Russia after 2020

Looking Ahead after Two Decades of Putin

J. L. Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000450057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ethnische Studien

This book presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of Russia and how Russia is likely to develop in the immediate future. Not always sticking to the mainstream narrative, it covers political events including Putin's constitutional reforms of January 2020 and their likely consequences, economic developments, Russia's international relations and military activities, and changes and issues in Russian society, including in education, the place of women, health care and religion. Special attention is paid to manifestations of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book's overall conclusion is that events of 2020 may compel Putin to 'think again' before he decides whether to run for office in 2024.

1 The presidency, the executive and the Constitution

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158646-2

Introduction

When, on 26 March 2018, Russians elected Vladimir Putin to his fourth term as president of the Russian Federation, he began his 19th year as the most powerful and most popular political individual in the country. According to the Constitution (Basic Law) under which he first came to power, he would have been compelled to step down in 2024, the end of the current term. As of 2020, however, Putin has the right, if re-elected, to serve for a dozen more years after that. An entire generation of Russians has grown up knowing only Putin as their leader; a second such generation is in the making. Writing in late 2019, two senior researchers at the Russian Higher School of Economics (HSE) understood that a majority of the first ‘Putin Generation’ personalizes politics and still see him as the ideal political leader for the Russian state, the very future of which depends on who is president.¹ The second generation may not share those presumptions.

The first two decades of the 21st century have not been easy ones for Russia. The already weakened economy had been shattered by radical reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘restructuring’ (perestroika) policies in the 1980s and the disastrous ‘shock therapy’ forced on Russians by Yeltsin in the 1990s. Part of that latter regimen featured the privatization of state assets, which in practice meant selling off valuable state properties cheaply to a class of corrupt businesspeople, who came to be known as oligarchs. These assets included valuable natural resource enterprises. Making matters worse, in 1999, the year Putin was named prime minister, the country was at war in Chechnya for the second time, relying on an underfunded, poorly trained and shoddily equipped military.

Putin won his first presidential election handily, taking 53 per cent of a nearly 70 per cent turnout. The Communist Party’s Gennady Zyuganov was well behind at just under 30 per cent and none of the other ten candidates came close to double figures. During the campaign, Putin called on Russians to be patriotic and promised to restore Russian domestic immunity and international prestige. Emphasizing that Russians need to take care of their own business, he failed to invite any foreign leaders other than Ukraine’s Leonid Kuchma and Belarus’s Alyaksandr Lukashenka (Lukashenko) to the inauguration. Putin’s approval rating hovered between 65 and 73 per cent over the late summer and fall of that year and, except for a few brief higher and lower peaks, rarely fell much below that until 2019.

The turn to patriotism came as no surprise. In a paper published in December 1999 and titled ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millennium’, Putin called attention to the ‘Russia idea’, that is, the notion that there is a uniquely Russia way of doing things.² While opposing the ‘restoration of an official state ideology’, he made it plain that the way to achieve ‘social accord’ was through ‘traditional Russian values’ and patriotism. Citizens must believe ‘in the greatness of Russia’ and the ‘exceptionally important role of the state’. The paper came to be known as the ‘Putin Manifesto’. Notions in it may not have represented another type of ideology per se, yet they provided catch words for the next two decades of Putin’s foreign and domestic policies.³

In foreign affairs, he has had to deal with an expanding NATO and European Union (EU), both of which exclude Russia. NATO was then and still is perceived as a strategic threat. A brief war with Georgia in 2008, Russia’s annexation/reintegration of Crimea in 2014 and its involvement in the on-going fratricidal conflict in eastern Ukraine, resulted in Russia’s isolation from the West. These consequences were mostly self-inflicted, to be sure, but also a consequence of the West’s inability, or unwillingness, to accept that Russia has legitimate national security interests in the neighbourhood that surrounds it.

In addition to the problems it faced in the international arena, the Russian government had to find ways to help its failed economy recover from the disasters of the 1990s, survive the global recession of 2008–9 and, after 2014, counter the repeated imposition of economic sanctions by North American and European states. Whereas Putin proclaimed the need to integrate ‘the Russian economy into world economic structures’ in his Manifesto, the Kremlin eventually had to alter its traditional trading patterns by ‘pivoting’ to the East to find new commercial partners and political allies.

Ameliorating the disastrous economic consequences of the dozen or so years prior to 2000, while at the same time muting disruptive dissent in the name of social order, has been a constant struggle. In these matters, the Russian state has been unexpectedly successful – so far.

Putin has not acted outside the powers granted him by Russia’s Constitution, though his government sometimes bypasses it by means of legislative acts. Before 2020, the first amendments made to the 1993 document were introduced in 2008 by President Medvedev. Instead of four-year terms for both the president and deputies in the Lower House of parliament, the State Duma, he raised the presidential term to six years and to five for the deputies. Medvedev argued that more time in office was necessary because Russia was still in a state of transition and needed consistency and stability.⁴ That argument was delivered again in 2020. Other changes came in 2014, when several articles were modified to abolish the Supreme Arbitration Court, increase the number of members of the Supreme Court and clarify procedures for naming prosecutors. Later in that year two articles were altered to provide a presidential quota in the Federation Council, or Upper House of parliament (see Chapter 2). These changes were all minor compared to the dramatic amendments of 2020.

The president’s mandate

According to the 1993 Constitution, the president is the head of state, guarantor of the Constitution and of state sovereignty. He or she determines the direction of both internal and foreign policy and is the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.⁵ That Constitution granted the president the right to select the prime minister, the head of the Central Bank, government ministers, judges, regional governors, plenipotentiary representatives, and chiefs of security and the Armed Forces. Faced in 1993 with uncertainties generated by a near civil war between still sitting communist and nationalist deputies elected in 1989 to the RSFSR (Russian) legislature and the post-Soviet executive headed by Yeltsin, most Russians welcomed a Constitution that allocated centralizing authority to a head of state. On a referendum coinciding with a general election, 12 December 1993, 58.4 per cent of the 53.2 per cent of registered voters who turned out approved Russia’s new Constitution.⁶

Russia does not have a vice president. That office was not included in the 1993 Constitution, presumably because Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi orchestrated a revolt against Yeltsin earlier that year. In fact, the USSR’s only vice president, Gennady Yanaev, had been part of a coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991, so the position had a bad track record. If a president dies in office, his powers are transferred temporarily to the prime minister, who will then also chair the Security Council. An election for a new president must be held within 90 days. Already faced twice with attempts by what was then the Congress of People’s Deputies to impeach him, Yeltsin made certain that articles related to impeaching the president were greatly reduced from earlier draft constitutions.

On taking office the president swears an oath to ‘respect and safeguard the rights and freedoms of man and citizen’ and ‘to faithfully serve the people’.⁷ It is here that presidential obligations become less clear in practice. Yet, if the description of a younger Putin presented ahead is accurate, it is likely that he assumes that he has been serving the Russian people faithfully. Moreover, it would seem that most, if certainly not all, Russian citizens have believed that as well.

The government before 2020

The government wields executive power in Russia (Arts. 110–117). It is comprised of the prime minister who, before 2020, was appointed directly by the president. Until 2020, the State Duma had the right to ‘consider’ the president’s nominee and, if it rejected the candidate three times, could force another election. That never happened. According to the 1993 Constitution, the prime minister then recommended cabinet members to the president. In practice, the proposals were made the other way around. The government prepares the federal budget and ensures it is implemented if adopted by the Duma. It manages federal properties, oversees the implementation of state policies through the offices of its various ministries and committees, and enforces the country’s laws and decrees.

Prime ministers serving Putin were Mikhail Kasyanov (2000–04), who is now in the liberal opposition, Mikhail Fradkov (2004–07), Viktor Zubkov (2007–08), Dmitry Medvedev (2012–20) and, from January 2020, Mikhail Mishustin.

Who is Vladimir Putin?

There is a large literature on Vladimir Putin. For this study, it is enough to recall that, prior to becoming prime minister in 1999, he had been a KGB agent posted in East Germany. He resigned from the KGB in 1991 and joined the staff of the mayor of St. Petersburg, the famous democrat Anatoly Sobchak. In 1996, Yeltsin appointed him director of the FSB (Federal Security Service), successor to the KGB. That KGB background gets by far the most attention from those who seek deep-rooted motivations for Putin’s behaviour as Russia’s president. John Evans, the US Consul general in St. Petersburg from 1994 to 1997, was one eye-witness who was not overwhelmed by the easy KGB label. Putin was a ‘gosudarstvennik’, he wrote, a man of the state, one of the very few Russian bureaucrats of that time who seemed not interested in wealth and would not take a bribe. Evans went on to say:

I am not going to attempt to prove it, but I assure you that Putin 1) was not anti-American (although he felt more comfortable with Germans); 2) was not a communist (at least by that time) or hostile to private business; 3) was not anti-Semitic; 4) and was not intolerant of gay people. I have already noted that he had a legal bent. You may take my word for these assertions or not. I have concrete examples to back each of them.⁸

With the exception of the first of Evans’ first-hand presumptions it is probable that these character traits remained true for the next quarter-century, and Putin’s anti-American sentiments were by-products of events and pressures over that time. Indeed, from the moment Yeltsin named him acting president on New Year’s Day 2000, and charged him with ending the debilitating Chechen war, curbing the unchallenged power of the oligarchs and putting the Russian economy in order, Putin was caught between either fulfilling his mandate or alienating the West. His choice was clear – he fulfilled his mandate. If he was not what the West wanted in the Kremlin, he was exactly what Russians wanted at that time.

In 2019, while musing on Putin’s first two decades in office, Fred Weir, a Canadian journalist who married a Russian, has lived for decades in Russia and writes about Russia regularly for the Christian Science Monitor, put it differently:

Putin is popular becaus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Transliteration, spelling, punctuation and sources
• Abbreviations and key terms
• About the author
• Introduction
• 1 The presidency, the executive and the Constitution
• 2 The Russian Federation: Internal strengths and strains
• 3 The political arena
• 4 Economic patterns and the sanctions saga
• 5 Russia in the world: Changing patterns
• 6 New Cold War: The Russian Federation, the United States – and China
• 7 The re-militarization of Russia, and the end of arms control?
• 8 Quality of life: Media, mind and behaviour
• 9 Quality of life: Pandemic, body & soul
• Closing remarks: What’s left after 2020?
• Bibliography
• Index