Muddling through the shadow of the past(s): Post-communist Russia's search for a new regime ideology

Demokratizatsiya

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 37-57

  Chen, Cheng ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

elite politics; ideology; regime legitimacy; Russian politics

Indexed keywords

DEMOCRACY; DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY; GOVERNANCE APPROACH; NATIONALISM; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY; POLITICAL POWER; POST-COMMUNISM; SOVEREIGNTY; STATE ROLE;

RUSSIAN FEDERATION;

EID: 78650668068     PISSN: 10746846     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3200/DEMO.19.1.37-57     Document Type: Article

References (133)

1. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2009 Annual Convention of the American Political Science Association. The author would like to thank Karrie Koesel, Rudy Sil, and four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
2. Since 2004, Freedom House has downgraded Russia from the category of "partially free" to the category of "Not Free" because of the Putin regime's increasing restrictions of political rights and civil liberties.
3. See, for example, Harley Balzer, "Managed Pluralism: Vladimir Putin's Emerging Regime," Post-Soviet Affairs 19, no. 3 (2003): 189-227;
4. Vladimir Shlapentokh, "Putin as a Flexible Politician. Does he Imitate Stalin?," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 41, no. 3 (2008): 205-216.
5. Although the Soviet regime could be quite pragmatic at times, such as during the Brezhnev era when black market and blat were being tacitly tolerated and the regime pursued detente with the West, the official ideological commitment to building socialism remained firm until the Soviet collapse.
6. See, for example, Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001);
7. and Stephen Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001)
8. Richard Rose, Neil Munro, W. Mishler, "Resigned Acceptance of an Incomplete Democracy: Russia's Political Equilibrium," Post-Soviet Affairs 20, no. 3 (2004): 195-218.
9. Stephen Hanson, "Instrumental Democracy: The End of Ideology and the Decline of Russian Political Parties," in Vicki Hesli and William Reisinger, eds., Elections, Parties, and the Future of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 163-185.
10. News conference of presidential aide Vladislav Surkov on the official website of the G8 presidency of the Russian Federation in 2006, at http://en.g8russia.ru/news/20060704/1168817.html (accessed December 1, 2010)
11. cited in Ken Jowitt, "Rus United," Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 24, no. 4 (December 2008): 503. Surkov currently serves as the First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office in Russia.
12. The representative major works focusing on the role of political ideologies in post-Communism with a comparative angle include Hilary Appel, A New Capitalist Order: Privatization and Ideology in Russia and Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004);
13. and Stephen E. Hanson, Ideology, Uncertainty, and Democracy: Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
14. Here it should be emphasized that this paper's use of the term "regime ideology" does not carry any derogatory connotations of such ideology being "false" as in the case of many kinds of "ism"s. Therefore, even a liberal democracy like the US could be considered as having a regime ideology that is committed to individualism-based liberal capitalist democracy with elements of "manifest destiny" such as the belief in the American "mission" to spread the American image and promote democracy.
15. For a succinct discussion of the more general term "ideology," which informs the definition of "regime ideology" here, please see Michael Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
16. Although national ideology and regime ideology are conceptually distinctive and have different emphases, their goals sometimes could overlap, such as in many post-colonial contexts when the post-colonial regime is confronted with the dual challenges of regime-building and state-building.
17. See Graeme Gill and Roger Markwich, Russia's Stillborn Democracy: From Gorbachev to Yeltsin (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000)
18. and Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms.
19. See M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
20. See Philip Hanson, "The Russian Economic Crisis and the Future of Russian Economic Reform," Europe-Asia Studies 51, no. 7 (November 1999): 1141-1166.
21. Tim McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 162-186.
22. See, for example, Richard Rose, "Russia as an Hour-Glass Society: A Constitution without Citizens," East European Constitutional Review 4, no. 3 (1995): 34-42;
23. and Judith Kullberg and William Zimmerman, "Liberal Elites, Socialist Masses, and the Problems of Russian Democracy," World Politics 51 (1999): 323-358.
24. Philip Hanson, "The Russian Economic Recovery: Do Four Years of Growth Tell Us that the Fundamentals have Changed?" Europe-Asia Studies 55, no. 3 (2003): 365-382.
25. The number dropped a couple of times in 2010, but even the lowest "dip" was still around 60 percent.
26. Rudra Sil and Cheng Chen, "State Legitimacy and the (In)significance of Democracy in Post-Communist Russia," Europe-Asia Studies 56, no. 3 (2004): 347-368.
27. Dale R. Herspring, ed., Putin's Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain, 3rd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 3. Putin made this claim in 1999 before he became the President of Russia.
28. This term was actually first coined by Sukarno of Indonesia, who claimed that Western-style democracy was unsuitable for Indonesia and that the country should be governed according to traditional principles. Sukarno used this idea as a pretext for his increasingly authoritarian rule.
29. See, for example, Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003);
30. and Perry Anderson, "Russia's Managed Democracy," London Review of Books, January 25, 2007.
31. Other labels that have been used by political scientists to describe the contemporary Russian regime include "Potemkin democracy" and "competitive authoritarianism." For the former, see W. Clark, "Russia at the Polls, Potemkin Democracy," Problems of Post-Communism 51, no. 2 (2004): 22-29.
32. For the latter, see Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism," Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 51-65.
33. "Russia's Week," CDI Russia Weekly 197, available at http://www.cdi.org/russia/197-11.cfm (accessed December 1, 2010).
34. Balzer, "Managed Pluralism," 190-191.
35. For the more general use of these terms on hybrid regimes, see Levitsky and Way, "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism"
36. and Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
37. Vladislav Surkov, "Sovereignty is a political equivalent of competitiveness," February 7, 2006.
38. "News Conference of Presidential Aide Vladislav Surkov, Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration," Official Website of the G8 Presidency of the Russian Federation in 2006, available at http://en.g8russia.ru/news/ 20060704/1168817.html (accessed December 1, 2010).
39. Richard Sakwa, "Russian Political Culture Through the Eyes of Vladislav Surkov," Russian Politics and Law 46, no. 5 (2008): 5.
40. Eugene Ivanov, "'Sovereign Democracy: Is it United Russia's Ideology?" Johnson's Russia List, January 21, 2007.
41. Examples include Nikita Garaja, Sovereignty (Moscow: Europe, 2006)
42. and A. V. Fenenko, ed., The Concept and Definition of Democracy (Anthology) (Moscow: URSS, 2006).
43. This manual was titled "A Book for Teachers: The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006." See Dmitry Babich, "On the Wrong Side of History: A New Teachers' Manual Provokes Debates," Russia Profile, July 25, 2007, available at http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/2007-161-6.cfm (accessed December 1, 2010).
44. Putin never actually claimed that "sovereign democracy" was the regime's official ideology.
45. For example, Medvedev's interview for "Expert," available at http://www.expert.ru/ expert/2006/28/interview-medvedev/ (accessed December 1, 2010).
46. "Russia Profile Experts Panel: The Debate over Sovereign Democracy," Russia Profile, September 22, 2006.
47. Cited in "The Rewriting of History," The Economist, November 10, 2007.
48. Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 231.
49. For example, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia: 1928-1931 (Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, 1978).
50. For a more detailed account of this process, see Cheng Chen, The Prospects for Liberal Nationalism in Post-Leninist State (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007), 45-75.
51. Leslie L. McGann, "The Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Aleksii II and the Russian State: An Unholy Alliance?" Demokratizatsiya 7, no. 1 (1999): 12-27.
52. See Nikolas K. Gvosdev, "The New Party Card? Orthodoxy and the Search for Post-Soviet Russian Identity," Problems of Post-Communism 47, no. 6 (November/December 2000): 29-38.
53. For example, the New Russia Barometer survey of April 2000 indicates that 71 percent of respondents viewed the pre-Perestroika Soviet political system favorably (and 22 percent unfavorably) while 82 percent viewed the old economic system favorably (and 13 percent unfavorably). See New Russia Barometer IX, available at http://www.russiavotes.org/rvwhatsnew.htm. A 2001 poll conducted by the Public Opinion Fund found that 79 percent of Russians regretted the dissolution of the Soviet Union (the figure was 69 percent in 1992).
54. See "Referendum on the Fate of the USSR: Ten Years Later," available at http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/cat/societas/prob-lem-soc/collapse- FSU/ed010909.
55. It should be noted that pre-Soviet Russia did have multiple political traditions. For example, the more liberal strand was evident in, for example, Miliukovs and Kerensky of 1917, while the Slavophiles were more emphatic about the purity of the Russian soul, as represented by the peasantry. Yeltsin clearly emphasized the first element more as evidenced by his liberal reforms, while Putin and Medvedev tried to balance between these two elements by combining both the liberal tradition, especially in economic affairs, and the emphasis on the distinctiveness of Russia.
56. Putin, "Russia at the Turn of the Millennium," December 30, 1999. Available at http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/parliament/3005/poutine. html (accessed November 22, 2010).
57. Vladimir Putin, "Inaugural State-Of-The-Nation Address to the Russian Parliament," July 8, 2000.
58. Victor Yasmann, "Russia: New Russian Holiday has more Behind it than National Unity," RFE/RL, November 23, 2010.
59. "Russian democracy should correspond to Russian traditions, universal values-Medvedev," RIA Novosti, April 15, 2010.
60. Leon Aron, "Putinism," Russian Outlook, AEI Online, May 8, 2008, available at http://www. aei.org/publications/pubID.27958/pub-detail.asp (accessed November 30, 2010).
61. See, for example, "Putin Expresses Gratitude to Church for Uniting Russian World," Itar-Tass, June 28, 2008;
62. and "Russian Orthodox Church to Work for Russian Identity-Putin," Interfax-Religion, February 3, 2009.
63. "Russian President Outlines Principles of Relations between State and Church," NTV, February 2, 2009, BBC Monitoring.
64. "New Supervisor of Religious Policy Appointed in Presidential Administration," Gazeta.ru, April 27, 2010, available at http://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2010/04/2-a-3358001.shtml (accessed December 1, 2010).
65. Mansur Mirovalev, "Russian Orthodox Church a Growing Political Force," The Associated Press, April 4, 2009. Church leaders have blessed the government's plans to eliminate some social benefits for the elderly, called on Russia's youth to volunteer for military services, and consecrated new warships and nuclear missiles, calling the latter "Russia's guardian angels."
66. Although most Russians do not regularly go to churches, a 2006 poll conducted by Izvestia and VTsIOM showed that 63 percent of respondents in Russia identified themselves as Orthodox Christians. See Georgiy Ilyichev and Boris Kliin, "Can One Only Believe in Russia?" Izvestia, December 23, 2006.
67. See Zoe Knox, "Russian Orthodoxy, Russian Nationalism, and Patriarch Aleksii II," Nationalities Papers 33, no. 4 (December 2005): 533-545;
68. and James W. Warhola, "The Kremlin's Religion Temptation," Current History 106, no. 702 (October 2007): 340-345.
69. McDaniel, 162-186. "Putin Calls for Soviet-Era Anthem, Czarist-Era Symbols," The Associated Press, December 5, 2000.
70. "Red Star set for Russian Comeback," BBC News, November 26, 2002, available at http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2515515.stm (accessed December 6, 2010).
71. Judyth L. Twigg, "What Has Happened to Russian Society?" in Andrew C. Kuchins, ed., Russia After the Fall (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), 159.
72. Vladimir Putin, "Annual State-Of-The-Nation Address to the Russian Parliament," April 24, 2005.
73. Vladislav Surkov, "Interview by Elena Ovcharenko and Larisa Kaftan," Komsomol'skaya Pravda, September 28, 2004, available at www.kp.ru/daily/23370/32473/print/ (accessed December 1, 2010).
74. Astrid S. Tuminez, Russian Nationalism since 1856: Ideology and the Making of Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 297.
75. "Russians Call Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 Biggest Event of the 20th Century," Itar-Tass, November 16, 2008. The space flight of Yuri Gagarin ranks second (13 percent).
76. For a detailed account of the role of Stalin in the forming of a new Russian national identity, see Veljko Vujacic, "Stalinism and Russian Nationalism: A Reconceptualization," Post-Soviet Affairs 23, no. 2 (2007): 156-183.
77. "The Rewriting of History," The Economist, November 10, 2007.
78. Yuri Zarakhovich, "Putin Plays Follow the Leader: Is Stalin Coming Back in Style?" Johnson's Russia List, January 20, 2002.
79. Also see Adrian Karanycky, "The Great Memory Purge," Wall Street Journal Europe, March 5, 2008.
80. Ariel Cohen, "Russia on the March: The Return of the Red Square Parades," The Heritage Foundation, February 11, 2008.
81. "Over 70% Russians Approve of Renewed Military Parades on Red Square," Itar-Tass, May 4, 2008.
82. "Put in More Flags," The Economist, May 16, 2009.
83. Pavel Felgenhauer, "Medvedev Forms a Commission to Protect Russian History," Eurasia Daily Monitor 6, no. 98, May 21, 2009.
84. For example, in April 2010, Putin became the first Russian leader to join Polish officials in commemorating the anniversary of the Katyn Massacre. In the same year, Putin called Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago-a book on the crimes of the Soviet regime-"essential reading" for Russian students. See Vladimir Isachenko, "Putin's Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago Essential," The Associated Press, October 26, 2010.
85. Arkady Ostrovsky, "Russia: Enigma Variations," The Economist, November 29, 2008.
86. "Attitudes on Stalin," Gazeta.ru, March 8, 2008. In 2003 the number was 53 percent.
87. "Most Russians Regret the Fall of The Soviet Union-Poll," Interfax, December 21, 2009.
88. John B. Dunlop, "Russia: In Search of an Identity?" in Ian Bremmer and Ray Taras, eds., New States, New Politics: Building the Post-Soviet Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 55.
89. Anne Clunan, The Social Construction of Russia's Resurgence: Aspirations, Identity, and Security Interests (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 117.
90. Johnson's Russia List, February 5, 2004.
91. This poll was conducted by the All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion. See "Russia has Bright Future in Poll," Kommersant, November 12, 2008.
92. McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea, 21.
93. See The Levada Center, "Public Opinion on the Yeltsin Years," available at http://www.rus-siavotes.org/president/yeltsin-public-opinion.php? S776173303132=9dfdd7e1487702e5ecb81a66 d913152b#243 (accessed December 2, 2010).
94. Leon Aron, "Was Liberty Really Bad for Russia? Part I," Russian Outlook, Summer 2007, available on-line at www.aei.org/publication26600/ (accessed December 2, 2010).
95. In 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin as Russia's prime minister. At the end of the year, Yeltsin resigned and handed the presidency over to Putin.
96. Clunan, 102-103.
97. Ibid., 144.
98. Vladimir Putin, "State-Of-The-Nation Address to the Russian Parliament," April 18, 2002.
99. "Putin: Non-market economy performed well in the 1920-30s, then resulted in USSR collapse," Johnson's Russia List, June 14, 2005.
100. The limits to such commitments are clearly demonstrated by events such as the Yukos affair; the Khodorkovsky trials; and the regime's recent decision to pull the country out of WTO entry negotiations unless as a part of a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan (the regime blamed the US and EU for the collapse of its unilateral bid).
101. This survey was conducted by the polling firm Bashkirova & Partners in May 2008. 77.4 percent of the respondents listed culture and 75 percent listed scientific achievements. 60.7 percent pointed to the Russian armed forces and 55.6 percent to their country's influence in world affairs. Only 40.5 percent expressed pride in the country's economic achievements and just 37 percent felt the same way about the state of democracy in Russia. See "Russians see their history as the greatest source of pride," Bigotry Monitor-UCSJ's Weekly Newsletter 8, no. 25, June 20, 2008, available at http://www.fsumonitor.com/stories/062008BM.shtml (accessed December 2, 2010).
102. Kommersant, March 17, 2000, 2.
103. Marlene Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 152.
104. Clunan, 117-118.
105. Gill and Markwick, 258.
106. During the Yeltsin era, the Duma did successfully block a number of presidential initiatives, such as key efforts to alter labor legislation and social policy.
107. The Yeltsin era came to an end right before 2000, at which point Russia was perceived as one of the top ten most corrupted countries in the world according to Transparency International. See "TI Corruption Perception Index, 2000," available at http://www.transparency.org/policy- research/surveys-indices/cpi/previous-cpi/2000 (accessed December 2, 2010).
108. See Richard Rose, "Russia as an Hour-Glass Society: A Constitution without Citizens," East European Constitutional Review 4 (1995): 34-42;
109. and Stephen White, Russia's New Politics: The Management of a PostCommunist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 144-181.
110. After his re-election in 1996, Yeltsin called upon his top campaign aids to form a commission to "give Russia an idea." The commission reached no definite conclusion. See Michael Urban, "Remythologising the Russian State," Europe-Asia Studies 50, no. 6 (1998): 969-1002.
111. Vladimir Shlapentokh, "The Short Time Horizon in the Russian Mind," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 38 (2005): 1-24.
112. For example, see Vladimir Shlapentokh, "How Putin's Russia Embraces Authoritarianism: The Case of Yegor Gaidar," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 40 (2007): 493-499.
113. Richard Sakwa, "Regime Change from Yeltsin to Putin: Normality, Normalcy or Normalization?" in Cameron Ross, ed., Russian Politics Under Putin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004): 17-36.
114. For example, the KPRF had been the most organized and popular political party in Russia until Putin managed to splinter it, cause defections to new, pro-Kremlin parties, and use Unity's ties to the Kremlin to push out KPRF leaders from key committee positions.
115. For example, see "Putin Elite Consolidates Its Position in Business Circle," RFE/RL Newsline, February 6, 2008, available at http://rferl.org/newsline/2008/02/060208.asp#archive (accessed December 2, 2010). For further discussion, see the next subsection.
116. Shlapentokh, "The Short Time Horizon," 16.
117. For example, see William Zimmerman, "Slavophiles and Westernizers Redux: Contemporary Russian Elite Perspectives," Post-Soviet Affairs 21, no. 3 (2005): 183-209. Zimmerman argues that the fundamental divide among Russian elites is between Slavophiles and westerniz-ers in a reprise of 19th-century debates, while others, such as Clunan, argue that there are more nuanced divides. According to Clunan, in contemporary Russia, elites of different ideological orientations include national-restorationists, neo-Communists, statists, Slavophiles, and western-izers.
118. Clunan, 116. Also see Lilia Shevtsova, "Russia and the West: A Liberal View," OpenDe-mocracy.net, November 3, 2008.
119. George W. Breslauer, "Personalism versus Proceduralism: Boris Yeltsin and the Institutional Fragility of the Russian System," in Victoria E. Bonnell and George W. Breslauer, eds., Russia in the New Century: Stability or Disorder? (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001): 35-38.
120. Lilia Shevtsova, "The Return of Personalized Power," Journal of Democracy 20, no. 2 (April 2009): 61-65.
121. The importance of such ties is highlighted, most prominently, by the choice of Medvedev by Putin as his successor. They worked together in St. Petersburg in 1990-1991 under Major Sobchak, and then Putin brought Medvedev with him in Moscow in 1999. Medvedev was Putin's chief of staff during his tenure as prime minister and then as president. He had also been the head of Gazprom and the first deputy prime minister under Putin. After Medvedev became the president, many powerful Kremlin aides from the Putin era stayed on.
122. "Putin Elite Consolidates Its Position in Business Circles," RFE/RL Newsline, February 6, 2008, available at http://rferl.org/newsline/2008/ 02/060208.asp#archive (accessed December 1, 2010).
123. Leon Aron, "The Merger of Power and Property," Journal of Democracy 20, no. 2 (April 2009): 66. These companies include Gazprom; Rosneft; Channel One, which is the largest TV network in Russia; railways; a big cellphone company, and the oil-export monopoly.
124. Previously Rogozin had criticized the corrupted nature of the Putin regime. Given the popularity of Rodina, an alliance with the Communists could potentially make United Russia lose control over the Duma. Such a scenario would be highly undesirable for the regime.
125. "Russia: Expert Eyes Security Ties among Siloviki," December 20, 2006, available at www.rferl.org/content/article/1073593.html (accessed December 2, 2010). Cited in Andrei Illari-onov, "The Siloviki in Charge," Journal of Democracy 20:2 (April 2009): 70.
126. The argument that common ideological beliefs could create a longer time horizon for politicians to overcome collective action problems is elaborated within the context of party politics in Stephen E. Hanson, Ideology, Uncertainty, and Democracy: Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), Chapter 1.
127. The trust ratings for the country's political institutions were among the lowest in the world. See Vladimir Shlapentokh, "Trust in Public Institutions in Russia: The Lowest in the World," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39 (2006): 153-174. Also see Sil and Chen, 2005.
128. In the first quarter of 2009, Russian economy shrank by 9.5 percent year on year, and industrial output tumbled by almost 15 percent.
129. Arkady Ostrovkey, "Reversal of Fortune," Foreign Policy (March/April 2009).
130. Also see "Russia-Surkov attack suggests infighting intensifies," US Open Source Center, March 31, 2009.
131. Pavel Baev, "Putin is rapidly losing his "father-of-the- nation" image in Russia: Economic catastrophe propels Russia into an identity crisis," Eurasia Daily Monitor, March 2, 2009.
132. Shevtsova, 64.
133. "Impervious to War, Inflation, and Foreign Barbs, Russian Pride Grows," RFE/RL, September 23, 2008.