On
Putin’s Russia
February
8, 2022
©
Thomas C. Sorenson, 2022
Russia has been
much in the news recently for the crisis Russian President Vladimir
Vladimirovich Putin has created with his threat to invade Ukraine. I am
currently reading the book The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep, by
David Satter. Satter
paints a picture of Russia in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union
that is almost unbearably bleak. In Satter’s telling of it life in Russia since
the fall of the USSR has been characterized by rampant crime and corruption
that ran all the way up to Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet
president of Russia, and to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Yeltsin’s successor
and the current president of Russia. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Satter’s
book is an account of how Russia missed its chance to become a true democracy
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in1991. It is a tale of leadership
incompetence an greed in which organized crime infected every aspect of Russian
life. Such crime has been tolerated if not actually encouraged at the highest
levels of the Russian government. Satter, correctly I think, accuses Russia’s
leaders of stealing businesses that had been privatized and whose owners were
not loyal followers of Putin by forcing the owners to sell the business to
someone the regime liked at well below market prices. The government used arrests
on false charges and trials where the outcome was preordained to force such
sales. the buyers of those businesses, of course, are all people who will
support and not criticize the regime. The government under Putin has especially
forced the owners of Russia’s major television networks to sell to handpicked buyers
in order to silence opposition.
Satter’s most
powerful and somewhat shocking charge against the post-Soviet Russian
government under Yeltsin is that it carried out three bombings of civilian
apartment buildings in different Russian cities including Moscow. Something
like three hundred civilians were killed in those bombings, and many more were
injured. The government blamed and blames the bombings on Chechen terrorists.
Yeltsin used the bombings, Satter says, as a way to raise his favorability
ratings in advance of a presidential election. He used the bombings as an
excuse to launch a military campaign against Chechnia, and his popularity
numbers did improve. Satter makes a strong case in support of his claim that
the highest levels of the Russian government carried out the bombings against
their own people for the purposes of
political gain. There is however now way to know for sure if Satter’s charge is
correct.
Satter accuses
the Russian government under Putin of being responsible for two more tragic
incidents of violence against innocent people. October 23, 2002, terrorists
entered and occupied a movie theater in Moscow. The Russian authorities,
probably the FSB, fed toxic gas into the theater. Forces then entered it a
killed all of the terrorists. A large if uncertain number of civilians died as
a result either during the assault or from gas poisoning later on. Satter goes
through evidence that suggests governmental involvement in the attack at least
to the extent of facilitating it.
On September 1,
2004, Chechen terrorists attacked and occupied a school in the town of Beslan,
taking a large number of civilians, including school children, hostage. The
terrorists treated the hostages very badly, but only a small number of them
died as a result. Rather than negotiate with the terrorists the authorities
launched essentially a full-scale military attack on the school. Satter says
that 318 hostages, including 186 children, died in the attack. Satter accuses
the Russian government of at least facilitating the attack when people in the
government knew it was coming. He has some substantial evidence of government
complicity, and it certainly seems that the authorities launched an attack
against the school when there may well have been other, nonviolent ways of
resolving the crisis. As with the apartment bombings and the taking of the theater,
there is no way to know if Satter’s charges are correct.
What it is
possible to know is that, if the Russian government was in any complicit in any
of these incidents (or really even if they weren’t), the post-Soviet Russian
government values human life no more than the Soviet Communists did, which is
to say not much. Russia is a country balanced on the divide between Europe and
Asia. One of its Asian characteristics is that Russians have never valued human
life as highly as the people of Europe and North America have. I’ll cite just
one example. One reason Soviet casualties in World War II were as high as they
were—something like more than twenty million dead—is that one of the Soviets
strategies in fighting the invading Germans was to throw wave after wave of
soldiers at the Germans knowing that a great number of those soldiers had no
chance of survival. I have heard, though I can’t vouch for it, that Stalin said
he had more soldiers than the Germans had bullets. Western militaries commonly
try to keep casualties at a minimum in any military conflict. The Russians don’t
and never have. This aspect of Russian culture certainly seems to have survived
the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I was struck by
this passage from Satter’s book. He’s talking here about the development of the
Russian government under Putin:
The shift of power to the government
bureaucracy and concentration of decision making in the hands of the president
created a situation in which nearly everyone in a management position felt that
he needed the protection of a good relationship with the authorities, which, as
representatives of the regime made clear, was best guaranteed by donations and
activism on behalf of United Russia.
When I read those words I thought
yes, Putin really is trying to build a state as much as possible on the Soviet
model. Substitute Communist Party for “governmental bureaucracy,” and you’ve
got the Soviet model without the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Then there’s this
that Satter says about the courts under Putin: “[I]f there is ‘government
interest’ in a case, orders for its resolution are transmitted to the judge
through the court chairman.” This is exactly the way the courts worked in the Soviet Union. The courts
usually decided each case on the basis of the applicable law and the facts of
the case. That’s how every court should function in every case. In the Soviet
Union however everything changed as soon as the KGB took an interest in the
case. In such a case every judge knew what had to happen. The court had to
reach the verdict the KGB wanted. It's not that the law was written that way.
It wasn’t. Still, every judge knew what they had to do. Ruling against the KGB
would at the very least be detrimental to the judge’s career, and everyone knew
it. Most Soviet people never even thought about going against the KGB or the
Communist Party generally. It rarely if ever happened. Passivity of the
citizens in the face of evil is what every totalitarian our would be totalitarian
regime tries to create. Th Communist Party of the Soviet Union created it more
completely than most other totalitarian regimes have been able to do.
It is no coincidence
that Vladimir Putin has Russia running on so much of the Soviet model. He was
born in 1952. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from
1975 to 1991. He started to work for the KGB in 1975. He was the Director of
the FSB, the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB, in 1998. He moved into a
governmental position in 1999, and on August 16 of that year the State Duma
approved Yeltsin’s appointment of Putin as Prime Minister of the Russian
Federation. Yeltsin made it known that he wanted Putin to be his successor as
the country’s president, the one who held virtually all political power in the
country. When Yeltsin suddenly resigned as president on New Year’s Eve 1999,
Putin became acting president. He was elected as president later that year.
Putin’s first act as president was to pardon Yeltsin and all of Yeltsin’s
family for any crimes they had committed. I doubt that there’s any way to know
for sure, but it looks like Yeltsin and Putin had a deal. Putin would promise
to pardon Yeltsin and his family, Yeltsin would make Putin president.
I have seen Putin
quoted as saying in 1999 that communism was “a blind alley, far away from the
mainstream of civilization.” More familiar to most of us is his statement that
the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical calamity of the
twentieth century. One wonders if he had forgotten about the two world wars in
that century, but never mind. What’s important is that Putin believes it, and
there is no reason to doubt that he does. When we put these two statements
together it isn’t at all surprising that Putin is trying to recreate the USSR
without its communist ideology.
Satter blames
Russia’s descent into what his book’s subtitle
calls “terror and dictatorship” mostly on Yeltsin and Putin. It certainly is
true that both of these post-Soviet Russian presidents consolidated power in
the office of the president. It certainly is true that Yeltsin benefitted from
and Putin continues to benefit from the corruption and crime that came to
dominate Russian political and economic life. Yet it seems to me that there is
a deeper dynamic at work in Russia’s failure to become a western-style
democracy. That dynamic is Russian history. Russia has never had a political
system that was in any way truly democratic. The effect of Russia’s lack of a
democratic tradition under the tsars was amplified by the seventy-four years of
Communist dictatorship which was far more deadly and far more totalitarian then
any tsar had ever been.
Russia’s
historical development differed greatly from those of more western nations. At
least since the time of Ivan IV, known to us as Ivan the Terrible, who ruled
from 1533 to 1584 and as tsar for the last fifty-one years of his reign,
political power in Russa became wholly centralized in the person of the tsar.
There had been a privileged caste in Russia known as the boyars. In earlier
times they had some political influence. Ivan IV reduced them to servants of
the tsar with essentially no political power whatsoever. Tsar Peter I, known as
Peter the Great, ruled 1682 to 1725, tried to modernize Russia in various ways,
but he brooked no interference with his imperial power whatsoever. Later in the
eighteenth century Tsarina (the feminine form of tsar) Ekaterina II, known to
us as Catherine the Great (who was German not Russian) was enamored with some
of the rationalistic thought of the European Enlightenment. However, she did
nothing to modify Russia’s autocratic form of government along western lines. By
the early nineteenth century some Russians had come to want Russia’s autocracy
modified in the direction of a democracy. When Tsar Alexander I died in 1825 a
group of Russian military officers, known in Russian history as the
Decembrists, attempted a coup. The governmental forces easily crushed and then
executed them. The tsar whose ascension to the throne the Decembrists were
trying to prevent, Nicholas I, made his regime one of the most regressive and
authoritarian in the imperial period of Russian history.
In the 1860s,
after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, the next tsar, Alexander II, introduced
some significant reforms in the Russian political and social systems. Most
importantly, he liberated the serfs. The serfs were Russia’s peasants. They
weren’t slaves exactly, but they were not free to leave the land they worked.
Alexander’s program of freeing them was hardly free of questionable elements,
but at least the serfs were now more or less free to leave the land. Alexander
II reformed Russia’s legal system
somewhat along western lines. He also created local administrative bodies
called zemstvos. They elected their own leaders, but only the landed gentry
could vote. The zemstvos had some autonomy with regard to purely local
administrative affairs, but they were in no way free to alter any of the tsar’s
national policies, and they had no meaningful influence over the tsar at all.
In 1881 a group
of radical terrorists assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Upon his death his son
became tsar. He ruled from 1881 to 1894 as Tsar Alexander III. Upon his
ascension to the throne he issued something called the “Manifesto on the
Reaffirmation of Autocracy.” It had been written by Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev,
a legal scholar who had opposed nearly every one of Alexander II’s reforms
(though he did work on the reform of the legal system some). He had been a
tutor on the civil law to both Alexander II and Alexander III. He was firmly
committed to Russian autocracy and opposed any modification of it throughout
his long career in the Russian government.
In that Manifesto Pobedonostsev had the new tsar say that God had called him to
reaffirm and preserve autocratic power. Alexander III became one of the most
regressive tsars in Russian history. He did indeed preserve Russia’s autocracy
unchanged just as his Manifesto said he was called to do. There was no
development at all in the direction of democracy under Alexander III.
Alexander III
died in 1894, and his son, Nikolai Alexandrovich, known to history as Nicholas
II, came to the throne. Nicholas II never should have been tsar. He didn’t want
to be tsar. He had neither the temperament nor the abilities for being an
autocratic ruler. Yet he was as committed to preserving Russian autocracy as
his father had been. The difference between Alexander III and Nicholas II was
that Alexander III was able to do what he set out to do but Nicholas II wasn’t.
In 1905, after Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905
the people of Russia rebelled. The Revolution of 1905, the first Russian
revolution of the twentieth century, led Nicholas II to change Russia’s system
of government to make it look somewhat democratic. He created a body called the
Duma. It consisted of elected representatives, and it could and did pass laws.
Yet it was all for show. The tsar retained the authority to veto or disregard
anything the Duma did. Nicholas II continued to reign while paying little or no
attention to anything the Duma did.
Begun in 1914,
the First World War completely undid both the Russian economy and its political
structure. Nicholas II abdicated in March, 1917, thereby ending Russian
hereditary autocracy and more than three hundred years of rule by the Romanov
family. The so-called Provisional Government was formed in its place. It
consisted of more or less liberal men. It could perhaps have moved Russian
along the path to democracy, but it refused to do the two things Russia
desperately needed it to do. It failed to pull Russia out of World War I, and
it refused to call a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution for the
country. Yet it insisted that it really couldn’t do anything until after such a
constitution had been drafted. It never was.
The most
important consequence of the Provisional Government was that on November 7,
1917, a small group of Marxist fanatics then called the Bolsheviks led by
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, nee Ulyanov, staged
a coupe d’état against the Provisional Government in St. Petersburg. The Soviet
Communists called this coup “the great October Revolution,” (October because
Russia was still on the old Julian calendar at the time. In that calendar our
November 7 was October 25). Yet what the Bolsheviks did in 1917 can hardly be
called a revolution. They seized control of the Russian government, but they
had to fight a long civil war in order to establish their control over the
whole country. By 1922 the Bolsheviks, by then called the Communists, had
gained control of most of what had been the Russian Empire.
The Communists formed
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. Having been essentially taken
over by Joseph Stalin (nee Dzhugashvili, a Georgian not a Russian), the Soviet
Communists proceeded to create one of the most brutal, repressive regimes in
all of human history. Stalin ruled through terror all the while convincing the
people of the Soviet Union that he was their great friend and benefactor. He is
responsible for the deaths of millions of the people he was supposed to be
benefitting. The exact number of deaths for which he is responsible is
difficult to determine. Scholarly estimates range from around one million to
nearly twenty million. Whatever the number was, under Stalin the Russian people
became more subservient to the state and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
than they ever had been to the tsars.
Stalin died in
1953. Thereafter the Soviet regime was less oppressive than it had been under
Stalin. In 1956 Stalin’s successor, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, gave a
famous secret speech to the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union in which he condemned Stalin. That speech was a start, but
Khrushchev didn’t go nearly far enough. He condemned Stalin for his purging of
the Communist Party. Stalin had indeed eliminated all of the so-called “Old
Bolsheviks,” the people who had worked with Lenin. Khrushchev did not condemn
Stalin for starving millions of peasants to death to force them into collective
farms. He did not condemn the totalitarian nature of the Soviet state. Though
Khrushchev loosened the state’s controls on freed of expression a little bit, he
had no intention of creating a true democracy. He took no steps in that
direction.
After Khrushchev
Soviet Union was led by Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev from 1964 to 1982. Russians call
the Brezhnev years the era of stagnation. It seems Brezhnev had no intention of
doing anything other than maintain the Soviet regime. I was in the Soviet Union
for one of the Brezhnev years doing PhD dissertation research. To me and most
observers of the time the USSR seemed to be a huge, inert mass that wasn’t
going to go away any time soon but that wasn’t going to change much at all
either. In the 1970s we couldn’t imagine the Soviet Union ceasing to exist in
our lifetimes.
How wrong we
were! In 1985 Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He would be that nation’s last Communist
leader, at least so far. Under Gorbachev the USSR began to change. He tried to
reform the country’s stagnant economy by introducing reforms in the direction
of a market economy. We know these reforms as perestroika. He also
loosened the Party’s control of freedom of expression. We know those reforms as
glasnost’. It seems Gorbachev didn’t know what he had unleashed. It wasn’t
long before the Soviet Union started to fall apart. I’ll skip all the gory
details. The Soviet Union was dissolved on December 25, 1991 (which isn’t
Christmas in the Russian Orthodox Church). Each of the constituent republics of
the USSR became an independent, sovereign nation.
This is the point
in Russian history where Satter says Russia missed its chance to become a
democracy. It is true that Russia today is not a democracy in any meaningful
sense. What I find questionable is Satter’s assertion that with the fall of the
Soviet Union Russia had a meaningful chance of becoming a true democracy. I won’t
say that Russia becoming one was impossible. I am however convinced that she
faced very long odds against becoming one. History matters. History cannot be
ignored without dire consequences. History colors everything in the present.
There are at best only faint traces of democracy in Russia’s history. Except
for the faint traces of the zemstvos, the powerless post-1905 Duma, and the ineffective
Provisional Government of 1917, Russia’s political history is one of
authoritarian autocracy at best and Stalinist totalitarianism at worst. All
through the century before the fall of the autocracy in 1917 there were Russian
voices calling for reform of the autocracy in the direction of democracy. They
were never able to produce that reform. Instead Russia went from Soviet totalitarianism
to the chaos of the first post-Soviet years.
That Russia in those
years would become authoritarian rather than democratic was perfectly
predictable. Of course I wish Russia’s development after 1991 had been
different than it was. Even without the freedom we take for granted, the
Russian people have created one of the world’s great cultures. They have
remarkable achievements in science. Even in the Soviet period Moscow State
University was named for the great eighteenth century Russian scientists
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov. The Russians beat the US into space, a feat of
which Russians are understandably proud to this day. World literature would be
poorer than it is without the contribution of great Russian writers from
Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn. World music would be poorer than it is without the
contribution of great Russian composers from Tchaikovsky to Shostakovich. The
great Russian people deserve better government than they have ever had. They
deserve better than Vladimir Putin. What they have is Putin’s attempt to
recreate the Soviet Union as an authoritarian if not quite totalitarian state
without Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Will Russia ever
become a truly free and democratic nation? I would never say it isn’t possible.
I will say that Russia has a long, hard struggle ahead if she is ever to become
such a nation. That is the reality with which Russian history has presented the
Russian people. One possible ray of hope is that Putin has no apparent
successor, and his United Russia party is nothing like the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union used to be. Authoritarian systems survive only when they have
a strong leader and/or a strong party apparatus capable of asserting and maintaining
control of a country. There is no way to know for sure what will become of
Russia after Putin is gone. There is however no way to deny that Russia
becoming a true democracy after Putin will be difficult at best. We can perhaps
hope that it might evolve in the direction of democracy and the rule of law. Of
course, only time will tell.
