Having it both ways

Opinion about Russia under Vladimir Putin is more divided than ever. Gideon Lichfield tries to reconcile the opposites

“THE sovereign must be autocratic,” said Catherine the Great, “for no other form of government but that which concentrates all power in his person is compatible with the dimensions of a state as great as ours...Any other form of government would be not only harmful, but utterly ruinous for Russia.”

After several centuries of autocracy and 13 years of what they were told was democracy, most Russians would side with Empress Catherine. Boris Yeltsin, hailed as Russia's first democratic leader, spent nearly a decade presiding (or rather failing to preside) over ruinous near-anarchy. Vladimir Putin, specially plucked from obscurity to be Mr Yeltsin's obedient successor, has turned out to be nothing of the kind.

Russians admire his youth, sobriety, steely restraint and love of order, and many find their own lives better and calmer. Foreign investors who ran away after the government default and economic crash in 1998 have flocked back. They extol the increasing stability of the economy, the growing power of consumers, the energy and imagination of entrepreneurs. They are convinced that the president and his economic reformers want to remove the distortions caused both by Soviet socialism and by the post-Soviet, crony-capitalist gold rush, and create a land in which the free market can flourish. They too will say, quietly, that the empress had a point.

But both Russian and western political liberals look at Russia with a tightening knot of fear in their bellies. They see an authoritarian leader who has repressed the media and free speech, planted former secret agents and soldiers throughout the government, and turned both houses of parliament into dispensers of rubber stamps; who has encouraged the resurgence of nationalism and allowed the conflict-ridden republic of Chechnya to become a morass of banditry and killing on both sides; who has shown his taste for power and distaste for business by persecuting Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man; and whose “reforms” are at best ineffectual and at worst a charade.

The biggest land-mass, the coldest places, the greatest riches, the cruellest rulers on earth: an extreme land provokes extreme views. But today they seem more divided than ever. Sometimes one wonders if people are talking about the same place. An article in the New Republic in February by Masha Gessen, a leading Russian-American journalist, accusing the American media of largely ignoring “the death of Russia's nascent democracy” under Mr Putin, started a furious debate on Johnson's Russia List, the online forum of the small international community of English-speaking Russia-watchers. A few weeks later an article in Foreign Affairs by two scholars, Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, provoked another row. The authors berated the press for exaggerating Mr Putin's autocratic bent, and argued that on just about any measure Russia is now “a normal country”, doing no worse than the average in the developing world.

One of the things that developing countries take time to establish is a consensus about what they should be developing into. Russia has a special knack for confounding predictions. In the heady days of the early 1990s many assumed that the wave of democratic feeling that had washed away the Communists would permeate everything and that Russia, having been a Communist superpower, was well on the road to becoming a capitalist, democratic one.

But the new regime was more fragile and corruptible than anyone had imagined. It twisted the notions of capitalism and democracy out of all recognition. Under Mr Yeltsin a small cabal of magnates, the “oligarchs”, obtained much of the country's industry and natural resources on the cheap in return for supporting the president. Economic disasters repeatedly swallowed up ordinary people's savings. Political parties came and went like puffs of smoke. Not until last December's parliamentary elections, which wiped out the two small liberal parties, Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, and filled the Duma with grey Kremlin yes-men, did it finally hit home that Russians had found their “democracy” to be as shoddy as anything they used to buy in Soviet-era shops, and were content to let it go. That bitter disappointment is one reason for the lack of consensus today.

Call me unpredictable

Another reason is that Mr Putin, on whom everything in Russia is perceived to depend, also has a knack for confounding predictions. In the autumn of 1999 Mr Treisman, blissfully unaware (like everyone else) that the then prime minister would soon take over the country, argued in Foreign Policy that the next president--whoever he might be--would remain shackled by the powerful oligarchs, renegade regional governors, corrupt officials and querulous parliament that had hobbled his predecessor. “Probably about a year after he moves into the Kremlin,” Mr Treisman wrote, “Russia's next president will look in the mirror and see not himself but Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.”

The opposite happened. Much of what Mr Putin did in his first term was aimed at dismantling Mr Yeltsin's legacy. Just before his virtually unopposed re-election this March, he dismissed Mikhail Kasyanov, the prime minister and the last of Mr Yeltsin's (and the oligarchs') senior allies, making his own position more unassailable than ever. Facing his second and final term (unless a servile parliament changes the constitution), he has as much freedom as any post-Soviet leader will ever have to do what he wants--whatever that may be.

That has brought the question, “Who is Mr Putin?”, which raged for the first couple of years of his presidency, to the fore again. His background as a mid-level KGB agent in East Germany, followed after 1991 by a stint as deputy mayor of St Petersburg (where he was responsible for the city's foreign relations and economic development), shows in his policies: he tends to trust his fellow siloviki, men from the security services, yet he clearly understands the need for Russia to overcome the legacy of Soviet economic planning and rethink its position in the world.

Those who know him describe him as a “mirror-man”, often seeming to adopt his interlocutors' ideas and even speech, which adds to the confusion. Human-rights activists and army generals alike come away feeling that he is on their side. He keeps all the forces in his government in balance, creating endless debates about whom he favours, and indeed whether he is the puppet-master or the puppet. He is also good at shifting blame on to his officials, so he remains hugely popular even if his policies are not.

Nonetheless, over the past four years his main goal has become clearer. On the face of it, it is a simple and reasonable one. He wants Russia to be a strong country: economically powerful, politically stable and internationally respected. What is in dispute is what those goals mean to him, the methods he uses to achieve them, and whether he is as powerful as he seems.

This survey looks back at Mr Putin's first term and forward to the second. It tries to reconcile the optimistic and pessimistic views by showing that both contain much truth, and both are necessary to understand today's Russia. Economic liberalism and political illiberalism are complementary parts of Mr Putin's strategy, but his contribution to both is often exaggerated. Russia's new-found prosperity is fragile and will require deep and difficult reforms to sustain. At the same time the shrinkage of freedoms is less clear-cut than it seems, and not always the result of orders from the top.

A case neither open nor shut

What is clear is that an open economy and a closed political system make uneasy bedfellows. The overweening bureaucracy is harming business, and not just that of power-hungry magnates like Mr Khodorkovsky, but of the little people building the foundations of Russia's new economy. Encouragingly, business is fighting back, and citizens, increasingly deprived of a political voice at the top, are beginning to build democracy from the bottom up.

But that will take time. The past 13 years have discredited democracy for Russians. The way to avoid both disappointment and confusion is to abandon the assumptions of the 1990s, accept that Russia is on a path of its own for now, and try to understand where that path leads.

Opinion about President Putin is divided in Russia. The article examines the evidence. Article forms part of a survey on Russia in this issue of The Economist.

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