Who lost Russia?

Two recent articles on Russia appearing in Foreign Affairs magazine are worthy of remark. The first, Dimitri Simes' "Losing Russia," casts a glance backward at the train of events during the 1990s and beyond that led the Russian Republic to its current authoritarian turn; the second, "The Myth of the Authoritarian Model" by Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, takes a look at today's Russia and attempts to dispel some of the misconceptions surrounding Vladimir Putin's term in office. Both essays are well argued and seem to speak to another. I find Simes' essay to be the more provocative of the two, and for that reason wish to address a few of the points its raises.

Simes' essay centers upon the poor policy choices made here in the US since 1991 that have contributed to Russia's drift away from the West. While stopping short of squarely placing blame in Washington, Simes clearly believes that Russia could have been a vastly different place today had the US conducted its foreign policy with greater skill and wisdom. My own feeling is that Simes gets his history right, and many of his conclusions are spot on as well, but I cannot help but feel that not enough blame is shouldered by the Russians themselves, at least, in his telling of it. In this Simes cannot be faulted too much; his aim in the article is to generate greater awareness here in the US that our own policy prescriptions for Russia during the 1990s greatly impaired Russia's ability to transform itself into a modern liberal democracy, but in seeking to make that point Simes by turns allows Russian liberals to escape too easily from the blame they should, properly, carry with them.

The problems faced by Russia's liberals today are complex and historical, but Russian liberals did themselves no favors during the Boris Yeltsin years when their power and influence crested in the post-Cold War era. They rapidly and clumsily pushed through a series of austerity measures in order to jolt Russia into the global financial system, but the economic hardships of the late Soviet era persisted and became worse. The lot of ordinary Russians degraded quickly. The network of state-run services was dismantled, yet comparable economic activity did not evolve quickly enough in the private sector, and even when it did, accessibility was often limited by cost.

This fundamental problem was made worse by an equally botched attempt at privatization. Early on, the intention was to privatize the Soviet Union's vast holdings whereby the Russian people could become shareholders in the enterprises formerly run by the state, but this went awry, and the result was that commercial power was concentrated into the hands of a few well-placed 'oligarchs.' This represented not only a perversion of the stakeholder society that Russian liberals sought to build, but also stoked class hatred and envy. It did not help matters that several of the oligarchs were Jewish, further inflaming public sentiment that the country's crown jewels had been 'stolen' by a privileged few in league with foreign powers.

Simes is correct in that the US in many cases made things a good deal worse by not acknowledging the difficulties faced by the majority of the Russian people in the early post-Cold War era. There was a facile belief in the unconditional good of free-market economics and economic libertarianism, but lacking American institutions -- a strong and independent judiciary, a well-funded and vigorous regulatory regime, and a healthy banking industry -- these 'reforms' floundered.

The question that should gnaw at Western observers is why did Russian liberalism so inflexibly pursue such a politically suicidal course? Did they, too, have such unreserved confidence in the economic libertarianism of their American counselors? Some surely did, but there were also men of great pragmatism who failed to react swiftly enough to the dire economic conditions on the ground in Russia. Whatever the reasons, these economic failures and the privation they brought to the Russian people have set back the liberal cause in Russia immeasurably. In this instance it is easy to sympathize with ordinary Russians, many of whom were already distrustful of market economics to begin with. There really was a pressing need to get these things right the first time, and as we are finding out, second chances in Russia might never come. Still, it is easy to forgive the Russian people for their impatience with 'Anglo-Saxon economics,' especially when it was shoved down their throats by a small cadre of technocrats who proved to be not up to the challenge.

What is less forgivable is how quickly Russia's economic failure turned into a catastrophe for liberal democracy more generally. Even during the reformist years of the Yeltsin presidency, Russian liberal parties did not perform very well at the polls. Yabloko, the leading liberal party in Russia, has never won more than 8% of the vote in Russia's legislative elections. Allied parties did less well, such that in sum liberals never accounted for any more than about 12 to 15 percent of the Duma. Today, their support is almost zero. In the 2007 elections Yabloko won 1.6% of the vote, which was not good enough for even one seat.

The point here is that Russian liberalism, even before the abject failures of policy, was an exceedingly shallow pool. The failures only entrenched beliefs that Russians already held about themselves and liberal democracy. For instance, the failed privatization schemes only reinforced many Russians' suspicion of private property, which was reinforced in turn by 70 years of state indoctrination. In 2004, as he was awaiting trial after the Russian state seized Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky wrote passionately about how reform in Russia was less a matter of state ideology or state institutions and more so a matter of taking personal responsibility. He wrote:

In order to change the country, we must change. In order to convince Russia of the need for, and inevitability of, a liberal vector for development, we must remove the complexes and phobias of the last decade and of the entire dreary history of Russian liberalism. In order to return freedom to the country, we must first believe in it.

To understand why this latest experiment with liberalism failed is to understand the mass psychology, such as it is, of the Russian people. With no visible economic successes to point to during their short stay in power (a situation not entirely of their own making) liberals simply had no leg to stand upon. They couldn't rally around prosperity, for there was none; the couldn't rally around liberty, for their audience distrusted the very idea of it. They couldn't rally around the idea of fraternity because the Soviet state (and the Czars before that) had systematically destroyed any sense of civil society or esprit and replaced it with fear of one's neighbors and confreres.

As Khodorkovsky noted, the change that needed to take place was in the hearts and minds of the Russian people, but change did not come. What surfaced instead was a deep-seated and -- as far as the West is concerned -- deeply troubling traditionalism. Lilia Shetvsova, a research fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described this movement in February 2004:

In other words, a new type of traditionalism is taking shape that is free of the Communist shell. By “traditionalism” I mean that the accent is still being made on the leader’s personified and unlimited power in domestic policy, together with the use of force in foreign policy.

Over and above the economic failures of Russian liberalism and the tin ear of liberal politicians, this circumstance alluded to by Shevtsova is perhaps the immovable object in Russian politics: the "personified and unlimited power" of the head of state. All of Russia's dalliances with alternative forms of government have ended up here, and despite the machine of state repression that Russians have eternally battled against, this is the circumstance that Russians must answer for. No outside power or influence can or should be blamed for this choice, one that Russians seem almost fated to make over and over again.

The Government They Deserve?

This morning's New York Times leads with a long expose of political life in Putin's Russia, and of the many interesting details among the reportage comes the story of campaigning in 2007 in the Nizhny Novgorod region, once a relative stronghold of liberal sentiment. After detailing the hardships of candidates standing for office against the Putinists Times reporter includes this quotation from one-time opposition candidate Artur Nazarenko, "You begin to think: you have a family, you have a business, and you may value this significantly more than a political career."

This quotation is a slice of life that plays itself out hundreds of thousands of times a day in Russia. Clearly, my deepest sympathy is with the Artur Nazarenkos of the world, and it is very easy indeed to cast the repressive state as the villain and call it a day. Such states, of course, are villains, but leaving the discussion at that point does very little to open up the possibility of change, much as Khodorkovsky noted earlier. So to what degree are we to "blame" the victim?

It is along these lines that I got into a friendly debate last year with Ilya Somin, Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University and a frequent contributor over at the Volokh Conspiracy. In a flip and casual manner I had suggested, after Edmund Burke, that countries get the governments they deserve, to which Mr. Somin took some degree of exception. Somin argued:

...organizing such concerted resistance is a classic collective action problem, in which each individual has strong and understandable incentives to free ride on the efforts of others. Not to mention the fact that efforts to organize against the govenrment [sic] are likely to be ruthlessly suppressed and punished by the authorities. In light of these facts, I think it is wrong to assume that people living under a repressive regime necessarily approve of its policies. It is even more wrong to blame them for their supposed cowardice in failing to engage in active resistance.

Cowardice in this context is a strong term, and one I wouldn't use lightly, particularly when the men and women whom we ask to "stand up" face conditions more daunting than most Americans will ever face. But we must call the action (or inaction) captured by Artur Nazarenko something. We must give it a name and call attention to it, because as Khodorkovsky hinted at, the change that must take place in Russia concerns the Russians themselves. Transitioning Russia to a more liberal democratic country is not something that can be done for the Russian people -- it is something they must do for themselves.

Khodorkovsky should know. Like fellow former oligarch Boris Berezovsky, he had every opportunity to flee Russia with his riches (he was reputed to have been the 16th wealthiest man in the world at one point); like Roman Abramovich, he had every opportunity to cozy up to the Putin regime and thereby retain his influence and riches. In both cases he declined and was eventually consigned to a prison cell in Siberia. While Khodorkovsky is far from a paragon of virtue, his dissent is precisely the kind of action that would rally and inspire a people yearning for freedom. Instead, he is largely reviled by the Russian people, most of whom feel that he has gotten exactly what he deserved. One might say the same of Russians themselves.