Seventeen years after Vladimir Putin first became president of Russia, his grip on the country is stronger than ever. The West, which still sees Russia in post-Soviet terms, sometimes ranks him as his country’s most powerful leader since Stalin. Russians are increasingly looking to an earlier period of history. In Moscow both liberal reformers and conservative traditionalists are talking about Putin as a 21st-century tsar.
Putin has earned that title by lifting his country out of what many Russians see as the chaos in the 1990s and by making it count again in the world. As the centennial of the October revolution draws near, however, the uncomfortable thought has surfaced that Putin shares the tsars’ weaknesses, too.
Although Putin worries about the “color” revolutions that have swept through the former Soviet Union since 2000, the greater threat is not of a mass uprising, still less of a Bolshevik revival. It is that, as of spring 2018, when Putin starts what is constitutionally his last six-year term in office after an election that he will surely win, speculation will begin about what comes next. The fear will grow that, as other Russian rulers have, Tsar Vladimir will leave turbulence and upheaval in his wake.
Putin is hardly the world’s only autocrat. Personalized authoritarian rule has spread across the world during the past 15 years—often, as with Putin, built on the fragile base of a manipulated, winner-take-all democracy. It is a rebuke to the liberal triumphalism which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Leaders such as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, the late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and even Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India have behaved as if they enjoy a special authority derived directly from the popular will. In China this week, President Xi Jinping formalized his absolute command of the Communist Party.
Like a tsar, Putin surmounts a pyramid of patronage. Since he moved against the oligarchs in 2001, taking control first of the media and then of the oil-and-gas giants, all access to power and money has been through him. These days the boyars serve at his pleasure, as those beneath them serve at their pleasure and so on all the way down. He wraps his power in legal procedure, but everyone knows that the prosecutors and courts answer to him.
Putin enjoys an approval rating of more than 80 percent partly because he has persuaded Russians that, as an aide said, “If there is no Putin, there is no Russia.”
Like a tsar, too, he has faced the same question that has plagued Russia’s rulers since Peter the Great, and which acutely confronted Alexander III and Nicholas II in the run-up to the revolution. Should Russia modernize, by following the Western path toward civil rights and representative government, or should it try to lock in stability by holding fast against them?
Putin’s answer has been to entrust the economy to liberal-minded technocrats and politics to former KGB officers. Inevitably politics has dominated economics, however, and Russia is paying the price. However well administered during sanctions and a ruble devaluation, the economy still depends too heavily on natural resources. It can manage annual GDP growth of only around 2 percent, a far cry from 2000-2008, when it achieved an oil-fired 5 percent to 10 percent. In the long run this will cramp Russia’s ambitions.
Like a tsar, Putin has buttressed his power through repression and military conflict. At home, in the name of stability, tradition and the Orthodox religion, he has suppressed political opposition and social liberals, including feminists, NGOs and gays. Abroad, his annexation of Crimea and campaigns in Syria and Ukraine have been burnished for the evening news by a captive, triumphalist media. However justified, the West’s outrage at his actions underlines to Russians how Putin once again has asserted their country’s strength after the humiliations of the 1990s.
What does this post-modern tsar mean for the world? One lesson is about the Russian threat. Since the interference in Ukraine, the West has worried about Russian revanchism elsewhere, especially in the Baltic states. Putin cannot afford large numbers of casualties, however, without losing legitimacy, as happened to Nicholas II in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and in World War I. Because today’s tsar knows history, he is likely to be opportunistic abroad, shadowboxing rather than risking a genuine confrontation.
The situation at home is different. In his time in power, Putin has shown little appetite for harsh repression. Nonetheless, Russia’s record of terrible suffering suggests that, whereas dithering undermines the ruler’s legitimacy, mass repression can strengthen it—at least for a time. The Russian people still have something to fear.
© 2017 Economist Newspaper Ltd., London (October 28). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
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