– Strange Creatures –
2005
(Found this while looking for news item about transfer of wealth from democracies to autocracies, which I haven’t found yet.)
Finally in 1991, Russia announced that it would adopt the markets and democracy of her Cold War adversary. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out as many hoped. Privatization became a giant swindle in which well-positioned bureaucrats divvied up amongst themselves the vast Soviet carcass. Russians would vote, but active and participatory civic associations would never develop. Within a matter of years, power and wealth were once again highly concentrated. Former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin remarked, in superlative Russian fashion, “We wanted it to go better, but it turned out as always.”
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For centuries, a Kremlin oligarchy, whether comprising Muscovite and Kievan princes, the Romanov court, or the General-Secretary’s Politburo, has governed Russia. But this seems to have finally given way to a rough and imperfect liberty. This does not mean, of course, that thousand-year-old traditions disappear overnight, or for that matter, over a decade of nights. The tiny parasitic elite is back, this time in the form of the superrich “new Russians,” and the siloviki, the super-bureaucrats. These groups, as Billington notes, are the chief obstacles to democratic change.
If you wish to understand the nature of arbitrary power in Russia, look no further than a little flashing blue light, the migalka. Available to elites with cash and connections, it confers on its owner the right to disregard any and all traffic laws. I’ve seen migalka-equipped Mercedes 600s and Land Rovers drive on sidewalks and fly through red lights at busy intersections.
During the Yeltsin era, a handful of “oligarchs” built financial-industrial clans that came to control nearly half the Russian GDP. Such a concentration of wealth, especially in the absence of reliable legal and financial institutions, distorts the growth of markets. Some estimate that this thievery has created a gap between rich and poor wider than the one that preceded the Revolution. By most indicators, Russia is now a Third World country, yet it is second only to the U.S. in its number of billionaires.
With the end of the Cold War, Russia lost half its industrial output. Each year, Russia’s population declines by a stunning one million people. At this rate, by 2050 its population will have shrunk by a third. Male life expectancy is 58 and falling (it’s 75 in the U.S.). One cause, according to a parliamentary report, is “stress generated by people’s lack of confidence in their futures and those of their children.” Another is alcoholism. The suicide rate between 1995 and 2000 was quadruple that of Europe. A sodden, depressed Russia can only be further eclipsed on the international stage.
President Vladimir Putin is working to reverse this. In his mind, a good number of Russia’s problems—poverty, terrorism, mafiosi, Chechnya—are the result of a weak and semi-dismantled state, and so he has set about rebuilding it. His soft authoritarianism, coupled with various tax, legal, and benefit reforms, has contributed to economic growth averaging 6.5% per year since 1998—though Russia’s economy is still only slightly larger than that of Los Angeles County. Putin has also taught the country’s most powerful men that they are nothing compared to his state. But if Russia is to democratize, the state cannot always win.
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But one thing is certain. Russia possesses one-third of the world’s natural gas, 7% of its oil, one-fifth of its precious metals, endless forest and farmland, ports on seven seas, the world’s second-largest nuclear stockpile, and 140 million patient and educated citizens—all spread across eleven time zones. This means that no matter how stormy its progress, Russia will matter. Like the ocean, the strength of a nation is a matter of ebb and flow.
