In a recent interview, timed to help drum up support for a constitutional reform that would strengthen the power of the presidency and potentially extend his rule until 2036, Vladimir Putin said, among many other things, the following:
What is democracy? It’s the power of the people, that’s right. But if the people elect their higher authorities, then those higher authorities have the right to organize the work of the organs of executive power in such a way as to guarantee the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population of the country.Footnote 1
Putin was, in fact, talking about the United States, lamenting the fact that American state governors failed to fall in line with President Donald Trump’s orders, whether on COVID-19 or the response to Black Lives Matter protests. But it was also a statement of political philosophy, encapsulating much about how Putin sees the source of his own power, its structures, and its limitations—three fields that are at the heart of this combined issue of Russian Politics & Law.
In a series of essays, the liberal Russian online journal InLiberty—closely associated with many of the thinkers and policymakers who led the country’s early post-Soviet reform efforts, including the late Yegor Gaidar—revisited the idea of modernization in general and modernization theory in particular. In his introductory text, the Gaidar Institute political scientist Kirill Rogov reminds readers of the old maxims of modernization and wonders what we should make of the fact that they don’t seem to hold true. This is, of course, not a new dilemma, but as the contributions by Rogov and his colleagues make clear, the question might look somewhat less theoretical from within Russian than from without.
Picking up Rogov’s challenge, the St. Petersburg–based Higher School of Economics sociologist Ella Paneyakh suggests moving away from an institution-centric view of modernization to a view that focuses more on more fluid behaviors—what she calls “liquid modernization.” When the state itself becomes an impediment to the rationalization of human interaction, she argues, the rational response may be to elide the state. Perhaps, she writes, “we are ceasing to live in the bureaucratized, centralized, state-centered society of modernity, where the principal supplier of institutions and, in particular, trust … has been the state.”
Paneyakh’s fellow sociologist Vladimir Magun—who both teaches at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and heads the Personality Studies Sector of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences—picks up where she left off, suggesting that the process of transformation that exploded the USSR in 1991 is still in motion, as people’s understanding of what is and is not possible continues to change. “What used to seem immutable and was perceived as unalterable, … ” he writes, “is now perceived as pliable, manmade, created by concrete actors—and hence as something that can be remade, corrected, or restructured.” This, he argues, leads to a new logic of empowerment.
To the fundamental optimism of Paneyakh and Magun, however, Maria Volkenshtein adds a note of caution. The owner and director of a Moscow-based social research agency, Validata, Volkenshtein does not dispute the phenomena that her colleagues identify. She observes, however, that the opportunities for change that this new diversification and autonomy open up also produce powerful conservative and traditionalist tendencies. Moreover, she argues, the challenge for those who would like to see Russia “modernize” (whatever that might mean) is not simply that the state seems impervious to change: the public sphere itself, she writes, “remains … frozen,” while Paneyakh’s “liquid modernity,” thus far, at least, flows mostly in people’s private lives.
Irina Busygina, a comparative political scientist at the Higher School of Economics, explores the changing—and largely diminishing—nature of Russian federalism. Whereas federalism generally involves “mutual interdependencies” among central and regional authorities, two decades of post-Soviet reform have left the interdependencies of Russian federalism somewhat less than mutual, Busygina argues. And yet for Russia, federalism is more or less the only option available, and so the question becomes not whether Moscow’s power over the regions will wane but how and when. The most likely scenario, she writes, is a gradual loosening of economic control, in an effort to create new stimuli for growth. Whether this would eventually bring political decentralization is, of course, a separate (but related) question.
Picking up on the theme of economic imperatives, Natalya Zubarevich—director of the regional program at the Independent Institute of Social Policy and Russia’s foremost expert on regional economic policymaking—reviews the impact of the four years of post-Crimean economic downturn on Russia’s regions. What she finds is far from a pretty picture, and not simply because the economic indicators are poor. In its drive to maintain fiscal discipline and shore up central coffers, the federal government has turned to the regions as sources of additional income, squeezing budgets and tax bases. This has further deprived governors in particular of autonomy and resources, even as they have been saddled with an increasing burden of social policymaking and the task of maintaining the political popularity of President Putin and United Russia. The result has been a spiral of repression and subterfuge that has undermined the quality of governance, she writes.
While Busygina and Zubarevich take the broad view, two other authors—Sergey Sergeev and Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya—delve into critical regional cases. Sergeev, a professor of political science at Kazan Federal University, charts the rise and fall of Tatarstan’s experiment with semi-sovereignty. While the idea of a unique identity and a special status remains politically and socially important in the republic, the current trajectory will turn the region—which once claimed co-equality with Russia itself—into just another subject of the Russian Federation, he writes. If Tatar sovereignty may slip quietly into history, however, no such fate is likely to await the North Caucasus. There, as elsewhere, the Kremlin has attempted to subjugate republic governments and elites to the same logic used to manage other parts of the country. Unlike elsewhere in Russia, however, these efforts have been less than fully successful, writes Sokiryanskaya, director of the Conflict Analysis and Prevention Center and formerly a Caucasus analyst with the International Crisis Group. Not least, she argues, this is because the Kremlin itself has failed to resolve the conflicts that still structure politics in the region.
Finally, Igor Zadorin, director of the polling agency Zircon, turns our attention to Russia’s “frontier” regions and asks whether being located far from Moscow and close to the rest of the world—with all of its threats and opportunities—creates a distinct pattern of public opinion. His answer (as is often the case in social science) is yes … and no. Russians living along the country’s borders do not appear to have a heightened sense of threat or a greater focus on patriotism; nor are they more likely to see themselves as somehow connected to the countries across the border. They are, however, considerably more likely to see their relationship with Moscow as antagonistic, Zadorin finds.
Separately, we turn to Russian politics writ large, with a data-rich exploration from Rostislav Turovsky, a professor of political science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Crunching electoral data from all of Russia’s post-Soviet parliamentary and presidential elections, Turovsky attempts to trace the sources of an evident pro-incumbent bias among Russian voters. The answer, he finds, is “strategic voting” on behalf of a “weakly ideologized and apolitical electorate,” whose support is available to whoever is in power, even if their deeper sympathies may lie elsewhere.
Notes
1. “Moskva. Kreml’. Putin.” Rossiia 24, June 14, 2020. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO8BMZYEehQ).