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Putin's `strong leadership' is a soft dictatorship

By Lilia Shevtsova

Wednesday, May 05, 2004, Page 9

A joke doing the rounds in Moscow goes like this: The Americans didn't know who their president was two months after their presidential election, but we Russians knew who was going to occupy the Kremlin two years before ours.

Russia's political class has ample grounds to be slyly and cynically proud of the system they invented -- it guarantees the result it wants. Despite its lack of drama, intrigue and competitiveness, the election was important not because Russia's political class renounced all the key elements of authentic democratic electoral procedures, but because it closed the chapter on Russia's liberal democratic experiment, legitimizing President Vladimir Putin's new political system.

What is the nature of the new system? Is it democracy with adjectives, such as "managed" democracy, "illiberal" democracy or "electoral" democracy? Only a few pundits stubbornly adhere to this approach. Or is the system simply that of a conniving authoritarian? This view is already conventional wisdom, not only in the US, but in Europe as well.

In reality, however, Putin's regime is a strange and complicated mix, which relies upon two important elements: the personal power of Vladimir Putin himself and the growing role of Russia's consolidating democratic institutions. The tension between these two forces will drive Russia's political dynamics for the next four years. Complicating the picture further is the fact that Putin represents the most pro-Western force in Russia, while the state apparatus remains conservative, traditional and archaic.

So Russia's liberals and democrats face a harsh choice: Do they support Putin's personal authoritarianism or seek to weaken and delegitimize him and thus restore the role of an ascendant bureaucracy?

How do the "siloviki," the now notorious representatives of Russia's security and power structures, fit into this picture? Everybody likes this myth of the siloviki, because it's so easy to explain Russian developments by ascribing events to a "KGB-ization" of power. But this is unpersuasive: the siloviki have not coalesced into a coherent group and consolidated their authority -- at least so far. They lack a leader, have no agenda and failed to seize power during Putin's first term.

I think they will fail again during Putin's second term. Indeed, in coming years, other forces have much greater potential to consolidate power, with the siloviki used only as their praetorian guards.

So who is responsible for the fact that liberal democracy has ended in Russia? Well, Putin, of course, and Yeltsin before him. Moreover, ordinary Russians are becoming allergic to liberal democracy, because liberal technocrats have consistently served as window dressing for an illiberal Kremlin regime. Having tied themselves to Russia's existing power structures, liberals are now in no position to become convincing critics.

Indeed, Putin's soft authoritarianism is now probably the greatest threat to greater democratization in Russia. Paradoxically, because Putin's "strong" leadership incorporates liberals and even democrats to preserve a pro-Western facade, a truly liberal opposition cannot emerge. By contrast, a genuinely repressive iron hand would be far likelier to spur a potent democratic resistance.

Of course, Putin has concentrated so much authority and control over the levers of power in his own hands that he appears capable of anything. But appearances can deceive, for the legacy of Putin's first term is that he is losing his fight with the state apparatus that he inherited. He's not yet a hostage of the bureaucracy, but he regularly loses major battles.

So what will happen when Russia's political class and the president himself discover that "bureaucratic authoritarian-ism" is not the recipe for modernization ala South Korea that they hoped for? What will they do when they realize that it has failed to secure sustainable economic growth and political stability?

Under the current soft authoritarian regime, I can see only one rather negative scenario for the future: authentic, full-fledged dictatorship. The question is whether it will be a Pinochet-style dictatorship bent on economic modernization or a dictatorship with a revived totalitarian ideology.

By winning so decisively, Putin has legitimately made himself responsible for everything. There is no government below him to take the blame for failure, and failure is the easiest way to lose legitimacy. Failure, moreover, will likely bring with it a split in the political class, making it very difficult to find a single candidate to become Putin's successor. Not one political force in Russia knows how to answer the challenges that "soft authoritarianism" has brought.

Russia has never made a successful transformation of any kind in a time of peace. Change comes through war and domestic conflict. For those who seek a democratic and liberal Russia, the quandary is awful, because to delegitimize Putin only risks bringing darker and more archaic powers to the surface.

Lilia Shevtsova is senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow. Copyright: Project Syndicate
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