SPEAKING
FREELY Russia is part of the West.
Honest By Nicolai N Petro
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
As the leaders of
the world's major industrial democracies prepare
to converge on St Petersburg next month, tension
is in the air. Many of them are frustrated with
their host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, for
backsliding on democracy. But what if that
perception were wrong? What if, in response to the
disastrous decade of Western-led reforms, Russians
are merely trying to set their own democratic
agenda? This is what Putin's supporters have been
arguing for years, and there is much to support
their claims.
To recognize the progress
Putin has made specifically on
democratic reforms, one
needs to ignore the sensational headlines and
examine in detail his initiatives in areas such as
the media, the law and
political activism. That list is very long, but
here are some of the highlights.
While
state-owned corporations do own majority shares in
the three national television channels, there are
now also more privately owned newspapers, journals
and local television and radio stations than ever
before in Russian history - three times as many,
in fact, as under president Boris Yeltsin. And
while many studies criticize state-sponsored
television for fawning over Putin, they also
typically find that other outlets present a wide
variety of critical views.
While attention
in the West has focused on the trial of oil tycoon
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in Russia itself the number
of citizens turning to the courts to redress their
grievances has shot up from 1 million under
Yeltsin to 6 million under Putin, with more than
70% of plaintiffs winning their cases against the
government authorities. Nor should it be forgotten
that it was Putin who introduced habeas corpus
legislation to Russia in 2002, so that now
anyone arrested in Russia must appear before a
judge within 48 hours, be charged with a crime
within two weeks, or released. It is also thanks
to Putin that the experimental jury system
introduced by Yeltsin has expanded nationwide.
You might have read that Putin is holding
back civic organizations, yet under his watch the
number of non-governmental organizations in Russia
has increased from 65,000 at the end of 1999 to
nearly 600,000 today. Indeed, they now form such a
large constituency that a new branch of
government, the national Public Chamber, was set
up last year to serve as a permanent,
institutional ombudsman to the parliament.
It is said that Putin is constraining
political parties, yet in the latest national
elections in December 2003, an average of nine
candidates from 12 federally funded parties
competed for each seat in the national
legislature, and 54% of incumbents lost their
seats (compared with fewer than 5% in the US).
Indeed, Putin's new legislation now requires
party-list voting in all regions, an initiative
that strengthens the role of parties in the
political process, and a necessary step toward
parliamentary oversight of government.
Interestingly, had this rule been in place in the
last parliamentary election, it would have
significantly reduced the number of seats won by
Putin's party.
Perhaps the most
misunderstood portion of the reforms Putin has
introduced since the Beslan hostage crisis in
September 2004, often called "Russia's September
11", has been the false claim that he can now
appoint and remove local governors, who were
previously elected. In fact, as the Constitutional
Court's decision of last December 20 clarified, it
is the local legislative assembly of each region
that has the final say on whom to appoint as
governor. The president may propose candidates,
but he does not appoint them.
The failure
of the Western press to provide a fair and
balanced picture of Putin's policies has reduced
them to mere caricatures, with dangerous
implications for US foreign policy. One can choose
between two forms of pessimism about Russia. The
first sees Russians as congenitally undemocratic,
with Putin expressing the yearning for
authoritarianism that is deeply embedded in the
Russian soul. Because of this yearning there will
always be a fundamental conflict of values between
Russia and the West. The solution to this conflict
is a hard-headed "realism", the spirit of which is
succinctly captured in former Central Intelligence
Agency director Porter Goss's remark, "The Cold
War is over, but Russia is still up to its old
tricks."
The other, equally pessimistic
view argues that Russia's lack of democracy
results more from Putin's secret-service soul than
from its culture (though the latter is not
entirely without blame). Hence were Putin to be
replaced by a "reformer", Russia might someday
aspire to democracy. Analysts of this persuasion
await the rise of the next "Great Russian Liberal"
(past candidates have included Grigory Yavlinsky,
Boris Nemtsov and, currently, Vladimir Ryzhkov),
who will prove to be what Boris Yeltsin was
obviously not - competent, effective and sober.
Alas, both these attitudes are utterly
divorced from Russian reality. The first ignores
the profound changes that have taken place in
Russian society, and stubbornly clings to the view
that, even though 70% of the country's gross
domestic product (GDP) is in private hands and the
Communist Party now polls at less than 10%, Russia
is still the USSR. Against the second view, by a
3:1 ratio Russians today feel that their country
is more democratic under Putin than it was under
Yeltsin (nearly the same percentage say
human-rights conditions are also better now). In
other words, what they fail to see is that, at
least for most Russians, Putin is the "Great
Russian Liberal".
For the most part, such
facts are either ignored, or attributed to a lack
of information on the part of Russian citizens.
But since Russia ranks third globally in total
newspaper circulation, among the top five in books
published and top 10 for total numbers of Internet
users (ahead of Italy, Canada, India and Brazil),
any argument that suggests they lack information
is clearly ludicrous. This leaves Western
decision-makers with a rather uncomfortable choice
of options: either write off Russia as a hopeless
case, or insist that they just do not understand
what democracy is all about, and hence will have
to learn about it from us. The first means a new
Cold War for geopolitical reasons; the second, a
new Cold War for ideological reasons.
There is a better way. It begins by
recognizing that President Putin is bringing
Russia closer to the West by crafting a democracy
around its indigenous history, customs, and
expectations. We really should not be surprised
about this. After all, in his very first public
comment as prime minister, "Russia at the Turn of
the Millennium", Putin wrote that Russia would
integrate "general humanitarian values with
traditional Russian values that have stood the
test of time", thereby creating a civic accord
that reaffirmed the value of Russia's past, rather
than breaking with it.
Seen from this
perspective, it is clear that the failure of
Western efforts to promote democracy in Russia are
due neither to insufficient enthusiasm for Yeltsin
nor to insufficient criticism of Putin, but rather
to a failure to support strong and effective state
institutions. Instead of addressing Russia's
emergence from communism as a problem of
state-building, too often Western pundits stood on
the sidelines and cheered the collapse of the
state, the army and the economy as "triumphs for
freedom", treating those who opposed the Russian
state as heroes, while applauding "reformers" who
could barely muster 5% of the popular vote. Could
there be a surer recipe for disaster in our
relationship? A decade has passed since US
president Bill Clinton's chief Russia policy
adviser, ambassador Stephen Sestanovich, wrote:
"We won the Cold War. It should be further behind
us than it is." Yet here we are, a decade later,
closer than ever to renewing that conflict over
disagreements that are more tactical than
substantive. Will we never get beyond Cold War
thinking?
I believe that we can, but a
necessary first step is to acknowledge Putin's
good-faith efforts to promote democracy in his own
country. Any honest appraisal will show that he
has accomplished at least as much in this regard
as either former Soviet president Mikhail
Gorbachev or Yeltsin. Doing so now is vital
because it removes the main argument in favor of a
return to Cold War hostilities - the notion that
there is some ineffable "values gap" separating
Russia and the West.
But if attitudes are
to change for good, the Western media must also
re-examine their role. If, as Boston Globe
columnist Mark Jurkowitz writes, the US media
remain "the institution left most adrift by the
end of superpower conflict", then the best way to
end this drift is to recognize how divorced from
reality media stereotypes about Russia have
become. Breaking the cycle of negative discourse
does not mean devoting less time to criticizing
Russia's failings, but it does mean reporting more
about areas where cultural, economic, and
political overlaps with the West already exist, so
that they too can become a familiar part of our
political discourse on Russia. If Russia's
domestic debates were likened, say, to those that
take place in any of a dozen other Western
countries, I very much doubt that our perpetual
foreboding about Russian democracy could be
sustained. The "values gap" would eventually
dissolve into manageable disagreements within the
context of shared aspirations.
Until we
replace Cold War thinking with a new paradigm that
envisages Russia as an indispensable part of the
West, however, our disagreements will always run
the risk of being manipulated into apocalyptic
portents. Policymakers, after all, can only choose
from among policy alternatives that they recognize
as possible. Only by broadening the conceptual
framework within which Russia is viewed can new
political opportunities be created. I call
this process "learning to view Russia as part of
the West". Without it there is simply no way to
arrive at a peaceful post-Cold War international
order, and we will remain stuck in our present
doldrums. The task of forging such a new
relationship, however, cannot be Russia's alone.
It requires Western partners who are willing to
listen to all segments of Russian society, willing
to re-evaluate their stereotypes about Russian
political culture and, ultimately, willing to
embrace Russia as a necessary and vital part of
the Western community.
Nicolai N
Petro served as the US State Department's
special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union
under president George H W Bush, and now teaches
at the University of Rhode Island.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
