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3 All power to Putin - not
quite By Anna Arutunyan
Russia, according to the Western news
media, is increasingly slipping toward
totalitarianism. The man allegedly pulling all the
strings is Russian President Vladimir Putin,
ex-spy and apparatchik extraordinaire. This
misconception of Putin as a powerful dictator
whose control over his citizens must be countered
through punitive measures is deeply ingrained. The
myth is embraced by journalists and politicians
alike.
According to Le Point, "Putin is
endlessly displaying his might." His government,
according to The Guardian's Marc Rice-Oxley, is
more
"brazen and confident" than it ever was in the
1990s. Max Boot reiterated the repetitive claim in
another syndicated column: "Having taken power in
a nascent democracy six years ago, Putin has been
reestablishing authoritarian control." And to
"secure" that "control", The Independent
editorialized, Putin "knew where to turn for help"
- none other than the siloviki (power
elite) of the former KGB. He is, in the words of
US Senators Lindsey Graham and Joseph Biden, "a
one-man dictatorship" who "continues to
consolidate power" in Russia.
While all
myths, including this one, have origins in
reality, Putin's perceived might can lead
policymakers to dangerous oversimplifications. But
how do these perceptions arise, what is the real
state of Putin's administration, and how harmful
can this myth of total control really be for
policymakers in Washington and Europe?
Origins of the myth Journalists
covering Russia can hardly be blamed for
interviewing the sources closest at hand - usually
those with a good command of English, contacts
with the West and a deep distrust of the current
Kremlin crew. While perhaps well-meaning, such
editorial policy, particularly in the case of US
media, succumbs to the tendency to dumb down what
it cannot grasp.
As such, the news media
often censure concepts that fail to fit into the
familiar dichotomy of dictatorship vs democracy.
Of course, this simplification applies practically
to any country outside the West's scope. But given
its size and energy potential, Russia is a
particularly fertile breeding ground for grandiose
theories and myths regarding power grabs and
malign leaders.
The fault lies not only
with simplifying journalists. The myth derives as
well from the self-serving perspective of Russia's
failed reformers.
"Russia's liberal
opposition has a vested interest in feeding this
myth," said Boris Kagarlitsky, a prominent expert
(and former dissident) with the Institute for
Globalization Studies. "First, it helps them get
help from abroad. Second, it helps explain away
the failures of the liberal opposition itself.
Instead of saying, 'We didn't offer anything that
the people could support and that is why we
failed,' they end up saying that a fascist regime
kept them from getting there and that everything
is so terrible they couldn't have done anything in
the first place."
Fed these perspectives,
the West still perceives Russia's political
playing field mainly as a struggle between
pro-Kremlin forces and a Western-leaning, liberal,
pro-market opposition. Meanwhile in Russia itself,
the liberal opposition is marginalized. Its
representation in the media, where it still has
access to the printed page, exaggerates its
influence among the population.
Who
rules Russia? Instead of a one-man
dictatorship, experts close to the Kremlin
administration, as well as pro-Kremlin ideologues,
describe a struggling, fractured corporation that
at best is trying to become transparent and at
worst is acting directly against the national
interest. That the Kremlin's "propaganda machine"
is willing to take such a grim view of things
should be a signal that Putin's power, and
Russia's government, is far less strong and stable
than Western observers care to admit.
Stanislav Belkovsky of the National
Strategy Institute is perhaps the chief proponent
of this corporate view of the Kremlin. What is
ascribed to Putin's KGB past and his
siloviki-saturated government, Belkovsky
argues, is actually the legacy of the putatively
liberal tenure of Boris Yeltsin.
"In the
beginning of the 1990s, when the seemingly
immortal KGB fell apart, many agents became in
demand outside of the system ... because of their
value as a qualified ... workforce," Belkovsky
writes. "As the post-Soviet security structures
continued to fall into disarray, the specialists
that had survived physically began to leave
Lubyanka [KGB headquarters] to take up civilian
posts - not just in the government, but in purely
commercial structures as well."
As for the
allegations regarding Putin's anti-liberal track
record, Belkovsky describes how under the current
administration "privatization has gone further
than [former vice premier Anatoly] Chubais could
have ever imagined during the early 1990s". The
Yukos affair, in which the Russian government
threw entrepreneur and Yukos oil company head
Mikhail Khodorkovsky in jail, was less a
tightening of political control, Belkovsky argues,
than the result of various bureaucratic clans
vying for a piece of the energy pie.
Is
Putin, then, a powerful chief executive officer
taking charge of his company or a weak corporate
leader held hostage by an increasingly powerful
bureaucracy of institutional players?
"The
bureaucracy is spreading," Kagarlitsky told me.
"It is very involved in business. And in the West
this is understood as lack of business freedom in
Russia - as though all business is controlled by
bureaucracy. In reality it's the other way around
- the more the bureaucracy is involved in
business, the more each
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