Who is to blame? And what’s to be done? Political scientist Timothy Frye responds to Alexey Navalny’s recent denunciation of Russia’s pre-Putin, post-Soviet era
Earlier this month, the imprisoned Russian politician Alexey Navalny released, with the help of his team, an extended essay on who should be held responsible for the erosion of democracy in Russia. Navalny’s insistence that Russia’s authoritarian turn under Putin is rooted in the unprincipled politics of the 1990s sparked a discussion about how much that period still matters in determining the outlook of contemporary Russia. Timothy Frye, the author of “A Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia,” discussed this question with Meduza special correspondent Margarita Liutova. Meduza presents a condensed English-language version of Timothy Frye’s side of that conversation, edited lightly for clarity.
After communism
Many factors drive institutional choice; the most important is the bargaining power of the different groups who write the rules. If we look at a country like Uzbekistan, for example, the same people who were in power in the late 1980s got to write the rules in the early 1990s. And lo and behold, they gave a lot of power to a president everyone knew would remain in power. And so, Islam Kerimov managed to write constitutional rules in his own favor.
In other settings, there’s a lot more bargaining that takes place. For example, if we look at Russia in 1990 and 1991, there was a great deal of bargaining within the Russian Federation between the RSFSR Supreme Soviet and the newly-created presidency, as they tried to figure out the actual rules — because often institutional choices are made at a very abstract level, to be defined further as politics happens. It’s very difficult to define an institution so precisely that the rules would address every contingency. This is why we have constitutional courts, which can help legislatures and presidencies interpret the rules. But in the post-communist world, constitutional courts were quite weak. This renders institutional choice more of a function of the political struggle between the main groups in power.
In the Russian case, the great difficulty was that there were leftist forces (headed by the Russian Communist Party) and more liberal forces (headed by President Yeltsin), and these competing forces with different policy preferences controlled different institutions, using those institutions to pursue their own policy goals.
In contrast, weakened communist parties in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states had to reform themselves and become supporters of democracy and market economics. We saw this in Poland and Hungary, for example. The differences between Polish communists and liberals were within the normal range of politics. A traditional left camp and a traditional right camp fought over policy, but it was within the range of normal political outcomes.
In cases like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, there was very little political turnover, and it was easy to agree on the rules because there was no one to oppose them.
But cases like Russia, Bulgaria, and Romania are particularly interesting because they feature largely unreformed communist parties holding significant political power and liberal groups holding roughly equal political power. Throughout the 1990s, the Russian Communist Party had the largest membership. It was also the best-organized party, given its history and the institutions that it was able to preserve. It’s also just very difficult to build new parties from scratch. In Russia, the liberal wing could never coordinate a common policy platform beyond opposing the Communists.
Rebuilding the ship while at sea
Throughout Eastern Europe, liberal parties struggled with coordination far more than their ex-communist rivals, particularly where there wasn’t a natural leader, or where infighting (between social-democratic and pro-market camps, for example) distracted liberal groups from vying for power.
Those groups lacked the kinds of institutional resources that the communist parties had inherited: various organizations, lists of supporters, hierarchies that are really difficult to create from scratch. It typically takes a long time to build parties, and in Russia the ship had to be rebuilt while at sea, with the 1992–1993 inflation crisis and the 1994 war in Chechnya.
Also, post-communist transitions had no historical precedent, and the countries enacting them were not just building market economies and more competitive political systems; they were also trying to rebuild states that had great difficulty collecting revenue, judicial systems, and political parties — all at the same time. It was a very chaotic period, regardless of the country you were in.
In principle, countries can be stable as long as everybody agrees on the basic set of rules: agreement as such matters more than the decision to play by the rules of a parliamentary system, or to play by the rules of a presidential system, or to have a federal system allocating specific powers to subnational units, as opposed to the center. But what often happens is that stakeholders fight about the rules and how to interpret them, rather than fighting within the parameters of a particular kind of political system.
In Russia, the rules were constantly being rewritten. The root of the fight that led to the conflict between the presidency and the parliament in 1993 was over decree power and what it would mean to grant presidential authority to issue decrees on economic policy. It was also about how to change the constitution, given that the Supreme Soviet had repeatedly changed it. And when the rules constantly change, it’s very difficult for businesses to attract investment, to produce new products, or to plan for the future.
Still, as long as the groups that are losing in policy terms under the current rules are determined to keep playing by that same set of rules, that system of rules will remain in place. So, for example, if there’s an election and one party loses, that party can challenge the election and say it was fraudulent and that they won’t accept it and will protest and resort to violence. Or they could say: We lost this time, but the rules themselves are legitimate, and if we play by the same rules again, we might win in the next round. As long as the groups that lose today think that they can win tomorrow under the same rules, they will continue to abide by those rules.
Regarding constitutional design, political scientists often say that rules which reduce the gains to the winners and the losses to the losers are generally better in the long run than rules that allow one party to take all.
There are also cases like Hungary, where, according to the rules of the 2018 election, Viktor Orbán’s party received about 48 percent of votes but got 66 percent of the seats. Rules that allow huge gains on small margins of victory are often really dangerous because they make it seem that if you lose today, you will lose forever. This means you must fight to change the rules, instead of continuing to play by them.
Putin and the lawless 1990s
In the early aughts, when Putin came to power, Russia had many different options. What happened in the 1990s did not determine what followed. We can criticize the economic and political reforms of the 1990s, the corruption, the loans-for-shares deal, which many people thought was wrong even then. But the fact is that when Putin came to power in 2000, Russia could have gone in many different directions.
The great failure of the 1990s was the failure to build institutions like a legislature, a party, a business association, or strong regional governments that could have constrained Putin from consolidating power in his own hands. Political scientists always assume that politicians want to take more power. And what prevents them from doing so are groups that can threaten them with removal from power if they try to take all power into their own hands. In Russia, there were powerful governors and business people, but they acted as individuals rather than as organizations.
Why didn’t institutions spring up, then? First, it takes time to build institutions, and the polarization we saw in Russia prevented the left and the right from agreeing on a set of rules that everyone would be willing to follow. Another factor was the price of oil.
Economic reforms in Russia were starting to turn the corner in 1996–1997. Growth was starting to return, but the East Asian financial crisis in 1997 caused oil prices to plummet. Oil prices in 1996 and 1997 were $12 and $17 a barrel. This made it really difficult for the government to collect the revenue needed to pay pensions and salaries for bureaucrats, the police, and the military. There was a sense that the government wasn’t working, and this made it harder for people to play by the rules.
The prevalent notion about privatization — the transfer of state assets to private hands — had been that it would lead various groups to demand a single set of rules for everybody. In Russia, however, privatization largely sanctioned or formalized what was already occurring on the ground. By then, managers had taken control of the enterprises, and the state was too weak to reclaim it. So, the state just recognized the managerial control over the enterprises, and the managers then became an interest group more interested in seeking rents for themselves than in building a broad coalition to support a single set of rules.
Everybody hates privatization. If you look across the post-communist world, privatization has been incredibly unpopular everywhere, even in places where economic reforms were largely successful. But I do think that the loans-for-shares privatization, which took place before the 1996 election and where the state relinquished control over some of its most valuable assets, was a mistake. And later, Vladimir Putin re-established control over those assets in a way every bit as ugly as the way they were privatized in the first place.
Vladimir the Lucky
The banking sector was the big beneficiary of the high state bond prices, since the banks were buying a large portion of those bonds. Essentially, they became a pro-rent-seeking lobby that benefited from the government’s hunger for money. In a sense, the worse things were for the government, the better they were for the banks and the people buying these bonds as long as the government could repay them. After President Yeltsin’s election in 1996, it looked like the economy was starting to turn the corner. Privatization was largely over, and inflation was coming down. The sharp economic declines of the early 1990s had stopped, and the economy was just starting to recover when oil prices collapsed. That made it extremely difficult for the Russian government to raise the revenue to pay off those bonds. The oligarchs, banks, and foreign investors who bought those bonds then blocked policy change.
The 1998 financial crash broke this pro-inflation, pro-rent-seeking coalition of banks and oligarchs. When Putin came to power, the main institutions of a market economy were all in place: there were free-floating prices, private property, and a currency that was undervalued, making exports very profitable. And then, oil prices surged, which meant that Vladimir the Lucky joined Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great in the succession chain of Russian power. The economic conditions for a boom were already in place — not because of what Putin did, but because of the 1998 financial crash and what he’d inherited from his predecessors.
When Putin came to power, the concern was less about autocracy than about the weakness of the Russian state. The whole gamut of people, from liberals like Gaidar to Putin supporters, shared this view. If we look at what Putin did in his first three years in office, he conducted a lot of economic reforms that had broad consensus among the elites. But oil prices stayed high, and Putin could deal with the governors and business people piecemeal, buying them off one at a time and consolidating power in his own hands.
When a leader has to bargain with other groups who wield the power to remove him, this may turn into an autocracy, albeit an autocracy where a party or the military constrains the ruler. Russia, on the other hand, turned into a personal autocracy where it was Putin making all the major personnel and policy decisions, without a single institution being able to keep him from doing what he wants.
Once an autocrat consolidates power in their own hands, it becomes very difficult to get them to relinquish it. Typically, they can use the power they have today to expand the power they have tomorrow. So, the real battle of trying to prevent an autocracy comes before the autocrat consolidates power. To compel Putin or any Russian leader today to bargain with other groups when making policy, it would have been necessary to create institutions before 2004–2007.
If we think of Russia in the 1990s, Yeltsin was a very powerful president on paper, but he still had to bargain with the parliament to get the budget passed, to get it to spend money on government programs, and there were big fights around the budget every year. What Putin was able to do when he came to power was to deal with the powerful governors and the powerful business people, and then to create a majority within the parliament, which Yeltsin never had. By the time Putin decided to consolidate power in his own hands, no one could stop him.
A different narrative
The 1990s were pivotal in Russian history, and the discussion around this period has become very politicized. The Kremlin tries to paint the 1990s with a broad brush, as pure chaos, impoverishment, and subjugation before the West. There’s also a camp within the opposition to Putin that is very critical of the democrats during the 1990s, blaming them for creating the conditions that allowed Putin to seize power. But I think it’s important for us to look at what actually happened and to recognize the great difficulties of the period.
Even well-intentioned politicians would have found it very hard to make the transition without having lots of corruption and making lots of mistakes. We must recognize just what a difficult task it was to go from a political system with no private property or autonomous institutions and basically no civil society, when that system collapsed overnight. The 1990s were a complex political task, and we should avoid using this period to score political points, either for the regime or its liberal critics.
I think the conditions of a post-Putin era will be very different from those in the 1990s. The rudimentary institutions of a market economy are already in place, and people already know about competitive politics. I’d also point out that voting rates in Russian presidential elections in 1996 and 2000 were higher than in the United States in those same two years. So, the notion that Russians are somehow unfit for democracy just doesn’t hold water.
Weak democracies can govern pretty well, often better than weak autocracies. I’m skeptical of the notion of building a weaker autocracy instead of a weaker democracy. If you value voting rights, equality before the law, and other liberal rights that go along with liberal democracy, those are almost by definition going to be greater under a weak democracy than under a weak autocracy. Given the choice, seeing Russia as a strong, capable, stable democracy would be the best choice. Failing that, a weak democracy would be preferable to a weak autocracy, as far as ordinary Russians are concerned.
The key to preventing the rise of a new autocracy is to build institutions: business associations, legislatures, regional governments — any kind of organization that can make life difficult for a would-be autocrat. I think that’s the important task for building a post-Putin Russia. In the interim, maintaining ties with the outside world and preventing Russia from becoming even more isolated is an important goal. A good task for right now is to think about what a post-Putin Russia would look like and which resources within and outside of Russia might allow Russians to build a more open, competitive political system in a post-Putin era.
The human capital in Russia is still quite good and can be used to build a better Russia in the future. Russians can begin addressing these long-term structural conditions even today, and this is an important agenda for those interested in building a more open and democratic Russia in the future. Diversifying the economy and rebuilding society after the war would also be important. And ending the war itself is critical. Typically, wars produce deep cleavages within societies, unless they’re short victorious wars where people rally around the government. Longer wars tend to be much more divisive. How Russia deals with the fallout from the invasion of Ukraine is likely to be an issue that will last for a very long time.
Interview by Margarita Liutova. Adapted for Meduza in English by Anna Razumnaya.
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