The Myth of Democratic Power: Politics in Russia from Perestroika to Putin

At a recent Kennan Institute talk, Marc Garcelon, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Middlebury College, and former Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar, Kennan Institute, argued that, despite a veneer of democratic institutions, Russian politics have never been truly democratic. Although significant liberalization and democratization did occur under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, neither Gorbachev nor subsequent Russian leaders allowed democracy to consolidate.

The system that Gorbachev inherited, Garcelon stated, was a well-established hierarchy. At the top of the system was the Central Committee of the Communist Party, who had direct control over the appointments of the next level—the nomenklatura. According to Garcelon, by the end of the Brezhnev era, the high-level state officials who comprised the nomenklatura had become an entrenched, rent-seeking elite. Under the nomenklatura were lower-level bureaucrats (apparatchiks), specialists (well-educated individuals working in science, education, and culture), workers, and farmers. The conservative nomenklatura proved to be an obstacle to Gorbachev's efforts to reform Soviet communism and increase economic productivity. Gorbachev's glasnost reforms, Garcelon contended, were an attempt to gain the support of the specialists against the nomenklatura by promoting democratization and an open society.

However, Gorbachev's reforms satisfied no one, Garcelon said. Supporters of democracy quickly became radicalized and demanded that reforms go further, while supporters of the Soviet system feared that it was being destroyed. The 1989 elections to the Congress of People's Deputies provided Gorbachev's opponents with a degree of legitimacy, which Gorbachev himself—who had never stood for election—did not have. The supporters of democracy, Garcelon continued, formed an alliance around Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin, who became the most powerful political figure in Russia. Meanwhile, according to Garcelon, nationalist movements were becoming increasingly powerful, both in the non-Russian Soviet Republics and inside Russia itself. As the republican nationalist movements broke the Soviet Union apart, regional nationalist movements were co-opted by local nomenklatura, who developed regional strongholds in many areas of Russia.

After the collapse of the USSR, President Yeltsin and his administration began a program of shock therapy intended to rapidly establish a market economy in Russia. The economic turmoil, combined with Yeltsin's 1993 standoff with the Congress of People's Deputies and other undemocratic actions, discredited the democratic movement in the eyes of many Russians, according to Garcelon. The Yeltsin era, he argued, was the era of the oligarchs and the establishment of a mercantilist system in Russia. The mercantilist system collapsed with the 1998 financial crisis, he argued. This was followed by the rise of Vladimir Putin, who was virtually unknown when he was appointed prime minister in 1999, but developed considerable popularity following his reaction to the apartment bombings in September of 1999 and the subsequent renewal of war in Chechnya. Putin, Garcelon contended, went on to destroy many of the remaining aspects of open society in Russia, and has built a soft authoritarian system in the guise of a democracy.