DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING OR EVOLUTIONARY LIBERALIZATION?

In 1989 for the Soviet Union and again in 1990 for Russia, there were vigorously contested elections for national parliaments in the two countries, and in many respects these were the freest elections that Russia has witnessed in the last two decades. The heady breath of freedom inspired the country and the world. Extraordinarily liberal laws were passed on religion, the media and other aspects of social life, repudiating 74 years of Soviet experience. It seemed, as Moshe Lewin argued, that the society had indeed matured.Footnote ¹ Isaac Deutscher had also earlier argued that Stalinism was its own gravedigger, modernizing the country to such an extent that at a certain point the archaic form of rule represented by the CPSU's dominance over state and society would be subverted.Footnote ² Thus modernization theory seemed to point to the ineluctable triumph of a less ‘totalitarian’ political order, and Gorbachev's reforms seemed the apotheosis of these aspirations. Although there were always concerns, optimism prevailed.Footnote ³

Why did all of this unravel, and so quickly? This is where the pessimistic accounts come in. Indeed, the factors that undermined the consolidation of Russian democracy are so numerous as to suggest – to the pessimists at least – that the failure of public, free and competitive politics was ‘over-determined’. At the top of the list is the ‘stateness’ question, the struggle between Russia and the USSR for ‘sovereignty’ from 1990, which quickly degenerated into a tawdry ‘war of the laws’. On its own, the dissolution of the Soviet order may have allowed an evolutionary transcendence of the communist system towards a more democratic and pluralistic polity. However, the process of dissolution was entwined with the disintegration of the Soviet state, two very separate yet linked processes. The result was the break-up of the USSR, formalized by the declaration of the three presidents (from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine) meeting at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha hunting lodge on 7–8 December 1991. Russia has still not quite got over this traumatic founding stage; it haunts the country to this day.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), the main successor party to the CPSU, still considers (in its pronouncements if not its policies) Russia in its present borders to be an illegitimate state. President Vladimir Putin, in his annual address to the Federal Assembly on 25 April 2005, described the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’ of the twentieth century and a ‘tragedy for the Russian people’, and warned that the ‘epidemic of collapse’ was threatening Russia itself. He stressed, however, that the Soviet Union was a thing of the past, and the coherence of the Russian Federation depended not on retreating from democracy but on strengthening democratic institutions and principles throughout society. On other occasions he lamented that those who do not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union had no heart, but warned that those who considered it possible to reconstruct the old state had no head. More than anyone, with the adoption of a bricolage of national symbols (anthem, emblem and flag), Putin attempted to reconcile the various eras of Russian statehood, and effectively put an end to the question, although there continue to be endless debates about the scope and nature of Russian national identity.

The second factor concerns institutional design. In the final Soviet years Russia created an increasingly powerful presidency, but at the same time continued with a newly empowered national legislature. The conflict between the two principles of governance, both equally valid in their own way but not at the same time, provoked a confrontation that only ended with the violence of 3–4 October 1993, when President Boris Yeltsin forcibly dissolved parliament. The years between 1991 and 1993 were marked by a period of ‘phoney democracy’, setting in train a pattern that lasts to this day. The popular movement that had brought Yeltsin to power (notably Democratic Russia) soon lost the ability to constrain presidential policy. Following the bloodshed, a strongly presidential system was codified in the new constitution, finally adopted in a flawed referendum on 12 December 1993. From that point onwards the presidency has towered over all other institutions. It is certainly not a foregone conclusion, though, that the ‘super-presidential’ system is itself a main cause of Russia's democratic backsliding, as argued by M. Steven Fish.Footnote ⁴ Equally cogent arguments could be made that a strong presidency, in a weakly institutionalized political environment lacking trust and requiring systemic reforms, needed a strong presidency to achieve a degree of political integration and policy momentum.Footnote ⁵ Thus it could be argued equally plausibly that a strong executive is a consequence of Russia's fragmented politics and political culture, rather than a cause in and of itself for the lack of democratic consolidation.

Numerous other factors are involved, notably the continuing struggle over economic policy, the sharp differences over Russia's place in the world and modes of engagement with the international system, and the influence of ‘path dependency’ and in general the role played by the Soviet legacy and Russian political culture. As primary commodity prices rose in the 2000s, Russia enjoyed windfall rents that allowed the regime to insulate itself from popular accountability. There are extensive literatures on all of these issues, yet one point consistently emerges: the sheer enormity of the choices facing Russia as it emerged into the harsh light of the post-communist day as a newly independent state. This is a point stressed by Michael McFaul in his study of ‘Russia's unfinished revolution’,Footnote ⁶ and is certainly accurate in describing the overload placed on the political system.

This helps take us away from what are sometimes simplistic categorizations of optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of Russia's post-communist trajectory. Indeed, observers can be divided into two camps. As I have argued elsewhere, on the one hand there are those who argue that Russia has endured a failed democratization or a failed transition.Footnote ⁷ The early 1990s were catastrophic for Russia: the ‘shock therapy’ that robbed people of their savings (thus undermining popular trust in the new order), the wild ‘piratization’ of state property by a small group of so-called ‘oligarchs’, the massive growth in social inequality, the violent confrontation between parliament and president in September–October 1993, the foisting of a super-presidential constitution on a cowed people in a flawed referendum in December 1993, a pattern of elections that may well have been free but were certainly far from fair. The legacy of the Soviet system, its personnel and its spirit combine with all these events to attest that, as far as the failed democratization school is concerned, Russia, as in 1917, has not been able to live up to the challenge of transforming itself into a modern state governed by a responsible government and regulated by a law-bound polity.

These negative trends were accentuated by Putin, including attacks on media freedom, the undermining of judicial independence and property rights, notably in the Yukos case from 2003 when the oil company saw its assets effectively expropriated by the regime. In the associated trial of the company's former chief executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a process dubbed ‘Basmanny justice’ (from the Moscow district where Khodorkovsky's trial was directed) once again saw the re-emergence of ‘telephone law’ where the authorities ensure that they gain the verdict they want. Human rights abuses in Chechnya and the consolidation of a ‘warlordist’ regime there under the leadership of Ramzan Kadyrov, the rollback of regional autonomy as part of Putin's ‘new federalism’, and the growth of corruption and the opaque operations of the ‘national champions’ in the energy sector and in the new state corporations all suggested the emergence of a self-seeking elite interested only in maintaining their own power and using the levers of the state to enrich themselves, especially at a time of abundant energy rents. Some in this school would go further, and draw on arguments based on history and political culture to suggest not only that the institutionalization and consolidation of democracy in post-communist Russia has failed, but that this failure was determined by the whole pattern of traditional relations between state and society and by Russia's geopolitical aspirations, evident since at least the sixteenth century, to be a regional and, later, a global power. Even the so-called Russian democrats, from this perspective, were little better than their more overtly authoritarian protagonists, driving through liberal economic reforms at the expense of the mass of the people.Footnote ⁸ The intersection of, and possibly contradiction between, the great power and democratization agendas is one of the unique features of Russia's transformation process since 1991.Footnote ⁹

There is also a second position (admittedly, with fewer advocates), which maintains a guarded optimism regarding the institutional potential of the existing constitutional order and its ability to evolve towards a livelier, more pluralistic and accountable democratic polity. For convenience we can dub this group ‘democratic evolutionists’. They do not deny that Russia's post-communist trajectory has been a difficult one, marked by severe breaches of what would be generally recognized as democratic standards. The negative picture from this perspective is mitigated, however, by the continued commitment of the regime to a programme of democratic liberalization. This has been most apparent during the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev since 2008. At that time Putin stepped down, as stipulated by the constitution, after two consecutive terms as leader (which itself was a major achievement); and he nominated as his successor the most liberal of the putative candidates. Although the presidential ballot in March 2008 was neither free nor fair, it did reflect the preferences of the majority of voters.Footnote ¹⁰

Although those pressing for a rapid liberalization of the Putinite system were disappointed by the painfully slow and technocratic nature of Medvedev's changes, these actions at least had the merit of reaffirming a certain direction of movement. Medvedev was haunted by the spectre of perestroika, where rapid decompression and radicalization destroyed not only the Soviet authoritarian system but also, as we have seen, the state. Thus, from this perspective, only the evolutionary transcendence of the present shortcomings has the prospect in the long run of rooting the changes in an enduring and more pluralistic polity. In a society where the very existence of the state is far from guaranteed, with a spreading insurgency in the North Caucasus, perceived threats from the rising powers of Asia in the underdeveloped Russian Far East, and major demographic challenges, this gradualist strategy represents a break from the radical ruptures of the past, which in Russia have tended only to reinstate authoritarianism in new forms.

PARTIES AND IDEOLOGY

It is at this point that Hanson's work sheds important new light on the problem of Russia's democratic development. His book, Post-Imperial Democracies, looks at the role of ideology in shaping the party systems in the founding period of the Third Republic in France in the early 1870s, the Weimar Republic in Germany, 1918–34, and in post-Soviet Russia up to 2008. This is an ambitious, erudite and thoroughly researched work, making perceptive links between the three case studies. His basic aim is to ‘bring ideology back in’, and thus privileges commitment to a firm set of ideas and principles by political leaders as the determinative causal factor in the success or failure of a national party-building project in conditions of high uncertainty. Ideologies are here defined as ‘proposals made by individuals to define clear and consistent criteria for membership in a proposed polity’.Footnote ¹¹ The key is for a leader to enunciate a differentiated ideology, which as Hanson argues, artificially elongates the temporal horizons for its adherents. In making the rational choice whether to commit themselves or not, potential adepts will be more likely to join with others (and thus overcome the collective action problem) if a desirable and coherent representation of the future is adumbrated by the nascent party. Once the process begins, it can gather force as newcomers are attracted to become part of a successful organizational enterprise that has a clear stake in the future, and thus a self-reinforcing process is set in train. By contrast, Hanson gives several examples where already successfully functional national associations disintegrated when they lacked a clearly articulated vision of the future.

This is a powerful argument, and works extremely well in the French and German cases. In the French case, it helps explain why the radical republican ideology espoused by Léon Gambetta was able to break the post-Franco-Prussian war stalemate, overcoming the alternative programmes adumbrated by the Orléanists, Legitimists and Bonapartists. The country had been unable to break through to a more dynamic capitalism because of the small-scale structure of its agriculture, an inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy, and weak executive capacity until Gambetta was able to articulate a vision capable of mobilizing principled grassroots support. In a very different way, Adolf Hitler was also able to do this in the Weimar Republic based on three endlessly repeated and savagely enforced principles: a Social Darwinist theory of racial struggle as the motor of history; the rebirth of Germany through the conquest of living space (Lebensraum) in the east; and the leader principle (Führerprinzip). Thus the political stalemate of the Weimar years was broken, and Germany set on a trajectory that was to lead to military defeat and the re-creation of the republic on fundamentally new principles after 1945.

The model does not work anything like as well for the post-communist Russian case, though. Here the problem has been not so much an ideological vacuum, of the sort that characterized Italian politics in the 1880s and which prompted the trasformismo degeneration of the party system, but a cacophony of competing ideologies, each of which has the potential to elongate the time horizons of potential converts. Thus Hanson is forced to deal with the problem of an absence: why no ideologically oriented party was able to generate and sustain its hegemony. Hanson identifies the three party formations that were in the frame to do this, but none became predominant and instead a centrist coalescence under the presidency came to dominate. Hanson looks at three groupings to develop his argument: the CPRF under Gennady Zyuganov, which held true to the vision of a reconstituted Soviet Union, non-market economy and great power Russian nationalism; the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) under the ebullient ‘joke fascist’ leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, holding to a supranational imperial ideology and unitary state formation; and the fragmented and ultimately marginalized liberal parties, notably the Yabloko grouping under Grigory Yavlinsky. In looking at these parties, and in particular the first two, Hanson appears to be grasping at straws to sustain his model in the Russian context.

Hanson argues that the liberals lacked a coherent and enduring vision of the appropriate liberal future, torn as Yavlinsky was between his view in 1990–91 that economic reform could only take place on a Union-wide basis, a position drastically undermined by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. He never quite regained the initiative, and his party was doomed to a slow decline that finally saw it excluded from the State Duma in the December 2003 elections. Another factor weakening the liberals was their alleged view that ‘the sun rises in the west’, as their critics often put it, and they were thus unable to present liberalism as a genuinely patriotic endeavour. There were, however, plenty of liberal groupings who sought to achieve precisely such a synthesis, notably Sergei Shakhrai's PRES grouping in the early 1990s and Boris Fëdorov's ‘Forward Russia!’ party. They enunciated this vision with passion and conviction, yet this did not save them from electoral marginalization. A more fruitful comparison may have been not with the Weimar Republic but with post-war Germany – even though the post-war system was structured by occupation and the onset of the Cold War – where the challenge of rebuilding a party and economic system almost from scratch is comparable to the challenges facing post-communist Russia.

There is yet another reason why Hanson's model does not work quite so well for Russia. In the two earlier cases the ideological terrain was structured according to powerful competing ideologies. In France republicanism was challenged by legitimism and other deeply rooted currents; in Weimar Germany the great cleavages of the twentieth century between communism and fascism, between the left and the right, gave a powerful structure to political contestation. Hanson is right to stress that it took leaders of genius to catalyse the aspirations of the ideological tendencies into coherent party organization, notably Gambetta in France and Hitler in Germany. In contemporary Russia, though, there are no such epochal ideological cleavages. There are numerous differences over the appropriate economic, national and international policies, but these do not equate to the fundamental ideological cleavages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hanson engages with this argument through his notion of ‘world time’, the deep trends in political temporality, but the issue remains pertinent. It is not that we have entered a post-ideological age – since the anti-statist ideology of, for example, neo-liberalism, still has the power to mobilize and enthuse – but that these different ideas, even with the most brilliant leadership, are difficult to catalyse into the creation of a new party.

This is one reason why Russian presidents have had recourse to the top-down creation of so-called ‘parties of power’; instruments established not so much to catalyse voters on ideological lines, but precisely to rally them behind the administration on pragmatic grounds. Hanson's model is certainly useful in examining the dynamics of a regime-centred system, noting that its lack of ideological focus makes it difficult to maintain organizational integrity. Undoubtedly, without ‘administrative resources’ United Russia would find it hard to mobilize the masses. Russia has a heavily presidential model of executive dominance, which is at the core of a dominant power system. This system is careful to preserve its autonomy, and thus guards against the emergence of a dominant party system. Hale argues the same point in a rather different manner when he argues that parties were unable to impose a monopoly (typical for western democracies) over the political marketplace, and thus a range of ‘party substitutes’ came into play, including regional agglomerations and business groups, until ultimately they were all incorporated into the expanding ‘centrist’ agglomeration headed by Putin.Footnote ¹² Thus the regime party and its allies act less as instruments of representation than as a tool to achieve political mobilization, and by the same token the role of political opposition is marginalized. Parties have limited political reach and fail to provide the framework for the institutionalization of political competition or the integration of regional and national politics. They are not the source of governmental formation, personnel appointments (although under Medvedev there has been a move in this direction) or policy generation; neither are they, more broadly, ‘system-forming’, in the sense of providing the framework for political order.

In other words, there are parties but no party system, with the latter defined as an independent sphere of party development that can autonomously shape the conduct of politics. A dominant power system, whose rule in the Russian context is exercised by a strong state-based political regime, prevails over a dominant party system in which political conflicts, executive selection and policy formulation are resolved by an autonomous party formation. Although parties are the main actors in parliamentary elections, they are at best accessories to processes taking place within the regime. This applies as much to United Russia as to other parties, hence its role as a ‘dominant party’ is limited. The regime exercises numerous ex ante and post facto controls over the party, including the imposition of a weak leadership and carefully monitors its work in the legislature.

A STALEMATED POLITICAL SITUATION

The whole process of change in Russia, in its extraordinary depth and intensity while appealing to principles of normality and regularity, remains contradictory. This has given rise to a distinctive type of dual state. Freedom would be granted to the nation, but this freedom could only be exercised within the constraints of the logic of the transformative process itself. In other words, while the typical panoply of democratic institutions was created within the framework of a constitutional order, a parallel system emerged at the same time that claimed certain prerogatives that transcended the rules and constraints of the constitutional state. This ‘prerogative state’ or, as I call it, the administrative regime (Verwaltungsstaat), represents a classic case of ‘domain democracy’; the rules applied to the rest of society do not apply to itself.Footnote ¹³

Russia's dominant power system has some distinctive characteristics. From the time Putin came to power in 2000, the regime took on an ever-stronger tutelary aspect, claiming the right to manage not only the sphere of policy, the usual job of governments, but also the exclusive right to manage political processes as a whole. This is what distinguishes a ‘regime’ from a normal ‘government’. Fearing for the stability, and indeed for the very existence of the state, Putin's regime represented a powerful shift from mobilizational to pacificatory politics; from encouraging independent civic activism to controlling and regulating it. In the process it suffocated not only political pluralism but also eroded the sources of regime renewal. This was the system known as ‘managed democracy’. Popular inclusion in the Putin period did take place, but in an archaic manner reminiscent of Soviet practices. This was not modern civic participation of an active citizenry accompanied by the pluralistic representation of divergent interests. Putin's mutuality was top-down, mobilizational and paternalistic, and vitiated by the internally hierarchical power system. Inclusion at the economic level was even more partial, with small businesses remaining at the mercy of the bureaucracy, while big business was incorporated as a subaltern partner of the regime. The modernization agenda from above was not accompanied by the necessary modernization from the middle, represented by a competitive party system, an entrepreneurial and independent business culture, and a vibrant public sphere.Footnote ¹⁴

Russian politics is characterized by the dominance of a powerful yet diffuse administrative regime, recognizing its subordination to the normative state on the one side and its formal accountability to the institutions of mass representative democracy on the other.Footnote ¹⁵ However, it is not effectively constrained by either, hence the ‘regime’ character of the dominant power system. It is also for this reason that it would be an exaggeration to suggest that a full-blown ‘prerogative state’ has emerged in Russia, ruling through emergency decrees and sustained repression (which would have to hold to allow Russia to be characterized as a full-blown authoritarian state; hence Russia is often dubbed as ‘soft authoritarian’), instead we have an ‘administrative regime’ as the protagonist of the normative state. There is no prerogative state as such in Russia, constituted through formal but extra-constitutional decrees or laws, but instead there is informal behaviour by an administrative regime that fulfils some of the functions of the prerogative state but has no independent legal or institutional status of its own. The administrative regime is a network of social relations in which political and economic power are entwined in a shifting landscape of factional politics, but it also functions as an actor in the political process. It thus has a passive element, acting as an arena of intra-bureaucratic contestation (since the social basis of the administrative regime overwhelmingly lies in Russia's burgeoning bureaucracy); it also has agency features, allowing active purposive behaviour. The presidency is only one element of the administrative regime, although obviously a crucial one.

The regime exhibits certain features of ‘neo-patrimonial’ systems, and in particular the enduring systemic insecurity about whether a specific rule will be applied at any particular time. The arbitrary application of rules and constant changes to the framework regulating the conduct of elections and party development give a very short time horizon to individuals and to the behaviour of organizations. This has not yet been trumped by the emergence of a system-forming party with a longer time frame, on the Hanson model. Instead, actors devise numerous strategies to try to overcome this insecurity, above all by operating in a ‘dual’ way: by employing both the formal and informal arenas. This reproduces systematic insecurity, and reinforces the insecurity that is endemic to the operation of the system as a whole. The combination of legal-rational behaviour and patrimonial forms of domination is typical for neo-patrimonial systems, but the application of the model of the dual state to describe this behaviour gives substance to a more dynamic model, identifying the process itself (which is the advantage of theories of neo-patrimonialism) as well as to the contradictory nature of this form of rule, and thus identifies the dynamics of resistance to that rule.

In Russia both pillars of the dual state – the constitutional state and the administrative regime – emerged at the same time and are therefore more in balance than the earlier German, or even Soviet, models. In the 1990s the relationship between the two parts of the system was confused and inchoate, although it was clear from the first that the Yeltsin regime was ready to engage in sharp practices to ensure its own continuation. Since Yeltsin associated himself with the long time horizon of democratic reform and the creation of market capitalism, some short-term deviations from the operating codes of the desired new order seemed necessary in order to ensure that the ‘progressive’ constellation remained in power. In other words, there was an immediate disjuncture between the stated ideals of the reformist government and its political behaviour. In the context of mass immiseration, wild privatization and near-collapse of the state, accompanied by the fear that ‘revanchist’ parties such as the CPRF or LDPR would come to power, this was not an illogical position. Not only did democracy have to create the conditions for its own existence; the means available to perpetuate the existence of the democratic regime could not always be drawn from the democratic armoury.

The constitutional state is based pre-eminently on the formal order of institutions, and thus its practices are unlike the factionalized politics of the administrative regime. Its adherents are found in legal-constitutional structures, among the liberal intelligentsia and those who have advanced into the elite up the electoral ladder. The latter route for independent politicians has, however, been increasingly blocked by the suffocating regulations imposed on the electoral process by the administrative regime. By definition, the defenders of constitutionalism and the rule of law appeal to openness and due process, although that does not preclude some factional fighting of their own. The goal of universal law has been proclaimed by all leaders since Gorbachev, and both Putin and Medvedev, with their legal background, have proclaimed the supremacy of law (gospodstvo zakona), although the achievement falls far short of the ambition. Post-communist Russia has been in a permanent state of exception, exercised not through constitutional provisions of some sort defining a state of emergency (as in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt to 2010) but through an informal and undeclared derogation from constitutional principles. This is exercised by the administrative regime, which in the long term undermines the viability of constitutionalism as a whole. Elsewhere, notably in Malaysia and Singapore, regimes of exception have been unable to return to a condition of constitutional normality, but the problems associated with exceptional rule have been mitigated by the delivery of significant public goods, notably security and economic growth. In Russia, however, the state of exception has not become the norm and co-exists with the routine exercise of law, and thus the situation remains liminal and open-ended.

Russia is not Italy, but the notion of trasformismo can be usefully applied to the present ideologically confused period. Trasformismo describes the opportunistic acceptance of political support from any quarter and is also a synonym for corruption and stagnation. In Italy, as in contemporary Russia, left and right united in support of putatively non-ideological government from the centre that proclaimed the reconciliation of extremes for the good of the nation. In Russia this has taken the form of a state-oriented centrist coalition. Putin's administration claimed to stand above the historic divisions of the modern era, and indeed, purposely sought to reconcile the forces that had torn Russia apart in the twentieth century. The democratic process was managed by a force standing outside democracy, co-opting elements of political society willing to compromise and marginalizing the rest. This was a type of passive revolution, which for Antonio Gramsci entailed ‘an abortive or incomplete transformation of society’. This can take a number of forms, including one where an external force provokes change but lacks a sufficiently strong domestic constituency and runs into the resistance of entrenched interests. When the forces are equally balanced a stalemate emerges, giving rise to a situation of ‘revolution/restoration’.Footnote ¹⁶ As I shall argue below, however, passive revolution is also associated with the long-term attempt by an articulated ideal to win hegemony and to inscribe itself in the routine structures of political life, and in that sense is no less applicable to contemporary Russia.

Thus, rather than comparing Russia with the early Third Republic, a more pertinent comparison could well be with Second Empire France. We have a Bonapartist situation where social forces are equally balanced (above all between the bureaucracy and nascent political representations of the middle class), allowing the regime to act with autonomy. The Russian government continued the revolution in property and power begun in the late Gorbachev years, but at the same time restored elements of the previous regime. Promoted as the ideology of reconciliation, the inconclusive nature of the system takes the form of a dual state, with all of its inherent contradictions and accompanying stalemate.

PEOPLE AND POWER

It is this ‘imperfect world’ that is analysed so brilliantly by Ellen Carnaghan. Based on 60 in-depth interviews with Russian citizens in the late 1990s and early 2000s, her study gives a profound insight into the dynamics of opinion formation in contemporary Russia. Her work discards the over-blown rhetoric of so much essentialist writing on Russia, and instead she analyses the realities of how political culture is shaped, not by distant historical events or some essential psychological characteristics of the Russian people, but by the interaction of people and power in today's specific historical conjuncture. The dual character of the state is reflected in the views and behaviour of ordinary citizens. It can also be seen in the highly ambivalent attitude to the concept of ‘democracy’, which in contemporary Russia is associated with a range of negative phenomena.

Carnaghan inverts the usual logic of examination. Instead of asking whether Russians have the ‘right stuff’ to sustain democratic institutions and practices, she looks at the way existing institutions and practices shape values. The overriding picture that emerges from her study is that Russians tend to have ‘visions of order [that] are entirely consistent with much more democratic institutions than they have ever enjoyed’.Footnote ¹⁷ This has important implications for the future of democracy in Russia since, as she puts it: ‘If popular values are formed in the present rather than in the distant past, no nation, not even Russia, is closed off by culture from the possibility of democracy.’Footnote ¹⁸ Central to this argument is the notion of ‘order’, which Carnaghan's respondents identified as the rule of law to which even, indeed especially, government officials are subordinate, and which thus allows a genuinely universal political and economic community to flourish, governed by a single set of rules. Thus the neo-patrimonial features of the present ‘disorder’ in Russia would be overcome, and above all the constitutional state would close out the irregularities of the administrative regime.

In a paradoxical way, Putin was perceived to be doing precisely this. He came to power declaring the ‘dictatorship of law’, and he did indeed humble some of the ‘oligarchs’ who most egregiously flaunted their extra-constitutional status. When it came to the Yukos affair, however, the attack on Khodorkovsky was selective, but certainly far from arbitrary. Yukos was perceived to have created a ‘state within the state’, seeking to set the political agenda and to shape policy in a number of fields (notably energy taxation and pipeline routes), and thus challenged the core prerogatives of the state. This would be problematic in any society, but when the protagonist was an administrative regime with elements of the prerogative state, this proved intolerable. Hence the full force of ‘the law’ was unleashed against Khodorkovsky and his associates, inflicting a damaging blow precisely against the development of an impartial legal system. The Yukos affair revealed the ability of the regime to apply ‘telephone law’; that is, to influence judicial outcomes. The Yukos affair was a classic case of a ‘prosecution to order’ (zakazannoe delo) accompanied by the malpractices of ‘Basmanny justice’. It is the hunger for judicial impartiality and universally applicable rules that emerges so strongly in Carnaghan's work, and thus indicates the popular desire for the division between the two wings of the dual state to be overcome in favour of the order associated with the constitutional state.

Thus the apparent paradox about why Putin enjoyed such overwhelming popularity for so long, when he was apparently leading the country away from democracy, is resolved. At one level he was seen as taming those who refused to submit themselves to the rule of law. At the same time he exhibited the qualities of energy, dynamism and flair that are required in an emerging market state, even if this entails on occasion flouting the rules – something that the Soviet and post-Soviet generation had been used to in their daily lives in order to survive. Thus the average Russian citizen is far from being a perfect democrat, having to adapt to a disordered daily reality, but this does not obviate (and indeed, encourages) a general orientation to a vision of order where it would no longer be necessary to live in that dualistic way. Elements of the ‘dual Russia’, the stark tension between state and society, where the authorities are viewed as distant, alien and almost unrelentingly predatory, survive into the present day. It is the existing imperfection of current institutions that generates and perpetuates this duality, not some primordial political culture. This is a profound insight into the dynamics of social relations. People adapt to living under authoritarian regimes, but dream of living in a system where such adaptation is no longer necessary. This provides an enormous potential normative basis for the strengthening of Russian democracy.

THE FUTURE OF RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY

The system at present is locked in stalemate. This was already the case in the early 1990s, on a different plane, as a result of the conflict between parliament and the presidency and provoked the violent denouement of October 1993. The outcome was not simply a ‘winner takes all’ situation, since there remained limits on presidential power as new actors emerged to balance the executive. Yeltsin was certainly not able to have his way in a Duma dominated by an opposition majority. Once again, Putin resolved the problem by creating a loyal pro-regime dominant party, but at the cost of eroding political pluralism and the quality of governance overall. Political opposition as a political practice was marginalized, allowing a bureaucratic managerial style to predominate. In the absence of an open public sphere and accessible mass media, however, corruption proliferated. A no less deleterious consequence of the erosion of open politics was the growth of intra-regime factionalism.

To leave it there would be to tell only half the story. The political stalemate continues, but its axis has shifted away from institutional blockages of the type in evidence in the 1990s. Instead, there is now a clash of two political orders: the forms of order associated with the constitutional state, on the one hand, and, on the other, the neo-patrimonial features of the administrative regime. Elements of the two are present in most countries, but in Russia the combination now constitutes a distinctive order of its own. The two types of rules interact on a daily basis, leaving observers to clutch at every small sign as evidence of the predominance of one or the other. The apogee of systemic stalemate was reached in the tensions apparent in the ‘tandem’ form of rule in the final period of Medvedev's first term as president, as it became clear that Putin, as prime minister, was considering whether to assume the presidency (as allowed by the constitution) in 2012.

It would be a mistake to ascribe to Putin the primary role of exponent of the administrative regime. The essence of his rule was contradiction, as we have indicated above, and his political genius lay in straddling the two orders, while masterfully balancing the factions that were spawned by the systemic stalemate and the suffocation of open politics. In other words, he was a master at intra-elite bureaucratic intrigues, while presenting an appealing persona to the public. There was limited mileage in this permanent political juggling act, and a more ordered and routinized system of rule became increasingly desirable for a growing constituency. This appeared to be what was on offer with a second Medvedev term.

Thus, as the country approached the 2011–12 electoral cycle, it was once again faced by a historic choice. The two types of rule are more than a façade and cannot be reduced to personality politics or the manipulations of the Kremlin's spin doctors, but each carries defined political weight. Both sub-systems are hegemonic, in the sense that they are each associated with what Gramsci would call a ‘historical bloc’, a vision of the appropriate social order carried by specific social groups and elites. The tragedy of Russian post-communism is that these two blocs have become locked into stalemate, preventing a radical move towards a more genuinely open and competitive political system and a de-bureaucratized economy. The triumph of Russian post-communism, however, is that the stalemate has also prevented regression towards full-blown authoritarian restoration. The factional structure of the administrative regime does not predominate over formal political institutions. Instead, the system remains liminal, with its further evolution to be determined by the changing balance of power between the constitutional state and the administrative regime.

The struggle for genuine constitutionalism is the cornerstone of the ‘normative’ pillar of the political diarchy, and in this contest the ‘constitutional state’ is the protagonist of the administrative regime. The dual state character of the political order has allowed contradictions to develop that enhance demands for the constitutional state to be strengthened, and with it a greater autonomous representative role for political parties, more free debate in parliament, and greater mass media pluralism. Given the catastrophic consequences of Russia's repeated leaps into the future through revolutions, Medvedev has adopted the strategy of the ‘passive revolution’, anticipating that his orientation towards the strengthening of the constitutional state (however minor and incremental his actual measures) will allow the organic transformation of society. The strategy of passive revolution, as Carnaghan attests, is also one that responds to popular desires. Ideological affiliation has thus shifted away from ideological partisan alignment, so well described by Hanson, towards a more diffuse orientation towards support or otherwise for certain systemic characteristics. These were already well in evidence during perestroika, as noted in Fish's study of political mobilization.Footnote ¹⁹ The choice in Russia is no longer so much between alternative parties, but between types of regime, each of which is an articulation of an ideal. These are regulated by a rather capacious constitution, but there are of course limits to the compatibility of practices to be assimilated to the present constitutional order.

There is no doubt that the administrative regime has deep social and political roots, reaching back well into the Soviet era. In his study based on thirty-four interviews with leading Russian political figures, Michael Urban traces the moral and political universe of the Russian elite. Urban reveals the intensely ‘neo-patrimonial’ personalized nature of their understanding of the conduct of politics and social processes in general, with a deeply ambivalent relationship with formal political institutions. This is contrasted with what he calls the ‘political community’, what we more conventionally call the constitutional state, the established structures of the political order. The latter in Urban's world remains little more than a shadowy presence, an alterity that lacks substance but which is posited as the alternative collective moral order. Urban argues that this individualized discursive orientation is homologous with the broader pattern of social relations in Russia, and represents an enduring nexus that inhibits the country's advance towards a rule-based democracy.Footnote ²⁰ This is a sophisticated rendition of the political culture approach, but like most other versions it lacks a developed mechanism for explaining political change. He concludes that the discursive practices that he has identified reinforce authoritarianism, but he acknowledges that they can also provide a platform for the development of forms of deliberative democracy.

It is precisely this open-endedness of historical outcomes that the dual state model brings to the centre of political analysis. It is important to stress that the present balance is not in ‘equilibrium’, in the sense typically used in political science to describe a situation in which contrary pressures are durably balanced, but one of stalemate. This is a more dynamic situation in which the contrary forces are locked in a permanent endeavour to gain advantage, and it takes all of the leadership's skills to prevent one side or the other from prevailing. If Russia were to become a more consolidated authoritarian system, in which the arbitrariness and supra-political practices of the administrative regime were locked in, or if the constitutional state was able to bring its own officialdom under control to ensure the impartial and predictable application of rules, then the enhanced role for leadership would become redundant. Medvedev's leadership style, lacking the charismatic elements that have made Putin so popular, is precisely suited to the routine management of a constitutional state.

The motors allowing the present stalemate to be overcome include long-term social change (often associated with the consolidation of a Russian middle class), a crisis of one form or another, and the more proximate exhaustion of the present conflicted system to deliver desired public goods, notably personal security, impartial access to law, sustainable and balanced economic growth, and above all the complex ‘modernization’ so assiduously proclaimed by the present elite. This does not require another perestroika, but simply the application of the normative principles embodied in the Russian constitution. The shift from ‘regime’ forms of rule to constitutional governance would entail a profound revolution, but the most revolutionary aspect would be if this were achieved through a passive revolution. We would call the ensuing system democracy.