Despite these tendencies, Russia does not fully fit into the model outlined by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.86 They argue that the survival interests of political leaders contribute to an intentional decay of quality of governance more or less universally. However, the Russian state was and is still able to conduct prudent policies and successfully pursue major developmental goals if and when they are strategically important for political leaders. Apart from rent-seekers, Russia’s “winning coalitions” have also involved numerous technocrats who have effectively provided quality expertise and put forth effort to prevent major governance failures and have often designed and implemented policy advancements, even though their results are sometimes far from desired. Certain state-driven development programs have brought positive effects. The problem is that such a coexistence of various patterns of governance (in the jargon used by some international agencies, it is referred to as “bad enough governance”)87 is rather imperfect and results in numerous contradictions. At best, these winning coalitions enabled certain fool-proofing in governing Russia88 during the twenty-first century, but they were a poor fit for further development of the country.89 Following Rodrik’s parallel stated above, one must admit that governance in Russia resembles neither Singapore under Lee Kwan Yew nor Congo under Mobutu Sese Seko, but rather combines elements of various models. However, this combination also contributes to the reinforcement of bad governance in the manner of a vicious circle. This vicious circle may be reproduced over time under different rulers, and attempts to overcome bad governance, if and when they occur, face strong resistance and often have only a limited impact on the quality of governance. I argue that the mechanism of bad governance in Russia and beyond cannot be broken without major regime changes, and even these changes will not necessarily bring about its defeat and the improvement of quality of governance, at least in the short term.
As I consider bad governance to be a primarily agency-driven phenomenon, its construction in post-Communist Russia and beyond may be regarded as an equivalent to the deliberate poisoning of the societal organism.90 Unlike other causes of major diseases—such as inheritance or trauma—it has been an outcome of the purposeful actions of numerous actors, driven mostly by their self-interest but also by certain ideas that guided the processes of post-Communist transformation. In one way or another, this poisoning achieved its goals because of the fertile grounds and the lack of antidote amid the cultivation of bad governance via the efforts of Russia’s rulers and their cronies. Before turning to a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of bad governance in Russia, I will briefly outline the trajectory of its rise and further evolution, with an emphasis on the major critical junctures and drivers of continuity and changes.
The quality of governance in the Soviet Union was exceedingly poor. However, it was very different from what is understood as bad governance in terms of this book: rent-seeking and corruption as goals of governing the state. The political regime in the Soviet Union was highly institutionalized: it placed major formal and informal constraints on the behavior of elites, at least after Stalin’s death.91 Even though major violations of these rules occurred from time to time, they were largely considered deviations rather than norms.92 Nevertheless, attempts to rearrange the Soviet model of governance during Gorbachev’s perestroika were poorly prepared and changed the quality of governance from bad to worse amid a major crisis of the Soviet economy and the state.93 In the end, the Soviet Union collapsed under the avalanche of simultaneous economic troubles, political tensions, and ethnic conflicts.94 To some extent, the Soviet collapse, which contributed to a dramatic decline of state capacity in Russia and in the entire post-Soviet region,95 had the unintended consequence of serving as a trigger event for the rise of bad governance during the following decades because of the grave weakening of political and institutional constraints to rent-seeking.
No wonder that the “roaring” 1990s in Russia demonstrated plenty of examples of bad governance against the background of major political conflicts, a deep and protracted economic transformation recession, and the fragmentation of the Russian state in both vertical and horizontal dimensions. These include various developments such as “state capture” by economic interest groups,96 spontaneous state devolution from the federal center to regional fiefdoms,97 the criminal business of private protection98 and the like. After this turbulence, the period of complex “triple transition” (regime change, market transformation, and nation-state building)99 ended by the early 2000s. Then the Russian economy attained an unprecedented growth rate, and the Russian state partially restored its capacity. Soon after, agents of state capture became peripheral or were integrated into the new institutional environment. “Oligarchs” lost their control over the political agenda and were placed into subordinate positions within the state-led corporatism;100 regional bosses lost their leverages of power and became dependent upon the federal center and large nationwide companies;101 criminal “violent entrepreneurs” were either legalized or marginalized,102 and so forth. To paraphrase the title once coined by Theda Skocpol, the Russian state was being brought back.103 One might expect that the conservative post-revolutionary stabilization of the 2000s104 would not only extend the time horizon of major actors, but also open up room for a new gradual drift of Russia toward eradication of bad governance, similarly to overcoming growing pains. Over time, however, these tendencies in Russia became even stronger.
In the early 2000s, the Russian leaders launched several programs of state-driven policy reforms aimed at improving the quality of governance, and some of them brought major positive effects, even though they were only partial.105 Still, the drive for policy reforms was short-lived, and gradually these reforms lost priority status in the agenda of Putin and his entourage.106 At the same time, political changes aimed at democratization were intentionally and systematically pushed out of the menu of options for political leaders and policy reformers alike for the sake of an “authoritarian modernization” strategy (analyzed in detail in chapter 3).107 Over the course of the next decade, this strategy was implemented in a controversial way—an electoral authoritarian regime was successfully built and consolidated in Russia,108 yet the “narrow” economic modernization faced numerous problems, including those related to the quality of governance. In fact, Russia’s ruling groups effectively used the strengthening of the state and economic growth to pursue their opportunistic interests. Speaking more broadly, one might argue that the restoration of state capacity and economic growth does not by default lead to the overcoming of bad governance. Quite the opposite, the Russian experience of the 2000s has demonstrated that the “medicine” of authoritarianism can be even worse than the illness of bad governance itself; the post-traumatic stress resulting from this method of healing can easily turn into a pernicious chronic disease. In many ways, Russia in the 2000s fits the bitter statement of Adam Przeworski: “as any order is better than any disorder, any order is established.”109 This maxim is also true for the politico-economic order of bad governance that was established in Russia at that time.