RUSSIA: Can Putin solve the ex-Soviet state crisis?

Analysis

Change in the political system was inevitable after the North Ossetian hostage-taking in early September. By proposing to increase central control over political life (see RUSSIA: The more power Putin has the weaker he gets - September 16, 2004), President Vladimir Putin has acted in line with earlier policies of decreasing regional independence (see RUSSIA: Putin restores central control over regions - March 12, 2004). However, his policies are unlikely to solve Russia's problems.

Trading democratic rights for security, as Putin has proposed in the wake of the Beslan tragedy, is common when a nation is under threat, and is usually accepted by a frightened citizenry. Opinion polls show broad acceptance of Putin's proposal to abolish gubernatorial elections and change the system for national parliamentary elections. With opposition weakened by recent elections and splits in the Communist Party, Putin's proposals will be enacted and the central government's control over political life will grow.

However, these changes to the political system will not create a more efficient or effective state of the kind that can avoid further Beslans, or provide social and economic stability. Putin's changes are superficial in that they will change the balance of power in his favour in Moscow rather than build a strong state that can manage the complexities of a market economy.

Weak state. Russia has a weak state because of Soviet legacies and post-Soviet policy choices. The Soviet Union left Russia with a deeply embedded culture of political corruption and patronage that has not been broken down by reform. Instead, reforms in the 1990s emasculated the state:

• Patronage networks survived as elites regrouped after the first wave of reform, and forced Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, to compromise to survive politically.
• Yeltsin drew potential rivals into the executive. He then created overlapping institutions to accommodate different interests in government. This weakened his rivals, but further diminished the state's organisational integrity by creating a maze of bureaucracy, much of which had no clear functional responsibilities.
• The fiscal base of the state collapsed. With the end of communism, the state was no longer able to acquire resources by right of ownership, but no new working tax system was introduced and Russia was forced to borrow heavily to cover basic budgetary requirements.
• Russia's armed forces declined, as their reform was not a priority for the political elite. Training and procurement programmes were allowed to lapse and Yeltsin created overlapping institutions in the armed forces and security services as in the rest of the state. Consequently, Russia's military and security apparatus became less competent and factionalised.
• Society as a whole was weakened by reform. Its economic effects have left people economically vulnerable to political exploitation by local elites and created a deep popular distrust of organised politics and political institutions.

Putin's problem. Putin says he is committed to building up the state to develop a market-supporting public administration. However, he has achieved the centralisation of power over decision-making rather than reform of the state. Only one of the problems left by Yeltsin has been solved, but not because of any action of Putin's: the fiscal crisis has been eased by high energy prices and the revival of competitive domestic production thanks to currency depreciation. Other problems have either not been addressed or have simply had surplus oil money diverted towards them, as in the case of the military and security services, in the hope that this will produce a solution despite the institutional chaos left by Yeltsin.

Atomised society. Putin has centralised power because he does not have the resources to make more substantial changes. His greatest resource has been his personal popularity. However, this does not entail mass support for a specific programme of change. Russians approve of Putin's statism because they have no hope of change coming from anywhere else. On the whole, they have little trust in their local leaders and no great sense of social solidarity that might inform a political agenda. A people without solidarity with their neighbours, colleagues or social group tend to attach themselves to an abstract concept, the nation, and its political form, the state.

Support for Putin and a strong state is thus a sign of the weakness of Russian society rather than a positive force for change. Society has no resources to deploy to support change and no idea of what the state should do. Putin's approval ratings are more or less a conditioned response to social hopelessness and show primarily that he has no political rivals worthy of the name.

Implementation. In the absence of social support that might embed change and make it effective, Putin's centralisation of power has become an end in itself. The idea is that further centralisation of control over policy-making narrows the room for elite action so that the state becomes more powerful by default, and that implementation of policy has to happen in the absence of an alternative. However, control over policy-making is not the same as control over policy implementation. Policy implementation has to be policed and enforced, and this requires large resources and bureaucratic capacity if implementation is not demanded and enforced by society.

The suppression of popular initiative in the Soviet Union meant that the only way of checking policy implementation was through the creation of a vast parallel bureaucracy and police to supervise the public administration. The ultimate failure of the Soviet system shows that this way of policing policy implementation is inefficient. Although the Russian state is richer than in the past, it is committed to spending a large proportion of revenue on servicing foreign debts and on defence. Resources to police policy implementation are therefore still inadequate, especially as they have to compensate for the lack of interest in policy implementation among large sectors of Russia's unreformed civil service.

Finally, the possibility that society might help enforce policy implementation by holding power-holders accountable for their actions at some future date is lessened by the contraction of democratic rights. Putin's actions thus run the risk of creating a vicious circle of progressive state decline as the state forgoes possible social support for state-building in favour of policing itself at great cost and with all the opportunities for corruption that bureaucratic self-regulation creates.