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(Generally, Foreign Affairs is not among the journals I consult but this
article was recommended by Keith Gessen, a Russian immigrant who is an
editor at N+1 and a radical.)
Foreign Affairs, March 2015
The Resistible Rise of Vladimir Putin
By Stephen Kotkin
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin
BY FIONA HILL AND CLIFFORD G. GADDY. Brookings institution Press, 2013,
400 pp. $29.95.
Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?
By KAREN DAWISHA. Simon & schuster, 2014, 464 pp. $30.00.
Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin
BY BEN JUDAH. yale university Press, 2013, 400 pp. $22.00.
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 time; 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.”
Russia is classified as a high-income economy by the world Bank (having
a per capita gdp exceeding $14,000). its unemployment remains low
(around five percent); until recently, consumer spending had been
expanding at more than five percent annually; life expectancy has been
rising; and internet penetration exceeds that of some countries in the
european union. But Russia is now beset by economic stagnation alongside
high inflation, its labor productivity remains dismally low, and its
once-vaunted school system has deteriorated alarmingly. And it is
astonishingly corrupt. Not only the bullying central authorities in
Moscow but regional state bodies, too, have been systematically
criminalizing revenue streams, while giant swaths of territory lack
basic public services and local vigilante groups proliferate. Across the
country, officials who have purchased their positions for hefty sums
team up with organized crime syndicates and use friendly prosecutors and
judges to extort and expropriate rivals. President Vladimir Putin's
vaunted “stability,” in short, has turned into spoliation. But Putin has
been in power for 15 years, and there is no end in sight. Stalin ruled
for some three decades; Brezhnev for almost two. Putin, still relatively
young and healthy, looks set to top the latter and might even outdo the
former.
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.
FROM LENINGRAD TO MOSCOW
Putin was born in Soviet Leningrad in 1952, the only surviving child of
parents who had lived through the Nazi siege of the city a decade
earlier. He grew up in a rough section of Peter the Great's showcase,
took up martial arts, graduated with a degree in law from Leningrad
State University, and begged his way into the kgb, eventually being
posted to Dresden, East Germany, in 1985.
In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the kgb recalled him to
Leningrad and assigned him to his alma mater, where his former law
professor Anatoly Sobchak still taught part time. Sobchak eventually
became chair of the city council and then mayor, and Putin served as his
top deputy, responsible for difficult assignments, including feeding the
city's large population during the years of post-Soviet economic
depression. He discovered that Leningrad's self-styled democrats could
get almost nothing done and that he could embezzle money both to help
address the city's challenges and to enrich himself and his cronies.
When Sobchak lost a bid for reelection in 1996, Putin found himself
unemployed at 43. But a year later, through connections (notably Alexei
Kudrin, another official in the Sobchak mayoralty who had become deputy
chief of staff to Russian President Boris yeltsin), Putin moved to
Moscow and obtained a series of positions in the presidential
administration, the successor to the old Soviet central-party apparatus.
There are indications that Putin might have coveted the lucrative,
powerful ceo job at Gazprom, Russia's monopoly gas behemoth, but if so,
it eluded him. Then, in July 1998, lightning struck: Yeltsin appointed
the former lieutenant colonel above hundreds of higher-ranking secret
police officers to head the fsb, the successor to the kgb—and the
following year appointed him first acting prime minister of the Russian
Federation and then acting president. So the simplest answer to the
question of how Putin came to power is that he was selected.
Yeltsin's inner circle, known as “ the Family”—in particular, Valentin
yumashev (the ghostwriter of yeltsin's autobiographies) and yumashev's
future wife, yeltsin's daughter Tatyana—picked Putin over others who
failed their auditions. He had shown a basic competence in
administration and had demonstrated loyalty (having arranged in 1997 for
Sobchak, then under threat of arrest, to escape to France without
submitting to Russian passport control). It was hoped that he would
protect the Family's interests, and maybe those of Russia as well. Putin
secured victory in the March 2000 presidential election through control
of the country's main television station, Channel One (thanks to Boris
Berezovsky, a secondary member of the Family); ruthless manipulation of
the Chechen terrorist threat; and access to all the perks of incumbency.
Some fraud, too, cannot be excluded. In the reported results, Putin
received nearly 40 million votes, 53 percent of those cast, a majority
that enabled him to avoid a runoff. Second place (29 percent) went to
the Communist Party candidate-bogeyman. Nine other candidates split the
rest of the votes.
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 Khodor-kovsky. 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.
From 1999 through 2008, Russia's economy grew at a brisk seven percent
annually, thereby doubling its gdp in ruble terms. Real individual
income growth was even brisker, increasing by two and a half times. In
dollar terms, because of the ruble's appreciation over time, the
increase in gdp was exceptionally vivid: from a nadir of around $196
billion in 1999 to around $2.1 trillion in 2013. A new, grateful Russian
middle class was born, some 30 million strong, able to travel and shop
abroad easily. More broadly, Russian society was transformed: cell-phone
penetration went from zero to 100 percent, unemployment dropped from
12.9 percent to 6.3 percent, and the poverty rate fell from 29 percent
to 13 percent. Wages rose, pensions were doled out, and the immense
national debt that had been accumulated by previous leaders was paid off
early. Foreign investors reaped rich rewards, too, as Russia's stock
market skyrocketed, increasing 20-fold.
Many analysts have attributed the Russian boom to luck, in the form of
plentiful fossil fuels. Yet although oil and gas have generally brought
in approximately 50 percent of the Russian state's revenues, they have
accounted for no more than 30 percent of the economy at large—a high
number, but significantly lower than Middle East petrostate proportions.
Even adding in all the knock-on effects around hydrocarbons, the most
sophisticated analyses of Russian economic growth credit oil and gas
with at most 40 to 50 percent of gdp during the boom. An immense amount
of other value was created during these years as well, and Putin was
partly responsible.
As president, Putin delegated handling of the economy to Mikhail
Kasyanov, his prime minister; German Gref, the minister of economic
development and trade; and Kudrin, then the finance minister, who
introduced a raft of anti-inflationary and liberalizing measures
(Gazprom excepted). Tax cuts increased incentives to work and reduced
incentives to hide income. Simplification of business licensing and
reduced inspections led to a burst of entrepreneurialism. Financial
reforms and sensible macroeconomic policy facilitated investment. And
land became a marketable commodity.
The impact of these pro-market reforms, which Putin supported and
signed, was magnified by favorable trade winds. Russia had undergone a
searing debt default and currency devaluation in 1998, and most
commentators thought the country would be devastated. But in fact, the
devaluation unintentionally made Russian exports cheaper and thus more
competitive. At the same time, China's ongoing rise lifted global prices
for Russian products, from fertilizer and chemicals to metals and
cement. Insatiable Chinese demand brought Soviet legacy industries back
from the dead. Brand-new sectors surged as well, such as retail, food
processing, biotechnology, and software, driven by increased domestic
demand and global outsourcing. Many of the Soviet legacy industries,
such as coal and steel, underwent significant rationalization, as
unprofitable mines or plants were phased out. (Agriculture, however, was
never really revived, let alone rationalized, and Russia became
dependent on food imports.)
Skeptics take note: oil prices during Putin's first presidential term,
when growth was robust, averaged only around $35 a barrel; during
Putin's second term, the average grew to around $65 a barrel. In recent
years, with oil prices consistently at or above $100 a barrel, Russia's
economy has stagnated.
China's rise, the ruble's devaluation, and a pent-up wave of structural
reforms were critical to the Russian boom, but as the man in charge,
Putin took the lion's share of the credit. His critics refuse to
acknowledge his contribution, and some have improbably made him out to
be a nonentity. In her 2012 biography, The Man Without a Face, for
example, the Russian American journalist Masha Gessen offers the
ultimate portrait of Putin as an accident. A well-written, impassioned
compendium of facts, hearsay, and psychologizing about Putin's life and
career, Gessen's book makes Putin out to be a mere thug and self-dealer,
a murderer but ultimately a small man. Yet accidents and nonentities do
not stay in power this long.
Mr. Putin, by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, two Russia hands at the
Brookings Institution, offers less drama but more balance. It
characterizes Putin as moving back and forth among six different
personas: the Statist, the History Man (celebrating tsarist Russian
statesmen), the Survivalist, the Outsider (not a Muscovite, not an
apparatchik, not even a typical kgb officer), the Free Marketeer
(actually, crony capitalist), and the Case Officer (who wins people's
confidence through manipulation, bribery, and blackmail). It is a nicely
rounded portrait. It is not, however, an intimate one.
Refreshingly, Hill and Gaddy refrain from imputing motives to Putin.
They have met with him briefly in a large group but rely mostly on many
of the same few voices that are quoted in Gessen's book, as well as in
foundational biographies by Oleg Blotsky and Alexander Rahr, and on a
published interview with the former Kremlin insider Gleb Pavlovsky. In
their best chapters, Hill and Gaddy delineate the self-defeating
cross-purposes among the six Putin personas, along with Putin's
limitations when it comes to public politics. They rebut the prevalent
American narrative about a tragic Putin betrayal of a yeltsin-era
trajectory toward democracy, bending over backward to make
understandable the alternative Russian narrative of a Putin-led rescue
from a 1990s “time of troubles.” But they do not advance their own
explicit, systematic explanation for how it was possible, in such a vast
country, to establish what they dub a “one-boy network” political system.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Western sanctions levied against Russia over its actions in Ukraine have
targeted not economic sectors but individuals. Putin's Kleptocracy, by
Karen Dawisha, shows why such an approach makes sense. It offers a
comprehensive catalog of Putin's cronies: Arkady and Boris Roten-berg of
gas pipeline construction fame, Gennady Timchenko of the Gunvor Group,
Igor Sechin of Rosneft, Alexey Miller of Gazprom, Sergey Chemezov of
Rosoboronexport, yuri Kovalchuk of Bank Rossiya, Matthias Warnig of Nord
Stream pipeline, and many more. Although a few of these individuals rose
to power during the last decade and a half, most got to know Putin
early, during his St. Petersburg years. (Warnig's relationship with
Putin dates back to Dresden.) Dawisha details how they all got filthy
rich thanks to the noncompetitive privatization of state assets, no-bid
government contracts, dubious loans, fake bankruptcies, phantom
middleman firms, tax “refunds,” patriotic megaprojects (such as the
Olympics), and other favors. She maintains that Putin, too, is a thief,
and, calling attention to the $700,000 worth of watches publicly spotted
on his wrist, she repeats guesstimates that put his personal wealth at
$40 billion.
A political scientist at Miami University in Ohio, Dawisha has, for the
most part, not uncovered new information but assembled in one place
nuggets from the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, investigative
reportage, old Stasi files, comments made by an important Russian
defector, and other sources, all of which she has posted online. Her
prose is workmanlike, and not all the disparate materials fit easily
into her simple storyline.
Particularly striking is the fact that most of the book is devoted to
the period before Putin first became president. Dawisha reminds us that
the kgb's role in private business began even before the Soviet
collapse, and she argues that these are the roots of Putin's
kleptocracy—challenging the conventional wisdom in which the 2003 arrest
of Khodorkovsky and the confiscation of his private oil giant, yukos,
marked a key turning point. “Like other scholars of Russia, I have spent
a significant portion of my career thinking and writing about how the
post-Communist states might make a transition toward democracy,” she
confesses, but says that eventually she got wise, concluding that Russia
was not “an inchoate democratic system being pulled down by history,
accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or
poor Western advice.” Rather, “from the beginning Putin and his circle
sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal
with embedded interests, plans, and capabilities, who used democracy for
decoration rather than direction.” Putin's nasty tendencies, in other
words, cannot be blamed on external factors, such as nato expansion.
Questions about her analysis can be raised. Dawisha never really
clarifies, for example, the extent to which sincerely held beliefs bind
the Putin kleptocrats (as they did, say, the old Brezhnev clique, who
also were said to be a bunch of cynics). She quotes Nikolay Leonov, the
former head of analysis for the kgb, as saying of Putin and his kgb
associates back in 2001, “They are patriots and proponents of a strong
state grounded in centuries-old tradition. History recruited them to
carry out a special operation for the resurrection of our great power,
because there has to be balance in the world, and without a strong
Russia the geopolitical turbulence will begin.” So is the enrichment an
end in itself or a means to an end?
Most fundamentally, Dawisha's assertions about near-total
intentionality—kleptocracy by “intelligent design”—strain credulity.
Russia has known lots of designs, including those of Mikhail Gorbachev
and yeltsin, and what happened to them? She concedes that under Putin,
“not everything went as planned,” but her telling of the story makes it
seem otherwise. This misses the fact that Putin and his cronies, as well
as his mass base, were largely losers under Gorbachev and yeltsin.
Notwithstanding its private-sector and offshore machinations, the former
kgb was initially cut out of the really big money in oil, gas, metals,
diamonds, and gold. A strong continuity argument obscures the shifts and
contingencies that have occurred, as well as the progressive
radicalization in the kleptocracy that has taken place over time—not
only after 2003 but even over the last two years. Dawisha also overlooks
any dynamic beyond Putin. Property is continually being expropriated by
regime loyalists because that is a major way they mark their relative
status in the pecking order—and how they survive, warding off attacks
from others by going on offensive raids themselves.
Dawisha's portrait of Putin's supposed primordial will to enrichment
leads her to dismiss not just his first-term structural reforms and the
vision behind them but also the four-year presidential term of his
junior crony, Dmitry Medvedev—an episode that followed Putin's decision
to respect, at least formally, the constitutional limit of two
consecutive presidential terms. The dismissal may be understandable:
Medvedev was (and is) derisively known as “the Teddy Bear”
(Medvezhonok). He was picked for a reason. And yet throughout his
tenure, Medvedev was urged by his own entourage and various powerful
interest groups to dismiss Putin from the prime ministership.
One can debate the seriousness of the Medvedev-approved investigation of
the Kremlin's own Khodorkovsky prosecution, the pressure campaign
against Sechin and other Putin cronies serving on the boards of private
companies, the timid moves toward economic diversification and
redemocratization, and the improved relations with the United States.
One could even implausibly assume that all of that was brilliant
manipulation by remarkably clever and effective puppet masters in order
to fool the Russian people and the West. But the fact remains that
Medvedev had full authority to dismiss Putin, to deny him access to
state resources in a campaign, and to declare his own intention to run
for reelection. That the Teddy Bear did not make a move does not mean he
couldn't have.
EMPEROR WITHOUT CLOTHES
In Fragile Empire, the journalist Ben Judah sees Putin's return to the
presidency for a third term as a severe blow to the regime. His punchy
book can be flip, but he talked to so many people, and lets their voices
be heard, that his own snark and contempt are somewhat offset. “you see
this man had good qualities, too,” Alexander Belyaev, the former head of
the St. Petersburg city assembly, tells him of Putin. “He was an expert
at making friends, of being loyal to those friends. He is a brilliant
observer of human nature, and he is very good at tactics.” Similarly,
Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of Putin's St. Petersburg clique who had
been helping finance a palace for Putin in the south before choosing to
expose his corruption and then going into exile in Estonia, tells Judah,
“I was surprised when Putin became president. Of course I was surprised,
everyone was surprised. At first I really wanted to support him and help
him in any way I could. The 1990s had been a criminal, dangerous time. I
hoped for something different.” The something different turned out to be
a personal dictatorship.
Judah has actually written two books. One is about what he calls Putin's
“tele-populism,” in whith he discusses the Kremlin's spin doctors and
puppeteers, such as Vladislav Surkov, and how the George W. Bush
administration's aggressions and transgressions proved to be a gift to
their manipulations. But the concept of the Putin regime as a
“videocracy” dead ends, because, as Judah himself demonstrates, the
propaganda is not always so effective and Putinism is more than mere
show; it is a society. Judah details how Russian state spending on
security, law, and order went from $2.8 billion in 2000 to $36.5 billion
by 2010. More than 40 percent of the new middle class works for the
state, and therefore they are not independent people. The regime's
social base, in other words, is itself.
The other book is a vivid portrait of Moscow as an oppressive colonial
power in its own lands. Judah travels out to remote locales and finds
the little Putins, the feudal lords presiding over near statelessness
and profound despair. He makes it to desolate Tuva, once part of
Mongolia, in southern Siberia, where Putin is said to have posed topless
for the cameras on a faux hunting expedition. “Putin?” a villager from
Erjei says to the author. “He never did anything good for the country.
He just took all the money from oil and gas production and took it for
himself and his mates…. Why the hell would we support Putin?” Judah also
travels to Birobidzhan, the improbable Soviet Jewish homeland on the
border with China, and finds no sign of a feared Chinese demographic
invasion. “Are you worried that in the future the land will not be
Russian and will be controlled by China? That there will be no more
motherland here?” he asks mushroom sellers in a Russian area leased to
Chinese farmers who grow soybeans. “Who gives a fuck about the
motherland,” the mushroom sellers answer. “There is no fucking motherland.”
How representative such interviews are remains unclear. Judah apparently
spent little time in Russia's many bustling provincial cities, such as
yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, or Lipetsk, which are clearly better off
today than they were even just a few years ago. His reporting is
designed not to offer a full picture of Russia but to show how the
lawlessness Putin sought to fix is worse than ever. He finds the
predominantly Muslim North Caucasus, a place where Putin pays colossal
tribute for a sheen of loyalty, nearly fully de-Russified. Whereas
previously it was the Chechens who wanted out of Russia, Judah writes,
now many Russians would not mind seeing Chechnya go, since they detest
the massive budget transfers to the region ($30 billion for nine million
inhabitants between 2000 and 2010).
Judah has some smart things to say about the Russian Internet, pointing
out that “unlike in other Eastern European countries, the platforms that
hosted it were largely indigenous because of the Cyrillic script,
allowing it to become a ‘pole’ in the emerging online world, like China,
which also uses home-grown platforms.” Russian equivalents for Google
and Facebook, moreover, have operated largely beyond the suffocating
regime. “The Internet grew in Russia in a kind of utopia—where there was
no state,” one interviewee tells Judah. “This was the only part of the
economy where to be a player and to be a winner you needed no political
connections, no United Russia membership card, and no visits to the
Kremlin.” All that has been changing, however, since the book was written.
Judah rips into the Internet-savvy opposition to Putin for being out of
touch with the common people. He describes Alexei Navalny, the blogger
who rose to fame as a critic of corruption, as a xenophobe and a “pure
product of Putinism.” Judah heaps disdain on the tens of thousands of
Muscovites who risked going out into the streets in 2011–12 to protest
the regime, calling them “the demographic in Russia … most accustomed to
skiing in France” and asserting that “the protests failed because Moscow
is not Russia.” (Protests occurred in many cities.) His condescension
descends into incoherence when he writes of Pussy Riot, the punk band
that carried out an ill-fated performance act in an Orthodox church,
that they “captured the vanity and, ironically, the unpolitical nature
of the radical art scene. They were interested in protest, not
politics.” Readers are likely to find this an often engaging book marred
by an excess of attitude.
Still, Judah offers one of the best accounts of how Putin built his
personal regime out of the mundane process of addressing the pathologies
of the Russian state he inherited. To clean things up, an undertaking
for which Putin had wide support, he had to acquire ever more power. All
the while, a bogeyman served him well—not a return to communism,
yeltsin's scarecrow, but the chaos of yeltsinism. “The power to control
the Russian nightmare of total collapse brought [Putin] to power and has
kept him in power,” Judah succinctly summarizes.
But none of this unfolded automatically; the construction of such a
regime required certain skills and real work. Putin seized an
opportunity provided by historical contingencies, and he proved up to
the task. He made himself indispensable to all factions and interests,
their guarantor—or not—in a system in which uncertainty besets even the
richest and most powerful. He shamelessly monetized his political
position, but he also turned out to be dedicated to the cause of Russian
statehood, in his own kgb way. Certain kinds of leaders do seem to fit
certain moments in a country's history. Putin only looks like an
accident. And it is precisely because he is not a nonentity that he has
been a calamity.
THE LONELY POWER
Remarkably, this pattern keeps repeating itself in Russia. About a
decade ago, Stefan Hedlund, an expert on Russia at Uppsala University,
in Sweden, wrote an impressive overview of 12 centuries of Eastern
Slavic history in an attempt to explain Putin's authoritarianism. He
pointed out that Russia had essentially collapsed three times—in
1610–13, 1917–18, and 1991—and that each time, the country was revived
fundamentally unchanged. Despite the depth of the crises and the stated
intentions of would-be transformative leaders, Russia reemerged with an
unaccountable government, repression, and resistance to the imposition
of the rule of law. Hedlund's impressive tome was titled Russian Path
Dependence, but rather than complete determinism, he perceived
choices—albeit choices heavily conditioned by culture. He noted that
efforts at institutional change in Russia had always failed because they
had not altered the country's underlying system of norms, which rested
on a deeply ingrained preference for informal rules. “Modernization
reinforced archaism,” Hedlund grimly concluded, quoting the historian
Geoffrey Hosking; “increasing state control meant entrenching personal
caprice.”
Hedlund's attention to values yielded exceptional insight, but he
overemphasized the institutional continuities supposedly at work from
ancient Muscovy onward and underplayed the power of Russia's relations
with the outside world. Not just a preference for informal rules but
also Russia's quest for great-power status, and especially its perennial
difficulties competing with stronger powers, has produced both the
collapses and the trying aftermaths, during which an imperative to
revive national greatness comes to the fore. “Russia was and will remain
a great power,” announced Putin's original presidential manifesto,
posted online in late 1999. “Russia is in the middle of one of the most
difficult periods in its history. For the first time in the past 200–300
years, it is facing a real threat of sliding into the second, possibly
even the third, echelon of states.” In response, he offered an abiding
vision of Russia as a providential power, with a special mission and
distinct identity. Exceptionalism has been the handmaiden of personalism.
Putin resembles a villain out of central casting. He has repeatedly
revealed himself as cocksure, patronizing, aggrieved, vindictive, and
quick with a retort for Western critics. But he is hardly the first
Russian leader to make demonization of the West a foundation of Russia's
core identity and its government's claim to legitimacy. Moreover,
today's Russia is significantly more ethnically homogeneous and
nationalist than was the old Soviet Union, and Putin has perfected the
art of moistening the eyes of Russian elites assembled in opulent
tsarist settings, plucking the strings of mystical pride in all things
Russian and of ressentiment at all things Western. They see reason where
critics see madness. From the Kremlin's perspective, as Washington
engages in stupid, hypocritical, and destabilizing global behavior,
Moscow shoulders the burden of serving as a counterweight, thereby
bringing sanity and balance to the international system. Russian lying,
cheating, and hypocrisy thus serve a higher purpose. Cybercrime is
patriotism; rigging elections and demobilizing opposition are sacred
duties. Putin's machismo posturing, additionally, is undergirded by a
view of Russia as a country of real men opposing a pampered, gutless,
and decadent West. Resentment toward U.S. power resonates far beyond
Russia, and with his ramped-up social conservatism, Putin has expanded a
perennial sense of Russian exceptionalism to include an alternative
social model as well.
Paradoxically, however, all of this has only helped render Russia what
the analyst Lilia Shevtsova has aptly called a “lonely power.” Putin's
predatory politics at home and abroad, his cozying up to right-wing
extremists in Europe, and his attempted engagement of a powerful China
hardly add up to an effective Russian grand strategy. Russia has no
actual allies and has damaged its most important relationship, that with
Germany. Winning domestic plaudits at Western powers' expense is
politically useful, but those countries, as always, continue to possess
the advanced technology Russia needs, especially in energy exploration
and drilling. Over the long term, realizing the ambitions Putin and his
supporters have articulated would require new and deeper structural
reforms, a dramatic cutback in bureaucracy and state procurement
shenanigans, and the creation of an environment supportive of
entrepreneurialism and investment. Medvedev made gestures in such a
direction, but Putin has ridiculed those, choosing the path of least
resistance in the short term and thus risking possible long-term
stagnation or worse. A revival of Russia's latent Soviet-era industrial
capacity was a trick that could happen only once.
Emotive nationalism and social conservatism have long been present in
post-Soviet Russia, but they have intensified in state propaganda since
2012. This was due partly to the outbreak of street protests in the
winter of 2011–12 challenging Putin's announcement that he would return
to the presidency. But more fundamentally, it was also because the other
possible way forward—a second round of structural reform—would have been
incredibly hard to carry out, not least because it might have threatened
to undermine the current elite's suffocating grasp on power. As it
happened, the mass Ukrainian uprising against misrule that began in late
2013 and culminated in President Viktor yanukovych's cowardly
abandonment of Kiev in February 2014 reconfirmed the long-standing
Kremlin line of a scheming West committed to encircling and overthrowing
the regime in Russia. Putin's seizure of the southern Ukrainian region
of Crimea, in turn, strongly reinforced the trend in the Kremlin away
from facing the tough policy choices that would actually bolster
Russia's great-power status.
Given the West's imposition of sanctions and dropping world oil prices,
it might be tempting to write Putin off. Authoritarian regimes often
prove to be at once all-powerful and strikingly brittle, and Judah, for
one, sees Putin's rule as almost on its last legs. And yet, despite the
Russian population's seething anger over its predatory state and
educated urbanites' despondency over the absence of a modernizing vision
for the future, much of the elite retains a strong sense of mission and
resolve. Dawisha concludes that “Putin will not go gentle into the
night,” and she is probably correct. Judah underestimates the ways this
new kind of flexible authoritarianism has found to adapt to often
self-created challenges, and his book is bereft of any discussion of
foreign policy, a vital instrument in the tool kit of authoritarianism.
Putin's Russia possesses powerful resources as a potential international
spoiler, including the ability to apply economic pressure, buy off or
co-opt powerful foreign interests, engage in covert operations, wage
cyberattacks, and deploy a modernizing military force that is by far the
strongest in the region. Ironically, Russia's greatest source of
leverage might be the fact that the West, especially Europe, needs its
neighbor's integration into the international order. Managing such
integration would be a lot less difficult if Putin were just a thief, à
la Dawisha, or a cynic, à la Judah. But he is actually a composite, à la
Hill and Gaddy—a thief and a cynic with deeply held convictions about
the special qualities and mission of the Russian state, views that enjoy
wide resonance among the population. So what happens now, especially
given that the Russian leader has managed to trap himself in the latest
and largest of his so-called frozen conflicts, enraging the West and
setting himself on a path toward isolation and creeping autarky?
A WAY OUT?
Neither Putin nor his Western counterparts planned to get embroiled in a
prolonged standoff over Ukraine. Russia's seizure of Crimea and support
for separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine violated international law and,
following the downing of a civilian airliner (almost certainly by
Russian-assisted rebels), provoked the imposition of significant Western
sanctions. But the crisis is not simply about Russian aggression, nor
can it be solved simply by trying to force Moscow to retreat to the
status quo ante. Even an unlikely retreat, moreover, would not
necessarily last.
Ukraine is a debilitated state, created under Soviet auspices, hampered
by a difficult Soviet inheritance, and hollowed out by its own predatory
elites during two decades of misrule. But it is also a nation that is
too big and independent for Russia to swallow up. Russia, meanwhile, is
a damaged yet still formidable great power whose rulers cannot be
intimidated into allowing Ukraine to enter the Western orbit. Hence the
standoff. No external power or aid package can solve Ukraine's problems
or compensate for its inherent vulnerabilities vis-à-vis Russia. Nor
would sending lethal weaponry to Ukraine's brave but ragtag volunteer
fighters and corrupt state structures improve the situation; in fact, it
would send it spiraling further downward, by failing to balance Russian
predominance while giving Moscow a pretext to escalate the conflict even
more. Rather, the way forward must begin with a recognition of some
banal facts and some difficult bargaining.
Russia's seizure of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine do not
challenge the entire post-1945 international order. The forward
positions the Soviet Union occupied in the heart of Europe as a result
of defeating Nazi Germany were voluntarily relinquished in the early
1990s, and they are not going to be reoccupied. But nor should every
detail of the post–Cold War settlement worked out in 1989–91 be
considered eternal and inviolate. That settlement emerged during an
anomalous time. Russia was flat on its back but would not remain
prostrate forever, and when it recovered, some sort of pushback was to
be expected.
Something similar happened following the Treaty of Versailles of 1919,
many of the provisions of which were not enforced. Even if France, the
United Kingdom, and the United States had been willing and able to
enforce the peace, their efforts would not have worked, because the
treaty had been imposed during a temporary anomaly, the simultaneous
collapse of German and Russian power, and would inevitably have been
challenged when that power returned.
Territorial revisionism ensued after World War II as well, of course,
and continued sporadically for decades. Since 1991, there have been some
negotiated revisions: Hong Kong and Macao underwent peaceful
reabsorption into China. Yugoslavia was broken up in violence and war,
leading to the independence of its six federal units and eventually
Kosovo, as well. Unrecognized statelets such as Nagorno-Karabakh, part
of Azerbaijan; Transnistria, a sliver of Moldova; Abkhazia and South
Ossetia, disputed units of Georgia; and now Donetsk and Luhansk, parts
of Ukraine—each entails a story of Stalinist border-making.
The European Union cannot resolve this latest standoff, nor can the
United Nations. The United States has indeed put together “coalitions of
the willing” to legitimize some of its recent interventions, but it is
not going to go to war over Ukraine or start bombing Russia, and the
wherewithal and will for indefinite sanctions against Russia are
lacking. Distasteful as it might sound, Washington faces the prospect of
trying to work out some negotiated larger territorial settlement.
Such negotiations would have to acknowledge that Russia is a great power
with leverage, but they would not need to involve the formal acceptance
of some special Russian sphere of interest in its so-called near abroad.
The chief goals would be, first, to exchange international recognition
of Russia's annexation of Crimea for an end to all the frozen conflicts
in which Russia is an accomplice and, second, to disincentivize such
behavior in the future. Russia should have to pay monetary compensation
for Crimea. There could be some federal solutions, referendums, even
land swaps and population transfers (which in many cases have already
taken place). Sanctions on Russia would remain in place until a
settlement was mutually agreed on, and new sanctions could be levied if
Russia were to reject negotiations or were deemed to be conducting them
in bad faith. Recognition of the new status of Crimea would occur in
stages, over an extended period.
It would be a huge challenge to devise incentives that were politically
plausible in the West while at the same time powerful enough for Russia
to agree to a just settlement—and for Ukraine to be willing to take
part. But the search for a settlement would be an opportunity as well as
a headache.
Nato expansion can be judged to have been a strategic error—not because
it angered Russia but because it weakened nato as a military alliance.
Russia's elites would likely have become revanchist even without nato's
advance, because they believe, nearly universally, that the United
States took advantage of Russia in 1991 and has denied the country its
rightful place as an equal in international diplomacy ever since. But
nato expansion's critics have not offered much in the way of practicable
alternatives. Would it really have been appropriate, for example, to
deny the requests of all the countries east of Germany to join the alliance?
Then as now, the only real alternative was the creation of an entirely
new trans-European security architecture, one that fully transcended its
Cold War counterpart. This was an oft-expressed Russian wish, but in the
early 1990s, there was neither the imagination nor the incentives in
Washington for such a heavy lift. Whether there is such capacity in
Washington today remains to be seen. But even if comprehensive new
security arrangements are unlikely anytime soon, Washington could still
undertake much useful groundwork.
Critics might object on the grounds that the sanctions are actually
biting, reinforced by the oil price free fall—so why offer even minimal
concessions to Putin now? The answer is because neither the sanctions,
nor the oil price collapse, nor the two in conjunction have altered
Russia's behavior, diminished its potential as a spoiler, or afforded
Ukraine a chance to recover.
Whether they acknowledge it or not, Western opponents of a negotiated
settlement are really opting for another long-term, open-ended attempt
to contain Russia and hope for regime change—a policy likely to last
until the end of Putin's life and possibly well beyond. The costs of
such an approach are likely to be quite high, and other global issues
will continue to demand attention and resources. And all the while,
Ukraine would effectively remain crippled, Europe's economy would
suffer, and Russia would grow ever more embittered and difficult to
handle. All of that might occur no matter what. But if negotiations hold
out a chance of somehow averting such an outcome, they are worth a try.
And the attempt would hold few costs, because failed negotiations would
only solidify the case for containment in Europe and in the United States.
It is ultimately up to Russia's leaders to take meaningful steps to
integrate their country into the existing world order, one that they can
vex but not fully overturn. To the extent that the Ukraine debacle has
brought this reality into sharper focus, it might actually have been
useful in helping Putin to see some light, and the same goes for the
collapse of oil prices and the accompanying unavoidable devaluation of
the ruble. After the nadir of 1998, smart policy choices in Moscow,
together with some lucky outside breaks, helped Russia transform a
crisis into a break-through, with real and impressive steps forward.
That history could replay itself—but whether it will remains the
prerogative of one person alone.
STEPHEN KOTKIN is Professor of History and International Affairs at
Princeton University and the author of Stalin, vol. 1, Paradoxes of
Power, 1878–1928.
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