Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007
From: Sergei Roy SergeiRoy@yandex.ru
Subject: Putin, Russia after 2008: Plan A or Plan B?
Putin, Russia after 2008: Plan A or Plan B?
By Sergei Roy,
Editor, guardian.psj.ru
Whenever the people of Russia ask themselves, “What will Putin do after March (or rather May) 2008?” they actually mean “What will happen to Russia – to us – after March 2008?”
It is a fact that in the seven years of his rule Vladimir Putin has achieved the status of the nation’s leader – something quite different from being head of government or of party in power or legislature or top manager of Russia Corp. What there is of the country’s “moral-political unity,” as it was known in the Soviet times, is bound up with that magic name. The fates of Putin and of Russia are therefore inextricably linked at this moment and in the foreseeable future: a Russia without its national leader will not be the same as with such a figure. And so far there is no other likely candidate for the position – no one to surpass Putin in terms of stature, popularity, and record of service to the country.
Such is the main point that we have to bear in mind when we are dealing with this all-important issue of what Putin will – or better say, should – do: Putin must remain a, or rather the, national leader, and he is most likely to do so. I for one just do not see Putin modestly retiring into private life.
This answer is, of course, much too general to be any good, for any practical purposes. The question is, in what capacity could Putin continue to perform his duty as the nation’s leader?
Personally, I do not see Mr. Putin as a sort of ayatollah figure, providing spiritual guidance for the nation from some celestial heights of God-inspired wisdom: he is too practical-minded, not to say businesslike for that. Besides, Russia already has such a figure, periodically discharging thunderbolts at the way things are done in Russia and the universe in general – and a fat lot of good this has been to the nation [1].
Putin has been good for the nation – both for the people’s well-being and for the country’s stature in the world. We have, of course, all sorts of individuals both inside the country and especially abroad yelling “dictatorship,” “autocracy,” “backsliding on democracy” and, in the more clinical cases, like that of a certain chess champion with an obvious disarray in the upper storey, “fascism” – but we, the people living over here, know what we know: the country is no longer up to its ears in debt, people no longer depend on humanitarian aid for their physical survival, and there is no specter of Gaidar “reforms” (in plain English, robbing the nation of its savings and a thousand-fold rise in prices) or a national default hanging over us. There is plenty of discontent and misery, but please, when have things been otherwise in Russia? Under Stalin – when “life was becoming better, life was becoming merrier”? For heaven’s sake…
So – to continue to be the nation’s leader, Putin must go on being good for the country. And to do that, he must do away – or be seen trying to do away – with things that are bad for the country. It is thus a question of Putin’s agenda for the next few years, maybe a decade, and of ways and means of implementing that agenda.
The ills that plague the land are there for all to see. Putin has talked of those ills time out of mind, the party of power is talking of them at every photo op, the opposition ditto, and it has now come to pass that the Orthodox Church itself has spoken out on the subject – not in camera but ex cathedra, at its All-World Russian People’s Assembly (Sobor) [2].
The worst, the most disastrous of these ills is the gap or rather chasm separating the very few super-rich and the impoverished masses – a chasm that, far from getting filled in or smoothed out, is growing deeper and wider [3]. In terms of per capita GDP, Russia is in the 90th place in the world, while it is second to the USA alone in the number of billionaires – and their numbers, far from diminishing, have grown 1.5 times plus in the past year (see Forbes Magazine). “These days 53 of our ‘workaholics’ possess assets exceeding the country’s annual federal budget,” writes Yuri Boldyrev, a prominent critic of the state of affairs in this country. [4]
Another index pointing to the enormity of this chasm is the fifteen-fold difference between the incomes of the top ten percent of the population and the lowest ten percent. It has rightly been pointed out that these official statistics do not take into account the richer strata’s shadow incomes; the actual incomes of the upper brackets are more like twenty-five times higher than the lower ones’, not fifteen.
Now, this widening of the gap between rich and poor has been a feature of the entire Putin tenure. The feeling is that he fell on the job somewhere there, he must be held accountable for it – and he must do all he can to put it right. If he could not do it in his first two terms in office, he must use the four-year interlude out of office to prepare for ultimately achieving that goal.
Neither Putin nor his think tank, or any other think tank, will have to set the Moskva on fire to find remedies for this ill: they have been around for ages.
Point one: eliminate that monstrosity, the “flat” income tax, with Mr. Abramovich with his $18 billion and an agricultural worker getting 1500 rubles a month (if ever he gets it) paying the same 13 percent. This is not taxation, this is mockery. Introduce progressive taxation – and make it work! It’s no use saying that the big earners will be getting their salaries in “black cash,” in “envelopes,” like they used to and still do. If the internal revenue apparatus cannot cope with this ill – what’s the use having an internal revenue apparatus?
Point two: tax on luxury. I would suggest an eminently practical, foolproof, once-off method of raising old-age pensions to human levels (current ones are definitely inhuman, mostly way below subsistence levels), paying the cash-strapped army, paying single mothers who get a pittance from the state for their children’s upkeep, getting the down-and-outs off the streets, and actually providing for all the needy. The method is simple: take an aerial survey of Moscow’s environs, list all of the zillion luxury villas (castles, rather) built all around Moscow in the last fifteen years, levy a tax on these luxury properties – and make them pay it! If payment is not forthcoming, put them up for auction. That measure would yield literally countless billions of dollars. Revolutionary? Of course it’s revolutionary – but at least more honest than the way in which those villa owners came by their wealth.
Point three: introduce proper death duties, something of the order of 40 percent, as in France. Unlike the scheme outlined above, this will take effect in the longer term (most owners of mammoth, ill-gained fortunes will be around for quite some time – barring accidents involving bullets and high explosives), but in the nature of things it is the surest way of filling the treasury coffers.
I am sure there are other, perhaps even more effective proposals for leveling off the rich/poor divide and relieving attendant social tension. Some of them will involve the proper way to handle the Stabilization Fund (there has already been some movement there); others have to do with the so-called natural rent from exploiting God-given natural resources that should, by rights, benefit every citizen (as they do in, say, Norway), not just the few who proved more predatory than the rest at the initial, catch-as-catch-can phase of Russian capitalism. But the three moves outlined above are obvious, incontestable, and comprehensible to any person of practically any level of intelligence.
What will happen if these or other measures to bridge the rich/poor divide are not implemented in the near future? Certain sections of the political spectrum, united primarily by their hatred for the “Putin regime” and for Putin personally, predict, and call for, some sort of an “orange revolution” – a spontaneous uprising of the downtrodden masses carefully guided by the “orangists,” their oligarchic backers and interested – very interested – parties abroad. However, even the most radical of these “revolutionaries” living here in Russia realize, deep down, that these hopes are mere wishful thinking, and formulate their predictions in properly cautious terms. [5]
Unencumbered by observation of Russian realities, certain Western “analysts” are more bold – or foolish – in their predictions of this sort. Just recall Anders Aslund’s inane forecasts for immediate revolt against Putin back in 2005: “… the challenge to President Putin is likely to come from the very top or the bottom of society, that is, from his KGB cronies or the people. … The powerful men surrounding Putin may conspire in a putsch against him. … Another possibility is a popular uprising through escalating spontaneous protests. … The population is evidently uncommonly irritated, and it has been inspired by the recent revolutions in Ukraine and the Kyrgyz Republic. A broad popular protest suddenly looks like a distinct possibility…. In Russia, no obvious leader is apparent, but that is hardly central. The most authoritative name to surface so far is former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.” [6]
Mr. Aslund’s faith in Kyrgyz “revolutionaries” providing inspiration for their Russian counterparts, or his faith in Misha “Two Percent” Kasyanov as the intrepid leader of the future Russian “orange” revolution might merely inspire solicitude for his mental health – if it were not for the fact that the ruling circles of, say, the United States shape their Russia policy on precisely this type of delirious “analysis.” I am sure Mr. Aslund’s clients, the people who ordered this kind of analysis, will easily forgive him the idiocy thereof; after all, he meant well – just happened to be a bit too eager to please, glibly overlooking such uncomfortable facts as Putin’s seventy-percent approval ratings. That American, and generally Western policy towards Russia is based on this type of inanities is nothing new, and will have to be suffered as an elemental phenomenon, like global warming. There is little Russia can do about it except clearly state its scorn for such attitudes, along the lines of Putin’s recent Munich speech, and pursue its own national interests regardless.
I am more bothered by predictions of a diametrically opposed kind. You see, some analysts hold that the “Putin regime” is here to stay, in its present form, for at least forty years; that is, practically indefinitely. [7] The analysis on which this forecast rests is fairly primitive: Russian society is said to have reverted to the autocratic or Politburo mode of governance, with a KGB junta of some five people, a sort of behind-the-scenes latter-day Politburo ruling the country and intending to go on ruling it in precisely the same manner for as long as they can.
The reason this bothers me is that it is too close to the conspiracy-theory view of Russia prevailing beyond its borders – and we have seen on what kind of “analysis” such views are based. Rather than predict an uprising or coup round every corner, in the manner of Aslund, M-me Kryshtanovskaya insists that the Chekist regime is “fantastically stable,” with no fear of a reversal to a Kasyanov-led oligarchy. Well, many thanks for that – but a “fantastically stable” regime has no need of changing, of dealing with the major ill affecting the land, as described above. And one simply cannot accept that.
Russia’s political class will absolutely have to deal with the suppurating sore of social injustice, and in order to achieve that, the country’s political system will necessarily have to change in certain basic ways – that is the short and the long of it.
If nothing is done to relieve social tensions, things will look fairly bleak, however “fantastically stable” the regime. Sure, there will be no revolutions, orange, red, or polka dot; there will be no coups, KGB-engineered or any other sort. Only – there are so many other ways for a nation to commit suicide, apart from coups and revolutions…
Russia is leading the world in the number of babies killed in abortions; more babies are simply not born because the families cannot afford them; great, previously unheard-of numbers of babies are left upon birth by their mothers to the doubtful care of state institutions; and ever more children leave their alcoholic or criminal families to go live on the streets.
Russia is in 142nd place in the world in terms of life expectancy, below Iraq and just a jot higher than Belize, at 67.66 years.
This country is a leader in such questionable achievements as consumption of alcohol per person, drug addiction, deaths from alcoholic poisoning, suicides, murders, deaths in road accidents and in industrial accidents. Incredible numbers of people – no one knows exactly how many – just disappear into the blue; they leave their residences and are heard of no more.
In sum, the country is losing a million people a year, of which the greater part – people in the prime of life – die from what is known as unnatural causes rather than passing away quietly in their old age.
There is also emigration, brain-drain, and trafficking in “white slaves,” mostly in young females – all drifting westwards in the hope of escaping from poverty and hopelessness at home.
At this rate of population loss, Russia might not have enough people, towards the end of the forty-year golden age of “fantastic stability,” to hold on to its vast territory, and might simply be peacefully or not so peacefully swamped by legal and mostly illegal immigration, in much the same way as Serbs have been squeezed out of the province of Kosovo, the birthplace of the Serb nation, by the Albanians.
There is also the question of the nation’s “political-moral state,” known in Soviet times by the hideous acronym polimorsos. It is currently nothing short of abominable. Rotten. It is characterized by two polar features – passivity on the one hand and aggression on the other.
Increasing numbers of people lose all interest in public affairs, staying away from elections and similar activities which, they believe, have nothing to do with them and everything to do with the games the top dogs play. This undermines any progress towards higher stages of democracy, for you cannot have democracy without its central figure, the demos.
The reverse side of the coin is aggression. Frustration has to break out in some way, and it is released through racial and ethnic violence, football hooliganism, satanic cults, and ordinary violent street crime. One hears that, say, in Ulyanovsk, formerly a peaceful backwater mostly known as the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin, a person is no longer safe in the streets which have been divided among youth gangs fighting each other and anyone who crosses their path with mindless ferocity.
Moscow is a special case, the city is perhaps better policed, but the rot is there, right at the core of things. There are considerable numbers of the unemployed here – but will they work for good pay if the work is hard? Just you ask the managers of the city’s most flourishing industry, construction. They will state frankly that if all illegal migrants working at construction sites were to be sent out of the country, all construction activity in the capital would freeze overnight. The city is kept clean, the refuse is dealt with, and public transportation is run by imported, mostly illegal workforce – Ukrainians, Moldavians, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Azeris, etc. The Muscovites find other ways of scraping by, like letting rooms or “corners” to out-of-town job seekers, and God knows what else. Anything but honest, hard work.
One could continue this Jeremiad almost indefinitely, but the overall picture is clear enough. Time to deal with the crucial question that bothered Chernyshevsky, Lenin, and practically every member of the intelligentsia since time immemorial: What is to be done?
I started out with a short list of measures that would eliminate, or go a long way towards eliminating, the core malaise affecting present-day Russian society – the unbearable contrast between the super-rich and the nation’s impoverished majority. Now the question we should ask ourselves is this: Can these measures be implemented under the present political setup in Russia? My answer is, Definitely not.
Consider one specific proposal outlined above: levying a tax on luxury properties around Moscow, what I called “castles,” each worth millions of dollars. The trouble with this scheme is obvious: the people who would, under the present setup, be expected to introduce the proper legislation and implement it are among the owners of these castles, or else it’s their wives, children, mistresses, and so on.
This fact illustrates the second major ill that affects the organism of the Russian state – the rot which has spread throughout the top of Russia’s socio-political structure and which makes it impossible to do away with the first major ill and the rot at the bottom: money and power are to a large extent in the hands of the same people.
According to the VTsIOM poll cited above, after the division of the nation into the rich and the rest comes the gulf between the bureaucracy and the population: 71 percent of the pollees regard this division as extremely significant, and only 19 percent, moderately significant.[8]
Now, the bureaucracy in its present shape is no good as an instrument of taking away the super-profits of the super-rich and distributing them more equitably for the simple reason that the upper sections of that bureaucracy are themselves the super-rich, while the lower rungs all aspire to become richer than they currently are and maybe get into the super-rich brackets – and the devil take the hindmost, those impoverished masses struggling for their daily bread.
Just by way of illustration take the upper house of Russia’s parliament, the Federation Council. It consists almost entirely of billionaires and multimillionaires, and whether we call them oligarchs in the same sense as Gusinsky-Berezovsky-Khodorkovsky-Smolensky and others in the recent past or use some other name for them, they are oligarchic in their very essence. Are these the people who would be expected to go altruistic all of a sudden? Might as well expect them to go through the eye of a needle, like a certain biblical animal.
Let me take an even more graphic example to show just how rotten and incapable of righting Russia’s wrongs this country’s bureaucracy is. On November 21, 2006 President Putin made a speech at the All-Russia Coordinating Conference of Law-enforcement Bodies, a speech that was expected by some to launch a revolution leading to the dismantling of the system of power established in this country in 1991-1992.[9] The key words of that speech were these: “money and power must be separated from each other.” In plain language, those who are after Big Money should go into business; those who choose to serve the public must be content with their salaries.
That blow was aimed at the root of corruption that hamstrings the working of the entire system of governance in Russia. Some researchers claim that the total of bribes changing hands in Russia in a single year is comparable to the country’s annual budget – a claim that, in the nature of the phenomenon itself, is hard to verify, yet anyone who wishes to run a small or medium-sized business here, or in fact anyone who has had any dealings whatsoever with that bureaucracy, will eagerly subscribe to it. [10]
Now, one would assume that the law-enforcers whom Putin was talking to were the very people to carry out a thorough purge and rid the nation of this age-old curse. One would expect them to greet that speech with a standing ovation, then roll up their sleeves and do a thorough job of bringing the culprits to account. Instead, there was a deathly silence during the speech and nothing like a revolutionary onslaught on corruption afterwards. Just feeble stirrings here and there – most of them initiated by the Kremlin itself, like the reshuffle at the prosecutor general’s office.
The reason for this misfire is obvious: the top law-enforcers themselves are among the owners of those luxury villas that would take them hundreds of years to save for, if their only source of income was their salaries. The lower rungs are on the take in their own modest or immodest ways. Each time I pass the local police station, I get a shock at the sight of their parking lot filled with Jeep Cherokees and similar monsters. One wonders if the officers’ official salaries would buy a front wheel of one of those vehicles.
Thus we come back to the same old question, What is to be done, given these sad facts?
A couple of years ago I wrote a rather lengthy article analyzing the main aspects of Putinism as an ideology (not all of it clearly articulated) and political practice. [11] Towards the end of it, I roughed out a couple of scenarios – Plan A and Plan B – the second of which may be seen as my proposal for answering the above question. Let me quote the pertinent passages, and forgive me their length.
“Roughly, two scenarios are possible.
(a) Putin goes in for the power-behind-the-throne bit, installing a Fradkov-like puppet and pulling the strings for all he is worth. Politically, he uses the already established United Russia party mechanism – somewhat refurbished, of course, but basically remaining what it is now, a party of the nachalstvo, the top dogs.
It is my view that under this setup none of the worthy goals outlined above will be achieved for decades, if ever. It will always be a case of too little too late, patching up a few things here, oiling a rusty mechanism there – until the oil and gas, or the people’s patience, run out, and I just would rather not look further into the future than that.
(b) Putin morphs out of his bureaucratic integument, jumps in, feet first, into the crowded left- and center-left area of Russian politics, and puts together a political machine capable of leading Russia along the path of – if not greatness, then economic and every other revival, modest prosperity and opportunity for all.
This would signify nothing short of a revolution in the Russian elite, a change-over from the current setup in which practically every member of the ruling class, while sucking the blood of Russia, has built a bridgehead in the West and is ever ready to strike camp and move out, if the going gets tough.
A political mechanism of this kind would represent at long last a viable opposition to the existing establishment and be doomed to a crushing victory at the next election. With lots of new and patriotic blood in the elite, the leadership might tackle not only the glaring problems of today, such as the unspeakable demographic situation or crime and corruption, but even those that are swept way under the carpet now, like the problem of Russia as a divided nation, with 25 million Russians (more like 30 million, if you count “Russian speakers”) living beyond the newly drawn borders of their mother country.”
Since that article was written, I have had occasion to preen myself on my clairvoyance, as a step has recently been taken in the spirit of Plan B: the Kremlin has launched Fair Russia, a center-left party that has even included in its program one of the measures suggested above – progressive tax instead of the “flat” one. This party has achieved a modest success in the recent provincial elections, coming in third, after United Russia and the Communists. Whether it will remain in this modest third place, or pose a serious threat to United Russia, the party of the bureaucracy, will depend on a few factors.
Point one: it will have to articulate its program of social justice more clearly (e.g. in terms of the three proposals listed above, as well as similar ones). This is sure to attract such vast, and most active, sections of the electorate as old-age pensioners and even some of the Communists. With proper propaganda work, these last may be persuaded that Soviet-style socialism is definitely not coming back, and that they should settle for a more modern, civilized mode of achieving social justice. In short, they will have to be reminded of the dull wisdom of Stalin’s maxim: “In order not to make a mistake in politics, it is necessary to look forward, not backward.”
Point two: the slogan “Purge the bureaucracy!” must be writ on the party’s banner in clear, bold type. The populace, especially the more active and enterprising part of the swelling middle class, is sick and tired of corruption and crime, of all those blood-sucking kryshas “protection rackets,” and will heartily support a force that extends the hope of eliminating this evil. The intelligentsia, or those sections of it that have not sold out body and soul to the oligarchs, is sure to join in: it is in the nature of the intellectual to lean left.
Point three is actually the crux of Plan B, as should be clear from the above quote from an earlier article: Putin must throw his weight behind this party. What it now has for a leader is a very poor, makeshift substitute with an inflated sense of his importance, popularity, and potential. Given Russia’s highly personalized attitude toward power, only a Putin-like figure has any chance of uniting the majority of the nation in the twin hopes of achieving social justice and building a civilized governance machine. And the only Putin-like figure on the horizon today is Putin himself.
With Putin at the head, electoral success – I’d even say landslide victory – of Fair Russia is a foregone conclusion. Translating that electoral success into achieving the party’s goals would take hard work, but it would be eminently worth it, both for the nation and the man himself.
The nation would at last wrestle in earnest – no one can say beforehand how successfully – with its age-old curses of injustice and corruption. And the man would – quite simply – attain greatness.
Notes:
[1] The latest such thunderbolt was on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the February 1917 revolution. I have dealt with it in my article “Echoes of February 1917 in Russia Today,” to appear in the UK-based journal The Liberal.
[2] Coming as I do from a background that has been Voltairean since the time of Voltaire, I was dumbfounded to find in the deliberations and final resolution of that Assembly a mapping out of roughly the same agenda as the one proposed here – sometimes item by item and word for word. To me, this only goes to show that the measures proposed here are absolutely self-obvious to anyone who cares for the good of the nation, and need only a political will and a political machinery to be implemented.
[3] It is the Russian people themselves rather than individual authors or politicians that put the rich/poor divide in first place among the many divisions within Russian society: according to a VTsIOM study, 79 percent of the Russian population regard the gap between rich and poor as “highly significant,” while 15 percent, “moderately significant.” No other differences (like those of class, generation, ethnicity, religion, etc.) came close to this split. See e.g. Vladimir Dzaguto. “Luchshe byt bogatym i nachalnikom” (It Is Better to Be Rich and a Boss). Vremya novostei, 22 March 2007.
[4] See Yuri Boldyrev. “Kto priznaet nepravotu?” (Who Will Admit Being in the Wrong?). Literaturnaya gazeta, 2007, No. 11.
[5] See e.g. Boris Sokolov’s rather hypothetically expressed hope of this kind in grani.ru: “When the mass of unsolved problems reaches a critical level, the people’s tiredness and irritation accumulate and may at a certain moment provoke the more active part of the people to stage a revolution.” (http://grani.ru/Society/History/p.119356.html ).
[6] See Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, www.CarnegieEndowment.org , August 2005. Policy Brief #41.
[7] See interview granted by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, head of Sector for the Study of the Elite, Sociology Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, to Kommersant-Vlast, 2007, #10, headed “The Position of Chekists Today is Fantastically Stable.” http://www.kommersant.ru/k-vlast/get_page.asp?DocID=750887
[8] See V.Dzaguto, op.cit.
[9] See Mikhail Antonov. “Sem let odinochestva prezidenta” (Seven Years of the President’s Solitude). Literaturnaya gazeta, 2007, #11.
[10] Most people must be aware that bribe-taking is endemic in Russia. In 1918, a few months after the Bolshevik revolution, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote this: “Old autocracy is no longer with us, neither are the old bureaucracy or the old police, yet the bribe is still the mainstay of Russian life, its basic Constitution.” (See N.A.Berdyaev. “Dukhi russkoy revolyutsii” (The Spirits of the Russian Revolution). In: Iz glubiny (De profundis). Moscow, Novosti Publishers, 1991, p.57 (original edition, 1918).
[11] See Sergei Roy, “Putin's Power.” Johnson’s Russia List, 16 Sept. 2005. See also Peter Lavelle’s site Untimely thoughts, http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/index.html?cat=3&type=3&art=2093.