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COMMENT: RUSSIA'S COMING DECADE
By Andrew Wood
business new europe
October 8, 2009
SUMMARY
Despite initial optimism, the overall effect of Vladimir Putin's
presidency of Russia has been to weaken Russia's political structures
by substituting the potential for a set of independent institutions by
a closed elite answerable principally to itself, with little interest
in reform or modernization.
The lack of an autonomous legitimating ideology beyond a sense of
national grievance, together with the absence of renewal within the
ruling elite, has increased its tendency to distrust others, including
its subjects, and to cling more insistently to its own received truths.
The Russian government's response to the economic crisis has been
primarily tactical in nature. It has sought to avoid popular discontent
through palliative measures to keep down unemployment and prop up often
unprofitable industries in the hope that a return to global growth
will again push up commodity prices. Even in the short term, this is a
risky approach; there is a possibility that Russia's reserves may not
last until growth picks up sufficiently. In the longer term, changes
in the oil and gas market outside Russia, and a failure to invest in
domestic production, will weaken a resource-based growth model.
Despite the rhetoric, there has been no attempt to launch a systemic
modernization agenda in Russia. While the preconditions for renewal are
well understood (political and economic competition, an independent
judiciary, further liberalization including in the resource sectors,
an effective anticorruption campaign), none of these generalized
aspirations have been fulfilled.
There looks to be little prospect in the next couple of years that
economic or social pressures will push the elite towards reform.
However, the chances of keeping such a shift under control will become
more difficult the longer it is postponed.
INTRODUCTION
The next two years will be critica Russia begins to develop over the
coming decade into an effective polity with a modern and diversified
economy. Three cycles, sketched out below, will interact to determine
the outcome: the pre-electoral period will produce either more of the
same or renewal; what follows the first efforts of the authorities
to cope with the global economic crisis will indicate how far Russia
will realize its fuller economic potential; and both these factors will
show whether or not Russia is able in the predictable future to begin
to lessen the distance between itself and the more advanced economies.
THE POLITICAL CAGE
The institutional structure of the Russian state has been weakened
as the potential for a set of interdependent actors answerable to the
wider public that existed in the 1990s has been replaced by a closed
elite answerable principally to itself. Vladimir Putin's re-election
in 2004 pushed Russia further down the path of centralized personal
rule. Dmitry Medvedev's anointment in 2008 was a missed opportunity
for renewal. He has had no discernible success in pursuing the two
themes he identified as central to his presidency, establishing the
rule of law and attacking corruption. The institutional standing of
the presidency has been attenuated by Putin's move to the 'White House'
as prime minister. The result is rigidity.
The next electoral cycle begins in the new decade. Presidential
and Duma elections are due by 2012, with the four-year term for the
presidency being replaced by one of six years, renewable for a further
six if it is Putin who runs - and probably also if Medvedev does. If
Medvedev is to be more than a placeholder and Putin is to fade, the
current president will have to build up his independent authority
and personal entourage during 2010/11.
The issue of who will be next and where he (it would be a polite
figure of speech to write 'she or he') will exercise power is bound
further to lengthen its shadow over Russian politics between now and
2012. The chances of a third candidate em isruptive. That too is a fact
to be stressed: while power in Moscow has indeed become personalized
it is also exercised through a small group made up of Putin's
associates. Change has been minimal here too. The core of the regime
remains with pretty much the same men of power ('siloviki'), reliant on
a corrupt bureaucracy, and the rent of the dominant enterprises based
on Russia's Soviet inheritance. However able some individuals may be,
their REP PP 09/03: Russia's Coming Decade www.chathamhouse.org.uk 4
sense of change as risky, and best managed centrally and by themselves
if it must be contemplated, is not likely to be shaken.
It is only human for such groups to become both introverted and
captives of their own assumptions. Putin, Medvedev and their principal
colleagues are by reason of the centralization of the Russian
state more than usually circumscribed by their actions to date as
individuals, as a group and through the prevailing expectations
which now permeate the Russian state. The lack of an autonomous
legitimating ideology beyond a sense of national grievance, together
with the absence of renewal within the ruling elite, has increased
the latter's tendency to distrust others, including its subjects,
and to cling more insistently to its own received truths. It is, as
Pravda used to say, no accident that the official view in Moscow so
often seems at odds with the commonsense perceptions of the outside
world. The longer the current political system persists, the greater
the likelihood that these attitudes will become more dominant,
and the more disruptive it will be for the present elite to review
its policies. It is indicative that, for instance, even the idea of
interrupting the judicial persecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky for his
alleged misdemeanours when running the former Yukos energy company,
which had some currency when Medvedev came into office, seems now to
be beyond the pale.
How the ruling elite will cope with the next presidential succession
cycle is bound to be contentious as winners and losers are sorted
out and as the implications for longer-term policies take shape.
THE EASY WAY OUT OF THE PRESENT ECONOMIC CRISIS
Once it realized the scale of the crisis it faced, the Russian
government was by no means the only one to look primarily to first
aid, not the post-crisis transformation of the economy. The essential
task as seen by both Prime Minister Putin and his government and,
perhaps to a lesser extent, President Medvedev, was to prevent popular
discontent. That meant not only helping the banks but keeping workers
in their existing employment, holding devaluation off and avoiding
bankruptcies (especially but not only in the 'monotowns'). Much of the
considerable funds allocated by the authorities went to large-scale
enterprises controlled by the state or its associates, including
enterprises with little or no prospect of ever becoming profitable.
That tactical approach has persisted. Whether or not it will be enough
to see Russia through to calmer waters in the next couple of years does
not depend only on Russia. The last year ought to have destroyed any
illusion of the country being a safe haven, though it is not certain
that the top leadership has been completely persuaded of the limits to
what Russia can do on its own, or in company with like-minded client
states. The latest budget plans nevertheless recognize that the next
couple of (pre-electoral) years will be difficult. The Reserve Fund
is to be spent almost in full in 2010, and the National Welfare Fund
hollowed out, as social and anti-crisis expenditures are kept high
and the budget is once a icit. Russia may seek to borrow (on present
plans) some $60bn over the next three years. The overall aim is still,
rhetoric apart, to preserve current structures, however ineffective
or even bankrupt, until the world economy recovers sufficiently to
allow Russia to revert to the natural resource drivers which appeared
to work so well over the past decade.
This seems a risky strategy, even for the short term. It depends
critically, in the first place, on the recovery, speed and extent
of global growth, and on Russia's reserves lasting until that growth
picks up sufficiently. If this does not happen over the next eighteen
months or so, and current policies are maintained, the strain on
the government's finances will very likely become severe enough to
force difficult and divisive spending choices on the ruling elite
in the course of 2011. The IMF has warned, in its latest report, of
the inflationary pressures building up because of the rising budget
deficit. There are other rocks in the way, including weaknesses in the
banking system, the vulnerability of the rouble, social discontent
and so on. But there is, as far as I can tell, no compelling reason
to expect a second and game-changing crisis wave to hit Russia this
autumn. Tactical management of the economy in the expectation of a
short global crisis is therefore likely to remain the first choice
of the ruling group.
The longer-term flaws in this approach are considerable, even if
tactical spending works well from the point of view of the governing
interests in keeping the economy on its present path over the next
couple of years.
Russia's world will not be the same as it was for Putin in his
first two terms as President even if global recovery is relatively
quick. Changes in the oil and gas markets, outside competition and
Russia's failure to invest effectively or sufficiently in the energy
sector will ensure as much, together with the fact that nothing
significant has been achieved so far in developing Russia's economy
beyond its natural resource bases. And even there it lags behind its
comparators. The money that seemed so abundant in 2008 will on current
form have been spent by 2011, while the subsidies now agreed will be
hard to reduce. But the government is unlikely to be moved by such
doubts while its political interests point clearly towards as quiet
a life as can be managed.
If, on the other hand, global growth does not resume with sufficient
strength in the next couple of years then Moscow will come under
greater pressure to contemplate a more strategic approach, which
would require systemic reform.
Achieving that would require either a radical change of policy by the
present leadership, or their replacement; but the first is improbable -
for who would risk being its initiator? - and there are no candidates
for the second. It is also questionable whether there would be popular
understanding of, let alone support, for radical change. A prolonged
period of difficult global conditions would be likely instead to
promote still greater central control over the economy, and society
as a whole, with grim and in the end even selfdestructive results.
MODERNIZATION
The energy-inspired boom of the early 2000s encouraged hopes of
Russia's future economic growth. But much of its dilapidated Soviet
inheritance has continued to fade during this d nomic crisis has
cruelly shown up the Russian economy for its dependence on imports
financed by earnings from the country's natural resources. This is
not to say that every Russian enterprise is flawed, just that there
are not enough bright spots for Russia to begin to catch up with its
competitors. On the contrary, it has continued to fall behind.
Productivity, as measured by the Russian Academy of Sciences, is
27% of that in the United States, and 42% of that in Germany and
Japan. Russia does not have the cheap labour available to China or
India. Both the costs and the ineffectiveness of its road building
are without parallel in the world.
The number of Russian applications for patents is nugatory. Russia's
obsolescent Soviet inheritance is as much a burden as an asset,
as evidenced recently by AvtoVAZ, the failed Bulava missile, and
the catastrophe at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro-electric station
(not its first, either). And so on.
The preconditions for renewal are widely understood and have been
publicly recognized by Putin, Medvedev and others, as well as in
documents such as the Ministry of Economic Development's pre-crisis
plan to lead up to 2020.
They were listed by the Director for Macro-Economic Research at
the Higher School for Economics on 13 August as follows: 'Political
and economic competition, the independence and effectiveness of the
courts, corruption, opening up the economy to foreign investment,
and the exposure of the non natural resources sectors of the Russian
economy to the global economy.' One might add a long-term commitment
of the government to programmes REP PP 09/03: Russia's Coming Decade
www.chathamhouse.org.uk 7 built around these principles, with a focus
on key infrastructural investment, and supported by an effective
and honest bureaucracy. Many Russians would call in addition for
a reinvigoration of the country's education system, including its
technological education.
But none of these generalized aspirations has been fulfilled; instead,
political and even i modernization programme would be interconnected
and extraordinarily wideranging.
It would take a real Kamikaze to put flesh on its bones, let alone
bring them to active life, because implementing them would directly
threaten the structures of the present system. The idea widespread
in recent years that generational change coupled with economic growth
will eventually soften Russia's governing system and thereby allow an
emergent middle class to take the reins was a comforting but illusory
proposition, especially given the existence of a hardening 'vertical
of power'. It was suggested in 2004 that Putin would in his second
term build on the reforms of his first, that Medvedev would in 2008
make the system more just and flexible, and more recently that the
present crisis would compel radical change. None of that has happened.
President Medvedev's caustic comments in his 10 September article for
the online journal Gazeta.ru were eloquent in underlining the need
for renewal but short on practicable ways to achieve it. Meeting the
challenge of avoiding Russian decline and political degradation gets
more difficult, not less.
Over the next couple of years the governing group will have to
come to an understanding of who will be their leader from 2012 (or
conceivably earlier).
That may well be while the hope of muddling through persists, or in a
worse case before an attempt to deal with lasting global difficulties
by still greater central control has been shown as wanting. Experience
so far suggests that the elite would prefer Putin if he were prepared
to resume full formal responsibility, but that Putin would not
return as a reformer. Nor would his associates support him again if
they thought that he might. They have too much to lose from radical
[root-and-branch] change. There is no reason to suppose that the
bureaucracy would be able to produce effective and disciplined change
even if it could be made to take that task seriously.
Medvedev could in principle yet surprise, but he is unlikely to become
a domi orce able to marshal public and political support for effective
modernization before or after the next rotation.
SOME CONCLUSIONS
Russia's obstacle to the greatness it could have, and that its
leaders say they want, is that it is in a political cul-de-sac, with
no evident orderly way out at present. The parallel with Argentina,
a country which missed its destiny, has been suggested, and can be
made to fit, sort of. The parallel with the Brezhnev years is closer,
but incomplete, for now there is a greater vacuum in the Russian
state. Putin quite recently told then President Bush that Ukraine
was not a real country. The unintended corollary was that neither
was Russia, without Ukraine It is impossible to tell whether or
when a further wave of economic or possibly social pressures, or the
fear of such a wave, will break the cohesion of the present elite,
and persuade enough of its members to take the risks inherent in a
decisive and therefore liberalizing change towards political, social
and economic modernization. This does not seem to be a prospect for
the next couple of years, and the electoral cycle would inhibit it
beyond that. But the chances of keeping such a shift under control
will become more difficult the longer it is postponed.
I have not sought in this piece to consider Russia's relationship with
the outside world. The country has been tellingly depicted as having
made itself friendless. The announcement this summer of its decision
to revamp its application to join the World Trade Organization into
a juridically impracticable one of entering as a unit of a nascent
Customs Union meant in practice that Russia was turning its back
on the WTO. Moscow may find itself having to behave more tactfully
than in recent years if it is to borrow soon on the international
financial markets. But the more it closes in on itself, and seeks to
deal with its problems by greater internal discipline, the greater
the temptation to balance that by blaming external enemies. Moscow's
problems in the Caucasus, in its own territory as well as beyond it,
appear to have no permanent solution. Medvedev asked the Duma on 10
August to amend the law governing the deployment of Russian troops
abroad so as greatly to enlarge the scope of pretexts for doing
so. Medvedev's intemperate message to Ukrainian President Yushchenko
on 11 July was notable for its refusal even tacitly to acknowledge
that Moscow might bear any responsibility for the poor relations
between Russia and Ukraine. Perhaps he and his colleagues genuinely
do not realize that Russia might in any way be wrong. Trouble on that
front is still possible around the turn of this year.
This comment first appeared in Chatham House September newsletter
www.chathamhouse.org.uk
Andrew Wood is an Associate Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
By Andrew Wood
business new europe
October 8, 2009
SUMMARY
Despite initial optimism, the overall effect of Vladimir Putin's
presidency of Russia has been to weaken Russia's political structures
by substituting the potential for a set of independent institutions by
a closed elite answerable principally to itself, with little interest
in reform or modernization.
The lack of an autonomous legitimating ideology beyond a sense of
national grievance, together with the absence of renewal within the
ruling elite, has increased its tendency to distrust others, including
its subjects, and to cling more insistently to its own received truths.
The Russian government's response to the economic crisis has been
primarily tactical in nature. It has sought to avoid popular discontent
through palliative measures to keep down unemployment and prop up often
unprofitable industries in the hope that a return to global growth
will again push up commodity prices. Even in the short term, this is a
risky approach; there is a possibility that Russia's reserves may not
last until growth picks up sufficiently. In the longer term, changes
in the oil and gas market outside Russia, and a failure to invest in
domestic production, will weaken a resource-based growth model.
Despite the rhetoric, there has been no attempt to launch a systemic
modernization agenda in Russia. While the preconditions for renewal are
well understood (political and economic competition, an independent
judiciary, further liberalization including in the resource sectors,
an effective anticorruption campaign), none of these generalized
aspirations have been fulfilled.
There looks to be little prospect in the next couple of years that
economic or social pressures will push the elite towards reform.
However, the chances of keeping such a shift under control will become
more difficult the longer it is postponed.
INTRODUCTION
The next two years will be critica Russia begins to develop over the
coming decade into an effective polity with a modern and diversified
economy. Three cycles, sketched out below, will interact to determine
the outcome: the pre-electoral period will produce either more of the
same or renewal; what follows the first efforts of the authorities
to cope with the global economic crisis will indicate how far Russia
will realize its fuller economic potential; and both these factors will
show whether or not Russia is able in the predictable future to begin
to lessen the distance between itself and the more advanced economies.
THE POLITICAL CAGE
The institutional structure of the Russian state has been weakened
as the potential for a set of interdependent actors answerable to the
wider public that existed in the 1990s has been replaced by a closed
elite answerable principally to itself. Vladimir Putin's re-election
in 2004 pushed Russia further down the path of centralized personal
rule. Dmitry Medvedev's anointment in 2008 was a missed opportunity
for renewal. He has had no discernible success in pursuing the two
themes he identified as central to his presidency, establishing the
rule of law and attacking corruption. The institutional standing of
the presidency has been attenuated by Putin's move to the 'White House'
as prime minister. The result is rigidity.
The next electoral cycle begins in the new decade. Presidential
and Duma elections are due by 2012, with the four-year term for the
presidency being replaced by one of six years, renewable for a further
six if it is Putin who runs - and probably also if Medvedev does. If
Medvedev is to be more than a placeholder and Putin is to fade, the
current president will have to build up his independent authority
and personal entourage during 2010/11.
The issue of who will be next and where he (it would be a polite
figure of speech to write 'she or he') will exercise power is bound
further to lengthen its shadow over Russian politics between now and
2012. The chances of a third candidate em isruptive. That too is a fact
to be stressed: while power in Moscow has indeed become personalized
it is also exercised through a small group made up of Putin's
associates. Change has been minimal here too. The core of the regime
remains with pretty much the same men of power ('siloviki'), reliant on
a corrupt bureaucracy, and the rent of the dominant enterprises based
on Russia's Soviet inheritance. However able some individuals may be,
their REP PP 09/03: Russia's Coming Decade www.chathamhouse.org.uk 4
sense of change as risky, and best managed centrally and by themselves
if it must be contemplated, is not likely to be shaken.
It is only human for such groups to become both introverted and
captives of their own assumptions. Putin, Medvedev and their principal
colleagues are by reason of the centralization of the Russian
state more than usually circumscribed by their actions to date as
individuals, as a group and through the prevailing expectations
which now permeate the Russian state. The lack of an autonomous
legitimating ideology beyond a sense of national grievance, together
with the absence of renewal within the ruling elite, has increased
the latter's tendency to distrust others, including its subjects,
and to cling more insistently to its own received truths. It is, as
Pravda used to say, no accident that the official view in Moscow so
often seems at odds with the commonsense perceptions of the outside
world. The longer the current political system persists, the greater
the likelihood that these attitudes will become more dominant,
and the more disruptive it will be for the present elite to review
its policies. It is indicative that, for instance, even the idea of
interrupting the judicial persecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky for his
alleged misdemeanours when running the former Yukos energy company,
which had some currency when Medvedev came into office, seems now to
be beyond the pale.
How the ruling elite will cope with the next presidential succession
cycle is bound to be contentious as winners and losers are sorted
out and as the implications for longer-term policies take shape.
THE EASY WAY OUT OF THE PRESENT ECONOMIC CRISIS
Once it realized the scale of the crisis it faced, the Russian
government was by no means the only one to look primarily to first
aid, not the post-crisis transformation of the economy. The essential
task as seen by both Prime Minister Putin and his government and,
perhaps to a lesser extent, President Medvedev, was to prevent popular
discontent. That meant not only helping the banks but keeping workers
in their existing employment, holding devaluation off and avoiding
bankruptcies (especially but not only in the 'monotowns'). Much of the
considerable funds allocated by the authorities went to large-scale
enterprises controlled by the state or its associates, including
enterprises with little or no prospect of ever becoming profitable.
That tactical approach has persisted. Whether or not it will be enough
to see Russia through to calmer waters in the next couple of years does
not depend only on Russia. The last year ought to have destroyed any
illusion of the country being a safe haven, though it is not certain
that the top leadership has been completely persuaded of the limits to
what Russia can do on its own, or in company with like-minded client
states. The latest budget plans nevertheless recognize that the next
couple of (pre-electoral) years will be difficult. The Reserve Fund
is to be spent almost in full in 2010, and the National Welfare Fund
hollowed out, as social and anti-crisis expenditures are kept high
and the budget is once a icit. Russia may seek to borrow (on present
plans) some $60bn over the next three years. The overall aim is still,
rhetoric apart, to preserve current structures, however ineffective
or even bankrupt, until the world economy recovers sufficiently to
allow Russia to revert to the natural resource drivers which appeared
to work so well over the past decade.
This seems a risky strategy, even for the short term. It depends
critically, in the first place, on the recovery, speed and extent
of global growth, and on Russia's reserves lasting until that growth
picks up sufficiently. If this does not happen over the next eighteen
months or so, and current policies are maintained, the strain on
the government's finances will very likely become severe enough to
force difficult and divisive spending choices on the ruling elite
in the course of 2011. The IMF has warned, in its latest report, of
the inflationary pressures building up because of the rising budget
deficit. There are other rocks in the way, including weaknesses in the
banking system, the vulnerability of the rouble, social discontent
and so on. But there is, as far as I can tell, no compelling reason
to expect a second and game-changing crisis wave to hit Russia this
autumn. Tactical management of the economy in the expectation of a
short global crisis is therefore likely to remain the first choice
of the ruling group.
The longer-term flaws in this approach are considerable, even if
tactical spending works well from the point of view of the governing
interests in keeping the economy on its present path over the next
couple of years.
Russia's world will not be the same as it was for Putin in his
first two terms as President even if global recovery is relatively
quick. Changes in the oil and gas markets, outside competition and
Russia's failure to invest effectively or sufficiently in the energy
sector will ensure as much, together with the fact that nothing
significant has been achieved so far in developing Russia's economy
beyond its natural resource bases. And even there it lags behind its
comparators. The money that seemed so abundant in 2008 will on current
form have been spent by 2011, while the subsidies now agreed will be
hard to reduce. But the government is unlikely to be moved by such
doubts while its political interests point clearly towards as quiet
a life as can be managed.
If, on the other hand, global growth does not resume with sufficient
strength in the next couple of years then Moscow will come under
greater pressure to contemplate a more strategic approach, which
would require systemic reform.
Achieving that would require either a radical change of policy by the
present leadership, or their replacement; but the first is improbable -
for who would risk being its initiator? - and there are no candidates
for the second. It is also questionable whether there would be popular
understanding of, let alone support, for radical change. A prolonged
period of difficult global conditions would be likely instead to
promote still greater central control over the economy, and society
as a whole, with grim and in the end even selfdestructive results.
MODERNIZATION
The energy-inspired boom of the early 2000s encouraged hopes of
Russia's future economic growth. But much of its dilapidated Soviet
inheritance has continued to fade during this d nomic crisis has
cruelly shown up the Russian economy for its dependence on imports
financed by earnings from the country's natural resources. This is
not to say that every Russian enterprise is flawed, just that there
are not enough bright spots for Russia to begin to catch up with its
competitors. On the contrary, it has continued to fall behind.
Productivity, as measured by the Russian Academy of Sciences, is
27% of that in the United States, and 42% of that in Germany and
Japan. Russia does not have the cheap labour available to China or
India. Both the costs and the ineffectiveness of its road building
are without parallel in the world.
The number of Russian applications for patents is nugatory. Russia's
obsolescent Soviet inheritance is as much a burden as an asset,
as evidenced recently by AvtoVAZ, the failed Bulava missile, and
the catastrophe at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro-electric station
(not its first, either). And so on.
The preconditions for renewal are widely understood and have been
publicly recognized by Putin, Medvedev and others, as well as in
documents such as the Ministry of Economic Development's pre-crisis
plan to lead up to 2020.
They were listed by the Director for Macro-Economic Research at
the Higher School for Economics on 13 August as follows: 'Political
and economic competition, the independence and effectiveness of the
courts, corruption, opening up the economy to foreign investment,
and the exposure of the non natural resources sectors of the Russian
economy to the global economy.' One might add a long-term commitment
of the government to programmes REP PP 09/03: Russia's Coming Decade
www.chathamhouse.org.uk 7 built around these principles, with a focus
on key infrastructural investment, and supported by an effective
and honest bureaucracy. Many Russians would call in addition for
a reinvigoration of the country's education system, including its
technological education.
But none of these generalized aspirations has been fulfilled; instead,
political and even i modernization programme would be interconnected
and extraordinarily wideranging.
It would take a real Kamikaze to put flesh on its bones, let alone
bring them to active life, because implementing them would directly
threaten the structures of the present system. The idea widespread
in recent years that generational change coupled with economic growth
will eventually soften Russia's governing system and thereby allow an
emergent middle class to take the reins was a comforting but illusory
proposition, especially given the existence of a hardening 'vertical
of power'. It was suggested in 2004 that Putin would in his second
term build on the reforms of his first, that Medvedev would in 2008
make the system more just and flexible, and more recently that the
present crisis would compel radical change. None of that has happened.
President Medvedev's caustic comments in his 10 September article for
the online journal Gazeta.ru were eloquent in underlining the need
for renewal but short on practicable ways to achieve it. Meeting the
challenge of avoiding Russian decline and political degradation gets
more difficult, not less.
Over the next couple of years the governing group will have to
come to an understanding of who will be their leader from 2012 (or
conceivably earlier).
That may well be while the hope of muddling through persists, or in a
worse case before an attempt to deal with lasting global difficulties
by still greater central control has been shown as wanting. Experience
so far suggests that the elite would prefer Putin if he were prepared
to resume full formal responsibility, but that Putin would not
return as a reformer. Nor would his associates support him again if
they thought that he might. They have too much to lose from radical
[root-and-branch] change. There is no reason to suppose that the
bureaucracy would be able to produce effective and disciplined change
even if it could be made to take that task seriously.
Medvedev could in principle yet surprise, but he is unlikely to become
a domi orce able to marshal public and political support for effective
modernization before or after the next rotation.
SOME CONCLUSIONS
Russia's obstacle to the greatness it could have, and that its
leaders say they want, is that it is in a political cul-de-sac, with
no evident orderly way out at present. The parallel with Argentina,
a country which missed its destiny, has been suggested, and can be
made to fit, sort of. The parallel with the Brezhnev years is closer,
but incomplete, for now there is a greater vacuum in the Russian
state. Putin quite recently told then President Bush that Ukraine
was not a real country. The unintended corollary was that neither
was Russia, without Ukraine It is impossible to tell whether or
when a further wave of economic or possibly social pressures, or the
fear of such a wave, will break the cohesion of the present elite,
and persuade enough of its members to take the risks inherent in a
decisive and therefore liberalizing change towards political, social
and economic modernization. This does not seem to be a prospect for
the next couple of years, and the electoral cycle would inhibit it
beyond that. But the chances of keeping such a shift under control
will become more difficult the longer it is postponed.
I have not sought in this piece to consider Russia's relationship with
the outside world. The country has been tellingly depicted as having
made itself friendless. The announcement this summer of its decision
to revamp its application to join the World Trade Organization into
a juridically impracticable one of entering as a unit of a nascent
Customs Union meant in practice that Russia was turning its back
on the WTO. Moscow may find itself having to behave more tactfully
than in recent years if it is to borrow soon on the international
financial markets. But the more it closes in on itself, and seeks to
deal with its problems by greater internal discipline, the greater
the temptation to balance that by blaming external enemies. Moscow's
problems in the Caucasus, in its own territory as well as beyond it,
appear to have no permanent solution. Medvedev asked the Duma on 10
August to amend the law governing the deployment of Russian troops
abroad so as greatly to enlarge the scope of pretexts for doing
so. Medvedev's intemperate message to Ukrainian President Yushchenko
on 11 July was notable for its refusal even tacitly to acknowledge
that Moscow might bear any responsibility for the poor relations
between Russia and Ukraine. Perhaps he and his colleagues genuinely
do not realize that Russia might in any way be wrong. Trouble on that
front is still possible around the turn of this year.
This comment first appeared in Chatham House September newsletter
www.chathamhouse.org.uk
Andrew Wood is an Associate Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress