Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Stagnation or transition?

A briefing in the The Economist raises questions about the stability and future of the Russian political system. Putin and Medvedev are key, but so are corrupt bureaucrats and public perceptions of the system and its leaders.

Frost at the core: Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin are presiding over a system that can no longer change

According to Alexander Oslon, a sociologist who heads the Public Opinion Foundation in Moscow, Mr Putin’s rule ushered in a breed of “bureaucrat-entrepreneurs”. They are not as sharp, competitive or successful as the oligarchs of the 1990s, but they are just as possessed by “the spirit of money” in Mr Olson’s phrase, the ideology that has ruled Russia ever since communism collapsed. By the end of the 1990s the commanding heights of the economy had been largely privatised by the oligarchs, so the bureaucrat-entrepreneurs began to privatise an asset which was under-capitalised and weak: the Russian state…

Corruption was also excessive in the 2000s, but it was compensated for by strong economic growth and fast-rising incomes… As Vladislav Inozemtsev, an economist, argues in a recent article, the improvement in living standards was achieved at the cost of massive under-investment in the country’s industry and infrastructure…

Russia’s trade surplus is shrinking. As imports grow, so does pressure on the rouble. The government is now running a budget deficit…

To keep up his approval rating, particularly among pensioners and state workers, Mr Putin has had to increase general government spending to nearly 40% of GDP…

That economy is growing by less than 4% a year. This would be respectable in many Western countries, but as Kirill Rogov, an economic and political analyst, argues, it is not enough to sustain the political status quo…

[G]rowing numbers of the elite feel that the present political and economic model has been exhausted and the country is fast approaching a dead end. “The problem is not that this regime is authoritarian, the problem is that it is unfair, corrupt and ineffective,” says one leading businessman. “Corruption will erode and bring down this system.” The paradox is that few Russian government officials disagree with this…

[There will be a] conversation between Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev [to] decide, probably next summer, which of them will become Russia’s next president. As Mr Putin said, the decision will be made on the basis of what is best for Russia... The aim is the same, but the styles vary.
Mr Medvedev calls for innovation and technical modernisation to revive growth. He is appealing through the internet to the most enterprising people in Russia, and is inviting Russian and foreign scientists to come and innovate in a specially created zone, called Skolkovo, which would be protected against the rest of the country by a high security wall and honest police…

The two men may belong to the same system and want the same thing, but they are formed by different experiences. Mr Putin, despite his belligerence about the 1990s, is the very epitome of that period. He operates by informal rules and agreements rather than laws and institutions…

Mr Medvedev, on the other hand, was installed as president after nearly a decade of stability, when the political landscape was cleared of opposition and the coffers were full of money. He is a stickler for formality…

As stability turns into stagnation, Mr Putin is becoming a symbol of the bygone 2000s. Mr Medvedev, on the other hand, with his tweets and his iPad, has absorbed hopes of change among the younger, more restless set…

Stanislav Belkovsky, a political commentator, sees a similarity between Russia’s situation and the period of Perestroika reform under Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s. As then, a large part of the elite has realised that the system is ineffective and is no longer willing to defend it. When ordinary people come to share this view, the system is in grave danger...