Never Show Weakness: How Faking Autocracy Legitimates Putin’s Hold on Power

Never Show Weakness: How Faking Autocracy Legitimates Putin’s Hold on Power

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According to Alexander Lukin, ‘Putin effectively transformed a mixed and unstable political system, which he inherited from Boris Yeltsin, into a classic authoritarian regime’. But this is giving Vladimir Putin more credit than he deserves. To understand better the trajectory of Russian politics in the two decades since 1991, we first need to grasp that an authoritarian regime is almost as difficult to create and consolidate as a democratic regime. This is especially true in the absence of two key factors that buoyed up Soviet power, first, a justifying ideology, and, second, sealed borders insulating the Russian elite from unshielded contacts with the West. The obstacle to recreating Muscovite autocracy today lies not in the absence of political will but rather in the absence of political capacity. Putin may pose as a superhero, but he cannot re-isolate Russia from the world. Such a reversion to autarky was never on the cards, for many reasons, above all because it would have struck directly at material interests of influential individuals in the Russian establishment: ‘What is the point of stealing all of that money from state coffers, stashing it away in foreign accounts or investing in expensive foreign real estate if the corrupt officials are denied access to these assets?’ Nor can Putin promulgate a new and persuasive theory of history with a capital H, any more than he can issue a decree and reconvert Russia to the Soviet economic model, reconstituting the command economy with the flick of a switch. The virtual impossibility of recreating a strong authoritarian regime in post-communist Russia is rooted in the nature of the Soviet collapse. Until 1991, the country was governed by a genuine ‘power vertical’, namely the CPSU. When this bureaucratic machine suddenly melted down and its myriad tentacles shrivelled up and disappeared, it left behind not scorched earth but a constellation of ‘orphans’, or highly developed but now disunited and essentially autonomous fragments of a highly developed but now defunct state. Such surviving shards of a once-mighty political system are what distinguish post-communist Russia from most other soi-disant democratizing countries. The arresting specificity (osobennost’) of contemporary Russia cannot be denied, despite the valiant efforts of Daniel Treisman to lump the lot and treat Russia as a ‘perfectly normal’ middle-income country. But neither can the country’s political distinctiveness be traced backed to the enigmatic Russian soul in the manner admired by Slavophiles and reviled by Westernizers. Rather, the historical exceptionalism of Putin’s Russia, seen in comparative perspective, appears most clearly in the bureaucratic fragmentation resulting from the disappearance of the CPSU, the immense riches that even today remain up-for-grabs because of the continued absence of socially legitimate owners, the extensive interpenetration of corrupt local, regional and national officialdom with criminal groups, and an anaemic sense of national identity among the country’s political and economic elite. No other country with such an undeveloped economy will be sending American astronauts into space. In the United States, at least, the Russian space programme is the best-known agency that was orphaned when the CPSU passed away. More important politically, naturally, are such entities as Gazprom, the former Soviet Ministry of Gas, now a humungous and non-transparent corporation in which the Russian government holds a controlling stake, and the Procuracy, which retains its formal prosecutorial and other functions but no longer has to answer to any ranking organization in a position to supervise its every move: ‘Prosecutors and police continue to dominate the judiciary as they did in the Soviet era, but unrestrained by the institutions of the old Communist system’, we are told, ‘the opportunities for abuse have grown’. Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB agent who also spied for MI6, makes a similar point about his former employer: ‘The KGB without the Communist Party is a gang of gangsters’. Putin’s attempt to restore the power vertical in post-communist Russia was doomed not by a non-existent democratic opposition but by the conflicting vested interests of semi-autonomous bureaucratic agencies and financial- industrial clans: ‘For years, Putin tried to make it (Yedinaia Rossiia) the ruling party of Russia, a modern version of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’. But his attempt was doomed to fail. ‘United Russia has suffered from its lack of a real active role. It is used too much as a shield against potential challengers: it is more of a party to protect power than a party in power’. Timothy Colton and Henry Hale describe Yedinaia Rossiia in similar terms, as ‘an administrative mechanism for elite advancement, coordination, and control, with few real roots in the electorate’. Commenting on the oddity of Putin’s decision to place various popular entertainers in the Duma as members of Yedinaia Rossiia, Boris Nemtsov is more scathing still: ‘United Russia is not a political party. These people are just the hired help. You know, at the king’s court, there were jokers and singers and clowns, and the king was their master. Their job is just to raise their hands on command and then put them down again’.

Source Publication

Power and Legitimacy—Challenges from Russia

Source Editors/Authors

Per-Arne Bodin, Stefan Hedlund, Elena Namli

Publication Date

2013

Never Show Weakness: How Faking Autocracy Legitimates Putin’s Hold on Power

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