Bureaucrats and Russian Transition: The Politics of Accommodation

At a recent Kennan Institute talk, Yevgenia Albats, columnist, The Moscow Times; host, Echo Moskvyi; and Professor of Political Science, Moscow Higher School of Economics, spoke about the role that state officials have played in Russia's transition. According to Albats, following the collapse of Communism, newly elected state leaders had to choose between forcing Soviet-era bureaucrats out of government and coopting the bureaucrats to work in the new system. She argued that the most successful transitions occurred in those states that forced Communist bureaucrats out of government and pursued an aggressive strategy of de-Communization. In Russia, where 70 percent of bureaucrats serving in 2001 had been in government during the Brezhnev era, Albats contended that state officials have prevented any real liberal democratic reforms from being implemented.

Albats suggested that democracy should be viewed as a commodity that needs to have buyers. In order for democracy to develop in Russia, there must be a class of "consumers of democratic politics," consisting primarily of people involved in small and medium businesses. Unfortunately, Albats warned, the number of people employed in small and medium business in Russia has declined from a peak of 8.9 million in 1995 to only 6.3 million in 2001. At the same time, the proportion of bureaucrats relative to the population has been increasing: In the Soviet Union, there was one bureaucrat for every 75.6 citizens, and in Russia today there is one bureaucrat for every 49.6 citizens.

Based on surveys and interviews conducted with 706 Russian federal officials at different levels of authority, Albats argued that Russian bureaucrats are not in favor of democratic politics—over 50 percent of her respondents were opposed to transparency. She noted that the majority of regulations existing in Russia today were issued not by the Duma or the President but by various state agencies.
Thriving in a system rife with corruption and lack of accountability, Soviet-trained bureaucrats have stifled the growth of small businesses in Russia, according to Albats.

Albats challenged the conventional wisdom that state officials are very poorly paid in Russia, noting that only a small percentage of bureaucrats ever leave government service to enter the private sector. She argued that the monetary value of the apartments, cars, medical care, and other benefits that bureaucrats receive is many times greater then their nominal salaries. Factoring in benefits, Albats found that the highest level bureaucrats receive over $500,000 per year. In her research, she found that salary was not a factor that influenced bureaucrats' desires to remain in or leave government service.

Russia missed out on the opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Union to dismantle the structures of the "ultra-bureaucratic state," according to Albats. In the early stages of the transition, Soviet bureaucrats were able to engage in de facto privatization of state resources, and many left the government to establish private firms, she said. However, during the political and economic crises of the 1990s, Soviet bureaucrats returned to government at all levels in order to make use of the opportunities created by the free market and the protections of office for their personal gain. Albats argued that this created the consolidated, pervasive bureaucracy that Russia has today.