| JRL HOME | SUPPORT | SUBSCRIBE | RESEARCH & ANALYTICAL SUPPLEMENT | |
Old Saint Basil's Cathedral in MoscowJohnson's Russia List title and scenes of Saint Petersburg
Excerpts from the JRL E-Mail Community :: Founded and Edited by David Johnson

#13 - JRL 8108 - JRL Home
From: "Richard Sakwa" <r.sakwa@kent.ac.uk>
Subject: Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia's Choice
Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2004

Dear David,

It was interesting to see the rather enigmatic reference to my new book in JRL 8100 #16. It is quite an uncomfortable experience to be airbrushed out of the review by George Walden in the Sunday Telegraph - and note that Walden managed to get my forename wrong!

For information, the details are as follows:

Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia's Choice
(London and New York, Routledge, March 2004).
(15.99 GBP in UK).

The Contents are as follows:

1
The path to power
The unlikely making of a leader
The succession operation

2
The ideas behind the choice
Who is mister Putin?
The Russian ‘transition’ and beyond
Russia at the turn of the millennium
Planning for the future
The state of the nation
The ‘normalisation’ of politics

3
The Putin way
Building the Putin bloc
Putin and the people
Leadership and style
Putin’s path: towards a Russian ‘third way’?

4
State and society
State and regime
State strengthening as politics or law
The ‘liquidation of the oligarchs as a class’
Freedom of speech and the media
Judicial reform and human rights

5
Restructuring political space
Changes to the party system
Changes to electoral legislation
Parliamentary realignment
Regime and opposition
Democracy and civil society

6
Putin and the regions
Segmented regionalism
The reconstitution of federal relations
Establishing the presidential ‘vertical’
Reorganising federal relations
Regional governors and legislatures
State reconstitution and federalism

7
Reforging the nation
Images of the nation and symbols of the state
Social aspects of national identity
Chechnya: tombstone or crucible of Russian power?

8
Russian capitalism
Entering the market
Models of capitalism: oligarchical democracy?
State, economy and society

9
Putin and the world
The normalisation of foreign policy
Putin’s choice
Practising normality

10
Conclusion
Select bibliography
Index

Please find below a section from Chapter 2:

THE RUSSIAN ‘TRANSITION’ AND BEYOND

In the twentieth century Russia had endured two experiments with modernisation from above: the Soviet attempt to achieve accelerated development through the planned economy; and the neo-liberal reversion to perhaps excessively free markets in the 1990s. While very different in character, for those at the receiving end both were traumatic. Putin tried to move Russian politics away from these ‘extraordinary’ times towards a routine politics that could incorporate change but within the bounds of the constitution and law.

Extraordinary politics

The whole epoch of Soviet power can be considered a period of ‘extraordinary politics’. If we define normal democratic politics as the relatively open-ended debate over alternative policies within the framework of the rule of law and certain guaranteed rights for individuals, then clearly the ‘ideological’ politics pursued by the Bolshevik regime in Russia was dominated by a contrasting set of values determined by the over-riding goal of ‘building communism’. The definition of communism remained the prerogative of the high priesthood of the communist regime, and it was this combination of ideology and exclusive organisational rights on which the power of the communist order was based. Gorbachev’s attempts to ‘normalise’ this system during perestroika between 1985 and 1991 included the renunciation of the claim to ideological leadership, let alone invincibility, and at the same time he attacked the powers of the apparat as part of his attempt to introduce a degree of political pluralism. Instead of achieving some sort of stable reformed socialist ‘normality’ the system crashed. Gorbachev’s great achievement, however, had been to bring to an end the period of Bolshevik extraordinary politics in a remarkably peaceful manner.

Following perestroika and the end of what some have called the seventy-four year period of emergency between 1917 and 1991, however, there was no simple return to ‘normality’. The foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, for example, argued that there could be no ‘returning to a normal economy’ because Russia had never known anything other than the totalitarian distribution of resources.[1] The Russian government under Yeltsin committed itself to the rapid transformation of the country. The government sought to take advantage of what Leszek Balcerowicz, the finance minister and architect of Poland’s economic ‘shock therapy’ from 1989, explicitly termed ‘extraordinary politics’, the moment following the fall of communism when society expects radical changes.[2] In Poland this period of high legitimacy for fundamental reform lasted some three years, whereas in Russia it barely survived a few months. The neo-liberal reforms launched by Gaidar’s radical government in the first days of 1992 soon ran into bitter opposition and by mid-year had been severely modified. The extraordinariness of the Soviet period had been perpetuated in new forms by the post-communist leadership.

Although extraordinary politics of the Balcerorowicz sort soon came to an end, politics in the Yeltsin years were anything but ‘normal’. Following the breakdown of the first set of post-communist Russian political institutions in September-October 1993, when Yeltsin forcibly dispersed the legislature based in the Russian White House, a new constitution was adopted in December 1993 that lay at the basis of the system inherited by Putin.[3] For many, however, the consolidation that took place after 1993 has not been that of the independent institutions of democracy but of an excessively powerful presidency. In the economy a distinctive hybrid system emerged that appeared to borrow the pathologies of both the planned and market systems. Despite Yeltsin’s rhetorical, and in many ways genuine, commitment to market reform, the 1990s were characterised by the emergence of a hybrid economic system. In politics, sharp polarisation between ‘democrats’ and an eclectic communist-nationalist anti-Western group meant that elections were less about changing governments than referenda on the very nature of the system that was to be built. Politics remained axiological, in the sense that ideological issues remained in the forefront. Yeltsin’s presidency remained a ‘regime of transition’, devoted to the systemic transformation of the society and the marginalisation of opponents. Although the aim of Yeltsin’s reforms was the creation of a capitalist democracy, his methods were divisive and on occasions flouted basic democratic norms and appeared to be an inverted form of the authoritarian order that it sought to overcome. This characteristic is highlighted, for example, by Reddaway and Glinski, who subtitle their major analysis of the Yeltsin years ‘market Bolshevism against democracy’.[4] Their work stresses the continuation of extraordinary measures that flout legality and which allow the government to position itself above the laws that it seeks to impose on the rest of society.

The revolution from above

In one of the most detailed analyses of Russia’s fifteen-year revolution that began in 1985, Gordon Hahn argues that the result was not democracy but an illiberal system. Instead of being a ‘revolution from below’ (although he notes that there had been elements of popular mobilisation), Russia had endured a ‘bureaucrat-led revolution from above’:

Russia’s revolution from above involved the mass cooptation and incorporation of the former Soviet party-state’s institutions and apparatchiks into the new regime. These institutions and bureaucrats constrained the consolidation of democracy and the market by bringing their authoritarian political culture and statist economic culture into the new regime and state, producing to date an illiberal executive-dominated and kleptocratic and oligarchical political economy.[5]

The institutions of the state in Russia, according to Hahn, were taken over by a group of radicals led by Yeltsin, who then ‘proceeded to carry out a creeping bureaucratic revolution against the central Soviet party-state machine’,[6] and, it may be added, against Gorbachev’s vision of a humane, socialist and reformed Soviet state. Although they are modernising, revolutions from above are liable to lead semi-authoritarian, or at best semi-democratic systems. According to Hahn they ‘produce a state with very little autonomy from the former ruling class and the most powerful economic interests left-over from the ancien regime, producing non-liberal, oligarchic “state capitalist” economies in which economic elites maintain close ties to government, rent-seek and foster corruption’.[7]

Although undoubtedly elements of this are present in Russia, the key question is the degree of autonomy enjoyed by the government and its ability to exercise state power in ways that run counter to the immediate interests of the nascent capitalist class. This class gradually transformed from ‘red directors’ and holdovers from the bureaucratic order of the past into players in the global economic order. In other words, to what degree was Putin an independent political actor or was his freedom of political manoeuvre excessively constrained by the oligarchic-bureaucratic structures bequeathed to him by Yeltsin? Putin’s struggle to strengthen the state, as we shall see, was primarily intended to reduce its dependence on the powerful economic interests that had been spawned by the anti-communist revolution while at the same time strengthening the presidency. The aim was to increase the state’s autonomy and the presidency’s ability to pursue policies that represented what he considered to be the interests of the country as whole rather than that of the new capitalist-bureaucratic elites.

Michael McFaul argues along similar lines in suggesting that rather than a liberal democracy emerging in Russia, by the early years of Putin’s rule it had become an ‘electoral democracy’; one where the forms of democracy and electoral competition were preserved, but which had failed to gain the real spirit of democratic accountability and leadership turnover.[8] As far as he was concerned, this outcome derived not from the actions of any particular individual or set of policy preferences, but from the sheer scale of the changes required and the finely balanced relationship between those pushing for democratic change and the institutions and individuals who could take advantage of the residues of the old system. The emergence of an electoral democracy was not predetermined by Russian history or political culture, in his view, but by the confrontational, imposed and protracted transition itself, traumatised above all by the moments of institutional failure in August 1991 and October 1993. For McFaul, the ‘scars of transition’ include a number of institutional problems: ‘a superpowerful presidency, a weak party system, an under-developed civil society, and the erosion of the independent media, the rule of law, state capacity, and center-regional relations’, quite apart from ambivalent attitudes towards democracy by elites and the people.[9] There are elements of truth in all of this, but the traumatic birth of Russian democracy should not detract from the very real democratic gains achieved in a remarkably short period. After all, not only Russia bears the ‘scars of transition’. France endured De Gaulle’s coup de main in 1958, and as late as 1968 Ralf Dahrendorf had very real doubts whether democracy had sunk into German popular consciousness.[10] One of Putin’s central goals was to transform the democratic capitalist project from a state of emergency into an everyday part of Russian normality. Democracy was to be ‘naturalised’, that is, to be made part of Russia’s natural order of things.

The return to normality?

Normality is always relative, and when we use the term the intention is not to suggest that somewhere (other than in the realm of theology) there is some perfectly normal state. Our measure of normality is derived from Russia’s own traditional sense (expressed most forcibly by Peter the Great) that its development has in some ways been ‘deviant’ from a standard set in Western Europe, and in recent times more broadly in ‘the West’. We are also well aware that the standard of normality set in the West is deeply problematic; after all, Emile Durkheim was convinced that the Western European pattern of development over the last half millennium has been deeply morbid, if not pathological, a view that this author shares. At the same time, the development of a set of liberal rights, democratic methods, the rule of law and the individual right to economic self-affirmation (including property rights), as codified in the European Convention on Human Rights and subsequent protocols, defines a normality that, while failing to achieve medieval or Marxist visions of the unity of the social, political and religious, do offer a viable model of civilisation. It is to this ‘normal’ civilisation that Russia under Putin aspired. As Maly puts it, ‘For the majority of Russians today “normality” is defined on a scale borrowed from the West’.[11]

The approach to reform under Putin moved away from systemic transformation towards system management. This suggests that politics has finally become ‘normal’, in the sense that larger constitutional questions over the shape of the polity have now given way to governmental management of mundane policy questions. The period of constitutional politics, predicted by Dahrendorf to last ‘at least six months’,[12] in Russia effectively lasted about a decade but now gave way to the hard work of ‘normal politics’.[13] The question of regime type has been resolved and the basic choices between institutions of government have been decided. Schumpeter argued that a successful transition occurs when ‘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’.[14] For the authors of a landmark study of democratisation, ‘normality, in other words, becomes a major characteristic of political life when those active in politics come to expect each other to play according to the rules ­ and the ensemble of these rules is what we mean by a regime’.[15] Russia under Putin finally had a chance to move away, as Kaspe puts it, from its ‘permanent condition of being “post” something or other’.[16] A transition is over when the initial period of uncertainty associated with regime change comes to an end, and in Russia we appear to have reached this point.

This return to ‘normality’, an approach that was explicitly taken up by Putin, is tempered, however, by at least two other processes. The first is the strong and explicit project of a ‘return to normalcy’. The notion of a return to normalcy was the slogan popular in the United States after the First World War and reflected the desire for peace of a nation tired of military exertions. The idea has also been applied to the period of recuperation in the USSR following victory in the Fatherland War.[17] In the Russian context today the politics of normalcy reflect a country that endured over a century of revolutionary, military and secret police depredations. The attempt to link up with the past, to restore the torn fabric of society, to draw on intellectual traditions and cultural values of yesteryear, all reflect this post-traumatic pursuit of a usable past as the grounding of the present. Putin’s pragmatic approach is rooted in the explicit attempt to base Russia’s politics of the twenty-first century in the repudiation of ‘revolutionary’ and ‘shock therapy’ politics of the twentieth. He is in effect saying to the Russian people: ‘The period of emergency is over. Carry on with normal lives’. Putin’s identification with the politics of normalcy was one of the most potent sources of his enduring popularity.

Putin’s politics of normality and a ‘return to normalcy’, however, are accompanied by disturbing overtones of ‘normalisation’, the term used to describe the pacification of Czechoslovakia following the Soviet invasion in 1968. The concepts of ‘managed’ and ‘guided’ democracy are openly proclaimed by some of Putin’s advisors as preferable to the unpredictability and disintegrative trends so evident under Yeltsin’s leadership in the 1990s. A whole raft of terms have been devised to describe the state of affairs in countries like Russia where the formal institutions of democracy are vitiated by informal practices that subvert their impartial operation. O’Donnell’s concept of ‘delegative democracy’,[18] Zakaria’s notion of ‘illiberal democracy’[19] and Diamond’s idea of ‘electoral democracy’ (which we have already mentioned) are among the best known. This post-communist normalisation is very different to that imposed on Czechoslovakia by Gustav Husak in the wake of the Soviet invasion, yet in certain respects the attempt to subvert the free operation of politics and the accompanying dialectic of coercion, consent and consumerism, the three Cs of late communism, find some echoes today.

A benign version of this would be the comparison with De Gaulle, who after 1958 managed to achieve the rapid modernisation of French political institutions and the economy by combining a regime of personal power and managed democracy. Similarly, following Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping shifted China away from the revolutionary path of modernisation towards a distinctive communist-led capitalism. Another comparison is with Alexander III, who succeeded to the Russian throne after the assassination of the ‘tsar-liberator’, the reformer Alexander II in 1881 and proceeded to impose stability by repressive means. In 1917 the symbol of the failure of Russia’s first transition to democracy had been Kerensky, and some suggested that Putin could become the gravedigger of Russia’s second attempted transition. The comparisons between Kerensky and Putin are even deeper: both had been born in St Petersburg, both studied in the law faculty of St Petersburg University, the careers of both developed with dizzying speed, and both enjoyed phenomenal popularity at first as they stood for ‘war to victorious conclusion’ and attempted to strengthen the state (Kerensky by reimposing the death penalty). However, while Kerensky had become a noted democrat, Putin went into the security services, and Kerensky was a better public orator. By July 1917 Kerensky’s popularity had fallen dramatically and by October he was overthrown by a ‘third force’, the Bolsheviks.[20] An even more malign comparison is with Andropov, who followed his stint as head of the KGB by becoming the successor to Brezhnev as General Secretary from November 1982 until his death in February 1984. The model here is an authoritarian modernisation from above, seeking to impose social discipline by coercive means while recognising the need for economic reform.[21] As Pechenev notes, there is an obvious lack of comparability between Putin and Andropov, since the latter was ‘neither a liberal nor a democrat (in the contemporary sense of these words) and not even a “secret” (as many people in Russia today affirm) communist reformer’.[22] Andropov had, however, been able to establish the legend that the KGB was the least corrupt and best informed agency in the decaying Soviet Union, one that was not entirely devoid of truth.

Putin’s approach, characterised by the pursuit of a politics of normality, is thus riven by contradictory ideas and processes. The most glaring one is the tension between trying to achieve a genuinely ordered system, where democratic institutions work largely free of political constraints and are accountable to the people, and a system that tries to impose stability from above by managing political processes, and thus impeding the free operation of political institutions. The contradiction between order and stability is one that has deep roots in Russia. Too often a genuine political order (Ordnungspolitik) has been reduced to poryadok, the coercive imposition of stability. This was the case with Brezhnev’s stagnation, a peculiar type of late Soviet politics of stability and normality that proved to be far from stable and a ‘normality’ that turned out to be unsustainable, hence clearly abnormal. The fundamental tension in Putin’s politics was the desire to create a self-sustaining system that did not require ‘manual control’, and the fear that such an autonomous system would spin out of control. It was not clear whether Russia’s Thermidor, the post-revolutionary attempt to achieve ‘normalcy’, would find an adequate balance between normality (order) and normalisation (stability).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Andrei Kozyrev, ‘Russia: A Chance for Survival’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 2, Spring 1992, pp. 8-9.

[2] Leszek Balcerowicz, Common Fallacies in the Debate on the Economic Transition in Central and Eastern Europe (London, EBRD Working Paper 11, 1993).

[3] For details about the October 1993 crisis and the institutional arrangements of the constitutional system introduced in December 1993, see Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, third edition (London and New York, Routledge, 2002).

[4] Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, DC, The United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001).

[5] Gordon M. Hahn, Russia’s Revolution from Above, 1985-2000: Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 2002), p. xii.

[6] Hahn, Russia’s Revolution from Above, p. 2.

[7] Hahn, Russia’s Revolution from Above, p. 9.

[8] For a discussion of the concept of electoral democracy, see Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Towards Consolidation (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

[9] Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 29. [10] Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968).

[11] Matvei Maly, Kak sdelat’ Rossiyu normal’noi stranoi? (St Petersburg, Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003), p. 7.

[12] Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (London, Chatto & Windus, 1990), pp. 92-3.

[13] Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, pp. 60, 85 and passim.

[14] Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 2nd edn (New York, Harper, 1947), p. 269.

[15] G. O'Donnell, P. Schmitter, and L. Whitehead, L. (eds.), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, Vol. 4, Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 65. [16] S. I. Kaspe, ‘Tsentr i vertikal’: politicheskaya priroda putinskogo prezidentstva’, Politiya, No. 4 (22), Winter 2001-20002, p. 5. [17] See Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Postwar Soviet Society: The Return to Normalcy, 1945-1953’, in Susan J.Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union (Totowa, N. J., Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), pp. 129-56. [18] Guillermo O'Donnell, 'Delegative Democracy', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 55-69.

[19] Fareed Zakaria, ‘The Rise of Illiberal Democracy’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 6 (November/December 1997), pp. 22-43.

[20] Bortsov, Vladimir Putin, pp. 211-15.

[21] The comparison is made at length by Drozdov and Fartyshev, Yurii Andropov i Vladimir Putin, in particular pp. 133-47.

[22] Vadim Pechenov, Vladimir Putin ­ poslednii shans Rossii? (Moscow, Infra-M, 2001), p. vii. Pechenev worked periodically as part of an analytical group with Andropov for some eight years, and thus is in a position to know.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Professor Richard Sakwa
Head of Department
Department of Politics and International Relations
Rutherford College
University of Kent
CANTERBURY
Kent CT2 7NX
Telephone: +44 (0) 1227 827409
Fax: +44 (0) 1227 827033
Email: R.Sakwa@kent.ac.uk
Website: www.kent.ac.uk/politics.