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Moscow Times
January 25, 2002
Chronicling a Political Era
By Jonas Bernstein
Russia-watchers remain roughly divided between those who see the cup half
full and those who see it half empty, and Michael McFaul, a senior
associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is a leading
representative of the former school of thought. But the optimism in his new
book, "Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to
Putin," is cautious. Russia's "battle for liberal democracy," he concludes,
may be "a long one."
McFaul casts a critical eye on the reform process that began in the
mid-1980s. The book seeks to explain why the Soviet Union and then Russia
experienced two "design failures" in the transition from communism -- the
first leading to the abortive August 1991 putsch, the second to the October
1993 shelling of the Soviet-era parliament -- before embarking on a "more
successful" attempt to build new political institutions. While ultimately
giving Boris Yeltsin passing marks, McFaul catalogues many of the first
president's sins. These include his incorporation of the Soviet "power
ministries" without "attempting any serious internal reform or instituting
civilian control over these bodies" and the way his economic reforms
spawned oligarchic capitalism, impeding the development of civil society,
small businesses, an effective party system and a fully independent media.
The book's problem, however, is that many of its conclusions do not follow
from its own evidence. For example, it describes how, following the
"October events," the Yeltsin team apparently falsified the December 1993
referendum in order to ensure the passage of a new constitution
establishing an essentially powerless parliament. The Constitutional Court,
when it was eventually allowed to reopen, was also toothless. The Central
Electoral Commission, meanwhile, exercised "authoritarian control" over who
could run in the December 1993 parliamentary election and "blatantly abused
this power on behalf of parties loyal to Yeltsin." Yet McFaul says it was
an "overstatement" to call Yeltsin's post-October 1993 regime a
dictatorship -- although he himself refers to it as a "transitional
dictatorship."
But if the author seems uncertain about how to characterize the regime, he
nevertheless justifies it, arguing that while "negotiated rules would have
been better than imposed rules," two violent confrontations in as many
years meant that "some rules, however deficient, were better than no rules
at all." Similar arguments could have been -- and, in fact, were -- made to
justify Taliban rule in Afghanistan. McFaul notes, however, that Yeltsin
created "incentives" to garner his opponents' acquiescence to his new
rules. But this, by itself, also means little: most nondemocratic regimes
try to co-opt at least some of their opponents.
Likewise, the author says that after October 1993, the opposition, above
all the Communist leadership, made a "deliberate decision to acquiesce to
the new rules," having concluded it was "better off participating in the
new system than continuing the struggle against Yeltsin and his allies by
confrontation." The "new rules," McFaul argues, left open the possibility
that someone other than Yeltsin could win the presidency. Had Gennady
Zyuganov not had such a chance, the author reasons, the Communist leader
would not have run against Yeltsin in 1996.
Here, as elsewhere, the author takes politics in Russia -- which Boris
Nemtsov recently described as "a Byzantine country" that lives for
"under-the-carpet" battles -- too literally. In fact, as Alexander
Solzhenitsyn shrewdly observed, Zyuganov seemed terrified he might win and
have to run the country. The Communists' ritual denunciations of Yeltsin's
"anti-people" regime were never much more than a way to appease their aging
electorate and thereby put off the day they would have to give up the
Moscow apartments, dachas, cars and offices afforded Duma deputies,
courtesy of the Kremlin property department. McFaul also takes mostly at
face value the "fascist" shtick once performed by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who
former Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov once aptly described as the guy the
Kremlin trotted out when it wanted to scare up some IMF money. (In December
of last year, the "ultra-nationalist" leader said Russia should join NATO.)
And while McFaul claims "no major group" in Russia today believes it would
be better off "by deviating from electoral and constitutional rules," he
seems unaware that some of these groups may say they adhere to them but not
really mean it, much the way the Soviet Communist Party used to say it
ruled on behalf of the workers. Zyuganov's "opposition" has certainly
evinced no inclination to break the rules. But the 1996 and 2000
presidential elections, like the 1999 parliamentary contest, showed that
elements of the ruling elite were ready, willing and able to disseminate
compromising materials, manipulate state media and election commissions,
engage in massive illegal campaign spending and falsify voting results. And
if there is truth to the allegation -- first made by some media and more
recently by Boris Berezovsky -- that Russia's special services organized
the September 1999 apartment-building bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk in
order to provoke another Chechen war and thereby ensure Vladimir Putin's
accession, this would seriously undermine McFaul's thesis that Russian
politics has become more peaceful since October 1993.
But perhaps the conclusive reality check for "Russia's Unfinished
Revolution" is who's mentioned and who's left out. The book, for example,
includes several pages concerning Viktor Sheinis, the liberal former State
Duma deputy who penned a draft electoral law in 1993, but never mentions
Pavel Borodin, the Yeltsin crony who headed the Kremlin property
department. Borodin's perks served to control parliamentary deputies,
Supreme Court judges and prosecutors, among other officials, rendering
Russia's already paper-thin constitutional separation of powers essentially
irrelevant. Sheinis is undoubtedly an honorable man. But in Yeltsin's
Russia, who of the two was more important?
"Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin,"
by Michael McFaul. Published by Cornell University Press. 383 pages. $35.
Jonas Bernstein is a senior analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a
Washington-based think tank.
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