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Foreign Policy
After Yeltsin Comes... Yeltsin
By Daniel Treisman
This abstract is adapted from an article appearing in the Winter 1999-2000 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.
Barring some sort of constitutional coup, seven months from now a new president will be rearranging the furniture in the Kremlin’s official chambers. Whoever this successor turns out to be—current prime minister Vladimir Putin, Moscow’s mayor Yuri Luzhkov, former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, Krasnoyarsk governor Alexander Lebed, Communist Party chief Gennadi Zyuganov, or some wild-card candidate—he is likely to lead the country in a radically new direction, away from the lurching improvisations, regional crises, and politics of corruption and deadlock that characterized the late Yeltsin era. For better or worse, Russia seems headed somewhere new.
At least, so one might like to think. And many observers do. As a November 1998 editorial in the Washington Post put it, Russia’s failures in the late 1990s result from both the current president’s “mistakes” and his “inconstancy and absence during recent years of illness.” In the words of its editorialists: “Mr Yeltsin today cannot govern; and as long as he remains president, neither can anyone else.” Within Russia, opposition candidates actively cultivate the impression that Yeltsin’s departure will, by itself, put an end to Russia’s woes.
Despite its widespread acceptance, this image is almost completely wrong. The particular character flaws, intellectual lapses, and health problems of Yeltsin do not explain convincingly why successive Russian governments have become mired in corruption, why the economy has stagnated, and why the country’s territorial integrity seems so often an open question. The undesirable aspects of Russian politics and policies in the 1990s have resulted less from the bad decisions made by powerful central leaders-or even from their distraction as the president’s health worsened-than from these leaders’ extreme impotence. A saint or clairvoyant in the Kremlin would have also been hedged in by a variety of constraints—some political, some economic, and others even geographical—that would shrink any president’s room for maneuver.
First, Russia is and will remain a decentralized federation. While there is much to be said in favor of decentralization, the existence of 89 semi-autonomous regions also means that economic criminals or tax evaders have 89 possible hiding places and 89 chances to find a corrupt regional government. Large companies play the regions and the central government against each other. The president can do little but bargain with regional leaders who threaten secession in order to extort aid, pilfer federal taxes, and co-opt federal police or even army units on their territory.
Second, although political corruption is sometimes viewed as a personal failing of Russia’s current leadership, it is a function of the setting in which these leaders-whether naturally honest or avaricious-must operate. Countries that are as poor as Russia and that have had as little experience with democracy or openness to trade are always corrupt, as a quick glance around the world will confirm. Against the force of such conditioning factors, the integrity of one leader can only help a little at best.
Third, in Russia, huge quantities of extremely valuable natural resources are concentrated in a few regions. Two districts in Siberia produce four fifths of Russia’s oil and one fifth of the world’s supply, while the Sakha Republic accounts for one quarter of the world’s diamonds. Highly concentrated industrial conglomerates-such as the partially privatized natural gas company Gazprom-are another legacy of the Soviet Union. This concentration meant that those who happened to be sitting in the best seats after the Soviet-era music stopped became instant millionaires. Whether the raw materials barons cashed in their chips during the mafia-ridden free-for-all that was the late Soviet state economy or the equally corrupt market economy under Yeltsin is a secondary matter. The rise of a powerful economic oligarchy became inevitable.
Fourth, Russia’s fledgling democracy has a presidential system that does not guarantee a parliamentary majority for the chief executive. When, as has happened throughout the 1990s, the Russian president faces a hostile majority, significant policy changes should hardly be expected. Even presidential decrees can be overruled by parliamentary laws, and industrial lobbyists end up playing the Duma off the president just as they pit the central against the regional authorities.
These constraints remain. Yeltsin’s possible successors are starting out their campaigns with a variety of plans and programs, ranging from the communist revanche of Gennadi Zyuganov to the law-and-order primitivism of Alexander Lebed. Yet any one of the candidates, as he tries to implement campaign promises or even stray from them, will find himself blocked in by the realities of Russia’s political game, pushed back toward a set of policies and a style of governing that closely resemble Yeltsin’s. Like his predecessor, the next Russian president will alternately bargain with and fight challenges from the country’s regional governors, threaten to prosecute the big business “oligarchs,” while striking secret deals with some of them; promise social welfare benefits that never materialize; and scold the West rhetorically, while simultaneously negotiating for IMF aid. Within six months to a year after taking office, the next president will find himself against his will, to the horror of his supporters, and probably against all observers’ expectations ... “becoming Yeltsin.”
The challenge for Western states dealing with Russia in the next couple of years can be summed up in a question: What is the best way to deal with a naked emperor? Within the first year of taking office, the new Russian president, and his supporters, are likely to realize the emptiness of their hopes for a breakthrough. An emperor whose nakedness has become apparent will be preoccupied at least initially with finding some clothes, possibly leading to a sharpening of anti-Western rhetoric.
The danger is that Western politicians will overreact to the hostile rhetoric, stir up public opinion, and shut off contact, thus missing the opportunities that such rhetoric conceals. One day, probably about a year after he moves into the Kremlin, Russia’s next president will look in the mirror and see not himself but Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin. Let us hope that by that time the West has not taught itself to see Lenin or Stalin.
References
Rose Brady’s Kapitalizm: Russia’s Struggle to Free Its Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
Timothy Colton’s “Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s All-Thumbs Democrat” in Colton and Robert C. Tucker, eds., Patterns in Post-Soviet Leadership (Boulder: Westview, 1995)
Alexander Korzhakov’s Boris Yeltsin, Ot Rassvieta Do Zakata [Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Sunset] (Moscow: Interbook Publishing House, 1997) [see Lilia Shevtsova’s review in the Winter 1997-98 FOREIGN POLICY]
Lilia Shevtsova’s Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Realities (Washington: Carnegie Endowment, 1999)
Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman’s Without A Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming)
Strobe Talbott’s “Dealing with Russia in a Time of Troubles” (The Economist, November 21, 1998)
Treisman’s After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999)
Treisman’s “Russia’s Taxing Problem” (FOREIGN POLICY, Fall 1998)
Thomas F. Remington, Steven S. Smith, and Moshe Haspel’s “Decrees, Laws, and Inter-Branch Relations in the Russian Federation” (Post-Soviet Affairs, 1998)
Boris Yeltsin’s The Struggle for Russia (New York: Random House, 1994)