International sanctions may have shaken the former KGB guy, but his control on the levers of power is still very solid. Putin has not lost all while wading through the troubled waters of Ukraine and persistently the Syrian quagmire. Moreover, under his tutelage, Russia has doubled its GDP, paid off its foreign loans almost four years early, built up a one party façade of democracy, deployed its energy resources as a means of coercive diplomacy, reasserted its regional influence
Vladimir Putin is one of the most theatrically visible leaders in the world starting from the UN to Ukraine via Syria. He plays his own brand of politics. Upon his third victory to power on May 7, 2012, he pronounced publicly, “serving Russia is the meaning my whole life”. Alas! His persona full of greed for both money and power is marching ordinary Russians back to the days of anarchy and probably to a kind of “state of nature” as British philosopher Thomas Hobbes predicted in the 16th century. On the other hand, “during the Putin era, Russia has changed considerably. The country has doubled its GDP, paid off its foreign loans almost four years early, built up a one party façade of democracy, deployed its energy resources as a means of coercive diplomacy, reasserted its regional influence, fought a war against Georgia” as Joshua Yaffa writes in 2012 on the eve of Putin’s third stint in power. But gradually most of the myths around the epitaph of his power personality is fast fading and it is well established that behind the dream of the revival of his “Great Russian Empire”, he and his cronies are consolidating power and amassing wealth at the cost of the rest of Russia.
let’s see how he is rising (to fall!) in his power ladder and what defines his untrammeled quest for the same. First of all, if we flip through his autobiography published in 2000 named First Person wherein he told, “I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person, really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot…A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people.” This amply portraits the real power monger in him and his constant search for ways and means to consolidate authority only with him. In a wonderful account of Putin, Masha Gessen in her The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012) diagnoses him with “pleonexia”, the desire to have what rightfully belongs to others. But this could be an exaggerated claim to be established lawfully. The initial years of post-Soviet days were disorienting time, which finally lead to the fall of the ruble, an upcoming horrific war in Chechnya and an extremely quiet rise of Putin from the shadows of the Kremlin. On the sidelines of those turbulent days, there was a tantalising hope generated among some of the Russians that the country may witness twilight of democracy. But Russia, the first-ever Socialist State established under the so-called principles of Marxism, awaited its new era politician who grandiosely cherished the dream of the revival of an empire in a globalised world truly passing obviously to the US and its allies.
Today, Russia under Putin is a unique type of a hybrid regime which can be rightly called as “electoral patronage system”. First, the formal mechanism for gaining, maintaining, and retaining the most powerful posts in the country is regular elections. Second, real opposition parties are allowed to exist and at least some of them are permitted to compete in these elections. Third, power in the regime is exercised primarily through complex networks of patron-client relations (Afanasiev 1997). Thus under Putin, the politics take a new turn that offers individual incentives and private benefits to a selected group of elites; and at times, some of these people also receive both explicit and implicit threats from the machines of the all-powerful State. The methods employed currently are called in the West as “machine politics” whereas in Russia as “administrative resource” (administrativnyi resurs). Putin’s State machinery is controlled by him at the top of the pyramid followed by a series of individuals and institutions that surely ensure the equal distribution of both resources and punishments. Again, an entire set of sub-patrons monitor and hold on their influence on the organs of the system under the supervision of the patrons. Popularly, in Russian prism, this system can be called “power vertical” (vertical vlasti). This is the kind of system that unleashed an entire process of autocratisation since the coming of power of Putin in 2000s.
However, Putin’s arrival was scripted nearly ten years after the collapse of the USSR under the decaying personality of Boris Yeltsin. Indeed, his rise could be credited to the humiliating, at times overbearing and counterproductive approach that West, particularly the US, took towards Moscow throughout all the 1990s. This further reinforced the insecurity of Russia in the emerging power play of the global bigwigs and it tacitly put the seal of approval for Putin’s reactionary and nationalistic foreign policy agenda when he took over the reins of power from Yeltsin. Thus, “Putin was meant to rescue the country from that painful era. To the members of Yeltsin’s inner circle, he seemed an honest, dependable figure and, most important, one without a threatening agenda or a power base of his own” (Yaffa). To many, this surely made Putin the ideal candidate for replacing the ailing ruler of Russia. Gessen says that Putin being apparently devoid of personality and personal interest would be both malleable and disciplined. Many Yeltsin-era statesman and the Kremlin strategists found in Putin “the loyal statist, the clean cut, modernising reformer, the sober and disciplined KGB man”. But no one could foresee the “grand statesman” in Putin, who simply wanted power to be one and only with him.
The opposition which is growing much faster in Russia can now never be called as “ineffectual” as Putin used to claim. It is for sure now that growing anti-Government protests in Russia, basically spearheaded by a rising middle class and activists would continue. The opposition is not organised, have no ideological or common set of goals, and Putin can hardly be scared of them. Besides, unlike the Soviet Union, “Putinism” offers a wide array of opportunities and life chances for its citizenry. The Putin system leaves its citizens alone without the blind and regressive ideological moorings of Soviet era. Hence, it does not demand unquestionable loyalty from the citizens like the days of Stalin, leaving them with a growing economy, rechristened armed forces, and a deep sense of patriotism which the Russians had never felt before in the recent past. Except meddling in politics, Putin allows all other career options to his countrymen. To be precise, his Russia can aptly be described as much more post-modern than the archaic, lumbering and stifling control all brought by the Soviet system. Nevertheless, Putin detractors and the most liberal folk of the western critics, who are regularly harbouring Russia’s transition to a democratic future, do believe that he has solidly established the architecture of stability, a sheer divorce from the catastrophe heralded by Gorbachev’s Perestroika and Glasnost to the most humiliating days of Yeltsin saga of the 1990s.
The crux of the “Putin Problem” is to be measured from the parlance of the Russian millennials, the young people belonging to the late teens and 20s. They are known as “Putin Generation” or “Pokolenie Putina” in Russian language. Ironically, though these Russians are best exposed to the rest of the world through the gizmos and gadgets of the information and communication technologies, yet they prefer not to cherish the Western liberal values or rather not willing to see Russia as a weak power. As Sarah E Mendelson emphatically writes, “Russian millennials wished to see their country restored as a hyper sovereign power that would stand outside the Euro-Atlantic community and resist international legal norms. Most of them believed that Putin had set the country on the right path. They enthusiastically consumed the Kremlin’s steady diet of Soviet nostalgia, xenophobia, homophobia and anti-Americanism. And the more educated they were, the more likely they were to hold anti-American views.” This quietly infuses a broad stream of energy and passion to Putin in quelling independent media, opposition, personal rivals and particularly critics in the liberal parts of the world. By now, he has assured that no opposition and independent voices could thrive in his empire. But it would always remain a mystery whether the views expressed by Russian millennials are representative of the whole cohort of young and educated Russians across the country.
For many international observers, Russia’s transition to democracy may not be as bloody as the one we foresee for Syria in the post-Assad phase. Examples of this dynamic abound, but Putin might suffer from his own mistakes. This could be so because his ideas, policies and master strategies are always being emanated from limited sources that are also decided in close doors (say close minds!).
Paradoxically, international sanctions may have shaken the former KGB guy, but his control on the levers of power is still very solid. He has not lost all while wading through the troubled waters of Ukraine and persistently the Syrian quagmire. Hence a group of strong but very small section of Russian elites would definitely fight until the last to safeguard Putin and his Russia. Indeed, should Putin fall, it is widely presumed that Russia may not fall into an abyss, but its populace may witness a less violent, and much quicker bloodless political transition. But then what would Putin doIJ It seems instead of “withering away of the state” as Karl Marx’s prophetic dictum goes, the time now has come for the 21st century Russian political panorama to witness, the “withering away of the statesman” (of course the most indispensable one ever in the recent history of Russia).
(The writer is an independent political analyst based in Delhi)