Putin Redux

Power and Contradiction in Contemporary Russia

Richard Sakwa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415630931
• eBook ISBN: 9781317704287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book builds on the strengths of the previous volumes by the same author to provide the most detailed and nuanced account of the man, his politics and his profound influence on Russian politics, foreign policy and society.

However, this is not a new edition of the earlier books but is an entirely new work. The focus now is on the dilemmas of power since 2008. There is a brief biographical sketch of Vladimir Putin and much analysis of his ideas and policies, but the book now focuses on the systemic contradictions that have created a blockage on modernisation and a stalemate in politics, Putin's role as Prime Minister since 2008 and his political successes and failures, analysis of the implications of Putin's third term as President and the 2011-12 electoral cycle and the ensuing crisis which led to thousands protesting on the streets

This work assesses the achievements and failing of Putin's rule, but above all tries to make sense of contemporary developments. This is the definitive account of Putin and is essential reading for all scholars and students of Russian politics.

1 Introduction

An era in Russian history is now associated with the name of Vladimir Putin. Appointed prime minister in August 1999, he was designated acting president by the aged and infirm Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president, just a few months later, on 31 December. Putin remains the dominant political figure in Russian politics to this day. However, neither he nor the country has stayed the same. Although there are profound continuities in Putin’s leadership style, at least four different stages in his rule can be identified, coinciding with the classic cycle of leadership.

The first phase was a combination of continuity and remedial politics. In March 2000 Putin won the presidential election in a hard-fought ballot, and quickly set upon stamping his vision of politics on Russia. In policy terms Putin continued to implement Yeltsin’s legacy, and inmost ways more effectively. Crucial new Labour and Land Codes were adopted, tax collection was greatly improved by the introduction of a flat rate income tax of 13 per cent, and in general the economic liberals were in the ascendant. The new leader also distanced himself from the earlier period. Although Putin was careful not to attack Yeltsin personally, his politics was based on the idea that in the 1990s the Russian state lost the ability to manage affairs, the economy declined, and powerful special interests had emerged that threatened governance in its entirety. The era was presented as a new ‘Time of Troubles’ (smutnoe vremya), which takes an act of supreme concentration to overcome. Putin fostered a culture of trauma that reproduced in new forms the pathologies of the 1990s. He quickly clipped the wings of some of the more egregiously political of the so-called ‘oligarchs’ and established a new ‘social contract’ with them: as long as they stayed out of direct politics, they could get on with the business of making money. At the same time, he pushed back against what was widely perceived to be the excessive powers of the regional governors. In this way he bolstered his personal power, reinforced later by taking control of television, merging the two loyal parties, and the abolition of gubernatorial elections.

The latent powers of the Russian state, eclipsed by powerful oligarchs and governors in the 1990s, were re-activated. However, the only effective carrier of these powers was not the new forces unleashed by Russia’s capitalist revolution, notably liberal political parties, an independent business class (the bourgeoisie) and an active civil society, representing the forces of democratic modernity, but the bedrock of the Soviet system, which had been overthrown with so much fanfare in 1991: the vast bureaucracy and the equally vast security apparatus (collectively known as the siloviki). From the first the Putin system was marked by the contrast between the declared goals of the administration, and the means by which its aspirations were implemented. Although in numerical terms the late Soviet bureaucracy may not have been so large in proportion to the size of the nation, it exercised a deep hold on the population. Regulate, control, stifle and, increasingly, extort became its mantra. Equally, Putin’s accession to power reactivated deeper patterns of security service behaviour. In state organisations, ranging from banks, shipbuilding to the precious metals and stones reserve (Gokhran), there are endless accounts of how security officials began to exercise a type of secondary power, acting as the alleged emissaries of the regime while lining their own pockets. This provided fertile ground for corruption, while stifling the further development of a more competitive liberal economy.

The turning point that inaugurated the second phase of Putinite politics, a period of regime consolidation marked by intensified constraints, was the assault against the Yukos oil company and the arrest of its head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on 25 October 2003. Two logics of modernity collided. Khodorkovsky represented a more liberal and open style of politics and economic governance. Although the creation and development of Yukos in the 1990s was accompanied by the shortcomings and sharp practices typical of that era, nevertheless in the early 2000s the company was transformed and presented itself as the modern corporation that Russia needed to become a developed and diversified economy. Unfortunately, this programme became a sort of crusade, which was perceived to threaten once again the prerogatives of the state. The response of the statists and siloviki was not long in coming. The silovik faction, a core constituency in Putin’s power base, reasserted the claimed prerogatives of the state over economic policy and political life as a whole. The result was a conflict in which the regime destroyed not only a political opponent but also the oil company. Yukos was broken up and mostly absorbed by the new ‘national champion’, Rosneft.¹

In this period the gap between the regime and the state became increasingly apparent. The distinction between the two wings of the ‘dual state’, the constitutional state and the administrative regime, will be explored later in this book, and is central to our understanding of the contradictions of the Putin system.² In modern political theory the constitutional state is an entity that exists separate from any particular ruler, endures beyond the life span of a particular government, and is rooted in the public good. It is regulated by impartial norms of law and managed by a disinterested bureaucracy. In Russia this Weberian ideal was subverted by the administrative regime, which drew legitimacy from claiming to apply the principles of the constitutional state and authority from its representation of the common good, but in practice the polity and the state effectively became the property of the regime, and increasingly of the leader himself. When talking about strengthening the state, Putin in fact too often only reinforced the prerogative powers of the regime. In other words, a new form of a patrimonial regime was consolidated.

Instead of consolidating the rule of law, the authority of constitutional institutions such as parliament and the formal procedures of modern governance, regime practices predominated accompanied by the development of a whole range of para-constitutional bodies, such as the seven (later eight) federal districts, the State Council and the Civic Chamber. Putin never repudiated the formal framework of the constitution, and as we shall see a key part of his political identity was that he was serving the constitution, but the sphere of discretion (which exists in all political systems) became extraordinarily wide. This fostered the practice of legal populism, allowing the regime to avoid direct coercion. The law was used to advance policies that ran counter to the spirit of constitutionalism, thus eroding trust in its institutions. The legal system was subordinated to political authority and in certain cases, such as in the Yukos prosecutions, undermined the consolidation of independent courts and the rule of law in general. A system of ‘legalistic nihilism’ was established, in which the Soviet tradition of arbitrary ‘telephone justice’ was reinstated. People with influence and connections are immune from prosecution for even the most heinous criminal offences, whereas those who fall foul of the system are subject to prosecution.

Much of Putin’s second term was devoted to ensuring the permanence of his power and to rendering the regime invulnerable to overthrow. Putin took advantage of the 1–3 September 2004 Beslan school hostage siege, organised by Chechen insurgents, to consolidate power. On 13 September Putin announced a range of measures, including the abolition of gubernatorial elections, many of which had at best a tangential relationship with the struggle against terrorism. I call this ‘Putin’s constitutional coup’, the first of two such events (the second was the announcement of his return to the presidency on 24 September 2011). In that same autumn Russia was heavily engaged in supporting the regime’s candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, in the hard-fought Ukrainian elections. Already in December 2003 the first of the post-Soviet ‘colour revolutions’ had taken place in Georgia, with the overthrow of Eduard Shevardnadze and the rise to power of Mikheil Saakashvili following a flawed election, the typical pattern of such events. In Ukraine the western-backed ‘democratic’ candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, finally won in an unprecedented third-round ballot, following a massive popular mobilisation in favour of free and fair elections. This ‘orange’ revolution was perceived as a warning to the Putin regime, and the response was a clamping down on independent political activity, onerous NGO regulations and the attempt to conquer the streets through the creation of loyal pro-regime youth movements.

In political economy, the Yukos affair inaugurated a period of active state intervention. It would be going too far to call this ‘state capitalism’, since there was little outright nationalisation, or even corporatism of the traditional kind where companies are bound to the state in social and investment policy. The thrust of this period was ‘deprivatisation’, whereby independent companies were brought into a form of flexible but occasionally heavy-handed dirigisme. State corporations were established, notably the sprawling ‘Russian Technologies’ industrial empire that encompassed titanium production to car manufacturing. Political and economic power once again, as in the 1990s, converged but in a new way. The development of national champions, above all in the energy sector, was closely tied to elite interests, rendering them as much ‘regime companies’ as state entities, funding various pet projects of the system. Gazprom’s long-established privileges were confirmed, while the state-owned Rosneft grew into a major international oil company on the back of expropriated Yukos assets. This was an era of social paternalism, with resources flowing into the social sphere. Whereas Putin’s 2005 state-of-the-nation speech (poslanie) to the two houses of the Federal Assembly, drafted by his chief of staff Dmitry Medvedev, stressed democracy and liberalism, his 2006 poslanie, written by his new head of the presidential administration, Sergei Sobyanin, talked of a turning point in economic and welfare policy. The grant of generous ‘maternity capital’ to families for the birth of a second child was announced, which the mother could use for education, mortgage payments or pension savings after the child reached the age of three.

Putin was limited to two successive terms by the 1993 constitution. His silovik allies encouraged him to amend the constitution to remove term limits, as so many of the other post-Soviet states had done, to allow him to rule legally for an indefinite period. In practical terms this would have been possible, since the regime enjoyed constitutional majorities in both the State Duma (the lower house of the Federal Assembly) and the upper house, the Federation Council, as well as enjoying the support of the governors, most of whom had now been appointed in the new system. However, Putin insisted that he would remain loyal to the letter of the constitution. In an extraordinary manoeuvre, Putin engineered the election of his nominated successor, Medvedev, while he took on the post of prime minister. This brought to an end the ‘classic’ period of Putin’s rule, which had moved from ‘remedial’ power accumulation into a more consolidated ‘developmental’ project. The remedial strategy had enjoyed widespread public support as some of the genuine abuses of the 1990s were mitigated, whereas the regime’s consolidation accentuated concern about ‘democratic backsliding’, the suffocation of political pluralism and competitiveness. These two phases, the remedial and the developmental, comprise ‘classical Putinism’, in which the evolutionary direction of the system remained open.

In the third phase, between 2008 and 2012, Russia was governed by the ‘tandem’. Medvedev was constrained by the terms of the deal, but from the first he showed signs of political independence and advanced a distinctive programme of his own. From condemnation of ‘legal nihilism’ to supporting what he called ‘modernisation’, including measures to ease the pressure on business, Medvedev shaped a policy that was not anti-Putinite but represented a modification of some of the key features of classic Putinism. Medvedev represented the Putin system at its most benign and progressive, although critics suggest also at its least coherent and competent. As a lawyer by profession, he was above all concerned with re-asserting the independence of the judiciary as part of a broader programme of strengthening the constitutional state against the arbitrariness of the administrative regime. While it is now customary to mock Medvedev’s ineffectual style, in fact he represented a form of evolutionary development that could have retained the achievements of the remedial aspects of Putinism while pushing back against the excesses of the consolidation period. Just as Putin had transcended what he considered the limitations of Yeltsin’s rule, so Medvedev, without condemning Putin the man, reflected the potential of the system to evolve by strengthening the institutions of the constitutional state, while clipping the wings of the administrative regime.

This was a normative but realistic possibility, and gained the support of a growing band of adherents who had been at the heart of the creation of classic Putinism, above all the economic liberals and even the democratic statists. In the end intra-systemic reform was stymied by the constraints of the tandem arrangements, which did not allow the reformist programme to take political form to challenge the power of the siloviki and other defenders of the administrative regime who aligned behind Putin. The gulf between exaggerated expectations and disappointment was in part fuelled by Medvedev’s style, in which the anticipation of great reforms constantly collapsed into small actions, but also by the objective need to resolve some of the accumulating contradictions between liberal and conservative strategies. In the end, the swelling elite counter-movement to Medvedev’s liberalising aspirations was provoked in no small part by concerns over the perceived geopolitical ambitions of the West in the wake of interventions in Iraq and Libya and the precipitate demonisation of Bashar al-Assad in Syria as the insurgency began there in spring 2011. The ‘Arab Spring’ of this period appeared to signal the continuation of ‘orangism’, reminiscent to the Putinites of the chaos unleashed by perestroika earlier. In the bowels of the administrative regime there was a swelling movement for Putin to return and reassert his authority.

Medvedev apparently anticipated being allowed a second run at the presidency, but the tide had turned against him. On 24 September 2011 the ‘castling’ (rokirovka) plan was announced to a shocked nation: Putin would return to the presidency, while Medvedev would become prime minister. The move in itself was not a surprise, since Putin had clearly been in permanent campaigning mode since assuming the premiership in 2008, with increasingly flamboyant (and ridiculed) publicity stunts. The intense negative reaction was provoked by two key factors: the claim that the deal had long been agreed (when in fact it had not, although of course it had been one of the most likely options); and the contempt for the Russian electorate and people that the move implied. Although couched in the appropriate constitutional language, everyone knew that in the era of ‘managed democracy’ the regime would get the result it wanted. Putin’s return inaugurated the fourth phase of his leadership, and was indeed perceived to be a return (redux), a going backwards, confirmation of the power of an increasingly closed elite and a leadership insulated from the real demands, needs and aspirations of a changed society. In the event, the deeply flawed parliamentary election on 4 December 2011 was followed by the largest political protest movements of Putin’s entire leadership. On 4 March 2012 Putin once again comfortably won the presidential election, but his support was clearly eroding.

The fourth phase is what I call ‘developed Putinism’, by analogy with the ‘developed socialism’ proclaimed during the mature phase of the Brezhnev era in the 1970s. The features of this developed phase will be the subject of the bulk of this book. The differences between the four stages should not obscure the elements of continuity, just as there are profound continuities between Yeltsin’s regime of the 1990s and Putin’s rule in the 2000s. Neither Yeltsin’s nor Putin’s system of rule was an autocracy, but both shared elements of authoritarianism in the management of political processes. Both sought to manage competing demands, with pressure for political participation and social welfare, to reverse the fragmentation of post-Soviet Eurasia, and to respond adequately to new security challenges. Nothing is black and white about the governance system, caught up in turbulent policy conflict over the most appropriate developmental path, the country’s place in Eurasia and in energy markets, and in general the position that Russia should adopt in a world torn between rising powers and the defenders of the apparently triumphant western hegemonic system. As an aspirant power, Russia advanced ‘multipolarity’ and defended the institutions of international governance, notably the United Nations system, as part of its struggle for recognition.

Putin’s leadership remains the subject of intense and polarised debate. For many he remains the saviour of Russia. He presided over years of unprecedented growth, and even weathered the economic crisis from September 2008 with relatively little damage because of the counter-cyclical accumulation of reserves, which provided resources to support the banks and industry when the crisis struck. Sovereign debt fell from 51 per cent of GDP in 2000 to under 5 per cent in 2006 and is now around 3 per cent. In 2008 the sovereign wealth reserve (the Stabilisation Fund) was divided into two: the Reserve Fund (for a rainy day) and the National Welfare Fund, created for future generations as well as to plug the shortfall in the Pension Fund. The Reserve Fund allowed Russia to weather the global economic crisis without going cap in hand to external lenders. As in the West, the scale of support for banks and fragile enterprises was as controversial as it was enormous, with the Fund’s holdings falling from an aggregate $125bn in 2008 to some $25bn in 2011, although by August 2013 it was back up to $85bn. This is textbook macroeconomic management, pursued by none of the other major economies who find themselves embroiled in a sea of debt, accompanied by ‘austerity’ policies attacking the foundations of the welfare state. By 2013 the proportion falling below the poverty line in Russia had fallen from some 30 per cent in 2000 to 11 per cent.

Improvements in health care and welfare policies, accompanied by family support, ameliorated the predicted demographic crisis. In 2012 Russia for the first time in nearly two decades saw positive natural population growth, fostered by a range of pro-natalist policies. With a population of nearly 143 million, almost two million births are registered in Russia each year, and the birthrate reached the average European level and the infant mortality rate halved in ten years. Russia still faced the long-term consequences of the demographic catastrophe of the 1990s, with the number of women in the prime reproductive age (20–29) halving in the next decade, with a commensurate long-term decline in the labour force of 73 million in 2004, estimated to fall by seven million by 2020. In international affairs Putin is seen as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Note on transliteration and translation
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The contradictions of Putinism
• 3 Crisis of modernisation
• 4 The impasse of power
• 5 On the eve
• 6 Putin’s constitutional coup
• 7 Putin’s return
• 8 Tightening the screws
• 9 The new traditionalism and regime reset
• 10 Conclusion: Respice finem
• Bibliography
• Index