While addressing the problem of reuniting and regaining control over the country, Vladimir Putin simplified the political system dramatically. Yet once this problem was solved, it became clear that the system was not capable of addressing the issue of Russia’s strategic development.

Iskander Khisamov

Gorbachev’s unsuccessful attempt to convert military factories to civilian production gave birth to a telling joke: Workers at a firearms factory tried with all their might to produce a cooking pot, but they ended up with a Kalashnikov. Ten years later, Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former Russian Prime Minister and leader of the Our Home is Russia Party, which lost the 1999 elections, noted, “Whatever party we try to build, we always end up with the CPSU.” After the Dec. 7, 2003, State Duma elections, and without waiting for the presidential elections scheduled for March 24, we can clearly say that whatever government we try to set up in Russia, we always seem to end up with the same old autocracy.

Ratings Mean More Than Elections

The big winner in December’s elections was United Russia, the party of the national bureaucracy, completely controlled by the Kremlin and led by two security ministers and two regional leaders. Its election campaign took full advantage of its administrative resources at every level of Russian executive power, and the results turned out even better than expected. Together with satellites from smaller pro-presidential parties, “The Bear” (United Russia’s unofficial nickname) now controls two thirds of the State Duma, a constitutional majority, and everything in the parliament, down to each committee and commission. Boris Gryzlov left his post as Interior Minister to become the speaker of the Duma.
It is highly unlikely that the numerous communists, Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s liberal democratic faction or Sergei Glazyev’s national-patriotic union Rodina will be able to realistically influence Duma resolutions at this point. The Union of Right Forces and Grigory Yavlinsky’s leftist, liberal Yabloko did not even make the five percent cut-off and will not be represented in parliament.
Obviously, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected as president by at least an 80 percent majority. Gennady Zyuganov, who fought both Yeltsin and Putin as an equal in previous elections, has not announced his candidacy, nor have other veterans of presidential campaigns, such as the liberal Yavlinsky or the populist Zhirinovsky. Among the dozen politicians who have announced their candidacies, only Glazyev, leader of Rodina, has a chance to win more than three or four percent of the vote.
So here are Putin’s accomplishments during his first term as president. He actually became the head of the government long before his victory in March 2000. In August 1999, faltering President Yeltsin introduced Putin to the country as the new prime minister and his official successor. Many believe this was the nadir in the decline of Russian statehood. The country had yet to recover from the financial catastrophe of 1998, and President Yeltsin had almost been impeached by the communists. In Moscow and other cities, terrorists were blowing up apartment buildings, killing hundreds of innocent civilians. Armed bands from Chechnya, already independent for three years at that time, invaded Russian territory, entering Dagestan and starting a war with the stated goal of creating a unified Islamic caliphate from the Black to the Caspian Seas.
Provincial leaders insisted that local laws had precedent over federal ones and ignored the decisions of the central government en masse. The governors and republic presidents in the Federation Council, the upper house of Russian parliament, firmly refused to cooperate with Yeltsin and twice rejected his proposal to dismiss General Prosecutor Yuri Skuratov, who in turn professed his insubordination to the president. 
The State Duma elections in 1999 threatened to tear the situation apart for one and for all. The central television channels, belonging to various groups of oligarchs, waged an unprecedented and unbridled propaganda war with each other and the government by means of widespread slander and compromising information leaked from the secret services. All this seemed to be leading to the collapse of the country and mass riots. 
In 4 1/2 years, Putin and his team have managed to solve all these problems. In a referendum last spring, the overwhelming majority (87 percent) of the population of Chechnya voted to rejoin Russia. Immediately after Putin was elected president in March 2000, he created nine federal districts and appointed his authorized representatives, mostly former security agency officials, to head them. With their help, Putin managed to bring the governors and republic presidents under control and force them to recognize the supremacy of federal laws. The country became a unified economic and legal space. Reforms to the Federation Council meant that the representatives of regional leaders, and not the leaders themselves, sat on the council, and the upper house lost much of its status and independence. It now merely rubberstamps the decisions of the lower house, the State Duma.
Russia’s biggest media magnates, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, were chased out of the country and deprived of their assets. Their television channels came under government control. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the oil company Yukos and the richest man in Russia, has been in a Moscow detention facility for the past several months awaiting his trial for financial fraud and tax evasion. He personally financed the liberal opposition party Yabloko, was one of a small group of sponsors of the Union of Right Forces and announced his financial support of the Communist Party not long before the start of Duma election campaigning. In addition, there were more than 100 open and secret Yukos lobbyists in the last State Duma, according to various estimates. Russian experts have no doubts that the General Prosecutor and the Basmanny Court, which made the decision to place Khodorkovsky under arrest, were acting under orders from the Kremlin and thereby helping to form a legislature advantageous to the executive authorities. Now the Russian president has no rivals or serious opponents left in Russia. His team’s only problem is how to get a decent turnout for scandal-free presidential elections in March. 
Thus, the main accomplishment of Vladimir Putin’s first 4 1/4 years in power was the creation of a united and governable state. The dynamic economic growth of these years resulted not only from favorable international market conditions, but also from internal political stability. Democracy and the division of powers between different branches and levels of government had to be sacrificed to achieve it. Some analysts believe that this sacrifice is temporary, while others think it is final and that Russia has simply returned to its preordained autocracy and powerful and indivisible centralized authority. The most radical social scientists are predicting the death of democracy around the world. They say that current brain washing techniques are transforming democratic processes, turning national elections into an illusion and democratic institutions into fronts behind which the real powers-that-be actually get things done. Meanwhile, Putin’s approval rating in December, according to polls by Yuri Levada’s sociological service, reached 84 percent immediately after the State Duma elections.
Let’s not forget about one peculiar aspect of the Russian national character. While in other countries, political parties emerged to protect the interests of a particular class or social group, in modern-day Russia these social classes have yet to evolve, and there are more than a 100 parties. Yet all the more-or-less notable organizations, with the exception of the heirs to the CPSU, the Russian Communist Party, were all Kremlin projects: the LDPR, Yabloko, SPS and Rodina. They were all founded with the active, and sometimes deciding, participation of politicos from the Yeltsin or Putin administrations. In 1993, the Kremlin forced the LDPR and Yabloko into parliament, SPS in 1999, and now Rodina. By carefully following public opinion and the public’s expectations, the Kremlin concluded that voters would support the nationalist social rhetoric of Rodina, and that SPS or Yabloko’s interpretation of humanist liberal ideas was not of interest at this stage. The Kremlin was right.
After the Duma elections, the leaders on the “right,” like Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar, and Boris Nemtsov, encountered a wave of justified criticism. They were accused of missing their chance to make SPS the party of Russian entrepreneurs, of being cut off from reality and overly bureaucratic. SPS leaders believed that the liberal slogans they once had the monopoly on would at least get them into parliament. They thought that people who valued civil liberties and private property would have no choice but to vote for them. This is exactly what happened, except there turned out to be fewer of these people than they thought. Chubais and Gaidar assumed that thanks to the numerical expansion of the bourgeoisie, their electoral ranks would also swell. It turned out, however, that this expanding Russian bourgeoisie voted for Zhirinovsky, Glazyev and Gryzlov. The explanation is simple. All three, with varying degrees of persuasiveness, promised business, law and order to the public. They all intend to build a strong government capable providing security. They demand modesty and obedience from business. Businessmen should know their subservient place in society and not try to dictate to, control or, god forbid, restructure the government. Rightist politicians continue to passionately spout old truths regarding civil society, its control over the government, the division of powers, and so forth. However, these same people had a defining influence on the president’s and the government’s actions over the 12 years of new Russian history, and they did not succeed in creating real democratic mechanisms. As a result, today the public and the business community prefer security to freedom.

The Government of the Sun

“I came from endless freedom and arrived at endless slavery,” as one of Dostoevsky’s characters put it. This quote is currently being tossed around by the Russian media. Yeltsin also made his historical contribution to the endless debate on the limits of freedom in 1991: “Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.” This recommendation was addressed to Tatarstan, which at that moment demanded the authority to establish its own international relations while remaining part of Russia. We can now state that they couldn’t swallow it. If those living in the Russian Far East, with extensive natural resources and sea routes to the wealthy Pacific Asian region, are shivering because they can’t pay for heat and electricity, this means they can’t swallow their municipal and regional sovereignty. If courts are approving en masse the clearly criminal demands to declare solvent companies bankrupt, this means the same thing. If the Duma unanimously passes a law and then unanimously strikes it down, it means that it, too, cannot swallow its sovereignty. 
In other words, Russia’s so-called political and economic subjects remain non-entities and have not been able to master and properly take charge of the independence granted them. They have not been able to become equal partners of the executive branch. As a result they have turned into the routine objects of governance. The result is a new form of autocracy. First there was the tsar, then the general secretary, and now the president. The ideological basis for this new autocracy has been in the works for a long time. It is based on the fact that Russia is cold and huge, which means that the cost of manufacturing, transportation and simply living is significantly higher than in other countries. Thus, Russian-made products cannot compete on the tough world market. Yet the country also has oil and natural gas, and low energy prices can compensate for the lack of sun and the excessive distances, allowing national business to breathe freely and prosper.
But there are two problems with this ideology. First, the world community will not agree to the government use of protectionist measures to help its national business. It will not let Russia into the WTO and will declare war on Russian goods. The second consequence, however, is far worse. National business under such conditions will only breathe as freely as those in the government determining prices will let it. The government will become the equivalent of the sun. Then there will be no discussion of democracy. If the government determines whether business prospers or not, what is there to discuss? The government must be reinforced and rivals such as media magnates, oilmen and liberals eliminated. 
This is a miserable idea. However, the Russian intellectual elite has yet to come up with other ideas that would imply a nobler approach to development. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is getting tougher as aggression and instability increase. New and very serious foreign risks and threats are emerging. In order to respond to them properly, we must in part strengthen our defense and replace expensive weaponry. In order to do this, we need to modernize the entire economy without delay. We need to double the GDP, which Putin named Russia’s main task in his address to parliament last year. We need to concentrate our resources.
Yet in order to concentrate our resources, we have to first concentrate political power. In order to collect taxes from the federation subjects, they must be turned into to governable objects. Thus, the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district, home of the largest natural gas fields on Earth, is a subsidized region, begging for money from the federal budget to support schools and hospitals.
When you take something from someone, however — from regions, from corporations or from private individuals — the goal of doubling the GDP suddenly moves even further away. Organizations and regions lose their economic incentive, and this blank can no longer be filled in by executive authorities using the extra-economic intimidation of the 1930s. What worked during the industrial era will no longer work in the information age.
To reunify and regain basic control over the country, Vladimir Putin dramatically simplified the political system. Yet the moment this was accomplished, it turned out that the simplified system was not capable of solving the next problem, that of strategic development. The centralized government, in which all decisions are made in one place, is becoming unwieldy, inefficient and inhumane.
This process has not gone too far. Perhaps we are looking at a natural lull after revolutionary upheaval. It’s important to recall Putin’s multiple public reassurances that he will not attempt to change the constitutional limit of two presidential terms, and that Russia will have a new president in 2008. The coming transfer of power will become the dominant topic for speculation and discussion among the Russian elite immediately after the presidential elections in March. And the question of whether the political course will shift slightly or change completely will be unavoidable.

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