The heart-wrenching 2004 hostage crisis at Beslan School No. 1—where a firefight and botched attempt to rescue one thousand captives of Chechen terrorists led to the tragic deaths of 334 hostages, mostly children—was pivotal in bringing the regions further under the center. Blaming the tragedy on blundering, disconnected regional authorities, the Kremlin used Beslan to justify eliminating the direct election of governors. Henceforth, governors would be appointed by the president, and serve at his pleasure, allowing Putin to replace potential rivals with loyal disciples and rendering Russia a federation in name only.35
What does this have to do with vodka politics? Well, for one, since many regional governments were built atop vodka mini-monopolies, those arrangements and revenues would now be in the hands of trusted Putin loyalists. In this way, the national champion Rosspirtprom was “a cornerstone of Putin’s centralization policy,” according to Yulia Latynina. “But in order to effect this centralization, the governors must be stripped of their control over state budget cash flows, and no fewer than half of those are generated by vodka sales.”36 Plus—in theory at least—this should have led to greater oversight and coordination of an industry still plagued by counterfeit and third-shift vodkas.
Second, centralization destroyed the ability of the various regions to act as—in Louis Brandeis’s famous adage—“laboratories for social experimentation.”37 Any hope for civic activism or policy innovation “from below” were all but snuffed out. As professor Ekaterina Zhuravskaya explained, “federalism combined with the absence of elections at the local level can potentially work only when the policy is designed solely to deliver economic growth and is not aimed at providing public goods, such as quality education, health care, and social protection.”38 Instead of encouraging civic activism that might help alleviate Russia’s public health woes, centralization only cemented the dominance of regional authorities and their liquor interests.
With alcohol consumption reaching alarming heights into 2007–2008, researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tried to determine why nothing was being done. Wasn’t there public concern at the local level? If so, why wasn’t it being translated into action? Based on in-depth interviews with a wide variety of stakeholders concerned with alcohol control, the London group found that the widespread concern with problem drinking was stymied by a general powerlessness to influence policies regarding taxation, education, drunk driving, minimum drinking ages, and other restrictions. Health-sector organizations, physicians, psychiatrists, pharmacists, educators, church organizations, labor unions, employers, and even the local health ministry all decried the moral, health, and economic problems caused by alcohol—but all also lamented that they had no way to influence policy. In other words, unlike the civic response of temperance to alcohol problems (of far less severity) in the West, the researchers found “no evidence of an existing or emerging multi-sectoral coalition for developing alcohol policy to improve health.”39
Caught in their vodka revenue trap, even the regional governments were powerless to undertake meaningful reform. State and municipal authorities “faced a conflict because of the substantial contribution of the alcohol industry to oblast [regional] tax revenues.” Given the primacy of alcohol revenues to regional governments, their representatives “acknowledged little opportunity to influence federal alcohol policy, and did little within their own areas of responsibility, such as their power to restrict hours when alcohol can be sold.”40
So, who could stand up against the flood of alcohol? Who controlled the local policy process? Not surprisingly, the London group found only two key political players: the Kremlin and the local alcohol producers themselves. In their case study region the local distillery generated over $70 million in tax revenue annually. With sixty-four percent of their output sold within the region, they strongly opposed any local restrictions. Despite the facade of federalism, any genuine policy change would have to be handed down from the Kremlin on high. The study concluded that “although ministries and regulatory agencies recognize that there is a problem, they are either conflicted, because of the revenue provided by the alcohol industry, or feel that it is not their responsibility. In part, their unwillingness to assume responsibility reflects a belief that it is up to the federal bodies to act.”41
In sum, even the centralization of high Putinism was triangulated through vodka politics—strengthening the regions’ reliance on alcohol revenues while disempowering civic initiatives to confront vodka in the name of public health. The result was a return to the eternal dynamics of Russia’s autocratic vodka politics—only now at a local level, multiplied a hundredfold.
Domesticating The Opposition
Reclaiming power from the regions was only part of Putin’s recentralization. Stabilnost also required marginalizing partisan opposition and subordinating the legislative and judicial branches to the executive. The result was a system of bureaucratized politics that shared corrupt elements with both Russia’s feudal and Soviet past.
Boris Yeltsin—even standing triumphantly atop a tank in the early 1990s—always saw himself as above partisan politics. His decision to be a president without a party was a major mistake. Thanks to the wrenching hardships of post-Soviet demodernization, popularly elected legislators across the political spectrum freely took potshots at a president, who had few defenders.
There were occasional attempts to create a “party of power” to support Yeltsin’s government and groom potential heirs. Unfortunately, the president’s coattails weren’t particularly long when he was lying drunk on the floor. In 1995 Yeltsin backed the centrist “Our Home is Russia” party to support then-prime minister (and founder of the natural gas mega-corporation Gazprom) Viktor Chernomyrdin. The party received only ten percent of the votes in the 1995 Duma elections before fading into oblivion. It did not help that Chernomyrdin shared Yogi Berra’s curse of tragicomic malapropisms: “Wine we need for health, and the health we need to drink vodka!” When asked about alcohol and Russian health, he quipped: “Better than vodka there is nothing worse!”42
Yeltsin shelled his own parliament in 1993 to constitutionally secure tremendous power for the executive. Even still, his Duma opponents were a constant nuisance. Pro-Western liberals condemned corruption and the brutal war in Chechnya. Nationalists and communists blasted Yeltsin for selling out Soviet greatness and regularly blocked his ministerial appointments.
Even at the close of his lame-duck second term, Yeltsin’s Duma opposition wanted to send him out with a black eye. In 1999, shortly after the U.S. Congress finished their impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about inappropriate sexual relations, the Russian parliament tried impeaching Clinton’s buddy Boris. The accusations against Yeltsin were a tad more severe, however. The Duma charged him with treason and murder for unlawfully dissolving the USSR, the shelling the parliament, launching the bloody war in Chechnya, and selling out Russia’s military might. The final accusation was the most damning: genocide. In May 1999, chairman of the Commission on Impeachment, Vadim Filomonov, highlighted the 4.2 million lives lost on the president’s watch. “Yeltsin consciously accepted the worsening of the living conditions of Russian citizens, with an inevitable rise in the mortality of the population and a decrease in the birthrate. All suggestions that the political course be changed were consistently refused.” Filomonov concluded the indictment with the melodramatic proclamation: “The blood of the murdered and crippled, the tears of the dying, degraded, and insulted beat in our hearts!”43
“Depopulation proceeds against the background of the worsening health of all age groups in the population,” explained Dr. Viktor Benediktov in the proceedings. “There is every reason to believe that the population of the country will be reduced to such a level in the twenty-first century that its preservation and replication will be impossible.” Amid allegations of $70,000 bribes for votes against impeachment—which would have forced Yeltsin from power—the motion fell seventeen votes short.44
Three months later, Vladimir Putin became prime minister and later president. Putin’s recentralization prevented similar humiliation at the hands of the opposition. In 2001 he began raising the requirements for registering political parties. By 2004 all parties required a minimum of fifty thousand members distributed evenly across Russia’s regions. New parties could be created only with the consent of the Kremlin. Over-the-top criticism of the government could be construed as “extremism”—and adequate grounds for disqualifying a candidate.45
While small parties were swept away, changes ahead of the 2007 Duma elections squeezed out medium-sized opposition parties. Electoral rules were changed from a mixed system to straight proportional representation, with a raised minimum threshold of seven percent of votes cast. Aimed at solidifying the major parties, liberal opposition parties like Yabloko and the Union of Rightist Forces, which received just less than seven percent, were suddenly on the outside looking in. The simultaneous elimination of legislative districts meant that no individual, no matter how charismatic or influential (like Yeltsin), could enter national politics without going through established parties. Consequently, the 2007 election empowered only four parties: Zyuganov’s Communist Party, Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats (who are neither liberal nor particularly democratic), a small leftist coalition called A Just Russia, and Putin’s United Russia party. With seventy percent of the seats in the Duma, United Russia was the main beneficiary of the alleged vote-rigging, ballot-stuffing, voter intimidation, media restrictions, and constriction of civil liberties that only seemed to increase from one election to the next.46 Such a supermajority made it easy to rubber-stamp Kremlin legislation and amend the constitution itself.
From threatening impeachment and blocking legislation in the 1990s to being effectively left out of the legislative process altogether by 2008, the organized party opposition had been marginalized within a few short years, with Putin and United Russia ruling supreme.47 But what was this United Russia party? Where did it come from? What did it stand for?
Amid economic turmoil and default in 1998, Moscow’s loyal, ambitious, and bald mayor Yury Luzhkov—whose office dominated the lucrative Kristall plant—hoped Yeltsin would appoint him as the new prime minister. He ultimately did not. Jilted, Luzhkov amassed dissatisfied members of Yeltsin’s Kremlin into a new party—Fatherland—to act as a powerful, centrist opposition to contest the 1999 Duma elections and the presidential elections the following year. Fatherland added powerful figures—like hawkish former Prime Minister Evgeny Primakov—and the “All Russia” faction of big business leaders and regional governors to create the Fatherland-All Russia coalition.
Suddenly threatened by this powerful centrist rival, the Kremlin hastily threw together a party called Unity to support the new prime minister, Vladimir Putin. Ironically, the hodgepodge of governors and Kremlin lackeys had little actual unity beyond their support for Putin. Also ironically, Putin has never been an actual member of Unity or its successor, United Russia—only “associated” with it. Initially, Unity’s only platform was to support the war in Chechnya. It was also endorsed by President Yeltsin, which normally would have been a political kiss of death. Yet partly due to Putin’s self-assured leadership, within two months Unity had become the country’s second largest political party (23%), well ahead of Fatherland-All Russia (13%), and just behind Gennady Zyuganov’s Communist Party (24%). Putin’s subsequent torching of Zyuganov in the 2000 presidential election (53% to 29%) extinguished the ambitions of the Fatherland-All Russia leadership, and in 2001 the party merged with Unity into a new party: United Russia.48
The rest, as they say, is history: greater stabilnost, economic growth driven by rising oil prices, rekindled national pride over the Chechen war effort, and a good deal of electoral shenanigans ensured United Russia’s victory in the 2003 Duma elections, with thirty-eight percent of the vote. In the face of Putin’s growing popularity and slanted playing field, longtime rivals like Zyuganov, Zhirinovsky, and Yavlinsky decided it was futile to even try to run for president, conceding a landslide seventy-one percent presidential victory for Putin in 2004.49
At the end of Vladimir Putin’s second presidential term, United Russia decimated the opposition, securing seventy percent of Duma seats in 2007. Shortly thereafter, Putin was crowned Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.” He is no boy scout, democrat, or paragon of free speech, Time explained, but “at significant cost to the principles and ideas that free nations prize, he has performed an extraordinary feat of leadership in imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it and brought Russia back to the table of world power.”50
Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrates the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of prestigious Moscow State University by sampling students’ traditional kvas and mead. Associated Press, ITAR-TASS.
Putin’s centralizing reforms gradually, yet effectively, reconstituted the traditional Russian autocracy. Increasingly, political power is exercised not through institutional checks and balances, but through a growing number of informal ties and extraconstitutional bureaucratic bodies: the Presidential Administration, the State Council that “advises” on social issues, the Security Council that considers military matters.51
Western fearmongers have hastily condemned Putinism as the “Soviet Union 2.0.” That is shortsighted. Certainly, neither Putin’s Russia nor the Soviet Union was a democracy—but then again, neither was the ultra-conservative tsarist empire that preceded it. The USSR was an expansionist empire driven by communist ideology. Putin has neither global expansionist interests nor an ideology of any kind—much less an anti-capitalist one.52 Putin’s primary goals are maintaining stability and the power of the system—another enduring trait of the traditional Russian autocracy.53 However, United Russia has filled the hegemonic political functions vacated when the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) crumbled. Like its Soviet predecessor, United Russia is “the guiding and directing force” of Russian politics, with power resting only in the hands an inner core of loyalists. Like in the Soviet days, party membership is the primary means of political advancement. Like the CPSU, the organs of the United Russia party parallel the formal institutions of governance and in many cases supersede them. Likewise, Putin’s Russia has an elaborate (though mostly decorative) formal system of representation, which is superseded by the informal ties of a small ruling elite. In the Soviet past those elites were part of the Central Committee of the CPSU—now they are part of the Presidential Administration, which even occupies the same buildings on Staraya Square in Moscow.54
More simply—as the unintentionally insightful Viktor Chernomyrdin quipped—“Whatever party we establish, it always turns out to be the Soviet Communist Party.”55
A Return To Normal?
Particularly among economists, the conventional wisdom about Russia’s demographic nightmare of the 1990s was that, since it was caused by economic downturn, once the economy got better so would Russia’s health. Logically, if economic uncertainty prevented couples from having children, the return of stabilnost should produce more babies. If layoffs, displacement, and poverty drove Russian men to seek refuge in the vodka bottle, then the expanding wealth and opportunities should lead them back out.56 Especially under Putin’s streamlined flat tax reform, more productivity would mean more government revenues and greater contributions to the cash-starved health system. In sum: Russia’s demographic crisis would all but solve itself.
Again, the conventional economic wisdom was dead wrong: while the economy was steaming ahead under Putin, Russia’s health did not snap back to the “normal” dynamics of the pre-crisis era. Riding high on oil, economic output finally eclipsed pre-collapse levels in 2004. By the time Putin first left the presidency in 2008, Russian GDP was triple what it was when Putin took office. Yet Russia’s health measures did not keep pace. Life expectancy crept slowly up, from 65.3 years in 2000 to 67.9 in 2008. Suicides, murders, and external traumas were all down. In 2008,
only twenty-four thousand Russians died from alcohol poisoning—half as many as in 2003 but still fifty times higher than in the West. The slight increase in fertility (from 1.2 children per woman to 1.5) wasn’t nearly enough to halt the shrinking of the Russian population.57
“The country just keeps going down—in numbers, in health, and in its possibilities for the future,” demographer Nicholas Eberstadt told New Yorker journalist Michael Specter at the time of Putin’s 2004 reelection. Putinism was making Russia more wealthy but less healthy. “Russia, like Africa, I am very sorry to say, is taking a detour from the rest of humanity as far as progress is measured by improving general health.”58
It wasn’t just that there were fewer Russians, but those who remained were more sickly—largely due to the epidemic levels of vodka consumption. At the end of Putin’s second administration, Dr. Aleksandr Baranov of the Russian Academy of Medical Science reported that Russians had actually become more languid and shorter than even during the depths of the Yeltsin-era nightmare. As human societies modernize, they generally get taller, making population height an important health indicator. Baranov’s announcement that “Russia is becoming one of the shortest nations”—measuring in a half-inch shorter than during the 1990s—flew in the face of reported macroeconomic progress. (Of course the replacement of the diminutive 5′7″ Putin in 2008 by the 5′4″ President Dmitry Medvedev did not dispel the image—and actually unleashed a barrage of short jokes, including how the new president was a product of Russia’s technological advancements in nanotechnology.) But this was no laughing matter—Russians had gotten more feeble: the average boy had lost eighteen percent of his muscle mass as compared to the Yeltsin years, whereas girls lost twenty-one percent. Average lung capacity was down twenty percent, and one in five children was underweight. Cases of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, cancers, hepatitis B and C, all manner of physical and mental disorders—and especially adolescent alcoholism—continued to ravage Russian youth. The ministry of defense raised alarms that the decreased quantity and quality of conscripts would undercut the military’s ability to field a healthy standing army—leading to the 2006 establishment of public health as one of four National Priority Projects: to be spearheaded by then-First Deputy Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev.59
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