The news itself was hardly startling. That the Regent (Vladimir Putin) would recover the throne from the Dauphin (Dmitri Medvedev) was increasingly clear for some time. As early as a year ago, the portents became easy to decipher and by mid-summer of this year Russian officialdom was clearly betting on Putin’s presidency.
The real importance of Putin’s decision to reclaim the presidency is that it almost certainly marks a point that future historians will designate as the beginning of a deepening and fateful crisis. The economic, political, and social context of this re-shuffle in the Kremlin is profoundly and perilously different from the ones in which Putin’s previous ascensions to the presidency (2000, 2004) and quasi-presidency (2008) occurred.
In 2000, Putin was genuinely popular because he was not Yeltsin and because he dealt decisively with the threat—manufactured, perceived, or real—of militant Islam from Chechnya. He was popular in 2004 because Russia was in the middle of perhaps the strongest economic boom since the 1910s and because, as Putin and the television he controlled never missed an opportunity to remind the country, Russia was no longer in what they called the “lawless and corrupt 1990s.” And, despite the early signs of the onset of a global financial crisis, these legitimizing factors more or less carried the regime forward even in 2008.
Today, all these reservoirs of legitimacy are close to depletion. That Putin isn’t Yeltsin and 2012 isn’t 1992 matters little to the tens of millions who were too young to remember and to their parents who are used to steady growth in income. Growth is all but gone and there is a strong consensus among Russian economists that no matter who is elected and regardless of the price of oil, the next president will have to adopt very painful cost-cutting measures to stave the budget deficits and inflation—something that Putin himself acknowledged in his speech to the “party of power,” United Russia. (With taxes on oil profits contributing at least half of the state budget, Russia can contain budget deficits only when oil is around $90-$100 a barrel. Lower prices are bound to cause serious economic and social dislocations.)
Yet this may not even be the worst of it. Putin’s vaunted “stability” has been bought at the expense of political, economic, and social ossification. Russia’s dependence on oil exports has spawned virtually all the niceties of a classic petro-state: inefficiency, stifled competition, a sharp decline in education and technological and scientific progress, and, of course, mammoth corruption. (According to public opinion polls, a majority believes that there is more corruption today than in the “lawless 1990s”).
As its satellites are falling down and intercontinental ballistic missiles are failing test after test, Russia now imports not only passenger planes but also high-tech weaponry, such as drones and Mistral helicopter carriers. Economic opportunities are constricted by rapacious state functionaries that, from top to bottom, prey on businesses. For many potential entrepreneurs the “corruption tax” is prohibitive. The result is a mass emigration of Russia’s most productive citizens—more than a million in the last few years. And more have told sociologists that they would leave if Putin became president again.
Yet millions of others are deciding to stay and resist. There are signs of an emergent civil society, some of whose leaders I had the good fortune to meet and interview during a long trip across Russia this past July. This civil society is increasingly impatient with daily indignities, not afraid of the state, and ever more insistent on fighting for its rights. According to different polls, between one-fifth and one-half of Russian citizens surveyed say that they would take part in protests—a dramatic jump over the last few years.
So this is the Russia that is about to receive 12 more years (two six-year terms) of the same under the man who had engineered the present political and economic system—the system that everyone, from Medvedev on down, has openly acknowledged to be exhausted and an obstacle to any meaningful progress. To draw on an historical analogy that is increasingly popular in Russia today, this is as if Leonid Brezhnev had reappointed himself for another unlimited term in 1982.
Likely seeing the writing on the wall, the formerly “monolithic” elite is beginning to show fissures. The vaunted “vertical of power” that until now secured the implementation of the Kremlin’s policy is showing signs of ineffectiveness. The resignation today of Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin—the last remaining reformer and fiscal conservative at the top of the Kremlin power pyramid—could well be only the first in a series of high-level defections.
Fasten your seat belts, ye Russia watchers! A very bumpy ride is about to begin!
An English adage’s wisdom—of needing a long spoon when supping with the Devil because, no matter what you do, you emerge morally stained—has been much in evidence in the “spy” “swap” between the United States and Russia.