Russia's democratic dictatorship

...To this end, his minimum program, so to speak, is to encourage foreign investment and the voluntary return of Russian capital from abroad, by guaranteeing property rights, enforcing the rule of law, and instituting a level playing field in the market...

...The oligarchs didn't mind...

...Zyuganov played his assigned oppositional part the old way, predictably charging vote fraud, though Putin actually polled a few points less than the pre-election surveys had predicted, and Zyuganov was correspondingly up...

...Restoring State Power...

...The fact that he was Yeltsin's—or the Family's—choice was quickly forgotten...

...After the collapse of the Soviet regime, Leningrad/St...

...This gambit prompted a brief protest walkout by the losers, the Primakov-Luzhkov Fatherland bloc, Yabloko, and even Kiriyenko's Union of Right Forces (who had themselves been snubbed by Putin...

...As their supporters in the regions dribbled over to the Putin camp, they lost their resolve, and by the end of January agreed to end their boycott of the Duma...

...The six main parties, with their seats from 225 single-member districts added in, scored as follows: Communist Party of the Russian Federation, 113...

...Publicly honoring the history of the communist secret police, he has tightened oversight of the press by regulation or threat and implemented police surveillance of e-mail transmissions and Web sites, with a chilling effect on potential critics...

...He is the only one, society believes, who not only wants that but can make it happen...

...In foreign policy, Putin is both the nationalist and the Westernizer...

...When the newly elected Duma convened in mid-January and commenced its organizational routine, ex—prime minister Primakov, anathema to the Kremlin, seemed to be the leading candidate for speaker...

...His military doctrine now includes the first use of nuclear weapons if the country's defense requires it (just as NATO threatened during the cold war...

...Most of the regional governors, even Mayor Luzhkov of Moscow, forgot about Fatherland-All Russia and climbed aboard the Putin bandwagon...

...The Family knew him well when they installed him in the position of prime minister and heir-designate to Yeltsin...

...By waving the banner of nationalism and by launching all-out war to I0 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 avenge the defeat of Russian arms at the hands of the Chechen separatists three years before, Putin was by the time of the December parliamentary elections the country's most admired politician...

...How the Splendid Little War in Chechnya was contrived is a matter of intense controversy among Russian commentators and Russiawatchers abroad...

...Rarely has a leader in any country had his biography and principles more openly advertised, even to the extent of posting them on the Web site of the Russian government...

...Berezovsky, the most outspoken of the tycoons, was arrogantly unmoved: "It is impossible to distance oligarchs from power," he told the German magazine Der Stern...

...Practically everyone else of consequence, apart from Yavlinsky's unbending band of liberals (weighing in at just under 6 percent) was sucked into the Putin orbit, fearing to remain alienated from the new center of political gravity...

...How can this be happening...

...National disgust, as much as the Chechen war, explains why a desperate electorate was willing to embrace Yeltsin's unknown designee, if only he would serve as an elected czar and bring order to the country...

...Externally, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United States were allegedly trying to isolate and humiliate Russia...

...Yabloko ("Apple," the classic liberals led by Grigory Yavlinsky), 21...

...By a better margin than Adolf Hitler scored in Weimar Germany's last free election, Putin won what the late William Yandell Elliott termed a "doctor's mandate"—take charge, and cure our desperate and humiliated country any way you can...

...Vladimir Putin's election to the presidency this past spring consummated the first voluntary transfer of power—instead of by death or a coup—in the entire millennial span of Russia's history...

...At that time Stepashin, an architect of the first Chechen war, was only minister of the interior, but the Family was already conspiring to install him in place of Prime Minister Primakov...

...by cutting down Vladimir Zhirinovsky's truly right-wing nationalists...

...The Union of Right Forces—the party of ex—prime ministers— fell apart, as most of its leaders endorsed Putin...

...In any case, the oxymoronic democratic capitalism that Western leaders so fondly imagined in the Yeltsin regime remains unrealized and unrealizable...

...When Putin lost the deputy mayor's job after Sobchak's electoral defeat in 1996, Chubais brought him to Moscow to serve as deputy business manager in the presidential administration, the fourth branch of government in Russia...

...Internally, it was the rebellious Muslim Chechens of the North Caucasus...

...FatherlandAll Russia, 66...

...At the same time, the previously favored Fatherland-All Russia bloc got only 13 percent, and immediately began to fall apart as many of its regional leaders hastened to join Putin...

...The Russian political scientist Lilia Shevtsova called it a "pocket two-party system...

...He has been ferocious on the subject of Chechnya and Western criticism of the war...

...Did he execute a shrewd move to advance the electoral prospects of his preferred successor before the opposition had a chance to regroup and before the Chechnya war might go sour...

...In the same breath he backs an interventionist role for the state...

...If Putin could stop the outflow (and even get some of that money back), Russia would be independent of outside financial support...

...To plan for economic growth, even before he took over from Yeltsin, Putin set up a "Center for Strategic Studies" under another St...

...To explain away Putin's triumph, native and foreign commentators rediscovered old Russian habits of submission to authority...

...It is the stability of exhaustion, coming after jarring change and infirm leadership...

...Next came the Family's chief agent in the cabinet, First Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Aksyonenko, who was demoted to his old job of railways minister...

...For some time, Putin can seek to balance off options—democracy and authoritarianism, regionalism and centralism, free market and planned economy, Russian nationalism and the global community...

...A more recent parallel, more apt than Pinochet, might be Peronism...

...Yeltsin's departure met with universal relief among Russians, but speculation ran riot over the motive as well as the manner of his resignation...

...On the economy, Putin enunciates principles of the free market that accord with Western expectations...

...But never since 1991 has foreign money more than fractionally offset the capital flight that has kept Russia so impoverished...

...But to most members' surprise, Putin's Unity Party concluded a non-aggression pact with the Communists and re-elected the outgoing Communist speaker, Gennady Seleznyov...

...Russia seemed headed for the kind of party system without alternatives that marked Italy and Japan for decades after World War II: one dominant, conservative party, and a tame opposition (in Italy, the Communists and their allies...

...Early in August, the rogue Chechen leader Shamil Basayev undertook a raid into the neighboring Muslim region of Dagestan, a Russian-inspired provokatsiya, charge critics of the government...

...Old Russian Habits...

...Public opinion expert Yuri Levada asserted shortly before the presidential election that "Putin can do what he wants...

...He made a positive impression on visiting businessmen...

...In essence appointed by his faltering predecessor Boris Yeltsin, the forty-seven-yearold Putin seems destined to enjoy a four-year term with the opportunity for another seven years if the Constitution is so amended...

...Such steps could swing Russia over to the Chinese economic model of state control at the top with individual enterprise still DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 13 POLITICS ABROAD left lower down...

...Ten single-member seats were left vacant where the voters exercised their unique Russian option to vote "none of the above" and defeat all the candidates on the ballot...

...Petersburg became a base for free-market reform, and for corruption as well, both associated with the Leningrad economist Anatoly Chubais, Yeltsin's privatization pusher, deputy prime minister, chief of staff, and charter member of the Family...

...With the election of Vladimir Putin—a coronation, some say—and his affirmation of a "strong state," Russia's long era of postrevolutionary wobbling may have come to an end...

...And he restored the statue of Andropov at the Lubianka, headquarters of the Federal Security Service just as it was for the KGB...

...To kill two birds with one stone he might also tighten his squeeze on Berezovsky's rival and Kremlin enemy Vladimir Gusinsky and assure state direction over their respective media empires...

...Putin's predecessor as prime minister, Sergei Stepashin (another policeman, supplanted after his brief stint because the Family found him too soft for the mission it contemplated), has revealed that the new Chechen operation was conceived as early as March 1999...

...The Communists actually came in marginally stronger, though the fact that more parties cleared the 5 percent barrier to be seated meant that their share of the proportional seats had to shrink...

...The opposition did not long hold ranks in its defiance, however...

...Under the pressure of NATO expansion and competition to control Caspian oil, it is not surprising that Putin joined the call to resist what Russia considers the American bid for global hegemony...

...But Gref appears to be a doctrinaire free-marketeer, while Putin has already committed himself to protectionist measures and the social safety net...

...EVEN so, the outcome of the Duma election was not the sweeping triumph of "democracy" and "centrism" announced in the world press...

...Considering the police ideology of nationalism, statism, and control that nurtured the new president, the prospects are strong for the subordination of private business interests, one way or another, to the interests of the state...

...pUTIN'S TRIUMPH in the March election was a foregone conclusion, the only matter in doubt being whether he would score the absolute majority in the first round needed to avoid a runoff...

...According to Gorbachev, "He resisted with all his might...

...Andropov is still favorably remembered from his early Communist Party career in Karelia...

...To make up for his own lack of charisma, Putin has taken advantage of the nation's enemies both internal and external...

...Unity, 72...

...Political Shocks Against this background, the Russian political landscape was shaken in December and January by three seismic shocks...

...Considering all the negativism, the turnout of 62 percent was not bad by American standards (though not impressive by European norms...

...By July, the Family was privately threatening a coup if Primakov, heading the opposition after his removal in May, could not be stopped...

...Putin has won," wrote editor Vitaly Tretiakov of the Independent Gazette two days after the March election, "because, of all the candidates he (paradoxically) is the only one whom society does not associate with Yeltsin...

...In the Karelian Republic they call Putin "the second Andropov," referring to the long-time KGB chief who briefly succeeded Brezhnev as general secretary in 1982-1984 on a platform of discipline and effort...

...They stand a realistic 12 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 chance of becoming a modern parliainentary party in the European sense of the term...

...ROBERT V. DANIELS is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont and the author, most recently, of Russia's Transformation...

...Cut out of the speakership, Primakov withdrew his announced intention to run against Putin for president, leaving only the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov as a major challenger to the incumbent...

...The circumstances were supremely ironic...

...14 s DISSENT / Summer 2000...

...This colorless man with no experience in national leadership—he was never elected to anything and was a protégé of the country's most unpopular politician—was almost instantly perceived by the Russian pubDISSENT / Summer 2000 n 9 POLITICS ABROAD lic as the forceful leader it craved...

...and by soaking up minor-party voters...

...The uncharacteristic retirement statement that Yeltsin was given to read, apologizing for the failings of his administration, strongly points toward the latter theory...

...The body also includes the billionaire Family members Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, who essentially bought themselves seats in remote districts in order to gain parliamentary immunity from prosecution arising from their business activities...

...He realizes that Russia's revival on the international scene must come about above all in economic terms, which means growth, revitalization of industry and agriculture, and a war on poverty...

...He has a portrait of Peter the Great in his office...

...Putin is not the unformed neophyte with "no bottom line" that Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott described to the Senate Appropriations Committee...

...The new Duma is an interesting animal in its own right...

...Backed by a virtual media monopoly as in the Duma election, he made it with almost 53 percent against Zyuganov's 29 percent...

...The impending presidential election was moved up from June to late March to comply with the constitutional requirement that an election be held no less than three months after an acting president takes over...

...Yavlinsky called Putin "a Communist in disguise," and Andrei Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner, predicted "modernized Stalinism," adding, "If in 1991 someone had said that the KGB would return to power nine years later, I would POLITICS ABROAD have thought him mad...

...To be sure, Putin faulted his Communist partners for "their demand of confiscating and nationalizing everything," but he left the door open for expropriating the moguls as the Communists urge: "If the preceding years have been marked by some illicit steps which have been established and proven in court, that is quite another matter...

...How Putin would cope in the meantime with the Kremlin's enemies, still strong in the new parliament as they licked their electoral wounds, was soon made clear...

...This Duma is much younger on average than its predecessors, and less than half of its members have served in any previous Russian parliament...

...The Kremlin's critics in Russia have been flabbergasted by Putin's political success since that moment...

...Or, more likely, in his dotage, was Yeltsin talked into resigning by the Family, acting through his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, in order to let Putin tighten his grip and distance himself from his patron before having to face the voters...

...in Japan, the Socialists) who could never win an election...

...Uncertainty resides only in his tactical approach to this overriding goal: his emerging style is to move simultaneously in each area of policy, shifting his emphasis from one to the other as need be...

...But stability at what price...

...Pro-Putin parties got most of their votes by wiping out "Our Home is Russia," the party of long-time prime minister Viktor Chemomyrdin...

...Among the first to go was Yeltsin's daughter, relieved of her official post as presidential image-maker...

...He is articulate about his strategic goal of turning Russia into an effective state, a great and rich nation...

...Big capital will always be in power, as we live in a modern society...

...He professes a commitment to Russia's integration in "civilization," with reforms to attract foreign investment...

...The comparison is not pejorative...

...The campaign for the Duma was distinPOLITICS ABROAD guished by a one-sided media onslaught, less against the Communists than against what the Putin government regarded as its main adversary, the Fatherland-All Russia alliance of Primakov and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov...

...Just days later, Prime Minister Stepashin got his walking papers, and Putin succeeded him...

...The "Union of Right Forces," the other pro-Putin group, led by ex-prime minister Alexei Kiriyenko along with ex-deputy prime ministers Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, surpassed expectations to win nearly 10 percent of the vote...

...Even before his election, knowing the unpopularity of the tycoons, Putin turned his rhetoric against them and promised ominously, "There will be no such oligarchs as a class...

...Less than two weeks after the Duma election came the second political bombshell, not entirely unexpected except as to its timing, when Yeltsin abdicated in favor of his heir-designate...

...Thanks in part to pressure on regional governors to deliver the vote—threats to cut off their fuel supplies, for instance—Putin's newly created party, Unity, or "the Bear," came from nowhere to rival the Communists by winning nearly a quarter of the party-list vote for the 225 Duma seats that were distributed proportionally among the major parties...

...But why choose Putin, in particular, to get Russia out of its impasse...

...Zhirinovskyites, 17...

...Don't they realize what is obvious to everyone," wrote the business-oriented Sevodnya [Today], "that their song is over no matter what, that no new president is going to put up with the old clique of advisers...

...We are returning to a Russian political tradition in which all responsibility for the country's situation is given to a supreme ruler...

...He even won accolades from dissident historian Roy Medvedev as a leader who is "energetic" and "effective," "cautious" and "reliable...

...The next episode is shrouded in more mystery: a series of apartment-house bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities, officially blamed on the Chechens but later attributed by some critics of the government to the Russian security services themselves, as a pretext for war...

...minor parties and independents (all from singlemember districts), 122...

...This reminder of how Stalin liquidated the kulaks "as a class" hinted at a maximum program, if and when the moderate approach fails to deliver the quick economic gains that Putin demands: dispossess the oligarchs, reclaim their exported assets by force, and renationalize properties, especially in the energy sector, that were more or less criminally given away to the financial combines during the Yeltsin years...

...In politics, Putin reiterates his theoretical embrace of democracy at the same time that he shows in practice what he means by a strong state...

...If Putin eliminates one oligarch, another will appear...

...Putin was thereby elevated to the position of acting president (while retaining the prime ministership for the time being...

...Over all this uncertainty hangs the question of how Putin will deal with the financial oligarchy that put him in power...

...His immediate boss at the time, Pavel Borodin, is currently under Swiss indictment for money-laundering...

...He was picked, as far as anyone can divine, by the same people who were most immediately responsible for the mess, the "Family" so-called— Yeltsin's entourage of relatives, scheming staffers, and financial oligarchs...

...In 1998 Putin moved to the directorship of the Federal Security Service, the reincarnation of his old employer, the KGB...

...At the same time, he speaks soft words to keep the door open for foreign loans and investment...

...His mission ; as Yeltsin's mandate and health were running out, was plain: to protect the Family's ill-gotten billions by putting down, forcibly if necessary, the real reformers and corruption fighters led by former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov...

...Putin candidly acknowledges his historical models—Charles de Gaulle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, even Napoleon Bonaparte...

...Russians value might more than principles now...

...On the other hand, there are members with noteworthy experience: no less than six former prime ministers, going back to Gorbachev's one-time aide Nikolai Ryzhkov and including every one of the men Yeltsin had fired before he appointed Putin...

...But putting down at least that one oligarch would seem politically to be a sine qua non for Putin, if only to show who is boss...

...Putin, for his part, urged the formation of a two-party system, and assigned the role of opposition to the Communists: "We have always been cooperating with the Communists in the Duma," and their social base could not be ignored...

...These were the parliamentary elections of December 19, Yeltsin's resignation on New Year's Eve, and Putin's deal with the Communists to take control of the new Duma...

...Some critics, like the long-tme human rights advocate Sergei Kovalyov, revived the specter of "a Pinochet-style dictatorship" that had flickered in the Russian political firmament throughout the Yeltsin years...

...In any case, Putin took the helm with vigor and dispatch, promising to hew to "the path of DISSENT / Summer 2000 n I I POLITICS ABROAD democracy and reforms," but assuring the public, "There will be no power vacuum, even for a moment...

...By political and financial armtwisting, he pressures the governors into subservience to the center...

...Having co-opted almost everyone in sight, Putin virtually wiped out Russia's nascent multiparty politics...

...Union of Right Forces, 29...

...Coalition politics would have to be the order of the day...

...Though he kept a low profile, Putin was not an unknown to those on the inside—certainly no "black box"—when he was tapped for prime minister in August 1999 to end more than a year of revolving door leadership in the Russian government...

...Even Yeltsin's dedicated apologists now concede that the man who was supposed to give Russia rule-of-law democracy and free-market prosperity instead turned Russian government into a Byzantine cabal and the economy into a thieves' paradise...

...He came across as a distinctly Germanic personality, efficient and self-disciplined, not unlike Lenin in this respect, and the antithesis of the dissolute and impulsive Yeltsin...

...Putin has made his bottom line perfectly clear: it is to restore the power and prestige of the Russian state...

...Journalist Galina Kovalskaya likened his success to the legendary ninth-century invitation by the citizens of Novgorod to the Vikings to "come and rule over us...

...Russia settled down," explained the noted political analyst Alexander Tsipko, "but in a typically Russian way...

...Pyotr Aven of the "Alfa" banking group urged "totalitarian force" to protect the market: "I'm a supporter of Pinochet...

...Whoever was responsible, the atrocities served as the signal for the ground invasion of Chechnya and a meteoric surge in Putin's political popularity...

...But much of his political appeal is based on hopes that he will reverse Russia's national decline of the past decade...

...Ignoring the tradition of European parliaments, observed in Russia since 1991, that all parties share in positions of leadership, Unity and the Communists excluded all their opponents, including Primakov, from the deputy speakerships and committee chairs...

...There are analogies in the aftermath of earlier revolutions, notably nineteenthcentury France, where the Emperor Napoleon III, epigone of the original postrevolutionary dictator, offered his own model of soft authoritarianism...

...Yet Putin's backers may get more than they bargained for...

...He began immediately to clean Family cronies out of the presidential staff and the Council of Ministers, while decreeing personal immunity from prosecution for the outgoing Yeltsin (shades of Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon...

...The big break for this former intelligence operative came in 1990, when his one-time law professor, the late Anatoly Sobchak, became mayor of Leningrad in the democratic local elections that Mikhail Gorbachev had allowed in connection with his reforms of perestroika...

...Petersburg friend, German Gref...

...Sobchak named Putin his assistant for international matters (particularly to seek out foreign investment), and then deputy mayor...

...Essentially, they pushed him...