Democratic Consolidation in Russia - Essay Example

RUNNING HEAD: DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION IN RUSSIA Democratic Consolidation in Russia [Name of the Writer] [Name of the Institution] Democratic Consolidation in Russia Introduction Russia’s political situation after mid 90s has been suffering from American democratic ideas and policies. To restore the democracy in Russia it is necessary to stabilize the liberal movements. Politicians and intellectuals need to keep their freedom and well being at stake for the restoration of democracy. During 1990s instability was there in Russian politics due to democratic reforms. Rivalry between political groups caused economic instability also. In my point of view, Yeltsin is the only Russian nationalist who not only consistently pursued Russian national interests against the centre, but was die major force in the collapse of the USSR. This depiction underplays the crucial role played by nationalist movements outside Russia which both preceded Yeltsin and gave him the lead to follow, obscures the relatively late conversion of Yeltsin to Russian nationalism, and fails to discuss the degree to which this conversion may simply have been tactical in order to outflank Gorbachev and the Soviet centre. And in this last regard, there is no attention given to the personal antagonism between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, which seems clearly to have been a driving force in die dynamics of the relationship throughout this period. In this paper I don’t agree that the consolidation of democracy was achieved in Russia in the second half of the 1990s, instead there is an authoritarian state in which the president interfere in the public affairs and has control over all the powers. Just after two years of soviet collapse the presidency came up and restrictions were made on media and political competitions in 1996 elections which show that democratic consolidation had not been achieved. Putin and Yeltsin have used their control and power on other things like presidential control over armed services. When the autocracy finally did buckle under the strains of the First World War, the violent eruption of mass politics in 1917 seemed to confirm for many their worst fears. The effects of democratic practice between the February and October Revolutions were in fact deepening the polarisation of society. Voting, the expansion of the press, petitions and town hall and village meetings were encouraging the population to think of themselves not as members of a multinational community but rather as corporate bodies of workers, peasants, Cossacks, industrialists and so on, whose interests were unavoidably in conflict. Many liberal observers came to fear that, grafted onto a society with little common sense of itself and polarised along class and ethnic lines, democratic forms of government would simply propel Russia into an abyss of civil conflict and anarchy. The liberal politician and eminent scientist Vladimir Vernadskii observed during the upheaval of 1917, that 'at present we have democracy without the political organisation of society ... It is a tragic situation. Forces and layers of the people are now playing a role in determining our structure of life, but they are in no condition to understand [this structure's] interests. It is clear that unrestrained democracy, the pursuit of which has been the goal of my life, in fact requires corrections.'(Beer, 2009) This retreat from democracy was manifest in deed as well as in word. The Provisional Government that briefly ruled Russia between the February Revolution of 1917 and the Bolshevik seizure of power later that year began to move in an authoritarian direction. A liberal minister, Andrei Shingarev, introduced the grain monopoly in March 1917, a wholesale repudiation of the free market in goods, and it was the Provisional Government that in autumn 1917 sanctioned the use of armed force to secure grain from the peasantry. In July 1917 the Provisional Government approved the reinstitution of the death penalty within the Russian army. (Andrei, 2004) The decision unleashed waves of protest among the lower orders for whom its abolition in February 1917 had been a cornerstone of their new civic freedoms. Liberalism in the decade or so leading up to the 1917 Revolutions was characterised by three things. (Andrei, 2004) The first was a Great Power nationalism of the sort that had no problem with bullying the subject peoples of the Russian Empire. The second was an emphasis on the need for a strong state as the only way of guaranteeing the rule of law and respect for private property. The third was a readiness to ignore and circumscribe or 'manage' the democratic wishes of the population when they were perceived to come into conflict with the needs and interests of the state. It is true that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not result in a civil war, but it did result in the economic collapse of the early 1990s (many Soviet citizens depended on food parcels sent from abroad in the winter of 1990). The shock therapy, blithely recommended to government reformers by Harvard-based free marketers, robbed tens of millions overnight of both jobs and savings. 'Democracy' enjoyed a popular resonance for about two years from 1991 to 1993 during which the Yeltsin government presided over an economic collapse so vast and devastating that for most (Beer, 2009) Russians the term became synonymous with chaos and the plunder of state (that is society's) resources by a small clique of robber barons with political connections. Crime levels went through the roof. The streets of Russian cities, once far safer than their western counterparts, became infested with criminal activity, both organised and disorganised. By 1993 Russians were bitterly referring to dermocracy dermo being the Russian for 'shit'. (Andrei, 2004) Putin's popularity since his assumption of the presidency in 2000 has been based upon an explicit repudiation of the chaotic freedoms of the Yeltsin era. Putin's consolidation of political power in a centralised state, his control over the media, his emasculation of the Russian parliament and his reliance upon Great Russian nationalism as a form of social glue all implement this idea. Putin has fostered the belief that Russia's authoritarian traditions are morally the equal of democratic western traditions. His supporters argue that Russians value a strong state, economic growth and security more than human rights or democracy, which have no roots in Russian history. They may well be right. But to understand the appeal of Putin's 'managed democracy', we should look not to the legacy of Communism as much as to the destabilising power of democracy in a country without strong traditions of the rule of law and a developed and robust civil society. Putin's desire to constrain the effects of democracy recalls the direction of travel of pre-revolutionary liberals after 1905 in their retreat from democracy. Rather than the gravedigger of Russian liberalism, Putinism is the inheritor of Russia's first liberal experiment. In the next couple of years expect a barrage of new laws relating to technical aspects of public administration. Expect as well the resistance of officials to their implementation. It will not be easy to reduce corruption or develop an ethos of public service in Russian bureaucracy. Yet, without this the Russian state will not become strong and will continue to be plagued by informal practices that compete with or subvert formal institutions. One example is the requirement faced by many businesses to pay for protection (kryska), either from private purveyors or increasingly from the police themselves, who offer services for hire both after hours and on company time! Another example is the role played by the chairs of courts in trying to assure that cases that matter to powerful people are heard by judges known to be reliable. Fall 2004 witnessed two troubling initiatives from the Putin administration, one concerning judges, the other governors. (Beer, 2009) In late September, Speaker of the Federation Council Sergei Mironov introduced a draft law (allegedly written in the State Legal Administration of the President under the supervision of Putin aide Viktor Ivanov) that would change again the makeup and method of choosing members of the Judicial Qualification Colleges, so that judges would no longer constitute a majority and even the judge members would be confirmed by the Federation Council itself. "It is a big stupidity," said Iuryi Sidorenko, head of the Council of Judges of the Russian Federation on the pages of a national newspaper, "but unfortunately in the spirit of the times. It is clear that these actions are meant to limit the independence of courts and judges." (Chomsky, 2007) Sidorenko's views were shared by most judges, and communicated to the president both by the chief judges of the three high courts (Supreme, Constitutional, and High Arbitrazh) and the sharp resolutions of the Sixth Congress of judges held in December 2004. (Chomsky, 2007) This full-fledged attack on judicial self government (a crucial part of judicial power in Russian conditions) may yet to be checked; as of May 2005 the draft law had not received first hearing at the Duma. But, like the judicial counter reform urges of the late 19th century, it reflected an impatience among politicians with a judiciary that even in important cases sometimes rules against the government (for example in the case of environmental whistle blower Nikitin). (Beer, 2009) Judges, or at least the chairs of courts, must be part of the "system." The initiative may also be seen as one of a series of judicial counter reform threats of the past few years that included the proposal to move the high courts to St. Petersburg against their will and without consolation and the outbreak of talk in high places about judicial corruption. (Solomon, 2005) The replacement of elected governors and presidents by appointees confirmed by regional legislatures has taken place, although sitting leaders of the region will be allowed to complete their terms in office. While Russian public intellectuals have often criticized this change, there has been surprisingly little resistance from the governors themselves. Some have actually requested that the President reappoint them ahead of time. (Kahn, 2007) The basic message of Putin is this-that good governance requires that all persons with power work in a single system, coordinated directly or indirectly from the centre, and that achieving this is all the more urgent because of the terrorist threat. A "politics of fear" may be central to the story. A sometime advisor of Putin's Stanislav Belkovskii sees these changes as crucial, arguing that the whole exercise in creating a vertikal in Putin's first five years was ineffective because it "had no relationship to power." Real power, in his view, was connected to "service," which is another way of saying that informal relationships and institutions remain crucial in the real world of Russian politics. Putin himself insists that he has no trouble handling any of the governors and presidents on a personal level, but he does seek more tools to use in these relationships. Putting the governors and especially republican presidents into a hierarchical structure of power seems crucial to the new concept of an integrated and coordinated system of power, now taken to be a sine qua non of good governance in the Russian Federation. That this step promises to eliminate the main pocket of democratic accountability in contemporary Russia does not weigh significantly in the balance. As if to reinforce the new priorities, Putin's chief of staff Dmitrii Medvedev in a recent (and rare) interview called repeatedly for a "consolidation of elites" and deemed this crucial to Russia's overcoming the threat of disunity. Still, this leaves little room for political competition and accountability, two key dimensions of democracy. (Beer, 2009) Conclusion In the present times Russia is more of a super presidential authoritarianism state. Some commentators in Russia and the West alike recognize the logic of President Putin's strategy, and accept the premise that democracy that is not based on a strong, centralized state that has the capacity to promote law and legal regulation will prove unstable and ultimately unsuccessful. They would accept the argument that democratic development in Russia should be delayed, so that a more felicitous sequence of development can take place, in which democracy follows rather than precedes a liberal state. (Chomsky, 2007) Through another prism one could argue that Russia seeks to develop a smooth form of federalism or effective intergovernmental relations before letting leaders of different levels of governments have separate mandates. The combination of democracy and federalism in the absence of legal order and a real civil service may itself be dangerous in a federal system with 89 different constituent units (subjects of the federation), many of those leaders play the power game in unprincipled "ways. (Kahn, 2007) The crucial question is whether, if implemented, the new understanding of good governance will create the kind of strong state on which authentic democracy and civilized capitalism can be built. Not likely, I believe, for the emergence of a state governed by legal rules rather than personal relationships itself seems to require a healthy dose of political competition! This proposition finds support in a variety of studies of the reduction of corruption in governments and the empowerment of judges and growth of independent judiciaries. Sad to say, what social science tells us is that a law-based state (rechtsstacit), not to speak of rule of law, comes into being in the wake of new and meaningful competition among political elites. Furthermore, in the absence of political competition, laws and courts in the restored state can too easily serve as tools for officials rather than as constraints upon them. Arguably, in Russia today the preoccupation with hierarchy and coordination downplays competition and accountability to the point where informal institutions remain more important than formal ones and the realization of a law-based state seems a dream for the future. In short, Putin may achieve a state that, while strong on paper, remains weak in practice as well as less democratic than many would prefer. References Andrei Klimov, "Power is a Delicate Matter: Why the Negative Reaction to Putin's Proposals is Overblown," Russia Profile, 5, November 2004, p.11. Beer, Daniel. "Russia's Managed Democracy." History Today 5(2009):37. Chomsky Noam. (2007) Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kahn Jeffrey. (2007) Federalism, Democratization, and the Rule of Law in Russia, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solomon H. Peter, Jr., "Threats of Judicial Counterreform in Putin's Russia," unpublished paper prepared for the international conference "Commercial Law Reform in Russia and Eurasia," Kennan Institute, Washington, D.C., April 8-9, 2005. Read More