Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

There was now little to prevent non-Russian autonomous republics within Russia declaring their own secession. In the event, only one did so, Chechnia, but the consequences were destructive and far-reaching. After negotiating for three years, Yeltsin decided in 1994 to restore authority by sending in the Russian army. It suffered a series of humiliating reverses and eventually had to withdraw. In 1999, it invaded again, and after a long and indecisive campaign, left Chechnia in the hands of a local warlord under uncertain Kremlin control. The Chechen experience revealed brutally Russia’s weakness and deepened the corruption and violence prevalent in both military and civilian leadership.

Under Yeltsin in the 1990s, then, oligarchs, provincial governors, and ethnic separatists each built their own sub-state networks, controlling access to capital and coercive resources. Ordinary people became more dependent than ever before on their bosses and other local magnates for the routine facilities of life: housing, food, transport, health care, recreation, and the education of their children, even sometimes for their physical safety. Most Western commentators on the early post-Soviet years wrote as if the choice for Russia was between authoritarianism and democracy. In actual fact, the real issue was whether Russia was going to have an effective state at all. If not, its population would have to place its trust in such lower-level leaders and institutions as could protect them and provide them with life’s necessities.

After he became President in 2000, Vladimir Putin in some respects strengthened the state, which he referred to as the ‘power vertical’. In ruthless manner, he brought Chechnia back under nominal Russian control. He simplified taxes, to make them easier to understand and harder to evade; they were also centralized, to facilitate redistribution and alleviate the glaring disparity between richer and poorer regions. Rising oil and gas prices enabled the government to pay schoolteachers and pensioners on time.

Like earlier Russian rulers, however, Putin strengthened the state largely through the manipulation of personalized networks. He ended the election of provincial governors and tightened Kremlin control over them. He made the Duma, the post-1993 parliament, more compliant, and sponsored the largest party, United Russia, as a permanent government majority inside it. In the interests of what he called ‘information security’, he brought most of the media, especially television, under tight supervision. He came to an understanding with the oligarchs, under which the dubious sources of their wealth would not be investigated, provided they kept out of politics. When one of them, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, stepped out of line by financing Duma deputies, he was arrested and charged with fraud, tax evasion, and embezzlement. This was not only an economic move: as well as an oligarch, Khodorkovsky was also a potential presidential candidate. He had proposed strengthening the rule of law, adopting a more open and pluralist style of politics, and a more transparent system of corporate governance, compatible with international standards of financial probity. After his arrest, his successful oil firm, Yukos, passed into the hands of senior government officials, who thus became oligarchs themselves. Robber barons had moved into the highest echelons of the state.

Putin, and his rather shadowy successor, Dmitry Medvedev, have fallen well short of consolidating the state by grounding it in popular trust or stable institutions. Without the rule of law or strong political parties, authoritarian rule means in practice that the wealth of society is the object of competition between powerful patron–client cliques, who are able to operate unchallenged and in the obscurity provided by media deference and censorship. Russian government is still at the mercy of the same cliques, now at the very heart of the state; it has become more corrupt under Putin. Meanwhile, popular unrest is expressed in spontaneous demonstrations and strikes, protesting against local abuses of power but unable to affect the political system as a whole.

Conclusion