Russia reflects on Putin's decade
By Robert Coalson
What a difference a decade makes.
Ten years ago this week, Russia was a collapsing state with a dying president
and an economy on life support. Regional leaders were increasingly and openly
adopting separatist policies, while a fractious Duma (parliament) seemed to be
in a state of perpetual gridlock. The country and the world barely noticed when
President Boris Yeltsin - on August 9, 1999 - tapped the colorless and
virtually unknown former KGB operative Vladimir Putin as his fifth prime
minister in 18 months.
And Yeltsin didn't just pick the 46-year-old former head of the Federal
Security Service (FSB) as his next prime minister. He went one step further -
telling the public he wanted the little-known
Putin to succeed him as president of Russia.
In Russia's personality-driven political system, it was a portentous
declaration.
Outgoing prime minister Sergei Stepashin announced the decision to journalists.
"This
morning I visited the president," Stepashin told journalists at the time. "And
he signed a decree on my resignation. He thanked me - and fired me. As acting
prime minister he has named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the secretary of the
Security Council and director of the FSB. He is a decent and honorable man. I
wish him luck. That is all he will need. He has everything else."
Different place
Few observers at the time realized how prophetic Stepashin's words were. Ten
years later, Putin has gone from prime minister to president back to prime
minister again - and in the process, fashioned himself into an unchallenged,
seemingly infallible leader of an increasingly powerful Russia.
However, Russia was a different place in 1999. On August 16 of that year, an
assertive Duma endorsed Yeltsin's choice by a slim majority - just six more
votes than were required for confirmation. It is hard to imagine a scenario in
today's compliant parliament where 84 deputies would vote against Putin and
another 88 would abstain.
Initially, Putin was shaky and unsure of himself. He seemed shy when he spoke
to reporters, usually speaking deferentially with downcast eyes. He was a far
cry from the confident leader who now regularly appears in macho poses and
seems eminently in control of every situation.
Putin also assumed a host of problems when he took the reins of government. The
economy was on the ropes. International debt was skyrocketing. And a group of
militants from rebellious Chechnya had just launched a violent incursion into
neighboring Daghestan.
Then Russia was rocked by a series of devastating apartment-building bombings:
the fourth and last occurring in Volgodonsk on September 16, exactly one month
after Putin's confirmation. Nearly 300 people were killed in the bombings,
which the government blamed on Chechen separatists, but which Kremlin critics
have charged was a provocation carried out by the security services to justify
a second war in Chechnya.
On October 1, Russian troops reentered Chechnya, just three years after the end
of the first war in the North Caucasus republic. The Russian public - and much
of the political elite - rallied around the new government, and within months
Putin began to show signs of the tough, decisive personality that has become
his trademark style.
'Need for a new start'
As with almost all aspects of Putin's decade in power, opinions are divided on
just what kind of situation he inherited from Yeltsin. Some analysts - such as
Edward Lucas, author of The New Cold War, who was the Moscow bureau
chief for The Economist at the time of Putin's appointment - emphasize the
crisis atmosphere and the public's weariness with the perceived weakness of
Yeltsin and the central government.
"There was a tremendous need for a new start, and I think Putin capitalized on
that. He was sober, diligent, and visibly competent," Lucas says.
Putin supporters emphasize that Russia was on the verge of disintegration and
that the dominant and parasitical oligarchs - first and foremost, Boris
Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky - had to be reined in.
On the other hand, Kremlin critics assert that Russia in 1999 was already on
the ascent after reaching rock bottom economically, and that the foundations of
a democratic system and open society had been laid - before being scotched by
Putin's regime.
"In part following his own understanding of the public good - formed in the KGB
- and in part carried away by high oil prices, he began to build an isolated
model that is incapable of coping with contemporary challenges," says
Moscow-based political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin. "You can say that he inherited
a country on the rise democratically and economically and reduced it to the
relatively trivial status of a Latin American power whose prospects for the
future have disappeared."
Effect of high oil prices
Former independent Duma deputy and Putin critic Vladimir Ryzhkov has written
similarly that "the Kremlin was not able to exploit its huge reserves that it
accumulated after eight years of an oil boom by turning its economic power into
political clout in the global arena. On the contrary, Russia's global standing
has worsened across the board."
Putin also presided over a massive concentration of political power - stripping
away the independence of the legislative branch and regional administrations.
He tamed the country's political parties and brought the national media under
state or state-friendly control. He accused independent civil society
organizations of nefarious ties with foreign intelligence services and created
a parallel network of state-controlled pseudo-nongovernmental organizations.
There is no doubt that Putin's position was bolstered by years of
uninterruptedly high global oil prices.
"I suppose the question that I always have is, 'How would Putin look if he'd
had Yeltsin's oil price and how would Yeltsin look if he'd had Putin's oil
price'?" says Lucas of The Economist.
But Putin's success in transforming that wealth into sustainable economic
growth is uncertain. A recent opinion poll by the independent Levada research
center found that a plurality of Russians - despite their overwhelming support
for Putin personally - believe the gap between rich and poor in Russia is
greater now than it was during the Yeltsin years.
One of the key explanations for Putin's popularity - which regularly measures
between 60% and 70% - is the Kremlin's iron grip on all the main national media
outlets, another cardinal change from the Russia that Putin inherited. As a
result, most Russians see no alternative to Putin except chaos.
"To a large extent, Putin's authority, his recognition, and the willingness to
support him springs from this idea - that there is no one else," says Levada
Center Research Director Boris Dubin. "And [Kremlin] propaganda and the mass
media under Putin have done a lot to create just such a picture."
Analyst Oreshkin agrees that Putin's popularity is largely determined by the
bell jar-like political atmosphere that he has created.
"Putin's popularity is partly a rating of despair, because there is nothing
else to believe in," Oreshkin says. "We don't believe in institutions; we don't
believe in the courts; we don't believe in elections. In this situation, there
is one single figure upon which to concentrate all our positive hopes -
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin."
(RFE/RL's Russian Service contributed to this report.)
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