From his garret office in a smart block on the banks of the river Moskva, Gleb Pavlovsky has a bird’s-eye view of Russian politics. Literally: a telescope in the corner of the room looks right into the Kremlin. With a moon-shaped face and round body, Pavlovsky looks like a teddy bear, but he is not so cuddly. The architect of Vladimir Putin’s 2000 and 2004 presidential victories, Pavlovsky is co-founder and president of the Foundation for Effective Politics, a consulting organisation which is a trailblazer of post-Soviet politics. During the many election campaigns it has helped run, the foundation has pioneered dubious tactics: setting up parties with similar names to established ones, running fake candidates, publicly attacking the reputations of others, and spreading compromising information about political enemies. Yet Pavlovsky sees himself as an intellectual rather than a machine politician. And now he is grappling with his hardest project yet: transcending the Putin consensus that he worked so hard to bring about in order to build President Dmitry Medvedev’s profile as a modernising alternative.
Although Putin oversaw an often brutal and kleptocratic regime, his era has not just been about accumulating wealth and power. Alongside the former spooks and hard men who helped him suppress dissent, he attracted an army of intellectuals to his side—many of whom, like Pavlovsky, are former liberals. These thinkers have been engaged in a parallel quest to develop a Russian state with a distinct ideology.
Putin’s consensus was built in three main steps. First, he sought to reinvent Russian politics by building a system of “responsive authoritarianism,” alert to what people wanted and, for a while, able to give it to them. Second, he developed a new economic model, seizing assets from oligarchs to create a form of state capitalism. Third, he used these assets to restore Russia’s status as an energy superpower.
There is now a heated debate about all three strands of the Putin model, which has divided the country into two main factions. But the split does not pit the government against the opposition. Rather it is an argument within the elite about the best way forward—and it will come to define Russia’s political system, its economic model and its foreign policy
In September, the contest burst into the open when Putin gathered his favourite thinkers on a boat for a discussion on stability. Less than a week later, Medvedev organised a rival gathering in the ancient Russian capital of Yaroslavl, on the theme of modernisation and democracy. This event, organised partly by Pavlovsky, was premised on the idea that the stability Putin’s presidency had provided—arguably his greatest achievement—could turn into stagnation, particularly in light of the economic crisis. Different constituencies are lining up behind the two men, not because they are separate centres of power (Putin is the real source) but because they stand for different strands of thinking about Russia’s future.
Whoever becomes president in 2012 (and it may be Putin again), they will most likely try to modernise the Putin model rather than preserve it or break with it. To see what shape this modernisation might take, we must first understand how the three pillars of the consensus were forged—and how the thinkers around the Kremlin are trying to update them.
AN OLD, NEW POLITICS: "PUTIN 2.0"
Pavlovsky’s thinking is a barometer of the political temperature in Russia. In Yaroslavl he challenged Medvedev to sack Yuri Luzkhov, the mayor of Moscow, who had criticised the president. A few weeks later, Medvedev did.
In fact, Pavlovsky’s own career mirrors Russia’s attitude to western democracy: from aspiring to it in the early 1990s; to faking it in the late 1990s; and, finally, disputing it during the Putin years with a system called “sovereign democracy.”
A former dissident, Pavlovsky first got into trouble with the authorities in 1974 for distributing copies of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. He was eventually arrested in 1982 for publishing a subversive magazine, and spent time in prison and exile. As Russian politics loosened up in the late 1980s he worked for George Soros, trying to build the country’s civil society. But by the 1990s Pavlovsky had made an accommodation with power, taking a job under Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin. It was at this time that he and a small group of political strategists launched “project successor”: a plan to create a new leader to replace the ailing, unpopular Yeltsin.
Pavlovsky emphasises that Russian politics today are a reaction to the country’s experiences since the end of the cold war, rather than a reversion to Soviet times. His generation was shaped by what they saw as a double failure: of authoritarianism in Soviet times and democracy under Yeltsin. Two sets of events in the late 1990s were particularly painful. First, the 1998 financial crisis saw Russia’s economy collapse, undermining its economic sovereignty with harsh conditions from the IMF. And barely a year later, Nato’s decision to override Russian objections to the Kosovan war showed that Russia had lost its influence over the former eastern bloc. From then on, Pavlovsky (along with much of the Russian elite) saw the biggest threat to freedom in Russia as weakness abroad rather than autocracy at home. This is what led Pavlovsky’s friend Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s chief ideologist, to make waves across the world in 2006 with the concept of “sovereign democracy.” This slogan contains two key messages: first, that Russia is democratic and does not accept the west’s definition of its regime; and second, that the most important part of being free is being able to resist foreign intervention.
I once asked Pavlovsky how he could switch from being a dissident to supporting a regime that largely controls the media and puts its opponents in prison. He replied that the consolidation of power was the prerequisite for real freedom. “The crucial thing is the conception of sovereignty as the basis of freedom,” he said. “In other words, the possibility for the individual to realise his freedom in practice.” In the 1990s, Pavlovsky felt, only oligarchs had freedom, while ordinary people suffered under the chaos of weak government.
Pavlovsky’s approach to political institutions has evolved with his philosophy. He helped the early Putin appeal to the people over the heads of the politicians. But he soon feared that the vacuum this left could lead to instability and came up with a cleverer ploy: creating institutions—political parties, trade unions and youth movements—to soak up discontent and express it within the system. After a year in power, Putin started to build a managed politics “based on a strong president who controlled a strong governing party, with some weak opposition parties around it that he could also control.”
Putin’s enduring popularity—he still has over 70 per cent approval ratings—flows partly from his control of the media and willingness to suppress dissent. But Pavlovsky argues it also comes from his capacity to crystallise, express and even pre-empt people’s expectations, helped by the weekly opinion polls and focus groups conducted by a “sociology-obsessed” Kremlin. Pavlovsky’s goal was to allow Putin to occupy all of the political space in the country—from the parliament to the protest movement—and deprive the opposition of oxygen.
Before the global economic crisis it was often said that ordinary Russians had traded political freedom for prosperity and order. Yet while liberal critics—such as chess grandmaster turned politician Garry Kasparov—still fail to win much support, the downturn has brought a new chorus of voices for pluralism. The most audible of these were the 10,000 people who took to the streets of Kaliningrad in February 2010 to demand the removal of the governor of the semi-autonomous region. But these protests were designed as much to attract Putin’s attention as to challenge his authority. Real change will come about through revolt by the elites, not the masses.
That is why western observers are paying increasing attention to the activities of intellectuals close to the regime. The liberal-minded Igor Yurgens, for example, who runs a think tank that claims Medvedev as its chair, has criticised the state’s habit of holding sham elections. The president called for more political competition in October 2009, after suspicious jumps in support for the United Russia party in the regional elections. (United Russia, which holds the majority of seats in parliament, is led by Putin and endorsed Medvedev for president.) What is more, since Medvedev came to power the term “sovereign democracy” has fallen out of fashion—he has said that democracy does not need adjectives. Yet there has been little real change, despite talk that Medvedev plans to form a pro-business party to challenge United Russia.
Putin and Medvedev come from different generations, have different ways of expressing themselves, and Medvedev can touch parts of the electorate that Putin’s strongman image has failed to reach. But these nuances do not amount to a fundamental difference of ideology. As Pavlovsky says: “Medvedev’s policy can be described as Putin 2.0. The model is becoming more open, but this is what was intended in the early days of Putin’s rule. The system is becoming more pluralistic but the basic model remains intact.”
THE NEW RUSSIAN CASTE SYSTEM
Alongside the remodelling of the political system after 1998 were the attempts by Putin and his advisers to modernise Russia’s economic and social order. Here, too, the thinkers around the Kremlin were haunted by what they saw as a double failure: this time of communist state planning and the unbridled capitalism of the 1990s. The sociologist Simon Kordonsky, a former Kremlin aide, published an influential book in 2008, Estate Structure of Post-Soviet Russia. It explained how the fall of the Soviet Union undermined the traditional “estate” system (in which an individual’s relationship to the state, and their rights and responsibilities, was determined by their social status)—and replaced it with class warfare and chaos. Putin, in turn, used some of the resources he extracted from oligarchs (and nationalising companies) to create a new estate society, organised around new groups—including the police and military intelligence—all owing allegiance to the central state.
I met Kordonsky for lunch last year at a restaurant in an old KGB building. He has a well-worn face partially covered by a straggly beard, but his eyes sparkle mischievously. Over a heavy meal of pickles and stew, he explained how in Putin’s first term as president, he passed 140 laws giving different groups—among them civil servants, consultants and business leaders—entitlement to public money and immunity from prosecution, along with special car licence plates and other benefits. He claims that the new caste system now includes more than 100m citizens and forms a new social structure. “People in the west do not understand Russia. The special thing about the estate society is that there is no split between the state and civil society. Russia’s money is consolidated in the federal budget and then distributed to the estates and territories. If you look at it from the outside it looks like corruption, but in fact it is a key mechanism for bringing structure to Russian society.” Kordonsky argues even the oligarchs are extensions of the state. Politics becomes a “horizontal” battle between estates to enlarge their share of the pie, rather than a “vertical” contest for control of power.
It is easy to see how Putin managed to make this system work during a period of booming oil and gas prices. But how do you keep it running in the new era? Some intellectuals have argued that a new estate is needed to modernise the economy. Recently, Kremlin power-broker Vladislav Surkov has called for the creation of an “innovation city” by attracting 30,000 of the world’s most innovative people to create cutting-edge technologies. His vision is based on the Soviet experience of setting up creative centres, where writers, scientists and artists were encouraged to live in relative luxury. In his view, the model the country needs is “authoritarian mobilisation”—where the state acts as a vanguard of Russia’s transformation—rather than the chaos of perestroika, where modernisation involved loosening the reins of central government.
But liberal commentators are sceptical. “Russia’s modernisers don’t seem to understand that you can’t have a centrally planned innovative economy,” says Vladislav Inozemtsev, author of a bestselling book on modernisation. He argues that Russia is uniquely backward among the so-called Bric [Brazil, Russia, India, China] economies. While China’s industrial production rose fourfold between 1994 and 2008, and India’s doubled, Russia’s is lower than it was in Soviet times. Inozemtsev says all successful modernising states started with basic sectors and only moved into hi-tech once they had a solid economic base and a skilled workforce.
Even some Kremlin insiders agree that modernisation must include economic and political liberalisation. In January, the Institute of Contemporary Development, Igor Yurgens’s think tank, published a report arguing that Russia’s “raw-materials economy is oriented toward societal worship of the state and its authorities.” Such figures think Russia has become a rentier economy, living on its natural resources and run by “economically illiterate” former KGB members.
But once the economic crisis hit, liberalisation moves stalled. Putin used the opportunity to consolidate his grip on national assets—growing the state at the expense of the market. He blamed the oligarchs for the country’s problems, while the independent mayors of Russian cities were also criticised (more than 100 have been put in prison). As Kordonsky says: “In a crisis the system may need to find and punish ‘enemies of the people.’” As this crisis has gone on Medvedev has apparently become convinced of the need for reform. So far he has gone for easy opportunities: changing his rhetoric, talking about alliances with the west and visiting Silicon Valley. But many think that he will go no further than centrally planned innovation because liberalisation would destroy the economic base of Putin’s system—and with it Medvedev’s chances of staying in power. Outsiders underestimate the internal weakness of the Russian state. The truth is that its leaders lack strategies to overcome bureaucratic resistance to modernisation and are very aware of their own weakness.
Given Russia’s poor economic performance, Putin’s political genius has been to mask its decline. Instead of the post-imperial angst and retrenchment experienced by powers such as Britain after the second world war, Putin has mixed a new Russian nationalism with an identity as a Bric country, travelling in the slipstream of China and India. But now the financial crisis has undermined growth, should we in the west get used to a declining Russia again?
THAWING FOREIGN RELATIONS
The same question obsesses Russia’s foreign policy community, and lies at the heart of understanding Putin’s attempts to create a new role for his country abroad. Many of the Kremlin’s brightest minds were taught by Vladimir Tsimbursky, an international relations professor who died last year. I met him—in Pavlovsky’s office—in late 2008. He was already infirm: a stooped figure with a terrible cough, wearing a scruffy sweater stained with food. But his mind remained focused on increasing Russia’s power: not by challenging America’s hegemony, but by using others to restrict it. “We live,” he told me “in what Samuel Huntington called a ‘multi-unipolar world.’ In this world, the parameters are set by the US, but in each region there are local powers which can limit the actions of the superpower. They do not unite or offer an alternative world order—but they substantially restrict the ability of the superpower to advance its agenda.”
Tsimbursky’s ideas go a long way to explaining Russian foreign policy, in particular its approach to countries such as Serbia and Iran. By this account, Russia interpreted western actions in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq as attempts to eliminate local powers that might constrain America. And Russia’s support of Serbia was not part of a pan-Slavist fantasy. Instead, Russia “worried that if the US got its way in Yugoslavia, the world’s leader would declare the situation in Chechnya a humanitarian catastrophe and send troops in to solve it.” He also explains Russian ambivalence about slowing the Iranian nuclear programme: “In the west, [a nuclear Iran] would be seen as revolutionary, but in my framework it would be a helpful way of preserving the status quo.”
Tsimbursky told me Russian foreign policy is not aimed at developing a truly multipolar world, but at resisting the consolidation of a unipolar order: “Some in our system call for a multipolar world, but they don’t know what that means. It would mean that the US withdrew to a Monroe doctrine position. It would leave us to face China alone in east Asia. The most intelligent Russian politicians... should be interested in the power of local centres to prevent the unipolar project.”
The most ambitious manifestation of Tsimbursky’s framework is Russia’s policy towards Europe. In the good years—as oil shot up to $147 a barrel—Moscow crafted its policies, priorities and ideology to provide neighbouring countries with an alternative to the EU. When revolutions saw pro-western leaders come to power in Georgia and Ukraine, Russians worried that they would be encircled by western protectorates. In 2005, the Kremlin appointed Modest Kolerov, Gleb Pavlovsky’s deputy, to oversee a fightback. Kolerov set up pro-Russian NGOs and funded political parties and media to counter the forces behind the revolutions. The idea was to use Russian soft and hard power to compete with the EU’s use of free trade and visa-free travel, in order to promote the transformation of the countries on the EU’s periphery.
Since the economic crisis, it has become harder to see a cash-strapped Russia challenging the EU in Europe, or becoming anything like an equal of China on the world stage. This has led liberal voices such as Igor Yurgens to work on Russia’s (unlikely) accession to Nato. Meanwhile, Russia’s reluctance to intervene in Kyrgyzstan during the unrest earlier this year shows a fear of imperial overstretch. And Russia’s recent moves in Ukraine could also be part of a pragmatic rethink of its neighbourhood policy. Rather than backing a single candidate in the 2010 presidential elections as it did in 2005, Moscow cultivated good relations with both leading candidates Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Yanukovich—and tried to encourage Ukraine to join its customs union. When Yanukovich won, Russia used offers of cheap gas to secure a surprise 25-year extension on the lease for the main Russian naval base in the Crimea.
A recently leaked memo from the Russian foreign ministry shows it is also planning to turn on the charm with western countries. It talked of a new policy of friendship based on “modernisation alliances” with no less than 14 EU member states. The Kremlin has backed this up with symbolic actions: at the Red Square parade on 9th May commemorating victory in the second world war, soldiers from Nato countries, including the US, Britain and Poland, were invited to march with their Russian counterparts. The Obama administration’s policy of “reset diplomacy,” which saw plans for Nato expansion and missile defence shelved, has helped Russia move back to bargaining rather than posturing.
But although Russia’s new “westpolitik” represents a shift in tactics, it will not lead the country to join the western club. Russia wants to assert its European identity and make economic development the major objective of its foreign policy. But Russian elites will continue to resist the west’s policies of transformation or containment. They see foreign policy as a tool not simply for defending national interests, but also for securing the survival of the regime. This explains why Moscow will never accept Ukraine’s or Georgia’s membership of Nato—and will never encourage Ukraine to join the EU.
WHAT HOPE FOR THE FUTURE?
The parameters of Russia’s battle for ideas can be hard for outsiders to understand. Behind the personality debates and different positions, there is a choice about Russia’s future. Its demographic crisis (mitigated by immigration, see Ben Judah's article in this month's Prospect), combined with its sclerotic economy, chronic lack of investment and endemic corruption mean that the Putin-Medvedev model will eventually become economically unsustainable.
Yet it seems unlikely that either leader will break with the politics of the past ten years. Although some are calling for modernisation, the elite are using technological change to extend the life of the political system, rather than doing away with it. The leaked memo makes it clear that Russia sees the EU as a source of know-how and investment to drive Russian innovation, rather than a model for democracy or political reform. And if the global economy recovers soon, the price of oil, coupled with the simulacra of modernisation, might see the current system survive for a few more elections.
If you synthesise the big debates between the intellectuals around the Kremlin, you can detect the contours of a plan for the future. Although they don’t use the term much now, they want Russia to be a “sovereign democracy” (rather than a straight autocracy). They aspire to build a vaguely defined hi-tech economic model based on “estate” patronage (rather than being a petro-state). And they want Russia to establish itself geopolitically as a balancing power within Eurasia (rather than a resurgent great power). But can this new path work, or will Putin and Medvedev need to liberalise their politics and the political system to succeed?
This modest reform programme is unlikely to match the scale of Russia’s problems. But what these debates show is that while Yeltsin’s Russia was inclined to adopt western ideas, the Russia of Putin-Medvedev is still trying to come up with a model of its own. Their aim is not to join the west, but to build an independent Russia.
Also in this month's magazine: Ben Judah on immigration to Russia. Click here for more...
