Russia After Yeltsin

Vladimir Tikhomirov, Vladimir M Tikhomirov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351786799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2001. This study attempts to present a broad picture of political, economic and social developments in Russia at the start of the 21st century. It provides an overview of the legacy of the Yeltsin era and attempts to outline major limitations and policy choices that Putin is facing. The book contains an in-depth analysis of power stuggles in Russia, the background to Vladimir Putin's rise to presidency, the role of oligarchs and other pressure groups in Russia. There is also a focus on economic, social and financial developments in Russia, with an overview of Russian foreign, military and social policies, as well as looking at its level of development when compared with other countries.

1 Introduction

LESLIE HOLMES

Russia’s first ever freely elected President, Boris Yeltsin, surprised the world one more time on the last day of the twentieth century. Just as everyone was preparing for the New Year of all New Years, Yeltsin suddenly announced his resignation. His term of office had not yet expired; his mandate was until June 2000. In his resignation speech, Yeltsin maintained that a new century required new vigour and hence a new leader.¹ But these words could hardly be taken at face value. Since Yeltsin had rarely shown himself to be a man who would put the interests of others, even his own people, before his personal ones in the late-1990s – when his amazing capacity to keep going despite very poor health served as a metaphor for the state of Russia – the timing of his departure had to be more than a generous gesture to his people. Hence his announcement initially appeared enigmatic. But within a few hours of his departure, at least part of the riddle was solved; the prime minister, and now acting president, Vladimir Putin, issued a decree (ukaz) granting Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. A corruption scandal had been developing around Yeltsin and his two daughters in the months preceding the resignation, and the decree appeared to guarantee that this would not result in any future problems for the outgoing president.²

But the corruption scandal was not the only reason for the President’s decision to retire early. The larger context was that Yeltsin was anxious to do everything possible to ensure that his chosen successor, Putin, would be favoured by the Russian electorate. One of the most positive aspects of the Yeltsin tenure was that the days were gone – at least for the present – when a Russian or Soviet leader could arbitrarily decide on their successor without reference to the people.³ Yeltsin had made clear his faith in Putin as the future president from the moment he appointed him as prime minister in July 1999, but also accepted that this would have to be put to the Russian electorate. Fortunately for Yeltsin, Putin rapidly acquired mass popularity, primarily because of what was perceived by most Russians to be his effective handling of the Chechen issue. They believed that here, at last, was the strong – and fit! - leader the country needed.

A clear indication of Prime Minister Putin’s rapidly growing popularity was given by the Russian electorate on 19 December 1999 when, in elections to the lower house of the legislature (the Duma), the party to which Putin had given his support – Unity (also known as Medved) – came a very close second to the Communists as the most popular political party; in the party list vote, Unity secured 23.3% of the vote, compared with the Communists’ 24.3%. The significance of this achievement becomes more obvious when two points are borne in mind. One is that, in marked contrast to the Communists, the party was almost brand new; it had been established only in September 1999, and still had almost no regional infrastructure. The other is that the party had little in the way of a programme; its identity focused primarily on its support for Putin. Within a couple of days of the election, Unity’s position was further strengthened, when a key component of a third bloc – a group of regional governors within Fatherland–All Russia (OVR) – pledged their support for Putin, and thus appeared willing to cooperate with Unity. Unity’s success was almost certainly a major factor in the timing of Yeltsin’s resignation; whatever other criticisms can be levelled against him, there is near universal agreement among analysts that the former president was a brilliant politician and survivor – and his political intuition told him to strike while the iron was hot.

According to Russia’s current (December 1993) constitution, elections for a new president must be held within three months of an outgoing president dying, resigning or being declared incapable of performing his or her duties (through ill health, etc.). Once again, it was testimony to the moves taken in the direction of constitutionalism under Yeltsin that presidential elections did take place on time, being held in March 2000. Although the electoral rules permitted a run-off of the top two candidates from the first round if no-one were to achieve an absolute majority, Putin won in the first round, with some 53% of the vote – easily beating his closest rival, communist party leader Gennadi Zyuganov (who secured just over 29% of the vote) in an election that witnessed a turnout of nearly 70%. Putin was formally inaugurated as President on 7^th May 2000.

This book focuses on the Yeltsin legacy, and the challenges that face both President Putin and Russia more generally. The challenges are formidable, and individual chapters consider various aspects of the political scene, the economy, relations between the polity and economy (notably the huge problem of corruption and the boundaries between the state and the private sector), the military, and Russia’s place in - and relations with - the rest of the world. In this brief introduction, I shall consider in very general terms some of the major dilemmas facing this vast country at the start of the third millennium. In line with one of my own principal interests in recent years, there will be some consideration of the issue of legitimacy.

As noted above, one of Putin’s very first actions as president – granting Yeltsin immunity from prosecution – was symbolically of concern. Corruption had by the end of the 1990s become one of the most serious problems in Russia, and many expected the new leader to work hard to reduce it to much lower levels (it is unrealistic to assume that corruption can ever be totally eradicated, either in Russia or in any other country; for an interesting argument outlining the restrictions on Putin’s capacity to combat corruption see Shelley, 2000). This is why the decree on immunity was on one level disturbing. However, it is important not to overlook two points.

The first is that, in the grand scheme of things, the corruption scandal – as it related to Yeltsin himself – was small-scale. The allegations were that a Swiss building company (Mabetex) that had secured the rights to renovate the Kremlin had been paying off the credit card bills of Yeltsin and his two daughters for more than three years. The sum involved was less than US$90,000 for all three recipients. If the allegations are true, there is no question that it was wrong of Yeltsin to accept such indirect payments: yet the scale is trivial in comparison with what many other Russian politicians and officials had been accused of accepting or demanding in recent years.

Even if it is maintained that this was an important matter of principle (and a president should set a good example), so that the sum involved is not of major relevance, the granting of immunity should not necessarily be taken to indicate that Putin was ‘soft’ on corruption. There are historical precedents in which a new, incoming leadership has engaged in one final act along the lines of that which they have criticised in their predecessors, as a form of closure. Prime examples of this are the show trial and execution of Beria after Stalin’s death, and the show trial and imprisonment of the Gang of Four after Mao’s death; it could be argued that the new leaderships sought to bring rapid and effective closure to periods of terror by engaging in one final act that, in both cases, had terroristic elements. According to this argument, then, we should not make too much of Putin’s pardon. Rather, it should be interpreted as an example of an incoming leader wanting to be as little burdened by messy issues from the past as possible, so that he can concentrate on the present and future.⁴

But what are we to make of the first few months of Putin’s presidency? Is Russia now on the right path (whatever that might be) – or indeed any discernible path? Or are the structural constraints on the Russian president so great that even an apparently strong and determined leader like Putin cannot realistically hope to overcome the obstacles?

When Putin first came to power, many observers pointed to the ambiguities of his past career to highlight how difficult it was to predict how he was likely to act in the future. On the one hand, he had spent a long period working for the infamous Soviet security agency, the KGB, and had been head of its successor, the FSB. On the other hand, he had also been Deputy Mayor to the generally progressive and liberal Anatoly Sobchak in St.Petersburg in the early-1990s. The enigma continued even after Putin became acting president. While he showed he was prepared to be tough on the Chechen separatists, it was far from clear what else he stood for. Even by the time he was elected, neither Russians nor external observers had much idea of how he was going to solve arguably Russia’s biggest problem, the appalling state of the economy. Had Russia just elected a second ‘virtual president’, albeit one with a proclivity to clamp down on those who stood in the way of his political ambition? Or was this simply a cautious and reasonable man, sensibly waiting until he had a firmer grasp of the problems before proposing solutions?

In this climate of uncertainty, there was no shortage of commentators, particularly in the Western mass media, who warned of the dangers of Putin becoming a new dictator, perhaps akin to his Belarusian counterpart, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Russia, when part of the USSR, had already experienced a leader coming to power who seemed reasonable enough at the outset, but who became increasingly dictatorial; in his analysis of Stalin’s rise to power, Isaac Deutscher referred to the common perception of Stalin as ‘the Man of the Golden Mean’. By some criteria, Putin already appeared to be at least as tough as Stalin was at the start – and he had something Stalin did not have, legitimacy based on a constitutional description of his powers and a mandate from the electorate. After all, surely most Russians were, by the beginning of the new century, demanding strong leadership?

Against this was the argument that a leader can only become a dictator if s/he has a strong state at his or her disposal; at the very least, a potential dictator needs to have a tight grip on the security forces, notably the military and the secret police. But according to many evaluations, neither of these was in a very healthy or unified state at the time Putin came to office. Although Putin had talked tough on the Chechnya issue, the fact is that the Russian army had not been performing nearly as well as Moscow would have liked it to have done in 1999. Throughout the 1990s, there were numerous cases of the military not being paid for months on end, being unable to meet their utility bills, and of officers seeking to survive by engaging in corrupt sales of military equipment, including even nuclear materials! The Russian military thus hardly looked like the kind of state agency through which to implement and enforce a dictatorship. Putin’s close links with the FSB were of more concern.

Despite this ambiguous legacy and start, Putin had by the middle of 2000 begun to give a clearer idea of what he stood for, and how he intended to work to overcome Russia’s problems. Details will be provided in the chapters that form the core of this collection; I shall be highly selective here.

In the political sphere, Putin soon set about addressing three of the biggest issues in Russian politics in recent times – the relationships between Moscow and the regions; those between the Kremlin and the so-called oligarchs (the wealthiest and most powerful businesspeople, the majority of whom had made their fortunes as a result of the questionable privatisation processes of the early- and mid-1990s); and the state of the military. Each of these deserves some attention.

Even following the break-up of the USSR, Russia remains by far the largest country, territory-wise, on earth, being more than twice the size of the USA minus Alaska (approximately one and three quarters times larger if Alaska is included). In the Soviet era, control of such a vast area was secured through a large, highly centralised and very hierarchical party-state machinery based in Moscow. But in the 1990s, as Moscow simultaneously advocated more democratic political processes and yet was so concerned with politics at the top that it lost some of its interest in provincial Russia, a number of local political elites in the regions began to assert themselves. Although the constitution had allowed all 89 regions and republics (hereafter, for the sake of simplicity, I shall refer just to regions) a voice in Moscow, via the upper house of the legislature - the Federation Council - several regional governors clearly believed they could largely ‘go it alone’. Those who headed regions that were naturally wealthy felt particularly able to assert themselves. Putin has made it clear that he is not prepared to tolerate this decentralisation, and had within months of becoming President taken two major steps to counter it. The first was to establish seven ‘super-regions’, and to appoint the heads of these himself (governors are chosen by their local electorate). The second was to alter both the composition and the role of the Federation Council. Hitherto, governors and speakers of local parliaments had automatically had seats on the Federation Council (though this was not specified in the Constitution); with effect from early 2001, one of the representatives on this Council from each region is to be nominated by the governor and approved by the legislature, while the other is to be elected by the legislature from a list presented either by the speaker or at least one third of the deputies (on the potential significance of this, and an interesting argument questioning the political wisdom of centralisation in Russia, see Tompson, 2000). These two moves have substantially reduced the powers of the regional governors vis-à-vis Moscow. This said, in introducing the proposed changes, Putin argued that the governors’ role in their regions would be increased if they did not have to spend so much time in Moscow, while the interests of the regions would be better served in Moscow if the representatives on the Federation Council were full-time professionals.

Putin also soon made it clear that he was to be much stricter with the oligarchs than Yeltsin had been. The relationship is a complex one, and is considered in more detail in Yuri Tsyganov’s chapter. Suffice it to say here that by mid-2000, and following a number of raids by the tax police on companies such as AvtoVAZ and Media Most, most of the oligarchs were on the back foot, seeking an amnesty on questionable privatisation deals in the past, in return for which they promised to pay their taxes in full and on time. One of the oligarchs who was particularly close to Yeltsin, and a member of the so-called ‘Family’ of inner advisers and close friends of the former president, had not capitulated at the time of writing, and had even given up his seat in the Duma so as to be better able to challenge Putin. But this man, Boris Berezovsky, was the exception.⁵ It is important to note, however, that Berezovsky soon approached regional governors who were unhappy about their recently downgraded status, with a view to collaborating on bringing the new president to heel; Putin had not had it all his own way.

It is also worth noting at this juncture that Putin has substantially downgraded the role of the ‘Family’ generally, while early signs are that the punishment of officials found guilty of corruption is becoming much harsher under Putin than it ever was in Yeltsin’s time. Regarding the former, both Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and the head of the Kremlin’s Administrative Office (Pavel Borodin) were dismissed from their privileged ‘inner sanctuary’ positions in January 2000. As for the latter, the punishment meted out to former Rear Admiral Vladimir Morev in April 2000 for corruption – an eight-year prison sentence for attempting to sell radar equipment for some US$3000 - was a markedly tougher sentence than was typical for this type of crime in the Yeltsin era.

Putin has certainly given various indications, both before becoming president and subsequently, that he intends to bolster the role of the military and improve its standing. For instance, he announced in January 2000 that defence expenditure would be doubled by the end of the year. Moreover, the seven ‘super-regions’ mentioned earlier not only broadly correspond to Russia’s major military districts, but five of the seven people named by Putin in May to head these were from either the military or the security services.

It has been argued that a leader can only become a dictator if s/he can rely on the coercive organs of the state for support. A precondition of this is that the state can afford to maintain such organs properly; promising to ...