Power in modern Russia

Strategy and mobilisation

Andrew Monaghan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781526126412
• eBook ISBN: 9781526126429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book explores the Russian leadership's strategic agenda and illuminates the range of problems it faces in implementing it. Given these difficulties and the Russian leadership's concerns about an unstable and increasingly competitive world, the Russian official and expert community often use the term 'mobilisation' to describe the measures that Moscow is increasingly resorting to in order to implement its agenda. The book explores what this means, and concludes that many of the terms used in the Western debate about Russia both misdiagnose the nature of the challenge and misrepresent the situation in Russia. At a time when many of the books about Russia are focused specifically on the war in Ukraine and the deterioration in relations between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia, or are biographies of Vladimir Putin, it offers a new and unique lens through which to understand how Russia works and how Russian domestic and foreign politics are intimately linked.

1

Setting a strategic agenda

Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian leadership has consistently sought to shape a strategic agenda. In December 1999, when prime minister and acting president, Putin published a ‘millennium’ article outlining his views on the situation in Russia. He wrote about the lessons to be learnt from Russia’s history, the crisis Russia faced and possible opportunities. He identified a strong state and efficient economy as the keys to its recovery, and what Russia needed, he suggested, was to ‘formulate a long-term strategy’, one that would help to overcome the crisis.¹ Subsequently, the Russian leadership has often reiterated this commitment in a series of major planning documents, supplemented by articles by senior figures, and prominent speeches such as the president’s annual speech to the Federal Assembly.

This strategic planning process is multifaceted and more complex than allowed for in most discussions of Russian strategy. It opens up three sets of questions that are central to our understanding of the ‘formulation’ aspects of Russian grand strategy. These are, first, the strategy planning process and the legislative and policy architecture that has taken shape; second, the nature of the agenda itself, partly as framed in the documents relating to foreign and security policy, but more particularly Putin’s May Edicts of 2012, which set out Moscow’s core strategic agenda; and third, the questions raised by the numerous problems in planning and the extent to which they undermine the idea of Russian grand strategy, even at the stage of its formulation.

Shaping a planning process

Since the mid-2000s, the commitment to strategic planning has become codified in legislation. Indeed, the need for a more systematic approach to it emerged at a meeting of the State Council in mid-2006 at which it became clear that there was no legal basis for a comprehensive federal level strategy. What turned out to be a lengthy and rather complex process was launched to establish just such a basis. This led first to the order ‘On the Foundations of Strategic Planning’ (2009), which framed strategic planning as the determination of the directions and the means of achieving the strategic goals of the stable development of Russia and providing for national security, and then the ‘Law on Strategic Planning’.²

One of Russia’s most prominent strategic thinkers, Andrei Kokoshin, wrote in 2007 that the ‘application of strategic planning means a significantly higher level of governance than governance based on reacting to immediate situations’. Putin’s directive to create a state system of strategic planning, he suggested, was fully justified as one of the mechanisms for a strategy for Russia’s development. ‘The advancing of this kind of strategy has a political-mobilisation function’, he said.³

The order on the Foundations of Strategic Planning set out the legal basis for the preparation, development and function of the system of strategic planning in the areas of socio-economic development and national security, and set out both a time-frame for strategic planning in stages and an understanding of a process of foresight and response to developments likely to impinge on Russian society. It also provides for the introduction of mechanisms for the monitoring and control of the implementation of documents. It covers state, regional and municipal governance and the coordination of the respective organs of power, including the presidential executive, government, both Houses of Parliament, and the Central Bank.

A number of organisations are involved in contributing to strategic planning. The relevant ministries are responsible for planning in their own sector, but the Ministry for Economic Development has been tasked not only with elaborating economic plans but also drafting the law on strategic planning. The Russian Academy of Sciences and Higher School of Economics have contributed to planning and preparation the documents, as have a number of think tanks.

Perhaps most notable, though, is the role of the Security Council (SC). In 2006, the SC formed an inter-agency commission dedicated to strategic planning, and began to play an increasingly important role in the process. Indeed, since then, and particularly since Nikolai Patrushev was appointed secretary in 2008,⁴ it has emerged as the dominant feature of this process, the main reservoir of ministerial resources and authority. The core of the SC consists of a permanent membership drawn from the security and law enforcement services and parliament which meets regularly.⁵

The Council has taken on the central role in the overhaul of the documentation that began in 2006, and become the main organ for forging consensus and coordinating strategic planning, and the preparation of the various strategies, concepts, doctrines and programmes. Its role has been incrementally strengthened by legislation – not just that on strategic planning, but also by presidential orders, which have reinforced its powers so that they go beyond forecasting and threat assessment towards a greater role in formulating and implementing policy. According to a presidential decree of 2011, it ‘forms the main directions of state domestic and foreign policy’,⁶ and in 2013, Patrushev stated that it had become the chief inter-agency coordinator of decisions on the main tasks in domestic and foreign policy, both formulating policy and overseeing its implementation.⁷ The SC’s remit is broadly defined as a national security agenda, including the security of the state and society, socio-economic security and information security, as well as defence and international affairs.

Shaping a strategic agenda

The timing of the decision to create a more systematic strategic planning process was significant because of the difficult context Moscow then faced. Domestically, not only had there been major terrorist attacks in Russia but major social reforms had failed, leading to large protest demonstrations in 2005. The international context was no less demanding, given the ‘colour revolutions’ in Georgia and Ukraine and a sharply deteriorating relationship with the Euro-Atlantic community as a result of disagreements over international developments such as the Iraq war and also in the bilateral relationship with growing Western criticism of Russian governance.⁸ Existing Russian strategic plans, including ‘Strategy 2010’, no longer corresponded to this challenging context and required updating.

Thus, alongside the structural process the leadership conducted an overhaul of the main strategic planning processes and agenda, one which led to the publication between 2008 and 2010 of a cascade of updated strategic outlook documents. These took the form of a series of strategies, concepts and doctrines, and included the National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation to 2020 (2009), the Long-term Socio-economic Development Plan to 2020 (2008), and updated versions of the Foreign Policy Concept (2008) and Military Doctrine (2010). These were supplemented by Medvedev’s article ‘Russia Forward!’ (2009) and initiatives in foreign policy, such as the proposals for a new European security treaty (2008).

These documents illustrated the main assumptions about Russia and its place in international affairs. The main themes were that Russia was in the process of resolving – or had already resolved – many of the problems it had faced in the 1990s and that its main goal was to become a leading state on the international stage by preserving its independence and influence as a sovereign actor, particularly in the Eurasian region. To do so, a dual focus was necessary – to invest in infrastructure and economic modernisation in Russia, and to build regional integration so that Russia would become a hub in the Eurasian region through the promotion of projects such as the Customs Union, the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation.

Another stage began in 2011–12, with the return of economic growth, and efforts to consolidate strategic planning further and continue to update plans. Many of the assumptions and aims in this third stage remained consistent. During his speech to the Federal Assembly in 2012, for instance, Putin emphasised the sense of continuity, stating that national reconstruction and strengthening had been completed and that the task was to build a rich and prosperous Russia that could retain its sovereignty and influence in a competitive world marked by an increasing sense of conflict. Russia, he said, had to preserve its geopolitical relevance and even increase it.

This stage began with the preparation of an informal ‘Strategy 2020’ document, commissioned by Putin in January 2011 and published in March 2012. This project brought together some 1,500 specialists in twenty-one working groups to offer a range of scenarios and policy options.⁹ But it is best understood as having two main pillars. The first represents the core strategic agenda, and is in the shape of the so-called May Edicts of 2012, a set of eleven presidential Edicts signed into force by Putin on his return to the Kremlin in May 2012. They expanded on a series of articles he had published during his election campaign, and he has frequently emphasised ever since that they are the central plank of Russia’s strategic agenda.

The Edicts cover a vast, and in many ways aspirational, agenda, one that includes economic and social policy, healthcare, housing and utilities, education and science, inter-ethnic relations, demography, state administration, as well as foreign policy (including foreign economic relations) and military matters. Each Edict gives a sweep from the very broadest level, such as the need to prepare updated legislation, to the very specific. The overall thrust is the attempt to modernise Russia, to drag it into the twenty-first century, by restoring economic dynamism, improving living conditions, for instance by building at least 25 million square metres of new housing with social infrastructure, and modernising and expanding Russian military power.

This latter point was framed in two of the Edicts: one on improvements to military service conditions, including improvement of pensions and other conditions, and the intention yearly to recruit tens of thousands of contract troops, the other on modernising the military industrial complex and the armed forces. This included priority focus on increasing the share of modern arms and technology to the armed forces and other organs to 70 per cent by 2020, the priority development of Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent and other capabilities.¹⁰

Putin has emphasised that this modernisation process pre-dates the escalating emergency since 2014, and is intended to make good the chronic underfunding for the armed forces and defence industry in the post-Cold War era. He has also stated that it is necessary because other leading states are investing in modernising their armed forces, including developing strategic projection and high-precision conventional capabilities. It also has wider ramifications. As Putin has noted, the defence industry plays a crucial role in social stability, particularly during the economic downturn, because it employs hundreds of thousands of people.¹¹ Putin has also suggested that the development of the defence companies has an important socio-economic role, since the defence industry represents some 3 per cent of Russia’s total employment and dominates the economies of a number of cities and regions. It thus contributes to maintaining social stability.

Alongside this was the second pillar, the ongoing updating of the main strategic documents, such as the Foreign Policy Concept (2013 and again in 2016), Military Doctrine (2014) and the National Security Strategy (2015) and either the long-overdue updating of, or the introduction of, a plethora of new strategies, concepts and doctrines dealing with a wide range of subjects from maritime affairs to food security, from a state anti-drugs policy strategy to 2020 to anti-terrorist strategies and from information security to the Arctic.

It also included important but often overlooked developments. The first of these was the refreshment of legislation dealing with mobilisation of the economy, a process which appears to have begun in December 2008. In 2010, Putin signed off a concept for the improvement of mobilisation preparation of the economy, and in 2011 he approved a decision to prepare a new mobilisation plan for the economy to be ready for 2014. According to Julian Cooper, this document reflects a fundamental break with the Soviet past and the 1990s in the way that it shifted the mobilisation away from the conservation of production capacities. The move towards the sharp increase in production of military goods and only focusing on armaments specified in the current arms programme and thus already in volume production, he argues, is similar to the surge capability of the United States and other NATO states.¹²

A significant addition to strategic planning during this period was the Defe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: strategy in a time of crisis
• 1 Setting a strategic agenda
• 2 The problems of power in Russia
• 3 Making Russia work
• 4 Defending Russia
• Conclusions: mobilising power in Russia
• Further reading
• Index