Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, Part 3 of 14
Centralization versus decentralization is one of the most subtle issues in human history. There is never any kind of permanent or lasting answer that works in all situations. A person who says decentralization is always the right answer must be of the anarchist/libertarian persuasion, someone who feels we should all go back to living the simple life on a farm, far away from modern complexity, or sometimes they subscribe to science-fiction scenarios where it becomes possible to marry together our sophisticated economy with extreme decentralization. (In conversations online I’ve noticed some people will insist “We can do this now thanks to computers.” They vaguely gesture at computers as some kind of magic force that can solve all problems, but they never get specific about how, exactly, computers would allow decentralization. I’ll point out that so far computers and the Internet have facilitated the centralization of human knowledge and human relationships into a small number of databases, controlled by a half dozen corporations.)
No doubt many people would be happier in a high decentralized world, so perhaps someday someone will figure out how to make it work. For my part, I'll simply say, I don't think most people want to be farmers. I worked on an apple orchard for much of 6 years and I can tell you that it is difficult work. I don't think most people would enjoy it. I do think most people enjoy some of the perks of our modern, sophisticated life. And for now, no one has managed to figure out how to achieve our current international division of labor without also allowing a high degree of centralization (though of course the international nature of the work is, in itself, a form of decentralization). Therefore, I assume that during my lifetime, a high level of centralization is necessary to build a prosperous society.
Nevertheless, we write treaties to better decentralize the economy through international trade, dispersing the work from old economic centers and expanding the overall range of activities carried out over a wider and wider area. Likewise, any Constitutional system tends to reserve some powers for the center while it also reserves some other powers for the periphery. So a careful system of decentralization can be thought of as akin, or perhaps parallel to, our system of checks and balances.
However, decentralizing during a crisis, decentralizing pell mell, decentralizing for sheer lack of revenue, will tend to lead to chaos and will compound the crisis, leading to a deeper crisis. So we can agree, there was nothing liberatory or freeing about the crisis that Russia found itself in during the 1990s:
The treaties proved a useful tool for avoiding further ruinous conflict. They also resulted in the piecemeal, asymmetric decentralization of the Russian state and a confounding set of overlapping responsibilities. The bilateral–treaties were extremely unpopular in central government and parliamentary circles. By the end of the 1990s, as Putin rose to the top of the Russian government, they had become one of the most enduring symbols of the administrative chaos and weakness of the Russian state. Politicians in Moscow demanded they be overturned. With the treaties in place, leaders of republics vaulted from the status of regional functionaries to presidents and national–level political figures. Regional politicians reinterpreted Moscow’s decrees to suit local concerns. They refused to implement Russian federal legislation. They created their own economic associations. They withheld tax revenues from the federal government. They openly criticized central government policy. Beyond Chechnya, this weakness found perhaps its best expression in the Russian far east, in Primorsky Krai. There, at the furthest edge of the Russian Federation, Moscow engaged in what seemed like a never–ending political battle with the region’s obstinate governor, Yevgeny Nazdratenko. From his political perch in Vladivostok, the governor assailed the Yeltsin government’s attempts to reach a border agreement with China. He accused Moscow of cutting off Primorsky Krai’s access to the Pacific Ocean. He stationed his own paramilitary Cossack forces on the border, diverted federal funds for his personal pet projects, and generally harangued Yeltsin for creating the region’s chronic economic problems.
The point is, nothing about this was liberatory. This is the decentralization of crisis, it is not a planned or deliberate decentralization, it does not lead to a well-designed system of “checks and balances.”
About this:
The first key to Vladimir Putin’s personality is his view of himself as a man of the state, his identity as a statist (gosudarstvennik in Russian). Putin sees himself as someone who belongs to a large cohort of people demanding the restoration of the state.
It strikes me as noteworthy that we don't have a good word for "gosudarstvennik" when we mean to refer to a leader in a democratic nation who wields legitimate power under a Constitution. That is, what is the right word for someone who wants to expand the power of the state while following a legitimate democratic process, and for legitimate democratic goals? Many people use the word "socialism" for this but that is wrong in two ways. First of all, "socialism" does not automatically indicate "democratic" nor "legitimate" and, second of all, "socialism" implies a left-wing economic agenda that is an extraneous meaning in this context. After all, we can imagine a moderate right-wing leader who wants to expand the power of the state while following a legitimate process, and for a legitimate goal, especially during war. Since "ikano" is Greek for “ability”, I'd suggest "demoikano" would be more precise for this usage. I'm going to come back to this in later essays.
About this:
One of Putin’s main points in his manifesto was that throughout history, the Russian state lost its status when its people were divided, when Russians lost sight of the common values that united them and distinguished them from all others. Since the fall of communism, Putin asserted, Russians had embraced personal rights and freedoms, freedom of personal expression, freedom to travel abroad. These universal values were fine, but they were not “Russian.”
I read this book, Mr Putin, during 2021, but I'm only now posting it on Demodexio, in 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, and I admit, I read this paragraph differently now than I read it a year ago. Reading it now I'm surprised to realize how much was visible in plain sight, we just didn't interpret it the correct way. What is clear now is how much Putin's drive to reestablish an authoritarian order was visible from before his first full day on the job.
About this:
There were other, distinctly Russian values that were at the core of what Putin called the “Russian Idea.” Those values were patriotism, collectivism, solidarity, derzhavnost – the belief that Russia is destined always to be a great power (derzhava) exerting its influence abroad – and the untranslatable gosudarstvennichestvo.
For all the many failures of Putin, we must acknowledge that he was able to assert that he knew what Russian values were. Unlike with Yelstin, with Putin there was no need to form a committee to figure out what Russians should believe in. Perhaps this is one reason why confident strongmen tend to win during episodes of chaos -- they seem to have answers while other leaders are forming committees to try to discover answers. Of course, history teaches us that these strongmen often have answers that are inaccurate, and which over time will lead to disaster. But their confidence, in the short term, makes them very attractive. (But given that Russia is unable to conquer a poor nation such as Ukraine, the belief that Russia is derzhava is clearly inaccurate.)
Many people have noted that the war in Ukraine seems devoid of ideology. Perhaps this explains the lack of comprehensible political ideals:
Putin promised to restore that role. He declared himself to be a gosudarstvennik, a builder of the state, a servant of the state. A gosudarstvennik, a person who believes that Russia must be and must have a strong state, has a particular resonance in Russia. It does not imply someone who engages in politics. A gosudarstvennik is not a politician driven by a set of distinct beliefs who represents a certain group or constituency and jumps into the fray to run for political office. Instead, the term refers to someone who is selected or self–selects to serve the country on a permanent basis and who believes only in the state itself.
Here is perhaps the saddest aspect of Russia' fate, that during a liquid moment, when anything was possible, they could not come up with any new ideas:
In July 1996, Boris Yeltsin’s weak, crisis–ridden government concluded that with so many of its supporters and opponents obsessing about a national idea, it would have to jump into the fray. Yeltsin designated a presidential aide and prominent political thinker, Georgy Satarov, to chair a group of scholars and analysts that would sift through all the material on the issue. Yeltsin directed the group to roll out prescriptions for creating a new Russian Idea before 2000 and the new millennium. In a speech justifying his decision, Yeltsin noted, “In Russian history during the 20th century, there have been various periods – monarchism, totalitarianism, perestroika and finally a democratic path of development. Each stage has its own ideology…[but now]...we have none.” Unfortunately, the group did not make much progress in coming up with a Russian Idea. At the end of 1996, Georgy Satarov came out with a few vague parameters and some strong cautions for the new national idea.
And so, lacking any new ideas, they went back to a very old idea: tyranny.
By the way, this is partly why I write here on Demodexio. I assume at some point in the next 100 years the USA will also have a liquid moment when substantial change is possible. And I want the public to be armed with a rich set of new ideas, to which I hope to contribute.
This is a surprise:
Putin, however, has consistently proved more circumspect on the issue of russkost’ and russkiy than General Leonov and the other professional patriots in Russian nationalist circles. While their hopes may have offered a broader frame of reference for the Millennium Message, Vladimir Putin explicitly talked about a Rossiyskaya ideya, not a Russkaya ideya in his manifesto.
That is, Putin believed in a greater Russia, beyond Russian ethnic identity. Here we are to believe that Putin is multicultural, he embraces the rich diversity of all of Russia. Given how he has evolved, we must ask whether he had a certain wisdom, which he has lost with time, or whether he had good advisors who initially steered him away from his worst impulses? Or would it be correct to think of Putin as a multicultural imperialist? His invasion of Ukraine shows that his expansive understanding of Russia includes other Slavic ethnic groups. Perhaps he is only open-minded in the sense that an all-conquering emperor needs to be open minded?
Coming from someone else, this might have been a message of liberation:
In the Millennium Message, Putin explicitly warned against the danger of creating another schism (raskol) in society with the creation of a new state ideology. He also took direct issue with politicians, publicists, and scholars who demanded it: “I am against the creation in Russia of a state, official ideology in any form.”
Here we see, at least in retrospect, the dangers of populism and personal rule. In the West, we are official committed to an ideology of liberal democracies. In the Soviet Union they were officially committed to an ideology of Communism. Under Putin, they are unofficially committed to whatever whims dominate Putin's thinking. Populism, whether left-wing or right-wing, leads to personal rule, and personal rule does not offer liberation. The absense of an official commitment to particular values does not lead to more freedom, but rather, it leads to domination by whatever ideas the leader decides to inflict on society.
The eventual defeat of the libertarians was inevitable, but we should take a moment to appreciate exactly how ironic this was:
Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar, and the other liberal economics reformers had focused in the early 1990s on dismantling and deregulating the defunct Soviet state so they could unleash the forces of the free market. They were not adherents to the gosudarstvennik myth of the enduring stand–alone power and permanence of the “State.” Faced with institutional chaos and attempts on every front by individual interests, like the oligarchs and regional leaders, to capture bits of the Russian state, they could not press ahead with their reforms. The liberal reformers recognized the state was now too weak. They needed to restore some capacity to the apparatus of the state, to the vlast’, even if they intended only for the state to play a more instrumental or caretaker role until the reforms could take hold. The primary key to restoring this version of a strong state was to ensure, first, that the team administering the state apparatus – the Russian leadership and the Russian government – was strengthened. This is what the poslaniye laid out.
Yes, the libertarians needed a strong and powerful government to fight for less government.
Let's think about the evolution of leadership over the grand sweep of things. When Caesar went into Gaul, around 58 BC, he encountered large tribes of 500,000 to 1 million people. Let's assume these tribes had expanded thanks to the domestication of animals, in a revolution similar to the Industrial Revolution. Let's assume a factor of 10. So perhaps 20,000 years ago, before the domestication of animals, the largest tribes had between 50,000 to 100,000 people. These tribes might have been the last time where a single individual could actually govern, though even here we assume chieftains had advisors and loyal warriors to translate commands into action.
The feudal governments of Europe never got past a king and a few hundred advisors and secretaries. Such governments might have been large in the 1400s, but were too small by the late 1700s. In 1789, on the even of the Revolution, the French court consisted of the King and a bit more than 500 advisors and secretaries, and the French government was crippled, relative to Britain, as Britain was already developing a modern bureaucracy. The French Revolution brought enormous strength to France, such that by 1795 the French government had grown to 5,000 staff -- almost a 10x expansion in a few short years. And this bureaucracy gave France the remarkable power to fight all of Europe.
The 1800s witnessed an enormous expansion of these bureaucracies, as society became more complex, and the division of labor became more specialized. By the late 1800s, all successful societies were governed by a system of committees. Only in primitive, backwards Russia was there still the notion that the Tsar could govern personally, but this meant that every town in Russia was sending their complaints to the Tsar, and the Tsar was overwhelmed with paperwork, as he lacked the staff to sift through and filter out the unimportant requests (I'm taking this last bit from The Sleepwalkers). The Communist Revolution of 1917 accomplished in Russia what the French Revolution had accomplished in France, it brought in the kind of modern bureaucracy that could manage a large and complex society. But without a system of "check and balances" (in particular, an independent judiciary and an independent free press) there was no outside force to keep the system accountable, nor anyway for the committees to resolve their differences when they had become deadlocked. We covered that previously.
Without any system of accountability, the system of committees devolved into a pure struggle for power, in which the revenues commanded by each committee mattered far more than whatever the supposed legal mandate of that committee might have originally been. The law was disregarded, the legal mandate given to the committee was ignored, actual control of money trumped all else. The collapse of Communism was, therefore, a chance to get back to some kind of law based system.
Chubais and Putin initially wanted a law based system:
The reference to the law (pravo) in the poslaniye is another important element. Anatoly Chubais and his team wanted the law to set the new rules of the market economy and provide the means to enforce them. They wanted to get everything back on the right track of reform again (their track). Putin, after becoming acting president in 2000, would also emphasize the importance of the law. He would emphasize it as an instrument – as a means of controlling, proscribing, and constraining economic, as well as political, reform. Putin’s concept of the law as a means of control draws upon ideas he became well–versed in during his long association with Anatoly Sobchack, first as his student then as his aide and deputy. Although Sobchak was seen as a leading Russian democrat in the 1990s, his legal views were much less liberal than his political reputation might have suggested. In his legal writings in the Soviet period and the 1990s, Sobchak presented the establishment of a “law–based state” (pravovoye gosudarstvo) as a form of conservative rebellion against the Communist Party, which he described as “substitut[ing] itself for all government institutions.” The concept of a pravovoye gosudarstvo, standing above any party or other institutional entity, with rights guaranteed by the state itself, was an idea to which Putin would frequently return during his presidency.
But again, without a system of "check and balances" (in particular, an independent judiciary and an independent free press) there was no way to preserve a law based system. The law never got a chance to function correctly, as it has always been crippled by the large space that Putin reserves for his personal rule. Apparently Putin has often complained that the government should be able to operate more automatically, with less involvement from him -- he does not seem to understand how much he himself blocks the operation of a bureaucracy that can run on autopilot. Who wants to make a decision, when the decision might displease Putin, and the punishment might be death?
Circa 2000, we can never know how much Putin agreed with Chubais, versus how much Putin had to pretend to agree with Chubais because what Chubais was saying was in keeping with the mood of the Russian elites around the time that Putin first gained power. Some of these slogans are not far from the standard formulations we associate with the British Whigs:
"but democracy – this is a dictatorship of the law"
Substitute “liberalism” for “democracy” and this was a common idea in Britain in the 1800s and 1900s. And also this:
The quote reflected Novgordtsev’s (and Putin’s) antirevolutionary, statist beliefs: “People often think proclaiming various freedoms and universal suffrage will in and of itself give some miraculous strength to direct life onto a new course. In actual fact, in such instances in life, what happens usually turns out not to be democracy, but depending on the turn events take, either oligarchy or anarchy.”
As written, such a statement is something any British Conservative would agree with.
What’s missing is the awareness that the law can only be preserved by a system of “checks and balances.” This was clear to Montesquieu, back in 1748, when he wrote The Spirit Of The Laws. That was the book when he first introduced the phrase “checks and balances.” Our freedom survives only if the law survives, and the law can only survive when there is an independent judiciary. All of history teaches us this, again and again. The lesson is clear. But somehow Putin missed the lesson, or he never actually cared, and he was only pretending.
Of course, all of this theory is rather pretty. In reality, Putin and the oligarchs built a system largely based on corruption. Without a system of “checks and balances” there was no real hope of building a law based system, so the corruption came to define all power relations.
The above quotes are pulled from this excerpt:
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin
Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy
Copyright © 2013/2016 The Brookings Institution
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Page 31–32
The treaty between Moscow and Chechnya emboldened other regions to demand bilateral treaties. Instead of a stopgap measure, the treaties became the primary mechanism for regulating Moscow’s relations with its entire periphery. Over a two–year period, the Yeltsin government was forced to negotiate agreements with Bashkortorstan, a major oil–producing region next to Tartarstan; republics neighboring Chechnya in the North Caucasus; Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Perm, and Irkutsk, all predominantly ethnic Russian regions stretching from Russia’s heartland into the Urals and the Lake Baikal region of Siberia; the Siberian republic of Sakha–Yakutiya, which is the heart of Russia’s diamond industry; the enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea; and even St. Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad oblast. The treaties proved a useful tool for avoiding further ruinous conflict. They also resulted in the piecemeal, asymmetric decentralization of the Russian state and a confounding set of overlapping responsibilities.
The bilateral–treaties were extremely unpopular in central government and parliamentary circles. By the end of the 1990s, as Putin rose to the top of the Russian government, they had become one of the most enduring symbols of the administrative chaos and weakness of the Russian state. Politicians in Moscow demanded they be overturned. With the treaties in place, leaders of republics vaulted from the status of regional functionaries to presidents and national–level political figures. Regional politicians reinterpreted Moscow’s decrees to suit local concerns. They refused to implement Russian federal legislation. They created their own economic associations. They withheld tax revenues from the federal government. They openly criticized central government policy. Beyond Chechnya, this weakness found perhaps its best expression in the Russian far east, in Primorsky Krai. There, at the furthest edge of the Russian Federation, Moscow engaged in what seemed like a never–ending political battle with the region’s obstinate governor, Yevgeny Nazdratenko. From his political perch in Vladivostok, the governor assailed the Yeltsin government’s attempts to reach a border agreement with China. He accused Moscow of cutting off Primorsky Krai’s access to the Pacific Ocean. He stationed his own paramilitary Cossack forces on the border, diverted federal funds for his personal pet projects, and generally harangued Yeltsin for creating the region’s chronic economic problems. Putin would later find a creative way of dealing with Governor Nazdratenko that would become a hallmark of his efforts to deal with other difficult personalities in the 2000s.
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Page 39–40
THE “MILLENNIUM MESSAGE”
The first key to Vladimir Putin’s personality is his view of himself as a man of the state, his identity as a statist (gosudarstvennik in Russian). Putin sees himself as someone who belongs to a large cohort of people demanding the restoration of the state. Vladimir Putin publicly presented himself as a statist and offered his vision for the restoration of the Russian state in one of his first major political statements and presentations just before he became acting Russian president. This statement sets the scene for Putin’s time as both president and prime minister. As a result, we need to examine the specific connotations of being a statist in the Russian context of the 1990s.
On December 29, 1999, the website of the Russian government posted a 5,000–word treatise under the signature of then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Its title was “Russia on the Threshold of the New Millennium.” Two days later, the president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, appeared on national television to declare that he was resigning and handing over power to Putin. The Internet treatise became known as the “Millennium Message.” It was Vladimir Putin’s political mission statement or manifesto for the beginning of his presidency, and it provides the overall framework for understanding the system of governance he has created around him.
One of Putin’s main points in his manifesto was that throughout history, the Russian state lost its status when its people were divided, when Russians lost sight of the common values that united them and distinguished them from all others. Since the fall of communism, Putin asserted, Russians had embraced personal rights and freedoms, freedom of personal expression, freedom to travel abroad. These universal values were fine, but they were not “Russian.” Nor would they be enough to ensure Russia’s survival. There were other, distinctly Russian values that were at the core of what Putin called the “Russian Idea.” Those values were patriotism, collectivism, solidarity, derzhavnost – the belief that Russia is destined always to be a great power (derzhava) exerting its influence abroad – and the untranslatable gosudarstvennichestvo.
Russia is not America or Britain with their historical liberal traditions, Putin went on:
For us, the state and its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of the country and the people. For Russians, a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Quite the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any change….Society desires the restoration of the guiding and regulating role of the state.
Putin promised to restore that role. He declared himself to be a gosudarstvennik, a builder of the state, a servant of the state. A gosudarstvennik, a person who believes that Russia must be and must have a strong state, has a particular resonance in Russia. It does not imply someone who engages in politics. A gosudarstvennik is not a politician driven by a set of distinct beliefs who represents a certain group or constituency and jumps into the fray to run for political office. Instead, the term refers to someone who is selected or self–selects to serve the country on a permanent basis and who believes only in the state itself.
Similarly, the state, or gosudarstvo, has a very specific meaning. In Russia, the relationship between the state – Mother Russia, the motherland, Mat’ Rossiya, or Rodina – and the individual is different from that in most Western countries. In the United States, the state exists to protect the rights of the individual. The twist in Russia is that while Mother Russia must be protected, she does not necessarily protect her own citizens. In Russia, the state is primary. The state is a stand–alone entity – sometimes rendered in a capitalized form as the “State.” The individual and society are, and must be, subordinate to the state and its interests. This is the essence of gosudarstvennichestvo as Putin conceived of it in the Millennium Message.
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Page 44–46
Over the next several years, the elite debate about pulling Russia out of its crisis settled on the concept of finding a national idea to bring the country’s political factions together. The concept of a Russian Idea had many prominent proponents before Putin featured it in the Millennium Message. One of the first was Andrei Kokoshin, a leading academic arms control specialist who served as first deputy defense minister from 1992 to 1997. Kokoshin circulated a treatise on Russia’s national security and “military might” in 1995 that argued that Russia could not revive unless it came up with a new national idea. Kokoshin asserted in this treatise and in subsequent publications that the importance of creating the idea had “already been acknowledged by the most active part of our society – politicians, scholars, journalists, public servants, party leaders, union activists, entrepreneurs, and of particular importance by leaders of industry and regular workers.” This was exactly the same reference Vladimir Putin would make in December 1999 in the Millennium Message, when he asserted, “Society desires the restoration of the guiding and regulating role of the state.”
General Alexander Lebed chose the same theme as a focal point for his political program during and after the 1996 Russian presidential election. In a series of speeches, interviews, and articles, Lebed stressed the importance of establishing “powerful authority” in Russia by formulating a unifying national idea. The Russian Communist Party presented itself as the “party of the restoration of Russia’s great–power status” in the 1995 parliamentary elections and then continued to emphasize restoration as a key political goal. Gennady Zyuganov’s 1997 report to the annual Congress of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, for example, declared that “the restoration of the people’s power and the rebirth of the ruined state...is the basis for a true national consensus.” Zyuganov also argued that “during its thousand–year existence [the Russian] people have discovered the ideals of Spirituality and State Strength, Justice and Collectivism. The history of Russia testifies that none of these qualities can be neglected without the risk of causing the greatest upheavals….We are confident – Russia will be Great and Socialist.” With the exception of the reference to a “Socialist” Russia, Zyuganov’s 1997 report could have been given by Vladimir Putin at any point on or after December 29, 1999.
YELTSIN’S SEARCH FOR A NEW RUSSIAN IDEA
In July 1996, Boris Yeltsin’s weak, crisis–ridden government concluded that with so many of its supporters and opponents obsessing about a national idea, it would have to jump into the fray. Yeltsin designated a presidential aide and prominent political thinker, Georgy Satarov, to chair a group of scholars and analysts that would sift through all the material on the issue. Yeltsin directed the group to roll out prescriptions for creating a new Russian Idea before 2000 and the new millennium. In a speech justifying his decision, Yeltsin noted, “In Russian history during the 20th century, there have been various periods – monarchism, totalitarianism, perestroika and finally a democratic path of development. Each stage has its own ideology…[but now]...we have none.”
Unfortunately, the group did not make much progress in coming up with a Russian Idea. At the end of 1996, Georgy Satarov came out with a few vague parameters and some strong cautions for the new national idea.
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Page 48–49
Not surprisingly, the KGB, not just the interior ministry, was heavily involved in the debates and interpretations of the Russian Idea in his period. Embracing the Orthodox Church became very popular in KGB circles in the 1990s. In 1995, several years after his retirement from the KGB, General Nikolai Leonov, for example, became a political commentator for the popular Russian TV program, Russian House (Russkiy dom). The TV program also published a magazine of the same name. It was widely seen as “an Orthodox, nationalist program,” and Leonov was viewed as a strong advocate of the more exclusive, ethnic Russian version of the Russian Idea championed by Zhirinovsky and Rogozin. Leonov even sought election to the Russian parliament in 1999 as part of the Russian Popular Union (Rossiyskiy obshchenarodnyy soyuz or ROS), a nationalist party then headed by Sergei Baburin, vice speaker of the Russian Duma. In his May 2001 interview with Spetsnaz Rossii, Leonov claimed that Vladimir Putin was in fact “a pupil of … I’d say, Russkiy dom, in the broad sense of that word.” He described Putin as “the president of our hopes,” for Russian “professional” patriots like himself.
Putin, however, has consistently proved more circumspect on the issue of russkost’ and russkiy than General Leonov and the other professional patriots in Russian nationalist circles. While their hopes may have offered a broader frame of reference for the Millennium Message, Vladimir Putin explicitly talked about a Rossiyskaya ideya, not a Russkaya ideya in his manifesto. Putin’s concern as Russian president, as we will discuss later in more detail, has been to create a sense of unity in his Russian Idea – something inclusive for everyone, as Georgy Satarov recommended – not to be exclusive and sow disunity. In the Millennium Message, Putin explicitly warned against the danger of creating another schism (raskol) in society with the creation of a new state ideology. He also took direct issue with politicians, publicists, and scholars who demanded it: “I am against the creation in Russia of a state, official ideology in any form.” He went on to note that societal consolidation could only be accomplished on a voluntary basis with the majority of Russian citizens (rossiyane) – not just ethnic Russians – firmly on board with the general ideas underpinning the state. In many respects, this section of the Millennium Message was the rollout of the prescriptions for a national idea that President Yeltsin had called for in July 1996. The prescriptions had been produced in advance of the 2000 presidential election as Yeltsin had requested, but it was the soon–to–be new president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, who produced them, not the Satarov group, nor the Yeltsin government.
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Page 50–53
The poslaniye was a nuts–and–bolts speech that honed in on the importance of restoring government control over the country’s political disarray. Its main message was that the greatest danger facing Russia in 1997 was the excessive weakness of state authority (vlast’). “One lesson is already clear,” the address asserted, “Russia needs order. But it is necessary to answer two not–so–simple questions: what kind of order and how to introduce it?” Yeltsin went on: “One reason for the current situation is that we had such political disagreements that we needed to compromise to avoid clashes. Now the situation has changed, and we can return to complete the reforms….The most effective way to establish order on the construction site is to complete the construction.”
The president’s address concluded:
The main obstacle to establishing a new economic order and a new political system is the low effectiveness of government authorities [vlasti] … order in the country begins only by establishing order in the state organism itself….Only a strong government authority [vlast’] which makes reasonable decisions and is capable of ensuring their effective implementation is in a condition for fulfilling its obligations: to give guarantees for the activity of the strong and of supporting the weak with dignity….
The reference to vlast’ (government authority) instead of gosudarstvo (the state) was particularly significant. Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar, and the other liberal economics reformers had focused in the early 1990s on dismantling and deregulating the defunct Soviet state so they could unleash the forces of the free market. They were not adherents to the gosudarstvennik myth of the enduring stand–alone power and permanence of the “State.” Faced with institutional chaos and attempts on every front by individual interests, like the oligarchs and regional leaders, to capture bits of the Russian state, they could not press ahead with their reforms. The liberal reformers recognized the state was now too weak. They needed to restore some capacity to the apparatus of the state, to the vlast’, even if they intended only for the state to play a more instrumental or caretaker role until the reforms could take hold. The primary key to restoring this version of a strong state was to ensure, first, that the team administering the state apparatus – the Russian leadership and the Russian government – was strengthened. This is what the poslaniye laid out.
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ANATOLY SOBCHAK AND THE LAW–GOVERNED STATE
The reference to the law (pravo) in the poslaniye is another important element. Anatoly Chubais and his team wanted the law to set the new rules of the market economy and provide the means to enforce them. They wanted to get everything back on the right track of reform again (their track). Putin, after becoming acting president in 2000, would also emphasize the importance of the law. He would emphasize it as an instrument – as a means of controlling, proscribing, and constraining economic, as well as political, reform. Putin’s concept of the law as a means of control draws upon ideas he became well–versed in during his long association with Anatoly Sobchack, first as his student then as his aide and deputy. Although Sobchak was seen as a leading Russian democrat in the 1990s, his legal views were much less liberal than his political reputation might have suggested. In his legal writings in the Soviet period and the 1990s, Sobchak presented the establishment of a “law–based state” (pravovoye gosudarstvo) as a form of conservative rebellion against the Communist Party, which he described as “substituting itself for all government institutions.” The concept of a pravovoye gosudarstvo, standing above any party or other institutional entity, with rights guaranteed by the state itself, was an idea to which Putin would frequently return during his presidency.
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On February 20, 2000, Anatoly Sobchak died suddenly of a massive heart attack while on a campaign trip to Kaliningrad in support of Putin’s official candidacy in the 2000 Russian presidential election. Putin was shaken by Sobchak’s death. It was a personal blow. Putin had initially been assigned to work with Sobchak by the KGB, but his relationship with the mayor long preceded this arrangement. Sobchak had been an important figure in Putin’s life, a close confidant and mentor as well as his professor and boss. A few days after Sobchak’s death, Putin turned to elaborate again on Sobchak’s, and his, core idea of the importance of a law–based state in an open letter to Russian voters. The letter laid out Putin’s view of the law and democracy, and the idea of the Russian people being governed by and abiding by the laws of the state: “but democracy – this is a dictatorship of the law (diktatura zakona), not a dictatorship of those whose jobs oblige them to uphold the law….The police and the prosecutors should serve the law, and not try to ‘privatize’ the powers given to them and use them for their own benefit.” This letter marked the beginning of Putin’s efforts to deploy the law as an instrument to strengthen the state. In doing so, Putin would enlist the assistance of Russia’s leading legal gosudarstvenniki, who, like Anatoly Sobchak, saw a powerful law–governed state as critical to Russia’s future development. The key person in this cohort was Valery Zorkin, the chairman of the Russian Constitutional Court, and the central figure – along with Sergei Glazyev and Gennady Zyuganov – in the 1994 Soglasiye movement for the restoration of the Russian state.
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In the words of the Millennium Message, the Russian president is required to ensure the “constitutional security of the gosudarstvo.” Thus, in keeping with the constitution’s prohibition against three consecutive presidential terms, Putin stepped away from the presidency in 2008 and into the role of Russian prime minister. Putin was explicit in his assertion that he did this to ensure the constitutional security of the gosudarstvo. “I will not change the constitution and in line with the constitution, you cannot run for president three times in a row,” Putin said repeatedly in the years leading up to the end of his second term. Similarly, in April 2012, just before leaving the premiership to reassume the presidency on May 7, 2012, Putin resigned from his leadership of the United Russia party, putting Dmitry Medvedev in charge. Mr. Putin stated that “the president should be a non–party figure...a consolidating figure for all the political forces in the country, for all its citizens.”
These ideas about the Russian constitution and the presidency, and many other concepts espoused by Valery Zorkin since the 1990s, infuse Putin’s official publications. In a January 16, 2012, presidential campaign article in Izvestiya, for example, reviewing the challenges Russia faced, Putin proclaimed that the Russian state would not allow itself to be swept up by the growing forces of instability. Instead it would seek to control these forces by actively “setting the rules of the game.” Putin continued with an analysis that echoed the language of the tsarist statist school, noting that Russia will “muscle up” by “being open to change” through state–sanctioned procedures and rules. In a subsequent article in Kommersant, on February 6, 2012, entitled “Democracy and the quality of the state,” Putin directly cited one of the tsarist–era liberal conservatives embraced by Valery Zorkin, Pavel Novgordtsev, who was a law professor at Moscow State University. The quote reflected Novgordtsev’s (and Putin’s) antirevolutionary, statist beliefs: “People often think proclaiming various freedoms and universal suffrage will in and of itself give some miraculous strength to direct life onto a new course. In actual fact, in such instances in life, what happens usually turns out not to be democracy, but depending on the turn events take, either oligarchy or anarchy.”