Writing in the UK's Times, Anatole Kaletsky says Vladimir Putin is tightening the noose on the 'backing vocals' that paved his way to office:
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Is Russia moving back towards some form of Stalinist dictatorship? Or is the transition from communism to capitalism now irreversible, as almost everyone so recently believed? In the immediate aftermath of a political and economic upheaval, such as the one set off by the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s most powerful and richest businessman, the easy answer to such questions is “only time will tell”. In this case, however, one can be clearer: the answer to both my opening questions is “yes”. Russia probably is reverting to an authoritarian society, in which the President and his immediate entourage believe that they are entitled to keep a tight rein on political activity, as well as maintaining a monopoly of power. But the decay of liberal democracy will certainly not bring back communism: it will probably do the Russian economy no great harm. Dictatorship could even make the country more of a magnet for Western investment, in the same way as it has in China. Idealistic linkage so often suggested by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan between free markets and “free peoples” was never more than a rhetorical device. History has seen plenty of liberal democracies with highly regulated economic systems and there have been even more examples of tyrannies that have run their economies on broadly free-market capitalist lines. To judge by recent events, Russia may well turn its back on the experiment with democracy initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev and then subverted by the corruption and anarchy under Boris Yeltsin. But even if this happens, there is no reason that its economy should suffer or Western investors take fright. It is laughable to suggest, for example, that oil companies that have thrived on relationships with corrupt dictators in the Middle East, Nigeria or Indonesia, would suddenly pull out of Russia because it ceases to be a flourishing democracy or because civil liberties come under threat. Putin may want to make Russia an orderly one-party state by taking control of the media and making sure that concentrations of wealth are not transformed into rival centres of power. But a reversion to communism plays no part in this scheme.
Putin is intelligent enough to understand that communism as an economic system was a complete and irrevocable failure that condemned Russia to a century of backwardness and a catastrophic loss of influence in the world. The last thing he wants is to restore centralised control over the economy or natural resources. Indeed, Russia under Putin has arguably moved further from any kind of socialism or social democracy than the US or any other major country. Russia now has a lower ratio of government spending to GDP than any OECD country. Its flat-rate tax system, with absolutely no element of progressivity, is almost identical to the “idealistic objective” proposed by the most extreme economic libertarians on the US Republican Right. Putin’s heroes are clearly not Lenin or Stalin. If he wants to imitate anyone it is probably Deng Xiao Ping, who introduced capitalism and private enterprise to China while safeguarding the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. Another more sinister role model may be General Pinochet in Chile. When Putin’s mood is milder he probably imagines that he might be able to emulate on an infinitely grander scale a thoroughly pro-Western and benign authoritarian, such as Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore. There seems to be no great worry about Russia’s economy after this week’s events. Whatever happens to Khodorkovsky – whether he is imprisoned for years or eventually freed and exiled; whether he is made to sell his stake in Russia’s biggest oil company or it is expropriated by the State – Russia will remain for years the fastest growing economy in Europe, as it finally adapts to the market system and begins to exploit its natural resources and its intellectual wealth. The collapse of the Moscow stock market on Monday was the least significant consequence of Khodorkovsky’s arrest. The real worry is not Russia’s economic performance, but its political development and its pro-Western orientation. For the shadowy siloviki (roughly translating as “wielders of power from the security apparatus”) who have been tightening the screws on Khodorkovsky and other dissenters are also the people who have been pushing Putin away from the West on issues such as Iraq. The most obvious message conveyed by Khodorkovsky’s arrest is that wealth and economic influence offer no protection against coercive state power. This notion that wealth should not put you beyond the reach of the authorities may appear to be a bedrock of any law-governed society, but there is a world of difference between applying the principles of due legal process and arbitrarily persecuting individuals who are politically troublesome.
Every Russian who shares in the collective memory of Stalin’s purges and show trials has a perfect understanding of this distinction, even if some of Putin’s Western apologists do not. Khodorkovsky, whatever his past financial misdemeanours, is not being persecuted because of the way he acquired his wealth. The fact is that all the robber barons who now control the Russian economy got rich in the same way. They bribed, cheated, stole and, in some cases, murdered their way to wealth. Why, then, make an example of Khodorkovsky? Since the end of the legalised looting of the Yeltsin era, Khodorkovsky has turned himself into a model of probity and business legitimacy. The company he created, Yukos Oil, was one of the first Russian businesses to publish Western-style audited accounts, to pay taxes on time and to deal fairly with minority shareholders and foreign investors. In his personal activities, Khodorkovsky emphasised his determination to reinvest his wealth in Russia, rather than ferret it away in Swiss banks; he gave generously to unfashionable charities; he supported cultural and scientific exchanges with the West and created a programme for Russian students at Oxford modelled on Rhodes scholarships. Why, then, did Putin target this model oligarch? Western politicians and businessmen purport to be mystified. The US State Department and Exxon said that they needed to study the situation more closely. Lord Browne of Madingley, the chief executive of BP, who has invested billions in other Russian oil fields, said yesterday that “it is still impossible for us to tell what the deep motivation is” for this arrest. But for anyone who does not need to worry about staying on the right side of the Putin Government there is no mystery at all. Khodorkovsky was arrested not because of the way he made his money, but because of the way he chose to spend it. His generosity extended well beyond charities to political movements. Khodorkovsky financed all three of Russia’s opposition parties, mainly the liberal Yabloko and the pro-market Rightists, but also recently the Communists. He supported pro-Western think-tanks that were critical of the Russian Government’s economic and foreign policies. He opposed the war in Chechnya. He recently acquired several newspapers. And he was said to have political ambitions, possibly including a run for the presidency in 2008, when Putin is required to stand down, unless Putin decides to revise the Russian Constitution, which on present form, he well may. Khodorkovsky’s independent liberal nexus came nowhere near to challenging Putin’s political control. The parties he supported financially will struggle to secure even the 5 per cent vote they need to win any representation in the new parliament. As for the idea that impoverished Russians would elect as President the country’s richest robber baron, this was widely dismissed in Moscow as a joke. But, for Putin and the siloviki around him, it seemed to be unacceptable as a matter of principle that there should be any independent media and any centres of political activity outside Kremlin control. In the end it comes down to the question of whether the Russian State can tolerate political independence.
I will give the last word to Boris Berezovsky, the dominant oligarch of the Yeltsin era, who now lives in London as an exile, after handpicking Putin for the presidency and then becoming too powerful for his own good. He summarised the Khodorkovsky affair like this: “Every totalitarian system fights against independent people. And, for sure, people who have a lot of money are more independent than people who don’t have a lot of money.”
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-873236,00.html"Putin's heros are clearly not Lenin or Stalin": true. More likely Bush 1 and Thatcher.....
Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky, Abramovich et all are walk-on parts in their macabre Greek tragedy. Can't see Putin lasting much longer than 2004.
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