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Vladimir Putin occupies so much political space in Russia than healthy, democratic, political competitors cannot take root. Like a great tree, Putin shades out lesser saplings. Unfortunately, poisonous weeds are creeping in the place of normal political fauna. The latest piece at HNN from Dr. Andreas Umland:

“The Great Danger If Russia Stays on the Path It’s On”

The roots of Russia’s currently rising nationalism are threefold: pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet. The idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome,” i.e. of a special Russian mission in world history, goes back several centuries. Russian nationalism had been – contrary to what many in the West believed – an important element of Soviet ideology ever since the 1930s. Like in the early 19th century when Moscow’s so-called Slavophiles applied German nativist thought to Russian conditions, ideas of various Russian nationalist movements today are often imported from the West.

….The main difference between Russian and Western forms of nationalism is that, in the contemporary West, the intellectual and political mainstream of a given country usually more or less clearly distances itself from that country’s – sometimes, also rather strong – nationalist movement. While the Russian mainstream is quick to condemn racist violence, its relationship to the world view standing behind such violence is, in contrast, more ambivalent. Thus, authors who, in the West, would be regarded as being far beyond the pale of permissible discourse, such as the ultra-nationalist publicist Aleksandr Prokhanov or ideologue of fascism Aleksandr Dugin, are esteemed participants in political and intellectual debates at prime-time TV shows. The bizarre, pseudo-scientific ideas of the late neo-racist theoretician Lev Gumilev are required reading in Russia’s middle and higher schools. Gumilev teaches that world history is defined by the rise and fall of ethnic groups that are biological units under the influence, moreover, of cosmic emissions.

Russia has always had a deep streak of xenophobic, romantic, mysticism as part of it’s character; a part that comes from it’s Pre-Petrine heritage but one that  has continued to resurface despite the best efforts of Westernizing modernizers or Soviet commissars to extinguish it. This latest resurgence is reminiscient of the wildest rhetoric from the racial lunacy of the 1920’s Volkish far Right in Weimar Germany in which the nascent Nazi Party incubated amidst Freikorps paramilitaries, Bavarian separatists and ultranationalist conspiracies.

In comparison, the siloviki do not look too bad.

TIME magazine, as most are no doubt aware, named Russian President Vladimir Putin as it’s 2007 “Man of the Year“.  The editors explained their choice in a way that also attempted to  articulate Putin’s stabilitarian “siloviki ideology”:

“But all this has a dark side. To achieve stability, Putin and his administration have dramatically curtailed freedoms. His government has shut down TV stations and newspapers, jailed businessmen whose wealth and influence challenged the Kremlin’s hold on power, defanged opposition political parties and arrested those who confront his rule. Yet this grand bargain-of freedom for security-appeals to his Russian subjects, who had grown cynical over earlier regimes’ promises of the magical fruits of Western-style democracy. Putin’s popularity ratings are routinely around 70%. “He is emerging as an elected emperor, whom many people compare to Peter the Great,” says Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and a well-connected expert on contemporary Russia.

Putin’s global ambitions seem straightforward. He certainly wants a seat at the table on the big international issues. But more important, he wants free rein inside Russia, without foreign interference, to run the political system as he sees fit, to use whatever force he needs to quiet seething outlying republics, to exert influence over Russia’s former Soviet neighbors. What he’s given up is Yeltsin’s calculation that Russia’s future requires broad acceptance on the West’s terms. That means that on big global issues, says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former point man on Russia policy for the Clinton Administration, “sometimes Russia will  be helpful to Western interests, and sometimes it will be the spoiler.”

Putin’s rule can ( and typically has been) analyzed from the perspective of Sovietology and Russian history. Articles feature the usual, superficial, observations that Russians like a strong vozhd (supreme leader) in the tradition of Stalin, Alexander III, Nicholas I, Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible; that Putin’s regime is a Cheka-KGB front (  actually, KGB veterans are among the most competent and least ideological technocrats of the Soviet era officials – who would YOU hire ? The guys who ran Soviet agriculture ?); that Russians yearn for a return to the Cold War and so on.  While there is some truth to these statements regarding the Russian national character and unhappy history, to use them as a fundamental explanation of Russia’s current political system is mostly rubbish.  The truth is that Russia’s liberal and democratic parties self-destructed and discredited themselves among Russian voters in the waning years of Yeltsin’s tenure and that Putin enacted a moderately nationalist  and anti-oligarchical agenda that catered to the tastes of the vast majority of his countrymen. When Putin centralized power in his hands as a quasi-dictator, he did so in a political vacuum.

This pattern is hardly uniquely Russian. We have seen populist, plebiscitary yet police state regimes long before Vladimir Putin’s New Russia. Napoleon Bonaparte was the modern innovator, abolishing the decrepit Directorate and constructing a regime that offered a little something for everybody who wanted a glorious France; his cabinet included Jacobin Terrorists, Monarchists, Girondins, aristocracy, bourgeosie and the chameleon-like Talleyrand. Napleon made use of “new men” and flattered the old nobility even as he created a broad class of “notables” and answered the desire of the French for both greatness and order. Propaganda was used liberally but so to were the police-spies of Fouche to cadge Napoleon’s impressive plebescitary majorities out of the electorate. How different, functionally speaking, is Vladimir Putin? Or for that matter, Hugo Chavez ?

We  could go back still further to the Caesars – Julius and his canny heir Augustus. Both men understood well that truly revolutionary changes in a political system were most placidly accepted when cloaked in the guise of adhering to old forms and restoring order and normality ( it must be said though, that Octavian understood this better than his martial Uncle). After periods of disorder, want or uncertainty there has always been many people who are all too willing to trade liberty for economic security.

Whenever authoriarianism has the added attraction of marshalling competence and cultural values behind it’s standard, democrats should beware.

ADDENDUM:

Thomas P.M. Barnett – “Putin Positions himself as Russia’s Lee Kwan Yew”

The Guardian – “Putin, the Kremlin power struggle and the $ 40 bn fortune”

The Russia Blog – “Why Russia Loves Putin”

Michael Barone – “Putin: Odd Choice for Person of the Year“

ON PUTIN AND HIS IMAGE ABROAD: THE RUSSIAN GEORGE W. BUSH ?

President Vladimir Putin of Russia is under increasingly critical western scrutiny these days. Drum roll please….:

“Post-Putin” By Steven Lee Myers –NYT Magazine

“The Putin Era in Historical Perspective” (PDF) –National Intelligence Council report

“Kremlin Inc. Why are Vladimir Putin’s opponents dying?” – Michael Specter, The New Yorker

“Who’s killing Putin’s enemies? -Part I” and “Part II” – Michael Specter, The Guardian Observer Magazine

“Seven Questions: Russia’s Cloaks and Daggers ” –Foreign Policy

“Europe wary after Putin tirade” – The Daily Telegraph

“Russia’s Managed Democracy” by Perry Anderson – London Review of Books

The Russians have expressed some concern on how Putin’s recent speech in Munich has been portrayed:

“One Cold War Was Enough” – Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov –Washington Post

They should be concerned.

Russia’s siloviki political system is a carrot and stick machine for quiet, minimalist, authoritarianism that seeks to keep the masses of the Russian public complacently supportive while neutralizing intelligentsia critics (unpopular with the masses anyway), neutering the free press and preventing the emergence of any serious (or semi-serious) power blocs or public figures who might challenge the interests of the regime.

Normally, Russian hamfisted behavior at home and abroad raises more hackles than this but at the moment, much of the world’s intellectuals and political literati are obssessed with George W. Bush. The Bush administration soaks up a great deal of negative rhetoric and political energy both here at home and overseas. But as Bush’s term wears on and certainly by the time he leaves office, this enormous global resentment and capacity for selective outrage will begin casting about for new “villains”. This is not to say Putin’s regime is a good one or that Russia can be regarded as a democracy; it can’t. These are real issues to be addressed and not swept under the rug. But if you become highly exercised over Vladimir Putin, while being conspicuously silent over Robert Mugabe or Dar Fur, your moral calculus is in disarray

Putin will clearly be in that bulls-eye at that time and there will be a media stampede to push the already poor state of U.S.-Russian and EU-Russian relations over a cliff.

Hat tips to Dr. Diane Labrosse of H-Diplo and Stan Reber of the SWC

FISKING VLADIMIR PUTIN

Russian President Vladimir Putin rattled the diplomatic set with a pugnacious and critical speech about American foreign policy that was a clever mixture of blunt realpolitik, obvious gestures for domestic consumption, a play for the sympathy of the anti-American Left in Europe and the anti-Bush Left in America. It was also a not so subtle form of pressure on the Bush administration to treat Russia as a great power partner in world affairs, especially the Middle East.

Russia of course, while not an enemy of the United States, would like all of the goodies that come with being an American strategic partner without having to ante up anything of substantive import in return. While not much praise can be given to the unimaginative, backburner, American policy toward Russia since the Soviet collapse in 1991, the Bush administration has at least been smart enough to not reward empty talk from the Kremlin until Putin puts something concrete on the table. Something the Russian leader has steadfastly refused to do on Iraq, Iran or much of anything else.

Addressing Putin’s specific remarks:

“The United States has overstepped its national borders in every way,” he said in an address at an annual international security conference here. “Nobody feels secure anymore, because nobody can take safety behind the stone wall of international law.”

I have also read this statement more literally translated as ” hide behind international law”, which to my reading of Putin, is more in tune with his ex-KGB cynical realism and “Great Russia” nationalism. The statement above reads more like the Foreign Ministry approved text.

On one level, Putin speaks for many foreign leaders who are unhappy with American intervention in Iraq and other places overseas even as American power hems in their own regional ambitions. The Bush administration has failed to use diplomacy, particularly public diplomacy, well or offer realistic carrots to win over the mercurial fence-sitters who do not give a fig for Iraq of Islamist terrorism but care deeply about other subjects. Using hard power successfully requires making the connections beforehand that minimize counterbalancing “blowback” and this chore the Bush administration has been unwilling or unable to do.

On another, deeper, level this is a very illuminating and an honest realpolitik assessment, while being cleverly worded to appeal to Bush critics and International Law professor types who believe that the world actually turns on the moral implications of their abstruse interpretations of treaty conventions. What Putin is really acknowledging is that the previous, Cold War era, ability to carry out policies that were serious threats to the vital interests of other states, especially America, because of ” plausible deniability” created by fig leaf nods to international law, is now much riskier.

The plausible deniability for which Putin longs, served a critical purpose -to avoid escalating a minor regional conflict into a superpower confrontation, so the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were forced to look the other way on many instances of terrorism, subversion, espionage and nuclear proliferation involving each other’s clients. We had to grin and bear it or strike back at the Soviet bloc with equal indirection, sometimes in a wholly unrelated sphere. This dynamic suited the Soviets well which is why they also fiercely resisted Nixon-Kissinger “linkage” at the bargaining table. Lacking the nuclear tripwire, the need for Washington to pretend hostile actions are anything but hostile was going to fade regardless of who was president, but 9/11 and Bush administration ideological convictions vastly accelerated the process.

“we don’t want Iran to feel cornered.”

Translation: “We need Iranian cash. We can’t afford to be seen backing down to Washington and continue to be regarded as a viable alternative arms supllier to the United States. We are against you attacking Iran, even though, frankly, we Russians don’t like Iranians or Ahmadinejad very much but find Iran useful as a counterweight to American power in the region, and this overrides longer term concerns.”

“It is a world of one master, one sovereign … it has nothing to do with democracy,” he said. “This is nourishing the wish of countries to get nuclear weapons.”

This is laughable to anyone with rudimentary knowledge of the history of nuclear weapons but it is good propaganda for justifying Russia’s assistance to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Nor does possession of a small nuclear arsenal help much against the United States, if Pervez Musharraf is to be believed. It will help you against your neighbors in your own nation-state weight class though.

How serious is Putin ? Recall that politically, Putin takes the wind out of extremist parties, Right or Left, by preventing them from waving the flags of Nationalism and Neo-Sovietism by doing so himself ” responsibly”. His governing class, the Siloviki, were entirely insincire Communists in Soviet times, KGB pragmatists who saw the world from the prism of power, carrots, sticks and dirty tricks. The Siloviki hold all the power in Russia and political opposition is effectively neutered and could, if they had chosen to do so, enact far more aggressive anti-Western policies. They and Putin have not because it isn’t in their personal interest or Russia’s to get into serious conflicts with the U.S. or the E.U.

ADDENDUM:

First, thank you to Real Clear Politics for linking to this post. Much appreciated!

A few Putin links:

Thomas P.M. Barnett

RedState