Working for the Clampdown

Clifford Levy had a fantastic piece in yesterday's New York Times, giving a granular, micro-level account of Vladimir Putin's takeover of Nizhny Novgorod, formerly the political home base of Boris Nemtsov who's now a leading figure in the anti-Putin opposition.

This was of particular interest to me because I spent the summer of 1998 living in the city in question. And here's the one area where I feel a lot of this kind of reporting on Putin's authoritarianism falls down. I never met anyone in 1998-vintage Nizhny Novgorod who was really excited about the state of Russian politics. The general feeling was that rather than democracy, they were suffering from a regime of chaos and corruption. People would talk openly about their yearning for a strong leader who could restore order and prosperity -- Singapore, Pinochet's Chile, postwar South Korea -- those were the models on people's lips. And this, I think, is more-or-less what most people think they've gotten from Putin. In reality, it's almost certainly the case that Russian prosperity is founded on the current high price of fossile fuels (the oil crisis years were very kind to the Soviet consumer) rather than on anything Putin's done, but that's how it's seen.

I think that's the context you need for Levy's stories. The kind of tactics Putin used to consolidate control would never have worked if Russia had featured real liberal political parties with meaningful mass support. But by the time Boris Yeltsin put him in power, the screw-ups, deprivation, and corruption of the previous years combined with the sense that Russia's position on the world stage was slipping had badly hollowed out support for liberalism at non-elite levels.

Comments

Matt, please, stop with the Clash references. They're annoying.

Posted by Kevin | February 25, 2008 1:33 PM

This is mostly okay, and you're getting better from many of your earlier remarks on Russia, but still not quite right. You need to note, too, that "prosperity" in Russia is _deeply_ concentrated and hasn't come to many people- many people are much more hurt by the years of 10%+ inflation than they have been helped by oil money, for one thing. Next, Putin isn't really _that_ popular- if he were it wouldn't be necessary to intimidate people into voting for him, to bus unwilling students to take part in neo-brown-shirt rallies for him, etc. Finally, you'd put more weight on the fact that much of the popularity that Putin does have is due to his near total control over the news media. Still, I'm glad to see you're making some progress here.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | February 25, 2008 1:42 PM

There was really very little popular support for liberalism of the Nemtsov variety even as far back as 1993. A lot of Westerners really underestimate the political damage the simple fact of the dissolution of the USSR did to the reformers, and the psychological damage to the populace at large. Most Russians, and a surprisingly large number of non-Russians, were Soviet patriots first, and had lived their whole lives as Soviet citizens, not Russians or Kazakhstanis or Ukrainians. The spectacle of the country just disintegrating in what looked like selfish power grabs by various regional Communist bosses encouraged a lot of cynicism, especially regarding the very pro-Western orientation of reformers like Nemtsov. Many Russians still view him and his allies as basically Western agents provocateurs.

Posted by vanya | February 25, 2008 1:49 PM

In reality, it's almost certainly the case that Russian prosperity is founded on the current high price of fossile [sic] fuels (the oil crisis years were very kind to the Soviet consumer) rather than on anything Putin's done, but that's how it's seen.

I don't think you give Putin enough credit here. While there is no doubt high oil prices helped, a quick look at CIA factbook tells us that much of post 2003 growth is attributed to other factors, such as increased consumer spending and foreign investment. More broadly, Russia is simply too large a country for oil alone to bring about the kind of prosperity that Russia has been experiencing. And if you look at other countries, like say Iran, oil wealth is far from sufficient in ensuring sustained economic growth.

Posted by MS | February 25, 2008 1:57 PM

A lot of the hostility towards Putin here is fueled by neocons resentful that he doesn't think that Israel is the Land of Milk and Honey. And also that he went hard after the many Jewish kleptocrats who robbed Russia blind. In other words- it's pure ugly bullshit.

Posted by Trevor | February 25, 2008 2:01 PM

"But by the time Boris Yeltsin put him in power, the screw-ups, deprivation, and corruption of the previous years combined with the sense that Russia's position on the world stage was slipping had badly hollowed out support for liberalism at non-elite levels."

Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" sheds a lot of light on this. What hollowed out liberalism in Russia was Boris Yeltsin shuting down Parliament so that he could introduce unpopular free market reforms. When you treat democratic institutions as a joke from day one, and sacrifice popular sovereignty for free market crusading, of course the ground will be laid for someone like Putin.

And why did Boris Yeltsin pursue rapid economic liberalization policies that were so wildly unpopular in Russia? Because they were the policies that the United States supported. And why was Yeltsin not rebuked for stifling democracy? Because the United States condoned the actions. Russia's current state of affairs is not merely the result of internal problems such as corruption, but equally the fault of the international community for privileging radical market reforms over democracy.

Posted by Blake Emerson | February 25, 2008 2:05 PM

Surely it bears noting that the issue is not just a the psychological reaction to the dissolution of the Soviet Union cited by Vanya, but the fact that Russia endured a very severe economic collapse, with very significant reductions in the median standard of living, from which it did not recover until around the time Putin became president.

This simple fact is grossly underappreciated in the US.

Posted by Steve | February 25, 2008 2:11 PM

Blake,

To add to your point, there is also a belief in Russia (doesn't matter if it is true or not) that the United States actively donated money to Yeltsin's campaign in 1996, and helped get him elected despite his miserable approval ratings.

Posted by MS | February 25, 2008 2:14 PM

The BBC World Service's Putin Project has been putting out some very good radio documentaries, too. The one on Putin's attempt to locate himself in Russian history, albeit with a strange nod to FDR, is well worth a listen.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | February 25, 2008 2:21 PM

Steve,

You are correct, but don't forget that because of the timing in many peoples' minds the early 90s economic collapse and the dissolution of the Soviet Union are completely intertwined. And it is also true that the dissolution of the USSR did a lot to aggravate the economic crisis by creating chaos and confusion in supply relationships, pricing and legal structures and providing ample opportunities for clever people to enrich themselves at public expense. I think Blake and Naomi Klein are taking the Western-centric point of view - sure, the shelling of parliament caused a number Western oriented liberal intelligenty to disavow Yeltsin - but to most Russians it was a pretty mild aftershock compared to the dissolution of their country, and really just reconfirmed what most people felt intuitively - that Yeltsin was a power grabbing hack.

Posted by vanya | February 25, 2008 2:42 PM

the screw-ups, deprivation, and corruption of the previous years combined with the sense that [the country's] position on the world stage was slipping had badly hollowed out support for liberalism at non-elite levels

I'm quite frankly amazed that this statement doesn't currently apply to the US.

Posted by The Confidence Man | February 25, 2008 3:18 PM

Did Russia ever really have a period of economic liberalism?

Sure, there were a lot of Fukayama style triumphalists trying to shoehorn the post-communist era into some sort of pro-market dialectic, but facts on the ground were a lot less pleasant. (The US is as guilty as anyone else for pretending that this clusterf*ck represented progress)

The dilapidated economic assets of the USSR were sold to the highest briber for a good portion of the 90s. You may believe this is how a market economy operates, if you're Naomi Klein or Noam Chomsky. To me, it more resembles the Phillipines at 50 below zero. (Just put Yeltsin in place of Marcos)

At one point in the nineties, there were more billionaires in Moscow than in London, and they were all involved in one of the recently privatized national industries. The usual term for this is "Kleptocracy", and I think it fits pretty well. Going on the basis of South Korea, Russia will probably need to wait 25 or 30 years for any sort of real liberal democratic order to emerge. And that's if they're lucky.

Posted by heedless | February 25, 2008 4:45 PM

I'm not sure that the non-famous Matt is being fair here. I spent a bit of time in Russia in the 1990s and lived there in the early part of the Putin recovery. It was pretty clear to me that the Putin recovery helped a whole lot of ordinary folks. This was obvious from visiting places and people that I had known in the 1990s. By contrast, though a few people did well in the 1990s, most ordinary Russians were really struggling and felt highly economically insecure. It didn't help that investment in the sort of public infrastructure that served them was hardly noticeable, which was not surprising since the state was either unwilling or unable to put any money into it. By the early part of this decade, wages were increasing, people were far more likley to be paid on time and in cash, investment in public infrastructure inproved very noticeably (of course, improving from almost zero is pretty easy) and people were generally less likely to feel that they were living hand to mouth.

Matt (not the famous one) has a much better sense of a somewhat representative part of provincial Russia at the present moment than I do, so I might be off as to how things have gone since 2004. But I suspect that he is underplaying the extent to which life has gotten better for the average Russian in the vast majority of places in the country since the 1990s - not just Moscow but also most provincial cities and many rural areas (some parts of rural Russia are a lost cause and a rapidly depopulating as a result). This probably explains most support for Putin - leaders in normal democracies tend to be popular when they precide over this sort of economic turnaround regardless of whether they are responcible for them. Note that Putin is now supported by lots of folks who were communist voters in the 1990s - I suspect that a lot of this is genuine (restoring state support for agriculture, for example, gave communist and agrarian party voters in rural areas a real reason to support Putin). People who were Yabloko or SPS voters are probably not likely to be fans of Putin today. But there are a lot less of them in Russia . . .

Posted by ikl | February 25, 2008 5:00 PM

The Clash references are cool. But here, let me tell you what you should be doing with your blog: Gang of Four references, esp. from the first album, Entertainment!

("Gang of Fourteen" doesn't count.)

Posted by live | February 25, 2008 5:28 PM

ikl- You're right- lots of people are better off now than they were in the past. I don't want to deny that. And it's not _only_ people connected to oil directly- all that money sloshes around in lots of ways- building ugly monstrosities, luxury goods, etc. That activity in turn helps lots of other people out. Many people benefit. But many do not and a lot have been hurt by the very large, persistent inflation and the continuing under-investment in the medical system, education, infrastructure, and so on. (One example- there were gas shortages last winter at service stations as domestic refining capacity can't keep up with demand.) The development is greatly retarded by the fact that corruption has grown greatly under Putin (hard to believe, but true) as has the bureaucracy has grown massively, to larger than soviet size, and is one of the real growth industries. This sort of thing leads me to think the good in Russia is largely _despite_ Putin rather than because of him. Yeltsin was a terrible, terrible leader but only someone who thinks Russians are too stupid to be ruled by anyone but a Tzar would think Putin was the only alternative or that something better could not have been done.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | February 25, 2008 5:48 PM

Even in areas like education, medicine and so on that are in a bad condition now were even worse off in the 1990s from what I saw. There appeared to be virtually zero capital investment - schools were falling apart, hospitals were falling apart, people who worked there weren't paid, often for months at a time. They were basically functioned off of investments that had been made in Soviet times. I got the sense living there in 1999 that nothing substantial except homes for oligarches, gangsters and government officials had been bulit in the 1990s. This is a slight exageration. But only a slight exageration. The physical plant of the country hadn't been maintained (other than housing which people built partially as a way to save since the banking system was disfunctional). And mainly I was hanging out in places that were doing better than average from what I can tell - though not in Moscow where some stuff was getting built in the 1990s, partially because the only really profitable economic activity basically involved theft by the well-connected . . .

So things may be bad on these fronts now, but to this observer, it was almost all much worse in the 1990s. Though I'll grant that corruption in some forms has increased substantially (partially because there is actual economic activity to skim off the top of - it is lot clear that the 1990s were less corrupt - it is just that the corruption involved generally involved privitization and asset striping).

Inflation is a problem, but from what I can tell, saleries usually keep pace. From what I can tell, it has remained relatively steady over the last number of years.

In short, while the politics of the place are really nasty these days, Matt's analysis of the situation seems basically correct. My American friends and I joked darkly about living in Weimar Russia in 1999 . . .

Posted by ikl | February 25, 2008 10:28 PM

My experience with the education sector comes from having worked at a pedagogical university and having kept in pretty close contact with many of the faculty there. My impression is that pay for teachers hasn't come close to keeping up with inflation (both for university and for primary school teachers) and that material supplies are pretty bad. This makes it really difficult to recruit teachers, leading to shortages. In the past (even in the mid to late 90s) many of the best university students wanted to go to teach at the university but this is less and less so. Bribery is up, it seems, at both the university and secondary level. In the past many schools (and especially universities) got a lot of help from grants from foreign NGOs and governments but this has been clamped down on and the FSB now monitors contacts with foreigners again to a fairly large degree. The problems are, of course, more pronounced in the regions.

As for the medical system, I got more of a close-up look at it than I would have liked recently as my mother-in-law died of cancer about a year and a half ago. The system, outside of what's for elites, is in a very bad state though perhaps in some cases better than in the 90s. If you don't buy your own supplies you'll often not get them (bed pans, syringes, etc.) People who are sick and dying wait in huge lines in the dirty hall-ways in great pain. It's terrible, massively below minimum standards, and disgusting when compared to the wealth of those with government connections. My mother-in-law was a doctor and also claimed that the quality of medical eduction had gone down greatly and that bribery was up very much there, too. It's a very poorly paid profession where wages have clearly not kept up with inflation.

Finally, my acquaintances from ever further away than I regularly go (out in Siberia, mostly) tell me that the small cities there are in terrible shape and that inflation and crumbling infrastructure is taking a terrible toll. I don't have first-hand evidence of this, though.

I don't claim that life is worse for most people than in the early 90's or just after the Rubble crash in '98. For most people it's not, I guess. But, this seems to me to have very little to do with Putin while much of what's bad (and there is a lot of this, even beyond the political arena) is pretty clearly tracable to him and his band of criminals that run the country.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | February 25, 2008 11:46 PM

Of course someoene like Putin is popular in Russia. Like most people in the world they are sensible enough to realize that democracy and political freedom are a means, not an end, and that when they fail to achieve those ends, it's stupid and immoral to hang on to them. In a great many parts of the world, "liberal democracy" really means the choice to 'choose' every five years between two corrupt oligarchic factions, and political 'freedom' means the freedom of those same oligarchic factions to block needed social reforms and fill the airwaves with their propaganda. So it was in Russia. Russia has always needed strong leaders, and it probably always will- liberal democracy is not something that translates well to poor and/or non-Western countries.

The belief in liberal democracy for its own sake is a modern belief, confined to the dominant sectors in the liberal Anglo-American world for the last couple centuries. It wouldn't make sense to people in most other cultures, in most other centuries, to a person anywhere in the world who lacks food or shelter, and it makes little sense to me. It never took hold in a country like Russia, and it never will. As I'm no great fan of liberal democracy myself, I would say good for them.

Posted by Hector | February 26, 2008 9:23 AM

I'm with heedless's interpretation of this. One of the shocking things to me during this period was the hackneyed tropes trotted out by the press: "young, liberal reformers" out to recast Russia as a progressive market-oriented country in the face the nefarious forces of reaction. It reminded me of much western reporting about Iran, fitting events into the standardized one-model- fits-all-countries moderate reformers vs. conservative hardliners dichotomy.

And where I think Naomi Klein is right is that these "ylr"s were not just perceived as agents of the west, that is precisely what they were--the local constabulary of the IMF international money police. And the fact that they [at best merely]oversaw massive theft -- a greatly under-reported development at the time -- has to have consequences.

Posted by Gene | February 26, 2008 10:15 AM