Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  Nor did Putin’s team succeed in trimming the bureaucracy and improving its quality. On the contrary, the civil service became bigger if not better, growing by 50 per cent (from 1.0 to 1.5 million in 2000–6). Putin himself complained that state officials were ‘ill-prepared for working out and implementing the decisions appropriate to the country’s present needs’, and on another occasion declared that ‘we should limit the power of bureaucrats, make them comply with laws, and provide for the transparency and openness of bureaucratic procedures’. Despite some flowery rhetoric, Putin also failed to eradicate corruption; as he admitted himself in May 2006, little had been achieved in eliminating a ‘major obstacle’ to development—corruption.

  Military reform proved equally elusive. The tragic sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk in August 2000 symbolized the pitiable state of the military: the sole recovery vehicle of the Northern Fleet was inoperative, having been cannibalized for spare parts. The increase in state revenues did, however, enable the government to increase the military budget from 7 billion dollars in 2001 to 30 billion in 2006. That spending enabled the development and testing of a new ICBM, the RS-24 (with a 10,000-kilometre range and MIRV capability) and the renewed production of nuclear submarines (with the launching of several in 2007—the first in seventeen years). That same year the government adopted a seven-year, 200 billion dollar rearmament plan to create a new generation of missiles, planes, and aircraft carriers. However, as Putin emphasized in May 2006, ‘we must not sacrifice the interests of socio-economic development to develop our military complex’. As a result, the Russian military budget remained comparatively small (that of the United States being twenty-five times greater) and did not even suffice to achieve an acceptable level of combat readiness. As the chief of the general staff declared in December 2008, only 17 per cent of the military units were combat ready, half of the warships were at anchor, and the like. Finally, still more problematic was the transformation of the military from a conventional force into one better suited to fight insurgencies and respond rapidly to crises. In particular, the government failed to abolish conscription and create an all-volunteer professional army, partly because of the spectre of high costs (exaggerated by military opponents of the change) and partly because of the low rate of re-enlistment by contract soldiers. As a result, Putin left the military slightly improved, but much as he found it—underfunded, unprepared, and untransformed.

  Society and Culture

  The prosperity of the Putin years significantly raised living standards. That meant, above all, a significant drop in the poverty level, as the number of those with incomes below the subsistence minimum fell from 40 to 16 per cent during Putin’s two terms. Not only the economic boom but government policy accounted for this decrease, especially its decision to raise pensions and keep pace with inflation. Unemployment, similarly, fell by half (from 12.4 to 5.9 per cent between January 1999 and January 2008). The rise in personal income (12 per cent per annum) reduced the army of poor and created a small, but growing, ‘middle class’, with 20 per cent of the population self-identifying themselves in this category. But the social sphere also offered negatives: the demographic crisis deepened, as the population continued to decline (from 146.3 million in 2001 to 142.0 million in 2008).

  Prosperity also failed to diminish inequality. The decile ratio (the proportion of the richest 10 per cent to the poorest 10 per cent), which had already jumped from a relatively egalitarian 4.5 (1991) to 13.8 (2001), edged upward to 15.6 by late 2007 (compared to 15.9 in the United States and 13.6 in the UK). Another measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient, rose from 0.399 in 2001 to 0.415 in 2008. And, apart from the handful of ‘oligarchs’ (such as Khodorkovskii) who ran afoul of the regime, the rich became the super-rich, with the number of billionaires increasing from 17 (2003) to 53 (2006) and controlling some 400 billion dollars in assets (or about one-third of the GDP).

  A stronger, richer state could afford more social services, but Putin’s government was no spendthrift, preferring instead to build up foreign exchange reserves and a stabilization fund. The state budget allocated 3 to 4 per cent of the GDP for health and education; and nearly 6 per cent for social security—in real terms, a marked improvement over the 1990s. In education, for example, the number of students in higher education (including new private universities as well as state institutions) rose from 4.7 million (2000–1) to 7.5 million (2007–8). Such gains were reflected in the World Bank’s ‘Human Development Index’ (HDI), an aggregated numerical rating that calculated a host of different variables (such as health services, education, and gender empowerment): Russia, while still significantly below other developed countries, none the less lifted its rating from 0.776 in 1995 to 0.806 in 2006.

  But Russia still lagged far behind the developed countries. That was apparent in its rank in the World Bank’s HDI: despite the improved score, in 2006 Russia was only 73rd of 179 countries and, over the entire post-Soviet era (1990–2006), had actually suffered a 0.014 drop in its aggregate HDI indicator (compared to a 0.156 rise in China). That decline was due mainly to the disastrous 1990s, but also reflected Putin’s reluctance to invest in the social sector. Thus in public health Russia’s ranking was even below its HDI score; revealingly, the World Health Organization ranked Russia 127th out of 192 countries. Official reports cited serious deficiencies: much of the medical equipment was obsolescent, the drug supply met only 30 to 40 per cent of demand, and more than two-thirds of those polled (in August 2006) complained that they could not get ‘good’ health care. The result was a decline in life expectancy; during Putin’s tenure, 2000–8, it dropped from 67.2 to 65.9 years. Russia, like other developed countries, also faces a looming pension crisis; by 2010 sheer demography—the widespread phenomenon of population ageing, with a higher mean age—dictated that the pension costs would rise steeply (50 per cent in a few years, according to some projections), and precisely at a time when the proportion of working population to retired elder would shrink. Another dark side, crime, also significantly worsened under Putin: the number of reported crimes rose 21 per cent (from 2.95 million to 3.58 million in 2000–8). In short, the Putin era witnessed some improvements in the social sphere, but the country still faced major challenges—some were due to the ‘catastroika’ of the 1990s, some reflected budget austerity, and others (in particular, demographic) resulted from long-term processes that were hardly unique to Russia.

  By contrast, the picture in the cultural sphere was much brighter, for the relative affluence of the Putin era proved a tremendous boon for creativity in the arts. The resurgence was particularly apparent in cinema, with the production of prize-winning films that earned international renown. Nikita Mikhalkov’s The Twelve (2007), based on the famous Twelve Angry Men, adapted the plot to show a Chechen youth who had allegedly murdered his Russian stepfather: the jury overcame ethnic stereotypes to declare the youth ‘not guilty’. Aleksandr Sokurov directed Russian Ark (2003), an innovative (if dizzying) film about the entire history of Imperial Russia, staged with 867 actors and produced in a single, uninterrupted shooting of 96 minutes, with the Hermitage as its backdrop. Contemporary Russian art, repressed in the Soviet era and ignored in the perestroika era and immediate post-Soviet years, suddenly came into favour after the turn of the twenty-first century. Ilya Kabakov’s 1981 painting La Chambre de luxe (1981) sold for 4.1 million dollars, and in 1998 the Tretiakov Art Museum displayed contemporary art in its first exhibition on twentieth-century Russian art. Buoyed by this demand, much of it coming from the wealthy ‘new Russians’, Sotheby’s opened a Moscow branch in May 2007, and Christie’s also made plans to enter the new lucrative Russian market. Literature also produced some popular but sophisticated best-selling novels, such as Viktor Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2005) and Vladimir Sorokin’s dystopian novel A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik (2006).

  The Putin era also witnessed a revival of religion, especially the Orthodox Church. The resurgence of Orthodoxy had begun dur
ing the perestroika and Yeltsin eras, but accelerated under Putin. The president himself, who unabashedly and (to all appearances) sincerely identified with Orthodoxy, emphasized his ties to the Church from the very outset, with a procession to the Cathedral of Annunciation immediately after his inauguration in May 2000. In subsequent years he reaffirmed those ties to the Church, with quasi-pilgrimages to hallowed sites and public expression of respect for the Church, its leaders, and the faith.

  The public, especially ethnic Russians, also displayed a growing identification with the Church. Whereas 24 per cent of the population self-described themselves as Orthodox in 1990, that quotient reached 62 per cent in 2005 and 73 per cent in 2008. Some observers, however, regarded such professions of piety to be more rhetorical than real; church attendance remained extremely low and only 2 per cent knew all of the Ten Commandments. Nonetheless, the popular affirmation of belief stimulated the recovery of institutional Orthodoxy, the number of registered parishes growing from 8,729 in 1999 to more than 12,214 parishes in 2006. After the death of Patriarch Aleksii II, closely associated with the Putin government, on 5 December 2008, the Church elected Kirill I and conducted the enthronement ceremony on 1 February 2009. The new patriarch brought a more liberal reputation to the office, especially in theological and liturgical issues, even in the contentious question of ecumenical ties (perhaps heralding better relations with the Vatican). Kirill was also quick to express a commitment to social issues: ‘Our Christian duty is to care for the suffering, for the orphaned, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, the prisoners, and the homeless. We can help all of these to regain hope. The voice of the Church should reinforce the voice of the weak and those deprived of power, so that they may find fitting justice.’

  The new prominence of the Orthodox Church, including the demonstrative display of ties to the country’s leaders and government, aroused deep concern among secularists and adherents of other confessions. Most controversial of all were the attempts by the Church to reclaim a role in education, including demands for ‘religious education’ and even instruction in the ‘foundations of Orthodox culture’. That provoked vehement opposition from secularists, including academicians; even state officials spoke in favour of allowing only generic instruction in ‘world religions’, not a specifically Orthodox curricular requirement. The government’s caution derived from the fact that Russia remains, despite the renaissance of Orthodoxy, a multi-confessional state. Of the total registered local religious communities (22,523), the remaining 10,309 (45.8 per cent) belong to a variety of Christian and non-Christian groups. By far the largest was Islam, with 3,668 communities (16 per cent of the registered religious groups), which represent a Muslim population estimated at 20 to 24 million, with strong concentrations in the north Caucasus, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan. Muslims constituted the fastest growing segment of the population, increasing 40 per cent since 1989, with 2.5 million in Moscow itself. Muslims also used the religious freedom in post-Soviet Russia to reclaim property and reopen mosques, which increased from 150 in 1991 to approximately 6,000 in 2006.

  Russia and the World

  The economic boom and state-building encouraged the Putin leadership to reclaim Russia’s former status as a major power. In talks with the Italian prime minister in 2007, Putin bluntly asserted his country’s claim to global power: ‘As Russia’s economic, political and military capabilities grow in the world, it is emerging as a competitor—a competitor that has already been written off. The West wants to put Russia in some pre-defined place, but Russia will find its place in the world all by itself.’ From the very outset, Putin embraced an ambitious foreign policy that would eventually be called the ‘new realism’. Its basic premiss was that Russia should foreground its economic and business interests, yet continue to seek integration into the global economy. Putin showed some sensitivity to ‘soft power’ as an alternative to military force. He also demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with the West in the wake of 11 September 2001, agreeing to open Russian air space for the NATO campaign in Afghanistan and acquiescing in the creation of temporary US airbases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

  However, Moscow’s response to 9/11 did not presage better relations with Washington, which steadily worsened thereafter. To be sure, Putin famously charmed the American president George W. Bush, who, after a summit in June 2001, gushed: ‘I looked into that man’s eyes and saw that he is direct and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. And I saw his soul.’ But others in his administration saw something else—a former KGB officer, a challenge to American dominance, an obstacle to the onward march of ‘democracy’. At the very outset of the Bush presidency, his then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, declared that ‘Russia is a threat to the West in general and to our European allies in particular’. Six years later Vice-President Richard Cheney, in a meeting of East European leaders, accused Moscow of using energy as a political weapon and demanded that it ‘return to democratic reform’.

  The challenge from Washington did not go unanswered. Shortly after the Cheney speech (which ignited an uproar in Russia), Putin bristled that ‘we are categorically against such intervention into our affairs’, and a high-ranking official (and regime ideologue), Viacheslav Surkov, declared that Russia must defend its rights as a ‘sovereign democracy’. The minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, castigated America’s arrogant ‘transformational diplomacy’ (codeword for the promotion of democracy), neo-containment rhetoric, and unipolarity. Putin himself responded in kind to what he saw as American hypocrisy and provocations. Thus, after Bush unveiled a memorial to the ‘victims of communism’ (accompanied by a wave of anti-Soviet declarations), Putin recommended that the United States—which was so generous in exposing the dark sides of Russian history—look back at its own sorry record: ‘We have not used nuclear weapons against a civilian population [as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki]. We have not sprayed thousands of kilometres with chemicals [an allusion to agent orange], or dropped seven times more bombs [in Vietnam]’ than in all of the Second World War. In early 2007 Putin fumed that Russia is ‘constantly being taught about democracy, but for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn it themselves’.

  Substantive differences fuelled the rancour and rhetoric. One was Moscow’s concern about American expansionism, especially in ‘post-Soviet space’—the former Soviet republics and Russia’s neighbours. Above all, Putin opposed Washington’s campaign to promote pro-Western democracy by financing the ‘colour revolutions’, bringing to power regimes which would not only replicate Western democracy but also ally with the West against Moscow. American intervention succeeded in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, where support (monetary, not merely rhetorical) for ‘democratic forces’ helped to topple current governments and install pro-Western regimes. It was precisely this foreign intervention that provoked the 2006 decision to regulate NGOs that relied on Western, official or private, financing.

  A second flashpoint of contention was the Middle East. Russia deemed the American military attack on Iraq an unjustified, illegal violation of the UN Charter. Putin emphasized that the Americans had failed to find weapons of mass destruction—the putative reason for launching a military invasion without authorization from the UN Security Council. Iran was another bone of contention. The West, led by Washington, accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons and insisted on harsh sanctions to prevent the ‘nuclearization’ of Iran. Moscow, however, resisted such demands and refused to cancel its contract to build a nuclear plant at Bushehr (ostensibly for peaceful purposes). It also reportedly sold sophisticated anti-aircraft battery units to Iran, which severely complicated American and Israeli threats to launch a pre-emptive military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations.

  A third issue was disarmament and nuclear deterrence. The dispute erupted at the very beginning of the Bush presidency, when Washington decided unilaterally to renounce the ABM treaty of 1972—which limited each side to a single missile defence system—and to r
esume development of Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’, the National Missile Defence (NMD) system, initially in North America, but later in Europe as well. The NMD in Europe was purportedly intended to neutralize a potential Iranian or North Korean missile threat by positioning a missile defence unit in Poland and an advanced radar system in the Czech Republic. Russia vehemently objected, suspecting that the real objective was to neutralize Russia’s own nuclear deterrence. Given the size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, Moscow’s argument did not seem very compelling; no doubt more weighty were other considerations, especially the fear that NMD would generate new technological spin-offs (to Russia’s disadvantage) and strengthen America’s strategic superiority. The Putin government also realized that NMD would unleash a new arms race (forcing Russia to undertake a costly modernization of its own nuclear defence system), which was most unwelcome at a point when Moscow sought to limit military expenditures in order to concentrate on economic development and diversification. Another thorny issue was the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) between NATO and the Warsaw Pact Countries, which limited the size and deployment of military forces along the borders of Western states and the Soviet bloc. That agreement had been revised in 1999 (to account for the break-up of the USSR and Warsaw Pact), but the revised text gave rise to new disputes, with the result that only Russia and three close allies ratified the new text. Angered by the Western refusal to ratify the revised text, Russia formally withdrew from the CFE in December 2007, declaring that it could no longer tolerate a one-sided disarmament policy.