The Russian State Is Overwhelmed
Clearly, the abrupt shift to capitalism outpaced the establishment of rule of law and institutions that could regulate against its excesses. The Russian state couldn’t contain the economic effects that it had unleashed. Before long, it could no longer provide security to the population either. Organized crime became a daily fixture of life in Moscow, providing protection to small shopkeepers and oligarchs alike. And with that came a spike in violence that made the capital city feel unsafe for both citizens and visitors.
In May 1994, I got out of the car at my favorite Moscow restaurant, the Café Pushkina located on Tverskaya Street, just a few blocks from the Kremlin. All of a sudden there was a big commotion behind us. The driver said, “Oh, there is a man with a machine gun.” I looked back to see two burly bodyguards, bracketing an equally burly “businessman.” They were toting Czech Samovals. My escort pushed me into the restaurant, where my host suggested that we sit “away from the window.” Apparently this was a common occurrence in the summer of 1994. I remember thinking that my friend Andrei seemed relatively calm.
The police could no longer control the streets, caught between the Russian mafia and rampant corruption within their own ranks. Homicides tripled from 1988 to 1994. Brazil had about the same number of people as Russia at that time, and in 1988 it had nine thousand more homicides than Russia; yet by 1994, Russia had fifteen thousand more homicides than Brazil.14 The absolute numbers are not very high, but the spectacular nature of the crimes in Russia gave a great sense of insecurity to a population unaccustomed to random violence.
Bombings and assassinations of businessmen, journalists, and bankers added to the chaotic atmosphere. Just weeks after I stayed at the Radisson Hotel in central Moscow, the lobby nearly became a shooting gallery as special forces troops stormed in without warning to raid a suspected meeting of mafia chiefs.
The erosion of state capacity and authority didn’t stop with the inability to control criminal elements. Regional and local officials took full advantage of Moscow’s weakness. Anxious to reap the benefits of privatization, some of them tailored their political programs for maximum personal gain. Federalism can be a means to greater efficiency. Political and economic decentralization can be healthy. The United States is not the only country with strong regional powers: Germany, Brazil, and India all lodge considerable authority in their states.
But in Russia federalism had simply become an excuse for local leaders to do whatever they wished. This was true not only of governors but of mayors as well. The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, improved the city in many ways, including raising money to restore beautiful old treasures like the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. But his wife owned the real estate around many of the restoration projects and benefited greatly. These personal deals were the rule, not the exception.
Boris Yeltsin, who had once exhorted the regions to “grab as much authority as they could,” would soon see the disasters that were unfolding as taxes went unpaid, decrees were ignored, and the regions prospered as the national government faltered. Beginning in 1994, he signed a series of “treaties” with different regions to try to bring order to governance. But the Russian state had been seriously wounded. The centrifugal forces that had collapsed the empire and freed Ukraine, Belarus, and the other republics of the Soviet Union seemed to be rolling back toward Moscow itself.
The country was in chaos and the Russian people could see and feel it all around them. Pensioners who were forced now to live with their children were humiliated. Soldiers sleeping in Gorky Park, having returned from Eastern Europe with nowhere to go, were humiliated. Industrial workers with no job to do were humiliated.
The Soviet Union was gone and Russia was failing. Even the symbols of the nation seemed to be trapped in purgatory. Standing on the White House lawn at the arrival ceremony for Boris Yeltsin in 1994, I listened to an unfamiliar song. I turned to a Russian diplomat and asked him if it was the new national anthem. “No,” he replied, “it’s just some song by Glinka.” At the Olympics in 1992, the athletes of the former Soviet Union marched under the Olympic flag and stood on the podium to hear the Olympic hymn. One of the skaters said poignantly that he had trained all of his life for the moment of the gold medal ceremony. “And now I stand on the podium to hear a song I have never heard under a flag that I do not recognize,” he said. In 2000, at the urging of Vladimir Putin, the Russian parliament would vote for a new national anthem: the tune from the anthem of the Soviet Union—with new words. Confusion and fear had engulfed the Russian people. They were exhausted and ready for order.
Still, with all the chaos surrounding and devouring Russia, things might have turned out differently. Democratic transitions do not succeed suddenly, and, conversely, they do not fail in one moment either. There are, in retrospect, important inflection points that might have taken a different turn.
The Third Opening: The Elections of 1993
Despite the troubles, the political system was developing in favorable ways. New political parties and coalitions dotted the landscape in 1992–93, hundreds of independent newspapers sprang up across the country, and small numbers of civil society groups began to flourish. The worsening economic situation formed the backdrop for disaffection with the government’s policies. Demonstrations were commonplace and for the most part tolerated by the government. Some of democracy’s scaffolding was emerging.
But at the top of the political system, constant conflict between the parliament and the president seemed to throw the new Russian state into crisis on what seemed like a daily basis. Boris Yeltsin was a mercurial figure, often bristling at challenges to his power and ideas. There were repeated fights over economic policy. At one point, in December 1992, the Congress of People’s Deputies stripped Yeltsin of the extraordinary powers that they had only recently granted him and forced him to fire his prime minister.
The parliament challenged the president on political matters too, including the growing power of the republics and the nature of constitutional reform. When Yeltsin outlawed a coalition of reactionary political parties, the National Salvation Front, the Supreme Court ruled his action unconstitutional.
Yeltsin was increasingly frustrated with what he saw as interference with his efforts to overthrow old economic and political structures. In a speech to the Civic Alliance in February 1993, he said that he could no longer “tolerate the parliament’s parallel government.”
In a temporary truce, the president and the parliament were able to agree on a political referendum that for the moment forestalled a complete breakdown of civil order. In that vote, Yeltsin won the backing of 59 percent of the population, but 49 percent wanted new elections for parliament and the presidency.
Many Russians came to think that constitutional reform was the only answer to the clear dysfunction of the new institutions. Not surprisingly, the presidential administration and the parliamentary committee produced radically different versions of a proposed new constitution. Yeltsin wanted a strong presidency. The opposition, including his own vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, accused him of wanting a dictatorship. Yeltsin suspended Rutskoi, who took his case to the Constitutional Court.
One could imagine this tug-of-war between the president and the parliament and their invocation of the courts as a hopeful sign for democracy. It was not. While Russian citizens suffered economic ruin and the streets of Moscow grew more dangerous by the day, the politicians in Moscow, struggling over constitutional questions, seemed out of touch with the concerns of the people. Governance ground to a halt.
Yeltsin suspended the parliament. The Constitutional Court declared his decree unconstitutional. The Congress of People’s Deputies voted to impeach him. And in short order, violent demonstrations rocked Moscow. After a day of rioting, Yeltsin moved to crush the rebellion with military force. Army units stormed the parliament, and Rutskoi, who had tried to surrender, was arrested for plotting a coup. The Constitutional Court was suspended. One hundred and fo
rty people were killed in the confrontation.
It was against this backdrop of violence and confrontation that Russian voters went to the polls to elect a new parliament and vote on the constitutional referendum in December 1993. The final results were not released for two months. When they were, liberal parties had won only 34.2 percent of the vote. The parties that were a loose confederation of oppositionists to Yeltsin won 43.3 percent.
In fact, liberal parties had been unable to organize effective campaigns, instead criticizing and undermining each other. An eleventh-hour effort to present a unified bloc fell apart when the leaders of the main parties refused to cooperate. After their crushing defeat in 1993, these same leaders became dispirited and even less capable. Several parties became closely identified with single personalities, like Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko (which means “apple”), rather than with political platforms. The parties had no reach into the population and no real program for governing. Outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, these liberal forces ceased to matter at all.
The rough birth of Russia’s first constitution in 1993 and the lingering animosity toward the president by parliamentarians doomed the chances for the legislative and executive branches to govern effectively. In fact, Yeltsin ruled more and more by decree, particularly on economic matters, ignoring the parliament whenever possible. For all that he had done to free the Russian people, he did little to transfer his personal standing and authority into the institution of the presidency. His rule became self-centered and erratic.
The first president of a country sets the tone for how future presidents will behave. Just imagine if George Washington had given in to the desire of many to make him king. Instead he understood that the presidency had to be something more than the person who inhabits it at any one time. Nelson Mandela refused to serve a second term to show others that the office is not meant to be a personal fiefdom. Yeltsin did not see this, acting arbitrarily with increasing frequency. This prevented the young institutions of the new Russian government from gaining strength and legitimacy as they were simply cast aside.
By the election of 1996, Yeltsin’s message had become undeniably populist—a direct appeal to the street, not to democratic institutions. He criticized his own prime minister for “forgetting about people living on wages and pensions.” Facing a runoff after receiving only 36 percent of the vote, Yeltsin ordered a sweeping shake-up of his government. It was as if he divorced himself from responsibility for all that was happening to his country.
The democratic opening was overshadowed too by Chechnya and the rise of terrorism in Russian cities. By 1994, the restive Muslim-majority republic in the country’s unstable south had slipped into civil war. Following the collapse of peace negotiations in the fall, Yeltsin ordered the invasion of Chechnya by forty thousand federal ground forces. For twenty months the war raged, with more than five thousand Russian troops and tens of thousands of Chechens dead. The war was unpopular but tolerated. When in 1995 the militant Chechen leader Shamil Basayev took a thousand people hostage in Russia proper, the government agreed to restart peace talks. Still, from that time on, Russia could add to its list of woes terrorism at home, stemming from the suppression of the majority Muslim populations of the south. In time, Basayev would fall into bad company, training with al-Qaeda, radicalizing further, and producing calls from the Russian population for tougher measures against those hated minorities suspected of endangering the homeland.
And finally there was the matter of Boris Yeltsin’s health. The president was repeatedly hospitalized, disappearing from the public eye with frightening frequency. As Russia slipped deeper and deeper into trouble, particularly during the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, Boris Yeltsin failed to inspire confidence in his people or among leaders abroad.
In 1999, an exhausted Yeltsin named a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, to become his fourth prime minister in a year and a half. Then, on December 31, 1999, Yeltsin resigned, leaving Putin as Russia’s president in an acting capacity. Putin was elected three months later in March 2000. Many believe that he was chosen because he alone—the former KGB colonel—was prepared to protect Yeltsin’s family and its ill-gotten gains. This single act would have a dramatic effect on Russia’s future. One only needs to remember that one of the other candidates to succeed Yeltsin was the late liberal hero Boris Nemtsov.
The Democratic Opening Closes
Knowing now that Vladimir Putin would become an autocrat at home and an aggressor abroad, it is hard to go back and look dispassionately at the circumstances in which he came to power. By the end of the decade of the 1990s, the Russian state needed to be rebuilt, confidence had to be restored in its leadership, and the chaos had to be ended.
The Russian people were frightened. Throughout the country’s history, times of trouble had been associated with a weak state, weak leaders, and enemies that picked at the bones of its vulnerable territory. The strong state and a strong man were associated with order and safety. That would become the rallying cry of Vladimir Putin, chosen by a frail and spent Boris Yeltsin to succeed him as president.
By the time Putin took power, Yeltsin’s efforts to contain unrest in Chechnya were failing. Russian cities increasingly experienced terrorist attacks from the troubled region. The origin of some of these incidents was suspicious—leading many to believe that Russian security services might have been involved. Whether it was on the basis of a pretext or indeed in response to actual terrorism, Putin’s forceful actions in Chechnya were welcomed by frightened Russians and enhanced his reputation as a tough guy who would defend the country.
Putin was systematic in centralizing power after his ascendance to the presidency. On the surface, some of his reforms seem aimed simply at reversing the corrosion of state power. In 2001, the laws were amended to establish a mechanism for “federal intervention” if regional lawmakers persistently violated the Russian constitution or federal laws.15
Putin changed the way that members of the Federation Council were chosen, replacing governors with “senators” selected by the central government to represent the governors. Putin established the State Council as a forum for the governors, but it was now purely advisory. And in 2004, new legislation created seven federal jurisdictional districts and placed those under super governors, all appointed by the Kremlin.
These moves taken together might have been seen as a way to rein in out-of-control regional leaders and put Moscow back in the game. But five of the seven new regional governors had, like Putin, made their careers in the KGB or armed services. This began the ascendancy of the siloviki (“powerful”)—men who had largely come from the same institutions: the security services.
Meanwhile, the raging war in Chechnya, which had resumed in 1999, continued to produce violence in Russian cities. The calls for a crackdown reached a crescendo in September 2004 after an attack on a kindergarten at Beslan. More than 150 children were slaughtered and the population demanded an answer. Putin drew upon the anger and the not too thinly disguised racism against those from the Caucasus in order to solidify the Kremlin’s assault on the independence of the regions.
As Moscow’s grip tightened, tax reforms after 2005 sealed the fate of healthy federalism, making the regions dependent on a revenue-sharing formula devised annually in the capital. Putin would then take a final step in recentralizing power over the regions, abolishing the election of governors and appointing them in Moscow. But this decision appeared to be a bridge too far and was so unpopular that then-president Dmitry Medvedev reversed course in 2012 and reinstated direct elections of governors. That lasted one year. In 2013, Putin returned to the presidency and reversed Medvedev, cynically citing concerns for the well-being of minorities in the regions.
The genius of these steps was that they were rooted in a certain reality: The regions had taken advantage of Moscow’s weakness, and the imbalance between the center and the periphery had to be addressed. The Kremlin, though, blasted through an equilibrium that might have creat
ed sustainable federalism and concentrated power again in the center—indeed, in the hands of the president himself.
All other nascent institutions of Russian democracy were crushed in their cribs one by one. The parliament was transformed from a raucous and admittedly ineffective legislature to the president’s rubber stamp. The 2003 election reforms banned parties from forming election blocs to receive seats in the State Duma (the lower house), reduced the minimum number of parties to be represented in that chamber from four to two, and increased the financial requirements for the formation of parties. Independent liberal parties that had enjoyed some popularity in the 1990s found themselves under attack after 2000 and by the middle of the decade unable even to register.
By the time Putin became president in 2000, the “right forces,” meaning liberals, were already disorganized, fighting among themselves and ill-suited to challenge the emerging authoritarianism at the center. Political parties continued to exist, but in time, only those that were loyal to the president gained access to the government-controlled media, particularly television.
And Putin made certain that the media would help to doom political opposition. During the 1990s there were hundreds of independent newspapers, ranging from responsible ones, like Vremya (the Times), to simple scandal sheets. The press was most assuredly free with criticism of the government, reporting on official corruption and open debate about Russia’s political future. The print media was largely untouched well into the first decade of Putin’s presidency. That is because he concentrated first on the electronic media, perhaps realizing its greater reach and impact.
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