Maybe this will be useful for politics students. A goodie from me to YOU!
Vladamir Putin is an interesting character. After serving a constitutionally decreed maximum of two consecutive terms of presidential office, he stepped down as President of Russia after the election of March 2008. His successor, Dmitry Medvedev, previously Putin’s Presidential Chief of Staff had received the prominent backing of Putin and with an air of inevitability had managed secure an electoral stamp of approval of more than 70 per cent of the popular vote. It was reminiscent of a time when Yeltsin resigned and relinquished power to a relative unknown Putin, whom had managed to go on and secure an election landslide in 2000.
When Putin inherited Yeltsin’s legacy, he was faced with a system that had laid the foundations of independent Russian statehood, market economy and democratic institutions but that was guilty of Byzantine court politics and insulation from popular accountability. Thus through his accession into power, Putin was consigned to a framework that on one hand sought to bear the fruits of democratic development but that on the other hand sought to administer a restoration of state authority.
The leadership of Putin has been defined by contradictions in the society he led. Whilst Russia had moved far away from its past, in many respects it remains paradoxically deeply entrenched in it. The dismantling of the communist rule in 1990s left a lasting legacy of communist elites adapting to democratic procedures and democratic procedures constrained by the history of regime politics. It existed within a muddled system that was assured in its revolution against communism but that was dubious towards a ‘revolution of values’. It was signified by Yeltsin’s instrumental approach to democratization. Whilst he had allowed for the establishment of an institutional framework for capitalist democracy in the December 1993 constitution, he was unable to provide ‘a spirit of openness, accountability and probity’ or any cultural preconditions required for the consolidation of the democratic principle. Whilst marketization and privatization swooped in to replace the old Soviet apparatus, open democracy and accountability struggled to replace state control and a desire for perpetual status quo. For all his efforts, Yeltsin could not materialize the democracy he had envisaged in his revolution against communism. When Putin walked into presidential office, a great potential for democratic progress remained. However, what transpired instead was the gradual “roll-back” of democratic reform and a revival of the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian state. It is for this reason that Putin attracted the most criticism.
In the Yeltsin era, privatization and free market economics had facilitated the rise of a new class of tycoons known as ‘the oligarchs’, who were able to exploit the genesis of capitalism in Russia by securing substantial financial empires for themselves. Yeltsin’s administration became a privatized enterprise ridden with oligarch capitalists looking to secure their own corporate interests. By the year 2000, they had reached the peak of their political power but had proved to far too powerful for Putin to allow them to continue in the same capacity. By helping him on the road power, some oligarchs could have been forgiven for expecting to hold some kind of sway over him during his premiership. Yet Putin sought to redefine the roles of the all too powerful oligarchs. He had made it clear that he did not intend to expropriate the oligarchs en masse as to have done so would have meant risking political and economic instability just at the moment when political stabilization and economic recovery were beginning to take hold. Furthermore it would have jeopardized his own attempts to consolidate his power immediately after taking to office. Instead he made certain to specify that ‘the terms of the relationship between big business and the Kremlin were changing’.
In order to assert this he made certain high-profile examples out of some of the most wealthy and influential oligarchs in Russia, most notably media tycoon Vladimir Gusinskii whom had backed Putin’s opponents in the 2000 election, and Boris Berezovskii whom conversely had actively aided Putin’s rise through the Kremlin. When Mikhail Khodorkovsky, owner of Yukos was arrested in 2003 on fraud charges with his oil company facing charges of $28bn on a back tax bill it appeared to be part of the same prosecution process. It had indirectly informed the oligarchs of their new role. Yet Putin was more tactful than to merely scare regional bosses and business leaders into concession of their assets; for he did not desire ownership. Instead he sought to use the vast resources of the Russian state to formulate de facto loyalty and obedience to the state.
In tightened his grip over many key industrial and financial assets such as gas monopoly Gazprom, the oil transport monopoly, Transneft and state savings bank Sberbank, Putin was prompting wide criticism from the democrats. It resulted in the coining of term ‘Russia Inc.’, where Putin’s administration was made up of either ‘Kremlin appointees at the head of management boards of state-owed companies’ (such as Medvedev as chairman of the Gazprom board) or ‘executives at the head of state-owned companies’ (such as Segei Bogdanchikov at the head of Rosnef). Whilst most analysts may have conceded the necessity of Putin’s taming of the oligarchs they may have preferred the separation of political and business interests in a stable system governed by the rule of law rather than the integration of those interests. Instead he paved the way for a new class of politically connected business leaders and business-invested politicians and placed them at the centre of a state-monopoly. It was a system susceptible to crony capitalism and neo-patrimonial tendencies that ‘provided rich scope for corruption’.
‘The most important requirement for our country’s development is the continuation of calm and stable development. What we need quite simply is a decade of stable development—something that our country never had in the twentieth century’.
Based on his comments, Putin’s state intensifying reforms may well have been part of a very Russian desire for stability in the face of a tumultuous 1990s and a severe accumulation of international debt. Indeed, Putin went a long way to securing not just a period of stability but a period of relative prosperity with real incomes doubling and living standards improving dramatically. He was undoubtedly aided by favorable circumstances during the initial years of his leadership particularly from the commodity-price boom. The price of oil remained high and had allowed Russia to reap the rewards of their abundant reserves and rake in massive revenues. However, the overall economic growth Putin achieved in the 8 years of his premiership was arguably one of his greatest achievements. GDP went up about 70 percent, industrial growth up 75 percent and investments increased by 125 percent, placing Russia among the world’s top 10 economies once again. By 2007, GDP had reached the 1990 level showing a recovery from the economic crisis that plagued Russia after the collapse of the USSR throughout the 1990s.
However Putin’s leadership saw a growing gap between the rich and the poor. The majority of Russians were not receiving the statistically increasing average monthly wage of 12,500 rubles. This figure was made up of the super-profits of a ‘very small class of top managers’ as well as the ‘low wages of the bulk of economically active Russians’. Whilst dealing with inflation problems as well as a high dependence on food imports, Putin’s critical point was concerned with the longevity of a single-track ‘petro-economy’. Russia’s payments from the fuel and energy sector in the form of custom duties and taxes reached 3.1 trillion rubles in 2007, making up half of the federal budget’s revenues. By 2006, oil and gas made up 40 percent of Russia’s total GDP. This dependence on the energy in part came from Putin’s efforts to stabilize Russia’s 1990s economy in an economic system that had seen the failure of ‘shock therapy’ and that the lacked the structural conditions to develop from a more diversified platform. In true Putinite form, Russia’s dependence on energy undoubtedly acted as both a problem and a solution, providing the platform to recovery and stability whilst requiring the sustenance of radical reform. Even so it was an initiative more perpetuated than rectified under the Putin administration, and it will be down future leaders to diversify the Russian economy to avoid likely economic problems in the future.
In many respects, Putin is revered in Russia for his engineering of the economic recovery. For the first time since the collapse of the USSR, Russia had been projected to great international power status once again. In overcoming the dark times of the 1990s, the Putin reforms appeared to restore Russia’s national dignity. Yet, once claiming back Russia’s international esteem, Russia’s achievements in the international sphere under Putin were at best a mixed blessing. By and large the isolationist foreign polices of bygone years were supplanted by a recognition for a partnership with the West. Putin now understood the benefits of a relationship for the procurement of investment, management skills and improved technology for the amelioration of Russia’s domestic economy. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia moved to modernize with a Western agenda of capitalist democracy harboring very little anti-American sentiment. However, there were significant developments in Russia’s relationship with America thereafter, notably American repudiation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in December 2001. Thereafter, the relationship became characterized by isolated incidences such as Russia’s supply of anti-aircraft missiles to Iran and Syria, disagreements such as Russia’s alignment with the Franco-German ‘axis of peace’ in the Iraq War, as well as confrontations such as Russia’s ongoing dispute with Georgia. As the post-communist system started to clip back the wings of Yeltsin’s early westernized reforms and take on the more familiar form of state strength, Russia’s ‘rosy’ outlook and expectations towards America turned to ‘doubts, disappointment and suspicion’.
Although Russia backtracked in her relations with America, Putin was still very active and personalized in his foreign policy. He visited numerous countries, represented Russia as a permanent member of the UN and attended various summits such as the G8. Yet Russia’s involvement at the G8 was a temperate one. The G8 tended to operate as a ‘seven-plus-one’, as the ‘gap between what Russia considered was its appropriate place in the world, and what the powers were willing to accept, yawned even larger’. Indeed Putin struggled to improve relations closer to home, as the old Soviet republics became disengaged with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The inter-governmental institution proved weak in its functionality and its unity as its members were wary of Russian domination and sought to diversify their traditional links away from Russia and towards the West and regional partners. Following the conflict in the Caucuses and the withdrawal of Georgia from the CIS, the Presidents of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan skipped the October 2009 meeting in what was clearly an erosion of old ties with Russia. While the Chinese strengthened in the East, and instability ruled in the Islamic south, Putin turned Russia’s international agenda towards the West, most notably towards Europe. Putin claimed that ‘being a true Russian will ultimately mean bringing reconciliation with Europe’s contradictions’, whilst asserting that ‘the full unity of our continent can never be achieved until Russia, as the largest European state, becomes an integral part of the European process’ making ‘multifaceted ties with the EU…Russia’s principled choice’. Yet as long as the nations of Europe raise their eyebrows at both the aspirations of the Russian state and the domestic erosion of the most basic terms of democracy in Russia, the EU will remain a skeptical ally. Putin’s positivist foreign policy, for the most part had been successful in its attempt to bridge the gap and jettison old isolationist tendencies, but so long as international communities were observing the acute contradictions of Putin’s reticent domestic politics, Russia would struggle to integrate.
Russia’s ambiguity in the international sphere accounted for Putin’s most contentious domestic policy, which for many not just in the West was the purging of democracy in Russia. As part of his taming of the oligarchs, expansion of the state and formulation of a ‘managed democracy’, Putin moved in forcefully to secure some of they key media outlets in Russia. Prior to Putin’s taming of the oligarchs, only three networks had the ‘national reach to really count in politics’ – the ORT, Russian Channel and NTV. The Russian Channel, formerly known as RTR was already state owned and had been since 1991, but through the persecution of previous owners Berezovsky and Gusinski, Putin claimed ownership of the partially privatized ORT and seized control of an NTV channel previously critical of Putin and the government. The assault on NTV, the only national independent TV station, appeared to be Putin’s assault on press freedom. As Putin’s state media conglomerate Gazprom-Media claimed majority ownership of NTV, Putin was granted the opportunity to ‘discipline the media while not resorting to outright censorship or authoritarian control’. Yet, Russia had no history of an active media and thus had little structural resistance to Putin’s monopolization of the industry. Whilst independent media outlets on the regional level were eroded, people resorted to the internet as their only means for expression, and Putin’s administration persisted in a system without checks and balances or accountability. ‘The crackdown and increasingly authoritarian rhetoric have created a strong urge amongst liberals to express their frustration and fury’, But these outlets make essentially ‘no difference in policy formulation as the Kremlin dominates the political scene, and official media control the airwaves’.
Putin was to face further charges of repression of democracy and civil liberties with his rapid federal reforms. In the face of the Second Chechen War, Putin feared a backlash from the ethno federal regions and was able to implement reform that reasserted central authority. His restructuring of the Federation Council resulted in the appointment of regional delegates rather than the election of popular representatives in what became part of Putin’s ‘dictatorship of law’ whereby constitutional and juridical authority stifled the claims of sub-national sovereignty.
‘The presumption was that Russians, raised in the communist Soviet Union would be willing to give up civil rights in exchange for economic growth and stability in their daily lives’. Indeed Putin’s reforms have arguably fuelled the failing federal system in Russia. By underpinning a federal separation of power much more vertically aligned than horizontally, Putin was allowing an unequal top-down flow of power in which ‘the regions could not act as a check on central authority’.
Putin’s leadership became somewhat defined by way in which he dealt with the faltering system he had inherited from Yeltsin. Rather than persevere with the radical change of Yeltsin’s Russia, Putin sought to use the familiarity and stability of the past to steady the ship of a troubled transition. The fervor of popularity gained from his uncompromising “iron fist” approach to leadership as seen in Chechnya allowed him the opportunity to exercise strong policy initiatives. It was his leadership and direction of the Russian economy and the succession of prosperity that awarded Putin’s enormous praise amongst his compatriot Russians. Of course as he neared the end of his second presidential term, he received an 81 per cent approval rating, the highest in the world of any leader and arguably the greatest achievement of a politician – popularity.
Putin’s dealing with the Second Chechen War was however symbolic of a Putinite solution. As the region of Chechnya disintegrated and sunk into the ‘complete lawlessness’ of disastrous human rights abuses and eternal conflict, Putin was forced to intervene. He declared the war over in 2002 and installed peacekeeping operations to maintain order. The subsequent installation of a corrupt dictatorship although considered a necessary evil of the peace process in Chechnya was indicative of typical a Putinite solution, which seemed to replace a problem with a problem.
This was the case with the taming of the oligarchs. Putin replaced the all-too-powerful class of oligarchs with a less challenging but equally corruptible class of patrimonial bureaucrats and business politicians. Equally with his economic reforms, Putin reshaped the inherited dysfunctional economy of the 90s, into a ‘petroeconomy’ that reaped the rewards of quick revenues but overlooked the long-term drawbacks of a single-track economy. It was Putin’s privatization and strengthening of state authority, which brought with it the most problems through the curbing of federal powers and the purging of the free press. It incited scrutiny into Putin’s failures to uphold the most basic of democratic principles and cost Russia its membership as a fully-fledged member of the international community.
However the “failings” of his leadership were to be defined by the society that he led. The lack of trust and skepticism towards typically democratic institutions and the refuge taken instead in the stability of a strong central authority could in fact have been Putin’s greatest service. The determinant of an “achievement” or “failure” in Putin’s leadership is thus subject to whether the “roll back” of democracy or restoration of the state are considered achievements or failures. Thankyou and goodnight.
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