The Myth of the Authoritarian Model

How Putin's Crackdown Holds Russia Back

Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Summary:  A growing conventional wisdom holds that Vladimir Putin's attack on democracy has brought Russia stability and prosperity -- providing a new model of successful market authoritarianism. But the correlation between autocracy and economic growth is spurious. Autocracy's effects in Russia have in fact been negative. Whatever the gains under Putin, they would have been greater under a democratic regime.

MICHAEL MCFAUL is a Hoover Fellow, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. KATHRYN STONER-WEISS is Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University

The conventional explanation for Vladimir Putin's popularity is straightforward. In the 1990s, under post-Soviet Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, the state did not govern, the economy shrank, and the population suffered. Since 2000, under Putin, order has returned, the economy has flourished, and the average Russian is living better than ever before. As political freedom has decreased, economic growth has increased. Putin may have rolled back democratic gains, the story goes, but these were necessary sacrifices on the altar of stability and growth.

This narrative has a powerful simplicity, and most Russians seem to buy it. Putin's approval rating hovers near 80 percent, and nearly a third of Russians would like to see him become president for life. Putin, emboldened by such adoration, has signaled that he will stay actively involved in ruling Russia in some capacity after stepping down as president this year, perhaps as prime minister to a weak president or even as president once again later on. Authoritarians elsewhere, meanwhile, have held up Putin's popularity and accomplishments in Russia as proof that autocracy has a future -- that, contrary to the end-of-history claims about liberal democracy's inevitable triumph, Putin, like China's Deng Xiaoping did, has forged a model of successful market authoritarianism that can be imitated around the world.

This conventional narrative is wrong, based almost entirely on a spurious correlation between autocracy and growth. The emergence of Russian democracy in the 1990s did indeed coincide with state breakdown and economic decline, but it did not cause either. The reemergence of Russian autocracy under Putin, conversely, has coincided with economic growth but not caused it (high oil prices and recovery from the transition away from communism deserve most of the credit). There is also very little evidence to suggest that Putin's autocratic turn over the last several years has led to more effective governance than the fractious democracy of the 1990s. In fact, the reverse is much closer to the truth: to the extent that Putin's centralization of power has had an influence on governance and economic growth at all, the effects have been negative. Whatever the apparent gains of Russia under Putin, the gains would have been greater if democracy had survived.

POLITICAL THERMIDOR

The process of democratization started before Russian independence. In the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev began to introduce important reforms, including competitive elections for many national and local offices, pluralism in the media (even when still state-owned), and freedom of association for political and civic groups. After 1991, Russia started developing all the basic elements of an electoral democracy. There were competitive elections for parliament and the presidency and mostly competitive elections for regional governors. Political parties of all stripes, including opposition communist and ultranationalist groups, operated freely, as did nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Electronic and print media outlets not controlled by the state multiplied. So vibrant was the political opposition that Yeltsin twice faced possible impeachment by the Communists in the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament. Deep divisions among national officials, regional governors, oligarchs, and media outlets made the 1999 parliamentary election the most competitive contest in Russian history.

Yeltsin was far from a perfect democrat: he used force to crush the Russian parliament in 1993, bulldozed into place a new constitution that increased presidential power, and barred some parties or individuals from competing in a handful of national and regional elections. He also initiated two wars in Chechnya. The system that Yeltsin handed over to Putin lacked many key attributes of a liberal democracy. Still, whatever its warts, the Russian regime under Yeltsin was unquestionably more democratic than the Russian regime today. Although the formal institutional contours of the Russian political system have not changed markedly under Putin, the actual democratic content has eroded considerably.

Putin's rollback of democracy started with independent media outlets. When he came to power, three television networks had the national reach to really count in Russian politics -- RTR, ORT, and NTV. Putin tamed all three. RTR was already fully state-owned, so reining it in was easy. He acquired control of ORT, which had the biggest national audience, by running its owner, the billionaire Boris Berezovsky, out of the country. Vladimir Gusinsky, the owner of NTV, tried to fight Putin's effective takeover of his channel, but he ended up losing not only NTV but also the newspaper Segodnya and the magazine Itogi when prosecutors pressed spurious charges against him. In 2005, Anatoly Chubais, the CEO of RAO UES (Unified Energy Systems of Russia) and a leader in the liberal party SPS (Union of Right Forces), was compelled to hand over another, smaller private television company, REN-TV, to Kremlin-friendly oligarchs. Today, the Kremlin controls all the major national television networks.

More recently, the Kremlin has extended its reach to print and online media, which it had previously left alone. Most major Russian national newspapers have been sold in the last several years to individuals or companies loyal to the Kremlin, leaving the Moscow weekly, Novaya Gazeta, the last truly independent national newspaper. On the radio, the station Ekho Moskvy remains an independent source of news, but even its future is questionable. Meanwhile, Russia now ranks as the third-most-dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, behind only Iraq and Colombia. Reporters Without Borders has counted 21 journalists murdered in Russia since 2000, including Anna Politkovskaya, the country's most courageous investigative journalist, in October 2006.

Putin has also reduced the autonomy of regional governments. He established seven supraregional districts headed primarily by former generals and KGB officers. These seven new super governors were assigned the task of taking control of all the federal agencies in their jurisdictions, many of which had developed affinities with the regional governments during the Yeltsin era. They also began investigating regional leaders as a way of undermining their autonomy and threatening them into subjugation.