Russia

A State of Uncertainty

Neil Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134488285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Over the last hundred years, Russia has undergone a succession of failed projects of state construction - from Tzarist modernisation to Soviet state socialism to liberal democratic market capitalism. This new book introduces these vastly different projects and explains their failure in order to illuminate the common problems of balancing social and economic transformation with political stability that Russia's rulers have faced during the twentieth century.
Russia: A State of Uncertainty traces Russia's complex historical development in the last century, as well as its recent political troubles and economic misfortunes, and its place in the contemporary international system. Providing up-to-date information on Russian political developments, including the elections of 1999 and 2000, Robinson assesses the chances of future projects of political and economic reconstruction. Written in a clear and accessible way, this book will be an invaluable text for students learning about Russia for the first time, as well as anyone interested in the state and history of Russia.

1 Introduction
Strong states, weak states and the Russian problem

The cycles of state failure and reconstruction that make up Russian history in the twentieth century have created a paradox. The failure of the state and the brutality with which the state has tried to reconstruct Russia in the past has lead many Russians to distrust the state, to see it as something alien and predatory that has imposed new ways of life on them against their will. The very idea of state power was not legitimate in the eyes of many Russians for much of the twentieth century and as Russia enters the twenty-first century, popular esteem for political institutions is at what might be its lowest ever ebb. Many Russians prefer private life to the vicissitudes of public life and are loyal to family and networks of friends and kin rather than to the state. However, despite this, and as Vladimir Putin, Russia’s new President, has noted, Russians expect the state to play a larger role in public life than might be common in established liberal democracies and expect it to take the lead in solving Russia’s political, economic and social crises.¹ This is not as surprising as it might seem at first glance. The brutality of Russia’s rulers has destroyed public institutions and eroded faith in public life to the point where the only body left that might act for the collective good is the state, or some part of it. Moreover, Russians are right to want action from the state since only a reconstructed state in Russia can provide the public goods (goods that all citizens share equally, that no one in a society can be excluded from enjoying) necessary for a decent, peaceful and prosperous life. Only the state can provide for the rule of law across Russia, for a relatively stable currency that is honoured throughout the country, for security of property rights, and the enforcement of contracts whether they are between businessmen, banks and their clients, employers and employees, or welfare recipients such as pensioners and those agencies responsible for paying them.

If the state’s role is desired and also necessary to the reconstruction of public life in Russia, how can we explain the failure of the Russian state in the past and its current weakness? There are two common explanations for Russia’s problems that appear in the media when Russia has a crisis, or that are often to be found in the academic literature on Russia: the argument that Russia’s problems are historically inevitable, and the argument that Russia’s problems are culturally determined and hence unavoidable. Neither of these arguments is very good. The causes of state failure in Russia have been different at different times. It is not simply a matter of state weakness and failure explaining state weakness and failure ad infinitum. Variously, different combinations of personality, ideology, the pressures of modernization and international forces have caused state failure in Russia. A history of state failure does make constructing a stable polity and economy more difficult. Each failure means that a state and nation lags behind its competitors and is overtaken by emerging powers. Consequently, there is further to go to deliver comparable standards of living and security, to produce goods of a comparable technological level and quality, etc., and it is harder to attract investment, capture markets, or command respect and project influence in international politics. Nevertheless, failure, whilst it may get harder to avoid, is not inevitable. Structural factors (which states cannot easily change or avoid because they are beyond their individual control) such as international competition, the health of the global economy and one’s position in it, or the fact that society and economy are agrarian rather than industrial, or industrial rather than post-industrial, are important influences on the outcome of state building projects, but they are not necessarily decisive. Success and failure are contingent on many things and the influence of structural factors can be mediated by how politicians approach them. Nor is failure to be surprised at or despised. State failure is more common than success; very few states had stable political systems over the course of the twentieth century and the majority of states that appear to be most stable and most successful have only recently so become.² The lessons of history are the same for Russia as for any other state: failure is not surprising, nor is it inescapable.

Arguments that assert that the failure of the Russian state over the last century is explicable by reference to culture are not much better. The Russian state does not fail because it is Russian; past and present crises of political authority and state failure have not been caused by something intrinsic to ‘Russianness’ or the Russians. Certain common Russian traditions and attitudes have not helped state building in Russia. However, these traditions and attitudes are often themselves the result of state failure and can be amended by fresh state building projects, or serve as their basis or inspiration. It is therefore inappropriate to blame culture for all of the failings of the Russian state, especially if this means that factors specific to a particular moment at which the Russian state failed are not given their proper due and explanatory weight.³ To put it another way, why say a crisis is due to some vague quality of ‘Russianness’ if it is better blamed on some clearly visible combination of poor leadership, economic crisis, international apathy or hostility and inadequate institutions, each of which has a form unique to its own time of crisis? The cultural argument is also contradictory; it blames state collapse and failure of ‘Russianness’, but also argues that Russians have a cultural affinity for order and discipline, two features of any well-ordered state.

If we cannot blame Russia’s problems on historical inevitability or on some innate cultural tendency, we must seek answers to state failure that are more specific. We must explain how the forms taken by the Russian state in the twentieth century proved inadequate and how contemporary politicians have made decisions that have produced a particular form of state to the detriment of democratization and economic transformation. This requires us to understand something about states in general. The fact that the state has been the problem in Russia and yet is necessary if the resolution of Russia’s current problems is to be a happy one demonstrates something about states in general: they are not easy to define and it is not easy to distinguish what affect, positive or negative, that they have on societies and their fate. Nevertheless, it is to these questions that we must now turn. If we are to argue that a failure to build a strong state is at the heart of Russia’s historical and contemporary problems, we must have some notion of what constitutes a strong state so that we can measure Russia’s historical and contemporary state weakness against it.

Defining the state is difficult since they are ‘not the sort of abstract, formal object which readily lend themselves to a clear-cut, unambiguous definition’.⁴ This is because states are defined by political factors and phenomena that are often unstable and contested. Essentially and basically, we can say that states have three main features.⁵ The state is, first, ‘a set of institutions . . . manned by the state’s own personnel’. This means that the state is not a unitary actor, a single organism that always acts according to a common purpose. It cannot ‘decide’ to do something and do it even when great power is vested in a single ruler like a Tsar, a General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), or a president. A state is a composite of different institutions, leaders and interests, and even when one institution is more powerful than the rest it relies on other institutions to implement its orders and they may often subvert its will. Second, the state has a dual character because the institutions that comprise it ‘are at the centre of a geographically-bounded territory, usually referred to as a society’. As a result, the state both looks inwards to the society that it manages and ‘outwards to larger societies [the international system of states] in which it must make its way’. Thus, the domestic policies of the state are often the product of its international concerns and vice versa. Finally, the state ‘monopolizes rule making within its territory’, to ‘define and enforce collectively binding decisions on the members of a society in the name of their common interest or general will’.

The basic features of a state – the fact that it comprises institutions, has tasks of social management and an international role, and that it seeks to monopolize rule making in a specific territory – all demand that the state strive to create three things: capacity, autonomy and organizational integrity. A state has capacity where it has the ability to get things done: rules are made, policies are formulated and the machinery (institutions) exists to ensure that policy is implemented and rules are kept. A state is autonomous when it is able to define policy independently of social groups and act independently of their interests, when private interests do not ‘capture’ it. Finally, a state has organizational integrity when its machinery and the officials who serve in it (bureaucrats, civil servants) are unified by a clear set of norms and goals, and where officials do not subvert state policy for private ends. States strive to create some measure of capacity, autonomy and organizational integrity because creating autonomy, capacity and organizational integrity enables them to better respond to international events and to the changing demands of social management. The manner in which they achieve capacity, autonomy and organizational integrity depends on two things: the type of political regime that exists in a state and the character of administrative organization. For simplicity’s sake, we can reduce both types of regime and of administrative organization to two basic forms and from this derive four basic types of state formation that can be used to describe modern states in general, the Russian state in its Tsarist, Soviet and contemporary forms in particular, and the form of state that it has been struggling to develop over the last decade.

Regimes, the systems of rule that endure beyond the life span of any particular politician’s government, can be classified as either absolutist or constitutional, the character of administrative organization can be classified as either patrimonial or bureaucratic.⁶ A regime is absolutist where both executive and legislative power is combined in the person of a ruler or a set of institutions, and constitutional where legislative powers are divided between the executive branch of government and a representative assembly. Administrative organization is patrimonial where office holders are selected through patronage as clients of a ruler, or as clients of one of the ruler’s clients, and possess the ability (and sometimes the right) to use state resources for personal ends. This is called ‘proprietary officeholding’. Bureaucratic organization, in contrast, exists where the appointment of officials is impersonal and formal regulations govern administration so that there is no ‘proprietary officeholding’.

Combining these ideas about regime and state organization we can produce four classifications of state formation: constitutional-bureaucratic, absolutist-patrimonial, absolutist-bureaucratic and constitutional-patrimonial. The basic characteristics of these four forms of state are laid out in Table 1.1. Constitutional-bureaucratic, absolutist-patrimonial and absolutist-bureaucratic state forms correspond respectively to modern consolidated democracies such as exist in countries such as the USA and Western Europe, Tsarist Russia (and other states where monarchs have ruled in conjunction with aristocratic elites), and the Soviet Union (and other twentieth century dictatorships such as Democratic Kampuchea under Pol Pot and communist China). Describing the generic types of constitutional-bureaucratic, absolutist-patrimonial and absolutist-bureaucratic state will enable us to see how stable modern political systems work, the strains that development puts on absolutist-patrimonial states, and the inherent problems of absolutist-bureaucratic states. This is important first, because Russia has gone from absolutist-patrimonialism, through an absolutist-bureaucratic

Table 1.1 State formations and their characteristics

state formation, and is now trying to construct a modern democratic system akin to the constitutional-bureaucratic state formations of the ‘West’. Second, describing these three types of state formation enables us to develop two ideas of state strength: we will be able to see that only the constitutional-bureaucratic state is strong over time because it is more adaptable, but that absolutist state formations can be strong because they can achieve specific tasks quite well at certain historical junctures. Realizing this, we can say something about our fourth form of state formation, constitutional-patrimonialism. This is an unstable type of state formation. Its evolution to the constitutional-bureaucratic type is not guaranteed because politicians may decide that the short-term strength of an absolutist state is better suited to their interests and to dealing with problems of social management and the provision of security.

The chief difference between constitutional-bureaucratic and an absolutist type of state formation is in the prevalent form of state power. All state formations have both despotic and infrastructural powers, but which form of power is most prevalent differs widely.⁷ This means that the nature of state autonomy, capacity and organizational integrity also differ considerably. In a constitutional-bureaucratic state formation infrastructural power is more prevalent than despotic power. Infrastructural power exists where there is a cross-penetration of state and society so that decision making is not isolated from social concerns. The state’s decision-making powers are created by a negotiation of its functions, rights and responsibilities that is carried out primarily through the interaction of the executive branch of government and representatives of social groups in legislative assemblies. A state with infrastructural power is thus not isolated from society, but nor is it dominated by any particular interest from within society, or by society as a whole to the point where officials cannot sometimes take action that they think necessary.⁸ The state and its autonomy are ‘embedded’ in society, and the state’s power is exercised evenly over all of the territory of the state and is not effectively challenged in any part of its territory.⁹ Within the territory for which it claims to make rules, a state with infrastructural power can thus work to satisfy the common interest or general will that was mentioned above. The general will is defined – imperfectly – and redefined by elections, debate, lobbying, social protest etc., which work through the constitutional division of responsibility for legislative activity between executive and representative assembly. Of course, social inequality does have an impact on policy: the economically powerful have more chance of making their interests heard than the poor; the state takes action to preserve an economic system in which there are social divisions; the reproduction of social division with the connivance of the state naturally favours the rich. The state’s embedded autonomy is thus relative: there is only ‘fairly strong’, rather than an absolute, ‘institutional differentiation of formal collective decision making from the overall system of inequality’, rather than an absolute differentiation.¹⁰

Relative state autonomy is facilitated by the complexity of the modern democratic state and their organizational integrity. State officials and depart- ments might share concerns with social groups that they deal with on a regular basis. For example, farmers may be close to bureaucrats from a ministry of agriculture, or bankers might have common cause with civil servants from a finance ministry. But the complexity of a democratic state prevents any one interest from dominating the whole: state officials may thus reflect social interests in constitutional-bureaucratic systems, but they generally do not do this at the cost of bureaucratic neutrality in the state at large. Moreover, there is a social expectation that state officials will work according to legal norms that are neutral. This means that there is coincidence between the organizational norms of the state and social norms. This organizational integrity is not perfect – state officials fall from grace just like the rest of us – but where it breaks down, the polity itself at society’s demand rectifies it. Corruption, for example, is prosecuted and rectified through the regulation of the bureaucracy by law. Organizational integrity, like autonomy, is therefore never absolute, but private interests do not break it down finally or irrevocably.

State autonomy and organizational integrity facilitate state capacity because the orders that emanate from the state are viewed as generally being legitimate and are implemented. Capacity is also constantly under review in a constitutional-bureaucratic state formation and what the state ‘does’ and what society ‘does’ is negotiated between them and by such things as elections changing what society asks the state to do through its elected politicians. The need for coercion is therefore low since the state does not generally demand more of its citizens than they are prepared to do. The need to coerce bureaucrats is also relatively low. They require supervision, but organizational integrity and the social legitimization of power facilitate the practical aspect of policy implementation, the actual process of getting things done. Orders are respected as they are passed down bureaucratic hierarchies and both those who give orders and those who seek to fulfil them expect that bureaucrats will obey the orders given them. Since state orders are accepted as legitimate, the range of supervisory tasks that bureaucrats have to undertake is limited and the ability of the state to gather resources to create capacity is great. Since the responsibilities of the state are defined by negotiation, society accepts that resources have to be passed over to the state on a regular basis in order that it may fulfil its responsibilities. Infr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Chronology: Russia’s Twentieth Century
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Strong States, Weak States and the Russian Problem
• 2. The Limits of Absolutism: Tsarism and Soviet Socialism
• 3. Russian Politics Under Boris Yeltsin: Democratic Hopes Versus Political Fragmentation
• 4. From Planned Economy to ‘Virtual Economy’: The Failure of Economic Transformation
• 5. The Politics of Faded Grandeur: Russia’s New International Relations
• 6. Conclusion: A State of Uncertainty – Russia Between the Past and the Future
• Select Bibliography