Beneath the many labels attached to it, the Putin system is not fundamentally distinct from the one set in place under Yeltsin. It represents, rather, that system’s continuation and growth. In his highly astute writings on post-Soviet politics, the late Dmitri Furman argued that we should see Russia’s post-Soviet rulers as embodying successive stages in the evolution of a single modeclass="underline" a ‘revolutionary’ period of destruction of the old regime in the 1990s was followed by one of consolidation in the 2000s.{21} Throughout this period, the dominant political form in the countries of the former USSR was what he termed ‘imitation democracy’: a system in which a formal commitment to democratic norms and procedures coexisted with a total absence of actual alternatives to the current regime. In most of the Soviet successor states – from Belarus to Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan to Russia – it remained impossible for the opposition to come to power, yet the ‘democratic’ facade of these regimes required them to hold elections of some kind every few years. This gave rise to recurrent moments of crisis. Indeed, as Furman pointed out, contested votes account for most of the rare occasions when post-Soviet countries broke out of the ‘imitation democratic’ cycle – Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004, Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution of 2005. The Russian protests against electoral fraud in late 2011 occurred at another such moment of vulnerability, when the regime’s democratic rhetoric ran up against the reality of how it exercised power.
The basic post-Soviet political condition, then, has been one of what Furman called bezal’ternativnost’ – ‘alternativelessness’. Many commentators have located its origins in these countries’ supposedly authoritarian political culture, or in some unabashed nostalgia for Stalinism, or in popular distaste for the democratic process. Furman came to rather different conclusions. He held that it developed out of a contradiction that attended the birth of these regimes: the mismatch between the new governments’ supposedly democratic goals and the gaping lack of a popular mandate for their programme of free-market transformation.
Every time the requirements of capitalist ‘transition’ came into conflict with the principle of popular sovereignty, Russia’s post-Soviet rulers made it clear enough where their loyalties lay. Yeltsin’s attack on the parliament in October 1993 was only the first in a long line of violations designed to shield a nascent post-Soviet capitalism from being held to account by the citizenry. After Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996 – secured, it bears repeating, thanks to a combination of electoral fraud and Western meddling – Anatoly Chubais, one of the main architects of privatization in Russia, left the public in no doubt about what had been at stake: ‘Russian democracy is irrevocable, private ownership in Russia is irrevocable, market reforms in the Russian state are irrevocable.’{22}
This original contradiction between democratic appearance and capitalist substance was a crack in the foundations of the post-Soviet order, and it was preserved and maintained by Putin after 2000. Rather than overturning the policies of the Yeltsin period, he built on them. There was, however, one important difference between the presidencies of the two men, and it played out in the realm of ideology. Yeltsin, as the dismantler of the Soviet system, could openly embrace the ideology of the free market, as the necessary instrument of the transformation he was pushing through. Putin, though he had come to power as the guarantor of the system’s continuity, presented himself as someone who would undo the excesses of the 1990s. His rule was from the outset constitutively riven, defending in practice the outcomes of free-market reforms its rhetoric repudiated, and making nostalgic appeals to a Communist system whose egalitarian principles it rejected.
This contradiction remained the unbreachable limit of the Putin system, preventing it from developing a consistent ideological project. For most of the 2000s, attempts to concoct suitable concepts for it fell flat. ‘Sovereign democracy’ and ‘managed democracy’ were more exercises in marketing than expressions of a coherent vision, and didn’t gain any traction among the public as a whole. After returning to the Kremlin in 2012 Putin adopted a more stridently nationalistic agenda, in an attempt to give the system a more solid ideological foundation.
The persistence of this dilemma points to the post-Soviet system’s conceptual hollowness, its inability to devise an ideological formula to fill the void left by Communism’s collapse. Yet despite this weakness, the ‘imitation democratic’ system commanded first by Yeltsin and then by Putin survived the 1990s and the first decade of the new century intact and largely unchallenged. The reasons for its surprising stability are not to be found in the personal attributes or willpower of whichever man has stood at its summit. They lie instead in the particular forms capitalism has taken in post-Soviet Russia. To understand that, we need to look more closely at the distinctive relationship between money and power that emerged in the 1990s, and at the changing character of the society over which Yeltsin and Putin have presided.
CHAPTER 2
Faces of Power
IN THE SPRING OF 2014, the US, the EU, Canada and several other countries imposed sanctions on dozens of individuals, many of them high-ranking friends of Putin, in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. These sanctions have been extended and renewed several times, most dramatically in the spring of 2018, after the attempted killing of a former Russian spy in the UK produced yet another diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West. Sanctions, it seems, have all but become a permanent feature of Western policy towards Russia: in 2017 the US Congress enshrined them in law, and although some European governments have occasionally made noises about revisiting the question, they, too, remain committed to sanctions for now.
The West has repeatedly used sanctions to try to force troublesome states into line – with limited success. The sanctions on Russia, like those applied to other countries, are rooted in the notion that punishing a select circle of people at the top is tantamount to disciplining the country as a whole. The individuals targeted after 2014, for example, included the Russian and Ukrainian officials who played an active role in the annexation – from high-level Kremlin operators such as Igor Sechin, a close ally of Putin, and Vladislav Surkov, the Machiavellian inventor of the term ‘managed democracy’, to the men charged with implementing Moscow’s policy on the ground in Crimea. But the sanctions list also included many private businessmen deemed to be close to the Kremlin. There were Yuri Kovalchuk and Nikolai Shamalov, the two largest single shareholders in Bank Rossiia, widely rumoured to operate as a private bank for senior Russian officials. And there were individuals known to have personal connections with Putin – and to have profited handsomely from them – such as Gennady Timchenko, whose firm, Gunvor, rapidly grew from almost nothing in 2000 to become the third-largest oil trader in the world by 2007. There were also the Rotenberg brothers, Arkady and Boris, whose construction firm won $7 billion worth of no-bid contracts for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.{1} The 2018 US sanctions focused still more closely on Putin’s inner circle, targeting his son-in-law Kirill Shamalov, as well as businessmen linked to the Kremlin such as Vladimir Bogdanov and Oleg Deripaska.
According to the logic of the sanctions, since power and wealth are highly concentrated in Russia, punishing those with personal connections to Putin is the best way to strike at the heart of the regime. Yet the belief that a handful of people wield absolute political and economic power over the country – or that it is ruled by a ‘kleptocracy’ centred on Putin{2} – mistakes a symptom for a prime cause. Even if sanctions brought about a change in policy or personnel, they would do little to alter the underlying conditions that produced the regime in the first place. As suggested in the last chapter, the Putin system isn’t simply a corrupt, dictatorial structure imposed on a helpless population; it’s embedded in the social, economic and political fabric of the country. In other words, if we really want to understand how Russia is ruled, we need to look beyond the individuals at the summits of wealth and power to the system that enables them to thrive.