Vedomosti: "From First Person to Second"
By Olga Proskurnina
Last week Vladimir Putin returned to the post which was his stepping stone to the presidency eight years ago. Vedomosti has tried to find out how much he has changed as a politician over the years.
"I am not a dictator and I am not going to bring the country back to a command economy," Prime Minister Putin said eight years ago in an interview for his election campaign book "First Person". However, during his second term as President liberal economists began to publicly question his sincerity. "In the [initial] period of the Kasyanov government he relied on professionals," says Yevgeny Yasin, head of research at the Higher School of Economics. "But then, with a nod from him, pressure was stepped up on business, culminating in the high-profile Yukos case. There was a departure from the earlier [Yeltsin] line, it looked as if [Putin] became convinced that business did not show enough responsibility, in contrast to the state. State corporations began to be created."
It was only recently, Yasin observes, that this thrust of economic policy was moderated.
"Although state corporations create specifically Russian risks [corruption], this is not the mainstream, but a tactical retreat under the pressure of circumstances," argues a former high-ranking official who worked with Putin for several years. "Indeed, the Yukos case is a reaction to concrete circumstances, it is an isolated episode and not part of a general political line."
However, important structural reforms, such as the pension and housing and utilities reforms, slowed down during these years, according to Professor Yasin. He notes that in spite of the growing construction of new housing and all the declarations about affordable housing, it has not become affordable for the majority of citizens during Putin's two presidential terms. Instead, regional authorities have merged with the local monopoly developers who are dictating prices. Finally, in spite of eight years of high world prices and a soaring growth in budget revenues, poverty has remained a problem (see box).
"THE MARKET, YURI MIKHAILOVICH!"
On the other hand, the Land Code which overnight created a huge land market in Russia was adopted in the beginning of Putin's first term as President, Yasin points out. The same goes for much else: "Mortgage legislation, new housing and labour codes that replaced the Soviet ones, full convertibility of the rouble... And think of the reform of the power industry he presided over."
One of the participants in the meeting of the State Council Presidium in 2002 which discussed that topic later recounted to Vedomosti an episode that struck him during the meeting: Yuri Luzhkov, in his usual energetic manner, brands market radical Anatoly Chubais and appeals to Vladimir Putin: "Who will now regulate our energy sector?" Putin replies calmly: ‘The market, Yuri Mikhailovich, the market. And also you and I.'
"Yes, the reformist drive was greater in the early years, and then it diminished noticeably," the former official admits. But he does not think it happened because Putin changed his views, but on the contrary, because his opinions about concrete government officials had not changed.
For example, he attributes the appointment of Mikhail Fradkov as Prime Minister to real flaws in the work of Mikhail Kasyanov who at the time "became immersed in conflicts with Gref and Kudrin and effectively lost the chance to continue his political career". "I can imagine what prompted Putin to choose Fradkov: he had been in charge of foreign trade, had experience with taxes, had worked at the Security Council and was Russia's representative at the European Union, which is our main trading partner," Vedomosti's interlocutor goes on. "But when [in 2005] the cash-for-benefits drive began Fradkov shirked responsibility and no matter how hard Putin tried to elicit a clear-cut government position he hedged."
A similar situation arose with the reform of the power industry, which is why the project slowed down under Fradkov, says a top executive of RAO UES. "Fradkov was tolerated until last, but both these ‘stories' [oddly enough] attest to Putin's conservatism in his approach to personnel, he has not changed in that respect over the last nine years", the former official states.
"THE SAME TRAJECTORY AS YELTSIN'S"
Putin's famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 was seen by many observers as proof of a radical change of Russia's positioning in the world (some even described it as the declaration of a new Cold War). But according to Putin's current press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, "[even before his speech] the President in his talks with world leaders expressed bluntly and without mincing words the same position as was set forth in Munich". That he made his views public, according to Peskov, was due to the critical mass of problems that had piled up in the field of international security.
"The trajectory of Putin's foreign policy is the same as Yeltsin's," says a source close to the President's Executive Office. "The first president's inflated expectations from cooperation with the West giving way to massive disappointment by the time he left: by that time the US was bombing Yugoslavia. The substance of Putin's foreign policy did not differ in any fundamental way from Yeltsin's. Only the circumstances were different."
Many experts on CIS countries agree that Russia's second president has not departed too far from the course charted by the first president. "With regard to Belarus, Russia continued to buy political loyalty in exchange for economic subsidies," says Yaroslav Romanchuk, the head of the Mizes research center in Minsk. "In recent years subsidies to Belarus have begun to taper off, but have not disappeared."
Even so, the Russia-Belarus Union State, approved by Yeltsin in word, never got off the ground during Putin's two presidential terms. Romanchuk attributes it to the fact that each side pursued its own goals: "Russia wanted to buy part of Belarusian sovereignty with cheap oil and gas, and Alexander Lukashenko tried to simply legitimise the existing system of subsidies without surrendering any of his powers to Moscow."
Dmitry Vydrin, the head of the Kiev European Integration Institute, also says that in the beginning of his rule Putin continued the policy of the later Yelstin with regard to Ukraine. Gradually his position became tougher and more pragmatic, emphasizing economic issues, the expert adds.
Perhaps the biggest change of Russian policy introduced by Putin was with regard to Georgia: even before Mikheil Saakashvili's electoral victory, Moscow was stepping up its links with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, says Alexander Skakov, expert with the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies.
However, Putin, like Yeltsin, failed to launch the process of repatriation of fellow compatriots who had found themselves outside Russia after the breakup of the USSR. The 2006 state programme envisaging house-moving allowances and other benefits for migrants has so far lured just 900 people to their historical homeland, according to the Federal Migration Service.
"A MONARCH DOES NOT HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT BEING ELECTED"
"From the beginning Russia was formed as a super-centralised state. This is built into its genetic code, its traditions and the mentality of its people," Putin wrote in his book "First Person". In that book he referred with sympathy, albeit with a lot of diplomatic reservations, to the autocratic traditions characteristic of Russia.
"A monarch," the then acting president reasoned, "doesn't need public criticism on the part of [electronic and most printed] media: a tsar berated by the democratic press is not a true tsar in Russia." The decision to head up the ruling party as well as the government is absolutely in line with that philosophy, the political scientist adds.
"It is unlikely that such a perception of supreme power in the country is due entirely to Byzantine influences, as the current mantra goes," says Sergei Ivanov, a historian of Byzantium. "But the idea that that power can spring from only one centre is very much part of Russian perceptions."
A Chinese specialist finds analogies with another tradition in Putin's behaviour: "All the traditional views of government that can be traced back to Confucius revolve around government by a ‘perfect statesman' who is an accomplished ruler and whose intuition makes him act precisely in accordance with the world laws. At the time Yeltsin chose him as his successor, Putin met that description. It is not by chance that Putin has a habit of being late for meetings: by putting himself in a situation of danger he makes his mind work more sharply in search of correct and unorthodox decisions. That same trait can be discerned in his enthusiasm for judo. In that sense, Putin has hardly evolutionised at all as a politician since 1999," the Chinese scholar concludes.
