Stephen Kotkin is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author of “Stalin, vol. 1, Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928.” In the March/April 2015 issue of Foreign Affairs, he has an essay (as part of a review of three books on Vladimir Putin) and I just wanted to note a few of his comments.
Stephen Kotkin:
How did twenty-first-century Russia end up, yet again, in personal rule? An advanced industrial country of 142 million people, it has no enduring political parties that organize and respond to voter preferences. The military is sprawling yet tame; the immense secret police are effectively in one man’s pocket. The hydrocarbon sector is a personal bank, and indeed much of the economy is increasingly treated as an individual fiefdom. Mass media move more or less in lockstep with the commands of the presidential administration. Competing interest groups abound, but there is no rival center of power. In late October 2014, after a top aide to Russia’s president told the annual forum of the Valdai Discussion Club, which brings together Russian and foreign experts, that Russians understand ‘if there is no Putin, there is no Russia,’ the pundit Stanislav Belkovsky observed that ‘the search for Russia’s national idea, which began after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is finally over. Now, it is evident that Russia’s national idea is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.’....
In some ways, observers are still trying to fathom how the revolt against tsarist autocracy in 1917 – the widest mass revolution in history up to that point – culminated in a regime unaccountable to itself, let alone to the masses. Now, after the mass mobilizations for democracy that accompanied and followed the 1991 Soviet collapse, a new authoritarianism has taken shape. Of course, Putin’s dictatorship differs substantially from the Soviet communist version. Today’s Russia has no single ideology and no disciplined ruling party, and although it lacks the rule of law, it does allow private property and free movement across borders. Still, the country is back in a familiar place, a one-man regime.
The methods Putin used to fix the corrupt, dysfunctional post-Soviet state have produced yet another corrupt, dysfunctional state. Putin himself complains publicly that only about 20 percent of his decisions get implemented, with the rest being ignored or circumvented unless he intervenes forcefully with the interest groups and functionaries concerned. But he cannot intervene directly with every boss, governor, and official in the country on every issue. Many underlings invoke Putin’s name and do what they want. Personal systems of rule convey immense power on the ruler in select strategic areas – the secret police, control of cash flow – but they are ultimately ineffective and self-defeating.
Russia just might be able to get out of this trap, in part because of the severity of the various crises currently besetting Putin’s regime. But perversely, even that hopeful scenario would require yet another act of personal rule....
Interestingly, when Putin took office, he had little effective power. His chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, was a core member of the Family and would remain in his commanding position for two more years. Berezovsky continued to control Channel One, and the second most important station, privately owned NTV, belonged to the independent actor Vladimir Gusinsky. The mammoth cash flow generated by the state gas monopoly had been largely privatized into the hands of a cabal led by Rem Vyakhirev (a protégé of the former Soviet gas minister, later the Russian prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin), and much of the oil industry had been formally privatized, a lot of it into a huge new company, Yukos, controlled by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Russia’s then 89 regions were in the hands of governors who answered to no one. Chechnya had de facto independence. The Russian state was floundering.
Bit by bit, however, using stealth and dirty tricks, Putin reasserted central control over the levers of power within the country – the TV stations, the gas industry, the oil industry, the regions. It was a cunning feat of state rebuilding, aided by Putin’s healthy contrast to the infirm Yeltsin, hyped fears of a Russian state dissolution, well-crafted appeals to patriotism, and the humbling of some oligarchs. Some fear of authority was necessary to tame the utter lawlessness into which the country had sunk. Putin instilled that fear, thanks to his own history and persona and some highhanded political theater, such as the arrest of Khodorkovsky, who was taken right off his private jet, which was shown again and again on Russian TV. But Putin’s transformation into a dominant political figure required more than a widely shared appreciation that he was saving the Russian state. It also took a surprise economic boom.
Part II next time in two weeks.
Brian Trumbore
