Russian Politics and Society

Richard Sakwa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000097764
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Fully revised and updated to reflect the considerable changes in Russia over the last decade, the fifth edition of this classic text builds on the strengths of previous editions to provide a comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of Russian politics and society.

The new edition incorporates the latest debates about Russian politics, analysing recent institutional and political developments, and examines the electoral cycle and prospects of the president elected at the end of the process.

New to this edition:

• an evaluation of Putin's leadership and the country's political performance under him;
• updated election results and demographic, social, ethnic/national statistics to include results of the 2010 census;
• changes in the party system, to electoral legislation and to the composition of parliament as well as the relationship between the executive and legislature;
• coverage of the constitutional changes and governmental appointments under the various prime ministers;
• more analysis of economic performance including discussion of the energy sector and pipeline politics;
• changes in Russian foreign policy since EU enlargement, its relationship with NATO since the 'reset', as well as its relations with post-Soviet states;
• assessment of the military reforms and security and defence policy;
• debates over the question of democracy in Russia today, the nature of the system, and its future prospects.

Written in an accessible and lively style, this book is packed with detailed information on the central debates and issues in Russia's difficult transformation. An unrivalled textbook on the subject it is essential reading for all those concerned with the fate of Russia, and with the future of international society.

1

Approaches to Russian politics

A weak state is a threat to democracy in no less a degree than a despotic power.

Vladimir Putin¹

Nikolai Gogol ends the first part of his satire on Tsarist Russia, Dead Souls (1842), with the image of a careering troika (three-horse carriage) dragging Russia no one knew whither: ‘And where do you fly to, Russia?’ This troika has still not yet been tamed, and its final destination remains uncertain. The country in 1991 set its compass for capitalist democracy, yet the storms and turmoil of the succeeding years have taken Russia into unfamiliar territory. It is not a fully fledged consolidated democracy, since the rule of law remains weak, property rights are not always defensible, executive and bureaucratic agencies insulate themselves from popular accountability and control, and elections have become exercises in mobilisation rather than popular will formation. On the other side, Russia is not a consolidated authoritarian system (let alone an ‘autocracy’, the term now favoured by political scientists). There is simply too much outside the purview of the power system, and for much of the time the stipulations of the constitution are observed, Russia has a vibrant public sphere of debate and contestation and, despite some restrictions, there is a vigorous civil society, accompanied by what remains a relatively open internet. It is inaccurate to talk about Russia having endured a failed democratic transition, since it is far too early to consider the present system as the end point of Russia’s post-communist evolution. Russia is a hybrid system with considerable scope for further democratic evolution, but there is also the potential for the establishment of a harder authoritarian order. The model that will be used to describe this hybrid system is that of the dual state, in which the constitutional state operates in parallel with an administrative regime, but with the two symbiotically tied together. The administrative regime gains its legitimacy from claiming to operate according to constitutional principles in defence of strong state power, but at the same time it subverts the principles of genuine constitutionalism by managing elections and the political process as a whole. This and other models will be discussed later in this chapter, but before that we will look at the broader historical and political context of the world’s largest country (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The Russian Federation.

The challenge of history

Russia’s history of authoritarianism and its failure to come to terms with its past is often considered the greatest obstacle to the development of democracy. According to the historian Yury Afanasyev, ‘The public consciousness has not yet reached the required level. That there existed a certain regime and that a return to it is out of the question is acknowledged only by individuals, not as yet by the society.’² Nostalgia for the past is entertained not only by the communists but also by the great mass of the people. Memory of the past, however, is selective: both in terms of choosing the particular period that suits present tastes; and in reinterpreting the significance of each particular epoch. Early in his presidency Vladimir Putin pushed through legislation adopting the Tsarist double-headed eagle as the state emblem, the Soviet national anthem (with new words) as Russia’s official hymn and the ‘democratic’ tricolour (white, blue and red) as the national flag, intending thereby to reconcile three eras and with it three national myths – the imperial, the Soviet and the democratic. History remains central to post-communist Russian culture, with the flood of memoirs showing no signs of abating. Most newspapers and journals have a section devoted to Russia’s past, there are numerous historical series on television and many volumes of archival documents are being published. The past, its selection, interpretation and dynamics, remains a contentious issue in contemporary Russian politics.³

The speed of the collapse of the communist system, as with the destruction of Tsarism in February/March 1917, took most observers by surprise. When in 1913 the Romanov dynasty celebrated its 300th anniversary, the throne and empire appeared solidly in place; yet a mere four years later both lay shattered. When Mikhail Gorbachev was selected leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in March 1985, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Soviet system appeared firmly ensconced; and once again just seven years later communist rule had dissolved and the Soviet Union had disintegrated.⁴ Tsarism had been unable to survive the strains inflicted by the Great War, but in the Soviet case the absence of inter-state war made the collapse all the more astonishing. In a time of relative peace one of the world’s great geopolitical powers dissolved politically and disintegrated territorially. The Cold War played its part: the attempt to challenge the capitalist democracies for world leadership and to match their combined military potential provoked a severe case of ‘imperial overstretch’, to use Paul Kennedy’s phrase.⁵ Official accounts suggest that some 15 per cent of the budget was devoted to military expenditure, but this was probably much higher. If at the height of the Cold War in 1950 Western states on average spent 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) on social purposes and the same amount on military purposes (a ratio of 10 : 10), by 1990 military spending comprised 5 per cent of GDP and social spending 25 per cent, a ratio of 5 : 1. However, the USSR went the other way. If in 1950 the ratio was 25 per cent of GDP on social needs and 15 for military purposes, by 1985 military spending represented 18 per cent of GDP and social spending 22 per cent, almost a 1 : 1 ratio. Thus when Gorbachev came to power the ratio was worse than at the height of the Cold War.⁶ The arms race stretched Soviet resources, and this helped provoke the New Political Thinking, the re-evaluation of Soviet security and political strategic priorities. The dissolution of the Soviet regime resulted from a profound internal ideological evolution that questioned some of the fundamental philosophical principles on which the system had been founded.

External factors did play a part in the Soviet collapse, with oil prices halving in the first half of 1986 (to about $12 a barrel), thus depriving the USSR of desperately needed foreign revenue, while US President Ronald Reagan in March 1983 condemned the Soviet Union for being an ‘evil empire’, and in the same month announced the Strategic Defence Initiative (‘Star Wars’) missile defence system. The war in Afghanistan, which Moscow had ill-advisedly launched in December 1979, was grinding on, with the United States supplying military assistance to the mujahideen resistance. At the same time, Soviet economic growth was slowing, although the system could probably have muddled on indefinitely until it was destabilised by Gorbachev’s reforms.⁷ These reforms, which he described as perestroika (restructuring) had been long in the making, but when they arrived they were implemented in a haphazard and incoherent manner. The renewal strategy reflected a profound desire for change and a recognition, as Gorbachev himself repeatedly stressed, that old forms of political and economic management were becoming unviable.⁸ Soviet structures of accountability and policy-making had become so narrow that ultimately they lost contact with the society that they sought to manage. Political power became responsible to a narrow ‘selectorate’ and was unable to respond to the enormous social changes provoked by Soviet industrialisation and the broad programme of post-Stalin modernisation.⁹

Isaac Deutscher had earlier argued that Stalinism would be its own gravedigger, having set in motion social changes that would undermine the authoritarian political system. Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s responded by trying to re-energise the revolutionary spirit of Leninism, while Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled from 1964 to 1982, bought off potential demands for political inclusion by promising improved standards of living in return for political passivity. This was the late-Soviet ‘social contract’ that was reproduced in new forms in the Putin years. The stability that was at the heart of Brezhnev’s rule undermined the system’s potential to adapt to the changes that it had set in motion. According to Philip Roeder, the Bolshevik ‘constitution’ (the rules that governed the Soviet system from the early revolutionary years into the post-Stalin era; not to be confused with the official constitutions adopted in 1924, 1936 and 1977), imposed severe institutional constraints on the USSR’s adaptability.¹⁰ The debate continues whether we can still call the late Soviet regime totalitarian. In social terms, perestroika exposed the contradictions between the attempt to transcend the market and the realities of the command economy in which informal economic activity and corruption were rife; between the abolition of private property that condemned the mass of the population to a universal ‘equality in poverty’ and the luxuriating privileges of the political elite; between the progressive claims to political leadership by the Communist Party and its own crude manipulations of political decision-making; and above all between the regime’s claims to a monopoly of truth and the many lies on which it rested.

The Soviet regime went the way of the Romanovs earlier and entered the dustbin of history, but what was to take its place? Max Weber in the early years of the twentieth century had been sceptical about the possibility of democracy in Russia.¹¹ Many today are equally doubtful, given Russia’s tortured past in which the country had endured at least nine major foreign invasions in the course of a millennium. Not surprisingly, national security ranks highly in leadership concerns, but this enduring preoccupation conceals deeper continuities. The history of reform in Russia provides ‘many examples of opportunities missed and reform initiatives wrecked on the rocks of popular indifference or hostility or the resistance of powerful groups in society to the loss of their privileges’. Equally pertinent, given the apparent adaptation of contemporary reforms to traditional patterns, is Crummey’s observation about ‘the ease with which initiatives for change can be sucked into the morass of traditional administrative habits and ways of thinking’.¹² The hopes of the era of ‘great reforms’ of the 1860s under Alexander II, under pressure from the terrorism that culminated in the Tsar’s assassination in 1881, gave way to the reaction of the 1880s under Alexander III. The aspirations vested in the February 1917 ‘bourgeois democratic’ revolution soon gave way to the disappointment of the Provisional Government and the calculated brutality of the Bolsheviks after they seized power in October of that year. The three main reform periods of the Soviet regime – the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s, Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ of the 1950s and Gorbachev’s perestroika – all dissolved into disappointment. Against that background, it is hardly surprising that the prospects for Russian democracy are not considered bright.

Russia is not the only European country where the passage to political modernity has been traumatic. Weber had been as sceptical about the prospects for democracy in Germany as he was for Russia. Studies of the origins and dynamics of the Nazi regime offer a useful comparative perspective on Soviet developments.¹³ Recent studies have rejected orthodox Marxist interpretations of Nazism as an instrument of monopoly capital, but at the same time the standard liberal view of Nazism as a temporary archaic regression in the onward march of modernisation is equally untenable. Like the Lenin–Stalin regime in Russia, the Nazi state was propelled towards ever more radical measures by its inherent instability.¹⁴ Structural and institutional factors complement approaches based on political culture or social psychology. In post-war Germany the alleged ‘totalitarian personality’ appears to have adapted remarkably swiftly to democratic mores after 1945, although as late as 1968 Ralf Dahrendorf argued that high rates of political participation masked a qualitatively flawed political socialisation: ‘Democratic institutions are accepted; but th...