Putin the Great?
TCS Daily, DC
July 17 2006
By Nathan Smith
In his TCS article, "G7 + 1 Autocracy," K. Caldwell Harmon voices an
increasingly common view: that "G8 member countries should examine
whether Russia deserves to be represented in a group intended to
represent the developed, free world," in view of the way "political
freedom under Vladimir Putin has been heavily curtailed."
Yet despite, or because of, his moves to centralize power and clip
the wings of civil society, Putin now enjoys a 77 percent approval
rating in Russia, which is probably the highest in the G-8. Why don’t
Russians seem to object to the curtailment of their freedoms?
The Russian language has two words for freedom, neither of which
quite corresponds to civic freedom in the Anglo-American sense.
Svoboda is merely not to be a slave, serf, prisoner, or under foreign
occupation. Russians under the tsars were svobodnye. Volia, which also
means "will," is like the wild freedom of a Cossack on the steppes. For
generations, Russian writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Nicholas
Berdyaev have struggled to articulate a quixotic "Russian Idea," which
combines a inner freedom, made possible by spiritual transcendence,
with a communitarian ethos. The Russian Idea is believed to inhere
in the Russian people.
Though not illiberal in itself — it implies no clear political
program — the Russian Idea has been a distraction from the gradualist
pursuit of practical freedoms. Worse, it has periodically morphed into
political utopianism, and helps to explain Russia’s attempts at total
societal transformation, in which the past is completely repudiated,
and the country tries to emulate foreign models.
In the 17th century, Czar Peter I the Great decided to recast Russia
in the Western mold. He introduced Western-style fashion, navigation,
education, and even built a new capital, St. Petersburg, on the Baltic
Sea, as Russia’s "window on Europe." But Peter the Great was ruthlessly
repressive, all the more so because his expensive Westernization
program required heavy taxation, and provoked cultural resistance.
Next, the revolution of 1917 sought to realize the socialist theory
developed by a foreign philosopher, Karl Marx. The Soviets repudiated
Russia’s past, and desperately tried to industrialize the country
and imitate Western technology. Finally, in 1991, Russia attempted
another societal transformation, this time from communism to democratic
capitalism. Like past Russian revolutions, the 1991 revolution was
a time of grand illusions juxtaposed on social breakdown, chaos,
and impoverishment. The forms of Western practices appeared without
the substance.
Today, while Westerners regard the non-violent fall of communism as one
of history’s better moments, Russians regard the Soviet collapse as a
disaster. With the dissolution of the USSR, millions of Russians found
themselves living in foreign countries. There were mass exoduses from
places where Russians had lived for decades or generations. Wars broke
out between Armenia and Azerbaijan; in Tajikistan; and in Chechnya. The
economy unraveled, and by the mid-1990s, Russia’s official GDP, in
current dollars, had sunk by over 40 percent; Ukraine’s, by over 60
percent; Georgia’s, by almost 80 percent. Male life expectancy in
Russia fell from 65 to 58. For a few years, the centrifugal forces
of regionalism put the very survival of the Russian state in doubt.
The year 1991 for Russia was like the Great Depression and the South
losing the Civil War, rolled into one. Like post-Civil War Southerners,
Russians half realize that the West was right in the Cold War, but
nostalgia and romantic nationalism keep enmity with the West alive
in the Russian imagination. At the same time, after the meaningless
suffering of the 1990s, Russians admire Putin for getting their country
out of its Great Depression, just as an older generation of Americans
once admired Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In the aftermath of the 1991 revolution, Russians have become
pragmatic. A Pew poll in January showed that Russians favor a "strong
leader" (66 percent) over a "democratic government" (23 percent),
and also think that a "strong economy" (81 percent) is more important
than a "good democracy" (14 percent). One might object that these
are false dichotomies. "Democracies, both old and new," Dick Cheney
said in Vilnius last May, "can follow a course to political stability
and economic prosperity." In the Russian context, this claim has,
to put it mildly, not much empirical support.
Fareed Zakaria, in his recent book, uses Russia to illustrate his
"illiberal democracy" thesis: Putin is an elected leader who has
restricted freedom, with strong public support. Yet in the same book
he calls Putin a "liberal autocrat." Which is it — is Russia an
illiberal democracy, or a liberal autocracy?
Maybe both. Putin’s apparatus has stifled criticism of the president
on television, and NTV, the last independent TV channel, was shut down
in 2001, though newspapers have sometimes criticize the president,
and the internet remains uncensored. Putin’s main ally in the Duma,
the Unity party, is short on ideas and long on yes-men. But with the
help of a pliant Duma, Putin has passed reforms that, among other
things, allow private ownership of land, introduced trial by jury,
cut corporate taxes, and most importantly, introduced a flat tax
of 13 percent, which has led to increased revenues and a balanced
budget. That Russian GDP per capita has increased at an average 7
percent per year since Putin came into office owes a good deal, of
course, to high oil prices, but smart macroeconomic policies have
also helped.
Daniel Treisman and Andrei Shleifer recently disputed the black legend
about Russia in a Foreign Affairs article entitled "Russia: A Normal
Country," by which they mean, "a normal middle-income country." Point
by point — on elections and democracy, on corruption, on economic
inequality, on press freedom — Treisman and Shleifer argue that,
while Russia has its flaws, its problems are not systematically worse
or different than those of other middle-income countries.
Of course, even if Russia is a normal middle-income country (with
nukes of course), its G8 membership is still anomalous, because,
minus Russia, the G8 is a club of high-income countries. But is
the exclusiveness of the G8 club an end in itself? There may be
practical benefits to giving Russia a seat at the table that, in
some sense, it doesn’t "deserve." The themes that Russia chose for
this G8 summit are energy security and education. What’s the harm
in Russia leading discussions on these topics? Indeed, Russia has a
comparative advantage on these issues, since Russia itself and the
former Soviet Union generally are both large energy exporters, and
unusually well-educated relative to their level of per capita income.
Given Russians’ recent bad experience with trying to import the Western
model, Western "pressure" or "holding Putin accountable" will go down
badly with normal Russians. For now, Russians have the government that
they want, and they’re tired of Western meddling. We should respect
that. If Russia’s G8 membership gives Russia a stake in a Western-led
international order which otherwise it might be inclined to subvert,
it’s an anomaly worth keeping.
Nathan Smith is a writer living in Washington, DC. He blogs here,
and you can e-mail him here. He has lived and traveled extensively
in eastern Europe, Russia, and other post-Soviet countries, and is
married to a Russian national.