It’s that time again: time to talk about life after Vladimir Putin.
In March 2018, as most observers expect, Putin will be reelected to the presidency of the Russian Federation, launching him into the second of two constitutionally allowed consecutive six-year terms; assuming he serves out that term in full, he will have been in power for a quarter century. But the problem of 2024—what to do when his next term is up—begins the day after (or perhaps before) his assumed re-inauguration in the spring of 2018. The question of succession will, inevitably, hang over every policy move he makes. Speculation and the dark art of ‘kremlinology’ will saturate the analysis of every reform, every appointment and every major public statement. Despite his immense power, Putin’s usual preference for inscrutability means he may effectively be paralyzed.
What is an analyst to do? The answer, according to the authors in this issue, is to look at the country, rather than at its leader. As guess-work once again becomes the name of the game for kremlinologists, those who want to understand what the future may hold for the political governance of the country need to look beyond those narrow confines. That was the intuition—at once blindingly obvious and yet startlingly refreshing—that Maria Lipman and Nikolai Petrov had in September 2008, when they produced an issue of the Russian-language journal Pro et Contra focusing on the “successor’s burden”. Rather than try to guess at who Putin’s successor would be (or whether, in fact, the successor would wield any real power), the authors of that special issue focused on the tasks that anyone governing the country would have to face: the issues mounting in Russia’s economy, in its center-periphery relations, in its ethnic and religious diversity, in its civil society and media, and, of course, in its political elite and security apparatus.
That remarkable issue of Pro et Contra has had one of the longest legacies of any special issue of any journal in any language. It gave rise to three books—Russia in 2020: Scenarios for the Future; Russia 2025: Scenarios for the Russian Future; and The State of Russia: What Comes Next?—and a follow-on issue of Pro et Contra published in May 2014. Unfortunately, that issue was the journal’s last, but Lipman has kept the venture going under the flag of her new Russian-language journal, Counter-Point, which returned to the question of the ‘successor’s burden’ in December 2016. Four articles from that issue are presented here.
Perhaps the most famous outcome of that decade of scholarship was Natalia Zubarevich’s conception of ‘four Russias’—a heuristic for understanding and analyzing Russia’s complex political, economic and social geography. Zubarevich looked at the range of environments and settings in which Russians live and conduct their daily lives and found not one country, but four: Russia One, limited to the inhabitants of Russia’s largest cities; Russia Two, comprising the residents of mid-sized industrial cities; Russia Three, encompassing the residents of Russia’s thousands upon thousands of small towns and villages; and Russia Four, the least populous, including the residents of the ethnic republics of the North Caucasus and southern Siberia. Each of these Russias, Zubarevich wrote at the time, lives according to its own set of priorities, institutions and understandings and follows its own political logic. Ten years later, Zubarevich sees a more monolithic picture—not because the ‘four Russias’ have converged, but because the logic of economic and political crisis has pushed actors at all levels into greater alignment and narrowed the scope for maneuver. Looking ahead, Zubarevich writes, the most likely prospect is of inertia: federal and regional elites should have little or no difficulty maintaining control over politics in most (if not all) regions of the country, even as the economy and social welfare for citizens deteriorate or stagnate. The outcome is stability built on mutual apathy.
Kirill Rogov, writing in 2008, noted two competing socio-political constituencies in Russia: one seeking reform and ‘progress’, and another seeking stability at all costs. These two proto-parties—imperfectly represented as they were through formal and informal politics—periodically drove policymaking from one extreme to the other, as a result of which even without major changes in leadership Russia seemed to swing back and forth between periods of rapid change and periods of retrenchment. The burden of Putin’s successor a decade ago, Rogov wrote, was to begin to find a pathway towards consensus, or at least more institutionalized competition. Instead, however, the combination of deepening economic crisis in 2015–16, Russia’s entry into geo-political confrontation with the U.S. and Europe and the increasing role of ideology and identity in Russian politics meant that the question of reform or retrenchment was effectively driven off of the public agenda. As a result, Rogov suggests, public politics in Russia has become captured by agendas that push against—rather than towards—productive institutionalization.
Nikolai Petrov comes to a similar conclusion. A decade ago, Petrov grappled with the question of how the Russian political system would settle the question of elite recruitment and management: whether it would move towards a meritocratic (and thus at least partly competitive) system, or else re-consolidate a Soviet-style nomenklatura ecosystem of a more limited (and limiting) nature. Now, however, Petrov finds that the Russian state has done neither. Instead, the Kremlin has opted to maintain ‘manual control’ over appointments, adjusting strategy and tactics to fit the demands of the day, rather than to develop an institutionalized—and thus inwardly and outwardly predictable—system for recruiting and managing political elites. The overriding goal, Petrov writes, is the maintenance of stability—of “quiet”, in his term—above all else. But because no system of governance can survive for long without institutionalization, Petrov argues that Russia still faces the same choice that he identified in 2008: reconsolidate the Soviet system of elite management, or discard it altogether.
If Zubarevich, Rogov, and Petrov find a general lack of institutionalization, Andrei Soldatov’s analysis of the security sector points in the opposite direction. As Putin prepared to cede the Kremlin briefly to Medvedev, the project of what former Federal Guard Service boss Nikolai Patrushev called ‘the new nobility’—a term that later found its way into the title of an influential book on the subject by Soldatov and Irina Borogan—was reaching its apex. Members of Russia’s security services were insinuating themselves throughout the commanding heights of the state and the economy, creating an informal network of governance behind the formal state. By 2016, however, their role was becoming more formalized. While the mooted project of merging the security services into a single monolith didn’t come to pass, Soldatov argues that the services are closer than at any point in the post-Soviet period to replicating the institutional coherence of the KGB. With this institutionalization has come a shift in focus, Soldatov writes, from serving “the security of Russia” to serving “the security of the state”. It is more, he argues, than a question of semantics.
Lastly, Andrei Starodubtsev’s review of the evolving relationship between Chechnya and the Russian federal government could easily have been published among the other contributions to Counter-Point, although it ran instead in Neprikosnovennyi zapas in January 2017. Looking back over Ramzan Kadyrov’s time in office, Starodubtsev finds not just a regional politician jockeying for position, but a regional government constantly pushing the boundaries of its settlement with the federal government and rewriting the terms of federation in the process. The result, Starodubtsev writes, will redound not just to Chechnya, but to the future of the federation as a whole.