Three phases of Vladimir Putin's own form of "Putinism"

Die Zeit's Moscow correspondent Michael Thumann gives his description of three stages Vladimir Putin's rule over Russia in "»Habe ich Angst?«" (Diktatoren ZEITGeschichte 04-2022).

He designates the three distinct periods as: a "hybrid"phase, 2000-2011; an "authoritarian" phase, 2012-2021; and, "the destruction of civil society," 2021-on.

I don't try to engage here with how precise Thumann's definitions of the varying states of Putin's rule may be. But in light of the sometimes cartoonish polemics we're currently seeing around the Ukraine war, it's useful to keep in mind that Putin's more than two decades of being the de facto chief leader of the Russian government has been marked by varying approaches on his part. Thanks to the decades-long use - mostly misuse, actually - of the Munich Analogy, the US always winds up making its opponent of the moment into "Hitler." It's a habit that generally produces more fog than clarity. How many times have we been in a conflict with the latest "Hitler" since 1945?

Putin was brought into Boris Yeltsin's government in 1997 as a Deputy Chief of the Presidential Administration. Putin became Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in 1998 and then Prime Minister in August 1999, as the early clashes of what became the Second Chechen War (1999-2000) were already underway. Though the regular military phase of that war ended in 2000, Chechen insurgent activity continued for years. Western concern over human rights violations and war crimes committed by the Russian government in Chechnya was mixed with a certain amount of sympathy for Moscow's fight against "Muslim terrorists," especially after the 9/11 attack in 2001.

Konstantin Eggert describes Putin's role in that war as follows (Russia still lives in the shadow of the Chechen war Deutsche Welle 09/30/2019):

Young and energetic, he immediately started talking tough on Chechnya, especially after a series of mysterious apartment block explosions hit Moscow and the towns of Volgodonsk and Buynaksk in September. Security at any cost and "eradicating terrorism" became top priorities for the Russians. When Russian armor started moving on the Chechen capital Grozny, people knew it was not so much the ailing Yeltsin who was behind this offensive but Putin. A year later he became president.

Officially the war was called a "counter-terrorist operation." It was supposed to be brief and victorious, not least because the main leader of the Chechen forces and the republic's grand mufti, Akhmat Kadyrov, changed sides and agreed on a deal with the Kremlin. [my emphasis]

The post-Soviet Russian government under Yeltsin was structured conceptually along the lines of European and American democratic governance. But the "shock therapy" economic program Yeltsin's government undertook to transition from widespread state ownership of industry to a privatized system was not only traumatic in its reductions of the standard of living for most Russians. It also facilitated massive corruption, which went a long way toward undermining the functions of the new governmental institutions and legal system. The system was also notoriously open to fairly blatant intervention by foreign powers, as illustrated by this Time cover of its 06/15/1998 edition celebrating US assistance to Yeltsin's Presidential re-election campaign.

Yeltsin's health problems, i.e., alcoholism, didn't help to engender confidence in his leadership, either.

Neither did this incident in 1993 during his first term: Yeltsin Shelled Russian Parliament 25 Years Ago, U.S. Praised “Superb Handling” National Security Archive 10/04/2018.

And the Russian debt default of 1998 was also a major financial event for Russia and the world.

Hybrid Phase (2000-2011)

Thumann sees the "hybrid phase" of Putin's governance beginning with Putin's Presidency in 2000. After serving two four-year terms, Putin again became Prime Minister in 2008-2012 under President Dmitry Medvedev. But even during that time, Putin was already generally considered the real leader of the country.

Without repeating Yeltsin's directing of cannon fire at the Parliament (Duma) building, Thumann argues that Putin successfully undermined the Duma's power, in particular by putting his United Russia party in control together with "free-rider" parties that were nominally oppositional. "From then on, the Duma practiced faithfulness and loyalty [to Putin], and occasional heckling from the actual opposition could no longer disturb Putin in governing." (The translations here from Thumann's German article are mine.)

In other words, Putin established de facto single-party rule in the form of a so-called illiberal democracy.

Thumann sees a second key part of this "hybrid" phase in a steady undermining of the authority of "the governors and republic presidents, who ruled like little kings in the federal system of the nineties" and who "had formed a real counterweight to the center.

The third part of this "hybrid" phase was concentration of control over television stations, which Thumann considers the most important aspect. Putin's government, he writes, took control of media properties of oligarchs by "making them an offer they couldn't refuse." And political surveillance was considerably stepped up during this time.

Thumann writes, "The political technocrats loyal to the president built a hollow façade democracy in the still unoccupied space between European values and Eurasian traditions. At that time, Putin still managed without camps and police terror. He worked in the penumbra of a hybrid system in which much was under control, while a residual pluralism flourished." He argues that Moscow in particular enjoyed a more open system, including critical media, than other parts of Russia. And, not least because of rising oil prices on which the petrostate Russia is so dependent were rising, the population also experienced a genuine improvement in living standards after the devastating "shock therapy" hyper-free-market experience of the 1990s.

(I attended a panel at the 2014 Netroots Nation convention that featured a panel of Russian journalists whose presence in the US was sponsored by the State Department. It was suggested there that media in smaller media markets was at that time allowed greater leeway than in larger cities.)

Authoritarian phase (2012-2021)

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder once infamously described Putin at the start of his first Presidential term as a "flawless democrat." Putin apparently appreciated Schröder's attitude, because Schröder did a long and profitable post-Chancellorship stint as chairman of the board of the Russian oil company Rosneft.

But Putin himself turned out to be no more of a fan of competitive democracy, free and fair elections, or an independent justice system than Donald Trump or Viktor Orbán. When half a year of public protests broke out over justified public suspicions of a manipulated Duma election at the end of 2011, Putin began to worry. He had always been leery of the so-called "color" revolutions in places like Georgia and Ukraine and also those of the Arab Spring. As much of the recent commentary on the Ukraine war has mentioned, Puting saw such pro-democracy, anti-corruption movements in nearby countries as a potential threat that could spread to Russia. And he viewed the 2011-12 protests against his government as not only a threat but one instigated if not directed by Washington. (How much of that suspicion was political paranoia and/or cynical propaganda is not something that Thumann's article addresses.)

Thumann describes this phase:

With Putin's return to the Kremlin [i.e., as President] in 2012, the second, the authoritarian phase began, in which the regime systematically cracked down on Russian pluralism and expanded the repression of individual oligarchs to indiscriminate mass repression. An important instrument for this were the "agent laws", an extension of the regulations for non-governmental organizations: associations that were even remotely socially or politically active and received money from non-Russian sources had to call themselves "foreign agents". A stigma. This was accompanied by monitoring of these associations and harsh penalties for violations of bureaucratic requirements. [my emphasis]

He sees this as a period where political rights were continually restricted but which also provided decent incomes compared to the recent past with various consumerist benefits. "In Moscow and the other major cities of the country, restaurants, private clinics, summer cafes and amusement parks flourished. Animal welfare associations and dance clubs emerged. People had jobs, some got good salaries and went on holiday to Turkey."

Putin also shifted his politics to a more nationalist position. To what extent that focus was driven by ideological conviction, internal political opportunism, pressure from NATO expansion, or general Russian evilness has of course become an endless part of the polemics around the current Ukraine war. The actual foreign policy shifts Putin executed during this period don't overlay seamlessly with Thumann's three-phase scheme of his internal governance methods.

But the Russian government has been saying since the 1990s, and even more explicitly since the 2007 Munich Security Conference, is that they have viewed the enlargement of NATO as a security threat. Yeltsin's government had reluctantly made an agreement with the Clinton Administration and NATO to accept the expansion of NATO to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic that included ongoing consultation procedures. The Cheney-Bush Administration with its charge-ahead unilateralist foreign policy and its sneering contempt for diplomacy just blew off Russian concerns about further NATO expansion. And Putin's government made a distinct shift in its public posture in 2007 over discussions of adding Georgia and Ukraine to NATO.

It's worth noting here that even during the current Ukraine war, Putin himself officially took the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO in stride with the explanation that the two countries were de facto NATO members anyway. Those countries were already bound by the mutual defense clause of the European Union Treaty, a factor that seemed to be little discussed in political commentary until this year. Sergei Markov, a former official spokesperson for Putin and currently head of the very Putin-friendly Institute for Political Studies in Moscow, repeated this position just this past week. (What does Russia's naval strategy mean? Aljazeera Inside Story 08/01/2022) Which is not to say that Russia will make no foreign or military policy adjustments in response.

The Cheney-Bush Administration wanted to begin the formal accession process for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO. Germany and France - which Bush's government treated with more-or-less open contempt - refused to go along. But at Washington's insistence, NATO make a formal statement in 2008 with its Bucharest declaration that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become NATO members. It was a worst-of-both-worlds approach: they didn't start the formal process for accession but declared unequivocally that the two countries would eventually join.

New Cold Warriors like former US Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul take it is an article of faith that Russian policy towards Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansion and everything to do with some combination of Russian religious-political messianic expansion and Putin's dictatorial tendencies.

But if you are a Russian leader looking to use nationalism to boost your political position, this sequence of events worked out nicely for that scenario.

In the 2010s, world oil prices seriously crashed. For a petrostate like Russia, heavily dependent on oil and gas exports, this is always an important factor. Just as healthy oil and gas income had facilitated the "hybrid phase," falling oil prices presented new challenges for Putin's ruling model in the "authoritarian phase."

Destruction of civil society phase (2021-on)

Thumann may be anticipating the Owl of Minerva's ruling on the current Putinist period, the "destruction of civil society." He points to the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, a genuinely dodgy Duma election in September 2021, and the banning of the human rights group Memorial. Then in 2022 came the attack on Ukraine:

With the invasion of Ukraine, the authorities set in motion their plans to destroy civil society. The last free media, Radio Echo Moscow, the TV channel Dozhd, and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, had to cease their work. People who protested against the war were arrested. In Russia, since the introduction of military censorship in early March, there has been no public voice other than Putin's.

Thumann's own characterization of Putin's regime is as follows:

What should the Putin system be called today? Putinism is a kind of USSR without socialism, a pseudo-clerical-conservative moral dictatorship, a poisonous police state, repressive internally, aggressive on the outside. But this is not a new system in itself. Putin, divorced and in a relationship with an athlete, paints a picture of the conservative family as the ideal of society. The state propagandists strive for control over minds. They are creating a hermetic "Russian information space." They are deveöpüomg the ideal of the conservative strongman, who defends his weak wife and children, who cultivates his field in front of the city, and fights for the fatherland. They are mobilizing the masses for the isolation of the country and for attacking its neighbors. Hundreds of thousands are allowed to cheer the course of the leader in stadiums with flags. Society is atomized and has hardly any forms of organization beyond the vertical state. The Russian political scientist Andrei Kolesnikov calls it "hybrid totalitarianism". [my emphasis]

A construction like "hybrid totalitarianism" could easily be a euphemism for, "Who knows where this will go?" It's likely to be a while before the Owl of Minerva will be ready to make a pronouncement on this.