Russia Profile
February 29, 2008
A Wider Look at Putin’s Presidency
All Roads Lead to the Kremlin
Comment by Sergei Tereshenkov
Presidential elections this Sunday will elevate Dmitry Medvedev to Russia’s highest office, but they will also underscore the impact of President Vladimir Putin’s tenure. Looking back at the eight years that transformed Russia’s political system and changed its positioning on the global arena reveals a mix of dizzying success and stark failure.
The legacy of the 1990s was a heavy burden for Putin. The financial crisis of 1998 eliminated all efforts to create a middle class and ruined whatever remained of ordinary people’s trust in the Kremlin. Citizens grew tired of the stream of new faces in the government, the doling out of presidential duties to the so-called “Family” around President Boris Yeltsin, and the elites’ preoccupation with self-enrichment. They felt such elites did not care about the hard life of the majority of Russians hovering below the poverty line. And this was only the tip of the iceberg.
Putin quickly gained broad support for his candidacy after being appointed prime minister in 1999. His very appearance as a younger, energetic official contrasted with the sick and apathetic Boris Yeltsin. Furthermore, he created a new form of seemingly direct communication between himself and the people. His principle of taking “personal responsibility for everything” sounded extremely attractive to the electorate.
He paid visits to Russia’s far-flung regions, including tea parties in the kitchens of military officers and pensioners. He didn’t limit his public persona to the annual message to the Federal Assembly. Instead, he organized national call-in shows as well as marathon press conferences for Russian and foreign journalists. At these public events, he showed an incredible command of facts and figures. He vigorously presented his vision for a strong and successful Russia. He forged a populist image with appearances aboard a military ship or an aircraft. His recent fishing trip, where photographs were taken of his shirtless, cross-wearing torso reconfirmed his image as a macho leader with a proximity to the people.
The president enjoyed fame as a strict and even severe politician. In internal affairs, his famous “power vertical” ran through all the strata of the state machine and enabled the implementation of practically every strategic decision only upon the Kremlin’s approval.
Step by step, Putin weakened the influence of local authorities that had gained tremendous powers during Yeltsin’s tenure. First, he divided the country into seven federal districts and assigned personal envoys to oversee the activities of governors. He then undercut their authority at the federal level by changing the way appointees entered the upper chamber of parliament. He also enrolled the majority of regional leaders into the main pro-Kremlin party “United Russia.” In a final blow to regional autonomy, he took away the popular mandate of regional governors, making them Kremlin-appointed officers, rubber-stamped by regional legislatures.
These actions pulled a decentralized country together. The Kremlin now held sway over all of Russia and one, unified law from the center rippled out across the country. The war against Chechen rebels, who invaded neighboring republics and threatened the stability in the entire Caucasus, also allowed Putin to consolidate his power. The mission’s success averted the disintegration of Russia. Unfortunately, it couldn’t prevent further terrorist attacks outside Chechnya, including the most terrible ones like the swath of apartment bombings in 1999 or the capture of hostages at Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre in 2002 and at a school in Beslan in 2004.
The terrorist sallies and other tragedies, most notably the sinking of the Kursk submarine early in his presidency, aroused a wave of criticism of the way the government and the president himself handled the disasters. Putin mistakenly interpreted the criticism as treason to state interests. He used the violence as a pretext to “turn the screws” and reduce the influence of his opponents. The wreck of the Kursk submarine in 2000 led to the first strike at the media and the most odious “Family” confidant, Boris Berezovsky, who at that time controlled Channel One at the Russian television. He also lashed out NTV’s Vladimir Gusinsky, who had never regained Putin’s trust after supporting the “party of governors” in the 1999 Duma elections.
Following the Dubrovka siege, the Kremlin rolled out a tougher version of the media law. Beslan opened the way to the appointment of governors by the Kremlin and to toughening of the electoral law. The amended law required parties to maintain a membership of at least 50,000 people, switched to a proportional system of appointments in the State Duma, and raised the accession barrier to that body from 5 to 7 percent. The law also eliminated the “against all” option on ballots and lowered the minimum turnout. These measures made it easier for authorities to pack the legislature with loyalists and to vastly complicate the chances of the opposition.
The campaign against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his YUKOS empire ended the political influence of Yeltsin-era oligarchs, and further concentrated the country’s economic wealth in the hands of the Kremlin.
The consolidation of power, along with heightened economic prosperity due to high prices for natural resources, made Putin feel far more independent on the international scene than his predecessors ever did. Whether he was bargaining for favourable conditions for accession to the WTO, protesting against the plans for the U.S. anti-missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, or voicing support for Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia, he has tried to refashion the rules of engagement with the West from the position of a junior, albeit still mistrusted, partner that Russia played in the 1990s, to a more equal relationship.
His main advances to the West – the proposed energy partnership with Western European powers and anti-terrorism security partnership with the United States in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, resulted in a disillusionment most vividly represented since the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine.
Yet throughout his presidency Putin has been extremely active internationally, paying attention not only to the regions and organizations of traditional Russian interest, be it the Commonwealth of Independent States, the United States and Europe or G8, the United Nations and NATO. He has also sought to broaden and diversify Russian foreign policy agenda by trying to build strategic partnerships in Asia, engage the Muslim world and even ventured to Africa and Latin America for the first time since the Soviet years.
Putin earnestly demonstrated Russia’s significant role in global politics during its chairmanship of the G8 organization and at the summit in St. Petersburg. He reminded everyone of the danger of a uni-polar world, and even staked a claim to Russia’s status as a “superpower.” The crowning moment of this shift in tone was his speech to the Security Conference in Munich in 2007.
However, he often lost his temper with “unfriendly” neighboring regimes and responded to their actions with countermeasures hardly worthy of a “superpower.” He banned the import of various goods from Georgia, Moldova, Poland, or Estonia, waged a “gas war” with Ukraine, which affected the European Union downstream, and ousted the British Council agencies in Russia’s provinces, leading to a palpable tension between the two countries.
Now, at the end of his presidency, Putin has turned not into a ”lame duck,” but a ”national leader,” because he was strong enough not to let his new “Family” – the team of former and present security officers known as “siloviki” – rule him during the second term. Despite obvious pressure, he persisted in his desire to follow the constitution and step down as president and simply nominated a successor, like Yeltsin nominated him eight years ago. In an important gesture, Putin named Dmitry Medvedev, who comes from the so-called liberal wing, unlike another favourite, Sergei Ivanov, a man of the security services.
Nonetheless, the overwhelming support for Putin’s policies, the catastrophic changes in the electoral law, lack of a constructive opposition, and the shrinking field of free speech distort – including in the president’s own eyes – the actual state of affairs and prevent the free flow of opinion. It is a question of interpretation then, whether one can call it a balance of freedom and order or authoritarian rule.