Why the Conventional Wisdom about Russia is Wrong

By Daniel Kimmage

The brouhaha over Russian President Vladimir Putin's alleged rollback of democratic reforms is a case of misplaced indignation. Putin is anything but an all-powerful autocratic. But the reasons have nothing to do with democracy. They have to do with Russia's schizophrenic and dysfunctional political system, which creates the illusion of concentrating power in formal institutions, while clannish informal groups exercise real power in a chaotic, never-ending struggle for personal gain. That this system is undemocratic may be the least of our worries. It might not even be stable.

When conventional wisdom goes bad, it starts to wear its internal contradictions on its sleeve. In a 14 September editorial, "The New York Times" chided Russian President Vladimir Putin for using the horrific terror attack on a school in Beslan, North Ossetia as a pretext to ram through yet another raft of antidemocratic measures. Be that as it may, the Times provided a beautiful synopsis of the current conventional wisdom on Putin's Russia, with contradictions bared for all to see:

 It has been clear to Russians for some time that all real power flows from Mr. Putin. That is why so much of the public outrage since the slaughter at the Beslan middle school has been directed at him. Over the years, Mr. Putin has made all the other institutions answerable to him in the name of reasserting order. Yet at Beslan there was no order, only the chaos of dysfunctional institutions: government officials who spouted misinformation, armed checkpoints that failed to check anyone, border protection forces that failed to seal borders, elite Army rescue units unable to rescue victims. Many of the most damaging failures were at the federal level, where Mr. Putin's responsibility is already supreme.

 As a graduate student in Ithaca, NY in the 1990s, I shared a house with four of my colleagues. The house was built into a hill, and the kitchen received scant heat in the winter. Eventually, the drain froze up in the kitchen sink, the landlord refused to contemplate expensive renovations, and we stopped paying rent. In the ensuing dispute (which we resolved in our favor), one of my housemates argued, "Running water that has no place to go is not running water."

 In President Putin's case, the question is, "If all real power flows from Mr. Putin, but the institutions he must use to exercise that power are dysfunctional, where is the real power?" Just as ice trumps water when it blocks the drain, the mechanisms that channel power emasculate even the most seemingly autocratic leader when they cannot be trusted to perform the functions with which they are nominally entrusted. Real power, in other words, lies somewhere in the system itself, for whatever its dysfunctions, it is still a system.

 The problem, of course, is describing how Russia is actually ruled. The first and most basic truth is that the real picture differs substantially from the formal system visible to all, in which, to give one small but telling example, officials receive extraordinarily modest salaries yet enjoy a lifestyle that implies rather more substantial means. This dichotomy has a long history in Russia. In the Soviet Union, apparatchiks were officially part and parcel of the people, yet they stocked up on the sly in special stores chock-full of bourgeois delicacies deemed unnecessary for the proletariat. And the dichotomy went beyond sausage. In fact, the party nomenklatura inhabited a distinct "legal" realm, subject to unwritten laws of its own but free from many of the official constraints that bound the general populace. The Slavist Edward L. Keenan argued in a brilliant mid-1980s article titled "Muscovite political folkways" that the cleavage between the formal and informal has been central to a centuries-old Russian political culture in which the illusion of an all-powerful tsar provided crucial cover for bickering informal elite groups that hold real, if diffuse, power.

 While Russian history is anything but a changeless still-life stretching back across the centuries, Keenan's insight is the key to an accurate understanding of how Russia is ruled today. Formally, power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of President Vladimir Putin, with the democratic veneer of the 1990s wearing thin to reveal mechanisms of managed democracy and bureaucratic control. Informally, various groups -- clans bound together by ties ranging from regional affiliation to some sort of corporate identity to the shared experience of mutual enrichment in the 1990s -- vie for money, influence, and access to the formal mechanisms of state power.

 Since most of the sources and virtually all of the participants are silent on the actual workings of the system, any attempt to describe it in detail must rely on the moments when feuds -- which call to mind Churchill's famous comparison of Politburo rivals to "bulldogs fighting under a carpet" -- break out into the open, giving us a glimpse of a gear here, a cog there. The ongoing ruckus over Mikhail Khodorkovskii and Yukos is one such example.

 Before he ended up in jail and the tax police set upon his company, Khodorkovskii was merely Russia's richest man and Yukos the country's most successful private oil company. Khodorkvskii was a big player in the informal system, the head of a clan that came together amid the rubble of the Soviet Union and fused into a financial force during the privatizations of the 1990s. Then something went wrong. The conventional wisdom holds that Khodorkovskii fell afoul of President Putin by getting involved in politics and is now paying the price. But Khodorkovskii's support for a few fading opposition parties in a nominally democratic system of dubious relevance never represented a real threat to anyone (nor was he the only person playing this game). More importantly, the assault on the Khodorkovskii clan that began in July 2003 has proceeded in stops and starts that betray the controlling hand not of the unitary state aiming to crush a political rival, but rather disparate groups using the mechanisms of the state for their own ends.

 The summer of 2004, for example, witnessed a series of confusing and contradictory statements by high-ranking officials and rulings by courts that set Yukos stock on a zigzag jag until Russia's fledgling stock market finally gave up and stopped paying attention. Brokers and analysts concluded that insiders were using official statements to stir the pot and reap the benefits. Meanwhile, in the big picture, a stuttering series of court actions has pushed the company ever closer to a forced asset sale, with the beneficiary as yet unclear.

 The question of "Why Yukos?" is beside the point. The point is that if we assume that a unitary state ruled by an all-powerful Putin is facing off against Yukos, it is engaged in a vast and infinitely complex conspiracy (and inflicting considerable damage on Putin's image as a reform-minded leader). We have little evidence to suggest that the Russian state as currently constituted is capable of such coordinated planning and filigree execution. A much more plausible explanation is that rival clans are tussling beneath the carpet for a piece of the pie, each employing the mechanisms of the state when it can but none capable of controlling enough of them for long enough to enforce a coherent strategy. The levers work, and each action -- a court decision, the ruling on appeal that reverses it a week later -- is coherent in and of itself. Yet the multiplicity of actors and interests renders the overall picture chaotic. It is entirely characteristic of the system Keenan described that the actors should strive throughout to maintain the illusion of the one strong, unitary actor -- the state -- whose existence their sparring belies.

 The precedence of the informal over the formal can do more than ruin the capitalization of a multibillion-dollar oil company. More damagingly, it can wreak havoc with national security. Formally, the Federal Security Service (FSB) is charged with defending the nation against such evils as terrorism and separatism. Informally, many FSB officers place other interests above those of the state they are supposed to serve. As an active reserve FSB officer told "Moskovskie novosti" on 10 September, the results can be dire. He said, "We know the structures where [Chechen] militants make money. For example, by trading in foreign cars. But as soon as the FSB starts to close in on them, suddenly the Prosecutor's Office, customs agents, the Interior Ministry, and fellow FSB officers from other departments get involved. They all make it clear that the people the FSB is interested in are 'their people.' An absurd situation obtains: the financing for terrorists takes place with the help of the law-enforcement organs that are trying to fight terrorism. I know special-forces personnel who help semi-criminal businessmen make money here in Moscow. Later, risking their lives in Chechnya, they battle militants who fight with weapons bought with that money."

 And there's the rub. As long as this crazy-quilt system is squabbling with itself, it can maintain the appearance of relative order. But as soon as a real foe emerges, be it Chechen terrorists or some equally committed opponent, it finds itself hamstrung for the simple reason that the real system is not what it appears to be on paper and the people who are supposed to make it work are busy doing other things.

 This does not mean that Putin's power is a sham. Formally, he wields sweeping power. But the use of that power is limited by pervasive corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence. More importantly, the president's ability to act as a truly authoritarian ruler rests on the consensus of the informal actors who make up the real power structure (although many, but not all, of these actors also occupy high-ranking posts in the institutions of government, of course). As the fall of the Khodorkovskii clan shows, the state's repressive mechanisms can be mobilized against any single group. It is a foolish illusion, however, to think that Putin can single-handedly use the powers he possesses on paper to remake the underlying system by moving against all of the players whose informal consensus is the system's substitute for bedrock. In the end, this is the greatest limitation on Putin's power.

 The deepening cleavage between the formal and informal under President Putin has two crucial implications for Russia's future. The first is that any and all reform projects will fail unless stronger formal institutions begin to take shape. Not only is there no sign that this is happening, informal centers of power are actively obstructing any movement in this direction. The second implication is that if and when Russia faces a real crisis, whether in the form of an ongoing terrorist threat or budgetary shortfalls occasioned by falling oil prices, the stability that is now seen as Vladimir Putin's one undeniable achievement may prove as ephemeral as the virtual formal system on which it rests.