A New Turn to Authoritarian Rule in Russia?

GRAEME GILL

Many observers have pointed to the increasingly authoritarian nature of President Putins regime in Russia. This apparent turn away from democracy has generally been attributed either to Russian political culture or to the security background of Putin himself and many of those he has brought to ofce. However, analysis of the democratization literature suggests that the sources of Russias authoritarianism may lie in the nature of the initial transition from Soviet rule, and in particular the way in which elites were able to act with signicant independence from civil society forces because of the weakness of such forces. This weakness enabled successive elites led by Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin to construct a political system in which popularly based involvement and participation were severely restricted. In this sense, Putin is merely building on what went before, not changing the regimes basic trajectory. Key words: Russia; authoritarian rule; democratization; transition; elites; civil society

In the period since the replacement of Boris Yeltsin as president of Russia by Vladimir Putin at the end of 1999, many observers have pointed to the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Russian polity.1 Such comments have become particularly forceful in the wake of Putins election victory in March 2004 and the decisions he announced to alter the political system following the Beslan hostage crisis of September 2004. Observers have pointed to the consolidation of presidential power, the marginalization of the legislature, the weakening of civil society, the muzzling of an independent media and the reduction in the independence of regional politicians as evidence of creeping authoritarianism.2 This diminution of the independent sources of power across the system constitutes a closing of the space for independent political activity and accordingly a strengthening of authoritarian power. Sometimes this is presented, almost in classical terms, as a fall from the democracy of the Yeltsin period into the anti-democratic authoritarianism of Putin,3 but even when this contrast is not as starkly drawn, the authoritarian characterization of the latter era has been widely accepted.4 Two main lines of explanation have been prominent in the discussion of this development. The rst type of argument is the appeal to Russian culture. Many observers have been quick to point to a Russian historical tradition of preference for a strong leader heading a powerful state and standing atop a more passive society.5 This tradition is seen as being embodied in the long line of powerful tsars followed by communist rulers who were able to assert their personal dominance
Graeme Gill is Professor of Government and Public Administration, School of Economics and Political Science, The University of Sydney, Australia. Democratization, Vol.13, No.1, February 2006, pp.5877 ISSN 1351-0347 print=1743-890X online DOI: 10.1080=13510340500378258 # 2006 Taylor & Francis

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over both political structures and a weakened society as a whole. This line of argument sees the achievement of democracy in Russia as, at best, problematic, and the default political position as being authoritarian. As such, the perceived Putin swing toward authoritarianism is seen as simply a reversion to Russian type. The revival of this sort of argument, which was prominent in many explanations of the Soviet system, is a little curious because of the way in which many writers in the 1990s and early 2000s claimed to nd a strengthening of democratic elements in Russian political culture. Various authors claimed that the strengthening of democratic values underpinned the advances made toward democracy following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that this boded well for the future.6 But if democratic elements were strengthening, how could the perceived turn toward authoritarianism happen in the rst place, and how could it be explained in cultural terms? What this shows is the slipperiness of cultural arguments. Cultural values, assumptions and norms are neither static nor consistent. Those values will change over time as the society changes; the experience of Soviet industrialization transformed many aspects of traditional Russian political culture, introducing into it new elements which may have either replaced traditional elements or sit uncomfortably beside such elements. This means that not only will the culture be dynamic, but it is also likely to be characterized internally by tensions and inconsistencies. Authoritarian strands are likely to coexist with more democratic elements. As a result of such tension, two contrasting political developments could both be solidly rooted in the culture of the society. In such circumstances, while culture may play an important part in shaping political development its exact role is not easy to isolate, and we should beware of arguments blandly ascribing to culture the determinative role in shaping political developments. The second type of argument refers to Putins background in the Soviet security apparatus, the KGB, and in particular to the way in which members of the former security structure, the so-called siloviki, have become prominent in his regime. Various observers have pointed to the way in which leading posts in many of the regimes key institutions have come to be dominated by people with backgrounds in the security apparatus.7 It is assumed that they bring with them to their posts both a commitment to the sorts of values which do not sit easily with democratic principles and a certain sense of esprit de corps and group solidarity. This line of argument sees authoritarianism as chiey a result of the nature and personal preferences of Putin and his supporters. The emerging prominence of such people in the corridors of power in Russia cannot be disputed, and the fact that they would carry with them into their new posts particular sorts of mindsets and assumptions about the correct way of acting is also widely accepted. Although we should be careful not to be too dogmatic about this, as the cases of Gorbachev and Khrushchev, reformers who appeared from the interstices of the Soviet system to impose signicant change upon that system, attest, it is highly likely that such people would have a more authoritarian than a democratic disposition and outlook. And it is clear that a perceived authoritarian turn has taken place since Putin came to ofce and while the siloviki were strengthening their position within leading ranks. Indeed, such has Putins position

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been that it is inconceivable that the political changes occurred without his support. Therefore, on this basis it should not be surprising that an authoritarian turn has occurred if this is what Putin and his immediate allies have wanted. However, to point to the role of authoritarian aspects of political culture and of Putin and his allies as being instrumental in bringing about such a change is only half the story. What is also important is why there has been so little opposition to the perceived winding back of democratic gains. The answer to this may be found in what much of the democratization literature, sardonically often called transitology, tells us about successful transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule. The Democratization Paradigm There has been signicant debate about the relevance to the fall of communism and the subsequent emergence of post-communist regimes of that body of transitological theory emerging from the experiences of Latin America and Southern Europe.8 Critics of the use of this democratization literature in the analysis of the fall of communism and the emergence of new regimes pointed to a host of differences between the respective sets of case studies. The starting-points of the transition were said to be markedly different, with the communist regimes much more powerful and deeply penetrative of the society than were their Latin American and southern European counterparts. This factor was reected in the different political economies (a merging of the political and economic realms under communism, in contrast to the separation in Latin America and Southern Europe) of the countries in these regions. Society under communist rule was said to be much more attened, with the pursuit of private interests at best marginalized and civil society very weak, while in Latin America and Southern Europe civil society was more rmly established and private interest embedded as the basis upon which the economy functioned. It was also claimed that the level of economic, especially industrial, development was much higher in the communist states than in those of the other regions. The communist cases were also said to involve questions of identity (mostly independence from an imperial overlord but in Russias case the search for a non-communist identity) not present in the other two regions. As well as different starting-points, there were also said to be differences in mode of transition. In the communist cases, international factors (especially in the case of Eastern Europe, the role of Gorbachev) and the role of mass mobilization were seen to be much more important forces shaping the transition than they were in Latin America and Southern Europe. Furthermore the strategies of the democrats needed to be different. In Latin America and Southern Europe where the state and its ofcials were much less strongly embedded in society and the control exercised by the state was weaker, the democrats could neutralize old-regime functionaries by coopting them into and reassuring them about the changes. In contrast, in the communist areas the extent of the control that these people exercised meant that their control had to be broken, and therefore rather than cooptation, the democrats were required to follow a course of breaking with them. Similarly, given the respective political economies, in the communist areas political change had to be accompanied

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by major economic restructuring, something that was not necessary in the other two regions. There is clearly something to these charges, but not as much as the critics suggest.9 The regional case studies are nowhere near as homogeneous as the critics argue, with both starting-points and modes of transition varying often signicantly between individual countries in each region. For example, a comparison of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Romanian and the Bulgarian cases illustrates the variety within regions, even among countries located contiguously, and some similarities across regions.10 The contrasts between the regions are therefore much less sharply drawn than the critics suggest. Of course, there were differences in the detail of individual transitions because their forms were shaped by the particular institutional and political environments within which they were played out. For example, different forms of pacting occurred in Spain, Brazil, Peru and Uruguay, and all of these were different to the Round Tables (which is the form that pacting took) in Eastern Europe.11 The military was more prominent as an actor in Latin America and Southern Europe (where the military was often in control of the government) than in most communist cases,12 while international inuences were evident in all but probably played a more direct role in many of the communist cases.13 Such differences of detail should be expected in such a large range of countries. But what is crucial is that the basic process that they experienced was generically the same: the shift from an authoritarian towards a democratic system with that shift being shaped in signicant measure by elite action and preferences. It has been a characteristic of much of the literature seeking to explain the socalled third wave of democratization14 that the primary emphasis in the explanation has been placed on the role and activities of elites.15 The democratic transitions have been managed, with the interaction between incumbent, ruling elites and the elites seeking to displace them constituting the main dynamic of this process. In this view, what is crucial is the capacity of the respective elites to mobilize political resources, including crucially their own internal unity, to achieve their aims of, in one case, holding on to power (or if this becomes impossible, extricating themselves at limited cost) and in the other case, gaining power. In the classic cases of democratization, as this interaction proceeds agreement is reached between the competing elites, enabling the challengers to move into power. The former incumbents are either guaranteed immunity from retribution (often a necessary concession to persuade them to give up power without a ght), or guaranteed a subordinate place in the new power structure. It is therefore this relationship between elites that shapes the whole process of democratization and determines its outcome. This focus upon elite strategic choice has been apposite because, as the studies show, elites have exercised overwhelmingly important inuence over the course of political change. They have not acted in a vacuum, but have been constrained by a range of factors including regime type, civil society forces and international conditions,16 but nevertheless their primacy in shaping the outcome has been generally unquestioned. Some observers of democratization in the post-communist world have argued that these cases should be classed as a fourth wave, in which the dynamic of change is different to that of the countries in the third wave. A leading proponent of this view,

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Michael McFaul,17 argues that rather than being the result of agreement between competing elites, the political outcome of transition in the fourth wave is shaped by the balance of power between those elites. Thus, where democrats are supreme, democracy will ensue; where anti-democrats are more powerful, dictatorship will emerge; where there is an approximate balance, a partial democracy is likely. The driver of change here is therefore different to that which he sees in the earlier democratization literature; rather than elite agreement contained in a pact, it is the result of relative power shares. While this is a useful point to make, what is important for our purposes is that the focus of analysis is essentially the same, the elites. What is central in the fourth wave is what was central in the third wave, the disposition of the elites. One of the problems with the way much of the democratization literature has proceeded (although this is less true of those studying post-communist change) has been the tendency to focus, perhaps not unnaturally, on those cases of democratization that have been successful. While such a focus has conrmed the importance of elites, a study that analyses only the successful cases cannot explain why in some cases a democratic regime is established and is able to become consolidated and yet in others such a regime is not the outcome. Only a focus which includes both successful and unsuccessful cases can hope to do this. When the study is expanded to include both types of cases,18 the centrality of elites is conrmed, but what is important in determining the success or otherwise of democratization is the relationship of those elites with organized forces in civil society. In essence, where elites remain isolated from civil society, as is the case with military and many bureaucratic elites, the chances of a democratic outcome are much reduced. They will depend upon the democratic proclivities of the elites themselves, and if those elites are not connected with political parties, socially embedded interest groups or similar organizations, there seems to be little reason for democratic sentiment to be solidly entrenched within them. For example, regime change from one type of authoritarian regime to another tends to involve elites with their roots in hierarchical state structures such as the military or the bureaucracy (as in many of the cases of regime change in Latin America in the 1970s), or in conspiratorial parties which are largely free from civil society control (as in the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917). In contrast, in those cases when democratization has been successfully achieved, the challenger elite has generally been closely linked into civil society, and it has been through this link that pressure for a democratic outcome has come. Political parties have been central to many of these cases of successful democratization because they have provided the institutional connection between elites and civil society more broadly. They have been the means for the institutionalized mobilization of sections of civil society into the struggle for democratic change, the channel for continuing pressure for such change to be exerted upon the various elites, and a negotiating partner for the incumbent elites. They have been the institutional mechanism for the transformation of popular mobilization into continuing popular control. This does not assume that such civil society forces are necessarily all committed philosophically to a democratic political system. It may simply be that they

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see the opening up of the system and the forms of democracy as the best means for them to gain access to that political system. But such forces can often provide a guarantee against backsliding on the part of the elites because of their demand for more broadly based involvement in the system. What is crucial here is not that, for example, party elites are able simply to mobilize popular support and to use their followers as a tool against the incumbents in power, but that those elites are actually responsible in some form to their supporters. If the elite is insulated from its putative supporters and is able to ignore their wishes at will, democratic pressures upon them will be blunted and the likelihood of a democratic outcome accordingly reduced. Elites close links with civil society forces do not ensure a democratic outcome, but they make it more likely that those elites will continue to seek such a result, rather than compromise democratic aims in the interests of power seizure. The centrality of the relationship between elites and civil society forces is evident in examples from all the regions upon which the democratization literature has focused. In successful cases of transition to democracy, such as Spain, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil (all 1970s), South Korea, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland (all late 1980s/early 1990s), the counter-elites were rooted in civil society and sustained by civil society organizations, mostly political parties. In cases of regime change where the outcome was not democratic, such as Chile (1973), Bolivia (1971), Argentina (1976), Azerbaijan, Belarus, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (all early 1990s), there was no close association between the new ruling elites and civil society forces.19 This essential component of the dynamic of democratization, whether elites are embedded in civil society through bodies such as political parties or independent of it, reected in wide cross-national and cross-regional experience, both testies to the value of the general democratization literature for an understanding of the post-communist experience, and provides explanatory purchase for an understanding of the presumed new authoritarianism in Russia under Vladimir Putin. The Russian Transition When Mikhail Gorbachev began the process of liberalization in the Soviet Union in 1985, civil society was very weak. The Soviet regime had left no public space for autonomous organizations to develop in society, and when such bodies had sought to become active they had generally been suppressed. The only organizations given licence to operate in the public domain were bodies that were linked to the regime. As a result, when Gorbachevs reforms created some space within which autonomous organizations could act, these had mostly to be constructed from scratch.20 Nevertheless, the result was a owering of bodies of all types. The so-called informals21 emerged to provide vehicles for people to become actively involved in a range of activities and to prosecute their particular interests. Many of these were directed at purely personal (for example, defence of the rights of invalids or Afghan veterans) or recreational concerns (for instance, cinema, rock music and chess), but especially after 1988 many emerged with a distinctly political tenor. Human rights movements, including Memorial, became particularly prominent and, in the non-Russian

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republics, there were national front movements (see below); also important were the proto-political parties. However, in the Russian Republic these proto-parties remained weak and disorganized. They were small, with little active membership, often beset by argument and dispute, they did not speak for social interests and were generally intent on maintaining their independence both organizationally and operationally. These bodies were more interested in jostling for position in the developing political spectrum than they were on combining either to be better able to place pressure on leading political actors or to create the sort of institutional structure that would have brought those actors under social control. They received little ofcial assistance or support from the top and for the most part they lacked direct access to the central elite players; elites at the federal level retained signicant independence from these representatives of emergent civil society. The weakness of these proto-parties in practice accorded with Gorbachevs attitude to popular involvement in the reform process. While Gorbachev came to believe that the populace at large did have a role to play in the unrolling of perestroika, that role is better described as mobilization rather than independent participation. Throughout most of the period from 1986 until 1991, he saw popular activism in an instrumental sense, something to be directed and targeted against the enemies of change rather than as a form of activity with intrinsic value in itself. This is reected in a range of positions he took on issues, from his initially limited view of the nature of glasnost, through his treatment of the Congress of Peoples Deputies (see below) to his refusal to face the voters in his quest for the Soviet presidency in 1990. This means that although Gorbachev was directly instrumental in opening up the regime much more to broadly based participation than it had been in the past, in practice such opportunities were always qualied and hedged to prevent full-blooded, effective popular involvement. Gorbachev was not interested in setting up mechanisms whereby an emergent civil society could interact systematically with and even exert control over societys rulers. He was more interested in mobilizing the populace in order to increase information ow to the centre and to defeat his opponents. In the face of this sort of attitude, emergent civil society organizations were unable by themselves to construct the sort of system that might have made elite political leaders responsible to society more broadly. This does not mean that the mass of the population and the organizations that were emerging to structure their public activity had no inuence on the course of Gorbachevs program for change. It is clear that the course of the radicalization of that program was powered in large part by pressure from below, especially after mid-1988 when the bounds of popular discussion widened considerably. Not only was discussion in the pages of the mainstream press and on the airwaves of the electronic media becoming increasingly free and open, but political groups were beginning to publish their own newspapers and broadsheets as public demonstrations and rallies became more common in the streets of the cities.22 A major actor in this was the national front organizations. Emerging in many of the republics in 1987 88 and resting on an appeal to national sentiment that in some republics became increasingly stridently asserted as time went on, these organizations were able to mobilize signicant numbers of people onto the

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streets. They brought pressure to bear on both the local ruling elites and the central authorities. Their success was reected in many of the republican elections in March 1990, a success that projected them into the heart of the republican (and sometimes by extension, the federal) political process and gave them a rm institutional base. From their new positions in the republican governments, national movements such as the Lithuanian, Estonian and Georgian, were then able to increase the pressure on the Soviet centre, pressure which played an important part in the erosion of that centres authority and subsequent collapse. In some cases, such as the Baltic republics, such movements also fostered the development of effective political parties and paved the way for a democratic outcome; in others, such as the Caucasian republics, such movements did not promote broader party development and the initial outcome was authoritarian. No such powerful national front organization emerged in Russia, in part because the raison detre of these organizations was generally to achieve independence from what was seen to be Russian rule. The most important organization that was able to mobilize signicant levels of popular support was Democratic Russia.23 This body emerged in late 1989 to contest the republican elections scheduled for early 1990, although its ofcial founding did not take place until October 1990. It was formed from the merger of some 18 social movements and nine political parties and included people ranging from reform communists to democratic nationalists. This organization was able to mobilize many supporters onto the streets in demonstrations and into the voting booths to support their candidates in various elections, including Yeltsin in the presidential poll in 1991.24 However, it was not able to create a stable mechanism for ensuring elite accountability despite the fact that it emerged as a potential key link between opposition politicians in the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies in the Congress of Peoples Deputies and popular organizations. It was never clear whether Democratic Russia aspired to be a broad-based movement or a more disciplined party which aimed at gaining control in the legislatures,25 with the result that it never had a structure designed for political competition and for operating within a legislative chamber as opposed to a structure designed for popular mobilization. It remained a loose alliance of parties and fractions, a structure inimical to its becoming a means for emergent civil society to control political elites. This was also due, in part, to the role of Boris Yeltsin. From 1989 the chief dynamic of change in Russia was the result of a split within the Soviet political elite. While there had been divisions within that elite from the time of Gorbachevs election in March 1985, it was the split initiated by Yeltsin that was central to the course of future development. That split had become open at the end of 1987 with the expulsion of candidate member Yeltsin from the Politburo and his dismissal as leader of the Moscow party organization, but it gained increased signicance with his later election to a number of ofcial posts: deputy to the Soviet Congress of Peoples Deputies in March 1989 and the Russian Congress of Peoples Deputies in March 1990, to the post of Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet in May 1990 and as Russian President in June 1991. These positions gave him a prole and a forum which he could use to rally opposition against the Soviet centre. Crucial in his rise was the support he received from Democratic Russia.

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However Democratic Russia did not act as an effective means of tying Yeltsin and his closest supporters into civil society more broadly. In addition to Democratic Russias organizational structure noted above, two other factors were important in this. First, Democratic Russia began to fragment towards the end of 1991, in the process spawning a large number of very small and weak political parties. There are many reasons for this fragmentation, including its organizational form noted above; but also important was Gorbachevs treatment of the Congress of Peoples Deputies. When this body emerged with a mind (or minds) of its own rather than one Gorbachev could bend easily to his will, Gorbachev sought to locate political primacy and power elsewhere, in an enhanced presidency. In this way, Gorbachev and his allies tried to sideline the legislature. The leaders of that body used it increasingly as a forum or instrument to attack Gorbachev and those around him. Thus, rather than develop as a powerful arena within which political parties could develop institutionally as integral parts of the governing process, the Congress became a shrill critic at some distance from the heart of that process. The legislature, therefore, did not stimulate party development in a way that it would have been likely to do had it been embraced as part of the ruling political structure. Second, Yeltsin took a stance of consciously eschewing any party afliation. Yeltsin publicly interpreted his role as president as being to represent all of the Russian people rather than only that part of it that supported any party which he headed. Thus, rather than being a member of a party and both acting to strengthen that party while himself remaining at least to some degree under its inuence, he refused all party afliation. Yeltsin declared he would stand above party politics, and sought to base his position directly on a personalist tie with the populace. When the USSR collapsed, the underlying structural characteristics of the situation in the Russian Republic were nely balanced. While the monopoly power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been broken, there had not been a denitive democratic breakthrough. The political elite had been driven in a more radical direction by the growing strength of popular sentiment, but no effective mechanisms had been set in place to ensure continuing control over elite political actors by civil society. Not only had the principle of elite accountability not been established, but the institutions through which this might have been achieved, namely elections and the legislature, were weakly developed, and the latter remained institutionally isolated from the populace by the weakness of political parties. The August 1991 attempted putsch changed the ground rules for politics fundamentally and created the opportunity for the development of a new set of political institutions which could be more inclusive and could build in greater popular accountability than the Soviet ones had done. But this sort of outcome would be dependent upon the positions taken by elite political actors, because those political forces rooted in civil society, parties and social groups, were neither strong nor united enough to force elite political actors to mould a system that involved real constraints upon those actors. Unfortunately the leading politician of the period, Boris Yeltsin, and those around him, were not thus inclined. Instead they sought to build a political system that effectively demobilized the populace by sidelining those institutions through which popular control could be exercised.

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The Hegemonic Presidency26 In a move that had direct implications for the type of presidency he was to establish, Yeltsin sought to rest upon charismatic notions of authority from the time he became President of Russia in June 1991. He sought to generate a charismatic tie between himself and the Russian people, claiming to rule on their behalf and in their interests, and to be able to interact with them directly rather than being mediated through any intervening institutions. At base, the attempt to create a charismatic sense of legitimacy for the president was anti-institutional27 and antithetical to any attempt to restrain the president through civil society-based organization. The charismatic relationship implied that the putative followers, in this case the Russian people, should sink their capacity for independent judgement into commitment to the leader, accepting what he said and doing as he instructed. While this situation was never fully realized by Yeltsin in his relationship with the people, what is important is that his understanding of that relationship, his perception of himself as the personication of the nation, effectively denied any notion of the need for society-based checks upon his authority. The charismatic presidency left no room for notions of responsibility to the people. Indeed, while encouraging some types of popular mobilization, Yeltsin also acted consistently to structure and restrict access into that system for autonomous political organizations. The insulation from popular control that such a notion of the presidency involved was reinforced institutionally by the growth of the presidential administration.28 From the time he became president of Russia, Yeltsin was intent on building a personal apparatus staffed by people who were personally loyal to him. In the early stages, this involved reliance upon people from his original power base in Sverdlovsk/ Ekaterinburg, but even when these were later pushed more to the margins by newcomers, the key to appointment and promotion remained personal loyalty to the president or one of his chief aides. In a situation where the president wanted to expand his power and where neither the bureaucracy nor the legislature was able to exercise effective power, the scope and power of the presidential administration expanded rapidly; it expanded so much that by early 1992 there were public fears that it might even displace the government.29 Although such fears were unfounded, the presidential administration became an important instrument of presidential power, in practice unrestrained by either the constitution or any other organ of state. As the main executor of the presidents will and a principal institution sustaining him, the administration was a major pillar of the presidency and gave him signicant practical autonomy from the other parts of the political system and from the electorate. Furthermore, it acted as a gatekeeper controlling access to the president. This was important for the hegemonic nature of the presidency. Just as personal loyalty underpinned the administrations relationship to the president, so personal relationships loomed large in the question of gaining access to the president. Access was a function of personal contacts and connections rather than regularized or routinized procedures; who one knew was important rather than any routinized structure of access. This undercut the development of such procedures, and liberated the ofce from bureaucratic restraints. This situation became even more

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apparent with Yeltsins heavy reliance upon personal friends and relations, referred to euphemistically as the family, during the mid-1990s.30 This was a group of Yeltsin family members and personal cronies who surrounded the president from the middle of the decade: much of their initial power was owed to Yeltsins poor health. The basis of their power was their loyalty to the president, and the chief symbol of it was Yeltsins own daughter, Tatiana Diachenko. The family exercised signicant inuence over the president, controlling access to him and providing it either to those who were personally known to them or who were introduced by friends. Their role as a lter reinforced the institutional constraints on access stemming from the presidential administration, and conrmed the lack of avenues for social control over the president. The reliance upon personal channels for access to the president was reected in another pillar upon which the Yeltsin presidency rested, especially from the middle of the decade, the support of big business. Big business, most particularly those businessmen known colloquially as the oligarchs, played an important stabilizing role in Yeltsins rule by using their resources to underpin the presidency. There have been many reports about the provision of money to Yeltsin personally and to members of his family by wealthy businessmen,31 but the more important form this has taken has been through the way in which the oligarchs used their resources to support Yeltsins re-election campaign in 1996 and to oppose those parties critical of the Yeltsin government in the legislative elections of 1995 and 1999. Their role was important in subordinating the electoral process to the presidency (see below) and in bolstering the presidents personal position. But crucial to their playing of this role was the personal access that they gained both to the president and to the state and its resources more generally. It was the latter, reected most egregiously in the loans for shares deal of 1995 96, which enabled them to enrich themselves at the states expense and to develop the resources that helped them to channel support behind the presidential regime. This does not mean that they were the captives of the president, although their continued nancial security relied in part on continuing presidential good will. However, they were in the sort of relationship with the president where their mutual interests were met by continuing association. Importantly for the political structure, this association reafrmed in practice the principle that underlay Yeltsins hegemonic presidency, the primacy of informal, personal relations over routinized, ofcial procedures.32 The other pillar upon which the hegemonic presidency rested was manipulation of the electoral process. Elections were not prevented from taking place at the national level (although elected ofcials at lower levels were replaced temporarily by appointees in 1993 and the election of governors was postponed until 1996) and Yeltsin did reject pressure to cancel the presidential election in 1996; but when the elections proceeded they were certainly not fair contests. In 1993Yeltsin brought on an early election, set the parameters of debate in the campaign, and established an electoral system in such a way as to disadvantage his opponents. The nal vote tallies may also have been rigged.33 A heavily biased media in the 1995 legislative election and the 1996 presidential election, and the massive overspending by Yeltsins supporters in the latter, undermined the fairness of both polls. Similarly, in the 1999 legislative election

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and the 2000 presidential poll, the reporting was heavily in favour of the incumbent, while the circumstances surrounding the calling of the latter (Yeltsins surprise resignation which propelled Putin into the acting presidency, thereby giving him the advantage of incumbency, and the bringing forward of the election date, thereby disadvantaging opposition forces) was a classic case of manipulating the legal provisions in order to disadvantage opponents. Through such manipulation, the elections were largely subverted and, especially the presidential polls, transformed into a type of plebiscitary exercise. Their capacity to bring about a change in government was destroyed as the integrity of the presidential poll was violated. Given the subordinate constitutional position occupied by the legislature, even if opposition parties had been able to consolidate a majority in the State Duma, their role could only have been an attempted blocking one. Such manipulation of the electoral process was one factor in the failure of strong civil society organizations to emerge. Political parties have therefore remained weak, in part because of actions taken by the president and those around him. Yeltsins previously noted refusal to associate himself with a political party signicantly undermined the prospects for party building in the new Russia. His decision not to call new legislative elections in the wake of the failed August 1991 putsch was unhelpful as well.34 Many called for new elections at this time. They believed that elections in the immediate post-putsch environment would promote the importance of a new legislature and would have led to an anti-communist vote. Elections would promote a wave of support for Yeltsin as the symbolic head of the movement that led to the collapse of the putsch. It would also have given a stimulus to party development, perhaps enabling some of those parties that had emerged during the Soviet period to use an election campaign to build up both an infrastructure and popular support and to gain representation in a new legislative body. The llip to party development that this would have meant could possibly have laid a basis for the subsequent growth of parties and for a more benign legislature than that which confronted Yeltsin in the following two years. The capacity for parties to develop as powerful entities was undermined further by the conict between Yeltsin and the legislature in 1993. By rejecting the popular mandate possessed by the members of the Soviet-era legislature, by refusing to involve the populace at large in the resolution of the dispute with the Supreme Soviet through the mechanism of a referendum with a question that would have resolved the issue35 and instead by closing that body by force, Yeltsin effectively sought to sideline the main institutional form through which civil society normally exercises control over its rulers. The effect of this was reinforced by the constitutionally inferior position given to the new legislative structure in the Constitution introduced in 1993.36 This position was maintained throughout the rest of the Yeltsin presidency, with the legislature unable to exercise any effective control over the President. The most important party during the 1990s was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the leading lineal descendant of the old ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union. However, this party was the body against which much of the electoral manipulation noted above was chiey directed. All sorts of barriers

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were put in the partys way in its endeavours to develop as a major political force in the country, with the result that it was never able to break out of its electoral heartland. Most of the other party groups remained small and unable to build up substantial stable representation in the legislative chamber; indeed, many enjoyed only a eeting existence. The development of vigorous independent parties was also hindered by the practice, begun during perestroika,37 of leading gures close to the president establishing a quasi-ofcial party from the top down. Often called the party of power, such bodies included Russias Choice led by Yegor Gaidar, Our Home is Russia founded by Viktor Chernomyrdin and Unity headed by Sergei Shoigu. Such elite creations helped to crowd out the room for more spontaneous parties founded from below. As a result the State Duma, like the political spectrum generally, was fragmented and unable to gain the unity needed if it was to confront the president successfully. A fragmented and polarized party system such as the one that emerged was not only a major barrier to democratic stabilization,38 but also prevented exercise of control over the executive. The state of the parties was a reection of the weakness of civil society as a whole. The problem was not that there was no organized public life in Russia, but that the multitude of groups and organizations that had emerged to structure public activity remained isolated from elite political actors. None of those organizations was able individually to exercise any effective control over elite political actors, and there were no institutional mechanisms in place which would have enabled combinations of such organizations to exert such control. As a result, the civil society that emerged enjoyed little interaction with elite politicians. The inability of the trade unions to act as an effective defender of workers interests and of protest groups to substantially affect the course of the Chechen conict is testament to the incapacity of civil society. By the end of the 1990s the Russian transition to democracy had well and truly stalled. Under Gorbachev, the all-powerful party-state had been dismantled but no powerful civil society organizations had grown up to exert control over political leaders in Russia. Yeltsin had built on this Gorbachev inheritance to construct a charismatically based hegemonic presidency in which power was concentrated in the presidential ofce and justied by appeal to popular support. This was a so-called delegative democracy39 whereby the leader gained authority through the manipulated, electoral process and then proceeded to rule in a manner little checked by forces from within civil society. While Yeltsin built directly on the legacy bequeathed him by Gorbachev, Putin was to take this legacy even further. Putin Strengthens the Hegemonic Presidency Since his election to the presidency in March 2000, Vladimir Putin has sought to build on the bases inherited from his predecessor while at the same time both continuing to close off avenues of popular control and to bring under his purview those aspects of the power structure that had escaped the control of Yeltsin. The one area where Putin has not built upon the Yeltsin model was Yeltsins attempt to create a charismatic relationship with the people. Although there has been some promotion of Putin the

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individual leader, Putin seems to have consciously eschewed the populist image and style of his predecessor. He has not sought to project himself as a personalist leader with direct ties to the populace (although he has engaged in apparently unstructured talk-back sessions with the populace40), instead emphasizing the importance of the formal ofce he occupies. Rather than relying on charisma, he seems more intent upon projecting an image of legal rational authority based on the strengthening of state institutions with himself at the head. However, such an image does not necessarily imply a president who is any closer to his people or is more responsible to them than was the case for the charismatic leader. While an emphasis upon legal rationality implies the importance of laws, unless those laws involve restraints upon the leader, this type of legitimation does not necessarily reduce the leaders standing compared with charismatic legitimation. Putin did seek to use the same strategy that Yeltsin had with regard to the presidential administration. Part of this has involved the replacement of Yeltsin loyalists by people with career ties to Putin, many from St Petersburg and from the security services. Gradually over his rst term, Putin replaced those who had occupied high executive position under Yeltsin as a result of their personal ties to the president, to one of his family or to cronies.41 But although the personnel have changed, the principle has remained the same: the key to appointment and promotion is personal loyalty to the president. Although Putin has not been debilitated by illness in the way that Yeltsin was, the construction of the presidential apparatus on the basis of personal loyalty has as effectively insulated Putin from would-be lower level controls as it did Yeltsin. The manipulation of elections has also bolstered the Putin presidency. The circumstances surrounding the 2000 presidential election have already been mentioned. In the December 2003 legislative election, media bias was at as high a level as it had been at any time in the past. The pro-president United Russia party42 was given an enormous boost by the media coverage, never having to explain or defend its positions, never having to make clear what it stood for. In contrast, its major opponent the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was given almost unrelentingly negative coverage in the state media and never given a real opportunity to explain what it stood for.43 Similarly in the lead up to the 2004 presidential poll and during the actual election, no challenge to Putin was able to gain a fair hearing. This poll was the closest to a simple plebiscite that post-Soviet Russia has had, with Putin refusing to participate in campaigning, to release a coherent programme of any kind, or even to acknowledge his challengers; he received some 71 per cent of the vote, with his nearest challenger gaining 13.8 per cent. Under Putin the position of privileged access enjoyed by big business has remained, although the terms upon which it is enjoyed are different. Under Yeltsin, the state took no punitive action against leading business circles, with the relationship being one of loose partnership: the state, through the president, allowed the businessmen to keep their gains from privatization and continue to prosper while the businessmen were expected to support the president when he needed it. The businessmen thereby retained a degree of autonomy. Under Putin, this autonomy has been reined in. Certainly business retains the ear of the president, but it is now

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under conditions dened by the states chief executive. This is clear in the injunction that businessmen may retain their prots from privatization as long as they remain out of politics,44 and made clear by the series of conferences at the Kremlin when Putin has called businessmen in to discuss issues with them and make his views known. Channels between the president and big business remain highly personalized, and these meetings do not represent in any way a type of routinization of relations between president and business. Furthermore, those businessmen who have acted contrary to the way Putin desires have been met with punitive action. Gusinsky and Berezovsky went into exile abroad and lost control over their assets in Russia, including their media assets; Khodorkovsky was put in gaol and his oil company investigated for falsifying its tax returns. While big business may still support Putin, it does so from a much weaker position than it did under Yeltsin. The reining in of the independent power of big business was important not only for the place of big business itself, but for the implications this had for civil society more generally. By apparently bringing these most powerful of interests to heel, Putin made it clear that all parts of civil society were to remain subordinate to the states interests. While he did not seek to limit the activities of most civil society organizations (although the takeover of the All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion, VTsIOM, in August 2003 and of the ofces of the Soros Foundation in December 2003 are important exceptions to this), it has been made clear most graphically by the treatment of Gusinsky, Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky that independent, effective involvement in political matters was not appropriate. The sharp reductions in press freedom that accompanied action against these businessmen was also an important constraint upon the capacity of civil society to even give voice, let alone wield political inuence. Civil society has had at least a partial muzzle applied to it. This does not mean that civil society has been destroyed. Associative behaviour in Russia has continued to grow, there is public discussion of issues, and at the grass-roots organized life continues to develop in complex and positive ways. However, there is limited effective contact between this sort of activity and the upper levels of the political process. Civil society lacks the organizational mechanisms for asserting signicant, continuing inuence, let alone control, over political elites. Putin has also acted to deal with those areas that were not under Yeltsins control. His emphasis upon strengthening the Russian state, reected particularly clearly in the drive to increase taxation revenue, is a reection of his desire to make that state work more effectively, and in particular to function better as an instrument of central rule. Such bureaucratic improvement is an enormous task, but Putin has at least signalled his desire to attempt to bring this about. Also important in this regard has been his attempt to bring regional authorities closer under Moscows control.45 His establishment of seven regions, each run by a presidential envoy with oversight powers, has been one weapon in this struggle. So, too, has a change in personnel policy, with the provision of government jobs to governors who are removed, thereby giving them an incentive not to continue to oppose the centre.46 Putin also changed the composition of the Federation Council, the federal upper house, to remove the governors and replace them with their representatives,

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thereby reducing the power of the governors in the federal arena.47 Also important in this has been the drawing of the governors into the new party established for the 2003 elections, United Russia. Many of the governors, perhaps recognizing the strength of Putins position and trying to tie their fortunes to his joined this body and became the mainstays of it at the local level. This constitutes the effective incorporation of the regional leaders into the presidential electoral machine. Even Moscow mayor Yurii Luzhkov, who had played an ostentatiously independent role under Yeltsin, was included in this machine. Putin has actually used a party of power in an effective way to suborn both the legislature and these regional elites. In 1999, the party Unity was established just before the election. This was clearly associated with the then prime minister Putin, and did sufciently well in the election that it was able to play a major role in the State Duma, including gaining leadership of many Duma committees. A combination of the role played by this party in the legislative chamber and the non-confrontational approach adopted by Putin effectively neutered the legislature as a critic of the president. However, this was taken a step further with the 2003 election when the new presidential party United Russia swept to an effective majority in the chamber. This has enabled it to take control of the committee system, and potentially to dominate the course of legislative life.48 This means that the legislature has effectively been integrated into the presidentially dominated power structure, which thereby appears much more monolithic than that of Yeltsin. Importantly, while Putin achieved this through the medium of a political party, initially Unity and then United Russia, neither party was the sort which promised to constitute a channel into the political system for more broadly based civil society forces or enable them to exercise any control over the president. Unity was created from above, shortly before the 1999 election, and lacked both a mass membership base and an organizational structure reaching into society at large. United Russia was formed principally from the merger of Luzhkovs political machine FatherlandAll Russia and Unity, and incorporated most of the regional governors. Thus it, too, lacked a mass base, resting instead on elite political actors at both central and regional levels. Neither party was in a position to project grass-roots or democratic sentiment into the upper levels of the political process. In any case, Putin was not a member of either party and therefore was not subject to any party discipline. Both parties clearly acted as instruments of the president and means for him to consolidate presidential control and direction in the legislature. Furthermore by gaining positions of, initially, electoral primacy and then electoral dominance, these Kremlin parties have effectively blocked the development of parties with a rm basis in the broader electorate. The collapse of the liberal parties (Yabloko and the Union of Rightist Forces) in the 2003 election was a graphic illustration of this. Conclusion Thus Putin has clearly strengthened the position of the presidency compared with what it was under Yeltsin, and he has done so principally by using the same basic strategy as his predecessor, the closing-off of independent channels of participation

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in the polity. The tighter control that Putin has sought to create clearly is related to the personal perceptions of the president and those around him. It may be that Yeltsin, who came up through a system which gave him a sense of a right to power and a condence in its use, was more willing to allow greater latitude to other forces to exercise a role in political life than was Putin, who was propelled into the top political job with no such preparation but whose career in the security service engendered in him a suspicion of independent activity. But while such characteristics of the leader may be inuential in shaping the form authoritarianism takes, the dominance of the authoritarian paradigm owes much more to the circumstances of the original transition itself, and in particular the autonomy of political elites from civil society forces. Such forces were always going to start from a weak position given the Soviet legacy and the absence in Russia of a vigorous nationalist movement to provide an umbrella under which other sorts of civil society forces could develop. Successive elites led by Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin, despite their democratic rhetoric, took advantage of this weakness both to act independently themselves and to design a system in which future access was restricted. In this sense, the increasingly authoritarian nature of Russia under Putin is not a radical departure from earlier development, but a logical (although not inevitable) continuation of the dynamic stemming from the collapse of communism and the form it took in Russia. The weakness of institutional channels between political elite and civil society more broadly was thus a direct result of the circumstances of the Russian transition and the scope this gave for political elites to build a system which undercut further the development of such channels. The political trajectory towards Putins authoritarianism was thus set by the course of developments under Gorbachev, but this trajectory was not inevitable. Had Yeltsin and his supporters sought to construct a more open and inclusive system and thereby encouraged the growth of effective institutional channels of control between elites and populace, the legacy inherited by Putin could have been very different. Similarly, had Putin acted in a different fashion, the outlook today could be very different. Furthermore, as the cases of Georgia and Ukraine show, an authoritarian trajectory may be derailed through broad-based popular mobilization, although whether this will result in a stable democratic outcome depends upon the development of strong institutions that will enable popular control to continue to be exercised. In this regard, the sustained demonstrations by pensioner groups in Russia in early 2005, demonstrations which have clearly caused some worry in the Kremlin, may be the beginning of popular mobilization against the regimes authoritarian trajectory. But the lesson from the democratization literature is clear: such mobilization can only be successful in changing that trajectory if it spawns an institutional means for expressing the sort of popular control over the political elite that the Yeltsin and Putin regimes have sought to avoid.

NOTES 1. Some of the terms used to describe the nature of Russia under Putin include managed pluralism and managed democracy; respectively, Harley Balzer, Managed Pluralism: Vladimir Putins Emerging Regime, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2003), pp. 189227 and Timothy J. Colton and

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Michael McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy. The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003). The essence of both formulations is that some participation is allowed, but both the identity of those who can participate and the forms of participation are tightly restricted. For perhaps the earliest example, see Michael McFaul, Russia under Putin: One Step Forward, Two Steps Backwards, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2000), pp. 1933. For example, this is implicit in McFaul (note 2), p. 19. Although there are differences over what the regime is to be called and the degree to which it is authoritarian. For one such culturalist discussion, see Vladimir Brovkin, The Emperors New Clothes: Continuities of Soviet Political Culture in Contemporary Russia, Problems of Post-Communism, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1996), pp. 218. For example, see Alexander Lukin, Political Culture of Russian Democrats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Nicolai N. Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy. An Interpretation of Political Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). For example, see Olga Kryshtanovskaia, Liudi Putina, Vedomosti, 30 June 2003, Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, Putins Militocracy, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 19, No. 4 (2003), pp. 289306, Gail W. Lapidus, The War in Chechnya as a Paradigm of Russian State-Building Under Putin, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2004), p. 14 and Pavel K. Baev, The Evolution of Putins Regime: Inner Circles and Outer Walls, Problems of Post-Communism, Vol. 51, No. 6 (2004), pp. 48. For the rst major exchange on this issue, see Sarah Meiklejohn Terry, Thinking About Postcommunist Transitions: How Different Are They?, Slavic Review, Vol. 52, No. 2 (1993), pp. 3337; Philippe C. Schmitter with Terry Lynn Karl, The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?, Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 1 (1994), pp. 17385; Valerie Bunce, Should Transitologists Be Grounded?, Slavic Review, Vol. 43, No. 1 (1995), pp. 111 27; Terry Lynn Karl and Philippe C. Schmitter, From an Iron Curtain to a Paper Curtain: Grounding Transitologists or Students of Postcommunism?, Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 4 (1995), pp. 965 78; and Valerie Bunce, Paper Curtains and Paper Tigers, Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 4 (1995), pp. 97987. Also see Valerie Bunce, Can We Compare Democratization in the East Versus the South, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1995), pp. 87 100; Valerie Bunce, Regional Differences in Democratization: The East Versus the South, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1998), pp. 187 211; and Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a sophisticated attempt to use a common framework, see Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). For a more expanded discussion, see Graeme Gill, Democracy and Post-Communism. Political change in the post-communist world (London: Routledge, 2002), esp. pp. 1114, 197201. For an analysis that highlights the differences between the experiences of different countries, see Bunce, Regional Differences (note 8) and her Rethinking Recent Democratization. Lessons from the Postcommunist Experience, World Politics, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2003), pp. 167 92. The propensity of many analysts to focus purely on a single country is one source of the exaggeration of differences between the regions. On pacting see, Terry Lynn Karl, Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America, Comparative Politics, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1990), pp. 121. For a discussion of the Round Table talks in Eastern Europe, see Helga A. Welsh, Political Transition Processes in Central and Eastern Europe, Comparative Politics, Vol. 26, No. 4 (1994), pp. 3838. Even in Poland, where the head of state was the military chief, the military did not play an active part in the transition process. This generalization is less true of the former Yugoslavia. On the role of international factors, see Laurence Whitehead (ed.), The International Dimensions of Democratization. Europe and the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). This tone was set by the path-breaking Guillermo ODonnell, Philippe C. Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Much of the earlier literature tended to downplay the importance of such contextual factors and exaggerate the freedom of action of elites. For a sophisticated discussion of such constraints, see Linz and

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DE MOCR AT IZ AT ION Stepan (note 8), esp. Part 1. For a critique of this, see Graeme Gill, The Dynamics of Democratization. Elites, Civil Society and the Transition Process (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000), pp. 719. Michael McFaul, The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Postcommunist World, World Politics, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2002), pp. 21244; also Michael McFaul, Russias Unnished Revolution. Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). See Gill, Democracy and Post-Communism (note 9). The absence of this checking mechanism is vital. While Gordon Hahn, in his stimulating study of what he calls revolution from above in Russia, recognizes the importance of elite autonomy from civil society, he places primary emphasis on the domination of the process of regime change by many of the former regimes governing institutions and personnel, that is, on the nature of the elites that dominate the process. His argument is thus consistent with that focused on the siloviki noted above. But in all cases of democratic regime change including those accepted as paradigmatic cases, such as Spain, many aspects of the process are dominated by those who held ofcial ofce under the old regime. Indeed, this is often crucial to the pacting process which Hahn emphasizes the need to guarantee security to incumbent elites. More important than elite identity in ensuring a democratic outcome is control from below. For Hahns argument, see Gordon M. Hahn, Russias Revolution from Above. Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985 2000 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). The quotation is from p. 498. On the importance of civil society control, see Gill, Dynamics (note 16). To borrow the terminology of an inuential study of early party development, M. Steven Fish, Democracy from Scratch. Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). On the informals, see Spravochnik po neformalnym obshchestvennym organizatsiiam i presse (Moscow, SMOT Informatsionnoe agenstvo, 1989, Informatsionnyi biulleten no. 16) and Neformalnaia Rossiia. O neformalnykh politizirovannykh dvizheniiakh i gruppakh v RSFSR (opyt spravochnika) (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1990). On this burgeoning wave of public discussion and debate, see Judith Devlin, The Rise of the Russian Democrats. The Causes and Consequences of the Elite Revolution (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995). For a contemporary study of the components of Democratic Russia, see Argumenty i fakty 46, 1990. See Michael E. Urban, Boris Eltsin, Democratic Russia and the Campaign for the Russian Presidency, Soviet Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2 (1992), pp. 187207. For one discussion of the debate within Democratic Russia over the question of whether to become a party rather than remain a movement, see Geir Flikke, From External Success to Internal Collapse: The Case of Democratic Russia, EuropeAsia Studies, Vol. 56, No. 8 (2004), pp. 121727. On the presidency, see John P. Willerton, The Presidency: From Yeltsin to Putin, in Stephen White, Alex Pravda and Zvi Gitelman (eds), Developments in Russian Politics 5 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 2141; Eugene Huskey, Presidential Power in Russia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999); and Thomas M. Nichols, The Russian Presidency. Society and Politics in the Second Russian Republic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). This is a particularly important aspect of charisma as seen by its chief interpreter, Max Weber. See Max Weber, in Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (eds), Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), Vol. 1, pp. 24155, 111158. See Graeme Gill and Roger D. Markwick, Russias Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 4; and Eugene Huskey, The State-Legal Administration and the Politics of Redundancy, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1995), pp. 11543. See the comments by Justice Minister Nikolai Federov, Izvestiia, 29 January 1992. On the family and its inuence, see Aleksei Mukhin, Korruptsia i gruppy vlianiie. Kniga 1 (Moscow, SPIK-Tsentr, 1999), pp. 2037; A. A. Mukhin and P. A. Kozlov, Semeinye tainy ili neotsialnyi lobbizm v Rossii (Moscow, Tsentr politicheskoi informatsii, 2003); and V. A. Lisichkin and L. A. Shelepin, Rossiia pod vlastiu plutokratii (Moscow: Algoritm, 2003). For Korzhakovs account of his role, see Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Eltsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Moscow; Interbuk, 1997). For example, Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin. Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York; Harcourt Inc., 2000), pp. 11819. Such access was also used by people and groups who gained privileges and favours from the regime, such as the red directors. A subsequent report claimed that the turn-out was articially inated (to legitimize the adoption of the constitution) and large numbers of votes were misallocated between the parties: Izvestiia, 4 May 1994.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

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34. For Yeltsins comments on this, which imply that it was a mistake not to have done so, see Boris Yeltsin, The View from the Kremlin (London: Harper Collins, 1994), pp. 126, 127. 35. Unlike the referendum of April 1993 whose questions did not ask whether the populace preferred a presidential or a parliamentary system. 36. For an inside account, see Iu. M. Baturin et al., Epokha Eltsina (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001), Parts II and III. 37. The mayors of Moscow and Leningrad/St Petersburg, Yurii Luzhkov and Anatoly Sobchak, used their ofces to construct party organizations. 38. Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully (eds), Building Democratic Institutions. Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 323. 39. For an early application of this notion to Russia, see Paul Kubicek, Delegative Democracy in Russia and Ukraine, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1994), pp. 423 41. 40. For the transcript of one such episode, see V. Putin: Razgovor s rossiei, Stenogramma priamogo tele- i radioera (Priamaia liniia s Prezidentom Rossii) 18 dekabria 2003 goda (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2003). 41. For details, see John P. Willerton, Uncertainties of the Putin Hegemonic Presidency, in Geir Fikke (ed.), The Uncertainties of Putins Democracy (Oslo: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, 2004), pp. 2532. 42. On this party, see Nikolai Petrov, The 2003 Duma Elections and the Unied Russia Phenomenon, Fikke (note 41), pp. 93107. 43. Russian Federation Elections to the State Duma, 7 December 2003, OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission Report, Warsaw, 27 January 2004, pp. 15 17. 44. On this, see Peter Rutland, Putin and the Oligarchs, in Dale Herspring (ed.), Putins Russia. Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleeld, 2003), p. 148. 45. See the discussion in Matthew Hyde, Putins Federal Reforms and Their Implications for Presidential Power in Russia, EuropeAsia Studies, Vol. 53, No. 5 (2001), pp. 71943; and Nikolai Petrov and Darrell Slider, Putin and the Regions, in Herspring (note 44), pp. 203 24. 46. For example, former Primorskii krai governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko became head of the State Fisheries Committee while former St Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev became a deputy prime minister. 47. They were given a symbolic advisory role through the establishment of the Presidential State Council. 48. Although this does not mean that it has everything its own way; witness the back-down over harsh proposed restrictions on demonstrations in April 2004. Manuscript accepted for publication May 2005 Address for correspondence: Graeme Gill, Government and Public Administration, School of Economics and Political Science, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail: G.Gill@econ.usyd.edu.au