Russia Turns the Corner

Stephen Sestanovich

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1994

Summary:  Despite apparent anarchy, Russia is passing three important tests for establishing a democracy. The military is acquiescing in the new democratic order, the old managers of the economy are losing their political grip, and the new regime has come to embody patriotism and legitimacy in the mind of the populace. A fledgling Russian republic may succeed where the Weimar Republic failed.

Stephen Sestanovich is Director of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Now that the confrontation with parliament is behind them, Yeltsin and his colleagues can deal much more effectively with the problems that it spawned. Although the central government is still being weakened in many ways, it retains major points of leverage over the provinces. As early as September, for example, the Cabinet began to hint about its possible responses to nonpayment of taxes: suspension of financing for federal spending in the territories; revocation of export licenses for strategic raw materials; termination of credits from the central government, including credits for purchases of foodstuffs; and a freeze of cash support for territorial banks.

One of the particular targets of this threat was the republic of Bashkortostan, which was unable to defy the central authorities for long. According to Russian media reports, its 1,700 oil wells were temporarily shut down, and federal purchases of the republic?s oil were suspended. This squeeze soon had its effect. On October 1--before the White House shoot-out--Bashkortostan and the federal government announced an agreement on resumption of tax payments.

The revolts of the enterprise directors and the provinces were caused by economic change, which has fallen well short of expectations. Further tests are ahead, of course, and the one that seems to be next--the structural transformation of heavy industry--could have more dangerous political consequences than anything yet seen. No one really knows what will happen when millions of Russians are thrown out of work. Yet even here--post-communist Russia?s biggest undertaking to date--there are reasons to be skeptical of alarmist scenarios.

For one thing, structural transformation is already underway, even without a full-blown government campaign. Industrial employment declined by three million workers in 1993, according to Gaidar, with virtually no effect on the unemployment rate. His explanation: Russia?s expanding service sector has picked up the slack.

Second, because joblessness will begin to rise in the near future (no matter how fast services grow), the government knows that it must build a functioning system of unemployment relief. As Gaidar puts it, policy must shift from protecting vulnerable factories to protecting vulnerable people. Such a welfare system would, moreover, immediately ease pressure on the state budget. Finance Minister Fedorov argues that paying unemployment benefits costs only a third of what it takes to keep running factories where the unemployed used to work.

To date, the attitude of the Russian people toward economic reform has been, as Sartre might have had it, that of the crowd waiting to take the bus, not the crowd waiting to take the Bastille. An effective social safety net would go a long way toward solidifying popular support for the Yeltsin government?s program. One recent poll found that 84 percent identified inflation as a prime concern; only 30 percent cited unemployment. These numbers are certain to change as more workers lose their jobs, but even unemployment need not threaten the regime if the government shows that it can help people through the transition.

THE POLITICS OF PATRIOTISM

The third challenge that Russian democracy must meet concerns national identity and pride. The country?s current troubles evoke centuries-old anxieties about whether Russia has a distinctive mission that can only be served by rejecting Western models. To this long-standing ambivalence, the collapse of the Soviet Union added a psychological jolt that may be felt for years to come. Russia?s relations with other former Soviet states--the so-called "near abroad"--will for the foreseeable future be the most important single issue in the politics of patriotism. This patriotism, however, need not pose a threat to the consolidation of democracy; to the contrary, there are already signs that it is losing its emotional charge.

This is not because the opposition has neglected it. For hard-line nationalists, who like to call the Yeltsin government an occupation regime, patriotic appeals are a way of challenging the legitimacy, even the moral fitness, of Russia?s new rulers. Democrats, they say, are basically traitors. Both Aleksandr Rutskoi and Ruslan Khasbulatov made increasing use of this theme in their struggle with Yeltsin last summer and fall. Typical was Khasbulatov?s charge that democrats consider patriotism inherently antidemocratic. "[H]ow can we not love our own people?" he fulminated to journalists. "I want to see the word patriotism in the newspapers."

One reason that democrats have sometimes done poorly in the politics of patriotism is that Khasbulatov?s claim was not his usual crude invention. Some Russian reformers really do consider patriotism dangerous and repugnant. The leaders of Democratic Russia, the umbrella group that united the anticommunist opposition in the days of Gorbachev, tirelessly repeat their view that democracy and patriotism are incompatible. In taking such a categorical stand, Democratic Russia may well play into the nationalists? hands, but it does not in any sense speak for the current government. Yeltsin himself has long made full use of the rhetoric of national pride and frequently refers to patriotic sentiment as a great national resource in rebuilding the country. One of his closest advisers, Vladimir Shumeiko, recently acknowledged that a post-communist regime, like its predecessor, must have its own ideology, and he identified the animating idea of all government policies as the "revival of Russia as a mighty state." For him, there are no contradictions between modernity and tradition: the goal of reform is "a new democratic state that is still Russia all the same."3