Contemporary Russian Politics

An Introduction

Neil Robinson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509525188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin for a fourth presidential term in 2018 has seen Russian democracy weaken further and Russia's relations with the West deteriorate seriously. Yet, within Russia, Putin's position remains unchallenged and his foreign policy battles have received widespread public support. But is Putin as safe as his approval ratings lead us to believe? And how secure is the regime that he heads? In this new book, Neil Robinson places contemporary Russian politics in historical perspective to argue that Putin's regime has not overcome the problems that underpinned the momentous changes in twentieth-century Russian history when the country veered from tsarism to Soviet rule to post-communist chaos. The first part of the book, outlining why crises have been perennial problems for Russia, is followed by an exploration of contemporary Russian political institutions and policy to show how Putin has stabilised Russian politics. But, while Putin's achievements as a politician have been considerable in strengthening his personal position, they have not dealt successfully with the enduring problem of the Russian state's functionality. Like other Russian rulers, Putin has been much better at establishing a political system that supports his rule than he has at building up a state that can deliver material wealth and protection to the Russian people. As a result, Robinson argues, Russia has been and remains vulnerable to political crisis and regime change.

1
Change and Continuity in Russian Politics

Introduction

Russia has experienced massive shifts in its political and economic organization over the last hundred years. In 1917, the tsarist system of autocratic monarchy fell as the Romanov dynasty was deposed. The Soviet system that replaced it was supposed to usher in an era of equality and social freedom, to lead the global liberation of humanity from economic oppression. The higher goals of the revolution never came to pass, but Russia, and the rest of the tsarist empire that fell under the rule of the Bolsheviks, was transformed. Economic backwardness was attacked head-on by Stalinist modernization policies. Agriculture, which was the main activity of the mass of the Soviet population in the 1920s, was reorganized, and industrialization and urbanization transformed a peasant society into a version of modern society. Although the political system remained a form of dictatorship, the social basis of the Soviet regime was vastly different to that of the tsars. Aristocracy was replaced by rule through a mass party and bureaucracy, which together formed a party-state. The power of Soviet leaders was greater than that of the tsars, since they commanded huge apparatuses of coercion and ideological control which destroyed organized opposition to the Soviet system. The Soviet system rebuilt Russia and competed for power globally with the United States and the ‘West’, but it collapsed under the strains of competition and because of its systemic intractability, which made it slow to adapt and reform.

The post-Soviet Russian political system was supposed to develop liberal market democracy but has become increasingly dictatorial and illiberal. A form of capitalism has been built in which the market plays a role in the distribution of resources, but this is a political capitalism in which the economy is dominated by elite political interests, which take ‘rent’ – essentially unearned profits – from the economy and use them to buy support. In some respects, this system resembles its Soviet predecessor. The Soviet system also gathered rents, and the direction of its economy was also set politically. However, the new authoritarianism in Russia is as different to that of the Soviet past as the Soviet system was to its tsarist predecessor. The ruling mass Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) has been replaced by United Russia, but this is a highly personalized party loyal to President Vladimir Putin; it is not a political force in its own right. Repression still exists but is less systematic than it was for most of the Soviet era. The last few years have seen an increasingly ideological politics developing based on what Putin calls ‘traditional Russian values’ (respect for family, patriotism, intolerance for social difference, Orthodox Christianity, and hostility to liberalism). This worldview infuses media commentary in Russia on its politics and relations with the outside world, but it is not (yet) an official ideology in the way that Marxism-Leninism was. Large parts of the Russian population are sceptical of ‘traditional Russian values’ and are able to express their scepticism (mostly on the internet). A weak opposition exists and protests. Russians enjoy some freedoms of speech, association, belief and movement which were denied them in the recent past.

A central problem in the study of Russian politics, which is fundamental to how we see Russia developing in the future, is how to account for these changes and for the continuities that we can see in the midst of change. Describing change and continuity involves identifying the key factors, forces and institutions that we believe have acted as agents of and obstacles to change in the past and that will shape political development in the future. This chapter sets out the problems encountered in building states and regimes, Russia’s place in the world under the tsars and the Soviets, and how the country is placed following the fall of the USSR.

Political development: the problem of building states and regimes

Day-to-day politics involves a lot of change, much of which is ephemeral. Decisions to remove some minister or other, to alter economic policy by raising tax rates, or to modify social welfare spending impact on people’s lives but they rarely transform a political system fundamentally except as they add to the accretion of many changes that take place over time. Looking at political development involves looking at fundamental changes both in political systems and in the nature of political institutions through which day-to-day policy decisions and political manoeuvres are made. Political development concerns how institutions are built and how their construction influences who can access power and decision-making. It is about how rule over people by politicians evolves, what constrains or enables how that rule is exercised, and what shapes the ends to which rule should aspire. It is about the establishment of ‘political order’, involving two related political phenomena: the development of states as institutional ensembles that seek sovereignty over territory and endeavour to monopolize decision-making and the legitimate use of violence in that territory; and the development of political regimes, the rules that govern how power in and over the institutions of the state is organized and the rules that determine who can access that power and what they can use it for.

The distinction between state and regime is a fundamental one for this book. Practically, state and regime development often overlap, and the actors involved, if they even think about the relationship between them, will probably not see a distinction between the two. Analytically, however, we can see that they are different processes and that they therefore have different criteria for success and failure and need not be complementary, even if, and as, they affect one another.

Political science recognizes many regime types – democracy, autocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, pornocracy (really, look it up) – to name but a few. No matter what labels we choose to characterize individual regimes, they all describe who may make decisions and how they come to occupy decision-making positions, together with the relationship of society to power and resources that exist within the state. The creation of any regime is a process that centres on elite groups and their struggles. Elite groups may represent wider society, but agreeing the rules (regime) that govern access to power is generally the preserve of different elites as they try to achieve dominance over each other. Regime building is brought to a conclusion – a regime emerges – when such groups achieve a set of political rules that they cannot change without at least some fraction of the elite incurring a high cost to themselves. Regimes seek stability once constructed; they try to reproduce themselves and the particular patterns of access to decision-making and resources that they contain. Initiating regime change and restarting competition over the rules that determine rights to make decisions creates uncertainty for elite groups about their future prospects. It is thus something that they will try to avoid for fear that it will lead to a loss of access to positions of political power.

State building is a much more complex process than regime building. States have functions, the most basic of which is providing security to their populations by protecting them from external predation and enforcing some common standards of behaviour among them. Developing this ability entails creating both institutions (such as armies and police forces) to provide security and institutions (such as tax collection agencies) to finance them. Achieving even a basic level of state formation can be hard to achieve where a state faces security threats externally or has to develop extensive mechanisms to manage internal order – for example, because of the difficulties of regulating relations between different ethnic communities. As provision of security and order become more complex, state building has to develop to ensure continued functionality. If security threats can be dealt with only by the development of larger, better equipped and organized military forces, states have to regulate more of their economies to fund such militaries, create industries to arm them, develop education systems so that soldiers can use advanced armaments, etc. The more complex the functions a state has to fulfil, the more it needs its institutional development to create state ‘capacity’ and to be based on ‘organizational integrity’. Capacity means the proliferation of agencies that can make and implement public policy, while organizational integrity means that these agencies have clear lines of authority and accountability based on functional specialism and common standards of administrative practice, as well as mechanisms for arbitrating and resolving disputes between them. Success in state building is a moving target. Basic state functions will need to be supplemented over time by other state welfare functions, such as the active promotion of economic growth and the delivery of a broad range of public goods – education, health care, etc. Because the functions required of a state are always changing, state building is never actually completed.

The different criteria for success in regime and state building mean that the relationship between them is complex. The consolidation of state formation is far more difficult to achieve than the consolidation of a regime. A regime may be stabilized before the development of a state that can easily fulfil a state’s classic functions, let alone carry out an expanded repertoire of tasks. If this occurs, the question before a regime is whether it can contain and ameliorate the problems of maintaining social order and national security in such a way that it can survive ruling through a ‘weak’ state. If it cannot do so (for example, by gaining aid or security guarantees from other states), it will come under pressure to develop the state, and, if it doesn’t respond to this pressure, its long-term viability will be open to question. It may be called to question from below – that is, from society at large concerned about its security and future – or from within, as pressure to take action grows from state officials who cannot maintain order and security. Failure to perform these functions threatens the state’s ability to reproduce itself, and hence the interests of state officials who draw their living and privileges from its existence.

Regime building may involve state building, since an elite may try to prop up its preferred regime by delivering greater state capacity and public goods. Alternatively, regime building might substitute for state building, which involves building up regime strength rather than state capacity to deal with the relevant functions. A strengthened regime might suppress calls for increased state functionality so that it appears to have resolved state-building dilemmas. This suppression may be coercive or through consensus building, or it may combine both approaches. Coercion can limit the range of demands made of a polity from within or from society, so that the regime can claim that the level of state formation is adequate to the tasks at hand. Consensus building can be used to try to persuade people that demands for higher state functionality are illegitimate or to limit the range of demands that can be made. Substitution of regime strength for state development can give the impression of a strong state. Indeed, political actors who build up the former as a substitute for the latter may well believe that there is no difference between regime and state strength, and that development of one automatically delivers the other. This may occasionally be true, since a strong regime that secures both high degrees of loyalty from officials within the state and social compliance will be able to shape people’s notions of security, order and welfare and persuade them that it has delivered these things. However, such strong regimes can face problems when the state needs to be reformed to continue to deliver welfare and security. Where regime strength has been built up as a substitute for state formation, reform can threaten regime stability. State reform will often involve changes in the balance of power between elite groups, not least as it means the redistribution of resources between policy areas. It can therefore look like an attempt to change the regime in ways that threaten the members’ future access to power. Trying to build up the state’s capacity in this situation is thus fraught with danger: it may be resisted, with struggles over reform endangering regime stability; or it might be delayed as members fear its consequences, but this delay might then eat away at regime stability as state functionality remains low over the longer term.

This brief discussion shows that a basic issue of political development is whether or not regime building supports, or substitutes for, state development. Both strategies can be successful in the short to medium term (Robinson, 2008). However, over the longer term, the better developed a state, the more likely there is to be government stability, and hence regime stability, since continuity of governments – or at least their regularized replacement – is less likely to call in to question the basis on which power is accessed and used. How long the ‘long term’ is depends on the pressures that a country has to deal with. Where pressures are great, supplanting state for regime building will be dangerous, especially if a state has low capacity to begin with. A regime in a state with high capacity has more resources to deploy, better chances of extracting extra resources to deal with problems, and potentially more and broader reserves of political loyalty to fall back on because it is able to deliver a wide range of public goods through the state. Moreover, there is less chance of political fragmentation if the delivery of these goods is not delivered directly by some elite faction of a regime but is filtered through the capacity of a state. Where states deliver public goods, they can be rationed in times of crisis or shortage; where delivery is personalized through connection to the regime, there is more chance of political contestation. This is because power within a regime depends on the ability to deliver resources, which then become objects of struggle between different factions or are unevenly distributed so that regime legitimacy declines.

Long-term stable political development therefore generally depends on finding a regime form that supports continual state development through reform that responds to new pressures and demands as they emerge. Finding such a regime form is never easy, but democracy has historically been better at supporting continual state development than other regime types. This is probably because elite members in democratic regimes have agreed to be democratic citizens and ‘subject their interests to uncertainty’ (Przeworski, 1986: 58) – i.e., elite members do not expect that the arrangement of politics and policy will always work to their advantage. Democratic citizens should not expect to get their own way all of the time, so they are more tolerant of reform that could threaten their interests. Losers from change and reform in a democratic regime know that they have mechanisms available to them – political participation and organization at elections – that can be used to readjust the balance of interests back in their favour; democratic politics is not a zero-sum game in which losses are permanent. Consequently, while democracies are not necessarily efficient in adjusting the state to deal with the problems that confront them, some have, historically at least, been able to ‘muddle through’ and endure over time (Runciman, 2015).

These means of dealing with the need to reform the state and its capacity are not necessarily features of non-democratic polities. Elite members that lose power or status as a result of reform have no chance of recouping these through regular elections. Even if elections are held, they will not be free or fair. Loss of access to political office and the resources that come with it, or the weakening of such access or of the rewards of office holding, may well be permanent. This incentivises resistance to change if reform is enacted and also makes enactment less likely: would-be reformers, if they have any realistic appreciation of what change entails, know that embarking on reform will create enemies and resistance which will undermine their chance of success, and that such resistance and failure may lead to their being ejected from office. Reform, and the adjustment of the state that it entails, may well, therefore, be delayed, perhaps until it is so late that the dysfunctions of prioritizing regime building and maintenance over state development overwhelm a regime.

The complex relationship between state and regime development makes the course of political development difficult to predict. The range of factors and forces that might influence it is vast and includes unexpected events, both natural and man-made. Political development – change in how political order is constructed – can only rarely be analysed as the outcome of a single cause, or even of a few causes. Most often it is the result of a combination of a wide range of structural factors – i.e., circumstances and phenomena that are the products of the natural world, the long-term development of society and economy, the organization of power within global systems of international relations and economy, and how political actors and agents read (or misread) and react to those factors.

Political development: state, regime and Russia’s place in the world under the tsars and the Soviets

Russia’s experience of political development over the last hundred years has been marked by a high degree of instability. The radical changes that have occurred were not preordained in either their outcomes or their timing. The highly unpredictable shifts have been the result of a combination of structural and contingent factors (the latter including such things as the personalities and choices of the political actors involved) and external events. Recognizing the importance of contingency and the incidental, whether it is the character of political actors and their choices or the intrusion of external events such as war, does not mean that there are no enduring factors, problems or patterns in the development of Russian politics, state and regime. Regime development has generally taken precedence over state b...