Presidential Power in Russia

Eugene Huskey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315482194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the first major assessment of the role of the presidency in Russia's difficult transition form communist rule. Huskey analyzes the establishment and functioning of the Russian presidency as an institution and in relation to the other leading institutions of state: the government, parliament, courts, and regional authorities. Although this is not a biography of the first president, Boris Yeltsin, his allies and his rivals loom large in the study of a critical phase in the creation of a new Russian political system.

1
Introduction

In the spring of 1991, a concert in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory honored the late physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov. The event brought to the stage eminent Russian musicians who rarely performed in Moscow: Mstislav Rostropovich, Sviatoslav Richter, and Vladimir Spivakov. Among the many dignitaries in the audience were Mikhail Gorbachev, perched to the side of the stage in the tsar’s box, and Boris Yeltsin, sitting in the stalls.¹ Despite Gorbachev’s rank as Soviet president and his visibility in the loge, it was the insurgent politician, Boris Yeltsin, who attracted the attention of the crowd that evening. During the intermission, while Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, retreated to the privacy of an anteroom, Boris Yeltsin strode back to the public entrance hall, where he greeted a pressing throng of well-wishers. It was only three weeks before Russia’s first democratic presidential elections, and candidate Yeltsin radiated an energy, charm, and resolve that would see him through to victory in June and to defeat of a right-wing coup attempt in August. With the collapse of the USSR—and Gorbachev’s humiliating abdication of the Soviet presidency—in December 1991, Boris Yeltsin took the final step in his journey from rebel to ruler, joining the long line of princes, tsars, and general secretaries who have governed Russia.

Writing about these events almost eight years later, in the first days of 1999, it is difficult to conjure up the image of a vibrant and confident Boris Yeltsin, on whom so many hopes were placed, and misplaced. Having survived two violent constitutional crises, hyperinflation, a war of secession, a bruising reelection campaign, continuing budget shortfalls, major heart surgery, and mounting insults by politicians and public alike, the Russian president cut an almost pathetic figure midway through his second term. Even a high-ranking official in Yeltsin’s own administration volunteered in July 1998 that the president “has accumulated such a burden of tiredness, both physical and psychological,” that he should not run for a third term—an idea Yeltsin continued to toy with until the fall of 1998.²

But whenever, and however, Boris Yeltsin departs the political stage, he will leave a formidable legacy. On Yeltsin’s watch, Russia destroyed the last vestiges of Communist Party rule, dismantled a centuries-old empire, joined the Council of Europe, enacted a market-oriented code of civil law, and began to recast relations between the citizen and the state and the capital and the provinces. Not since the French Revolution—or at least the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917—has a country experienced so much political change in a single decade. Our judgments about presidential leadership in Russia in the 1990s will surely be colored by whether the Yeltsin years represent a prelude to a deepening democracy or a new authoritarianism. Thus, how we view the role of the Russian presidency in this era of transition depends not only on our own politics but on Russia’s future.

Like the French Revolution, Russia’s protracted and painful transition from the ancien regime is generating a vast literature of reportage, reminiscence, and analysis. In the Western scholarly literature on Russian politics, studies of changes in society initially took center stage. This orientation in academic research and writing flowed in part from the desire to apply the sophisticated tools of social science analysis, especially public opinion polling, to a previously closed society. Where Western survey research in the Soviet era had been limited to emigrant populations from the 1940s and 1970s,³ each unrepresentative of broader Soviet society in its own way, at the very end of the 1980s political scientists began to question large samples of citizens in Russia about their political attitudes, values, and beliefs.⁴ In addition, the nine Russia-wide elections or referendums held between 1989 and 1996 provided scholars with rich—and even, by Western standards, unprecedented—sources of information on political behavior.⁵ These attitudinal surveys and electoral studies revealed a complex, and in many ways deeply divided, society. On some issues, the new data merely confirmed what every Russian understood intuitively: a member of the Moscow intelligentsia thinks and acts differently in politics than a peasant in Orel province. But on other questions, Western social science research challenged the received wisdom, most notably on the democratic potential of the Russian population.⁶

Alongside studies of political attitudes and behavior, there has appeared a burgeoning literature on social groups and parties in Russia.⁷ Throughout most of Soviet history, group membership had been limited to organizations sanctioned and controlled by the Communist Party. But by the end of the 1980s, Gorbachev’s more tolerant approach to private associations gave birth to a spate of new “informal organizations,” which began to mobilize citizens behind various ethnic, environmental, and political causes. This rise of social activism seemed to many Western scholars to signal the emergence in Russia of a civil society, that dense network of voluntary associations that instills habits of political trust and cooperation in citizens and serves as an institutional shield protecting individuals from the power of the state.⁸ However, public interest in associational activities seemed to wane at the beginning of the 1990s, the very time when a more liberal legal and political environment was taking root.⁹ Behind this “demobilization" of Russian society lay a disillusionment and exhaustion with politics as a remedy for societal ills. For many Russians, the excitement of participating in a political revolution hypertrophied into cynicism and despair once they experienced the immediate fruits of change: political instability, social deviance, and economic collapse. Ironically, as the formal impediments to associational activity fell in Russia, everyday life erected new, and in many ways more imposing, barriers. Members of the intelligentsia who had made a comfortable living in the Soviet era were forced by the early 1990s to take on additional jobs to make ends meet. Put simply, as a result of worsening economic conditions, Russians no longer had as much time for politics. Many began to withdraw into themselves and their families.

Despite the emphasis of the scholarly literature on citizens and groups, it is the state that merits the most intense scrutiny at this stage of Russian political development. The society-centered orientation of Western—and especially American—writing derives not only from methodological preferences and the torrent of new data on political participation in Russia but from the prevailing liberal model of politics, in which the state is seen as a product of social forces. To understand the state, the argument goes, one must first understand its progenitor, society. Open virtually any textbook on American government and one finds—after a nod in the direction of culture and history—a series of chapters devoted to such topics as parties, interest groups, public opinion, and the media. Only after this introduction to “society” does one encounter the core institutions of state—presidency, Congress, and courts. Whatever the value of this approach in American politics, it is inappropriate for Russia, where there has been no mythology—such as Lockean contract theory—or procedural regime to bind the state to society. Indeed, the Russian state has historically exercised a degree of autonomy from, and dominance over, society that clearly distinguishes it from its Western counterparts. Despite the introduction in recent years of a relatively open press and competitive elections, politics in Russia remains overwhelmingly state-centered. Robert C. Tucker’s description of the origins of “dual Russia” still seems fresh at the end of the twentieth century:

Far from developing as a dependent political “superstructure” over a social-economic “base,” the Russian state organism took shape as an autonomous force acting to create or recreate its own social base, to shape and reshape the institutional pattern of society, in a series of revolutions from above.¹⁰

The dominant role of the state is evident in the politics of change.¹¹ Unlike the transition from authoritarianism in the Philippines, where “people power” pushed Ferdinand Marcos off the historical stage, the major impetus for the reform of Soviet politics came from Mikhail Gorbachev and a small group of supporters within the Communist Party.¹² Likewise, in the 1990s, President Yeltsin and his westernizing advisors have imposed a package of economic reforms on a largely unsuspecting, and unsympathetic, population. These episodes are but the latest in a series of revolutions from above that have transformed Russia during the last four centuries. Although Russia has adopted certain democratic institutions, its state is not yet accountable to a vibrant and demanding society.

Thus, for all it weaknesses and divisions, the state remains by far the most important story in Russian politics.¹³ And within the state, there is no more dominant institution than the presidency, which serves as the engine of reform, the nerve center of political communications, the chief patron for positions in the executive and judicial branches, and a symbol, however flawed, of Russian national unity. Yet the Russian presidency has been the subject of little sustained analysis by scholars.¹⁴ This book represents a first attempt to assess the role of the presidency in Russia’s difficult transition from Communist rule.¹⁵

Although Boris Yeltsin looms large in the study, this is not a biography of the first Russian president but an analysis of political relations within the presidency and between the presidency and the other leading institutions of state: Government, parliament, courts, and regional authorities. Whether one speaks of the White House or the Kremlin, the presidency is far more than a single individual. In the Russian case, it is a collection of several thousand officials with diverse political views, expertise, interests, and bases of loyalty to the president. Given its size and its direct involvement in the full range of domestic and foreign policies, the Russian presidency operates as a state within a state, as the hub around which political decisionmaking revolves.

As Chapter 2 points out, the presidency is a new institution in Russian history, having appeared in the Soviet Union in March 1990 and in the Russian Federation, in slightly revised form, a year later. But the exercise of presidential power preserves many traditional patterns of authority in Russia. The most obvious is the division between a Government, or Council of Ministers, charged with the everyday management of the state bureaucracy, especially in economic affairs, and a political institution that stands above it as the “leading and guiding force” in politics.¹⁶ In prerevolutionary Russia, this institution was the tsar and his personal chancelleries; in the Soviet era, it was the general secretary, the Politburo, and the Central Committee apparatus of the Communist Party; and in present-day Russia it is the president and his extensive administrative apparatus. As part of his offensive against the Communist Party in 1991, Yeltsin and his entourage sought to regather in the presidency many of the powers that the party had wielded in the old regime. Partly out of habit, partly in response to an immediate need to impose discipline on autonomy-seeking ministries and regions, Yeltsin revived in the presidency many of the structures and functions of the Communist Party Central Committee, without of course reviving the party’s ideological or political monopoly. Where Lenin sent political commissars to the provinces to ensure Bolshevik rule among wavering or hostile local authorities, Yeltsin appointed his own presidential representatives in the country’s eighty-nine subject territories to serve as his watchdogs.

One of the paradoxes of the Russian transition has been the use of traditional patterns of political authority by Gorbachev and Yeltsin to undo the traditional bases of economic and social relations. Frustrated by an uncooperative parliament, for example, the Russian president has sought, unsuccessfully, to introduce a free market in land by decree, a tactic smacking of authoritarian diktat in the eyes of Yeltsin’s opponents.¹⁷ When is a democratically elected president justified in ignoring, or circumventing, existing laws and the constitution in order to advance the cause of economic and social reform? This question, made all the more acute by the Russian population’s hostility to many westernizing reforms, has dogged Yeltsin and his domestic and foreign supporters throughout his presidency. In contrast to the view proffered by many Western governments, the Russian transition is not a simple morality play: its leaders at times use illiberal means to achieve liberal ends.

Among the many continuities with the old order is institutional redundancy. As we noted above, the large bureaucracies surrounding the tsar, the general secretary, and now the president all duplicate a perfectly reasonable executive management team already in place in the Government and headed by a prime minister. But the duplication does not stop at the apex of Russian institutional arrangements. Yeltsin has permitted the development in the presidency of several competing power centers with overlapping responsibilities. Moreover, he has sanctioned the establishment of new, reform-oriented state committees whose jurisdictional lines cross those of long-standing, and politically stodgy, ministries. In the Communist regime, the proliferation of “checking mechanisms” was an essential ingredient of party rule. However, in the more open and competitive environment of post-Soviet politics, it has heightened administrative inefficiency and political conflict.¹⁸

A central assumption of this book is that how decisions are made tells us much about what decisions are made. Although a country’s rules of governing—its institutional design—are themselves products of numerous factors, such as the cultural legacy, the interests and tactics of key elites, and the circumstances under which the rules of the political game were crafted, once in place institutional arrangements become a relatively autonomous force that makes certain political outcomes more likely than others.¹⁹ To provide a stark example, if Russian electoral rules had provided for indirect, rather than direct, presidential elections, Boris Yeltsin would not have won the presiden...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Making of the Russian Presidency
• 3. The Institutional Presidency
• 4. President and Prime Minister
• 5. The Politics of the Dual Executive: Policy Making on War and Peace, Finance, and Legal Affairs
• 6. The Presidency and Parliament
• 7. The Presidency and the Provinces
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author