Among the neon and the glitz of Moscow’s car-choked streets, a new hoarding stands out for its stark simplicity. Apart from the colours of the Russian flag, there is no image and its wording is short: ”Putin’s plan, Russia’s victory”.
For Russians over the age of 30, the echo is unmistakable. They are bound to remember a favoured Soviet slogan from Communist days: ”The party’s plans are the people’s plans.” But the new hoarding looks forward as well as back. With parliamentary elections due next December, it is a subliminal advertisement for the ruling party, United Russia, which everyone expects to gain the victory that Putin wants for it, in large part because it is associated with him.
Eight years after coming to power, Putin remains extraordinarily popular. The Constitution dictates that he cannot have a third consecutive term, and last week, in a lengthy encounter with foreign analysts and long-time reporters of Russia, he insisted he would indeed leave office next spring. There would be no messing about with the Constitution, he told us. He had not yet decided what to do next, but he expected to retain influence. It seems he intends to take a top job, perhaps in charge of Gazprom or one of Russia’s other state-owned mega-corporations.
What, then, is Putin’s legacy? Stability and growth, for starters. After the chaos of the 1990s, highlighted by Yeltsin’s attack on the Russian Parliament with tanks in 1993 and the collapse of almost every bank in 1998, Putin has delivered political calm and a 7% annual rate of growth. Inequalities have increased and many of the new rich are grotesquely crass and cruel, but not all the Kremlin’s vast revenues from oil and gas have gone into private pockets or are being hoarded in the government’s ”stabilisation fund”. Enough has gone into modernising schools and hospitals so that people notice a difference. Overall living standards are up. The second Chechen war, the major blight on Putin’s record, is almost over.
For Western observers the conundrum is Putin’s foreign policy. Only the hawks dare call it ”aggressive”. The evidence is just not there. So today’s favoured clichés are ”assertive” or ”nationalist”, which imply something negative without quite saying so. The adjectives Putin uses are ”independent” and ”sovereign”. In the modern world, independence is an expensive luxury that few countries are rich and big enough to afford, he told us last week: ”Most countries are dependent on their neighbours or on the alliances they belong to.”
Putin is right, especially when ”independence” is polite code for ”independence from the United States”. Not every country sinks to being a poodle, but it is hard to disagree with Washington on a sustained basis and go unpunished. Russia can. Ten years ago it was in massive debt to the International Monetary Fund. Now its reserves total more than the IMF’s available funds for global lending.
Some foreign analysts suggest Putin is a ”neo-imperialist”. He rejects that absolutely. In our conversation he took issue with the pan-Slavism of the 19th century when Moscow expected all Slavs to come under the Russian umbrella, as well as with the Leninism of the 20th century. ”Lenin said he didn’t care about Russia. What was important for him was achieving a world socialist system. The Russian people didn’t expect this. They were deceived,” Putin said. ”Russia today has no intention of repeating the tsarist experience or what happened in Soviet times — I hope no missionary ideas get into state policy. We should be true to ourselves, respectful of others, and good partners.”
An anti-Leninist, Putin is also a firm anti-communist who calls the current Russian Communist Party ”a holdover from the past”. Asked about the party’s complaints that it gets minimal access to state- controlled television, Putin sneered: ”The communists are always complaining. In Soviet times they had a monopoly and it didn’t help them to get or keep support.”
Putin’s political philosophy reflects the conventional wisdom of the world’s globalised elite. ”We want to encourage the growth of a middle class. It is the backbone of any society,” he said, before launching into a description of Russians becoming property owners, taking out mortgages, and thinking in terms of budgets and planning. The ”smash the bourgeoisie” ideology Putin grew up with was extreme, but today’s political opposite, the picture of the middle class as unique motor of democratic progress, is equally simplistic. Take Chile, or more recently Venezuela and Thailand, as three cases of bourgeois backing for military coups against democracy and economic fairness.
The puzzle is why Putin and his colleagues feel the need, given their popularity, for so much more political control than seems necessary, even in terms of their desire not to allow serious democratic competition. They keep Parliament weak, and make it hard for new parties to organise or cross the threshold of the 7% of the national vote required to win any seats. They hog the airwaves and manipulate TV. They condone the repression and intimidation — and sometimes the murder — of independent activists.
Grigory Yavlinsky, of the social democratic party Yabloko, calls it bureaucratic authoritarianism, ”in which everything is decided by chance and violence — everything is conditional”. Irina Khakamada, of the Union of Rightwing Forces, describes it as ”an instrumental democracy” in which democratic institutions in Russia have no intrinsic value but are only designed to keep a narrow elite in charge. Neither politician expects any early change. Whoever succeeds Putin will follow the same line.
For outsiders the message is dramatic. Thanks to the independence that he has given Russia, with its new role as an energy superpower, Putin’s team exudes a confidence that neither Brezhnev, the last traditional Soviet leader, nor his more democratic successors, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, ever had.
A century of Western ability to influence Russia’s internal development is finally over. That is Putin’s main legacy. He has created the foundation for a political and social system that does not require Western fear or favour to survive. He is pursuing a foreign policy that is not dominated by what Washington or indeed Europe expect him to do. Russia is neither competing with the West nor confronting it — nor, at the other extreme, is it desperately trying to join the Western club. It prefers its relations with the West to be good rather than bad, but if the West wants a new Cold War, Russia will choose either to ignore it or respond in kind.
For the next few decades at least, the West will have to accept this new independence. It must learn to treat Russia in the same way as it already treats China — as an economic and strategic giant that it no longer lectures and provokes but trades and lives with on realistic and sober terms. — Â