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« Back to Russian Democracy main page    Transcript for: Russian DemocracyThink Tank - Ben Wattenberg withLeon Aaron and Steven Sestanovich 'Russian Democracy' TTBW 1314 Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is still struggling toward democracy. The recent massacre of more than 300 children and adults by Chechen terrorists was labeled by many as Russia’s own 9/11. President Vladimir Putin responded by taking tough new measures that many critics say are undemocratic. But inside Russia, his popularity remains high. Is Putin the strong medicine Russia needs to become a successful democracy? Or is he taking it down the path to dictatorship? To find out, Think Tank is joined this week by Steven Sestanovich, ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union under the Clinton administration, and currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; and Leon Aron, director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is 'Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life.' The topic before the house: Russia: Democracy or Dictatorship? This week on Think Tank. WATTENBERG: Okay. Leon Aaron, Steve Sestanovich, welcome to Think Tank. There has been a great deal of turmoil and tumult about what is going on in Russia. I wondered if we could jump right in and get a brief answer from each of you and then we’ll just go from there. What is going on there? ARON: What I think is going on is that ostensibly in response to the Beslan massacre. WATTENBERG: Beslan is where? ARON: Bordering on Chechnya. WATTENBERG: Part of the Chechnya province... ARON: No, it’s a separate area of the Russian Federation. WATTENBERG: No, but allegedly done by Chechnya... ARON: Right, allegedly done by the Chechen terrorists. Ostensibly in response to that, President Putin said that he would change the structure of the - of the - or change the ways in which A: the governors are elected - they would be appointed rather than elected; the way the Russian parliament, the Duma, is formed; it would be now elected entirely by the party lists. Now half is elected by party lists and the rest by individual, you know, traditional... WATTENBERG: By human beings. ARON: By human beings; by the majority first, beyond the pole. And also, in fact while I was there, there was a very disturbing development whereby a highest qualification commission which alone used to have the right to fire judges, the majority of the - the members of that commission were selected by secret ballot by judges themselves. WATTENBERG: All right. Steve, there has been a gathering in of power to the presidency to Putin; is that correct? SESTANOVICH: Yes and what Leon describes is only what’s happening now. But if you look at what has been happening under Putin, I think you have to describe it as a continuing expansion of his power and of power of the state bureaucracy at the expense of pluralism of more decentralized institutions, at the expense of anybody who can be a power center challenging Putin. WATTENBERG: Does he want to be a dictator? I mean, Russia has a history of being - even before the Bolsheviks and the communists of sort of leaning towards central authority and autocracy. Is that what people are worried about? That he would like to be a dictator? ARON: There is certainly that possibility now, although at least until now it’s... WATTENBERG: And you’ve always been sort of a big optimist on this... ARON: Well, I was... WATTENBERG: We’ve talked about this. ARON: Yes, I was - I was waiting for the proof of that and I regret to say that there’s more proof now than there used to be. I agree here with Steve. Although it is still, you know, we still got to be watching the facts rather than - rather than see, you know, how we feel about this. It is not yet - the door is not closed. I think the final test Ben, would be whether he leaves in 2008 as he is supposed to by the constitution, or whether A: he stays; or B; there could be some sort of constitutional amendment and here we’re talking about all kinds of scenarios...the presidency is abolished but there’s a parliamentary commission which he has... WATTENBERG: Has he made any steps toward extending his rule beyond 2008? ARON: No, he denies - he denies vehemently that he would do anything like that. WATTENBERG: But we’ve heard that story in many places and... ARON: Of course. WATTENBERG: ...and many times. SESTANOVICH: Yes, I would disagree a little bit with Leon as to whether that’s really the only relevant test or the most relevant test, because if Putin steps aside in favor of a successor very much like himself, who’s picked in through a process... WATTENBERG: When you say very much like himself, you’re saying somebody autocratically minded. That’s the subtext? SESTANOVICH: Yeah. Somebody who comes out of the old Soviet bureaucracy, whose instinct is for a state that is ruled essentially by the bureaucracy in a highly centralized way without much challenge from outside. And Putin may actually not aspire to be a 'personal' dictator, but he clearly does aim to rebuild the state, as he says, and maybe even to go beyond what we would think of as just a stronger state; to creating a system in which, you know, what he sees as the deformities of democracy just can’t in any way challenge state power. ARON: Yes. Yes, Ben and I think we now could start talking about policies. And approximately a year ago - in fact it’s - it’s just a year ago that there was the arrest of Mikhail Khordokovsky, the embodiment of this independent - not anti-state but sort of exo-state... somebody outside of state, the sort of liberal capitalist. Although, with plenty of skeletons in his closet, who turned his company into the flagship of Russian - what might be called the Russian industrial progress. It became transparent, started caring about shareholders; foreign investors were very interested and so on. The question is at that time whether it was a personal revenge; whether it was indeed the issues of taxes. It’s an extremely complicated story. Bottom line, Ben, and I think the policy, the signal in retrospect - the - the policy change was signaled then, meaning that the state started regaining 'commanding heights' or crawling back towards those commanding heights... WATTENBERG: The commanding heights is an economic term. ARON: Economic term describing vital industries; let me put it this way. Or - or industries that are responsible for most of the revenue... the lucrative ones. WATTENBERG: That’s... ARON: ... in this case, oil of course. WATTENBERG: That’s Marxist and Leninist... ARON: That’s correct, terminology. But what we’ve seen since then, and probably before that, but again it was not entirely clear, was that it was an attack on a very broad front. Now, it was not a Bolshevik-type, you know, bloody seizure, but it was a steady pressure in the direction of a greater state control or ownership of society, politics, and economy. WATTENBERG: Steve, if you would, let’s just do a quick box-score on conditions in Russia today. As I understand it, there is what passes for a free print press, is that correct? SESTANOVICH: Yes. WATTENBERG: Okay. But there is not free television? SESTANOVICH: The national networks are all pretty much under state control. WATTENBERG: Right. SESTANOVICH: There are individual stations across Russia which can sort of say what they want and then they get - then they hear about it. WATTENBERG: Right. And people vote. SESTANOVICH: Yes. That’s right, although they’re going to be able to vote for less if Putin has his way. They won’t be able to vote for local governors anymore; those will all be appointed by Putin, and their votes in the - for the parliament will be counted in way that makes it harder for kind of insurgent opposition parties to operate. WATTENBERG: Let’s speculate. Why is he doing all this? ARON: There is no sort of ideology with which we are used to associating the Russians with in the past eighty years. But there is, I think, this sort of inchoate sense that the Soviet Union, as he said by the way in his post-Beslan speech was a great state for all its problems... WATTENBERG: Beslan was a stake in their heart. I mean it really showed that the... ARON: Well, there were other... WATTENBERG: The killing of the children was the terrible thing. ARON: Right. Right. It was a national trauma but I think it also brought forth in everybody and in Putin, sort of some deeper... deeper things that they were thinking. A: the Soviet Union was a great state with all its problems. From that flows a number of things; that the state ought to be in a greater control of the economy; that too much liberty is not a good thing; that - that people who know better should be in charge... you know, the usual, the usual. It’s not - it’s not a totalitarian impulse, but it’s clearly the sort of proto - at this point sort of populist-syndicalist goal. SESTANOVICH: Yes. I think there’s no doubt that Putin’s goal is to make Russia a modern country and he has a particular, whether it’s a Soviet nostalgia or a sense that you just got to catch up with the West... WATTENBERG: And this means sort of... I’m sorry; go ahead. SESTANOVICH: He - he’s brutally honest in public about how backward Russia is. WATTENBERG: They believe... SESTANOVICH: And he emphasizes Russia is a poor country and he doesn’t want it to be and he emphasizes that its goal has got to be doubling its G&P in ten years, looking more like a European country. In that respect I think he does consider himself part of Europe. But he has an idea about how to get there that involves sort of tidying up what he considers the disorder of Russia’s democratic experiment... WATTENBERG: Smashing the oligarchs, for one. SESTANOVICH: ... in the ’90s. He, you know, he doesn’t want competing centers of power and that means he doesn’t want rich people outside of government who can challenge him, who can support political parties, opposition candidates; he doesn’t like the idea of a parliament that can actually block what he wants to do; he doesn’t like the idea of a media that actually can investigate what he does, hold his people to account. He wants order without a lot of accountability and without a lot of pluralism. And in that respect I think he may end up being - making the mistake of thinking that he can get to a particular kind of modernization without what we think of as the modern social and political norms that go - practices that go along with that. WATTENBERG: That has been a love allegedly of the Russian people even pre-Bolshevism. I mean this idea of order, out of chaos. I mean, is that right? ARON: Well, every big state has it - the fear of disorder is true of the Chinese people because once you plunge into disorder in the state of that scale, you know, the historic memory, it still makes you shudder. But continuing what - on what Steve said, the debates that raged in the late ’80s -- can we build a modern state without liberty? Can we build a modern state based on sort of the government of the experts without people involvement? Can the government rule without the feedback from the society, or will we again go back to the swamp. All of those things that prompted Gorbachev, in effect, first tactically, to open up so that he can hear from the society and would not get in the same swamp that the previous regime put Russia in, appeared to have been lost on - or almost lost on Putin. That’s - that’s what I’m thinking. And this is particularly ironic and not yet tragic, but sad, that he appears to be falling for that same temptation that always was there for the Russian rulers. It appears that in economy as well as politics, Putin’s policies are beginning to break, beginning to put the stress on the economic growth; they’re stressing political system; his - his attempt to bring back the provinces, not through any organic arrangement, but by the traditional Russian way of just simply shortening the leash and yanking it. WATTENBERG: The provinces being which? ARON: Eighty-nine Russian so-called provinces or regions. WATTENBERG: This is after the breakup of the Soviet Union? ARON: After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin... WATTENBERG: The remaining 89 provinces? ARON: That’s right. Boris Yeltsin literally, I think, saved Russia by giving autonomy to provinces. WATTENBERG: And they have more autonomy than say, an American state. ARON: No - well, it’s - it’s a complicated issue. I think de facto they have less... I mean, I’m sorry, in theory they have less; de facto under Yeltsin they had probably just about enough. WATTENBERG: I mean Siberia has pretty well gone its own way aren’t they? ARON: But - but Putin is trying to reverse what I thought was one of the key achievements of the ’90s, which is that Russia was free and whole for the first time in its history because it was never whole and free. It collapsed into anarchy or alternatively was kept under - under dictatorial regime. All of that is to say that Putin’s policies are putting - are putting Russia under stress. WATTENBERG: Let me play the dumbbell here for a minute. Why does this matter so much to the United States, or apparently matter so much to the United States? Why are we doing a program about it? Goodbye everybody. SESTANOVICH: One answer that a lot of people would give you is, you know, this place has a lot of nuclear weapons and we need to worry about that. I think you can update that answer. Russia is one of the most vulnerable fronts in the war on terrorism, and they’re losing. They have shown themselves for all the efforts that Putin has made to strengthen the state, to be painfully and tragically and bloodily incompetent in dealing with this. That’s one reason it matters. A second reason is Russia still has unreconciled, unsettled relations with many of its neighbors, conflictual relations... WATTENBERG: They have troops where, in several of those nations, right? SESTANOVICH: They have troops that are... WATTENBERG: Uninvited troops. SESTANOVICH: ...not welcome in Moldova and Georgia. They have a sort of uneasy arrangement with Ukraine, and they have a military alliance with most of the other states, but what... WATTENBERG: In the old days that would be called an invasion or whatever... SESTANOVICH: Well, yes and it’s not... WATTENBERG: ... or occupation or... SESTANOVICH: ... and it’s not something that, you know, we generally look the other way at when states have military - military presence in another country’s territory. But the broader problem is that relations between these states are unsettled, and they have a lot of potential for turmoil. I give you a last reason though, and that is that Russia’s not at the end of its political trajectory coming out of the Soviet system. And a lot of people say, 'Well, Putin is, you know, he’s good because he offers a stable answer to all the puzzles as to where Russia is headed.' But I think what you see in Russia over the past year and more, is instability. That this is a more turbulent, unpredictable country than we thought. One of the things that has been most dabated in Russia since Beslan - and there’s still a fair bit of public debate even in the media - is the way which corruption has made it impossible for the organs of law enforcement to actually prevent terrorism. WATTENBERG: But corruption is nothing new in the Soviet Union, is that... SESTANOVICH: I think everybody would agree that the institutions of the state are more thoroughly corrupted now than they were under Yeltsin... WATTENBERG: But this, this is not Putin lining his own pockets as far as we know? SESTANOVICH: Some of his people are living a lot better than they used to. Before there was Beslan, the week before, two aircraft took off from Moscow Airport and were blown up in midair. And the investigation shows that the hijackers - the suicide bombers on the plane paid tiny bribes in order to get on. Well, Russians are appalled by this. They recognize it as a familiar fact of life; they have to pay a lot of bribes in order to settle a lot of their ordinary problems in life. But it begins to make the state look like a set of institutions that can’t actually solve the problems that people wanted Putin to be able to address. And that begins to make people say, 'You know, we thought he was a strong leader, but maybe he isn’t.' You now hear as many people saying Putin is weak as that he’s too strong; that he’s indecisive instead of, you know, an autocrat. WATTENBERG: So that would set the stage for plausibly at least, a real dictatorship where he’s doing what he wants to do but without the popular backing. SESTANOVICH: Absolutely. And maybe - but maybe not just ruling on the basis of greater force but with a different kind of ideology. Putin has essentially wiped Russian politics clean of the traditional ideological challengers that Russian leaders faced in the 1990s... communism, liberal democratic ideology; but the one that has proved kind of resilient to some degree with his encouragement is nationalism and then with less of his encouragement, a kind of xenophobic, chauvinist, fascism. And that exists in Russia. It offers... WATTENBERG: Fascism defined as what? SESTANOVICH: As a - a dictatorship based on sort of a ferocious nationalism. And that’s - that’s something that you have in Russia and its representatives who you know, make up a spectrum of different kinds of nationalist extremism, they are putting themselves forward as the ideological alternative to Putin. The only people who’ve got an idea of where Russia ought to go when he fails. WATTENBERG: How much power do we have over directing the nature of change in the Soviet Union? Leon, why don’t you... ARON: Russia. WATTENBERG: Russia. Right. Good ’ol Russia. ARON: Ben - Ben, very little. In fact when I was trying to think about the levers of power, I think about the most powerful one we have is a reportedly very close relationship based on mutual respect, or certainly on Putin’s professed respect and admiration, even, for President Bush. And I believe that... WATTENBERG: And that was reciprocated. Bush said some very nice things... ARON: Correct. Correct. Correct. WATTENBERG: ... and look into his soul and see how wonderful, blah, blah, blah. ARON: Well, Bush did for him what Thatcher did for Gorbachev as he was coming up; you know, we can do business. But Bush did more than that. He - he was actually more affirmative with his praise. For that reason, for other reasons that I don’t want to go into, Putin really apparently likes him very much and respects him. But there’s another in the broader sense, I think our greatest leverage is the desire of virtually every Russian leader, including Soviet leaders to be part of what they call the civilized world. The biggest leverage I think is an intangible leverage, namely that Putin does not want to end up like Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus. WATTENBERG: And... ARON: A pariah of the civilized world. WATTENBERG: And notwithstanding all our problems, we are still the arbiter of that. We... ARON: I think - I think ultimately it’s America and Europe is - Europe is second. A distant second. WATTENBERG: If we say 'you’re okay, pal' that means a lot. ARON: ven for domestic public opinion. Absolutely.« WATTENBERG: Absolutely. ARON: Absolutely. Always. It always has been the case, I think. SESTANOVICH: I think that’s right, although it’s very hard for Western leaders to exercise that leverage because they’re constantly tempted by the thought that if they maintain good personal relations that they’ll get better results on practical issues. And there’s something to that. But if the real leverage is Russian desire to be part of the civilized world and Russia is falling short in creating the institutions and the internal norms and practices that would reflect that, then you’ve got to find a way to say so. You have to find a way to say this isn’t what we mean by the civilized world and not only is that something we disapprove of, which Russians very understandably bridle at, but we need to say it’s something that keeps you from actually cooperating with us in an effective way, and if you’re not going to, then of course, you’re just... you know, you have a different status. And there’s another point of course which is it keeps the Russians from dealing with problems they acknowledge themselves are important. WATTENBERG: Go forward into the future fifteen years, in the year 2020. Where are we going to be at with them? SESTANOVICH: I think long-term most people are optimists. Most people who know Russia are optimists about the - about the future, because the potential is immense. But you got many things standing in the way... WATTENBERG: It’s better than it was... I mean, looking back. SESTANOVICH: It’s sure a lot better than the Soviet Union, but is the ability of Russia to get to that positive result in 2020 or 2025 greater than it was a couple years ago? No, actually. WATTENBERG: Leon, where are we going to be twenty years from now or fifteen years from now? ARON: Well, I think what we’re seeing now is what happens after every great revolution. There is a - there is a period of restoration one way or the other. It’s a detour, but I agree with Steve here. I think the Putin era, if it is to become a detour, will be just that and eventually they’ll be a move back onto the understanding that liberty and economic development are two things that Russia needs in order to move forward. WATTENBERG: Okay. Thank you very much. Leon Aaron, Steve Sestanovich. And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via email. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. 1 Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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