Russia's Unfinished Revolution

Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin

Michael McFaul, Michael A. McFaul

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801439001
• eBook ISBN: 9780801456961
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For centuries, dictators ruled Russia. Tsars and Communist Party chiefs were in charge for so long some analysts claimed Russians had a cultural predisposition for authoritarian leaders. Yet, as a result of reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, new political institutions have emerged that now require election of political leaders and rule by constitutional procedures. Michael McFaul—described by the New York Times as "one of the leading Russia experts in the United States"—traces Russia's tumultuous political history from Gorbachev's rise to power in 1985 through the 1999 resignation of Boris Yeltsin in favor of Vladimir Putin.McFaul divides his account of the post-Soviet country into three periods: the Gorbachev era (1985-1991), the First Russian Republic (1991–1993), and the Second Russian Republic (1993–present). The first two were, he believes, failures—failed institutional emergence or failed transitions to democracy. By contrast, new democratic institutions did emerge in the third era, though not the institutions of a liberal democracy. McFaul contends that any explanation for Russia's successes in shifting to democracy must also account for its failures. The Russian/Soviet case, he says, reveals the importance of forging social pacts; the efforts of Russian elites to form alliances failed, leading to two violent confrontations and a protracted transition from communism to democracy.McFaul spent a great deal of time in Moscow in the 1990s and witnessed firsthand many of the events he describes. This experience, combined with frequent visits since and unparalleled access to senior Russian policymakers and politicians, has resulted in an astonishingly well-informed account. Russia's Unfinished Revolution is a comprehensive history of Russia during this crucial period.

CHAPTER 1

The Revolutionary Transition from Communism to Democracy: A Model

Dictators have ruled Russia for centuries. Czars and Communist Party chiefs were in charge for so long that it became difficult to imagine a different kind of political system in Russia. Some even claimed Russians had a cultural predisposition for authoritarian leaders. Yet in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new way of governing unfolded; democracy did emerge. As the result of reforms initiated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a different kind of political regime eventually took hold in Russia. The new political institutions—that is, the rules of the game for structuring politics— stipulated that political leaders had to be elected to assume political power and that, once in office, these new leaders had to abide by constitutional procedures. Even if eventually this system collapses, its emergence represents a qualitative break with past political practices in the Soviet Union and Russia. Explaining the emergence of this new political system—Russian democracy—is the subject of this book.

Russia’s transition from communism to democracy has not been smooth, fast, or entirely successful. An explanation for the emergence of new democratic institutions in Russia must account for institutional failure, because some new institutional designs have succeeded in reorganizing politics whereas others have not. A failed attempt at designing new institutions occurs when a change in the political rules of the game generates “abnormal” politics or “revolutionary” politics. Such moments occur when one or more significant actors opt to pursue political objectives outside of the previous or amended rules of the game. These situations become revolutionary when two opposing groups claim sovereignty over the same territory and end only ‘When a single sovereign polity regains control over the government.”¹ Since 1985, the Soviet Union and then Russia have experienced a total of two such design failures or revolutionary situations.

The first failure occurred in August 1991. Beginning in 1988, Gorbachev and his allies initiated the most dramatic reform of political institutions of national government ever attempted in the history of the Soviet Union. In its final and most radical phase, Gorbachev’s blueprint for political reform included rule changes that allowed for free speech, elections, and a new relationship between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet state. However, Gorbachev’s reforms did not succeed in creating a new set of political institutions for governing the Soviet Union. Instead, in August 1991 his institutional innovations ended with violent confrontation between opposing forces, each claiming sovereign authority over the same state. Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the political institutions of the Soviet Union had failed.

The second failure occurred in October 1993. In the wake of the failed coup attempt of fall 1991, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, his government, and the parliament designed a new set of political institutions for governing Russia. After a euphoric beginning, this design also failed, culminating in another military clash in fall 1993 between two groups, each claiming sovereign authority in Russia.

In the wake of the October 1993 conflict, Yeltsin and his advisors crafted a third set of rules for governing Russia. This third attempt at building new political institutions has proven to be more successful than the first two. In 1993 in a national referendum, Russian voters approved a new constitution, that has organized politics ever since. Elections, as provided by the new constitution, became a critical component of this new political order. In 1993, 1995, and 1999, Russian voters elected representatives to the State Duma, the new lower house of parliament. In summer 1996, citizens elected Russia’s first post-Soviet president. In March 2000, they elected their second head of state. These elections were guided by law, held on time, and did not contradict the 1993 constitution; approximately two-thirds of the electorate participated. Election fraud tarnished the results, especially in 1993, yet all major political actors recognized the results as legitimate and refrained from challenging their validity.² Unlike the March 2000 presidential election in which Vladimir Putin emerged early as the clear favorite, in all other elections in the 1990’s it remained uncertain during the campaign period who would emerge as winner. In the three parliamentary elections, incumbents who lost then gave up their seats peacefully, suggesting that voting had real political consequences.

By most definitions, these electoral milestones marked the end of a successful democratic transition in which “abnormality is no longer the central feature of political life; that is, when actors have settled on and obey a set of more or less explicit rules.”³ The regime in place since 1993, often referred to as the Second Russian Republic, may even meet Joseph Schumpeter’s procedural definition of democracy: “the institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”⁴ Significantly, in contrast to the Gorbachev era (1985–1991) or the First Russian Republic (1991–1993), during the Second Russian Republic all major political actors have pursued their objectives within the confines of the new institutional order and have not challenged the existing rules to realize their agendas.

Comparatively speaking, Russia has been in transition from one type of regime to another for a much longer period than that experienced by most other modern states that have made recent transitions to democracy. Whereas the most successful transitions have broken with the authoritarian past, co-opted or disempowered the authoritarians, and built democratic institutions simultaneously and quickly, the Soviet-Russian transition sequenced and prolonged the resolution of these tasks. In particular, in Russia the ancien régime’s collapse was not synchronized with the building of a new political order. Instead, Russia experienced a prolonged gap between the end of the old and the beginning of the new.⁵ This protracted transition has had consequences for the kind of regime that eventually emerged. If the third attempt at designing democratic institutions in Russia has proven to be more durable than the first two attempts, the new system nonetheless is not a liberal democracy.⁶ Pluralist institutions of interest intermediation are weak, mass-based interest groups are marginal, and institutions that could help to redress this imbalance—such as a strong parliament, a robust party system, and an independent judiciary—have not consolidated. The absence of these democracy-supporting institutions means that Russia’s democracy is more fragile than a liberal democracy. In addition, a deeper attribute of democratic stability—a normative commitment to the democratic process by both the elite and society—is still not apparent in Russia. Although all major political actors in Russia recognize elections as “the only game in town” and behave accordingly, antidemocratic attitudes still linger in Russian elite circles and society as a whole. Self-interested motivations for adhering to democratic rules have not translated into normative commitments to democracy.

Why did the first two attempts at reform of political institutions in the Soviet Union and then Russia fail, ending in armed conflict between political opponents? In comparison with the first two attempts at political reform, why has the third attempt been more enduring? How durable is this political system that emerged after two previous failures? Are the institutional flaws in Russia’s democracy permanent or temporary? These are the questions addressed in this book.

A THEORY OF TRANSITION

An Actor-Centric Approach

The first argument in developing an explanation for the slow, protracted, and incomplete emergence of democracy in the Soviet Union and then Russia is that individuals make history. Russia’s transition from communist rule has been bumpy and protracted because of individual decisions made along the way. Socioeconomic, cultural, and historical structures shaped and constrained the menu of choices available to individuals, but ultimately these innate forces have causal significance only if translated into human action.⁷ Cultural and modernization theories may provide important generalizations over time, but they are inappropriate approaches for explaining variation in a short period of time. The same structural theory, after all, cannot be deployed to explain both change and continuity.⁸

Decades from now, the dramatic and volatile changes in the Soviet Union and Russia during the 1990s may appear to have been episodic flirtations with democracy, off of Russia’s more traditional authoritarian path. Or these changes may turn out to be the beginning of a fundamentally new and long-term democratic trajectory for Russia, in which case the false starts under Gorbachev and during the First Russian Republic will seem like minor antidemocratic hiccups. Today, however, both the failed and successful attempts at designing democratic institutions in the Soviet Union and Russia demand an explanation. If democracy eventually fails again in Russia, the very attempt at making democracy work in the 1990s merits an explanation. If Russia is bound to be a dictatorship forever, as some cultural theorists would have us believe, then why did Russians begin to tinker with democratic institutions in the first place? Conversely, if Russian democracy is inevitable, as some modernization theorists would have us believe, then why did the earlier attempts at designing new democratic institutions fail? Only when individual action is brought into the analysis can these kinds of questions be answered.

Institutional design in particular is an elite endeavor, making personalities such as Gorbachev, Yeltsin, their advisors, and their political allies and enemies the principals in this narrative. During moments of rapid, revolutionary change, when institutional guideposts and constraints for human action weaken or collapse altogether, we should expect individual choices to be especially consequential.⁹ Over time, the resilience of old structures becomes easier to identify. The short-term zigzags of history that seem so important in the moment look more like straight lines of history over the long run in which the trajectory seems both obvious and inevitable. Over time, new structures also begin to constrain the choices and behavior of individuals. While a country is in transition from one political system to another, however, uncertainty is high and contingency is real, making individual actors the cause of most outcomes. By focusing on individuals, their preferences, and their power to promote or impede change, the argument advanced in this book places human agency and individual choice at the center of analysis.

This focus on actors rather than structures is not novel to this study of regime change. On the contrary, many theorists working on problems of democratization in the last three decades have devoted particular attention to the role of actors, and elites in particular, and the bargains between them as the central drama in the transition story.¹⁰ Although a theory of elite-centered transition has not yet been fully specified or formalized, the broad contours of a model or metaphor can be discerned. The deep causes that initially spark the transition period vary considerably, ranging from rapid economic decline to war. Several authors have identified a similar logic of transition from authoritarian rule to democracy, which occurs once change is under way.¹¹ First, a split within the ancien régime occurs between soft-liners and hard-liners. Soft-liners believe that some degree of political reform is necessary, whereas hard-liners oppose any reform at all. When the soft-liners gain the upper hand, they initiate a policy of political liberalization, which in turn allows for new societal actors to organize and mobilize. These forces outside of the state also split into two camps—moderates and radicals. Moderates seek to negotiate with the soft-liners in power as a means of producing a new set of rules—democratic rules—to organize political competition. Radicals oppose any form of negotiation and instead advocate the overthrow of the ancien régime. A democratic transition is successful when the soft-liners and moderates manage to isolate the hard-liners and radicals, and then negotiate the basic principles of a new democratic polity.

The basic elements of this transition story can be found in the Soviet and Russian case of regime change that first began under Gorbachev.¹² Responding to a perceived economic crisis, Gorbachev initiated political liberalization in the Soviet Union as a way to spur economic reform. In doing so, Gorbachev alienated hard-liners within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and at the same time stimulated the emergence of new political actors in Soviet society. Over time, one could even discern radicals and moderates among these new societal actors. By fall 1990, the situation in the Soviet Union seemed ripe for a democratic transition. But such a smooth, negotiated transition from communist rule to democracy did not occur. Instead, confrontation ensued in August 1991, followed by another violent conflict between Russian elites in October 1993.

What happened? Why did the Soviet Union and then Russia diverge from...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Revolutionary Transition from Communism to Democracy: A Model
• PART 1. THE GORBACHEV ERA, 1985–1991
• PART 2. THE FIRST RUSSIAN REPUBLIC, 1991–1993
• PART 3. THE EMERGENCE OF THE SECOND RUSSIAN REPUBLIC, 1993–1996
• PART IV. THE FUTURE OF RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY