There is an interesting anecdote from the early 1970’s when Henry Kissinger was National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon. On one of his ground-breaking trips to China Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai for his opinion of the French Revolution. Zhou replied: “It is too early to tell.”
This view from the Middle Kingdom is extreme for most Westerners. In 1999, several months prior to the resignation of Boris Yeltsin, Lilia Shevtsova published Yeltsin’s Russia. Notwithstanding the fact that Yeltsin’s formal term as President had more than a year to run, Yeltsin’s Russia was an excellent review of this period of current Russian history, perhaps because Yeltsin’s early years were much more important than his second term. Shevtsova thus successfully established that Zhou Enlai’s unique perspective was not essential for a useful work on current Russian history. In her latest book, Putin’s Russia, however, one might conclude that Shevtsova has pushed this historical perspective too far. After only three years of what she and the rest of the world believe will be at least an eight year reign for President Putin, Putin’s Russia has appeared.In fact, however, Putin’s Russia is not a parallel volume to Yeltsin’s Russia. Doubtless it was the publisher who believed the parallel title would enhance sales.
This volume is neither history nor a comprehensive account of Putin’s first three years in office. What we have is a collection of journalistic notes, often interesting, sometimes inconsistent, and occasionally wrong on the facts, which Shevtsova herself first labels as a “political diary” and later characterizes as “ruminations.” Rather than a consideration of Putin’s first years in office, Putin’s Russia is Shevtsova’s private diary, in which she tries out commentary, conclusions, and hypotheses, reaches for generalizations, and crafts labels, just to see how they will sound and how they might fit in the final version of the work. This book, then, is not an account of Russia under Vladimir Vladimirovich or even the first few chapters of that story. It is rather a unique opportunity to observe Shevtsova as she begins to assemble her account of Russia’s continuing transition from rule by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to whatever form of government Russia is to have.
In this book Shevtsova repeatedly describes the views and attitudes of various groups important to the analysis of this transition. Thus she refers to, and often criticizes, the views of what she labels “civil society,” the “elites,” the “intelligentsia,” “ordinary people,” the “political class,” the “ruling class,” “society,” “thinking circles,” and the “wandering mass.” There is nothing in this work, however, which defines or even begins to describe these groups. We must hope that when her definitive study of Russia under Putin is published, these terms will be more fully described and distinguished.
It is apparent that Shevtsova’s final version of Putin’s Russia will have as its dominant theme her analysis of how close the Putin years bring Russia to “liberal democracy.” We have scores of comments in this work on this theme of achieving, or perhaps, failing to achieve, “liberal democracy.” A few examples: Putin is accused of having become “hostage to his ratings” and of rejecting or postponing unpopular actions “because they threatened to ruin his ratings”; she blames Putin for “trying to appeal to all forces simultaneously”; she accuses Putin of including representatives of various competing groups in the Presidential Administration; Putin is criticized for “commercializing” Russia’s foreign policy.
One wonders what definition of liberal democracy Shevtsova contemplates. Seeking to be “all things to all people” is a hallmark, if not the essence, of modern democracies. Commercialization of foreign policy has long been practiced by major European powers and was finally achieved by the U.S. in the Clinton administration.
Shevtsova describes how A. Rutskoi, governor of Kursk and one of the leaders of the 1993 parliamentary mutiny against Yeltsin, was seeking reelection early in Putin’s term. Rutskoi’s candidacy was challenged in the courts and he was finally removed from the ballot the day prior to the election. Shevtsova writes: “No one doubts that Rutskoi… was corrupt. But the Kremlin did not know how to get rid of him. So Putin’s people chose the simplest path: The Kremlin put up its own candidate... and used the courts to remove Rutskoi from the race the day before the election.” Then she notes: “And after all that, the Kremlin did not finish the job. Rutskoi was removed from the ballot but the Kremlin’s candidate did not win in Kursk; the victor was a Communist, an anti-Semite, and most likely a thief too.”
The serious reader is left with genuine doubt as to the point Shevtsova would like to make. If opposing a corrupt governor through the application of law for political purposes was appropriate, was it wrong to accept the decision of the electorate? In some Western democracies, prominently including the US, convicted criminals and reprehensible corrupt officials can be and are elected to office. This Rutskoi anecdote is best taken as an example of a journalist’s jottings for a headline-grabbing news story. It is appropriate in a “political diary” containing notes for a news article intended for that part of the entertainment industry known as commercial journalism. Without much more discussion and analysis, however, it is not appropriate for serious study of Russia under Putin.
This book desperately needs an entire chapter on what Shevtsova believes is the standard by which she will evaluate Russia’s progress to “liberal democracy.” A careful definition will be the keystone of her analysis of Putin’s years as leader of Russia. And this definition must accept, or at least deal with, the generally accepted view that liberal democratic politics is, regretfully, never more than the art of the possible; the triumph of pragmatic compromise over ideological purity. As Russians, more than most, have learned in the past century, the single-minded enforcement of the “correct, ideologically pure solution,” does not yield democracy.
The story of Putin’s Russia will necessarily focus on the continuing transition of Russian institutions and society from Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika” through Putin’s “managed” democracy. The analysis of Putin’s years must distinguish between what he should have done and what was not possible. It is, for example, meaningless to blame Putin for Yeltsin’s 1993 Constitution. Furthermore, undeveloped social institutions are not obviously Putin’s fault. Civil interest groups, which play an essential role in the checks and balances of a functioning democracy, must evolve over time. They cannot be imposed from above by Putin or anyone else. Modern democracies are dynamic, continually evolving and never complete or perfect. If the process in the United States has been underway for more than 225 years, the English example spans a millennium. Lilia Shevtsova is a shrewd observer of the Kremlin chaos we know as Russian democracy. That makes this book interesting, timely, and worth reading. Those of us outside the Middle Kingdom, however, look forward to her more complete view of contemporary Russia, because Shevtsova is one of the few able to present a coherent view of Russia’s enormously complex transition under Putin.