Addendum to the Discussion of a Possible "Second Coming of Gorbachev" in Russia Profile, May 13th, 2008, and OpEdNews, May 14th, 2008 ( http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=7393 ).
I am flattered that Vladimir Frolov took my recent article “Gorbachev Number Two: Dmitry Medevdev” ( click here ) as a starting point for a discussion of the prospects that Medvedev’s rise may or may not offer for Russia and Russian-Western relations.
There are many points that I could and some which I will make below concerning Eric Kraus’s, Anthony T. Salvia’s and Stephen Blank’s various rejoinders concerning an interpretation of Medvedev as a second Gorbachev, and Frolov’s introduction. At once, a clarification needs to be made concerning Blank’s seemingly sensible suggestion that “[w]e need to judge Medvedev by what he does.” Hardly anybody will disagree. Yet, ex post judgments are not always the purpose of academic or journalistic investigations. We get our money not only for assessing what happened, in the past (many people could do that). One reason that modern societies afford themselves professors, pundits or other analysts is that people want to know what may happen, in the future. It was, perhaps, because I proposed in my article a relatively clear vision of Russia’s future that Frolov decided to use my piece to kick off a discussion. While the commentators found much to criticize in the view (not necessarily only mine) of Medvedev as a possible reformer, they did not develop lucid alternative future scenarios. This is doubly convenient: It looks more sober than the speculative predictions that I offered. And it is less risky: Not taking a definite position spares one from, or makes it easier, defending it.
Here come my comments to the Russia Profile expert panel “The Second Coming of Gorbachev?”
First, Frolov introduces the discussion by asserting that “many Western analysts” have entertained the hypothesis “that Medvedev’s presidency will usher in a more liberal period in Russia’s political development.” My impression has been different, so far. While all Western observers I have read agree that Medvedev was the best pick among the candidates available in Putin’s entourage, few have been as enthusiastic about Medvedev as me. Instead, many have portrayed Medvedev as an opportunist, if not as a mere puppet of Putin.
Also Frolov mentions that observers focused on the facts that Medvedev is young and has no communist background or known KGB past. While this has been indeed mentioned in numerous of the more optimistic comments on Medvedev, these aspects were not the foci of my argument. I do not consider such affiliations or non-affiliations per se as important. Many of the most radical reformers and staunch liberals in the post-communist world where once communist party members; some even had party apparatus jobs before turning into reformers. Even a KGB background as such does not necessarily imply that the person in question has low respect for democracy. Not only Vladimir Putin, but also Oleg Kalugin, Alexander Litvinenko and others critical of Russia’s return to authoritarianism were once KGB officers.
Further, Frolov’s evaluation that “political and media freedoms […] have been somewhat limited under Putin” is a misleading understatement. There are, in Russia, still some critical media outlets such as Novaya gazeta, Ekho Moskvy as well as a whole number of informative websites. But they exist not because the Constitution gives them the right to do so, but because Putin & Co. have decided that taking control of them or shutting them down would be more costly than letting them serve their limited audiences. If pluralistic outlets such as the above developed into true mass media, they would start getting telephone calls from their stock holders, or visits from the tax police, fireworks department, or other governmental offices. The reason that Russians, for instance, cannot watch any longer, on their major TV channels, the once popular political shows of such journalists as Evgenii Kiselev, Leonid Parfenov (whose historical programs, to be sure, are still on air) or Savik Shuster is not because these men are dull commentators whom nobody wants to see. Rather, Kiselev, Parfenov or Shuster are smart, articulate and independent-minded professionals with the capacity to gather mass audiences, on TV. Talent is not something that in Putin’s new Russia would be sufficient to make a career in a field linked, in one way or another, to politics.
Frolov is also somewhat confusing when he talks about “checks and balances already installed by Putin.” While one may argue that Putin has indeed put “checks and balances” on Medvedev’s freedom to move, this particular terminological construct is – I assume, Frolov knows – usually applied in descriptions of democratic polities where the different branches of power are kept in an approximate equilibrium and relative independence from each other so as to prevent usurpation of prerogatives by one of them. Even many Russian fans of Putin would today, probably, admit that there are no real “checks and balances” left in Russia’s political system. And some might add that Russia does not need them because she is a different country with her own peculiar traditions.
Second, when Eric Kraus calls it “touchingly naïve” to speculate about the possibility of a re-democratization of Russia, I would return the compliment. In the mid-1980s, Oxford’s Archie Brown and some others were identifying Gorbachev as a reformer. The idea that the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU could be presiding over the dismantling of key elements of the Soviet system seemed to many observers, at that time, far-fetched, to put it mildly. The German Chancellor Helmut Kohl went furthest, and compared Gorbachev to Joseph Goebbels. (A couple of years later one could observe Kohl and the “Russian Goebbels,” though, walking together in wool cardigans through an idyllic landscape in the Caucasus.)
Further, Kraus’s affirmative assessment of recent Russian affairs, and, in particular, his statement concerning Russia’s “increasingly well-articulated policy” under Putin would be questioned by many. In my view, it has, instead, become increasingly unclear where Putin wants Russia to go. For instance, within his eight years of rule, Putin managed to build two “special relationships” with Britain: a friendly one, at the beginning of this presidency, and an adversarial one, more recently. Even more disturbing has been the Russian leaderships frequent switches between xenophilia and xenophobia, and the various repercussion of its instrumentalization of ethnic stereotypes concerning Balts, Georgians, Ukrainians, Americans, and Westerners, in general. I have, in an article on Russia’s rapidly rising nationalism, opined that, if one extrapolates Russia’s development during the last eight years into the future, the Russians will become “a lonely people and Moscow an isolated international actor, in the new century.”
Finally, in his defence of authoritarianism, Kraus considers Russia as a “developing country.” Probably, this would not find many supporters even among those Russians who might otherwise support Kraus’s apologetic assessment of Putinism. If he had been in Russia in 1999-2000 (as I was), Kraus could have witnessed a paradoxical situation: relatively high political pluralism and mass media freedom, and an economy that was just starting off, in this “developing country,” at the same time.
Anthony T. Salvia’s following critique is far more serious and interesting: He does not regard the parallel between Gorbachev and Medvedev convincing because the situations in which these two politicians found themselves when becoming the official leaders of their countries are different. I agree with this critique, and would admit that this was an aspect that I did not, and could or even should have touched upon in my article. The one qualification that I made was that my predictions only apply, if Medvedev retains sufficient powers in the presidential office, and does not become a mere figure-head President. If the gravity of power travels with Putin from the Kremlin to the White House, on the Moskva, then obviously there will be no second perestroika.
To this qualification, and here Salvia makes an important addition, one needs to add that Gorbachev came into office when the country and its ideology were both, at least among the intellectual and political elites, perceived to be already in crisis. Neither of these two conditions applies to today’s Russia. Still, Gorbachev’s democratic inclinations proved to be strong in 1989-1991 when he was reacting to society’s push for ever more freedoms rather than acting himself as a liberalizer. My suspicion is thus that Gorbachev would have, much like Alexander Dubcek before him, attempted to initiate liberalization and democratization even without a looming crisis (though he may not have risen as far as he did without such a crisis - doubtlessly, a major factor in his promotion to General Secretary).
In another article called “The Towers of Future Russia” ( click here ) I argued that the emergence of a pro-Western “tower” around Medvedev, in the Kremlin, will lead to a counter-reaction and the emergence an anti-Western “tower” within some other Russian institution. While there are certain parallels between Medvedev’s and Gorbachev’s relative positions in Russia’s ideological spectrum and political history, it is to me thus unclear what exact results Medvedev’s probable attempts to liberalize the Russian polity will have. In view of the impending consolidation of various sections of the nationalist spectrum in Russian politics against Medvedev, a second “perestroika” is only one of the possible outcomes, perhaps, not even the most likely one. Salvia’s scepticism concerning Medvedev’s capacity to implement democratic reforms is justified. In the worst case, Medvedev’s “home-range” will be circumscribed to such an extent that he will not even be given the chance to initiate changes. Yet, this would be substantially equivalent to depriving the office of the President of the Russian Federation of its hitherto defined prerogatives – a caveat I mentioned in my initial comparison of Medvedev with Gorbachev.
Finally, Professor Blank speaks of “speculation and wishful thinking” with regard to the argument about Medvedev as a possible reformer. I should remark that I, at least, never proposed that the fact, mentioned in Blank’s critique, that Medvedev’s parents are professors is of any importance as such (as I did not present Medvedev’s lack of links to the CPSU or KGB as being per se reliable indicators). In distinction to Frolov, I also did not focus solely on pro-democratic quotes by Medvedev though I did collect – and here Blank would be right – some of the new President’s more remarkable statements on “sovereign democracy,” Russia’s position vis-à-vis the US, or the future of European-Russian relations. However, I argued that it is a combined consideration of such statements (of which there are many), Medvedev’s brief engagement in Russia’s emerging democratic movement in late 1988 - early 1989, and some facts of his biography that allows one to see him as a potential reformer.
When Blank writes that “Umland’s analysis is already off the mark, because the government apparatus is brought under Putin’s control without any apparent sign of protest from Medvedev,” I am not sure to which part of my article Blank refers. If I were Medvedev’s advisor, I would tell him not to protest anything that Putin does. I would further advise the President to wait for a year or two, if not longer, with attempts to re-democratize Russia in the same way in which Gorbachev, after becoming General Secretary in 1985, waited for about two more years before he made clear that when he says “glasnost’” he actually means it (Brezhnev had used the word too). I think that Blank’s assertion that “[t]he stories about [Medvedev’s] alleged liberalism recall the old KGB line that Andropov was a secret or closet Westernizer and reformer, and smack of the same provenance given the competent organs' belief that many Westerners, including seasoned analysts and politicians, are gullible enough to believe anything coming out of Moscow” is so much off the mark that it does not warrant further discussion.
