Периферийный авторитаризм: Как и куда пришла Россия

It was exactly the time when the Soviet-era administrative elite, which had presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union and had taken control over what remained there after its demise, did not risk letting itself divide and create competing centers of power. Power in Russia remained undivided, the ruling group was subject neither to control from beneath or from competing rivals, nor to the possibility of replacement or rotation through collective decision of the privileged classes. Its power was limited only by the technical feasibility of policies to be implemented, not by binding obligations or external checks. Competition in political life was tolerated as long as rival groups aspired for the opportunity to influence the government, but not for the power it held. The single centre of undivided and unquestionable power (in the 1990s it was then-President Yeltsin) used competing groups below as checks and counterweights against each other, but its own power could not be either checked or counterbalanced.

It is exactly this kind of political system that was inherited and conserved by Putin. Moreover, he has stripped this system of unnecessary disguise and hypocrisy, and consolidated it, as well as its self-evaluation, thus making it more assertive. In fact, his personal contribution to the system could be summed up as two important things.

For one thing, he has determined the direction of its further course. As a possibility he could have opted to try changing the path of the system’s evolution towards laying the foundations for political competition and Western-style democracy, if he chose so. He did not do that for at least two reasons.

First, nobody really pushed him to do that. Neither the Russian political class at large, which had no aspirations for the role of the modernizer of Russian society. Nor the West, which talked to Putin as a man who was presiding over a country that had lost the Cold War and hence the right to participate in deciding the rules of international and even its own domestic political affairs.

Second, he himself being a true son of the old Soviet ruling elite (the siloviki part of it) did not believe in the power of political competition, considering it harmful to the unity of the Russian nation and to the strength of national statehood.