The Past Decade Has Been Relatively Successful, but Russia Will not Improve Further Unless Russian Society Can Find the Will to Change
Ten years after Vladimir Putin first came to power, Russian media, political life and public discourse have changed so much they are almost unrecognizable. The results are not perfect, but they are better than nothing. Putin has been generally successful in managing the myriad of mutually-exclusive problems he inherited. But what of the future? And in another decade, will the Russia of 2009 be as outlandish as the Russia of 1999 is to us now?
Vladimir Putin acquired his large-scale powers not when he was appointed the acting prime minister, but when his appointment was approved by the State Duma. It happened on August 16, 1999, before the anniversary of the financial default. There was a certain risk to this venture: the new appointee could have failed to get the necessary number of votes, if, for example, the Yabloko party did not give him their 17 mandates, along with two or three other deputies from the loyal factions.
This used to happen back then; we simply forgot how it can happen. We also don’t remember the other details, both pleasant and not. For example, the way Boris Berezovsky ran in Karachaevo-Cherkesiya, while Nikita Mikhalkov, under the pretense of the election campaign, showed the electorate his film “The Siberian Barber,” patriotically combining the pleasant with the useful. But another ten years later, if all goes well, we will reluctantly recall how we used to seriously debate the eternal perspectives of the duumvirate, believing that “Bulava” can be covered up with “Sineva” and saying that there can never be freedom in Russia, since there never was. And if things don’t go according to plan, we will nostalgically recollect the epoch of moderate liberty, when nobody forbid you from expressing a “special opinion” even if you just mumble it in a whisper, and nobody demanded that you denounce the damned West during the morning town hall meetings. Even the loyal yet nonpartisan bosses were appointed to serious jobs.
The years that have passed since August of 1999 are enough to calm down and assess the period as a whole, even though it is too small to be academically objective. So what can be said here and now, while realizing that tomorrow a few of these assessments will have to be clarified, and others will have to be altered?
Firstly, Putin became the logical president. Not good or bad, but precisely logical. Only a person of this type, disposition, and with such a varied background (service in the KGB, a dive into the democratic camp, loyalty to Boris Yeltsin, patriotism, utter pragmatism), who seemed to have come out of nowhere, could end up at the helm of a beaten country that was tired of itself. Typologically the voters would not have accepted anyone else, and there were no others back then. Not one generally acceptable “democrat” or one sane “patriot.” Evgeny Primakov, thank God, was already senile, while Berezovsky’s hopes for either Alexander Lebed or Nikita Mikhalkov were illusory and dangerous. Ambitious players in a game of conservative utopia do not handle the country with kid gloves.
The people wanted to end the revolution, they wanted stability even if the latter was illusory, they wanted to be confident in today and to overcome the national inferiority complex. While the previous elites wanted for their personal security to be guaranteed. Yeltsin offered both in the shape of a young and tough premier. And another thing is very important: after the tragedy of 1993, when the siloviki had to be brought in to quench an armed rebellion, the special service corporation invariably accrued might—the new governor must have been at least understandable to these people. Better yet, they should have fully liked him. “I would like to report back that the special operation ‘entering into power’ has been successful.” Sure, it’s a joke, but there is a grain of truth in it.
Secondly, the successor faced a few very difficult and sometimes mutually exclusive tasks. He was called to reconstruct the state and bring back if not its authority, then at least its power, without sacrificing any democratic institutions. Which meant ending the “oligarchic” period with all of its “informational blades,” without stamping out the inchoate economy and destroying the media per se. He was responsible for forcefully appeasing the Caucasus, because it was impossible to isolate Chechnya without completely undermining security and running the risk of breaking up the country. He had to provide for a growth in the GDP so that an economically diverse territory did not start drying up. And he had to continue the country’s slow (too slow) but sure progress toward the legal milieu—from the criminal code to the law.
Putin was more or less successful with his first task. The state has been restored from oblivion. Sure, it is corrupt to the bone. Sure, too much has been forfeited to the bureaucracy. And yet it is institutional, and not chaotic. Whether it is reliable and stable is another question, in any case, terrorism attacks, gas wars, the permanent quarrels with the West or the governmental semi-panic in the fall of 2008 did not break it. That means that the time of the new republic has not yet come—we will have to deal precisely with this (Putin’s) state in the foreseeable future.
Everything is just fine with the democratic procedures: even against the backdrop of the late 1990s with their “additional votes,” the current management seems like an aggravated parody of the expression of the people’s will. Sure, in today’s Russia, with its present level of societal self-consciousness, full-scale political governance is impossible, but there is no movement toward the experience of difficult freedom, there is no process of democratic self-teaching; there is no penchant for being responsible for your own destiny. Without these, we have no chance for self-development. On the contrary. The system is getting preserved. Its small amendments (the few deputies whose parties have not met the quota, but who have been allowed into the Duma nonetheless), do not, in essence, change anything (yet). Whether there will be other, more notable steps taken—we’ll see. All of this certainly isn’t tyranny—one can live with this regime even if one does not accept its foundation.
However, a dependent democracy and a softened authoritarianism are dangerous, as is anesthetizing the wound without healing it. Sooner or later the painkillers will wear out, the shocking pain will come back and the decay will continue.
Chechnya has been appeased. Unstable, on the verge of collapse, but it has. Will this appeasement last long; will we succeed in keeping the Caucasus at least within the framework of today’s explosive order, with mundane killings of ministers and regular attempts on the presidents’ lives? That’s not clear. But let’s be fair—the mess we are dealing with now is still much better than the mess we dealt with in 1999. It is bloody but not deadly, it might turn into a catastrophe, or it might not. Certainly this isn’t much, but it is better than nothing; it is not the way out of the deadlock, but it’s not Buynaksk, not Nord-Ost, not Beslan. (I am not going to go into details and discuss the price that was paid for Nord-Ost and Beslan right now, that’s a separate story).
And again, on the way toward this precarious and by definition temporary equilibrium, the entire system of civil life was suffocated. Those exact horizontal initiatives without which the power vertical cannot stand upright have been strangled, the screws have been tightened, and everyone can feel that they are too tight, even those who tightened them. And nobody knows how to unscrew them without the pipes bursting. We know that we should start, but it’s too scary. Until the crisis began (which, despite the fact that we blame America for all our woes, has hit us harder than Europe and much harder than China), Russia’s economic growth had been provided for. It is clear by what means, but luck is also on the list of a real politician’s virtues, the masses have to feel like he is lucky. And Putin is lucky, there is no arguing with that. At least he was, until now.
Sure, in 1999 he received a truly imperial present: Yeltsin prematurely left the Kremlin, and Putin received the presidency not from the hands of a great, unpopular, controversial politician, who twice partook in coups (thank him for that) in 1991 and 1993, but from the hands of the acting president. Putin received the reigns of power from himself. His past has been cleared and he was allowed to become legitimate, so that he could move on into the future. But he also must have been given mutually-exclusive orders, which we can only guess about: not to break the elite over the knee, not to reconsider the results of the privatization, not to radically alter the previous team, to be tenderly friendly with the special services but not to give all of the power levers over to them, to wage war on the separatists but not to reject democracy altogether. Although countries that are at war tend to limit it. Thus, the task has been set: to keep the balance while moving forward.
Some observers are convinced that there was another condition: to tame the media sphere, to bring television under the state’s control. Evgeny Kiselev believes that the previous candidate for the succession, Sergey Stepashin, boldly refused such an offer, for which he was fired from big politics. While Putin agreed. Anything can happen.
Although it is most likely that things were a bit different: having used the television resource during the parliamentary elections to the full and having immediately turned into a popular television figure, the new leader was quick to put his media weapon back in its case so that others would not be able to use it. While the philosophy of managing the country on the air, when the main news flow is formed not at the TV stations but “behind the wall,” as journalists like to call the offices of the Kremlin elders, was added to the practice later. In any case, first the battle was fought particularly against Berezovsky and Gusinsky, and NTV, which had been taken over, and retained not just the previous quality of its television product, but also its previous direction and acuteness, all the way up until Nord-Ost. And “The Other Day” with Leonid Parfenov was almost tougher than Kiselev’s “The Outcomes.” The incorrigible turn in the media system began only after 2003, and we ended up with what we are enjoying today.
Likewise, it is impossible to know whether the goals of Putin’s new elite were established from the start. This elite has quietly, conspicuously, without revolutionary shocks and powerful attacks a-la “you’re not sitting in the right place” has laboriously, diligently and with the stubbornness of an ant climbed to the top of the pyramid, flipping the switches of loyalty along the way for those who were ready to forget their previous service to the oligarchs and join the team of the new master. Or this goal was shaped slowly, during the artistic process. In the end, it doesn’t really matter all that much. It only matters that this goal has been set. To bring the tastiest pieces of the Russian economy under the state’s control. To bring the state under your own control. To fortify your position. And then, having saved up the necessary resources, to buy all of this out for your own, reliable and loyal people. Without any auctions, vouchers, or reassessing the results of the first privatization, thereby designating the 200 to 300 key families that are going to manage the Big Economy and thus, to some degree, politics.
Peaceful re-distribution. A revolution without a revolution.
But for this, it is necessary to hold on to the levers of power for a very long time, for twenty years at least—those exact Fyodor Stolypin’s twenty years of peace an inclination toward which Alexander Solzhenitsyn saw in Putin’s politics but endowed with his own meaning. Whether this goal is attainable is not clear: do we have another ten guaranteed years ahead of us, or has history gained speed once again, and will we see God crushing the plans of the strong and the proud? Just like this, back in 2002, Mikhail Khodorkovsky did not imagine that his might will turn to dust in a year, because the time has come to break the main agreement with the previous powers: the inviolability of the elites, the safety of the personnel. And the conflict with Khodorkovsky will present an opportunity to provoke a schism in the system, to involve your own people in redistributing the property. As for the others who have been inherited from Yeltsin, some can be fully forced out (everyone should learn from Mikhail Kasyanov’s example) while others can be fully re-coded and enslaved. Administrators and oligarchs alike.
In any case, a different decade has arrived. Both the government and the country are faced with completely different tasks, unlike those of 1999. We will lean on a relatively competent state. Will have to pay for everything that has been destroyed on our way to today. The main loss is not the media, who did plenty on its own accord to be crushed. And not the democratic elections, which, at the end of the 1990s were no longer utterly free, and by 2010 have become just another strange form of appointing people to political jobs. The main calamity is not the quarrels all along the perimeter of the borders—in any case, even given a wiser policy these conflicts could not have been avoided, all young states go through these growing pains. The main catastrophe is not even the utter loss of a common agenda with the key powers in the world: they also did a lot for this to happen.
There are more important and painful issues. The way I see it, there are two cornerstone problems. First of all, even the remainder of the feeling of general trust in society, without which not one large country can exist, has disappeared. The current atmosphere is not one of fear, but it’s not one of political creativity, either. The present-day Russian society is an isolated farmstead society that has divided up into households and lost all solidarity: a society in which nobody trusts anybody and thus everyone is on his own. Secondly, in the process of settling issues with the enemies and taking their property away, we have consciously finished off the judicial system. It was weak to begin with, nearing collapse during the 1990s, spoiled by the oligarchs and the bureaucracy. If before the 2000s it was managed solely by money, now the state manages it as well. The state is more important, but the money has not disappeared, either.
Meanwhile, without an atmosphere of civil and unifying trust, without the society’s will to change, getting rid of the customary lies, there can be no long-term development. And without a legal system of a blind prevalence of the law there can be no democracy. No honest elections. No full-fledged parties. No free media. And no truly competitive relations in the economy. Where there is no independent court, there can be no free market. And so on.
Everything else is, in essence, secondary. What the name of the person who will be able to solve these problems will be. Whether he will be an offspring of the previous system of the 2000s. What’s important is that a new decade is starting. Ready, set, go.
