Search

The Russian system of personalized power is growing ever more dependent on the same strategies that proved useless in sustaining the USSR. While the system still has the potential to limp along, its survival tactics render the it progressively more dysfunctional. Among the circumstances weighing against the system’s survival are the unintended yet logical consequences of the regime’s own strategies for monopolizing power and resources. While there are grounds for cautious optimism regarding Russian society’s future beyond the system, the system itself is moving toward its self-destruction.

Lilia Shevtsova is a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. From 1995 to 2014, she was a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Her books include Putin's Russia (2005) and Lonely Power: Why Russia Has Failed to Become the West and the West Is Weary of Russia (2010). The Russian system of personalized power, the antithesis of a state based on the rule of law, is demonstrating an amazing capacity for sur- vival even in the midst of advanced stages of decay. The latest survival strategy that the Kremlin, the central headquarters of this system, is now using to prolong its life includes several parts. The first is a "conserva- tive revolution" at home. The second is the conversion of Russia into a revanchist power that will undermine the rules of the international order if that helps to preserve the internal status quo. The third is the containment of the West, combined with the forging of an anti-Western International. Throughout its long struggle to keep itself going, the Russian system has defied many predictions and ruined many analytical narratives. At the end of the 1980s, it humiliated the entire field of Sovietology, which had persuaded the world that the Soviet Union was as solid as a rock. In the 1990s, "transitologists" said that the system would move one way, only to find it going in another direction entirely. In the early 2000s, the system discarded the assumption that Russia would partner with the United States in its battle against terrorism. And from 2008 to 2012, the system turned both the U.S. "reset" policy and the EU Partnership for Modernization program into the punch line of a joke. Over the past two decades, the system has limped on, meeting new challenges with imitation solutions that do not change its essence. At the beginning of the 1990s, it reincarnated itself by dumping the Soviet state, faking adherence to liberal standards, and professing a readiness for partnership with the West. Today, its liberal dress-up game is a thing

The Ukrainian events of late 2013 and the first half of 2014 reflect the flowing together of several different crises. The first is the crisis of the post-Soviet political model; the second is the crisis of soft authoritarian rule in Russia; and the third is the normative crisis that besets the liberal democracies and their policies. In addition, these events have not only revealed liberal civilization’s failure to defend Ukrainians’ “choice for Europe,” but have also laid bare that civilization’s inability to stand in the way of attempts to undermine the existing world order.

Following the 2011–12 Russian elections that sparked a wave of protests ended the era of Putin’s status quo, a newly awakened Russia is now asking of series of questions, such as how to transform the current system and who will be the actors to lead the transformation. Putin’s regime is clearly now in decline, but it is unclear whether the death knell has sounded for the “Russian System”— a combination of personal rule, the merger of power and assets, and a self-perpetuating statist-militarist model. Once can conclude, however, that the Russian system cannot be reformed from the top and that real transformation will come only through pressure from citizens.

After a decade of revolutionary changes Russia is returning back toward traditionalism. Vladimir Putin is trying to modernize Russia through forming bureaucratic authoritarian regime. But his authoritarianism is weak being constrained first of all by apparatus, the major gravedigger of all Russian reforms. Russian stability is fragile being based on the presidential ratings and lack of alternative. Russia's economic growth is hardly sustainable when the economy is not diversified. Russian modernization can't be achieved without changing the way Russia is being ruled. So far Putin has proved that he is not ready for this task which means that Russia is doomed to face stagnation or crisis. And the goal of Russian liberals to prepare ground for new reformist agenda.

Ten years after the Soviet Union broke up into 15 independent states, it is possible to form some preliminary conclusions regarding the challenges and problems faced by these transitional societies. First of all, despite their common Soviet roots, their paths of post-Soviet development are becoming ever more divergent—evidence that there are more influences at work than just the legacy of the USSR. One can provisionally identify three groups of states, based on the degree to which they have moved toward “polyarchy.” The first group, the Baltic states, have come closest to liberal democracy, although even here it is premature to speak of democratic consolidation. The second group includes those states that have been able to form weak institutions but still suffer under personalistic government, or those in which the Soviet bureaucracy, which has disintegrated into clans, still holds sway. There are as yet no guarantees that democratic changes are irrevocable in these states—Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova. The third group includes neopatrimonial and even openly sultanistic regimes of varying degrees of authoritarianism. It comprises Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. In the overwhelming majority of post-Soviet states, the fundamental problems of democratic development—building the foundations of the rule of law, dismembering the traditional monolithic government, training society and the elite to live under independent political institutions, ensuring political accountability and alternation in power, and forming a consensus in society that democracy is “the only game in town”— have still not been resolved. True, in almost all the newly independent states people have realized that the old mechanisms of legitimation— Lilia Shevtsova, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, divides her time between Moscow and Washington, D.C. Her most recent book is Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (1999). This essay was translated from the Russian by Mark H. Eckert.