Putin and "sovereign democracy": Comments on Putin's political philosophy (1)

I plan to do a series of posts on the political philosophies surrounding Putin’s in Russia. By seemingly all accounts, Putin is not much of an ideologue, much less a political philosopher. But he and his supporters do draw on some concepts and ideas that are more than just bumper-stick type slogans of the moment.

Governments and the people who run them do operate on ideas, however flexible they may be in applying them. John Maynard Keynes famously wrote:

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

The “realist” school of international relations stresses the centrality of geopolitical considerations of military power, economics, and geographic location in national decision about international politics. Yet it also recognizes that governments are run by human beings with their own conceptions of the world and with inevitable deficiencies in knowledge. The Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr famously cautioned decision-makers to maintain a sense of humility and to be careful of being led astray by pride and arrogance in his book The Irony of American History (1952).

The famous investigative journalist I.F. Stone also irreverently reminded us that not only do governments gives cynical reasons for their actions, but they also sometimes act on genuinely bad assumptions: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”

I’m using as a starting point a book by Michel Eltchaninoff. Eltchaninoff explains the backgrounds and what he sees as their relative importance in the current situation, always recalling that the emphasis put on them changes over time.

Putin’s “Sovereign Democracy”

In his second Presidential term (2004-2008), Putin began to define the Russian political system as a “sovereign democracy.” The concept is credited to Vladislav Surkov, who served as Putin’s Presidential advisor 2013-2020. Surkov publicly defined the idea in a lecture for Putin’s United Russia Party in 2006. Ivan Krastev discussed the concept the same year, noting, “The new Kremlin's ideologues are not philosophers but public-relations specialists.” (Ivan Krastev, "Sovereign Democracy'', Russian-Style Insight Turkey 8:4 (2006) Ironically, it’s a concept with a Ukrainian origin:

By nationality the concept of sovereign democracy is Ukrainian. lt has its origin in the Kremlin's conceptualization of the orange revolution (orange technologies in [the] Kremlin's terms) of November 2004 to January 2005 in Ukraine. This lineage can be tracked in Surkov's thesis... Sovereign democracy is Moscow's response to the dangerous combination of populist pressure from below and international pressure from above that destroyed the Leonid Kuchma regime [of 1994-2005].

Boris Yeltsin had used the term “directed democracy” during his Presidency to describe the less-than-fully-robust politics of Russia in his years as President (1991-1999). On becoming President in 1999, Puting continued use of the term. But the “color revolutions” in Georgia (Rose Revolution of 2003) and Ukraine (Orange Revolution of 2004) aroused deep suspicion on Putin’s part. Whether it was a fear of Western-promoted “regime change” or a fear of popular pressure for democratization, Putin responded by seeking a more secure approach to securing the Russian government while still maintaining some features of libral democracy.

Krastev writes that the “key to the [directed democracy] system was not just to establish a monopoly of power but to monopolize the competition for it.” Krastev, a liberal theorist in his outlook, accepts a concept that New Cold Warriors find uncomfortable, which is that the post-1991 vision of democracy was to a large extent a sham that provided a polite cover for the brand of oligarchical rule that established itself in Russia and other post-Soviet spaces. And he notes that it was designed to accommodate the Western powers on which post-1991 Russia was heavily dependent:

The key element in the model of directed democracy was that the sources of ehe legitimacy of ehe regime lay in the west. The project of faking democracy assumes that the faker accepts the superiority of the model he fakes. Being lectured by the west was the price that Russian elite paid for using the resources of the west to preserve its power.

In its social origins, directed democracy reflected the strange relations between the rulers and the ruled in Yeltsin's Russia. Stephen Holmes as acutely portrayed this relationship: "Those at the top neither exploit nor oppress those at the bottom. They do not even govern them; they simply ignore them." [my emphasis]

The fact that Putin’s regime has become considerably more authoritarian than Yeltsin’s and notably more aggressive in its foreign policy does not imply that Russia in the 1990s was some kind of model liberal democracy with a social state that protected ordinary Russians from the worst effects of “shock therapy” transition. It was neither. As Krastev puts it:

In the current [2006] western discourse on Russia, Putin's authoritarianism is usually contrasted with the imperfect democracy ofYeltsin's Russia in the way that tyranny contrasts with freedom. In reality, Yeltsin's liberalism and Putin's sovereigntism [sic] represent two distinctive but related forms of managed democracy.

It’s worth noting that the kind of more social-democratic political system that Mikhail Gorbachev tried to build seems to have been based on more of the liberal-democratic system of independent parties and competitive elections than Yeltsin’s “directed democracy” system was. (Archie Brown, Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat? Europe-Asia Studies 65:2, 2013)

Krastev distinguishes the Putin/Surkov concept of “sovereign democracy” as follows:

For the Kremlin, sovereignty is a capacity. lt implies economic independence, military strength and cultural identicy.

The other key element of the sovereign state is a "nationally-minded" elite. The nature of the elite in ehe view of the Kremlin's ideologues is ehe critical component of ehe sovereign state. Tue creation of the nationally-minded elite is the primarily task of the sovereign democracy as a project.

It’s always a temptation for Western observers to assume or imply that Russian political practice after 1991 shared some of ideological practice of the Soviet regime, in which Marxism-Leninism was the official state ideology from 1917. Even that was not the static ideology that dogmatic Cold Warriors often implied.

A similar caution is also helpful in looking at post-1991 Russia ideological positions. Surkov’s 2006 speech promoting the “sovereign democracy” idea was criticized by, among others, Putin’s ally Dmitry Medvedev, who would serve as Putin’s de facto surrogate as President 2008-2012, criticized Surkov’s concept publicly at the time. (Peter Schulze, "Souveräne Demokratie: Kampfbegriff oder Hilfskonstruktion für einen eigenständigen Entwicklungsweg? – die ideologische Offensive des Vladislav Surkov" in Matthes Buhbe & Gabriele Gorzka (eds.), Russland heute.Rezentralisierung des Staates unter Putin 2007)

But the idea has since functioned as a way to distinguish Russia's current authoritarian system from the "Western" concept of democracy, emphasizing the distinctiveness of the Russian style of government and emphasizing the apprehension against regime-change operations directed by the US. A Russian-style democracy, as Putin called it at the 2006 G-8 Summit. Putin has also referred to his system as "managed democracy" and a “dictatorship of law.”

However, it's worth noting that Surkov himself in the mid-2000s was polemically redefining the Western use of a “managed democracy” (a limited democracy with authoritarian leanings) to be instead something that the West had imposed on Russia, bringing with it all the ills of corruption, chaos (like the 1998 Russian financial crisis), and drastic declines in standards of living that it experienced during the Yeltsin era. "Sovereign democracy" in this framing has the task of fixing what the Western-imposed "managed democracy" had broken. This could reasonably be taken as a populist pitch portraying Putin's government as championing the ordinary Russia against the new oligarchs. Putin was providing a "way toward normalcy," as Surkov put it then. (Schulze 2007) Though he was careful to distinguish that kind of normalcy from what the democratic movement around the Orange Revolution of 2004 in Ukraine sought.

But in the mid-2000s, the Russian government was still declaring the hope that Russia would be accepted by the West as still a great power and that there could be cooperative solutions to outstanding differences. The lack of progress on agreements over NATO and then in 2008, the official NATO declaration that Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO members at some time in the future marked a turning point toward sharper conflict.