To the Editor:

Leon Aron has long been an outstanding analyst of developments in Russia, and I largely agree with his assessment of Vladimir Putin’s first term as president of Russia [“Is Russia Going Backward?,” October 2004]. From 2000 to 2003, Putin balanced elegantly between his own rising circle of former KGB men from St. Petersburg and the declining oligarchs. A few liberal technocrats were even able to carry out impressive market reforms. Although the political trend was authoritarian, it was very gradual, with checks and balances prevailing.

As for Putin’s second term, Mr. Aron sees continuity with the first, but I see quite a new course. Mr. Aron burdens the critics of Putin with the strawman of a “Soviet restoration,” but the more immediate threat to Russia is a dysfunctional authoritarian regime. In the last few years, an extreme centralization of power to the president has taken place. Though jealous of his power, Putin now has more of it than he can manage, and is not very decisive. He has also deprived himself of strong executives, replacing his formidable chief of staff and prime minister with men famous for never making decisions. This power vacuum was obvious in the Beslan school-hostage drama. Because Putin acts as the only authoritative spokesman of his government, he is overexposed. And since his words are not always substantiated by actions, his authority may dwindle.

By depriving Parliament, the Council of Ministers, and the regional governors of much of their power, Putin also has emptied formal institutions of real content. In their place he has set up informal advisory institutions, such as the State Council and the Public Chamber, which are of little or no consequence. As the regime has changed, so too have its interests. Putin’s KGB friends dominate not only the state administration but also the state-run enterprises, which are thus unlikely to see any further reform.

Mr. Aron describes how the Putin regime has skillfully manipulated the media and civil society, but Putin can only manipulate them so much before he loses credibility and authority, and that threshold has probably been crossed. The system he has created is impervious to feedback.

Mr. Aron is right to argue that Russia is not that authoritarian, but his prediction of “a political and economic arrangement that is more enduring, more stable, and more organic than what has gone before” is not very plausible. What worries me more than Russia’s current authoritarian tendencies is the possibility of destabilization. Putin could have won free and fair presidential elections, but he chose not to—and therefore does not benefit from democratic legitimacy. Moreover, he has deprived of legitimacy all the institutions that could have defended him, from Parliament to regional governors.

The world has seen many excellent first-term presidents descend into authoritarianism and corruption in their second terms. Alberto Fujimori of Peru and Carlos Menem of Argentina come to mind, and Vladimir Putin may join the list.

Anders Åslund

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Washington, D.C.

To the Editor:

Leon Aron’s article is to be commended for its sober tone and balanced analysis. Too often, Western observers are tempted to underestimate Russia’s virtues or overestimate its vices while discarding inconvenient facts that conflict with their preconceived notions of how things in Russia “really are.” It is refreshing to find a piece that deals frankly with the positive and negative trends in today’s Russia.

It is important to dispel the myth that Vladimir Putin “stole” victories in Russia’s parliamentary and presidential elections. Mr. Aron is quite right to note that “manipulation of the media and other electoral shenanigans were hardly required in order to secure his lopsided triumph at the polls.” Opinion surveys confirm that most Russians endorse Putin’s vision of state-directed reform. And they agree that the first order of business is not the establishment of a liberal democracy but the continuation of orderly reform. Americans might have hoped that Russians would choose a different course, but what is now unfolding does reflect popular preferences.

Like Mr. Aron, I would take issue with those who believe that Russia is “going backward.” Russia is not regressing from an idyllic democracy; the perception that the country was “freer” under Boris Yeltsin came about because the state was weak, not liberal. Currently, we are seeing the consolidation of a system best described as “managed pluralism,” the outlines of which were already clear by the second Yeltsin administration. There is some room for free enterprise and choice, but the Kremlin consciously regulates the available social, political, and economic options. Leaders can be replaced—it bears remembering that more than half the Duma turned over in the 2003 elections—but the center controls access to the public square and sets the limits of debate. Putin’s vision for the future of Russian society is “state capitalism” married with “controlled democracy.”

Mr. Aron’s reminder that Russia’s “epochal experiment in liberty” is “far from over” is often forgotten in the rush to recast Russia as a KGB dictatorship bent on subverting freedom at home and abroad. Americans who are unhappy with the restricted zone of civil, political, and economic liberties under Putin should not shy away from saying so, but the emergence of a Singapore-style regime in Russia would not be a catastrophic defeat for freedom. There are hopeful signs that the groundwork is being laid for the rise of a prosperous middle class, without which no sustainable democracy can be built. Let us not write off Russia just yet.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev

The National Interest

Washington, D.C.

Leon Aron writes:

I am grateful to both Anders Åslund and Nikolas K. Gvosdev for taking the time to produce such thorough and stimulating comments. Yet, while there is much that is valuable in its own right in the critique of my article by Mr. Åslund and the endorsement of it by Mr. Gvosdev, both, like my article itself, have been largely overtaken by events.

In revolutions, Leon Trotsky wrote somewhere, life moves fast—and revolution-watchers must try to catch up with it, the imperatives of publication cycles notwithstanding. My article bore a dateline of August 27, 2004. A “tipping point” came a short while later, first in the horrific terrorism of Beslan and then in Putin’s speech of September 13, in which he proposed appointing rather than electing governors. In one fell swoop, the Russian president took the country twenty years backward, casting aside perhaps the key historic achievement of Russian democracy under Yeltsin: a Russia free and whole for the first time in its history.

In a painful-to-watch Greek tragedy with the characters speaking in Russian, Putin seems determined to subvert a relatively stable transitional democracy and undermine a flourishing economy. By putting both under enormous stress, he risks not only destabilization but perhaps the country’s territorial integrity as well. Until his September speech, Putin’s statist impulses and policies could be weighed against Russia’s steady progress in economic liberalization and privatization, which were critical not only for the economy but for the continuing declawing of the state’s power over society. Both contradictory trends unfolded in parallel; in the absence of a clear public endorsement of one or the other by Putin, it was a matter of intuition and judgment as to which one would prevail in a clash. After September 13, Putin’s choice is now almost certain.

As an avid reader of everything written by Mr. Åslund, who like myself had been firmly within the “optimist” camp of Russia-watchers over the past decade-and-a-half, I am reasonably confident that until quite recently he would have agreed with every word of my piece. Today, I would gladly say the same about his letter.

Although I am grateful to Mr. Gvosdev for his generous words, I take issue with his conclusion that Russians prefer order to liberal democracy. A number of polls over many years appear to contradict this view. Still, despite this caveat, Mr. Gvosdev’s letter remains a valid antidote to the near-hysteria about Russia’s triumphant dictatorship that has been brewing in the pages of our elite newspapers and which, pace Anders Åslund, is not a “strawman”—one need only read, for instance, some of the recent editorials in the Washington Post.

What, then, of the road ahead? As the upheaval in the Ukraine shows, one should never underestimate a people’s innate thirst for self-rule. Given the enormous risks of the policies that Putin seems to be adopting, and the virtually certain deterioration of his popularity (which is his regime’s sole reliable resource), major crises and destabilization, provoked perhaps by further acts of terrorism, are at least as plausible a scenario for Russia’s near future as renewed authoritarianism.