Dmitri Trenin - The Legacy of Vladimir Putin

Current History, Russia and Eurasia, October 2007

No Russian presidency is over until a new master is installed in the Kremlin. Vladi­mir Putin has said countless times that he will leave office on schedule, but he will only be believed post factum. Indeed, merely by departing in full accordance with the constitution—a constitu­tion that Putin could easily have altered, with mas­sive popular and elite support—the president would establish a key element of his legacy. In order for constitutional norms to stick, the high and mighty must develop a tradition of observing them.

But what else, assuming Putin leaves office next year, will he bequeath to his successor and his country? In Putin's own view, it will prob­ably be "Russia in one piece." When Boris Yeltsin appointed him prime minister in August 1999, one of the questions most frequently asked by the international media was whether the Russian Fed­eration would break apart, like the Soviet Union before it, but this time along the boundaries of military districts. A "Russia of the regions" was looming on the horizon. A "world without Russia" seemed a distinct possibility.

In response, Putin has reasserted the power and scope of the Kremlin. He confronted head-on the challenge of Chechen separatism, ruthlessly sup­pressing the resistance and in the process restoring the Russian military's self-esteem. Through a policy of Chechenization, he has sealed the military suc­cess with a political arrangement that turned the former battlefield into a feudal khanate ruled by an adversary-turned-client. Chechnya has become a region with a Russian military garrison in place but virtually no ethnic Russians as residents. War in Chechnya, as people once knew it, has ended— though managing its aftermath, and bringing secu­rity and stability to the Northern Caucasus, will remain a heavy-duty task for years to come.

Putin dubbed his Chechen campaign an anti-terrorist operation. From the apartment house bombings in several cities in 1999 to the Mos­cow theater siege of 2002 to the Beslan school tragedy of 2004, Russia was rocked by a string of terror attacks, some resulting in hundreds of deaths. Each attack provoked public fury against the radical Islamists. Each also created doubts about the authorities' competence to deal with threats, and dark suspicions about their willing­ness to properly investigate what had happened. This will cast a long shadow on the record of the Putin administracion.

The Security State

The war in Chechnya not only propelled Putin, little known at that time, to the presidency; it defined his presidency. National security has been elevated to the highest public good, and security officers, some of them Putin's former colleagues, have taken over key positions within the state. The result is not the "KGB state" that many feared but rather a country in which a network of "security specialists" both rule the nation and enjoy access to some of its choicest assets. Putin crushed the Yeltsin-era oligarchy by exiling or incarcerating its more rebellious members and turning the rest into pliant tycoons at the mercy of the Kremlin. He has allowed a new oligarchy, made up of top bureau­crats, to control vast money flows.

Control is the key word of the Putin presidency. He has centralized political power around the ''presidential vertical," effectively subordinating the legislature, judiciary, regional administra­tions, and principal media outlets to the Krem­lin. Opposition, whether communist or liberal, has been contained or marginalized. Public poli­tics has been replaced de facto by a more famil­iar bureaucratic politics. And the Kremlin has assumed the role of creator of all public life. It has built parties, managed elections, planted seeds of a "healthy" civil society, organized youth, and developed ideological constructs. What the Kremlin has been singularly unable or unwill­ing to confront is runaway corruption, which has thrived on bureaucratic laissez-faire.

Critical to the stability of the regime that Putin has built is his personal appeal in the eyes of most ordinary Russians—which has spiked, rather than dipped, toward the presumed end of his presiden­tial reign. Putin's popularity has given Russia's political life a rare quality: authoritarianism with the consent of the governed. It helps, of course, that Putin has held office during a period of excep­tionally high energy prices, which have spurred the country's economic growth. It also helps that Putin's government has pursued sensible macroeconomic policies. Indeed, Putin has led the country as it mounted a spectacular economic comeback.

With the destruction of Yukos Oil marking a turning point, the government has reasserted con­trol over the oil and gas sector. Private interests, whether Russian or foreign, have been reduced to minority status. This has had a hugely negative effect. Private property, while it has grown and developed substantially, remains provisional, subject to redistribu­tion if an owner expe­riences conflict with the state or with people close to the powers that be. State capitalism is still more a trend in Russia than a dominant reality, but economic nationalism has nonetheless been a hall­mark of the Putin presidency and will remain an important piece of his legacy.

"Great Russia"

Putin's apparent politico-economic goal has been to establish "Russia, Inc.," a country that would use its energy abundance as a platform for build­ing a more diversified and competitive economy. This project requires a significant degree of fusion between the public and the private, government and business, bureaucrats and corporate leaders. There is no doubt in Putin's mind that the public sector should be preeminent over the private; yet it is equally clear that state ownership, for Putin, is not an ideological precept but a political tool.

Ideologically, Putin has been something of a right-wing conservative—moderately nationalist, compassionate as necessary, but never a socialist or a left-wing populist. He has managed to restore a modicum of Russian unity by bringing the czar-ist and the Soviet legacies together, by utilizing the theme of a "great Russia." Emblematic of this mar­riage of legacies was Putin's success in establishing the double-headed imperial eagle as Russia's official coat of arms while replacing a Yeltsin-era national anthem with the familiar Stalinist anthem. Putin has turned Russian nationalism into a main­stream establishment movement.

Curiously, Russia the great power is the anti­thesis of Russia the empire. Putin, having pro­claimed the collapse of the Soviet Union a major geopolitical catastrophe, has put Russian self-interest at the center of Moscow's relations with the former borderlands, thus completing their separation from Russia. Putin's hardball attitude toward the near neighbors has resulted in a series of crises that have led to alienation and acrimony. In foreign policy more broadly, Putin has built on Russia's position as a major energy supplier, and on its new economic strength, to end Moscow's dependency on international financial institutions. He has rejected Russia's status as subordinate to the United States and the European Union and insisted instead on sovereign equality. He has severely reduced Western political influence within Russia and revised arrangements reached at the time of Russia's international weak­ness. Putin's assertiveness has been based not only on Russia's economic recovery but also on a surge of Western business interest in Russia, a coun­try that now stands on the verge of entry into the World Trade Organization.

Russia's political relations with the West, which appeared to hold considerable promise after the overtures Putin made toward the United States in the wake of 9-11, have become very tense toward the end of his tenure. International suspicions sur­rounding the poisoning of former KGB agent Alex­ander Litvinenko in London, coming soon after the diplomatic triumph of the Group of Eight sum­mit in St. Petersburg, illustrated that the us and European publics, along with their political elites, lack confidence in Russia generally and Putin per­sonally. In the Western public's mind, Russia has moved from the category of democratic hopefuls to the authoritarian camp, along with China.

Putin has solidified relations with the major non-Western states, notably China and India. Yet his greatest legacy in this arena will not be the Sino-Russian friendship treaty or even the found­ing of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), but rather an agreement finally demarcating the Russian-Chinese border in its entirety. Early in his term, Putin recognized the need to strengthen Moscow's hold on Siberia and the Russian Far East. From this perspective, the 2012 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vladivostok emerges as more important than the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Under Putin, Russia's foreign policy has again attained global reach. Putin's frank pursuit of eco­nomic goals has revived Moscow's interest in Latin America and Africa. Energy considerations have added an important dimension to Russia's tradi­tional interests in the Middle East. At the same time, Russia has become a privileged partner of NATO, a founding leader of the SCO, a party to the Middle Eastern diplomatic quartet, a member of the G-8, an observer at the Organization of the Islamic Confer­ence, and a self-appointed spokesman for the large emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—know7n as the BRIC countries.

A silovik (former member of the security ser­vices) in power, Putin has managed to arrest the downward spiral of the Russian military. He has stabilized the armed forces and the defense indus­try and laid the groundwork for their future mod­ernization—without, however, making the military his priority.

The Flip Side of Stability

From a long-term historical perspective, Putin has cemented the most important work of his pre­decessors, Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Unlike them, he has been no liberal revolutionary, but rather a conservative stabilizer. He has not pushed the country a step forward by consolidating the rule of law. But by taking the proverbial step back he has secured its general capitalist orientation. As a result, Russia is no more democratic, and is far less pro-Western on the international stage, than it was in the 1990s. On the other hand, it is more capitalist, and thus proto-Western inside.

To his successor, Putin leaves a legacy that will be difficult to handle. Many of the president's achievements that appear most significant to Rus­sians today are likely to show their flip side in the future. Centralization of power will not com­pensate for the absence of political institutions. Bureaucratic rule amounts to poor-quality gover­nance and well-nigh invincible corruption. Stalled reforms cry for a new push, which will be painful for many. Nationalism has shown its ugly face in the rise of xenophobia, chauvinism, and fascism. Chechnya, without seceding from Russia, may gradually become quasi-independent.

In foreign relations, strained ties with neighbors may prove more than a passing episode, alienat­ing Russia still further from Europe. And using the United States as a bogeyman for domestic politi­cal purposes, while openly challenging Ameri­ca's global dominance, could result in long-term estrangement between the two countries.

The only burden that Putin's successor will probably avoid will be appointing his own succes­sor. Putin's Russia is a myth. The country is largely on its own, and by the time the next succession cycle comes up, the master of the Kremlin will not be Russia's sole elector.

Putin himself is due to step down at age 55. If he indeed exits the presidency, yet chooses not to retire as a major public figure, he will change Russia's living constitution: The country has never lived with a relatively young and active former head of state. Putin's admirers are already set­ting their sights on 2012, when their hero will be able to run for president again. (The constitution only bans a third consecutive term in office.) But one should not bank on this eventuality: The new leader and his crowd will certainly feel entitled to their own eight years in the Kremlin.

If Putin departs in a timely fashion, and this leads to a norm of routine rotation in power—in exchange for immunity and privileges when one's time is up—Russia will have taken a big step. As for Putin the man, he ought to be preparing him­self for a new career. His ultimate legacy remains a work in progress.

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