I disagree pretty fundamentally with Christian Caryl’s piece in the New Republic, “Why Democracy Didn’t Work in Russia”. I think that there are any number of reasons that liberal democracy hasn’t flourished in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here are three.
First, institutions matter. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the only functioning institutions in Russia were the military, the KGB, organized crime, and to some extent the Orthodox Church. Those are the institutions that form the foundations for today’s Russia.
Second, Russia has no tradition of liberal democracy. Certainly none of the institutions listed above has any tradition of liberal democracy or any interest in it for that matter.
Third, the transition was bungled, abetted by the West. What needed to happen was a much more gradual transition during which liberal democratic institutions like a free press or an independent court system could be nurtured. We should have been willing to foster that. Instead the transition was abrupt and you can see the results.
Was the outcome we see inevitable? I don’t think so. Was the outcome inevitable given the sudden collapse of the Communist Party and the whole Soviet system followed by an overly rapid transition away? I believe it was. It was at least a foreseeable consequence and we’re partially to blame.
I think you are exactly right. The conditions that prevent democracy in Russia are found all over the world with predictable results, hence my skepticism of our national mission to create democracy around the globe.
Just what is the outcome we see? Although authoritarian, it is not a dictatorship like China’s. There are real elections and electoral politics. Putin is constrained, but don’t cross him. He did yield to the constitutional term limits the first time around. And, if the expatriot/repatriot Anatoli Karolyn (?) is to be believed, Putin enjoys a popularity rating of over 80%.
I think the Russia we got was pretty much the best that could be had. If the neocons could be sidelined, we might be able to reach some sort of accomodation. Remember that Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Medvedev and Putin all have at one time on another called for a Europe from Lisbon to Vladsvostok. Russia would rather be in the EU and NATO than the embrace of China.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “could be had”. If you mean that it was the political path of least resistance both in Russia and here, I’d agree. If you mean that even with better leadership and planning, it was unavoidable, I’d disagree.
Lets ask the question from another perspective, why is support for democracy in Russia still as robust as it is. Think of another superpower that lost a war, became a democracy amid turmoil and suffered hyperinflation. That country (Weimar Germany) became a dictatorship within 20 years. Russia still has the workings of representative and constitutional government (i.e. the regime still holds elections, meaning they have value to Putin even if they are rigged)
I think the US is making two mistakes with regards to Russian policy. One is an excessive focus Putin; we are closer to the end of his reign then to its beginning. At the current course, its going to be someone who won’t like us very much.
The second is to think if Russia if Putin was gone and Russia was a democracy all the problems would stop. Russia would be like India, maintaining its independence and willing to assert its prerogatives in its areas of interest
I think that’s largely right. However, the U. S. “cult of personality” WRT Russian leaders didn’t begin with Putin. It’s been a failure of our policy for the last century.
To answer your question (“why is support for democracy in Russia still as robust as it is”) the reasons can be summed up as Russians are aware that their country is backward compared to the EU and the United States, they want to catch up, and they see liberal democracy as a means to that end. They’re becoming increasingly disillusioned and the Chinese model is looking more attractive all the time. In other words the best thing we could do to encourage liberal democracy in Russia is to be successful economically.
Good interesting points. I’ll add one thought —
We’ve actually seen (and managed) successful large scale political and economic transformations in the past. We switched West Germany from Nazism over a five or ten year period; we did the same in Japan with a somewhat larger breakup of large corporations. We watched the emergence of a prosperous democratic South Korea.
Less successfully, we saw Britain stagger along for 15 years or more trying to switch to socialism after WW 2; we’ve watched much of Latin and South America oscillate between democracy and juntas; we’ve watched Sub-Saharan African states shift from minority white dominated control to majoritarian black states; we’ve watched post-Mao China expand. Et cetera.
Which is background. My point is we could have done a much better job guiding the USSR and Eastern Europe to post-Communist existence, because we clearly did so in the past. Our failure to do here was criminal, and we ought to dump much of the blame for this on (a) the American economists and professors who gleefully gave so much bad advice to Russian bureaucrats and kleptomaniacs, and (b) the American government of the time which paid such little interest to the Russian transformation.
(a) means Harvard; (b) means the Clinton administration and Congress during those years. Arguably there were other guilty parties, London financiers and the like, but these were maggots in the guts of the dying USSR, symptoms of the decay rather than its cause.
Anyhow, in the interests of justice, if nothing else, we should punish Western people connected to the USSR’s bad transformation, if not with jail terms and executions and confiscation of wealth, at least with censure and public scorn and a refusal to allow their employment anymore in our government.
I don’t see us doing this.
a) I actually think that the Chicago Boys had a hand in there also IIRC, but I think we had just a transitory influence anyway. I think what we got is mostly what we were going to get since it was Russia.
Steve
Mike, I think Russia was different. In the case of Germany and Japan, we were able to transform them because we occupied those countries and still have military forces stationed there. Our ability to dictate changes to Russia after the collapse of the USSR was comparatively very limited.
It needs to be said the article is probably as useful as “who lost China” articles written in the 50’s and 60’s. Everything old is new again.
At least the US is not involved in multiple shooting conflicts in the periphery of Russia like with China….
It may be that I’m hypersensitive about U. S. involvement in the transition from Soviet Union to Russian Federation because I knew so many people going over there with lucrative consulting contracts and no knowledge of the Russian language, Russia, Russian history, etc. but lots of nifty political contacts here in the U. S.
Dave, history will be pretty harsh on US policy towards Russia post 1991, maybe not as bad as historians think of inter war France and UK ala Germany, or US vis a vis China prior and after the communist revolution, but it’s in that direction.
My point is I think Russian policy is headed to the same bad spot that China policy got into in the 50’s, 60’s. Underinvesting or misinvesting when it could have mattered (prior to 1949), then turning China into a boogeyman that led to 2 bad wars. It took Nixon to realize that was all sunk costs; and move forward in a productive way. The Chinese seem to recognize Russia is not the USSR and Putin’s Russia is not Yeltsin’s Russia; Americans can’t seem to move forward.
Oh, final comment, to link it back to the news of the day.
The ex USSR thought they were being taught how to build the government of Washington and Jefferson, but instead they paid for the advice from the likes of Paul Manafort. Wonder why things turned out poorly.