Source: Carnegie
Vladimir Putin's Grand Strategy. . . for anti-democratic regime change in Russia.
Reprinted with permission from The Weekly Standard, 11/17/2003, Volume 009, Issue 10.
IN THE BARRAGE OF COMMENT on the recent arrest of Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, much attention has been paid to Khodorkovsky's political activities and to Russian president Vladimir Putin's brand of crony capitalism--but the essence of the scandal lies deeper. The imprisonment of the richest man in Russia has to do with more than the parliamentary elections coming up in December and the greed of second-tier KGB officers who think they got less than their share of the spoils in the 1990s. Rather, the move to eliminate Khodorkovsky as a political and economic force is part of an unfolding strategic plan, whose goal is a regime neither accountable to the people nor constrained by autonomous political actors. The author of this blueprint for dictatorship is Putin. And to date, it is succeeding.
One reason it is succeeding is that few in the West can see it. Each stage of its realization has been clouded with controversy, subject to conflicting interpretations, its actors decked in gray rather than black and white. As a result, observers have resisted connecting the dots of a systematic plan to roll back democracy. Many--including me--hoped for better. Gorbachev failed. Yeltsin disappointed. Surely the Russian people and their friends in the West wouldn't be wrong a third time? Other observers had an economic or geostrategic interest in casting Putin as above the fray. Today, however, it is naive to ignore the man's strategic vision or fail to marvel at the speed of its accomplishment.
The project began in Chechnya. For those who aspire to make the Russian state feared, respected, and "great" again (the derzhavniki), like former KGB officer Putin, the anarchy in Chechnya after the withdrawal of Russian troops in 1996 was an embarrassment and a testament to Russia's weakness. When the fanatic Chechen commander Shamil Basayev and his Saudi sidekick, Khattab, moved into neighboring Dagestan in 1999 to liberate the Muslim people of the Caucasus, they gave Putin the perfect pretext for sending Russian troops back into Chechnya.
But the attempt to reassert Russian control over the breakaway province would have happened under Putin with or without that invitation. The rape, pillage, murder, and destruction of civilian property by Russian soldiers reveal how little value Putin assigns to the protection of individual human rights. Unapologetic, he worries about the state, not about the individual.
Next came the destruction of the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, the man perhaps most responsible for bringing Putin to power, first as prime minister in 1999 and then president in 2000. It was Berezovsky who masterminded the transition from Yeltsin to Putin, who built from scratch Putin's party, United Russia, and who wielded his control of Russian national television to neutralize Putin's only potential rival in the 2000 presidential election, former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov. Berezovsky is no democrat. But he was an independent political force, and so had to be eliminated. Today, Berezovsky lives in London.
Up next was television. When Putin came to power, only three networks had the national reach to really count in politics--ORT, RTR, and NTV. By running Berezovsky out of town, Putin effectively acquired control of ORT, the channel with the biggest national audience. RTR is still 100 percent owned by the state, so it was even easier to tame. Controlling the third channel, NTV, proved more difficult, since it was in private hands. But the anarchy of the early 1990s gave Putin and his lieutenants a treasure trove of compromising material on anyone who did business back then. In 2000, federal authorities filed charges against NTV's principal owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, who eventually lost his property and now shuttles between Spain, the United States, and Israel, never Russia. NTV's original team of journalists tried to make a go of it at two other stations, but eventually failed. Today, the Kremlin de facto controls all national television in Russia.
Next came the regional barons. In the 1990s, governors of oblasts (administrative units roughly comparable to states) and presidents of republics acquired significant political autonomy. To reassert Moscow's dominance, Putin created seven new supra-regional executive authorities whose mandate is to enforce his policies at the regional level. He then emasculated the Federal Council, Russia's closest approximation to the U.S. Senate, by removing governors and heads of regional legislatures from its membership. Under the new system, Putin effectively appoints most senators, making the Federal Council a rubber stamp for Kremlin policies. To dispose of really troublesome regional leaders--those slow to submit to Putin's authority--federal authorities have rigged elections. Disqualification of candidates from the ballot on technicalities has been their means of choice--for example, in Kursk Oblast, Ingushetia, and Chechnya. Most recently, Putin's aides have resurrected "party" politics in the regions by inviting/coercing regional executives to join Putin's party, United Russia. This new party, built in no small measure on the remnants of the old Communist party of the Soviet Union, is expected to provide the Kremlin another institutional mechanism for controlling regional politics.
So after the oligarchs had been tamed, the regional leaders reined in, and television seized, who was left to defy the president? Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In contrast to Berezovsky, Gusinsky, and some of the rebellious regional bosses, Khodorkovsky seemed an unlikely challenger to the Kremlin's power. For the first years of Putin's reign, he did as he was told. When Putin warned the oligarchs to stay out of television, Khodorkovsky complied. When the Kremlin asked him to provide money to Grigory Yavlinsky's party, Yabloko (as a reward for Yavlinsky's good behavior in the hostage crisis in downtown Moscow last year), the billionaire did as he was told.
But somewhere along the way, Khodorkovsky began to show signs of independent thinking and political ambition. Perhaps the final provocation was his suggestion in the spring of 2003 that Russia needed a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential republic. Perhaps it was his pledge to Putin that he would make sure the presidential transition in 2008 (at the end of Putin's second term) went smoothly. Such statements were in direct defiance of Putin's plan to create a political system that he alone controlled and that he alone would decide how to change. Khodorkovsky had to go.
WHEN CONSIDERED IN ISOLATION, each of the steps in Putin's plan can be interpreted as something beside democratic backsliding. The government in Chechnya did not work; terrorists were and are active there. Berezovsky and Gusinsky have many skeletons in their closets. Some of the regional barons Putin has reined in were behaving like tyrants in their fiefdoms. Khodorkovsky is no Sakharov. And, more generally, everyone believes that Russia needs a more effective state if its market economy and democracy are to develop further.
But when analyzed together, these events are clearly linked: All tend toward the weakening or elimination of independent sources of power. Khodorkovsky's arrest was not only a triumph of the guys with the guns (the siloviki) over the guys with the money ("the family"). Nor was it only an incident spurred by personal rivalry and private greed. Rather, it was the execution of the latest phase of a grand strategy for regime change in Russia--autocratic regime change. And the master strategist is not Igor Sechin or Viktor Ivanov, both long-time KGB associates of the president now working for him in the Kremlin. It is Putin himself.
The group of people in Russia who understand most clearly how the dots connect are the same people who fought the last dictatorship in Russia. Last week in Moscow, at a gathering of human rights activists--some of whom had logged years in the Soviet camps--delegates passed resolutions denouncing the war in Chechnya and the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, spelling out the relationship between these two events. Although they lack the power to stop Putin's plan, they have the clarity of mind and courage of conviction to speak the truth about the rise of dictatorship in Russia.
Shouldn't we as well? In his meeting with President Putin at Camp David last month, President Bush attributed to Putin a vision for his country that these Russian human rights activists would not recognize. Bush said, "I respect President Putin's vision for Russia: a country at peace within its borders, with its neighbors, and with the world, a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive." The evidence for this vision does not exist. The evidence for the opposite is overwhelming.
Even if there is little Bush can do to stop the erosion of democracy inside Russia, he should at least join Russia's human rights heroes in speaking the truth about Putin's actions. Anything less would make a travesty of Bush's great theme--articulated again, most eloquently, in a major address last Thursday--that "the advance of freedom . . . is the calling of our country."
Michael McFaul is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and teaches political science at Stanford University. He is coauthor with James Goldgeier of "Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War" and, with Timothy Colton, "Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000," both just out from the Brookings Institution Press.