a panel discussion with (in alphabetical order):

On April 29, 2004 the project on New Post-Transition Russian Identity, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and organized jointly by the New School University, The World Policy Institute, and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, presented a panel entitled “Russia’s Present Condition: Why Putin Couldn’t Lose.” (The following text is a full transcript, for discussion summary see Click Here)

Nina Khrushcheva :
First, I would like to speak very briefly about the subject of today’s panel, Russia. Organizing this panel, I have been trying to come up with interesting thoughts on what Russia is and what Russia will be. How should we assess the Russian present condition? Russia has been under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin since 2000 and now after the March elections will be at least until 2008, when his second term ends.

My question is whether Russia matters now. We hear very often that in a post-Cold war, post-911 world, with the Iraq war and War on Terror ongoing, Russia doesn’t matter as much as it used to, that it almost doesn’t matter at all. I think the full house today suggests that that this is somewhat untrue, and that Russia is still very “hot” indeed (in addition to being “big and cold,” as has been said.) In fact, two books written on Russia have won this year’s Pulitzer Prize. So if we agree that Russia remains “hot,” then the question is why? Why does Russia matter still, despite everything? When I was composing this panel, I thought it would be interesting to put together a group of journalists so that they could tell us what Russia’s present condition is, not only as analysts, but as those who create the public perception—those who, as the saying goes, write the first draft of history. As you can see, this panel is rather remarkable. I was also very lucky geographically, having representatives from various parts of the globe. Gideon Lichfield represents Western Europe, Masha Lipman represents Russia, the legendary Adam Michnik represents Eastern and Central Europe, and David Remnick represents America.

Masha Lipman :
Those who lived in Moscow in very late 1990s may have kept memories of odd and mostly incomprehensible billboards appearing here and there in the Moscow streets.

The first such billboard to appear showed a young woman’s face. There wasn’t any brand name on the billboard, nor did it show a bar of soap, an antiperspirant or a bottle of perfume. A short line said simply “I love you.” Who was the woman, who loved her and why did he want everyone to be aware of his passion? Rumors had it that this was a particular person, one of Russia’s very rich men, who thought of this as a way to impress his sweetheart. After a while the billboards disappeared, but nobody ever found out whether or not the rumored explanation was a true one.

Next came a billboard showing a man’s face, foreign coins flowing down upon him. The line read, “Roma takes care of the Family, the Family takes care of Roma. Congratulations! Roma found a classy place for himself.”

There was never any public explanation for this message either, just rumors. Rumors had it that Roma was the nickname of [governor of Chukotka and key shareholder of SIBNEFT oil company] Roman Abramovich (the year was 1999, long before the eccentric Russian tycoon bought Chelsea soccer team and became a world celebrity), that Roma was very rich (hence the coins) and had close ties with the “Family,” as Yeltsin’s close inner circle came to be called at that time. Even the happy few, who claimed to have some knowledge about Roma and his situation, were not sure who commissioned the display of this billboard in the Moscow streets. Somehow it was taken for granted, or at least accepted, that what is supposed to be public space - the streets of Moscow - has been appropriated for this vaguely menacing private message.

In the following months the streets were used by the adversaries in the so-called tolling war - a fierce struggle between competitors in the aluminum industry who had opposing views on the specific form of taxation practiced in aluminum production and sales. The key word in the billboards was “tolling,” a technical term only narrow industrial specialists would understand. The public looked on and shrugged: once again somebody was using the common space for private purposes.

The billboard game continued for about one year. Themes may have varied, but one element remained; unlike regular advertising billboards seeking to be as public and clear as possible, so as to target more consumers, these “private” billboards fully disregarded the public. Their target audience was just one person or a tiny group.

The implications of the billboard game appear to run much deeper than the actual messages sent and received. The cited billboards with their private messages occupied public space because in Russia this space is virtually empty: there’s very little, if any, communication between state and society, and barely any public debate.

Here I will try to illustrate what I see in today’s Russia as the emptiness of the public space, and compare today’s situation with that of the USSR and the period of late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

Back in the days of Communism, the USSR was, for the obvious reason, the scene of public silence - the police state barred its citizens from public expression of anything except loyalty and servility. The state addressed the people, or rather, instructed them - orally and on paper - but discouraged any feedback. In fact, feedback was punishable. Venues for debates were confined to the proverbial kitchens. Everything beyond private space was state territory, and those who dared encroach upon it - by carrying their own messages in the form of a rally, by circulating leaflets or manuscripts – were banished from this broader space altogether, isolated and confined to a distant location someplace in Siberia.

Perestroika was about turning the country into one big public space. Streets and squares, newspapers and literary journals have instantly become the venue for free public expression and opinion. Gigantic newspaper runs were never enough. The desire to read and exchange opinion was insatiable. Debates didn’t fit in newspaper pages, they quite literally splashed out into the streets: crowds that gathered around stands where spread-out papers were displayed were engaged in heated discussions about what they had just read.

Then came political debating clubs and campaign activism; voters’ district meetings, whose task was to nominate candidates for the First Congress of People’s Deputies, lasted all through the night.

Never before in the Russian history had there been such a sense of national unity; the intellectuals rallied together with the masses, newly elected people’s deputies were part and parcel of those who had elected them. The people of Russia wanted to make a difference and believed that they could. What’s most amazing, they did make a difference: It was this public energy and cohesion that put an end to the Communist rule.

Of course, what Russia had in late 1980’s and very early 1990’s wasn’t institutionalized democracy – it was revolutionary excitement. Likewise, the congress of People’s deputies was not a legislative institution - it was a nationwide public forum.

This revolutionary euphoria of course couldn’t last very long.

It was expected that somehow institutions and a political system would emerge out of this sea of revolutionary animation. These expectations didn’t quite come true.

Today the alienation between state and society is close to that of the Soviet days, even though there’s nothing like the Soviet oppression. The political life is reduced to a mere formality. The society itself is deeply fragmented and apathetic.

This change of attitude is well reflected in polling numbers. In a survey taken by VTsIOM [All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion] polling agency back in 1991 right after the coup, 57 percent of the people thought public resistance was the main factor that prevented the coup-plotters from winning. Ten years later only 20 percent thought this was a major factor. As many as 30 percent found it hard to say. Back in 1991 only 7 percent were in quandary over what was the main reason of the coup failure.

Today’s Russian state no longer treats its citizens as a flock that needs instruction and preaching. In fact, the state generally ignores the citizens – it is in no way accountable to the public, nor does it care to explain what it is actually doing over there, inside the Kremlin.

Here are two examples. President Vladimir V. Putin dumped his Prime Minister [Mikhail Kasyanov] a couple weeks before the presidential election without giving any reason as to why he actually did it. According to the polls, the public had no idea why the PM had been dumped. Yet, this does not seem to bother either the government or the people. Analysts may offer sophisticated theories that involve political intrigue, conspiracies, intricate plots and far-reaching consequences, but the audience of these analyses is basically confined to the so-called analytical community itself.

Or take pension reform. Plans for this reform were announced. Then the reform plan was all but scrapped before the people could figure out how they would support themselves in the old age. It would seem one’s retirement plan is a matter of high importance to any person. Yet, there is no sign that pension reform has become an important policy theme of broad public interest. Actually, it’s hard to think of anything in Russia today that would constitute an important public policy theme.

With political parties driven to irrelevance, with the parliament turned into a rubber stamp agency, with national television networks taken under government control and printed media having very low runs, public discourse has all but disappeared. Things may be said or written, ideas may be voiced, but there’s barely any audience, and these utterances don’t resonate; they die away with no implications or consequences. A theme brought up by one paper is not taken up in another, and it’s hard to tell an important policy issue from a minor casual event.

Deficient political system and public apathy work as mutually enhancing factors.

Today’s Russian society is fully atomized: there’s no sense of cohesion, solidarity, collective drive in any interest group, professional or social, big or small.

Big business wouldn’t stand up for the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky [CEO of Yukos oil company], picked by the Kremlin as a political enemy and kept in jail since October last year. The Russian business magnates appear to be driven by the inmate logic “You die today, so I can live till tomorrow.” Each of them makes his own deals with the Kremlin, always ready to pay off, so as to feel relatively secure.

The same lack of cohesion is found among the journalistic community. No professional solidarity was shown back in 2001, when Russia’s biggest privately owned media group Media–MOST was taken over by the government. The government campaign to take national television under control was not regarded as a crackdown on press freedom. The public wouldn’t see the media as an institution - an agent that may help the society hold the government accountable. As a result, the troubles of NTV [Independent Television Network] and Media-MOST were not regarded as a public problem; rather, they were seen as a conflict between the owner and the government.

It should be emphasized that in today’s Russia there remains a considerable degree of freedom, the situation of today is not that of repression or intimidation, it’s about submissive society freely giving ground to the state.

After the defeat of the two liberal parties in December 2003, the Russian liberals seem to be even more deeply fragmented. They are unable to agree on any cause, idea or slogan. In fact, any idea, cause or slogan is more likely to divide, rather than to bring together.

There is no recognized intellectual or political authority; nobody may claim the role of a public intellectual.

In theory printed press still presents a sort of public ground. There are about 7 or 8 non-tabloid-like, liberal-minded, critical dailies to be found in Moscow, their runs mostly ranging between 20 and 100 thousand copies. All of them are mostly circulated in Moscow. With a run like this they are all but politically irrelevant, and editors and journalists are aware of it.

To cite just one example of this irrelevance, as soon as Mikhail Fradkov was unexpectedly named by president Putin as the new Russian Prime Minister, several of the above-mentioned dailies published allegations that he is corrupt. In fact, those were more than allegations, the newspapers had documented stories with facts, dates and numbers. Yet, this has never become an issue. When the Duma took a vote to confirm the president’s nomination, none of the deputies suggested that a probe be conducted of Fradkov’s past.

In Russia today public awareness does not work like a tool of influence.

The irrelevance of printed press prompts newspaper writers to be more concerned about style than substance. In some sense it is a luxury for a journalist to be writing for a narrow audience of like-minded, sympathetic individuals. You don’t have to bother too much about facts – the right attitude combined with elegant, sophisticated style is what does it. An Izvestia political columnist has for years filled his copy with subtle literary allusions and Latin phrases intended for the happy few. Once a promising literary scholar, he most likely has fellow-intellectuals, literary connoisseurs in mind, as he writes his opinion of the Kremlin politics.

For several years now a Kremlin reporter for mainstream daily Kommersant (its run is one hundred thousand copies) has opted for a peculiar manner of writing. He focuses much more on the scene and characters rather than fact, which leads his admirers as well as critics to believe he invents half of what he writes about. Still, they find his manner fascinating. His trademark style is that of an anthropologist who observes weird rites of an unknown tribe. Everything looks just a little bit absurd, every word sounds a bit bizarre; anybody on the scene, a photographer or a fellow-reporter may be as important a character of his “reportage” as the Prime Minster of Britain or a Russian Cabinet minister. He may be given full credit for describing the president himself in much the same irreverent fashion, yet this too is a message for the happy few, rather than a professional reporter’s effort to inform the reader of the policy-making and political events at the top level of government.

If half of these newspapers were to cease to exist tomorrow, they may be mourned by their tiny, loyal audiences, but the event itself is likely to go largely unnoticed.

The general public doesn’t seem to be anxious to get a better idea of how the important government decisions are made or to find out whether, indeed, the Prime Minister is corrupt. It is broadly assumed that they UP THERE will take their own decision regardless of US DOWN BELOW. Hence, there’s no point to bother, better stay quiet and mind your own business; hopefully the government will mind its own business also.

This attitude is well illustrated by the results of a recent opinion poll.

Question: Do you understand in which direction the country’s headed? Eighteen percent say, “Yes, I do.” 43 percent have a vague idea, 23 percent have no idea.

Asked whether President Putin has a program of reforms for the next 4 years, two-thirds say, “Yes, he does.” Eighteen percent don’t think he’s got a program.

In this atmosphere of public silence, the mostly vacant public space comes to be filled with odd voices, not intended for public consumption. It’s THEM communicating in our common space, exchanging messages, as it were, over our heads. The above cited billboards were but an example.

Early in Putin’s first term, the transcripts of phone conversations in the office of the Kremlin chief of staff (believed to be the second most important person in the Russian politics after the president himself) appeared on a Website and were then reprinted in several newspapers. Who did it? If the FSB [Federal Security Service] had been bugging the office of the president’s chief of staff, one would think the whole thing smacks of a state coup – what with the state security agency seeking to publicly compromise one of the topmost government officials. If somebody else had done the illegal recording, then it meant that the FSB couldn’t even ensure the security of one of the highest-ranking executives in the country. Yet, nobody appeared concerned. It was universally understood that this was one Kremlin faction sending a message to another. This is not intended for US, people, this is THEM, talking to each other over our heads. Their dealings are mostly hidden from us, and only occasionally a glimpse of their communications make themselves apparent in the public view.

Just recently, a high-quality Moscow business daily called Vedomosti published a letter from Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It was somewhat of a mystery how the letter was smuggled out of jail, and various theories were ventured. It was discussed whether, indeed, Khodorkovsky had written the letter or merely signed it, and if he did write the letter himself, whether it was a political manifesto or an act of repentance. In the murky atmosphere surrounding Khodorkosvky’s case, it is virtually imposible to find out which theory is true.

It seems, however, that a more relevant question is: Who’s the addressee of Khodorkovsky’s letter? It is barely the 60 thousand Vedomosti readers to whom the letter was formally addressed. The public at large was basically unaware of Khodorkovsky’s address, since state television didn’t mention it in its news programs. His missive was more likely an element in behind-the-scenes negotiations between Khodorkovsky and the Kremlin or between different Kremlin factions who may have different ideas of how Khodorkovsky problem should be tackled.

Whether the Kremlin will make some sort of a deal with Khodorkovsky or lock him up for many years will have nothing to do with what the readers of Vedomosti may think about the letter. This decision, like all other important political action, will be made by those in the Kremlin.

Khodorkovsky’s letter may be likened to the earlier cited “ I love you ”   billboard. For the time being, however, the government’s response to Khodorkovsky has been: “ And I don’t love you. ”

Gideon Lichfield :
While I’ve been working in Moscow for slightly over a year and a half, the other people sitting at this table have spent all or most of their lives in one way or another living with Russia. To say “living with Russia” makes it sound like a chronic condition–and perhaps it is a bit like living with a chronic condition. It does strange things to your mind.

One of things that it seems to produce is an extremely wide range of opinions, particularly in the west but also in Russia, about what exactly is going on there. First, there is the gradual emptying out of public space and public discourse and the gradual closing down of official sources of information, which means that things are much less out in the open than they used to be.

Someone in Moscow explained to me that in the Yeltsin years, the government was like a transparent box inside of which there was a horribly complicated mechanism. This mechanism went round and round. No one could understand what it was doing, but you could see that it was turning. Now, it’s like a black box that just spits out decisions, and one doesn’t know if there is a mechanism in there at all, and if so, what it’s doing. This begins to describe some of the difficulties in making sense of Russia these days. It is indeed a lot more opaque than it used to be.

One of the things that has bothered me ever since I got to Moscow, since I started having conversations with people about Russia, is that people seem to have an incredibly wide range of views about what is happening. Some people say that Russia is “a riddle wrapped inside of an enigma wrapped inside of mystery.” Others believe that Russia is “hell wrapped inside of purgatory wrapped inside the inferno.”

If one listens to the discourse about the loss of public space, about the way in which people are losing the ability to understand what’s going on in Russia, that is just one of the ways in which you can see things seriously deteriorating. On the other hand, there are people in Russia and in the West who actually believe that things are going very well. They see remarkably positive aspects.

I’ve been bothered ever since I got to Russia by these different perceptions because it made it very difficult for me, as a novice Russian journalist, to do my job. I really couldn’t figure out how everyone could be talking about the same country. It also made it difficult for me because I am, by nature, a fence-sitter. You might think this is a very good quality in a journalist, but it’s actually a terrible quality. Editors don’t want you to say “well, it’s a little bit like this and a little bit like that.” They want you to say something. They want a clear line. They want a story. They want an opinion. At least in most newspaper and magazine articles, that is what is wanted. I’m very bad at providing that sort of clear answer, especially when I don’t know myself whether it’s one thing or the other.

What I’ve been doing for the last year and a half is not only trying to understand Russia, but trying to understand the people who are trying to understand Russia. It is an attempt to make sense of why there is gap in perceptions and how to reconcile it and come up with a view of Russia that, at least to me, makes some kind of sense.

Here are some of the conclusions I’ve come to. One is that it depends on what aspect of Russia you’re looking at. There are people who look more at the political side, people who follow human rights, who follow the political sphere, who follow the media, the closing down of television stations, the closing down of public space, people who follow the war in Chechnya, people who follow the way in which international organizations that are providing support for Russian pro-democracy groups and civil society have steadily been kicked out of the country. Last year alone, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Open Society Institute of George Soros, the AFL-CIO representative in Russia, the American Peace Corps all had to leave Russia, forced out one way or another by the authorities. All of these are very negative signs of what is going on in Russia. It is clear that there is a decrease in political freedom, a reduction in democracy, and a loss of freedom of speech.

On the other hand, for the people who are following what is going on in the economic sphere, there is absolutely no doubt that things are doing much better than they ever were, both in terms of overall economic growth, which is still very much dependent on the oil sector, and also in terms of what is going on at the almost invisible grassroots level of the economy.

There are things going on in Russia which are so boring and obvious in a western country that we don’t even think of them, but they are tremendously important to a country that is a transition economy. In the last two and three years, Russians have started having credit cards, taking out mortgages, having bank loans and having bank accounts at all. They have started buying things by mail order.

All of these are all things that we take for granted and don’t even think about as being essential moving parts of the economy, but they are. The fact that they are happening in Russia now, though it’s taken 13 years, is a tremendously positive sign, a sign that the economy is at last beginning to get out of the phase of robber baron crony capitalism that characterized the 1990’s, and it’s beginning to be built as a proper economy from the ground up. That is tremendously important both for the stability of the country and for people’s own well-being.

You can talk to people about these different things that are going on and naturally you’ll end up with very diverse views. If you talk to someone who looks at human rights, they will understandably and correctly tell you that things in Russia are getting much worse than they were before. There is no protection for citizen’s rights.

If you talk to someone who follows the economy, they will enthuse about the fact that Russians are saving for the future, thinking about their pensions and thinking about their children’s futures—a very good democratic sign. People who are thinking about the future, about their children’s futures, will start making plans, and if they’re making plans they’re thinking about what the country’s going to be like, and if they start thinking about what the country’s going to be like, they’ll start thinking about what kind of people are running the country. Very slowly you see the kind of civic consciousness emerging that is necessary in order for democracy to exist at all.

One of the questions that Nina [Khrushcheva] actually asked us to answer in her briefing for the seminar was whether Putin’s victory in the elections was inevitable. Was it generally supported, or was it the result of a lack of media freedom—the way in which the media was manipulated?

I think that the answer is absolutely that it was a result of the fact that Putin is popular and people voted for him, and this is very much a consequence of what has happened in Russia over the past ten years. People generally admire Putin as someone who they can see bringing stability and making their lives better, even though their perceptions of him and the reality show variance with one another.

One of the other reasons why people have divergent views of Russia depends on the time scale. It depends on how long they’ve been looking at Russia.

To go back to the “chronic disease” metaphor, it depends on how long they’ve been living with Russia. I think anyone who lived through the end of the Soviet Union or who experienced it in some way close at hand and who watched the appearance of what was supposed to be democracy must have felt a tremendous relief and elation at what was going on and a tremendous hope for the future. Then they must have felt a tremendous sense of disappointment when the Yeltsin government proceeded to twist the notions of democracy and capitalism that Russia was supposed to be enjoying out of all recognition. A group of a few very rich men essentially bought the country and with it, the support of Yeltsin’s government, thereby essentially disenfranchising the people and abolishing any notion of the people’s ability to influence their leaders.

All of those are the reasons why Putin’s victory is so solid now. People generally have no faith at all in democracy any more in Russia.

People who have observed that whole process are very disappointed in what’s happened now because it represents a rejection and collapse of the ideals that existed at the beginning of the nineties. It’s much more likely that anyone looking at the whole process is going to be a lot more down about what’s happening now. Then again, some of the people who’ve been living in Russia for twenty or thirty years are surprisingly positive because they compare now with the era of communism and find that things have, in fact, improved a great deal.

Another reason why Russia is so confusing and why it produces such a wide range of views is the man at the center of it. Vladimir Putin has the most amazing ability to keep people guessing.

When Putin fired Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, nobody knew why. They attempted to apply conspiracy theories, but nobody knew why. For the following six days, people were speculating about who the next Prime Minister would be. Everyone had their options, their theories, their candidates. Everyone had a very good reason for why each of the candidates would make the ideal Prime Minister.

About the only person that nobody thought of was the guy that Putin named Prime Minister, Mikhail Fradkov. What was even more remarkable was that not only had nobody guessed that Fradkov would be appointed, but that people had been hoping that whoever it was, it would be an indication of what direction Putin was taking. If he was going to appoint someone who was more inclined to the security services, the siloviki [military and security structures], it would be a sign that he was going to be more hard line. If he appointed an economic liberal, it meant that he was going to give reforms the priority.

Mikhail Fradkov, apart from being a complete unknown, was about the only person who gave no clue whatsoever as to what Putin wanted. He had a sort of liberal background because he’d been trade minister. He had a sort of security services background—there were signs that he had had some links to the KGB, maybe when he was younger. He went on a diplomatic mission very early. He represented Putin’s absolutely uncanny ability to remain mysterious.

The same thing happened before Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested when the investigations into his oil company, Yukos, were going on. People had no clue at all what was going on or why.

A million different theories proliferated about what was behind the attacks. It’s only been recently that people have started coming to some kind of conclusion about what things precisely Yukos was doing to interfere with his plans for reform.

The fact that Putin keeps everyone guessing is also reflected in the opinion polls. People have very high ratings of Putin, but they don’t have very high ratings for what he’s actually doing. This is one of the great paradoxes. The opinion polls rate him at about 80 percent, but if you ask people about how’s combating corruption, improving the economy, the war in Chechnya, he gets much lower ratings.

This is an ability that he has to separate himself from his government’s actions to make himself look like the czar who represents the country, while all his lowly officials get on with running things and messing them up. All of this makes it very hard to get a handle on what is actually going on.

The question is: how do you reconcile these viewpoints? What I’ve been trying to do is come up myself with a view of Russia that is neither very negative nor very positive, but maybe more somewhere in between that encompasses all of these views and tries to bring them together into one.

The ways to reconcile these views are the following. One is to understand the inevitability of what is going on now. The twisting of democracy and capitalism that happened in the nineties, the enormous corruption, the inability of the opposition parties to make any headway themselves, to distinguish themselves from the government, to set their own policies, to appeal to an electorate—all of those things contributed to Russian disillusionment with democracy. Even in the middle of the nineties, some very perceptive people were predicting that the result of this mad “gold rush” would in the end be the return to some level of authoritarianism, if only out of the desire of everybody to have some stability, control and order. There is now no constituency that has a vested interest in democracy in Russia. First, then, is to see that there is an inevitability to what is going on in Russia right now. Putin is very popular for very good reasons, and that will stay so for a while.

The second is to stop comparing today’s Russia with the Russia of five or ten years ago. People talk about whether Putin’s Russia is better or worse than Yeltsin’s Russia, whether it represents an advance or a regress for Russia. To ask whether Putin’s Russia is better or worse than Yeltsin’s Russia is like saying that the back end of my car is worse than the front end of my car because it produces more exhaust fumes. Or that the front end is better than the back end because it has lights on it that show the way. The back end and the front end are parts of my car. The car itself as whole cannot be separated. Likewise, you can’t separate Putin’s Russia from Yeltsin’s Russia.

Nina said something to me a little while ago which encapsulated this very well. She said that we have a tendency to try to label Russia as good or bad, but instead we should see it as a process. Putin’s Russia and Yeltsin’s Russia are all part of a Russia which is not a point in time but a whole ongoing process which is developing in a certain way. Once we understand that development, we see that it is somewhat inevitable and that there’s not much we can do about it. To lament that it’s going badly from a democratic point of view or to exalt how well it’s going from an economic point of view is to miss the point, like praising the front end or the back end of my car is missing the point. You must look at the whole process.

A third way that one can reconcile these points of view is to remember that there are a lot of other countries that Russia is similar to. There is a tendency to think of Russia as a country that was headed down a specific path—that it had to undergo this transition in order to become a democracy. This is partly a tendency to associate Russia with being a great power. Having been a communist great power, we expect it to become a capitalist great power and a democratic great power.

Instead, I like to compare Russia to another country in which I’ve spent a lot of time. Russia actually bears many similarities to Mexico. Mexico in the 1930’s was a country in which there was a terrific divide between a political class and a monied class: in this case, the church. There was a terrific conflict between these two classes which resulted in the church being brutally suppressed and a political party being created which was, like Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, was a very broad party that had no ideology whatsoever except to stay in power. This party, the Revolutionary Party, was an institution in Mexico, and it stayed in power for seventy years. It wasn’t a very unsuccessful party. It wasn’t too democratic. It had its own ways of including people, allowing debate, allowing opinions to be taken into account, but it did manage to run Mexico successfully from an economic point of view for forty years until things started to go wrong. Then things started to go wrong quite badly, and it took about another 30 years before the political system finally collapsed in 2000 and something approximating democracy was let in.

The point is that Mexico managed to succeed as a successful country and an undemocratic country at the same time. Many other countries have managed the same thing. We can talk about Chile, Malaysia, South Korea. Any historical analogy has weaknesses, but there are lots of countries that show how Russia could persist in this dual state of being politically, democratically rather dubious, economically, rather successful, and possibly stable.

Adam Michnik: (Elzbieta Matynia, translator):
I’m sure that you know the folktale about the raven and the fox.

A raven sits in a tree. He has a piece of cheese in his beak. A fox is approaching him and he really wants the cheese; he really wants the raven to open his beak.

So he asks the raven: “Do you think that in the next presidential elections you’re going to be voting for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?”

The raven is silent.

The fox asks him again: “I didn’t come here of my own whimsy. I was sent here by the Federal Security Service, and I’m asking you a question. Are you going to vote for Putin?”

The raven is silent.

The fox, approaching him again says, “Not only was I sent by the Federal Security Service, but I also have friends in the mafia, and they are ready to come here and cut this tree that you are sitting on, and when they’re through with that, they’ll move on to your head. I ask you again: Are you going to vote in the presidential election for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?”

The raven opens his mouth. “Yes.” The cheese falls from his mouth, and the fox runs off with the cheese. The raven thinks to himself: “How stupid! If I’d said no, what would this have changed?”

I was told this story two weeks ago by an actual functioning Minister of Russian government.

If I were to answer the question that Nina asked, I would have to tell you about the very specific perspective from which I am looking at Russia, which is a Polish perspective.

From a Polish perspective, there are two kinds of Russia that are dangerous: the imperial, expansionist Russia and the chaotic Russia. There is a frequently-quoted sentence by Alexander Pushkin [from his novella The Captain’s Daughter, 1836]: “Pray God you never see brutal Russian rebellion, senseless and pitiless.”

From the Polish point of view, Boris Yeltsin represented Russia immersed in chaos. He was unpredictable, and trying to figure out the logic behind his activities was impossible. It was a time of a free Russia, but freedom is not equivalent with democracy.

I was in Japan once at a conference together with Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev [along with Mikhail Gorbachev Yakovlev, one time a high level communist party official, is often referred to as the “architect of perestroika”]. I turned to Yakovlev and I said, “Japan is a country in which there is democracy but no freedom. There are democratic institutions, but there is no freedom. In our part of the world, in Poland and in Russia, it is quite the opposite: freedom, but no democracy.”

When I look at Putin, I see him as a great stabilizer of the Russian state. This is a stabilizer who is trying to suppress everything that is independent from central power.

All the post-communist countries have tended towards “oligarchization.” Russia is now facing a dramatic choice: who is going to run it: oligarchs or special services? A few years ago, their answer to that question wasn’t as clear as it is today.

After we have seen what has happened to Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and recently Mikhail Khodorkovsky, it indicates that Putin has broken the spine of oligarchs. Oligarchs cease to exist as a sovereign force. By breaking the oligarchs, Putin has also hit all institutions of civil society.

Not long ago there was a trial against a Russian scientist who was accused of spying. He had been working for an American institution that was allegedly connected to the CIA. I asked our newspaper [Gazeta Wyborcza] correspondent in Moscow to collect the opinions of some distinguished speakers. I asked him to collect remarks from Putin’s critics as well as his allies. Everyone refused to comment. These were people I’d known for years. Something new had happened.

The question that I’m interested in is: What has happened that democracy has ceased to be needed in Russian society?

Of course, this is a broader question, one that does not apply only to Russia. When I look at my own country, Poland, we love to talk about how much we love freedom, but nearly 50 percent of those who have the right to vote decline to do so.

Perhaps in Russia, three separate processes have overlapped. The first is the erosion of democracy, which is characteristic more broadly of contemporary democracy around the world. We have to agree that when the leading democracy in the world, the American democracy, has elected Schwarzenegger for governor, that this is not a good sign for the weaker democracies.

The second point is that Russia has an autocratic, not a democratic tradition.

And finally, we must recognize the disappointment with democracy that followed the collapse of communism. This democracy is characterized by corruption, theatrical spectacle, and the tossing around of words with no meaning.

However, there is an important difference between Poland and Russia here. For Poland, the collapse of communism meant regaining freedom. For Russia, it meant collapse of the mighty power of the state. There is a certain saying that Putin often uses: “He who does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. He who wishes for the return of the Soviet Union has no brain.”

Putin and the group that he’s brought in around him, is facing a dilemma: how to connect the tradition of powerful, pre-Bolshevik Russia with the Soviet tradition. One can see this in the debate around the Russian anthem and its eclectic coat of arms.

I’d like to point of one more element: the mafia. Mafia exists in all post-communist countries, but in the Russian provinces it is perhaps the most powerful.

The question I’m asking is: Will Putin be able to deal with the mafia as he has been able to deal with the oligarchs, the political parties, and the free media? I’d propose that he will not be able to do it. The future of Russia is defined through this very conflict. Perhaps paradoxically, it could turn out that this deadly conflict is the only real chance for Russian democracy.

This is where the real pluralism of interests is expressed in Russia. To arrest mafia leaders is much more difficult than to arrest Khodorkovsky.

David Remnick:
I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I’ll be relatively brief. The bad news is that I’m not a Russian expert. I pick talking dog cartoons for a living. The doors are open. You may flee if you like.

Some years ago when Boris Yeltsin was still upright and in office, he instructed members of his team to do for post-Soviet Russia what post-Soviet Russia had not yet done for itself, quite understandably. He asked them to come up with a national identity—a Russian idea. Two teams were appointed. One team was instructed to develop a western-liberal political idea. The other, an identity with a greater sense of nationalism, a gosudarstvennik, or statist sort of idea.

As these meetings were described to me by several participants, many memos were sketched, many late-night ideas, many bottles of beer, and, curiously enough, whiskey drunk. The lack of vodka was itself a new kind of idea, though no one could decide what it was an idea of, what it led to, or what it was in service of. Perhaps needless to say, these ideas, like so many political discussions in previous Kremlins, to say nothing of bars and kitchen tables, came to nothing except damp tablecloths, damper ideas, and a misty cloud of insubstantial nothing. An intellectual lost weekend.

Thirteen years have passed since 1991 and the collapse of the old order. We cannot easily deny that a new order far below our hopes and expectations has taken shape or is taking shape under the presidency of Vladimir Putin.

To some extent Russia is the ultimate mixed bag - a nation whose mixed post-modern symbols, some czarist, some neo-Soviet, some sui generis - stand for the severe, post-modern soup that is the nation itself. Its pre-modern attitudes towards work and efficiency, its eternal corruptions, its gloomy patina of twenty-first century commercialism describes, or begins to describe, that contemporary state of affairs.

Those of us who had hoped that Russia after 1991 would set out rapidly on the road taken by, for instance, Poland or the Baltic States, were sadly mistaken, certainly in temporal terms. But those who thought that Russia was a permanent state of affairs, a permanent set of dark attitudes, a collection of despotic, subservient arrangements and relationships, have also had to re-understand things. Take note, Professor Pipes.

1991 was a revolution, and it was not a revolution. Only the intellectually stubborn or the extremely young will doubt that, in many respects, contemporary Russia is a more humane place, a place of far greater potential than the old Soviet Union in any of its temporal positions. In case anyone has forgotten the days of terror, absurdist central planning, draconian censorship, and Joseph Brodsky’s expression “equal in poverty” are long gone.

The new arrangements of public life are the result of an ineffable combination of real reform, horrendous collapse, authoritarian resistance and perhaps most notably, economic scandal and crime played out on a colossal, world-historical scale. Many of the same problems that haunted the last years of the Soviet Union - a rotting infrastructure, pre-modern agriculture, pre-modern industry, alcoholism, an incredibly dangerous spreading AIDS problem that has gotten very little publicity, and a bloated, top-heavy reform policy - have grown in many respects worse since 1991.

As Stephen Kotkin and many other scholars have pointed out, a true revolution leads to a real rearrangement of elites. This was not entirely in the case of the passage of the Soviet Union into the new Russia. Old elites clung to their posts, in some cases dragging down with them whole institutions: economic, educational and so on. The new elites who have jumped most efficiently to the fore have, to say the least, not always been the most attractive or healthy elements of society.

A World Bank report recently made clear what everyone has suspected all along. The small group of oligarchs who came into their properties through government connections and the employment of criminal and semi-criminal elements, now operate an enormous percentage of the economy, especially the core economic resources such as oil, gas and metals.

In this atmosphere, the prestige of terms like “democracy” have suffered enormously, so that a democrat has long been called a dermokrat—a “shitocrat.”

Russia and the United states today are led by presidents who are decidedly, aggressively, obviously mediocre at best. What is more, they are mediocre men of illuminance and confounding self-confidence, and a preternaturally clear sense of where they are going. God help us.

But we’re not here to talk today about President Bush’s relations with the Almighty. Best to pause though, over President Putin, about whom we think little for obvious American reasons having to do with engagements elsewhere in the world.

Where the United States is concerned, Putin is extremely pragmatic. He wants in. He wants to join the league of developed nations, and despite the periodic bursts of anti-Americanism that occur in Russia from time to time, especially when America goes to war, invited or not or commits a faux pas in an Olympic skating competition--despite this, Putin has been an extremely accommodating and supportive voice. When he’s been resistant, as he was during the run-up to the Iraq war, it was never with the same tone as the French or even the Germans.

Bush, in fact, remains quite grateful for many Russian favors including Russian intelligence where Afghanistan was concerned, his support for our base in Uzbekistan, to say nothing of Russia’s quick and supportive gestures after 9/11. Where US-Russian relations are concerned, Putin wants ‘in,’ and has been willing to swallow quite a lot, almost as much as Yeltsin in the days of his most liberal Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev.

At home, however, Putin is a creature of his earlier profession. He cannot abide the press. He cannot abide truly free enterprise. He cannot abide any notion of civil liberties. He is, where democracy is concerned, a student at best, and most times, its opponent.

The recent elections were an exercise in authoritarian overkill. Considering Putin’s popularity - a popularity that speaks to the Russian gratitude for stability and, whether they know it or not, for the high oil prices that virtually float the economy – with a popularity rating well over 7o percent, the president could have run against a Russian Roosevelt and won. He would have won easily. But, as with any constitution, he could not abide it if the written constitution demanded it. Opponents were harassed, intimidated, warned. In the end, the election resembled at best a one-party race in Latin America and at worst a one-party election of Vladimir Putin’s youth in Leningrad. He crushed a process as much out of atavistic Soviet habit as anything else.

What comes after Putin, I’m afraid, is Putin. I highly doubt that he will leave such a thing to chance as succession. In my mind, the only immediate future imaginable is for Putin to find a way, constitutionally or otherwise, to succeed himself or, like Yeltsin before him, to designate a successor in a very particular, semi-authoritarian mold. In the short term these regressive features of contemporary Russia are deeply disturbing, and I have left much out. But I think it’s also important to see through the gloom, to see past the KGB officer in the Kremlin, and to recognize a couple of things.

The first is the legacy of Russian and Soviet history. A thousand years of authoritarian brutality followed by eighty years of Soviet brutality - unprecedented, sustained brutality against the body, against religious life and its institutions, against civil, economic and cultural life, against the countryside, against the cities, against the psychological life of every man, woman and child who ever lived there.

Second, I would say, yet again as an optimist in a dark time, that Russia is doomed to success. Over time, as in Latin America (and I think the Mexico analogy is not a bad one), as in central America, while we begin to overtake rampant criminality, the urge to have some form of Russian democracy, whether it resembles American democracy or French democracy or what have you, has the best chance to take hold in Russia. Indeed, Russia has tried just about everything else, and it has failed. That too is fast in the Russian memory.

This transcript was prepared by Wendy Eberhardt, project on the New Post-Transition Russian Identity research associate.

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