#16 - JRL 6585
Jamestown Foundation
www.jamestown.org
Russia and Eurasia Review
Volume 1, Issue 13
December 3, 2002
RATING PUTIN
By Peter Rutland
Peter Rutland is a political scientist at Wesleyan University and the editor of Russia and Eurasia Review.

One month after the hostage crisis, and two years after his appointment as acting president, it is time to address the question of how Vladimir Putin is doing as president.

It's still too early to assess the long-run significance of Putin's presidency. The Chechen war, the pivotal event of his rise to power, is still an unresolved nightmare. The economic surge of the past two years was driven by the spike in world oil prices, and may not be sustained. And it will take several years before one can assess whether the important structural reforms that Putin has put in place over the past two years (strengthening the judicial system, restoring central control over the federal budget, simplifying the tax system) will be effectively implemented and really take root.

It is thus premature to try to judge whether Putin will go down as a "transformational" leader, one who will shape the character of Russian society for years to come. Perhaps, as his critics suggest, he will turn out to be a mere placeholder, presiding over a period of relative calm in between one crisis and the next.

In the meantime, we are left to discuss the effectiveness of Putin as a political leader in the here-and-now. Experts are indeed engaged in lively debate on this very topic. Such discussion usually kicks off with poll data about the remarkably high level of trust and support Putin enjoys among the Russian public. In a recent VCIOM poll, his approval rating hit 83 percent, half a dozen points above its "normal" level, with only 15 percent disapproving of his performance.

Yet the same polls show that Russians remain deeply dissatisfied--about the state of the economy, about the performance of their country's political institutions, about the war in Chechnya.

Does this sound familiar? Precisely the same disjuncture between approval of the man as president, and approval of the policies he advocates, was noted over the past week in the American press, apropos of George W. Bush. He scores an unprecedented level of trust, though the public disagree with his stance on social security, abortion, Alaskan refuge drilling, and so forth.

What do the two publics, Russian and American, have in common? Anxiety. Anxiety about terrorist attacks--but also anxiety about a sluggish economy, about provision for old age, about whether one's children will reach the same living standard as their parents. In anxious times, people rally about symbols of security and authority--and the head of state is a convenient rallying point.

There are limits to the Putin/Bush comparison, of course. Bush was chosen in a fiercely competitive election, and faces another challenge in two years time. Putin was not, and will not. He was nominated by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, and by election time in March 2000 Putin's victory was assured. Likewise, Putin is a shoo-in for the March 2004 election. The only question is whether he will manage a clean first round victory by a sufficiently impressive margin. Of secondary importance is the question of whether his minions will be able to orchestrate a majority for pro-Putin forces in the December 2003 Duma elections.

PUTIN IS LIKE....

Another popular mode of analysis is that of argument by analogy. At the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies last week, one scholar after another rose and voiced their favorite analog for Putin. He is like Gorbachev, successful in foreign policy but stymied at home. No, he is like Brezhnev, an authoritarian leader presiding over a stagnant society. Putin, surely, is the Andropov of our times, a KGB veteran using discipline to shape up Russia. No, Putin is simply "Yeltsinism without Yeltsin"--he inherited the power apparatus and policies of his predecessor, with only stylistic corrections.

In other words, Putin reflects some characteristic of every Soviet leader for the past half century. And why stop there? Putin is also depicted a great Westernizer in the style of Peter the Great. But no, for others he is the supreme statist, in a Russian tradition going back to Ivan the Terrible.

Analogy also works on the international stage. For example, Putin is urged to emulate that other nationalist leader, Charles de Gaulle, and give up on keeping control of Algeria/Chechnya. Yet Putin himself seems most comfortable with contemporary politicians of the mold of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder.

Putin, in short, is turning into a Rorschach test for Western observers: Whatever hopes and fears they have about Russia are projected onto his personage. Some serious and systematic attempts to evaluate his actions in office usually come a poor second.

Analogy is a seductive and thought-provoking form of argument, but it quickly exhausts its usefulness.

RATING THE MAN

Perhaps a more productive approach is to borrow from the toolbox of Princeton professor Fred Greenstein. In his recent book The Presidential Difference (2001), he rates U.S. presidents on six criteria: communication, organization, political skill, vision, cognitive style and emotional intelligence. How does Mr. Putin score on the Greenstein scale?

Communication. Putin is an effective communicator, both in small groups and on the public stage, in the hands of his accomplished spin-doctors. He is not a great orator, but he does connect with his audience, and that is what counts. Here there is some similarity to Bush 43rd, perhaps.

Organization. He seems to have pretty effective organizational skills. He can set goals and accomplish them. He can delegate authority, which is the key to effective management in a national executive. He leaves people to do their job, and does not micromanage or shuffle ministers "like a deck of cards," a charge often leveled at Yeltsin.

But Russia is a hard nut to crack. Its scale, complexity and history of crazy bureaucratism would defeat most national leaders, even if they were blessed with the managerial skills of a Lee Iacoca. Organizational inflexibility and ineffectiveness is, however, a major weakness in the Russian state: It was this more than anything else that doomed the Soviet system. Putin's business-as-usual approach to running his government may not be up to the task. Too often, Putin's initiatives are taken in response to exogenous crises. Russia still needs a major transformation in organizational structures and style.

Political skill. Many observers rightly questioned whether Putin, a shadowy bureaucrat who had never been elected to public office, would have the political skills necessary to manage Russia's fractious democracy. Here, he has proved the doubters decisively wrong. Apart from his impressive electoral victory, he skillfully handled relations with the State Duma, at first allying with the Communists and then dumping them as pro-Putin forces gained strength. He has slipped a few times--his delayed reaction to the Kursk sinking, his relative silence during the Nord Ost hostage crisis--but in each case he recovered, and came out ahead.

Cognitive style. Here Putin scores very high, close to the Clinton end of the spectrum. He is intelligent, well-informed and seems to think analytically. This surely is one of his main strengths. But one is reminded of the cliché: "One cannot understand Russia by reason alone..."

Emotional intelligence. By this, Greenstein means the president's ability to insulate his personal feelings and desires from the task of the presidency. It was lack of said characteristic that doomed the immensely talented Clinton's chances of entering the history books as a great president.

Putin has emotions, and he is prepared to show them. Sometimes this has worked in his favor. One thinks, for example, of his tears at the funeral of his mentor Anatoly Sobchak, or meeting with the Kursk families. Sometimes it works against him--as in his outbursts about flushing terrorists down the toilet, or inviting a French reporter to be circumcised as a Muslim.

But apart from these outbursts, Putin seems a very stable personality--a family man, with hobbies and interests. The contrast with Yeltsin is clear: He was often drunk, angry, suspicious, whimsical. And Putin seems to have good ability to empathize with the emotional state of others.

Vision. Greenstein argues that a great president is one who inspires voters and officials with a vision of where he is leading the country. The "vision thing" is hard to pin down. But is generally agreed that it sunk Bush Senior in 1992, and Greenstein suggests that Bush Junior found his strategic goal only after September 11th.

Does Putin have a strategic vision? He is usually portrayed as the arch pragmatist, a man without principles who is a technologist of power (see Dale Herspring's "Who is Vladimir Putin?" in Russia and Eurasia Review, November 5, 2002). Putin himself has often said that Russia does not need, and cannot sustain, an "ideology" of the sort it carried in Soviet times.

But is Putin's homestyle patriotism adequate to the tasks facing Russia? To the extent that he has articulated a vision, it is that of a prosperous, democratic Russia taking its place at the table of the word's leading powers. But is that vision shared by ordinary Russians--and by Russia's political and military elite? Just last week, Putin approved a proposal to allow the army to restore the Soviet-era five pointed star to its insignia.

ONE MAN IS NOT AN ISLAND

In Russia, the post of president bestows more power on its incumbent than in the United States. But the president alone does not determine the fate of any political system, in Russia or anywhere else.

A great deal depends on the political institutions that are in place, the attitudes of society at large, and--last but not least--the skills and inclinations of the country's political and economic elites. As an individual, Putin himself seems up to the task at hand. Russia has been lucky in stumbling on such a leader: It is not hard to imagine far more disturbing hands at the helm of this former nuclear superpower.

But Putin is only as good as the team of officials formulating and implementing policy. And here the doubts begin. Putin inherited a ramshackle collection of newly-minted oligarchs and stick-in-the-mud Soviet bureaucrats. Unless he can leverage more influence through groups out in society, his political acumen will be confined to ruling from behind the Kremlin walls.