2. Discussion points.

• How did the terrorist attack on Beslan change Western attitudes towards Russian internal politics?

• What are the peculiarities of Russian political sentiment?

• What in author’s opinion the encroachment on freedom means?

• How does the author describe Russian voting preferences?

RUSSIA: AUTHORITARIANISM WITHOUT AUTHORITY

Kathryn Stoner-Weiss. Journal of Democracy. Baltimore: Jan 2006.Vol.17, Iss. 1; pg. 104,15 pgs

1. While reading compare the views of the author with the conclusions of the previous article. How might the change of the attitudes be explained?

February 2006 marks the first anniversary of Russia's clear turn away from democracy. The key event was the enactment, in early 2005, of a law abolishing the popular election of governors in Russia's 89 provinces. This formal rejection of the electoral principle came after four years of steadily growing limitations on democracy under President Vladimir Putin, years that had seen a narrowing of the freedoms to speak and publish, to associate, and to be immune from arbitrary searches and seizures. But the actual elimination of 89 elective offices was a definitive step off the path of democratic consolidation.

In order to justify this move, Putin cited the horror that had unfolded in the small southern town of Beslan in early September 2004, when Chechen terrorists took hundreds of schoolchildren, teachers, and parents hostage on the opening day of the school year. More than three hundred of the captives died in the course of a botched rescue attempt ordered by either federal or local officials-it remains unclear.

Following Beslan, Putin mused publicly that the country would be better able to fight terror if errant regional governors were brought more firmly into line with Moscow. In reality, however, Russia has a long history of confused and disorganized federal relations, and the terrible bloodletting in Beslan was little more than a pretext for Putin's latest maneuver to recentralize and de-democratize Russia. In October 2005, moreover, another hostage-taking incident in yet another southern Russian city, Nalchik, suggested that recentralization has yet to make ordinary Russians safer.

Putin's efforts to recentralize by weakening Russia's already feeble democracy had been under way long before Beslan. The tragedy there merely gave him a long-sought opportunity to blame democracy for what ails the Russian state. But will a plainly authoritarian recasting of Russia's political system necessarily lead to a more capable state? Can a unitary state run from Moscow truly govern a country that spans 11 time zones and encompasses more than 120 distinct ethnic groups in 89 provinces? Will a unitary, increasingly authoritarian Russian state prove better able than a federal and democratic one to protect the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens? Putin would have people believe so, but recent events-not to mention the long arc of Russian and Soviet history-suggest a different answer.

With a year of hindsight, it is safe to say that Putin's recentralizing measures have done little to serve his purported goal of ensuring a more secure and governable Russia. On the contrary, they have merely pushed Russia farther off the path to democratic consolidation and pointed the country toward a hardening authoritarianism. Rather than sweeping out potentially (or actually) corrupt and incompetent regional officials over the past year, Putin has so far named 22 incumbents out of the 26 governors whom he has appointed. Rather than clean house, he has been mostly content to leave people in place, albeit with the proviso that their job security now depends not on the voters, but on him.

Is it right to think, as Putin apparently does, that autocracies tend to govern better than democracies? In 1968, Samuel P. Huntington wrote approvingly of the Soviet state's ability to govern its vast domain.' A little more than two decades later, however, that state would lie in ruins, hollowed out to the point of collapse by decades of progressive exhaustion. Left behind to sift through the debris was a population sunk in poverty and beleaguered by numerous social and economic ills. Whatever else it may have been, Sovietism was obviously not a successful development model.

Consolidated capitalist democracies have proven more enduring. They rely on bureaucratic and organizational (infrastructural) capacity rather than force to ensure the allegiance of their populations. The state's ability to wield force remains present, of course, but most of the time it stays well in the background and has little to do with day-to-day allegiance or obedience. Indeed, states that rely heavily on force (or despotic power) but which lack significant infrastructural supports are by nature precarious.

By considering how types of state power can differ, we can more reliably assess the nature of the contemporary Russian state. In doing so, we should keep in mind that whether the Russian regime is democratic or authoritarian, the state itself must possess enough infrastructural power to make its authority regularly run beyond the Kremlin walls. Even if Russia completely abandons democracy, the demise of the highly centralized Soviet state is a reminder that authoritarianism is not necessarily a more reliable way in which to ensure adherence to central state authority. Regardless of the amount of financial aid that Russia receives from international organizations, the quality of its public policies, the fiscal and political threats issued by the president, or even the extent of electoral rights at the provincial level, if the central state lacks sufficient infrastructural power then positive change will come slowly, if at all, to the lives of ordinary Russians outside Moscow.

But in contemporary Russia, where infrastructural (administrative) capacity is relatively low and there is an apparent unwillingness or inability to use despotic power in a broad and reliable way, democracy is the better governing alternative. From the point of view of actually being able to provide public goods and services (including personal security), democracy's major edge over authoritarianism is that the former offers a regular method by which officials can be held accountable to the public. Lacking any regular mechanism of accountability to rival free and fair elections, an undemocratic system must resort to extraordinary means (such as despotic power) to get rid of inept or corrupt officials or else resign itself to a cycle of cronyism and low governing capacity.

Putin's claims about what ails Russia are wrong. The culprit behind Russia's ungovernability is not the country's halting democracy but rather its weak, poorly institutionalized state. The best cure, moreover, is not authoritarianism-whether hard or soft-but rather an enhanced democracy, more deeply institutionalized than it ever has been under Putin or his predecessor Boris Yeltsin.

In order to see how a better-built, more firmly rooted democracy would make the Russian state stronger rather than weaker, it is helpful to look briefly at how the Soviet state was governed. Its key institutions-the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the command economy-collapsed during the era of Mikhail Gorbachev. Yet neither Yeltsin nor Putin ever really tried to replace them with democratic successors that could do the work of governance while respecting rights and liberties. The potential for leveraging democracy's major governance advantage-regular accountability through free and fair elections-was never tapped. Russia's tale, in short, is a sad one of a horse (accountability) that was never ridden and a bridge (democratic consolidation) that was never crossed.