On Putin's Russia

 

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.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3]

 

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,[4] 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.[5] 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.

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[1] Satter, David, The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep, Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2016).

[2] Chechnia is a predominately Muslim area in the south of European Russia. Chechen extremists have been agitation for independence for quite some time, and they have not been shy about using terror to advance their demands.

[3] Satter, op. cit. 89-90. United Russia is Putin’s political party.

[4] The Russian word “tsar” is a Slavic adaptation of the Latin word “Caesar.” The rulers formerly known as the Grand Princes of Moscow began to use it around one century after the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks.

[5] In 1881 Alexander III made Pobedonostsev the Over-Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Holy Synod became the ruling body of the Russian Orthodox Church when Peter the Great abolished the Moscow Patriarchate. Pobedonostsev served in that capacity until 1905. Although being Over-Procurator made him in many ways the one with decision making authority in the Russian Orthodox Church, Pobedonostsev was a government official not a churchman. For what I believe still to be the best study of Pobedonostsev in English see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Reflections on a Russian Statesman, The Populist Conservatism of Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev, available in paperback and electronic form from amazon.com. It is the book I turned my PhD dissertation into.