Russian Politics and Presidential Power

Transformational Leadership from Gorbachev to Putin

Donald R. Kelley

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781483320892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique russe

Russian Politics and Presidential Power takes an in-depth look at the Russian presidency and uses it as a key to understanding Russian politics. Donald R. Kelley looks at presidents from Gorbachev to Putin as authoritarian, transformational leaders who set out to build the future, while sometimes rejecting and reinterpreting the work of past modernizers. Placing the presidency in this context helps readers understand both the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the nature of the Russian Federation that rose in its place. And by setting the presidency within a longer historical context, Kelley shows how the future of the presidency is dependent on other features of the political system.

1 Executive Power in Russian Politics

The office of the Russian presidency is a relatively new creation. In constitutional terms, it has existed in its present form only since 1993, when Russia’s current constitution was written amid the turmoil of the early Yeltsin years. The office itself has had only three incumbents, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Dmitry Medvedev. Even during its brief existence, the Russian presidency has undergone considerable evolution marked both by the personalities and strategies of the incumbents and by the broader transformation of the Russian state, within which it is unquestionably the single most important institution. For the foreseeable future, Russian political life will be defined by the continuing transformation of the presidency, and although it seems at times as if Russia’s presidents have been making up the rules as they deal with the day-to-day issues confronting them, the broader perspective reveals a remarkable continuity linking Russia’s past with its present and likely future.

The most important thing to realize about the Russian presidency is that it cannot be understood without a broader examination of the place of executive authority throughout the history of the nation. The office, and the men who have held it, do not stand outside the sweep of Russian history. They and the system they govern are influenced by its tsarist and communist past as much as they are by the notion of what constitutes democratic rule in the twenty-first century.

Throughout Russian history there is well-established precedent of turning to what social scientists call “authoritarian modernizers” in a time of troubles. ¹ During the twentieth century, many nations—Turkey, Japan, and China are the best examples—created similar political systems to navigate a disruptive but arguably necessary period of industrialization and social transformation. ² What seems to set Russia apart is the frequency with which such leaders have taken the reins of power to modernize the nation. From Peter the Great to Putin, Russia time and time again has been led by men who sought to transform the nation. Such leaders have set out to drag Russia, sometimes kicking and screaming, into whatever constituted their vision of a better future, one in which a newly “modernized” nation would stand as an equal with the most powerful states of the day.

Virtually all of Russia’s authoritarian modernizers have, to some degree, copied their reforms from other presumably more advanced nations. The willful rush to catch up with more powerful and advanced nations usually was animated by a national inferiority complex and a fear that Russia’s future and perhaps its very existence were in danger. Sometimes the fear had solid justification. Peter the Great and Alexander II were shocked out of their complacency by embarrassing military defeats, and Joseph Stalin’s headlong rush to industrialize Russia was motivated, at least in part, by the growing fear of Germany and “capitalist encirclement.”

But despite their willingness to copy from other nations, Russia’s authoritarian modernizers also have sought to impose a certain “Russianness” on their reforms. Sometimes they tried to limit the impact of borrowed Western technology, attempting to insulate political and social life from the influence of Western ideas of constitutional monarchy and democracy. At other times they have created a distinctly Russian variation of Western philosophies. V. I. Lenin and Stalin fundamentally rewrote traditional Marxism to serve the needs of the moment. Mikhail Gorbachev tried and failed to create Russian versions of democratic and market socialism, and his successors initially offered a hybrid theory of “sovereign democracy.”

Although the motivation to produce such hybrid forms is certainly understandable, it nonetheless leaves observers with the task of sorting out what is distinctly Russian, what has been borrowed, and how each component has affected the other. We should admit from the beginning that any effort to answer this question risks distortion in two directions. On one hand, we could set the bar for accepting Russia as a democracy so high that we preclude its admission to the club of democratic nations. Even the most widely accepted democracies fall short of perfection; the playing field is never completely level, the institutional structures never completely representative, and the leaders never completely devoid of human failings. But on the other hand, we could set the bar so low that any failure to approximate democratic rule could be explained away as just another consequence of Russian history or culture.

What Does Executive Leadership Mean in the Russian Context?

If asked what executive leadership means in the Russian context, any sophomore political science major could give the generic answer accepted in most successful democracies. The executive official of government is that person who has been chosen to manage the executive functions of the state. That definition is not as circular at it might seem, at least in the sense that every government must have someone whose job it is to run the day-to-day activities of the state. To paraphrase former U.S. president Harry Truman, that executive official sits where the buck stops.

But then things get more complicated. De facto executive power may lie completely outside the state or at a lower level within the official hierarchy. In most of the communist states, real power resided in the highest party office, usually called the general or first secretary, leading to the common description that the party ruled while the state governed. Or in more unique cases, the de facto leader may hold a lesser office within the state hierarchy; Deng Xiaoping led China from the post of deputy premier, although there was no doubt about who was really in charge.

The most important lesson from our perspective is that we should not fixate on a single institutional form if we want to understand the role of executive leadership in the Russian system. Students of American politics are lucky; there is a presidency that stands independently of the identity of individual presidents. Historically, Russia is not yet at a point at which that distinction is meaningful.

Authoritarian Modernizers: The Prototype

The concept of authoritarian modernizers is hardly new. It has been applied to many leaders and revolutions for well over a century. It originally described the revolutionary transformation of a nation from a preindustrial, largely traditional, and relatively weak position into a modern, socially transformed, and powerful player in the international community. It had many different iterations: from peasant nation to industrial power; from colonized or externally controlled nation to an independent state; from one belief system usually rooted in religion, traditional society, and preindustrial social and political norms to a secular messianic ideology promising the transformation of social, political, and economic life, often with a vision of worldwide relevance; or in its most recent form as communism has fallen or been transformed, from an inefficient and collapsing economic and political system isolated from economic and cultural globalization to an emerging market-oriented postindustrial economy and internationalized culture able to take its place in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.

Whatever else such modernizing revolutions are, they are quintessentially about power. Power shifts from the old leadership to new leaders who promise to transform the nation. It empowers some to transform others, often through violent and draconian social revolutions from above. In most of the authoritarian modernizations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these transformations reached deeply into the social structure and psyche of the nation. New class identities emerged, as did “class enemies” and “enemies of the people.” Economic transformations changed the social profile of the nation. National and ethnic identities were transformed, as Russians, Ukrainians, and others became soviet citizens, later to reverse the process as the Soviet Union and soviet identity collapsed. More invasively, authoritarian modernizers got into the heads of their soon-to-be transformed citizens, promising to create the “new _______ man,” the blank space to be filled in by the nature of the future society they would inhabit.

Revolutions led by authoritarian modernizers also embody a conscious and self-serving political formula. By political formula, we refer to a combination of programmatic and tactical elements that set forth the agenda of authoritarian modernization and offer a rationalization of the new political and economic pecking order. Like most revolutionaries, authoritarian modernizers set out to do something—to overthrow the old and presumably regressive regime, to create a new political and social order, to move the nation forward toward their vision of the future, to end foreign occupation or influence, and to salve the nation’s embarrassment over its “backwardness.” They also articulate a strategy for revolution, usually combining a destructive stage in which they take control and then a transformational stage in which they implement their program. Taken together, these two elements comprise a political formula that offers direction, strategy, and self-justification. The two must operate in tandem for the revolution and transformation to succeed. Utopian vision without organization and strategy leads nowhere; organization and strategy without direction transform nothing.

The concept of authoritarian modernizer may be vested with different meanings at different points in time. Although the notion first emerged in connection with the rapid industrialization and social transformation of allegedly backward nations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the central idea has gone through a series of iterations with the passage of time. In the Russian context, Peter the Great and Alexander II were both authoritarian modernizers working within their own specific historical contexts. Lenin and Stalin followed in their footsteps, albeit pursuing radically different goals implemented and rationalized by very different ideological and social agendas. A central theme of this examination of executive leadership in the Russian and soviet contexts is that the basic concept of authoritarian modernizer continues to be relevant in the late soviet and post-soviet eras. Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev all fall within an updated version of being an authoritarian modernizer in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For our purposes, it is irrelevant that their actions disassembled most of the political, economic, ideological, and social features of the old order, substituting an incomplete and flawed democracy operating within the context of a mixed economy. The important point is that Russia and its contemporary leaders are pursuing and ultimately modifying a version of modernity that is widely accepted in today’s world, one that in their view would not have emerged without strong leadership from above.

Richard Sakwa acknowledges the post-communist iteration of modernity in his most recent book on the Putin presidency: “In the post-communist transition period, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ envisioned by Marx as the period of extra-legal class dominance of the makers of the socialist revolution, in the 1990s gave way to the dictatorship of the executive designed to push through a modernization process that would ultimately render that dictatorship, as it would for Marx, redundant. . . . It was Putin’s achievement not only to reconstitute the state, but also to endow it with renewed legitimacy drawn from its developmental agenda.” ³

What does modernization mean in this context? The truthful if initially unhelpful answer is many things. But three important characteristics must be present. First, the model must be flexible and eclectic enough to include all of the aspects of modernization that are relevant within the context and timeframe in which it is applied; in some cases political or economic transformations will be the key, while in others broader social and cultural changes may be equally important. It also must establish a tactical link between the goals and mechanisms of the authoritarian transformation, what we termed a political formula earlier in this chapter.

Second, it must be flexible enough to permit both tactical and substantive reinterpretation of what “modern” means. Leaders who begin to transform their nation often alter course along the way, sometimes forced to do so by circumstances beyond their control, sometimes because their initial understanding of modernity was flawed or unreasonably utopian, and sometimes because they must include elements of the premodern culture to preserve the nation’s unique identity and win broad public support.

Third, the model must provide a clear distinction between the role of authoritarian modernizer and that of conventional authoritarian rulers. The distinction is important for both intellectual and political reasons. If we argue that the concept of authoritarian modernizer is an important explanatory tool in understanding political and social changes in Russia and many other nations, then it must be possible for us to see the distinctions between these transformational leaders and the rule of status quo autocrats and dictators. Alexander II clearly fits the transformational model, but Alexander III does not; Lenin and Stalin must be included, and perhaps some of Nikita Khrushchev’s actions. But Leonid Brezhnev should n...