| 来源类型 | Report |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| Putin’s Russia: How it rose, how it is maintained, and how it might end | |
| Mikhail Dmitriev; Evgeny Gontmakher; Lev Gudkov; Sergei Guriev; Boris Makarenko; Alexey Malashenko; Dmitry Oreshkin; Kirill Rogov; Natalia Zubarevich; Leon Aron | |
| 发表日期 | 2015-05-13 |
| 出版年 | 2015 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Editor’s note: The next president is in for a rough welcome to the Oval Office given the list of immediate crises and slow-burning policy challenges, both foreign and domestic. What should Washington do? Why should the average American care? We’ve set out to clearly define US strategic interests and provide actionable policy solutions to help the new administration build a 2017 agenda that strengthens American leadership abroad while bolstering prosperity at home. What to Do: Policy Recommendations for 2017 is an ongoing project from AEI. Click here for access to the complete series, which addresses a wide range of issues from rebuilding America’s military to higher education reform to helping people find work. Key Points As the steady economic growth characteristic of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first years in office has dissipated, he has relied on the rally-around-the-flag effect produced by the wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and, most recently, Ukraine to maintain his favorable approval ratings—a hardly sustainable strategy in the long run. The root cause of Russia’s economic problems is not international sanctions or oil prices, but rather the Putin regime’s failure to modernize its economic and financial institutions, which has left the economy in a fragile, hydrocarbon-dependent state. The regime’s efforts to centralize power have resulted in poor governance in the provinces, increasing the likelihood of discontent among the rural residents that form Putin’s conservative political base. While the development of civil society in Russia still faces formidable obstacles, the growth of Russia’s middle class and the resulting spread of Western-like values are causes for optimism in the long run. Growing links between Russian Muslims and international Islamist groups have been fortified by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and are becoming more prevalent not only in the North Caucasus but also across Russia as a whole. Download or purchase: PDF | EPUB | Kindle | iBooks Print copies are extremely limited. To request a copy, please click here. Watch the event video. Share the infographic. See media release and scholar booking information. Read Leon Aron’s Q&A series with Russian experts: The Wall Street Journal’s Edward Lucas reviewed “Putin’s Russia” saying: Contents Introduction I. POLITICAL ECONOMY, POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY, AND THE POLITICS OF FEDERALISM Political Origins and Implications of the Economic Crisis in Russia Sergei Guriev Four Russias and a New Political Reality Natalia Zubarevich Russian Federalism: Reality of Myth? Evgeny Gontmakher II. REGIME, IDEOLOGY, PUBLIC OPINION, AND LEGITIMACY Resources of Putin’s Conservatism Lev Gudkov Evolution of Values and Political Sentiment in Moscow and the Provinces Mikhail Dmitriev Triumphs and Crises of Plebiscitary Presidentialism Kirill Rogov III. CIVIL SOCIETY: DEFEAT AND RADICALIZATION? The Difficult Birth of Civic Culture Boris Makarenko Moscow to Swallow Putin: The Rise of Civil Society in Russia’s Capital Dmitry Oreshkin Islamic Challenges to Russia, from the Caucasus to the Volga and the Urals Alexey Malashenko Conclusion Acknowledgments About the Authors Introduction With an intellectual feast awaiting, I promise not to detain the readers of this compilation a minute longer than necessary and will use the introduction merely to whet their appetite. At the outset of this project, my hope was to assemble a dream team of Russia’s top—and most of my favorite—political sociologists, political geographers, and political economists; ask them to write about what they think are the most significant trends in their field of study; and have them project three to four years ahead. To my surprise and delight, every one of the nine authors I sought out agreed. The result is a collection of essays unmatched, I believe, in Russian studies today in depth and breadth. Caveat emptor: a reader looking for an elaboration of today’s headlines might be disappointed. While the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine are definitely part of the conceptual framework for most of these essays, these events (as well as plunging oil prices and the economic sanctions against Russia) are not what this book is about. Instead, it is designed to describe and analyze some of the regime’s key structural strengths and weaknesses that are obscured by what Russian journalists call “the smoke” of the battle for Ukraine. As far as the regime’s fault lines are concerned, the evidence presented by the authors shows no reversal, or even narrowing, of these structural dysfunctions in Putin’s third presidential term. Indeed, most of the problems—or perhaps more precisely, potential political, social, and economic crises—have been exacerbated since March 2014. To quote Boris Makarenko, “The rallying around the flag buys time for the regime but does not resolve a single socioeconomic problem.” It is these postponed crises—their causes and their impact, on the one hand, and the regime’s engagement with them, on the other—that this book is about. To elucidate the antecedents and political implications of the unfolding economic crisis, Sergei Guriev opens by retracing Russia’s macroeconomic dynamics of the past 14 years. Guriev dates the start of the current economic crisis to early 2014, before international sanctions were imposed against Moscow and before oil prices fell. Instead, he lays blame mostly at the regime’s door for rejecting the institutional reforms needed to radically modernize the country’s economy and end its reliance on hydrocarbons. The shrinking of the national economic pie is bound to aggravate the structural dysfunctions in the relationship between the Russian center and provinces, described by Evgeny Gontmakher, and extend the rifts between what Natalia Zubarevich calls “the four Russias”: segments of society sharply varied in their income, urbanization, education, upward mobility, and, as a result, modalities of their political attitudes and loyalty to Putin’s regime. Like the United States, Brazil, or Germany, Russia is too big and too diverse to be both unitary and democratic. Instead, again and again throughout the country’s history, liberalizations have almost invariably been accompanied by greater self-rule at the local level, while authoritarian consolidations have inevitably led to a more rigid subjugation of the country to the center. Small wonder, then, that—as Gontmakher demonstrates—Putin has chosen and systematically pursued the latter path. Already in Putin’s first presidential term (2000–04), the march toward “the vertical of power” (as Putin called the central government’s complete control over regions) included abolishing the direct election of regional governors, denying both an independent political base and loyalty to local leaders. Another blow to regional autonomy was the change in the composition of the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the Federal Assembly, or Russian parliament), where governors used to be ex officio members (“senators”) and thus had a say in national politics. Yet, while the vertical of power has made a sham of constitutionally mandated federalism, Gontmakher points out the unintended consequences eroding the center’s rigid control of the unitary state. The quality of the center’s decision making is being compromised by distorted feedback from the regions and increasingly selective implementation of the center’s decisions as local authorities increasingly deviate from its control. In the end, the relations between the center and provinces amount to what Gontmakher calls a “systemic crisis” in Moscow’s ability to govern Russia. Examining some of the similar problems from the opposite end of the vertical of power, Zubarevich further develops her four Russias theory, increasingly recognized as one of the most useful tools for assessing and predicting the country’s political dynamic. Based on the economic geography and demography, she maps out in fascinating detail population clusters ranging from those engaged in “postmodern” economic activity to Russian citizens with the “lowest levels of education and upward mobility,” higlighting the “pronounced differences” in these groups’ “quality and way of life” and values. *** Trends in ideology, public opinion, and legitimacy are taken up by Lev Gudkov, Mikhail Dmitriev, and Kirill Rogov, who agree that it was the constant and significant economic growth in household income between 2000 and 2008 that secured Putin’s high approval ratings and, with them, the regime’s legitimacy and what Dmitriev calls a “political equilibrium,” responsible for the relative stability of the regime during that period. Delving into the causes of Putin’s personal popularity within the current political system of “plebiscitary presidentialism” (in essence, authoritarianism with elections that do not change the head of state), Rogov does not attribute the Russian president’s appeal to some extraordinary charismatic qualities. Rather, he attributes it to a “systemic phenomenon deeply connected” to both the needs of society, on the one hand, and the “institutional environment,” on the other—that is, the regime’s almost total control or manipulation of key political, legal, and social institutions. Rogov diagnoses the key to the regime’s stability as Putin’s “supermajority” (overwhelming political support), which is held together by a combination of economic and mobilization factors. The former category is predicated on economic growth, while the latter derives largely from the effects of a “value-centered rallying around the leader,” who is perceived as both an effective “wealth manager” and the “savior and protector of the nation.” Some examples of the mobilizing trends are the 2000 war in Chechnya, the 2003–04 war on the oligarchs, and the 2008 war on Georgia. (The 2014 annexation of Crimea and the war on Ukraine also fit well into this paradigm, as evinced by the 20–25-point upswing in Putin’s ratings.) By contrast, Dmitriev investigates the economic, demographic, and, especially, value-related causes of the discontinuity in Putin’s approval ratings. He traces the first cracks in the supermajority’s foundation to the aftermath of the 2008–09 world financial crisis, with both the number of public protests and their provenance belying the Moscow-centric stereotype. Still, even at the lower end of his ratings, Putin scored far better than the government bureaucracies at all levels, thus making the president’s personal popularity the key to the regime’s legitimacy. Gudkov explores some of the legitimizing themes (myths) of the Putin regime and the reasons for their resonance and appeal (in addition to the censorship and propaganda), including the allure of a “strong leader” at home and abroad. *** Of all the fault lines explored in this volume, the one that has been the furthest from public view in the past few years of authoritarian consolidation is the disconnect between the regime and civil society, manifested by the 2011–12 mass protest rallies, which were spearheaded by the middle class throughout Russia. Makarenko details the tall barriers impeding the development of Russian civil society. There is a historical tradition of top-down modernization in Russia, which from Peter the Great to Putin placed civil society under the state’s supervision and control, with private actors accorded, at best, the roles of what Stalin called “cogs” (vintiki) in a “huge and all-knowing,” in Makarenko’s words, state machine. Another factor is the political, or rather apolitical, national culture, in which mistrust of any authority translates into mistrust of politics. Finally, cemented in large measure by the “power-property alliance,” the regime does its best to “retain its power monopoly at the cost of sabotaging modern political institutions.” Yet, while very formidable, the obstacles to Russian civil society were and are not insurmountable. Makarenko reminds us that the “perennial subject,” the Russian people, did rise against the existing order in 1905, 1917, and 1991. There has also been a perceptible accumulation of what might be called “initial social capital,” also described by Dmitriev and Zubarevich. This term refers to the growing number of Russian men and women who “owe their prosperity to their own efforts rather than government paternalism,” resulting in values and attitudes “comparable to those of Western societies.” These and other precedents and trends amount to what Makarenko sees as structural factors “conducive to the emergence of a Russian culture of citizenship.” It is this culture, along with the values and behavior of its main bearer, the middle class, that Makarenko and Dmitri Oreshkin portray in fine detail, correcting, along the way, a few stereotypes about the demographics of the Russian protesters, civil society’s ability to organize political actions, and the attitudes of society at large toward the public protests. To Oreshkin, the most significant trend within Russian civil society has been the emergence of “self-governing” civil society groups that fill the vacuum left by the state, which is inefficient, corrupt, “free from any responsibility to the electorate,” and unable or unwilling to provide services and protect “the rights of the public.” Pragmatic and nonideological (or, one might say, ideologically inclusive), these nongovernmental organizations are involved in activities ranging from charity to traffic safety to exposing corruption, including falsification of educational certification, especially doctorate degrees. One of the most impressive tests of civil society’s ability to self-organize was the monitoring of the 2011 Duma campaign in Moscow. Because of the monitoring, the authorities felt more constrained in their falsification methods during the 2012 presidential election; as a result, Putin received less than half of Moscow’s vote, according to the official count—and probably closer to 40 percent in reality. During the September 2013 Moscow mayoral election, even more divergent were the tallies from polling stations monitored by volunteers versus those where authorities were in complete control. By contrast, Alexey Malashenko delves into a segment of Russian civil society that is in many regards opposite to the one analyzed by Makarenko and Oreshkin. He details the symptoms and causes of the radicalization of Russian Muslims outside the North Caucasus, most notably in Tatarstan, “the heart of the Russian Muslim community.” Despite terrorist acts in Tatarstan and the neighboring Bashkortostan, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe’s oldest continuously Muslim community—5 million strong and predating the Christianization of Russia and the emergence of Russian state—has gone largely unnoticed. Yet it fits well within the pan-European trend of the radicalization of younger and seemingly assimilated Muslims. The appeal of “nontraditional” Islam, especially to young Russian Muslims, is undeniable and has been growing since the early 2000s. The Arab Spring and the war in Syria have further radicalized the Salafist (Wahhabist) movement in Russia. Unfolding in parallel have been fundamentalist trends among Russia’s estimated 2.5 to 3 million migrant workers from Muslim Central Asia. In the end—whether in the precarious state of the Russian economy, the relationship between Russia’s center and periphery, the divergent paths of the “four Russias,” public opinion trends, or the state of civil society—emerging in these pages is a finely textured portrait of a society rife in complexities, contradictions, and postponed but looming crises. Now that your appetites are thus sufficiently whetted, I invite you to be edified and stimulated by the original, searching, and powerful chapters that follow. Read the full report. |
| 主题 | Europe and Eurasia |
| 标签 | Crimea ; federalism ; Russia ; Russia-Ukraine ; Vladimir Putin ; What to Do Policy Recommendations Russia |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/putins-russia-how-it-rose-how-it-is-maintained-and-how-it-might-end/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/206116 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Mikhail Dmitriev,Evgeny Gontmakher,Lev Gudkov,等. Putin’s Russia: How it rose, how it is maintained, and how it might end. 2015. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| Putins-Russia.pdf（3229KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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