Page 2 of 3 All power to Putin - not
quite By Anna Arutunyan
bureaucrat becomes a hostage of the
business interests he's involved in."
In
the end, it is hard to say whether Putin controls
Gazprom and Lukoil or whether Gazprom and Lukoil
control Putin.
Viktor Militarev, a
colleague of Belkovsky at the National Strategy
Institute, also argues that Putin's possibilities
are limited. Although conceding an increase in
authoritarian tendencies during
Putin's administration,
Militarev points out that "a majority of the
population would be willing to forgive Putin this
'managed democracy' if those very authoritarian
tendencies were directed at raising the standard
of living".
As for Putin's alleged
consolidation of vertical power, Militarev added,
"That is all Western nonsense. Putin can't even
fire [Mikhail] Zurabov," the current minister of
health and social development, despite a series of
corruption scandals and demands for his sacking by
the ruling party in the parliament.
If
this is true, then Putin's control over his
ministers is considerably limited. He can't issue
directives for his ministers to follow in part
because his ministers don't control their people
either. The chain of command, in other words, is
broken. This failure to assert vertical
hierarchies of authority can be seen in the new
practice of appointing regional governors rather
than electing them.
In this view, the new
governors face the same problem at the regional
level that Putin faces at the top. As Kagarlitsky
put it, "Either the new governor has to fire
everyone and appoint his own people, or he must
come to terms with the fact that he only controls
what's going on in his office, while real life is
in the corridors, and he has no control over
that."
The Stalinist system of one-man
rule and even the Leninist concept of
partiinost - following the party's
directive - simply do not apply. Instead, several
bureaucracies of power based in personal clans
contend for power. And whatever authority Putin
once commanded to forge coalitions has been
significantly diminished by his announcement that
he will step down in 2008.
The near
abroad Another perception in the West is
that Putin's Kremlin is taking a more muscular
stance toward the post-Soviet territories known in
Russia as the "near abroad". The current
government has reinforced this perception that it
is attempting to re-establish influence in former
Soviet republics - particularly the more
Western-leaning ones such as Georgia and Ukraine -
with aggressive rhetoric of its own. Russia's
approach to its neighbors has proved more
worrisome to Europe and Washington than the
president's harsh policies at home.
But
some analysts in Russia are questioning this
stance as well. According to political analyst
Alexander Khramchikhin, who writes for Russky
Zhournal, which is run by the pro-Kremlin
think-tank Foundation for Effective Politics,
Russia's foreign-policy clout declined not during
the Yeltsin era but under Mikhail Gorbachev and
his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze.
Yeltsin, not Putin, re-established Russia
as a prominent player in the world arena.
Khramchikhin cites such "achievements" as Russia's
membership in the Group of Eight and the use of
Russia's Black Sea fleet to quell unrest in
Georgia in the autumn of 1993. "It was then that
Russian peacekeepers appeared in the Commonwealth
of Independent States [CIS], and showed themselves
to be the only effective peacekeepers in the
world," writes Khramchikhin. "Russian soldiers
were prepared to kill and be killed, and that is
exactly how they were able to quickly stop the
bloodshed in Georgia, Moldova and Tajikistan."
Whatever the validity of Khramchikhin's
assessment of Yeltsin's operations in the near
abroad - as well as Russia's minor standoff with
North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops over
Kosovo - such activism does contrast sharply with
Putin's administration, which has made concessions
to withdraw bases from Georgia and other CIS
countries.
"It was Putin who made
Washington the source of legitimacy for
post-Soviet regimes," concurred Belkovsky. "Even
under Yeltsin the source of that legitimacy was
Moscow: not a single leader in the former USSR
could feel safe if he had deliberately turned his
back to the Kremlin. Now ... the position of the
Kremlin doesn't really interest anyone."
As for the recent "gas wars" that are
widely viewed as Russia exercising its energy
muscle, analyst Mikhail Delyagin, who actually
laments Russia's loss of control in the
post-Soviet sphere, writes in Yezhednevny Zhurnal:
"The principal approach of Russia's bureaucracy
toward the CIS is absolutely correct: if you are
truly independent, then pay for your gas like
independent countries and not like satellites."
According to the Western argument, Russia
is "bullying" its neighbors by threatening to
raise the price of the gas it sells to the near
abroad. But this argument gets it backward. By the
time the "gas wars" are over and the agreements
are signed, Ukraine and Belarus walk away without
the subsidized energy benefits that they enjoyed
as satellites. In the economic sense, Moscow loses
leverage. By weaning Ukraine and Belarus from
Russia's gas and gradually forcing these
"sovereign states" to pay for their energy
resources like any other country, Moscow is
undermining the cohesion of the CIS and giving a
clear signal to its former "satellites" that they
are on their own. Without the concessions of cheap
gas, there is little that Moscow can demand in
return.
It is certainly open to debate
which policy - Yeltsin's or Putin's - was the
wiser. But given its professed fears of expanding
Russian influence, the West appears to be
responding not so much to the
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