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Sunday, AUGUST 6, 2000
Putin's
Dilemma: Can Bureaucrats Be Trusted?
By GREGORY FREIDIN
STANFORD
--
In 1953, after an anti-Stalinist uprising was brutally put down in East
Berlin, Bertolt Brecht reportedly remarked that since the East German
government was dissatisfied with the nation, it should dissolve the German
people and call in a new nation. A joke making the rounds in Moscow these
days echoes Brecht's humor. It goes like this:
"What went wrong with Russia's last
democratic election?"
"Everything. It's not the people who
should have been electing a new president, but the president electing a
different people."
President Vladimir V. Putin knows this
sentiment well as he watches how government officials charged with
strengthening the rule of law and creating a positive climate for foreign
investment are instead reviving the specter of arbitrary repression,
Soviet style. In the eyes of the country's opinion makers, the
"dictatorship of law" that Putin promised to establish in place
of former President Boris N. Yeltsin's era of permissiveness,
influence-peddling and corruption seems to be succumbing to the law of
dictatorship: questionable charges against the independent media empire of
Vladimir A. Gusinsky and similar, if less spectacular, proceedings against
other representatives of Russia's big business.
What does Putin actually stand for:
maximizing the power of the state or safeguarding the freedom of Russian
society? In an Izvestia interview last month, when asked if he was worried
that the heavy-handed tactics of government prosecutors squash what little
Russia has of a civil society, Putin said: "We have the people that
we have, we have the economy that we have and we have the state officials
that we have." In other words, because reforms are implemented by
officials burdened with the habits and the institutional memory of the old
regime, the risk of failure of the entire reform effort is clear. It is
here--in Putin's recognition of the inadequacies of the state and society
for the radical reform agenda--that we should look for the key to the
president's ambiguous political persona.
Putin sees change toward a modern civil
society and market economy as inevitable. He is convinced that reforms
must be carried out if the Russian Federation is to stem confederate
tendencies, if it is to create a positive climate for business and
economic growth and if it is to replace the crooked bureaucracy with one
that "defends the citizens' dignity, freedom, security, making it
possible for people to earn a living." His legislative agenda for the
Duma, some of it already enacted, shows that he means what he says. But
his hesitation in criticizing overzealous prosecutors suggests he is
reluctant to take sides for fear of alienating state officials without
whom the reform process would surely grind to a halt.
In this regard, Putin is radically different
from his predecessor. Yeltsin treated the bureaucracy he inherited from
communism with suspicion and disdain. Tolerating it as a necessary evil,
he sought legitimacy by fomenting a "cold" civil war between
holdovers from the past, who held the government strings, and reform
forces, which had not yet had the opportunity to learn governance but were
more than adequately represented in the new Russian press. To maintain his
position as final arbiter, Yeltsin habitually transferred state assets
into the hands of quick-witted and powerful businessmen while diminishing
the federal power by ceding it to increasingly independent political
elites in the regions. The newly empowered businessmen were then allowed
to cut deals with the weakened bureaucracy.
Putin's own game becomes less opaque when
juxtaposed with the policies of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Unlike Yeltsin,
Gorbachev tried to use the levers of the Communist Party state both to
bring about radical change and to hold together the Soviet empire. While
diminishing the party's grip on power and loosening imperial bonds,
Gorbachev's method created opportunities for more flexible and intelligent
servants of the party-state to be the first to profit from change. With a
few notable exceptions, the apparatchiks proved incapable of adapting to
the new environment. In August 1991, as they realized they were digging
their own graves under Gorbachev's stewardship, their leaders staged a
putsch. The rebellion quickly fizzled, but it lasted long enough to
demonstrate that Gorbachev's party-based mandate, based solely on his
position in the party, had expired.
Putin suffers from neither of Gorbachev's
fatal flaws: He enjoys a popular mandate of a people no longer beholden to
the communist past and understands modern economics enough to be committed
to radical reform and to support it with all the authority of his office.
But a popular mandate matters less now than it did in the heady days of
1991-92. After almost a decade of stop-and-go economics, a diminishing
standard of living, continuing bloodshed in Chechnya and ceaseless
fisticuffs between Yeltsin's reformers in government and unreconstructed
communists in parliament, tacitly egged on by their cousins in the
bureaucracy, reform fatigue has set in. The regions, furthermore, have
come to appreciate their independence to an extent that threatens the
integrity of the federal state.
Under such circumstances, reformers need the
cooperation of the bureaucracy more than ever. This is why Putin has taken
steps to strengthen the presence of federal power in the regions,
appointing seven presidential representatives to oversee federal matters
and removing regional governors from the upper house of parliament. This
is also why he has tacitly encouraged prosecutors and the tax police to
contain the power of Russia's big business, even as he is pushing a
simplified, super-liberal tax code (a 13% flat tax) that would diminish
the role of the bureaucracy in the economy.
Putin's message to officials of the new
Russian state is that the virtual civil war of the Yeltsin era is over,
the 10 years since the collapse of communism in Russia have made the
return to the past impossible and the country has moved beyond the
ideological divisions that tore it apart for more than a decade. There was
no better symbolic gesture for conveying this message than to invite both
Gorbachev and the mastermind of the '91 putsch, former KGB chief Vladimir
A. Kryuchkov, to Putin's inauguration. "Forgetting remembering,"
however, has its hidden costs.
Russia's civil society may prove too
fragile, if not for the surgery Putin is prescribing, then for the
surgeons wielding the state's knife. Should this be the case, it may be
too late for Putin to help the patient. Worse still, a career bureaucrat
and one who, in the words of one Moscow pundit, has been "pollinated
by the KGB," Putin may beget a regime with a dominant KGB gene in its
genetic code. The danger lies in some of Putin's advisors. If his former
KGB associates form a critical mass around him, their worldview, shaped by
the shadowy universe of the intelligence and security apparatus, can
fatefully color Putin's take on the world.
Former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Y.
Nemtsov, now the leader of the reformist Union of the Right in the Duma,
may have put it most succinctly. Speaking after a recent meeting with
Putin to discuss the government's clumsy harassment of big business,
Nemtsov sounded both encouraged ("Putin knows what is going
on"). and cautious ("He is not sufficiently informed"). The
round-table meeting with business leaders that Putin held on July 28 was
supposed to clear the air and clarify the rules of impartiality governing
the relationship between the tycoons and the state. Whether it did remains
to be seen. Even the dropping of charges against Gusinsky does not mark
the end of government pressure on his media empire and independent press.
Gusinsky is feverishly looking for foreign investors to secure that
independence.
The struggle for Putin has now commenced in
earnest. It is a struggle in which the United States and U.S. business
interests may have a role to play. *
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