Russia’s future remains bleak
Leaders play power politics while citizens suffer
Vladimir Putin’s mildly fraudulent election as Russian president on March 26, 2000 brought the Boris Yeltsin era to an official end. Putin’s ascension from acting president to official head of state has already significantly affected the various groups vying for power over Russian society. The odds are against him achieving his goals of recentralizing Russia and elevating it back to great power status, but his efforts will define the country for the next four years.
Putin has now ruled over his troubled nation for 10 months. He has reconsolidated much of the Russian president’s expansive powers that Yeltsin divvied up between the competing interests in government and industry that helped re-elect the half-dead president in 1996. Putin’s immediate success in pulling some of the power back into the government in Moscow has given a few Western observers the jitters.
A growing economy and balanced budget for 2000 give Russians more cause for hope than they have had for six years. Unfortunately, Putin is riding a wave of short-term gain from booming oil prices and a recently devalued currency. His most serious challenges have not changed, and consolidating his power any further will be increasingly difficult in this fractured nation.
Russia faces a litany of problems – crime, corruption, a disintegrating military, massive foreign debt and large increases in alcoholism, AIDS and tuberculosis. No complex society can be summed up in a single statistic, but one telling number jumps out – Russia is the only major country in the world that saw its life expectancy decline during the ’90s. As is the way with palace politics, however, the powers competing to fill the vacuum left by the demise of the Soviet Union scheme and fight as if they are competing for control of a great power instead of the diseased corpse of a recently great power.
The palace factions represented by the military, bureaucracy, politicians, secret service and the oligarchies in the "private" sector at both the national and regional levels vie for power in an endless dance of co-operation and conspiracy. It is a fluid dance with generals (General Lebed) moving into politics, secret service directors (Putin) moving into the president’s office, and mayors (Juri Luzhkov) who run Moscow and media empires at the same time.
The secret service (the FSB) has seen a sudden rise in its fortunes with the election of a former director and longtime employee as president. In December, Putin announced his plans to revitalize the FSB so that it could fulfill its mandate to protect Russia from internal and external threats. With internal spying in Russia at its lowest levels since the end of the Soviet era, the announcement is a disturbing reminder of Putin’s former career and the paranoia and control that ruled Russian society in the not-so-distant past.
The success of Putin’s efforts to reassert central control over the Russian population by spying on them depends on what he can do for the economy and the crime rate. Russians have enjoyed increased freedoms in the last 10 years, but the economic turmoil has tainted their views on the matter. A majority of Russians appear willing to give up some of their freedom in exchange for economic stability and greater personal safety. How much freedom Russians are willing to give up, how close that amount is to the freedom Putin wishes to take away, and what improvements the Russian people expect in return are the three critical questions that will determine the future of Russian democracy.
The FSB is the only palace faction that has benefited from Putin’s reign. The Russian military continues to decline in influence. At least these days there is a plan in place to reduce the military to a size where Russia can afford to actually pay its military personnel – it has to be done, but the state of Russia’s military gives a very public lie to Putin’s promise to make Russia a great power again.
Based on Putin’s rhetoric about the evil oligarchies, the large industrial cartels that dominate the Russian economy are in for a tougher time. Under Yeltsin, their financial support of his political shenanigans gave them the freedom to plunder the Russian economy. The question is: how much can Putin limit their power before they threaten to withhold the finances he needs to win re-election? Putin may reduce the oligarchies’ influence over government, but he will not go much past rhetoric in limiting their control of the economy.
That sacrifice alone will make it difficult for Putin to make a lot of headway on some of the reforms that are critical to a Russian economic recovery. Tax reform, a transparent land-tenure system and a stable financial system that can provide secure mortgages will not make the kind of progress needed to bring an end to Russia’s economic woes in the next decade.
That is one step in the wearing complexities that Vladimir Putin faces in his efforts to re-create Russia in an image that, as yet, remains unclear to the West.
Next Week: Vladimir Putin and his plans for Russia
Statistics:
Russia's population: 147.5 million
Canada: 31 million
Russia's Gross Domestic Product: $183 billion (U.S.)
Canada's: $644 billion (U.S.)
Russia's armed forces: 1.2 million personnel
Planned reductions in Russian military personnel: 450,000
Canada’s total military personnel: 60,000
Russia's debt (defaulted on twice): $194 billion (U.S.)
Canada's: $595 billion (CDN)
Percent of Russian children under six living in poverty: 50 per cent
More information online:
· www.themoscowtimes.com – twice weekly English newspaper on Russia
· eng.strana.ru – Kremlin information service (comes with eBay ads)
· www.gum.ru – GUM online, but it's all in Russian |
