The Medvedev-Putin duo a year on
Thank God, we have left behind us all the anniversary celebrations, the first anniversary of the presidential election, inauguration, the first anniversary of the new Prime Minister in office with all the fanfare and praise. At the end of the day, we are interested in only one thing: whether the direction and mode of our progress has become any clearer.
The era of improvisation
What exactly do Mr Medvedev as President and Mr Putin as Prime Minister have to celebrate?
For Mr Putin it was an extremely difficult year, the year when he changed his political "skin," as it were. When the Medvedev-Putin tandem was formed nobody knew how it would work out. Mr Putin could not predict last summer whether his majority would not dissipate by the autumn, whether it would split itself between him and Mr Medvedev.
President Medvedev could not predict whether he would be rejected by society as a new figure by comparison with Putin. Our politics is replete with memories of nightmares: Yeltsin against the background of Gorbachev, Putin against the background of Yeltsin. Having Putin as a background is risky and President Medvedev must have felt pretty uncomfortable.
Mr Putin's tactics consist in seizing every opportunity to build up his leadership. He gets the maximum mileage out of these temporary situations, leaving behind disgruntled minorities which are then thrown out of politics. He has no time to talk to them. Meanwhile the governing majority is growing and gaining confidence.
Initially the Putin majority was a temporary political prop. Gradually it came to be identified with "the people". But that is where snags begin to appear. It is not just excessive bureaucratization, but something worse than that - the appearance of "majority jerks" whom we see and hear practically every day. Their majority mandate serves to substitute their competence, and "posing as champions of the people" makes them aggressive. Putin alone can restrain them.
The vertical power structure he had built was a very personal power of the leader. Mr Putin as the leader found himself between the elites and the mistrustful majority. He heroically defended the former against the latter and vice versa. The "tandem" idea was initially simply one of "Putin's defences". The extreme of the 2000s, which Putin turned to his personal advantage, is not an option for the new President. Mr Medvedev does not enjoy the advantage of being an intermediary between the masses and the elite. He has to build power and its very concept along new lines.
Double insurance
The people who invented the tandem were the same people who drafted the Constitution in 1993. It was they who built into the Main Law the provision on two chief executives: the President is the head of state and the Prime Minister is the head of the executive branch. The tandem has materialised this oddity and it works. While last year's war subjected the tandem to some strain because it required an exceptional level of coordination, the economic crisis put it in a working mode. It turned out that "the thing works" and it works especially well at the level which caused the most concern: the existence of the two leaders.
The tandem works in a mode of steady oscillation as the centre of decision-making and the centre of opposition alternate. When one of the two, the President or the Prime Minister, initiates a decision the other acts as an observer and sometimes even as a critic. The two swap roles every now and again, and although it is clear who makes the decisions, these are not autocratic decisions. It is a mode of mutual restraint from extremes and improvisations.
Luckily, the question how a "tsarist" model of power would have handled the world crisis is merely academic. The tandem has on the whole done a good job. Could it be because the country's leadership was not tempted to go for broke and put the stake on the Kremlin?
While the vertical power structure is basically non-public ("the democracy of approvals", "democracy of zero readings") the tandem has to be open to society, in other words, it is public power. Gradually, a working dialogue at the top is becoming the norm and society has an addressee and a partner. Is it a mere trifle that for the first time in 20 years experts interact with the authorities in a working mode? That is how the economists now work with the Government and the President. Perhaps this is only made possible by the fact that they work with each of them separately?
The Medvedev majority is a sum of minorities
While Mr Putin has discovered and established the hegemony of the majority as the basis of power, Mr Medvedev makes his pitch to the minority. His initiatives are aimed at protecting the rights of the minority as partners in the democratic process. It is generated by the middle class because the middle class is not homogeneous. It is pluralistic, it consists not of masses, but of minorities, very different communities.
Mr Putin has been criticized, not quite fairly, for presiding over stagnation of the vertical power structure.
The United Russia is a strange replica of the nobility that served the Tsar. It has emerged from the middle class. But it is non-public and very passive. President Medvedev injects life into these communities by being willing to talk to their leaders, and leaders indeed come forward. They seek to engage the President in a dialogue. They are leaders of civil society groups and foremost businessmen. Smart people, human rights activists. By engaging in a dialogue with them President Medvedev little by little increases mobility in society. For in our system he who talks with the "tsar" is himself a "nobleman".
President Medvedev does not want to preside over an immutable majority that is given once and for all. He is the President of all the citizens of Russia, including those who argue with him and who oppose him personally. All these people, even those who disagree with his policy, are political partners and participants in the process of government. They discuss Putin's decisions and arrive at conclusions that appear to be "non-Putin". Think of his efforts to protect the Duma parties from the arbitrary rule of the "dumb majority" to give them comparable access to the media. Mr Medvedev tries not to sack candidates promoted by parliamentary parties. It may be a trifle, but it is heartening because it is becoming a norm.
Moving towards normalization?
These trifles indicate a movement towards a different culture to which we are all strangers, including President Medvedev. It is a project of normalization of the country's life. One can talk about participatory democracy or the democracy of responsibility, but so far people are reluctant to buy it, like the checks of offshore banks. Being part of the tandem, Mr Putin is protected against losing the old majority. That enables President Medvedev to conduct "non-Putin dialogues" with small communities which are politically significant but scattered.
In some sense the so-called 10 political initiatives - President Medvedev's political reform - are just an elaboration of the pluralistic logic of the tandem. While people were excitedly counting how many governors President Medvedev has sacked society has become more mobile. Even the fact that Medvedev addresses the leaders of small communities stimulates mobility in society.
The Medvedev-Putin tandem began as a tactical move, but unexpectedly it grew into something more. The question now is: is it possible to get rid of the tyranny of tactics, the dictatorship of temporary decisions in favour of an increasingly normal strategy? The way out today can only be the development of the tandem itself. If the tandem fails to work in the long run we will be back to the Yeltsin system of the "Tsar-President" in which the Government is only one of His Majesty's "offices". Only, one wonders if it is possible to go back to that model.
The crisis came out of the blue both for Putin and Medvedev. It was noticeable in the autumn that the tandem was at a loss. But they put their act together by the start of this year. The tandem as a polycentric institution has worked. If Medvedev had followed the advice of those who were egging him on towards a Yeltsin-type monarchy (you are the President, Your Majesty, you make the decisions) a lone president might not have coped. As it is, for the first time since the Constitution was promulgated the Government has been restored as the apex of the executive branch. It works constitutionally, effectively and it interacts with the President. This would not have happened but for Mr Putin, but now the political government has a chance to become a permanent part of our system. A political cabinet sooner or later will need real political support and not just "approval ratings".
The time of folk-tale heroes is over
The President's approval rating has become something like a fairy-tale monster of our politics, having lost all scientific meaning. An approval rating is an indicator, it shows the state of things. In this country that indicator has become the thing itself. It is not an indicator, it is something to be fought for and sought. The problem of keeping up the approval rating and cherishing the approval rating, of correcting the ratings and protecting them against malicious misinterpretation has turned into some kind of a ritual.
In this country the rating is a measure of charisma and not of real support. We have forgotten that even charismatic leaders are prone to face periodic slumps in their popularity. They lose and regain support, sometimes more than once during their careers. There is nothing dreadful or humiliating about it. With us, the approval rating is the leader's certificate attesting that he has charisma and therefore does not need to seek real support.
The approval rating is also a way of announcing to the majority that it exists when other methods of demonstration (such as public activity) are ruled out. (Hence the amazing phenomenon of the "apologetic impotence" of the most powerful forces in the country. They are not sure of their strength and avoid debates or demonstration of their strength). That is why approval rating has become an irrational factor of stability. It is etched on the Kremlin's Spassky Gates like a stone key in Irving's gothic tales. Its fall, which is bound to happen some day, would be a Gothic event that shakes the world and not normal adjustment of the market. To what extent can ratings be a guide in evaluating the problems of 2012? Probably not at all.
The president after Medvedev's presidency cannot be a personal hero. We are still discussing the problem of equilibrium in the system of two or more heroes, but the heroic era in Russia is over. The Putin majority has transformed itself into a prosaic middle class "plus all the others". That is, the people who are more concerned with the family budget than tall stories of the 1990s.
The twenty-year era of games in which everything could be put at stake, everything could be gambled away and then gained back little by little is over. It does not matter what considerations of expediency have brought the ordinary man into the game, but he is already in it and is counting his possible gains and losses. Normalization goes hand-in-hand with leveling and de-heroization. The tandem is transforming itself into an open stage of politics and normal life will return to the country. Russia will face an ordinary and exciting future.
Gleb Pavlovsky is President of the Effective Policy Foundation.
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Gleb Pavlovsky: "A working dialogue at the top level of power is gradually becoming the norm".
Gleb Pavlovsky