Russia – Stirred but not Shaken
February 6, 2012
As the March presidential elections approach, Russia is stirred but not shaken. December demonstrations were the biggest in two decades, but still they gathered only tens of thousands of demonstrators in the capital city, even less elsewhere. There is no atmosphere of fear, but neither are there proper organizations or policy demands. Arab spring has again shown that social media can call many people to the streets, but it takes a split of elites to transform demonstrations into a political movement. The call for honest elections is a fundamental one, but there is not much else to unify the tens of aspiring leaders of the crowd. As a rule they are men in ripe age, scarred by two decades of mutual battles and proven inability to cooperate. The demonstrations will in all probability not evolve into a political movement offering an alternative to the Putin regime.
Therefore Russia is not really shaken. And if it were, we had better beware. At the time of the post-Soviet color revolutions Yegor Gaidar said that he did not wish one in Russia. The color, he feared, would be black and brown like in a cockroach: those of nationalism and reaction. Just before the demonstrations another friend of mine, also somebody with rich experience of high-level positions during the past twenty years, argued that Putin with his attempted power vertical is the only barrier between today’s Russia and a criminal state. This speaker is a ranking member of one of the unregistered opposition movements. His children have vowed not to return to Russia as long as the Putin regime remains.
Vladimir Putin is scarred as well. Twelve years ago he had an evident program though that was not easy to detect in the beginning. Russia had been dependent on outside finance, a nation to which conditions were dictated. Poor Yeltsin, Bill Clinton once noted, we keep tabling demands that he has little possibility of fulfilling. That had to go and it did, not least because soaring oil prices helped Russia to pay back debt, accumulate reserves and start financing the rest of the world. For a few years Russians were high on oil. Still money was cheaper abroad, and the 1998 crisis was repeated ten years later.
Russia also longed for stability, and for years the Putin regime helped deliver it. Inflation and unemployment went down, consumption, foreign travel and life satisfaction up. Putin was repeatedly voted the sexiest Russian man, not so much because of the muscles but because his regime facilitated sexy things. There was also a kind of political stability, maintained by thugs when deemed necessary. Putin wished Russia and the world to function like a hierarchic bureaucracy. He had after all worked in one for sixteen years, and uses many pages of his dissertation to copy American organization science on how such a hierarchy should handle uncertainty.
But that is not the way the world or Russia actually functions. Not surprisingly Putin has grown frustrated and cynical. That is not a good starting point for a leader who should reinvent himself.
That Putin should do: politically, as there will be a real opposition; policy-wise, as Russia can no longer rely on those drivers of growth that just years ago made it one of the fastest growing major economies in the world.
Needed mental readjustment started in about 2006 when it was understood that Russia cannot rely on energy alone. It needs diversification and modernization. The readjustment continued a year ago when Putin tasked the leading economists to write a policy program for the post-elections. They did write, over 500 pages of program, with more than a thousand specialists contributing. In a little-noted speech just before Christmas Putin seemed to sign the basic message of the program. Russia’s future growth must be based on investment, and a major overhaul of investment climate is needed.
An authoritarian regime faces its biggest challenges when attempting partial democratization. That happened with Gorbachev’s perestroika. Putin is no Brezhnev but he risks becoming a Gorbachev – without Yeltsin as the alternative. The world and Europe in particular must pay great attention. The alternatives are several, and the most positive ones the least probable.
Pekka Sutela
Nonresident Senior Associate Carnegie Endowment, Washington D.C. & Visiting Professor at the School of International Affairs, Paris
