Source: Journal of Democracy
What’s the Matter With Russia?Postcommunist states have taken shape differently depending on the development paths chosen by the elites of the former communist countries. The Central and East European states have restructured themselves with liberal democracy as their foundation. By contrast, Russia and most of the newly independent states on former Soviet territory have reverted to various forms of personalized power. It seems to me that two circumstances ensured the integration of “New Europe” into liberal Europe: the ability of the elites of New Europe to reach a consensus on building their new states based on European standards, and the European Union’s readiness to accept New Europe into its fold.
Paradoxical though it may sound, the very fact of Russia’s existence was invaluable in facilitating New Europe’s transformation. The drive to escape the former suzerain laid the foundations of New European nationalism, which united left and right and legitimized the former Soviet satellite states’ decision to set their course toward Europe—a destination that they could reach only by taking the liberal-democratic road. Equally paradoxical, even as the New Europeans sought sovereignty from Russia, they were willing to cede some of their newfound independence to Brussels.
The West, in turn—acting not so much out of altruism as out of a desire to guarantee its own security—was ready to expand and integrate into its civilization the former communist countries that separated Old Europe from an inscrutable Russia still struggling with its own complexes. New Europe’s postcommunist history reveals an evolution that has not been easy. Essays published in the Journal of Democracy show that all the Central and East European countries encountered problems along the way.1 But these were problems of how to put into practice the principles of liberal democracy. Nowhere was there ever a real question of abandoning the European rules of the game.
Russia’s circumstances could not have been more different: In Russia, the elite proved unable to reach a consensus on the direction of the country’s transformation and the form of the new state, and the West never even considered integrating Russia into its orbit. This former great power thus reverted to its traditional matrix and became a serious obstacle in the path of the newly independent states’ transition to liberal democracy. What stopped Russia from breaking free of its past civilizational paradigm? What was the balance between inevitability and lost historical opportunity in Russia’s case? Is there hope for a future transformation in Russia? And why did Russia’s elite, unlike that of New Europe, not have the resolve to change the rules of the game? The confluence of several elements helped to set Russia’s course: the influence of history; the challenges of the transformation process itself, which proved too great for the Russian elite; the importance of leadership; and certain political factors that worked in favor of a return to the past.
In Russia, the interests of the state have traditionally taken priority over those of the individual, and centralization of power has always been bolstered by territorial expansionism and messianic ideology. In order to perpetuate itself, the Russian centralized state requires both a global mission and the recognition of its great-power status by the international community. These aspirations to greatness in turn encourage further centralization, thus creating a vicious cycle. After the fall of communism, a new Russian elite, convinced that Russia can exist only as a superpower, reiterated this claim to greatness and, in so doing, prevented the country from embracing a new vision of the state and forming a new identity.
Russia missed out on the period of liberal constitutionalism, the Rechtsstaat, which in Europe brought recognition of the importance of the rule of law. Russia never had what Ralf Dahrendorf called “the hour of the lawyer.” Even Russian liberals have been guided by political expediency rather than by rules, relying on leaders rather than on principles. Having had no “hour of the lawyer,” Russian society has been unable successfully to move to the next stages of liberal transformation: “the hour of the economist” and “the hour of the citizen.”2
Moreover, all historical assaults on autocracy in Russia have invariably ended in its restoration. Both Alexander II’s nineteenth-century experiment with “constitutional autocracy” and Nikita Khrushchev’s “Thaw” of the mid-twentieth century were reversed, as each time the Russian elite feared that any attempt to liberalize the regime would undermine the foundations of the state. Moreover, the USSR was not shaken by revolutions like those in Poland (1956), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968).
At the crucial moment in the late 1980s when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev threw open Russia’s long-shuttered windows to the world, the country had neither a credible antisystemic opposition nor a contingent of pragmatists capable of functioning in an atmosphere of pluralism. History had utterly failed to prepare Russia, which had been closed off from the outside world for decades, for the changes to come. Moreover, Gorbachev’s perestroika, which triggered the unraveling of the USSR, only reinforced fears among the Russian elite that further liberalization would bring about the collapse of the Russian Federation.
The Challenges of Transformation
There has never in history been a task akin to the democratization of a nuclear superpower with imperialist ambitions. Not only did Russia have to give up its position as an alternative civilization, its spheres of influence, and its territorially integrated empire—it also had to radically alter the principles on whose basis its state and society were organized and it had to quickly build a new market economy. These simultaneous tasks proved difficult to reconcile. Dankwart Rustow, Robert Dahl, and later Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan rightly warned that a precondition of successful democratization is a stable state (“no state—no democracy”). In the early 1990s, Russia was in the midst of collapse, and democracy-building and market reforms did not make comfortable bedfellows. Moreover, Russia had to transform an unusual type of state—a nuclear petrostate.
In the Russian case, the primacy of the state has been legitimized with reference to real or (more often) imagined threats, both internal and external. Those threats had to be severe enough to justify the militarization of everyday life in Russia and the subjugation of the very foundations of society to militarist goals. In short, Russia developed a unique model for the survival and reproduction of power in a permanent state of war. This situation was maintained even in peacetime, which has always been temporary in Russia. The country is constantly either preparing for war against an external enemy or pursuing enemies at home. Russia has survived by annihilating the boundary between war and peace; its state simply could not exist in a peaceful environment. The militarist model has been used to justify the supercentralized state in the eyes of the people. Militarization made Russia different from other transitional societies and became a tremendous impediment to transformation.
All this, however, is not meant to suggest that Russia possessed none of the conditions conducive to setting forth on the road to freedom and political pluralism. At the decisive moment for postcommunist Russia in autumn 1991, Boris Yeltsin had a huge mandate for change from the Russian public. About 70 percent of Russians at the time supported liberal democracy. Many were unsure of what exactly democracy was, but they accepted it as both an ideal and a way of life. Thus Russian society at that time was not a hindrance to breaking with the old system.
Effective leadership could have mitigated the influence of history while compensating for the absence in Russia of some transformation prerequisites. As Juan Linz has put it, “We cannot exclude the possibility of transcending those conditioning factors by political leadership and political engineering.”3 The East European states, India, South Africa, South Korea, and Taiwan have combined to prove that democracy can take root in non-European, non-Christian, and economically problematic countries, in agrarian societies, and in societies with a strong communist legacy—if the political leaders and other elites see democracy as best serving national (and personal) interests.
The leadership of Adolfo Suarez in Spain, F.W. de Klerk in South Africa, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, and Lennart Meri in Estonia helped to ease the democratic transition in their respective countries, each of which lacked a number of democratic prerequisites. Even a lack of democratically inclined leaders and elites need not prevent a successful transition, as Giuseppe Di Palma and Albert O. Hirschman have shown. Democracy can be built by pragmatists who recognize and appreciate the ruinous nature, not least for themselves, of an autocratic system. As Di Palma put it, “[the] nondemocrats of yesterday can become democrats, even convinced democrats.”4
There was a time when I believed that failures of leadership and the weakness of the Russian democrats were the crucial factor complicating Russia’s transformation into a rule-of-law state. Yeltsin, alas, was no Russian Suarez, and the Russian liberals and democrats were ill prepared to tackle the role that their counterparts in Eastern Europe played in the 1980s and 1990s. The lack of vision and of a clear agenda on the part of the new Russian political class (including liberals), combined with a mixture of naivete, neurosis, brashness, and social insensitivity, did not exactly help Russia to adopt new values.
It took me some time and effort to understand that there was another key factor that prevented the Russian elite from forging a consensus about the new rules of the game, neutralizing the influence of history, and overcoming the systemic constraints involved in reforming a nuclear superpower. I have in mind the emergence in 1990, one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, of an unusual political monster—the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies. This body was more than a parliament because, according to the constitution, it was the center of power in Russia.
After Boris Yeltsin was elected president, Russia acquired two new political institutions, both with democratic legitimacy and each fighting for a monopoly on power. One of these, the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies, was a vestige of the old Soviet state that declined to leave the political scene. The other was the presidency. The Russian political elite split, and various political forces dove head first into a dramatic struggle for dominance. It thus became impossible simultaneously to build a new state while reaching consensus on the new rules of the game. It was this power struggle between Yeltsin and the Congress that undermined Russia’s chances for transformation in 1991–93. Beyond that, there were no insurmountable obstacles—at least not in 1991—to elite agreement on the principles of the new regime and state building in Russia.
The West and the New Russia
The West could have made a difference in developments in Russia, at least at the beginning. In the 1990s, Russia was dependent on international financial institutions and on economic assistance from the Western community and beyond. In addition, Yeltsin and his team were seeking integration with the West, which made them particularly responsive to Western advice and influence. European and U.S. leaders, however, were unprepared to launch an ambitious program for assisting Russia’s transformation. By the time U.S. president Bill Clinton came to power in 1993 with a sweeping plan to help Russia, the window for democratization had closed.
In truth, all Western leaders made two grave errors: First, they relied on Yeltsin and believed that he would guarantee Russia’s transition; second, they emphasized the economy while neglecting to push for political reform. They would have been more successful in shaping a democratic and market-oriented Russia if in 1991 they had advised Yeltsin first to organize new elections, adopt a democratic constitution, and build a new state based on the rule of law, and to move gradually on to privatization only later, when it could be shaped by newly developed political and legal institutions. Instead, Western leaders fell short with their advice and failed to persuade Yeltsin even to consider other options. Rather than serving as a transformational force in Russian affairs, the West legitimized the Russian system of personalized power.
Why is transformation so difficult now? The answer is manifold and includes Russia’s hybrid regime, the ability of the Russian elite to imitate liberal democracy, the commodity factor (also known as the resource curse), and the efforts of the Russian elite to mobilize greatpower status as a bulwark against liberalization. The hybrid nature of its regime allows Russia to operate in a gray zone. The country has failed to take on board liberal principles and to Westernize, but it also does not want to return to the classic Russian paradigm. This ambiguity serves to prevent clear choices and prolong uncertainty.
The elite’s copycat democracy is another hindrance. In its attempts to imitate the rule of law, pluralism, and freedom while hanging on to top-down governance, the Russian elite is discrediting liberal principles. The commodity factor keeps the Russian economy afloat and may create the impression of an economic success story, but in reality it prevents Russia’s modernization. The continuing claim to great-power status is one more obstacle to Russia’s emancipation. The political class continues to foster mass phobias and neuroses, insisting that Russia is fated for glory and a special destiny. Daydreams of being a superpower, on the one hand, and the image of Russia as a “besieged fortress,” on the other, are again being used to justify personalized power.
Russia seems to be unable to move forward or backward, stuck between civilizations and historical epochs. Its future direction is unclear. Its present is full of incompatibilities. At home, there is a desire to disguise authoritarianism as democracy. Abroad, Russia lays claim to a partnership with the West, all the while openly opposing Western policies. Even as Russia regards itself as part of Europe and as sharing European culture, its political system remains alien to Europe and the West in general. The ruling tandem of President Dmitri Medvedev and former president and now–prime minister Vladimir Putin skillfully acts out a “good cop–bad cop” script that appeals both to traditionalists dreaming of restoration and to moderates and liberals hoping for a Medvedev “thaw.”
Exercises in imitation are presented as pragmatism. But in reality, they point to the inability of the ruling class to leave the past behind. The latest survival technique of the Russian elite is the attempt to reinforce the status quo by demanding a revision of the international order that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Simultaneously dogmatic and revanchist, the political class seeks to postpone an existential crisis and hopes to find a niche that will allow Russia to drift endlessly in indecision while coopting the West and using the West’s resources to pursue anti-Western goals.
It may well be more difficult for Russia to Westernize itself than it would be, say, for China or for certain Southeast Asian countries. In considering the liberal-democratic transformation of Southeast Asia, Francis Fukuyama wrote that “traditional political Confucianism . . . could be jettisoned relatively easily and replaced with a variety of political-institutional forms without causing the society to lose its essential coherence.” In his view, Asian democracy could be built “not around individual rights, but around a deeply engrained moral code that is the basis for strong social structures and community life.”5 In contemporary Russia, the lack of a “deeply engrained moral code” and other mechanisms that could guarantee social coherence makes the task of building a new political system a more fraught and unpredictable exercise.
The failure of the liberal and democratic project is sometimes taken as confirmation that Russia is incapable of living in freedom. For those observers who see Russian development as cyclical—from liberalization to restoration and back again—or as the constant replication of a traditional matrix, the country’s inability to transform its system of governance is but grist for the mill. Both of these explanations reflect a fatalistic view of Russia as doomed to autocracy and facing only ruin should it depart from the autocratic path.
My own narrative might seem to confirm that conclusion, but reality is more complicated. Russian history does not trace the path of a pendulum swinging between reform and counterreform; nor is it circular, though it often appears to be. Each successive liberalization moves Russia a little further forward, driving society toward greater openness. Successive restorations have not returned the country to its starting point; a little more freedom remains each time.
The Putin restoration, for example, has not taken Russia entirely back to Soviet days. Rather, it is a backsliding toward autocracy that nevertheless leaves society to its own devices. The regime appears to be telling the population, “Do as you please, just don’t try to seize power.” Leaving society alone, giving it the right to seek its own salvation, is a significant advance in social autonomy in comparison to the communist period, when the regime aimed to keep society entirely straitjacketed. Russia thus experiences its cycles, but each time it does so at a different level and in a new historical context. Attempts to understand Russia’s developments with reference to tradition, mentality, and culture tend to be instructive, but they are insufficient to explain new aspects of Russian life or to provide a clue as to what the next stage might be.
The time is coming when the Russian political regime will be unable to provide what society demands of it: stability and living standards that rise—not merely back up to Soviet levels, but instead to levels matching those of the West. We may find that the period of the Medvedev-Putin diarchy is the last gasp of an authoritarianism whose return was made possible only by the pain of the Yeltsin reforms and the high price of oil. Together, these two factors may have artificially prolonged the life of a system that is historically doomed.
If liberal trends were cut short in the early twentieth century because society was not yet ready for freedom, the defeat of Russia’s liberal project in the early twenty-first century has more to do with the Russian elite’s unreadiness to risk losing power through political competition. We should not overstate the political maturity of ordinary Russians or their ability to follow the rule of law; they are still politically inactive and seem incapable of coming together to force the regime to take their interests into account. The people of Russia are, however, increasingly ready to move toward European standards and norms. They already consider themselves to be Europeans. They increasingly long to be rid of a corrupt and burdensome state and to experience the personal well-being that people in the West enjoy. Today, between 62 and 68 percent of Russian respondents say that they prefer liberal democracy to authoritarianism. Even Russia’s second-tier elite is starting to understand that their survival requires transforming the old state into one based on the rule of law.
Contrary to some predictions, the global economic crisis that began in 2008 has yet to hit Russia severely enough to force the elite to move toward a liberalizing exit. In fact, in responding to the crisis, the regime is just as likely to tighten the screws. Should that happen, Russia will once again miss the “hour of the lawyer,” and a new cycle will begin, which may in turn bring the unraveling of the current state. The result would be a Russia with a new geographical configuration and an unclear civilizational dimension. Whatever scenario Russia pursues—stagnation and rot, state collapse, or a liberal breakthrough—an imperially minded Russia trapped in a state of decay is not historically sustainable.
NOTES
1 See Jacques Rupnik, “Is East-Central Europe Backsliding? From Democracy Fatigue to Populist Backlash,” Journal of Democracy 18 (October 2007): 17–25; Bela Greskovits, “Is East-Central Europe Backsliding? Economic Woes and Political Dissatisfaction,” Journal of Democracy 18 (October 2007): 40–46; Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Is East-Central Europe Backsliding? Leninist Legacies, Pluralist Dilemmas,” Journal of Democracy 18 (October 2007): 34–39.
2 Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), 79.
3Axel Hadenius, ed., Democracy’s Victory and Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 408.
4 Giuseppe Di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 210.
5 Francis Fukuyama, “The Primacy of Culture,” Journal of Democracy 6 (January 1995): 12.
This article was originally published in the Journal of Democracy.