Twenty years to the day since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Kremlin and launched the program of modernization known as perestroika, Russia has not stopped changing.
But have the shifts in property ownership really brought democracy? Is the new economic elite any less intertwined with those who hold power in the Kremlin than party managers were in the Brezhnev period? Do ordinary Russians feel more in charge of their lives under the new capitalist system than they were under Soviet communism? In recent months, most Western discourse on Russia has focused on the alleged revival of dictatorial tendencies at the top. Two versions clash. Vladimir Putin’s defenders define the issue as order versus chaos. They characterize Boris Yeltsin’s rule as a time of zigzags and loose government in which the rulers of Russia’s regions developed so much power that the country was in danger of falling apart. Hence the need for Putin to take control in the center, and to finish the war in Chechnya with victory rather than through talks. Where Yeltsin negotiated with the republic’s last moderate leader, Aslan Maskhadov, Putin hounded him and this week obtained his death.
Western critics see the issue as democracy versus authoritarianism. But they also contrast Yeltsin and Putin, claiming the freedoms brought in by Russia’s first president are being reversed by his successor. They cite the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsk (the major shareholder in the country’s biggest oil firm), the state takeover of the last independent TV networks and a new law allowing the Kremlin to nominate the candidates from whom regional governors are elected. Combined with Putin’s appointment of army and security service officers to top political and managerial posts, these moves certainly amount to a tightening of what Russians call the “power vertical”. Yet they pale against the similarities between Yeltsin and Putin; there is far more continuity than many of Putin’s critics care to admit.
The intermingling of business and politics, the green light the Kremlin gives to crony privatization schemes, the selective blind eye turned to tax fiddles and corruption and the use of pressure on judges go back to the Yeltsin era. Russia’s switch to democratic freedoms preceded Yeltsin. It was Gorbachev who introduced contested elections, permitted independent political parties, created a parliament, abolished censorship, ended the Communist Party’s “leading role” and gave Russians the right to travel freely outside the country. The retreat began two years after he and perestroika were driven from the stage.
In their eagerness to prevent a return to communism in the mid- 1990s, Western leaders and the advisers they sent to Moscow confused the introduction of capitalist institutions with democracy. As long as Yeltsin took steps toward “reform”, by which they meant the fastest feasible switch to market economics, and the privatization of as many state assets as possible, anything was tolerated on the political front. When Russian MPs hesitated to authorize further change after the lifting of price controls launched hyperinflation, destroying people’s savings and impoverishing the middle class, Yeltsin closed Parliament and rewrote the constitution so as to strengthen the powers of the president.
When it looked as though a disappointed electorate might choose a communist for president in 1996, albeit one who accepted multiparty pluralism and advocated only a mild review of the privatization scandals, the West backed Yeltsin and the oligarchs to use their control of TV to shut out or distort opposition views. Many Russian “liberals” who complain of Putin supported Yeltsin’s illiberal campaign for re-election then.
The key issue for contemporary Russia is whether some sense of civic responsibility can be revived. The social paternalism of the Soviet system in the years after Stalin’s terror ended has given way to a policy of dismantling almost every form of welfare. Free education and health are being replaced by fee-paying and privatization. The government is abolishing the subsidies that kept housing costs low. Hundreds of thousands of Russian pensioners have taken to the streets in recent months to protest at having free transport and other benefits switched to cash payments, which they rightly fear will either be delayed or not keep up with inflation. This comes at a time when income inequalities have already widened enormously.
By now it may be too late to break from the Yeltsin-era equation that the less democracy there is, the easier it is to ram through right-wing economic changes. Putin is making it harder for independents to get elected to the Duma and raising the threshold for smaller parties. Although the anti-communism of the 1990s has slackened slightly, as polls show increasing numbers of Russians are disillusioned with the “reform” process, it looks unlikely that a social democratic option can emerge any time soon. The left is still pilloried as communism in softer guise. Unlike in central Europe or the Baltic states, left vs. right politics has failed to develop in a mature way in post-communist Russia, or indeed in Georgia, Ukraine, and the other former Soviet republics.
Vague calls for “cleaning up corruption”, strong as opposed to weak government and foreign policy stances for or against “Europe” and “the West” become the dominant themes. But beneath the slogans the main issue between challengers and incumbents is who can capture the state, and thereby enrich themselves.
