Refreshingly clear insight from the Economist in today’s article about Putin’s legacy:
The real problem is not that the state in Russia is too powerful or ambitious, but that it fails in its basic functions of providing adequate health care, security, justice and infrastructure.
Indeed, today’s fatal bombings in Vladikavkaz as well as ever increasing AIDS rates illustrate its difficulties in securing even the safety of its citizens .
The article quotes an assessment from the Valdai Club, a group of Western experts that dined with the PM this week, that “there is practically no real modernisation, restructuring or diversification, oil and gas remain the main sources of revenue, corruption continues unchecked and there is almost zero innovation.”
However, it then criticises the Kremlin’s idea that the end goal of modernisation is “not to change the political set-up or overhaul state institutions, but to refine and preserve the system and justify the central role of the state”.
This is not really a valid argument because every state-led modernisation is by definition reactionary, simply by being an alternative to revolution and self-destruction. Bismarck and FDR, Gorbachev, Ataturk and Obama: every incumbent moderniser in history has acted to preserve and refine, rather than destroy or overhaul, the system he led. And so has Putin. No matter how nice a prospect, it would be absurd to expect self-destruction of our rulers through a sort of noblesse oblige.
The problem with Putin’s modernisation, then, is not its necessary limitation, but its lack of any significant successes. And as the Economist very astutely notes, such tangible success may have never been the point at all, because the Russian elite, in the spirit of Louis XIV, does not view the state as means to deliver benefits to people but rather just as a thing in itself:
The main role of the state, to Mr Putin and his entourage, is to keep political order; or, to put it differently, to protect the state and the vested interests of its bureaucracy.
Writing in today’s FT, Neil Buckley remarks (echoing your humble blogger) that stagnating, repressive Putinism has pushed Russia back to the 1970s.
But in a more profound sense, one in which the Russian state is now seen even openly by its own elite as merely co-existing with the Russian people – inconveniences who must, in the words of a senior official, learn to “fend for themselves” and leave the State to loot the riches of the earth – the country has gone back to tsarism.
Yet even tsarism relied on the people to the extent that it needed serf labour. Today, the State doesn’t even need that. It has all that it needs below the soil – oil, metals and gas – and would probably be far happier if most of its burdensome citizens would simply disappear (starting with journalists).
Thus, the Russian people are no longer even oppressed by their State. They are ignored by it, receiving occasional smack-downs only when they happen to get in the way of the State feeding itself.
