The Russian Challenge

The Russian Challenge
Russia’s Changed Outlook on the West: From Convergence to Confrontation
About turn: divergence and confrontation
From the middle of 2003, it became increasingly apparent
that the mood in the Kremlin was changing. Russia was
becoming richer. The urge to restore its historical role as
an independent Great Power and to reverse the perceived
humiliation of the years of weakness since 1991 was
strongly felt. The balance of power within the upper
echelons shifted towards hard-liners opposed to reformist
and Westernizing tendencies. Policy began to move away
from Putin’s proclaimed goal of closer integration with
the West and towards a very different model.
Internal governance: the state versus civil liberties
There had always been a tension between Putin’s
determination to rebuild a strong state, with the president
at the apex of a vertical of power, and the democratic
values which he claimed to espouse. The concept of
‘loyal opposition’ – that politicians or the media or nongovernmental
organizations can criticize a government’s
actions without their loyalty to the nation being called into
question – is hard to transplant and not one that someone
of Putin’s background can easily understand. Speaking
in 2000 about civil society, Putin had asserted: ‘We are
not always able to combine patriotic responsibility for the
destiny of our country with what Stolypin once called “civil
liberties’’.’ He had concluded that work was needed for civil
society to ‘become a full partner of the state’. 14 Likewise,
while calling for free media, he had criticized (not without
reason) the dependence of the media on the commercial
and political interests of owners and sponsors who allowed
the media to be used as ‘a means of mass disinformation, a
means of fighting the state’. His solution was for the state
to ‘create legal and economic conditions … for civilized
information business’. 15
Since his election, Putin had incrementally used the
presidential powers embodied in Yeltsin’s 1993 constitution
to bring the legislature, judiciary, media and regional
administrations under ever-tighter Kremlin control. From
the middle of 2003 it became evident that these powers
were being used not for the modernization of Russia, but
for the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of
Putin and his close associates.
The Yukos affair – the arrest of Platon Lebedev in July
2003 and of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in October, and the
subsequent transfer of the assets of the Yukos oil company
to the state-owned Rosneft chaired by Igor Sechin 16 – was
a signal that the tensions between reform and state power
were being resolved in favour of the latter. Khodorkovsky
was not only the independently minded head of one of
Russia’s most successful private-sector corporations. He was
also a man with political ambitions who had not been afraid
to challenge Putin in public.
Since his election, Putin had incrementally
used the presidential powers embodied
in Yeltsin’s 1993 constitution to bring the
legislature, judiciary, media and regional
administrations under ever-tighter Kremlin
control. From the middle of 2003 it became
evident that these powers were being used
not for the modernization of Russia, but for
the consolidation of power and wealth in the
hands of Putin and his close associates.
The Duma elections of December 2003 were another
indicator – so heavily manipulated that the combined
representation of the liberal Yabloko and SPS parties fell
from 51 seats to seven. 17 In February 2004 the liberal prime
minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, was replaced by the reactionary
Mikhail Fradkov (a former official of the Soviet Ministry
of Foreign Trade and since 2007 the head of the Foreign
Intelligence Service, the SVR). The presidential election
in the following month was little more than cosmetic,
with Putin facing a field fairly described as Lilliputian
and claiming 72 per cent of the vote. Some reformers
were dismissed; some drifted out of the administration
voluntarily in the period that followed; some have
remained to this day, but have been marginalized.
Economic policy: the state versus free enterprise
Whereas the administration had accomplished some
important structural reforms during Putin’s first term
(including legislation for the freehold ownership of land,
reforms to the judicial system and the break-up of the state
power-generation monopoly), it became clear in the course
of 2004 that further restructuring was off the agenda. In
2000, Putin had called for protection of property rights,
equality of conditions of competition, and the freeing of
entrepreneurs from administrative pressure, corruption
and ‘excessive intervention by the state in spheres where
14
Annual address to the Federal Assembly, 8 July 2000.
15
Ibid.
16
Sechin had worked with Putin in the mayor’s office in St Petersburg. He was a deputy head of the presidential administration during Putin’s first two terms as
president, also becoming chairman of Rosneft in July 2004.
17
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe declared the elections to be ‘free but not fair’ and said they had failed ‘to meet many OSCE and Council of
Europe commitments for democratic elections’.
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