Reading Russia: The Return of Personalized Power

Russia today serves as evidence of Francis Fukuyama's assertion that there are "few alternative institutional arrangements that elicit any enthusiasm" aside from liberal democracy—or at least the appearance of it.¹ The Russian elite has followed in the footsteps of other post-totalitarian regimes, which, as Larry Diamond writes, "have felt unprecedented pressure (international and domestic) to adopt—or at least to mimic—the democratic form."²

Thus, Russia has given the world yet another imitation, in which outwardly democratic institutions hide a hybrid of authoritarian, oligarchic, and bureaucratic tendencies. The regime rests on personalized power, signaling a return to the traditional Russian political matrix. Authoritarian power structures, in turn, rest on a form of bureaucratic corporatism that makes the leader its hostage. Moreover, the fusion of power and property—as evidenced by the seats that representatives of the ruling group occupy on the boards of key companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft, as well as by the state's expanding role in the economy more generally—must inevitably give rise to oligarchic trends. This time, however, Russia's oligarchs are totally dependent on the state, and the most influential are the bureaucrat-oligarchs—that is, the state officials who control so much property and so many financial flows.

The Russian political regime itself is a form of étatisme (in Russian, dierzhavnichestvo) that combines great-power status and spheres of influence abroad with regime-consolidation mechanisms at home that are based on elements of militarism and the search for enemies. By cultivating an image of Russia as a "besieged castle," the regime is able to legitimize personalized and hypercentralized power.

The regime has also been relying on the high prices that, until last year, it could get for exporting Russia's rich natural resources, especially oil and natural gas. The resulting revenues helped the regime to form a national consensus in support of the status quo. Russia has thus generated a variation of the petrostate, with the difference being that this petrostate is also a great power.

What is the upshot of all this? The political phenomenon that we see before us is a hybrid of pseudodemocratic mimicry, a great-power syndrome, imperialist longings, and the politics of oil. Attaching a simple, concise label to such a jumble is difficult. Perhaps it is best, all things considered, to say that Russia now finds itself ruled by a form of "bureaucratic authoritarianism, with add-ons."

Despite its similarities to bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes found in the annals of Latin America or of petrostates, the Russian regime is unique in its use of the tools of great-power politics and neoimperialist foreign policy—up to and including nuclear weapons—as part of its strategy for staying in power. The regime continues to seek Russia's restoration as a pole in international affairs, backing these ambitions with a taste for militarism and a willingness to use national energy reserves as a geopolitical weapon. Under such a regime, Russia remains antithetical to Western civilization. At the same time, however, Russia participates in Western institutions such as the G8 and the Council of Europe. This paradigm—in which Russia is both "together with the West and opposed to it"—is also unique.

A Shifting Picture

Nothing about the picture that I have just painted should be taken as static. Instead, we should expect the regime to evolve and adapt as circumstances change. The regime's hybrid nature allows it to alter its outward shading while remaining constant in its fundamentals. Recent evidence of this flexibility is the development of the governing tandem of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (b. 1952) and his protégé and successor as president, the younger Dmitri Medvedev (b. 1966). Putin controls the primary levers of power on a day-to-day basis, even though the presidency's authority under the constitution is potentially enormous. It would be naïve to assume that the emergence of this pairing signals a move toward a system of checks and balances, as if Putin (the tandem's architect) were a latter-day James Madison.³ Rather, what we are seeing is...