Russia: The Challenges of Transformation

5 Leadership and the Politics of Modernization

115 chapter five Leadership and the Politics of Modernization Timothy J. Colton All nations have rulers. This fact is almost a truism. It is simply the way things are.... Whether countries happen to be democracies or dictatorships, the people eventually want one person at the helm whom they can identify as their leader. —Arnold M. Ludwig, King of the Mountain:The Nature of Political Leadership, 2002 If a country has ever fit this near-truism to a “T,” it has been the Russia seemingly designed by nature for one-man rule. That being so, the presence today of a pair of ostensible captains of the ship, Vladimir Putin joined by Dmitrii Medvedev, is a novel and puzzling sight. Speculation about a rekindling of Russian modernization would be hollow at the core without a look at this anomaly and the circumstances behind it, at leadership in general, and at its place in promoting or retarding change. The Web of Leadership Comparative studies of leadership have long struggled to escape the shadow of reductionist, Victorian-era notions of “the great man in history.” The critics , who see impersonal factors of broader scope as the drivers of politics and policy, tend not only to rebut leader-oriented theories but to caricature them. Every now and then, somebody comes out with the contrary point, 116 Colton rediscovering individual agency as if it were some long-lost treasure and reproaching the structuralists for neglecting it. I am inclined toward the middle ground captured in the epigraph. Disproportionate power and influence in the hands of the acknowledged leader is the norm in political life—across continents, cultures, stages of modernization , and regime types. Typically, the leader exerts or has the potential to exert far more of an impact on events than any other single actor. That is not to say that this human being is omnipotent or 100 percent independent. He or she is in varying modalities and degrees constrained by institutions, elites, and social forces, and cannot be effective without compliance and a minimum of cooperation from them. Leadership in politics is multifaceted. Mainstream research on it asks three overarching questions: about who, how, and what. The first addresses who the leader is. If an earlier age might have stressed innate talents and quirks or the Oedipus complex, a behavioral approach would scrutinize the way leaders are made rather than born, as comes about through an incremental learning and skill-building process or through crystallizing experiences. A reply to the “who” question may be framed by biography , developmental psychology, or psychiatry. The second big question is about how leaders do their work. Answers here are best structured by social psychology, sociology, or micro-political economy. In an authoritarian or totalitarian political system, the strongman may lead primarily through brute force.1 In democratic and semi-democratic systems, the means available boil down to a triad: constructing and managing coalitions at the elite and state-institutional level; cultivation of a mass constituency below, which entails some willingness to take its preferences into account (to follow one’s followers, so to say); and molding the agenda of political debate.2 Question three has to do with what the leader accomplishes in the grand scheme of things—the outcome as opposed to the origins or phenomenology of his or her statecraft. History and the macro branches of the social sciences are the germane disciplines here. Leadership scholars need to make allowance for the intricacy of the agent’s motivation. A typology fruitful in the study of American presidents parses goals into three classes: power, which is intrinsically prized and also a prerequisite for attaining other goals; achievement , the urge to shape and reshape society in accord with a set of values; and affiliation, the pleasure taken in friendly relations with persons and groups.3 Leadership and Modernization 117 I would round these out with a fourth goal: avarice, the desire to milk public office for private gain. Once the goals of a leader have been identified, the brief is to assess how efficacious the subject has been in attaining them, and at the end of the day how much of a say she or he has had in comparison with other presences on the scene. Even to categorize the particulars of political leadership is a thorny exercise , and they are interconnected in myriad ways. Furthermore, the particulars are embedded in a shared context that contains political...