Teaching Comparative

Russia as reality rather than metaphor

Jim Lerch alerted us to PolicyPointers, and I found the following link to Stephen Kotkin's talk there.

I was going to add an excerpt from Kotkin's talk as a comment to one of the earlier entries here about Putin's Russia (like Leadership in Russia, that has links to several other articles.).

Then I read Kotkin's questioning of many of the assumptions and much of the reasoning behind the theme of "managed democracy" in Russia, which has gotten such attention in the press. I decided these ideas deserved more emphasis. Kotkin lays much of the blame for misinterpretation to ineffective reporting.

How would your students react to Kotkin's arguments? If you asked them to compare his reasoning with that presented by reporters cited in other entries here (or in other reporting) how well could they evaluate the arguments? My guess is that they'd need a bit of guidance from you to sort things out. The exercise would probably be worth it for the critical thinking process as well as mastering details of Russian governance and politics.


Russia under Putin: Toward Democracy or Dictatorship?

Stephen Kotkin is a professor of history and the director of Russian and Eurasian Studies program at Princeton University. This is the transcript of a talk Prof. Kotkin gave on February, 15, 2007, in Philadelphia.

"The answer to the question of today’s talk, Russia: toward democracy or dictatorship? is 'neither.' Russia is not a democracy, and it is not a dictatorship. Russia, like most countries of the world, has a ramshackle authoritarian system with some democratic trappings (some of which are meaningful). Russia is not in transition to or from anything. Russia is what it is.

"Here in the U.S., it seems much harder than it should be to get good information on and insight into Russia...

"American reportage on Russia generally obsesses about the Kremlin and the leader, Vladimir Putin. Putin dominates U.S. coverage of Russia far more than he dominates Russia...

"1. 'Kremlin Inc.' is something that anyone can readily understand. It signifies that a KGB-dominated Putin group has taken over Russia and controls the country politically and economically. It’s a wonderfully simple story, now perhaps the dominate view among U.S. commentators on Russia. But Kremlin Inc. is one of those pernicious half truths.

"The Russian political system lacks functioning political parties or other institutionalized mechanisms of elite recruitment. Instead it has an extremely personalistic system. Russian leaders appoint to positions of authority those people they went to school with, those from their home town, those from the places where they used to work...

"Putin’s regime falls far short of being a dictatorship... To outsiders, the strategy looks like centralization of all power in a disciplined pyramid, but on the inside the strategy looks like making sure that the ruling “team,” far from being united, is at each other’s throats... Its members compete incessantly...

"What keeps this divided, turbulent, unstable, misnamed Kremlin Inc. from spinning violently out of control is dependence on Putin...

"2. Russian society is enormously dynamic. According to professional studies by the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, something like 20-25 percent of Russian society qualifies as solidly middle class... the Russian middle class is something we hear too little about (unlike the middle class in, say, China or India)...

"About half of the Russian middle class works for the state... the Russian middle class is smart, and it knows that if it gets political, it could lose its property and status. Individuals respond to incentives very well (economists are not totally wrong), and for the most part Russia’s middle class is not ready to sacrifice its position to push for the rule of law and democracy; rather, it is interested in preserving its wealth, in privileged access for its children to educational institutions and to career paths. So there is no push in Russia for democracy either from the top or the middle...

"Consolidation of dictatorship is not happening either, and society is a factor in that as well... Even though there is a strong current in Russian society appreciative of order, few people mistake order for dictatorship...

"3. [A] revived, assertive, resentful Russia is nothing to fear. Russia has state interests that are different from U.S. interests (or Japanese interests or Chinese interests)...

"Energy supply looks like a point of tremendous leverage for Russia, except energy’s a market, which entails a kind of codependency relationship. Russian suppliers have to find customers... if Russia’s state-owned companies fail to perform in market conditions, the market will eventually punish them... The problem with a market economy is that you actually have to run a company as a business, and if you do not, you will pay the price...

"When the Russia government gets assertive, mostly rhetorically, there’s little cause to worry, or even to react. Sure, other countries need to try to understand what Russian state interests are, so that there can be productive state-to-state relations based on mutual interests. But this is no different from relations with China, India, or any major country that seeks a place in an international system... A new cold war does not happen simply because Russia is suddenly semi-assertive again. Russia’s military is a shambles. Russia’s territory is much reduced... it barely has a sphere of influence. It lacks meaningful alliances. Its current political-economic model does not appeal to developing countries. True, Russia’s GDP has been growing at a rapid pace for eight years, but this is a good thing. In the belated recognition that Russia is a petrostate, the degree of diversification of Russia’s economy (biotech, software, aerospace, military hardware, food processing) is often missed. That, not posturing, will be the basis of Russian power, or lack thereof.

"The overall picture in Russia, therefore, is, first, a false stability in the regime... Second, Russia has a dynamic middle-class society that is stable, and mostly apolitical... Third, the world will have to get used to the newly assertive Russia... a strategic power in a very important location, with its own state interests, interests that are going to conflict with others’ interests sometimes. Still, there is no need to be alarmed. The problem with viewing Russia as a major threat is that the threat is mostly to itself, not to the outside world."

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Labels: democratization, politics, Russia

posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:59 AM