#12
Moscow Times Metropolis
April 2003
Putin the Stabilizer or Transformer?
By Lynn Berry

Lilia Shevtsova tells readers of her new book, "Putin's Russia," that she has written a political diary, and even if that were all she has done, and it is not, the book would be an interesting read.

Like a diary, the book moves chronologically, beginning with the transition of power from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin and continuing through Putin's first three years in the Kremlin.

The events are still familiar to those of us living in Moscow, but through Shevtsova's eyes they take on new life. She puts the pieces together, and the puzzle that is Vladimir Putin begins to take shape.

Shevtsova, who splits her time between the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and the Carnegie Moscow Center, benefits not only from hindsight but exceptional insight.

The book moves quickly, slowing only in spots where she uses polling data to back up some of her assertions. Her language is active and vibrant, her images colorful. A Ph.D, Shevtsova writes more like a journalist than an academic, drawing comparisons to "The Russia Hand" by Strobe Talbott, who was a journalist before he joined President Bill Clinton's team.

Picking up where her 1999 book "Yeltsin's Russia" leaves off, Shevtsova starts "Putin's Russia" with Yeltsin's decision to make Putin his heir. After Putin is elected president in March 2000 and begins assembling his team and forming the Cabinet, she reminds us how few of his own people he was able to bring in initially. Yeltsin's Family was keeping him on a short leash.

"If anyone still labored under the illusion of Putin's independence, or wondered who really ran Russia," she writes, "then their doubts were settled once the prosecutor general was appointed."

Putin wanted to name Dmitry Kozak, an old friend from his days in St. Petersburg, and reportedly had even written the decree appointing him to the post, but under extraordinary pressure from the old Yeltsin entourage, he backed down and appointed Vladimir Ustinov. Ustinov, who remains in the post, was Yeltsin's prosecutor general and was seen as guaranteeing Yeltsin and his extended Family that they would be allowed to live in peace.

To make up for his defeat in forming his Cabinet, Putin charged ahead with his efforts to create what Shevtsova calls a "superpresidential regime" by limiting the independence of Russia's regions.

As Shevtsova sees it, the summer of 2000 was a triumph for Putin. "He succeeded in everything -- taming the governors, fighting the oligarchs, liquidating the independence of the Federation Council, pocketing the Duma, weakening all the other political institutions, and cowing the press." Putin seemed invincible, but then in August unpleasant things started to happen. The explosion at Pushkin Square was followed by the loss of the Kursk nuclear submarine and all 118 of its men, and then the fire in the Ostankino tower.

"The Ostankino fire demonstrated to the full the drawbacks of Putin's 'transmission belt' of governance. For three long hours, firefighters could not start putting out the blaze because no one ... wanted to take responsibility for turning off the electricity. Only President Putin could. Similarly, the military leaders during rescue operations for the Kursk did nothing at all while they waited for a command from above."

The country's bigger problems also started to catch up with the president by the end of 2000. The war in Chechnya was bogging down, and the government was unable to come up with an economic strategy. But instead of taking on the controversial economic issues, Putin turned to simpler things and asked State Duma deputies to extend their session so they could approve a package of new state symbols before the new year. "The president evidently had decided that the country could get by without a clear strategy for economic development but absolutely must have a new seal and anthem to enter the new millennium."

In 2000, Putin succeeded in consolidating power in his hands but otherwise had few achievements to point to, Shevtsova says, naming the Duma's approval of START II and the new flat 13 percent income tax as his only two.

She scolds Putin for contenting himself with the status quo. Why did he want power, she asks, if not to use it to push through reforms?

After a year in office, Putin came into his own in spring 2001. "It was obvious in his manner, his gait and his gaze, which had lost their former strain. The president no longer seemed stiff and reserved; he began speaking off the cuff. He stopped avoiding public appearances. The time had come for Russia's leader to show why he wanted a concentration of power." In his state of the nation address in April, Putin declared his determination to push ahead with market reforms, and he followed up his speech by delivering to the Duma a package of legislation that encompassed judicial reform, a land code, pension reform, changes in tax legislation, the regulation of business, a new labor code.

"What he did in the spring of 2001 looked like a revolution," Shevtsova writes. But Putin was hedging. When deputies began studying the legislation, they saw that the proposed reforms seemed "designed not only to preserve the political weight of the higher echelon of the state apparatus but also to help oligarchic businesses." Shevtsova acknowledges, however, that Putin might not have succeeded with more radical reforms.

It was about this time that the court squabbling that was so much a part of Yeltsin's rule resumed, as various groups began to fight for control over the president and his policies. The main clash was between the "Putinists" and the old Yeltsin Family, a clash we still see today as political forces maneuver ahead of the upcoming elections.

Putin allowed the conflict to continue because he did not want to become hostage to whichever faction triumphed and because he knew his people were still too inexperienced to run Russia, Shevtsova reasons. To this day, Putin has kept his chief of staff Alexander Voloshin and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, both holdovers from the Yeltsin era and committed Family men.

Putin's foreign policy gets less attention until Sept. 11, 2001, when, Shevtsova says, "the terrorist attacks on the United States forced the Russian president to make a choice that turned a mediocre politician into a leader who amazed the world by proposing a completely new role for Russia."

Putin's decision to make Russia an ally of the West in the counter-terrorism fight and to accept a U.S. presence in Central Asia was tantamount to rejecting Russia's great-power ambitions, Shevtsova says. "This was a step that shocked even his comrades in arms."

Putin, she says, understood that his goal of a strong Russia could be achieved only through broader engagement with the West. The question was whether others did.

"Unless he gained the support of the political class for that breakthrough, however, and unless he created a new team that included people free from the old mentality and Cold War stereotypes, Putin's new policy was unlikely to be durable and sustainable."

Sure enough, we soon saw the old anti-West and particularly anti-American sentiments return, particularly as the diplomatic wrangling over Iraq intensified.

Shevtsova puts much of the blame on the West, which she says was busy with its own problems and "seemed not to have the strength or desire to think about how to include Russia in its orbit." Her assessment holds up when we think of the Bush administration in the runup to the Iraq war.

Using one of her favorite terms, Shevtsova describes the alliance struck between Russia and the West as a Faustian bargain. The West includes Russia where it needs Russia, such as in fighting terrorism, while shutting its eyes to how far Russia still is from being a liberal democracy. Genuine integration, she says, depends on shared values, not just political convenience.

Throughout the book, Shevtsova comes down hard on Russia's political class: in foreign policy for being afraid to move beyond great-power politics and redefine Russia's role in the world; and domestically for being afraid of a society outside of state control. "Even the liberals in power fear the energy of the free masses." She suggests that society is ready to move forward toward a liberal democracy but must wait for a new political elite to lead the way.

Shevtsova's political diary ends in December 2002 but her book moves forward. With it she has created a framework not only for looking back on Putin's time in office but for watching Putin's Russia in the months and likely years to come. She has articulated the unanswered questions. She has asked us to ponder how Putin can continue to combine his authoritarian ways with economic liberalism and a pro-Western policy. And how he can keep stability from again turning into stagnation, how Russia can break out of its past while avoiding chaos.

For Russia's president, she says, the dilemma is this: "whether to stay a stabilizing leader of corrupt capitalism and of a country doomed to living in the waiting room of Western civilization, or to become a transformer and start building a new system that would allow Russia to become a full-fledged liberal democracy and enter the industrial world as an equal."

The second option is riskier for Putin, but Shevtsova challenges him not to squander the chance to transform Russia. It is his chance to make history.

"Putin's Russia." By Lilia Shevtsova. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 298 pages. $19.95.

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