Eurasia's New Frontiers: Young States, Old Societies, Open Futures

III. The Politics of Economics and Sovereignty

III The Politics of Economics and Sovereignty “Of cabbages—and kings . . . ” Lewis Carroll If infighting among elites has been the stuff of politics in the post-Soviet space, what do they fight about? Deprived of the unifying ideology of Communism, they no longer fight to end the exploitation of man by man, nor to consolidate and improve “really existing socialism .” They are not (or not yet) driven by nationalism based on ethnocultural identities. So the natural answer would be that post-Soviet elites fight about economics. They fight over access to resources that were scarce to begin with and dwindled still further in the painful period of retrenchment and readjustment that followed Communism ’s fall. Economies are now expanding again, but the fight goes on: the fear of losing is always near. Fighting can be direct or indirect. Elite factions can struggle to get and keep resources; they can struggle to define terms of access to resources that are favorable to themselves. In either case, the reason for fighting is that resources 63 are needed to keep together the patronage networks on which political power depends. The payoffs can be very direct. In Turkmenistan, President Niyazov would promise Mercedeses to ministers “who work well in the cotton harvest”; regional and district governors who met production targets were to get jeeps. And if they did not perform, they got smacked.1 In Russia’s Chuchotka Autonomous Okrug, Governor Roman Abramovich was Russia’s richest man for three years running, though he has now ceded the top spot to his fellow oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who started with Abramovich in aluminum but now has holdings in other metals, cars, and construction as well. As he anticipated selling his oil company to the giant state gas monopoly Gazprom in 2005, Abramovich ordered the world’s largest yacht— 160 meters long, worth $179 million—from a German shipyard; he already owned the world’s fifth and sixth largest. In 2007 he became the first person to own a private Airbus 380, to add to his Boeing 737 and his Boeing 767.2 And when former associates of the imprisoned oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky turned on their ex-boss, they complained that he was “stingy”—that he took 60 percent of salary payments for himself and left only 7 percent each for them.3 It is all very concrete. Much of the rapacity in the politics of rapacious individualism is therefore about straight economic resources. Yet economics is never just economic. The Homo economicus of classical economics has never existed in nature. “Economics” is as much a feature of consciousness as any other feature of the social landscape, as “the nation,” for instance, or “the individual.” This has been as true in the 64 Eurasia’s New Frontiers post-Soviet space as elsewhere. In its actual political experience , economics has been thoroughly commingled with sovereignty issues. Yet the proportions shift over time as circumstances change. To an extent this is true across Eurasia; let us follow these shifting mixtures chronologically since the Soviet dissolution, with a special focus on the largest player, Russia. 1991–93: The Preeminence of Sovereignty Economics and sovereignty were most intertwined in Eurasian politics in the early post-Soviet years, from 1991 to the summer of 1993. Two fine recent studies of the period show just how intimately. In the beginning Russia tried to keep alive a ruble zone for most of the area, a zone in which Russia’s currency would serve all the member states as well as Russia itself. The experiment proved costly and cumbersome, and Russia ditched it in 1993. But the business scholar Rawi Abdelal’s close examination of the record shows that elites in post-Soviet countries that were likely to suffer most outside a ruble zone—namely, the Baltic Republics —were nevertheless the most eager to get out of the zone, while elites in countries that were benefiting least from inclusion—in Central Asia—were the most willing to stay in. The key variable driving policy approaches, Abdelal finds, was not “objective” economic interest but nationalism, strongest in the Baltics and weakest in Central Asia.4 Similarly, the political economist Yoshiko Herrera finds that objective economic factors do not explain the The Politics of Economics and Sovereignty 65 very different political trajectories of two major Russian regions, Sverdlovsk and Saratov, in these years. Although the two regions were very similar...