3. How is Russian Autocracy Surviving?

Yeltsin retains his hold on power as a result of his 1993 rout of the parliament, following which the Constitution was adopted. The successful use of force against political rivals in a society with a weak, poorly rooted democracy is perfectly capable of becoming, and often in fact becomes, the consolidating impulse that allows the victor to retain power, at least temporarily, and forces the political class and the state apparatus to support him (even if unwillingly). In such a situation superpresidency can perpetuate its legitimacy through the electoral process, which is what happened for over three decades in Indonesia before its president Sukharto lost his power. But Sukharto had a loyal army on his side. In addition, he was able to remain in power for so long because he had put the opposition in jail, and also because he had seized power at a relatively young age. All of these factors forced Indonesian society to resign itself to the fact that Sukharto was a serious force, there for the long term, and they themselves helped Sukharto to hold on to the illusion that there was no alternative to his reign through multiple presidential elections, in which he was always the only candidate.

Another factor in the survival of the Russian superpresidency is the fragmentation in society and in the ruling class, as well as the inability of the latter to put forward a single powerful candidate as an alternative to Yeltsin. Passivity and apathy in society, its distrust of politicians, traditional patience and fear that things could get worse, the adaptation of a large part of the population to survival in stagnant conditions - all of these help the present regime to survive. But it is unclear how much longer these factors contributing to the regime’s preservation can continue to work at the expense of the artificial maintenance of stagnation and general decay. Moreover, the passivity of society cannot protect the system from the degeneration that is the result of the internal logic of its development. Besides, a constant war of all against all, the lack of responsibility among the chief political forces, the lack of commonly recognized and accepted rules of the game on the political playing field - all of this poses a constant threat of unpredictable shifts.

It has become obvious that Russia’s "elected monarchy" has already exhausted its former resources of stability, and it has no others. It is not very important as some observers assume whether the Russian president is sick or well, it is much more important that his illness exposes the non-viability of a system under which the leader does not have the right to get sick, and which turns the state of his health into a political factor of primary importance.

The presidential regime that has taken shape in Russia has already accomplished its revolutionary mission (the dismantling of the Soviet system) and history has not given it a new one. Moreover, it is not able even to bring the country painlessly from the revolutionary cycle to the creative one, to lead it out of the maelstrom onto a calmer course . Such a system can support its existence only by artificially prolonging the revolutionary period, by creating constant tension in the form of personnel reshuffling, which dimly recalls Stalinist and Maoist "purges." But they have nothing in common with the party-ideological and military support that the communist leaders had at their disposal.

People who have had the opportunity to observe Yeltsin up close have noted his psychological incapacity for "normal politics", and his heightened disposition toward fierce political struggle, in which he feels much freer and more sure of himself. These qualities correspond fully to the nature of the political system he created, which cannot develop on auto-pilot, but it can only rot and decompose. For this reason the system demands constant manual control to carry out sharp turns and, accordingly, a periodic rotation of cohorts and their teams.

Until recently Yeltsin used only one model of overcoming a crisis - bringing onto the stage new, inexperienced and therefore at least temporarily obedient players and then turning their age (i.e., their youth) into an independent political factor. He introduced the Gaidar-Burbulis team (1991), Chubais-Nemtsov team(1997), and then finally the Kiriyenko government (1998). But these appeals to technocrats not only failed to stabilize the system, they made it more vulnerable, knocking out from underneath it even those weak supports that it had. In any case, the arrival of the technocrats always raised the political tension. But it was even more important that such appeals to the technocrats, who came to power with reformist inclinations and at the same time supported the impulse of an ineffective system, also discredited the idea of reform. So the "stabilization" tactic that Yeltsin has used up to now has, in the final analysis, made the situation even more unstable.