Date: 30 Jan 2006T
From: Anna.S.Parachkevova.04@Alum.Dartmouth.ORG (Anna S. Parachkevova 04)
Subject: A Flip of the Coin [re: coup prospects]
David,
I am sending you an op-ed about Russia's weakness/strength in light of Berezovsky's recent threat to mount a coup against Putin.
Thanks
Anna
---------
A Flip of the Coin
By Anna Parachkevova
Boris Berezovsky’s recent interview for the Agency France Press reignited smoldering, but largely ignored, speculations about the possibility of a coup d’état in Russia prior to the 2008 presidential elections. Whether this is a real danger for Vladimir Putin depends on the answer to a broad but fundamental question: Is the Russia President “strong” or “weak?”
The answer is, “neither and both.” The Putin Administration has consolidated political and economic power very effectively. The ability to wield this power has allowed Russia to reassert itself on the world stage with a swagger absent for over a decade. Yet, in the process of centralizing power, the Kremlin has alienated, and in a few celebrated cases even imprisoned or exiled, many significant elites. This has created a fault line that could, within the near future, topple the regime and throw Russian and world politics into significant turmoil. Berezovsky’s warnings, therefore, should be taken seriously.
The Kremlin’s campaign to centralize power has had great political, social, and economic effect. The legislature, at the behest of the executive, has enacted laws that allow the president to directly appoint regional governors, and has repeatedly changed the electoral laws to weaken, if not stifle, political opposition. The government has also seized control of many once privately owned media outlets, and exerts significant pressure on the remainder. This effective muffling of press freedom has, predictably, led to an increase in general support for the President. But such support is based on manipulation, and is, therefore, fickle. If you change the message, you alter the result. Sensing the fragility of his hold on power, President Putin’s government recently passed a controversial law that makes foreign owned Non Governmental Organizations subject to interference from Moscow. Putin’s actions indicate that he is not as convinced, as the rest of the world might be, about his hold on power.
The economic and political changes wrought by the Putin administration focus on the essential re-nationalization of the petro-economy. In 2005, well before the gas war between Russia and Ukraine escalated, the Kremlin obtained a controlling 51 percent in Gazprom, the natural gas giant involved in the recent confrontation with Ukraine and Western Europe. For its part, Gazprom had already purchased Sibneft, Russia’s fifth largest oil company, for $13 billion. Sibneft, on the other hand, moved to purchase a 25 per cent stake in the huge Pacific-coast Lopukhov oil-gas field, formerly owned by the Russian-British joint venture TNK-BP. Further, the state-owned Rosneft gobbled up what was left of Russia’s third largest oil company Yukos, after its owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky was sentenced to eight years in a Siberian prison camp. This control allowed the Kremlin to play a very aggressive hand of high stakes Russian Roulette with Ukraine and Western Europe recently, and one that regardless of the future of Vladimir Putin, Russia soundly won.
In the process of absorbing control of both the petro-economy and the media, President Putin has made powerful enemies. Khodorkovsky, locked away in Siberia, has not been silent – issuing repeated calls for the need of a Left Turn in the state of Russian affairs. From Israel, Vladimir Gusinsky maintains his ownership – for now – of RTVi, while Berezovsky still publishes the business daily Kommersant. There are others, and they may successfully apply pressure to the fissures forming in the massive, increasingly monolithic, pillars of Putin’s rule.
Berezovsky has shown his willingness to actively engage in politics from abroad. Through his Civil Liberties Foundation, he donated $21 million to sources close to Viktor Yushchenko during the so called “Orange Revolution” that brought down the leading pro-Kremlin candidate. But Berezovsky’s plan for Russia is different. With Putin’s high approval ratings, the practically extinct political or media opposition, and the lack of unifying ideology make an uprising from below a remote possibility. Instead, he will attempt to oust Putin from above.
In his AFP interview, Berezovsky vowed to mount a coup against Putin by pitting elites against one another. Under Vladimir Putin, the electoral branch has essentially subsumed the power of both the legislature and the judiciary. Yet, its support rests on three pillars: Former KGB agents, businessmen, and party men. Rivalries and tensions already exist between these factions, and are bound to rise as Russia moves closer to its next election cycle and as the KGB men continue to gain influence vis-à-vis the others within the halls of the Kremlin. Berezovsky may hope to manipulate and mobilize certain important actors within these competing forces.
There are factions forming within these groups, and, with the proper application of resources, internal friction could be fanned to flame. And Boris Berezovsky has resources. Recently in the business sphere internal disagreements scuttled a merger plan between Rosneft and Sibneft which would have created a true oil-gas goliath, with real power devolving to President Putin.
The three existing spheres of power are not new in Russia’s government. The divisions first appeared in the late 1980s, when the Communist Party split into conservative and liberal wings. Many of the conservatives were former KGB officers who, ultimately, were to lead a coup against Gorbachev. The liberals were party members who realized the need for economic and political reform. Boris Yeltsin emerged as the leader of the liberal faction with his resistance to the coup plotters in 1991. During his rule, and in what can be thought his greatest failure, the third power center of post-Soviet reality was born – the oligarchs.
By Yeltsin’s second term, the oligarchs had absorbed most of the political and economic power in Russia. The opaque privatization “reforms” which made life difficult for small business, literally gave away the vast, if outdated, resources of the Soviet State to a small number of individuals. This accumulation of power and enormous wealth in private hands also led to the rise of organized crime, influence peddling, and outright corruption by government officials, including many former KGB agents. While many of them became wealthy, they were, during the Yeltsin administration, a secondary power source, reliant on the oligarchs for the grease to keep their machine in motion.
Vladimir Putin, if he has done anything, has essentially and elementally restructured the power relations within Russia, but by doing so he has only demonstrated that these relationships are, indeed, fungible. While the oligarchs have been marginalized they have not been neutered. For their part, the “party men,” the politicians and the organizers of the President’s United Russia Party, are, as of the moment, supportive of the president. But they may start to flood towards other candidates as the next presidential election, in which Putin has pledged not to run, draws near. Many have argued that no one in Putin’s circle would dare put Russia’s stability at risk. But such a claim rest on the assumption that Russia is stable. Putin’s marshalling of the economic and political forces has, to this point, created a new Russia, growing in strength and international muscle, but it is a high castle built on unsure foundation stones.
This is the paradoxical reality of Russia today. One side of the coin is a Russia reasserting its regional, if not global, strength and rebuilding its economy. On the other is an increasingly isolated, authoritarian and vulnerable presidency. And the coin is in the air.