By Gordon M. Hahn - Senior Researcher, Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program and Adjunct Professor, Graduate School of International Policy Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, California and Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group. Dr Hahn is author of Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007) and Russia’s Revolution From Above (Transaction, 2002).
With the demise of winter and the arrival of a new leader, president-elect Dmitrii Medvedev, to the Kremlin in less than democratic circumstances, a Russian’s fancy naturally turns to the question of a political ‘thaw.’ Russian history has been a series of zigs and zags, periods of reform and counter-reform, punctuated by explosions of instability, violence, palace-coups, even revolutions. Emperor Paul’s reaction against Catherine the Great’s more enlightened rule was followed by aborted reforms under Alexander I. His son, Nikolai I, firmly established a bureaucratized police state under a reactionary ideology of ‘autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Russian nationality.’ Nikolai’s son, Alexander II, ushered in the “Great Reforms’ freeing the serfs and prepared a constitution. His assassination at the hands of anarchists prompted Alexander III to cancel his father’s political reforms and clamp down on press and society. After resisting and procrastinating, the 1905 revolution forced Alexander III’s son, Nikolai II, to introduce an elected parliament, which he later castrated. The failure to reform and World War I led to a potentially democratic revolution in February 1917 soon hijacked by the Bolsheviks in October. A brief retrenchment in Lenin’s revolutionary maximalism under the quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy in the early to mid-1920s was followed by Stalin’s rise to power. The Khrushchevan thaw followed the Stalin era of Great Terror, war, and more purges. Gorbachev’s perestroika came in the wake of the Brezhnev era of socialist stagnation and led to Yeltsin’s revolution from above, the collapse of the Soviet state, and the chaos of his rather anarchic democratization in the 1990s.
With Medvedev’s impending succession of President Vladimir Putin, there has been considerable speculation in both Russian and western media about another Russian thaw. But are there any signs of one?
It is certainly not unusual, regardless of the type of political system, that a transfer of power from one leader brings policy change. Even in cases where the new leader is a close political ally of the former one, a policy shift may be preferred either because the former policy is seen to have been less than optimal in effectiveness or has simply served its purpose. Moreover, there is reason to believe that President Putin’s choice of perhaps the least hard-line official in his inner circle already reflects a conscious choice to move away from the harder line fostered by the most reactionary Kremlin clan of siloviki (the various power ministries - security, military, internal affairs, and other law enforcement agencies) led by Igor Sechin and Viktor Ivanov would be propitious for liberalization.
The Sechin siloviki clan overplayed its hand in the wake of Putin’s appointment of Viktor Zubkov appointment as premier in October of last year. Sechin and his colleagues were emboldened by what it interpreted as Putin’s acceptance of their ‘succession’ scheme whereby Putin would ‘leave in order to return’ to the presidency after a brief, interim Zubkov presidency ending in resignation due to health reasons.
In preparation, hard-line siloviki faction began to move aggressively against softer-line siloviki and more liberal civilian clans in and around the Kremlin. Immediately after Zubkov’s confirmation, Anti-Narcotics Agency chief Viktor Cherkesov’s right hand man General Alexander Bulbov was arrested on corruption charges. Bulbov had led the investigation into the ‘Tri Kita’ (Three Whales) smuggling operation led by chekist associates of Sechin. Then weeks later, two Anti-Narcotics Agency officers were killed in St Petersburg. The Sechin faction also moved against the civilian Petersburg clan. In December, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin’s deputy, Yurii Storchak, was arrested and charged with attempting to embezzle the fantastic sum of $47 million. This was not the sort of behavior that helped ensure a glitch-free managed election campaign and presidential succession.
The untimely and largely one-sided war between the various siloviki clans seems to have forced Putin to forego a dangerous interregnum in which a weak Zubkov or other interim leader would have to control the unruly siloviki. Instead, Putin backtracked and developed a transition modality in which he could keep his hands on the helm gradually letting a less hard-line, more practical, if not liberal successor take over. His successor would have to be one who was not tied to either of the siloviki clans, could enlist the support of moderate civilian jurists, economists, and financiers, and like Putin would stand above and balance the interests of Moscow’s competing clans. Not surprisingly then, Putin decided to anoint his long-time Petersburg associate, the more independent and less conservative Dmitrii Medvedev, as his crowned successor. Within days, the General Prosecutor’s announced an inspection of the Investigation Committee conducting the cases against Bulbov and Storchak.
Surely, the Kremlin must be feeling confident now that the federal election cycle has been concluded according to one of its own scenarios with little if any damage done to its domestic or external legitimacy. Such confidence in its authority can facilitate an atmosphere in Moscow favorable for policy change.
The President-elect’s comments regarding the preference for freedom over non-freedom, the importance of civil society, the temporary nature of state corporations in housing and nanotechnology, the need to overcome Russia’s “legal nihilism” and endemic corruption, and his pledge that siloviki found to be pursuing wealth rather than ensuring law and order “will be fired and charged with crimes” are encouraging.
And there are indeed more concrete signs that a political thaw may be in the offing. President Vladimir Putin met with the democratic Yabloko party’s leader Grigorii Yavlinskii, and the latter refused todeny rumors that he was offered a position in the future Putin cabinet. At the meeting Putin promised Yavlinskii that he would look into the clearly unjust arrest by police provocation of the chairman of Yabloko’s St. Petersburg branch, and days later a Petersburg court dropped all charges against him. Days later the reopening of the official investigation into the death of prominent Yabloko member and Novaya gazeta journalist Yurrii Shchekochikhin was announced. Also in President Putin’s native city, the St- Petersburg-based European University, closed down on the pretext of alleged fire code violations, was allowed to re-open. The university had been hosting a program on election monitoring that apparently rubbed authorities the wrong way.
Also, the pro-Kremlin youth group ‘Nashi’ announced it was ceasing its street actions such as counter-demonstrations against opposition meetings and pickets of Western embassies. A recent decision in Ingushetia to close the local branch of the independent REN-TV station was soon reversed.
In foreign policy, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reported a more open-minded attitude in Moscow when they met with Medvedev and Putin last week, and the Russian leadership received the American proposals on ABM cooperation and a new START agreement positively, expressing a willingness to find a compromise.
To be sure, none of this as yet amounts to a thaw, and Russia observers as different in their political orientation as Sergei Belkovskii and Masha Lippman have rejected the possibility of a thaw. There indeed may be another explanation for at least some of these developments that must be kept in mind. Given the clampdown on opposition groups and civil society during the Duma and presidential election campaigns, the small but not insignificant signs of thawing noted above might simply be an effort to return to the pre-campaign status quo and remove some of the harsher steps taken to prevent any glitches or colored revolutionary activity during the elections.
Future signals that a thaw is or is not on the way will come with the appointments to Medvedev’s presidential administration and Putin’s government. Cadre appointments indicating a further decline in the fortunes of the hard-line faction among the siloviki clans.
Medvedev’s selection by Putin and subsequently the Russian electorate in more or less smooth fashion brings the Kremlin an opportunity to rethink some of the policy choices that were in some ways determined by circumstances not of its own making. Only time will tell whether Putin’s efforts to cool off the hothouse of Yeltsin’s unstructured, indeed anarchic democratization preface a targeted, narrow thaw, a more broad but cautious re-liberalization, or a set of concerted institutional changes and real re-democratization.
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