A Normal Country

Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004

Summary:  Conventional wisdom in the West says that post-Cold War Russia has been a disastrous failure. The facts say otherwise. Aspects of Russia's performance over the last decade may have been disappointing, but the notion that the country has gone through an economic cataclysm and political relapse is wrong--more a comment on overblown expectations than on Russia's actual experience. Compared to other countries at a similar level of economic and political development, Russia looks more the norm than the exception.

Andrei Shleifer is Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Daniel Treisman is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. For full references and data sources see http://papers.nber.org/papers/w10057.

In a "phony democracy," one would expect reported election results to match the desires of incumbents. Yet in Russia, results have often come as a shock to political elites. In 1991, for example, an outsider candidate, Yeltsin, beat the favorites of Gorbachev and the Soviet communist leadership to win the Russian presidency with 57 percent of the vote. In 1993, elites were horrified by the strong showing of Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his clownish ultranationalists. And in 1995, the Communist Party surprised observers by coming in first in the party-list vote, with 22 percent, a feat it repeated in 1999, when it won 24 percent. The main party associated with the incumbent regime won only about 15 percent in 1993 and 10 percent in 1995.

Some falsification and improprieties have undeniably occurred. In regional elections, officials have used technicalities to disqualify unfavored candidates. Limits on spending have been breached (although the totals spent -- even by the wildest estimates -- fall short of those of a typical election cycle in the United States or Brazil). And incumbents at all levels have misused state resources to campaign for reelection.

Russia's press has come in for particularly harsh criticism. In 2002, Russia scored 30 on a Freedom House scale that rates a country's level of "political pressures, controls, and violence" against the media from 0 (best) to 40 (worst). This placed Russia below Iran, whose government had banned 40 newspapers in just two years, imprisoned more journalists than any other country, and sentenced others to be flogged.

Criticism of Russia's press environment has come in two, not entirely consistent, forms. During the 1990s, the main problem was perceived to be oligarchs' control of major television stations and newspapers. More recently, however, critics have charged the state with trying to harass and intimidate independent journalists and close down oligarch-owned media.

Both arguments have some validity. But the claim that Russia has had an exceptionally unfree press does not. In almost every country, the largest television channels, radio stations, and newspapers are owned either by a few families or by the government. Press barons throughout the developing world slant political coverage on their networks to help favored candidates. In many middle-income countries, journalists and their bosses are accused of biasing their reports in return for bribes or favors in the privatization of media outlets. Even in rich countries such as Italy and the United States, journalists shape their broadcasts to fall into line with the views of media tycoons such as Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch.

What about recent state harassment of the press? A single case of repression is obviously one too many. But state interference with news organizations is, sadly, almost universal among middle-income countries, and it occurs even in some highly developed ones. The International Press Institute in Vienna collects figures on various kinds of state interference with journalism in the countries of the OSCE. Of the 48 countries monitored between 1999 and 2000, 26 had at least one incident in which the media was censored or journalists were imprisoned or sentenced to "excessive" fines. Although Russia's record was relatively bad during this period, it was nowhere near that of the worst offender in the group, Turkey. Russian journalists were sentenced to prison or "excessive" fines 6 times in those two years, as compared to 22 cases in Turkey and 7 in Hungary and Belarus. Russia had 19 reported cases of censorship, compared to 62 in Turkey.

Considering the pattern of state harassment in other middle-income countries, Russia appears to be depressingly normal. In 2000 and 2001, as Putin's government sought to hound the tycoons Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky out of the media business, the Western press sounded the alarm. But it paid far less attention to a strikingly similar campaign that was unfolding in South Korea. In what was widely perceived as a politicized effort by President Kim Dae Jung to punish newspapers critical of his government, the Korean National Tax Service and Fair Trade Commission investigated 23 media companies and presented them with multimillion-dollar fines. Prosecutors arrested executives from the three conservative newspapers most critical of President Kim and held them in solitary confinement. Kim's aide Roh Moo Hyun, who later replaced him as president, reportedly said that the newspapers were "no different from organized crime" and told reporters that he planned to nationalize them.

PUTIN PERSPECTIVE

Critics of Russian democracy have been energized in recent months, as various developments have seemed to confirm their gloomy assessments. In the last two years, President Putin has stepped up efforts to intimidate the press, and he has used economic leverage to shut down critical media and to scare off potential political rivals. Khodorkovsky's arrest, if it was meant -- as many believe -- to punish the tycoon for funding liberal political parties, sent a message that Putin will use his official powers to attack those rash enough to challenge him. The October 2003 election in Chechnya, meanwhile, in which 81 percent of voters reportedly cast ballots in favor of the Putin-supported president, had all the credibility of a ballot held in the shadow of a tank.