Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (20 page)

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executive branch—even as these analysts looked to the executive branch to solve Russia’s problems. Here was the fundamental quandary of successful ‘reform’, meaning something approaching a liberal order: how was the incoherent Russian state going to solve the country’s problems when the state
was
the main problem?

Lame presidentialism

Think back to the spring and summer of 1989, a time when the first legislature worthy of that name came into being in the Soviet Union. It was an awkward two-tiered structure comprising a Congress of Peoples’ Deputies—a kind of permanent Constitutional Convention—and a smaller ‘working parliament’, the Supreme Soviet, selected from the Congress. Importantly, the nomination made by the Congress’s chairman (Gorbachev) for the post of prime minister was subject to a confirmation vote, after which he submitted nominees for other government posts to the deputies. Even the heads of the defence ministry and KGB, Yazov and Kryuchkov, had to appear and answer questions as part of the confirmation process. The two future putschists were confirmed, but some nominated ministers were rejected, and confirmed ministers could be called back any time to submit reports and answer questions. Lawmakers also formed committees that investigated the use of force on Soviet territory by the executive branch. Gorbachev’s call for a law-based state—
pravovoe
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gosudarstvo
, akin to the continental notion of a
Rechtsstaat
—began to resonate.

But, having sidelined the Communist Party and transformed the parliament, Gorbachev found himself with only indirect levers over the Soviet legislature and the government. In March 1990, when he created a Soviet presidency, supposedly adapting the French hybrid presidential–parliamentary system, the government began to report to both the president and the legislature, but the legislature granted the president extraordinary powers, such as the right to issue decrees with the force of law and to impose martial law. Still not content, Gorbachev remade the government (council of ministers), this time supposedly on the US model, into a cabinet directly subordinated to the presidency. But then, in February–March 1991, he evicted the cabinet from the Kremlin to make way for his own presidential staff, whose departments were made to parallel the government ministries. In other words, the structure of the Soviet presidency—redundancy to the executive branch—reproduced that of the Central Committee apparat, which Gorbachev had only recently subverted.

Draining the CC apparat of its best functionaries, the Soviet presidential staff grew quickly.
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But the president’s ability to enforce decrees, and penalize non-compliance by the central and regional bureaucracy, remained elusive. Gorbachev had recreated the formal position of the general secretary in the presidency, but he had no substitutes for the bygone cult of the office of general secretary, 148

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the lost presence of Communist Party organizations throughout all institutions, or the cohesion once provided by Communist ideology and party ‘discipline’. Vertical subordination was further undermined by the expropriations of state property, the assertiveness of republic legislatures, and the creation of republic presidencies. The Soviet state acquired a presidency suspended in the air, a government made redundant by the presidency, and members of a Soviet parliament expressing frustration at their decreasing ability to direct the president or the government. Following the failed August 1991 putsch by the marginalized cabinet, President Gorbachev dismissed his government and abolished the Supreme Soviet. Soon, of course, he, too, was gone.

Far from avoiding such self-defeating institutional arrangements, the Russian leadership under Yeltsin— obsessed with Gorbachev—
copied
them. First, Russia imitated the cumbersome model of a Congress of People’s Deputies and separate working parliament (Supreme Soviet), the only one of the fifteen Union republics to do so. Then, Russia imitated the general-secretary-like presidency. But, whereas the Soviet legislature had acquiesced in the aggrandizement of the Soviet presidency, the Russian legislature, skilfully dominated by Yeltsin’s hand-picked replacement as chairman, Ruslan Khasbulatov, dug in its heels. A twenty-month tug of war ensued, which seemed to turn on political programmes, since the president backed market liberalization, while the Supreme Soviet passed laws to increase industrial subsidies and 149

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pensions (without specifying how such measures would be financed, and having overwhelmingly endorsed shock therapy a few months before). The conflict also seemed to pivot on principle, since Yeltsin talked of overriding the Soviet-era Constitution still in force, while the parliament talked of defending it (though members did not hesitate to stockpile weapons). At bottom, the two sides were pursuing parallel quests for absolute supremacy.
2

Amendments to Russia’s Constitution confirmed the president as ‘the highest official’ (article 121) but designated the Congress as ‘the highest organ of state power’

(article 104).
3
Further ambiguity arose because the Russian Supreme Soviet—just like the direct democracy of Jacobin clubs, from which soviets (councils) were descended—incorporated both legislative and executive functions, while the Russian president enjoyed extra-parliamentary powers to issue decrees with the force of law, powers that after one year the parliament refused to renew. To break a stand-off that included impeachment efforts by the parliament and an April 1993 referendum won by the president—58 per cent expressed confidence in the president and 53 per cent in the painful economic reforms—Yeltsin issued an illegal decree in mid-September 1993 disbanding the two-tiered legislature, and calling for new elections as well as a referendum on a new Constitution. The leadership of parliament and their paramilitary supporters countered with an armed uprising, which ended in the presidential bombing and storming of the parliament building.
4
When the smoke 150

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cleared, the institutional settlements, like the clash itself, evoked Soviet and even tsarist legacies.

Yeltsin unilaterally promulgated a new ‘presidential’

Constitution, which was passed in a plebiscite. (When the preliminary voting results were reported to the president, he took a pen and raised the ‘yes’ vote from around 50 per cent to near 60
per cent.5) His Constitution re-established,

but modified, the legislature, which now comprised a popularly elected lower house—the State Duma (a name from the tsarist period)—and an appointed upper house filled by regional officials from both the executive and the legislative branches—the Federation Council (a name evoking the Soviet era). But some ministers were no longer subjected to confirmation votes, and even the legislature’s ability to confirm the prime minister was restricted by the fact that the president, like the tsar, could resubmit rejected candidates and, following three votes against confirmation, simply dismiss parliament. The Constitution also granted the Russian president, like the tsars and the politburo, permanent and nearly unrestricted power to issues decrees with the force of law—appropriating a prerogative of the legislature. For the executive branch, the president could issue binding orders, yet he also chastised the ministers (usually in front of television cameras), as if he were not responsible for his government’s policies.

These arrangements were said to have been modelled on the French presidential–parliamentary hybrid, an outgrowth of France’s monarchical traditions, but the 151

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Russian president’s formal powers far exceeded those of his French counterpart. Also unlike the French example, neither the Russian president nor the government he appointed had any moorings in parliamentary majorities.
6

Only one Russian prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov (September 1998–May 1999), forged a kind of coalition government—by voluntarily taking Duma deputies as ministers—but, after having brought a measure of equivo-cating stability, one day Primakov was summarily dismissed. (During two terms, Yeltsin sacked five prime ministers, around forty first deputy prime ministers, and more than 170 ministers overall.) Further unlike France, the Russian Constitution codified the practice whereby the ‘force ministries’ (the army, police, and renamed KGB) as well as the foreign ministry reported not to the prime minister, but to the president—as in Soviet times to the general secretary, and before that, to the tsar.

In a further reflection of autocratic traditions, Russia’s presidency commanded a formidable bureaucracy of its own, whose departments paralleled and to an extent controlled the government ministries—just like the departments of Gorbachev’s short-lived Soviet presidency had, and, before that, those of the CC apparat had. Appropriating the very premises of the old CC apparat, Yeltsin’s Presidential Administration grew to have even more staff, spilling over into the Kremlin.
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And in a new Property Office of the Presidential Administration, the Russian presidency acquired a financial base independent of the state budget that was even more phenomenal than those 152

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enjoyed by the tsars or the politburo. Amalgamating the three former property offices of the Central Committee, the Soviet Council of Ministers, and the Supreme Soviet legislature, Yeltsin’s Presidential Property Office also expropriated or established more than 200 private businesses, from tourism and newspaper presses to construction and mineral extraction, with more than 100,000 total employees. It was the presidency, rather than the government or the legislature, that became the owner of Russian property abroad as well as of the Kremlin itself, Soviet-era elite hospitals, state-awarded vehicles, countless elite apartments, and the thousands of state dachas in or near Moscow, including those that were awarded to, or taken from, members of the legislature.

And yet, despite resources ‘staggering in their scale and perplexity’,
8
in the words of one scholar, the Russian president’s effective power, like Gorbachev’s, turned out to be highly circumscribed. Part of the reason was leadership, or the lack thereof. Yeltsin valued surprise over strategy in decision making, and suffered from severe mood swings and health problems, disappearing for long stretches without explanation. His presidency came to recall the latter years of Brezhnev’s reign, when ‘court’

favourites enjoyed wide latitude because of the incapacita-tion of the ‘tsar’.
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But Yeltsin’s enfeeblement was more than just a matter of poor health or personal quirks. It derived from the enigmatic political system. Defined as ‘the guarantor of the constitution’ (article 80), Russia’s president did not govern; he was, like the tsar, a separate 153

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branch of government unto himself, the ‘ruler’ of those who governed. With the government detached from parliament and dependent on presidential whim, the duplicative Presidential Administration turned out to be less effective than even the CC apparat had been in overcoming the disconnected departmentalism of Russia’s nearly 100 federal ministries and executive agencies.

Eighty-nine fiefs

As a part of the Union, Russia had been tied together by the centralized rule of the party and by the warring Moscow ministries that owned the major physical assets in localities. The sudden end of party rule and planned economy meant the onset, willy-nilly, of new centre–periphery relations. That prospect was further complicated by the same structural legacy that, as a result of Gorbachev’s actions (and inactions), had made the Union vulnerable to separatism. The Russian republic, too, was a federation comprising, among its eighty-nine subunits, thirty-two nationally designated territories—either national republics or the lesser-status national districts. Several of Russia’s national districts unilaterally raised themselves to the higher form, but only five of what came to be twenty-one national republics inside Russia had a majority of the titular nationality.
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The country’s population, over four-fifths Russian, was more ethnically homogenous than that of Spain or the UK. Russia’s regional politics were shaped 154

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not by broad-based national movements, but by the formal existence of internal nation-state structures for largely unconcentrated minorities. By contrast, no ‘autonomous republic’ existed for the huge Russian populations concentrated in regions of Ukraine or Kazakhstan.

Watching the Union republics, including Russia, conduct insurgencies against Moscow, Russia’s national and even non-national subunits began to assert the priority of their laws over federal ones. One republic in the Russian Federation, Chechnya, did more—it declared independence. In late 1991, Yeltsin decreed a state of emergency in Chechnya, but then immediately rescinded his order.

Over the next several years, neither side displayed much wisdom or commitment to negotiations. Chechen gang-sters—connected to Russian criminal groupings—engaged in local oil siphoning and hostage taking as well as international narcotics and weapons smuggling. Moscow conducted covert operations to destabilize the Chechen regime, with mixed results. In December 1994, the Russian army launched a frontal assault, despite a warning by the General Staff that a ‘small victorious war’, along the lines of the recent US intervention in Haiti, was impossible in Chechnya.
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By mid-1996, after a brutal, disorganized military fiasco, Moscow sued for peace, leaving the status of Chechnya unresolved and ceding a free hand to the Chechen warlords. Neither Russian nor Chechen sovereignty offered much to the civilian population.

For all the drama of the Chechen War, which resumed in 1999, separatism was not the main challenge bedevil-155

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ling Russia’s federation.
12
Only one other republic, Tatarstan, also declared independence, but in February 1994—ten months before the onset of the Chechen War—the Tatar leadership signed a bilateral deal with Moscow renouncing its declaration in exchange for far-reaching autonomy and budgetary concessions from Moscow. Sakha (Yakutia), which had not pushed for independence, received much the same. Like Tatarstan, Sakha affirmed itself as part of Russia and achieved increased control over valuable resources on its territory, and its elites used these resources to consolidate their rule. Indeed, in all of Russia’s internal republics, ‘presidential’ systems were created, so that Russia soon had twenty-one presidents, in addition to the federal president, and twenty-one extra presidential administrations (which were redundant to the government ‘ministries’ of the internal republics). Simultaneously, gubernatorial and mayoral bureaucracies expanded in Russia’s fifty-seven non-ethnic provinces and federal cities.