Russia's President Vladimir Putin
Putin Trying To Build ‘An Anti-Soviet Empire’ Not A Remake Of The USSR – OpEd
By Paul Goble
Because Vladimir Putin talks about recovering territory that Moscow lost when the USSR disintegrated and because he has had positive things to say about Stalin, many people assume that he is trying to restore the Soviet empire. But that gets things exactly wrong, Andrey Kolesnikov says.
The New Times columnist argues that that Putin both because of his motives and because of his tactics is in fact “provoking an entirely different process – the continuing disintegration of the imperial space” and in a way that will involve the kind of violence the region generally avoided during the first three decades after 1991 (newtimes.ru/articles/detail/232864).
In fact, Kolesnikov says, Putin and his team are trying to build what one could call “an anti-Soviet empire,” one based almost entirely on the use of brute force rather than soft power and “along the way destroying the very legacy of the USSR,” including both its positive values and its physical infrastructure.
Putin’s “empire of the Russian world is destroying precisely the achievements of the Soviet empire,” at least after 1953, including the values of internationalism rather than the supremacy of one nation over all the others, and doing so in a way that is driving all those in the non-Russian countries who can to try to distance themselves as far from Moscow as possible.
The views driving Putin are not those of Khrushchev, Gorbachev or even Brezhnev; they are those of the last years of Stalin’s rule. And “so what is taking place now is in fact Stalinization, attempts to return” to the past Soviet leaders after Stalin’s death rejected, Kolesnikov continues.
Two myths have gotten in the way of an understanding of this reality, the commentator says. On the one hand, many seem to think that a post-Putin future will be even worse than his current rule, a view that ignores the fact that after every period of repression in Russian history, those who are the successors have liberalized one way or another.
And on the other, many are convinced that Russia faces another round of disintegration, something possible but unlikely Kolesnikov says because of the situation the republics and regions within the Russian Federation find themselves in, a position which they could not improve, he suggests, by leaving.
“In sum,” he concludes, analogies between what Putin is doing and what post-Stalinist leaders of the Soviet Union did are possible, but they require significant modification. And it is becoming ever more obvious that “those who have built the current system” of Russian power for a Russian world “cannot restore the Soviet Union” or repeat the Soviet experience.
Personalist Dictatorships Like Putin’s ‘Sooner or Later Begin to Make Fatal Mistakes,’ Golosov Says
Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 25 – There are four basic kinds of authoritarianism – monarchies, military rule, party rule, and personalist dictatorships – Grigory Golosov says; and Putin’s regime falls into the last category, a tragedy for Russia because such regimes almost inevitably “sooner or later begin to make fatal mistakes.”
That is because, the political scientist at St. Petersburg’s European University says, the leader is increasingly cut off from good information and can act without the constraints that either multiple centers or power or accepted rules of the game the other three kinds of authoritarianism feature (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/12/25/nikto-ne-skazal-net).
An important distinctive feature of Putin’s personalist dictatorship, Golosov says, is that it had its origin in “the imperfect electoral democracy of the 1990s. Typically, such types of regime have a different trajectory and appear as the result of the degradation of other kinds of authoritarian regimes.”
While personalist dictatorships strive to eliminate all multiple centers of power and all rules, Putin’s began at a time when there were competitive centers of power in the form of the oligarchs and elections. He sidelined the former and he showed he could win the latter, something that led many to believe that he always could and thus deserved support.
During Putin’s first two terms, there was a level of “informal institutionalization” that acted as a constraint; but after he returned to the presidency following the Medvedev interregnum, Putin moved quickly and consistently to destroy or at least divide all alternative centers of power and to reduce elections to a complete fiction.
As a result, Golosov says, Putin’s rule was “transformed into a purely personalist dictatorship;” and the mistakes that have followed, in particular the disastrous invasion of Ukraine and the break with the West, are the result of that and the unique way in which he achieved his personalist dictatorship.
In the coming years, there are compelling reasons to think that the country won’t become either a monarchy or a party regime and that a military rule is extremely unlikely. That is unfortunate because military rule is the kind of authoritarianism that most easily opens the way for democratization.
“Of all authoritarian regimes,” the political scientist says, “military regimes more often than others can evolve toward democracy. Not because the military are democrats but because its members cannot establish a stable power, constantly fight with one another, and at a certain pont decide that it would be better to hand over power to civilian politicians.”
According to Golosov, “democracy is a mechanism which allows that to happen,” especially if the successor democrats are careful to amnesty the military rulers they have replaced. Democratization, of course, doesn’t happen because of demands for it from the population: “ideologically motivated democratization is quite rare.”
Those facts make Russia’s near-term prospects bleak indeed. The masses don’t want democracy, and neither do the elites. Instead, many in the elites still think Putin may manage to escape his current problems and that his having forced Western firms to leave Russia will offer them opportunities for enrichment.
Consequently, Putin is likely to be able to hold on for some time; but he is also likely to make ever more “gargantuan” mistakes, the kind of mistakes that will cost his country even more dearly than the ones he has already made. The question really is which one of those will prove fatal.
Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at paul.goble@gmail.com .
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