Russia: The Challenges of Transformation

4 The Changing Dynamics of Russian Politics

87 chapter four The Changing Dynamics of Russian Politics Richard Sakwa Following the dissolution of the communist regime in 1991, President Boris Yeltsin was faced with the challenge of establishing a new political order. This involved a twofold project: transformative and adaptive. The transformative element was intended to overcome the Soviet legacy and to introduce elements of the market, and thus in certain respects was reminiscent of the Bolshevik attempt at grandiose social engineering, although in reverse gear. The adaptive element, however, mitigated the Bolshevik features of the new system. Rather than the regime setting its face against what were perceived to be existing patterns of subjectivity and popular aspirations, it began to adapt to them. The tension between the transformative and the adaptive elements has still not been overcome and has imbued post-communist Russian politics with an acute developmental crisis, as the forces for change are stymied by conservative and nativist constituencies and sentiments. This stalemate is reflected in the emergence of a distinctive type of “dual state.” Entrenched social interests (notably, the bureaucracy and the security apparatus) are expressed in the form of an administrative regime, while the attempt to institutionalize the normative values of the post-communist experiment in liberal democracy is represented by the constitutional state.1 The two pillars of the dual state give rise to a distinctive type of hybrid regime, in which a type of “mixed constitution” has emerged, combining two types of governmentality: the legal-rational proceduralism, and open political contestation and pluralism of the constitutional state, balanced by the shadowy and 88 Sakwa arbitrary factional politics based on informal networks in the administrative regime. By the time of Vladimir Putin’s second presidential term in 2004, it was clear that the two subsystems had become locked into stalemate, inhibiting further movements toward consolidating the democratic pluralist gains achieved in the early 1990s, but also blocking full-scale regression to a consolidated authoritarian regime. The boundaries between the two systems are blurred, yet they act as distinctive poles in Russian politics. The dualism of the system is reflected in contrasting evaluations of the system that has taken shape in Russia and in differing views over appropriate paths of development. “Failed Democratization” versus “Democratic Evolutionism” When in the first decade of the twenty-first century the regime began to reassert the assumed prerogatives of the state, it did so in a distinctive way. On the one hand, it appealed to the spirit of the constitution and the rule of law, a theme taken up by Putin in his early speeches in 2000 stressing the “dictatorship of law” and by President Dmitry Medvedev in his condemnation of “legal nihilism” and cautious program of political modernization. Combined with administrative reforms, this entailed the reconstitution of the state, based on a return to ordered governance and legal norms to strengthen the constitutional state. At the same time, by establishing a strong “vertical ” concentration of power and numerous control mechanisms over business and society, the process was accompanied by reconcentration, which only reinforced dualism because of the failure to limit the arbitrariness of the administrative regime. The logic of reconcentration was intended to overcome the institutional nihilism of the earlier period, but in practice it reproduced and intensified that nihilism in new forms. The dualism of the system is reflected in bifurcated views about the system. In rather simplified terms, we can divide mainstream views on the changing dynamics of Russian politics into two mains schools.2 On the one side, there are those who assert that democracy in Russia has failed. As in 1917, Russia has not been able to live up to the challenge of transforming itself into a modern state governed by a responsible government and law-bound polity. The failed democratization camp points to the legacy of the Soviet system, its personnel (above all in the security agencies), and its spirit. Notable landmarks in the failure of democracy in Russia from this perspective include the violent confrontation between parliament and president in September-October The Changing Dynamics 89 1993, the foisting of a super-presidential constitution on a cowed people in a flawed referendum in December 1993, and the deeply divisive events of the 1990s, including the “shock therapy” that robbed people of their savings (thus undermining popular trust in the new order), the wild “privatization” of state property by a small group of so-called oligarchs, the massive growth...