Vladimir Putin's Grand Strategy
MCFAUL, MICHAEL
Vladimir Putin's Grand Strategy . . . for anti-democratic regime change in Russia. by Michael McFaul IN THE BARRAGE of comment on the recent arrest of Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, much...
...It was Berezovsky who masterminded the transition from Yeltsin to Putin, who built from scratch Putin's party, United Russia, and who wielded his control of Russian national television to neutralize Putin's only potential rival in the 2000 presidential election, former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov...
...To dispose of really troublesome regional leaders—those slow to submit to Putin's authority—federal authorities have rigged elections...
...is the calling of our country...
...Khodorkovsky had to go...
...It is Putin himself...
...The project began in Chechnya...
...He is coauthor with James Goldgeier of Power and Purpose: U.S...
...But somewhere along the way, Khodorkovsky began to show signs of independent thinking and political ambition...
...Disqualification of candidates from the ballot on technicalities has been their means of choice—for example, in Kursk Oblast, Ingushetia, and Chechnya...
...For those who aspire to make the Russian state feared, respected, and "great" again (the derzhavniki), like former KGB officer Putin, the anarchy in Chechnya after the withdrawal of Russian troops in 1996 was an embarrassment and a testament to Russia's weakness...
...Last week in Moscow, at a gathering of human rights activists—some of whom had logged years in the Soviet camps—delegates passed resolutions denouncing the war in Chechnya and the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, spelling out the relationship between these two events...
...When the Kremlin asked him to provide money to Grig-ory Yavlinsky's party, Yabloko (as a reward for Yavlinsky's good behavior in the hostage crisis in downtown Moscow last year), the billionaire did as he was told...
...Nor was it only an incident spurred by personal rivalry and private greed...
...And the master strategist is not Igor Sechin or Viktor Ivanov, both longtime KGB associates of the president now working for him in the Kremlin...
...Berezovsky is no democrat...
...The group of people in Russia who understand most clearly how the dots connect are the same people who fought the last dictatorship in Russia...
...To reassert Moscow's dominance, Putin created seven new supra-regional executive authorities whose mandate is to enforce his policies at the regional level...
...In 2000, federal authorities filed charges against NTV's principal owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, who eventually lost his property and now shuttles between Spain, the United States, and Israel, never Russia...
...The imprisonment of the richest man in Russia has to do with more than the parliamentary elections coming up in December and the greed of second-tier KGB officers who think they got less than their share of the spoils in the 1990s...
...When considered in isolation, each of the steps in Putin's plan can be interpreted as something beside democratic backsliding...
...The author of this blueprint for dictatorship is Putin...
...As a result, observers have resisted connecting the dots of a systematic plan to roll back democracy...
...The rape, pillage, murder, and destruction of civilian property by Russian soldiers reveal how little value Putin assigns to the protection of individual human rights...
...Michael McFaul is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and teaches political science at Stanford University...
...Today, Berezovsky lives in London...
...When Putin came to power, only three networks had the national reach to really count in politics—ORT, RTR, and NTV...
...This new party, built in no small measure on the remnants of the old Communist party of the Soviet Union, is expected to provide the Kremlin another institutional mechanism for controlling regional politics...
...When Putin warned the oligarchs to stay out of television, Khodorkovsky complied...
...Gorbachev failed...
...Most recently, Putin's aides have resurrected "party" politics in the regions by inviting/coercing regional executives to join Putin's party, United Russia...
...Yeltsin disappointed...
...One reason it is succeeding is that few in the West can see it...
...But when analyzed together, these events are clearly linked: All tend toward the weakening or elimination of independent sources of power...
...Some of the regional barons Putin has reined in were behaving like tyrants in their fiefdoms...
...Perhaps it was his pledge to Putin that he would make sure the presidential transition in 2008 (at the end of Putin's second term) went smoothly...
...Khodorkovsky is no Sakharov...
...Bush said, "I respect President Putin's vision for Russia: a country at peace within its borders, with its neighbors, and with the world, a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive...
...Perhaps the final provocation was his suggestion in the spring of 2003 that Russia needed a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential republic...
...Khodorkovsky's arrest was not only a triumph of the guys with the guns (the siloviki) over the guys with the money ("the family...
...And, more generally, everyone believes that Russia needs a more effective state if its market economy and democracy are to develop further...
...terrorists were and are active there...
...The government in Chechnya did not work...
...The evidence for this vision does not exist...
...Berezovsky and Gusinsky have many skeletons in their closets...
...Unapologetic, he worries about the state, not about the individual...
...Even if there is little Bush can do to stop the erosion of democracy inside Russia, he should at least join Russia's human rights heroes in speaking the truth about Putin's actions...
...But the attempt to reassert Russian control over the breakaway province would have happened under Putin with or without that invitation...
...Such statements were in direct defiance of Putin's plan to create a political system that he alone controlled and that he alone would decide how to change...
...Next came the regional barons...
...For the first years of Putin's reign, he did as he was told...
...The evidence for the opposite is overwhelming...
...Senate, by removing governors and heads of regional legislatures from its membership...
...NTV's original team of journalists tried to make a go of it at two other stations, but eventually failed...
...by Michael McFaul IN THE BARRAGE of comment on the recent arrest of Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, much attention has been paid to Khodorkovsky's political activities and to Russian president Vladimir Putin's brand of crony capitalism— but the essence of the scandal lies deeper...
...Rather, it was the execution of the latest phase of a grand strategy for regime change in Russia—autocratic regime change...
...And to date, it is succeeding...
...When the fanatic Chechen commander Shamil Basayev and his Saudi sidekick, Khattab, moved into neighboring Dagestan in 1999 to liberate the Muslim people of the Caucasus, they gave Putin the perfect pretext for sending Russian troops back into Chechnya...
...Anything less would make a travesty of Bush's great theme—articulated again, most eloquently, in a major address last Thursday—that "the advance of freedom...
...So after the oligarchs had been tamed, the regional leaders reined in, and television seized, who was left to defy the president...
...Controlling the third channel, NTV, proved more difficult, since it was in private hands...
...Many— including me—hoped for better...
...Next came the destruction of the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, the man perhaps most responsible for bringing Putin to power, first as prime minister in 1999 and then president in 2000...
...Under the new system, Putin effectively appoints most senators, making the Federal Council a rubber stamp for Kremlin policies...
...Up next was television...
...Shouldn't we as well...
...But he was an independent political force, and so had to be eliminated...
...Today, however, it is naive to ignore the man's strategic vision or fail to marvel at the speed of its accomplishment...
...Rather, the move to eliminate Khodorkovsky as a political and economic force is part of an unfolding strategic plan, whose goal is a regime neither accountable to the people nor constrained by autonomous political actors...
...Surely the Russian people and their friends in the West wouldn't be wrong a third time...
...Today, the Kremlin defacto controls all national television in Russia...
...By running Berezovsky out of town, Putin effectively acquired control of ORT, the channel with the biggest national audience...
...In contrast to Berezovsky, Gusinsky, and some of the rebellious regional bosses, Khodorkovsky seemed an unlikely challenger to the Kremlin's power...
...But the anarchy of the early 1990s gave Putin and his lieutenants a treasure trove of compromising material on anyone who did business back then...
...Each stage of its realization has been clouded with controversy, subject to conflicting interpretations, its actors decked in gray rather than black and white...
...In his meeting with President Putin at Camp David last month, President Bush attributed to Putin a vision for his country that these Russian human rights activists would not recognize...
...In the 1990s, governors of oblasts (administrative units roughly comparable to states) and presidents of republics acquired significant political autonomy...
...Although they lack the power to stop Putin's plan, they have the clarity of mind and courage of conviction to speak the truth about the rise of dictatorship in Russia...
...Other observers had an economic or geostrategic interest in casting Putin as above the fray...
...Policy toward Russia after the Cold War and, with Timothy Colton, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000, both just out from the Brookings Institution Press...
...He then emasculated the Federal Council, Russia's closest approximation to the U.S...
...RTR is still 100 percent owned by the state, so it was even easier to tame...
Vol. 9 • November 2003 • No. 10
