Russian Politics

Russian politics

Feb 9th 2006 | moscow | from PRINT EDITION

EVER since his sudden emergence as Russia's president when Boris Yeltsin abdicated at the end of 1999, Vladimir Putin has baffled analysis. What does this ex-spy (if there is such a thing: he himself once said that “there are no former chekists”), who pays lip service to free markets, really stand for? What other leaders does he resemble? The Putinology game has continued for six years now.

Hardly anyone still hopes that Mr Putin can become the democrat he sometimes claims to be; even “managed democracy” is no longer touted much. Early talk of the “Chinese model”—liberalised economic policy, but a tight political grip—may have been harsh on Mr Putin politically but optimistic economically. The “Pinochet model”, which some advocated, took little account of Russia's great-power ambitions, and overestimated its governability.

These days, the comparison of choice among some Russian liberals is to the Brezhnev era of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then, too, high oil prices and westward energy sales accompanied prickly international relations. Vladimir Ryzhkov, a member of parliament, likens Mr Putin's manipulation of the Kremlin's clans to Brezhnev's politburo management. (The depressing comparison has an upside: when oil prices fell, so did the Soviet Union.) But, to be fair, Mr Putin's run-ins with the West pale beside the cold war; and, despite his KGB background, Russians are much freer now than they were then. Mr Putin himself recently denounced “Sovietologists” who see Russia through a cold-war prism, such as those who want to eject it from the G8 group of rich nations. “The dog keeps barking,” the president said, “but the caravan keeps rolling.”

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Mussolini was once another fashionable comparator. But Yegor Gaidar, an architect of Mr Yeltsin's economic reforms, this week proposed an alternative: Weimar Germany. Mr Gaidar postulates that the pattern of the Yeltsin/Putin era—disorder and economic chaos, followed by authoritarianism and widespread imperial nostalgia—matches Germany in 1918-33. The implicit prognosis is unhappy: 15 years after military defeat in Germany, Hitler was elected chancellor, and it will soon be 15 years after the Soviet Union collapsed. “I hope it will not happen,” says Mr Gaidar, but “we should not close our eyes” to the danger. Lilia Shevtsova, of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, takes issue with part of the analogy: Mr Putin's “cocksure political class”, she says, is beyond imperial nostalgia and is busy reviving Russia's superpower status. Her preferred formulation is “bureaucratic authoritarianism”.

Another analyst, Andrei Illarionov, used to talk of the “Venezuela model”, in which state meddling in energy destabilises the economy (this may explain why he is no longer Mr Putin's economic adviser). Last week, he proposed a different idea: Nashism. Nash is Russian for ours; but it is also a play on Nashi, a youth movement founded by the Kremlin to help stave off an unlikely colour revolution, as well as on fascism. The most important value in Nashism, says Mr Illarionov, is loyalty to the regime; another feature is the unequal application of the law; and a main purpose is the redistribution of property. Nashism has several analogues, Mr Illarionov argues, in countries such as Libya, Chad and Syria.

Piffle, says Vyacheslav Nikonov, a Kremlin-friendly political analyst. He diagnoses Mr Putin as a “Gaullist conservative”: liberal in economics, but robustly independent in foreign policy. And Mr Nikonov adds that, whatever else he is, “Putin is 100% Russian.”

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