October 15, 2005
What to Do About Russia
By James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul

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Moreover, at the beginning of Bush’s (and Putin’s) first term, conventional wisdom on Russia posited that Putin was too weak and too constrained to change qualitatively the nature of the political regime. Business interests, governors, and Yeltsin holdovers still working in the Kremlin would keep the inexperienced Putin in check. In addition, many argued that Putin could not undermine democracy in Russia because by 1999 there was nothing left to undermine. For some, nearly ten years of Yeltsin’s rule had destroyed the achievements of Russia’s democratic breakthrough following the collapse of the Soviet Union. For others, hundreds of years of autocratic culture were most enduring, and a “strongman” like Putin therefore represented continuity, not a disruption, with Russia’s past.

Five years later, while some cling to the idea that nothing is new in the way Russia is ruled, most observers are impressed by how much the regime has changed. The Russian state remains corrupt and inefficient, and Putin himself is in many ways an indecisive or ineffective leader. The regime he heads today is more stable but far less pluralistic and more centralized than the one he inherited in 2000.

First of all, there is Putin’s indifference to human rights, most grotesquely on display in Chechnya. When Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev invaded neighboring Dagestan in 1999 to liberate the Muslim people of the Caucasus, President Yeltsin and his new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, had to respond to defend Russia’s borders. But the response was not limited to expelling the terrorist attackers in Dagestan. Rather, Putin used the crisis as a pretext for trying to tame Chechnya once and for all through the use of force. To date, he has not succeeded. More than 100,000 people in Chechnya have died, but terrorist attacks against Russians have continued, including the horrific attack against the schoolhouse in Beslan in September 2004. As Putin fails, both Russian military forces and their enemies in Chechnya have blatantly abused the human rights of Russian citizens in the region.

Second, Putin and his government initiated a series of successful campaigns against independent media outlets. When Putin came to power, only three networks had the national reach to really count in politics — ort, rtr, and ntv. By running billionaire Boris Berezovsky out of the country, Putin effectively acquired control of ort, the channel with the biggest national audience. rtr was always fully state-owned, and so it was even easier to tame. Controlling the third channel, ntv, proved more difficult, since its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, decided to fight. But in the end, he, too, lost — not only ntv but also the daily newspaper Segodnya and the weekly Itogi — when prosecutors pressed charges. ntv’s original team of journalists tried to make a go of it at two other stations but eventually failed. Under control of those closely tied to the Kremlin, the old ntv has gradually come to resemble the other two national television networks. In 2005, Anatoly Chubais, the ceo of United Energy Systems (ues) and a leader in the liberal party Union of Right Forces (sps), was compelled to sell his much smaller private television company, ren tv, to more Kremlin-friendly oligarchs, even though Chubais could never be considered a fierce critic of the president.

In response to the inept performance of Russia’s security forces in the Beslan standoff in the summer of 2004, the print media showed signs of revival. But when the Izvestia newspaper did try to ask questions about the state’s failures, the newspaper’s editor was promptly fired.

The independence of electronic media also has eroded on the regional level. Heads of local state-owned television stations continue to follow political signals from regional executives, and most regional heads of administration stood firmly behind Putin in the last electoral cycle. Dozens of newspapers and Web portals have remained independent and offer a platform for political figures of all persuasions, but none of these platforms enjoys mass audiences. More generally, Putin has changed the atmosphere for doing journalistic work. His most vocal media critics have lost their jobs, have been harassed by the tax authorities or by sham lawsuits, or have been arrested. To keep their jobs, others now practice self-censorship.

Mysteriously, several journalists have been killed during the Putin era, including even one American reporter, Paul Klebnikov. In its third annual worldwide press-freedom index in 2004, Reporters Without Borders placed Russia 140 out of 167 countries assessed.1

A third important political change carried out on Putin’s watch was “regional reforms.” Almost immediately after becoming president in 2000, Putin made reining in Russia’s regional executives a top priority. He began his campaign to reassert Moscow’s authority by establishing seven supra-regional districts headed primarily by former generals and kgb officers. These new super-governors were assigned the task of taking control of all federal agencies in their jurisdictions, many of which had developed affinities, if not loyalties, to regional governments during the Yeltsin era. These seven representatives of federal executive authority also investigated governors and presidents of republics as a way of undermining their autonomy and threatening them into subjugation. Putin also emasculated the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament, by removing governors and heads of regional legislatures from this chamber and replacing them with appointed representatives from the regional executive and legislative branches of government. Regional leaders who have resisted Putin’s authority have found elections rigged against them. In the most recent gubernatorial elections in the Kursk, Saratov, and Rostov oblasts, as well as in the presidential races in Chechnya (twice) and Ingushetiya, the removal of the strongest contenders ensured an outcome favorable to the Kremlin. In September 2004, in a final blow to Russian federalism, Putin announced his plan to appoint governors. He justified the move as a means of making regional authorities more accountable and more effective, yet the overwhelming majority of the nearly 40 newly appointed governors have been the old governors in place before.

Fourth, in December 2003, Putin made real progress in weakening the autonomy of one more institution of Russia’s democratic system — the parliament. After the 1999 parliamentary election, Putin enjoyed a majority of support within the Duma. To make the Duma more compliant, he and his administration took advantage of earlier successes in acquiring control of other political resources (such as ntv and the backing of governors) to achieve a smashing electoral victory for the Kremlin’s party, United Russia, in the December 2003 parliamentary election. United Russia and its allies in the parliament now control two-thirds of the seats in parliament. In achieving this outcome, the Kremlin’s greatest asset was Putin’s own popularity, which hovered around 70 percent during the fall 2003 campaign. Constant, positive coverage of United Russia leaders (and negative coverage of Communist Party officials) on all of Russia’s national television stations, overwhelming financial support from Russia’s oligarchs, and near-unanimous endorsement from Russia’s regional leaders also contributed to United Russia’s success. For the first time ever, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (osce) issued a critical preliminary report on Russia’s 1999 parliamentary election, which stressed that “the State Duma elections failed to meet many osce and Council of Europe commitments for democratic elections.”2

Fifth, Putin and his regime demonstrated a blatant disregard for property rights and the institutions that protect them when they renationalized and then redistributed the most important assets of Yukos, formerly Russia’s largest oil company. Russian authorities first arrested Yukos ceo Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then saddled the company with billions of dollars in back taxes, and then sold its most profitable asset, Yuganskneftegaz, to a state-owned company, Rosneft — whose chairman of the board, Igor Sechin, is also a chief aide to Putin. Andrei Illarionov, Putin’s own economic advisor, called the sale of Yuganskneftegaz the “scam of the year.”3

Finally, Putin has even decided that non-governmental organizations (ngos) are a threat to his power. By enforcing draconian registration procedures and tax laws, Putin’s administration has forced many ngos critical of the Kremlin to close. To force independent ngos to the margins of society, the Kremlin has devoted massive resources to the creation of stated-sponsored and state-controlled ngos. In his 2004 annual address to the Federation Assembly, Putin struck a xenophobic note when he argued that “not all of the organizations are oriented towards standing up for people’s real interests. For some of them, the priority is to receive financing from influential foreign foundations.”4 Subsequently, pro-Kremlin members of parliament have introduced legislation that would tighten state control over the distribution of grants from foreign donors. Nor are Western ngos immune from Russian state harassment. Putin’s government has tossed out the Peace Corps, closed down the osce’s office in Chechnya, declared persona non grata the afl-cio’s field representative in Moscow, and raided the offices of the Soros Foundation.

When observed in isolation, each one of these steps in Putin’s plan can be interpreted as something other than democratic backsliding. The government in Chechnya did not work; terrorists did and do reside there. Some of the regional barons whom Putin has reined in actually behaved as tyrants in their own fiefdoms. Khodorkovsky is no Sakharov. What president in the world does not want to enjoy a parliamentary majority? And, more generally, everyone believes that Russia needs a more effective state to develop both markets and democracy. But when analyzed together, the thread uniting these events is clear — the elimination or weakening of independent sources of power.

Putin’s more autocratic regime has not made the Russian state more effective. During his rule, the provision of public goods has not increased significantly (though next year’s budget does plan for increased spending in education and social welfare), terrorist attacks have not abated, and corruption has skyrocketed from $34 billion spent on bribes by Russian businesses in 2001 to $316 billion in 2005.5

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1 Reporters Without Borders, “Third Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index,” available at http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=11715.

2 “Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions, Russian Federation State Duma Elections, 7 December 2003” (Vienna: Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe/Parliamentary Assembly, International Election Observation Mission, December 2003), available at http://www.osce.org/documents/odihr/2003/12/1629_en.pdf.

3 Arkady Ostrovsky, “Yukos asset called ‘scam of the year’ ,” Financial Times (September 29, 2004).

4 Vladimir Putin, “Address to the Federal Assembly of the Federation” (Moscow, May 26, 2004).

5 The Russian think tank Indem Foundation has used surveys of Russian firms to make these calculations, quoted here in Steven Myers, “Pervasive Corruption in Russia Is ‘Just Called Business’,” New York Times (August 13, 2005).