Two Decades of Russia Under Putin

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

It has now been two decades since Vladimir Putin took effective control of Russia.

In the summer of 1999 he was appointed Prime Minister of the Russian Federation by the ailing and increasingly unpopular President Boris Yeltsin, who knew he would lose another election if he ran again.  

At the end of the year, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned and, according to the constitution, Putin became acting president. Yeltsin's resignation resulted in the election being held three months early; Putin won in the first round with 53 per cent of the vote. 

In one way or another, including another stint as prime minister, he’s been running the country ever since. Putin’s return to the Kremlin for a fourth presidential term in 2018 has seen Russian democracy weaken further and Russia’s relations with the West seriously deteriorate. 

Yet, within Russia, Putin’s position remains unchallenged and his foreign policy battles, and the annexation of Crimea, have received widespread public support.

What kind of country has Russia become since his accession to power? In his recently published book Contemporary Russian Politics, Neil Robinson, a professor of comparative politics at the University of Limerick in Ireland, maintains that Russia’s leaders feel they cannot co-operate with the West but must practice realpolitik. 

In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians suffered the loss of some 17 per cent of their territory and 60 per cent of their population. 

While the Soviet Union was on paper an equal partnership of many different peoples held together by a complex system of ethno-federalism, in reality it was at its core a Russian entity which represented the geopolitical continuation of the old Tsarist Empire.

In modern Russian political discourse, the breakup of the USSR is regarded as a massive humiliation, stripping Russia of its military and industrial power. 

To make matters worse, during the Yeltsin years Russia’s cold war adversaries, in particular the United States, acted as victors and treated Russia, in Putin’s view, with contempt. 

American hegemony during the 1990s was unchallenged. President George H.W. Bush declared a “New World Order” with the collapse on the Soviet Union.

The Yeltsin years were also a disaster internally. Western support for Yeltsin discredited democracy rather than bolstered it.

European Union and NATO enlargement up to Russia’s very borders (and including, for that matter, the three Baltic States that had been part of the Soviet Union itself), with apparently no regard for Russian objections, increased Russian fears. 

For Putin, this had to stop – and he has since done his best to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining these organizations.

Putin sees Western rhetoric about democracy and rights as ploys to weaken Russia’s status as a great power and thinks it will not bring it acceptance in the eyes of its western rivals in any case.

Putin’s government therefore began to craft a political ideology of “sovereign democracy” and non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states.

This allows it to win support among the more authoritarian governments of the world, such as Iran and even Turkey, who see it as a counterweight to the West.

Russia’s intervention in Syria has also demonstrated to potential and existing friends that Russia is willing to use military force to prop up allies if required.

Domestically, though Putin has managed to curb the power of the biggest economic oligarchs that reigned supreme during the corrupt Yeltsin years, elites have continued to enrich themselves. 

Along with conservative voters, state bureaucrats, and workers in import-competing sectors, they benefit from the status quo.

For Robinson and other scholars who study Russian politics, the institutional and legal system of Russia as a modern state -- its democratic constitution and division of powers, multiparty parliamentary system, private and public law, and so forth – remains a mere shell, subordinated to the informal machinery of patron-client bonds, with Putin at its apex.

For political and economic actors in Russia, these bonds determine their access to various resources based on personal exchanges of loyalty and capital, not on formal laws and contracts.

Such susceptibility of state processes to elite machinations is of course dangerous. Robinson maintains that Putin has been much better at establishing a political system that supports his rule than he has at building up a state that can deliver material wealth and protection to the Russian people.