Potemkin Democracy

Potemkin Democracy

Description

“Elected” to the presidency of the Russian Federation on March 26, 2000, and inaugurated on May 7, Vladimir Putin's public embrace of democratic values cannot easily be reconciled with his evident belief that the Russian state can be strengthened by making its actions increasingly illegible to the public. His first actions on taking office were aimed at weakening public and private agencies designed to monitor the government, suggesting from the very outset that he identified an effective state with political arrangements that immunize office holders from criticism by the public. Kremlin policies during the past two years have only confirmed such suspicions. On becoming president, Putin quickly abolished two semi-independent agencies reporting on environmental damage: the state committee for ecology and the Russian forestry committee. He then reassigned their oversight functions to the Ministry of Natural Resources, an agency responsible for promoting economic development, which does not necessarily take a passionate interest in the free flow of information about environmental damage caused by the state itself. Within a few months, Putin also managed to convert the previously obstreperous “opposition Duma” into a rubber-stamp body. After a year, he had launched criminal investigations against a number of prominent “businessmen,” managing eventually to send two of the noisiest among them (Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Beresovsky) into exile. And he successfully subordinated the country's eighty-eight elected governors to an increased measure of Kremlin control by removing their immunity from criminal prosecution and by appointing a handful of “supergovernors” with vague but ominous powers of supervision. He also may have extracted at least some deference from regional elites by floating the idea of converting their governorships from elected to appointed posts. Well before September 11, 2001, Putin's Kremlin energetically wielded antiterrorism laws to impede the press from diffusing any information about the war in Chechnya that appears inconsistent with the official Kremlin line. Since September 11, these proclivities have been given free rein. But antiterrorism laws play a different role in Russia than in consolidated Western democracies, even though they are everywhere invoked to curtail civil liberties. Behind Kremlin policy in this area it is not difficult to discern something other than concern for Islamic terrorism, namely the antidemocratic policy of manufacturing a simulacrum of political support by repressing dissenting voices. What makes this policy seem especially flagrant, is the near-universal support already delivered voluntarily by Moscow's media elite for the Kremlin's war in Chechnya, which is still experienced by many Russians as symbolic payback for the country's decade-long humiliation. This autocratic turn in Russian politics may ultimately collapse under its own weight. But if it fails, it will not be because democracy has already become “irreversibly consolidated” in postcommunist Russia. Putin's power grab may end in defeat because the country's economic and social problems are immense and growing and are beyond the power even of a self-imagined man of steel to solve, because recentralization of power will trigger resistance and obstructionism from the social forces it threatens; because the bureaucracies (including the militarized secret services) at the Kremlin's beck and command are fragmented, incompetent, and corrupt; because the President will be unable to locate well-organized social partners for his initiatives; and because he cannot for various reasons resort to the principal Soviet-era method of social control, namely the sealing of his country's borders. Whatever other obstacles it faces, Putin's power grab will not be seriously hindered by electoral majorities.

Source Publication

The Making and Unmaking of Democracy: Lessons from History and World Politics

Source Editors/Authors

Theodore K. Rabb, Ezra N. Suleiman

Publication Date

2003

Potemkin Democracy

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