Vladimir Putin: How Successful a Dictator?
BY MARK N. KATZ
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is clearly not a democrat. He has closed down independent television as well as other media outlets that have criticized him. He has not only waged a brutal campaign against separatists in Chechnya but has also rigged elections there. He has stripped away the assets of several oligarchs, the businessmen who rose to prominence under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, who dared to criticize him. Putin and his allies benefited enormously from the favorable coverage they received in the Kremlin-controlled media both in the December 2003 parliamentary and March 2004 presidential elections. In the wake of the September 2004 Beslan tragedy, Putin proposed changes that would increase his authority. The changes included eliminating single-member Duma districts and electing all members—instead of half—on the basis of party lists, and selecting provincial governors through presidential appointment instead of popular elections. These steps, and others, indicate that Putin prefers to rule not as a democrat, but as a dictator.
But if this is the case, how much of a dictator is he? While he has seized control of part of the media, the print media—especially that based in Moscow—remains remarkably free and critical of his government. His forces have prevented Chechnya from seceding, but they have been unable to end the insurgency there. While Putin has moved against some oligarchs, he has not moved against others. He seems genuinely concerned about building a thriving market economy, and, most important, he has not eliminated elections. Even his plan for the presidential appointment of provincial governors calls for his choices to be subject to ratification by provincial legislatures.
What kind of a dictator is this? Part of the problem in answering such a question is that while Putin is clearly moving in a dictatorial direction, he appears uncertain about what kind of a dictator he wants to be. Indeed, it appears that Putin is attempting to emulate two very different dictators: Pinochet and Stalin.
Why Pinochet? While vilified as a right-wing reactionary in the West and Latin America, Putin (along with many other Russians) admires Pinochet for having destroyed an immature democracy, which they see as similar to what Russia had under Yeltsin; presided over the capitalist transformation of his country during an extended period of authoritarian rule; and then allowed the restoration of democracy once the economy had developed sufficiently to sustain it. Many Russians believe that the mistake made by Yeltsin was to attempt a capitalist and a democratic transformation in Russia simultaneously. Because the economic transformation was so painful, Russians soon began to vote for those who opposed marketization, thus forestalling it. Determined to avoid Yeltsin’s mistake, Putin sees the capitalist transformation of Russia as something too important to allow the electorate to interfere with.
And why Stalin? A desire to emulate him seems incomprehensible from a Western viewpoint.
Awareness of his brutality, though, is not widespread in Russia. He is remembered, instead, as having been effective both domestically and internationally. Indeed, all the leaders between Stalin and Putin (Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin) are commonly regarded as having been ineffectual or worse. While Putin’s goal of building a market economy is very different than the autarchic command economy that Stalin sought, Putin sees Stalin’s reliance on the security services as a more reliable means of achieving his goals than what, as was mentioned earlier, he regards as the immature democratic institutions that had come into existence under Yeltsin. Fortunately, there is a limit to the extent Putin seeks to emulate Stalin. Putin has not used state terror against the population the way Stalin did—except, of course, in Chechnya.
Putin, then, seeks to achieve what Pinochet did in Chile by using some, though not all, of the means employed by Stalin. However, Putin’s attempt to do this has encountered serious problems. To begin with, there is a contradiction between Pinochet’s goals and Stalin’s methods. Chris Weafer of Alfa-Bank, Moscow, noted, “One of the main reasons why Pinochet was so successful was because he managed to establish a high degree of cooperation between business and the state.”1 However, the Kremlin’s heavy-handed attack on Yukos, which had not only become Russia’s biggest oil company but also a strong advocate for corporate transparency, has served to convince Russian businessmen that a jealous Kremlin will punish, not reward, successful entrepreneurial activity. This view was reinforced when someone who attended Putin’s July 2004 meeting with Russian business leaders quoted Putin as saying that “five to seven people” could be “next in line.”2 The chilling atmosphere that has resulted prompted Russian economist Mikhail Delyagin to describe the “dialogue” Putin has sought to have with Russian businessmen as follows: “When you’re making scrambled eggs, you could just as well say that the eggs are conducting a dialogue with the frying pan.”3
Another obstacle to the achievement of Putin’s goals is the persistence of corruption. As Weafer noted, part of Pinochet’s success in developing Chile’s market economy was his ability to “reduce the level of corruption in business while at the same time preventing corruption from destabilizing the senior government.”4 Government corruption in Russia, though, remains extremely high: “Of the 104 nations surveyed by the World Economic Forum for its annual Global Competitiveness Report, only four…were found to be worse than Russia when it comes to the costs crooked officials impose on companies.”5 One reason for this appears to be that while Putin has emulated Stalin in relying heavily on the institutions of power to eliminate his political opponents, Putin has not been willing or able to conduct wholesale purges of those institutions like his predecessor in the Kremlin did.
Nobody, of course, would recommend that Putin kill or viciously treat anyone the way Stalin did. But Putin’s unwillingness to root out government corruption or even fire those guilty of it has allowed the Russian bureaucracy to stunt the growth of Russian business through extorting a significant chunk of the latter’s profits. According to one report, the arrest of Yukos chief Khodorkovsky in the fall of 2003 was seen as a “signal” by the Russian bureaucracy that it could actually “increase the amount of money being extorted.”6
Putin sees extending his control that would increase his authority—or the “power vertical,” as he calls it—as crucial for achieving his goals. Something he has been unable or unwilling to control, however, is his own emotionality. This has proved especially disastrous with regard to Chechnya, where Putin has persisted in his futile attempt to defeat the secessionist forces he has been fighting for over five years now. Despite this failure, he vehemently (and often crudely) defends his Chechen policy and refuses to alter it, even though it is well known that part of the problem he is facing is that corrupt Russian forces sell arms to and otherwise engage in illicit trade with the Chechen rebels they are supposed to be fighting. Stalin would undoubtedly have handled this situation differently. If the current level of Russian forces in Chechnya was insufficient to quell the rebellion, he either would have increased their level until they were able to do so, or he would have cut his losses (as both he and Lenin did on various occasions) by pulling his forces out of Chechnya and waiting for a better opportunity to reassert Moscow’s influence. Putin, though, has been unwilling to take either course of action, and thus both men and money are (literally) being wasted in Chechnya that could instead be much more productively spent on Russia’s economic development. This problem will only grow worse if Putin is unable to prevent the conflict in Chechnya from spreading elsewhere in the ethnically and religiously divided North Caucasus.
While they may be his role models, Putin’s inability to overcome all these problems shows that he is neither a Pinochet nor a Stalin. Instead, he appears more and more like Brezhnev, who also presided over a weak economy despite vast oil reserves; a corrupt, inefficient bureaucracy; and an insurgency in Afghanistan that he was both unable to defeat and unwilling to extract himself from. Just as with Brezhnev, Russia may have to wait for a successor to solve the problems that Putin has worsened by failing to resolve them himself.
Mark N. Katz (mkatz@gmu.edu) is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University (http://pia.gmu.edu/).
- Chris Weafer, “Kremlinology for Investors.” Alfa-Bank, Moscow, June 29, 2004, p. 37. [↩]
- Svetlana Babayeva, “Two Paths in One,” Izvestia. July 2, 2004, p. 2; translation in Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press (CDPSP), July 28, 2004, p. 4. [↩]
- Tatyana Rybakova, “When You’re Making Scrambled Eggs….” Izvestia. July 2, 2004, p. 2; CDPSP, July 28, 2004, pp. 3-4. [↩]
- Weafer [↩]
- Valeria Korchagina, “Survey: Russia a World Leader in Corruption.” Moscow Times, October 14, 2004, p. 7. [↩]
- Tatyana Chaplygina, “At This Point it’s Impossible to Rein in Corruption in Russia,” Russky Kuryer, March 16, 2004, p. 7; CDPSP, April 14, 2004, p. 16. [↩]
