Democracy in Russia

Largely forgotten before this year, the RPR is one of Russia’s oldest liberal (in the Russian sense–right-of-center, pro-market, and reformist) parties. Founded in 1990, it failed repeatedly to gain a foothold in the Duma, and sank from view. This year, however, the party was back in the headlines, overhauling its rules, adopting a new platform, and installing new leaders.

It was clear on the morning of July 2, in the Rusotel Hotel on the outskirts of Moscow, that this renewal went beyond any mere reorganization. Rejuvenation, even exuberance, was in evidence in the auditorium where several hundred delegates from 58 of Russia’s 89 provinces applauded and booed. The gathering overflowed with an energy and optimism I have not seen among Russian democrats since the revolution of the late 1980s.

Most reminiscent of those halcyon days, however, was the abandon with which the delegates criticized the government. Their indictment was remarkable both in its scope and its merciless intensity. It found vigorous expression in the documents released by the conference–an “Appeal to the Citizens of Russia” and a platform–as well as in speeches and debates, which were webcast live on the party’s website.

Yes, states the platform, Russia has enjoyed remarkable growth since 1999, with both GDP and incomes rising by a third and the number of people in poverty falling by half. But this growth is due largely to high oil prices. Outside the commodity sector, expansion has been modest and slowing, with rates of increase consistently smaller than in China, India, or Brazil.

The Russian people are receiving less and less of the “oil-soaked” economic pie. According to the platform, Russia is eighty-second in the world in per capita GDP, and one-fifth of the population still lives in poverty. Corruption is pervasive. About half of the money earmarked for government programs is stolen. The Soviet-era education and health systems, housing, and utilities are threadbare, failing, and starved for funds. At the same time, the armed forces, made up of conscripts, are bloated and ineffective, and the police are crooked, incapable of protecting the public from Chechnya-based terrorism, despite infusions of billions of rubles in additional funding.

Although the particulars of this indictment are staples of the Russian press, the ferocity of the RPR’s attack is singular. And so is the Republicans’ explanation for these and many other ills, spelled out in Section One of the platform. Entitled “The Quagmire of Authoritarianism,” it ascribes “all the systemic failures of Russia in recent years” to the Kremlin’s seeking a “monopoly of power.”

At the heart of the Republican party’s quarrel with the regime of Vladimir Putin is the latter’s assault on the democratic institutions and practices that “began to develop as a result of the democratic revolution of the 1990s.” Starting with the party’s motto–“Together, Toward Freedom and Dignity”–the word svoboda, which means both “freedom” and “liberty” in Russian, is by far the most common word in the RPR’s official statements. The title of the platform is “Individual Freedom, Honest Government, and a Dignified Life for All.”

Similarly, the conference’s “Appeal to the Citizens of Russia” begins: “We are guided by the conviction that as a strong, united, and peaceful state, which competes successfully with other states, Russia can survive and develop only in freedom–political and economic freedom, intellectual and spiritual freedom.”

Twenty years ago, the document continues, Russia “started down the path of freedom.” It was a difficult road, and many mistakes were made. Yet so long as Russia “moved toward freedom,” there was a chance of creating a just society and a dignified existence. “Today Russia is being forced off the path of freedom and thus deprived of its future. That is why we declare our principled rejection of the present political regime and its social and economic policies.” Authoritarianism, with its “fear and unfreedom,” can lead only to “backwardness and poverty.” The regime’s apparent determination to create a “bureaucratic police state” is driving Russia deeper and deeper into “shabbiness and injustice.” Therefore the struggle against such a state and “for freedom and democracy” is the “key precondition for Russia’s success.”

The muzzling of television and increasing pressure on the print media, restrictions on demonstrations and referendums, the bureaucratic hassling of opposition and independent parties and candidates have resulted in the dramatic weakening of democratic accountability, say the Republicans. Unelected bureaucrats are again in charge. Likewise, the state’s push to regain a monopoly over at least the most lucrative sectors of the economy and to constrain economic freedom are responsible for slowing economic growth. The platform scores the flimsy protection of property rights and the various forms of extortion to which private businesses are subjected by local and central authorities.

The state, which should exist to serve the people, is again becoming their master. A new, united democratic opposition party is needed to reverse this trend–a party that will “strive daily to protect the political and civil liberties of Russian citizens, and to create a modern, competitive, market economy.” Of the five “priority tasks” facing Russia, says the platform, the first is “the struggle to democratize Russia” and to bring the state back under “democratic control.”

IT IS HARD TO THINK OF A MORE FITTING LEADER for Russia’s reconstituted Republicans than Vladimir Ryzhkov, a member of the party’s collective leadership, the political council. (To dampen the battle of egos that has crippled Russia’s democrats in the past, the reorganized RPR has no chairman or president.) At 39, Ryzhkov represents a new political generation. He came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a “child of Gorbachev,” as he calls himself. Unlike the elites born or based in Moscow or St. Petersburg–but like both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin–Ryzhkov is a quintessential provincial Russian, a native of the Altai Territory, in southern Siberia, 1,860 miles from Moscow and about 65,000 square miles in area (slightly larger than England).

A graduate of Altai State University, he taught there and received a doctorate in history. Ryzhkov is married to a fellow historian turned lawyer and has an 11-year-old daughter.

Eighteen years old and a student when Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Ryzhkov quickly became a leader of the democracy movement in Altai. After the failed coup of August 1991, when Yeltsin appointed new regional administrators, the new governor of Altai chose the 25-year-old Ryzhkov as his first deputy. Two years later, Ryzhkov was elected to the first post-Soviet Duma from the district capital, Barnaul (population 600,000). He was reelected three times (in 1995, 1999, and 2003) by large margins. In 1997 the deputies elected him first deputy speaker of the Duma.

Although he has been in national politics for 12 years, Ryzhkov has never been implicated in any scandal–an almost unheard of distinction among top Russian public figures. (The only other exceptions that come to mind are two veteran liberals and ex-co-chairs of the Union of Rightist Forces, former acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar and former first deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov. To judge for themselves, Russian speakers may consult www.compromat.ru, which lists the real or alleged offenses of “compromised” politicians.)

A handsome, trim man in wire-rimmed glasses, Ryzhkov goes in for what Americans might call extreme tourism. Last year, he and several friends trekked on horseback through 150 miles of virgin Siberian taiga to a glacier, fording rivers and subsisting on fish they caught under the ice and cooked over a campfire. The journal of the Russian Geographic Society published Ryzhkov’s travel diary, which later won the Society’s prize for the best travelogue. (Ryzhkov reprised the journey this past March, in temperatures reaching-40 Fahrenheit.)

It seemed in character, then, that he chose as the locus for our interview not a stuffy Duma reception room, but the slick, chrome-and-glass Zen Café (a Moscow Starbucks-like chain) where he stops every morning for breakfast on his way to work. The place is on a cobbled street not far from Red Square that’s closed to cars and filled with bookstores and restaurants. On that fine July morning, it was indistinguishable from a quiet side street in Paris, Rome, or Berlin. I found Ryzhkov drinking a double espresso and reading newspapers.

Ryzhkov says his “dream” is to “ensure the success of Russia’s second attempt to become free.” In his keynote speech at the conference, he compared today’s Russia to the giant in a folktale who is bound hand and foot–bound, that is, by a corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy. “Our task,” he said, “is to free the giant, give him a chance to breathe deeply and freely, and allow him to march toward liberty and progress.”

According to Ryzhkov, it is impossible to live with dignity unless government is honest. And honest government can be ensured “only by democratic principles and individual freedom.” He closed his conference speech with, “Long live democratic Russia!”

In private, he expressed confidence in Russia’s ability to become fully democratic–and contempt for those he sees as blocking the way. Of the lies the Kremlin spreads in the West, Ryzhkov told me, one of the most pernicious is that the Russian people are somehow different from others and not ready for democracy. According to this party line, Putin is more liberal than most Russians, and the only alternative to him is a fascist nationalist. “Nonsense!” Ryzhkov said angrily. “Our people are normal, no different from any other! They want to live in a normal country with liberty, democracy, and prosperity.”

To Ryzhkov, Putin’s proto-authoritarian centralization, with its pressure on freedom of speech, harassment of civic organizations, and elimination of local self-government, is not only anticonstitutional, it is dangerous as well. Instead of the promised stability, Putin’s policies have brought tension, destabilization, and record corruption. Nor has the concentration of power–which Putin dresses up in the phrase “vertical power”–protected the country from terrorism or civil and ethnic strife. More people have died in the Northern Caucasus (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Northern Ossetia, and Dagestan) under Putin than in the 1990s, Ryzhkov said. Dagestan, the largest of the autonomous republics of the region (population 2,179,000), is virtually ungovernable today.

In Ryzhkov’s view, the country is being pushed to a “historic dead-end” by authoritarianism, state capitalism, corruption, and the oil-based economy. We were promised a “firm, top-down government,” Ryzhkov said, but what we have today is a “loose nail–the president’s popularity rating–on which the entire state hangs.” The more authoritarian it becomes, the more the regime distances itself from the people and the country, the more it fears free debate and free elections, the deafer and blinder it is and the less capable it grows of solving the big problems Russia faces. These include a deepening demographic crisis brought about by high mortality and a below-replacement birthrate; an incipient AIDS pandemic; sharp economic inequality; and the declining quality of health care and education for the poor.

As a party-builder, Ryzhkov seems to have learned from the mistakes of the first generation of post-Soviet democrats. He wants his party constructed from the bottom up, with maximum autonomy for local chapters. He is determined to avoid the top-heavy, Moscow-centric model that binds local activists hand and foot by requiring permission from headquarters for the minutest change in local alliances or campaign tactics, and in which the incessant bickering of leaders at the center is replicated in the regions, demoralizing pro-reform voters and leading to political defeat.

The great promise of Ryzhkov’s model is that it takes into account Russia’s enormous economic, political, ethnic, and cultural diversity. Like the centralized state that Putin is attempting to recreate, a centralized, all-Russia political party must inevitably be a shaky and artificial creation, kept alive by what Russians call “administrative resources” and generous funding from state coffers–as is today’s “party of power,” United Russia. (The only exception is the Communist party, with its uniquely disciplined but actuarially challenged electorate.) The Republicans’ new platform calls for the broadest possible electoral alliances with other democrats at the local level and party membership open to anyone who wants to join, including members of other democratic parties.

I suggested to Ryzhkov that he is building a party of the American, rather than the European, kind: loosely organized, with self-governing chapters that come together, after much gnashing of teeth, only for national elections. Because of America’s diversity, a Democrat from Manhattan or San Francisco is almost as far from his or her Texas or Georgia counterpart as he is from a Republican, I told him. This is a novel concept in the Russian context, dominated as it is by the century-old Leninist tradition of “democratic centralism,” with its ideological uniformity and unconditional subjugation to the “center,” copied from the German Social Democrats whose iron discipline Lenin so admired. Yes, Ryzhkov replied, somewhat to my surprise, the American model is different–and it’s precisely the sort of party he has in mind.

WILL RYZHKOV SUCCEED at turning the Republican party into a national democratic movement, capable of winning a sizable presence in the Duma in 2007 and mounting a credible campaign for president in 2008?

The obstacles are enormous. At Putin’s “suggestion,” the Duma a month ago passed legislation eliminating the single-member districts from which half of the Duma deputies have been elected until now. Instead, in 2007, all candidates must run on party lists. Guidelines adopted in November 2004 further require the parties to jump through so many hoops to register their candidates that they are almost entirely at the mercy of local authorities and the Kremlin-subservient Central Electoral Commission. For instance, to qualify for the ballot, a political entity now must have 50,000 registered members (up from 10,000), with at least 500 members in each of Russia’s 89 regions (up from 100). This in a country where fewer than 1 percent of registered voters have belonged to any party at all. To comply with the new laws, existing parties must reregister by January 1, 2006, which means the Republicans must more than triple their membership, from 15,000 to 50,000, in mere months.

In addition, the heretofore common practice of two or more parties’ joining to form an electoral bloc has been prohibited, while the minimum share of the national vote a party must win in order to secure seats in the Duma has been raised from 5 percent to 7 percent. Russian observers and media are now barred from observing the count on Election Day, and representatives of international monitoring organizations will be admitted only by personal invitation.

Meeting these requirements will be a challenge, to say the least, at a time when support for all the democratic parties combined barely reaches 7 percent, including 2 percent for the revived Republicans. In a nationwide poll in July, only 4 percent of respondents said they would vote for Ryzhkov for president if the election were held that week. Yet continuing squabbles dampen any hope of the democrats’ uniting in a single party and behind one presidential candidate.

The liberal parties’ disastrous showing in the last Duma election, in December 2003, was only in small measure due to government manipulation. Both publicly and privately, democrats admit their defeat was a result of their inability to stop attacking one another, to forge a common platform and joint electoral list, and thus give their supporters something to rally around. In that election, an estimated 9 million voters who had supported liberal parties in the 1990s stayed home–or around 9 percent of the eligible electorate and at least 18 percent of those who actually cast ballots. Still, in a speech at the July 2 conference, a representative of Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko party reprised his boss’s notorious obstreperousness, refusing to join with other democrats unless they publicly admit their past “mistakes” and join Yabloko. (At the time, Yaboloko’s support in the polls stood at 3 percent.)

In the end, however, the democrats’ core problem is not one of supply but of demand. If politically active Russians want a democratic breakthrough–as the Georgians, Ukrainians, and Kyrgyz all showed they did in the past 12 months–democratic parties and leaders will appear in short order. Think of the emergence in 1989 of Boris Yeltsin, drummed out of the Politburo only a year and a half before. The main questions, then, are: Where is Russia today in the cycle of revolution and reaction, and where does it appear to be going?

WHEN IN THE EARLY 1990s Russians emerged from seven decades of totalitarianism into an institutional wasteland, the real choice they faced was not between good, clean, liberal capitalism on the one hand, and cutthroat Marxian “primitive capitalism” on the other. Rather, they could choose between the latter–attended by soaring inequality and the capture of the state by “oligarchs,” nasty, rapacious, and lawless, pouring buckets of dirt on one another through the television networks and newspapers they owned, and deploying their media empires to destroy politicians and force political change to advance their business interests–and some form of continuing state control of the economy and politics.

Amid the painful, creative chaos of the 1990s, Russian society slowly built modern political and economic institutions and regenerated mechanisms of self-regulation and self-restraint. Through this difficult period, Russians showed remarkable resilience and prescience, stoically opting for economic and political liberty, no matter how unattractively incarnated, through a succession of elections and referendums. But after the 1998 financial crisis and ruble devaluation, their tolerance for conflict and their faith that self-rule and democratic liberties would in the end bring stability and economic revival were badly damaged.

People were tired. As in every classic restoration after revolution, the longing for physical safety and political and economic stability came to overshadow all other goals and aspirations. As Tocqueville said of Bonapartism, the French “abandon[ed] their original ideal and, turning their backs on freedom . . . acquiesced in an equality of servitude under the master of all Europe.” What has turned out to be the Putin restoration, with its “managed democracy” and “vertical power,” is no different. It is one more instance of what Eric Fromm called the “flight from freedom.” Russians were ready to give a strongman a chance.

Now, seven years later, trends in public opinion seem to indicate a gradual shift away from that preference for a largely illusory stability at the expense of economic and political liberty. This suggests that Russians may have had just enough of a taste of strongman rule to inoculate them against the temptation of seemingly simple quasi-authoritarian solutions to their still enormous problems. Asked in July whether “Russia needs democracy,” three times as many survey respondents said “yes” as “no”: 66 percent and 21 percent. (As usual, the differences among age groups were huge: In the 18-24 years old group, 80 percent responded positively and 13 percent negatively; among those 55 and older, the numbers were 52 percent and 30 percent.)

While the electorate is still apathetic (in June almost half of respondents could not name the party they would vote for if elections were held next week), the “democrats” were the choice of 14 percent, second only to the Communists (17 percent), and ahead of both the nationalist “patriots” (4 percent) and the Kremlin-directed party of power, United Russia (12 percent).

Perhaps most important, Russians are showing renewed appreciation for specific political and economic liberties–or, rather, renewed opposition to their curtailment. Presented with a list of quasi-authoritarian political and economic arrangements, two-thirds or more of a national sample opposed all of them. Only 27 percent, for instance, agreed that mass media, political parties, and civic organizations “must be organized in the interests of the security and unity of the country,” and only 19 percent agreed that the president should appoint all federal and regional leaders. The idea that the Kremlin should “control the work” of legislatures, courts, and the media was agreeable to a mere 16 percent; and giving the armed forces and state security organizations “a privileged position in society” to 12 percent. State control of businesses was supported by a larger minority, 29 percent. Even as Vladimir Putin enjoyed an approval rating of around 70 percent, only one-third of Russians agreed that all state power should be concentrated in the president’s hands, and only 29 percent thought there should be no term limit (it’s currently eight years) on his tenure in office.

VLADIMIR RYZHKOV, then, appears to be right: There is nothing abnormal about Russians’ political attitudes. He seems also to be correct in insisting that Russia is far from happy behind its façade of relative placidity.

This past July, polls found that the government’s economic policy was “unsatisfactory” to three-quarters of respondents, and only 9 percent believed things would change for the better soon. Two-thirds were unhappy about “what is going on in the country,” and half thought it was “moving in the wrong direction.” And in late July, a leading national newspaper, Izvestia, published the results of yet another poll: For the first time since Putin came to power, the share of those in favor of fundamental economic and political reforms equaled those who “long for stability.” Each opinion garnered around 44 percent. Especially interesting is the fact that the call for change was most prevalent among those who have “made it”: post-Soviet middle-class families, with per capita monthly incomes of over 5,000 rubles (about $178). In this group, 53 percent want a new perestroika.

Izvestia‘s headline was “Back to the 1990s. People are tired of stability and demand change.” Ryzhkov and his party are standing by.

Leon Aron is director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. This article is drawn from a longer essay, which will be published at www.aei.org in October.