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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin for a fourth presidential term in 2018 has seen Russian democracy weaken further and Russia's relations with the West deteriorate seriously. Yet, within Russia, Putin's position remains unchallenged and his foreign policy battles have received widespread public support. But is Putin as safe as his approval ratings lead us to believe? And how secure is the regime that he heads? In this new book, Neil Robinson places contemporary Russian politics in historical perspective to argue that Putin's regime has not overcome the problems that underpinned the momentous changes in twentieth-century Russian history when the country veered from tsarism to Soviet rule to post-communist chaos. The first part of the book, outlining why crises have been perennial problems for Russia, is followed by an exploration of contemporary Russian political institutions and policy to show how Putin has stabilised Russian politics. But, while Putin's achievements as a politician have been considerable in strengthening his personal position, they have not dealt successfully with the enduring problem of the Russian state's functionality. Like other Russian rulers, Putin has been much better at establishing a political system that supports his rule than he has at building up a state that can deliver material wealth and protection to the Russian people. As a result, Robinson argues, Russia has been and remains vulnerable to political crisis and regime change.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Table of Contents
Tables and Figures
Tables
Figures
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Illustration Acknowledgements
Maps
1: Change and Continuity in Russian Politics
Introduction
Political development: the problem of building states and regimes
Political development: state, regime and Russia’s place in the world under the tsars and the Soviets
Political development: state and regime and Russia’s place in the world after the USSR
Conclusion
2: The Soviet System
Introduction
The intellectual origins of the Soviet system
The CPSU in the Soviet political system
The centrally planned economy
The dysfunctions of the Soviet system
The informal Soviet polity
Modernization and stagnation
Conclusion
3:
Perestroika
and the Fall of the USSR
Introduction
The origins of
perestroika
: economic trials, international tribulations and social crisis
Reform begins
Reform spreads
Putting pressure on the party: political reform and the failure of
perestroika
Endgame
Conclusion
4: Yeltsin and the Politics of Crisis
Introduction
The Yeltsin reform project
The project comes unstuck
Regime consolidation and reform compromise after 1993
Securing the Yeltsin succession
Conclusion
Notes
5: Putinism, Reform and Retrenchment
Introduction
Building Putinism
The consolidation of Putinism
Tandemocracy and crisis, 2008–12
Putin’s second term: the ‘cultural turn’ in Russian politics
Conclusion
Notes
6: Presidency and Parliaments
Introduction
The presidentialism problem
The origins of the Russian presidency and its contest with parliament
The 1993 constitution: the consolidation of presidentialism and the weakening of parliament
Putin and the presidency
Conclusion
Notes
7: Russian Federalism
Introduction
Regional politics under Yeltsin
Initial efforts at re-creating the Russian federal state
Asymmetrical federalism
Recentralization after Yeltsin: political control versus good governance
Putin’s reforms: the roll-back of regional power
Reform results
The democratic discontents of regional politics
Conclusion
8: Political Parties and Opposition
Introduction
The development of Russia’s party system from
perestroika
to Putin
The first stages: political parties and
perestroika
Parties and the constitutional struggle, 1992–3
Parties under Yeltsin, 1993–9
Putin and the consolidation of the party system
Controlling the party system
United Russia: ‘hegemonic’, ‘dominant’ or Putin’s personal party?
The systemic opposition
The dilemmas and difficulties of the ‘real’ opposition: non-systemic forces and civil society
Conclusion
9: Elections and Voters
Introduction
Elections under Yeltsin
The 1993 Duma election
The 1995–6 and 1999–2000 electoral cycles
Back to acclamation: the 2003–4 and 2007–8 electoral cycles
The 2003–4 electoral cycle
The 2007–8 electoral cycle
The spread of electoral fraud
The system wobbles: the 2011–12 electoral cycle
The 2016 Duma election and 2018 presidential election: manipulating the electoral system and turnout
Conclusion
10: The New Russian Political Economy
Introduction
The Yeltsin legacy
Putin or oil? Change in the Russian economy, 2000–8
Crisis, ‘modernization’ and the return of Putin
Conclusion
11: Russia and the World
Introduction
Drivers of Russian foreign policy
Was Russia lost?
Bringing Russia back in
Russian foreign policy under Yeltsin
From pragmatism to confrontation: foreign policy under Putin
Improvements in relations on the surface, but tensions underneath, 2000–2
Breaking with the West: Iraq, neo-conservatism and ‘colour revolutions’, 2003–8
War with Georgia and the Obama reset, 2008–12
Putin’s return to the presidency: Ukraine, Syria and confrontation
Conclusion
Notes
12: What Kind of Polity is Russia?
Introduction
Between extremes: regime hybridity and authoritarianism
Hybridity and comparative politics
Hybridity à la Russe
Russia’s system as neo-patrimonial
The concept of neo-patrimonialism
Russia as a neo-patrimonial polity
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
For Maura, Sáoirse and Mani, and in memoriam: Frank Robinson and Peter Frank
Copyright page
Copyright © Neil Robinson 2018
The right of Neil Robinson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3136-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3137-0 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Names: Robinson, Neil, 1964- author.
Title: Contemporary Russian politics : an introduction / Neil Robinson.
Description: 1 | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017057445 (print) | LCCN 2018012665 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509525188 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745631363 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745631370 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Russia (Federation)--Politics and government--1991- | Post-communism--Russia (Federation) | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / General.
Classification: LCC JN6695 (ebook) | LCC JN6695 .R62 2018 (print) | DDC 320.947--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057445
Typeset in 9.5 on 13 pt Swift Light
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Tables and Figures
Tables
2.1 The modernization of Soviet society
2.2 Soviet economic performance, 1965–85
6.1 Factions in the Duma
6.2 Control over the legislative process
7.1 Federal districts and subject units of the Russian Federation, 2016
9.1 Duma election, December 1993
9.2 Duma election, December 1995
9.3 Presidential election, June–July 1996
9.4 Duma election, December 1999
9.5 Presidential election, March 2000
9.6 Duma election, December 2003
9.7 Presidential election, March 2004
9.8 Duma election, December 2007
9.9 Presidential election, March 2008
9.10 Duma election, December 2011
9.11 Presidential election, March 2012
9.12 Duma election, September 2016
10.1 Selected economic indicators, 1992–8
10.2 Selected economic indicators, 1999–2017
Figures
1.1 Russian governance indicators, 1996–2015
5.1 Government and Putin’s popularity indexes, 1999–2008
5.2 Approval ratings for the tandem and trust in Russia’s future, September 2008 – January 2012
5.3 Approval ratings for Putin, January 2012 – February 2017
10.1a Barriers to trade and investment (product market regulation indicator, 0–6) (data for various years 2008–10; Russia data for 2008)
10.1b Innovation in manufacturing sector (percentage of all manufacturing firms) (data for various years 2008–10; Russia data for 2008)
10.2 Economic dependency on oil
12.1 The neo-patrimonial space
12.2 Exits from the neo-patrimonial space
Glossary
autonomous republics
One of the three names for the large territorial units that made up the Union republics of the USSR and make up the Russian Federation. Now known as republics in Russia (see the entry ‘krai’ below).
CIS
Commonwealth of Independent States
colour revolutions
Protest movements that overthrew established rulers or their designated successors in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004–5) and Kyrgyzstan (2005). The term comes from the names given the Georgian and Ukrainian revolutions, which were labelled ‘Rose’ and ‘Orange’, respectively.
CPRF
Communist Party of the Russian Federation
CPSU
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Duma
The lower house of Russian parliament from 1993
EU
European Union
federal districts
Eight administrative units established by Putin in 2000 as a new layer of regional administration
glasnost’
‘Openness’: the media management policy adopted by Gorbachev
krai, oblast’, okrug, republics
The large territorial-administrative units that made up the Union republics of the USSR and now the names for Russia’s provinces (federal subjects).
LDPR
Liberal Democratic Party of Russia
NGO
Non-governmental organization
perestroika
‘Restructuring’: the collective name for reform policies launched in 1985–6 by Gorbachev.
Politburo
The permanent standing committee of the CPSU’s Central Committee, chaired by the general secretary (also known as the first secretary), and the highest decision-making body in the USSR.
polpredy
Presidential representatives, first appointed by Yeltsin to each of the constituent units of the Russian Federation in 1991, replaced by heads of the federal districts under Putin in 2000.
RSFSR
Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic
Supreme Soviet
The legislature of the USSR and Russia (until 1993)
Union republic
The fifteen main constituent parts of the USSR, named after their dominant ethnic group, each of which became an independent state in 1991.
USSR
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Acknowledgements
As usual there are too many people to thank and not enough space in which to do it. My colleagues at the University of Limerick’s Department of Politics and Public Administration are owed thanks for putting up with my frequent lapses in attention to their needs while I have been diverted by this book and for the help that they have given me along the way. I have had a lot of advice about its content, both directly and indirectly, from other Russian and post-Soviet specialists. It is unfair to single people out since so many different conversations and e-mails have helped me towards its completion, but (and in no particular order) David White, Richard Sakwa, Cameron Ross, Vladimir Gel’man, Paul Chaisty, Sarah Milne, Stephen White, Rico Isaacs and Derek Hutcheson have all left a mark in some way. They have my thanks and apologies for not always heeding what they have tried to teach me. My thanks and apologies, too, to Louise Knight and Nekane Tanaka Galdos from Polity, who have been exemplary in their professionalism and diligence and saintly in their tolerance of my lack of either of those virtues.
The people who really keep my show on the road are family and friends. The ‘Cheetahs’, Stephen McNamara and Sinead Lee, Katie Shishani, Natália Ferracin and Rafa Rossignoli have provided help and support in so many ways that they have blurred the line between family and friends to a point where you wouldn’t know there was one. Maura, Sáoirse and Mani are the three pillars on which everything rests, as always, but it is great that they have been joined of late by Adam, Somjai and Pitcha. I need all of the familial support I can get.
Illustration Acknowledgements
p. 21: ‘Raise the Banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin’: Soviet propaganda poster from 1933: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marx,_Engels,_Lenin,_Stalin_(1933).jpg
p. 27: ‘Chimney smoke is the breath of Soviet Russia’: Soviet propaganda poster promoting industrial growth: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smoke_of_chimneys_is_the_breath_of_Soviet_Russia.jpg
p. 49: Gorbachev addressing the CPSU Central Committee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Gorbachev#/media/File:RIAN_archive_850809_General_Secretary_of_the_CPSU_CC_M._Gorbachev_(close-up).jpg
p. 57: Boris Yeltsin rallying opposition to the August 1991 coup: Wikimedia Commons
p. 86: Putin meeting Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the owner of Yukos, in 2002; Khodorkovsky was arrested for economic crimes in 2003 and lost control of Yukos: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5398658
p. 89: Some of the victims of the Beslan school siege: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&profile=images&search=beslan+&fulltext=1&searchToken=92ibc0ib9f8y1y05wyqtyikql#/media/File:Beslan_foto_pogibshih.jpg
p. 98: Putin and Medvedev at the military parade marking the sixty-ninth anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sergey_Shoigu,_Vladimir_Putin,_Dmitry_Medvedev,_May_9,_2014.jpg
p. 114: The Duma building, Moscow: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&profile=images&search=Russian+Duma&fulltext=1&searchToken=55c4qpf7t7lkcv99g2tswbukw#/media/File:Russian_Duma_1.jpg
p. 123: Leader as action man: Putin submerges on board a mini-submarine to explore a shipwreck in the Black Sea: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50147
p. 136: Chechen fighters with a downed Russian helicopter, 1994: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&profile=images&search=Chechen+war&fulltext=1&searchToken=5qsv7xuzrxejd5guzdlfldg3t#/media/File:Evstafiev-helicopter-shot-down.jpg
p. 148: Alexei Navalny at a protest rally, Moscow, 2013: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexey_Navalny_at_Moscow_rally_2013-06-12_3.JPG
p. 155: CPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov and supporters in Red Square celebrate the 130th anniversary of Lenin’s birth: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&profile=images&search=CPRF&fulltext=1&searchToken=eyqvl8vqsr3z5yn4dw39t64sk#/media/File:RIAN_archive_783695_The_leader_of_the_CPRF_Gennady_Zyuganov_at_the_Red_Square.jpg
p. 162: A United Russia campaign poster for the 2007 Duma election: ‘Moscow votes for Putin!’: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17665177
p. 188: ‘I didn’t vote for these bastards’ (the United Russia logo adapted by Alexei Navalny to show the United Russia bear with a bag of swag), ‘I voted for some other bastards’ (logos of Yabloko, A Just Russia and the CPRF). ‘I demand a recount!’: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17665177
p. 191: The late Boris Nemtsov at the December 2011 For Fair elections rally: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59977710
p. 211: Putin’s tears in oil: graffiti in Perm satirizing Russia’s oil dependency: https://www.flickr.com/photos/centralasian/7180754004/in/photostream/
p. 212: ‘If Russia has oil, I’m shopping in Milan’: https://youtube/bnyBwNAdTu0
p. 224: Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_Clinton_and_Boris_Yeltsin_1994.jpg
p. 237: The EuroMaidan protest, Kiev, 2014: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33132150
p. 252: The cult of leadership: Putin, Lenin and Stalin impersonators outside Red Square: https://pixabay.com/en/putin-lenin-stalin-policy-1453504/
Maps
Map 1The USSR and its republics
Map 2The Russian Federation
1Change and Continuity in Russian Politics
Introduction
Russia has experienced massive shifts in its political and economic organization over the last hundred years. In 1917, the tsarist system of autocratic monarchy fell as the Romanov dynasty was deposed. The Soviet system that replaced it was supposed to usher in an era of equality and social freedom, to lead the global liberation of humanity from economic oppression. The higher goals of the revolution never came to pass, but Russia, and the rest of the tsarist empire that fell under the rule of the Bolsheviks, was transformed. Economic backwardness was attacked head-on by Stalinist modernization policies. Agriculture, which was the main activity of the mass of the Soviet population in the 1920s, was reorganized, and industrialization and urbanization transformed a peasant society into a version of modern society. Although the political system remained a form of dictatorship, the social basis of the Soviet regime was vastly different to that of the tsars. Aristocracy was replaced by rule through a mass party and bureaucracy, which together formed a party-state. The power of Soviet leaders was greater than that of the tsars, since they commanded huge apparatuses of coercion and ideological control which destroyed organized opposition to the Soviet system. The Soviet system rebuilt Russia and competed for power globally with the United States and the ‘West’, but it collapsed under the strains of competition and because of its systemic intractability, which made it slow to adapt and reform.
The post-Soviet Russian political system was supposed to develop liberal market democracy but has become increasingly dictatorial and illiberal. A form of capitalism has been built in which the market plays a role in the distribution of resources, but this is a political capitalism in which the economy is dominated by elite political interests, which take ‘rent’ – essentially unearned profits – from the economy and use them to buy support. In some respects, this system resembles its Soviet predecessor. The Soviet system also gathered rents, and the direction of its economy was also set politically. However, the new authoritarianism in Russia is as different to that of the Soviet past as the Soviet system was to its tsarist predecessor. The ruling mass Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) has been replaced by United Russia, but this is a highly personalized party loyal to President Vladimir Putin; it is not a political force in its own right. Repression still exists but is less systematic than it was for most of the Soviet era. The last few years have seen an increasingly ideological politics developing based on what Putin calls ‘traditional Russian values’ (respect for family, patriotism, intolerance for social difference, Orthodox Christianity, and hostility to liberalism). This worldview infuses media commentary in Russia on its politics and relations with the outside world, but it is not (yet) an official ideology in the way that Marxism-Leninism was. Large parts of the Russian population are sceptical of ‘traditional Russian values’ and are able to express their scepticism (mostly on the internet). A weak opposition exists and protests. Russians enjoy some freedoms of speech, association, belief and movement which were denied them in the recent past.
A central problem in the study of Russian politics, which is fundamental to how we see Russia developing in the future, is how to account for these changes and for the continuities that we can see in the midst of change. Describing change and continuity involves identifying the key factors, forces and institutions that we believe have acted as agents of and obstacles to change in the past and that will shape political development in the future. This chapter sets out the problems encountered in building states and regimes, Russia’s place in the world under the tsars and the Soviets, and how the country is placed following the fall of the USSR.
Political development: the problem of building states and regimes
Day-to-day politics involves a lot of change, much of which is ephemeral. Decisions to remove some minister or other, to alter economic policy by raising tax rates, or to modify social welfare spending impact on people’s lives but they rarely transform a political system fundamentally except as they add to the accretion of many changes that take place over time. Looking at political development involves looking at fundamental changes both in political systems and in the nature of political institutions through which day-to-day policy decisions and political manoeuvres are made. Political development concerns how institutions are built and how their construction influences who can access power and decision-making. It is about how rule over people by politicians evolves, what constrains or enables how that rule is exercised, and what shapes the ends to which rule should aspire. It is about the establishment of ‘political order’, involving two related political phenomena: the development of states as institutional ensembles that seek sovereignty over territory and endeavour to monopolize decision-making and the legitimate use of violence in that territory; and the development of political regimes, the rules that govern how power in and over the institutions of the state is organized and the rules that determine who can access that power and what they can use it for.
The distinction between state and regime is a fundamental one for this book. Practically, state and regime development often overlap, and the actors involved, if they even think about the relationship between them, will probably not see a distinction between the two. Analytically, however, we can see that they are different processes and that they therefore have different criteria for success and failure and need not be complementary, even if, and as, they affect one another.
Political science recognizes many regime types – democracy, autocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, pornocracy (really, look it up) – to name but a few. No matter what labels we choose to characterize individual regimes, they all describe who may make decisions and how they come to occupy decision-making positions, together with the relationship of society to power and resources that exist within the state. The creation of any regime is a process that centres on elite groups and their struggles. Elite groups may represent wider society, but agreeing the rules (regime) that govern access to power is generally the preserve of different elites as they try to achieve dominance over each other. Regime building is brought to a conclusion – a regime emerges – when such groups achieve a set of political rules that they cannot change without at least some fraction of the elite incurring a high cost to themselves. Regimes seek stability once constructed; they try to reproduce themselves and the particular patterns of access to decision-making and resources that they contain. Initiating regime change and restarting competition over the rules that determine rights to make decisions creates uncertainty for elite groups about their future prospects. It is thus something that they will try to avoid for fear that it will lead to a loss of access to positions of political power.
State building is a much more complex process than regime building. States have functions, the most basic of which is providing security to their populations by protecting them from external predation and enforcing some common standards of behaviour among them. Developing this ability entails creating both institutions (such as armies and police forces) to provide security and institutions (such as tax collection agencies) to finance them. Achieving even a basic level of state formation can be hard to achieve where a state faces security threats externally or has to develop extensive mechanisms to manage internal order – for example, because of the difficulties of regulating relations between different ethnic communities. As provision of security and order become more complex, state building has to develop to ensure continued functionality. If security threats can be dealt with only by the development of larger, better equipped and organized military forces, states have to regulate more of their economies to fund such militaries, create industries to arm them, develop education systems so that soldiers can use advanced armaments, etc. The more complex the functions a state has to fulfil, the more it needs its institutional development to create state ‘capacity’ and to be based on ‘organizational integrity’. Capacity means the proliferation of agencies that can make and implement public policy, while organizational integrity means that these agencies have clear lines of authority and accountability based on functional specialism and common standards of administrative practice, as well as mechanisms for arbitrating and resolving disputes between them. Success in state building is a moving target. Basic state functions will need to be supplemented over time by other state welfare functions, such as the active promotion of economic growth and the delivery of a broad range of public goods – education, health care, etc. Because the functions required of a state are always changing, state building is never actually completed.
The different criteria for success in regime and state building mean that the relationship between them is complex. The consolidation of state formation is far more difficult to achieve than the consolidation of a regime. A regime may be stabilized before the development of a state that can easily fulfil a state’s classic functions, let alone carry out an expanded repertoire of tasks. If this occurs, the question before a regime is whether it can contain and ameliorate the problems of maintaining social order and national security in such a way that it can survive ruling through a ‘weak’ state. If it cannot do so (for example, by gaining aid or security guarantees from other states), it will come under pressure to develop the state, and, if it doesn’t respond to this pressure, its long-term viability will be open to question. It may be called to question from below – that is, from society at large concerned about its security and future – or from within, as pressure to take action grows from state officials who cannot maintain order and security. Failure to perform these functions threatens the state’s ability to reproduce itself, and hence the interests of state officials who draw their living and privileges from its existence.
Regime building may involve state building, since an elite may try to prop up its preferred regime by delivering greater state capacity and public goods. Alternatively, regime building might substitute for state building, which involves building up regime strength rather than state capacity to deal with the relevant functions. A strengthened regime might suppress calls for increased state functionality so that it appears to have resolved state-building dilemmas. This suppression may be coercive or through consensus building, or it may combine both approaches. Coercion can limit the range of demands made of a polity from within or from society, so that the regime can claim that the level of state formation is adequate to the tasks at hand. Consensus building can be used to try to persuade people that demands for higher state functionality are illegitimate or to limit the range of demands that can be made. Substitution of regime strength for state development can give the impression of a strong state. Indeed, political actors who build up the former as a substitute for the latter may well believe that there is no difference between regime and state strength, and that development of one automatically delivers the other. This may occasionally be true, since a strong regime that secures both high degrees of loyalty from officials within the state and social compliance will be able to shape people’s notions of security, order and welfare and persuade them that it has delivered these things. However, such strong regimes can face problems when the state needs to be reformed to continue to deliver welfare and security. Where regime strength has been built up as a substitute for state formation, reform can threaten regime stability. State reform will often involve changes in the balance of power between elite groups, not least as it means the redistribution of resources between policy areas. It can therefore look like an attempt to change the regime in ways that threaten the members’ future access to power. Trying to build up the state’s capacity in this situation is thus fraught with danger: it may be resisted, with struggles over reform endangering regime stability; or it might be delayed as members fear its consequences, but this delay might then eat away at regime stability as state functionality remains low over the longer term.
This brief discussion shows that a basic issue of political development is whether or not regime building supports, or substitutes for, state development. Both strategies can be successful in the short to medium term (Robinson, 2008). However, over the longer term, the better developed a state, the more likely there is to be government stability, and hence regime stability, since continuity of governments – or at least their regularized replacement – is less likely to call in to question the basis on which power is accessed and used. How long the ‘long term’ is depends on the pressures that a country has to deal with. Where pressures are great, supplanting state for regime building will be dangerous, especially if a state has low capacity to begin with. A regime in a state with high capacity has more resources to deploy, better chances of extracting extra resources to deal with problems, and potentially more and broader reserves of political loyalty to fall back on because it is able to deliver a wide range of public goods through the state. Moreover, there is less chance of political fragmentation if the delivery of these goods is not delivered directly by some elite faction of a regime but is filtered through the capacity of a state. Where states deliver public goods, they can be rationed in times of crisis or shortage; where delivery is personalized through connection to the regime, there is more chance of political contestation. This is because power within a regime depends on the ability to deliver resources, which then become objects of struggle between different factions or are unevenly distributed so that regime legitimacy declines.
Long-term stable political development therefore generally depends on finding a regime form that supports continual state development through reform that responds to new pressures and demands as they emerge. Finding such a regime form is never easy, but democracy has historically been better at supporting continual state development than other regime types. This is probably because elite members in democratic regimes have agreed to be democratic citizens and ‘subject their interests to uncertainty’ (Przeworski, 1986: 58) – i.e., elite members do not expect that the arrangement of politics and policy will always work to their advantage. Democratic citizens should not expect to get their own way all of the time, so they are more tolerant of reform that could threaten their interests. Losers from change and reform in a democratic regime know that they have mechanisms available to them – political participation and organization at elections – that can be used to readjust the balance of interests back in their favour; democratic politics is not a zero-sum game in which losses are permanent. Consequently, while democracies are not necessarily efficient in adjusting the state to deal with the problems that confront them, some have, historically at least, been able to ‘muddle through’ and endure over time (Runciman, 2015).
These means of dealing with the need to reform the state and its capacity are not necessarily features of non-democratic polities. Elite members that lose power or status as a result of reform have no chance of recouping these through regular elections. Even if elections are held, they will not be free or fair. Loss of access to political office and the resources that come with it, or the weakening of such access or of the rewards of office holding, may well be permanent. This incentivises resistance to change if reform is enacted and also makes enactment less likely: would-be reformers, if they have any realistic appreciation of what change entails, know that embarking on reform will create enemies and resistance which will undermine their chance of success, and that such resistance and failure may lead to their being ejected from office. Reform, and the adjustment of the state that it entails, may well, therefore, be delayed, perhaps until it is so late that the dysfunctions of prioritizing regime building and maintenance over state development overwhelm a regime.
The complex relationship between state and regime development makes the course of political development difficult to predict. The range of factors and forces that might influence it is vast and includes unexpected events, both natural and man-made. Political development – change in how political order is constructed – can only rarely be analysed as the outcome of a single cause, or even of a few causes. Most often it is the result of a combination of a wide range of structural factors – i.e., circumstances and phenomena that are the products of the natural world, the long-term development of society and economy, the organization of power within global systems of international relations and economy, and how political actors and agents read (or misread) and react to those factors.
Political development: state, regime and Russia’s place in the world under the tsars and the Soviets
Russia’s experience of political development over the last hundred years has been marked by a high degree of instability. The radical changes that have occurred were not preordained in either their outcomes or their timing. The highly unpredictable shifts have been the result of a combination of structural and contingent factors (the latter including such things as the personalities and choices of the political actors involved) and external events. Recognizing the importance of contingency and the incidental, whether it is the character of political actors and their choices or the intrusion of external events such as war, does not mean that there are no enduring factors, problems or patterns in the development of Russian politics, state and regime. Regime development has generally taken precedence over state building and has substituted for the development of state capacity and organizational integrity. Because strong regimes have been able to control access to political institutions and force economic development through coercion, this has sometimes given the impression that the state has become powerful and capable of achieving economic and social change and providing security. Appearances, however, have been deceptive. Over time, regime stability, and the security of elite groups and their access to power brought by regime consolidation, has made Russia’s political regimes both too rigid to adapt and deal with new pressures and increasingly ineffective at providing development. This has created conditions that have weakened the state, eroded regime legitimacy, and led to radical shifts in Russian political development.
This pattern has repeated itself because Russia has never been able to deal with its state-building tasks through sustainable state formation. There has always been pressure on regimes to build up the state – pressure that has only, and generally only for a short time, been alleviated by the substitution of regime consolidation for state building.
Pressure to build up the state is high because of Russia’s political and economic geography. The country has a lot of territory to protect, and permeable borders, and it has often had unstable and hostile neighbours. Economic development is spread out across huge distances that add to its costs and mean that state action is necessary. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is supposed to have said that ‘geography is fate’. This is stretching things a bit and is a little too deterministic, since institutions and political choices also play a significant role in shaping development and the political possibilities that it creates, but the idea still contains a kernel of truth. To adapt Marx’s famous dictum a little, people make their own history but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected geographic circumstances. You can’t change your geography, no matter how much you might wish to be somewhere else. The ‘Subtropical Party’, which campaigned in the 1990s under the slogan ‘Bananas should grow in a Banana Republic’ and wanted Russia to have a permanent temperature of 25° Celsius, was never going to fulfil its campaign promises. Borders might change, but unless it disappears through conquest or total dissolution, or expands massively through imperialism, a state will stay in the same place and have access to the same physical resources. Geography – where you are and what you have – shapes economic structures, trade and international competition, and therefore shapes some of the pressures that have to be dealt with by the construction and development of the state.
Where you are influences both how close you are to major markets and historical centres of development and what you have to sell on these markets. It also determines which other states you have to compete with and what resources you have to dedicate to competition. Competition with others creates a further constant pressure on states and regime: pressure to modernize in order to compete. Competition is economic and military, involves changing levels of technology and economic organization, and brings about, and in turn is stimulated by, social change, the rise of new status and occupation groups and new social classes and forces, which have to be managed or accommodated to secure stable political order. The type of competition in which a polity engages can vary over time as its society and relations with the outside world change, and as it reacts to the alterations that are taking place, both in its neighbours and globally. Economic development can be more important than military competition at times, and vice versa, although generally they are linked, since effective military competition demands treasure from economic development and technological advancement to keep pace with rivals. All polities are therefore engaged in a balancing act as they seek to find the optimal equilibrium between economic development, security – which must be addressed through state development – and the stability of their political orders. Social change complicates this balancing act. Social groups’ demands for access to the fruits of economic development for consumption challenge traditional patterns of economic redistribution and inequalities.
The tremendous and fundamental changes that Russia has experienced and suffered over the last hundred years are a result of the difficulties that it has experienced in dealing with its geography and the problems that this poses for state and regime in the form of economic and military competition and modernization. The geographic core of economic development in Europe was centred in the past, first, on the Mediterranean and the Baltic and, later, on the Atlantic. Russia’s access to trade and markets was thus more limited historically than that of its competitors. It was not a major power in the Baltic region until the eighteenth century, by which time the centre of economic development had shifted to favour the Atlantic maritime economies.
Russia’s great size compounded the economic problems caused by its relative isolation from the main centres of economic growth. Even early in its history, before its expansion into Siberia and Central Asia, this meant that it had smaller domestic markets than its more compact competitors because of the dispersal of its population, the distances between its urban centres, and the distance between Russia and the major urban centres driving economic development in Western Europe. Great size meant that diffusion of new technology in the economy was slower: it took decades for technological innovation from the more advanced markets and economies in Western Europe to move across the continent and into Russia, and once these technologies arrived it was not always economic to adopt them because of the relative smallness of Russian markets.
Size also increased security costs. Russia had to police a large territory and extensive borders open to the south, west and east. This openness made expansion easy for the tsarist empire from the sixteenth century through to the end of the nineteenth century, but at the same time expansion increased the territory that the state had to administer and defend and brought Russia into competition with other states. Size, access to markets, constraints on internal market development, and security costs meant that Russia was increasingly challenged by international political and economic competition as its rivals progressed and developed.
These problems became particularly marked from the late eighteenth century onwards as the growth of the Atlantic economy combined with the intellectual revolutions that had taken place in Europe to start the Industrial Revolution and transform the power of Western European states. As the latter’s power grew in the nineteenth century, Russia’s went into relative decline. The country remained a military power for some time, but the base of this power, its economic infrastructure, lagged behind that of its rivals. As a result, from quite early on in the nineteenth century, Russia was well on its way to becoming a one-dimensional power. It had a large army but, without an economy to back up this armed force, remained uncertain what it could do with its military power. Some observers, such as the Duke of Wellington, recognized this even as Russia’s military prowess was at its height following the defeat of Napoleon. The Russians, the duke pointed out, ‘have neither wealth nor commerce nor anything that is desirable to anybody excepting 400,000 men, about which they make more noise than they deserve’ (quoted in Zamoyski, 2007: 461).
Russia’s problem in dealing with the issues of economic and military competition has often been labelled as a problem of ‘backwardness’ or of late or semi-peripheral development (Gerschenkron, 1962; Bradshaw and Lynn, 1994). These labels should not be taken as claims for the moral or cultural superiority of more ‘advanced’, less ‘peripheral’ developers and polities, nor should they be used to accuse Russia of some moral or cultural inferiority (although unfortunately this is sometimes the case). Rather, they describe how Russia has fit into the global system of states and show the necessity of its developing state institutions and policies that can overcome the structural conditions that have made it weaker and less economically developed than its rivals.
A perceived need to develop state institutions and policy to achieve modernization and parity with other states militarily and economically has been a constant in Russian political discourse since the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725). The ‘great debate’ of Russian social and political thought between ‘Westernizers’ and ‘Slavophiles’ that began in the nineteenth century was an argument over what form state and regime development, and hence modernization, should take to achieve parity with other powers and create conditions for stable and durable political order: should Russia follow its own developmental path, as the Slavophiles proposed, or copy those of more advanced European powers, as argued by Westernizers?
It is not really surprising that this debate became so heated in the nineteenth century, as Russia became relatively weaker in international terms. As other polities developed their states and economies, Russia’s ambitions came increasingly to be at odds with its power and place in the international system. It was unable to achieve the parity with other European states that it desired. Sergei Witte, the reformist tsarist minister of finance at the end of the nineteenth century, explained:
The economic relations of Russia with western Europe are fully comparable to the relations of colonial countries with their metropolises. The latter consider their colonies as advantageous markets in which they can freely sell the products of their labor and of their industry and from which they can draw with a powerful hand the raw materials necessary for them. This is the basis of the economic power of the governments of western Europe, and chiefly for that end do they guard their existing colonies or acquire new ones. Russia was, and to a considerable extent still is, such a hospitable colony for all industrially developed states, generously providing them with the cheap products of her soil and buying dearly the products of their labor. But there is a radical difference between Russia and a colony: Russia is an independent and strong power. She has the right and the strength not to want to be the eternal handmaiden of states which are more developed economically … She wants to be a metropolis herself. (Quoted in von Laue, 1954: 66)
Reform was needed to eradicate this discrepancy between ambition and power. However, recognizing Russia’s need to modernize, as did the intellectual debates of the nineteenth century and politicians such as Witte, and achieving it while maintaining social order were two different things. Russia’s efforts to keep pace with changes elsewhere in the world began to tear at its social fabric and undermine the tsarist autocratic regime.
A late developing economy, as the émigré Russian economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron (1962) pointed out, expands by using the machinery of the state to shift resources from consumption (people using resources to satisfy their personal desires) to investment that will secure future economic growth and prosperity for the country as a whole. The tsarist system was only partially successful in achieving this, since there were limits to how far it could encroach on the consumption of the elites that were its core support and personnel. The economic change encouraged by politicians such as Witte at the turn of the twentieth century was both dramatic and inadequate. New social forces were created: an industrial working class, the intelligentsia (a social stratum of educated citizens drawn from across the social spectrum and created by the expansion of the education system) and a middle class. But the size and social power of these new social groups was not great enough to force the transformation of politics by breaking the hold of the tsar and aristocracy on political power and decision-making. New social groups could protest for change, and often did so violently as their desires for change were frustrated. But political change, when it did take place from within the tsarist regime, was often partial and hesitant, even after the revolutionary crisis of 1905–7, which threatened to engulf the tsarist political order totally. The regime sought to perpetuate itself and the rules that governed access to power rather than change to facilitate state development. The result, as Tim McDaniel (1991: 227–8) has argued, was that autocratic modernization divided regime and state internally. Reformers and conservatives were brought into conflict with one another: no ‘coherent administrative apparatus c[ould] develop, and competing ideas … deepen[ed] political cleavages and administrative conflicts within the bureaucracy.’ Worse, this political confusion within the polity was mirrored by divisions that occurred in society over change, so that regime legitimacy was compromised. Groups desirous of change were alienated by its compromised nature; opposition groups were alienated by the threats they saw in reform and in calls to extend it. The end result was that the tsarist autocratic regime proved unable to secure a state strong enough to support its ambitions and weakened its legitimacy. When the state as a coercive apparatus began to fail in the course of the First World War as a result of military losses and declining legitimacy, the autocracy could not perpetuate itself; the regime fell as social protest at the ineptitude of regime and state in the war became uncontrollable.
The end of tsarism initiated a violent search for a new regime that could start and carry through a new state-building project. The Soviet regime that was consolidated through the Civil War of 1917–21 faced the same problems of economic development and security as its tsarist predecessor. Witte’s 1899 argument that change was needed for Russia to catch up with other states – to become a colonial ‘metropolis herself’ – was repeated in slightly different form thirty years later by Joseph Stalin:
Whoever falls behind gets beaten … The history of old Russia was … a history of the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. Beaten by the Mongol khans. Beaten by the Turkish beys. Beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. Beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. Beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists. Beaten by the Japanese barons. Everyone beat her because of her backwardness: her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, administrative backwardness, industrial backwardness, and agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and would go unpunished. … This is why we must no longer lag behind. … There is no other way. That is why on the eve of the October Revolution Lenin said: ‘Either perish, or overtake and outstrip the leading capitalist countries.’ We are 50 or 100 years behind the leading countries. We must make good this distance in 10 years. Either we do it, or they will crush us. (1952 [1931]: 361–2)
The Soviet system was better at both regime consolidation and mobilization than the tsarist system had been, largely through ideological control and its ability to mobilize the population using extreme violence. This enabled the Soviet regime both to move large numbers of people around the territory of the USSR in a way that had never been possible before and to control them politically through police control and terror to suppress their economic demands. The coercive capacity of the Soviet state, backed up by ideological control, overrode both popular and elite resistance to change. This enabled the Soviet system to use the state as a vehicle of economic transformation to a far greater extent than had its tsarist predecessor. The Soviet Union had fewer constraints on moving resources from consumption to investment and reallocated resources more harshly and thoroughly than any previous political system through the collectivization of agriculture and a programme of rapid industrialization. Wages – the means of funding consumption for most people – were kept low, giving the regime more to invest. Lower wages also enabled the greater mobilization of the population into the labour force by driving larger numbers of women out of the home and into the ‘productive’ economy (in practice, it meant that most women worked what came to be known as the ‘double shift’ – a shift in factory, office, shop, school or hospital followed by another shift of domestic labour). Resources were also forced into investment and away from consumption by the political prioritization of heavy industry and ‘capital goods’ in the centrally directed planned economy. The production of these capital goods – products used to produce other goods – was supposed to be the basis of future economic growth and meant that consumer goods were kept in short supply.
The USSR was able to achieve this high level of mobilization of human and physical resources through violence and because it effected a merger of regime and state via the intertwining of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) with the state bureaucracy, something that will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter. Formally, the merger of regime and state was a success. Regime goals – that is, the policies decided at the apex of the political system by the Soviet leadership in the Politburo, the decision-making body at the apex of the CPSU – could not be questioned either by society or by any functional part of the state. Practically, political control was less than complete; the high demands made on Soviet officials led them to reinterpret the orders they received from above and to protect themselves from political sanction. This changed the way that state and regime interacted in practice. In theory, the Soviet state was supposed to fulfil orders transmitted from the regime, from the CPSU and its leadership; the state’s aims were supposed to be those of the regime. In practice, and increasingly as the system developed, officials’ particular interests became important factors motivating their actions and behaviours to the detriment of regime goals. Coercion meant that there were no challenges to the regime until near the end of the Soviet system, but the Soviet state was never as strong in its capacity to deliver regime goals as the regime wished or as organizationally integrated as Soviet propaganda would have had us believe (Urban, 1985; Robinson, 2002). Soviet political history is in many ways a tale of the regime’s efforts to try to develop state capacity and organizational integrity to be able to fulfil its goals, the continuing shortfall of these efforts, and their eventual failure.
A key part of this failure was that, by the late 1960s, the USSR had caught up with its rivals, the leading capitalist countries, only militarily – that is, in only one dimension of politics. The promise of economic abundance for the Soviet population was never achieved. Living standards did improve for the bulk of the Soviet people over time, as they enjoyed high levels of welfare in education, health and housing relative to most citizens of other developing economies. But consumption levels overall remained below those of other leading economies, and the USSR was unable to reform itself, its economy and its political-administrative systems to match the consumption levels of its rivals. One reason for this is that the means – the policies and institutions – which a polity uses to catch up with its rivals are not necessarily the best instruments to keep pace with them once they have drawn level. Institutions and polices created in the race to catch up, if they are too deeply embedded (as Soviet institutions were), can eventually constrain adaptation to new patterns of growth, suck up resources that people would prefer to see spent on consumption, and in the end lead a polity to fall behind rivals that are more flexible. This is especially the case when the regime’s capacity to use violence declines, as was the case in Russia after Stalin’s death. Elite interests cannot be broken down to force reform through, and social complaint becomes more possible.
The USSR fell behind the West almost as soon as it had partially matched it. Catching up again meant reform, but, just like the tsarist autocracy, the Soviet autocracy struggled to achieve this. Changes made after the death of Stalin were constantly stymied by bureaucratic intransigence, so that they were often more cosmetic than substantive. Pressure for radical reform grew within the Soviet system as the post-Stalin generation of leaders saw the need for change (Gel’man et al., 2014). The reformist generation’s rise to power was delayed, however, by the slow turnover of elite members and leaders in the Soviet system. While reform was delayed, or half-hearted, the regime sustained itself by boosting its prestige, domestically, by spending on consumption that it could barely afford and, internationally, by spending on arms and financially shoring up Soviet client states in Eastern Europe and the developing world. By the mid-1980s, when a younger generation of the reformers led by Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the circumstances for the launch of reform were inauspicious. The investment needed for economic modernization was colossal, far in excess of the resources that the USSR had available. Nor was the Soviet leadership’s desire for reform matched by popular or bureaucratic willingness to bear the cost of change. Calls for reform, and the experience of reform, divided political and economic elites just as they had during the end of the nineteenth century. Political reform allowed these divisions out into the open so that the self-declared political uniformity of the Soviet system broke down. Social discontent with the Soviet system grew as suppressed political identities such as nationalism took the opportunities presented by reform to organize and press for political alternatives and were not repressed as they would have been earlier in the Soviet era. Elite adherence to the political rules that had bound them to the Soviet regime, and subsequently the integrity of the Soviet state, collapsed between 1989 and 1991. Again, unwillingness and/or inability to coerce the elite into line behind reform played a part in the breakdown of the already weak Soviet party and state organizational integrity.
Political development: state and regime and Russia’s place in the world after the USSR
The failure of the Soviet model of state building mirrored the failure of tsarism, although the process of change that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was very different to the violence of the end of tsarism. Neither tsarist nor Soviet autocracy was able to overcome the interests of its elites to reform soon enough, quickly enough, or as thoroughly as was needed to deliver security and development. The chaos of Soviet collapse and the failure of economic reconstruction in its wake deepened the distance between Russia and its rivals even further. Again, Russian leaders, first Boris Yeltsin and subsequently Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, recognized the problem of relative backwardness and called for reform and modernization. The language that Russia’s post-Soviet leaders have used to talk about modernization has varied, as have the means by which they sought to achieve it. There have been some striking continuities with the past, however. Modernization was supposed to be the main goal of the Medvedev presidency, for example, and the language Medvedev (2009a) used bore a close resemblance to that of Witte. Medvedev recognized ‘centuries of economic backwardness’ as one of the ills that beset Russia, ‘its humiliating dependence on raw materials’ for economic growth, its lack of global influence economically, and the negative effect that this had on the country’s international political power.
We will discuss the post-Soviet efforts at state building at greater length in chapters 4 and 5. For now, we will just note that the pattern of state building and its relationship to regime building have not been broken. The first effort at state building under Yeltsin was based on economic reform but was compromised by Yeltsin’s struggle to remain in office, a struggle that led him to build up the power of the presidency and to co-opt potential opposition forces. This expanded the political base of the regime but undermined constitutionality and formal politics. Influence peddling, patronage politics and informal politics grew to be more important than legality and transparency. The pressure to build up the state remained high, however, even as Yeltsin was sacrificing state development for regime stability. Russia’s security was threatened by regionalism within the country and instability within the former Soviet space, and it had lost international influence and prestige (see chapters 7 and 10). Economically it struggled to get out of the recession that came with the move from planned to market economy. Living standards dropped, economic inequality grew unchecked, and the state was faced with a permanent fiscal crisis throughout the 1990s.
Russia’s leaders have all been aware of these problems and the need to rebuild the state to check decline and to provide security and welfare for their people. Yeltsin, for example, identified the problem of state weakness as a key reason for the country’s economic problems in his 1997 ‘state of the union’ address to the Russian parliament. His successor, Putin, made the same assessment in his first speeches and statements when he took office in 2000. The problem that beset earlier Russian and Soviet leaders persisted, however. Maintaining power and at the same time conducting reform is no easier now than it has been in the past. Reform brings risks to the maintenance of regime stability. Faced with this problem, Russia’s rulers have engaged with reform half-heartedly and have compromised by trying to accommodate reform to the maintenance of regime stability.
A simple illustration of this can be seen in Figure 1.1
