Russia. A History

A second leitmotif was Putin’s nuanced conception of Russia’s past and its place in the larger scheme of things. In general, he portrayed Russia as an integral part of Europe and bore little sympathy for the then fashionable theory of ‘Eurasianism’, which holds that Russia is a civilization nurtured by both European and Asian roots. Although a Europeanist, Putin none the less rejected the idea that Russia must replicate European development and insisted that it must follow its own course, that it need not obey the demands of Western countries: ‘We are a major European nation; we have always been an integral part of Europe and share all its values and the ideals of freedom and democracy. But we will carry out this process ourselves, taking into account all our specific characteristics, and do not intend to report to anyone on the progress we make.’ He also expressed a positive, but qualified, view of the Soviet experience. His ‘Millennium Manifesto’ declared that it ‘would be a mistake not to recognize the unquestionable achievements’ of the Soviet era, but added that ‘it would be an even bigger mistake not to realize the outrageous price our country and its people had to pay for that social experiment’. He reiterated that view in April 2005 when he characterized the break-up of the Soviet Union as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’ but promptly added that it was impossible to fantasize about resurrecting the old Soviet state. That qualified nostalgia corresponded to the general public mood; a 2001 poll showed that 79 per cent regretted the breakup of the USSR, but that 58 per cent deemed its re-establishment impossible.

A third core element was Putin’s belief in a strong state. As the ‘Millennium Manifesto’ stressed, ‘our state and its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of country and its people’. A strong state, he argued, was a precondition for individual liberty, for only it could provide security and stability. As he explained in July 2000, ‘an effective state and democratic state’ alone can defend basic freedoms and create ‘the conditions for the social well-being for our motherland’. Six years later he defended his efforts to rebuild a strong state, which could ensure ‘the implementation of the laws that have been adopted’ and see that they were adopted in the first place. In particular, Putin insisted on the need to reclaim the power that Yeltsin had devolved on the eighty-nine regions of the Russian Federation. Putin’s idea of a ‘new federalism’ was essentially a call to restore the ‘power vertical’, the hierarchy of authority that accorded primacy to central institutions, laws, and practices. Putin’s stint as Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff for relations with the regions had convinced him that ‘the vertikal,

the vertical chain of government, had been destroyed and that it had to be restored’. In some sense, Putin was simply affirming the importance of ‘good governance’—a central theme since the late 1990s, when even ardent advocates of globalization (such as the World Bank) rejected the neoliberal programme and emphasized the need for effective governance. The United States, itself once a bastion of neoliberalism, came to the same view; its Millennium Challenge Accounts, established in 2002, made good governance a precondition for US foreign aid. Putin, at least in part, simply applied that new theme in global development to Russia itself.

But Putin went further, arguing not only for good governance but for a strong state, which should play a prominent role in the economic sphere. Reflecting the new emphasis on the linkage between ‘good governance’ and economic growth, as well as the strong statist traditions of Russian history, Putin insisted that the state must direct economic development. That view permeated his kandidat

dissertation, ‘The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources during the Formation of a Market Economy’, defended at the St Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997 (after

Putin moved to Moscow and became immersed in administrative duties). The 218–page dissertation, distilled in an article published two years later, specifically argued that the state should have the final voice in energy and natural resource policy. It was not, however, a reversion to a Soviet command economy: ‘The state must regulate the extractive complex using purely market methods, and in this regard the state must assist the development of processing industries based on the extractive complex.’ Such a state, argued Putin, would enable Russia to grow at twice the rate of the West and reduce ‘Russia’s lag behind developed countries in terms of GDP per capita’. Although some passages were allegedly plagiarized, the dissertation expressed Putin’s own vision of a ‘managed economy’, the antithesis of the neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’, yet in no ways identical with the étatisme of the Stalinist command economy.