Russia In The New Century: Stability Or Disorder?

Citation preview

This page intentionally left blank

ity or Disorder?

Edited by

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. 1Vo part of this puMication may be reproduced or transmined in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includiilg photocopy, recording, or any iahmlation storage and retrieval bystem, without permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright O 2001 by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Rooks Group Ptlt3listled in 2001 in the United States of h e r i m by Westview Press, 5500 Ckntral Averzue, Bu~xldier, Colorado 80301-2877, anti in the United Kingdom by Westview Press, 12 Hid's Copse Road, Gumnor Hill, C2xford OX2 4J jf Visit us on the M'orld %Tide Web at m~~.westviewpress.com

Library of C:ongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Russia in the new cat-rrry : stability or disorder? / edited ly Victoria E. Uonnell and George W. Ureslauer p, cm. Tnclucles bibliographical references anti index. TSBN 0-8 133-9041-9 1. Russia (Federation)-I3olitia and government----.i94i-S 2, Russia 3, Xlussia (Federation)-SociaI (Federation)-Economic ccmditiuns-1991-. conditions-1991-. 4. MationaIis~n-Russia (Federatiorri. 5. hst-communisnl-Russia (Federation), I, BsnnelI, Victoria E. XI, Bresliauer, C2eorge W.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standarc1 for Pernlanence of Paper for Printed 1,ibrary Materials 2539.48- 1984.

Contents List qf Tables and Figurns Acknowledgnzeat5 Acrr~ay~.lzs

vii xx xi

1 Informai Networks, Collective Action, and Sources of

(1n)stability in Russia: A Brief Overview Victorin E, Bon~zelland George W Breslauer

2 m e n More Is Less: S~zperexecutivePower and hlitical Underdevelopment in Russia

M.Steven. Fish 3 Personalism Versus ProceduraXism: Boris Yeitsin and the Instit~~tionaf Fragifity of the Russian System Georg-e W. Bralauer 4 Russia's Second Constitutionai Court: Politics, Law, and Stability

Roberf Slzurlet 5 Institutional Decline in the ltussian Military: Exit, Voice, and Corruption

Kimberly firten Zisk

PARTIf: Eca~awnx 6 Stability and Disorder: An Evolutionary Analysjs of Russia's

Virtual Economy CEfford G. Gdriy and Barry lil/:Ickes

103

CONTENTS

vi

7 Russia in the Information Age

126

Emma Ki'selyova and Manuel Castells 8 Organized Crime and Social Instability in Russia:

The Alternative State, Deviant Bureaucracy, and Social Black HoIes Victor M. Sergeyev

158

PART111: SOCIETY 9 Russia's New Entrepreneurs

175

Victoria E. Bonnell I0 The Russian Wurking Class in Times of Transition Victor Zaslavsky

11 Domestic Involution: How Women Organize Survival in a North Russian City Michael Burawoy, Pwel Krotov, and Tatyarra Lpkina

20 1

23 1

PARTIV: THENATION 12 The Redefinition of the Russian Nation, International Security, and Stability Igor Zevelev

265

13 Serving Mother Russia: The Communist Left and Nationalist Right in the Struggle for Power, 2991-1998 Veljko Vujac'id

290

14 Dagestan and the Stability of Instability in the North Caucasus

326

Edward I N Walker

About the Contributors Index

358 363

es and Figures

4.2

Classification of cases decided by the Russian Constitutional Courts, 1992-1 998

7.2

Internatic~nalcr~nnectivityof Russian networks, 1998

9. 1 9.2

Background of entrepreneurs, 2 993-1 995 Major Russian financial-industrid groups and their founders

2 0.1 20.2 10.3 20.4

Unemployment, 2 992-1999 &nrnonetary pi2yment of wc~rkershwages,1995-1 997 Mrorkershttitrrdes toward trade unions, 1994 Strikes in Russia, 2991-1997

11.1 2 1.2

Living standards in the Komi Republic, 1994-1 998 Unemployment in Syktyvkax; 1993-1 998

12.1

Beliefs about state, nation, and security in Rr~sslia

figures 6.2

R-D space

11.1

Dimensions of domestic invczlution

This page intentionally left blank

edgments

This project was initiated with the encouragement and suppc~rtof Astrid Tuminez and David Speedie at the Carnegie Corporation, of New York, Mre are gratef~~l to the Carnegie Corporation for funding the broad, ambitiotls research effort launched by our group in 1998. Many of the ideas and research findings included in this volume were first presented at Carnegie-funded seminars cond~lctedover a two-year period at the Center for Siavic and East European Studies, of the University of Califc~rniaat Berkeley. We atso wouXd Xike to acknowiedge and thanic the many UC, BerkeXep facutty members, graduate students, visiting scholars, and ir-tvited guests whose participation in the seminar series and in the subseqtlent conference in May 1999 hetped make the discussions both lively and inhrmative, We owe a considerable debt to Edward Walker, executive director of the Berketo the fey f2rogram in Soviet and Pc~st-SovietSttldies (BPS), whose cr~ntributic~ns design and implementation czf the project and to the preparation of this book were ir-tvaluable.We are gratef~~f also for substantial assistance rendered by other BI3S staff members, incfuding Sasha Radovich and Uenise Monczewski. We appreciate: Tane Zavisca" hetp with the page proofs, Matthew Bencke made ionpartant contrib~xtionsto the project as rapporteur during the Carnegie seminars, and later, during the preparation of the manuscript, as editrsrial and research assistant. Victoria -E:* Bonnclll George W Breslauer

This page intentionally left blank

Acronyms ASSR CXS

GPCU CPIZF Ch-"KSFSK GPSU DEMOS

FBIS-UMA FDR FIG FNS Cazprom GDP GKO GUUAM

11" ISP ImR-TASS

autonomous Soviet sociaXlst republic Commonwealth of Independent States (of the former Soviet Union) Congress of Peoples c z f Chechnya and Dagestan Communist Party of the Russian Federation (also KPKF) Communist Party of the KSFSR Communist Party of the Soviet Union a commercial electronic communication network, the Russian equivalent of UNIX Foreign Brcjadcast Information Service, report on the Sovietlpost-Soviet states Fcjreign Broadcast Information Service, report on military affairs FrankXin DeXano Roosevelt financial-industrial group Nationaf Salvatic~nFront the IZussian natural gas monopoly gross domestic product short-tern government bond the attiance among Georgia, Ukraine, U~bekistan,Axerbaijan, and Moldova internally displaced person Institute of the WorId Economy and International Iklations (at the Russian Academy of Sciences) Internet prutocczl Internet service provider Independent Telegraph Agency of Rz~ssia-TelegraphAgency of the Soviet U ~ ~ i o n Young Communist League Communist Party of the Russian Federation (also CPKF) Communities Congress of R~~ssian Liberal Democratic k r t y of Russia miltibytes per second multipfe-dmg-resistant (adj.)

Menatep MGIMO MVC) MZhK NATO NUR PJG NPSR PJTTM NVO

RSrD UPJ KCC X;tELCOM KF X;tFE/RL KNE KNS X;tOClT ROS KSFSR XXUIE SBS-Agro SFOK SMZ TB TsK KPSS USXA VTsIOi%

one of the first Soviet banking ventures; the acronym stands for Inter-Branch Center for Scientific and Technological Program Moscr~wState Instittlte of International Relations IXussian Interior Ministry Soviet housing complex for youth North Atlantic Treaty Organization Our Hame Is Russia (yotiticaX party) Nczavisixnaia Cazeta Narodncl-Patrioticheskii Soiuz Rc~ssii(Popular-Patriotic U ~ ~ i oofn Russia) Center for Scientific-Technical Creativity of Youth Nezavkz'vnoe voevznoe oboz~-evzie(Russian armed forces newspaper) research and development Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk (Rt~ssianAcademy of Sdences) Russian Constitutional Court IXeTiable Communication (Rt~ssia'sfirst electronic communication net~vork) Russian Federation Radio Free EuropelRadio Liberty Russian National Unity party Russkii Natsional'nyi Sobor f b s s i a n National &ion) IXussian Public Center far lnfrorrnation Technologies Russian All-People" Union Russian Sot.iet Federated Sc~cialistRepublic IXussian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Stolichny Bank of Savings-Agroprombank StAilization Force (peacekeeping operation in Bosnizt) Sylifylcar Machine Building Factory tuberculosis R~lssianacronym for the Central Committee of the CPSW United States Xnformation Agency Russian Center for Public Opinion Research

In trod uction

This page intentionally left blank

Networks, ective Action, and Sources of in Russia Overview Victoria E, Banrrelt

George W. Breslauer Universiy of Calqornia, Berkeley

A

Irnost a decade has passed since the collapse of communism in the USSR and the dismemberment of the corrntry, Xn the immediate ahermath of the mc~numentatevents of 1991, Western scholars offered widely ditrergent assessments of the country" tr;ljiectory. Mrlsereas some anticipated progress toward democratization and marketization, many others made onninotls predictions that Russia might not survive the coming winter.l At the same time, Western politicians justified their support far economic and other assistance to Xxussia by stressitzg the potentially apocalyptic conseqrzences of "hosing" Russia and allowing that ccluntry to fall victim to chaos, communist restoration, or fascist reaction.' IXussian leaders, eager to secure loans and grants from the West, consciously reitzforced these fears with their own rhetoric," Neither apocalyptic fears nor optimistic hopes have been realized. Rtrssia has in fact survived many winters since the demise of the USSR, but there has alscz been widespread human suffering. Russia possesses a minimalist electoral democracy with extensive civil liberties but has made little progress in building the many other strong, autonomous instittrtions needed to consolidate IiberlzX

4

Victoria E. Bonnelf and Ceorge Irv". Breslauer

democracy and civil society, Similarly, f;tussia has a market economy of sortsbut one that more closely resembles Tl-tird World emnomies, with their crony capitalism and racketeering, than it does ecr~nomiesin the West. Russia has descended into the ranks of "failed states" whose distinguishing feature is the diminished power and authority of the central government to enforce the law; collect taxes; enforce conscriptic>n;ensure a minirntlm standard of living; provide basic health, education, and wetfare service; and maintain pubfic order, As this project comes to completion at the end of march 2000, Russia's future pnrsspects remain uncertain. Afthough that crluntry has escaped widespread social disorder or political collapse, few observers w u t d argue that the situation has truly stabilized. The financial crisis of A~~grxst 1998 underscored the contixztling fragility and vulnerability of major institutions. The renewed warfare in Chechnya holds out the prospect of an extended guerrilla war and increased domestic terrorism. Hetiertheless, the reactions of most Russians have thus far been adaptive rather than defiant, Yeamings for stabilization and predictability have steadily grown stronger as the visible enfeeblement and corruption of the central government have increased. That Uevgenii Prirnakov was the mczst popular politician in the country throughout most of 1999 provided a teiting indicator of the centrist orientation of most Russians and their desire for stability, The results of parliamentary electiclns in December 1999 atso reffected a preference for pofiticaf parties that would maintain order and avoid transformative policies of both the eft" and the "right." The groundswet1 of support for preidential andidate VLadimir Putin, dtle in large part to the renewed Chechen war, reflected the craving of many citizens for a decisive and dependable leader capable of preserving order, fighting domestic terrorism, and sustaining the national integrity of the Russian state. At his ejection on March 26,2000, this former KGB inteUigence officer had yet tcz articulate a clear set of policies for domestic and foreign affairs. Neverthdess, Putin's bland but diligent demeanor, and the poptllarity of his "get tau* rhetoric, enabled him trz attract a broad and motley coalition of political leaders and parties, ranging from cornmunists to liberal reformers. But in order to deliver on his promise to restox Kremlin pcrswer at htzme and abroad he will have to contend with Rtlssia's ccznfiicting historicat Zegacies and with a formidable set of contemporary problems, m a t path. will Russia take in the new century? 1s the current balance between atlthoritarian and demczcratic elements in the pofiticaf order likely to persist? Will the combination of racketeering and fiee-marketination eventually lead to a stable economy? Does the weakness of the Russian state portend greater or lesser pubfic unrest and defiance of that state by regionaf elites! Wil Russia" passage from imperial core to independent nation-state bring with it the consotidaticjn of liberal nationalism, or the reemergence of a revanchist, imperialist mentality? Will the current situatic~n,so laced with contradictions, soon give way to an attesnative, such as an authoritarian regime, military rule, growing political violence, civil. war, or an accelerating ""Ottomanization""of the corrntry?

These questions are addressed by the contributors tcz this vczlume-seventeen distinguished scholars from the United States, Rz~ssia,and Europe-with the aim of identi~ingthe institutions, social forces, and ideas that are transforming Kussia and are in turn being transbrmed, There is abundant evidence that Itussia is in crisis. Far less is know11 about popular and elite reactions to that crisis. We have asked the authors to map Russia" postcommunist experience during the Yeltsin era with an eye to the country" prospects for stability and disorder in the comir-tgcentury. We address the issues without a precr~nceivedtheoretical or pr~liticalagenda. Xxussirt today shows features suggestive czf a rewlutionary situation-such as splits among elites, widespread alienation, and a state fiscal crisis. The current sittlation in Rr~ssiasomewhat resembles that in Germany before the rise of Hitler, and in Italy before the rise of Mussolini. But neither social revolution nor fascism provides an adeqrzate basis for assessing the trajectory of contemporary Russia, given the vast differences among these nations with respect to their history, international context, sociopolitical organization, and patterns of economic develapment." Were W testing specific propositions, we might have narrowed our focus significantly, One could, for exampXe, envision a project that w u I d combine theory with empirical observation in order to test specific hypotheses about the relationship, say, b e ~ e e nfrustration and aggression. Alternatively, one might devote a vczlume to reexamining the evidel~ceabout Xxussian political cutture and public orientations to authority in order to test variozts theories about the prerequisites fc3r democratic consolidation.W~~lr approach is broader, more eclectic, and less disciplined, as we have sought to give attention to a multiplicity of actual and potential challenges to stability both from above and from below. We begin with the assumption that there can be many paths trz systemic breakdown. Violent challenges to the existing order could come from within the pofitical establishment, from social forces, or from same combination of the two. Economic shocks or internaf or international incidents could trigger such cfralenges. Political and social forces can be mobilized by restricted cabals, by electoral victories (whether rigged or not), or by popular movements united by compelling ideas that congeal into a credible alternative ideology. A collectivity may suffer from widespread deprivation and disaffection and yet find itself incapable of organizing for collective action to improve conditions, Xn a single volume, we could not explore all these possibilities. m a t we have tried to do instead is to analyze major features of postcommunist Xxussia with an eye to speci~ingthe fiactors that brought about the current situation, the tensions that create pressures for change, and the circtlrnstances that are likely to prc3mote or inhibit stability, XnevitabIy, as in any generat discussion about this vast and varied nation, there are gaps in coverage-most notably, that of Russia's regions (other than the Ntzrth Caucasus and Uagestan); of relations b e ~ e e nMoscc>wand the regions; and of the ruraf poputation. A truly comprehensive, equitable discussion of the regions would have reqrzired many more pages than co~lldbe accommodated in

6

Victoria E. i";"onnelfand Ceorge Irv". ereslauer

this vcllume. Moreover, as regards rural areas in particular, we concluded early on that the peasantry is much less likely to challenge political stability than is the urban working class, These particular omissions no~ithstanding,W believe that czur contributors3nformed observations and empirical findings wiU generate new insights among scholars, students, and other readers making their way through the complex and variegated landscape of R~lssiatoday.

A Brief Outrine of Chapters The chapters in the first part of the volume anaIyze polificat institutions. M. Steven Fish disctrsses the formation of the system of "superpresidentialism,"" which accords vast legislative, fiscal, and jttdicial powers to the executive even as it emasculates other branches of government. Utilizing political theory as well as the experiences of other postcommunist countries, Fislz argucs that such a concentraticln of authority has ""pernicious effects" on Russia by interfering with both democratization and the emergence of a vibrant civil society Mare specifically, he finds that superpresidentialism ""has impaired the legitimacy of the postSoviet regime and helped to discredit democraq itself, arrested the development czf pailticat-societal organizations, enfeebled state agencies and undermined state capacity, and dixninished the accountability of officialdom to the citizenry" "1 Russia. George W. Breslauer, who also focuses on the Russian presidency, makes a cornplernentary argument, He examines the evolution of Boris Yeltsitz" personalistic and patriarchal leadership style since 1991. His chapter emphasizes the negative consequences of these arrangements, which have undermined the ""rtional distribution of formal power,""fostered an ""individualized, anti-procedural and antiinstitutional" approach tri governance, widespread cczrrmption, and ""cony capitalism." By frustrating the construction czf institutions based on stable procedures, Boris Yeltsil~has bequeathed a legacy of ixzstitutions that are highly personalized and fragile. Both Fish and Breslauer emphasize the importance of future measures tci halt further devolution czf pcltver and to promote the development czf imzstltutions capable of buttressing civil society and democrati;lation. The Constitutic~nalCt~urt,which is modeled on the U.S. Supreme Court, is the subject czC IXobert Sharlet" contribution. In contrast to the instit~rtionafweaknesses discerned ixz the executiive branch by Fish and Breslauer, Sharlet sees subde but steady progress over time in the Court" ability to influence both the legal agenda and elite czpinion concerning issues such as the separation czf powers, individllai rights, and federalism. To be sure, Russia" fledgling judicial order remains fragile. The key to judicial influence, according tri Sharlet, lies in avc~iding too sharp a break with those in power, and in adopting a pragmatic, cautious approach to judicial innovation. SharXet avoids prognostications on whether the Ctlurt will gain greater freedom from political intervention in coming years, but he clearly believes that an expansion of the Court" discretion woutnd have a satutary effect on political stabilization.

Klmberly Zisk anatyzes the cczndition czC Xxussian military forces and the prospects for a military coup itz response to widespread disaffeaion both in the military and in the yoyulatic~nat large. Zisk reaches the cr~ncltlsionthat the risk czf such a coup is very 10w. She finds that although disaffection is high, the deterioration of colleaive solidarity within and among the ranks, the erosion of military resources and discipline, and the spread of corruption and demorali~ationat att levels have robbed potentiai coup plotters of both the ideological and the organizational means necessary for a successk~lmilitary coup, In Part 11, the authors address issues relating to the Russian economy Clifford Caddy and Barry Xcks find that the Russian economy is trapped in a condition that they describe as the "virt~laleconomy.'The virtuai economy combitzes elements of the old Sc~vietsystem and of macroeconomic pc~liciesfe3tlowed since 1992 with the defensive, adaptive behavior of enterprises and management in response to the disloations and ~~ncertair-tties they face. The economy is only partially mc~netized,for barter remains widespread; and many enterprises find themselves in the anomittous situation of producing goods but destroying value, Ail this and much else is hidden horn p~lblicview. The virtual eccznomy is a continuation of Soviet welfarism, aimed at staving off social dislocations that could cause vvorkers to take to the streets en masse. Xt may purchase near-term political stability, but how long can it last? There are limits to the Internatic~nalMonetary Fund" willingness to subsidize this economy as well as to the Russian government" ability to subsidize loss-making enterprises. Furthermore, the entire arrangement irngedes the industrial restructuring that is so necessary if R~lssiais to become cr~mpetitivein international markets for manuf'actured goods, In short, the temporary stability eventually may be foliowed by a day of reckoning. Another srlurce of sczcial inequality is explored by Emma Kiselyova and Manuel Castells, whose analysis focuses czn the role of technologicat innovation and the diffusion of information technology in Russia. Since 1991, Russia has witnessed the demise of microelectronics and the traditional computer industry as well as the retardation of the public telecommunications n e ~ o r kAs , a conseqkxence of these developments, Kiselyava and Castells conclude that a process of ""dualization" b s been accelerating within Russia, This pnzcess separates the minority c 2 1 the population that is plugged into the Internet (whom they ca!! "netizensW")rom the vast majority of the pop~zlation,which remair-ts outside the new technczlogy and the global ecrlnomy more generally, Netizens do not necessarily coincide as a social group with weatthy industrialists and banicers. Their ranks also indude many p u n g , urban professionals who are seeking to establish their own small businesses, as wefl as many urban intellectuals wbcz are seeking tcz plug into the global information highway, KiseXyclrsa. and Casteits see this group as the country" best hope for the ftrture. Victor M. Sergeyev addresses the issue of organized crime, another source of mass indignation, extreme social inequalit5 and remonopolization of the economy, XII a complement to Gaddy and Ickes's '""viit~lal economy,"3ergeyevemploys

8

Victoria E. Bonnelf and Ceorge Irv". Breslauer

spatial metaphors to explain the circumstances that allow organized crime to Rourish in Russia. He argues that much of the economy has been transformed into enormous ""gay zonesm-the space that exists between formal rules, on the one hand, and inhrmat understanding and patterns of belzavior that survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, on the other, The "'alternative state" "at has arisen within these gray zones provides the terrain for a wide array of criminal activities. In the worst cases, gray zones have become bIaclc l-roles in which the state has almost entirely lost its power to enforce the law. But in most of Russian society> gray rxlnes predclminate as a result of the paucity of legal development, the weakness of judiciai organs, and the corruption of pofiticaf and economic elites. Or@nized crime now performs some of the regulatory functions that are usrzally perfc3rmed by a strr3ng state, such as crlntract enforcement. Part IIX is dewted to an exploration of social groups, specifically entrepreneurs and workers, Victoria Bonnefl's analysis of the evolution of the entrepreneurial class reinforces the image of Russia" dclualization described by Kiselyova and Castells. Forged in the crucible of the perestroz'ka era, this highly variegated group stratified rapidly into an oligarchy (made up of a small number of vvealthy and influential businessmen wh(>preside omr vast resources) and a much larger group of middle-lewt and small-scale entrepreneurs struggfing to survive. Personal ties, political connections, crime, and corruption have been major formative elements in the creation of this social stratum, A ""circulation of elites" at the top has taken place, bringing regional tycoons and former Soviet bureaucrats into pasiticzns of vast wealth and power, together with. a hanrlhl of self-made men. The deep lines of stratification within the business crlmmunity and the predatory relatic~nsfiip behiveen business and state present major obstacles to the czrganimtional consolidation and public recognition of the new entrepreneurial stratum, Victor Zaslavsky examines the working class+oal wrkers, in particular, The number of Russian strikes and striking workers has grown steadity since the Soviet collapse, but the working class has yet to coalesce into a stable formation and has proven unable to engage in effective and sustained collective action. Rather than organize for long-term gain, the vvarking class remains generatly atomized, with individuals and small grotlps struggling among themselves for lirnited resoLIrces. Zaslavsb finds that the wrking class has been a force far stability due to the sysnbiotic relationship between management and workers-a relationship focused on preserving employment and generating ""infnrmaf" inincome. Btlt even as vvarkers cushioned the transition to a market economy, they atso hindered this transition, contributing to widespread disillusionment about economic reform and democracy. Zastmsky csncludes that despite this disitlusionment, the still growing mass of un- and underemployed uvarkrs, and wrkers9etative disempowerment, Russian society sl-rowslittle sign of polariizing along class lines, HCWdo ordinary people cope with the deprivations that have been their lot in recent years? This question was the subject of ethnographic research conducted

by MichaeX Burawoy, Pavel Mrotov, and Tatpna Lytkina. The authors repclrt two kinds of coping strategies-defensive and entreprenerrrial-developed by ordinary people in Syktykar, the capital of Komi, in northern Russia. Their ethnographk research brings to light several key factors shaping the lives of ordinary people, Like other contributors to this vcotume, Burawoy, Krotov, and Lytkina find a dualistic pattern: (1) The vast majority of people react defensively to their conditions and engage in an unremitting struggle for survival; and (2) a small minority, often for a lack of alternatives, embrace proactive, entrepreneurial strategies far finding and exploiting opyt~rtunitiesfor survival and advancement. The key to defensive (surviwfist) strategies is a combination of public weiflare and social networks, whereas the keys to entrepreneurial coping strategies are one" ability and willingness to combine material, skill, and social and citizenship assets to venture into economic exchange. Most Komi residents seem to have chosen their strategy for coping with ""economic involution" by 129961995, and their choice has proven remarlczlbly stable despite ongoing environmental challenges and uncertainty. The autl.rars%ndings highlight the continuing role of the state in providing minimai but essential transfer payments, and the critical role of social (~nartic~lfarly En-based) networks in keeping people afloat. Part XV includes three chapters on the theme of the nation. As the imperial center is being transformed itzto an itzdependent nation-state, Russian nationalism is undergoing a re-formation. The search for a national identiq may have many cjutcczmes. A liberal, inclusive, and tolerant variant wouXd provide an ideational buttress for stabilization, whereas a reactionary>exclusive, and intolerant variant maid surely facilitate an authoritarian or fascist ascendancy Xgor Zevelev surveys Russian political parties and their positions on issues of nation-buildir~g,national security, and Russia's relations with the so-called near abroad. He presents a typology of five major perspectives on Russia" post-Sot.iet rate in the former Soviet space, and more generaity in its international relations: those of ""sate-builders:" ""rstorationists:" ""ethnooationalists:"""dmir-tators," and "integrationalists." Zevefev develops this typology in reviewing the referents, goals, threats, and instruments of the major past-Soviet Ixussian factions and deploying this frame~vorki r ~a case study of Russian-Ubair~ianrelations. He finds that cr~alitionsformed by political actors are based in large part on particular concerns about nation-building and security policies, X n other wards, Zevelev asserts that foreign poliq, tto a large extent, determines the identity of domestic political actors. He concludes that a common preoccupation with the pursuit cr>staf bility has provided grounds for compromise among key Russian factions, produdng a relativeby cautious foreign policy and a measure of domestic political collaboration. This common grotlnd has tended to marginalize extreme viewpoints, and Zevelev specutates that it may prove a force for fi~turestability. The historical and contemporary context of Russian national identity is further explored by Veljko Vujacic. His chapter focuses on the strange union between the Communist ""XeEf" and the Russian ""rght:" dating from the perestroika

10

Victoria E. Bonnelf and Ceorge Irv". Breslauer

era if not earlier. Through a close analysis of the rhetoric and actions of nationatist and neocommunist groups, Vujacic analyzes the circumstances that have given rise to ideologies and organizations whose celebration of the ideal of the corporatist state is reminiscent of intewar right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in Western E~~rope, The early success of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDf2R)was no accident, Vujacic arwes, but a product of Vladimir Zhitrinovsle)l"sunsurpassed ability to tap into the sentiment of national humilktion. Yet the EDPR's achievements faded by the end of the decade, and the Commtlnist IJarty of the Russian Federation (GPXXF) prwed the most enduring and infiuential af national-revanchist organizations. By the middle of the decade, the Communist party had co-opted natic~nalisticpolicy and rhetrsric, purveying a distinctive brand of patricstism. The left, the gght, and the left-right coalition X aX failed to mobilize the people for a successful seizure of power during the 'lieitsin era. Like other contributors to this voltlrne, Vujacic discerns a weak variety of stability to date, with a weak foundatic~n far the future. The final chapter ixz the volume examixzes the problem of stability through a case study of the most virrlence-prime region in Rt~ssia,the &rth Caucasus. Edward W. WaIker" investigation of the Republic of Dagestan seeks to explain Uagcstan" avoidance of large-scale political viialence since t 991, no~ithstandir-tg the republic" deep ecrznomic and social crisis. Walker3 chapter addresses a question that has preczccupied foreign policy experts and policymakers in Moscow: Will Russia's conflict in Chechnya spread beyond Chechnya" boders, prompting a region-wide Islamic or pan-highlander uprising that drives Rtlssia from the region and limits Rt~ssia"participation in the new "Great Game" unfolding in the South Caucasus and Caspian region? Walker a r p e s that the nature of Dagestan" social structure, which encrzmpasses numerous religious and national identities, has created a ""cassic balance-of-powr system" "at makes it quite unlikely that Dagestan will follow Cihechnya in wagir-tg a long-tern, armed stnnggle against Moscow. Mialker highlights the potentially stabilizing consequences czf localized sctlidarities, particularistic concerns, and social atomization in a society ixz which broader allegiances and networlis for collective action and identity have been undermined. On the other side, he notes that ecrznornic and social conditions in the republic are unlikely to improve significantly for the foreseeable ft~ture.As a result, Uagestan" '""table instabaity;""as Walker puts it, is very likely to persist.

Several u n i ~ i n gthemes cut across the contributions to this vczlume. Over the past decade, Russia has witnessed a variety of new social, economic, and political formations, ranging from entreprene~lrialgrcsuys to netizens to pr~liticalparties, At the same time, preexisting elements at ail levels of society and polity have regrotlged and reconfigured. M a t all of these have ir-t common is a persistent ten-

dency toward fragmentation czr dualization and a relatively tow level of institutionalization. Weak legal traditions, combined with personalism, ctzrruption, privatimtion of violence, economic deprivation, and nadonatistic (not to speak of anti-Western) rhetoric, reinforce the lines of cleavage among groups and create new forms of stratification. In this ctznnection, Soviet legacies are particularly potent and lasting, The absence of a genuine civil sociev and truly voluntary associations for so many decades has been difficult to overcome, and there is considerable evidence that Russians remain trapped in the residue of their Soviet experience. The net result is a society and a polity in wl-xici~the capacity for antisystemic collective action rcmaitzs low. These circumstances have proved ctznducive to the flourishing of ad hsc inftxmal n e ~ o r k and s groups, brmed under adverse conditions, by people trying to cope with crisis rather than to overthrow the system. Some network informally tlnite the reform-minded; others, the backward-looEng, But all unite people in ways that reinforce the particutaristic concerns that are darninant in itussia tczday Thus, informal networks l-rave congealed among segments witllin the military (Zisk); among value-subtractors (Gaddy and Ickes); netizens (Kiselyr~vaand Castells); organized criminals (Sergeyev); entrepreneurs (Bonnell); wrkers (Zaslavsky); lower-class groups (Burawoy, Krotov, and Lytkina); coalitions organized around foreign psficy ctzncerns (Zevelev); "patric>ticS"political factions (Vujacic); and localized solidarities in Dagestan (Walker), The itnposition of superpresidentialim and the corresponding underdevelopment of political parties and groups have further contributed to fragmentatic~n. Yeitsin" persanalistic and arbitrary leadership, along with the corruption it fostered, helped keep the military and other possible contenders for power divided and off-balance, thereby diminishing the near-term prospects for antisystemic actions. Similarly, the underdevelopment czC political parties in Xxussia, largely traceable to Yeltsin" leadership style, red~rcedthe capacity of appositional elites tc> mczbilize the citizenry, At the same time, bs~thdemocracy and stability hinge czn the creation of reliable venues into which collective action may be chxnneled. But personalistic leadership, which divides organized collectivities by buying off key members or leaders of those groupings, can blunt various fc3rms of ctzllective action. Moreovel; the country" political leaders have exercised power in ways that reinfarce this sociopolitical fragmentation (Fish, Breslauer) and that fbrce the protean f'ormaf-proceduralinstitutions (Shartet) tcz exercise their powers with utmost caution. Sodoeconomic and sociopolitical networks, and the strategies and tactics they deployed, prc>videdinterim stability.in Rt~ssiaduring the 1990s. They are but a fragile basis far Iczng-term stabifity; howver. Although the current pattern coutd conceivably endure well itzto the new century, there is no way to predict how long the "near term" will last. President Putin is bankng t>nnear-term stability; but the test czf his leadership will come when he conkants the need to build institutions that will buttress long-term stability.

12

Victoria E. Bonnelf and Ceorge Irv". Breslauer

1. Sce, for example, kit11 Bradsher, ""Frecasting the Hungriest Sovict %[inter in Years:" iYew York Ernes, November 10, 1991, section 4, p. 4; and Fred Maplan, "Muscovites Chi1tc.d

t,y 'Choughts of a Ax~otEterLean Rtlssian Winter,""Journal of Chmmerce, October 20, 1992, p. 3A. 2, See, for example, Amy Kaslotv, ""Bush Aid Plan Aims to Bolster Yeltsin Reforms:1 CIzristian Scienitr;,Monitor, April 3, 1992, p. I; and ""Riigl~t%[e Lose Russia? Nkan Dares to Ask the Question: Los Angeles Ernes, March 13, 1992, part B, p, 6. 3. See, f i ~ exa~nple, r "Yeltsin Warns of 'Threat to His Rule," Llaik Titlegraph, February 7, 1992, p. 9; and Fred Hiatt, "A-Arms Chief Says Russia Needs Welp,'W&sl.rivtgton Post; Febmary 5, 1992, p. 822, 4. Stepl~enE. Elans-on and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, ""TheWeimariRussia Comparison:TostSoviet A#airs, 13,3, Julj~Septernber1997, pp. 252-283; but see, ftor a counter-argument, Stepl~enD, Shenfield, ""TheJYeirnarlRussia Comparison: Iteflections on Wanson and Kopstein$ 14,4, October-December 1997, pp. 355-368; and the reply by Koysteirr and Elianson, in ibid., pp. 369-375. 5.Harry Elcksteiirz, Frederic J. Fteron, Jr., Erik I). Hoffmantl, and Wiliam M. Reisinger, Ir>emocxucyTake Root in hsl-Soviet Russia? (Lanham, Md.: Kuwman tk Littlefield, 1999).

This page intentionally left blank

en. More Superexecutive Power and Po Underdeve opment in Russia M. Steven Fish U~iwrsityof CaEfc~rnia,Uerkele),

When legislative p o w r is uniled with executive power ilz a singk person or i n u single h d y of ~lilet.rzagistrucyl tlzere Is noi fiibertyg because one can fiar that the same nzonarch or senate that maki3s tyrannical laws will execut-i: them tyratznically. f i r is tlzere liberty if the power ofjudging is nol separgte from legislcrtive po~ver.Y i i were joined to Zegislutizje power, the power power and fionz e3e~?czttive over the lije atzd liberty ofthe cirimns would! be arbitrarxfor the judge would t-te rhe legisllilor, If iil were joined to execzltive power, rh~judgecould have ilihefurce of' an rjpprasor. All .iwuld be lost lifthe same man or the same bodj) ofprincipal men, either qf nnbks, or of the people, exercised thwe three powers: rl'zar of nzaking the ELJWS, that of executing public resolutions, rand t/?at rf judging the crimw or the disputes of irzdividuak. -k4enlesquieu1

A

rnong citizens and students czf pastcommunist countries and other polities undergoing systemic transformation, few notions have been more widely and renexivefy embraced than the claim that ""strong executive power" aids political and economic advancement. In most pastcommunist countries where power have preis concentrated in the executive, electorates and constit~~tion-makers ferred presidential systems to parliamentary ones, and executive p o w r has been vested in a president rather than a prime minister. Mighty presidents have been

hailed as saviors from statelessness, dictatorship, national dependence, and economic crisis, Yet few generalizations are based on flimsier evidence. Indeed, superexectltivism-----understoodhere as overweening, largely uncuntrolled executive powerhas resulted in all manner of pathologies in the postcommunist world. En Russia, superpre"dentialism has impaired the legitimacy of the post-Soviet regime and of democracy, arrested the development of sociopolitical organizations, enfeebled state agencies and undermined state capacity, and diznitzishe-d the accountabgity of officialdcmm to the citizenry, In no respect is Russia exceptional; suyerpresidentiaiism has exerted similar effects in other postcommunist poli"res as well. I mean specifically a form of regime that may "rr conBy s~4perpr~sidentiaEisnt sidered a democracy (or a partial demc~cracy),insofar as regular elections are held for power holders and the latter normally observe basic associational and communicatke rights.' Thus, superpresidentialism may be contrasted with dictatorship such as that found in Azerbaijan since 1993; Belarus and Kazakhstan since roughly mid-decade; and Serbia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan since the late 2980s and early $990~.It may also be contrasted with moderate presidentialism and semipresidentialism such as that found in Georgia since mid-decade, as wetf as in Lithuania, MoXdczva, Mongolia, Poland, and 1;tomania; and with parliamentary regimes such as those in Bulgaria, the Czech Rep~zblic, Estonia, Htlngary; tatvia, Macedonia, Slovakia, and Slovenia, In crlntrast with these other forms, superpresidentialim includes the following features: a sprawling apparatus of executive power that d\varfs other state agencies itz terms of its size and the resources it cr>nsumes;a president who enjc>ysthe power tc>legislate by decree; a president who controls most of the powers of the purse; a legislature that cannot repeal presidential decrees and that enjoys little authority andlor scant resources for exercising oversight of the executive branch; yro)visions that render impeachment of the president virtuatly impossible; and a court system that is controlled wholly or mainly by the chief executive and that cannot in practice serve as a significant check on presidential prerogatives or abuse of power. Xn the postcommunist region since the end of the XWOs, superpresidentiaiism is found in Russia, Kyrgy~stan,and Armenia. Ubair-te is an ambiguous case; its regime includes several but not all of the components listed above. In some respects it exemplifies superpresidentiafism; in others, moderate presidentialism, Several countries have constitutions that are semipresidential or even parliamentary in fi~rm,but also presidents who took advantage of national crises and constitutional ambiguities in a manner that enabled them to estabiish essentiaity superpresidential regimes. Croatia under Franjo Tudjman and Albania under Sali Berisha serve as the region" exemplars of this phenomenon. Superpresidentialism, or at least most czf its katures, is also found in some polities outside the postcommunist region, including the Philippines, Korea, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru-although one might argue that the last of these by 1997 or 1998 wtlld be better classified with authoritarian regimes such as those in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan."

The Baradox of Superpresidentialism Superpresidentialism in Russia has been paradoxical in several respects. First, and most generally, it has influenced politics in a manner diametricatty oppclsed to that prophesied by its apologists. It was, and often still is, touted as the institutic~nafguarantc>rof political stability and constanq. In practice, as will be discussed belc~w,it has ensured voXatility in multipte realms of political life. Second, it was created and supported during the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods by anticommunist revolutionaries who regarded it as a weapon of democratization and reform, but in practice it has stymied both. The origins of the overtveening presidency ixz Russia are forrnd in the democratic movernentk pus11 tto undermine communist power by withdrawing Russia from the USSR and in its concurrent attempt to create a powerful post for the politician who vvould Xead the struggle to end communist domixzation. The spring 2991 referendum ixz Soviet Russia, in which a majority voted to fo~lnda presidency of the republic elected directly by the people, was essentially a vote against the communist regime and for an open polity. VirtuaXly all voters knew that Boris Yeltsin, the dc facto leader of the anti-Soviet motiernent, enjc~yedunrivaled personaf authc~rity in IXussia and would certainly capture the new office. One may even posit that voters created the office specifically for kltsixz." The paradoxical career of superpresidentialism continued after the June 299 1 election that brought Veltsin to the new office. At the time, the Soviet Union remained in existence, though. it was in the midst of its death throes. Yeltsin's moral and personaf atlthority as the new president of the RSFSR far outstripped his legal authority, which was m u r b , Fot2owing the collapse of the Soviet system afier the abortive putsch in August 1991,Yeltsin" personal authority grew from formidable to immense, As difficult as it might be to imagine from the vantage of the post-Yettsin period, Yellsin emerged from the putsch with the status of a demigod, He enjoyed charismatic authority in the exacting, Weberian sense of the term, meaning that he was widely regarded in his own society as a doer of extraordinary deeds, a holder of distinctive powers, and a liberator from a widefy despised, time-worn way of life5 Yeltsin therefore began his post-Soviet presidential career with towering stature but undefined formal powers, The Soviet-era constitution was still in effect-a patchwork document of outdated provisions and fictions (such as that which declared the Stlpreme So>vietto be the organ of highest atlthority) that had been modified by numerous Gorbachev-era amendments reflecting incipient liberalization and democratization. Despite the lack of constitutional clarity on the division of powrs, Yeitsin tlsed his t>verwhelmingpersonal popularity and atltharity to gain temporary decree powers and the right to appcliatt his personal plenipotentiaries to provincial-level executiive posts. From the outset of the postSoviet period, therefore, the president enjoyed extraordinary power, As the relationship b e ~ e e nRftsin and the Supreme Soviet grew mare conflictuat during late $992 and early 1993, however, the future of the division of powers be-came

uncertain, even as Yeitsin rapidly buitt large presidential and executiveministerial apparatuses. Yeltsin" victory in the bloody showdown of October 1993 with his opponents in parliament, who were led by but not limited to communist and nationalist forces, brzried the old Supreme Soviet and effectively ended the contest over presidential powers. Two months later, voters approved in referendum l"eltsin2 prt~posedconstitution, which cczdified the superpresidential system, As Stephen White rightiy has noted, "After December 1993, it was the presidency that defined the character of the political system, as Yeltsin used his ascendancy after the dissolution of parliament to secure the adoption of a constitution that extended his atready considerabje powers,""" In all mdor realms of polities-in state-society relations, sociopolitical life, state-btzilding, and the performance of state agencies-the tzverweening presidency has exerted pernicious effects. The following discussion outlines the muttifarious and proforrndly negative effects of the superpresidential system on Russian politics.

Tenuous Regime Legitimacy The first arena in which superpresidentialism has undermined pailticat devetopment in Russia is that of state-society relations. Specifically, it has had a negative impact on the popular legitirnaq of the post-Soviet regime. ""tegitirnacy" is a slippery concept, It must not be conhsed with mere ""pputarity,""and it cannot be fully capttrred by public opinion polls; however, it does refer to a generally positive orientation among the populace toward the political regime. A regime is legitimate to the extent that the populace regards it as providing a satisfactory order and believes that no available alternative would be vastly superior.' There is oxrwhelming evidence that the yost-Soviet regime in Russia at the czutset of the 2000s faces a serious crisis czC legitimacy Although various public opinion surveys conducted in postcommunist countries have turned up wildly disparate results on other subjects, there is ccznsiderabfe convergence among surveys showing that public trust in governmental institutions was exceptlonitfty low and in declitze during the $990~Even by the standards of postcommunist potities, in which trust in institutions is normally not high, Russia ranks very low,' The second indicator of a legitimacy crisis is found in the depth and universality of r~oncompliancewith the law. Problems of public order are endemic to polities in transformation; but few majc~rcountries that have undergt~neregime change in recent decades have experienced the meftdown of public compliance with the law that has been manifested in post-Soviet Russia.The third indicator of legitimacy crisis is the relative strength of parties that openly call for a change of regime. During the second hatf ezf the 1990s, the two largest parties in 1;tussia in terms of membership and representation in the Uuma (the lower house of parliament) were the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and the misnamed Liberat Democratic Party czf Russia (LDPR). Some analysts have argued that these parties' willingness to play by established rules of electoral poli-

tics, which they indeed have done in parliamentary and presidential elections, indicates that they have embraced competitive, open politics and do not- seek to overturn the regimesi"The significance of the participation of such parties in electoral potitics should not be dismissed lightly; but there are nevertheless good reasons to view s~ichparties-as well as organizations srich as the ultra-left Communists-Mji3rking Russia party, which came within one-half of a percentage point of dearing the 5 percent threshold needed for parliamentary representation in the December 1995 elcctions-as truly ""antisystem" in their aspirations and intentions, Many leaders openly espouse a change of regime. Anatolii Lukianov, a CPRF leader and chairman of the p o w r h l legislation committee in the Duma, calls for reestablishing ""Soviet power," wwkicfie defines largely as the Soviet-era system of rule." "Indeed, it is difficult tc> read the literature prr3duced and public statements made by such parties and their leaders without concfuding that, l i b the Communist and Nazi parties in itzterwar Germany, these R~~ssian parties are perfectly willing tc>play the game for the time being but nevertheless intend to push the polity towrd much greater closure and authoritarianism if and when they gain the opportunity to effect such change," The mere existence of such parties is not a sign of weak regime legitimacy; but their popularity and influence are, S~zperpresidentialimhas contributed to the legitimacy crisis ir-t Russia by ident i ~ i n gthe regime with a single individtiat in the popular imagination. Since so much power rests in the hands of a single person, it is unsurprising, especially in a fledgling democratic regirne in a corrntry with no history of open politics, that many citizens wczuld cczme to associate the system with the person. Were &Itsin the perfect politician, and were political, economic, and social circumstances in post-Soviet Russia rosy and auspiciaus, the conseqkxences of such a p ~ ~ b lperic ception might not be grave for regime legitimacy. In fact, h o w e ~ rYeltsin , was not the perfect polidcian; and as in all czther countries undergoing major transformatian, in Russia rnuch of the populace has faced onerous conditions. It was therefare important that Yeitsin, the leader of the democratic mc>vementand the leading politician of the post-Soviet period, be able to share the blame for the hardships of transformatisn with other politicians, including the custodians of other offices. By cr~ncentratingso rnuch power in his own hands, at least in fc3rmat terms, Yeltsin rislced identi~ingthe regime with his own government" polities, and his own government" pohcies with Elitnself alone. In tirne, the crisis of his own popularity-which was inevitable-woufd becr~mea crisis of regime legitimacy that might otherwise have been avoided, Citizens who opposed Yeltsin understandably may hiwe perceived themselves as opponents also of the postSoviet regime and perhaps even of the democracy that it supposedly embodied. A compari~cfnwith czther presidential systems enables us more fully to grasp the logic of this political phenomenon: Xn the United States, France, bland, Mongolia, Lithuania, Moldova, and other polities that disperse power at the national level, potlticians from different branches of government habitually blame one another for all of the cormtry" woes-but they most often da so without actually.

targeting the paliticiti system itselE Most impclrtantty, ordinary citizens in these countries also can pick tl-reir favarite target of blame without necessarily condemning the political system, As parliament and the president openly and unqualifiedty blamed one another in Poland for the country" high unemp'fcjyment rate, so too did unemployed Polish workers at mid-decade-when unemployment reached 15 percent-have the oppsrttrnity to feel that their pain was inflicted by either the addle-headed, brutish, Xiberall-nadonaflsf president, Lech Walesa, or the treacherorrs, uncaring, atheistic former communists who predominated in parliam a t . Neither option necessarily inwlved turning against the regime itself. As the me~ re1990s drew to a close and unemployment and u n d e r e ~ ~ ~ p l o ystubbornly maixzed stuck at distressingly high levels and violence for the first tixne poisoned what previously had been a highly peaceful transition, Mongolian herdsmen could btame either the conservative, intransigent, hidebound sociaiist president or the chaotic, out-of-touch, liberal, World Bank-loving parliament. The herdsmen cr~uldeven blame the semipresidential system for encczuraging political deadlock in 1998, as the president and parliament yuarreled over who woutd fill the prime mixzister's post and the corrntry was governed by an interixn pritne minister. But they would be, and have been, far less prrme than have Russian agricultural workers to respond to frustration by throwing their support to political forces that stand for communism or extreme nationalism, indicting the regime as a whole by casting in their lot with forces that seek to (lverturn it." Xronically, the superpresidential system did not even work to benefit the president. Had institutions divided power rather than concentrating it in a sir-tgleoffice,Yeftsin could have shared blame for the country" many economic and social w e s and dislocations, By the late X990s, blame for every pmblem was falling on the president" shoulders, even in matters that he cotlld not really control. Coal miners, who stood staunchly behind l"e1tsin at the time of the revolution in 1990-2 99 1, placed Yeitsin" resignation at the heart of their demands during their strikes in summer 1998. Regional officials who previousiy had supported Yeltsin abandoned him in drclves." Yeitsin left office in complete disgrace, despised by the vast majority of IXussians as the source of their many problems, rather than being admired as the revolutionary hero who had led Russia to independence and popular rule and who subsequently encr~untereddifficulties along the road of pastcommunist transformation. The dknouement of superpresidentialism in Russia was the destruction of the president" reputation as well as that of the post-Soviet regime.

Listless S o c i ~ d Organization One of the most salient characteristics of post-Soviet IXussian politics has been the sluggish dwelopment of political parties and organizations of civil society Membership in political parties in Russia remains among the lowest per capita in the postcommunist region. Most of the minuscute percentage wha are members of political parties betong to the CPRF, the Russian successor to the CPSU; non-

communist party development has been particutarly torpid, Parties do play same role in structuring political competition in the Duma, but they do not enjoy a strong presence in society outside of the largest cities. Ncrr did trade unions, prof'essional associations, and business associaticzns establish a vital presence in Russia during the country's first post-Soviet decade. Social movement activity has been sporadic, severely lirnited in scczpe, and for the most part poorly organized.15 There are many possible exptanations for the weakness czf societal organization in Russia. Soviet repression of ail nonstate forms of intermediation undoubtedljr has left a legacy. Pczlitical parties and other autoncsmous organizations are generatty Zess vigcrrous and robust in the postcommunist region than in other regions that have experienced an opening up of political access aAer a long spelt of authc~ritarianrule. Even by postcommunist standards, however, Russian political society has developed particularly slowly," hlgaria and Mongolia, countries that started their pastcommunist lives ~lnderconditions that did not favor the emergence of vigc~rouscivil societies, have nonetheless outstripped Russia in the development and maturation of societal organizations. The Union of Democratic Forces (UWF) in Bulgaria and the National Democratic Party in Mongolia estabfished themselves as strong, liberal, right-center parties with deep roots in society and a capacity for winning eIections. Parties in Moldova and IXomania, despite their merctrrial character, are significantly better developed than are those in Russia. A well-differentiated and reasonably coherent party system evolved in Hungary during the X'39Os. SIovakia, despite the presence of an autocratic prime minister during much of the decade, also developed political parties far more substantial than those in Russia, m a t is more, in each of these crruntries, social movement activity has been more vigorous than in XXussia, The electoral victories of the UDF in Brzlgaria itz 1997, of President Emil Canstantixzescu in Romania in 1996, and of the National Democratic IJarty and its partner, the Social Democratic Party, in Mongolia. in X996 were preceded by mass mobifizations of ordinary citizens, human rights advocates, journalists, and nongovernmental organizatis~ns(NGOs) of many types. Social mozvernents in these cases aimed to rerncm inefkctive and corrzzpt parties from powe~; and in each country they scored victories. The youth-organized "Rock the Vote" "campaign preceding Slovakia's fail 1998 etecticsns enlisted young, first-time wters in a successful push to oust the government Zed by Prime Minister Vladiinir Meciar. No social movements or parties of similar salience and power have emerged in Russia.I7 Superpresidentialism is not the sole source of weakness in Russian political society; but it does exacerbate the problem. Superpresidentialism subdues the irnpetus for political and economic actors to itzvest in autonomous societal organizations. The strengh of the stimuttls to build parties depends in large part on the power of the legislature, Parliaments and parliamentary elections are where parties attract attention and resources, brzifd their reputations, and find their voices. Parties normally control the ncsmination of candidates in electic~nsto the legislature and organize competition within the legislature between elecdons. Parties do fulfil1 such F~znctionsin the Dilma; brzt the weakness of this body compared to

the executive branch provides ambitious politicians and societat actors with scant reason to seek their fortunes and advance their ixzterests by constructing and contributing tc>political parties. Graft may seem a much more ef5cient way of pursuing one's goals than Xczbbying or vvarking with this or that patiticat party. A superpresidential system tends to encourage the formation of small, closed, crlmpact societal organizations that are adept at applying pressure on and currying favor with individuals in ministries and other executive-branch agencies. Indeed, the numbers of highly persanalistic, well-endowed cliqrres representing business and financial interests mushroomed in Russia dtlring the 1990s. These groups have defined the character and complexion of post-Soviet Xxussian palitical sodety much more than have political parties, interest groups (in the traditional meaning of this term), professional associations, trade unions, or social movement czrganizations, Other 6actors (e.g., the privatization process) also contributed to the emergence of this peculiar type of political society ixz Russia.' V u t this political society bears an elective affinity with superpresidentialism, and it is particutairXy XikeXy to emerge under such a regime, The stirnulus to build political parties may: have been stronger, even under the superpresidential system, had parties managed the nomination of candidates in presidential elections, Poli"rcal parties in the United States and Chile are strong institutions not only bemuse Xegislatures hold a great deal of power in the moderate presidential systems of both cczuntries but also because parties in both countries play important roles in nominating presidential candidates, E.lypathetica1t.1);one can even irnagine how parties, if granted a de fact0 monopoly over nomixzating atlthority far election to the presidency, may evolve into reasonably strong organizations even in s-ystems with relatively weak legislatures. One would expect such circumstances to faster the emergence of systems dominated by two broad-based parties, since presidential electic>nstend tc>push party systems tr~wardconsolidation.'" Parties in WO-party-dominant systems, no less than in multiple-party (or more highly fragmented) systems, may be and often are strong and vital institutions. Parties did not play leading rofes, however, in Iaccrzunt for W ! Ethe ~ former set of leaders, even after electoral defeat (in the cases of Walesai and Itiescu), left office with both their good names and their countries>olitical systems intact. Xt is difficult to argue that either Walesa or Iliescu was any more interested in deyersonatizing power and building strong state institutions for their own sake czr in fostering the development of a vigorous civil. society, including opposition movements and parties, than were kltsitz and Akaev. But the Pc>l-ishand Romanian presidents operated in semiyresidential systems that continually pruned their autocratic ambitions, exposed their most expansive conceptions of themselves as delusions, and contaitzed the effects of their mistakes. The regime atso forced the presidents tc>hone their skils at politics and governance, since they realty had to compete with their adversaries, and not only during election campaigns, They lacked tl-re options of bypassir-tg,,ignoring, and quashing their foes. Although, the generalizations offered here with regard to the postcommunist world might not hold true outside it, it might weU prove huitftaI to investigate how or whether the pathafogies examined here manifest themselves in polities in czther regions. The four disorders idelltified in the Russian case might indeed be more endemic in Brazil, Peru, Korea, and the Philippir-tes,with their overweening p~sidents,than in Chile, Uruguay%or Taiwan, with their mczre balanced systems, A great deal of further research would be required to estabiish a firm basis for evaluation. If this chapter is correct in its argument that superexecutivism engenders pathologies in the pailticat system, then neither a redistribution of power within the executive branch nor the election of a new president will remedy Russia's so-

Iitical underdevelopment. During Prime Minister Yevgenii Primakov" tenure from fa11 1998 to spring 2999, some observers argued that a great deal of power had drifted from the president tcs the prime minister and that the time of Russian superpresidentiaXisMI was past,'" But the combillation of a stronger prime minister and a weaker president in Russia proved ia transient configuration arising from the president" incapacitation, and it cr~uldhardly have mitigated the effects of superexecutivism. The regime does not operate in a manner in which the president and the prime minister exert mutual checks over one another, as was demonstrated by Eltsin" ssuccessi.re purges of prime ministers dturing his last two years in office. The president appclints the prirne minister, and the latter serves at the president" pleasure. Russia" problem is superexecutivism-a bloated, muscle-bound executive that is neither balanced nor monitored by the legislature or the courts. No temporary or even lasting reattcjcation of power within the executive branch could remedy the deleterious effects diagnosed here. Russia needs a regime that disperses power at the center-either moderate presidentialism or semipresidentialism-and a more autonomous and authoritative judiciary. Nor will a new helmsman repair the ship, The new president may: prove more vigorous and effective than Eltsin, bat the institution that prrsmored political underdevelopment in the beginning will remain in place and cczndnrze to consign X%ussia to political backwardness.

1 , Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesguieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, U.K., 1995), 157 [first published 17481, 2, On Russian superpresidentialim, see, among other wrks, Euger~eHuskey, "The State-hgal Administratiu~~ and the Politics of Kedundal~cy,"Lzosl-Soviet Afuin 11,1~o.2 (19995): X 15-143; "TimothyJ. Colton, ""Sperpresidentialis~nand ltussia's Backwdrd State:"

fist-Sovief Afairs l l, no. 2 1995): 144148; Timr~thyf. C:ofton, ""Brigkitsin, Russia's AllThumbs Democrat:"n Timothy J. Colton ar~dXtoberr C. 'rucker, eds., Patterns i l . ~PostSoviet 1,mdership (Raufder, 1995), 49-74; Rc)berf SharIet, ""The Politics of Constitutional Amendmerlt in Itussia,'Tost-Soviet Aflairs 13, no, 3 (1997): 1517-227; Philip G. ltaeder, "Varieties of Post-Soviet Authoritaria11 Regiines:" fist-Soviet Aflairs IQ, x~o,1 (1994): 61-101, 3, Scott NaIi~waringand Matthew Soberg Shugart, eds,, Presidentialismz and I;lemocru~y in Latin America (Cambridge, U,K,, 1997); Juan J, Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, eds., ?'he hilure qf Presidential Demucmq (Baltimore, 1994); Gabriella R. Montinola, ""Prties and Accountability in the Philippines:" JuurnaE of Democracy 10, no, 1 (January 1999): 126-1 40; Steven L~vit sky, ""Fujimori and Post-Party Politics in Peru ,'"t~urnu2 of Demt~cmq 10, x~o,3 ('rrly 1999): 78-92, 4. See Michael Urban, The Rebirth of Politics in Russia (Carnbrictge, U.K., 1"37), 24&244. 5, Max Nreher, The Theory of Social and Economic CJrgutzization (New York, 1947), 64, 328, 358-363. C ~ &Itsin5 I extraordinary rc~feand authority in the earfy post-p~1tsct-tpe-

riod, see ""Mad vsei Rossiei bezoblachnue nebo,'"ir2osstia, C3ctober 16-22, 1991; " b r i s Ye12sin: 100 dnei pasle palaecSy,'2ussii~C3ctober 23-29,1991.

6, Steyhen White, "Russia: Presidential Leadership under Yeitsin:" in R i Taras, ed., I""ostcommtrnislPresidenn (Cambridge, U.K., 19971, 38. 7. See LYeber, Z'he Theory c?f'Sociatand EconofnicOrganization, 124-132,324-329. 8. Richztrd Rose and L3oh C:hull Shin, "l>emr~cratizationBackwards: 'l'he Problem of Third Wave Dernocracies'7unpublished ms,, 1999); USIA [United States Information Agency), Office of Research and Media Reaction, Opinion Analjfsis, March 15, X 999; Richard Rose, ""Pastcommunismand the Proble~naF rX"nlst:"in Lxry Dian~ondand Marc E Planner, eds., The Global Resurgence o(l>emocracx 2d ecl, (Baltimore, X 396), 25 1-263. 9, See the works of Louise I, Shelitey, including ""Pst-Soviet Clrgallized C:rime,'" Ilemokrrarkutsiy~2, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 341-358; Stephen Holmes, "What Russia 'reaches Us Now,'I3mrican h s p e c t 33 (July-August 1997): 30-39; M, Steven Fish, ""'l'he Roots af and Remedies for Russia's 1Pack;et Economy,'" in Stephen S. Cohen, Andrew Scl-rwartz,and John Zys~nan,eds,, 2"heElnnel at the End ofthe Ligjzr;:P"rvatizntion, Bt~siness ~Yet-tuorks, rand Economic l'rauz~for~nution in Russia (Berkeley, 1998),86-137. 10. See Micfiael McFaut, "Lessons from Russia? Prc)tracted"fraxlsitionfrom Communist Rule," Political Science Quarterly 114, no. 1 f Spring 1999): 103-130. I I. Author's interview with Anatolii Lukiaxlov, Moscow, Tlecember 13,1395. 12, On antisystem parties and their participation in etectoral politics, see C;iovan~~i Sartori, P~krtiesand Ptzrty S~lstenzs:A Frumeworkfor Analysis (Cambridge, U.K., 1976). For trnequivc~calevidence of the noncommitment of both colnmunist and ~latiul~alist partics in Russia to the existing political regime, see, for example, G. A. Ziuganov, Za gor-lzontonz (Clref, 1995); Sergei Kurginian, Rossir'a: Vlast' i oppozifsik (MoscI)~,1984);Veljkc~Mjilcic, "Gennadiy Zwganov and the T11ird Road,'" Post-Soviet-g a i r s 12, no. 2 ( 1996): 118-154; or peruse any issue of the newspapers Sovevetsh-aia Rossiin or Zavtr~,both of which are controtled by and speak for communist and nationalist argar~izations. 13, On Poland, see Andrew A. Michta, "Democratic Consolidation in Poland after 1989,'"n h r e n Dawisha and Bmce Parrott, eds., The C;onsolidation of" Democracy in EastCentral Etrrope (Cambridge, U.K., 1997),66-108. On Mongolia, see M. Steven Fish, ""Mongolia: Democracy without Prerequisites:" burnal of Demucracy 9, 1x0, 3 (July 1998): 127-141. 14, "ilossiiskie regiany vkliuchaiutsia v bczr'bu za otstavku Yel'tsina,'Wezavkl'maia gazet& July 1, 1998; ""Saglasie hudet nedolgim," Iz~~estiz'n, March 16, 1'399, 15. Michaeli McFauf, Russia"s996 Presidential Election: The End of Polarized Politics (Stanbrd, 1997), 83-88; M. Steven Fisl-r, ""The Predicamer~taf Russian 1,iberalism: Evidence from the 13ecember 1995 Parliamentary Elections:" Eurqe-Asia Studies 49, no, 2 (1997): 191-220; M. Steven Fish, L1ernocrac;~cyjrom Scratch: Opposilkn and Regime in the New Rtlssiara Revolution (Princeton, 1995), 21G230; Marc Morje Haward, ""Teenroblilii.,ed Societies: U~lderstandingthe MTeakness of C:ivil Society in Post-C:ommunist &rope," (Ph,D. dissertation, University of Caiiforxzia, Berkeley, 1999)). 16, By political society I mean both political p arties and the orga~~izatiuns normaly subsumed under the rubric of civil sociay. I distinguish between state and societaf organizations, with the fatter being defined in terms of their autorlomy from the state. 1x1 contrast with other authors, l~owever,I do not draw a llard fine between political society (whicl-r some anajysts define as political parties alone) and civil society (meaning nonparty forms of sacietal organization). See M, Steven Fish, "Russia$ Fourth Transition,'Yn Larry Diamond and Marc F. Pjattner, eds., The Global Resurgence uf D e m o c r a ~2d ~ ed. (Raltimore, 1996),274, note I.

17, M, Steven Fish, ""Postcommunist Subversior~:Social Science ax~dT>emocratizatim in Fist Europe and Eurasia:' SSlazjic Review 58,110.4 (Winter 1999); M, Steven Fish, '&I\rloving Backwards: The Dynamics of 1)emocratic Erosion and Iteversal in the Postcon~rnunist Nrorld:" Wrking Paper no. 2.67, (:enter for German and European Studies and the (:enter for Slavic and East Ellropean Studies, University of Califorrzia, Berlceley, 1998. 1 8. Fish, ""The Roots of and Remedies for Russia's Racket Economy3"88-54 1. 19. Giovar~niSartnri, Cowrpuratitfe G"onsrr"t~ltional E~gineering(New k r k , 19%); Arend Lijphart, ""Pesidentialism and Najoritarian 13emacracy:" in Linz and Vaterszuela, eds,, 91-1 05; Matthew Sobcrg Sliugart and John M. CC:arey>Presidents atzd Assemblies: Gnstz'lutic2nulI)clsign and Electoral llynamics (C:ambridge, U.K., 1992). 20, Fish, ""Moving Backwards"; M, Steven Fish, ""The End of Meciarism:" East Europetltz C;i>nsritzr;tionulReview 8, no. 1-2 {Winter-Spring 1999): 47-55; liya Prizel, ""Ukraine beAutlioritarianism,'" in h r e n 13awisha and Bruce Partcveen Brc~to-demczcracyand 30% rott, eds., L>emocraticChauzge and Authoritarian Reactions in Rrlssia, Ukraine, Bejarus and Molduw (Cambridge, U.K., 1997), 33G369; EIizabeth Fufler, "The Fail frcjrn TJemocratic Grace,'Tmnsifion, November 15, 1996; Euger~eHuskey, "Kyrgyzstan: The Fate of Political Liheralizatian:" in Karen Dawisha ax~dKruce Parrott, eds., Coepz'ct, Cleavage, and Chulzge in Ckntral Asia and the C:L;ll;kcas~s (Cambridge, U.K., 1997), 242-274; Kathleen C:ollins, "Claxls, krties, and b t i t i u : 'Che Failrrre o f lJolitical krties in 33emocratic%yrgyzsta~~" (unpublished n1s., 1999). 1 am focusing here exclusively on countries that may be considered dernacracies or partial dernacracies and am excluding from analysis the autocracies with perscznalistic dictators who take the name ""yesiclent: which are Azerbaijan, Belaws, GzaM-rstan,Serbia, Tajikistan, Turk~nenistan,and Qbekistan. 21, Fish, "The Roots of and Remedies for Russia's Racket Economy"; Kathryn StonerMiss, ""The Russian Central State in Crisis: Center and Periphery in the Post-Soviet Era'' (rrnyublished ms., 1399); Zoltan Barany, "Corrupt Generals, Hxrngry Soldiers: The Armed Fc~rcesin Russian Politics'"unpublis11ed ms., 1999); C:liarles H. Fairbank, fr., ""The Feuhlination of the State:" Jilurnali of Ijemucracy 10, no, 2 (April 2999): 47-53; Gabrlietla R. Montinola, Yinai Qian, and Barry R. Weingast, ""Federalism, Chinese Style: The Political Basis of Economic Success in China,'"Vodd Politics 48, no. 1 (October 1995): 50-82; AnatoI ticven, Chechnya: Tbmbstone qf Russian Power (NW Haven, 1998); ""Movoe obczstrenie politicheskogo krizisa v Iloskl~e:"~"teznvisimaiugazefa, March 18,1999. 22. George W Kreslauer, "Evaluating Yeltsin as Leader" "funpublished ms., 1999). 23. Barany, ""Corrupt Generals, Hungry Soldiers.'" 24, Breslauer, "Evaluating kitsin as Leader'? Barany; "Corrupt (;enerafs, Hungry Soldiers:" 25. Joel S. Nigdaf, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Sociely Xelcrtions and State Gpahz'litz'es in the ?'lzird World (Princetan, 1988), 172-173, 181-237. Quoted pasfaiges appear on 207. 26, For explication, compare the depiction of Russian society found in Fish, Ir>e-mocracy fmwr Scratch (esp. 21-24, 52-64, 210-218) with that offered by Migdal of the cases on which he builds his thec~ry.For ax~othertelling portrait of societies ax~dstate-society relations that resernbtes Mig&at%,see Naomi Chazan, "Akica's Democratic Ghallenge:Wor/d Policy Journal, Spring 1992: 2 7 W 0 8 , 27. "The main advantage of dispersing ycwer, explicated originally and most forcefully by Montesquieu and farnes Madison, is normally seen in the creation of harriers to tyranny rather than in the prcjmotion of institutional development. See Montesquicu, ?'he

Spirit lljFthe I,laws, 15&166,325-327; Alexander Hamiftarl, Jarnes Madison, and John Jay, ?'fie Federalisl Papers (NewYork, 1941), 308-3 13,320-323. 28. Charles "X'illy,G"upit.al,Cc~orcion,and Ellropean States, A.D. 9961990 (Oxford, 1990). 29, D a n b a r t Kustc~w,""rransitionsto Democracy: 'Ttlward a 1311amicMode1,'Tumparrative Politics 2, no. 3 (April 1970):337-363. 30. Barbara Geddes, I"oliticianS Ililemma: Building State Ccrpacity in 1,niin America (Berkeley, 1994). 3 1, Nigdaf, Stmng ,ficrcieries and Weak Sfaies, 151-173. 32. Among other wcjrks, see GuiIlermo C)Wl)onnell,""lelegative Democracy," Jotkr~~al of llemocracy 5, no, I (January 1994): 55-69; idern, "Horizontal Accountability in New L3emc1cracies:" Journal of Dewrocraq 9, no. 3 (July 1998): 112-124; and 'krry Lynn Karl, "Eilemmas of Democratizzltion in Latin America,'~~;;)~1~p~rative Potitics 23, no. l (C?ctober 1990): 1-22. 33. '"The 'I"xansparer~cy Illternationat 1998 Corruption Perceptions Indcsx:" at ,transparency.de/d~c~~rnent:s/cpi/index~btrn f April 1999). 34. Robert G. Maser, "Coi~stitutiorrrztDesign and Democratization: ExecutiveLJegislativeRelations in Russia, 1991-1998" "(rxnyublished ms., $999). 35. Jonah L3. Levy; /bcquevilleS Revenge: Stare, Sociel-y, and Economy in Gntemporary France (Cambridge, Mass., l999), t 2- 15, 293-3 18; Fish, Democracy from Scralc!~,73-75, 122-125, 36. See ""Xowshki:O paradokgakts. rossiiskoi pofiticheskoi zhizni raz~nyshliaetpotitolog Liliia Shevtsc~vd:' Trud, March 18, 1999.

Persona ism Versus Procedura tsin and the

the Russian System

Russia's.fil~tdame?ztaIproblem is that it dcsesn? haw any credible fiscal rules or unyfiscgl admiuzist r~tiltiun, -Michel Camdessus, Mana9;:ng Dkectar, Internationat ManeEary Fund (San Francisco Chronicle, July18, S 998)

X do nor claim to be able ttl discuss t/?epi"rilosopkybelzind econotnic rt.form, -Baris YelESiPl, Zapiski pretidenta ((naoscow~1994,235)'

T

he collapse of the IXussian financial system in August and September 1998, the threat of rising social protest, and the itzcreased tendency toward fiscal separatism among regional etites highlighted a key gap in the country" plplitical and economic deveioyment during the 1990s. IXussia has indeed broken with the communist system and replaced it with formal organizations that bear a family resemblance to the structures of a capitalist ecr>nc>myand liberal democracy. But these formaf organizations are largely shells that do not necessarily contain the processes necessary for the democratic regulation of political, social, and economic exchange, Under Russia" cwrent system of crony capitalism and illiberal democracy, organizational processes are driven, by personalistic considerations

that override both efficiency calcutations and procedural propriety Although it is not necessarily ir-tcompatiblewith economic growth. and political stability, this ystem is refatively feeble, fragile, and susceptible to collapse when shaken by external shocks. In this regard, Russia" system is similar to that in a number of Asian countries that underwent economic col1apse in t 997 and 2 998, after decades of impressive g r o ~ rates. h Russia experienced a similar cr~llapsein 1998, but without a preceding period of growth or wealth-creation. In contrast, X;tussia's GCUP had declined markedk throughout the t 990s. It is now ol2vious that the infrastructure of Russian public administration operates with little of the prc~ceduralirngersanallty required for the cohesion of a market economy and representative democracy. Russia lacks regrxlatory institutions that can ensure tax coUection, prrstection of yrr3perty rights, enforcement of contracts, and procedural propriety in the financiai sector. It lacks police, legal, and judicial ir-tstitutionsthat can ensure physical security for the poprxlace and rule of faw in the adjudicatic~nof social csnfiiets. And it lacks a system of nationwide or sectoral political parties that channeX societal demands into the political arena and that link regional politicians to those at the eenter through. a politicalorganizatic~nalretationship of mutual dependence. On this mtlch there is consensus in the theoretical literature: The proper funcdoning of a market economy rule of law, and representative democracy requires such institutions, The legitimacy, effectiveness, and tlltimately, stabifity of an advanced industrial srscietp hinge on the qualities of such structures.' IXussia is therefore institrrtionally fragile. Before we can ask how to overcome this condition, we must ask how it came to be.

Lessons of the Crisis A debate has begun in the West over the lessons to be learned from the current crisis. Some observers argue that a collapse was all but itzevitable, regardless of what Ueftsin had done during his years as Rt~ssiakpresident. There are three exptanations that run along these liizes, though they are not mutually exclusive. Qlle is cultural, and argrxes that Russian culture had never developed orientations cr~mpatiblewith impersonal markets, rule of law, or representative democraq. A second is institutional, claiming that the administrative fragmentation, tacit privatization, and widespread crirninalization of the Soviet state during the late Gorbachev era-or in some versions of the argument, present tlnder Brezhnevconstituted a legacy that the Yeitsin regime could not possibly overcome in so short a period of time. A third argument for ir-tevitabilityis circumstantial: that Gorbachev had made a mess of the Soviet econcsmy, the Sr~vietUnion, and Soviet foreign economic relations bp 1991. The result was a rupturing of economic refationshiys, which could not be surmounted by the Yeitsin regime, When we combine these explanations, treating them as mutually reinforcing components of the legacy bequeathed to Yellsin, the image of htility and inevitability becomes that much more credible,

An alternative approach to the question of historicat causality treats the current situation as a product of contingent policy choices made by Boris Yeltsin and his governments from 1991 to 1998, either tlnder foreign pressure or autonomously. Without denying that the above-mentioned constraints were real, this argument clairns that the constraints did not predetermine the outcome; that is, oppcxtuniities were missed to relieve these constraints and to alter the trajectory of Russian development. Thrzs, according to this argument, a corrupt, weak state might have been difficult to avoid, given the initial conditions; but the scope and depth of political corrzzption and criminalization, and the ""vrtual economy" of 1998,"ere products of specific policy choices made in 1992-1995: the approach to macroemnomic stabilization; the privatization prtlgrams of 1992 and 1994; and the ""loans for shares" "program of 1995, The fragility of democratic institutions might have been a product of the ""drtal power" h i l t into the constitution that was itz force in 1991, exacerbated by the disr>rientationand political conflict engendered by Russia's soss of its empire and gfobaf rote. But the political meltdown of 1998 was a product of choices about party-building and state-building made in faif 1991 and choices about ccznstituticonal design made in 1993 and 1994. Limited adherence to ""ruZe of law," and spotty protection of the population from physical insecurity, mi$t have been inherent in the ahermath of any state" collapse, but the minrzscule progress in building legal and judicial institutions, and the extent of police withdrwal from law enfol-cernent, were products of decisions made in 1992 and of a continrzous lack of priority given to legal-itzstit~ltionaldevelopment. Persistent defiance of central authsrity by the gotiernment of Chechnya might have been the bane of any KrernZin feader*But the costs and consequences of the war against Chechen secession were products of policy choices made by the Yeltsitz leadership in 1994 and 1995. The Russian state might have been institutionally underdeveloped in any case, given the time it takes to build effective institutions; but the extent of its underdevelopment and fragility was a product of neglea and of policies that undermined instituticonal goals. We thus have two sets of arguments: one based on the notion that culture, structure, and circrzmstance were determinant, and the other based on the notion that leadership-in this case, bad leadership-was determinant. It is not easy to choose between the two, for we are in the realm of counterfactual specutation. Had kltsitz done thitzgs differently itz each of these policy realms, we wo~lldhave been better positioned to assess the resilience of cultural, institutional, and circumstantial constraints on change. But in many realms of policy, UeXtsink iintiatives either acqrziesced in or exacerbated the situation he itzherited. Hence, we cannot say with confidence h ( w much wcotlld have been different had Yeftsin acted differently, What we can da is document Yeltsin's perssnaiistic and patriarchal leadership style and show how that style reinforced inherited constraints, and in many respects, created new ones, His style emphasized personalistic considerations and political rationality at the expense of procedural development and systemic legit-

imacy, thereby contributing to the institutional fragility that plagues Ixussia today, He may: not have been fully aware of this dynamic and may: have been gentlinely befuddled by the consequences of his actions, but that is a separate issuea4 The purpclse of this chapter is to document UeXtsin's personalistic style and its imin post-Soviet Russia, The sources for this study are pact on instit~~tion-building memoirs and speeches by Yeltsin, book-length memc~irsby ogcials whc:, w r k e d far him, interviews with a number of the latter individuals, and secondary literature on the Russian policy process. hrhaps the Russian bureaucracy defies reform and smothers a l effcxts at rationalization, Unfortunately,, Eltsin never really tested this proposition, If Yeitsin" successors wish to build a stable, market democracy that is integrated into the multilateral institutions of the rich democracies, they will have to break with the mentality that informed Yeltsin" choices, and develiclp strategies for institution-building that make up for time lost and damage done. Moreover, they will have to do so in a crjntext in which many constraints on change have arisen that did not exist in 1992.j If they do eventuaXly launch such a program, we will be better positioned to assess the ongoing resilience of crzlttrral, institutional, and circumstantial obstacles tc:, change,

kftsin's Personalistic Leadership Style Yeltsin is notorious for having concentrated enormous formal power in his hands as Russian president. This was consistent with his lifelong urge to be in charge. Such a self-image can be traced to the early stages of his life and career. As he wrote in his autobiography, 'Tor more than thirty years now I've been a boss. . . . Not a bureaucrat, not an official, not a director, but a boss. f can't stand the wrd-there? something about it that smacks of the chain gang. But what can yczu do? Perhaps being first was always a part czC my n a t u r e l V n earlier autobiography: records many stories of the leadership role he played among his friends and of his penchant for assuming the preponderance of risk-as, for example, when he insisted on being the czne among his friends to disarm a grenade, and lost two fingers in the processe7People who knew him early in his career, in Sverdlovsk, report that he was an assertive, demanding, and harsh boss,TTkose who knew him when he was first secretary of the Moscow party organization aver that he was a "true party despot."We viewed himself at tl-re time as a turnaround artist who needed to be tlnccjnstrained in restructuring his The Llrge to rule with as few institzltional constraints as possible followed Ueftsin into the Russian presidency. Of ccjurse, he rarely had the luxury of doing so. As a member of the Interregional Group czf Deputies within the Congress of People" Deputies itz $989,he was schooled by Andrei Saliharov and members of the democratic caucus, in the procedural ways of a demc~craticsociety As chairman czf the RSFSR Supreme Soviet from X990 to X99 1 , he had to bargain hard to b~liEctminimal winning coalitions for his initiatives. As the popularly elected

president of Russia, from June 1991 untit August 1991, he bargained and cornpromised with Gorbachev over the terms of the Union Treaty And for two years after his election as president of independent Russia (in January 19921, he locked horns with the Supreme Soviet and its chairman Ruslan Mhasbularov over matters of power, policy; and the terms of a new c~nstit~ltion. These constraints tested Yeltsin? crzmmitment to dernczcratic proced~lresand insdtutions, It would be unfair tcz claim that he behwed like an uncompromising autocrat in these contexts. Tc~ be sure, he was an able and hard bargainer, and his emotions at times got the best of him, But he also made frequent effcrrts to strike deals with his opponents and to push for legislation based on compromise. Yet, at key points, his patience ran out and his persanalistic urge came to the fare, After the August 1991 cr~up,he banned the newspapers that had suppi~rted the coup editorially-until his advisers convinced him that this was incompatible with a commitment to democracy, fn fall $991, instead of using his enormous political atlthc~rityand resources to help build democratic political parties, he declared his intention to stand "above partiesm-a commitment he reiterated in advance of the December 1993 and December $995parliamentary elections, much to the dismay of democratic activists. From fall 1991 to 1993, he demanded and secured the right to rule bp decree when the parliament refused to endorse his initiatives. Xn summer 1993, he decided to dissolve parliament-a right he did not yet possess-having crzncluded that fruitf~ilcomprr3mise was impossible, In his second autobiography, he admits his disillusion with parliamentary democracy, and its unsuitability for Russia." Although l"eltsin3spersonality inclined him to seek personal control, it is irnportant to bear in mind that personalism is not necessarily the same as desgiltism-though all despots are by definition persanalistic. Personalism is a form of rule in which the leader is not hefd accountabfe-form*, regularly; and frequently-to institutions that can substantially constrain his discretion. But personalistic rulers can be generous, propex; and temperate; they are not necessarily tyrannical, capricious, or corrupt. Yeltsin" self-image was that of a patriarch: a strict but benevolent flather-figure.

Within his inner circle, kltsixz demanded total loyalty to hirnself and his cornrnands, He exercised maximal discretic~nover his subordinates7ives bi~thptlblic and (at times) private. There was nothing impersonal about these relationships, nothing based on proced~~ral propriety or official prerogatives other than his own, The staff and of5cials of the presidential administration and executive branch were his retainers, not his lieutenants-his political ""family,""not his cabinet. He conceived of hixnsclf as a paterfamilias rather than as the cl-rief executive of a crlrpus of professionals," 2 s fc3rmer press secretary V-yacheslav Kc~stlikovhas noted in his memoirs, Yeftsin considered himself ""smething like the father of an extended family" "(ser?~eistvo),He enjoyed flaunting his patriarchal authority, and

liked it when he had the oppclrtunity to demand that somebody apologize for a bureaucratic bungle: ""Ask papa for forgiveness."" Memoirs by his associates and those by Yeltsin himself are laced with examples of the language of patriarchy and filial, intimacy. Kostlkov affirms that Yeltsin harbored a great deal of sentixnentality, almost love, for Yegor Caidar, and says that Gaidar was Yeitsin" "alter ego" fijtorynz ya).14Yeltsin is reported to have referred to Anatolii Chubais and Boris Nemtsov as "Eke sons to me.'""ieltslin% ghost-witer and eventual chief-of-staff, Valentin Yumashev, appears in a photograph with Yeltsin in one mernoir, with a caption that reads: ""Frr the President, tu! Yismashev is almost like a son. Xt is not for nothing that his patronymic is Borisovich."" "stwhile media director Qleg hptsov has noted Ydtsin's ""infatuation" with his p u n g advisers in early 1992,17a word also tlsed by an ""crutsider""student of Bltsin's leadership.'Tostlbvk mernoir is entitled Love-Afair with a Pmident,'" During the 2980s, Yeltsin" relationship with his bodyguard Aleksandr Kmzhakc:,~was ss:, intimate that the two exchanged blood from their ftngers on two occasions to affirm their eternat lopXty tcz each other as ""t-load brothers" "elfsin was in his mid-50s at the time).'" Karzhakov has referred to a vacation he and Ueltsin took in 1986 as a ""hneymoon."2i Yettsin was the designated "wedding yatriarch"" at the marriage of Korzhakov's daughter.'"treletskii writes of the psychology of those responsible for guarditzg party and governmental officials ~lnder Ueltsin: "Bit by bit they are turned into 'members of the fami1ies"of those they are guarding.""" Teltingly, after Yeltsin rebuked Korzhalcov in May 16396 for getting involved in politics, the latter proclaitned to Yeltsin's darzghter Tatiana, ""Iwould be an tlnderstatement to say that I no longer love Boris Nikolaevich." Tatiana reysrtedly flew into a rage at this ~tatement.~TeXtsink patriarchal self-conception also encompassed members of the military leadership, Colonel Viktor Baranets, onetime press secretary in the Russian Ministry of Defense, reyclrts that Defense Minister Grachev ""Xoed" YeXtsin and that the two men once declared their ""eternal hiendship and love" for each other. W e n he awarded Crachw a special presidential gold medal in a public ceremony, Yeltsin declared that it was his ""prsonal gift."" In this context, the key to political longevity and ir~Rtrencewas to capture the attention and the ear of the patriarch. But this had to be done with all proper deference, Indeed, when seven members ofYeltsin3 staff wrote a joint letter to their boss in $994,~lrginghim not to repeat his ernbarrassitzg, apparently drunken, performance irr Berlin, Boris Nikotaevich was livid. His reaction was that of a patriarch rather than an executive: He demanded that each of them admit their "guilt" and express "repentance."26 Within this familial context, Y'ltsin felt free to be an abusive parent. Like Napoleon, he m u i d dress down military commanders in front of their subordinates, as he did Defense Minister Igor Rodionov and Chief of the General Staff Viktor Samsonov just before firing them," Nor were the military the only victims. Other members of Yeitsink cabinet were subjected to open, verbal abuse: Foreign Minister Kozyrev, Interior Minister k r i n , and Nationalities Minister

Yegorov are specifically mentioned in memoirs as having received such treatment,'%nd Kostikov hints that Prime Minister Chernomyrdin was also publidy scrzlded by l"e1tsin." On occasion, particularly when he had been drinking, bltsin was atso physically abusive, He ""played the spoons" on the heads of ranking assistants, and when the others in the room responded with laughter, augmented the speed and force of the spoon-potlnding, as well as the ntlmber of heads being pounded.'" Another time, traveling on a boat down the Yenisei River, the president lost patience with interruptions horn his press secretary and ordered his bodyguards to toss the man (>verboard.m e n his bodyguards hesitated on the assumption that he was kidding, he reiterated that he was serious, and he saw that the hapless press secretary went over the side." l"eltsin5 abuse of his most dependent and servile subordinates did not cease at the boundaries of the Xxussian executive offices, Others have written about haw he played the spoons on the head of the president of Kyrgy~stan,Askar Akaeve31 Unless this was mutual, good-natured play (not clear firm the memczir accrzunt), it is a stunning indicator czf the extent to which UeXtsin considered portions of the CXS to be members of his household. Although l"e1tsin frequently abused his subordinates and dependents, he could atso be a generous benefactor to his political framiiy, F-Xe enjoyed bestowing gifts CusuaXly. expensive watches) on members of his staff." Such gestures reached beyond the inner circle, as Yettsin received innumerable requests for special favczrs-tax exemptions, in particrrlar-from representatives of regionat and sectoral interests. Reportedly, he found it difficult to say "no" in the face of opprxtunities to assist friends, maddening his budget-ccznscious finance minister in the process." This tendency extended also to "friends" outside the IXussian Federation. Gaidar reported in his memoirs his fear that Yeltsitz, if left alone with the leaders of Belarus dtlring economic policy negotiations, would concede more than Xxussia could afford." Allin interviewee confirmed that such fears were wellfounded, but not because of Yeltsill's (very real) ignorance of economics or his ideological commitment to CIS integration; rather, what drove Yeftsin in such conversations was paternalism and a sense of cornmunatism. As this interviewee put it, Yeltsin's expressed sentiment was: "Weke a flarnily here. Let's dispense with formalities! Why should we wranglemere, I'll give you this!" This attitude extended beyond Xxussian-Betarrzsian relations, according to this insider, helping to expli-rir-t Russia" flexibility itz relations with Ukraine and Kazabstan (the latter, regarding Caspian Sea oil), The same interviewee averred that in CIS relations, YeItsin ""cuuId be generous to a fauit." Yeltsin thought of himself as "&rector of all of Russia,"" whose election as p ~ s i d e nhad t validated his right trz interpret the will of the people. Becatlse of his overwhelming vicwries in confrontatians with the old system and in free elections, he didn't believe he had to account for or explain himself to anyone." But he also thought of himself as a ""pople" tsar,'""xenevolent and caring, though strict when necessary. W e n he offered reassurances to the populace that their pain would shortly ease, he was performitzg the role of a Russian priest, XiAing the

spirits of his Rock,'Wn a tour of IXussia in 1992, he brought atong hundreds of millions of rubles for ""gifts to the working people." He knew that this violated the p~evailingeconomic policy, "but he cr~nsideredit possibte for himself to make tsarist gest~res."~~~

Yeftsir-t entertained a persanalistic self-conception throughout his political career; he atways wanted tc~be "in charge." But his operating style evolved over time, with patriarchalism becoming a dominant czrientation only after 1993. Memoirs by his close aides of the late 1980s rarely mention the traits emphasized here, stressing instead his charismatic per~onalism,~' Several memclirs by people who uvarked with Yeitsin both before and after X993 distinguish between the early President kltsin and the late President Yeltsir-t, with the midpoint k i n g sometime in 1993, Befare then, Yeltsin was a p~)p?~lfist who was cc~nfidtfntof his ability to mobilize the masses against his politicat. adversaries. He also enjoyed enormous charismatic authority within his entourage, and rational-legal authority that derixd from his public election to the Rt~ssianpresidency in June 1991. In addition, within his inner circle, while demanding the defrerence due a patriarch, he was also accessible, consultative, and receptive to a range of policy advice. By fate 1993, however, Yeftsin had fost cc~nfidencein his ability tc:, rally the masses, a concfusion reinforced mightily by the results of the December X993 parliamentary elections," His memoirs published in 19% end with the prosaic promise to give the Rt~ssianpeople "&ability and consistency in politics and the ecc>nc:,my" and with the declaration that ""the only definite guarantor of calm is the president himself:" both of which are features of ;a patriarchal orientation." "The systembuilder had evolved into an auth~~ritarian system-manager. Thereafter, we are told, Yeitsin" presidential administration toolc on still more of the attributes of a "court" and ir-tcreasinglylost the attributes of a cabitzet. Gaidar, in fact, wrrlte that around this time Yeltsin began to present himself as a benevczlent tsar surrounded by a huge court." Increasingly over: time, Kostikov reto Korzhakov, ports, Yeltsin referred to hirnself in the third per~sn.~Vccording Yeltsin began tc:, be heavily pret~ccupiedwith his personal secmrity.'We also narrowed the circle of those to whom he would turn far advice, and allowed the security personnel in his entourage to have a major influence on policy." As Kostikov lamented, "We ['democrats"G,B.] were pained that in relations with b r i s NikclIaevich, a steady disappearance of democratism, accessibility, and relations of trust was occurring."*Wne former associate exglair-tsthis trend as a joint product of the physical pain and exhaustion Yeltsin experienced at this time and the emotional anguish of having "bst" the December X993 parliamentary elections after having expended sa much energy to prevail over the S~zgremeSoviet itz t 993. He had been expending sr:, much "negative energy" fbr so many years that by 19% the members of his entourage felt they could bring him bad news only when it was packaged with three titnes as much good ne.tn~s.~%atever the exact catlse of the change, it

was unmistakable. It led Gaidar tcz remark to Kostikov in January 1994 that "we must return Yeltsin to Yeltsin,"""%whh meant that they must find a way to curb Yeltsin5 atlthc~ritarianimpulse, reinfr>rcehis democratic strain, and prevent him from retying excessively on alcohol as an escape, Yeftsin had evolved from a ""pople's tsar"" to an embattled, increasingly reclusive autocrat. His personalism, constant throughout his years as p~esident,had metamorphosed fmm populist and consultative to patriarchal and exclusionary.

Personafism Versus Institution-Building

The Benefits ofPersonalism Some theorists believe that transitions to market democracies require strong executive leadership i t ~order to break through. the constraints on change, Others argue that a parliamentary system is a precondition for crznsolidating a marketdemocratic breakthrough. Given this lack czf tlleoretical consensus, Yeltsin" ppersonalism need not be treated as a self-evident obstacle to progress. Indeed, given his crzncern to otierturn the formal structures of communist power and to replace them with the formal organizations of a capitalist economy and a liberat democracy$integrated into Western organizations, within the territorial boundaries of the Russian Federation of December 1991, and resistant to bczth communist restoration and fascist reacdon, one could argue that in the near term Yeltsin's personalistic approach to leadership went far toward those ends. He forced through changes that created the framework for such a system. In these respects, Yeltsin w s indeed an institution-builder, Yeltsirl and his staff designed and won ratification of the Russian Constitution of 1993, which, hczweveit- flawed, finally provided a cc3nsistent constitutional framework for the nascent Ixussian, state. The parliamentary and presidential elections of 1993, 1995, and 19136 took place as scheduled, and although they were prt~cedurallyflawed in several respects, their outcczmes were prczbably legitimate. Yeltsin resisted the temptation to postpone or cancel the gubernatorial elections of 2996-1 998, even though. they threatened to dirnir-tishhis political Xeveragc over rcgional elites. He also resisted the temptation trz postpone the presidential electic>n czf 1996, despite the fact that in Janrzary 1996 his pubZic approval rating had fatlen to T percent and some of his advisers were recommending postponement, Similarly; 'ITeltsin resisted the temptaticzn to rczll back the civil rights won by Ixussians under Carbachev: freedoms to criticize, organize, uvarship, and travel, Books, newspapers, and television shows regrxlarly roasted or ridiculed the president. They sharply criticized many of his policies-at times, to the president's dismay and shock, These institutions survived despite Yeitsin? presumed distaste for such personal attacks, With. respect tcz transfczrmation of the eccznomic system, Yeltsin, in the name of creating a class of property holders who would fight to prevent communist restoration, sponsored a program of privatization that allowed the transfer of

state property into private hands at a rate and on a scale that exceeded anything seen before in world history. Thus, Yeftsin was the "founder" of hssia's ohgogofistic and plutocratic but nonetheless capitalistic economy. In his policies towrd Russia's regions, YeIrsin spclnsored a series czf biiaterat treaties and agreements between Moscow and itzdividuaf regions and republics that flexibly defined the respective obligations of the center and the periphery. The Constitution of X993 tried to rein in centrihgal forces by prescribing a strong role for irliIoscow,But that same document left many areas to joint jurisdicticm and failed to s p e c i the ~ mechanisms for resolving ambiguities and cr~nfiicts. Such ambiguities were consistent with Yeltsin" urge h r personal flexibility in striktzg deals with the heads of different ""slabjects of the Federation,""and consistent with the prevailing realities: the disparate resource bases of the regions, the varying levels of resolve of their leaders, the Iaclc of consensus among regional governors and republican presidents about constitutional principles, and the center" frequent inapacity to enforce its writ. Only in the case of Checfinya did Yeltsin resort to miiltary force, In the realm of nation-builditzg, Yeltsin consistently forrght against those who w u l d define the Russian Federation as an exclusionary, ethnically Russian entity. Instead, he sponsored and loudly argued for a civic and tolerant definition czf citiizenship itz Russia, and his definition of policy on these matters prevaifede5' At the international fevef, Ueftsin was one of the architects of the Commonwealth czf Illdependent States, established to foster peaceful relations among the successor states to the Soviet Union. Although he rhetorically defende-d the rights of Russian-speafcers resident in the successor states, he also insisted that such issues be resolved peacefrrfty And wl~enthe governments of other CIS states resisted Russian pressures for "&uai citizenship,""Yeltsin backed off on the issue.53 In relations with the ""Gr abrc>ad:"elttsin enccjuraged and mc~nitoredthe negotiation czf a NATO-Russia Charter as a way of making NATO expansion palatable political elite, He also successf~zll-)l negotiated the expansion of the to the R~~ssian G-7 into the G-8. On the basis of this record, if one vatues the ft~ndarnentalsthat UeXtsin put in place-assuming these institutions survive the current turmoil-one corlald arrive at a positive evaluation of lieltsin? contribution to Russia? recent pofiticafeconomic development and international integration. In fact, this is the basis for positive evaluations that are already on re~ord.~" These emphasize Yeltsir-t's role as founder of a new order and as guarantor of that order against communist restoration, fascist ascendanciv, and secession from the XXussian Federation. Xndeed, these were precisely the roles that Yeltsin conceived for himself in the ""struggle fbr Russia.'"

Macros@zdctgrckE WEnerabiligies And yet, czne could argue that Yeltsink urge to found and guarantee a new order of things as quickly as possible, and to do so through personalistic leadership,

planted the seeds of crisis that have been growing for several years and have finally begrrn to flower. fn the political realm, Yeltsir-tS primary macroitzstitutional accomplishment-the Constitution of 1993-established a framework that is so overcentrailzed and in certain respects so rigid that it inhibits the system" adaptation to a changing environment. The new constitution established a presidential system tmder which the pcjwers of the president are enormous, including vast powers of decree, and those of the parliament and the Constitutional Court are very litnited. Xt is almost impossible constitutionally ta impeach tl-re president, and equally diffic~~lt to amend the ccznstitutic~nitself. The ccznstituticln was designed to ensure that the president would be (by far) the highest authority in the land, largely unaccountable to ir-tstitutionsand primarily answerable only to the people, via subsequent presidential elections, Such discreticzn provides the president with strong incentives to ignore or infantilize the other branches of government, The constitution makes it easy for the president to dissolve parliament, but nearly impt~siblefor parliament to irnpeach the president. The courts, like parliament, are greatly underfinanced, whereas the presidency and the executiive branch are hugely bloated with redundant personnel. Given the resotlrces wailabfe to the president, his capacity to bribe or intimidate members of parliament by far exceeds their capacity to threaten him. The overwhelmir-tgpower of the presidency vis-8-vis other central institutions ensures that the general direction of policy is likely to reflect the president's preferences. But this also means that policy will depend Xargety on the wisdom and foresight of the president, that policy elaboration will not be the prodtlct of a parliamentary cc>nsensus-building process, and that an infantifized parliament wIiZ likely engage in obstruction, in those realms of policy within which it has same discretion. l"eltsin2 s%uperpresi&entialist'91iconstitution also etirninated the office of vice president so that no future VP could turn against the president the way Yeitsin's vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoy, had ir-t 2 B92 and 2 993. The lack of a vice presidency in a system in which the president has such extraordinary powers means that any sign of presidential ill-health-or the anticipation of such-sets off a chain of political manerrvering and demagogic rhetoric ir-t anticipation of a new election, The legal ambiguity about the definition of "incapacitation" "comes magnified, Efforts to alter the constitution to establish a vice presidency, or even to mandate that the prime mitzister serve out the former president's term before a new election, are impeded by the impossibility of amendment. More0.l.e~the constittrtion provides an incentive for those most hopeful of winning the next eleaion to oppose its amendment, W-ty reduce the powers of an office that you have reason to believe yc>ucan capture?" X n the economic; realm, Yettsink privatization program amounted to the greatest case of itzsider trading in history. Xt was consistent with kltsin" urge to build an economic etite as quicHy as possible-an elite that would support him pofitically and serve as a powerful bulwark against communist restoration. But the extraordinary concentratior~of wealth and conspicrxous consumption that this pro-

gram allowed, along with the illicit, often criminal, means by which that wealth was acq~liredand the crony capitalism that resulted, has nurtured a widespread sense of social injustice that cr~uldexplode into rage or public yrr3test at any time. The mass impoverishment resulting from the cl~osenstrategy of macroeconomic stabilimtion (i.e., liberal monetarism) gives a powcrf~~l economic motivation for pnrstest to new members of the economic underclass, Even if ideological and organizational obstacles to the mobilization of mass protest prove insurmountable," socioeconomic pressures corrXd eventually lead to the victory in presidential and parliamentary elections of a yoy~llist-atlthoritarianalternative, Similarly, UeXtsink decision to wage war in 611ecl1nya to defend the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation proved disastrous for all concerned, The human toll-among Chechens, Russian civilians in Chechnya, and soldiers of Russia's armed forces-was enormous, We probably wilt never know whether the war deterred other regional executives from contemplating secession. But certainly the cr~stsof the war further undermine the legitimacy stability, and effectiveness of the Xxussian government, however popuiar the decision in 1999 to once agaitz invade Chechnya. Above all, Yeltsin5 determination tc>stand "above pr~liticalparties" as '"directc~r of all of IX~~ssia" has inl~ibitedthe development of political parties that provide the organi~ationalbuttress for stable, representathe democracy In fall $991,and q a i n in fall 1993 and 1995,Eftsin was pregnted opportunities to sponsor reformist presidential parties that might have helped buijd muscular, nationwide political organizations. These co~lldhave expanded the mobiliizational capacity of antirestorationist forces and strengthened the organizational bond bemeen pc~liticiansin the center and those on the periphery. The Russian president cerbinly controtled sufficient material resources to invest in such a venture, Instead, Yeltsin opted far an ad hoc, personalistic approach to leadership, accepting no obfig~tionsto any particular organizadon and remaining free to shift support bases as his intuition dictated. Althorrgh this approach was consistent with his self-image as a leader and his canceptit~nof the kind of leadership Russia needed to found and guarantee a new order of things, it left the poli"rical system demonstrably underdevejoped and kagite.

Yeltsin'sMentality: Microinstitutional Blind Spots Yeltsi~l'sself-irnage as a leader ir-tfluenced his political strategies for accumulating and wielding power, However, to understand his policy pricjrities and tc>appreciate why he negiected microorganizational development, we must afso expfore his values, perspectives, and beliefs. Yeltsin believed that the Russian bureatlcraq was a quagmire that cr~uldserve little usefzrzl purpose. He wrote in his memoirs that both the Xtussian bureaucracy and the Russian people required a ""srong hand" to extract them from their inertia and their nihilistic behavioral patterns. Unified, strong command was more important than rule of law. In Yeitsin3 words: ""everyone: knows that we Russians do not like to obey ail sorts of rules, laws, itzstructions, and directives. . . . Rules

cut us Iike a knifeee""""3omebodyhad to be the boss,'%e wrote in his second boolc of memoirs, "Russia5 m h paradox was that . . . there had not been any real powerful leader in the Republic of Russia." At present, people ""are almost incapable of doing anything thernsefves." Two or three presidencies will have to go by, he asserted, before this sit~lationwould change." Gorbachev's problem, according to Yeltsin, was that he did not understand this: "Was he organically capable of playing the role of a severe, uncompromising n.xaster!" Gorbachev should have know11 better, Yeltsir-t wrote, fi>rhe had plenty of evidence: Whenever Gorbachev got tau@ with the o~bstreperousCongress of Efetzple" Deputies, it acceded to his demands. But when he was weak, it attacked him.M' These beliefs attracted Yeltsixz to a breakthrough strategy for building a new order in Rt~ssia,A plan that was subsequently dt~bbed""sock therapy" msolded to him like the approach he was looking for. It promised quick results at the macroeconomic level, with none of the procrastination he found so maddenir-tgin Gorbachev" policies," It was consistent with campaignism, commandism, and ""sruggfe:" which had been common features of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist administrative c~llturesin whiclz he had grown up, As former parliamentarian Valentin Fyodorc~vhas noted, this apprr3ach also fitted the cognitive vacuum left by evaporating confidence in the previous ideology, and appealed to Yejtsin's neo-Soviet mentality in that it was simple and clear-cut in its principles and required resolve and political decisiveness in i~nplementaticIn.'~ The so-calied shock therapy approach was reduct~on~sf in that it focused on the individual citizen, promising to cure Russians of the lethargy into which they had fallen, As mtlch as the strategy was a macrc>economic prescription for economic stabilization, it was atso based on an implicit theory of behavioral and cuttural change, If people-regardless of their cultural backgrounds-were put into situations in which survival depended on their exercising entrepreneurial initiative, they wouIQ finaIty overcome their Ietharg and seek out opportunities. As Yeltsir-t put it, ir-t retrospect, ""Smetimes it takes a sharp break or rupture to make a person molve foward or even s ~ m i v eat all"""-an ohservatic~nbased on personal experience, for he had put himself through just such a wrenching cognitive and value transformation during 1988, after being p~zrgedfrom the Soviet leadership," Presumably, sustained behavioral change ultimately w u l d bring attitudes into conhrmity with behavior, transforming letharrry and envy into initiative and achievement. Jtilctging from Yeftsin" statements abo~lteconomic reform:' neither the success of behavioral and cultural transformation nor that of macroecc3nomic strtbilization and liberalization hinged on microinstitution-building, wl~ichcould come later, devebopir-tg naturally in the course of thixzgs. To Yeltsin, this was perhaps a positive feature of the stratem, fc3r it circumvented or decr~mmissioned the bureaucracy rather than seelcing to reform or restructure it, To "Jeltsixz, cultural transformation would also be a product of generational change, Those who w u l d not or cczuld not adapt to the stringent new requirements would be replaced by the new generations reaching their twenties and thirties in the 1990s. He saw himself as the leader of rz revolution that would bring

those new generations into positions of authority in the polity>economy and society. For the most part, he assumed the older generation of citizens incapable of adjusting to capitalism, having been ruined by the old system. But l"e1tsin's candor revealed his own Leninist-StaXinist "campaign" mentality. For example, Yeitsir1 wrote that as head of the Moscow City Committee, he strove to replace ci~mpromisedwrkers in iZrlosc~>w shi~pswith "y~ung,'uninfected9 Jnezarazhennays] staff.'""" When discussing economic reform in his second book of memoirs, he praised tough, itzdependent, ambitious p u n g people, who possessed ""an entirely new psycholom.'"%~~ssia% backwardness cr~uldnot be olvercome tlntil generational change had taken place: "We must finalty admit that Russia comprehends democracy goorly-not merely for global, historical reasons but for rather prcrssaic ones: the new generation cannot break its way into power, The Socialist mode of thinking has left its imprint czn att of us . . . . The new generation must come to the forefront as quickly as possible."""" This emphasis on demographic change may have been perspicacious, but it atso reinforced Yeitsin" inattention to microinstitutional development. For if energy, enthusiasm, ""dmocratic" orientations, and a work ethic were decisive, then organizational rules and administrative efficiency were less important. Tc] a considerable extent, Yeltsin believed that ""cadres decide everythingn-an idea consistent with one strand of Soviet political culture. There were no hrtresses that "uninfected" "lung people cczuld not strsrm, once they were given an electoral voice, hired in large enough numbers, liberated from the command economy, and given a f~zngiblecurrency to f~zcleconomic ambition and exchange. A most telling indicator of &itsink blind spot was his treatment of microinsdtution-building in his second book of nlemoirs, which was written in 2994, Notably; this volume says very little about processes of ir~stitution-building required tc>consolidate the new order, even though it was written at a time when the pincl1 of organizational deficiencies was starting to become obvious, And when Ere did occasionaffy mention the problem, it was either: ( I ) i r ~a passing, rittlatistic reference to a highly generalized need (e.g., for ""r~leof law"") ((2) f(~cused on organizational farms, not internal organizational processes (e.g., we now have a stock market); ( 3 ) reflective of a fatalism or beffudlement about efforts to transform the Rt~ssianbureatlcraq (e.g., what can you do!); or (4) an effort tc> blame others for current deficiencies (e.g., it was partiarnentk fault)."Tor the most part, however, the problem of itzstitutiion-buildingwas ignored in favor of lengthy discussions of cadres policy, In a similar vein, when cr~rruptionwas mentioned, it was treated as a cultural or individual failing and not as a social problem that could be solved through changes in institutional incentives.

Personalkm Ersus Rationalkation of' the Russian B U ~ ~ R U C ~ G ~ Yeitsin" self-image and beliefs undermined administrative efficiency throughout his years in office. His organization of the presidency and his manipulation of the

executive branch did much to strengthen his grip on the formal reins of power and perhaps to make possible the achievement of his general goals, But they simultaneously strenghened the cr:,rrmpt bureaucracy" capacity t ~ avc~id > ratic~nalization and therefore undermined the sustainabilir)rof Yeitsin" achievements. In ail p~lblicadmixzistration there is an inherent tension between the requirements of political control and those of administrative efticienq. What distinguishes administrative leaders is how they deal with this tension, and whether their SOIIUtions strike a balance that is consistent with the realization and consolidation of their general policy goals. Leaders like Charles de Gaulle, Franklin Defanc:, Rc~osevelt, and Kemal Ataturk understood this, In Yeltsin" case, the sacrifice czf administrative rationality to the requisites of political control and personalistic leadership was such as to threaten the sustainability of his prr3gram. I will not try to determine whether Yeitsin" shortcoming in this regard was due to a preference for short-term power maxirnization, distaste for the detailed, programmatic thinking needed to tackle the reform of pubIic administration, or fatalism about the unreformabiilty of Russia" bureaucracy What is clear is that bureaucratic fragmentation, corruption, and unaccountability got worse as a resrrlt of the approach to administrative control that l"eltsin employed. Take, for example, llis approacll to the czrganization of advice within the presidency and the articulation of interests within the government. On both scores, Yeftsin" preferred approach was individtlalized, antiyrocedtlral, and antiinstitutional. Within his persona[ staff and advisory corps, Yeltsin resisted the crystallization of even itzformal constraints on his power over the "children." He did not cr~nceiveof the political organizatic~nof his staff as a rational distribution czf formal powers @olnomochiya), Instead he wanted to maintain fluidity and red~lndancyof jurisdictions itz order to maximize his capacity to play his subordinates off against each other and tc>maximize their sense of dependence on him f'or protection against the others, According to a former, high-level staff mernber,"" Yeftsin wished to get advice from staff members on an individual, not a collective basis, He did not want his staff t~:,get tc>gether,work out a common viewpoint on an issue, and present it to him as a collective judgment. Nor did he care to meet with them as a group. Instead, he wanted each of them to come to him individually with their ideas. M%en they defied this preference, he retaliated. Rrscznalism also informed Yeitsin" approach to interest articulation and aggregation. As nokd earlier, he was highly responsive to particularistic pleading for tax exemptions, licensing, and the like. He also preferred to deal with gomrnors, military commanders, and ministers czn an ad hoc, individual basis rather than through their organizations. Altho~lghthere may have been a political rationality tc:, some of these preferences, the effect was anti-institutional in that they tmdermined the development of organized ccjllectivities on which modern public administration is based. As Eugene Huskey has aptly observed, it was ""a style of rule associated more with traditional monarchs than modern chief exec~tives."~' Yeitsin" cadres policy also was andprocedural. Even after securing ratification of his superpresidentialist constitution of December 1993, he violated its terms

with impunity by using his decree authority to fill ministerial posts that he had no legal prerogative to fill. In other realms of policy; too, Yettsin's liberal emission of decrees frequently exceeded his crznstitutional authority," UeXtsink approach tcz administrative organization of the presidential and executive branches was the antithesis of rationalization; indeed, it was reminiscent of Khrushchev" approach of the early 1960s: constant reorganization, high turnover 01 personnel, and the regular creation of new units with jurisdictions that duplicated those of existing units," The Presidential Admixzistration evolved into a huge bureaucracy, larger in size than the CPSU's Central Committee apparatus and with at least as many departments. But there has been wefuity littte rationalization of jurisdictions within the apparattrs and between the apparatus and the ministries. Officials of the apparatus were left with neither the assurance of stability nor the information they needed to perform their jobs, In theory, one could view the blurring of jurisdictions and the ir-thibition of stable expectations as a textbook-rational way to organize a presidential administration. Organization theorists have long known that formal organization charts are ;a poor guide to how organizations actually run-or ought to run. U.S. president FranHin Delano Roosevelt found it useful to establish redt~ndantjurisdictions to ensure that he received a variety of v i e ~ o i n t and s had access to multiple sources of information on the same situation. This was not how Yeltsin" presidential administration and executive branch were run, X~~stability of expectations had less to do with the sequencing of tasks than with the cantintred existence of the agency and the maintenance of perquisites and privileges that accompany emplr,-yment in the Presidential Administration. Here the blurring of jurisdictions has not been a functional means so mucl1 as a proliferation of redundancies that of ensuring diverse vilr?wpoi~-tt~ leave trnits unclear as to who actually is resyonsibte for task ftlffillment. The expanentiai increase in the size of the administration did not foster a heafthp coverage of all issues so much as a duplication of the govemmentaii-ministerial structure within the presidential branch, a duplication of jurisdictions between the ~o branches, and a proliferation of decisional arenas to which bureaucrats and others could tum to subvert the ixnplementation of presidential decrees or parliamentary legislation. The frequent creation and abr~litionof agencies left oEcials little time for programmatic thinking and focused their attention largely on personal political survival, More generally,Ueftsin preferred to manipulate diversity in ways that played factions off against each other and thereby maintained or enhanced his leverage as the "ultimate arbiter."Yeltsin ir-tcludedwithin the Presidential Administration representatives of a11 political orientations save intransigent communists and radical nationalists. This is cerr;rinly a rational strateg for maintaining power. 11:can also be ia rational strategy for eliciting ia diversity of inprzts: Both FUR and French president Franqois Mitterrand, ably employed such a strategy. But they did so in a relatively strong institutional context and in a way that left most incumbents feeling reasonably secure in their jobs. If, instead, the ultirnate arbiter heqtzently shi&s

back and forth between preferred factions and forces the losers to pay with their jobs, the result is more likeljr to be sycophancy; individualize-d efforts to curry the favex of the patriarch, or cczllective eEorts to destroy the credibility and favex of competing factions. Yeltsin" s o d u s operandi has been to fire leading officials and their deputies with great he-ykxency and sornetixnes to balance one arbitrary dismissal with another dismissal of an equivalent f t p r e in the opposing faction.74 One result czf such a strateg is that ideological or grofessionaf factions crystatXiize within the Presidential Administration for mutual proteaion agaitzst the unpredictable cr~mmander.Factic~nswill spend a great deal of time attempting to compromise each other in the eyes czf the ultimate arbiter. Another result of the general atmosphere of profound uncertainty and itzsecurity is widespread and deep-seated cr~rrmptionwithin the Presidential Administration and the executive branch. Uncertain as to what actions are Xikely to fulfil1 the tasks assigned to them; equally uncertain as to how long they will keep their jobs regardless of their performance; finding themselves in a privileged position that affords many czpportunities for using public czffice for private material gain; and knowing that they might not be able to gather such resources-or avoid criminal prosectrtion-otltside of got.ernment, officials generally find it tot> tempting to resist f'eathering their nests while the oppartunip is there, Xn sum, rather than engendering a healthy, low level of competition and uncertainty, Yeitsin" approach to microadministration of the presidential and exectltive branches succeeded in protecting his personal power against challenge but failed to create the instltutional support needed for rational dedsionmakinge7' This leadership style not only undermined rationalization of the administrative apparatus; it also subjected Yeltsin to decisional overload that often paralyzed policymaking. Yeltsin was a victim of his own success in destroying the communist system, in that he ruled as president without the benefit of an est&lished apparatus of officials to organize the Row of information to him and the impternentation of his requests, Even a healthy leader would initially have been burdened by this deficiency. But lPeltsin was not a healthy man; he suffered from a weak heart, a painful back injury incurred in Spain in 2990, and a regimen of medications that exacerbated his seemitzgly manic-depressive mood swings. Over time, his press secretary reports, the burden of decisionaf t~verioadtook a further toll, leading Yeltsin to avoid documents, appclintments, and increasingly, decisiczns," Nonetheless, Yeltsin resisted the obvious conclusion-that he should delegate more decisionmaEng authc~rityto others-perhaps fearing a dilution of his auIndeed, even when he did thority czr the crystaiiIization of threats to his not fear losing control, kltsin's patriarchal sel6irnage predisposed hirn to take credit fc3r all distributions of benefits. In a telling example of this ""big man" mentality, Yeltsin told a U.S. subcabinet agency director, whom he met at a reception during a summit meeting, not to bother dealing with his ministerial counterpart in M~scczwbut instead to come directly to Rrhaps decisional czverload, combined with Yeitsin's expressed fatalism about reforming the Russian bureaucracy, eexglaitzs the blind eye he usually turned to at-

legations of corruption within his administration. This is a curious feature czf his presidency, Few observers see Yeltsitz as a man who held his office largely for personal material gain. In Sverdlo-r~sk, he was not noticeably cczrruyt. And when he was first secretary of the Moscow Party Committee, from X985 to 2987, he was famous for his anticorrtaption campaigns. Yet, despite rcgrxlar speeches as president about the need to root out corruytic~n,memc~iristsreport a tendency in Yeltsin to avoid following up on reports of corrrrption in his administration.""Xesignation, fatigue, and a lack of ideas about how to accomplish his goals-in Moscow he had been frustrated in his efhrts and befuddIed at the seemingly unending scope czf corruption8('-may have combined to deter him from tackling corrapti~n.'~ If such was the case, it vvo~lldbe symptomatic of still another characteristic of Ueltsin" that hc~bbledhis capacity tcz cr~nsolidatethe policy accomplishments of his presidency. Ele simply did not understand the contradictions between his leadership style and the requirements of administrative rationality, Put differently, he did not tlnderstand that his initiatives tlsualy made the situation w r s e czn that front. Vague decrees that either circumvented parliament or violated the constitution had the dual effect of lellrring ir-tterpretation up to the burea~lcrats and of undermining the credibility of parliament as a force for oversight or discipline czf the bureaucracy, The result was that the bureaucrats had the intellectual and political space to ignore or reinterpret decrees to their benefit." Indeed, it would not be too harsh to say that Yeftsin was not a programmatic thinker, He understood tile genera! direction in which be was determilled to push the country, And he ~lnderstoodthe general directions he was determilled to avoid taking. But when it came to elaborating cr~mplexprograms that would move the country forward toward the preferred end-state, Uettsin fell short. He admitted as much regardir~geconomic reform in his semnd book of memoirs, published in Russian in 1984; but he excised the admission from the English translation that was pubfished abroadEkWtherXxussian memoirists (among them one of Yeltsin" foreign policy advisers) have asserted that Yeltsin lacked a pczlitical strategy or philosok3hy of transfc~rmation;"some have cited his frequent bouts of depression czr his native ambivalence as the causes of his squandering of political opportunities." Whatever the sources of Yeltsin's policy choices, the implications for policy were clear: programmatic incoherence, Similarly, YeXtsin7sconscious strategy of balancing and playing off factions against each other helped him to maintain his political autonomy as the ultimate arbiter and allowed him to maintain a broad and shifting centrist political base, But it also left his programs hostage to political considerations, which usuaily resulted in a counterproductive alternation of policy directions rather than a consistent prclgram based on an appreciation of the interdependence among policy reatms, Yeltsin seems not to have understood a key requirement of successful transhrmational leadership: finding a workable balance between macro- and microinstitution-building; between the achievement of near-term ends and longer-term consolidation czf gains; and b e ~ e e npolitical rationality and programmatic coherence.

Culture, institutions, and inherited circtlmstances are three causal factors that fatalistic observers have pointed ro as determinants of the mataise in post-Soviet Russia. Rather than pin tlze blame on kltsin and his policy choices (or on ixzternational institutions and foreign gcmrnments that pressured hirn tc>adopt some czf these poticies), these analysts argue that the inheritance bequeathed to Russia in 1"32 would have led to an unhappy outcome, regardless of the best efforts of those in power from 1992 to 1998. From this perspective, failures on the microorganizational front should have been expected. The evidence discrsssed in this chapter cannot- disprove this counterfactual claim. But it does point to policies embraced in 1992-1998 that exacerbated the negative features czf the inheritance and created a still more fragile structure of public administration. Moreover, it highlights the teadershiy style of Boris Yeltsin: personalism, short-term political rationalit~r,and macroinstitutionbuilding geared toward preventing a communist restoration-all to the detriment of microinstitt~tion-building, Are &Itsin's perspectives and personality unique to hirn? Or do they reflect a broader IXussirtn "type" of leader and leadership that w s a product of the situation? Certainly; the kind of personalistic leadership that kltsin stood for can be found in many member-states of the Commonwealth of Independent States. This suggests that situations of institutional hagmentaticzn, such as followed the collapse czf communism and the USSR, may favor the rise of personalistic leaders, Moreover, vacutlms of politiaf pewer tend tc>favor those who w u l d seize and abuse that power. But instituticznitl fragmentation was common to alnlost all postcommunist countries, whereas only some of them succumbe-d to personalistic leadership and failed tc>build a sr>Iidinstitutional foundation. Perhaps Yeltsin shotlld be ccznceived of as a type czf leader, significantly a product: of his upbringing in Soviet cutture and structures, who abhorred institutionali~edchecks on his leadership ability and was inclined to exploit and abuse the opportunity to aggrandize pc~wer.Once he made that choice, and once he enhrced it in fall 1993, his own fears of the alienation engendered by his actions would lead him continuously to reinforce his p o w r and to keep imagined opponents off balance, From this perspective, personalism m s perhaps good for UeXtsin (as per the goal of saying in czffice), but bad for Ixussia. But how bad was it for Russia? Gotlld the benefits achieved under personalism have been attained without personalistic leadership? Wc>uld a weaker executive have been able to avoid gridlock czr restoration? How do we weigh the positive results of kltsixz's poocies agair-tst the downside? This is not the place to answer that question. But events in Russia in 1998 and 1999 suggest that the tjystem l"eltsin constructed was like a skeleton without ligaments: prone to collapse when it loses its artificial supports or when it meets countervailing force, The organizational ystem indeed collapsed, and society did not rush to fill the vacmtlm, either for good or for evil. The country has remained relatively stable (i.e., stagnant) since then. We slzaX1 see whether that situation lasts.

An earlier drafi of this cllapter wis presented at the confcrerltce ""Russia on the Eve of the 21st Century*"in Berkeley, California, May 14-15, 1999. Part ofthe chapter was published as George W Ifreslat~er,""Bris k"e13tsinas Patriarch,""Post-Soviet Agairs (April-June 1999): 186-200. I would like to thank ltobin Brooks, 1,eonicS Kil, Matthew Bencke, and Ilya Viinkovetsky for valuable research assistance; the Garnegie Corporation of New \iork for financial support; and participa~ltsat the May 1999 ccjnference for their comments.

1. This statement was omitted from the English-language edition, Baris kitsin, The Slr~ggkefarRussia (New York, 1994); see p. 145. 2 , See Douglass C:, North, It~stz't~irinns, Institutional Change, and Economic I""erfarma?za (New R r k , 1990); Richard Hofstadter, Tke Idea of u h r t y System (Rerkeley, 1970); 'bliilliam Kiker, &deraEi?;m: Origifz, 238,

12. For fuller documentation and discussion off"eItsil1" patriarchal style, see George W. Ureslauer, ""Koris Yeltsir~as ktriarch,'"Post-Soviet Anairs (April-June 1999). 13. Vyacfieslav Kostikov, Ronzun s prezident-om: Zapiski press-sekreturia f Moscow, 19971, 8,25, 14. Ibid., 157,278. 15, Firaunciak Times, September 16, 1397. 16. Valerii Streletskii, Mrukobcrsiye (Moscow, 1998), fast page, unnumbered. Mote also the falitowing observation by a Russiar~journalist: ""Presidential poIicy has long been a farnib business, in which Yurnashev is admitted with the ri&ts of a relative" "leksandr Gamov; in Kornsa~zol"sya pruljdu, July 8, 1998). What Garnov missed is that in Yeitsin's political family, relatives did not have ""rights:" 17. Oleg 13. Poptsov, Khroniku vretnyun tsarya Borisa (Berlin, 1995>,269, 18. Fyodcor BurIatsh*interview, Moscow, June 1998. 19. See Kostikov, Rowran. During an interview with me in Moscow in June 1998, an erstwhile presidentiaj aide expiained that in the early 1390s, Yeltsin ""loved" his jlaung advisers and they ""toved"" him in returxz. 20. Korxhahv, Baris YeE'fsin, 223, 2 1. Ibid., 63, 22. Ibid., 243. 23. Strcletskii,,Mrakobesiye, 24. 24. Kor~hakov,Boris YeZVsin, 358, 25, Viktor M. Baranets, Yel2sin i )/ego genera& (Mosc~ow~ 1998), 230, 170,248-249. '"l'his i-righly detailed memoir is writtell in a way that suggests a real effort to be objective, aithough it also draws blunt coxlclrrsiox~s. 26. Ibid., 226-223; Kostikov, Runzun, 328-33 1;. 27. Baranets, YelYsin i yegu genera@s77, 122. 28. Yegor Gaidar, Clni porazheniy ipobed (Mascow, 1996), 107-108, 333-334; Korzhakoq Baris Yel%sin,52-53, 29, Kc~stikc~v~ Roman, 347. 30. Kor~i-xakov, Boris Velvsin,81-82. 3 1, Ibid., 253-254, 32. Ibid., 82, This anecdote was corroborated by orl-rer presidential associates (none of them admirers of Konhakov) whom I interviewed in Moscow in June 1998. 33, Korzllakav, Boris VelYsl'n, 54. As Korzhakav notes, the notion that shef b-darit (the chief or patron gives a gift) was supparted by k"eltsir13spractices durir~ghis Sverdfovsk days as welf. 34, Kostikov, Roman, 2 16-2 17; Et~geneHuskey, Presidential Power in Rznssla (Ammonk, N.V., 1999); Anatol Liever~,Chechnya: Rmbstone of Kzcssiun Power (New haver^, 1997), 171; Victor M. Sergeyev, The MGld East: Crime and Lawlessness in Post-fitnn-rtlnisr Rrlssiu (Armonk, N.Y., 1998), 117-118. Huskey reported that Finance Minister Lifshits had iarnented that Yeltsin did not understand the economy ""ad tries to help everyone . . . ,but some people need tr>be imprisoned rather than hefyed? and that Ecoxlomic Minister Yasixl i-rad complained that Yeltsin had ""his favorite directors who can open any doors" Presiden tial Powr, 57, 137). 35. Gaidar, Dni porazjzenly ipobed, 183-1 84, 36. Kostikov, Rumnra, 306-307; see also Idoptsov, Khraniku ljrewzyun aurya Barisa, 283. 37. Kc~stikov,Roman, 304.

38. Fynzmunistn(September-October 1997). 57. Stepher1 E.. Hanson and JeffreyS. Kopstein, ""The WeimarlRussia Comparison:" Post,"iovietAflairs (July-Seyternber 1997):252-283, 58, Yeltsin, The Struggle? f 39-140; see also 148: ""Unfortunately, the law-enforcemex'i~ agencies are adapting very stt>wlyand poorly tc~this new crime phenomenon. That's the typical Russian style."

59,Xbid,, 6,18--19,7, 60. Ibid., 17, 109. 61. h he put it in introducing the reform ffovetskap Russiya, October 29, 1991): ""The time has come to act decisive15 firmly, without hesitation . . . .The period rsf movement wit11 small steps is aver . . . .A big reformist breabhrough is necessary.'%s translated and cluoted in Anders Axlurid, How X U ? ~ S ~Recan~e U a Market EcononIy (Wahington, T>,wedYeltsin to exercise ultimate contrt~lover his bureaucracy, including military oEcialdorn. Every mixzor decision had to be processed by a ~nultitudeof orgar~izationsand administrative departments and only then submitted to the president for final approval. W~ers,kltsin was incapacitated, the situation became even uvorse. Many of the most pressix~gprc~blernsof strategic or tactical importance never got salved ar~dkept accumulating. See aka L,irrven (Chechnyu, 296299) for a case study of the impact of this feadership style on military reform in Russia. 76. In the w(>rdsof Kostikctv (Komntz, 306-307): ""Ccoming into his oEce, I often found him seated behind an empty table in deep, morose thought. He missed his earlier rote of "Director of all of Russia: And it seemed that [he] was losing his head in the face of the scale of the deeds he enumerated for l-rimself in his Constitution.'Xostikov also reported that during his entire period as president of Russia, kltsin was in pllysical pain from a variety of ailments, including severe back and leg pain (Ibid., 196)----an observation supported by k;;nrzhakc>v(Roris VeEkain, 202). 77. Korzhakov (Boris Vel?tsin, 310) reports that in fall 19% Prime Minister Clierxlomyrdin began tqing to persuade k"eItsir3 to grarit him more responsibilities and duties in order t;o lighten the presidential wrM~jad.Yeltsin, according to Korzhakuv, was deeply suspicious and feared that Cherr~omyrdinmight be seeking more formal power or be planning to run against him in 1996. 78. Personal communication, nor for attribution. 79. Strcletsgi, ,Mrakobesiye, 155-1 54; Kc~stikcIv,Roman, 2 16, 80. He admitted as much in public speeches at the time, and later summarized his dilemma in kltsin, Agaivzsi ihe Gmin, I I 5-1 10, 81. In an ur~publishedbook mar~uscript,Jexy Hough has suggested anorl-rer passible reason, grounded in politicat rationafity: that by implicating a wide range of officials and politicians in corruption, Yeltsin enhanced the political elite's dependence on his staying in office to protect them fmm prosecution. 82. This point is made and documented in Sergeyev, The \"liild East, 84f6 and in Biryukov and Sergeyev, Russian Politics in ;li.nnsition, 260-269, 83. See the quotation from Yeltsin that heads this chapter, 84. Poptsov, KI~ro-onikavrenzyon, 43 1; Kostikov, Roman, 300-301, 323-324; and Aslund, How Russia Became u Markel Ec-onomy, 91. 85. Gaidar, Dni porazheniy i pobod, 106-107,3 10-314; Kostikov, Roman, 141-142, 1648-3 69, 174; Ko~hakov? Baris Yel'tsin, 315,

Russia's Second itics, Law3 and Stabi Robert Sbarfet Union College

A

s Russia enters the twnty-first century, one of its main objectives cczntinmes to be the creation of a stabte society ruled by Xaw. Ancilfary to this endeavar is the ongoitzg task of institt~tian-building,which is an essential part of the larger, longer-term process of democratic state-building; in essence, the building or restructuring 01 care legal institutions into a viable legaf system. These include such familiar instit~~tions of law as the courts, the prosecutor" offices, the bar, and rl-re law cczdes and statutes. A rule-of-law society atso requires other supportive institutions, such as police, a prison system, and law schoots. Absent these cornpanents of an integral legal process, it would be difficult to contemplate the construction of a state's regulative and adjudicative netwc~rks,not to mention its extractive and administrative capacities, which also are defined by law. In this chapter, I focus on the Russian Constitutional Court CRCC)-one of the newer additions to Rt~ssiakspectrum of legal institutic~ns,and one that has grown in stature and importance within the political system, This has especially been the case of the second Constit~~tional Court, which was first convened in 1995 and has gradually accrued to itself the values and attributes that etuded its ill-fated predecessor, the first Constitutional Court (which functioned from X99 t to $993).These valtlcs include the accrual of moral prestige and politial capital, along with the attributes of institutional stability and jurisprudential predictability Subtly but steadily?the second Court has gained respect and even some deference from the power centers of the Russian polity, the executive and legislative branches. This promising phenomenon, with its positive potential for Russids patidcat development, bears watching.

Prologue and Questions The new R~lssianConstitution of 1993 is a political document framed in the language of law As such, it represents a "power map" or outtine of the configuration and distribution of politial power in the state, in society, and itz state-society relations. Because a democratic constitution is esscmtially a metapolitical framework f'or the day-to-d;z)l operation of the polity, it necessarily requires explication, translation, and interpretation if it is to provide effective parameters for institutional and ir~dividualbehavior in a given sociey, In a civil law ystem, constitutic~nalexplication is suppiled by legal scholars who produce learned commentaries; in a common law system, this work falls to judges, who make case law. Xn both systems, cr~nstitutionsare translated into the laws needed for the got.ernance of a socieq. Finally, the function czf interpreting the constitution in matters of dispute czr uncertair-ttyfalls to the high courts-in the United States, to the Supreme Court; in Europe (ir~cludingRussia), to special tribunals called cr~nstitutionalcrItlrts, Thus, the Itussian Constitution charges the Constitutional Court with the taslc of closely readitzg, studying, anaiyzing, and authoritatively itzterpreting the fundamental law in cases of disputes between qualified parties as well as in instances czf ambiguity or uncertainty in the constitutional text, The Court" purpclse has been to resolve disputes withitz the constitutional framework and to help ensure the smooth and peaceful operatic~nof the political riystem by clarif).ing and occasionally even emending a partictrlar constitutional article. The demands on the RCC have been especially heavy sitzce its inception in 1991, as Russia has made its way through a rather difficult transition from political authoritarianism and economic centrafism toward a democratic polity and a market economy, m e r e a s the first RCC struggled with a much-amended, patchwork constitution, the second Court" task has been complicated by the fact that the new constitution contains a number of gaps, omissions, and ambiguities. If a constitution distills a society" pootical choices about power, then the institution created to interpret the doc~lmenthas a political character; As a scholar of the U.S. Supreme Court has bluntty stated: "The [U.S.] Constitution is a political document; it serves political ends; its ir-tterpretationsare political acts.""" French scihc~lar,taking into csnsideratic~nEuropean experience with judicial review, has argued that constitutional courts have a "hybrid, serni-judicial, semi-political nature.'%e added that these courts certair-tiy perform familiar judicial functions; but since, in addition, "they operate as mediators, implementing a system of checks and balances . . . they are also highly political bodies.""2 One of the RCC justices has gone even furthex; characterizing the Court as ""bth quasi-judicial body and quasi-legislative body" in the sense that it functions as both a negative and positive legislator in striking down unconstitutional rules and creating new legal norms,"t was in this spirit that a Russian constitutic~nallaw text described the RCC: "The Constitutic~nalCourt is a legal instittltion. Since it operates in a system of intersecting legal and pclliticitll relations, applying its decisions on the basis of the Constitution which has politico-legal

content and meaning, the Constitutional Cc3urt therefore also ftrnctions as a politica-legal ir-tstitution."% leading Russian Constit~~tional Court justice concurred, calling the Gzurt ""synthesis of a governmental agency, a juridical institution, and a [soc.ial] science research institute.""" The short history of tile RCC can be redted briefly The first post-Sovid, Russian republic operated under the heavily revised 1978 Constitution of the Russian Republic, which prc~videdf'ar parliamentary supremacy as well as a strong presidency, Due to political and personal differences among the principal actors, legislative-executive relations were extremely cr~nflictuat,causing serious political instability and eventually degenerating into a zero-sum political game. Throughout the life of the first post-Soviet republic, the first Constitutional Court sought tc>mediate disputes and conflicts b e ~ e e nthe branches of pclwer, but it eventually was caught in the politicat crossfire. Having prevailed over parliament by military force in October 1993, President Boris Yeltsir-t suspended the RCC, declaring that becatlse of its politicization and tilt tomrd the legislature, the Coart had contributed to the instability and collapse of the republic. From the ashes of October emerged the new Constitution (that of the second Russian republic), which was followed in mid-1994 by a significantly revised Constitutional Court statute. The complement of justices from the first KCC was grandfathered into the second Court, but newly created seats had to be filled, After many months of debate over judicial nominations and appointments, in March 1995, the new justices were seated and the second RCC got under way, ending a hiatus of nearly a year and a half. During its five years of existence, the second Court has quietly ptlrstled its legal tasks, while maintaining a cc~nsidesabXy tower profile politically tl~xndid its predecessor, For various reasons, the second Russian republic has been marked by relative political stability-or to paraphrase Ye&Gurr, the persistence of political institutit~ns, tcz which I would add the existence of mechanisms affording tile possibility of orderly social change over tixne,To what extent has the second Constitutional Court cc~ntributedto this outcome? Has the Cotlrt become a responsible part of the third branch, playing its role in the system of checks and baiances slc~wlyemerging under the Constitution's sparation of powers doctrine? Or, as its critics say, has the second RCC becr~me"the fifth wheel of the carriav of Russian atltc>craq~"?' To answer these questions, let us compare the first and second Courts far the purpose of highlighting changes ir-t the current Court's judicial structtrre, functions, and rc~les(as well as incumbents), and its res~lltingjuris~zrudencesince 1995,At the heart of this investigation is a criticaf inquiry as to haw well the second Constitutional Co~lrthas handled the potentially fractious mix of politics and law in Russia" continuing, tumultuous transition.

Comparative Constitutional Justice To determine to what extent the second Constitutional Court has contributed to or detracted from the political stability of the second Russian republic, X briefly

compare the experiences of the first and second Courts in terms czf (1 the constitutions under which they operated, and their respective conceptions of constitutic~nalcr)ntrc>l;(2) the statutes that guided their wcxk; (3) the judicial and extrajudicial behavior czf the justices-especially the respective chief justices; (4) the ensuing patterns of jurisprudence of the two Courts, emphasizilzg the effect of the second Court" decisions on the goal of advancing the rule of law in Russia; and (5) how well the Zorkin Court and the Tumanov-Bagtai Court have handfed the relationship of law and politics itz their work.

The C~nstituti~naE Frameworks The first Constittltic~nalCourt labored tlnder the much-revised 1978 Constitution, which had been amended over 300 tit-xles in the final years before the USSR expired in 1991. As prwiously mentioned, a maitz feature of this document was its endowment of the senior body of the tm-tier parliament with the power to amend the Ccznstitution legislatively by a two-thirds majority, Xt was in fact through parliamentary amendxnent that the first RCC was given constitutional life, Its enabling statute, the law on the Court, was passed in 1991, and was subsequently amended a year later to permit verification of the constitutionitflty of political partieskharters itz connection with the impending Communist party caseab Given parliament" leverage ewer the Court" scr~nstitutionaland statutory status and the ease czf amending either document, it was no surprise that the first RCC adopted ia pro-legislative tilt in its decisions from the outset. In crlntrast, the second RCC has w r k e d under the 1993 Constitution-a document not without pr~bfemsbut nonetheless a model of clarity and coherence in comparison with its predecrtessor. This constitution is oriented to favor the presidency, and it was designed to be very dificult to amend. The statute establishing the second Court, a federal constitutional law requiring supermajorities in the bicameral parliament, was enacted in 1994, the first year of the second rep~zbiic, Thus, the second G ~ u rhas t little fear that its constitutional authority or its statutory powers will be altered without an exceptional consensus. Flowever, the Court has had reasan to be concerned that the chief executive may use his control over the brethren3 ample fringe benefits, as l"e1tsin did during the first republic, to express his pleasure czr displeasure with a particrrlar ruling or decisionitf trend. The most significant change fmm the 1978 to the 1993 Constitution was that the RCC cr~uldno longer take up cases on its own initiative. Many observers felt that the so-catted auto-initiative provided by the 1978 Constitution had led the first Court deep into the trollbled waters of Russian transitional politics>where it eventually foundered. Under the 1993 Constitutic~n,the second Court may carry czut judicial review only in cases that come to it from petitioners granted judicial standing.Yn Xiell of the lost itzitiative powel; the second Court has been constitutic~nallyendowed with a new interpretive f~lnction.'"On petition from the president, the government, either house czf parliament, or the legislative bodies of the federation subjects, the Court may: provide authoritative interpretations of the

Constitrrtion when a particrrlar section of text gives rise to ambiguity czr uncertaixzty of meanir-tg. Western observers have agreed that the Courtk new function of issuing binding interpretations is ""pcllitical""" and potentially formidable.I2 As Sarall Reynolds, a major student of the Court, has observed, ""The interpretive role of the Court is likely to be a very powerft~lone and of very great importance in the development of a; state that is hnctlonal, stable, just, and democratic;\""Srofessor Vladirnir Tt~manov,the first chief justice of the second Court, expressed satisfaction that the new interpretive authority wotlfd allow the Cotlrt to mclve away f'rorn the literalism czf Soviet judicial tradition and toward a style of interpretation more open and more conducive to translating constitutional cla~lsesinto reasonable, pragmatic legal rules for everyday matters of governance. When asked whether the Court might exceed its new mandate to interpret the Constitution and instead create new constittrtional norms, Chief justice Tumanov acknowledged that norm creatic~n,tlsually on fairly narrrlw questions, wuXd be inevitable in the interpretive process, This w u I d be especially the case when the ir-tterpretiveft~nctionwas employed "in fillixzg gaps in the constit~~tional textn-a procedure that 7"umanovdubbed "wuplementary interpretation."""Subsequently, Justice 1FJikcoXai Vitruk confirmed Tumanovk position, adding that the new constitutional norms created w o ~ ~be l dprimarily "proced~ral."'~ Another associate justice, Boris Ebzeev, explicitly pointed out that the Ourt's decisions in interpreting constlttrtional clauses ""essentially become part czC the Constitution? He also called attention to an aside by Tumanov during his response quoted earlier-to wit, that because the Constitution is a rigid document difficult to formally amend, the new interpretive function provided essential flexibitity; Justice Ebzeev emphasized this point, argrxing that the Co.crrt5 iinterpretations lead to the ""dent transfr~rmation\~>f the Cc>nstitutic>n,i.e., changing it without amending the constitutional text:""" Before moving on, it s h o ~ ~be l d noted that beca~lscpetitions for bir-tdir-tginterp ~ t a t i o n smay only arise from the political branches of the Russian system, the Court's new power represented not cznly an opportunity but alscz a challenge to be used judiciousiy. Mir~dfi~l of this, the justices developed ir-tternal criteria for vetting requests fc3r csnstitutionaf interpretation-in efkct, cr~nstraintsdesigned "to prevent [the Court from] being drawn into political conflicts."17 entailed ft~ndaLastliy, the transition fmm the 1978 to the 2993 Constit~~tion mental changes in the KCC's status in the riystem of constitutional control as well as changes in the nature of the process of judicial review in IXussia. After the cotlapse of the first republic and the suspension of the first Court, the ft~tureof the KCC in the Russian political ystern was tlncertain. The Courtk reputation had been tarnished by events, and its institutional prestige was at a low ebb, President Yeltsi~l'shandpicked dra&smen,who were rushing ia pro-presidential draft constitution to completion in fall 1993, were considering absorbing the RCC into the Supreme Court, as the latter's special bench far constitutional questions. As then Acting Chief Justice Vitruk reported, this proposal was vigorously resisted by

himself and his brethren, who subsequently successfully argued and lobbied for the retention of the Constitutional Court as an autonomous body and for its inclusion in the draft ccznstittltion. Flowever, the legacy of the first Court had certain consequences for its successor. The president's constitutional draftsmen demoted the RCC from its status as the supreme j~tdicialbody of ccznstitutic~nalcontrolmto that of coequal partner with the Supreme Court and the Higher Commercial Court,"TTh change was more than semantic and symbolic. In the first republic, Russia had borrowed Europe" centralized model for judicial review of the cr~nstitutionalityof legislation. This was the exclusive dczmain of the first RCC, Hawever; for the purpclse of redrlcing the Court" preeminence and power in the political system, and presrrmably to lighten its immense caseload as well, the new Constitution left open a door for the other high courts to encroach upon the RCG's previously singular prerogative, This was accomplished through the demotion described above, cornbined with the intrr3dtlction of the principle of the direct applicability of constitutlonaf norms consistent with democratic constltuticznal practice.2f' As a result, the Russian S~zpremeCaurt openly challenged the RCC's erstwhile hegemony in csnstitutionaf judicial review. The second Constitutional Court did not remain passive, but instead insisted on its primacy in the constitutional verification process, in the tradition of European constitutional tribunals. A livedy exchange of dicta between the two high courts ensued, with justices from both courts entering the lists in the learned law journals, The Supreme Court fired the first shot with a decree or ""giding instruction" in late $995,which directed the lower crlurts, under the guise of the direct applicatic~nof the Constitution, to carry out judicial review with the option but not the requirement of subsequently referring the case to the RCC2" Replies from the KCC included a rebuttal frtjm retired Chief justice TumanoIv, who insisted that referral from the ordinary courts shoutd be "obligatory," not opti~nal.~' The current chief jrtstice, Marat Baglai, responded sharply, saying that "there is no basis to talk about the Supreme Court 3ablplicating\or "reempting the powrs of the Constitutional Court.'"' The nearly full bench of the RCG, in turn, issued a strong rebuttal to its brother courts in the Judicial Kevie1.v case, in which the Legislative Assembly of the Karetian Repubtic had petitioned the KCC to interpret the interrelationship bef~veenitself and the other high courts, the Supreme Corlrt and Higher Commercial Court, as defined in Chapter T (on the "budicial Brancfr"")of the Constitution. In the majc~rityopinion (with two dissenting), announced in June 1998, the second Court strongfy asserted its ""eclusive authority to examine the constitutionality of normative acts enumerated in Articfe 125.2.a & b of the Russian Onstitutic~n."'~ Just a year earliex; Peter Maggs, a high!y respected specialist in IXussian civil law and judicial practice, had obser-\ped""broad possibilities for the exercise of constitutional jurisdiction by the cczmmercial cczurts" in addition to the longer-term trend underway since 1993 in the courts of ordinary jurisdiction." In a magisterial study of the Supreme Court" jjurispmdence, another American scholar noted that in the

second republic, Rtrssia had moved away from the centralized model of judicial review "to a system marked by elements of diffusion and redrindancy:" and concluded that ""the Constitution ncw speaks thrrsugh two tiltirnate judicial vs~icesin lxussia, with the benefits and disadvantages that such a dud system might be expected to provide,""" Although the second Court" 1998 ruling, in theouy, constituted a binding interpretation on the subject, it remained to be seen whether it could successfully stem the emergent trends toward concurrent judicial review, For ir-tstance,just several months afier this ruling, the Supreme Cotrrt issued a decision directly challenging the RCC-a challenge that met with sharp criticism permanent representative to the Constitutional Court, who from the State U~~ma's declared it ""yoceduralfy untenablel""7~tiU~ the qtlestion must be asked: Will the KCC ruling on the books in this instance becczme the law in actic>n?

The Constlttrtional Court statrrtes of 1991 and 1994, reflecting the respective constitutions empowering the institution, operationaliized the necessary broad strokes of the constiitutionsklauses into the myriad organizational details necessary for institution-bui1di17ggEven before the end of the first republic, the justices of the first RCC, including even the hi&ly activist chief justice, Professor Valerii Zorkin, agreed that the Court" 1991 statute needed revision based on their collective experience on the bench. Atthough events outran the possibility of statutory revision, the gist of the Court" operational problems was later summed up by Acting Chief Justice Vitruk when he said, "The Constitutional Court is not the fire brigadem-a phrase his successor Chief Jrrstlce Tumanov of the secs~ndCourt was later fond of repeating.'" Since the justices themselves, together with representatives of the president and parliament, drafted the bill, which foifslwing committee work, floor debate, and amendment in the State Duma became the $994 Federal Constitutional Law on the Constittitic~nalGIurt, it is not surprising that the spirit of VitruKs criticism found its way into the revised law*In fact, the RCC's jurisdiction was both trimmed and augmented; access to the Court was narrowed; and changes ir-t the institution" internal structure and operations were written into the new statute. Far instance, the Court" jurisdiction over palidcat parties was eliminated, and disputes over jurisdiction and competence among institutional political actors within the separation and division of pcswers were added to the second Qurt's mandate. Alsa, the Court" jurisdiction aver judicial practice was dropped from the 1994 law This erstwhile part of the first Court" jurisdiction bad greatly added to case overload d ~ ~ r i nthe g first republic, as described by Alexander Blankenagel, a prominent German law professor and consuitant to the RCC: The C:~nstitutionalCourt presented itself as the Inaster of all courts: divisioll of labour or h~nction-specificcooperation with the other court system was unacceptable: no confidence in the other courts and their capacities to master tl-re task of in-

terpretation of ordinary law, let afone the application and interpretatiox~of the Gonstitution. So nearly every question, of ordinary law down to tl-re lowest administrative ordinance, of constitutional law up to the basic principles of justice was agproyriated: this was the fight of the fonely foner against the illegalisms and unconstitutionalisnxs everywhere, and tl-re possible deputy sheriffs being just as bad, could not be relied on. "l'he C:onstitutional Court tried to be a judicial everytl~ing:the general colitapse saved it from being submerged by the appt-opriated evevthing,"

Thus relieved of responsibility for the constitutionaf supervision of judicial practice, the second Court was authorized to receive specific case referrafs czn constitutional issues horn judges in the ordinary and commercial courts. Qvcr five years later, hcswever, there have in fact been very few such referrals, perhaps reflecting the trends discussed in the previous section whereby the czther courts tend to be gradually poaching on the second Court's judicial review turf. The rules on standing, or the questicsn of who has access to the second Court, were made more restrictiw. For example, in the first republic any parliamentary deputy who failed to reakze his political objectives in the legislative chamber had the option of turning to the first RCC-thus, to paraphrase one Court justice, turning the Court into a third house of parliament. Under the new rules for the second Court, no fewer than 20 percent of the complement of either chamber of parliament must endorse either a petition for relief or an interyretatic~n.This eff'ecdveliy means that a petition requires a minimum of 90 deputies of the Dlxrna (the lower house), or 35 senators from the Federation Council (the upper house), The 1994 law has also redesigned the Court's internal structure, frtlm the first Court" singte chamber to a plenum czf the full bench and two divisions of roughly equal size. Certain cases are heard only before the full plenum-for example, petitions fcx constitutional interpretation-wherezts other cases are assigned by the chief justice to one or the other division, allowing the second Court to hear two cases simultaaeousljr.This structure generally follows that of the German Constitutis~nalCs~urt,which being widely ct~nsideredthe most successful European constitutional court, had the greatest influence czn the RCC in bath czf its incarnations. However, the Russian Cotrrt did deviate horn the German model in certain respectse3" The new statute atso implemented changes in Court size and in the criteria for judicial selection. The 1993 Constitution enlarged the second Court from 15 justices to 19, In fact, the first Court had only 13 members, the last two seats never having been filled during the nearly WO-yearlife of the Court. Thus, the 1994 law provided for skv seats to be filled before the second Co~lrtco~lldsit, elect its officers, and begin hearing cases. Selection criteria were also tightened, whife judicial tenure was silortened. Under the 1991 law on the Court, anyone 35 years or older was eligible for appoir-ttment and carrid enjoy life tenure until the mandatory retirement age of 65, The 1994 law raised the age minimum tcs 40; required that a judicial candidate have 15 years czC legal experience; and limited tenure to czne twelve-year term or age 70, whichwer occurs first.

At its first sitting, in early 19"St5,the composition of the second Court was something of an anomaly-the original I 4 justices served rlnder the ""lk tenure'' rule of the 1991 law>whereas the new appointees were limited to a fixed term but coutd serve five years longer under the 1994 statute. As the Court was still under a cloud from the events of the first republic, the president and parliament apparently sought older and wiser or at least more experienced jurists for the new Court, and intended to keep it on a shorter leash. In the first republic, justices of the first RCC were chosen by the Congress of Russian f2etsple%Deputies upon nominatic~nby political parties, parliamentary f'actions, and other institutions, Xn the second republic, the 1994 law provided for judicial nomir-tatianby the president on the basis of recommendations frorn a judicial qualifications commission, and fc3r finat appointment by simple majority vote of the Federation Council. The enlargment of the second Court, ostensibty to accommodate the German two-chamber division (although the German Court has only 16 members), was prrhably actualy intended to allow f2resident Yeltsin to "pack""the Court with friendly justices, since a majority of the original 23 members had been opposed ta him even before his suspension of the first Court. UeXtsink court paclcing plan, howver, was thwarted by the senators of the upper house, who drlri~lgfall $994 ref~zsedto support four of the president's most liberal nominees, three of whom were resubmitted and rejected twice by the Federation Council." Thus, it toalc nearly seven months to fiXf the six vacancies on the second Court-a task that by law was to be accomplished within 40 days of the signing of the new statute (an unrealistic time period, by U.S. standards). The 1994 Court statute had been signed into law in July 1994, and the nineteenth justice, Marat Baglai, was not appointed until February 2995, A final notewcsrthy change from the 1991 to the 1994 RCC statute concerned the powers of the chief justice within the Court. Under the first Court law, the chief justice could hold the leadership position until mandatory retirement from the Corlrt or vc~funtztryresignation from the post. In the meantime, the chief had wide discretionary authority over the hiring and firing of the professional staff that made up the Court" Secretariat, The 1994 law made the chief jrlsticc more accountable to the brethren. Staff can be hired and fired only on the advice and consent of the plenrzm; the chief justice is elected for a three-year tern, with a two-term limit; and the chief justice can be removed horn the post by his or her fello~wjustices. Acting Chief Justice Vitruk" verdict on the first RCC law was most apt, Noting that the legislative drahsmen borrowed extensively and eclectically from foreign models, he concluded that the 2991 statute overbuift the first Cr>tlrt,"which T11e drafters of the 1994 could not bear the weight of its own ~onstruction."~~ stattrte sorlght to avoid past mistakes, most notably the descent into the cauldron of partisan politics-aprrspos of which the cr~authorsof the first Western casebook on Russian law shreMrdXy observed that although a constitrrtional court cannot avoid some exposure to politics due to policy considerations, and ""lbca~lse

constitutional adjudication is always value-laden, procedural rules may prevent unnecessary politicization" of the constitutional process. fn the case of Russia, they pointed to the stripping away of the Court" previous right to initiate its own cases as one particularly important procedural safeguard incorporated into the second RCCei3

Judicial and Efixajudicial BeharrJor Conventional wisdom holds that the suspension of the first RCC was largely dtre to Chief Trrstlce Zorkink proclivity for extr;ljiudiciat behatrior, which had drawn him and the Court deep into the ttrrbulent politics of the day. There is indeed much truth to this view>but it neglects the design flaws and dysfuncticznal features buiXt into Russia" first attempt at constitutional adjudication, which also contributed to the Court's political collisions and final end. As f have written elsewhere, Zorkin was as much a ""judicial politician" as a jurist, but that alone did not doom the first RCC, Structural and hnctlonat problems embedded in the institutionai design of the first Court must also be weighed in the balance.I4 As we shall see in this section, extrajudicial behavior did not cease with Zorkin" pressxrred resignation from the chief justiceship in October 1993,As atready noted, Vitl-uk,the acting chief justice during the long ixzterregnrzm between the first and second Courts, was himself occasionally guilty of extrajudicial pronouncements that crossed the line between law and pcllitics. The difference was that Xtruk was on the side of the angels: To wit, he was saying the right thixzgs, or at least what the power brokers wanted to hear as they contemplated the fate of the Constitudonaf Court in itussian politics. To his credit, Acting Chief Justice Vitl-uk's extrajudicial commentary played a major role in saving the Court and affording it a second opportunity to help steer a safe crlurse for Russia to the future, Part of the problem was that many Russian judicial players co~lXdnot easily discern the line between appropriate judicial conduct and inapprrzpriate extrajudicial remarks, given their earlier sociaIizrttion into the highly politicized Soviet legal process and their success in advancing up the hierarchy. An Austrian specialist on the RCC caught the essence of the prrhlem exceptionally well: "Rtrssian Constittrtionitl Court justices are products of the Communist namenklatura system. They would not have reached their positions without the political loyalty and adaptability required by that systed'" An added difficulty in staffing the RCC in both the first and the second rep~lblicshas been that most of the appointees were legal academics with long careers in academe and no judicial experience or understanding of judicial temperament and ibehavior, Of the original X3 justices, only one had any practicat legal experience-in his case, as a prosecutol-,Was it any wonder that one of their ntrmber dubbed their early decisions ""academicreyortsm"!"Ch six new appointees of the seccznd republic brought to the second G u r t its first and for a time its only professional judge. Later, after the mandatory retirement of Chief Justice TLI-

manov at age 70 and the death of Jrrstice Ernst Ametistov in 1998, the Court acqkxired two more justices with prior jt~dicialexperience, The argument here is not that the cr~nstitutionalbench primarily requires experienced judges, The Court is after all both a legal and political institution; hence, jt~sticeswith political experience and a broader legal theoretical bent are also needed. The point remains that 17 of f 9 justices on the Tumanov Court, and subsequentty 15 of 19 on the BagXai Court, were talented jurists but had little or no practical experience of the law before their appoir-ttments, Let us turn to the subject of ho>wthe chief justices of the secr~ndKCC acquitted themsetves judicially and extrajudicially, Leaving aside Zorkin, whose performance is wd1 known, we will focus for a moment on the successive chiefs of the second Court-Tumansv (1995-1997) and Baglai (1997-present), Although elected chief justice by a modest mgority of his peers ( f 1-81, Trimanov may have been the ideal navigator to steer the new second Corrrt through the early part of its institutionaf journey. At age 68 when appointed to the Court, Ttrmanot. was destined to retire in two years and therefore nicety fit the role of short-term, interim chief. A promir-tent legal academic expert in ""burgeois'Ylega1 philosophy> with only brief service as a legislator prior to his elevation to the Court, Tumancw brought neither judicial experience nor managerial slcills to the bench.'6 M a t he did bring, however, was much needed by a divided Court facitzg a skepticaf political elite. Tumano3v was a wc>rl&ly,politically sophisticated chief justice with good diplomatic skilis, who well understood that the resuscitated RCC would have to re-earn the trust and confidence of the power brokers to ensure its longer-term survival and institutionai g r o ~ hThe , theme of his brief tenure was to avoid inciting ""re presidential administration against a still weak court"".4--not a brave posture but probably a politically realistic one for 2995 and 1996, the latter of which was a presidential ejection year. If Tumanovk administration of the Court had a mantra, it would have been the "gcjlden mean,""his f w r i t e approach to any problem facing the Cotrrt during his incumbency" A critic, scornful of his timid judicial navigation, later derided Tumancw as he left office for his ""golden halfiertrtedness:""" Professor Marat PSagXai, Tumanov's successor as chief justice, could not have been mclre digerent. A btzsinesslike labor law academic with some administrative experience, Baglai was described as "the least politicized justice who suits everyone.""Wwas the KCC3sthird chief justice, elected in early 1997 to serve a threeyear term. In his inaugural remarks to the press, Chief Justice Baglai equated the second Constitutional Court with a ""slurdy ship" that w u t d stay the course to "pumote the stabilizatian of the constitutional system, and most irngortantly; to prcrstect the rights of our citizens,"" h spite of this restrained rhetoric, the new chief justice struck out on a far more chatlenging course than his predecessor, Extrajudicially as well, the t ~ r achief justices behaved quite difirently Tumanov made n(>effoxt to be publicly discreet about sensitive cases in which the president had a vital political stake, On the contrary, he used his regutar press conferences to signal the presidential administration on his pro-Ye1tsi1-ttilt and to

explain how he expected to lead the Court in particutar cases. He first did this in spring 2995, concerning the politically charged Chechen case, and then agaixz several months later at a press appearance where he candidly aired his yrcladministration views on a pending petition related to the parliamentary elections later that year. fn both. instances Tumanov violated the 2994 Court law, which fc3rbids justices to disc~lsspublicly cases that are either befare the Court or may be headed to the Court, Baglai has been more circrzmspect in prlbiic appearances. Xn a radio interview in late 1998, as he was discussing the Court" work on individual rights ases, he referred to a public issue still of concern to many: the question of whether rooms in a communal apartment could be privatized. Then he qkxickly added: "This case is currently being cr~nsideredby us. That's s h y at the moment f cannczt tell you anythix-rgan this issrre.3"q"Compared to two liberal justices who openly spoke out against the Communist party presidential candidate in $996while ostensibly addressing a constitutional law issue, the chief justice has been very careful in his other extrajudicial interventions as weff, addressing the specific issue at hand in a careft11and factual manner. All of Baglai" ytlblic statements have been ftrmly grounded in the Constitution. Sometimes his remarlis supported the president" position on an issue; on other occasions, he spoke critically of the administration in his defense of the Constitution. For instance, on several occasic~nsduring the late 199Qs,Baglai pubiicly argued against various proposals to amend the Constitution, a principled position on which he happened to be in concurrence with the president. On another issue, he occ~lpiedthe middle grczund, wlcrlming the prospect of a Kussian-BeXarusian union but also pointing out the constitutional obstacles and implications that would need to be considered, Qn the other side of the political ledger, during the temporary governmental crisis in spring 1998 over Ueftsink repeated nominations of Sergei Kirienkcj as prime minister, Bagtai ended public speculation on a possible dissolution of the Duma should it reject the candidate a third time, stating that dissolution wczuld not be just an option but a ccznstitutionaX imperative for the president, 0x1that same occasion, he also firmly rejected a presidential adviser's suggestion that stzotlld dissolution occur, &itsin could issue a decree changing the federat law on parliamentary elections prior to the constitrrtionaliy mandated elections to the successor Duma. The chief justice denied that the president had any right to unilaterally change a law under the Constitutiori, saying, "A presidential decree abrc~gatinga law is impossibte in our country,""*Conversely9in early summer $998,as the government was trying unsuccessfully to push a package of anticrisis legislation throrlgh the lower hcluse, Chief Justice Baglai publicly reaffirmed that both the constitution and an earlier RCC decision supported the president" arltbority ta issue temporary decrees in the absence of prevailing legislation, Although the idea. of a U.S. chief justice speaking extrajudicialliy on a wide range of p~zblicissues would be abhorrent to our more setded legal culture, it is

TABLE 4.1 Classification of Cases Decided by the Russian Constitutianal Courts, 1992-X 998 Type of Case

Zorkin Court

Seyaratiul~of powers

42%

Ixtdividuaf rights

30% 28%

Federalism

Emunov-Btzglaz' Court

possible that in the very different Russian political context Chief Justice Bagiai's periodic sallies into the p~zblicarena in defense of the Constitution might have had the positive effect of encouraging constructive constitutional dialogue bemeen the elites and among the attentive public,

Patterns of Constjtutional.Jurisprudence Russian constitutional jurisprudence can be divided into three types of cases: constitutional or separatirln-of-powers cases; federalism or center-periphery cases; and the wide spectrum of individual rights cases. Using this typology, Table 4.1 shows a comparison of the types of cases decided by the first and second Constitutional Courts, The first set of percentages shclmm was provided by a senior officiaI of the XXCC Secretariat," and the second set are estimates made by Chief Jtzstice BagXai in mid- 1998.45 The first category-separatic~n-c~f-powerscases-is of greatest interest for our examination of the retationship between the RCC and potiticaf stability or instability in Russia. As can be seen above, the Zorkin Court was primarily engaged in what one American judicial o~bserverpresciently called "toot>much heavy lifting"; that is, in cases involving the president, the parliament, and legislative-executive relations, which would eventualk lead to its breakdo~n.~'"nits initial case, in the first month of Russia" past-fc3viet period, the Zorkin Court took on the president on the issue of internal security, Xn that case, given that Chief Justice Zorkin had to privately pcrs~xadeYeltsin to accept the Cotrrt's r u l i ~ ~that g his executive decree merging two internal security agencies was unconstitutional, Zorkin should have known what Jay ahead as IXussia began its transition from autkoritarianism and introduced the concept of judicial. review. Instead, Zorkin continued to lead the new Court headlong into pc~litical conflicts inwlving the other branches of the government. The constitutional process was not prestigious enough, nor was the cloak of law thick enough, to ft~ily mume these rancorrlus conflicts and redtzce them trj quiet legal prrhlerns. Each encounter with the power structures left the Court more frayed, with its initial stock of goodwill further diminished among the elite. Although the purpose of a

constitutional court as first conceived by Austrian legal theorist Hans KeXsen was prixnarily to act as a check on the legislature, ensuring that its o~ltputwas compatible with the ccznstitutic~n,the Zorkin Court in its first 15 months acted mainly as a checlc on the executive branch within the separation-of-powers doctrine. Only in its last six months in 29993 did the Court, by then openly accused of antipresidential bias, hastily turn its jurisprudential spotlight f~lflyon parliament in an attempt tcz redress the imbalance in the public perception of its work, By then, howver, the deeply divided first rep~xblicwas hurtling toward its end, and it was too late for the Zorkin Court trz attempt to regain the legal high ground and the political center. The lessons czf the rise and fatX of the first RCC were not lost on Chief Justice Tt~manovas he assumed leaderslzip of the politically rehabilitated and legally recrznstructed (seccznd) Court in early 1995. The above data, which reflect the full two years of Tumanov" tenure but only the first pear of Baglai" term czf office, nonetheless make evident the second RCC's relative avoidance of collisions with other centers of pczwer in the government. During its first year of operation, the Tumanov Court Xargety addressed narrow issues czf technical jurisprudence in cases involving legislative procedure and the formalities of the constitutional amendment prrxess, along with a ntxmber of individual rights petitions and a few federalism cases. The one great exception was the Chechen case of summer 1995, which arose out of the Russian Federation government" militlirary campaign to rein in its rebeftious C11echen Xkpublic, Tumanov assiduousfy tried to avoid this pailticat hot potato, and failing to do so, telegraphed via the press his pro-presidential position even before the opening hearing. The Chechen case, in which parliament challenged the constitutionality czf YeXtsink war decrees, couXd not have come at a warsc tixne for the second Court, which was then only in its fourth month of existence. The deliberations were further cczmplicated by the nearly concurrent onset of peace negcztiations between the Checher~forces and the Russian government, just across town. Not tc> belabor what is well knozwn, Tumanov and the Court majority succumbed to political expediency, confirming as constitutional President Yeitsin's use of military force in Chechnya. In one of a number of dissents in this case, Justice Zorkin lamented that the Court had ""become a hostage of political ernotionn-a conclusion confirmed by Chief Justice Tumanovk extrajudicial acknowledgment that ""iegal argument was sometimes adjusted to political goals."47 A gratef~~l Eftsin soon after issued a presidential decree shr~weringthe justices and their families with a wide range of fringe benefits and other amenities, including cars, vacations, and shopping vouchers.4' The seccznd and final year of Tumanovk tenure as chief justice was relatively quiet on the separation-of-powers front, with onty an occasional pro-executive decision, such as tl-re Procedural Xrrcgrxlarities Case of 2996. Xn this case, an authoritative interpretation of Article 207-the "kederal taws and the President" clause-was sought by the two houses of parliament over the president" refirsal

to either sign or veto certain passed bills within the time period allotted by the Constitution. Yeltsir-t's refusal was based on his objections to mail balloting in the Federation Council and tcs prtsxy wting in the lower chamber. He filed a counterpetition to that effect, which the Court majority endorsed, finding that the president co~lldreturn bills unsigned and without veto (thereby avoiding the possibility of being cxrridden) in instances when prcscedrsraf irregularities had occurred in Xegisfative roll caXls,"" A similar quiescence continued during most of t 997, year one of BagXai" term as chief justice. Late that year, I.towe.rier, the Baglai Court began to find its vc~ice. In a series of cases, the Court bucked presidentia! policies or preferences, or at the very least made decisions inconvenient for executive authority. In a case decided in December 1997, the Court ruled that the gotiernment cczuld not demand that enterprises privilege tax payments before paying wages.%'During spring 1998, the Court issued two decisions in quick succession, ordering the president to sign the duly passed Trophy Art law cm Wortd War I1 booty, and confirming the ccznstitutionality of the five-percent cutoff in the law on parliamentary elections governing the alloation of party seats in the Duma." Following these decisions, dllring a June meeting, l"e1tsin reportedly admc~nishedChief Justice Baglai fbr the recent trend in Court-presidential relations, The presidential warning apparently had little effect on the imperturbable chief justice, as the second KGC cr~ntinuedthrough 19% and into 1999 to issue decisions that, at a minimum, demonstrated its growing authority and independence of the other branches of government. Some of these cases involved taking on the government for tlnconstitutionalIy cutting the budget line for support czf the judiciary; endiz-rg pc~titicaland legal speculation that Ueltsin might, if he wished, be able to run in the presidential election of 2000, in effect for a third term; and declaring the further impo6tion of death penalties unconstitutlionaI unless defendants were afforded their constitutional right to choose jury trials. The latter decision, anno~lncedin early $999, no doubt rubbed parliamentary proponents of capital punishment the wrclng way and discomfited various executive branch law enbrcement constituencies that opposed further expansion of the jury triaX beyond the original nine provitlces where it had been instituted. In mid- l9954 the Court revisited the issue of the so-called Mrorld Mrar II trophy art captured horn Nazi Germany-this time, on the basis of a presidential petiticm arguing that the 1998 law barring the return of any of the art works was unconstitutional. Declining to find the statute invalid, the Court did declare certain parts of it ~lnconstitutionalin a legally wctf-crafted and politically astute compromise ruling, which afterward was praised by both sides in the controversy, the Mremlin and parliament,52 PSy the fifth anniversary of the secand Russian Constitutional Court, at the dawn of the tmrenty-first century, one cczuld cr~ncludethat the second Court had overcome the legacy of i t s predecessor and had gained a surer institutional footing,

Politics, Law, and Constitutional Justice in Russia Even for the great John Marshall of early American legal history, there was perif in the ""shaowy borderland between law and politics,""and finding safe passage thrc~ughthat tlncharted territrsry was the major challenge of his chief justiceship." Chief Justice Zorkin, who was not equipped either by temperament czr by circumstance to navigate the perils of Russian politics and law failed this chaflenge, Although it was technically extraconstitutional, l"eltsin2 decree of October 7, 1993, suspendixzg the first Constitutional Court, represented a just political verdict on the chief jtrsticek extrajudicial activities, calling him to account for transforming the Court "frc~ma body of constitutional justice into an instrument czC politicat !in quest of stability, Zorlcin and his Court in the final analysis unintentionally. became a source of itzcreasir-tgitzstability and ungovernability, Zorkin" successors fared better. Chief Justice Tumanov; who sought to avoid Zorkink mistakes, erred in the opposite direction, bending more than necessary to the political winds. Still, he mtlst be given credit for guiding the new second RGC safely for two years, This period permitted institutional convalescence and recovery, and afforded the Goxlrt the opportunity to slowly rebuild its rep~station as a juridical institution. The subsequent chief justice, Marat Bagtai, who held a more hard-edged view c z f the distinction beftveen Xaw and politics, nonetheless has steered the Court safely as well, although on a mxlch more adventurous crlurse, In his textbook on Russian constittltic~nallaw, the chief justice assured his readers that the second Court has been alert to the dangers posed by the inrrusion of politics into the work of constit~ltionaladjudication.'' In a 1998 media interview, Bagtai ipefia~-3sbest captured the paradox of the X;tGC's place in the IXussian landscape, insisting that the Court was " ~ u t ~ i polide tics: while conceding with a toxlch of frustration that political matters still managed to penetrate the institutic~n,under ""the generaf cloak of the law.'" h the final analysis, though, it was Vladimir Tumanov; echoing Afex-is de Tocqueville's observations on nineteenth-century America," who made the wisest observation about the relationship of politics, law; and constitutional justice in crIntemporary X;tussia: " W e n they say that the Court should not examine political issxres, this is nonsense. The Constitutional Court is doomed to address political issrxes. . . . The Americans have learned to view every pr~liticalissue as a legaf problem, That's the t r i ~ k ~ ' " ~ In sum, the Tumanov Cotrrt m;zy have been the "fifth wheel of the carriage of Russian autocracyi3ut the Baglai Gzurt earned the institution a reputation as a fair and evenhanded tribunal of constitutional justice. Today the Court is increasingly recognized as the keystone of the third branch. Ur-rder Chief J~zstice Baglai" effective leadership, the Russian Constitutic~nalCourt has made significant cttntributions to the relative political stability of the second republic, trans-

Iaiting possibly contentious political disputes into manageable judicial issues and providing a forum for negotiating change through canstitutionai adj~dication.~'

1. Idaul Brest, ""Constitutional Xnterpretation,'?n LJeox~ardW. Levy et al., eds., Judicial I""omrand the Chtzstilutinn (NW York, 1990), 163. 2. Yves Meny, nzmunisrEurope>ms. ch. 5 (Chicago, forthcoming) [hereafter cited as Scl-rwartz,ch. 51. 8. See Robert Shartet, ""The Rtlssian Constitutianal Cor~rf:The First "firm:" Post-Soviet Aflairs 9, no. 1 f January-March 19933):19-20, 9, Gonstittttiox~of the Russian Federation [of 19933 (Moscotv; 19941, Arts, 125.2, 125.4, and 125.5 [hereafter cited as Constitution]. 10. Constitution, Art, 125.5. presentation on the second Rus11, Herbert Hausmaninger, [tra~lscriptof co~~ferencc sian Constitutional Court] A ~ n e r i c ~Llniversit;lr]our~.nmt :~ rflntemutionat Law rand Poliq 12, I I l~(1997): 101,

12. Jane Herlderson, "The ltussian Constitutional Court:" Rrlssia efh the Successor States Briefing Service 3, no. 6 (flecernlser 1995): 23. 13. Saral-r j. llynolds, editor's introduction to "The Russian Constitutional Court Revisited:" Statutes Q I3ecisions 31, no, 4 (July-Artgust 1995): S. 14, V; A. "rnmanc~v, "Konstitutsionnyi sud Kossiiskoi Federatsii: 1nterv"u Predsedatelia Kanstittttsior~nogoSuda Rossiiskoi Federatsii Prof., Iloktara iurid, narrk X A, TFumaxlova zhurnalu 'Gosudarswcr i pram,'" Gosudarstvo i prGvo, no. 9 (1995): 6-7. 15. Justice lijikofai Vitruk's remarks in "Kruglyi srot zhurnala Gosudarstvo i pravo': Sovremennoe sostoianic Kossiiskcrgo zakcInodateI'swa i ego sistemati-atsiia:' Cioszrdarstvo 2' pravo, no. 2 (1999): 27. 16. B. S. Ebzeev, ""'fi~fkovanieKonstitutsii Konstitt~tsionnymSudom Rossiiskoi Fedeno. 5 f 1998): 9, 12. ratsii: Teoreticheskie i prakticheskie probfe~ny?Gostt&rsilvo iprnl~t?, 17, Gadzhiev, ""TnRuence of the Constitutioxlal Court of the Russian Federation 0x1 the Legislative Brc~cess:"50, 18. Konstitutsii Rassiiskoi Federatsii [of 1978 as amended through spring 19933, Obozrevalel? Spetsiul%yi vyptdsk* vol. 2, no. 17- 18 ( 19931,Art. 165. 19. Constitution, ch. 7. 20, Constitution, Art. 15.1.

2 1, "Decree on Courts%pylication of (the]Constittttiox~in Administering ifustieof 31 October 1995,'"ossiE'skaia gazefa, December 28, 1995, in FBI$-SOY (Jal~uary25, 1996): 17-22, esp. pt. 3, 22, ""Soershenstvczvanie yrarvosudiia v Rossii: Interv5iu. glavnogo redaktora dlurnala s V. A. TumanovyitnP Gasui;larst.voi pravo, no. I2 (1998): 17. 23. Predsedate13Konstitutsionnogo Sltda Rc)ssiiskoi Federatsii, Chlen-Korrespondent Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk M. B. Baglai otvechaet na voprasy zhurnaia 'G6asudarstva i pravo,""Gosudarstvo i pray@, x~o,2 (1998):6, 24. ""UeIoo tolkc>vaniiotdelhykh palozhenii statei 125, 126 i 127 Kconstitutsii Kossiiskoi Federat~ii,~Testnik Konstitutsionnj~iSud Rassiiskoi Federatsii j hereaEler VKSj, no, 5 ( 1998): 58. 25. Peter B. Mass, ""'l'heRussian Courts and rl-re Russian Constitution:Vndiana Internafl'ouzalehCompamtt?/et a w Kevie9v 8,110. 1 ( 19527): 114, 26. Peter Krug, "Departure from rl-re Centralized Model: The ltussian Sslpren~eCourt and Constitutional Control of 1,egisfation:" Virginica Journal ojfi~ierr?ur.ionatiLaw 37, no, 3 (IC397):786. 27, Vaferii Liazarev, ""Rr,e of the Constifutianaf Court of the Russian Federation in the Enllanccment of l3emucratic Principles in Russian Legislatican," in Mentor Grt~uy,The Rznssian Ei7rwn-2for I,egaI and Ec~novzicAflain, 19. Court Heaid fntcmicwed:" FBIS-SOY (September 30, 1994): 28. "Acting Coastitutio~~at 23. 29. Alexander Blankenagel, ""Coming of Age of the Russian C:onstitutional (Zourt" (I995), 72-73. This is the first part of a book-lexzgth manuscript in preparation an the

Constitutional C:ourt from its inception tr>the present. 30. rjonatd P. Kommers, The Gnstit~~rional Jurisprudence ofthe Federat Republic r?fGer? n a p2d ed,, rev. ax~dexpar~ded(Durham, N.C., 1397), ch. 1. 3 1, Henderson, ""TheRussian C:onstitutiu~~alCZourt:" 25, 32, Nikc~taiVitruk, "Canstitutionaf Justice in Russia: Results and Prospects,'3irz Ner~tor Group, The 'I'roikafor IZtlssiavl Constitittionati Again: Securing the Fount;latiun ofthe Rtlssiavl C;i>nstitationf Boston, l994),38. 33. Cennady M. l3anijenko and William Burnham, Law and L e p l Sjtste-m ofthe Rtlssian Federation (New Uork, l989), 70. 34,. Rc)bert Sharlet, "Chief Justice as Judicial Politliciiax~,'"~asi European &nstitutional Review [hereafter cited as EECR] 2, no. 2 (Spring 19993):32-37. 35. Herbert Hausmaxlinger, """Totuardsa 'New' Rtlssian Constitutional Court:" OrneEl InfernationaE LazvJournal28 (1995):382. 36. V. A. 'rt~manov,fhnreznpomry Bourgeois I4egal ?&o@gftt:A Marxist Evaluarion ofthe Basic Gncepts (Mosccow, 1974). 37. Schwar~z,ch. 5. 38, "VLadimir 'Kumanov Reports Before Kecess,'3ego&ia, July 25, 1996, trans. in Current Dgesr of the Posr-Soviet Press, 48, no. 30 ( 1997): l l . 39, Quoted in Schwara, ch. 5. 40. Ibid. 41, "Marat Bagtai Is New Chairmax~of Constitutional Court,'Wezavisirt-saia gazeta, Febmary 2 1,1997, trans. in C:~trre?ztDigest ~ f z h eLzosl-Soviet Press 49,110.8 ( 19527): 12, 42, ""Constitutianaf Court Chairmax~[Marat Baglai] Interviewed:" Radio Eklzu iwoskv, October 21, 1998, tram. in WorId Ne~vsC:ouznection [hereafier cited as WiVC], availl-zhle at [email protected](C3ctober 22, 1998).

43. ""Russia:" EECR 7, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 27, 44. Sergei Bobtov, "Ca~~stitutiond Justice:A Czornyarative Analysis:" in Mentor Ciroup, The Trt~iktlfor Russian G"onsrr"tzr;tionat Aitf"airs,23. 45. "Constitutionat Court in No Hurry on 'Yrctphy Art, Electoral Lws: Intedm, June 2, 1998, RFE/RL iVetvsline 2, no. 105, part I (June 3, 1998). This report is based on a public axlnouncement t,y Chief Justice Bagtai, 46. Sharfet, ""TheRussian Csnstitutional Court:". 47, Quoted respectively in Schwartz, ch. 5; and in WiIIiam E, bmeranz, ""Jdicial Review and the Russian Constitutio~~al Czourt: 'Yhe (:heclhen (:age:" Review of C;entral and Eust Etrropean I,aw 23, no, 1 (1 997): 48. 48. Hausmaninger,American Uiriv,I; oflt~t?L, and Policy 112, ~ l o1, ( 1997): 105, 49. See "Delo o tolkovanii otdelhykh polazhenii stat'i 107 Kanstitutsii ltassiiskoir Federatsii,'VKS, no. 3 ( 1996): 5-14. 50. See ""Uefoo proverke konstitutsionnasti punkta 2 stat'i 855 Grazhdanskago bdeksa Rossiiskoi Federatsii i chasti shestoi stat'i 15 Zakona Rossiiskoli Federatsii 'Ob osntjvakh laalogovoi sistemy v Itossiishi Federatsii,""VKS, no. I ( I 998): 23-3 1. 5 l, See ""leelo o razreskeniii spara oh abiazannosti 12reziderltilRossiiskc~iFederatsii yodpisat"priniatyi Federal'nyi zakon YC kuuinrny& tsennostiakll, peremeshchennyM1 v Soiuz SSR v rezul'tate Vtoroi Mirovoi voix~yi nabodiashchikhslia na ferritorii Rossiiskoi Federatsii,'" "K$, no. 4 (1998): 11-20; and "L2elo o proverke kr>~xstitutsionnostiriada ' Ob asnovnyd~garttntiiaH~izbiratelhyfi prm i yrava na polazhenii FederaYnaga zakana O uchastie v refcrenburne grazhdan Kussiiskoi Federatsii:" "K$, no. 5 1998): 28-41. 52. See statements by the minister of culture and by Gennadii Zyganav, leader of the Communist faction in the Tluma, in, respectively, "Russian Restitution Decision Dcles Not Exclude Germany:" arsd "Zyuganov Sees llstitution Decision as "Rezlsanabte:'3TAR-TASS (in English), July20, 1999, 53. Charles F. Hobson, The Great Chief Jt4'ttz'c.e:John Marshall and the Rule of Law (Lawrence, Kans., 13961, 15X. 54, Quoted in Vitruk, "Constitutional Justice in Russia:%45, 55. See M. B, Baglai, Xi:onslitzrrsz'onnoepravo Kassiiskoi Fecleratsii (Moscow, 1998), 635. 56. "Constitutiunal Court (:hairman Interviewed:" WNC2 (0ctc)ber 22,1998). 57.Quoted in Gwin Ijrewry, "Politicrzl Institutions: X,egai Perspectives,'"in Robert E, Gc~odinax~dHatls-Dieter Klliingernann, eds,, A New HandlJlook ofPoriiticaE Science (Oxford, U.K., I996), Z99, 58. Quoted in Robert Ahdieh, report on the second Rtlssiaxl Constitutionaf Court for the Rule of Law Consortium, Wasbingoll, 1>.C,C:,(September t 9951, 15. 59,'l'he quality of court leadership has been no less a factor in the ymgress of Russian constitutional justice than in the develoy~nentof the U.S. Supreme Czourt. At crucial historical moments in American history, the Court has been associated with such notable and Pirl Warren. chief justices as folln Marshal$,Roger B, "f"aney>

the Russian Mi Exit, Voice, and Corrtlption Kmberly Marten Zisk Bamard College, Columbia ti"ni11ersity

by was the IXussian military so passive and acquiescent at the close of the twentieth century, in the face of terrible institutional decline? During the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years there were repeated warnings by outside analysts as well as members of the officer corps that quality of life had deteriorated so badly in the military that things might get to the boiling point, and the military might enter politics in some extracr~nstitutionalfashion. Yet despite the failed putsch effort launched against Carbachev in 1991 by a few members czf the military and security: forces, and despite kltsin's success at calling in the troops on his side in his vit~lentconfrontation with the legislature in 1993, the Russian military did not turn czut to be a very gowerhl or independent actor in Russian domestic politics. A close readitzg of what the Russian officer corps said about itself in the late 1990s shows that the military recognized that it had become a rather marginal sociaX actor. Military officers as individuals lack-ed broad sacietal authority and respect, even if the military as an abstract institution continued to hold a privileged place czf relative trust in the increasingly cynical [Xussian mind-set,' The military atso lacked the resources, disdpline, and morale that would be reqkxired for officers to play a significant role in domestic politics. The troops were increasingly tlneducated, unfit, and unruly, Garrisons and bases often had no assured access to daify needs such as food, f~zel,housing, and a living wage for personnel; and both the troops and the officer cczrps were plagued by cczrruytion, internal violence, and suicide, M i l e Presidel~tYeItsin may have tl~reatenedto call in the troops again in

the late 1990s (as he hinted he would do in July 1998) against political opponents or agitators; it is questionable whether many units would have responded if he had actually tried, and likety that the response would have been half-l~eartedand partial at best.TTke army was disintegrating, Uefense Minister fgor Sergeev made real strides in beginning much-needed military reforms dt~ringthese years, If the reforms are ever fuly implemented, they have the potential to turn the bedraggled remnants of the Soviet military into a tighter, more professional, and more appropriate armed force for the smaller Russian state. But military downsizing and reorganizing require a lot of money, which the IXussian miXitary did not have in the Yeitsin era; nor was there any obvious means for the military to get the money it needed, given Russia's endemic fiscal and mcznetary crises. As a result, Sergeev's refarm measures were only partially implemented, The partial reforms caused a great deal of personal suffering, anguish, and opposition ir-t the officer corps, lellrring the armed forces in even worse shape in terms of discipline and morale than they were before. (This may be the real explanation behind Sergeev" April X999 claim that downsizing of the forces was being stopped beause of NATO intervention in Ui3gr1sIavia.)" M e n IXussian military operations against rebel farces in the breakaway republic of Chechnya resumed in 011 2999, just before Yeltsin left office, many observers saw this as an attempt to placate frustrated Rt~ssianofficers, m a t started out as air strikes against reputed terrorist strongholds quickly grew into an allout ground ir-tvasion designed to redress the failures of the 2994-1996 Chechen war. The innuence of hard-liners within the General Staff seemed to be on the ascendancy, as Russian military leaders aimed to rebuild the reputation of their fighting machine by using more effective tactics against the rebels this time around,' Yet an easy victory in Chechnya was far from assured; long-standing resource and morale problems continued to hamper Rtrssian military effectiveness on the ground.T"Th institutional weaknesses plaguing the R~~ssian officer corps cczuld not be easily solved. Nonethefess, there was still no credible evidence of any concerted effort by the IXussian mititary to intervene in politics (at least not beyond the military policy advocacy role that every miiitary institution in any cczuntry plays), even in the uncertain months of the post-Yeltsin transition. The relative passivity of the Russian officer corps in the face of massive institutional decline may seem odd, but it is t~ndcrstandabfeonce the incentives facing individual military of5cers are clarified. Afthough the military as a whole was anhappy, there was neither the means nor the motive for many individual officers tcz take concerted political action in reaction to their unbappir-tess.The state bad no money to be redistributed to the military. Leading or even backing an authoritarian coup w u I d not enable the military to solve its instittrtionaf problems. Given endemic brzreaucratic corruption, massive capital Right, pervasive tax evasion, and continuing internatic~nalinvestment ambivalence tc>wardRussia, even an authoritarian reginle appeared unlikely to be able to produce the funds that would

put the military back on its feet. Furthermore, following the debacles in Afghanistan and in the earlier ro~lndof fighting in Chechnp, and given extensive public knowledge of the brutal and often deadly hazing of new recruits (dedsv~l'rchina),~ even an authoritarian regime w u I d be unlikely to make the X;tussian military a respectable career choice for ambitious young people in the near ft;lture.Wwr 80 percent of R~lssianyoung men by the late 1990s hoped to evade the draft, and according to official Ministry of Defense figures (which may be understated by a factor of two), 40,000 troops deserted between $994 and the first half of 1998.2s we shall see below, few young people chose to make a career in the o%cer corps, either. Political economist Albert Q. Hirschman noted ir-t 1970 that members of institutions in decline have two basic choices when they become dissatisfied: They can exercise voice, or express their discontent through political means; or they can, exit, deserting the institution for greener pastures," Those who remain loyal to an institution are likely to try to voice their unhappinea "st, in an effcjrt to repair the damage and rebuild their home; but if there is no institutional respclnse, exit becomes tlze most attractive option. ft is not surprising that when years of cornplaints failed to garner an imprc3vement in officersYiving conditions-which in fact deteriorated as time went on-many officers with talent and resources solved their personal financial and social problems by leavitzg the service as soon as they cr~uldand going into business or other civilian employment. Arrsund half of the officers surveyed in 1'39'7 indicated that they planned to leave the military as soon as their current tours were up," and these plans do not seem to have been altered by the August 1998 crisis in the civilian ect~ncsmy.~~ Some officers were unable to exit, however, probably because they lacked either the skills or the willingness to accept risk and to adapt easily to competition itz the market eccznomy,iWirschman argues that the inability to exit can empowr those with no alternatives, since their clamoring voices and increasingly raucous protests tend to become more and more ir-ttolerable to those in autlzority over time." Jet the Rt~ssianauthorities in the Ueltsin era overcame this situation by of&ring a third alternative to exit and voice. Unable to produce the resources necessary far instituitionai rejuvenation, they instead implicitly encouraged disaffected officess to tlse institutional decline for their personal gain. Those who were unable to exit adapted by moonlighting, with the blessings of the defense ministry, as private security guards or in other positions itz commercial structtrres, This secondary employment further damaged military cr~hesionand discipline, since officers in effect had two masters, and lines of hierarchicai authority were no longer clear or determitzant. The situation was made worse by the fact that much of this prbate economic activity occ~lrredat the direct expense of the military, Stealing from military coffers became common, most oaten either through direct theft of weapons and equipment or by cooking the books an procurement orders fc3r food and other supplies. of the declining institution-is one that This alternative-cczrrxlption Hirschman did not foresee,I3Corruption, of course, further harmed discipline

and cohesion, and thus morale, making any unified altecdve action on the part of officers in the future even more difficult to contemplate, Private economic interests split the officer corps along multiple, crosscutting lines, giving many an incentive to support the status quo. The status qrzo, after all, made both Xegitimate private business operations and unchecked the& from the state possible. This fi~rtherfragmentaticon of the officer corps prevented any unified political response of outrage, Repeated warnings by some military officers and their supporters of a nationwide military ""social explosion" or military-backed croup thus appeared to be paper tigers designed to extort mare money out of the state. This does not mean that voice ceased to operate as a strategy. As time went on, its forum merely shifted, responding to the fragmentaticon of economic interests within the officer corps. In desperation, officers and troops serving in individual garrisons began to resort to local protests, oAen with the support of m w r s and provincial governors. The military began to reflect the fragmentation of the Russian state and society as a whole; troops and officers increasingly joined the miners, the defense industry warlt;crs, and the teachers and scientists who had already been itzvolved in such local protests for years. I w u t d argue that this scenario does not make civil war or violent political separatism more likely, sitzce even Xoafly: concentrated officers do not form cohesive organizational groupings. However, any such argument must address claims from within the Xxussian officer corps that this fragmentation represents a return to a dangerous historical pattern of revolutian. In 1997, Lt. Col. (in reserves) Anatcslii Fanot. asserted that the military environment corresponded to that of the revolutionary period from 1905 to 1907, when local mutinies and rioting became common as soldiers started to agitate against the tsar."%t first blush Panov's aanlogy sounds forced and inaccurate, since the mutinies of that earlier era were carried out by conscripts against their commanding officers, whom they saw as elitist representatives of a repressive and alien state,17Conscripts viewed these officers as members of a social class to which they could never aspire, and resented the fact that society was passing them by and becomitzg increasixzgly Westernized, The soldiers, mostly peasants cr~nscriptedfor long tours of duty, stopped obeying orders, and often tcwk out their kustrations on focat civilians, in uncontrottable riots and pogroms. Similar class concerns and conscript anger at officers were not the primary causes of army unrest in the late 1990s. In fact, as the military officer" profession became less and Xess attractive from both a social and an economic standpoint, the Russian officer corps was increasixzgty drawn from the same relatively uneducated and ecronomically immosbile stratum of scjciety that prrsduced the tlnfc~rttlnate conscripts.'Wmt importantly, the protests that occurred across the Russian military itz these years (inciuditzga refusal to obey orders, the technical definition of mutiny) were led by (officers.i9 Although the social class distinctions at the ~ e n t i e t hcentury" opening are not analogous to the situation at its end, the ~lnderlyingfactors of poverty and

atienation from the state that fueled the earlier protests were in &ct present in the latter. The semnd time around, the poverty and alienation were sl-rared by the troops and officers; and in fact, the troops may actually have had better f~lture prospects than the officers, Desertion became an almost socially acceytabie choice in Russia, given the prwalence of dedovshci~inuas an explanation for it. The youngest male members of Kussiari society (thc~sewho were subject t r ~the draft) had the best chance of finding jobs in the civilian market-certainly, a better chance than those who chose the military profession beca~lsethey had no viable alternative. Revolutionary local protests and riots may indeed reemerge from Xxussian garrisons, but they are likely to be led by officers rather than against them. In the concluding section of this chapter f speculate about what this may mean for Rr~ssiansociety in the future.

Officers"Views of Military Hardships The basic outlines of the terrible situation of the Rt~sslianmilitary in the 1990s are w d h o r n and need not be repeated here in detail. Suffice it to say that plenty of reasons existed fbr officers t c ~have been tempted by revt~lutic~nary promises of a stronger military institution in the ft~ture.Neither officers nor troops were paid on time; many officers and their wives and children lived in abysmal conditions because adequate housing was unavailable; smooth demr~bilizationof those oEcers who were made redundant by military reform plans was hampered because little severance pay or reloation assistance were available for them, despite laws on the books and promises by the state to the contrary; food supplies for the troops were found to be contaminated or otherwise inadequate; the amount of time given to combat trainir-tgwas very low becrtause adeqrzate fuel was lacki~~g to fly planes or send ships on exercises; dedovsl~cl~ina, the brutal hazing of new recruits by more senior troops, was rampantaknd often led to murder or suicide; corruption of the officer corps was prevalent, ranging from illegal sales of wayons and supplies to the cczmmandeering of troops for private slave tabor on dachas or in czEcer-owned businesses; death rates of both servicemen and officers horn accidents, murder, and suicide soared; and as a result of all of these things, draf -dodging was at epidemic levels and the officer corps hemorrhaged its youngest and most talented officers, ,411 of these facts have been well reported both in the W e s t L h n d in many Russian national newspapers, especially Moskavskii Ko~rzsomoletsand Nemvisi~rzaictghzelia (NG).They were also the basis of strident complaints rnade by the late retired Gen. Lev Xxoblin, who used his Duma seat and his Movement in Uefense of the Army as a platbrm to call for President Yeltsink impeachment. IXather than concentrating on what outsiders and those with avowedly political goals have said about the military, X decided to see what Russian military officers said about themselves when they were writing in military newspapers and jsurnals-in other words, when they were communicating with a Russian military audience rather than lobbying civilian politicians, What f discwered is that there

is no real variation in what military czfficers said to different audiences. Afthough there were some exceptional cases (w21ich appeared prixnarily ir-t the defense mixzistry" (official newspaper, Krasrzaia zvezda) in which officers pretended that military reform was proceeding smoothly and that their prc~blernswere we11 on their way to being solved, the vast majority of articies reveal that officers agreed that the situation in the milirary was poor, and told each other about their problems freyuentty, For example, in the monthly gro~lndforces journal Armeiskii sbornik, the commander of the Moscow Military District, CO!. Gen. teontii Kuznetsov, wrote: The insufficient strength level of 13istric.t troops in persannef, weapons, military equipment, and supplies; [the] 1c3w intellsity of combat training; [the] ulleven nature of finaxlcirzg; and the decline in prestige of military service are haviixzg a negative effect an the averall status af troop combat readiness and on keying tl-re battle management system in a wcjrking condition, and they also considerably hamper ft~lfiliment of operationaf, mobifization, and combat training plans and /resolution of] social problems, Since at1 rl-ris. . .negatively affects the combat effectiveness of troops as a whole, a search for nontraditional and ~lonstandardways and means of keeping it at the requisite level has become the main content of practical activity of the command elerner~t,"

Kuznetsov went czn to say that ""re reduction in force, problems of social and legal protection of personnel, and the decline in prestige of military service are having a serious effect on servicemen" mmoocfs and behavior.'"' Xn the same issue of the journal, Lt, Gen. AXeksandr Voronin summarized virtually without comment a NATO report on the status of the Russian armed fc?rces,noting: They are shocked by tl-re miserable situation of officers and enlisted men. . . . 1,iving and ever$ay conditicjns of Russian servicemen and tl~eirfamilies are described here as dreadkl, Xr is no accident that maxly officers and enlisted men end their lives each year. . . by suicide . . . . The genuine surprise of the NATO military and parliamentarians is ev~jkedby the fact that night operations have become a rarity at Inany air bases . . . [and] that Russian Navy surface ships put to sea ox~Iyin exceptional instances. Xn addition, the West believes that the KF Armed Forces are den~oralized. Clnce powm'f l, they have turned into a ""fi

Military officers were even willing to admit the extensiveness of corruption in the officers corps, Stories about illegal activity were legion in the military press, and are perhaps further indications that group solidarity bad broken down. Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie (NVO),an occasional military and defense ir-tdustry supplement to the daily Nil;, reported that a military court in the Pacific Fleet had sentenced a submarine commander and other high-ranking officers to prison for grand theft of f ~ ~ cand l , stated that similar cases were pendi~lgagair-tst

seven other admirals and generats, The article noted that in several different instances "it has been necessary to remove the commanders of some units and their deputies from their posts and calf them to account for covering up [such] crimes,"25During the summer of 1998, Russia" chief military prosecutor, Gen. Yurii Diomir-t,was reported to be very angry becrtause the Duma granted wholesale amnesty to all generals and admirals who were under investigation far crimes of corruption but who had received medais for combat action; thirteen czf his cases were prematurely closed by this ;action2'-perhaps indicating that state atlthorities truly did see cczrruptic~nas a means of limiting the exercise of voice by disaffected officers. Even Krasnaia zvezda, which tended to be more circumspect about the problems of the military>noted that the Group of Russian Forces itz the Caucastls (serving as yeacekeepers in Abbazia) had special prt~blemswith corruption, especiaily because commandiizg officers were stealing the wages the state sent to the ""dead souis" (i.e,, fake employees) on their payrolls.27

Blaming Sta& and Society Despite their willingness to mice opent-y their lack of combat preparedness and the fact of military corruption, there was nonetheless a tendel~cyfor military officers not to take responsibility for these problems and instead to blame them on the crisis of the wider Russian society and especially on a lack of adequate funding, For example, an NVQ article told the (most Xikety apclcryghal) story of an ananymolls lierrtenant colonel (given the name Bezbrezhnii), a decorated hero who specialized in mine and bomb clearing, who was cr~nvictedof selling on the black market the mines and bombs he had cleared, and who was sent to prison as a result (he apparently did not report the existence of ;all the cleared materiel to the authorities). Afthough the article presumably was intended as a warning to those who might copy his strateg, it concluded with what sounds Iilce a cornplaitzt against the state, justil;y.itzg this officer's actions: After all, it is in fact unbearable to five for a fang time in debt, And the government is in no hurry to settle accourlts with us. One puts a bullet through his head while on duty another dies quietly by hanging himself in the shower, a third steps through the wi~~dotv of a n upper-story apartment. . . .And then here, in the Bezbrezhnii affair""stting an money.'"uyers are cornman and the money isn't bad.2'

Xn a similar vein, Lt. Gen. Vladimir Fedorovick KuIakov, head czf the Main Directorate of Educational Work in the military, candidly admitted that d ~ dovshchina was an ""ulcer that eats a w q at Army discipline and undermines military foundations," m d said that ""re problem czf people" deaths continues to be one of the most acute problems of Army rearity.'We spoke of how eradicatixzg this tllcer was one of the main tasks of edt~cationatand psychological work in the miXitar)r,Vet he then proceeded to blame society for the army" ills: ""fts czrigins lie in schooIs . . . . It has penetrated many walks of life of our society Xn the military

medium the old-timer always protected the young soldier czr sailor. Dedsvshchinm was carried into the Army from outside. Xt is very difficult to fight this phenomenon . . . because its roots are in society.'"' His assessment was clearly oversimplistic, Xt is true that violence has long been endemic in many sectors of Russian society and that dedov;sfichinuhas been difficult to contrc31, especially since the Russian military lacked a cohort of professional, experienced, noncommissioned officers who could stlpervlse the barracks in off-dr~tyhours (Russia did not even begin to develop a military police service tlntif 1994),"3ut violence inside the barracks was certainly exacerbated and even encouraged by the violence that czfficers routinely committed against service personnel tlnder their commandu-something that the officer corps could have crzntrolled if it had chosen to set a good example for the trc3oys. Tl-rerewas in fi~ctwithin the officer corps a tendency to blame most czf the military's problems on a lack of funding and attention from the state. As two colonels who are faculty members in the Department of Military Finance and Economics at the State Financial Academy wrote, ""Giwn the discrepancy between the volume of finances allocated and that required, military organizational development is turning into a process of destroying the state" mztary structurePi2Destruction czf the armed forces was occurring, say these czfficers, but occtrrring because of outside forces, not because of problems tlzat the military crzuld solve on its own,

Senior czfficers were particularly concerned about a growing deficit of junior czfficers. The Russian armed forces had been top-heavy for many years, and one of the centerpieces of Sergeevk reforms was an efiort trz reduce the size of the crzmmand staff, sending mid-level and senior officers into early retirement," h n i call-)I,howevex; the military sitnultaneotlsly needed scores of new iie~rtenantseach year to take over the cczmmand of platoons and companies and fill basic training posts. According to miXibry sociologist Maj. Umitrii Xzozhidaev, over 80 percent of officers who left the army at this time were doing so ""ahead of schedule" (i.e., befare they were required to retire), and 35 percent of those leaving were under age 30," Russian motorized infiantry and armor divisions were reportedly left with 25 percent of their lieutenant positions vacant, and began sending senior enlisted soldiers and reservist trc3oys through tcm-month crash training courses to ensure an adequate command staff at lower levels,'" Many senior officers blamed this situation, not surprisir-tgly, on funding problems. As an article in Krasrzaia z~jezdglamented: Unfc2rtunatefy, the cllrrent situation of rl-re Itussian Armed Forces is not attractive for our young compatriots. The ofticer cadre has decreased significantly; yrcjblerns with finaxlcing, lack of housixlg, insufficient supply of the latest types of weapons and equipment-afi this, of course, does not bode well for the authority of the gun-

slii~gers,Xt is not surprising that a difficult situation has arisen in the ground forces todny, especially at the level of the platoon, compally*and battalion."" Yet on this issue, at least, not all senior officers evaded responsibility for the situation. A major part of the problem, according to Col. Gen. Ilia Panin, who headed the defense ministry's Main Directorate of Cadres and Military Education, was that Russia" officer training programs left their graduates with only a narrow set of specialiized skills that lacked utility itz the market economy." This meant that few ytlung people sought career advancement by joining the military, since they could not transkr the experience they gained there into promotions in the civilian job market. Panir-t suggested that military education be reformed to give its recipients the same kind of basic higher education they w u l d receive at civiiian universities, In other words, when profitable exit seems passible at same future poitzt, entry becomes more attractive than if the organization appears to be a dead end. Panin atscz noted that senior officers did not sufficiently mentor their junior colleagues: When . . .there is indifference or even rudeness on the part of commanders and officers in charge, aggravated by . . . everyday disorder, young officers submit a rescluest for distsllarge from military setvice . . . . Clne has to fight for every lieutenant, not attention in his period of development as well as leave him without a c~mma~~der's during his entire subsequent oficer career.*8 This view was seconded by Vice Adm. V. Yarygin of the navy" personnel and military eduation department. Notitzg that there was ""no money, no living accommodations . . . only prr>blemsn"for young officers, he added: "As W see it, young officers do not want to serve because their superiors do not pay enough attention to their needs and problems, Moral stimuli are tacking, p u see."39 l"et even here it was possible for officers to lay the blame at the feet of the Kussian state, Undoubtedly a Iairge part of the reason why moral stimuli were lacking among the senior officers was that these officers were miserable about their own career prospects and focusing on their own survival at a time of dificulty Their own futures became uncertain under the reform plans that Defense Minister Sergeev initiated. In the words of Rear Admiral Diakonov of the Northern Fleet, "With what thoughts will a young c~fficerserve if he has before his eyes the example of a senior comrade who devoted his best years to service in remote Potair garrisons and who found himself, after release into the reserve, without work and without the opportt~nityto move into

Goals of Military Reform The primary gczal of military reform was to save money and rationafize the country's ddefenses, using a drastically smaller but better prepared and equipped active

military A large reserve officer corps was intended to back up the smaffer, active forces, to be called up as necessary during ~ a r t i m e . Officer ~' and troop levels were tc>be C L I ~severely, with hopes of reaching the target size of a 1.2-millionperson military in 1999, (Outside estimates indicate that the real size of the Russian military had not been much larger than this when reforms began; but the prereform unit structure was designed for a capacity of 1.7 million people, and many of these positions were vacant, Xeaving units seriously understaffed,) Simultaneously, the various command hierarchies were to be combined, leaving a much smaller number of organizaticlnal units, staffed at much higher levels of readiness. Nuclear deterrence became the primary focus czf defense activity, replacing the traditional Soviet predilection for covering ail contingencies, including large-scale ccznventional war. Conventional force planning would be centered czn preparedness to contain smaller, local conflicts czn Russia" borders and in the interior." Officers began speaking sf maintaining parity with the West at a nuclear level only, recczgnizing that R~~ssia lacked the money to match NATO conventional farce Many long-standing separate force structures were eliminated or merged, and huge numbers of oEcers (at the level of 40 to 45 percent in many of the services) were discharged into early retirement. The old divisions between the various armed services were eliminated, with the goal of eventually retaining only three groups: most likely, the grclund forces, air farce, and nav, although there was also talk of leaving the strategic roclcet forces a separate unit and combining the navy and air force into a single service." The military space force and the roclrct-space defense force were successfully merged into the strategic rocket forces, which Sergeev SW as a transitional service that wouIQ be reorganized by 2005." SmiXarly, in February 1998, the air force was merged with the air defense force, and 40 tc>45 percent of those services were scheduled to be laid off by June 1998, including 24 generals." This involved the elimination czf several entire regiments and brigadese4'The Baltic and Pacific Fleets integrated pieces of the ground forces into their command structures, eliminating a tqer of senior army officers and many units." Personnel levels in both the navy and ground forces in the KaXiningrad and Leningrad military districts were scheduled to shrink by 40 percent by the year 2000." In addition, more than 40 military higher education schools were consolidated czr shut down.j"'

OfficersVViews of the Refarm Process Although it was widely recognized within the officer corps that layoffs and restructuring were absolute ecr~nomicnecessities, the way the reforms were implemented pruvczked a great deaf of hostility and anger. The basic problem was that hundreds and even tho~lsandsof officers in particular Xoalities were suddenljr laid off without being given any housing, significant severance pay, or useful job retraining or czther relocaticln assistance, m e n we recall that a huge number of officers left voluntarily to take jobs in the civilian sector, it is a good guess that a

fairly large percentage of the officers who were inz)oifuntariklaid off as a resxrXt of restructurit~gwere those lacking the resources and skills to easily find employment elsewhere. Becatlse whole units were often decornmissioned, the burden of social welfare for those with no alternatives fell on the shoulders of particular cities and provinces. From the time of the first debacle in Chechnya (when talk of the need for radical strucruraf reform in the military began) thmugh mid- f 99'7, high-level opposition within the presidential Security Council and in the defense ministry repeatedly derailed any attempt at significant reform," But by the end of 1997, Sergeev, as the latest in a line of rapidly changing defense ministers, had gained enough authority to begin itnplernenting his reform program. This apparently was rnade possible both because President Yeltsin finally rnade military reform a high priority within his administration, and because officers%ack wages were (at least temporarily) paid off that fall." Thoughout 2998, real reorganization and downsizing occurred. Three trends are apparent when we look at officers' responses to this process, First, strong interservice rivalry emerged it1 the military as each branch argued that its role was uniquely vital for the future of Russian security, Thus, airborne troops commander Col. Gen. Georgii Shpak wrote of the ""growing role of airborne and airmobile troops" "1 the doarines of the United States and its NATO alies, cr~rnplainingthat ""aompxative analysis. . . shc~wsthat the prrsportion of airborne troczps in the overall Russian Federation] armed forces structure is low and there is a tendency toward its f~~rtfrer decrease." He argued tl-rat instead "the airborne troops must become a most important component of the armed forces and the foundation of immediate reaction forces."" Simultaneousty, Maj. Gen. of Aviation (retired) Vaientir~Rog argued that strike and reconnaissance aircraft had rnade the most decisive cr~ntributionto warfare since the 1940s, and that precision air strikes continued to play ""the deciding rote" in what he termed ""pacekeeping" operations (such as the NATO strike during the operation Croatian Storm), He argued that the ont;\rway to ensure air force effectiveness was to maintain a centralized command structure emphasizing the importance of aviation, since ""eevation of the air form role it1 warfare is not sameone" subjective wish, but an objective histc~ricalprocess""i" Meanwhile, Rear Adm, (retired) Georgii Mastev made a case for the cost-effectiveness of submarine-launched nucXear weapons as compared to those of the band-based strategic rocket forces, and cornplained about the priority that land-based ICBM$ nonetheless received under Sergeevk leadership. He noted the growing strength of the Turkish navy and the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Mediterranean just off Kussiafs borders, and complained: "The [Russian Federation] Ministry of Defense tries to close its eyes to such realities and is concerned more wit11 preserving capabilities for deploying fronts of the Great ktriotic War model, based on military districts . . . .The imp ~ s s i o nforms that the Ministry of Uefense is paying no attention to all of this."'" Of course, these highly varied claims were rn~tuitllyincompatible. The military budget had been drastically curtailed, and not every service branch co~lldre-

ceive the highest priority in f'undiizg, Atthough these arguments are completely understandable and perhaps even predictable given the radical restructuring of the forces that was under way, this interservice rivalry further errded the possibility of any unified mifitary action against the reform plan. Each branch, and in many cases each unit within a division, was competing against the others for survival, which made cstjpera tion tlnlikely. The second trend, wl~ichfoliowed directly from this rivalry, is that senior officers began to criticize and undercut the defense ministry, blaming it for the tenor of reforms. This is particularly significant when W are malcing predictions about f'uture political action by the military, because the ministry remained under the leadership of rrniformed officers. Other officers, not civilians, were being blamed fc3r the hardships of the reform process, destrc~yingany possibility of a unified military uprising against the center. Xn fact, the move toward a large-scale ground war in the second Chechen conflict was widely seen as the victory of one militavy faction over another-namely, against the defense ministry leadership, which preferred to cut conventional forces in order to concentrate on nuclear deterrence. Those whose units had been elimixzated or merged into other command structures spt~keout against the reforms, complaining that the choices made by the defense ministry left lethat gaps in state security. One common argument was that as command staff levels were cut in potentiat tfieaters of domestic military operations, it wc>ul&be increasingly d i f 5 ~ ~ 1tol t control trotlps in crisis situations." A similar complaint, with slightly different reasoning, was made by Lt, Gen. Mtrkhamed Batyrov, who had commanded ground troops in Kamchatka tlntif he was tc>ldtc>transfer his units to the ctlmmand of the Pacific Fleet as part czf the reorganization plan. He suggested that in the event czf an invasion from the east, it would be his troops who would repel an aggressor, not the navy, and that it was therefare a mistake to relieve him of his command. In what may be an extreme example czf an order being countermanded, Batyrov said in February 1998 that the commander of the Far East Military District, Col. Gen. Viktor Chechwatcw, had given him ""aerbaI directhe tc> stop transferring equipmrmt and other property to Pacific Fleet forces." Later press reports indicated that Chechevatov had succeeded in convincing the Ministry of Defense to halt the transfer of troops," In this case, a cczmplaint led tc>a technical mutiny (a refusal to obey orders) that impeded the progress of reform. The fact that officerskomplaints hiwe been public and have sometimes invcllved mutiny indicates how much the cr~hesionone normally associates with a professional military command has broken down in Russia. Pave1 Felgengauer, a civilian reporter who often has seemed to speak on behalf of high-ranking mifitary officers, claimed that ""the mc~raleof Russia" military is nearing the breaking paint"; that "miXitrtry rebrm is the main cause czf the growing discontent"; and that ""many [commanders] even say they would have preferred a civilian politician as defense minister to Sergeev,'\ince his fc~clason ntlclear deterrence to the detriment of a balanced farce structure was '%absuX"d"and left him "not fit to command Russia" military.'"'

The worst problem, in the eyes of many officers, was that an insufficient amount of money was allocated to cover the demobilization process, lellving officers who were transferred to the reserves without pay and housing." The air force went so far as to set up an emergency telephone hot line for those displaced by the merger witl-r the air defense forces, and Commander itz Chief Anatolii Kornukov started holding bimonthly receptic~nsboth in his office and at bases to ""del with individuais>roblem~."~'~ One resulting development that obviously disturbed the Yeltsin administration greatly was the grc~wingactivism of the Movement to Support the Army, which was staffed largely bp retired military officers and appeared to attract many current officers, even tho~lghthe latter were legally barred fmm joir-ting any political organization. (This explains the prevalence of rumors that Rcs&tin7s murder in July X998 was politically motivated, despite the confessiczn by his wife Tatiana and her resulting prosecution for murder.) Particrxlarity unnerving was the statement made immediately following Roblink death, by Viktcsr Iliubin, Rcskhtin" successor as chair of the Duma Security Council and head of the Movement, calling on officers ""not to f~zlfillorders, not to disarm, and not to leave mifitary scttlements if those demosbilized are not provided with hcsusing and cc~mpensatic~n."'~ l;tokhXin himself never pubticly suggested that officers should mutiny;" but his Movement is reported to have distributed flyers in May $998on the territory of the Volgograd 8th Guards Corps (which Koklin at one time cr~mmanded),urging officers to disobey orders in conjunction with a national demonstration that Rohfitz planned." h response to XliiuU1ir15 statement, the Mair-t Military Prosecutor" OOffice in Russia issued a counterstatement warning that acts of military disobedience were punishable under the Criminal, Code by up to five years in prison, and ~lrgingits representatives in the field to ""rsol~ntelycut short" any mutiny they observed." ((Iliubin,as a Duma deputy, was irnmtlne from prr3secution, even if his statement had been considered an incitement to mutiny.) Tl-rese facts indicated a growing level of political activism among Russian military officers. However, the sort of rebellion they encr~uragedwas limited tcs passive disobedience. The Movement did not call for officers to take action, to march on the defense mi~zistry~ irngede the ftnnctioning of federal offices, or to turn their arms against their superiors. Instead it told officers tcs ignore orders tcs after the status quo. In effect, it asked officers to use their voice to protect the third atternative to exit-nameljr, the use of an underfunded and overstretched status quo for individual self-interest, The third trend Rowing from this situation is that local protests against reorganization~and lay-offs at particular bases and garrisons became more freqrzent over time and were often supported by focal gcsvernmental authorities. Such protests seem to have begun in X99'7;"Sthey were reportedly widespread bp spring 2998,""and intensified ftnrther over the followirzg summel=By July 1998, a group of naval officers in St..Petersburg who were ordered to move their families off decommissioned ships where they had been living (in the absence of sufficient military housir-tg)went on a hunger strike and refused to leave the shiyseh7 Officers"

wives at the Uzhur Strategic Missile Forces base in Mrasnoyarsk bIocked a road to prevent their husbands from goir-tg on duty, and rallied for two hours, demanding their husbands3ack pay,"Vn army major in Nizhnii Ncrvgorod commandeered a tank kom his garrison and ended up leading a large rally, atstz demanding payment of back military wages." Krasnoyarsk governor Aleksandr Lebed cited the rally of the officersbives in an infamous open letter to Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko, in which he demanded that back wages be paid and suggested that otherwise he might take over jurisdicticrn of the strategic missile base, incltlding its launch atlthoritye7"(This appears to have been a jest rather tl-xan a reat threat, since launch authority could not physially be transferred to the local level.) Eebed also demanded that two focal military schools scheduled to be closed under the reform not be shut down, and criticized the merger of air def'ense and air forces on the Chinese border as detrimental to Russian security itzterests, Lebedk letter is tlnusualy strident, but his attempt to interfere in the military reform process was not an unusual step for a regional leader to take, Similar calls for particular installations to be kept open, or for authority over them to be transferred to the gubernatorial level, were reportedly made by the gcmrnors of Murmansk, Karetia, Klzabarovsk, Primorsk, Kamchatka, Ghukcztka, Maiiningrad, Khakassia, and Stavrogol." This should not be surprising, given that provincial goxrnors and other local officials were increasingly contributing to the expenses of local garrisons from their own funds, often on the explicit request of the defense mitzistry." For example, reserve officer traitzing programs in the Moscow Military District were f~lndedby the Mosc~rwoblast and raicrn administrati~rns;~' and several other city or regional governments ""adopted" Russian navy ships, acting as their patrons,"" In part this undoubtedly aided the political ambitions of regional officials looking for good publicity. In part it also reaected the increasing share of the social welfare burden that was shifted to regional budgets, malcing pay for decommissioned officers an important local concern.

Xnxplications for the Fwure The usually sober-minded editorial staff of the Econct~rzkrmagazine opined in 1998 that a military coup was becoming a real possibility in R~sslia,~Tet what the analjrsis presented above suggests is that although military officers may indeed becrzme more and more directiy involved in politics, they are unlikely to do so in any kind of cohesive fashion. The economic interests of IXussian military officers are in competition against each other. I)oXitical action by the military is likely to be fragmented along both service and geographical fines, and is more likely trz affect particutar Zocafities than to destabilize the Russian state as a whole. It: is atso likely to be of limited aims, bemuse so many officers benefit at an individual economic level from institutional breakdown, Will this trend lead to revolutionary local protests, or perhaps local warlordism? There is some evidence that as municipal and provincial governments

have ""sonsored" "particular ships and even land-based garrisons, these sponsored bases have taken on a cohesie Xoal character. For example, Rear Adm. Uiakont>vstated in late 1998 that because the Moscow ohlast sponsored the Ad~rz. Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, 200 residents of Moscow obXast have now been asnusigned to that ship, and that Murmansk's sponsorship of the Adm, Nakhz'nzo%~ clear cruiser has catlsed 80 Mlarmansk residents to be assigned there, Uiakont>v claimed that "up to 20 percent ofthe conscripts arrive in the fleet based upcm targeted recruitment, knowing beforehand that they are going to Yheir\ship, where they are awaited and where they wiff . . . meet their c~zmpatricsts.'"~ According to another report, Vladimir oblast ran a contest in which the prize-winning conscripts were assigned to a particrrlar border troop detachment and a particular tlnit in Moscc>woblast, and similar contests were being held in EIista, Tornsk, and many other cities.?' Howevel; these reports do not suggest that bases sponsored by local governments are located on local soil, If anything, the fact that one oblast sponsored a base Xocated in another czblast suggests regional trztegrutz'on through the use of regionat military resources, rather than disintegration. Even if ;a significant mir-tority of troops and officers on a particular ship or at a particular base share a home region, it does not follow that the entire garrison wlff exhibit Xoyaity to a regional governor over national authorities if push comes to shove and the governor tries to secede from Russia, The situation bears watching; but there is as yet ncs reason to believe that regional loyalty and solidarity on the part of local bases will supersede competing economic interests among undisciplined officers-especially since radical pc~liticalchange might threaten the opportunities for corruption and theft that so many officers now exploit, There is speculation that the Yeitsin administration planned the military refarm prrscess deliberately to ensure that competition over scarce resources wcsuld keep the military divided and contrcjlled. Rrhaps, the speculation goes, Yeitsin knew that the drastic reform that was needed would provoke outrage, and he preferred to have complaints expressed at an individtlal or local level, rather than f'acing a unified military bacMash that could lead to a coup attempt, This specutatian is ft~eledby the growth of resources granted to other, non-defense millistry security services under Ueftsin, especially the interior ministry troops and newly independent border guards, who might presumably be convinced to defend the state from an attempted defense mixzistry coup. In fact, as the pace of military refc3rms accelerated, defense ministry representatives supptzrted the ncstion of more cross-ministry cooperation with interior ministry and border guard trc~ops,including joint peacekeepixzg exercises in the Caucasus.'Valid military logic lay behind this positic>n;one of the problems the Russian forces encountered in the first Chechen conflict was a Iaclc czf coordination across troops from the various ministries, and by the time of the second Chechen conRict it appeared that the defense ministry had more successfully integrated control over this mixture of units. But it is probably no accident that the military statements fiavoring this integration tended to talk about the importance of keepir-tgcommand of these joint

czpaations based in the existing military districts (i.e., under the contrc~lof defensc ministry offi~ers).~"ointtraitling under military command might also lead tcz the development of joint interests, or at least to the defense minist~j."knnwledge about what w s going on inside the other power ministries. Given that the military reform plans were drawn up by senior military officers, it is unlikely that the intention was to cause the forces tcz split away from each cztkex; since this outcome undercuts military effectiveness as least as much as it does political cohesion. What:is more likely is that the defensc ministry was doir-tg the best that it crzuld at a time of crznstrained resources and rampant cczrruytic~n, and that mititary policy confronted the same reality of Xxussian regionalism and gubernatorial activism that Russian budgetary>tax, and privatization policies had also encczuntered.

A Revaf~iona~y Model? If these trends continue, then the sittration in the Xxussian military in the future mi$t itzdeed corne to resemble partially that of 1905- 1907, with individual garrisr~nsbecrzming uncontrollable frczm time to time, as they are demoralized and patidcized by those with revolutionary agendas. Some officers wiff undoubtedly corne to support the notion of a radically different government, especially if the post-Yeltsin regime does not appear able to solve the military" resource problems, Yet it is unfikely that every officer in a particrrlar garrison would be willing to risk life and limb for the political ambitions of any regional leader; given the crosscutting regional and ecrznomic loyalties that are prevalent in the Russian military today; At the moment, it is virtually unthinkable that the Rt~ssianofficer corps as a whole w u f d support a revolution atczng the lines of the Bolshevik tztkeo~rin 1917*There is simply no issue on the horizon that can cut across the varying interests of office-rs to uni@ them behind a particular radical program-especially since the option of exit, as Hirschman predicted, carries off many of the best and brightest who might czthervvtse lead a cohesive push for change.'" h the absence of a revolt~tiontoday, many disaffected officers can either line tlzeir owrz, pockets by stealing frc~mthe state, or quit and try their hands at legitimate business. The passibility of exit or corruption limits the likelihood of antiestabiishment viaXence, Furthermore, the Russian officer corps today lacks the sense of corporate cohesion that has pfiovc~kedmilitary cr~uysin Latin America and southern ELIrope in the past, Rrceived nlilitarp interests today are being threatened by other military officers (namely; those sitting in the defense mir-tistry in Arvl.oscow);and what threatens one service arm tends to benefit another, All military officers are not suffering equally, The significant effects of this breakdown of military cohesion may: be negatiive fc3r society as a whczle, as those trained in the use of wapons choose tcz fend for themselves in an anarchic environment. Military breakdown may contribute to an increase in crime and other forms of antisocial behavior. Serious political

repercussions, nonetheless, are much more likely to be international than dornestic, Continuing financial desperation already encourages individuai officers to sell Russian wapons illegally on fc3reign as well as domestic markets. And if local mutinies end up affecting the behavior of IXussian peacekeeping troops stationed in Georgia, Tajifiistan, or Moldova, for example, troops may take unauthorized actions that go against the interests of the Russian state. A partial example of this may have been seen in June 199% when Russian troops assigned to the StabiXization Force (SFOK) peacekeeping operation in Bosnia suddenly marched into war-tom Kc~sotioahead of the KFOK peacekeping schedule agreed to by the United Nations, to the surprise of NATO officials and apparently of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Although the exact chain of events in this case remains murky, credible reports indicate that the action may have been spearheaded by a fraction led by Gen. Viktor Zavarzin, far personaland ultitnately careerist-reasons." Zavarzi~lhad sewed as the Russian military representative at NATO headquarters, but had been recalled and apparently punished by his superiors after he faiXed to discover or predict the exact starting time of HATO air strikes against Serbia during the Kosovo crisis. Zavarzin is reported to have wanted rexnge on NATO as wefl as to restore his reputation at home. He suddenly appeared in Bosnia at the Xxussian SFOR base and communicated by radio to Moscow with Gen. AnatoXii Kvashnin, chief of the General Staff. En turn, eashnin apparently presented the trrwy transfer plan to President l"eltsin for signature only half an hour before the operation began. So although the action taken thus appears to have been "authorized," i t did not follow the path one would normally associate with major military undertakings that have strong diplol~~atic repercussions, The plan may in fact have been put into effect the same day i t was lilatched by a f'ew generals." Xt succeeded in boosting Zavarzitz's career, since he received a medal for this action; but it certainly was not welf conceived from an opaational paint of view, since within a week the Russian troops occupying the Pristina airport were reduced to begging for water horn the British KFOR forces surrounding them." The hyyc~thesisthat this actic~nwas inatlgurated by a faction of generals rather than by cohesiw state policy is strengthened by the fact that within days Russian defense minister Marshal Sergew signed an agreement with U.S. defense secretary William Gohen that put Russian fc~rcesin Kosovo basicatty where NATO had intended them to be X aX along, in small units under a unified, NATO-lied command. fn other words, the Russian military as a whsie made no attempt to subvert the generally cr~operativeapproach that Russian diplomats decided to take t w a r d the Kosovo situation, even though a group of generals was ablie to commandeer the reitzs of policy temporarily. Xn fact, the Russian mili~aryleadership has gone out of its way to support the Russian KFOR troops who are cooperating with NATO, repclrtediy paying them salaries ten titnes the level of troops not facing immediate combat," at a Xevcl equal to tl-rosc fighting in Ghechnya, so that they feel on an eqtlat. footing with their NATO counterparts.

Effective and cohesive pailticat action at the national level is unlikely to emerge from the Russian military anytirne soon, given the circumstances described here, For this situation to change, loyalty to the institution and to its core values has to reemerge among the officer corps, replacing both exit and corruption as attractive options, If down the road the officer corps can. once again articrxlate a clear and convincing purpose for its existence that is reflected in its size and structure, then a common sense czf patriotism and duty will iead 1;tussian society to regain its traditional respect for the officer corps, and will allow the officer corps again to respect itself. At that point, control of cc~rrmptionand enccjuragemrmt of prc3f'essionalism will ~OXIOWnaturally from the desire of the institution to reform itself in order to preserve its image and its own well-being. Simultaneoudy, the military will once again becc~mea real force in Rt~ssiansociety. The: one: note czf caution that must be sounded in conclusion is that internat reform of the Russian military organization in the f ~ ~ t uneed r e not be itz a direction that solidifies demcjcratic civilian cc~ntrol,There are multiple, credible reports that the extremist nationalist political movement Ied by Aleksandr Barkashov; Russian National Unity (RNE, in its Russian acronym), which is widely seen to be a violent, neo-Nazi organizatic~n,has been directing its youth cadres into military police, and internat ministry careers in an effort to gain infiuence in those institutions. The Russian military leadership apparently welcomes and even encrlurages these efforts, since the yclung men who go thrrsugh RNE paramilitary training are much more disciplined and physically fit than the average draftee czr officer recruit." If the RNE recruits of today becc~methe leading officers of the Russian military in a generation, and if their numbers and continuing connection with the RNE are sufficient for them to retain the values itzdoctrinated in them as teenagers, military corruption and disorder wilt becc~mea thing of the past. Cohesion and czrganizatlonal loyalty will reappear. Yet Ilberat democratic political institutions may fall victitn to this rebirthof the Russian military institution. It is at this point that a military-backed authoritarian cczup would becc~rnea real possibility, if the Redgling democratic IXussian state remained in the kind of disarray seen at the end of the Yeltsi11era, Loyalty would trump exit and corruption; and the Russian military might then assert a unified vc~ice,demanding order and promising its delivery should the state be unable to oblige.

Nates 1. The Russian Cerltter for Public Opinion Research (V1SIOM) reported that the level of ""cmptete trust" hthe armed forces fejt from 39 percent in 19993 to 27 percent in 1997, even though the military remained the seccjnd most trusted institution in socic?ty(after the Russian Orthodox clit~rcl-r) when compared against the political leadership and tl-re other power structures. A majority of resyonder~tsbelieved that the draft should be abolished. Polls done by other argar~izationsindicated that respondents in Moscow and St. Petersburg saw the army beset t,y poor standards of ymfessionafism (including butlyix~gof re-

cruits) and ""istxfficient irstellectuat.potential of the feadership." See Natafia Sbchenjkova, ""Ci~eMiltion Two Hundred 'rhousand to Join the Ranks: The Rest . . . :" Kossiiskie vesri, July 30, 1997, as reported in FBIS- U M 97-2 12; and "About the Wish of the Youth to Scrve in the Russian Armed Fc~rces:"East European Press Semice, Definse and Secztrit~ May 25, 1998, as reported in the Internet Securities Interxzational an-fine press database. 2. See TJavid McIIr~gh,"Yeltsirz Go~rrts(;enerals, Hints at Plot:" Masco~.rrTimes, July l 1 , 1998, and "Yeitsin Says At~thoritiesCan Foil Coup Ptan:"dio Free E~irope/RadioLiberty {XFEjRL) Newsline 2, no. 131, pt. l (July 13,1998). 3, A 1994 study spol~soredby the Lawrence Livermcire Natiul~alLaboratofy and led by Ileborah Yarsike BafI indicated that over half of the officers stxrveyed in a variety of Russian regions wcjuld be prepared to ignore orders to become involved in dctmestic political disputes or unrest. See Ball, ""MowReliable Are Russia's Clff-icers?""lane"s~ne//igence Review, May 1996: 20.2--207. 4. "Russia ltethinking Military Downsizing:" KFE/RL Newsline 3, no. 68 (Apr. 8,1999). 5. See Bavid Hoffman, "War Gives New Clout to Russia11 Military:" Washington Post, Dec. 5, 1999; Eva Busza, 'Chechnya: The Military3 Golden Opportl~nityto Emerge as an Important Ibotiticat Player in Russia:" Program on New Approaches to Russian Security (PCINARS) Policy Memo no. 98 ([:ambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Llavis Cellter for Russian Studies, 13ec. 1999); and Mark Kramer, ""Civil-MilitaryRelations in Rtlssia and the Chechnya C:onfiict:YVClNARS Policy Memo IT^. 99, Dec. 1999, 6. In addition to the above sources, see Michael J. Orr, "%me Pmvisional Motes on Current Russian Operations in Dagestan and C:hechnya,"" available on line at ww.ppc.gims.org/csrc/rt~ss~cl-rech1.htm(Dec. 1995));and Micl-raet R. Gordon, "The Grunts of Grozriy;T"Mew York Times Magaziuze, Feb. 27,2000. 7. JYithin the first month aAer the Ministry of rjefense set up a hot line for dedoz/fl"lc!~inacompiaints, it received 2,000 calls. See David Filipov; """Thousax~ds Flee Russia3s Brutal Military;' Boston June 14, 1998. 8. According to one source, ""Pniitarysociologists" dclined: ""Pejudiced coverage of the Armed Fc~rcesproblems in the media . . . plays- a negative ride . . . . Within the last seven years not a single movie was produced which showed the Arr~ledForces in a positive light, All crf this col~trihutesto the forgnation of an unattractive image of the Armed Fc~rcesin the public conscience and the gcmeration of the wrong notions about rl-re military service among the peapie" "'About the Wish ofVc)uth""). 9. Fifipov, ""ThousandsFlee.'" 10. Albert 0,Hirschman, Exit, Voice?and Loyalv: Responses iru Iledine in Firnzs, Cdrgalzizalions, and Slates (Cambridge: Hawdrd University Press, 1970). 1I . Alit oficers who were on active duty in 1993 signed a five-year coxjtract that was to expire in 1998. A 1997 poll indicated that 50 percent of those officers intended to leave the service wl-ren their contracts expired. See Stzllart 11. Goldman, ""Russian Conventional Arrned Forces: On the k r g e of Collapse?" "ongressional Research Service Report no. 97-820 F {Wasl-rington,D.C.: 1,ibrary of Congress, Sept. 4, 1997), p. 23. According to a mid-1998 Izvestiia poI1, 55 percent of officers surveyed planr~edto stay in the militarywhich of course means that 45 percent did not. See ""QnIyOne-Fifth of Soldiers Ldve an Their Tbay,'"FE/RL Newsline 2, no, 132, pt. 1 (July 14, 1998). 12, Vladimir Mufii?in,"Grc>und7"roczps Reduction Gc>mpteted:"l'heir Streng1-rLevel Decreased Tenfold in Nine Ears,""Nemvisimoe llruennoe obmrenie (m) /an occasional sup, 9 (Mar. 12-18, 1999), as reported in Foreign plement to Nezavisiintaia gazefa ( N G ) ] no.

Broadcast Information Service I>aiEy Report (FEIS)-SOV 1999-9322, H i s observation is based on intelviem at the ground troops ~naindirectorate, 13, For an application of this argument to the situation of Russian defense industrial wcjrkers and managers, see Kimberly Marten Zisk, Weapons, C;tillzrre, and Sev-Interest: Sovier Xlefense iwanagers in the New Russia (New York: Coturnbia University Press, 1998). 14. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loycklp, ppy,65-66, 15. Hirschman (Exit, Vnice, rand Loyals~p. 33) argues that c71-revoice option is tl-re only way in which dissatisfied customers or members can react whenever the exit option is unavailrth1e:Tormption could, ho)wever, be included in his category of "internal exit" (p. 1131,where members who do not leave an organization yhysicafly nonetheless drop out of its established norrns of functioning, 16. Anatolii Mostovoi, interview of Anatolii Panov, "Revival of Officers' Assemblies:" NVC), nno. 29 (Aug. 9-15,1997), as reported in FBIS-UMA 97-225, 17. John Busfrnefi, Mtiriu~yArnid Keprclssion: Russian Soldiers iu~the Revolution rf 1905-1906 (Bloomington: Ixtdiana University-12resrz;,1985). Chechrzyu: "Itnbst~?ne$Russian Power (New Haven: Yale University 18, h ~ a t o L,ieveill, l Press, 1998), p. 273. 19, "l'hese include the multiple instances where comlnanding officers refused to lead their troops iiltu Gkecbnya (see Gafdman, ""Rtlssjan Gonvez~tionaIArmed Forces: pp. 27-28), as we11 as other, more recellt prcjtests that have been reported across the ccjuntry and are discussed tater in this chapter. 20. Accoding to a ~nilitarymciologist, bemeen 50 and 70 percent of recruits surveyed reported ""le presence of rionregulation relatiox~shipsin units and suburlits:" which is how the Russian TJefertse Ministry officialfy refers tr>dedo~~sl-rchina. Maj. Ilmitrii bzhidaev, """l"he State and Revolution: &fadern Problems of Socieq and the Army 'rhrough a Sociologist" Eyes:" ArmeGkii sburrjik no, 9 (Seyt, 1997): 16-19, as reported in FRIS-SOV97-350. 2 1. For excellent recent examytes, see ''N W no, 10 (Mar. as reported in FBIS- UMA 98-078,. 13-1 9, 19981% 26, V. Vermolin, "A~nnestiedCommanders Go On Running the Show:' Zltlsskii telegt"a5 July 31, 1998, as reported in the Defense and Securilry compilation (available through the ISI Emerging Markets on-line press service), k g . 2,1998. "Ertgranichny: Shfagbaum'"Bor8er 27. Maj. VIaEitimir Mdl-rov and Maj. Vitalii D e n i s o ~ Guards: A Barrier], Krasnaiu zvezdcl, June 17,1998. 28. Valerii Drobot, ""Ofitser za reshetkoi" "Ecer Behind Bars], iWO (electronic version available through IS1 Emerging Markets on-Iine press service in Russian), June 26, 1998. 29. AAlebandr Shabtrrkin, interview of Lt. Gen. VIadimir Fedorc~viichK~~lakov, "At First Hand: Ideological Niche of Militafy Semice," NW, Oct. 3-9, 1997, as reported in FBISSOV 97-307. 30, Ibid.

3 1, LJieven,CJkec.clany~.r~ p, 292, 32, Col, Alekrsandr Mikhailovich Uatkovskii and Lt. Col. Igor Nikolaevicll Kuznetsv, ""Shortage of Finances Fraught with Disilztegration of Army: iW0, Feb. 12, 1998, as reported in FBPS-UMA 98-056. 33. Pave1 Fdgenhauer [Pwel Felgmgauer], ""Kremlin's Rank Obsession:" SE,Petersburg (Russia) Tima, 1I')ec. 1-7, 1997; Ax~ataliiBtxkharixz, irskrview of Col, Gen. Vladixnir Nikoiaevich Vakovlev, Commander in Chief of tile Strategic Rocket Farces, "Armed Forces: Prc~btems,Solutions:" Armeiskii sbnmik no. 2 (Feb. 1998): 4-9, as reported in FBIS-SOV 98-16"?; ""Ground Fc~rcesKeorgarltizatio~ltC:ontinues:WVO, Mar. 17, 1998, as reported in FBIS-SOV 98-076; and A, Bondar, iilterview of Adm. Kuraedov, "No Problems, Only Tasks:" Na srr~zheZapolz'arl'a [tile newspaper of the Russian Nczrthern Fleet], July 1, 1998, as reported in the L>efense and Securiy compilation (available througl-r the IS1 Eanerging Markets t>n-lintpress semice), July 1, 1998. 34. Pozl-tidaev,"The Slate and Revolution.'" 35. S. Ishcher~ko,""Oficers Are Baked Like Idancake< V4 slavu rndinjf j the Belarrtsian Ilefense Ministry Newspaper] no. 93 (19981, as reported in tile I>efensc rand Security (Russia) compilation (avaiiable thrc~ughthe IS1 Emerging Markeb on-line press service),Juty 1,1998. 36, Vladimir Matiash and Peliks SernianovsGi, ""Bulwczdtsy m 1 vekai"ICommanders of the 21st Century], Kr~snaiazvezda, June 9, 1998. 37. Cot. Gen. I13iaGrigor'evich Panin, "Pulse of Military Keform~'AArneiskiisbounik no. 2 {Feb. 1998): 10-15, as reported in FI3IS-SOV98-167. 38, Ibid. 39. S. llaskai, interview of Vice Adm. V, 'r"arygin,""E'~ndsAre Being Saved, Combat Readiness Xs Increasing,'3~1razFz Ralfiki ithe newspaper of the Baltic Fleet], July 7, 1998, as reported in the l?efense and Seczrritty cornpilatian (available througl-r the XSI Emerging Markets on-line press semi=), July 29,1998. 40, P. Lysenkc~,interview of Rear Abm. A l e h a ~ ~ C;enl~adievich dr LIiakc>nov,""rraining and Education: Always the TAeadingEdge:" Morskoz' sbornik 12 (Ilec. 1998): 50-53, as reported in FBIS-UMA 99-032. 41. VIadirnir Matiash, interview of C h t . Gen. Yurii Dmitrievicll Bukreev? ""Voiska me~liaiutobiik" [l'be 'htzps Are Changing "l'heir Lc~ok],Krasnaia zvezda, June 18,1998. 42. Igor D. Sergeev?"Voennaia doktrina ireformirovar~ieVuoruzher~nybSil Rossiishi Federatsii" Military TJoctrix-reand the Reform of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation], Krasnuia zvezc;!l.z,June 17, 1998; Maj. Gen. Anatotii Fillitpovich Klimenlo and Col. Aleksar~drArkadievicb Koltiukov, ""The Basic Document on Mifitary Organizational Ilevelopment:" NVC) no. 6 (Feb. 13-19,1998), as reported in FBIS-SOY 98-107, 43, Itear Adm. CX Shkiriatav and A. Zolotov, "Some Approaches to Reforming Russids Armed Forces," larskoi sbornik no. 4 (1997): 18-21, as reported in FBI$-SOV 97-203; VIadimir Mwailovich Zakharov, doctor of military scier~ces,""Gtefe~~se on All Azimuths:" NVO no. 38 (Oct. 10-16, 19971, as reported in FBIS-SCIV 97-328; C:ot, Gen. Vladirnir 'r"akovlev,cited in "Korntkoi"IBrieRyj, N W ,June 26, l998 (available thmugl-r tile IS1 Exnerging Markets on-fine press service, in Rtlssian). 44. Goldman, "Russian Caxltventior~alArmed Forces:" p. 41. 45.Sergeev, "bennaia doktri~za*" 46. '"Commander Lliscusses Merger of Air Force and Air LIefense "l'roops," lir2FE/Rf, Newsline 2, x~o,28, pt. 1 (Feb. 11,19982. 47. Vladimir Mukl~in,"Reform Prc~cess'Kook in the Bulk of 'l'r(>tzps:' NVCI no. 19 (May 22-28, 199K), as reported in FBIS-SOV98-190.

48, Ibid. 49, Sergcev>"Vc~ennaiadoktrina." 50. "Army Plans More Cuts Among Officers, Military Schools Face Closure:" Interfax, Mar. 7,1998, as reported in BBC: Stktnmary of Would Broadcasts SIJID31701SI. 5 1. L,irrven, Chechnyu, pp. 294-299. 52. Gotdman, ""RrrssianConventional Armed Forces," ppyy. 40-43. 53. Col. Gen. Georgii 1vanovicl-rShyak, "Armed Forces: Problems, Solutions:" Armeiskii sbnmik slo, 8 (Aug. 1997): 6-44 as reported in FBIS-SOV 97-307. 54, Maj. Gen. of Aviation (ret,) blentin Rog, "Armed Forces: Problems, Soluticans,'" Armeiskii sborrjik no, 1 I (Nov. 1997): 4-0, as reported in FBIS-SGV98-042, 55. 1Xear Adm, (ret.) Cleargii Georgievich Kostev and Sergei Ivano~vicl~ Paryrev, ""'l'he Navy in the Millstones of Refars1t:WMTSO no. 37 (Oct. 3-9,1997), as reported in FI3IS-SOV97-307. 56. Andrei Korbut, ""Fur Military Llistricts Wilt Be Eliminated," "VC], June 8, 1998, as reported in FBE- U M 98-1 59. 57. Xgor FroIov, ""Ferment Ixttensifies in the Rtlssian Artny>'WVO,Mar. 3, 1398, as reported in FBlS-UlMA 98-062. 58. Pave1 Feltjenpaur, ""Sdense TJossier: Army Morale at a New Low:" AWos~-ow Times, Mar. 12, 1998. 59, For example, see Y Izosimov, intexview of Maj. Gen. k r i i Usynin, commander of the Saratov Missile Engineering Schoot, ""Missiite Engineering School in Saratov marks 80th Birthday:" Sarato~j,June 26, 1998, as reported in the L>efense atzd Sectdrity compilation (a~ailablcthrougl~the IS1 Emerging Markets on-line press setvice), July 8, 1998, 60.01eg lX,itvinov, "Air Force Commander in Chief's Hot Line," AqrQ, June 24, 1998, as reported in FBE- UMA 98- 175, 61. "Defense Ministry Accuses IliuWin,'"FE/RL ~Yewslivze2, no. I40 (July 23,1998). 62. "Military Prosecutor's Office Deal Retaliatixzg Strike," f22nsskii relegraj JuIy 24, 1998, (a~ailablethmugll the IS1 Emerging as reported in the Defease and Security cctmpitatio~~ Markets on-line press service), July 27,1998, 63. h n Kurilia, ""Koulin Looks for Support on \Soll;ograd Military Bases:" Russian Regiotzal Kei?ou5;Internet Edition, May 7, 1998. 44, ""Military Prosecutor's Ofice Deal Retaliating Strike:" and ""Spporters of Opposition Arxlty Movement May Face Cri~ninalProsecution: Radio Rossiia, July 23, 1"388,as reported in the I3efense and Securz'liycompilation (available through the IS1 Emergii~gMarkets an-fine press service), July 23, 1998. 65, Goldmax~{'%ussian Gonwntional Artned Forces3"p. 32) reports that an airborxsle brigade in Stavropol refused to go on exercises until they received their back pay. 66. FroIov, ""Frment Ixttensifies in the Russia11Army.'' 67, WrV, ""Smicemen Protest as Cuts in Russiab Baltic Fleet Leave Them Homeless:" July 8, 1998, as reported by BBC Worjdwide nfloniroril~g(available throlagl~the IS1 Emerging Markets on-line press semice), July 16, 1898. 68. "Officers' Wives Are on Strike,'Vzvestiia, July 25, 1998, as reported in the Dcrfense m d Securiliy compilation (available through the IS1 Emerging Markets on-fine press service), July 29, ,998. 69, ""Facing 'l'axslks, Ilefense Ministry Is Scared:Trihuna, July 25, 1398, as reported in the Lkfitzse and Secztn'ly cc~mpilation(available tl~rou@the IS1 Einerging Markets on-line press service), July 29,1998, 70. Vladirnir Getbrgiev, ""Lebed's Nuclear Ultimatum," Neza~~isimtaia gazera, July 28, 1998, as reported in Kussiiall Press Ddgesl; an-line version.

71. Igar Frolov, "Temperature of Russia11 Army Approaches Boiling Point: Komsomol"skaia p r ~ v d Mar. ~ , 3, 1998, as reported in FBIS-UMA 98-062. 72. Gofdman, '2X;ussian Conventional Armed Forces:" p. 32, 73, Kuznetsov, "Armed Forces: Probterns, Solutions." 74. "TPiotr Vetiki-ecretty Hopes for Presidential Patronage:" Kuwrmersunr-DaiZ2i; Jrdy 28, 1398, as reported in the Ilcfense and Securip compilation (awiIable through the IS1 Eanerging Markets an-fine press service), July 31, 1998. 75. "Russia3 Crisis: CouXd It f,ead to Fascism?" konnmist, Jufy I 1 , 1998, p. 20, 76. Lysenko intemiew of Uitakonc~v,""Rainingand Education," 77. Vfadimir Mrxkhir~,""Rank and File: Ministry of Defense Satisfied with Results of LIra&-98,'WVO no. 3 (Jan. 29-Feb. 4,1999), as reported in FBIS-SW 1999-0215. 78. "Itussia's 58th Army Begills Mititary Exercises in North Caucasus:" and "Russia: Joint C:ommand Exercise b d e r M/ay in North C:aucilsus;"%oth I'YAR-"ASS, Jui)r27, 1998. 79. Col. Gen. I,eonid ;lolotov, head of the Fr~jrlzeMilitary Acrzde~ny* ""Vzairnodeistvie siIoyrkh struktur" "ooyeratiox~ of the Force Structures], Krasnuia xvezda, June 16, 1398. 80. Mbert C), Wirschman, ""Exit and Voice: An Expanding Sphere of Innuence:" in idern, Rival Vie3.t"~ uf Market Society arad Oiher Rec-ent Essays (Cambridge: Harvard Urlilidersity Press, 19921, p. 90. 8 1 . See Phi1 Reeves, "NKI'O in Kosovc): The Five-Minute Hero:?~ndepen&nt (London), June 20,1999. 82. See Viktor Baranets, ""Srbs Kissed rl-re Dust-Covered Arr~lorof Our BTIts:" KomsomolSkaia p r ~ v d June ~ , 15, 1999. 83. Andrew Jack, "Russian Elite Forces Pushed into Peacekeeping ltofe:" Finranciut Tima, June 18,1999. 84. See "Russian 'I"maps in Dagestan Get Top r)otbr(" Agence France-Presse, Aug. 17, 1999, as reported in the CIariNet on-Iine news service, which cites the Russian Defense Ministry as saying that KFOR troops are being paid $1,070 per month while troops serving in non-combat situations at home are earnix~g$I Q0per month. 85, For examples, see Pave1 C;nskt~v,May& Kadic:, N e ~ c j r kbroadcilst in Russian, Oct. 29, 1996, as reported in FBlS-SOV 136-204; Meksandr Gotubev, ""Brothers in Arms: MV11 Professio~~als Train Barkashc>vites,"CObshchaiu gazefa, May 15-2 1, 1997, as reported in FBI$-SOV 97-107; and Dmitry Babicl-r,""TheNational Socialists~~osrow Ernes, Apr. 24, 1999.

PARTI1

Economy

This page intentionally left blank

ity and Disorder

Russia's Virtua Economy Clifford G. Gaddy The Broukittgs Institution

Barry W. Ickes Pennsylvania State Unz'versz'~

T

he much-heralded ""tansition tc>the market" in Russia is now widely recognized to be a far more complex and open-ended process than many at first expected, Boris Yeltsin's last state-of-the-federation speech to the Uuma reflected this realization: "We are stuck halhay b e ~ e e na planned, command eccznomy and a normal, market czne. And now we have an ugly mudeX-a crossbreed czf the two systems." Yeltsin's mkving of metaphors-the spatial with the biological-reflected the fundamental cr~nfusionin logic that has plagued economic policymaking in post-Soviet Russia. A hybrid.----tilebiological mixtrrre czf two genotypes-is not a halhay point, If it were, the current dilemma would be simpler tc>resolve. This chapter offers an analysis czf the evolution of IXussia" current economic system, whiclz due to its unusual (some would say uniqtre) characteristics has been referred tc>here as the "virtual economy.'We pay particrntar attention tc>the interaction between economic reform policies and the adaptive behavior of enterprise directors, which has bl~lntedthe efficacy of attempted reforms. In concluding, W explore the dire implications of the virtual ecr>nc>myfor Rtlssia's internal stability and development as weir as for its international security, The critial question for Rt~ssia'sfuture development is whethe-r the current sittlation represents a transitory detour or a fundamental crisis of transition. The future success of the Russian experiment depends czn a successful economic transi-

61iford G, Caddy and Uarry frt! Ickes tion. Xf the current crisis is merely a tempclrary detour, i"r imptications for IXussia's fundamental stability are not too severe, We argue in this chapter, however, that Russia:.?ecr~ncsmicdevelopment has evc~lvedinto a new system-a virtual econoEzy (Caddy and Ickes 1998, 1999, and forthcoming; Ericson 1999)-that is stable in the near term brit is not conducive to sustainable economic development, In order to explore the potential f~lturedevelopment of the Russian economy, one must first analyze haw the economy got stuck, That is the primary question posed by the Russian experience for the economics af transition. Some argue that the virtual economy is just a continuation of the Soviet economy, This is not quite right; atthough there are important Xegacies from the Soviet period, it is important to understand how agents have ad'npted their behavior. The virtual eccsnow is the result of behavisral adaptation in the wake of incomplete shock therapy. The debate b e ~ e e nproponents of shack therapy and of a gradualist approach centered aro~lnddetails but shared a common technical view of the refarm prrsblern.That is, the argument between the WOfactic>nswas about the pace of reform and not its nature, We assert that this technical focus led to an incomplete understanding of enterprise behavior, resrrltitzg in policies too narrc~wlyfc3cused on ecr~nomicinstruments.The narrow apyrrsach indt~cedenterprises to adapt their behavior in ways that crystallized into the virtual economy. In analyzing this process, we have used an evolr~tionaryconstruct that exposes the behaviosal adaptation at the very core of the virtual ecrIncsmy, Becatise it is equally important to understand the larger context in which the system developed and which will shape its future, we also examine the current economic systern in the context of the fundamental policy imperatives facing post-Sot.iet Rr~ssia. This examination reveals that at the most basic level, the virtual economy was a result of Russia's inability to satis@its multiple imperatives simultaneously,

The Swi& Roots of the Virtual Economy The roots of the virtual economy lie in the largely tinrefarmed indtlstrial sector inherited from the Soviet period, At the heart of the phenomenon are the large number of enterprises that still prodrlce goods but destroy value.Xn enterprise destrcys value when the value of inputs it purchases from other enterprises exceeds the value of the output that it produces." To understand the phenomenon of value destruction, one must understand Soviet pricing practices. Raw material inputs were tinderpriced in the Soviet economy.' Their prices were based on the operating costs of extraction, ignoring rent (that is, disregarding the opport~lnitycost of tising the resources now rather than in the future). No doubt this prxtice harmonized with the short-term goal of increasing production; scarcity pricing might have induced more conservation, which would have militated against prodrlction increases. This bias itz raw material prices fed into the ystem of industrial prices. Heavy consumers of energy were, in effect, subsidized, So too were heavy users of capital, thanlcs to the

absence of interest charges, In short, the costs of production were calcutated on the basis of an ir-tcompleteenumeration of costs, In addition, the system was biased toward certain users, Many commodities bore two different prices-one for use by heavy industry, and the other for light industry. This bias would feed into the calculation of the costs of production of these goods in such a way that goods prodtlced by high-priority sectors wc>uld a p p a r to have lower costs of production than those produced by low-priority sectors, The distortions created by such pricing practices masked the true productivity of ecrlnomic sectors, leading economic policymakers d~lringthe postSoviet transition to make decisions based on faulty assumptions? Because the pricing system disguised the relative efficiency of various activities, the true viability of these activities would becr~meapparent only after economic Xiberalization, Once prices began to reflect costs, many sectors that earlier had appeared to be creating value turned out to be destroyililg it.' The extent to which the Soviet economy produced the wrrlng things in the wrrlng way could only be gauged after liberalization. This effect was magnified by the sirnuXtaneous adjustment to world market prices.Wany industrial, enterprises could not recover their cr~sts,once prices mewed to market-clearing levels. The raising of prices on goods produced anty led to unsold output. Price liberalization revealed the extent to which value added in the Soviet economy was ir-t fact created itz the energy and raw materials sector; but it had the effect of making price refarm appear to be the destroyer of the manufiacturing sector, lXussians\ecognition of the nonviability of value-destroying enterprises thus has been hampered by the poptlfar argument that faifed policies of reform are tc>blame.*Policy has sugered as a resutt, Much of the change that has occurred in the sectoral distribution of output since the end of planning is due more to price liberalization than to substantial changes in the structure of the economy.'" The Russian economy remains a hyperindustrlalized system composed of enterprises that wuXd not be viable in a martcet economy, supported by transfers fmm energy and raw materials seaors. There is one other key difkrence between the Sc~vieteconomy and the current Xxussian economy tbat shoutd be discussed here: Under Soviet conditions, the transfer of value from energy and raw materials to itzdtrstry was merely an accounting convenience with no effects on how the ecrlnomy operated. Indtrstry appeared more productive than it actually was; but this distortion was immaterial to the operation of the system. Xn the Russian economy, on the other hand, the transfer of resources frclm energy and raw materials tc>industry must be induced. The transfer of value is no mere accounting convenience but renects a redistribution of income, To maintair-t this transfer of value, the a m e r s of assets that are contributing value must be induced to continue to contribute that valueeiiTo the extent tbat the payment necessary to induce the value transkr leaves the system (for example, itz the form of capital flight), the Russian economy has less total value with which tc>support gcmrnment, cr~mparedwith the Soviet economy.

The Nature of Refarms The central idea behind Russian and other maricetizing economic reforms is to is, to force enterprises influence enterprise behwior via budget constraints-----tha~ to increase revenues or c ~ lcosts t in order to satisfjr the constraints of their budget~.~" prt~fit-maximizingfirm will respond to budget cr~nstraintsin agpropriate ways, either by reducing costs or by increasing revenues,

Budget 6onstrczinls An enterprise can relax the pressure exerted by its budget constraints in several ways. First, it can increase efficiency, raising the amount of output that it obtains from the same given inputs. Secondly, it can reduce the amount of inputs purchased, although. this approach may also reduce future output and revenue, if the inputs are key to productic>n.Third, the enterprise may increase sales through better marketing, obtaining a better price for output. Fourth, the enterprise can temporarily forego itzvestment. If the capital stock depreciates, howevex; this has long-term cc3nsequences for prodtictic>n," Fifth, the enterprise can borro- if credit is available and the enterprise is sufficiently attractive to investors, Eloweve&any borrowed sums must be repaid itz the future, witfinterest, Conversef-y,when subsidies are reduced or taxes increased to enterprises, their budget constraints harden. In Soviet times, subsidies were a necessary Feature of a regixne that required production of goods itzdependent of cost c~nsiderations.'~ In the post-Soviet transition, most direct subsidies have been reduced, although many indirect subsidies remain in glace, with tax offsets and other speciai deals being a key feattire of the environment, It is crucial at present that direct and itzdirect subsidies be etirninated and taxes be collected, fc3rcing enterprises to meet budget constraints through market methods. Market Distance, Refarm via the budget constraint is based on the assumption that an enterprise" survival depends on its profits. The tightening of the budget constraint itnpingcs on profits, forcing enterprises to itzcrease their efficiency Of crlurse, this agprrsach also wakens afl enterprises at impact, before adjustment. But the idea is that the strongest wiXI st~rviwand g r w even stronger." The underlying notion on which this approach is based is the monotunicity of reform. This means that the effects of the shock on an enterprise depend on the degree of the enterprise" inefficiency. We can think of enterprises in terms of the distance they must traverse to prodlice a marketable prodrrct.'%et di E (0,i))be the distance of enterprise i. An enterprise that produces a product it can set1 in tvortd markets has ldi = 0, while a completely inefficient enterprise has di = II. Transition starts with some initial distribution of' enterprise distance," The greater is d, the less viabfe the enterprise. Suppose that d is the cutoff point for viability: that is, all enterprises with di = 4 are not financially viabfe.

Now consider the effect, for example, of an increase in tax collection. This tightens the budget constraint Tor aU enterprises, essentially increasing difor all i. Those enterprises that were closest to the break-even paint, & are pushed beyond it. The pressure to restructure is greatest for the enterprises closest to this point, but all feel the pressure, The rnclre inef5cient the enterprise, the greater the shock, The most inefficient ml-ry be wiped out by the shock, but healthier enterprises wiXI grow stronger as a result of the intervention. This unidimensional view of restructuring-that reform means reducing dilies at the heart of much refarm advice,

Relational Capital. Ncrw suppose that the organism has another survival tool: relational capital, Enterprises vary in their inherited stack: of relational capital, Some enterprises (directors) have very good relations with Xoal andlor federal officials and with other enterprises. The stock of these relationships determines the types of transactions that can be suppclrted (barter versus cash, prepayment, and the like). Relational capital is goodwill that can. be translated into informal economic activity." Let ri be the stock of relational capital of enterprise i. The actions that an enterprise takes can affect its stock of r+ Just as iwestment alrgments the physical capital stock, enterprises can also inxst in and build up relational capital. For example, the enterprise can perform services for local. government. This action ml-ry enhance the enterprise's relationships with local officials, and thus ir-tcreaseits capacity to cr~nductinformal activities in the future, It is important to recr~gnize that the augmentation of retatianal capital is costly, The key point is that relational capital can aid enterprise survival. Enterprises that have high d may survix by exploiting relational capital, l-i.

R-D Space A consideration of retationat capital shows that the conditions that initially characterk~eenterprises in transition are two-dimensiond. Enterprises can thus be located in r-d space as in Figure 6.1. It is clear that the greater is di, the greater is the minimal level of relations necessary for survival. Although relations can. allow an enterprise to compensate for greater distance, some enterprises have such poor initial combinations of r and d that they are unviable. Not only are these enterprises situated far from the market, but the qkxality of their relations with officials and other enterprises is poor. Clearly; the minimum level of relations needed to survive increases with distance. So we can imagine a boundary (VC in Figure 6-1) with a positive slope separating the region of viable enterprises from those that are not viable,'" How steep VC is depends on the institutic~nalsetting.") In a fully transparent economy>relations may compensate little far great distance, If officials are more corrupt, then retations may: be much more important.

4 FIGURE 6.1

R-D Space

SOURCE: Clifford C;addy and Barry W. Ickes, ''Ib Restructure or Not to Restructure: Informal Activities and Enterprise Behaviior in Transition? wc~rki~~ilg paper, Wiltiam TJavidson Tnstititure, May 1998.

In this two-ditnensional environment, the effects of marht-type reforms need not be monotc>nic.That is, a tightening of the budget cr~nstraintdoes not necessarily put the greatest pressure on tl-xoseenterprises that are must inefficient (that have the highest d). Those that illvested in r are relativeljr better off. Xf it~vestment resources are limited, then the relevant issue for an enterprise is the relative return tu ix-rvesting in distance reduction and relational capital." Our analysis shows that these relative returns depend on the nattrre of reforms and on the choices made by individt~atenterprises.

One of the must important but least examined results of economic reform in Russia has been the privatization of relational capital. In Soviet times, personal relations, cr~nnections,and influence (blatJ2'were importmt tc>the system" functioning, The primary benefit to the enterprise director lay in increased ability to fulfil1 the economic plan. Xn the highly distorted regixne of central plannir-tg,supply failures were a feature of daily life. Relations with local party officials and with other enterprise directors were oftell crrrciiai to obtaining scarce inputs. In the late Soviet period and even more so duritzg economic reform, the autonomy

czf the director increased as the force czf the plan weakened. One consequence of this was that directors obtair-tedthe capability to appropriate the returns from the relationships they had d e ~ l o p e d . For directors to be able to appropriate returns, enterprises had to continue to function: Much relational capital was enterprise-specik and existed ixz the form of relationships with directors of other enterprises, often those in related lines of activity, Directors coutd not cash in this relational capital but could derive benefits horn it as long as their enterprises contixztled to operate, TCIab?prc>priaterents, the successful enterprise director utilized relationships tc> obtain inputs and find customers, If the enterprise produced marketable products, perssnai relationships would be of lesser importance, and workers would be less content tc>see a portion of the income of the enterprise diverted by directors; but f'or an unviable enterprise, the alternative tcz a director" appropriations was enterprise closure. Faced with this tradeoff$worhrs were comparatively willing tc>accept the personal enrichmat of directors whcs had shcwn themsefives cayable of keeping their operations going, The privati~ationof relational capital helps explair-t why directors have forrght so hard to keep enterprises open that have few yrrsspects in the market ecr>nc>my The frequent success of their efforts is exytainabte by the symbiotic relationship between wrkers and directors: Workers need the directors to keep ~lnviableenterprises afloat and keep their jobs; and directors need the unviable enterprises and their vvarkers in order to exploit relational capital.

Mutatian and Resistance:

hEvatutianaryhalysis Enterprisesbnd directorskxploitatic~nof relational capital to survive in a more hostiIe environment can be thought czf as a mutation, This view fundamentally contradicts that of the reformers who designed the Russian privatization, who viewed Sot.iet-type enterprises as typical of all enterprises encumbered by politicaX controls. The notion was that without government control, and with hard budget constraints, enterprises in Russia would behave like ""normal" enterprises." That is, once political crzntrr3ls were lifted, they wcsuld maximize shareholder value, like any firm in the West. This conventional view ignores the fact that the post-Saviet enterprise had wailabfe to it survival strategies tlnavailable to the "nrzrmal" enterprise. The enterprise in the virtual economy produces goods that can, be used for barter or for tax offsets but that cannot be sold on the market. It can also procure inputs at a lower cost because relations allow it to pay. in nonmonetary forms. However, the cost of pursrring such strategies is lack of transparency, which makes it impossible to attract external funds for restructuring. Hence, the enterprise in the virtual economy finds it prohibitive to reduce distance, and the marketoriented enterprise cannot engage in the survival strategies available to the virtual enterprise.14

Partially implemented pcllicies of economic shoclc therapy produced a sudden change in the environment facing enterprises, but the effeds of the reform were not monotonic, as had been intended. Enterprises that chose transparency found themselves at a competitive disadvantage to those that invested in, or had initially high, relational capital. Enterprises that had invested itz this alternative means of survival were less agected by the reform, These enterprises projved immune to the very shock therapy that had been designed to force them either to change or to shut down. The overal eccznomic effects of this developmrmt may extend far beyc~ndthe initial group of mutant enterprises. Enterprises tend to imitate belzwior that they see as successft~i.If some enterprises itz the virt~llaleconomy survive w i t h o ~ un~t dertaking costly restructuring, then other enterprises may choose to follow this behavior. The system may rapidly tip. We da not argue that Russia's economic reforms were ill-conceived,'%altho~~gh we do believe that they were excessively focused on the budget constraint, The greatest shortcoming of the reform process lay in the partial intpfementation of policy decisions. For the most part, reforms that would have shut down lossmakng enterprises were shunned becatlse their crlnsequences were deemed intolerabXe.'Tleariy, the effective hardening of budget constraints was an implicit assumption necessary to the therapy of tight money and iiberalization. The fact that hard-budget constraints were avc~idedthrough investment in relatirjnal cayital means that reforms were not hlXy implemented,

Incomplete shock therapy failed to wipe out loss-making enterprises, A new mutant strain emerged with the survival strategies wailable in the virtual ecrInczmy The mutation and survival of unviable enterprises made it harder h r new, viable enterprises to compete, The greater the number of mutant enterprises exploitir~g virtual strategies, the greater the relative disadvantage for market-type enterprises, because mutant enterprises operate under rules that market-type enterprises cannot use. This problem can y e r h a p A e better understood by analogy to that of muttipie-drug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis (TB). MDR strains of TB are never found in the wild. Genetic resistance to particular drugs occurs naturally but is diluted by the overwhelming prevalerice of drug-susceptible organisms.. In the natural environment, there is no evolt~tionaryadvantage to genetic resistance to antirnicrobials of syntl-reticorigin. The itztroduction of spthetic antitnicrobiais pfiovides the selective pressure for resistant organisms to became predominant. 111 other words, human intervention creates the selective pressure in favor of MUR. The primary mechanism by which this happens is an incomplete regimen of treatment (or poor adherence to zt proper regimen). The incompjete regimen

wipes czut the drug-susceptible organisms, leaving the field open to drugresistant varieties, A straightftzmard analogy can be drawn tc) enterprise behavior, In a competitive environment, there is no selective advantage to i n ~ s t i n gin relationat capital; red~lcingmarket distance is the key to viability. Incomplete therapy in Russia, however, did not create such an environment. Relational capital cczntinmed tc>resuit in a positive payoff, in terms of enterprise fitness and survival. Far enterprises that possessed sufficient relational capital, the opport~lnity:to survive via virtual strategies became a viable option. Hence, the burden of therapy was on the enterprises that did not have, or chose not tcz invest in, relational capital. Incomplete therapy imposed ;a relative burden on enterprises that chose to act in a "ilormaf" manner, It provided selective pressure that fawred the mutant enterprise. This is similar to the outcome for a TB patient wha does not take the full complement of anti-TB drugs or follow a multipfe-drug regimen,l7

In the biological wcxld, evc~lutionrelies solely on relative fitness. The yrc3portion czf nlutants is limited by the frequency of mutation. In social evolution, hczwver, st replication but through adaptation." Enterchange can OCCLIF not j ~ ~through. prises can imi&te behavic~robserved tc>be successful. If some enterprises are able to survive without undertaking costly restructuring, then other enterprises m;ry choose to follow this behavior. Hence, once virtual economy strategies appear to be working, the system may rapidly tip. The speed at which this process unflalds depends on the pattern of interaction among enterprises, Conservatively,, one could model the adaptive (imitative) prcscess with the asumption that enterprises were equally likely to interact with any type of enterprise. Pdyoffs are determined solely, on the basis of population frequencies for the economy as a whole, One could argue, however, that enterprises may be more likely to interact with like-minded enterprises. For instance, enterprises in the praducdon sector tend to interact with the same enterprises that they dealt with under central plannir-tg. This could lead to further bihrcatic~n.If agents tend to interact with like-minded agents, this may reinforce behavior,l"This suggests that the presence of nonrandom interactions could strengthen the virtual economy trap,

Policy Ineflecfiwness Ail of the shocks that have occurred since the start of transition have had greater relative impact czn enterprises vvorking according to the rules czf the market economy. Attempts to increase the itztensiity of reform have focused on hardening the budget constraint without any actions to reduce the payoft- frc~mrelational in-

vestments. Such policy measures illustrate the principle that in the virtual economy populated by mutant enterprises, conventiunai policy prescriptions will not w r k as expected. Below we consider two examples. Transparency. The first illustrative example of a policy that has unintended crlnsequences is that of increasing enterprise transparency. An essential element of market reform is that enterprises make their financial activities more transparent, The implicit bargain of m a r h t reform was that greater transparency would be rewarded by greater access to credit. Financial markets require transparency as do f'oreign investors, Of course, transparency also makes problems more apparent. But if the only way to obtain external financing is to take the p l ~ ~ n gtoe greater transparency then enterprises will choose this crlstly option. The pmbIem with choosing transparency is ~ o f o i dFirst, , transparency precludes the use of strategies that rely on relational capital. Semnd, transparency is essentially irre~rsible.If there were no r, then those enterprises with greater d would be disadvantaged, The move to greater transparency would have the greatest benefits for enterprises that are closest to the market, Hence, the fitness of the most efficient enterprises wczuld be enhanced relative to Ioss-making enterprises. The prc~blernis that when relational capitall is an avaiiabfe survival strategy, enterprises that choose transparency may find themselves at a relathe disadvantage, This argument has important implications for discussions of the role of corporate governance, lnadeq~latecorporate governance i s a severe problem in llussia, one that inhibits investment, especially foreign investment."The conventional view is that weak corporate governance is a key barrier to external finance for Russian enterprises. This is an important argument, but it is critial to keep in mind that the opposite is also true: The Iczw prt~habilityof attracting external finance inhibits the development of good corporate governance. There are two parts to this argument: First, enterprises that have very high d see very little return tlpom improving cczrporate governance. Even with very transparent retatic~ns they are unlikely to attract externaf financing, because the expected return is so low, Second, enterprises that may have higher expected returns face the twin pnhlems of high interest rates and increased tax incidence. The fiscal problems of the Russian gowrnment increase the cost of external finance, In addition, an enterprise that chooses to reduce d faces increased relative tax incidence from entering the monetized part of the economy, which also reduces the expected return. Hence, enterprises led bp directors who fully understand the connection between good corporate governance and external finance may clzoose not to implement the former became the benefits are insufficient. The relative disadvantage Faced by enterprises that choose transparency is due Even apart from problems of corto the extremely high cost of external fi~~ance. porate governance (which are in any case less severe in transparent enterprises), the fiscal. policy of the IXussian government has crwded out much investment. Transparent enterprises have not received the ir-ttendedbenefits of transparency,

but they have paid the costs of rekaining from the use of retational capital. Enterprises that choose transparency arc now more vulnerable than they were before, This is especially true when there is a tax crackdc~wn.High tax rates that result from fiscal weakness and campaigns to increase tax coXIections mean that the greatest pressure fails on enterprises with the most transparent accounts,

?TightMoney. A second example of a policy that is rendered ineffective by the virtxlal economy is that of tight money An essential element of shock therapy is a tight monetary policy aimed at stabilizing the price level. Indeed, most critics of so-catled shock therapy l~avepointed to tight monetary policies as one of the prime causes of redxlced industrial output. Certainiy, tight money is an essential element of the tightening of budget constraints. If credit is lax, there is less pressure on enterprises to restructure, Tighter credit is a perfect example of a policy that is supposed to hurt all enterprises and to have the greatest impact on the least efficient, The policy of tight money is premised on the assxrmption that reform is monotonic. If survival via investment in relationai capital is feasible, then this assumption is invalid, Enterprises that invest in relatir~nalcapital rnay insulate themselves against credit shocks, Tight money then has greater relative impact on tl-xose enterprises that have invested in redxlcing distance. The ""finess" of the latter enterprises relative tc> those that invested in relatitrnal capital is reduced by tight mcrnetary policy. This induces imitation, and virtual behavior spreads. Enterprises ir-t Russia were able to use relational capital to ir-tsulate themselves from the stringency of the budget cr~nstraint.The ability to pay for i n p ~ ~ tand s , to pay taxes in kind rather than in cash, provides them with an advantage compared to those that must use cash. Barter typically costs the paying enterprise less than an equivalent no~rzinalamount of cash, If it were not so, then the enterprise w u I d sell the output for money, and pay with the proceeds." Hence, once barter b e a m e more common, even enterprises that could afford monetary payment chose barter. To place this observation in the context of our evolutionary analysis: The transition process was perturbed by the tigbtenir-tgof credit during 2995 and the mble corridor, which induced a mutation in enterprise behavior. In particular, monetary tightening evoked the use of barter. Lack of liquidity rnay have induced enterprises to engage in nonmonetary behavior. Once this mutation occurred, the stability of virtual behavior implies that barter would persist even if the initial conditions that shocked the system were no longer present, Tl-xisaccount fits with recent empirical studies of barter. Xt has been argued by Commander and Mumssen (forthcoming), for example, that barter became widespread in Russia in response to the monetary tightening of 1994 to 1995,Yet, as demonstrated in Curiw and Ickes (lf)99),barter does not seem related to the financial position of the enterprise, The latter study also shows that there is a Ioclc-in effect of barter: Once enterprises resort to bartex; it becomes cheaper for them to continue to do sa,

The key paint is that the importance of relational capital and of n e ~ o r k of s relationships among enterprises preceded the imposition of tight monetary policy. m e n that policy was implemented, its intended effects were countered by enterprises-resort to virtrraf strategies. Tight monetary policy penalized the wrong enterprises, Et reinforced barter-a phenomenon that clearly preceded the tightening of credit-and provided a relative advantage to those whose relationat capital was sufficient to suppclrt barter. This leaves the interesting counterfactual: If: tight money had been imposed earlier-Erefire the mutation-rrvaulct. it have been mclre effective because virttlal behavior had not yet cr>nsolidate&?

Implications for the Future m i t t are the implications czf our analysis for the future evolution czf the IXussian economy? Is the virtual economy a stable institutional settixzg? Or is it a temporary resting point that will soon become a historical curiosity? The argument in fiavor czf the historical curiosity position rests on the notion that the virtual economy cannot sustaitz itself over the long run. Several facts give credence to this argument. First, the linchpin of the virtual ecr~nomy-the manufacturing sector-is made up of czld capital and old labor. One expects that over time these factors will wear out. Because capital replacement in loss-making enterprises is nearly nonexistent, this sector" role in the economy as a whole graduatty will shrink, A second approach considers the qrzestion horn the standpoitzt of infusion of value We h o w that the operation of the virtual economy depends on the csntinued infusion czf value-mast importantty from Cazprom, but also from the new private sector and external sources, One could argue that itz principle there are no sericjus limits to ftlrther infusions of value. As long as actors are willing to suppart the system, this peculiar development will persist. The capacity of the system to tap value is not unlixnited, however. Firstljr, the gas and oil sector-the most important source of value in the economy-has suffered from inadequate investment, Analysts suggest tl-xatthis deficit will severely hamper prc~cluctlonin the future. In a sense, the current operation of these sectors overstates true value prodtlction." Inadeqtlate investment means that current levels of value creation cannot be maintained indefinitely. Secondly, foreign investors have been less willing to invest in the Russian economy since the August 1998 crisis and the ensuing defiault on short-term gcmrnment debt (GKOs). It is not clear how long the aftereffects of this shock wifX linger, but tl-xeczptirnistic scenarios that led to foreign investment have been shattered. Moreover, international financial institutions ab3pear more reluctant to increase aid levels above what is needed to keep Rt~ssia more or less current on its debt repayment (we say "more or iess:%ecituse the debt is continrlalfy beitzg rescheduled). The third source of value is Russia's domestic private sectcjr. Ht~wever,the capacity of this sector to provide value to czffset tosses incurred elsewhere is limited. The continued operation of the virtual economy places a heavy tax on new actlivity.

matever the levels of inhsion of new value, the virtual economy still redistributes that value in an inefficient manner, and much value is lost in the process. First, value is destroyed in prc>ductic>nby an uncompetitive manufacturing sector. Second, value is lealced from the system. Some leakage is necessary, tcz keep valueadders in the system (the ""god leakageB")for example, payoffs to Gazprorn sa that they will cczntinue to stlbsidi~eloss-makers; but much is tlnnecessary and is actually a farm of looting, Third, barter-the characteristic form of exchange in the virtual economy-by its very nature involves substantial transaction costs. In sum, the potential sources of value infusion are waning, and value cczntinmes to be lost inside the system as welt as to the outside, IXussian policymakers wi!l continue to attempt to salve these problems, Slowing the loss of value on the one hand and increasing the value infusion on the other might enable the virtual economy to sustain itself indefinitely; but let us assume that the present trend of gradual declixze in value prevails, The q~lestiionthen arises: M a t happens as the qstem runs out of value3

The Primit-ivization ofProdsnlction,.Shrinkage Understanding how the economy adapts to a reduction in the total amount of value to be circulated is key for assessixzg the evolution of the econom).t,The optimistic scenaricj Etas enterprises choosing to restructure in order tc>survive. With resources no longer being infused into the system from Cazprom and other sources, enterprises must survive on their ow11-hence, restructure, This presupposes, hc~wever,that the investment decisions-or rather, the lack thereof-of the past eight years can easily be undone. It presumes that the distance that must be traversed to reach the market Etas not increased during the period of postponed restructuring, This assumptic~nis, of course, unwarranted. m a t happens to enterprises when the value pump ceases to Row? One passibility is bankruptcy. Enterprises may simply cease production. This is rather unlikely, however, in the case of Russia, Rather than cease pfioductic~n,Rt~ssianenterprises on the verge of bankruptcy m;ry transform themselves by limiting their activities, a process we call shrinkage, This transformation generally ir-tvolves a radial reorientation and in some cases a complete alteration of prrzduction lines. This is not the primary characteristic, however, Rather, the key characteristic of the shrinking enterprise is itzcreasir-tg witl-rdrawal from the market-in both its conventional (monetized) and its virtual (demonetized) variants." An enterprise that has seen the value of its relational capital dissipate will cease production of nonmarketable, value-destroying goods (ones that consume more in the value of their inputs than they produce). At the same time, given that the enterprise" distance to the market has increased during transition, the oppartunity to shift to prod~lcingmarkethie products is practically nonexistent. With a sufficient infusion of external finance, presumably any enter~lrisecan be restructured sufficiently to produce marketable goods. But enterprises that have migrated toward the southeast corner of r-d space are the least likely to be able to at-

tract any external ft~nds,let alone sufficient ones. The alternative for the enteritself from market forces, It will employ prise is to survive by radically. ir-tsulatir~g its capital stock to prrzduce goods that tise little or no purchased inputs, and it wilt increasingly focus on the survival czC its workers. This means more smallscale, pritlnitive prod~lctionand less spedalization. Ircznical'ly,this enterprise is, in a purely technical sense, more efficient than it was before. Bef-ore, the plant was attempting to produce, czn as large a scale as it could, a good that destroyed value, The more it produced, the less it contributed to the econczmy, Now, beause the plant uses few or none of the valuable inputs that it previously did, its activity is less socially harmhli. Indeed, the enterprise may even be adding value, Bt~tit is doing so on a drastically reduced scale of pr~duction.'~ This transformation of the enterprise via shrinkage is rationaf, and it is ef5cient, Less value is destroyed in the new activity. However, there is another side to this development that is less propitious for the country's economy. Slzrinkage may also involve a write-off of human capital-a waste to society, and a pennanent loss to the economy*

Stability md Disorder Ironically%Russia's virtual emnomy conserves old structtires and relationships, yet is destructive to society. The virttlaf eccznomy is a ystem that operates to prevent changes that need to take ptace for economic performance to improve. Xt postpones the day of reckoning for enterprises and institutions that should have left the scene at the onset of transition.

Implications of the Virtual Economy's Stability The imptications for Rt~ssia"economy if it continues along this track are dire. We can. see this by exiamixzing four issues tlzat are of key importance to Russia's economic survival: (1) ecr~nczmicg r o ~ h (2) ; development of the private sector; (3) the national integrity of the economy; and (4) the ability of the public sector to fulfil1 its tasks and obligations. Economic Growth, Xn the virtual economy, czfficliai growth figures mean little. Virtual (that is, illusory) prices result ir-t illusory GDP. Tlze economy m;zy appear tcz grew but it actually contracts. Fur the short term and middle term, this riystem is likly to remain stable, But the stability comes at a huge hidden cost, since the virtual economy ~lnderminesthe future competitiveness of the economy by discrzuraging the modernization of physical and human capital. Indeed, the virtual economy acts as a barrier to re~tructuring,~' Thus, the economy continues to grind down. The further it goes, the less competitive it is,

The Private Sector. The fiate of the true private sector-the value-adders outside the virtual economy, including foreign joint venttires-is a vital issue for

t;tussiak future. The virtual economy bears a curious relationship to the private sector: It will not elimir-tateit, since it needs a private sector in order to survive. It needs cash as wefl as the social safety valve that the private sector provides. l"et dominance by the virtual economy is incompatible with a genuinely independent, prosperous private sector. Consequently, small businesses will exist, but they will be prevented frrlm supplying public sector customers, They will not be allowed to devefop as subcontractors to larger enterprises. More seriously, as valuc-adders producing for the market (that is, selling for cash), they will be subject to a heavy tax burden. The virtual economy will therefore squeeze the private sector to get the cash it needs (taxes); and it will constrain the private sector to protect the market it needs.

National Xntegriv. The virtual economy tends to fragment the national economy into smaller, self-contained, local economies. This trend is evident in Rz~ssia, where local gtltiernment budgets are already more ""virtt~afized"-demonetizedthan even the federal budget. Local governments protect the local markets for the benefit of their Xoal, virtual economies, fn the post-August crisis, regional and focal gcmrnments intensified the tendency toward localism by introdt~cingmeasures to hoard goods tocafty and ban exports, especially czf food, even to other regions of Russia. The Public Sector. The public sector will be smaller and more demonetized, and as stated above, more localized. The federal governmental budget is key. took at the recent record: In 1997, R~issia?federal gcmrnment crlllected less than 60 percent of its taxes in monetary form, Its cash tax revenues came to barely U.S.$23 billion at 1997 exchange rates, Even if we add to that its other sources of mclnetary rexnues-privatizatim sates, c~istomsdt~ties-the gclvernment was able to raise no more than about U,S,$40 biiiion (not counting funds borrowed at home and abroad). With its highly publicized tax collection campaign at the beginning of 1998, the goxrnment was slightly more successful in raising cash; but as the virtual economy model predicted, the extra cash to the budget came at the expense of the rest of the economy, helpixzg to precipitate the financial collapse of August 17. Since the clefiault, tax collection in real terms has been below 1997 levels, Moreover, the devaluation of the ruble agair-tst the dollar has put the Russian government in a much worse situation as regards foreign debt repqment, greatly increasing its debt burden. As a result, the government has fewer resources at its disposal and continries to fall far short of providing the basic p~lbiicservices for which it is responsibfe. The failure to adequateiy Eund government agencies at all levels has meant that these agencies are becoming the bureaucratic analogties of self-subsistence farms. Gtlvernment employees use government assets and government time to earn enough to keep themselves alive, to grow food, or to perhrm other tasks necessary to survival. Little or nothixzg is left for servixzg the pubiic. fn the case of some

civil servants, whose jobs serve no useful purptlse* this trend ml-ry be acceptable. For many others, it is damaging, both for their o m health and well-being and lFor the citizens they are supposed to serve. And for some critical categories-the military is the best exampte-it may be disastrous,

The virtual economy has been consolidated since about t99r-1..ft might be argued, however, that the entrenched adaptatic~nof enterprises to the virtual economy does not mean that they cannot eventuaily restructure. Xrnprovements in the economic environment could alter the relative payoffs of market and virtual strategies, leading to real ecr~nomicrestructuring. Such an improvement in the economic environment could occur, for exampie, if the tax system is improved, or if the ruble depreciates itz real terms. The noric~nhas merit, but it ignores the fact that delayed restructuring has important consequences, Foremost among these is that the distance that enterprises must traverse increases with tirne. The initial di with urhich enterprises begin the transition is relative to the w r l d standard. If the world standard is advancing, then an enterprise that simply maintains its current level of efficiency wiXl see its distance ittcreuse, Hence, the payoff to that enterprise from investing to reduce distance will decline over time, Delayed restructuring increases the margin that must be overcome Eor an enterprise to become competitive," This raises the relative payoK for engaging in virtual strategies. Hence, stagnation may make the virtual economy more stable, We can outline four reasons for this bleak conclusion that time is not on the side of Russian economic rebrm: X . First and foremost, the critical implication of the adaptation of behavior

is that the system to be reformed is not the same as it was itz 1991 and 1992. The Russian ecr>nc>micsystem has evolved and adapted as a form of institutionaIized protection from and resistance to market reform. Over time, increasingly larger parts of the economy have been drawn itzto these institutions, The resistance to reform is thus mclre robust than ever; As a resutt, any program czf radical and comprehensive economic reform today has almost no popular appeal. The prospects are years of pain and dislocation, with few if any compensating benefits to the population except in the rather distant future. (This popular view contrasts with that typical between t 991 and 1992, when the new reforms granted a great deaf of personaf freedom to individuals, both political and economic.) 2. The consolidatlczn of the virtual economy has had an adverse effect czn the younger generation. Contrary to hopes, young people, in order to survive and succeed in this system, develop behavior more appropriate to the virtual economy than to a market economy, Although some in the new generation appeared to have broken out of the rut, they were still a

minority, Most have not, The younger generation is not an automatic guarantor of change. 3. Even if there were a willingness in enterprises to change and adapt and become competitive in the market, this has become a greater technical challenge than it was six or seven years ago, Things were bad enough then. Even by official Soviet standards, a huge proyortic~nof equipment in Rt~sslian,industry was physically czbsotete when reform began in 1992. The Russian economy needed massive modernization. ft has not l-tad it,. As a result, a physical plant that was generally of&and tlncczmpetitive to begin with is now seven years older and even less competitive,.Less drastic but still itnportant has been the loss of human capital. The people who worked in those tlncompetitive industries who felt that they had a chance in the new market economy left and tried their chances there, The people who remained behind tend to be the least produaive. 4. Finally, there is a steadily wczrsening macroecr~nomicbarrier to successful modernization of the Russian economy: the country" permanent debt trap, Russia contitztles to build its debt up, not down. This is true not only of the financial debt but also of society" cumulative, unpaid, nonpecuniary costs-----especiatly damage to the environment and the ~~nderrnining of public health. These are costs that must someday, somebr>wbe paid. Compared to six or seven years ago, the process of real economic reform-defined as reasonably cr~mpletemarketizatic~n,monetization, and mc~dernizationin ttussia today would be (1) more unattractive to begin with; (2) more dif6cutf (3) more painf1.11 for the population to and more costly to complete successf~zll-)l; endure; and (4) more burdened by accumulated, tlnptlid debts, in the broadest sense, The virtuat economy is a trap,

Escaping the Virtrral, Ecanomy Trap ff the virtual economy represents an adaptation of behavior to what would otherwise be an unsustainable environment, as we have argued, then the answer of how to escape this trap can come only from an examination of this broader environment," We suggest that this environment was created by the itnpossibie linkage of three goals or imperatives of post-Soviet Rt~ssianpolicy,

The impossible TrinityB The czverridiizg imperative for any state is national survival. The definition of national survival, and the cost of meeting this imperative depend on the external environment in which the co~lntryis located as welt as on the dominant vision of the nation shared by the leadership, It is critical nonetheless to recognize that national survival is an imperative; it is impermissible to allow other

policies, no matter how desirable in themsetves, to seriously threaten the very existence of the nation. National survival, guaranteed first and foremost by national defense, is naturally a policy imperative for Russia, bst-Soviet l%ussiakgoal af shedding its totalitarian past added two additional policy imperatiives: development of democracy and a modern, transparent market eccznomy, U ~ ~ dthe e r specific circumstances in which Russia found itself after the demise czf the Soviet Union, the three eiements czf this trinity were fundamentally irrec~ncilable.~~ Russia entered the transition with security needs inherited from the Soviet era, albeit with an economy only about 60 percent of the size czf the Saviet Ur-rion?. These needs were compounded by the breakup of the Union, which created new external borders that Russia alone would have to defend. Even without any short-term economic problems, the objective security imperative would have pressed heavily on the smaller economy; but national economic collapse further reduced Russia" capacity to meet its security needs."' In order to sustain an adequate defense capability, Russia w u l d have had to spend more on defense than the people of the newly democratic country would have supported, given general ecr~nomicconditions. Hence, Russia could not fuIfill all three imperatives in the trinity One of the elements-security, democracy, czr marliet economy-had to be sacrificede4' Given that the Rt~ssianleadership had cr~mmitteditself to the new imperatives czf democracy and n~arketeconomy, the only way out was to redefine the security imperative, The end of the Cold War was taken by many to mean that Russia's ssecurity needs wczuld be much reduced, With a less hostile security environment, lxussia could saitis~the security imperative, imptement democracy; and take czn economic reform. Hence, the initial attempt to salve the dilemma of the impossible trinity was affected by maintaining a pretense with respect to the first imperative, national security In the first few years, government leaders in the W s t as w d as in Russia pretended that Russia had less of a security dilemma than it actually did and that its defense capability was stronger than it really was, The idea that "the Cold Mrar is over" k Xed to Russian expectations that the West would ensure a better international environment for a newly cooperative, marht-i~edand democratized Russia, This was the essence of Kmyrevk foreign policy: lessening international tensions in order to foster reforms, At the same time, everyone pretended that Russia's strength was much greater than it was. NATO" eastward expansion and cr~ntinuedexclasion of Russia ended the yretense of a peacehi environment; and the first Chechen war ended the pretense of Russian strength. It was evjidmt that the only way to meet the security imperative was tc>devote more resources to defense. But if security is the ultimate imperative and pretense about it is no longer passible, then Ivc>cativeimplication. Tt] the extent that Russia was able to make serious moves toward the market in the early years of transition, it was in part becrtause pretense was concentrated on the security imperative, Once the possibility of contintled pretense vis-8-vis the security imperative was eliminated, Russia had to shift the pretense to either democracy or the market economy The price of preserving real freedom was a halt to serious efforts to create a true market economy.

The Way Out l;tussiak fundamental dilemma is the discrepancy between its security needs and its economic capacity, X f that discrepancy is not elixninated but merely covered tip, Russia is lilcely to proceed in a much less benign direction than is now the case, With security imperatives pressing ever more heavily on a steadily decreasing economic capacity, the options available to Russian leaders will not be attractive. Given that the security imperative must be met, a resort might be made to heavier dependence czn nuclear weapons, which woutd reduce the costs czf meeting security needs. However, as the example of nuclear weapons makes ciear, cheai3er tools and methods for maintaining national security are often more dangerous. An alternative reaction to an ever-shrinking resource base might be to end the pretense with regard to the ecrznomy. As the economy shrinks, it will be ever more difficult for the Russian state to extract resources through pretense and through. the voluntary contributions of value-producers itzd~lcedto contribute sa that they can continue to>benefit from good leakage, At that point, the security imperative will come into conflict with the goals of a market economy and democracy. It is hard to see how a return to a centrally planned economy could be accrzmplished withclut the abandonment of democracy. Two things are required to avert that scenario: ( I ) Rt~ssia"security needs have to be lowered; and (2) its economic wealth must be itzcreased. And these two goals must be accomplished in that order: Russians will never be able to abandon the pretense czf the virtual economy in fiavor of a true, transparent market economy until they can be certain that their national survival is not at risk.

We are grateful to the other contributii~gatrthors to this v o l ~ ~ mfor e their comments on early drafts of this chapter. "Thechapter also benefited greatly from our extensive discussions with Rruce Rlair, Richard Ericson, Vjijay Krishna, ax~dJohn Steinhrunner, 1. See, for example, the work af Dewatripont and ltoland (1995) and Stiglitz f 1999). 2 , Pcjliticat reasons were at least as important. But the ~nisunderstandingof enterprise betraviar altered the campromises that reformers were willing to make. A crucial role also

was pIayed by the international security envirorlment, as discussed below, in the section subheaded ""TheImpossible 'li-inity." 3. It is importar~tto note that activities can temporarily appear to be value-destroying because of a dedine in demand-for example, during a strong recession. Our concern l-rere, however, is with activities that have been value-destroying in the longer terxrl. For a fuller analysis of value destruction, see Gaddy and Xckes (forthcoming). 4 . n assess whetl-rervalue is being created or destroyed, one must consider the crucial factor of market prices: The same configuration of activities can prc~ducevafue at one set of prices and destroy it at others. The Soviet econo~nicsystem, under which prices were set by central government planning offices, separated domestic prices from the world market, Given Soviet prices, which ptaced a high prerniuin 01%defense output, economic activity produced value. Onty in comparison with outside opport~~niries far using the same resources does the pltenomeno~rof value destmctiolr come into play. 5. See Ericson (1997) for a discussioir of calculation of national income in tl-re Soviet economy, and of the implications of pricixlg rules on the measurement of sectoral income. 6. See Eriaon (1997) for an ax~aIysisof the implications of arbitrary pricing for the apparent and actual prcjduction of value added in the So~vieteconojny. Ericson (1988) was the first study to formalize the dual nature of the Soviet economy in terms of priority (xnilitafy)and no~ryrioritysectors. 7. Xt is perhaps more accurate to say tl-rat the end-users in tl-re Soviet regime-tl-re Corn~nulristparty-placed a high value on the output of the defense sector, and that with the end of the resg;ime, the value of defense production shranlc dran~atisally. 8, This point was emphasized in Bosworth and Ofer (1995). 9. This conf~~sion of nonviability with failed reforrn is exacerbated by the reforminduced recession common even among s~~ccessfulfy marketiziitg ecoxlornies. 10, This fact beco~nesapparent when sectoral output for the Soviet period is measured at world prices, Consider, for exampie, the contribution to industrial output from efectrical enerlSy; fuel, and fi3restry and timber products. In 1991, at Soviet prices, these sectors contrihu ted 17.1 percent of total rrutput, At world prices, however, these sectors amounted to 51.6 percellt of total output! See OECD, Rtlssz'an Economic Stirvey (19951, chapter l. 11. This process of inducing the owners of assets to contribute value relates to the notion of " p o d leakage:" discussed in Gaddy and Ickes (""'li,Restru~ture.,.~2998). 12. A refated aspect of marketking reforms has been the bargain between reformers and enterprises: Become trarlsparent, and the cost of borrowing wii) be reduced, Because credit is mrlre likely to BOWto enterprises tltat have Inore transparent books, and because firms in countries undergoing ecox~ornictrar~sitionsuffer from credit constraints, there should be great incentive to ciean up the books so as to attract credit. Of course, this holds true only if credit is actually available, as discussed below. 13, 'l'ltis is clearly a popular stratebjry ernyloyed by m a q Russian enterprises. 14. The soft-budget constraint of a Soviet-type enterprise (E;ornai, 1992) involved ex post s~~bsidies, T3uriitg marketization, so&-budgetconstraints often have been transformed into tax arrears and arrears to other enterprises. 15, The image suggested is that of wccination, during which miitute amounts of a virus are introduced into the bloodstream in order to trigger the imlnunc system's production of antibodies. The rationale for hardening budget constraints was that the organism, if appropriately stressed, could be induced to restructure its beltavior in order to increase its long-rurl viability.

16, The notion of market distance is disc~~ssed at length in Gaddy and Ickes (1998). 17. Let pi be i's share of GDP (or employment); then SZ=J;(di pi) di is a Ineitsure of the average distance of the econonly froin the market-the ilzitiaf gap that must be overcorne in transition, Under the initial conditions in Russia, [Oomega] was larger than in other marketizing economies. 18. It is important to note that refatianaf cayitaf contribtrtes to prc~duction.Hence, investing in relations is not the same as rent-seeking. 19. Note that the position of the VC line will deper~d0x1 how open the ecoxlomy is. Enterprises that w u l d be unviable (for given d) in an open economy may be viable if the economy is autarkic, 20, As d increases, we may ft~rtl~er suppose that the minimurn r necessairy for sumivai increases at an increasing rate. 21. Enterprise decisionmaking to reduce distance and invest in relations is analyzed in Gaddy and Iekes (1998). 22. See Ledeneva ( 1998). 23. This was articulated clearly by severat key architects af Russian privatimtion. See, for example, Boycko, Shleifer, and Vishny (1996,651: ""In our view, controjlixlg managers is I I O ~nearly as imporZant as controlling paliticia~~s, since managers" interests are generaILy much closer to economic efficiency than those of the pojiticians." 24. In practice, the boundary is rarely so sharp. See (;add)) and Ickes CC';I*t) R ~ S I ~ Z I G I M ~ . . . ," "98) b r a discllssion of Xgor's rules for successful enterprise managernerlt in ltussia. 25, That arwment has been Inane quite often recentiy, most lota ably in Stigtitz (1999). 26. This argument is developed further in Gaddy and Iclces (forthcoming), using the concept of impermissibility, 27. In fighting TB it is crucial to fc2ltow a multiple-drug regimen, because the virus mutates so dramaticafly that a unitary drug regimen is ineffective. 28, This difference has been explored in various contexts by Br))~d(1997) and Young ( 1998). 29. Young (1998) has shown that if agents interact in sufficiently small, close-knit groups, rlnen the lengtln aF the period witlnin which the evolutionary process can be expected to approach its asymptotic distribution is independent of the number of agents or of the initial state. 30. See BIasl;, Kroumova, ax~dKruse (1997, 176-182) for a discussion of the effects of corpar"e governance problems on the attraction of investment. This issue also was recently taken up by StigIitz ( 1999). 31. This may not be a valid generalization in all cases, as invisible costs may be asmciate4 with the use of cash, For example, cash piFyments may attract the attex~tianof crjmi~laIs,who will assume that cash is rekwIarly kept on the premises occupied by enterprises ren~ittingor receivitlg pqma" in cash. Likewise, barter may carry certai1.r tax advantages, In addition, an enterprise that sigr~atsthat it has cash 01%hand may find it harder to delay wage payments to workers. For furtlner discussion, see Gaddy and Ickes (1998). 32, Far an analysis of Gazprom, for example, see the report by TJeutsche Bank, "Gazprorn: Show Me rlne Money:" September 29,1999. 33. For a filrther analysis of the concept of skrixzkage, see Gaddy and XckEts (forthcoming, chapter 7). 34. Gaddy and Xckes (forthcoming, chapter 7) provide a concrete example of such an enterprise: Kvarts, a former television manufacturer in Omsk, which IIOW produces potatoes.

35. See Ericson and Xckes (forthcoming) for an analysis of the vjirtuaf economy trap. Xr-r that ~nodef,even enterprises tl~athave positive expected returns from restructuring choose not to fotlaw through with it, because the costs aF lertvi~~g the virtl~afeconomy outweigh the benefits. 36. It is as if the VC tine in Figure 6.1 is shifiing upward over time. 37, Just as in x~aturalhistory, changes in the macro environment (such as ctimatic changes) altered tl-recourse of evolution (led to the extinction aF dinosaurs). 38. See (;;tddy and Xckes (forthcoming, chapter 9) ftor a more extensive discussion and analysis. 39, 'Chis expression was first used t,y Rabert Mrrndeli to describe an economic policy that was aimed at simultanecjusly achieving a fmed exchange rate, an independent mrlnetary policy; and a regime of capital mobility. 40. We assume that this is an unprecedented event, and another aspect of Russia's unfortur~atesituation aF losing the peace rather tfian the war. 41, This analysis underscores how different Russia's situation was in comparison to that of Polarld or even Cfiina-neither of which l-rad ltussia's security needs. Potand, in fact, had its security needs lessened due to the dismax~ttingof the Warsaw Pact and PIJ'P;rO exs Russia pansion. China does not have the problem of insecure borders that p l a ~ e Russia. is unique in its mismatch b e ~ e e neconomic capaciw and raational secr~ritydemands, An excessive defense burden helped destroy the Soviet ecojlomy. "l'he new Russia, economically weaker than its predecessor, could not possibly sustain an even greater defense kurden than tl~atbczrne by the USSR.

References Blasi, Joseph R., Maya Mroumova, and Douglas Kruse. Kremlira Capz't~iism: Bz'vutizing the Russian Econonzy fthaca, N.Y., 1997. Boswc~rth,B,, and G. Ofer. Reforming Plantzed Econct~rziesin an I~ztegratirzgWorld Ecanow Mrasbhgton, D.G., 1995, Boyckcr, Maxim, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny Privutizirtg Russia. Cambridge, Mass,, 1996. Boyd, R. ""Vopulation Structure, Equilibrium Selection and the Evolution czf Norms." To be published in proceedings volume for conference on Economics and Evolution held at the Internatic~nalSchool for Economic Research, University of Siena. Uga Pagano, ed .,Cambridge University Press, U,K., June 19971, Commander, Sirnon, and Christian Mumssen. "Understanding Barter in Russia." In f2atlf Seabright, ed., The Vani5l-ting Rou bEe, Cambridge, U.K,, forthcczming, Dewatripont, M,, and G. IXotaind, ""i"TheDesign of EXeform kcicages under Uncertainty,"Anzerican. Economic Review, 85(5),December t 995. Ericson, K. E, "Rriority, Duality, and Penetratic~nin the Sot.iet Command Ecsnomy." IUND Note M-2643-NA,Santa Monica, Galif., 1988, ."The Structural Barrier to Transition: A Note on Input-Output Tables of Centrally Planned Economies." Columbia tmiwrsity Discussion Paper no, 9596-3 1, revised, New York, March. 19971,

."Comment czn an Accounting Model of lXussiak VVtual Eccznomy:" IJostSoviet GeograpEzy and Economics, 4Q(2),March 1999: 103-f 09. Ericson, R. E,, and Barry W Ickes. ""An Equilibrium Model of the Virtual Economy," Review ofEconomic Desiign, vol. 6, forthmming, Gaddy Clifford, and Barry W. fckes. "To Restructure or Not to Restructure: Informal Activities and Enterprise Behavior in Transition.'' Working paper, William Davidson Institute, Ann Arbczr, Mich., May 1998, . "Russia's VirtuaX Economy;""fireign Afairs, 7 T ( S ) September-Octobe~ 1998, . ?A "Ample Four-Sector Model of IXussia" Virtual Econornp3'Tost-Soviet Ceclgrapj~yaad Economics, 40(2), March 1999: 79-97. . Russia? Virtual Ec~nct~rzy. Washington, D.C., forthcoming. Ickes. ""Barter in Ilussia." "I Paul Seabright, ed., The Curiev; Sergei, and Barry Vanislziq RaubIc Cambridge, U.K., forthcorn ing. Kc~rnai,Janos. The Socictlbr Econo~rzy,f2rinceton, 1992. Ledeneva, AXena V, Rztssia"sconumy qfFavours. earnbridge, U.K., 1998, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECl)), Russian Economic Survey Paris, 1995, Stiglitz, Joseph E, " m i t h e r Ikform: Ten Years of the Transition? In Annual Bank Conference on Developnzent Economics. Washir-tgton, U.C., 1999. Yc>ung,Peyt~n,""Uiffusi~rzin Social Netmrh." Jahns HopkinNniversity working paper. Baitimore, Md., 1998,

Russia in the nformation Age Emma Kiselyova Manuet Castells Uziwrsity of Calfor nia, BerkeEey

P

ostcommunist Rz~ssiais managing four simultaneous transitions: from totalitarianism to democraq; from zt command ecrjnczmy to zt market economy; f'rorn ""dmocratic centratism" ta ddemocratlc federalism; and from the industrial era to the information age, In this chapter we have focused on the fourth d i ~ ~ e n s i oofn the Rt~ssiantransition, which in our view ccznstitutes a ftlndamental cr)mponent of lxussiak evofutlczn in the meaty-first century,' The ability of the new Rt~ssiato perform better than its Soviet predecessor under the new technologica! paradigm will cr~nditionthe wealth, power, and social develtrpment of Russia in the tmrenty-first century, which in turn will shape the country" srellttionship to the vvortd at large.

Information Technology Industries in Russia: Crisis and Restructuring Far zt major industrial prczdt~cerlike Srrviet Rt~ssia,the most direct path of transition to the information age would have been the upgrading of its inf'clrmatian technology industries and the development of domestic industrial producers of semiconductors, cr)mp-~lters, tetecr)rnmtlniatic~nsequipment, and ccznsumer etectronics. But the electronics industry in 13uss-irtlagged far behind the technological level of the electronics itzdustry in the United States, Europe, or East Asia in the 1980s, and in the fist half of the 1990s it cczllapsed. However, bemeen 1995 and 2000, incipient signs of recovery appeared in particular segments of int'ormation technology markets. XnterestinGy; although the industrial crisis primarily affected the defense-oriented industries, the recent rebirth of a Rtlssian electrcznics ind~lstry has been driven by demand. from business fims and aMt~entconsumers.

The roczt czf the problem is the backwardness of the Soviet Union" information technology ir-tdustries.A study of microelectronics factories ir-t Zelenograd (a city near Moscow at the heart of the Sc>vietequivalent to California" Silicsn Valley) conducted by Castelfs from 1991 to 1993 revealed a lack of sophistication in prodricts and proctesses, despite the high quality of scientists and engixzeers.' This retardation in development extended tc>the lozw end of the electronics industry, consumer electronics, where products could not match international standards, fn 1991, the final year of the Soviet Union" existence, Russia exported some 80,200 television sets with a topal value of U.S,$S.(i million, and imported 460,000 sets with a total value of U.S.$300 million. The same year, Russia exported only 800 videocassette recorders (VCRs), and imported 4 t 6,000 VCRs." The reasons fc3r the lag in So>vietdevelopment of information technologies lay deep in the structure of the Soviet system. They include the complete domination of the itzdustry by military reqriirements; the subsequent isolation of the Soviet indtistry from technological supplies and exchanges with the rest of the world; and the constraints on diffusion of technoiogical knowledge and information in civilian industry and ir-t society As a resuit of this technological backwardness, when Russian military markets began to shrink in the 1990s, technological &soIescence prevented Russian microeiectronics and computer firms from competing with foreign companies, both abroad and in the domestic market. The total value of chip yroductic~nin Rtissia declined from a relativeiy lo~wU.S.$1.5 billion in 1BKWo an incredible $385 mitIion in 1995, The most advanced segments of the industry were devastated: Out of f 40 microelectronics manufacturers existing in 19919, 130 had closed down by 1995. For the remaining 10 firms, manufacturing costs increased by 4,000 parcent. These companies and several remaining telecommunications equipment producers were barely surviving in the mid1990s as subcontractors for low-technology Asian companies, prc~ducingtoys and digital watches. m e n in 1996 Castells itzterviewed ;a second time the engineers of the leading microetectronics crlmpany that he had studied in Zelenograd in 1992, they reported that 50 percent of their factory was producing shampoo far the Russian market, One of the most technologically advanced companies still in the microelectronics business in Zelenograd, Mikron, b e a m e a joint venture with Hua KO Electronics, a Hang Kong firm that bought 50 percent of Mikronk shares far U.S.$ t 8 million. Indeed, the most profitble busir-tess ir-t Zelenograd bemme the sale of assets and shares to fc3reign investors. But there were few takers. In 1997, the Xxussian government, realizing the strategic importance of salvaging the microelectronics industry, announced priority credit lines for Russian microelectronics companies engaging in partnerships with fr~reignfirms that were willing and able to transfer advanced production technology. Three ZeXenograd semiconductor firms were targeted far development. Two of them, Mikron and Angstrem, claimed anntiat sales increases from 1994 to 1997; but the largest part of their production consisted of 4- by 6-inch wafers at the lower end of produc-

128

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

tivity and quality. Angstrem, which was studied by Casteits in 1992 and 1993, had been the star of Soviet microelectronics. It was slated to begin production of 8inch wafers and 0.5-micron chips; but lack of funding and the impossibility of accessing new technology blocked these plans, In 1997, Angstrem finatty built the 55,000-square-foot "clean room" &at its managers had dreamed of in 2993. They had the room at last, but no equipment, since the price fbr an up-tcs-date manufacturing line had gone up to about U.S.$300 million. F-Xwingspent $X20 million on this expansion-most of it ggovernment funding-Angstrern was still seeking an additional $200 million from potential foreign partners. Angstrem also had ambitions of building an even more advanced facility>capable czf achieving a line width of 0.35 micron, at a cost of $800 million in additional eqrzipment-an. obviously unreachable dream. Xn another effort to revive Zetentzgrad, the government provided a credit guaranty for $42.5 million to Elma, a semiconductor materials firm itz Zelenograd, to create a facililiy capable of prrsducing an 8-inch wafer. However, both the technolc z g and the capital had to come from foreign firms, With no Wstern partners in sight far such an ambitious project, these plans had to be shelved. Zelenograd's firms were crzndemned to technological obsolescence in an extracsrdinarily cczmpetitive, global market.Tooking far a revival czf the strategically crucial microelearonics industry, the Russian government in June 1997 designated Zelenograd as a special economic zone, dedicated tcs high-tech inxstment. The zone offered f'oreign firms a custorns-free warehouse for goods to be reexported, and a substantial tax reduction. '"Jetthere were no significant takers. fntel in 1997 sold $370 million worth of prrsducts in Russia, where its sales had been increasing annually by 50 percent, Yet it preferred to serve the IXussian market from other fczcations rather than risk investment in local prodrlctisn facilities,' The reluctance of foreign companies to invest in Zelenograd, or in Russia for that mattex; is best explained by the following example, which has become symbolic of the fate of foreign investment in Russian electronics: the rise and fall of an IBM PG factory in Zelenograd, In 1993, IBM linked up with Kvant, a fc3rmer military electronics enterprise, to produce 40,000 PCs per month for the IXussian market, Ux~deran agreement with the Russian government, XBrM-Kvant would be exempted from taxes on imported ccsmponents, This exemption was essential precisely because there was no reliable supptier of components in Russia. XBMKvant was a commercial success. Acc~rdif~g to busitzess so~lrces,in 1995, Russians bou@t close tcs 2 million PCs, 40 percent of which were supplied by IBM. IBMKvant ernptczyed 1,000 workers, and the value of its output was estimated at around $960 million per year, Xn 1994, the Russian parliament had approved a law eliminating the tax exemption on imported components (for a value of about 8.5 percent of the cost of the finished product). This law put XBM at a competitive disadvantage with the Russian trading companies that were itnporting finished PCs, mainly frrzm China and Southeast Asia, that contintled tcs be tax exempt. This was precisely the intent of the taw's drafters in the Uuma, who were swayed by a powcrf~zllobby of importlexport companies. On February 27,1996,

IBM stopped assembliizg PCs in ZeXenograd. Most of the workers were idled, and the plant was converted into a repair and maintenance shop for fUrM PCs irnpc~rtedinto Russia. For all practical purposes, PC production stopped. As for Kvant, it diversified its activity in order to survive. In 1997, for instance, one particular division of the company was working itz the following areas: chip design for a Western firm; development of a parallel computer system for a domestic customer; prototyping image prc~cessingunits; and conducting market research, Lacking technology, equipment, supplies, and know-bow, Russian microefecl of low-level Asian pfioductronics industries of en became l o w - l e ~subsidiaries ers, or in the best cases, subcontractors of specific tasks far Western firms. The exception was a small number of firms that continued to work for the Russian defense ministry, using imported components and foreign t e c h n c ~ l o(either ~ licensed or copied through reverse engineering), The defense ministry was rigl~tly worried about Russian technological dependence on Western suppliers. However, its emphasis on keeping defense electronic firms in operation and in isolatic~n from the international ux~arkethas reproduced the mistake of the Soviet era, undermining these firms' cornpetithe capacity and Xocki~~g them into obsolete technologies. Malcolm Hill, evaluating the interaction betwen electronics firms and the IXussian military, concluded that "in some instances, the influence of the military sector has ir-tcreased rather than dimitzished ir-t the electronics itzdustry, as attempts to diversi* a w q from defense production have met with a number of difficulties related to market competitiveness for civilian products."""Because this relative isolation makes many Russian microelectronics prod~lctsunfit for advanced electronic warfare, the Russian military ends up seeking an increasing propclrtion of its supplies on the international market, thus reducing market share for tile Russian suppliers aher locking them itzto a backward, homegrown technology for security reasons, The crisis in microetectronics was echoed in the advanced computers industry. Afier reviewing the evidence on the state of hi&-performance cornp~ltingin Russia in 1997, P. Wr~icc>tt and M, N. Uorojevets concluded, "As the waves of reft3rm have washed over Ixussia, estabtished Soviet industries, like high-performance computing, have been nearly: slept away."7 The demise of civilian indtlstries of microelectronics, advanced computers, and telemmmunications manufacturing industries has had far-reaching conseqkxences for Russia, First, it has left the new Rtlssian economy entirely dependent on imports for its advanced technological infrastructure, For example, imports of electronic components had grown from nothing in 1990 to about 40 percent of the total Russian components market ir-t 1997 (Analog Devices was making major inroads in supplying Rt~ssiancrjmpanies, by agreement with the Russian distributor Argusso&).KSecond, it has eliminated the passibility of industrial know-i~ow that could make possible the existence of Russian firms as part of an electronic pnrsducers netwcIrk The dependence of Russia, still a ntlclear superpower, on foreign supplies and know-how in advanced electronics and communications technology has lixnited its defense capabilities to existitzg nuclear weapons, prevent-

130

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

ing Russia from again becoming a credible, autonomous power in conventional warfare. Howver, there are promising signs that a l is not yet lost: Although R~~ssia's military- and industry-oriented production has been devastated during the transition period, its PC and soAware industry is flourishir-tg,driven by demand from business people and prc>fessionals.'Accrzrding tcrs the International Data Corporation (XDC), PC purchases in lxussia in 1996 exceeded the previous year" level by 20 percent, and in 1997,by an additionai 33 percent; and in 1997,1.4 million personal comptlters were sold in Russia, valued at a total of U.S.Sl.9 billion. Before the economic crisis of August 1998, purchases of PCs were growing at an annrzal rate of about 10 percent. The majority of buyers were first-ti~neusers engaged in p"vate industry or in the professions, and goxrnmrmt agencies. It was projected that in 2000 IXussia would become the fourth-largest PC market in Europe, Most significantljr, local PC makers account for 71 percent of the Russian market, and mczst of these firms are new: There were about 1,500 PC makers in Russia in 19%. AXthough foreign firms, led by Elewliert Paclcard and Compaq, also maintaitz a strong presence in the Russian marketplace, local brands are mucl1 more cr~mpetitivebecause of their considerably lo~werprices and despite their relatively deficient customer service, It shoutd be noted that IXussian PC makers, like their counterparts in western Europe, are primarily. assemblers of low-cost electronic crlmponents pro3duced in Asia, In August 1998,when the Russian economy crashed, PC sales plummeted, and they still had not recovered in March 1999. Nonetheless, a report prepared by International Data Corporation itz September 1998 identified considerabie g r ~ w t hpotential in Russian cOmk3uter markets, evidenced by the previous sustained level of demand. Simultaneously with the growth of the PC industry>a number of small software companies have sprung up in Russia. The scientific and technical potential of universities, research institutians, and state enterprises has found its way into this new industry. Entrepreneurs sometimes pursue unorthodox paths, appropriating wailable software and reconfiguring it to suit ct~stomershneeds.Indeed, software piracy is pervasive in Russia. During his visit to lxussia in 19W7,Bill Gates urged the Russian government to curb the growitzg market for pirated software, which was cutting into Microsoft" sales in Russia-an indirect tribute to n August 1999, the Ministry of the Xnterior the skills of Idernizatic>nremain the dismantlement of the Soviet scientific establishment and the lack of fiscaX resources either to update military procurements or to ir-tvest itz defense-oriented R&D, due to the ongoir~g national economic crisis. According to Sharon teiter, a Rand Csrporatic~nexpert czn IXussian defense science, the nrzrnber of scientists in Russia declined by cznethird from $990to 1993, and TO percent of Russian mathematical researchers left the country. The defense science budget sufkred a substantial decline, reaching the same low level as the civilian science budget: Xn 1997, both were officially set at about U.S.$3 billion (actual spending m;zy have been even lower). Xn Leiter's assessment: "This loss is having a negative impact on basic theoretical, applied, and defe~~se science, Until the federal government acts decisively to put into place the appropriate mechanisms for promoting development of the ir-tnovativeR&D sector, the contintling shrinkage of the Russian science and technc~logybase will accelerate;""TThe Rt~ssianmilitary wiff be increasingly dependent on foreign technology, A full-fledged modernization of the armed forces seems financially out of reach for R~~ssia in the near term. Accr~rdingto a special report published in 1998 by the journal V1~t~r: deknse investment in technoIot;-y,advanced military equipment, and R&D decreased by a factor of 14 from $990 to 1995. To redress the

132

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

technological obsolescence czf the Rt~ssianarmed forces as of 1998 woutd take an overall investment in the vicinity of U,S.$30 billion, a sum that is simply not wailable tc>the Rtrssian goxrnmentei4 One czf the international security implications of this technological tag in the Russian military is a dramatic weakening of the fighting capability of Rtissia's conxntional forces. This could be an ominous development for the world" security. NATO" attack on figoslavia in 1999 prompted considerable fear and hostlliv in Russia, both in the citizenry and ir-t the political leadership: most Russians felt threatened, A Cold War wind started tc>blow again, with the Russian military feeting that its weaicness coutd lead to Eurti~erhumiliation and even to a possible attack on R~~ssia. Minister of Defense lgor Sergeev, on April 26, 1999, dedared that the government was planning tc>use all available resources to extend the life span czf Soviet sitltary equipment, ixzciuding the nrzclear arsenal, and to upgrade it as much as possible. Qn April 29, Ycltsin signed a series of decrees instruaing the armed forces tr:, step up the readiness of both tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, Evidently this renewd emphasis on nuclear dekrrence was due to the perception among the Russian leadership that the corrntry wo~lldbe at a tcchnological disadvantage in fighting a limited, conventional war, and to the fact that Ixussia feels threatened and vulnerable after the war in VirgczsXavia, In this military logic, the distance between a possible conventional armed confrontation involving Russia and a possible nuclear exchange has dramatically decreased, p~ciselybecause Ixussia must resort to an old and dewstating tecl~nolog(nucfear weapclnry) to compensate for its handiap itz new, information technology-based armament. At an academic meeting in May 1999, our assumption that NATO" bodinngs w u I d incite IXussiak sifitary to shift from outdated conventionat armament to a defense based on nudear weapons was met with strong criticism from experts on Russia, Nevertheless, in late June 1999, R~rssiacarried out a military exercise including sirnutared nuclear strilces. According to the script, R~zssiahad come under attack by a Western "force" usir-tgnonnuclear weapons, At first Russia also tried to limit its attack to conventional forces; but when these defenses prr>.l.edineffective, the nuclear arsenal was brought into action. Xn the words of Defense Minister Sergeev, "The exercise tested one of the provisions of Russia" military doaritze concerning a possible use of nuclear wapons when all other measures are exhausted.""

Russian Telecommunications: Information Superhi&way s r Private Driveways? Telecr>mmunicatic~ns and information systems are the backbone of the computer netwrks that constitute the infrastructure of the information age. Studies bp Diane Doucette, by Robert Campbell, and by Rafai Rohozinski have provided conclusive evidence of the retardation of Sr~vietand post-Soviet Rtrssian telecommunications, as a result: of Soviet poilcies.'Wfficial international statistics for 2994 put the number of telephone lines per thousand persons in Russia at 162, in con-

trast to 602 for the United States and 371, for Spain, According to Ixussian official statistics, in 1996, only 48.7 percent of urban households and 19.7 percent of rural households had access to a private telephone. In addition, there was cr~nsiderable regional disparity in the acwss to telephone service: 76.9 percent of urban households in northwestern Russia had access to a telephone, as compared with 64.5 percent in central Rt~ssia,42.1 percent in wstern Siberia, and 32.2 percent in eastern Siberia. In 1991, independent Russia inherited the fragmented telecommunications structure of the Sot.iet Union. That year, only 55 percent of telephones were connected to the Public Telephone Network. The rest belonged to a variety of ""branch systems" "pendent on government ministries and ir-tdustrialenterprises or specific to the special, mititary-related tefecr~mmunicationsnetwork. This f'ragmentation contintzed and even intensified during the postcommunist era, as many banks, financial institutions, trading groups, corporate services, and business conglomerates created their cwn sateltite-based links. As the various systems were privatized in a disc>rderiyfashion, the results have been Iaclc of coordination, uneven quality of service, and absence of an integrated telecommunications grid prrwiding a basis for tlnitiersai access, tack of investment, along with the resultant delay in technological upgrading of the private infrastructure, also contributed to an ir-tcreasing gap between przblic service and private networks, and betriveen residential telephony and business-related telephony. In 1996, mclre than 9 million customers were awiting installation, An Economist Intelligence Unit report estitnated in 1997 that to meet the demand for new lines as well as to replace obsolete ones, 2 million fines wc3uld have to be installed every year until 2005. According to the Russian Ministry of Communications, the gradzral upgrading of the nation's telecommunications infrastructure to meet itzternational standards, including the installatic~nof a digital telecommunicatic~nsnetmrkscheduled to take place b e ~ e e n1895 and 2005-would cost about U,S,$40 bilXion." Although. foreign investment in Russian telecommunications doubled in the 1990s, it did not reach even $500 million in 1995, and it was substantially reduced after the 1998 economic; crisis, And foreign investment is crucial, as evidenced by the fact that irngorted digital systems were itz use by 90 percent of new telephone exchanges in Rt~ssiain 1998,1' In addition to the Ministry of Communications, several semiprivate companies created during privatization currently participate in the telecommunicatic~nsmarket. Rr>stelekomhas primary control over long-distance telephony and international communicatian, despite i f s deteriorating service and high prices, Svyazinvest, the large national holding company for Ilussian Xocal carriers, controls local cr~mmunicationsin most areas. In July 1997 (over the objections of the Duma and of the Federal Service for Expclrt Contrc>ls),it was partially privatized: 25 percent of its stock was sold, for U.S.$1.875 billion, to Mustcorn, a consortium including Oneximbank, Ueutsche Morgan, and George Sc>rrss%Quantum Fund, On the whole, foreign investment in ixussian telecommunications is hindered by a complex regulatory environment, which. makes returns highly un-

134

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

predic~able,Many markets are monopolized by XXussiak largest telecommunications companies.'" One area is wide open to fc3reign investment and techn(>lom:wireless, cellular, and sateitite-based telecommunications. Xtussian authorities began to issue GSM licenses in 2996, and by the end of 1996 they had licensed 40 regions for GSM."' Foreign cr~mpaniesseemed interested in entering the cellular telephony market in XXussia. The dominant player in this fieid is Cellular Vision of Itussia, a joint venture of the American company Cdlular Vision, Svyazitzvest, and the Russian government. Fujitsu is installing wireless digital micrcjwave facilities in the Western UraXs, and lXosteXeXcom/GlobatX Star is launching a joint venture company (Globaltel) to provide satellik services by 2002. In contrast with the lagging traditional tefecommunicatic~nsinfrastructure, the cellular market in R~~ssia was growing at an accelerated pace by the end of the 199Os, in spite of the high price of a celluiar phone (in 1997, the equivalent of U.S.$2,5QO). It was estimated that the number of cellular phones in service wo~lfdapprc~achl million in the early years of the new century, up from 6,000 in 1992. Although only a small fraction of the population uses cellular communications, these users may represent the dynamic, entrepreneurial core of the new market economy, However, the problem is that there is as yet no nationwide, integrated cettular network. Given the distances between nodes in Russia" vast territory, the variety of codes, and the fragmentation of maricets licensed to varic>uscr~mpanies,the technical and business problems of integration are staggering," Therefore, the development of cellular telephony is in het ir-tcreasing the social and territorial hagmentation of the telecommunicatic~nsinfrastructure. SateItite-based telecommunications may be the most important development in Russian communications, as it has facilitated the growtll of spedalized networks that cater to the strategically important functions in business and grlvernment, Russia began actively to seek foreign participation in satellite tefecornmunications as early as 1990, when the Instit~lteof Arrtomated Systems-the leader in the design of packet switched n e ~ o r k sin the former Soviet Union-and the American company San FranciscolMoscow Teleport established the first joint American-Soviet venture, SOVAM Teleport, to provide ir-tternationaltelecommunicatic~nservices using computer networks.'-y 1997, several semiprivate cornpanies were using satellite communications and digital technolog to link Russia and i t s regions ir-tternationalljr,particularly focusir-tg on communicatians for 6nancial transactions." On Noxmber 22, 1998, Russia" first csmmerciaf satellite, a Bonum-l, modeled on the Elughes HS-376FfP, was launched from Cape Canaveral. With a SO-channel capacity, the sateUite is beir-tg used for direct television broadcast service and for data transmission. Financing came from Russian financial institutions, Chase Manhattan Corporation, and the U.S. ExportImport Bank,'TThe Russian oligogolistic media seaor, controlled by various financial grotlps, has alsrs entered the teleccjmmunications field to enstlre autonomous broadcasting capability."

Connectivity in Russia is geographicatty specific, with the greatest access traditionally having been provided itz tbe northwestern and central regions, For example, a local fiber-optic n e ~ o r was k developed in Moscow as early as f 994. Using mostly IXussian equipment, the Prospective 'rechnokjgies Agency planned eventualljr to provide the whole Moscow area with a broadband communications netM I O L - ~ . Satellite ?~ cczmmunications are targeted s n Moscow St. f2etersburg,and the major regional nodes. Access to international connections is often provided via private, satelite-based channels. Connectivity is atsc:, ftlnctionally specific: Banks and financial institutions have f'acused on their global connectivity since the early 1990s. Needing access to global networks of information and financial exchange, and unable to wait for an improvement in Russian telecommunicatic~nsinfrastructure, Rt~ssidsfinancial institutions set up their own systems, focusing first on improving their internal networking capabilities. One early, critical investment was in wide area networking technology designed for both internal and external cc>mmunications. The high cost of this technolog caused small banks and local banks gradually to fall by the wayside and prompted the consolidation of larger banks, because only large financial csrporatic~nshad the necessary resources to invest in advanced communicatic>ntechnology," 7k World Banlc and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development participated in this selective development of telecommunications and information systems with an informatic~ntechnology scheme estabIished in 1996 under the Financial Institutions Development Program that was ir-ttended to improve itzformation technology and training for 40 Russian banks and to prr>mc>teelectronic links between them and their Western partner^,^ The U.S. government adopted a similar strafe@, supporting the linkage of new American busir-tessccnters in major regional nodes of Russia to global financial netmrks.'" In sum, the weak development of telecommunications and inhrmatlon systerns in Russia goes hand in hand with the development of specialized, satellitebased connections linking regional nodes with Moscc>w,and Moscc>wwith the world, Together, these two trends have produced a newly netwrked economic geography that reflects the uneven development of the information society,

The Development and Srrucrure of the Russian &r3' The origins of the Rt~ssianNet itltlstrate the meaningful, cr~ntradictoryrelationship bel~nreenthe Soviet system and the information society. State-spclnsored attempts to build computer networks in the 1980s (e.g., Akadernset and IASnet) failed, largely due tc>lack of interest on the part of potential users, scientists, and managers, many of whom feared the networks would flaciiiitate a tightening of bureaucratic control over tl-teir activities. A number of scientists and engineers tlsed research facilities tc>start independent netmrks of their own design, Out of these grassroots efforts the current Russian Met eventually emerged.'1

136

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

RELCCT)M/UEMOSuwas the earliest czf these computer networks, and today it is among the largest. It was created ir-t Moscow itz 2990, through a collaboration between researchers from the Kr~rchatovInstitute of Atomic Energy and the DEMOS Lab of Moscow State University>where a group of physicists were devetoging a Russian version of UNLX. By the end of $991, E%COM/DEMOS had over 211,000 tlsers in more than 120 cities, RELCOM (not the Internet) had become synonymous with the IXussian Net frar the XXussian media and remained so until 2996. It has always been a very decentraliized network, with different companies and institutic~nsexchanging E-mail with Moscc>wkKKELCBM node, each node and end user paying czn a per byte basis hr information sent and received, KELCOM has been a qriasi-commercid network since its beginning. In 1992, KELCOM and DEMOS split, and SF"-DEMOS became purely commercial. AOXXELCOM became the first IXussian hybrid XSV, being operated by the Kurchatov Institute but at the same time a publicly traded company. So, as Rohozinski has obsemed, AO-WLCOM was somewhat protected from the vagaries of the market during its developmental stage, Alongside the various commercial networks established in Russia itz the 1990s were a number of edtlcational and scientific networks aimed at linking dc~mestic uniwrsities and research institutions and providing a channel for their communication with hreiign academic institritions. One of these networks was the Freenet. Founded by the Zelinsky Institute of Organic Cl~emistryin 1991, the Freenet links universities and research institutes, serving about 350 academic institutions. Other research-oriented networks itzclude KEDLZNE, created in 1994 by the Ministry of Education and the trade union of wc~rkersin edtlcation and science, and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the E~lrasiaFoundation; E E A R N , created in 2993 ~lnderan agreement between the Ministry of Defense and the R~~ssian Academy of Sciences, the Kurchatov Institute, and a number of other leading research institutes; IXIYN, founded in 1992 by the Committee on Higher Education and the Kurchatov Institute; KUNNet, started in 1994 tmder the program ""Lmiversities of Russid" and UNICOR (University Networks of Knowledge), set up in 1902 by tile State Committee czn Higher Eduation." In the late 2990s, the Russian Net has become a highly developed and diversified structure, The national infrastructure of computer n e ~ o r l e based s on TCPlXP protocols CIP networks) ir-tcludesbackbone channels for trafgc exchange within the country as well as channels for cr~nnectionwith foreign Internet networlts, The picture is diverse, and lines between categories are sometimes indistinct. For instance, regional providers may operate their own high-capacity international channels, or academic netwrks might use their capacity to provide commercial Internet services. National networks include the following major commercial networks: ELInetlKEtCOM, Glasnet, Global One Russia, Internet/Russia (fc?rmerfy DEMOS), Portal, RoInet JS RTC, Rostelecom, Sovam TeXeport, and Teleport-TP, The main academic and research networks are RBNet, Freenet, MSUNet,

IXELARN-XP, RSSI, IXUHER/Radio-MSU, and IXUNNet, Among these networks we should also mention the projects developed by the Open Society Xnstit~lte (Sc~rosFoundation). There is also an atternative network, FIDOMET. IXohazinski conducted an indepth. field study of the origins and diffr~sionof this special network, which was derreloped in the 1980s by a yclung American anarchist tc>serve as a glchal, noncommerciai and noninstitutional computer netwrk running paraltet to the Xnternet. According to Rohozinski3sfield research, in 1996, Global F12>8NET ir-tcluded 33,000 nodes in six zones. The Russian segment (FIUONET-7) in May 1998 illcluded 4,469 linked nodes in 90 separate oblast-tevet networks, with up to 100,000 users. Rohozinski stated that the presence of FIDONET in Russia is considerable and growing," However, our t>wn on-line interviews in Novosibirsk (one of FIDBNET" original nodes) do not confirm the current ixllportance of this alternative network, which according to these reliable informants is ~"irnarily used by the very yclung and does not really concern most of the Internet population,

Internet Trgfic Exchange Within Russia: l X Nodes Cooperation among the major national and regional XSPs in organizing the rational exchange of IP traffic within the cc>untrywas extremely important for IXussia, Until 1996, ali connections between the different Russian networks were realized via the global Xntel.net. In other wards, the user with access to one network could reach a server from another Russian network (even located in the same city!) only by surfing the globat Met, using up the precious, limited capacity of external backbone channels, The resultant bottleneck was eased by the creation of IX (Internet exchange) nodes where different ISPs cotlld alfocate their backbone routers to allow peering with no inter-network channels and thus without additional costs. Xn t 999 there were two IP-traffic exchange nodes in the country: M9-IX in Moscow, and B-IX in St. Petersbtlrg. The exchange is regulated by bilateral agreements and does not provide for muttilateraI connections. Only seven commercial and academic ISPs participated in the first Moscow exchange agreement, btlt more than 20 other cc>mpanieshad joined by early 19%-

The capacity of Russian international telecommunicatians channels has growrz. quite rapidly-from abcxlt twcl Mbps in 1995 to 15 Mbys in 1996, and to 70 Mbps by early 1998, In 1997, several companies operating on the nationai level began to establish their t>wn internaticlnal channels. The quality of IP service irnyro.l.ed, and the channels were wrking at fult capacity because of new subscribers. New channels added in 1997 ir-tclrrded a connection to the MC1 network (through Rostelecom)

138

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

TABLE "7 ,f International Connectivity of Russia Networks, 1998 (by XSP and Capacity)

Gfasnet: UBNplanet (U.S.), 1 Mhps, MC1 (U,$.), 2 Mhps Global-One: 3 chax~nelsto U.S. and Europe, total 8 Mbys Demos: MC1 (U.S.), 6 Mbps Cornstar: Concert/Btnet (C;reat Britain), 2 Mhps Macornnet: 'Cefeglobe (Caxlada), 2 Mbps Relcam: EUneti (Netherlands), 4 Mbps; EUrret (Finland), 2 Mbps; MC1 (U.S.), 4 Mbps Kosnet: BBNplanet (US,), 2 Mbps; MC1 (U.S.), 2 Mhps PTT-'Cefeport Moscow: MC1 (U.S.), 2 Mbys; UUNE'C (U-S.), 2 Mbps Sovam 'ldeport: 3 channels to U.S. and Europe, total 6 Mbps 'KeIeyort TP: NyserNet (U.S.), 2 Mbps EIvis-tl"elecorn: 'Celeglobe (Caxlada), 2 Mbps FREEner: DTAG (Germany), 256 Kbps MSUnet: MC1 (U.S.), 512 Kbys ORGIMS net: TJFN (Germaxly), 2 Mbps Radio-MSU: DFN (Germany), to Hamburg, total about 2 Mbps KSSI: NASA Internet (U.S.), 512 Kbys

St. Pefersbarg RUNNet: MORDUnet (Finland), 2 Mbps; Teleglobe (Carlada),4 Mbps

'bliEBplus: "l'sleglobc(Canada), 2 Mbys Metrocorn: 'releglobe (Caxlada), 2 Mbit NI"(?"Rus~net'"Tefecorn Finlrrrld, 5 12 Kbgs Sot'rtc~:Authors' compilation.

and to the network Teleglobe International, which was very active in the Russian tefecommunicatic~nsmaricet in 1997. Table 7.1 s h c ~ the ~ s Rtissian networks3nternattcjnal channels as of late 1997 and early 1998. One of the recent Internet communicatians technologies to reach Russia i s DirectPC, devefoyed by Hughes N e ~ o r Systems. k This Internet service system uses a regular channel (switched or leased) to request data from a client, and a satellite channel (up to 400 Kbps) to transmit requested data to another client PC by ISP? In April 1998, the first Russian fast channef to the gl(st>af Internet was put into operation by the Business Metwork, a powtrhl corporation uniting the resources of 6 Russian XSPs (incltiding Rostefecom, RELCOM, and the Kurcbatov Institute). By means of terrestrial fiber-optic cable with zt bandwidth of 34 Mbys, this channel connects Moscow via St. Petersburg to Stockholm, and from there to the backbone of the UUNet, a leading international XSR This project was aimed at

correcting the bottfeneck in Russian international electronic communications and thereby enhancing the developmental potential of the Russian networks, Let tls ncw examine some statistical estimates of the development of the Russian Net in the late 1990s. According to a 1998 repart by the IXussian Public Center for Information Technologies (ROCIT),by the end of f 998, there were itz Russia b e ~ e e n150 and 200 natic~nalISPs, and about 300 additional ISPs operating at the subnationat level, SimiIar data for January 1999, collected and elaborated by Network Wkards, showed the R~~ssian Met to be considerably smaller in absolute numbers than that in the United States, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Finland. Even in per capita terms and in comparison, with other, Xess developed countries, such as So~ltEzAfrica, the Russian Net came up short." A special report published by Ekonavtzika i zhizn' (no. 73, April 1998: Sibit-7 argues that although it lags behind in actual nrzmbers, the Internet in Russia is growing at a pace similar to that itz the United States, According to this source, the number of computers csInnected to the Net w u l d have been at that date close to 200,000-twice as many as in winter 1997, Another survey conducted from October S to October 8, 1998, by Moscow University" IMernet researcher, Alex Tutubalin, indicated that the financial crisis had not significantly stowcl the growth of the Russian Met: The number of comptlters connected to the fnternet in the .sm domaitz l-rad shrunk by about 40 percent since March 1998; but the total number of crzmputers connected reached the figure of 238,887, including 16,1637 hosts with Xntranet addresses.'" How pervasive is the use of computer networks in Russia? Debate rages around statistics on the demographics of the Russian Net. Uet an accurate statistical assessment is crucial to any assessment of Xtussia" integration into the Internet, which is the backbone of the global information age, ROCIT has provided systematic, authslritative data in its annual report on the Ixussian Met h r 1998. Based on its own surveys as we11 as on srxrwys by two of the leading pollixzg firms in Russia, COMCOPcT-2 and Gallup, ROCILT fof-lnd that by the end of 1998 there were 180,000 Russian IP hosts in the .ru domain, and bemeen 150 and 200 XSPs. About 250,000 users were paying far access to the Internet. Another 500,000 users had free access from their workylaces. About 600,000 tlsers, including many in educational and research institutic~ns,reported that they regularly used the lnternet in their worli.j7 COMCON" survey, as reported by ROCIT, estitnated a more widespread use of the Net, It reported 840,000 users in June 1998, of which 644,000 cclnnected from their workpIaces, and 268,11(10, from their homes. Net use had increased substantialljr, to a total of 1,081,000, itz August 1998. Of this total, 852,000 had access from their wc?rkplaces, and 319,000, from their homes. Including all family members, it was estimated that there were about 608,000 home-based Xnternet users. Focusitzg on usage of the Net in higher eduation in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Omsk, the survey found that 40 percent of university staff and researchers and 30 percent of students had Internet access, but less than 50 percent of them used this access regrxlarljr,

140

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

A GaXfup survey of Muscovites, conducted in September 1998, found 237,900 users visiting the Net daily; and 436,200 (or 6.2 percent of Mctscowk adult populatic~n)visiting weErty. Usage on weekends was less frequent than on wekdays, emphasizing the predominantly worli-related use of the Internet. Combinitzg and adjusting these data, the authors of ROCIT's 1998 report estimated a total of 1.S million users, including E-mail users, and adding access from home, wrkplace, and educational institutions. Although these figures have been challenged by many Russian experts, they are relatively close to estimates provided by the internatisnal ce~nsultingfirm IUC for Jane 15, 1999: The total nurnber of Russia" Internet users was estimated to llave increased from 384,000 in 1996 to 1.2 million in 1998-a threefold increase itz less than three yearse3' 7"utubalin assessed the evolution of the Net between March 1998 and March 1999 by analyzing domains, web sites, and numbers of computers connected rather than end users. In this sitzgle year, domair-ts increased by 97 percent; web servers increased by 86 percent in 11.5 months; and IIhaddresses increased by 40 percent in 10.5 months, indicating a trend toward smaffer sites with fewer camputers, linking up to the Net by themselves,"' ROCILTk 1998 report shows an increasing csmmercializatic>nof the Internet, as informatic~nservices companies (80 percent of tbern self-financed) grew bp 200 percent in 1998, Search engines such as Aport and "Jandex, and lnternet catalog providers such as AU and ""1,000 Stars," experienced significant growth, with a total turnclver of U.S,$Ci million in commercial services. Internet advertising companies, such as Inter-XkkXama and Russian Link Exchange, were also expanditzg their busitzess, Private conneaion cr~mpaniesrecorded a 1998 turnover of ti,S.$S million. Internet portals in Russia, as in the United States, seem to be the fastest-growing segment of the industry. Mergers are taking place, adding resources to the itzdustry. The economic crisis of 1998 stowed the development of the Internet but did not affect the tlse of E-mail or the lczng-term prospects for IXussian Xnternet growth. There is strong evidellce that business firms and professionals are keeping their fnternet use a priority,

regions lag ccznsiderably in the development of commercial InAlthough R~~ssiak ternet usage, they are benefitting from nonprofit faundations2nd the government's efforts to set up a basic fnternet infrastructure centered around universities, research centers, schools, and libraries. The mclst significant of these projects is one built around a contribution from the Open Sociew Institute using frunds from the Soros Foundation. The TeleconnmunicationsII~~ternet Project is jointly ftlnded and is being d e ~ l o p e dby the Russian federal gowrnment, local governments, and universities. It aims at establishing 33 university-based Internet centers around the country, with particular emphasis on the regions. By 1995, such centers had been fotlnded in Moscr)w>Nr~vc~sibirsk, and Yaroslavl. Their primary purpose has been to provide open access to Internet resources, thus encouraging the diffusion of information in areas such as culture, edtlcation, libraries, muse-

urns, health care, and human rights, The program also helped the development of fnternet Training Centers. In 2998 there were 26 such ccnters operating in the crluntry, frtlm the Far East (Vladivostc>k)to the Nctrthwest (1E"etrozavtldsk). One of the leading noncommercial Xnternet centers in the regions is the Novosibirsk Scientific Xnternet Center" loated in Akaderngorodok, the science tcwn near Mc>vt>sibirsk,in Siberia. This center was developed in the early 1 9 9 0 ~ ~ through the integration of several n e ~ r k - o r i e n t e dprograms initiated by university and academic ixzstitrrtions and by the city of Novosibirsk. ft was one of the pnrsgrams suypt~rtedby the Open Society Institute in cooperation with the RLEsian Foundation for Basic Research, the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the regional administration. The building of this Intemet infrastructure allclwed the Nt)vt>sibirsk Center to participate in varicjus international netwrking prcjgrams, such as the MICE project Eunded by the European Cornmission ACTS program, and the U,S.-ir-titiated program MIKNet. Locally, several tlser organizations are ct~nnectedvia KKL links, and a metropolitan data cczmmunications netwrk, based on frame relay tecl~noIot;-y,was being developed by the local PTT (post, telegraph, and telephone agency) in cooperation with the Novosibirsk Internet Center. The goaI is to btlifd a node along the emerging """Trans-SiberianInformation EXighwy." hterestingly, the increasing communication capacity at this location led to a significant change ir-t the direction of information ROWS. The initial ratio of initjut traffic, which m s 1:5, changed to 1:3, meaning that external users were retrieving more informationaf resources from the system. The Novosibirsk netwclrk has kept its noncc>mmercial character while expanding its networking services to users such as health care czrganizations, regional museums, libraries, theaters, and art galleries, Libraries are now providing free access to a variety of users. Among the obstacles to the further k adntinistrators of the Center cite the lack of a development of their n e ~ o r the modern broadband infrastructure in Russia; the language probfern, given the p~evalenceof English in Illternet resources; and the need to provide tutorials at various levels, geared toward the staff members of institutions and toward users from the communityy4" Overall, although edt~catis~n-based, noncommercial n e ~ o r k sare aiding the diffusion of Internet technology among the Russian regions, a Zarge gap remains between the level of Intemet usage in the Russian regions and that in the largest metropolitan areas such as Moscs.tv, due to regional inequality in educational and other resources. The Russian Net has g r o w throughout the past decrtade to become a sizable phenomenon, spurred by a combination of the individual efforts of scientists, uvould-be commercial entrepreneurs, academic; programs (seeking to link Russian higher education w i t b h e world), and self-educated Net users building virtual ct~mmunitiesand information n e ~ o r k sHowever, ~ h be. its rate of g r o ~ lags hind that of the global Xnternet, and its diffusion, both in real numbers of hosts and users and in their proportion of the educated Russian population, seems dis-

142

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

proportionately low It is predominantly concentrated around Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other large urban areas, and is used primarily.by p u n g people and pfiofessionals. The lack of adequate tefecr~mmunicaticminfrastructtlre outside Moscow, the limited difft~sionof personal computers (in spite of its high growth rate), and the relativeby high cost of connectivity (U.S.$20 dollars per month is a pnzhibitive rate fc3r many Russian families) are the main factors sloowing the diffusion of the Russian Net.

fntel.net land Business Mannprnent This Xag in the difft~sionof Internet may prove costly for the productivity and cr~mpetitivenessof the Russian economy>as wefl as for the quality of education and information processing, In 1998, Intel commissioned a study fmrn COMCON on the Russian market potential for information technologies? Researchers surveyed managers of information systems in various sectors of the Russian economy, including finance, information technologies, and telecommunicatians. According ta the cancltlsions of the survey, outdated camputer equipment was found to hamper substantially management" performance and workers\~r~zdt~ctivity, Eighy percent of IXussian managers of information t e c h n o l o ~complained about the cansiderabfe amorrnt of time wasted bemuse of bow-performance cornpaters. Eighty-eight percent of managers ccznsidered the Internet a very important uvorking tool for increasing their company" competitiveness; yet they reported sporadic and itzefficient use of the fnternet in their firms. Eighty-five percent of managers claimed to have access to the Internet, but 84 percent thought they tlsed it inefficiently. One-third of the managers stated that the slowness of Xnternet connection and itzforrnation transmission was ia major deterrent to more effective use, Although X2 percent of all respondents thought a web site an irnportant cczmpany asset, only 50 percent reported the existence of a web site at their firms. In other words, afthough Russian information systems managers seem aware of the potential of the Net and are wil'Iing to use it, deficient telecommt~nications,lack of personnet training, and obsolete company structures appear to block the potential boost in productivity that the Net could bring.

Because the social universe that revc~lvesaround the Russian Net is diverse and rapidly changing, littie reliable information about it exists, Nonetheless, using the data that are available, we can ascertain the approitnate dimensions of that universe as w l l as its basic demographic and geographic characteristics.

M o Are iEhe Users? As in other countries, users of the Net in XXussia are mainly educated professionals: 55 percent are college graduates; and SO percent are professionals, 15 percent,

managers, and 18 percent, students. One-third appear to be wrking in occupations directly related to ir-tformation technology. A gender gap is apparent, with as many as 85 percent of users being men (albeit, more recent, adjusted data indicate that a 70/30 spilt is closer to a~tuaiity).~? Another major demographic divide in the Russian Net universe pivots around age: Only 15.2 percent of users are older than 45 years-an even smaller prrqmrtion than that of users bef~veenthe ages of 16 and 19 ( f 5.3 percent). This is a powerful ir-tdicator of what appears to be the marginaiization of Russia" solder population in the new information age, eccznomically, culturally, and technologicall~r.~~ As for the geography of the Russian Net, residents of the main urban centcrs predominate among users-particularly; Muscovites, who in 1997 accounted for about 60 percent of Met users, Hrzuvever, it appears that this dominance had decreased to SO percent of users by the end of f 998. Furthermore, Gallup Media estimated Muscr>viteshhareat 30-45 percent in their survey of Internet tlsers in July 1999. Other sources have confirmed the dominal~ceof the main urban centers." Yet, the Russian web space is growitzg qrzickly, Almost all major cities, administrative oblasts, and okrugs have their own web sites. Many of these sites seem to have been developed by self-trained local webmasters, as they are far from perfect in design, text structure, interactiviity, and navigability; they are often static and outdated. However, the process has at least begun: Sites exist. There remains a substantiaj gap between the territorial diffusion of the web and the diffusion of Xnternet users in the poprriatisn; altho~lghthe web is exgandi~zgrapidly; the number of users in nonmetropolitan areas is still very limited, A major issue in the diffusion of Znternet communication in Xxussia is language. Until $996,the Web was, according to Specter, ""under the absolute supreemq of the English language,'' which meant that Russia was being split into tw3 tiers: the cosmopolitan segment of the pclpulation, with easy access to a plethora of informational resources; and the rest-a new "world of cultural and intellectual ghettoes for people who cannot take advantage of what is out there in English,""" H98 is considered a turning paint in this trend, as Xxussian-language content on the Net increased substantiaily that year. According to data from Russian search engines Rambler, Aport, and Yandex, the number of Russianlanguage documents grew during 1997 from 500,000 to 2,1100,000, and the nrzmber of dedicated hosts, from 4,000 to 13,000." 7 Russian-speaking user can now surf an ocean of informatic~n-so much so, that there is already talk about an ""rformational Rood," the ""danger of entropy:hnd newssity for more advanced search engines and technologies. As far the content, one can find everything on the Russian Net-both the good and the bad-that is xvaiXable on the global web, Xs there something ""purely Xtussian" i1-t it? We think so, based on our direct observation of Russian web sites, Interaction on the Russian Net has a strong ""communal" "aracter like that of the Xxussian ""srudent collective"";verybodp is welcome, Anecdote and joke sites are the most pop~rlar,featuring distinctively Russian humol; and revealing a strong

144

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

trend toward the use of ""humr therapy" as an indispensable part of Rt~ssians" survival kit. Most sites offer a warm and friendly environment, displayitzg spontaneous trust and the desire tc>help and tc>share. The style of expression used by some Internetters is playful, almost like that of kindergartners, Theirs is a very nai've culttire, full of enthusiasm and frank and eager imitation of the foreign ""eder brother" who got there first. Flowever; as was the experience of the "elder brother;"?n Xxussia the Net is losing its human face. ""The Xnternet is approaching the end of the romantic period in its development,'5n the words of E, Genieva, president of the Open Society Insfittrte in Moscow" This newly discovered territory is being actlmly privatized and regulated, with its own set of rules of coexistence and property rights: WeIcrlme to Net civilization, a world apart from anarchy. As in other societies, in Xxussia the Xnternet faces serious problems: the uncomfortble coexistence of commercial and noncommercial. networks; the lack of itzfc3rmation security; infringements on intellectual property rights; and the tension b e ~ e e nmaintaining free access to information white protecting society kom extremism (e.g., zrenophobic propaganda), pornography? and incitement to viafence, a l of which are present on the Russian Net, But there are also manikstations of creativity on the Net, which has been embraced with enthusiasm by the artistic and cultural intelligentsia. These groups are attracted by the promise of equal access and by the relative ease of using the Net as a tool and a medium. It facilitates the dynamic exchange of ideas and reqkxires little monetary ir-tvestment. The lnternet is being studied and experimented with in many quarters of the rich culture currendy springing up in Russia. Xntellectuafs are reRecting on its "transcendental meaning" and implications for society; as they do with postmodernism, mass culture, democracy, communism, or fias~isrn,~' C~irrentdebates emphasize the end of the monopoly of the printing press and the death of distance and time. Global connectivity is expected to ir-ttensie the potential. of ixztellecttial life. Hypertext, literary games, and collaborative projects are not entirely new concepts (despite the new Russian word coined for the literature of the Internet, neteraturu), but they blossomed afresh when they found a new medirtm for their existence, in the Internet."The Internet opened a new space in the wc3rld of the arts, a space very different from the traditional, elitist, closed club with its rigid membership rules, strict hierarchy; and firm aesthetic criteria. The new world is open, democratic, very dynamic, and just miting for conquerors, Still, there do not seem to be too many takers on the Russian Net. For instance, among information resources itz 1998, web sites ir-t the ""culture and art" category accounted fc3r 9.2 percent of total If%,but received only 7 percent of total. hits," This cczuld mean that the suppty of such sites exceeds the demand. On the other hand, foreign web sites (based abroad) are strongly present ir-t cuXturall1iteral.y XR on the Russian Net.'"n demographic terms, Net art and neteratzkra sites are thinly poputated islands of distinctive and elitist culture, clustered around Moscow and St. Petersburg, where most of the electronic magazines are published. Many of these

magazines focus on the cultural life of these particutar cities, merely prgecting their longstanding rivalry as cultural capitals into the electronic ageai" One of the most important aspects of the Internet" contribution to social emIution as a whole is its use in education. The educationat value of the Met is widefy recognized itz Russia. Cultural, legal, research, and academic itzstitrrtions were the first tc>be connected tc>the Internet. In the early 1 9 9 0 a~ number ~ of pilot projects Uniwere initiated by individual universities, suppclrted bp the program "R~~ssian versities," under the auspices of the Ministry of Education. This effort resulted in the founding of the RUNNet (Russian Universities N e ~ o r k in ) 1994, and of the X;tBNet (lkssian Backbone Network) in 1996. The lxussian branch of the Open Society Institute (OSI) developed a high-speed backbone n e t w r k in Moscow that cr~nnectedthe academic network Freenet, Kadio-MSU, and MStrNet with the computer networlis of 111ajor research and educational centers located in southern Moscow. Regional telecommunications projects in Novosibirsk and Yaroslavl were also co-founded by the OSI. It is now possible to speak of an atfX;tussian inkastructure far computer telecommunications in science and higher education, well connected to the global lnternet via Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia, With Rt~ssian-languageresources being rapidly developed, the Internet is a growing resource for Russian education, The problems of lntel.net use in education are under discussion ir-t academic circles: One fc3rum for the ongr~ingdebate is the annual CIS conference on "New befd at Novosibirsk State Universit~.~~ Information Technologies for Universities," k At the conference itz March $999,a wide array of questions were discussed: fmm the informatization of higher education to the use of cczmputer technologies in the pedagow of pitrticutar academic disciplines; the uses of computers in traditional classroom settings and at distant learnitzg sites; and the teachir-tgof information science in primary schools. Speakers reyc~rtedtheir best case stories, shared their ideas on methodology, and complained about the lack of advanced software; there were as yet no electronic textbooks, manuals for students5ndependent study, and teaching programs for occupational retraining. The need for a common informational-educatiopta1 space prompted interuniversity cooperation in launching a remote electronic learning center: Several tlniwrsities pot~ledtheir intellectual and informatic>nal resources to launch a higher educatiollal consortium called the Open University of West Siberia. Founded in early $998by three universities, one year later the Open Ur-riversity had 14 member universities and coUeges. These participating institutions appear to believe in the future of on-line education. Elctwever, same critics have argued that remote learning cannot fi~llysubstitute for face-to-face interaction becatlse it dczwnplays the role of the teacher as the main actor in the edtlcational process, They fear that the quality of education wiitl suffer and that control will be uncertain because of an-line circulation of exams and tests, At stake is the FIZture of education as a social pfiocess incftlding direct interaction between teachers and students. A new balance must again be struck between technology and social experience. Meanwhile, Russian universities are using the tnternet even as

146

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

they debate how better to use communication technologies while conserving pedagogic and academic values, Nongoxrnmental organizations and grassrrlots motiernents, particularly human rights groups, are also avid users of the Net as a learning and teaching tool. Beca~lsethey lack financial resources, such groups seek access to the Net in order tcz ptlblicize their views, expose their critics, and build popular support, The often loose organizational structure of these groups is compensated for by on-tine organization and communication, which makes tasks easier and multiplies the impact of their efforts, Becatlse the Internet functic~nsin real or chosen time, its use has fiacilitated the timely spread of information on which local and international NGQs rely for effective action. Western support groups also use fnternet connectic~nsto link up with their Russian allies and keep their lines of infc3rmation open to the world,

Do Russian Imtr?rnet-Users Have DisE-inctiw Values? There are no reliable sources of information on the values of the Internet popuiatic~n.But we can report on one interesting snapshot of the opinions and beliefs of a nonrepresentative sample of respondents to an on-fine survey conducted by Moscow News from its web site, in 1998 and $999.The respected weekly conducted a cr~ntinuous(nonchtrusiive) on-line poll of readers of its electronic e r sion, asking one question each weekeisAn analysis of their archived responses to more than 40 qkxestions provides an interesting profife of the average (though often unpredictable) Russian netken, Only 20.3 percent of respondents were able to make ends meet from one paycheck to the next, although 70.6 percent reported that their financial standing had imprcmd dtlring the previous ten years, Seventy percent of respondents did not fear the impact of new legislation on the provision of personal financial information for large p~zrcfiases;53.7 percent were willixzg to pay taxes on their total personal income, &ereas 4 1. l percent were not, and 4.8 percent were undecided. Only 25 percent liked the new national anthem of Russia, whereas 31.4 percent disliked it and 42.4 percent had ""no emotions of any Ktzd" toward it. Charity was the subject on which respondents were most ccznflicted: 57.5 percent were reportedly willing to offer aid to sick children (mainly monetary, but same afso in the form of foodstuffs or caretakng); but in response to the question ""Sould beggars be given alms7,'"he respt~ndentsanswered "")as," "no:bnd ""Im not sure" in about equal proportions, As for their political standing, 70.2 percent were against military action by Mezsc~wtcz reestablish order in Chechnya; 52.7 percent approtied of air strikes against Xraq; and 59.8 percent tl-xoughtthe Communist party shouXd be banned, W ~ e nasked in October 1998 whetkr Russia should provide Serbia with direct military assistance if NATO initiated a military operation in Kosovo, 44 percent said "yes."

m e n asked about the influence of A. SoXzhenitsyn on their world~iew~ half acknowledged some influence. About 61 percent could recite at least one poem by P~lshkinfrom memory. On the whole, they indicated a lack of trust in the mass media: About 43 percent wuXd permit censorship of the Moscow N e w web site in order ta prevent the circtrlation of extremist statements. Trust in the media was extremely low: Only about 8 percent trusted television broadcasts; 6 percent, radio; and 25 percent, newspapers. About 61 percent said they trtrsted no mass media outlet. Sixty-eight percent would vote in parliamentary elections "if elections were announced tomorrow." Their natir~nkeconomic and political outlook appeared dim: 52.7 percent thought ltussia w u I d not survive without XMF loans; 80 percent expected hyperinflation in the near future; 53-5 percent did not believe that the Primakov gcwernment cr~utdlead the crluntry out of its current crisis; and about 55 percent were considering emigration as a way out of their personal problems in the R~~ssian situation. Lastly; 80 percent declared that they wc3uld not stop tlsing the Internet, even after the August 1998 crisis, Since the first electronic edition of M~sco-tvNews was issued on line, 29.9 percent reported that they had purchased the newspaper" print edition for the first time, and 12-3 percent, that they had stopped buyi~zgit, But the most interesting finding is that 67.6 percent responded, " m e r e X live, you cannot buy it anyay.'" In this respect, the electronic medium seems a more reliable channel for csmmunicating with the braad public than does print. More than two-thiirds of respandents to this on-line poll were residents of nonurban areas.

Internet Penetmbicrn of Russian Soctep It started as a phenomenon known only to computer literates and the professional, English-speaking elite; but today the Internet attracts a wider range of social and political groups. Its users now include many students and teachers, academics, office workers, managers, businessmen, and increasingly, bureaucrats and patiticians. Flowever, the Xnternet is still far from reaching the mainstream of Russian society; True, it has become fashionable in metropolitan areas to hang out in cyberspztce, In April 1999, the Internet community in Moscc)w organized a live ""Xternet Party 'W'" ("With free vodka and strip-teaseiH%veryone:invited!"). Another, rather difkrent manikstation of the virtual community's existence was a demonstration by young Internet tlsers-mainly fidoshvslki (subscribers to FEDONE?")-in December f 997, against rising telephone rates in Moscow, The Internet cafes and bars cater to a highljr diverse group of people, itzcluding intellectuals, kids, gays, and foreigners. Computer games simultaneously played by several players are a big attraction. Coupons for free use of the Xnternet are issued to patrons based on the amount of their regular (paid) usage." Cyberspacc is increasingly being studied and experienced by artistic and intellectual bohemians, and the fashionable neteratzlra circulates through. the capitals of Russia.

148

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

Flowever, the Xnternet is less developed in outlying regions, A study conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Social and Political Research concluded that Internet technology in Russia, outside of the largest cities, is rapidly becoming cjutmoded, leading to a situation similar to that in third world countries that are exclrtded from the global ir-tformation community Citizens of Russian regions are becr~mhg""virtual homeless yeop1e:hwith no prospect of escaping their marginalizatlon witl~inthe next yearsec' This problem is more than the sum of negative economic, social, and technological trends. It is also a functic~nof the lack of curiosity-of ""safe air"-in remote areas czf the country: There is little official effort to promote the diffusion of the Net-perhaps out of fear of rtncontrolled flows of ir-thrmation. In the words of one speaker at a recent conference titled "Internet-Society-Individual": "There is no demand for it [Internet] in society. . . . Computer technologies are developing too fast. The computer elite does not realize that society has been eAausted by the pace of swift changes thrust upon it, Rapid change cannst be relentless, . . . Xt is necessary to get people interested, and to show them possible uses of new technologies."" The mass media contribute to the Internet" unpopularity with the social mainstream. There are only a few periodicals that cover informaticjn technologies regrxlarly (e.g., Moscow Times>Novaya Sibir". But those who do write about the Internet focus on the dark side of the Net: computer piracy, viruses, thefts, disasters at the space stations, the health effects of radiation, madness as a result of Internet use, and information overload. These are the favorite computer-related topics for articles in the media. Basically, the Internet is depicted as an expensive way of obtaining news about crime and perversion. my pay for it, when the radio is sa much cheaper and more reliableT5" The specialized computer press is the honest servant of the computer business and represents the interests of producers but not of consumers. Aggressive competition between computerlsoftware companies results in a steady flood of imperfect new .trersions of old yrodtlcts, with no adequate marketing information for users, No pubtic reviews or comparisons of products are available, so users feel helpless. Some observers have noted that Russians take a quasimystical attitude toward cc3mputers: In the best religious tradition, users feel guilty when they cannot make a program uvtzrk, and they never question its qrzaiity, The user interface is so unfriendly that a new type of interface is appearing: a human ""mediatorm-ansther user, who is more advanced in cornputing.") The growing amount of advertising is an czbstacle as well: The commercialization of the Internet makes it less attractive ta potential new users in the socid mainstream.

Increasing Disarray Among Rwsia's In ternet Pioneers In 1999, the company DEMOS, the pioneer of the Ixussian Met, celebrated its tenth anniversary, The Net was ten years old; it was high time to take stock, Pre-

dictably, various coltective reflections on the Xnternet appeared on-line in the first months of 1999. One ir-t particrxlar offers a unique perspective on the assessment of the Russian Net by those who created it," Their main w r r y is that the concept of the Xnternet is gradually being reduced to that of various information technologies, In their view, the Xntcmet is much more important than just another techncslogy; it is a new culture of cczmmunication. As large, commercial lnternet service providers take control of the networks, profits increasingly will come more from E-trade and advertising than from services (which will be practically free). In their view>three or four major cczmpanies will own the Internet in the United States. Similarly, the netmrks in Xxussia will be in the hands of b e ~ t e n five and ten companies," The managers of the Internet, rather than its users, will end up cr~ntrollingit. The Internet will be "McUanaldized"":verything will be standardized, The Internet will elimir-tatePCs and Windows; a personal web page on some site will replace the PG. The rrsuter will be the hardware, 112-telephc~nywill die. The future is in 2 Mbps capacity provided for the user at every point of the gtobe, Financial firms and Internet companies are vyia~gfor control over the network, with electronic brokers enjoying a competitive edge, The Internet also &ices self-destruction due to increasing entropy. The more information resources expand, the more difficult it is to process information ir-t a tlseful way. Search technologies are way behind the development of the Internet, inhibiting its informational potential, If the Russian government does not provide financing for the f~zrtherdevelopment of the R~~ssian Net, there is a risk that foreign companies may gain control of it. Leading Xxussian programmers are atready working for foreign firms, M. X. Uwidov proposes that a giant joint-stock company be created to fund the Russian Net and to cczunter the national brain-drain. He argues in favcsr of a fund similar in size and substance to the United Energy Systems of Russia (the Chubais-led state oligopoly). This would be, in his wideljr respected vies-v, the only certain way of avc~idingthe McDrznaldizatio of the Russian Net.

The State and the Net The IXusslian government realized the potential of Xnternet technology and accepted the idea of its development early on, as did local political leaders. Yurii ttlzhkov, iZrl~scc>w'smayor, was among the first to launch a web site during the 1996 presidential elections, using it to monitor the elections closely. In October 2997, Bill Gates "took Moscow by storm," opening the Russian market to his cr~mpany"prrsducts." OQfficiafgovernment and Duma structures started to install computers and develop web sites. A breakhrough came in May 1998, when nerizen Boris kltsin gave an on-line intervietruh4in which he blessed the development of the Internet in Russia because "the future is in the information technolcsgies." It is clear that the Kremlin sees the Internet as a matter of economic interest for Russia and as a political weapon that is best kept on its own side.

150

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

The concept of free and unmonitored exchange of lnhrmation and ideas has interested everybody in Russia, Potential threats from the Xnternet to information security systems, as exemplified by the efforts of an active and growing grclup of lxussian haclcers, gained the atfel~tionof the Uuma, which held several hearings on the topic (the first of them was titled "Threats and Challenges in the Sphere of Information Security"") In a different vein, George Soros" investment in the devetopment of a IXussian academic n e ~ o r lwas i considered bp Russian leaders an act of industrial espionage, potentially damaging to the interests of the Russian state; accrzrdingly, it had to be controlled and co~lnterbalancedby appropriate government actions. The Uuma started using the Xnternet to provide alternative information on its own activity, which Uuma members felt was cc~veredin a biased manner by the lxussian media. Thus, the reaction of the political class was rather typical of politicians around the world: They were using the Internet, and attempting to control it, to further their own ends. In Spring 1999, the political parade of new web sites continued, with new actors entering the theater every day." kliticlians launched web sites not only to itzform voters but to attract poprllar sympathy with entire pages (or even separate sites) being devoted to their permnal lives. Boris Memtsov was the first to open two different sites: one patiticaf and another personal."" Web sites became an itzdispensable sign of being a modern political leader-so much so, that the president of Tatarstan, Mintirner Shaimiev, received his site as a birthday present from his staff:7 As for the control side of the equation, at the reqrzest of the Russian government the Russian Federal Sec~lrityService (FSB) has prepared regulations and technical requirements to facifitate fieid czperati~work in computer networks. An operation code-named S O W - 2 (the Russian acronym for "@stem for Candtlct of Investigation and Field Operatic>nsn")as been planned, under which electronic devices are to be inilplanted in the web servers of each ISP, enabling the security services to intercept communications when necessary and as ordered by j~tdicialauthorities. The surveillance system was already in operation on traditional telephone lines. Recentty, paging and ceXtufar communication systems were included under the new surveillance procedures, Next in line is the Xnternet. Public reacticjn to early rumors about the FSB's regulation and control of telecr~mmunications netwrks was very strong, Human-rights NGOs launched protest campaigns." "reign mass media also paid considerable attention to the matter. Some grassrotlts organizations in Rt~ssiahave called for the development of a new electronic samizdat and have atready established a Samizdat web site. In their view, the media are no longer free, having been conquered by corruption, business, and government. The Russian state is again suppressing autonomczus expressions of dissent. Thus, the Xnternet i s the new space of freedom, which must be defended and utilized as a new form of political organization, free speech, and tlnfettered crzmmtlnication. Russian Xnternet providers are concerned not only about the potential violation of the constitutionai rights of web users but also about their business. Aborlt

U,S.$1003000will be required to install the SORM system in each network, at the expense of the ISPs, thus increasixzg their ogeratixzg costs by as much as $0 to $5 percent. The SORM projject is an acid test of the ability of the Internet, and elf the society and business circles built around it, to resist renewed state security control over the development of itzformational resources, A last refuge from such intervention, similar to that developed in the U ~ ~ i t eStates, d is tough-tc>-crackencryption technolog that enables users to avoid undue interference, Since most Net users in Russia have little or no experience with encryption techniqrxes, encrypric~ntechnolog is expected to becczme a boc~mingbusiness there in the near term.h"Vet as in the United States, the IXussian government is preparing legislative measures to make encryption illegal, with the exception of encryption procedures atlthorized by the gcmrnment and used under cczntrolled circumstances, where the govwnment has access to the codes, In August 1999, the Russian interior ministry opened a hot line on the Internet, inviting ""malicisus" hackers as w l l as cclmputer security experts and all Internet users to discuss computer crime-related issues. One of the first texts pubXished there was a press release on a new unit within the interior mixzistry: agency ('R>'' established on August 14,1999, to prevent high-technc~lomcrimes."%ccording to this document, the number of computer information crimes had increased fivefold in the previous two years, and 85 percent of all sahware products on the Russian market were pirated, with a turnelver of about US$1 S million. (By August 24, 1999, two criminaf investigations had been initiated pursuant to information placed on the web site by users,)

There is an active debate on the Rt~ssianNet about the prospects of the information society. An insightful web site is the one established in 1997 by the Movosibirsk Institute of Economics, the Virt~lalLaboratory for Russian Economists and Sociologists, on the initiative of S. f'arinc>~.~"t is filled with technological optimism about the transformative potential of information and communication technologies. In the wards of A. Shadrin, an economist at Moscow's Instit~lteof Eccznomic Prchlems of Transition: "The prospects of globalization of skilled labar, together with the development of on-line education, allow us to foresee a breakthrough in the dynamism of less developed countries. Advancements in crlmptlters and information technologies, and the decreasing cost of communications infrastructure, provide the conditions for the integration of deveioping countries in the global postindustrial space.'""" Howeve&these views crlntrast with Russia" current reality. On April 26, 1999, the World Bank issued a repclrt on the state of poverty in the world, In the countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Ellrope, the bank calculated that there were 147 million people living below the poverty fine of U.S.$4 a day. The equivalent figure for 198"fas 114 millicln. 11: is highly unlikely that the diffusion of information technologies, in the absence of broader trends of economic devel-

152

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

czpment and social reform, could reverse the structurat crisis in Xxussian society* Qn the other hand, we should not underestitnate the potential represented by a small but dynamic, entrepreneurial sector of Russian society, Nt~rshould W ignore the critical role of information technolog in ensuring the segmented connection of Russia to the global economy. Indeed, if there is one recurrent theme in our analysis, it is dualization: dualization between a crumbling high-technology production system (most of it military-oriented), and a dynamic consumer market, albeit limited to a small segment of the economy; between a ptlblic telecczmmunicatiom infrastructure stilt lagging behind the rest of Europe" in spite of recent modernization efforts, and specialized telecommunications links catering to business and global connections; b e ~ e e na small though fast-grc~winggroup of Internet tlsers, and the poyutation at large, which has remained aloof from technological change and is concentrating instead on survival; between the largest urban centers, the locale of most Internet users and information resources, and the rest of the cc>untry, served only by a narrow channel of electronic communications thanks to the courageotls efforts of eduational and research institutions; between the young and the old, as only about 15 percent of Internet users (the fatter being a smal minority of the general population) are older than 45 years; between men and women, although this is changing toward a more balanced gender distribution; betriveen languages and cultural resources-betmreen a tzigltfy educated, Englishspeaking, cosmopolitan stratum, and most Xxussians; more recently?between the commercial networks and the original, pioneer c~llturethat gave rise to the Russian Net ten years earlier; and last but not least, between the grc~winguse of cyberspace by the political class for their own advertising, and the attempt by the state to control citizens' free communication on the Internet. These fundamental fault lines in the Rt~ssianinformation society exacerbate the social, economic, and political cleavages induced by a market economy that p~lshed50 percent of the economy into barter; a polity that generated widespread distrust of the ""democrats"; and a social policy that left about 40 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Furthermore, electronic communication enables dynamic segments of the Russian economy and society to connect with their cczunterpztrts around the gtobe, while evading the burden of poverty and baclcwardness borne bp the rest czf the country. This mut"cdimensional dualism, expressed in c@erspace, splits Russia between the global and the local, with mclst valuables being global and most people being local. Vet we have also observed the emergence of an ebullient, electronic civil society, out of communal sharing, entrepreneuria1ism) and itztellccttraf curiosity. Although this dynamic group of neeizens is smafl in size and inflt~ence,it is growing fast, and it is concentrated among the younger population-----thosewho will create the new Rt~ssia,However, these words of hope may be grounded in little more than wishful thinking. The I n t e r n e t - s a ~educated ~ elite could tlse their apacity to Xink up with the world, in the midst of the harsh Russian reality, to find their own individual escape: first, in cybersgace, as they share in the networks of infor-

mation, business, and dreams that populate the Xnternet galaxy; then, in many cases, by ~lsingthis connection to physically leave Russia, building a new Xife in crruntries that mcrre closely resemble the Internet tales. That they dcr not-that they find enough hope, material reasons, and spirittrat companionship to stay and to spearhead Russia's entry into the new warid-will largely determine the crruntry" future in the information age.

afterward: The Russim lnternet in April 2000 The information technology revolution, with the Xnternet at its core, continues to expand throughout the world with unprecedented speed, Russia is no exception. Since the summer of 1999, when this chqpter was written, important developments have taken plaice, generally along the lines suggested in our analysis. The one thing that did not llappen was the Y2K disaster so feared by Western observers: Ncr nuclear weapons security was jeopardized, no breakdown of infrastructure took place, and the ""htjine" emrgency communications links continued to operate, Gken the widespread alarm about Russia's technical capabilities expressed in Western media dtlring 1999, we must conclude either that Russia was nat so unprepared or that the W s t overreacted in this matter. Other matters were and remain more worrisome: In January 2000, a new Russian law was passed that expands the reach of the Internet surveillance prc~ject SQRM-2, The power to monitor all Internet traffic in real time was extended from the FSB to ir-tcludeeight other agencies, among them tax inspectors, Krernfin security, border guards, and cmstc>mofficers, To be sure, goxrnmental monitoring of the Xnternet is not an exclusively XXussian phenomenon, as evidenced by the U,S./U.K. surveillance operation Echelon, and by the U,%. EB,X. Carnivore pnrsgram. Hc~wever,what is special in the R~~ssistn case is the degree of exposure that Xnternet users wiff have to potential abuse by corrupt or criminal elements with connections to the security agencies. The Internet has become a battlefield not only of fierce virtual wars but atso of real wars that incur a loss of human lives. Xn a striking example of today" gecrpoXitical networking, the battles of the Chechen war were displayed on the World Wide Web-an effort not only involving R~~ssians and Chechens but also Californians (one of the main Chechen web sites was based in that state). Russian politics is now fully reflected in the Internet. During the March 2000 p~sidentialcampaign, because the Internet has been legally defined as a mass medium, "qbervioiations" of lxussian laws on the dissemination of political propaganda during an electoral campaign were subject to monitoring and prosecutic.tn. The XXussian Net is expanding too quickly to permit the reliable tracking of its boundaries. New estimates of the number of its tlsers ir-t early 2000 ranged beween 1.5 million and 6 million, and the number of web sites was estimated at b e ~ e e n18,000 and 25,OOfI. The number of personal computers in Russia has increased to about 7 million, itzcluding 2 million home computers. The geography

154

E ~ t n z aKisekova and Manuel Castells

czf the Xnternet is quickly changing as well: Siberians are now the most frequent users; will their region become "Cyberia""? Last, bat not least, in R~~ssia as elsewhere in the wc?rld, the virtual wcxld of the Internet reeks of real money, increasing& attracting investors both Russian and to catch up foreign, Leading figures in the Russian busir-tessworld urge R~~ssians with developed countries in their tlse of the Internet, seizing on it as a chance for developing Russia, in glowing language similar to Mikhail Lomonosov\ classic prediction (that Siberia would become the source of Russian greatness), fn early 2000, the first major Internet business prr3jects came to light: Rambler, ToylQO, and iXBT An important independent portal, golit,ru, went on sale, The contours of potential Xntemet giants started to emerge, The spheres of ir-tRtrencein Russian qbersyace are being redefined every day, The Russian state is struggling to catch up with private investors: The major financial institutions in IXussia are preparing a large-scale strategic collaboration in fnternet banking, To maximize returns on their investments in Internet prr3jects in Russia, cornpanies must stimulate the growth czC Met use among Russians. Therefore, if is likdy that private business wilt lead the future growth of the Russian Xnternet, largely conditioning its structure and cc3ntent. How firm the business sectc~r's contrc~lof the Xnternet will be, with whom if wifl be shared, and haw much of Russian cyberspace will be left to society in which to play, to exercise democracy; to practice communal life, to edtlcate itself, and to communicate with the w r l d , remains to be seen,

1. Our analysis is based on a variety of ssurces: Grstly, 01%two studies by C:astelb on Russian irsformation technology industries, conducted between 1990 and 1993, in Masccjw, Zelenograd, and Novosibirsk, The first study focused on the development of Russian telecommur~icatiarls,with an emphasis on microelectronics and retecornmunications max~uFacruresin Xelenograd, It was conducted in cooperation with Svetlar~aHatalusko, director of the advanced sociology yrograrn at the Institute of Youth in Moscow. The second study focused on the prclcess of innovation in the Academy of Sciencesyinstitutes of Akademgurodrk (Nclvlzsibirsk) and tlleir relationsllip to industrial enterprises and commerciai agyIicatiox~s.For summaries o f these sttldies, see Manuel C:;lstelis and Emnra Kiselyrjva, The (hllapse of Snvicr C=ummtk~zism: The View from the Information Society (Berkeley: University OF Caiifarnia, International Area Studies, 1995). We have updated this information with our subsequent intelviews and ~neetingswith cotleagues in Moscow and No\~c1sibirsk,in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, ar~d1998. Second, we have used available information from both Rtlssiaxl and foreign sources on specific electrc)nic;s busillesses and industries refemed to in the chapter. 'rhird, we have retied an a few Wester11studies, which are cited in the endnotes. Our fourth and most important source has been the information 01%the Russian Net collected by Kiselyava in 1998 and 1999, via the Internet, 2. Gastells and Kiselyova, The CaEEapse of Sovier CJummunisn-2. 3. Malcolm Hill, "Russian Manufacturing in the C:ompetitix Electronics Industry:" Eurtlpeatan ~Wanageme~zt JotcmullS, no. 4 {August 1998): 495-504.

4. k t e r CIarke, ""lvestors Key to Russian Fabs:Ylectrunits Engineering Ernes, no, 952 (May 5, 1997): 22; Hill, "Russian Manufacturing in the Q~mpetitiveElectrrznics Industry,'? 5. Electronic Business, August 1998, availabte at ww.eb-agm/registrd/issues/B808/ 0898bt.htm. 6. Hill, "Russian Manufacturing in the Competitive Electronics Industry:" 50. 7. I" Wolcott and M, N. TJorojevets, ""Making the Bansition? High-Performance Computing in Russia: Crtrrenr Politics rand Econotnics irz Russia 8, no. 2/3 (1997): 105-133. Quote on p. 127. 8. Mick Elliott, "Distributors Help Lift the Silicon C:urtain:" Electronics Tbday 23, n(o. 3 (March 1397): 19. 9. &Iilicl~aelD. White, "Russian PC Market Surges," WorM Ti-ade,110.8 (Augwst 11,1998): 24. 10, Data available at 12. Gary W, Anthes, e coming?The Russians are corningt" Cotnputer~ t ~ r E 1, d 3xxlo, 4 l (October 13,1397): 87-89. 12. United States, Ger~eralAccounting Office, ""Emport Coiltrals: Sales af HighPerformaxxlce Cornptrters to Russia3 Nuclclear Weapons LJaboratories:" statement of Mr. Haroid jc~hnson,Associate Director, fnternatio~~al Relations and ?"rade Issues, National Security ax~dXnternatiux~alAffairs Ilivision, April IS, 1997. 13, Paul Mann, "Russian 'rechnology,'"Aviation \"Veek c.4- Space TechnoEogji (&lay 26, 1997): 73. 14, Vlost: November 10,1998: 91. 15. M. Gordan, ""ManeuversShow ltussian Reliance 0 1 %Nuclear Arms: Atomic Strike Sirnuf atediwew York Times, Jufy 10, 1999. 16. Diane r)ouceae, ""The Politics af Telecornmunicatiansin ltussia:" unpublished dissertation, University of Calif'ornla at Berkeley, Department of Ibolirical Science, 1995; Robert W. .org. . Com_yutt.rra magazine, available at

Organized Crime and ity in Russia ternative State, Devialz t Bureaucracy, and Socia Victor M . Sergeyev Moscow state Institute of International Relations (MGIMCZ)

T

he growth of deviant behavior in Rt~ssiasince the late 1980s has important implications far the country" future, Before anafyzing this behaviox; hawever, we must first understand the concept of ""cirninality" as used in Russian public discourse. What is crime, in a society where laws and other legal acts change constantly? The interpretation of civil rights, of rufes that guarantee freedom of information and that regulate the behavior of politicians and civil servants, especially those at the topmost fevef, remains tlnclear, The unyredictability of laws and regulations concerning business activities, export and import tariffs, taxes, and Central Bank regulations makes doing business in the country extremefy difficult. journalists do not hesitate to intrude into the private lives of potidclans, and they openly use ifiegal means to uncover corrzzption. Politicians, in turn, refuse to step down from their offices despite p~lblicscandals, cititzg the presumption of innocence in their own defense. Government and Central Bank officials speculate in state bonds because there is no law against such behavior. The concept of cri~ninalbehavior is in constant Rux in Russia today. Crime in Rt~ssiais also unusual in that the main target of organized crime is not the private citizen (who is too poor) brzt the state. 111 most industrialized

countries, the state is too strong to be a target of organized crime. But in Russia the state is extraorditzarily weak in certain respects.' It is not weak in relation to individual citizens; on the contrary, in this respect it is quite strong. An ordinary citizen has little chance of winning any confrontation with the state, because the bureaucracy is powerft~land the jt~dicialsystem is subordinate to executive organs. W e r e the Russian state is weak is in relation to lobbyists and srganized interests-a weaicness due primarily to the fact that the legislative branch cannot control Russia's executive organs and the electorate exercises no control over the state. Despite the introduction of formal democracy, the state for the most part czpaates independently of public control, As a result, civil society has acquired a d ~ ~nature: al It is formally sovereign but informally crirninalized. Although it lacks the strength to force the state to enact laws it feeis are appropriate, it has the capacity to ignore laws that the state enacts witl~outits consent." Two Octors have been itzstrumental in creating this state of affairs: the decay of the old state (the USSR), and the need tcs undertake radical economic reforms in the absence of a nationwide consensus about the nature of these reforms. The sudden disappearance of the USSR left what might be called a social ""back hole" in Russia, Customary rules were flouted even as the system of state control was being dismanded. This was followed by an ill-fiated attempt to introduce radical economic reforms, the itnplementation of which destroyed private smings and the well-developed Soviet srscial welfare system,Wost rank-and-file citizens f'ound themselves in extreme economic distress, a condition that was aggravated by the complete lack of clues about how to survive the new hardships. Furtl-rermore, the procfaimed ""new order" and new rules of ecc>nsmic behavior were never ixllplemented effectively, As a resuit, an enormous '"rq zone" merged between poorly implemented new laws and stable patterns of social behavior that had survived the Scsviet c ~ l a p s e . ~ Criminal activity in post-Soviet Russia benefited greatly from these circurnstances. The collapse of the USSR and the legal confusion created by poorly designed and implemented reforms opened tlp tlnfimited spportunities for organizations, interests, and individuals powerful enough to profit from the new situation. From the start, the Russian p~lblicviewed much of what had been legitimized by the new order as criminal, especially the prrscess of privatization. As illegal activity grew, this perception onty deepened, At the same time, many customary aspects of social reality passed into history-first and foremost, the Soviet wlfare state-taking with them the behaviorai patterns on which social stability was based. For these reasons, the phrase criminuk behuvior can best be understood in the Russian context as economic bebwic>rthat takes place in the black and gray sectors czf the informal economy. It is not general criminality that currently endangers Russian social stability but rather specific types of deviant behavior made possible by the social cr~nfusionarising from the instability of rules and the tlncertainty of expectations.

160

Victor M. Sergeyev

In this chapter I have used three particular phrases to characterize the conseqriences and dangers of this situation for Russia, U e v i a ~ bureaucracy t refers ta government institutions that use their power to privatize the state and make it serve their own interests. Different branches of gczvernment and different levels of state organi~ationshave different and often conflicting interests, and there is thus a growing threat to the cr~hesionand tinity of the state. Serious criminal allegations against politicians and high-ranking civil servants are common features of Rt~ssianp~lbliclife. The government faces a barrage of criticism from regulatory agencies such as the Uuma5 Accounting Chamber and the prr>secutc>rgeneral's o%ce, But in the present state of legal disorder, it is difficrrl~osay exactly which actions go agaitzst the law and whiclz do not. The gray zones between the traditional tinderstanding of social order and the formal rules are just too brt~ad. Much aE what takes place within these zclnes is carried out bp groups that I refer to as the ulternatiive stat-e,The role of these institutions and organizations is to arrange and enforce contracts within the gray mne. Nczt all are, strictly speaking, illegal, Besides the mafia and various crimirrat groups, they inclrrde registered security agencies, legal firms, and various types of business organizations. Their principal feature is that although they are nongomrnmentztl, they assume roles normally reserved for agents of the state. Here, too, we encounter a blending czf formally crimitzal and formally itznocent power patterns. The final key concept is that of the social black IzoEe. A permanent lack of funds renders the state unable to suppclrt and control the law-enforcement agencies in certain regions of the country. The most notorious case, of course, is Chechnya, which has Iacked a law-cmfc~rcingregime since October 1991. Tt] some extent, the vacuum w s filled by the government of the 611echen Republic of Ichkeria, Mevertheless, before the renewed warfare in late t 999, power in many parts of Chechnya where official law enforcement was absent rested with the so-called ""frld commanderSf Unfortunately, similar conditions exist also itz other parts of Russia where social order and social infrastructure have been destro-y-ed.The best-known examples are certain areas of the Xxussian Far East, These are the predictable results czf a society in which the welfare ir-tfrastructureis no longer operative; schools provide ncz teaching becatise teachers do not receive their salaries; heating cannot be paid far, and electric power is not even available; local transportation systems are cut off from tile national network; and people cannot leave because they cannot afford travel tickets, to say nothing of new homes. W a r ; social structures are likely tcz emerge in such situatlczns?M a t are the tikety political conseqriences if these black holes continue to grow? Answers to these questions are crucial for understanding the prospects for social stability in Russia.

The Shadow Economy and Organized Crime Studying the shadow economy and czrganized crime is no easy task, First of all, one faces the problem of statistics. Official statistics often are vague and unreli-

able, representing only a smatt portion ozf reality. Russian criminal statistics, for example, show a decrease of crirnixxal cases connected with bribes horn the late 1980s to the mid- 1990s-a result that dramatically contradicts the impressions ozf all impartial observers, In the late 1980s, at the peak of perestroika, crirninal communities and the shadow economy became central topics of public disc~lssion.Earlier, the very existence of organized crime had been systematicatty denied by state officials. The sudden discovery of organized crime by liberal journalists during perestroika came as a shc~cktrs the public. The prosblem drew tlnprecedented public attention, and initial inquiries were made not by specialists in legal studies but by journaii~ts.~ erclwing openness about the extent of crime quicHy turned the problem into an ixllpartant political issxre, which the two main ozpposing political forces at the time, communists and liberals, exploited to their benefit in acscoxxntitzg for the difficulties the crluntry faced, Liberals viewed the g r o ~ of h criminal csmmunities as the legacy czf communist rule, whereas communists saw it as the resrxtt of liberal reform. By the mid-1990s, however, some serious studies of crime began to appear. Vadim IXadaev; for example, classified types of economic activity based on the degree of their crirninaiization. He distingrxished among the legal economy; the outlaw ecrlnomy (activities in spheres free of legal regulations, such as the financiaI pyramid schemes ozf 1993 and 1994); the quasi-legal economy (activities in pursuit: of goals that do not contradict the law but involve the use of illegal means); and the criminal economy (activities that directly cr~ntradictthe intent if not the letter of the law)." IXadlov, in contrast, used a tygofou based on the means employed by actors in the shadow economy and official attitudes toward the new sector. Steven Fish identified 6ve factors that contributed to the formation of the lxussian shadow eccjnamy: extraordinary natural resources, a privatization strategy that created a new oligarchy the virtual withdrawal of the state from law enforcement, the market vacuum, and weak social organization. Out of ~ e n t y - e i g h countries t considered in Fish's analysis, only in Russia were all five factors presente7Other examples of uscf~rlscholarship on this subject are works by R, R ~ k i n a ,D, ' Mtllrar~v,~ and S. Glynkna.Io This literature provided a general picture ozC the shadow economy; but the picture lacked causal dynamics that could account for changes over time. An attempt to anafyze the dynamics of the shadow ecrlnomy and to assess its infltlence on social stability in lxussia was undertal~enby L, KosaXs, wha concluded that the shadow economy may have a duaiistic effect." M i l e simultaneously promc~tingthe grrlwth of crirninality, cosrruytion, and inequality, the shadow economy also creates new jobs and stimulates the growth ozC civil society*Analying the balance between its negative and positive aspects, Kosals outlitzed two alternative scenarios for the future: a ""rdicafly liberal" ocstltcrzme and a dictatcsrial one. His conclusions, however, were pe~simisticin both cases: Both wouXd lead ta chaos.

162

Victor M. Sergeyev

X disagree with Kosafs's concfusion because his analysis neglects the ongoing formation of new itzstitutions and social practices that c ~ l r bthe trend toward chaos. For this reason, I propose a different approach-one that focuses on the inner dynamics of the stateebz

Uncertainty, Trust, and Social Networks We start with the idea of contract preservation. From the time of Hobbes, this notion has been central to pofiticaf science. The state is traditicznafly seen as the main force that secures contracts and provides legal means to resolve disagreements about mutual obligations. What happens if contracts are made in realms of activity that society does not acknowledge as finfly legitimate? For years, private business was illegal under Soviet Xaw. Human minds and crrltraraf attitudes are difficult to change even when laws have been altered. The contemporary economy is so complex and requires so much regulatictn that there is little or no chance for clearly defined business conditions to develop out of practically nothing in the course of several months or even years. Consequently, the entire economy has become a gray zone, Social activities in the gray zone are not perhrmed by organizations that are fully legitirnate, Lack of legitimacy leads to the formation of communities that are not based on law btlt on cmstczmary mtltual tlnderstandings among members. In this zone, the law-based state lacks any power to enhrce contracts, An alternative power therefore emerges, a kind of invisible state that occupies the same territory as the visible one but operates according to its own laws. Two questions are crucial for understanding how the alternative state functions. First, how are contracts executed without the help of the visible state's legal institutions? And second, how are cczntracts enforced"? have presented a detailed argument elsewhere that such a situation is identical to the well-known ""cooperation dilemma" identified by political science." The basic prercqilisites for cooperative behavic>rin gray mnes are a long experience of cohabitation, a long experience of coltaboration, and a common origin andlor common language. A culture of cooperation is not easily created in gray zones; but over the long term, csoyeratictn in opposing or evading the visibte state will form strong social netwrks, which gradually will devetclp into organizations with strong commitments. The permanent pressure exerted on such organizations by the visible state triggers psychological mechanisms of hierarchical behavior, Once created, such hierarchical organizations usuatty persist even under conditions where the original rationales for their activities have ceased to exist, The Italian mafia is a good example.14 The emergence of an alternative state presents another problem: W1en such an entity: coexists with democratic political institutions, congruent or overlapping power patterns may undermine those institutic~ns,~' Social experiences within the democratic state and the atternative state are strikingly different. As democratic practices within state bodies compete with hierarchical practices in the social cul-

ture (which in their extreme form are manifested as crude domination over the weak), there is a growitzg risk. that extreme forms of hierarchical behavior will permeate institutic~nsof the visible state-especialy law enforcement agencies and executive bureaucracy. Alternative states over time tend to merge with visible ones, This process may be described as the privatization of state power. At its extreme, this process transfarms the visible state into a mafia-type organization where patterns of behavior that agree with the formal laws are ir-tformallyprohibited, and where actions that violate laws but agree with tlnwritten rules are viewed as an admission ticket to important positions within the bureaucratic hierarchy, Individuals who are unwilling to adapt present a danger to such a system, and they must therefore be eliminated by all means, including yrc>vc>catic>ns and arbitrary accusations of incompetence. The merger of the alternative and the visible states can, in equilibrium, yield a kind of congruence whereby the differences betmreen their structures becczme insignificant and the average citizen cannot easily distinguish b e ~ e e nthem. The result is a deviant bureaucracy in which deviant behavior becomes a normal way of fife-a social reality that is described elegantly in the short stories by Jc~rgeh i s Borges. Individuals who seek justice from the visible state cannot be sure that their case will not eventuaily be adjudicated by participants in the alternative state. Such a p~~ssibifity is far more terrifying in the Russian context than are Ma&aesque fantasies about the almighty bureaucratic machine run amok. m e n the visible and the alternative states merge, the use of law for political purposes in pursuit of group interests becomes the rule rather than the exceytion. W1en a gray zone encompasses the entire sociev, everpne turns out to be formally grxilty, However, it is impossible to punish everybody. Criteria for punishment are then taken from a different sphere, that of group interests. The state bureaucratic machine is used to legitimize the process of punishment in favor of private interests. No one can feel secllre in such a society-and not beca~lsethe bureatlcratic machine is blind but because it is dominated by clearly understood interests, Networks withitz such a state are usually unclear. Many persons involved itz the activities of the alternative state mzly in fact not realize what kind of game they are playing. Consider, for example, a prosecutor initiating legal action against a person at the order of his superiors; he may w d be ignorant of the particular interests he is protecting through what appears to be normal legal-institutional behavior.

Bureaucracy in the Gray Zone Improper behavior on the part of the Russian bureaucracy has become a normal feature of its activities. Every day the Russian press pnwicles new testimony about conflicts of interest within the bureaucratic machine, particularly those related to the privatization process. The most typical cases are the "free privatizations""itz

164

Victor M. Sergeyev

the early stages of economic reform, beginning with the 1988 laitv on socialist enterprises, Cotrpled with the new law on cooperative enterprises, that Xaw provided ample opporttlnity for transferring the resotlrces of public enterprises tcz ccztlperative owners; cooperatives, it will be remembered, were usually established and ic managers. controlled by relathes of p ~ ~ b lenterprise Prr)cesses of this End are an intrinsic part of current Russian econczmic life. Intermediary companies owned directly bp managers buy products from public or private enterprises at very low prices and then resell them to customers at significant yrr3fit. In this way, the enterprise that actually pfioduces the cczmmodity in question is permanently kept on the threshold czf bankruptcb without the resources it needs to pay either its taxes or workers\alaries, while the owners of intermediary firms enjoy all the advantages without bearing substantial i n ~ s t m r m t risks.'" Needless to say; a scheme like that must be protected by force. Criminal groups violate the property rights of shareholders, both public (the state o f en owns a considerable share in enterprises) and private. In some cases, meetings of shareholders make decisions under direct pressure from critninal groups whose members attend with submachine guns. Such things w u f d be impossible, of course, were it not for the cooperation of lczcat authorities with criminatized managers, out of common itzterests. Another scheme, widely ased in the metalurm and textiles industries, consists czf leasing an enterprise to suppiiers of raw materials, who use it to transform raw materials into finished products, Such an enterprise would also be leA without money to pay taxes and salaries, and the whsfe business would again be yrr3tected and controlled by tczcal authorities directly or indirectly involved in the scheme. In certain cases such activity may contradict the interests of regional governors, Then there is a public outcry, and criminal investigations are launched. One recent example is the dispatch of an investigating team from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk at the itwitation of the populist governor General Alexandr Lebed, who 11ad pnzmised, if elected, to wage war on crime. After the ejection, dozens of criminal investigations began, and claims were made that numerous members of former admitzistrations had betrayed the p ~ ~ b iinterest ic by transferrir-tg control of stateowned shares to managers on dubious terms. Criminal accusations were brought against many individuals, including Anatoty Bybv; the director of KrAZ, a giant aXuminrzm-producix~gplant, The danger to society lies in the fact that again, as in Sozviet times, criminal justice has been used for political pumoses, The situation in the g r q zone makes it possible to accuse and prosecute practically every decisionmaker in the field of politics or eccznomy. The ambiguity and instability of laws chscure the criteria of criminalitlr, WOis to be accused-this is the key question. Somebody has to be sacrificed to public discontent, samethir-tg must be done to decrease the incompetence and cczrruytic~nof bureatlcrats and managers, but it is virtually impossible to prosecute everybody, Therefore, different, extralegal criteria must be found

and applied to select the scapegclats. These criteria tend to be purely political and closely related to group interests. In such a situation, the prrssecutork toffice becr~mescrucial. It is not difficult to understand why this office had become the focal point of political struggle in Russia by early 14399, The presidential admir-tistrationattempted to dismiss Prosecutr~rGeneral Yuri Skt~ratovin Tantlary of that year; but tmder the Constitution, appointments to this office are the prerogative of the Council of the Federation, the tlpper chamber of the Federal Assembly; The Gotlncil of the Federation twice refused to endorse Sktlratovk resignation despite a sex scandal and a criminal investigation launched against Skrrratov by his former subordinates. Thus, wen the prosecutor general3$office moved into the gray zone: Sk~lratov"resignation was rejected, as a result of which his office remained formally occupied although he was denied physical access to it by a presidential decree temporarily suspending hixn from his duties during the criminal investigation. Thus, power in presentday R~~ssia is highly unstable, with the problem of deviant bureaucracy at the core of the ongoing political struggte.

The dternative State As a gray zone spreads, an alternative state is likely to emerge to secure contracts within the mne. m a t does this mean for crlntemporary Russia? A striEng ytzenomenon of IXussian economic life is the enormous number of businessmen who are murdered. In the mid- f 990s, a spokesman for the prosecutor general" office stated that the number of contract murders had doubted every year since 1991. Among the more famous cases are the murders of Ivan Kivilidi-----thenpresident of the Association of Busir-tessmen,who vigorously advocated the idea tl-rat representatives of Rtlssian business sign a special code of behavior to exclude criminal methrzds from conflict settfement-and of Vlad Listiev, a weXI-known television perssnaiity, These and other notorious cases remair-t unsolved, despite repeated official claims that investigators have made ncstable progress and will soon apprehend the culprits, How can we explain the rapid growth of critninal behavior ir-t high-level business? The pubtic is cr~nvincedthat the aforementioned crimes were directly related to the victims>rofessionat activities. m y 3then, were the methods used so cruel? Why does conflict settlement entail so much violence? The answer is that in the absence of legal means to secure crlntracts in the gray zones of Russian economic life, alternative criminal methods will be used. In addition, there is little doubt that many such cases resrrlt from links between local admixzistrations and criminal groups, A fisrmer member of the St. htersburg city administration was recently arrested and accused of organizing and heading a group that specialized in dispensing ""pivate" criminal justice. St. Rtersburg is o f en mentioned as a center of organized criminal penetration of political life. The St. Petersbrxrg legisfative election in December 1998 was

166

Victor M. Sergeyev

one of the dirtiest political campaigns in recent Russian history and featured some ~lnprecedentedmethods of political str~xggle,At the onset of the campaign, Galina Starovc~itova-one of the more famous radical reformers and a deputy to the federal Uuma-was murdered during a visit to the city on election business, Shortly thereafter, the public watched a television intelcview with the chief csf a private security agenq in St. f2etersburgwho explained the methods criminal groups use to influence political life, The journalist who set up the interview claimed that it had been extremely difficult to find a place ta cond~lctit, and the owner of the small restaurant in which it eventually took place had to be paid a large amount of money, presumably in compensation for the risk he was running. One of the inn(watic>nsin the December 1998 St. Petersburg electoral campaign was the registration of candidates who were namesakes of the best-known contestants, The plirposc of these shadow candidates was to confuse voters with multiple candidates with the same last name and first initials, thereby splitting the vote, m a t was required of shadow candidates in the course of the campaign was, therefore, to avoid publicity and remain unknow. This technicl~iewas used even against political parties and movements: For example, a second mosvernent named Yabloko was registered in St. Petersburg and fielded a set of electoral candidates, in an apparent attempt to canfuse regular supporters of the original Yabloko. According trz some journalists, tip to SO percent of the candidates in that election were connected to criminal groups, Xn respclnse, a number czf democratic political parties resolved to organize an Anticrimir-talhlitical Front. Electoral machinations of this sort are alarming because they erode the borderline b e ~ e e nthe legitimate state and the afternative state. In St. Petersburg, the alternative state in effect attempted to absorb the official state, Official policy tinder l"eltsin facilitated this outcome. The course that reforms have taken in Kussia has proven counterproductive economically and extremely dangerous potitically. The reforms have led to privatization by criminal grotlps in cooperation with the bureaucracy and to political instability catised by power struggles without rules. Formal rules no longer constrain behavior, whereas a i t e r n a t i ~rules are blatantly critnixzal, as the St. ktersburg election demonstrated, How in such a situation, can the visible and the alternative states cr~ntinueto coexist? Often their actions are in direct con8ict. On other occasions, howver, the two states merge with one another and arc represented by the same people, Social stability depends upon the interaction between these institutic~nsand the people representing them. Were there to be Eull and open conflict, sociat order might disintegrate, VJhat, then, are the prospects for the integration and the reemergence of a c[>herent society? The problem may be addressed from the perspectiw of socialintegration theory. The way of life, sources of itzcome, and typical behavior of ordinary individuals invc~lvedin the activities of the visibte and alternative states are totally different. Those who receive their salaries from the state budget are usually very poor, whereas those who work for the alternative state hiwe more

than enough money to survive, Let us remember that the traditional sociaI status of those people was once approitnately equal. Might there therefore be an acute cr~nflictbetween them, as many politicians predicted in the early years of the refarms, in X 992 and f 993? From the perspective of ir~tegrationtheory, the answer depends on whether the links between these WO grrsups and the social n e ~ o r l t connecting s them persist." The fact that they belong to the same social strata, have a good deal in cornmon in their background and social experience, and are connected by networks of friendship and social ties are important barriers to social conflict, These barriers may explain why>even in the vvorst days of 1992 or after August 1998, social stability remailzed rather high. On the other hand, in regicsns where non-Russian ethnic groups dominate (as in the North Caucasus), social tensions are intense. The lack of ne~7nrorlisuniting different ethnic groups, and the much higher involvement of non-Russians (especially North Caucasians) in the activity of the alternative state, often produce open conflict and a massive migration of Russians out of such republics (again, especially in the North Caucasus). The absence of a Russian elite in these areas pRevents the formatic~nof a social bedrock separated from but integrated thrrsugh negotiation with the elite levef," The typical example is Karachaevo-Cherkessia during and after the $999 elections, In this and similar cases, circumstances clearly led to social disintegration. And a striking outcr>meof this disintegration has been the emergence of social black holes. Social Black Holes

Many societies in transition experience social black holes; Russia is not unique in this respect. Indeed, social infrastructures a n be destrcsyed in many ways..Ethnic and social conflicts, unsuccessful economic reforms, and financiaI crises undermine traditional norms, Brrt these difficulties do not lead neessarily to social black holes. Black holes are sittlations of despair in which people stop even trying to improve their status because they no longer betieve that doing so is even possible. Human history is f11ll of examples. Sometimes damage to social infrastructure is so great that individuals do not consider recovery a reasonable goal. The only passible reasan for life is individual survival. And one can thinic of circumstances when even that disappears, Not all members of society:have to share these feelings in order to produce a social implosion or black hole. But where a minority does share them, the result may be a deadly vortex of destructive thoughts and behaviors previo~lslyrepressed by social controls, The social structure that takes shape in social black holes is not clear. Hints can be drawn from the experiences of veterans of ethnic conflicts and wars like those in Vietnam and Afghanistan. This much we know: Experience obtaixzed in black holes changes a person" s ~ r l d v i e wIn particular, a sharp distinction develops b e ~ e e n"us" and "them" that drastically diminishes the value of human life-espedally "".theirs."

168

Victor M. Sergeyev

The political consequences czf such experiences are significant, Black holes change social memory, especially institutional memory, and form internal tensions that may remain hidden for decades and then explode suddenly, as did ethnic hostilities in the former YugosXavia. The experience of the black: hole end ~ ~ rover e s a long period and is passed from one generation to another; and like any war experience, it destroys basic humanist valtles. War is an alternative institution, with its own rules, justifications, and heroes; but in the black hole there are no lasting rules, justifications, or heroes-only terrible losses and tragedies. The geography of emerging black holes in Rt~ssiais reratlively easy to discern. They are found in most- dramatic form in three republics of the North Carzcasus: Ckrechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan. Parts of the Stavrr~polregion that adjcjin Ghechnya and Ingushetia are in a similar situation. In these regions, social control is usually. itz the hands of paramilitary organizations that belong to different ethnic groups, pitting Cossacks against Chechens, or Chechens against the many different ethnic groups of Uagestan. SociaI controi is not exercised by formal authorities and state institutions but is realized through itwisible social networks, amclng which interrelationships remain unclear. Social infrastructures in these regions are in complete disarray: Children may not attend school for years, and senior citizens live w i t h ~ regular t pensions. In cr~untriesin sr>cialdecay, paramilitary organimtions stage parades and publicly display their weapclnry, luxury cars, electronic equipment, and wealth. Peopte are effectively separated itzto two classes: the predators and the prey. This is a typical frontier situation, and it may affect human minds in a way that distorts normal social interaction for decades. Generations must pass before a frontier mentality 1s oVercOmC Other examples of emerging black holes in Russia are the North and the Far East-in the regions of Khabarovsk, Mamchatka, Vladiwstok, and Sakhalin. Each has numerous middle-sized and small t o m s that in many cases lack direct railroad connections to mainland Russia. Three factors seem to be of particular importance in these areas: lack czf state financial support, high transportation tariffs, and high energy costs. It is impossible to survive there without heat and electricity. Today, conditions in these areas are at a primitive level. State financial support has fallen drastically, Xn autumn 1999,all of Kamchatka was without fuel for several weeks. There was no heat, not even in hospitals, and schools could not open. Additional difficulties resxrlted fmln long-term arrears in salaries far employees in the social and economic itzfrastructure. Even hunger strikes by power station employees proved of no avail, The outcome is the rapid growth of organized crime and the dissipation czf local admir-tistrativepower. In Vladivostok, a prolonged conflict between the regicsnal governor and the former maycjr continues. Numerous elections, all plagued by serious irregularities, have failed to resolve the crisis; and their resutts

have been annulled for att kinds of reasons, including Iow turnout and the fact that the authorities did not approve of the outcome. Crirnitzal activities flourish, especially in illegal trade with Japan (seafood exports and second-hand automczbile imports). The sittration is aggravated bp the illegal immigration of etllnic Chinese itzto the region. It is estimated that between t and 2 million Chitzesc have recently settled on Russian territory near the Chinese-Russian border, Attempts to attract foreign investment in order to improve the economic and sociaI situation have failed. Administrative disorder and crimitzal activities produce such great instability that risks are believed tc>outivveigh the obvious economic advantages that same of the proposed projects would entail, There is a causal relationship between the formation of black holes and the de-c.efogment of the shadow economy and organized crime, The existence of a shadow economy and an atternatlve state in regions with ethnic heterogeneity intensifis the conflicts between different groups, These conflicts produce social disorder, which in tarn enhances the environment the alternative state needs to Rourish. Finally, conflicts between the visible state and the alternative state lead to a further aggravation of social conditions, Cihechnya is the best example of this process. The unregulated process of transition to a market ecrlnomy in an ethnically mixed society is clearly much more dangerous than in a homogeneous one-a cancl~~sion that is also supported by a comparison of the Asian and African experiences. Strt~ngsocial netwrks within an ethnic minority, reinfc3rced by the rote of these n e ~ o r k in s the shadow economy and in the formation of the alternative state, can prevent the development of trust between ethnic groups, thereby further undermining social stability." For this reason, one cannot separate the probXe111 of czrganized crime from the problem of etl~nicconflict in societies itz transition.

Today, Russia can be divided into three parts: the more or less prosperous big cities of the central region (for exampte, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Nizhnii Novgorod), which show clear signs of transformation and growth despite numerous difficulties; the larger part of the national territory, which remains in deep recessicln; and the growing number of emerging black holes in the North Caucasus, Far East, and North. fn all these areas, howevel; the "criminal economy" has becrlme an integral part of the Russian economy, some 60 to 80 percent of which is ""gay.'TTI.te penetration by criminal elements of state bodies-especially tegistatures at the regional and local level-is particularly significant, This crirnitzal activity, as weU as the deep differences in conditions amczng the three areas, cr~nstitutes a clear threat to political stability in Russia, With luck, apocalyptic prophecies of decay and collapse may prove unwarranted, and newly elected leaders may help mobilize popular sentiment for change. But fc3r the time being, stabiiity remains a distant goal.

170

Victor M. Sergeyev

1. See Chapters 2 and 3 in this voltlrne for a mare detailed exploration of the state's weaknesses. 2. On the ""rebirtl-r'kf civil society in ltussia, see Michael Urban, The Kebirt!? rfhlitics in Russia (Cambridge, U.K:Cambridge University Press, 1997). 3. On the transitional situation in Russia after rile decay of tile USSR, see Mikalai Biryrkov and Viktor Sergeyev, Rltssiun Politics in Trapzsition (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1997). 4. For more on the ""gay zone:" see Viiktor Sergeyev, The WiM Fast: Crime and I,lawliessvless in I""ost-C~omrnunist Rmssz'a (Armr~nk,M.Y.: M, E, Sharpe, 1998). 5. Concerning criminality in the period of perestroika, see Sergeyev, The Wild East, chapter 5. 6. Tj. Radaev, """l"er1evaya ekanornih v Itassii: lzrnenenie konturov:" in Pro et-njnrra 4, no. 1 (1999). 7. M. Steven Fish, ""The ltaots of and the Iternedies for Russia's ]Packet Econorny,'"in Steven Cohen, Ax~drewSchtuilrtz, and John Xysmaxl, eds,, The Tunnel ul rhe End of the tight: Privatization, Business Networks, and Economic jlkansfurmtafiorzs in Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 8. R, Rykina, ""Ot tenevcji ekrznorniki k tenevcjmu obshchestvtr," Pro et contrra 4, no. I ( 1999). 9. D. Makarov, ""Ekunomicl~eskiei pravrjye asgekty tenevt~iekono~nikiv Kossii," Voprosy ek~~notniki no. 3 (1998). 10. S. (;lynkina, ""Osobennosti tenevoi ekonomiki v Rossii," Pofiiteknnomiia, no. 5 (March 1998). 1I . L. Kosals, ""Nlezhdu haosom isotsialhyym poriadkom:" Pro et contra 4, no, 1 (1999). 12, Scrgeyev, The Wild East, 13. Ibict,, chapter 3, On noncooperative game theory (the prisoner" dilemma is the best-known exarnyle), see Kohert helrod, The Evolution ofC:or~peration(New k r k : Basic Bookscs, 1984);Thornas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Confaicr (Cambridge: Narvard University Press, 1960); V. A, Lefizvre, Kon_(Eiktuizrshchl'estruktury (Rrloscc>w:trysshaia shkota, 1966); A. V. Belayev and Viktor Sergeyw "An Ensembte of Neuron-f,ik Autornata as a Model of Social Stability" (in Russian), irl Inlerilektualhye protsessy i ikk ~zndelfrovanie [Modelingf ntellectual Processes] (Moscow: Nau ka, 1994). 14. See Hent~erHess, *Mafia and M~fiosi:Origin, Power, and *Wyth (London: 6, Hurst, 1996); K, SeindaI, Mqfia, Money, and Lfokz'tics in Sicily: 1950-97 (Copenhagen: Museum "fusculanumPress, 1998). 15. See Harry Eckstein, "Congruence "l'heory Explained;' in Harry Eckstein, Frederic J. Fleron, Erik P. Hoffmann, and William M. Reisinger, eds,, Dernt~cruc:yTake Root in fist-Soviet Russia? (New Ytx-k:Rowman fk Littlefield, 1998). 16. About the complex relations between the state and business community, see Aiexei Zudin, Business and 1>oliticsin Posl-Gmmunist Russia (h4oscow: Center for Political "f'echlaalogies, 1995); Biryuhv and Sergeyev, Russian Politics in Transitiorl, chapter 5 ( 2 23-132). 17, See, for example, Johann Galtung, "Pacifism from a Sociological Point of View:" Journal ofconflict Resoltition 3,110. 1 (1959): 67-84. 18. Arend Lijphart, "Multiethnic XJemocracy:" in Seymour M. Lipset, ed. Tke Encyclupedia of Llewrocracy, vt~l.7 (L,o~~cIc>n: Kt>utledge,1995), 863-865, See also a very stimulating

discussion in Axe1 Hadenius and Lmri Karvonen, The Pckradox ofI~tegrgt.i"tiunin In t rg-State Gnflicls, preprint (Uppsaia: Uppsala University, 1999). 19. See Barry R. Weingast, "Constructing Trust: The Political and Ecanornic Roots of Ethnic and Regional Confiict? in E;aroi Soltan, Eric M. Uslaner, and Virginia. Hattfer, eds., Insrr"tzr;tionsand Social Order ( k ~ Arbor: n University OF Michigax-xPress, 1998).

This page intentionally left blank

PARTI11

Society

This page intentionally left blank

Russia's New Entrepreneurs ViIctsria E. Bonnell Universiy of Calqornia, Berkeley

usslia" new entrepreneursLariginally labeled kooperatiwhchiAe.1and later biznesmeny or predprinimat-eli-emerged in the semnd haXf of the 198Qs, when perestroika began to undermine structures and p r x t i a s of the cr~mmandadmi~~istrative economy*The collapse czf the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 hastened these transformations, carried out under the banner of marketization and privatimtion. Initiated and imptemented frc~mabove by pr~liticalleaders and etites, the reforms brought into existence a stratum czf business people who introduced new forms of economic behavior-most notably; private en.t-repreneurshifl In a brief period (1986 tc> 19991, private entreyrenetlrs and entrepreneurship have grown rapidly. By 1996,7Qpercent of Russia" s d u i u - s i z e d and large enterprises were privatized, acco~lntingfor 88 percent of the total industrial output (but only about 40 percent of the total Iabor force).There were 868,000 small enterprises registered in 1997, not counting many small firms that did not register or pay taxes (209,000 entrepreneurs in this category were reported in early 1999).' Befare the August 1998 financial crisis, small firms accr~untedfor 14 percent of the country" labor force and produced 12 percent of its GDP, Ear less than in some postcommunist corrntries but a substantial increase for Russiaei These devefoymrmts have had far-reaching crlnsequences fc3r the country" sociaI and potiticat Zandscape, yet many important questions remain unanswered about this remarkable social group, Who are the entrepreneurs? M a t is their background, demographic yrrzfile, and point of entry into the ecr~nomyilIn what ways have they attempted to emufate their predecessors in earlier times and other places by creating formal and ir-tformal networks capable of making their case both to political elites and to the population at fargel The new entreprenerxrs-a highfy variegated group-have had a mixed reception from the Russian public. Associated first with the shadow economy and then with the so-called mafia, entreyrenetlrs are frequently linked to crime and torruption.Terms such as nomenklatura privatization highlight the invczlvement czf

f'ormer members of the party and state apparatus in the growing private sector and imply possible Cmis)appropriations of state and public property. The wealthier stratum of entreyrenetlrs has often been referred tc>as ""New Russians" "ovye russkie), x complex term conveying a muttitude of meanings, including ""dshonest. procurement of wealtl-r, ties with privileged and criminal elements, conspicuous consumption . . . and a lo~wcultural level.?" In the mid-X990s, the media began to refer to a smaff group of successful entrepreneurs as "oligarchs," "suggesting that the economy had fallen itzto the l~ands of a few powrfuf men who presided over financial empires based on ill-gotten wealth.TTlsis terminology has been mirrored in Mrestern public discourse, which commonly features a rich assortment of pejorative labels inclriding ""gangster capitalists,'?'""racketeers:" "mober-barons," "crony capitalists,'bnd "Ueptocrats.'" The reemergence of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurialism in iltussia after many decades of rtathless suppression and rdentless vilification invites historical comparison. In west Etlroyerzn societies of an earlier era, entreyreneurs-often designated as the bourgeoisie-led the way to potitical reform. Historians have argued that entreprenerrrial groups figured importantly among the major supporters of west European democratic institutions, a view summed up by the phrase ""Ncz bourgeois, no democracye"Sociologists and poli"rcal scientists have advanced sirniXar arguments, focusing on the proclivity of educated, urbanized, middle-class grou ys t s su ypc~rtindividualism, ecrznomic and political freedoms, and civic equality and participation. In sociaI science literature, the appearance of a business class has generally been linked to the growth of civil society and a prrblic sphere." The historical experiences of nineteenth-century western E~lropeoffer important precedents for gauging the trajectories of pastcommunist societies, but the transition itz the late twentieth ccnttrry from state socialism to some form of market economy ne~rthelesspresents striking contrasts with earlier developments. lxussian entrepreneurs of the 1990s confront a context that in several respects differs from the situations facitzg their cotlnterparts at earlier titnes and places. X. The transition we are witnessing today follows, rather than precedes, the creation of an advanced industrial econom).t,Russian entreprenerrrs no longer need tc> defend the values of industrialism against agrarian interests, a conflict decisively resolved bp the communist leadership, And very impartantty, the process taking place in Russia after 2986 ccntcrs around the redistribution of preexisting indtlstrial structures-that is, the transfer of existing structures from state to private contrc~l,The appropriation and not the creation of assets has been the defining feature of the Rrassian situation. The formation of a new group of entrepreneurs was marked, from the very inception, by this unprecedented circumstance. 2, Mew Xkssian entrepreneurs must operate within the context of an inauspicious legacy of private entrepreneurship extending back to botl-r the Imperial and the Sct.iet periods."')This can be attributed, in large measure, to historical conditions created bp a strong, centralized state. In earlier periods, the exercise of aubecause political etites viewed it as a chaXthority in industry was circ~~mscribed

Ienge to the supreme authority of the autocratic ekes czr the party-state. Today, Russian entrepreneurs must contend with a relatively weak but intmsive govemment at the nationaf level-a situation that contrasts sharply with a long tegacy czf extensive state intervention in industrial relations, 3. Since 1991, the weakness of state power at the national leveb has engendered WO responses. First, we have seen a shift in the locus of power from the center to the regions and localities. Second, itussia has witnessed the emergence of"viotent entrepreneurship" of both legal and illegal varieties. A powerful network of organizations (businesses) has taken over, to a cr~nsiderabieextent, functions normatty performed by the state, such as enhrcement czf contracts and debt recovery. Vadirn Voikov Etas identified three types of violent entrepreneurial agencies in postcommunist Russia: state and illegal (units of state police and security farces acting as private entrepreneurs); nan-state (private) and legal (private protection companies); and private and iHegal (organized criminal or bandit groups)." Recent research indicates that the mutual interpenetration of entreyreneurship and organized crime may be czn the decline, but criminal networks and violent entrepreneurship generally-remair-t important factors shaping the f~ltureprospects of business in RussiaS1' 4. IXussian entrepreneurs must contend with widespread negative or arnbivalent attitudes toward private busir-tessamong certair-tsectors of the Russian pop~zlatic~nand the political elite. This outlook has deep roots in Russian culture, predating the Soviet era but reinforced over many decades by relentless propaganda airned at discrediting private property and market-oriented emnomic activity. The reemergence of entrepreneurship as a cc3nseqtzence of perestrc~ikaand privatization potlcles has generated widespread allegations concerning the role of crime and corruption in private busir-tess, Negative pubiic opinion about businesspeople declined for a short time after the cr~llapseof cr~mmunism;and by 1994,49 percent ezf respclndents were '"ather positive" t w a r d Ilussian entrepreneurs, and only 28 percent were "rather negative.'' h 1997, the n~lmberswere nearly reversed: 49 percent viewed entrepreneurs as harmful, and only 34 percent, as beneficial.'TThis m s atmost certainly a respclnse to mounting evidence czf entrepreneurial wealth derived fmm improper acquisition of state and public assets. Since the August 1998 crisis, public opinion toward entrepreneurs has remained deeply divided. S. New Russian entreprenerrrs must contend with a global economy. The ir-tformation and communication revolutions have changed the ways people do business, and in many cases, expanded their horizons to encompass global markets and an international busixzess culture. Postcommunist Russia has been catapulted into a world ecr>nc>my,creating new opportunities (for example, for capital flight) as well as imposing new limitations.'" 6, The postcommunist Russian state, for complex reasons, has been unable to create and maintain an environment suitable for private entrepreneurship." Russia lacks key institutional, legal, and fiscal conditions that generalXy characterize economies where entreprenerrrs can flaurish.'Yn a recent study, Gil Eyal, lvan

Szelenyi, and Efeanor TownsXep argued that in Hungary>b l a n d , and the Czech lands, the demise of communism led to ""cpitalism without capitalists." In contrast, Russia presents a case of ""rapitalists without apitalism,""" This brief but expressive formuXation encapsulates a key aspect of the situation facing XXussian entrepreneurs. Four phases can be discerned in the evolution of entrepreneurs as a social group itz Russia since 1986: the first, ending in 1991; the second, fmm 1992 to 1994; the third, from 1995 to August 1998; and the fourth, from September 1998 to Veltsink resignallan in December 1999. We will begin our exploration of these phases with a brief comment on the sit~lationduritzg the Soviet period. Notwithstanding the vigorous and sometimes brutal campaign waged by the communists against private business for almost 60 years (beginning in the late 1920s), entrepreneurialism in various forms survived itz the Soviet Union and ultimately contributed to the fatal wakening of the system. Prior to perestroika, self-employed individuals (e.g., physicians, skilied workers, and engineers), managers of Soviet factories ("red direaors'", and seasonal cr~nstructionbrigades ( s l z a b a s ! engaged in various forms of entrepreneurialism." But it was the shadow economy, together with rampant crime and corruption, that provided the most extensive and lucrative opportunities for priivate entreyrene~~rship in late Soviet society. As Gregory Grr~ssmanhas observed, ""Ilegal economic activity ppeetrated every sector and chink of the economy; assumed every conceivable shape and form; and operated on a scale ranging fmm the minimal or modest for the masses to the substantial for many; to the lavish and gigantic, as wet1 as elaborately organized, for same;""'"However, saczn after Gorbache-v came to power, he introduced new laws that fundamentally changed the way Russians did business.

The First Phase: 19861991 The first phase in lXussia3 new entrepreneurship was set in motion bp the enactment of the Law on Xndivid~lalLabor Activity (1986),'" the Law on State Enterprises (1987)," and the taw on Cooperatives (1988).'These impr~rtantlegal landmarks were followed bp other laws regulating property rights in the USSR during t 989 and 1999. In late t 990, the Russian Supreme Soviet adopted the t a w on Enterprises and Entrepreneurial Activity, sanctioning private businesses including limited partnerships, joint stock companies, general partnerships, and sole proprietors hip^,^" The evolution of Russian entrepreneurship b e ~ e e n1986 and 1991 has been described as ""rmantic:"%evolutianary,"" and ""Irrai~,"~ During this critical stage, new legislation and regrxlations and a clzangixzg economic and political environment made it pc~ssiblefor private business to operate within an expanding sphere of legality," The circumstances that gave rise to these momentous reforms were complex and cannot "rr fully discussed withitz the confines of this chapter. Suffice

it to say that by early 1987, when perestroika and gfasnost were getting under way, new entreprenerrrial groups had begrrn to appear itz Kussia.'TThey emerged primarily from the ranks of Komsomol leaders, intelectuals (particularly scientists), industrial managers, people in the shadow economy, state bureaucrats, and bankers.17Within a short period, these entrepreneurs were refashioning old organizatic~ns,such as the Komsomol, and old (but seldom tltilked) forms of ~ C C I nomic activity, such as the producerskooperatives. The active engagement of the new groups had a profoundly corrosive effect on Soviet economic and political life and set a pattern fc3r the subsequent ewlution of entrepreneurship. The singular feature of this nascent entrepreneurialis was the large-scale transfer of prlblic and state assets into private hands, secured in most cases by one or another fc3rm of personal access to political power. The fascinating story czC KomsomoZ entrepreneurship began in 1986, with reforms initiated by the newly elected first secretary of the Kamsomol, 'Viktar Mironenko.29teven Sc>lnick"sstudy, Stealing the Sate: Gnerol and Collapse in Sozjkt Institutions, provides a detailed account czf the forces that led up to these reforms and were unleashed by them, A steady decline in Komsomol enrollment since the late 1970s had cut sharply into revenues from dues, a situation exacerbated by declining subsidies from Moscow. In response, some Momsomol activists began to convert programs created in the Brezhnev era-student construeticm brigades, travel bureatls, youth housing complexes (MZhKs), and centers for ""sientific-technical creativity of youth" "(I\J"jfTM~)~~-inro new commercial ventures for the benefit of local Komsomol groups and of the activists themselves. The rapid expansion of MZhKs and NTTMs was made possible by the exceptional (and highly fucrative) right of local Momsornol organizations to transfer funds between their own budgets and these enterprises."Toffowing the Twentieth Congress of the Komsomc~lin April 1987, new regulations shifted control of Momsomo1 finances fmm the Central Committee to local and primary organizations. The channelixzg of funds led to the creation of a wide range of businesses, According tcz Solnick, "Cafes, video bars, discczs, and travel bureaus were founded czr expanded with loans directly from Mamsornol brzdgets; new concerns atso used Komsomol printing presses and even operated out of Komsomol offi(;t~s."'~ A "quiet process of "olitical bourgesisi6cationn%as well under way by 1987, or even earlier.'" m i l e local activists turned their attention to new businesses, Komsomol Central Committee officials tczok advantage of the vast resources of the organization (1 billion rubles in 1987) to establish the first comrnerciaX banks, tourist bureaus, and p~zblisbixzgoperations." The announcement of an Extraordinary Congress of the Komsomc~lto be held in April 1990 accelerated the transfers of assets out of KomsomoX accounts," W e n the Momsomol was disbanded in 1991, the flourishing "Komsomol. economy" h s t no momentum. From the r a n k of Komsomol entrepreneurs came some of the most successful businessmen 01 the 1990s, such as Mikhail Mhc~dorkovskyand Vladiinir Vinogradov." ihodorko~sky~ who was ranked by Forbe5 in 1997 among the top 200

richest men in the uvartd," k g a n his business career ten years earlier, as a Komsomol deputy secretary for Moscow's Frunze district and head of the district's NTTM, Initially reselling crlmputers, Khc>dorkovsbgenerated e n o u e capital to start the Menatey (acronym for Enter-Branch Center for Scientific and Technologial Programs) bank in 1990, which became the authorized bank for the city of MOSC~MP three years later." He made a fc3rtune trading currency; sugar, grain, and oil. Similarly Vltadimir Vinogradov, one of the seven oligarchs of the mid- 199Os, was an economist at Promstroibank in the 1980s when he b e a m e involved ixz Kc~msomolcommercial activities through the Saburov l"outh Construction Complex, He founded Inlcombank in 1988 to service KomsomoX commercial activities, with the help of the Soviet Finance Ministry and Soviet State Banks3' The Komsomol entrepreneurs of the late 1980s prefigured a more extensive pattern of wealth transfers from public and state organizations into private hands. The early transfers of vvealth-exempli@ing the process of ""pwer conversion"""-were replicated s n an even grander scale when high and middle-ranking members of the party-state apparatus shifted their attention to the private sector, on the eve of privatization ixz 1989. By the end of $991,""nomenkEaturuprivatizatic>nn-a process that transformed atlthority over the eccznomy into private ownership of property-was under way" X-"rivurizutsiia (privatization) became prikhvarizatsiia (grabbing, swiping) beca~lsehigh- and middle-level party-state officials were uniquely positic~nedto acqtlire credit, real estate, export-import rights, and distribution and manufacturing firms, Nounenklatura privatization was concentrated in four areas: transformation of the state plannillg system; banking; distribution; and the privatization of existing, state-o~wnedenterprises.#" KomsomoI activists were not the only beneficiaries of a large-scate transfer of public and state resources. We can trace a sirniiar pattern in the cooperative mclvement, which like the Komsomol, opened up new and unprecedented opportunities far entrepreneurship."" The cooperatives provided a tegat basis for many businesses established during the final years of Soviet power and became an important vehicle for nanzenklatura privatization, Although the Law on Cooperatives was not put into effect until July 1, 1988, various legal cooperatives had been initiated, sametimes in response to official decrees, during the preceding eighteen months? By early 1988, only 14,000 cr~operativeswere registered in the country One year later, however, the nrzrnber had increased to 7&,500; and by the beginning of 1990,3 percent of the total Soviet labor force was employed in co~perattives.~~ Cooperatives eventually emerged in many different contexts and took many different forms, but the most prevalent type was what Anthony Jones and William Mosktlff have termed the quasi-official cczt~yerattive,~' Typically, csoyerattives of this era were initiated not by individuafs but by Iocat authorities, managers of state enterprises, or even plannixzg ministries, The 1987 Law on State Enterprises and subsequent legislation promoted this development by intrr3ducing ""seXf-financing""and reducing the impact of the centrailzed planning apparatused5 Another Saviet decree in 1989 permitted work collectives to lease state enter-

prises, which in turn stimulated the transfer of state property to the private sector."*By early 1990, almost 80 percent of production cooperatkes were operati~i~g inside state enterpri~es.~~ At the same time, a new type of firm arose for the purpose of providing protection, dispute settlement, contract enforcement, and other services to Russian entreprenetlrs. As recounted by Volkc~v: The surfacing of extartion and its conversion into a regular, observable pattern OF prcjtection racket occurred in 1987-88, as the co-operative movement, the first effect of the economic liberalization, gained momentum, Xnitialiy, co-operators and petty traders became victims of those extartionists wllo were formerly er~gagedin card debt retscjvery and shadow business protection. Very soon new groups composed of former sportsmen emerged on the scene and begin to earn money by sejling yrotection to small entrepreneurs and traders at city markets.""

Violent entrepreneurship was an intrinsic part of the entrepreneurial scene from the ir-tceptionof perestroika, lndividtlals with access to resotlrces and the motivation to tlndertake new types of entrepreneurial activity utilized cooperatives and ""satl businesses" (makyepr~dpriiatiia),which were legalized in the second half of 1990,4yas vehides for private entrepreneurship, In this manner, enterprising industrial managers (mostly middle-levet), professionals, people from the shadow economy, Komsomol activists, and state bureaucrats joitzed the ranks of the new entrepreneurs. The first private banks were established in 1989. Aleksandr Smolensky; founder of the country" largest commercial retail banlc (Stolichny Bank of Savingst 998 crash, got his start in 1987 as Agroprombank [SBS-Agro]). before the A~~grrst head of Moskva-3, a csnstructic~ncr~oyerative.With capital acc~lmufatedfrom the cooperative, he opened a bank in 1 9 8 h n d then went on to invest in media and oil companies," Likewise, ir-t t 987, Vladimir Gusinsk~~ a former theater director turned media tycotln, took advantage of the law on cr~operativesto lease a glassware factory at night and produce drinking glasses, This was followed by other cooperative ventures ir-tvolvingoffice supplies, legal and business consulting services, and office rencwation. Most-Bank was founded by Gusinsky in 1989 to finance these operations.'" Demographic surveys of perestroika-era entreprenerrrs indicate that they were p~edsminantlymen with a higher or technical education. Many came from the Kamsomo1, science, or banking and were in their ertrXy thirties when they entered the business worfd. An exception to this pattern can be f o ~ ~ namong d managers and some bankers, who tended to be men in their mid-forties to early fifties, holding middle- or upper-leve1 positions, Communist party membership was widespread among bankers (nearly universal) and managers (more than TO percent); four-fifths of Kc>msomolbusinesspeople belonged to the party, and about one-third of intellectuals. Most of the incipient entrepreneurs had withdrawn from the CPSU by 1990,'"

Psychological profiles generally subdivide perestroika-era entrepreneurs into two ""waves:'9lgor Br~nir-t, author of one of the earliest empirical studies of new Russian entrepreneurs, has characterized the ""fist wave" of btlsinessmen ( 1987-1 98") as ""adventuristsn-t hat is, people who were courageous, self-made men and who entered the business world with few assets," "usinsky gave the following account of the ""fist wave,'"to which he, himself, belonged: Many of them tried to make same quick money and tl-ren to hide it all. They were scared of Soviet banditism, Their ~nentalitywas very cioscd, especially in the first years o f the cooperative movement. At that time, people thought they were brriiding samething like ""society wit11 a hurnan face': . . .These people cloaked themselves in a new ideoloe, . . . I w(>utdsay about eighty percent of that first wave that made sc>me money went abrclad. They feft because they didn't trust the state, 'Chey didn't thixzk things could last.'*

The ""seond wve" of businessmen (1989-1'39 t ) continued to draw ""seff-made men" but also attracted what Bunin has called ""idealist entreprenerrrs:" who attempted ""aove all to realize themselves in business, [and were] not particularly concerned with economic efficiency," hcXuding physicists and engineers. Even more significant was the influx of party and state officials (nuchaEStvo), who drove foward the process of noprzeuzklatara privatization. Their shift to the business world took place under generally favorabfe circumstances because they brought assets with them, unlike those in the "fist wave" and the ""idealist entrep~enet~rs." Gusinsky observed of this group: "The second wave is the toughest and most crirninaliscled. They were people who came to the market on a wave of aggression. . . .These are tough, criminal people."55 During the Garbachev era, success in business frequently depended on personal access to power and patron-client retationships. Entrepreneurs-whatever their background-could hope to succeed only if they cultivated ties with ir-tfltrential party and government officials. Many of these ties were forged informally, but in some cases, entrepreneurs formed unions and associations, Lobbying through voluntary associations was a novelty, although sitnilar organizations had been formed during the late nineteenth century, only tc>be extinguished after the Bolshevik revolution, In the past-Stalin era, ministries represented the interests of particular industrial groups itz high party and governmental deliberations, Soviet lobbying, organized along formal hierarchical lines, fell into disarray bemeen 1989 and 1991,% The first associations of entreprenerrrs were formed locally ir-t 1988, by people in the cooperative moEment, fc~llowedin June 1989 by an all-union congress of cooperatives in Moscow, W ~ e ndelegates to this congress were asked to rank their aims, they listed first "to organize political protection for cooperators, through the nclmination of people" deputies.""'"Like their predecessors in other times and places, these entrepreneurs sought to combine collectively to strengthen their poXiticaE leverage.

The voluntary associations among entrepreneurs, founded between 1 9 8 h n d 2 991, were created by three groups. Among them were "pofitical admitzistrators" such as Arkadil Vc2lsky, formerly an official on the Central Committee of the CPSU, In December 1991,Volsky founded the Scientific-Industrid Union, which was renamed the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RIJIE) i predprinimatelei] the following year. It be[Rc~ssiisltiisoiuz prc>myshlennikc~v Other came one czf the most visible entrepreneurial organizations czf the 1990~~" associatians were established by people with a scientific background and by ""pfiticaf entrepreneurs"""" Some of them, such as the Chamber of Commerce of Trade and Industry of the Russian Federation (Torgovo-promyshiennaia palata RF) ( 1991) and the Association of Russian Banks (Assotsiatsiia rossiiskikh bankov) ( 1991), remained active in the fate 1990s:''

Phase Two: 1992-1994 In the aaermath of the August 1991 coup, President Yeltsin and his key advisers began to move in the direction of ""sock therapy" and privatization-a series of reforms aimed at the rapid and radical recr~nfigurationof the Rtrssian economy The history czf these reforms has been told elsewhere," Suffice it to note that between November 1991 and the end of 1994, periods of reform alternated with periods of stalemate in the struggle b e ~ e e npro- and antireform groups. &twithstanding the unsteady course of reform, major changes were imposed, including the lifiixzg of price regrxlation; the freeing of trade; privatization; and the itztrodtrction of a mucher program, In the csurse of 1993-1994, 21,000 large and medium-sized enterprises-70 percent of industrial enterprises in the countrywere privatized through joir-tt stock companies*b2 The character and impact of the reforms has been subject to considerable csntruversy both in Russia and in the West, For our purposes, what is impartant is that these years witnessed further transformatians in the position of Russian entreyrene~rrs,The reforms drew enterprise directors into the growing private sector, transfoming them from state employees into ownerseh'"The prime purpose [of the reforms],""in the words of Anders Asfrrnd, ""appears to have been to enhance privileges for the select few of the ofcl economic nomenUatura, but this was done in the name of the market?" It was typical for these directors, with a higher technical education, to move up through the ranks in their enterprises and acquire h i g h - l e ~ managerial l positions in the late 2980s. W e n joint stack companies were farmed, they often acquired substantial shares, Same of the mare enterprising, clever, and corrupt directors entered the ranks of the ""New Russians." Together with bankers, the directors of large fc3rmer state enterprises formed the elite of lxussian businesse6' The background of the business elite itz early 2993 and early 1995 is shown itz Table 9.1, based on data gathered by sociotogist I. Y Kukofev from a survey of 200 entrepreneur^.^^ Mre can see that in early 1993, perestroika-era entrepreneurs (K~msomolleaders, itztellecttrais, and itzdustrial managers, but not bankers) who

TABLE 9. X

Backround of Entrepreneurs, X 993-1 995 (in, percent)

bmsornol Physicists Managers Bankers Enterprise directors Others

15 24 22 I9 2 18

entered the business world dtlring the first phase of privatization ( 1986-1 99 1) constituted 61 percent of entrepreneurs surveyed, Two years later, in early 1995, these same groups made up 42 percent of the sample, Only bankers, among the early business people, contintled to increase in number betriveen 1993 and 1995, SeveraX new groups entered entrepreneurial ranks during these years, Most important among them were the directors of state fir~nswho had benefited from the p"vatizatic>n program. Another substantial segment-labeled "Other" in Table 9.1-consisted of several smatter subgroups: individuals (typicatty about 30 years of age) from privileged families, wel educated, wit11 past employment in the Kc~msomofor foreign trade organizatic~nsand membership in the Communist party;" and ""sperfiut~us"poeople, who were considered the most sociaXfy maladjusted in the Soviet system, generally ir-t their early 40s, who came from educated families and often had a humanistic rather than technical edtlcation. Some of the latter group previously had eked out a living on the margins of society, finding employment as ""janitors, firefightem or stokers" in order to avoid prosecution as parasites. "&gressi.re, clever, and unyrincipied," they sometimes rose to high positions in financial Although. Russia's growing private sector was increasingly domir-tated by concentrations of wealth and power, this was only part of the pictrlre. The ntlmber of legally registered small businesses, usualty defined in the Russian context as enterprises wit11 fewer than two hundred employees,"" grew rapidly Their proliferation provides an indicator of the vigor and prosperity of the newly privatized economy, Mereas 560,000 small businesses were registered in 1992, the number had grown to 896,000 two years later.""Wanyothers were operating without registration, and therefore are not included in the statistics. By 1995, apprmimately 10 percent of the labor force was working part- or f11f1-time in small enterprises-mainly ir-t manufacturing, construction, and commerce,71 The accelerated pace of privatization coincided with another trend: the formation of new entrepreneurial organizations, During 1992 alone, more collective efforts were launched by entreprenerrrs than during the preceditzg four years corn-

bined. These new associations can be divided into several categcrries. Some gathered together entrepreneurs from many branches of industry>such as the Association of Privatizing and Private Enterprises (Assotsiatsiia privatiziruemykh i chastnykh predpriiatii) ( 1993),7Qhe Round Table of IXussian Business (Kruglyi stol biznesa Rassii) (1993),7hndthe Sodety of Merchants and Industrialists (Obshchestvo km ptsc)~i prc>myshlennikov)( 1992).74The largest group, hc)wever, consisted of organizations within specific branches of industry, Same arose on the ashes of former planning mir-tistries;others were established ir-t new spheres of the ecr>nc>my,such as private banking, advertising, and real estate.7Tr:rrmerKc~msomol activists and middle-level managers from the perestroika era of entrepreneurialism often played an active role in these organizations." At the same time, the ""pc>liticalself-determination of business" was mo~ving f'orward as entrepreneurs created new channels for exerting political influence,77 The catafjrst for these efforts was the parliamentary election of December $993, which pnrsmpted Rt~ssianentreprenetlrs to farm political parties.'Wn the eve of the parliamentary election in December 1993, same of the largest banks and financial structures gave support to Yegor Gaidar's party, Our Choice Is Russia (Nash vbor-Rossii). Others ( S L I C as~Viktor G~lsinsky"Most-Bank) suppc~rted VabIokcz and the Party of Unity and Accord (Partlia irClternomyrdin, whose policies had generafty provided favorabIe conditions for the oligarchs,""n May>Sergei Kirienka, a reformer, was appoitzted in his place. On August 17, a Sunday, the oligarchs rushed back to Mc>scc>wfrom their Mediterranean villas in anticipation of the government's impending announcement of currency devaluation and debt default." Wllat subsequentljr took place behind the scenes is not fully h o w n . Shortly thereafter, Kirienko was dismissed from his post-a move perhaps prompted by Berer~vskyand other oligarchs in retaliation for Kirienko" unwillingness to bail out their banks, whose massive overinvestments in lucrative short-term got.ernment bonds (GICBs) had put them at serious risk following the devaluation of the The ensuing political crisis led to the appointment of Yevgenii Prirnakov as pritne minister, who p ~ s i d e dfor eight months over a coalition of former noprzenklatura and communists that attempted but failed to reconfigure the relationship b e ~ e e ngovernment and business.

Phase Four: Seatember 199&-Becemberl999 The financial crisis of August 1998 plunged many bank-led FIGS into disarray, and with them, some of the leading czligarchs, By January 1999, five of IXussia's ten largest banks-Xnkombank, Menatep, Qnexirnbank, Rossiiskii Kredit, and SBS-Agro-were no longer able to meet their financial cr~mmitmrmts,Only one of the five banks that were still sotvent-the Xnternational Industrial Bank-was controlled by Rt~ssianprivate ~ a p i t a lThe . ~ oligarchs regrouped, but all sustailzed some damage, Two of the original seven faced imminent legal action (Berezovsky and Smolensliy), and several others were at risk of the same (Fridman and Vinogradnv). By the end of 1999, h o w e ~ rthe , situation had changed once again. Some of the original oligarchs, such as Berezovsliy, Gusinsky, and Khodorkovsky, remained powcrftrl and highly visible in the country" economic and political life. The Primakov government and its successors did not attempt to repface the ofigarckic system but instead sought to advance the fortunes of a different set of economic actors, thereby facilitating the ""circulation of elitees.""" The oligarchs in ascendancy included Roman Abramclvich, Vagit Alekyerov, 12yotrAxn, Andrei Mazmin, and Ikm Vyakhirev. The new oligarchs traveled a road to fame and fortune that has much itz common with the seven famc~usoligarchs who emerged in the ptrblic arena during the mid- 1990s. Their informal, personalized approach to political power continues an established pattern. The new and old oligarchs have been consolidating their forces throrrgh mergers (e.g., that of Most-Bank, Menatep, and Oneximbank to form 1;tosbanXc) and agreements to undertake joint ventures (e.g., Lulcczil and Gazprom). At the same time, oligarchic forms of economic organization are extending beyond the capital city to Russia's regi~sns,~) The regional oligarch AnatoXii Bykov, head czf the Krasnoyarsk Aluminurn Plant, is the best-knclwn of these provitzcial tycoons becarlse of his wdl-p~rblicizedclashes with regional governor Ateksandr Lebed and his indictment in 1999 for money-laundering and conspiracy to commit murder, As the Yeltsir-tyears drew to a close, contemporary Rt~ssianentreprenerrrs faced an unprecedented situation. A small bat extremety powrfuf group at the pinnacle of the economic elite had taken passession of a great deal of wealth-----agroup that remains highly influential. Ncverthefess, tens of rhotrsands of entreprenerrrs (in many different firms, sectors, and market cr~ntexts)carry on business in the country, without benefit: of the two conditions that Max M b e r considered essential for modern, rational capitalism: ""a calc~llabielegal system" and ""administraticm in terms of format The central state remains weak and has lost its monopaiy on violence, yet it continues to maintain substantial interests in key industries, especiaify nattrral resource extraction. A predatory relationship has evolved betwen business and the state,"'" forcing Russian entrepreneurs to operate in a context of uncertainties and vagaries that discourage long-term plannillg and i~~vestnnent.

The financial collapse of August 1998 had devastating effects on a broad circle of entreprenerrrs, including many start-up companies and moneymaking enterprises whose bank deposits were wiped out. Small businesses were partic~llarly hard hit, and one-third were reported to have suspended work or gone bankr~rpt.'"'fn Moscow alone, 30,000 small and medium-sized businesses (about 15 percent of the total) ctosed due tc>the crisis, including many merchants purchasing products abroad for resale on Moscow markets."""Not aff businesses suffered, however. Deval~lationof the ruble provide-d the impetus for a general shift away from foreign imports and tc>ward domestic pr~sduction."')~ Firms that fared retatively well after August X998 include those in transit, construction, communications, natural resources, television, tires, paper? domestic food products, textiles, atlditing, and cr~nsulting."'"' Small, businesses had made a strong comeback by July 1999, when 890,000 of them were officially registered. Nevertheless, this number is slightly lower than the figure for small businesses registered in 1994-a telling indication that conditions remain extremely difficult for these firms, Small businesses are still concentrated in certain cities and regions of the c~untry.Xn fail 2999, about 20 percent were tocated in Moscczw 23 percent in St. f2etersburg,and ~>ne-third in the central region as a whole. Combined they had rnore than 7 million E~~treprenerrrial associations both national and regional continue to proliferate, representing the interests of specific or diverse branches of ind~lstryand gesgraph" areas, The rr-rost prominent organization todw is RUXE, with rnore than 2,700 institutional members representing enterprises, research organizations, cr~mmercialstructures, and public organizations, including a large cr~ntingentof f'ormer ""rd directors.'""Wnder the leadership of its president, Arkadii VoXsky, RUfE has stepped up the effort to reintroduce government regulation of strategic industries, reduce taxes on btlsiness, impose government protectionism, and grant concessions to selected foreign In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber made the argument that early apitalists fotlnd "ethical foundation and justification" their way of life in the ideas and practices of ascetic Protestantism, Eventually, howver, materiaf goods overcame religious asceticism and acqixired inexorable power over peoplethe ""ion cagen-turning them into ""specialists withsut spirit, sensualists withotlt heart."""""Like their Protestant forerunners in other times and places, IXussian entrepreneurs find themsdves in an "iron cage." They are imprisoned by the particular mode of acquisitiveness that tr~ole,form in the second half of the 1980s,with the appearance of KomsumoZ and cooperative businesses, and was reinforced in the 2990s by voucher privatkzation, loans-for-shares, and bank bailouts, Russian business culture has been shaped by a massive transfer of state and piilbfic assets into private hands. The late communist and postcommunist mode of acquisitiveness depends on personalistic ties, politial influence, crime, corruption, and violent entrepreneurship. Rt~ssiakbusinesspeople often yearn for a "civilked" spate>"civilked" business, and ""cvtlized" k~s"~~"-but they remain trapped by a different legacy of entrepreneurship at the beginning of the twenty-first cenmry.

appendix. Background Xlzfarrnarion on Russian OEigarchs"l" I

1;tOAMANAB1UMOVXCI-I Date of birth: t 966 Edt~cation:Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas, MOSGC)W Past and present business holdings and interests: Natural resources: Sibneft Oil

2.

WGIT ALEKPEROVHZ Date of birth: t 950 Edt~cation:Azerbaijan Oil and Chemistry Institute Past and present business iloldings and interests: Media: TSN, TV6, REN TV; dzvwtiia Natural resources: Lukoil (president)

3,

PYOTR AVEN"' Date of birth: 1955 Education: Department of Economics, Moscow State Universify Past and present busitzess holditzgs and interests: Banking: ALFA Bank (president) Financial-industrial group: ALFA Croup Media: STS regional television network

4,

BORIS BEItEZOVSKY1l4 Date of birth: t 946 Education: School of electronics and computer technology at the Forestry Institute in Moscow; mechanical-mathematical faculty of Moscow State University; doctorate in physical-matbematicaI sciences; corresponding member, Russian Academy of Sciences ( f 99 X ) Past and present business holdings and interests: A~ltomfg,: EogoVAZ (founder), LADA, Ail-Russia Automobile Alliance Financial-industrial group: LogoVAZ Media: ORT, 774-6, N0vy.e izvestiz'a, Nezavisz'maia gazeta>Opngk, Matador, Komnzersunt, Karavan, Almaty TV, Channel KTV Natural resources: Sibneft Oil, Gazprom Transportation: AeroRot, ?f"xansaero

5,

ANATOLII BYKOV" Date of birth: X960 Education: Krasnoyarsk Teacher-Trainitzg Instit~lte(physial education) Past and present business holdings and interests: Banicing: Rossiiskii Kredit Banic; Metaleks Bank Financial-ir~dustridgroup: Tanako Group "'

Natural resources: Mrasnoyarslc Aluminurn Plant (MrAZ) (chair of the board); Krasnoprsk Fuel Company (controlled though Tanako), which controls IOasnc>yarsk Coal Company; Achinsk Alumina Combine 6.

MlKHAlL FMDMAN1" Date of birth: 1964 Education: Moscow Steel and Atloys Institute Past and present busixzess holdit-rgsand interests: Banking: ALFA Bank (chair of the board) Financial-industrial grc~up:ALFA Group Media: ORT (part of bank consortium with Obedinennyi Bank, Menatep Bank, and SBS-Agro Bank); AIfa T x STS Natural resources: TNK Oil Sideniccz Other: Western Siberian Metallurgy Plant; chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food pnrscessing (tea, sugar), glass, electricity, construction, cement, art dealership, supermarket chain, orientat carpet exports, liquor imports

7. VLACtIMIR GUSlNSKY1i7 Date of birth: X952 Education: Cubkin Oil Institute and Lunacharsky Theater Institute; stage director for Tula Theater befare morsving tcrs Mosco>win early 1980s Past and present business holdings and interests: Bangng: Mast-Bank Financial-industrial group: Most Grrzup (chair of the board) Media: Media-MOST NTV9 NTV Plus, MTV International, TNT; Ekho Moskvy, Sem-nei, Itagi, Segodnia, Novafa:gazeta, Qbshcltuia gaztu, Smenu, I(inrrsMost, Centrat European Media Enterprises Other: Ikal estate 8.

ANDREI Ib?til;MINrrx Date of birth: X958 Education: Moscow Finance Institute Past and present business holdings and interests: Banking: Sberbank (chair of the board, president)

9,

MIKHAIL KHOUORKOVSKYIi9 Date of birth: X963 Education: Mendeleev Chemistry Technology Institute, Moscow Past and present business holdings and interests: Banking: Menatep Bank, Rospron holding company (chair of the board) Financial-ir-tdustrialgroup: MenateplRosprorn Media: 0RT W,Lz'&ratz-tmaieagazefa, Independent Media Grrzup (Mosmw Times, Kapita1>Piayb08 C O S ~ O ~ O I Z ~ Q I Z ) Natural resources: Yukos Oil Company

Other: Food processing, construction, paper, chemicitts, oil, metallurgy, construction, textiles, consumer goods, and Galeriia Nianmkx (a new, ~lpscale shopping mall in downtown Moscc)~) 20, VLmIMXK POTANIN"-"' Date of birth: 196 f Education: Moscow Institute for International Xklations with speciaXization in economics Past and present business holdings and interests: Banking: MFK IXenaissance Croup, Oneximbank, X;tosbanXc Financial-industrial group: Onexirnbank/lnterros (president) Media: Kovtzsovtzalskaj~apravda; Iz-vestiia; Ekspert.; Russkii ii.elegra;F,regional teievision and radio outlets Natural resources: Sidanko Oil, fifth-largest Russian oil producer; Gazgrom; Ntzrilsk Nickel Other: Sva~invest,Perm Motors, NavoIiyetsk Steel, ZXL autoworks, North West River shipping, Kt~znetskAiurnintrm, Oktyabrskaya Railroad, Lomo Precision Optics, Central Army ice hockey and basktball teams, fife and health insurance companies, mutual and pension funds 11. ALEKSANUR SMOLENSKYUi Date of birth: f 954

Education: Dzhambrzl Technological Geology Institute (economics) Past and present business holdings and interests: Banking: SBS-Agro (Stolichny Banlc of Savings-Agraprombank) (president), Finance Oil Bank, Soiuz group (chair of board) Financial-industrid group: SBS-Agro Media: 0ltT stake through consortium, Stoliaa, Kommersant Iiveekfy; Komnzersunt-Dull9 Bengi, Ilomovul, Segodnia and NTV Natural resources: Stake in Sibneft oil cczmpany 2 2. VLmIMIR VINOGMDOV"2 Date of birth: 1955 Education: Moscow Aviation Institute, in space power engineering; PleH~anovNational Economy Institute, itz economics Past and present business holdings and interests: Banicing: Inkambank Financial- ir~drzstriaigroup: Inkambank Natural resources: Trtsnsneft Other: Samara Aluminurn, Babayera Fatzd Processing, Magnitogorsk Steel, Nostas Pipe, Sokol Aircraft, steel, timber, metallurgy 13. XXEM VYAKHI REV " Date of birth: t 934

Education: Kuibyshev Industrial Institute, with engineering specialty in development of oil and gas Past and present business holdings and interests: Media: Gazpram owns 29 regional newspapers and teievision stations; partial a m e r s h i p of Media-MOST Natural resources: Gazyrom (chair of br~ard),Siberia Oil company

I would like to ach~owledgethe able assistance of Jane Zavisca in the preparation of this chapter. X am also grate5111 to VBdim Radaev far his interest in the prc~jectwhen X was in Moscow in surnmer 1998. Camnents and suggestions from my colleagues in the Carxzegie group also were helpful in making revisions, All dates of publication in the citations below are in American style (monthldayIyear), I . 1 have used the word entrepreneurs throughout this chapter in a brc~adsense, interchangeably with businesspeople, to refer to individuals who start or direct a business; make critical decisians relating to the use of capital, labor, and other resources; and assume risk for the sake of prcjfit. 2. Entrepretteurialisvt refers to a constellation of business practices including modes of capital accumulation, investment and marketing strategies, risk taking, inrlovation, ethics, contracts and mutual trust, authority relations within firms, and the creation of izetworks, 3, Joseph R, Bltasi, Maya Kroumova, and Ilo~lglasKruse, Kremlin Capitalism: Bizlkatzztng the Rtlssian Economy (Ithaca and Londor~,19971, 26, 4. X'ASS, 2/ J 7/99. An unknawxl number have eluded the atrtharities, 5, Izvestiiu, 9115/98:1; 'K4SS, 9/13/98; Anders Astund, ""Observdtiuns on the Llevelopmerlt of Small Private Enterprises in Russia:" Post-Soviet Geography and Econo~tics 38(4)(1997):191-205,One-quarter of the small enterprises were located in Moscc~w, 6 , ""Rossiiane i biznes: Dinamika obsfrchestvenlaogo mneniia,'" in Obraz predprirzimnteiia 1) nuvai Rossii, ed. 1, M, Bunin (Moscow, 19981, 13. Xn a 1991 survey, 45 percent of respondents believed that ""sindle and intrigue" were typical behaviors of Russian busixlesspeogle, The only entrepreneurial attribute that received a higher response (50 percent) was "thirst for profitsP See Stephen Handeiman, Chmrade Crimi~al:Russia's New Mtzfij~a(New Haven and LJondon, 1995); and 13avid Remnick, Xeswrrectkn: The Strugrylte for a New Russia (Mew York, 19971, 196-1 99, for accounts that hi&li&t this phase in the pubtic reception of new entrepreneurs. 7, ""Ohraz biznesa v Kossiisk(>mobshchestve: Vospriiatie, differentsiiatsiia, legitimaed. I , M. Bunin, 63. In 1997, British antl~rotsiia," in C)brazpredprinimatelia v IZOV[)E' ROSSZ'L poIogist Garoline Humphrey provided the followirlg descriyeiot~of the meaning of the term within Russian parlance: "It refers to an image of people with a new and alien menXn tality, yeogIe who are rapaciotrs, materialist, and shockingly ecox~omicallystxccessf~~I. are 'new' because tl~eydo not give precedence to various hoary Soviet short, NW Kussia~~s values, which are still mostly seen in a rose hue by everyone else: the vafue of honest lahc~ur,of supporting the koilektiv, of respect for the wr~rkingmasses, of hi&-~nindedpersonal fmgality, and above all the value of production of goods far the benefit of society as a whole" (Caroline Hu~nphrey~ 'The villas of the Wew Russians? A sketch of consumption and cultural identity in post-Soviet t-tandscapes:"Foeaal30-32 [ 1997]:87. See also Elernnick, Res:swrrettz'on,20 1 .

8. It appears that the first such usage of the word oligarch can be traced to an article pubiished by 'Fhomas Ciraharn, a U,S, diploinat in Moscow, in Nezavisimaia gazefa, in winter 11995 (Rernnick,Resurrection, 177-1 78). 9. See, for exa~nple,Barringon Moore, Jr., Social Origins ofDict~ztorshipand Llernocracy: Lord and Peusunt irz she iyaking of the iModern World (Eastan, 1966); lkinhard Rendix, Nation-Rzrilding and CJitize~slzip:Sludies of C>mrfJkaraging Social Order (Rerkeiey and Los h~geles,1977); Seyxllour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Pot'iriw (New kbrk, 1963). 10, Gregofy GuroE and Fred V, Czarstensen, Et~rrepreneunhipin Itnperial Russia and the Soviet Y ~ i u fnPrinceton, 1983). 11, Vadim \Solkov, ""Violent Entrepreneurship in Post-Communist Russia:" Europe-Asia Studies 51(5)(1999):741. 12, &dim Radaev, Fommirovrazzie noytkh rossiiskikh rynkuv: jlkatzsaktsionnye iderzhki, fornzy konrroliu ""dilovaia eriku" (Moscow, 11998),presents evidence for a decline. Fur a different view, see M, Steven Fish, "The Roots of and Realedies for Russia" Racket Economy,'" in EuneZ at the End of the Li,"lzt: Privatiz~lion,Business Net~vorics,and Economic Transfer?nation in Russia, eds,. Stephen S. Cofien, Andrew Schwartz, and John Xysman (Rerkeley,

1998),86-138.

13, "Rassiiane i biznes: Tlinamika obshchestvennogo mneniia:?n Obraz predprinimateliu v ~10voiRossii, ed. Bunin, 1X, 23. 14. Manuet Gastefls, ""Pths and Problems af tile Integration af Post-Communist Russia into the CilobaI Eco~~omy: A Concept Paper," in jltnnel nl the End ofthe Light, eds. Gohen, Schwartz, and Zysnlan, 66-85. 15. On this gerleraf point, see Fish, "The Roots of and Remedies for Rtlssl;a%R~acliret Econan~y: 92. 16, m a t we see in yustcommunist Russia is a group of busil~esspeoylewho are operating in what Barry Ickes and Czliffod C;addy have terrned a "virtual eccxnorny'Lthat is, an economy txf pretense, based on ""il~~sioxl about almost every ixnyortant parameter: prices, sales, wages, taxes, and budgets." " B e Russian economy retains distinctive features of the forx~~er Soviet system, with its s~lbsidizationaf industry, and in critical respects has failed to make progress tc>warda market e c o n o v (C:lifford G, Chddy and Barry W. Ickes, ""Kssia's Virtual Econan~y,'ToreignAflairs 777151[ 1998]:53-67). 17, GiI Eya1, Ivirn Szeltenyi, and EIeanor Tutunsley, *Wgi%ingfJapicalisn-2Witlznut f>apitalists: Ckss Sitrucaire rand Political Econonzy ofPnsr-C;i7nzmunistnu i z Certrral E~rt-uye(X,ondon, 1999). 18. VlaQimir Girnpel'son, ""New Russian Entrepreneurship: Sources of Forrnatiol~and Strateg of Sociat Actian)'TmbriemsufEconumic-Tratzsition 36(12)(Ayril 1994):25-26. 19. Gregory C;rossrnan, ""Subverted Sovereignty: Historic Role of the Soviet Underground,'"in "XnneZ at the End oftfile Light, eds. Gohen, Sch~rar~z, and Zj~sr~~an, 31;; Gregary Grossman, ""Sb-Rosa Privatization and Marketization in the USSR; Annals qftize 5U7(January 1990):47. 20. This law, adopted on November 19, 1986, did not go into effect untiI Nay 1987. X f provided a legal basis far Article 17 of the 19777 Constitution, authorizing individual labor activity, By permitting "activities and services" mrresyonding to local needs and traditions, the law "set in notion an evc~lutiunof private enterprise that was unstoppable" (Anthany Jones and William hiIoskoff>KO-vs: Tke Rebirth of Entrepreneurship in the Soviet h l o n [Bloomington,fnd,, 199I], 11).

21, This jaw, adopted on June 30, 1987, went into effect on January 1, 1988. It expanded the autonclmy of enterprise directors and permitted workers to elect managers, 22. Tile h w was adopted in May 1988 and went into effect on July 1,1988, The original law (which was later ~nodified)co~~sisted of 54 articles; it placed cooperatives "on an equal foating'"ith state enterprises (Misba Belkindas, ""Privatization af the Soviet Economy Under C;orbachev: IS, 1: "The Campaign Against Urlearr~ed1ncome"snd 2: ""The TJeveloprnent of Private Cooperatives:" Berkeley-Dulce Occasional Papers an rl-re Second Economy in the USSR, no. 14 /April t 989],40). See Jones and Maskoff, KO-ops: The Xebirrh of Entrepreneurship in the Sovier U~ion,12-14, on the law itself; the remainder of the book deals with the implementation and revision of the law. 23. The law was passed on Llecernber 25,1990. 24. IgorW Kuliotev, ""The Furmation af the Btzsiness Elite:" Rrlssian Sociat Scieuzce Review 38(4)(July-August 1997):65; OL'gga V, Kryshtanovskaia, "rr"ransft~rmationof the Old MornerlHatura into a New ltussian Elite,'"~ussian Social Science Revie~v37(4)(1996):3I. Knkolev applied the phrase romantic-perGd to the years from 1987-1988 to 1992-1993. I, 19941, 394) described the period Btzrlin (Biznesme?zyRussii: 40 isturii uspekha [MOSCOW, between 1986 and 1989 as ""heroic.'" 25. For an t>verviewof early reforms, see Jones and Moskuff, KO-ups,3-14; Anders Aslrxnd, How Russia Became u *Warkel Econony (Washixlgton, TIC., 1995); and Rlasi, Kroumovd, and Kruse, KremEin C;i.pitalism. 26. The following discussion draws primarily on Bunin, Bkrzctfmeny Russii; T. I. Zaslavskaia, ""Biznes-sloi rossiiskogo obshchestva: Sushchnost: struktura, status,'" Obshchestvennye nuuki i suvre~nennost" ( 1995):17-32; Vadirn IPadaert;;Stanovlenie novogu Rossiiskogo predgriniznate~'stvr;la'sva {S~f~ZoIugicheskiZ aspekt) (Moscow, 1993); Atfa Ghirikova, Lidery Russitskogc? predprinima~el'stvu: ~Mentmlitet,svtysljf, tsennosti (Moscow, 1997); Kryshtanovskaia, "Transformation o f the Old Nomenklatura,"" 18-40; Olga Kryshtanovskaia and Stephell White, ""From Sovict Nomellklatura to Russian Elite," E~tirupeAsia Studies 448(5)(1096):711-733; Kukolev, "The Formation of the Business Elite3" Roy Medvedev, "A New Class in Russian Society: A New Sacial Experiment," Russian Social Scietzce Review 39[5)(Septen1ber-October 1998):55-76, For a cornpariso~laf various periodizations of resurgent entrepreneurship, see Kukolev, "The Formation of the Business Elite," 65. 27. For a discussion of these sources of recruitment, see the citations i13 note 24; Medvedev, "A New Chss in Russian Society: 56-58; Alexei firchak, ""Post-Soviet Entrepreneurial Ctltr~tre:'Che State, the Subject, and the LJaw:" unpubtished paper, March 1999; Olga "n'artsevd,""I'entreyreneur russe depuis le d&hutde la perestrt>ika,'"Ckhiers inleruzationaux de sucialogie 96(X994):99-S 12; 0, V. PerepeIkin, ""Kassiiskii predprinimatel': Shtriki k sotsiai'nomu portretu," Sor-siologkr'zeskieisslednvaniia 22(2)(1995):35-40, 28. The accourlt that foltows is drawn from several sources, mast notably: Steven I,. Solnick, Stealing the State: Chntrol and Gllapse in Soviet Institztlions (Cambridge, Mass, and L,ondon, 1988), 108-124; Kryshtanovskaia and White, '"mm Soviet Momenklaturtt to Russia11 Elite? 716717; and brchak, ""Pst-Soviet Entrepreneurial C;ultt~re~" 29. Accordixlg to Kryshtar~avskaiaand White, a ressa1utior.r of the CPSU Central Cornmittee on July 25, 1986 "ayyrc)ved a proposal from the bmsomol that it establish a network of scimtific and technical celltrcs for the benefit of its members, The new centres were stxyposed to operate on commercial principles" "'From Scjviet Pd~menklatura10 Russian Elite," ?H),

30. Solnick, Stelaling the State, 1 I S, For an account of this process, based on interviews, see Yurchak, "Pc~st-SovietEntrepreneurial C:ulture." 3 1;. Solnick, Stealing the State? 116. 32. Kadaev, Statzovknlc:novogo Rossz'iskogopredprinimatelStvla, 57. 33, Solnick, Stealing tlze S1.ute9112,119. 34, Ibid., 121. 35. Kryshtanovskaia and White, ""Fom Soviet Mornenklatura to Russian Elite,"i"i1-733. See the Appendix, above, ftor details on Gusinsley, Khodork-ovsky>and Vinogradov. 36, Agence France-Bresse, 8/25/98, 37, RFE/R14 [Radio Free EuropelKadio Liberty) Report, ""Russia" Fiilancial Empire:" 1/98, 38. Ibid.. 39, Akc~sRona-"las,""Ihe First Shall Be Last? Entrepreneurship and C:ommunist Cadres in the 'rrzlnsition frorn Sociatis~n,'~ Amzericun JourrzaZ of Sociology 100(1994):40-69, 40. Kryshtanovskaia, ""lkansformation of the Old Nomenklatura:" 25-3 1; Kryshtanovskaia and m i t e , ""Farn Soviet Nornerlklatura to Russian Elite:" 716-721;. Both articles are based 0x1 empiricaf research carried out between X989 and 1994 by the Soviet ELites Project of the University of ups;"352."l'he prcjgram was terminated an July 25,1997. 86, At a meeting in TJavos, Swiiaerland, in early 1996, the major oligarchs (excluding Inkambangs Vinogradav) united to provide finar~cialar~dmedia support for Eftsin and bring in Anatolii Chubais tr>run his campaign (Ibid., 349-350). 87. Washif?gton Post, 8/28/98. Clf tlze seven oligarchs, tcvr~held political positions at an earlier time: Khodorkavsky was deputy prime mirrister of the h~eland exlergy industry in 1991, and Vinogradov was chief economist of the Presidential Cauncil for Private Enterprise in 1992. In 1997, Potanin was declared by Business M&ek to be '"tile most powerf-ul Inan in Kussia'YPatricia Kranz, ""?"he&lost Powerful Man in Kussia~~usiszness Week 3554 1r 124/971:6tj--xq. 88. Los Angeles Times, 8130198; Associated Press (AI"), 6/99. 89. A. Zudin, "Gosudarstvo i bizr~es:Povornt vo vzairnootnasheniiakh?'V~olitiia 3(5)( 1997):22-24, 90. A, Zudin, ""Stsialhaia organizatsiia rossiiskugo biznesa: Clt segrnentatsii k dtlalinmu:" KaLlu idet Xossila? Obshchee i iosobennoe 1) suvremennom mzvitil, "LI, Xaslwskaia, ed. ( M O S C O 1997), ~ 21 1-212, 91. Chrystia Freeland, ""'l'he Men Wzo lteally Rule Russia: Oligarcl~sLed by Baris Berezo~vsky,"New Statesman 127(4400)(8/28/98):17, 92. iWoscow Ernes, 211 1/99, 93,Xn 1996 the eight largest FIGSmay have accounted for b e ~ e e n25 and 30 percent of the country's GNP (Jensen,"How Rt-lssia Is Ruled: 1998'7. 94, Some reports iildicate that Berezovsky helped cox~viinceYejtsin to sack Gher~lc~myrdin. Uerezo>vsky.$~notiveis unclear; Nerntsov attributed the move to power hunger (LosAngeles Tifnes,8130198). 95, Journalist C:hrystia Freeland reported a few days later: "hatched the oligarchs, en masse, troop froin a meeting with one deputy prime minister, to a meeting with anotller, to a ~neetingwith the prime rninister himsdf. Gc~iIectively,they have been comferring almast daily with the Central Bank cll*airman'"CFlleelarld, ""'l'he Men 'Who Iteally RuIe"). 96. Gregary Freidin, "kltsin Yields to the Oligarchs:" Los Angeles Ernes? 8/28/98. 97. KFE/RI, Newsline, 3:6, Part 1 (1111/99). 98. Ibid. Accorditrg to one source in June 1999, the new big seven included Alekperov, Uerezcjvsky, vsky~ Smolensky>and Vyakhirev (Russian Chmmera News, 6/14/99), 99. Llonald N. fensen, "Ilumors of C3ligarchs"Demise Cirerttly Exaggerated,'"FE/RL ~Yewsllne,2:234, Part I ( 12/7/98).

100. Ibid., 25, 101. Radaev, F~rmirovazzienovf"kh rossiiskikh rynkov; Yurchak, "Post-Soviet Entreprelaeu rial Culture.'" 102, 'KASS, 9/23/98; I"1"AR-'TASS,12/23/98. 103. Agencc France-Presse, 9iSOi98; A. Ghepurenko, "Malyi biznes poste Avgusta l998 g.: Idrc>bfemy, ter~dentsii,adaptatsionnye vozmozhnosti:" in Osennii krizis 1998gadra: Xossiiskoe obshchesm do 1' posle f Mufascow 1998), 109-1 12. 104. ""llterprise and Kanking,'"ussiara Econo~zicli.ends Q~uarterEy111199~4, 105, Brc~ductiunin St. ktersburg food industries increased 28 percent in 1998 compared tr> 1997 (I'rAgrrASS, 1119/99). The auditing and corlsultir~;;sector grew by I5 to 20 percent in 1998 over 1997, according to official data. (""Kussian C:ompanies C;rc>w As the Big Five I~ave:2ussz"aJouruzat, 3/15/99). 106. Intedax Russian News, 11/5/99. 107. Intercon Daily Report on Russia, 10/21/98. 108. TASS, 12/4/98; Rossiiskii dellovoi ~zonz'tur,2/2/99; Russian. Business News7 1I /30/98. 109. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of CMiralism (New "York, 1958), 75, 181-182, 110, Yurchak, ""Pst-Scjviet Entrepreneurid C:ulture," 35. 1I I . This appendix was completed irr f>ecernber 1999. 112, "Ilussian Media IV; RFE/RL Report, 10198; 'TASS, 11/24/98; Interfax, 11/23/98; R ~ l s s i aCc~tntnerce ~~ News, 1/29/99; ~MoscowNew, 211 1/99; Russian Oil rand Gins Reporl; 3/29/99; Bernya AMN,7/28/99, 1113. Moscow ZFmes, l 1/7/98; Moscozv Tinzes? 1/12/99; Kowrmersanf-lluily, 1/27/99; Russian Qmmerce News, 1/29/99; K~mmersanl-l3aily, 2/18/99; iWclscuw Tirt-ses, 2/23/99; 1"ti;ftegazov)pi kornpleks, 2/27/99; Nezmvisimaia gazet-u, 3/10/99; Moscow Times, 6/23/99; Moscow Times, 6/25/99; AW~scuz.v News, 8117/99. 114, Time, 10120197, 66; Jcnsen, ""I-ic>wRussia Is Ruled: 1998'" Agence Francc-Pressc, 8/25/98; l,us Angel6 Rtnes, 8130198; Russian Commerce Nws, 1/29/99; New York Ernes, 2/13/99; Mskovskii Kowrsowrokts, 2/9/99; AI", 2/16/99; RFEIKL, 3/10/99; 6/99; 'KASS, 6/9/99; ItFEIRL, 6/17/99; Vretnytz OR7; 7/17/99; iMosct~wErne, 8/26/99; Moscow "limes, 9/10/99, 115. Moscow Tir~tes,2/10/98; rnmtnersanr-lltail~4/4/98; Xnfo-bjC3VA Press rjigest, 6130198; Mtlscow 751~-3es,12130198; Mtlscow Times, 2/27/99; Vek, April 1999, 3; Ptzrkanzepltskaia gaze&, 4/3/99, 2; ~Moscow2'imes, 4/9/99; Vrenzya, 8/24/99; Izvesriia, 8/25/99; Rznsskn I;"QEit.icuE Monitor, 9/3/99; New York Ti~t-ses,10112199, 116. RFEIRI, Report, ""Kussia"sFir~ancialEmpires," 1/98; Fitzatzcial YTirnes, 1/14/98; Mascolv Titnes, 8/6/98; RFEIKl, Report, ""Russian Media IV~"Oi98; Moscow Times, 11/l 0198; lCZFE/RIANewsline, 12/7/98; financial 25tnes, 12/14/98; Russian Chwtmerce Netvs, 1/29/99; Xnterfax, 3115/99; Potitekononziin, 6/99. 117, l'l'me, 10/20/97; KFEiKf, Report, "Ilussia's Financial Empires," 1/98; Interfax, 9115/98; Interfax, 11115/98; Moscow Times, l / t 2/99; Rtlssian Cc~nztnerceNews, 1/29/99; Moscow Times, 3/4/99; MOSCOW Tit?.~es,7/20/99; Kammersarai, 7/31/99; Times (florldon), 8/26/98; Intercon Daily Report on Russia, 10/7/99; Sepdnio, Il/I3/99; Barrks urtd Exclaanges, 1,1117/99; IE tercun Daily Xqurt on Russia, 12/7/99. 11X. Russian C:owrmerce Ne%vs,1/29/99; Reuters, 4/26/99; Kommersant, 7/1/99; Vremyu, 711199, 119. RFElKL Report, "Russia's Financial Empires,'9/98; Agcnce France-Presse, 8/25/98; Rmes (Landon), 8/28/98; Inl-t*mationat Herafd Ribunc3, 9/28/98; Moscow Erne, 12/3/98;

Rznsskn Cowzmerce News7 1/29/99;Moscow Tz'nzes, 5/220/99;AWos~-ow Tin~es,6/8/99; Business C=entmlEurope, 6/15/89; Vremya, 7/ 1/99; Economist r'nfelligenitr;Unit Ljrnited, 7/22/99. 120. RFEIRL Report, "IXussia's Finmciai Empires:" 1/98;Agence France-Presse, 8/25/98; Infernational Herald Il'ribune, 9/28/98; Russian C3mmerce News, 1/29/99;Financial IlFnta, 2110199; AP, 2/16/99; Business fiVeek, 3/1/99; Weraid>3117/99; Bztsiness Central E~irope, 7/ I 5/99; Euromoney Magazine, 911 0199. 121. RFEIRL Ileyort, ""Russi$s Financial Empire$"/98; Moscow Erne, 9/I 2/98; Sovershenno sekretno, 9116/98; Central Europmn, 1l / 10198; Moscuw l'itna, 3315199;AP>22116/99; Russian Gmmerce Neovs? 1/29/99;Izvestiia, 5/14/99; 1Wosco1v T'if~es,6/23/99, 8/17/99, and 8/4/99. 122, KFEIRL Report, "Russia's Financial Empires," 1/98; Agence France-Presse, 8/25/98; International f i r ~ l dTribune 9/28/98; Interfax, lUi29198; Financial Ernes, 11/10/98;'MSS, 11/12/98; Moscolv Times, 12/15/98; Russian Ckmwterce News, 1/29/99; Kommersnnt, 7/30/99; Moscr?wTimes, 8/17/99. 1 23. Gn-2parayand Industry I~~formatic?n fmmRAWC;>l l 1128197; Rznsskn Commerce News, 1/29/99; Vretnya, 7/27/99; IWOSC~W Tinza, 8/27/99; Moscow Ernes, 8/28/99; Intercon I2aiZy Report on Russia, 88130199,

The Russian Working C Times of Transition Victor Zaslavsky The Guide CarEl"Free International U~i-r,ersil;y of Social Sciences, Rome

T

he evolution of the Russian Federation during the first decade of its existence can be characterized by two parallel and interdependent prrscesses: the continuing decomposition of the major institutions of the Soviet system, and the creation of a national market through deliberate state action and international pRessures for institutional isr>morpfiism,The ongoing reforms have had a powerf'ul impact on all strata of the Xxussian population, altering the fabric of social life, f n particrxlar, the largest Russian social group-the working class-has seen profc3und changes in its circumstances. Reforms have proceeded at a very unequal pace in different sectors of the economy and the incomplete and uncertain character of the Russian transition hinders a comprehensive account of the ongoir-tg changes in the wcsrlers>ituation. This chapter pursues the more modest goal of analyzing several trends that have become pronounced in the first decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The recent restructuring of the Russian coal industry will serve as a paradigm of radical reform that may shed light on the possible consequences of similar transitions in other sectors of the economy affecting other segments of Russia" working class.

The Numerical Bedine of rhe VVorfing Class A basic trend in the situation of the Russian working class has been its numerical declii-re,which is attributable to a number of obvious fiactors: the general modernization trend, which favors well-developed service, p~iblichealth, and information sectors mer manufacturing; the fiall in output and red~iceddemand fc3r industrial labor in the economies in transition; and the rapid and radical change

202

Victor ZasEavsky

czf the IXussian social structure following the emergence of entrepreneurial, selfemployed, and unemployed social groups. The precise dimensions of these phenomena are impossible to ascertain and can only be estimated. There are several reasons for this, First of ail, the state statistical service has been particularly hard hit by the hancial crisis, The Rt~ssiannational census, scfie-duled tcj take place in 1999 after the same ten-year interval as the previous five Soviet censuses, has been canceled for lack of hnds. The Central Statistical Committee thus has to rely on self-reports by enterprises and organizations, which for ;a variety of reasons tend tc>prcjvide the state organs with inadequate and unreliable information. The statistical categories used to describe and analyze the socioeconomic situation of the h r n e r l y planned economy have become increasingly irrelevant to the emerging market ecc>nsmy,complicating the socioeconomic analysis, Furthermore, there l-rasbeen a complete reversal in the systematic distortion of data. Whereas enterprises durixzg the Soviet period were prompted by the tenets of the centrally planned eccjnomy tc>systematically elverstate their output, the current economic situaticzn prompts the same enterprises to underrepclrt their orrtput and to overreport economic and social ixzdiators in order to evade taxes, tc> preserve their Iabor force, and tc> gain state subsidies. The Central Statistical Committee has little experience in veriQing and correcting data distorted in these ways, and it has no means of conducting control surveJrs. Fortunately>several research organiaticlns, such as the Rrrssisan Center for Public Opinicln Research (VTslOM), conduct national polls and wrious kinds of surveys on a regular basis. Tl-resedata complement and balance out the official statistics. According to data gathered by the Rrrssian Statistical Committee from 1992 to 1997, the share of "workers" in the categcjry czf Russian hired labor (a category that did not exist in Soviet statistics) declined from 64 percent in the early 1990s tc> 58.6 percent in 19137. Taking into accrjunt that in the same pericjd the size of the hired labor group decreased from about 72 million to about 65 million, the numerical strength of the group defined in Russian statistics as ""workers" had pnrsportionatly declined in the five-year period by at least 15 percent. The official statl~11cafpicture also l~ighlightsthe decline in industrial workers: from 16.3 milXion (22.6 percent of the employed population) in $992,to 1 t .Q million C 17.0 percent of the e m p l o ~ dpopatation) in 1997, comprising about 39 percent of all vvarkrs in the ltussian economy.' The VXsXOM data on rl~esell'Lidentification of respondents present a picture sirnilar to that seen in official statistics: fn $99.4the average share of respondents identi@ing themselves as workers was 41.5 perant; the same categcjry in 1997 had dropped to 36.5 percent. The actual numerical decline of the workiit~gclass-partic~llarb that in industry-might well be tower, if one takes into account the Ukrainian and Byelorussian ""guest workers" massively employed in IXussian construction and transportation industries, These migrant workrs have never been registered by official statistics, and their number cannot be established with any precision, although experts estimate that it runs into the miXIions. Clearly, the Russian working class has shrrrnk considerably since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

TABLE X 0.1 Unemployment, X 992- 1999 Ecortounz'catly Active Population

(millliot"ts)

Une~zpkoyed I%nentplojled (percent of active (milliz'ons) population)

workers Amorzg the U~zentplojled (percent)

*Juty 19981""July 1399 Sot'rtc~s:Kossiiskii st-utisticheskii~~zhegodnik: Ofitsial%or izdanie3 1998 (MQSCIW:C;oskomstat KF, 19981, pp. 173,185,189; Voprosf)slatistiki 0 (20001, p, 7%

The Russian Working Class and Unemployment Unemployment, both as a threat and as an, everyday reality, has had a major impact on labor relations in Russia. Xt has changed dramatically the system of stratification and power retations within enterprises and has contributed to rapid differentiation and stratification within the w r k i n g class, A major rift emerged between workers and senior management as the latter took on primary responsibility for the economic direction and survival of the ind~~strial enterprise. W e t h e r as owners of the enterprise or as representatives of the actual owners (even in cases when the enterprise is employee-owned), management has assumed the right to hire and fire labor. The ongoing growth of unemptoyment and the growing share of workers among the ~lnernptoyed(by 2998, members of the worEng class comprised twothirds of all unemployed; see Table 10.1) are tmro o~bvioustrends in the workforce in the first years of the IXussian transition. Unemployment has been the major factor determilling radical changes in the situation of Russian workers. The actual level of unemplo~ymentis higher than statistics indicate: Official figures do not account for hidden unemployment-a shortened w r l i week, sacalled "admixzistrative:vacations'' at reduced pay, and unpaid leaves of absence. Xn 2997, betwen 5.5 percent and 5.8 percent of the labor force was wrking a reduced schedule, and 3.5 percent was on unpaid leave,' According to another source, in 2996 and t 997, between t Q percent and 12 percent of the workforce of large and medium-sized enterprises had a shortened work schedule," Financial pressures continue to push. enterprise management to reduce manpower and to enforce labor flexibility. The rise in Russian unemployment acceler-

204

Victor Zastavsky

ated after the August 1998 financiai crisis, Unemployment in the first half of 1999 grew by 16,t percent compared to the first half of 1998. The number of unemployed exceeded 9.5 million by early 1999, peaked around 10 million by March of that year, and then began declining toward the 9-million mark. During the first decade of the Russian transition, aff major economic indicators were tlnifarmly negative. Although bursts of inflation and drops in economic output and in the real income of most Russians had been anticipated,?he severity of the crisis surprised most economists.' Rising unemployment had always been among the major anticipated manifestations of the crisis; the stark discrepancy b e ~ e e nthe precipitous decline both in the country" gmss national product and in industrial production and the relatively slow growth of unemployment constitutes another major surtlrise of the Russian transition. It should be noted that the perception of the inevitability of increasing unemployment has become deeply rooted in Russian p~zblicopinion. According to data cr~llectedby VTsIOM-which began monitoring popular attitudes tr~wardunemployment in 1993-tl~e fraction of respondents who considered unemployment among the most pressing and threatening social problems has been growing steadily: increasing frczm the initial 30 percent or so in 1993 to 45 to 48 percent in 1994-1995, By 1998, 66 percent of respondents called unemptoyment the mast worrisome issue facing Russian satiety.' The share of gainfillk employed respondents who feared losing their jobs in the near future because of staff reductions, elimination of their job, or liquidation of the enterprise remained high, fluctuating between 35 percent and 50 percente7Howvex; abo~lt50 percent of respondents who wczrried about losing their jobs expressed ccznfidence that they wczuld be able to find another job in the same trade or profession, This figure remained stable even after the A~lgrxst2998 financial. crisis, In fact, employment decline cr~ntinuedto tag wet1 behind the decline in GNP until the August 1998 crisis, As a resuit, the XXussian transition-unlike those in Pafand, the Czech Republic, and Br~lgaria-has been characterized by a rather slow rise in tlnemployment and a peculiar substitution of unemployment by wage reduction. This practice has had a major impact on the labor market and the situation of the workt~gclass. One of the legacies of the Sozviet system is a structure of production that adapts poorly to a marlcet economy. According to Nikczlai Shmefevk estimate,kost former Soviet enterprises-up to 70 percent of larger plants and 70 percent of state and collective farms-cannot be expected to survive in a market environment and are doomed to bankruptcy. Other analysts have come to an analogous conclusion that no more than a quarter of Russian enterprises are well positioned for market refc>rms,and the other three-quarters remain in need of radical and farreaching restructuring," According to estimates from the Ministry of the Economy, in t 997 the economically active population of 75 million persons ixzcluded, in additiczn to almost 8 million unemployed, between 12 and 13 million redt~ndant uvorkers who were still at their jobs."'

TABLE 10.2 Nonmonetary Payment of w ~ r k e r ~ " ~X 995-1 ~ , 997 Share ujfNonmonettzry Z)nywsc.ntsin 2'20 tul Wages

Enterprkes Pmctz'cit~gNannt onetary Paywsc.nts (percent)

Up to 10 percent 10-20 percent 2&30 percent Mare than 30 percent

1995 43.8 18.8 14.6 22.9

Given the environment of general ecr~nomicdecline, a strict adherence tc>the new bankruptcy laws w u I d have resutted in a catastrophic jump in unemployment. To prevent this, the state granted Russian enterprises a fairly long grace period during which it ce~ntinuedto prcwide subsidies. During this period, managers were expected to identifi new market opportunities and respond to budget constraints ixz ways that generated economic value, and workers, to adapt to and learn ~ Q I Wtc> survive in a new economic order. But this same grace period also made it passible for Xxussian managers to avoid laying off workers, These conditions predetermixzed the ensuing symbiosis between workers and management, based on their cc>mmc>ninterest in ensuring the enterprise" ssurvival and maintaining their incomes." The most common entry point into m a r k t activity p~rrsuedby former Soviet enterprises was the diversion of their production to supply the "innformal econczmym"-----the modern variant of the Soviet ""seclcznd economye'%nterprises became deeply involved in a range of ""iiformal profi~see-king"" activities that required "a low level of rule ehedience and high level of trust in personal relations"""2his environment created a basis for the muttrat dependence b e ~ e e nvvarkers and management, who were united by the need to conceal these transactions hom the state authorities. The growth of nclnmonetary payments to uvorkers has been an inevitable consequence of this hidden production for the informal economy, Payments in kind-in the prt~dtuctsof one" own enterprise, to be resotd in the marketplace, or in goods received by the enterprise as a resutt of barter with other firms-are becoming increasingly freqrrent. In 1997, the machine-building industry paid as much as 24 percent of all wages in nonmonetary form, as shown in Table 10.2. In most cases, these payments amounted tcz a further reduction in wages, w i ~ i c h workers accepted for lack of an alternative. Workers generally take advantage of the informal economy by exploiting the resources czf their enterprises for private gain. For instance, they spend part of their

206

Victor Zastavsky

vvorkday working czn ""personal projects" uulifizing the equipment, electricity, and resources of the enterprise, and selling the produas of their labor on the market. This prodtlction is not accounted for in statistics, nor is the incr~mefrcm it declared for taxation purposes, Instead, it becomes part of the shadow economy* Accordixzg to Leonid Kasals and Kosaiina Itryvkina, the share of the workday dewted to private prrsductic~ncan be estimated at about 12 to 15 percent, and the share of enterprise" resources utilized bp uvarkers for their private production totals about 8 percent.'TThe management is well aware of this practice, with about half of all managers and directors cr~nsideringit ""normal under the present conditions," The rest condemn it as leading to a decline czf iabor discipline and to the their attitude, management normaily tol""enterprise's degradation.""' "atever erates this practice because it reinforces the symbiotic relationship between uvarkers and managers and contributes to the enterprise" social equilibrium. This mode of adaptation to declining wages and hequent payment delays is more widespread in state and privatized enterprises than in private enterprises,

The Trade-O@BeWeen Unemployment and Wage Reduction A major trend in the Russian labor market during the first decade of transition has been ""aagtation without restructuring:" as Kostlislav Kayelpshnikov put it.' ' Lacking external political support after the collapse of the party and the disintegration of ministerial structures, and Dcing the double uncertainty about the general direction of refc3rms and their own positions in view of the rapidly ci~angingproperty rights, directors and top managers have been eager to avoid layoffs by reducitzg wages. This tendency has been exacerbated by the tradition of hoarding labor-a holdc~verfrom the centrally planned Soviet economy>with its ubiquitous shortages of labor, suppties, and equipment," Afraid that they would not be able to recruit new workers should the economy recover or the state resume its subsidies, the disc>riented management attempted to minimize cuts tcs their uvarkforces, particutariy to their skilXed worker reserves. Soviet legislation that made enterprises responsible for paying three months' worth of unemployment benefits tcs laid-off workers also prrsmpted administrators to look for solutions other than shedding workers outright. The solutions they found were various forms of wage reductions: a &erne on raises ixz an environment of ir-tcreasing inflation; direct pay cuts; delays in payments; reduced wrEring hours; temporary layoffs ("administrative vacations" with mininlum pay); and unpaid leaves czf absence, The proportion of the total costs of grod~lctiondevoted to wages has considerably decreased, making employmrmt of smperfluous wrkers fess onerr3us. The czngczing privatkation initialjy affected the restructuring of the iabor market in a contradictory fashion, simultaneously providing ir-tcentives to lay off superfluous labor and promoting the substitution of wage reductic>nfor unemptc~yment. The f'ormaf change from state property to private property has been one of the key developments of the period; yet privatkzation did not transform former

state enterprises overnight into real private firms working to meet market demands and controlled by private owners who select managers capable of running ef5cient productic~n.Instead, Russian privatization has been a gradual process: As many enterprises became nominally employee-owned, ""the managers-in the name of all employees-cxrnti1111ed to dominate both the formal ownership and the reins of control of the very firms the government hoped would change with privatization.""""The first wave czf privatization has resulted in the predominance of inside ownership and blurred the distinction between real and nomitzai omers. The implicatic~nsof the new o~wnershipstructures fc3r the development of tlnernptcjyrnent have been considerable, Xn the early phase of privadzation, the key priority of senior management was to retair-t power and to avoid outside shareholder efhrts to change the management." Although the workers, as shareholders, putatively gained uttirnate ownership czf the privatized enterprises, their power to intervene itz the day-to-day management or to share itz the profits has been very limited." h many cases their nominal tswnership had a negative effect czn the economic situation of the enterprise: GeneraXty, the greater the share of ownership itz the hands of employees, the sharper the decline ir-t outp~ztand itzvestment.'" The tendency of enterprise management to ignore the new legat provisions and rely on the paternalistic style inherited from the Soviet period has become even mtjre pronotlnced. But managers can hold onto traditional paternalistic levers only to the extent that they can guarantee workers>ob security, Thus, nomir-tai ownership proved compatible with defensive restructuritzg that de-layed the shedding of redtlndant emplo-yees. This prrxess can be seen in the numerous attempts by various workerskollectives to take control over hiring and firing rules and procedures at their places of employment. Facir~gthe problem of redtlndancy, management has tended to make decisicsns based on meritocratic principles, first laying off workers with poor disciplinary records as well as older, less skilled, auxiliary, and female workers, The workers' collectives, more coocerned with maintaf ning ""sociaf justice:\sften have tried tro farce management to retain redundant ernplc3yees who have seniority or who have greater need of ernployment (stilch as single mothers, or the parents of very p u n g children), This pmdice has helped maintain social peace in the enterprise but also has damaged the prospects czf younger and better-qualified workers," The drunlcenness czn the job, absenteeism, and other violations of babor disciplitze that always plagued Soviet enterprises have diminished in frequency, hc~weverbsince wrkers with potor disciplinary records were the first victims of layoffs. Another consequence has been the virtual abandonment of the external labor m a r h t by privatized enterprises, which have come to rely exctusi.rely on the internal redistribution of labor. M a t is the socioeconomic significance czf the substitution of wage reduction for unemployment? As is the case with any contradictory social development, it is difficult to defend a strictly ptssitive or negative evafuation. As Leonid Gsrdon and Eduard KIopov argue, this strateg essentially involves choosing the lesser evil. Qn the one hand, the practice of maintaining redundant employees hin-

208

Victor Zastavsky

dered economic reforms and the rationalization of the lxussian economy, in the long run contributing to the mass disillusionment itz reforms and democracy On the other hand, it dissipated the accumulated social tensions and neutralized to some extent the threat of sociaI explosicln and Weimar-like developments in Itussia." "mRussian analysts have also argued that by avoiditzg radical cuts in the wrkforce, the management not only reinforced the old paternalistic stereotype of defending the vvorking coflective from external threat but also increased its real control over tlze workforce and its ability to exercise disciplinary pressure,'" It might be more fruitful to ccznsider the question from a different perspective: Was the unempfc3yment-wage reduction trade-off a policy consciously pursued by the Rz~ssiangovernment in preference to other options, or was it a largely itzevitable result of the structural prrsperties of the Soviet eccznomy and of the Soviet economic culture and mind-set of the Ilussian, population? According to the late flya Zaslavsky, a iongtixne student of the Russian labor marlet, the Chernomyrdin gcwernment detiberately engineered the phenomenon ofwage reduction to hinder the growth of unempl~yment,thus restoring the w d - k n o w Saviet practice of guaranteeing employment at the expense of efficiency," Yet although wage reduction as a substitution for unemplo-yment might have been welcomed by the IXussian government, which was justifiably preoccupied with the social stresses that high unemployment would entail, it seems unlikely that the practice was consciously pursued as a matter of policy. Gcsvemment control over the economy was insufficient to have supported such a large-scale, centralized policy. The case of the excess wage tax-a short-lived attempt by the go.l.ernment to maintain high employment levels through active intervention-can be cited as evidence of insufficient state control, This tax was predicated on the idea that the average wage at any enterprise should not exceed an amotlnt equal to five times the minimum wage. If an enterprise" wage fund exceeded permissible levels, that enterprise paid a tax on the diEEeren~e.~TThe excess wage tax did serve as an itzcentive to retain surplus labor; however, it proved tlnenforceabte, Management circumvented the tax by keeping mges to redundant workers Zow or by sending these wrkers on "administrative leave" at minimum pay, which enabled managers to pay higher wages to the rernainitzg workers as w l l as to themselves. In 1996, the tax was ab~>lished,~" Xt is more realistic to assume that the practice of wage reduction as a substitution for unemployment emerged spontaneously itz thousands of state and privatized enterprises facing the same ecr~ncsmicand psychological constraints, In this respect, the habitual paternalistic poticy szf the directors and top managers of enterprises in small "campany toms: wilere these enterprises represented the main or even the only source of employment, was especially important, By reducing wages or shortening the work week, or both, they avoided massive lapffs, reduced social tensions, and prevented open manifestations of protest. Pressures on the part of the regional administrations, which usually intensified in preelectoral periods, also played a significant rote: Exerting negative pressure, sume governors and regional admir-tistratorsthreatened enterprise directors with cut-

ting off electricity and water supplies and interrupting communication lines in the case of massive layoffs. Examples of positive pressure include agreements beween directors and regional administrations to maintain temporarily excessive labor in exchange for tax breaks and other concessions to enterprises, The substit~ltionof wage reduction for unemployznent undoubtedly accorded with the values and expectations of most wrkers. As I have noted elsewhere, although economic reforms have disrupted the reproduction of state-dependent workers, a very considerable part of the employed population still bdongs to this categr~ry."Fmm the very beginning of the transition, opinion polls invariably demonstrated that more than half of the respondents fiavored policies guaranteeing continued employment and minimizing individ~lalrisk over those directed at achieving higher prr3ductivity and higher mges." In the same vein, the 1997 and 1998 surveys demonstrated that in the case of an economicatty dire situation at one's enterprise, 53 percent and 49 percent of working respondents, respectively, favc~red""peserving jobs" even if wages were paid irregularly, partially; or sometimes not at all, whereas only 15 percent and 18 percent preferred to be dismissed and to seek unemployment benefit^,'^ Next to the practice of wage redtlction, the less-than-satisfactory performance of the state employment services and local employment centers bears considerable responsibility for the ~lnemploymentixz Russia remaining much lower than expected. Only a minority of tinemployed have registered with the state emplo-yment service, In the 1990s, the share of the officially registered unemployed osciliXated between one-skth and one-third of the total number (the figrare for the first half of 1999 being only 16.4 percent),"' The starvation level of unemplo-yment benefits (20 percent to 25 percent of an average wage, largely unindexed and hence constantly eroded by ixzfiation) obviously provides little ixzcentive for registratic~n.Moreover, many workers find the very pnrscedure of registering for unemptoyrnent benefits humiliating, especlalXy since the outcome of an application is uncertain. Lastly, the average length of time between jobs has increased steadily, from 5-13.months in 1993 to 8.8 months in 1997 and even longer." The proportion of unemptoyed seeking a new job for more than one year increased from about 19 percent ixz 1993 to 33 percent in 1996 and has contixzued to grow.

New Di~isiortsVVirhilz the WarKng Class Rapid and profound changes in social stratificatic~ngive rise to new social groups and aggregates, and widen the gap b e ~ e e ngroups in terms of economic wellbeing and opportunity. The fact is, political and managerial ekes of Soviet-type societies have proved capable of transmuting their political positions and resources into economic capital, giving rise to ""gotitical capitalism."""The growing political and economic inequality between workers and managers has become one of the most pronounced characteristics of the early phase of the transition. Another feature of the evolving socioeconomic system is the growing degree of internal differentiation and stratification in the Russian working class, whose

210

Victor ZasEavsky

various subgroups and segments have been strongly but very unevenly affected by tl-re ongoing social changes, In the Soviet era, stratification was largely engineered by the yarty-state, which combined production priorities with internal stability considerations, The systern of ""organized consensus," based on the ir1dividual5 dqpedence on the state and on bureaucratic redistribution, guaranteed job security, price stability%and a largely egaliarian income policy, A peculiar, semi-frree labor market existed, in which educational and labor qkxalifications o&en correlated ir~verselywith wage levels. Job turnelver, rather than higher proditlctivity and better skills, became the major bargaining resource of workers,'TTI.te system fiavored blue-coltar workers over white-collar employees and professionals, and workers employc;d itz heavy. industry, especially in the military-industrial cr~mpfex,over those in crlnsumer goods and services, Having become increasingiy dyshnctional under perestroika, this system totally unraveled a h r the Soviet Union collapsed, The hardshipwof the economic transition have fallen very unevenly on different segments of the working c h s . WOare the clear winners and losers in the transition? Given the ongoing economic restructuritzg, the situation is too complex and fluid fbr any definitive ccznclusions; but some broad trends point tc> a new internal differentiation of the working class. This differentiation is based increasingly on market principles, with skills and the type of enterprise becoming crucial determinants of a worker" economic situation. The result has been a growing gap between the wages czf workers employed by state enterprises and those in private enterprises. A similar gap has opened between wages and job security enjc~yedby skilled workers and by medium- to loow-skilled ones. The first phase czf Russian privatization resulted in the emergence of two different kinds of entities alongside the traditional state enterprises: privati~ed,or semi-state enterprises, and private entrepreneurial start-up firms, One of the distinguishing features of the period has been the passage of the best-skilled, most competitive workers fmm state and semi-state enterprises to the new private sector." The number of workers employed in this fast-growing sector increased more than tenfold between 1990 and 1994 and has kept growing ever since." The private sector is composed of relativeljr small firms that employ punger, betterskiled workers, Wages in private firms are usually one and a half to two times higher than those in the rest of the economy. Moreover, the majority ofthose employed in the private sector hold second jobs. According to V"TslOM data, i r ~2996 this group ccznstittlted only 23 percent of the toral labor force; but amclng the category of second-job holders, 56 percent were empfc~yedby private firmsS3' Workers employed by private firms represent a ""seff-seXected'"ro~~p that differs considerably from the rest not only in its age and skill pfiofile, but alscs in terms czC wages, work motivation, and vvtzrk satisfaction. Skilled workers and technicians previously employed by the military-industrial complex that have made the leap tc>private firms are a mainstsly of the new middle class. Analyzing the Xxussian population" evolving setf-identification, Liudrniia Khakhutina found that in 1998, 84 percent of respondents workitzg in state enterprises identified

themselves as lower- or working-class, and 16 percent, as middle-class, whereas in private enterprises 55 percent of respondents identified themselves as middleclass, and only 45 percent, as wc~rlcers.~~ Private firms depend on marliet success. In the conditions of a deepening economic crisis, they do not provide any job security. Moreover, the o w e r s as a r~ale mistrust collective bargaining and firmly oppose the very idea of trade union membership among their personnel. This has not provoiced any serious resistance on the part of the workers, for two itzterdependent reasons: First, as socialogical studies have demonstrated, on the whole, "wages and working conditions in the private sector have proved to be considerably better than in the state one.'"s" Second, from the very beginning of economic transition, private enterprises attracted the most prc~ductive,energetic, and enterprising workers, whc~valued achievement over security and were prepared to accept risk, confident of their bargair-tingpower. The moment of collective self-organization in the private sector has not arrived yet. It will, if and when the group of privately employed workers grows nurnericatt-yand Ioses its somewhat exclusive character, Skiled workers who stayed on at state and semi-state enterprises have adapted differently to working in a market system. These workers try to enhance their already strong bargaining position vis-a-vis management bp monopolizing their acq~~ired occupational skills and capitalizir-tg on their know-how and experience, Various comparative sociological studies of the sittlation of wrkers in state and in privatized enterprises-machine-building firms with relatively modern technology, and food and textile enterprises with rather obsolete technology-have demonstrated that a gap has been growing between wages, fringe benefits, and job security of skilled workers and medium- to low-skilied ones.") Ckarty, the market is rewaluating and putting ia premium on worker skills; but it would be a gross cmrsimplifrcatic~nto explain the process as the normal operation of blind market farces, During the Soviet period, when production and employment were expandir-tg, many factories either established their own training facilities or relied on external training institutions, In the new era of diminishing or nonexistent state subsidies, faced with growirzg competition, both state and privatized enterprises have been dismantling their training facilities so as to cut costs. Initially the enterprises tried to compensate by providing on-the-job training to newly hired employ.ees.40 They encountered strong resistance on the part of skilled workers, who refused to transfer their specific skills to young workers and potential cr~mpetitorsin a time of contracting employment opportunities. Today; on-the-job training is practically dead bemuse skilled workers will not accept apprentices or other newcomers tc-,their w r k teams, As noted aiready by Max Wber, the market situation of individuals and groups lacking property depends upon the value of their labor and the degree of control they are able to exercise over their worli=ingcr~nditionsand the prrsduction process." hradoxicatty the value of worker skills and experience during the Russian transition has been enhanced not so much through the workerskontrol

212

Victor ZasEavsky

czf technologically advanced production processes as through their specific knowledge of the obsolete and worn-out equipment that factories cannot replace because they lack iwestment funds. Moreover, privatized enterprises are now forced to loolc for one-time orders that in turn require frequent readjusting and retooling of eqkxipment, as well as rapid learnitzg of new operations on the part of the laborer. Sltilled wrkers are particularly favc~redby such circumstances, since they adapt better to changing conditions, possess transkrable skills, and are in high demand in the Xabor market, induditzg that at private enterprises, Even after the cczllayse of Soviet-style political cr>ntrr>f,skilled wczrkers felt secure and independent vis-A-vis management because they were able to contrc~l the production process and limit the entry of new competitors. Their bid for drastically increased wages also has been successful, judging by the reported wage differentials: Their average wage m;ry be 3 to 4 times higher than that of mediumor low-skilled machine operators and assembly line workers, not to mention their various fringe benefits and considerable job security.'T?Ih development testifies also to the high levels of solidarity achieved within the privileged group of skilled workers. There have been increasitzg attempts on the part of management tc>crlunteract the growing bargaining power of skilled wczrkers by intrr>ducing fixed-term contracts. Normally such contracts increase labor market RexibiXity and Ccilitate lapffs of redundant labor. The introduction of fixed-term crlntracts is tc>orecent a develoymrmt in the Russian economy to discuss its full significance, The first reports indicate that IXusslian, managers, at least initially, hope the fmed-term contracts will tie highly skilled workers to the enterprise and establish ""src~ngermanagerial cczntrol over their wc~rlc."~~ The privileges gained by highly skilled uvarkers have been achieved at the expense of other workers and of lower management, The growing segmentation of labor is the first result of ""src~ng"workerskbifity to exploit their po"iti"n for their own aclvantage. Conversely, unabie to control the ""srong" "segment of labor, management increases its control over the majority of workers whose maitz characteristic is that they are fully replaceable. These lcm- to medium-skilled workers are increasingly dependent both on the administration and on skilled uvorkrs. They are especiall-)l vulnerable to production cuts, since they are first to be laid off. Such practices as tlnpaid leaves of absence, wage arrears, and work week reductions are particrrlarly widespread in this group, Moreover, as these uvarkers are deprived of a functioning system of traitzir-tgand promotion, they lose itzcentives that might induce them to acquire new skills and achieve upward social me>bility. A decline in labor discipline and quality czf producticzn, and a high labor turnover among lower skilled workers, seem to be inevitable consequences of the growing segmentation of the working class. As Simon Clarke has justifiably concluded, ""This development does not bode welt for the development czf any sohdarity withhi the workforce as a whole, nor for the prospeas of 'social partnership%etween wrkers and management, nor for the effective development of the quitXitp and efficiency of production."*'

The monopoly over knowledge and skiIIs enjoyed by the most qualified workers today is a temporary phenomenon, however, In a vibrant economy with increasing ~ u t p t l and t employment and regular investment in new technc>logies, particular knowledge and specific slciIfs rapidly become obsolete, Both the state and the enterprises will eventually have to invest substantial resources ir-t expanding vc~catic~nal technical schot~ls,colleges, and other training institutic~ns.Skilled uvarkers are oAen well aware of the temporary character of their bargaining pasitions and privileges, but this only adds ta their determixzation to capitalize on their advantages in a cr~ntractingeconomy. Consequently, at this early stage of the transition, market reforms have already produced considerable tensions and increased open ir-tequality in ir-tcomes,consumption, and economic opport~lnity amclng digerent segments of the wrking class,

Trade Unions in Transition Given rampant inflation, growing unemployment, and a general fiatt in the workers' standard of living on one hand and broad democratization on the other, it stands to reason that independent trade unions should emerge as primary defenders of workers\ights and interests. After the collapse of the Communist party, no other organization co~lldbe expected to hear the workers2rievances over allegedly unjustified dismissals, demotions, and non yaymrmt of wages, and other abrzses by management and owners." Yet these reasonable expectations have not materialized, The reasons for the lack of trade ~lnionrevival illustrate both the strength of psychological and c~lfturafattitudes inherited from the past and the peculiar state of labor issxres in the first decade of the Russian transition. Official Soviet trade unions have never played the role of institutionali~edchannels for the articulation and aggregation of worker$ interests and grievances. They have always been a specialized organ of the party-state, a governmental tabor qency charged with adrnixzi~teringthe social insurance fund and mobilizing workers to fulfil1 prtlductit~nplans. At the factory level they played a dual role. Firstly, trlgether with the management, they deknded the ""iterests of the labor collective:" using the limited political and bureaucratic means at their disposal to mini~nizethe prt~ductic~n targets impr~sedon the enterprise by central planners. Secondty, they f'uncticzned as representatives of the administration, inducing workers to meet establishd plan targets, and smoothing away tensions between the adrnixzistration and the workers, In this second role, the trade unictn functionaries participated in ""conflict commissions" and had the right to appeal on behalf of individual wrkers to party and ~lnionft~nctionariesabove the level of the factory management. Xn addition, focal trade union commissions played a role in the Soviet redistributive state by srxpemising a wide range social services for workers, such as housing, kindergartens, sports facilities, and medical centers run by enterprises. At feast two generations of Soviet workers lived in the absence of a collective right to strike and a defacto prohibition on organizing true trade unions. The

214

Victor Zastavsky

wave of strikes during the last pears of perestroika served notice that the right of workers to form their own trade unions and engage in collective action w u l d be one of the principal objective measures of the democratic evolution of the IXussian state and society, Russian reformers understood this. Characteristically, a Yeltsin presidential decree ""On Social Partnership and the Resolution of Labor Disputes" was published in November 1991, a few weeks before the format dissolution of the Soviet Union. By 1992, the Russian Trilateral Commission for the Regulation of Social and Labor Relations, consisting of representatives of the gcwernment, employers, and trade unicsns, had been set up to promote a social partnership and to diminish the negative impact of market reforms on the populati~n.~" The right to organize trade unions and enforce sanctions against employers by withdrawing labor was upheld by a number of laws and decrees adopted in 1995 and 1999 that regrxlated the activhy of trade unions, labor disputes, strikes, and cr~llectiveagreements. This legislation was a significant step tcsward the dernocratization of labor relations and liberation of the worlifarce fmm state domination. But these were not democratic measures for democracy's sake only; As Walter Connor aptly noted, from the very beginning the Yeltsin gotiernment was interested "in extracting ifself h m the owner-manager-paymaster role in the economy as the beginning of a move toward a referee roXe between the itzterests of Xabor and those of the yet-vague category of owners-employers."47 After the collapse of the Soviet system, some representatives of what Leonid Gordon termed the old ""sate pseudo-trade unions""" abandoned any pretensc to independence and joined the specific managerial organs responsible for labor relations, Other functionaries of the czfficiai trade unions, having lost their particular position itz the party-state system, drifted toward the defense of the interests of hired labor. One would have expected the dissolutic~nof the So>vietCentral Council of "TradeUnions and its replacement by the Federation of the Xndependent Trade Unions of Russia to have real significance; but even though the new tlnions are ostensibjy independent, they continue to be burdened by the Soviet legacy. They stiIX rely on inherited welfare and distribution ft~nctionsto retain their memberships, although the benefits available for distribution are dwindling rapidly even in the large, state-owned industrial plants, as enterprises drop the extensive social services they can no longer support, "The fact that there has been no organizational split between management-orient-cd and worker-oriented factic~nswithin the corps of yrrsfessional trade unionists underlines the transitional character of the present-d;z)ltrade unions in IXussia, The ongoing economic crisis and the attit~ldesof trade unionists both contributed to the slcsw instittlti~naltransfc~rnationof former Soviet trade tlnions, lxussian enterprises are desperately searching for a particular niche in the marketplace. Their starting position in market competition depends decisively on the share of the former state prtlperty the enterprise managed to privatize or control and on the ties the enterprise estabiished wit11 state organs, the revenrze service, do create a combanks, and foreign trade organizations. These circ~~mstances

monalitp of interests between workers and managers-owners that paradoxicaiiy coixzcides with the Soviet propaganda clichk asserting a presumed commonality of interests between workers and management under socialism. Today" real commonality of interests slows the transformation of Russian official trade unions into truly ir-tdependcntworking-class organizatians. Moreovel; the traditic~nalactivities and the entire life experience of the professionaf trade unionist cadres better suit collaboration with the enterprise administration in defending the itzterests of the enterprise as a whole, rather than defending the workersYnterests against those of managers and administratc>rs.The trade unionists have not yet developed a clear perception of their role as independent representatives of hired labor. The official trade unions were so thorc~ughlydiscredited in the So>vietperiod that habit and inertia more than anything else explain their still considerable membership today. According to the data of a $995'irTs1OTv.I survey; only 24 percent of wc~rkerrespondents agreed that trade unions could be trusted fully or partially, whereas 55 percent of respandents asserted that trade unions could not be trusted at aXl."?n polls ranking p~rblicorganizations by the level of popular mistrust they generate, Rtrssian trade unions have come to OCCUPY the highest position.'" The conclrrsion drawn by Joseph Blasi, Maya Krc~umova,and Douglas Kruse, that "the weakness of trade unions duritzg economic reform was predestined by their past,"%nevertheless requires a qualification. The evolution of the old trade unions has been strongly affected by the emergence of true grassroots organizations of workers. Created as a rule by workngclass militants and activists who participated in the strikes and other cr~llective actions that marked the very end of the Gorbachev period, the new trade unions broke with the old Soviet tradition of lumpir-tgworkers and senior management tc>gether in the same unic~n.They act as true organimtic~nsof hired workers, articulating and defending the specific interests of certain well-defined groups of workers, A classic example is the Independent Trade Union of Miners, which became widely h o w n during the last years of Gorbachev" rule for its steadfast deknse of coal miners2nterests. In their origin, traditions, and leadership, the new trade unions have no connection whatsoever with the old trade ~lnionnetwork. An acute csmpetitit~nfor membership has begun between old and new trade unions. Despite the fact that new trade unions, like their Western counterparts, have a democratic structure and promise to protect the interests of their members on the natic~nallevel as wefl as defend them against local abtrses, they have had trouble maicing headway against the old trade unions." According to a nittianwide poll conducted by VElOM ir-t 2994 (see Table 10,3), 77 percent of ail wrkers considered themselves trade union members, but fewer than 10 percent had joined new trade unions, and the overwhelming majority still belonged to the old ~lnions. The decline of the Independent Trade U ~ ~ i of o nMiners from natic~nalvisibility and enormous success in mobilizing members f;or collective actions to total insignificance is a particubarljr interesting case that is discussed separately later in

216

Victor Zastavsky

TABLE 10.3 Workers%ttitudes Toward Trade &ions, X 994 (in percent of survey respondents) Belorzgirzg to Tracje Unions Members of old unions Members of new unions Not mernbers af any union L3o not knc~w

68 9 15 8

Unions are playing a positive role Unions are playing a negative role Unions do not play any serious role L3o not knc~w

12

9 64 15

E v ~ ~ u u o~f ~t hQ e Role Y ~ of Traditional artd New Unions Interests of ordinary permons are better defended: By traditional unions 19 By new unions 15 Unions do not defend ordinary persczns' interests 66

Sou~cscs:Ekonnmkkseskie i suisial'eye pperenaenj!: Monitoring a b s h c ~ s n mneniia o 4 (1995), p. 78; f,eonid Gordan, ""Patozl-tenienaernnyh rabatnikov v Rossii 90-kh godov:"

,"ior-sial?lzu-lr~td~~z"f"e kledovntziia, vczl. 7 (Moscow: IMEMC), 1997), p. 38,

this chapter. In contrast, other new trade unions-for example, those of longshoremen, locomotive engineers, automobile industry workers, pilots, and air traffic controllers-have noticeably strengthened the positions of these occupatic~nalgroups vis-8-vis managers, olwners, and the state. Characteristically, most attempts bp management to pressure and intimidate trade union leaders and activists have been directed against the new ~~nions." Yet the development of new, independent trade unions that succeed in artic~llatingthe interests and grievances of their members has so far been slow and limited, An analysis czf strike activity elucidates the reasons for the obvious underdevelopment of Russian trade tlnions. The legalization of strikes was one czf the most important achievements czf Russian labor. AAcr the collapse of the Soviet regime, strikes became a familiar way of presenting employeesYemands and grievances when other available methods czf pressuring employers failed, Between 1993 and 1997, the annual number of strikes grew from a few hundred to 17,000, and the number of strike participants ranged from more than 100,000 to about 900,000 annually (see TabXe 10.4),

TABLE 10.4 Striks in Russia, X 991-1997

Ear

Namber of Stvikel-f (tl~ousnrads)

To&E NQME ber of Strikes

Strikes in Industry

Strikczs in the hel-Energy Sector

Strikes in Higher Educatz'o~

"The available data show that the o~verwhelmingmajority of strikers belonged to such occupationat categories as teachers, miners, and to a Iesser extent, employees of public health service. The rest of the Russian employed population has rarely used strikes to pressure employers. Except for miners, most blue-collar vvarkrs not only have never: participated in a strike but have never icnown any person who did, Deeply ingrained deference to authority and unlimited faith in the strong boss remain embedded in workershmentafity, especially among the low-skilled, Sociologists cond~~cting interviews wirl-r workers time and agaizl encounter the old So>vietclichis-that strikes benefit only their organizers and assorted troublemakers, and that a goad manager or boss can defend uvarkersYnterests far mare effectively than can workers themselves, Accorditzg to the 29994 survey conducted by VTsIOM, 35 percent of respondents thcsught strikes did more harm than good, and only 23 percent thought the oppclsite, 611aracteristlcatty, half of all respondents in the group of low-skilled workers and only a quarter of skilled ones cr~nsideredstrikes more harmful than beneficial.'" A perception of strikes as socially disruptive, counterproductive, or even, illegal remains widespread among the majority of workers and state bureaucrats, Sharitzg this popular perception, one minister of the fuel and energy indt~strydenied the very right of workers to> strike: ""The miner has no more ri&t to leave the ntine [to participate in a strike] than a soldier to drop his arms."55 But the Soviet legacy of popular dependence on paternalistic authority only partially explains the obvious weakness of the trade union movement and the rarity of strikes in this early stage of Russian transition. The discrepancy between the number of respondents who prrsfessed po"itve attitudes toward strikes and the number of strike participants is very revealing. In the regular surveys con-

218

Victor Zastavsky

ducted bp VTsIOM, even though between 10 and 15 percent czf respondents expressed their personal readiness to participate in strikes, the level of actual participatic~nremained 10 to 20 times lower than the level of willingness."' A realistic assessxl-lent of the impact the strike will have on the worker" personal material prospects is the likdy cause of this discrepancy Attittrdes tc>wardtrade trnions, strikes, and other forms of colective action, like those toward liberal democracy in general, are not so much determined by the legacy of Soviet practice and mentality as they are a function of the postcammunist structure of economic opyr~rtunity.~~ The major ct>stacles to trade union activism are a contracting economy and the lack of internally generated capital acc~lnnulationfor investment. For the majority of former Soviet enterprises, the fc3undations of self-sustained growth have not yet been laid. Instead, crisis adaptation and sheer survival of enterprises as production units represent the major preoccupations of the working population. The search for a market niche unleashes powerful competitive interests that fracture the solidarity of enterprises in the same industry and simultaneously engender overarching common interests between workers and management within the same enterprise. Although wrkers might have clearly defined grievances and demands, they might see no concrete economic or political actors to whczm these demands ml-ry be realistically addressed. The overwhelming objectives of organized unionism remain increasing wages and improved vvarking conditions, Faced with economic contraction and the defensive restrtlcttrring practiced both by state and by privatized enterprises, mczst wc3rkers cannclt participate in organizing for csfIecti7ie action. Only yarticutar groups of wrlcers and specialists that enjoy a high level of control in vitally important sectors of the economy can use unions ta pursue their economic goals. Btrt in cr~nditionsof growing unemployment and deepening ecrznomic and financial crisis, most wrkers have become even more dependent czn management and employers than they were under the Soviet regime. As Gixnpelson and Liypoldt have justifiably concluded: "The centralized system of labor administration has been largely repfaced by managersVdiscretion. Within the evolvitzg indrrstrial relations, the role of trade ~lnionshas not yet been settled."" The paucity of strikes and the vestigial rcde of trade unic~nsin crlntemporary XXusslia is ample proof, if proof be needed, that Russia" transition to the market is inc~rnplete.~' The ewfutic~nof an independent trade trnion mr>vementhas barely begun, It is significant, however, that trade union activities in general and strikes in particular are finally receiving closer attention from the mass media and the public. Most importantly, Rtrssian wc3rlers have acquired both legal and pradical possibilities to deknd their interests through collective action, to organize their trade unions, and to negotiate at least acceptable if not favorabie collective agreemats-agreemats that go beyond formal declarations, into the tr ncharted territory of real labor defense.

Restructuring the Coal Industry: The Paradax of the MinersWavement The rise and falt of the Ixussian coal minershovement and the profound restructuring of the coal mine ir-tdustrynow ~lndervuayhighlight the possible course and socioeconomic consequences of truly radical reforms in the Russian economy. The minershovements in communist Poland, in the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent itz communist Romania played an itnportant role in the dissolution of these systems, The unique role of miners and their cr~llectiveactic~nsin precipitating ""re rapid destruction of the social order that existed far seventy years?" has been acknowledged by such authoritative observers as Corbachev and Ueftsin."' The trajectory of the Russian minershovement-which started by presenting economic demands, then supporting democratic and market reforms, and finally demanding the renationalizatiorr of the coal itzd~stry~ prohibition of p"vate o~wnershipof land, and resignation of the democratically ejected president-continues to puzzle ana)ystseb1 In the last years of perestroika, Soviet miners created the first independent trade union. In 1989, they organized the first mass industrial strike since the 1962 Novocherkassk revolt, which had been suppressed by the regime with armed force. Xn the t 989 strike, mitzers advanced broad economic demands. Two successive strikes in 1991 added demands for radical political changes, including the abolition of the siirxgte-party regime and the centrally planned economy; the introdr~ctionof political pluralism and a market economy; and the itzdependence of nc~n-RussianSoviet republics. A few years later, fc3llowing the ban on the Communist party and the dissalution the Soviet Union, democratization, liberalization of prices, privatization of state property, and other reforms, the miners shifted their support away from liberal-democratic forces and tomrd the regenerated Communist party as welt as other nationalist and imperialist forces. Along the way, the independent trade ~lnionlost all of its infiuence among the mir-ters and in the country at large, while the minershms mc~bil-izationdissipated into passive acceptance of and adaptation to the hardships of restructuring, The paradox of the minershovements in Soviet-type societies-the "mitzers" m0.l.e tomrd democracy and bacVa-has generated a ccznsiderabie literat~re."~ The rapid mobilization of miners in the last years of perestroika and the radicaliization of their demands, which seemir-tglycontradicted their itnmediate material interests, may be explained by a combination of factors."' By the 1 9 8 0 ~the ~ resources needed to maintain the extensive growth of the economy had been depleted, leading to a continuous, long-term decline ir-t rates of economic growth and labor prt~djtrctivity.The old social contract between the regime and the ~ C I ~ U Iation began to crrrmbte, as its economic and political costs could no longer be met. The fall in the standard of living was particularly hard on the miners for several reasons, The miners had been the highest-paid category of wrkers, in cr~mpensation far their arduous and dangerous work and their ofien appalling living

220

Victor ZasEavsky

conditions. The nominally high pay, however, did not provide access to foodstuffs and consumer goods that were becomitzg itzcreasingly scarce in the general economic decline. The danger inherent in mine working conditions had generated among the members of work teams an exceptionally high level of mutual dependence and a general prepxedness for collective action. Already known for their exceptional ability to organize for collective action and strikes, and not only in Russia,"' the miners were hrther motivated to mobilize by Corbachev's liberalization as w d as by their sense of ecrznc>micdeprivatic~n.The weakening c~fthe cczercive apparatus that led to a diminishing fear of repression was accompanied by an opening up of societti; which magnified "the pressrxres that Western material standards placed s n the institutions and stability of these [Soviet-type] regimes."""" This last point is especially important far understanding what prompted the coal miners, working ir-t an industry heavily dependent on state subsidies, to demand market reforms. Steyhen Csowley" rejection of rational choice in favor of "crrIturaf factors, in particular the ideolczgicaf frameworks that miners construaed in order to make sense of their situation,""""underestimates the eagerness of Soviet citizens to join the global material civilization created by Western material progress. The opening of society during perestroib brought home the hard fact that the Soviet system was lagging hopelessly behir-td the West ir-t the competition for higher standards of living, As the best-organized group in Soviet society?coal miners expressed the growing sense of relative deprivation and tremendous frustration that characterized the Soviet working poprzlation as a whole. They were mcztivated both by the ecrznc>micexpectations of selling coat for hard currency on world markets and by their quest for social justice.----a fusion of emnomic and political demands that required mass political mobilization against the party-state. Yet, as major supporters of marketization and liberalization of society, the miners unexpectedly found themselves among the first victims of market refc3rms. The miners"aradox, a sort of ""jest of history;%as been that the best organized, most active and united group of tuorkers toiled in the most obstzlete, wasteful, and often socially useless branch of industry. Tl-re Soviet mir-titzg industry epitomized the country's technological and srganizatic~nalbackwardness. For more than 30 years, it stubbornly resisted following the developmental trqectory of the coal industry in all Western industrial societies. Coal production itz the old crzal-producing crzuntries, such as England, France, and Germany, had declined since the early 1960s by a factor of two to five; and the nrzmerical decfine in the minir-tgprofession was much more dramatic. By the mid-1 990s, the half-millionstrong group of British miners had been redtlced to b e ~ e e n30,000 and 35,000, and France" miners, which earlier had numbered more than 300,000, had disappeared almost entirely Ur-rXike coal-producing countries in Europe, the h i t e d States had tripled its coal prrzduction during the same period; but thanks to technological progress and growing tabor prc~ductivitythe number of miners there too had fallen-from 230,000 in 1960 to about t 10,000 in the mid- 1.990s.Xn con-

trast, coaf production in the Soviet Union experienced a moderate growth from 500 million tons in $960to 700 million tons in 1990, and the number of miners remained constant at 1.2-1.3 million (about 500,000, in the KSFSTil). Coat production in the Soviet Union, and even more so in lxussia, required enormotls and ever growi~lgstate subsidies. The operating cost of coaf extraction in many mines was extremely high, even by the standards of the Soviet ecc>nc>my, in which raw material inputs had been severely underpriced. Moreover; the coal minir-tgindustry has always been burdened by the expense of maixztainir-tgthe cntire social infrastructure of isc~latedmining towns, This included providing employment for the female poputat-ion czf these towns, as labor legislation prohibited female work ~lndergroundand placed various other restrictions on women wrking in the cczat industry. The inevitable and radical restructuring of the csaf industry had been discussed among specialists for about 30 years, W e n 1 graduated from the Leningrad Minir-tg Institute in t960, I already h e w that some SO percent of Soviet coal mines were totally unproductive and continued to exist mainly b r poflticaf and social reasons, Far decades the Soviet leadership avoided acting, for fear of social instability. The USSR under Brezhnev profited enormc~uslyfrom the world energy crisis in the 1970s btlt squandered its windfall profits on expanding the military-industrid complex and maintaining price stability, missing its chance to restructure the energy sector relatively pair-tliessly. The social casts of post-Sc~vieteccznomic reform, which were predictably high for att groups czC the working class, have been truly enormous for coat miners, The role of miners ixz the collapse of the Soviet regime, and their exceptional organizational strength, prevented the post-Soviet Russian federal got.ernment from shutting down unprofitable mines during the first two czr three years of its existence. As a result of contixztling state subsidies, the ranks of coal miners contintled t ~ grc~w-from > 484,000 in 1990 to 52%000 -in 1993-whereas outk~utdeclined &am 395 to 305 million tons." Calculated according to these figures, the average Russian mixzer's productivity dropped to T percent of that of the American mher. Meanwhile, state policy evolved toward privatization czC unprofitable mines and ever diminishing subsidies that did not cover the cost of production and that arrived increasingly irregtlbrly. In 1995-1996, due to wage arrears, miners were paid up to 20 percent less."" The mines, especially privatized ones, ofien tried to adjust by raisixzg coal prices, only to realize that price hikes placed their product beyond the reach of potential custc>mers, By the second half of the 19"3s, profound changes had czccurred in the miners" attitudes toward market reforms and political parties as we11 as in the general pc~pulation"attitudes toward miners. In a total reversal of their pro-market stance, the miners turned against econumic reform, instead advocating the restoration of a strong state and authoritarian rule, They began supporting communists and extreme nationalists, expressing strong sympathy for such political leaders as Vladiinir Zhiri~zovsky.As czpinion studies have demonstrated, in the minerskonsciousness "a Pinochet figure has appeared as the prototype of a fu-

222

Victor ZasEavsky

ture Russian leader."7" krprised by the miners\sl"fi from supporting market and democracy to backing old communist and nationalist forces, Crowley asked, "mywas it so difficult for the miners tc> craft something resembling a sociatdemocratic alternative, as workershovements in the W s t had done for so long?""' An obvious answer, if one does not subscribe to the Leninist theory of "false cc>nsciousness,"might be that a socioeconomic group lacking economic czpportunity in an emerging liberal-democratic arder is unlikely to support market reforms, Moreover, the workers employed by an obsollete industry with the most outdated fabor process, producing unwanted goods, are the most improbable candidates to embrace and promote social de~~~ocracy. In Soviet times, miners who had led massive strikes and other collective actic~nswere not only expressing their own grievances but also those of other wc>rkers exploited and subjrrgated by an economically failiz-rg and undemocratic regime. In recent years, popular attitudes toward the minershovement have changed. The mass media in Russia began demonstrating another side of the minerskparadox: Hundreds of thousands of able-bodied, skilled worlcers engaged work cannot provide for themselves, and need huge subsidies in heavy; dangero~~s that the state can afford only at the expense of the education, pensions, and health care czf the genera! population. These reports led to the inevitable conchsions that the closure of unprofit;ible mines would alleviate the burden on the economy and that the wetfare and economic security of society csufd be undermined by colfective actions czf a group pursuing particrrlar interests. The nature of the conflict between the state and the mir-ters has profoundly changed: By penalizing the prrlducers of useless p r t ~ d ~ ~ cthe t s ,government can claim tc>be def'ending society as a whole against the selfish interests c~fa minority, Encouraged by this change ir-t popular attitudes, the Russian government began implementing a state-regulated restructuring of the coal mining industry. Since 1996, the Mrorfd Banlc: has granted XXussia a number of loans for this purpose. All of the major sociological institutes ixz Russia-VTsiOM, the Institute of the Mji>rfdEconomy and International Relations (IMEMO), the Instittlte of Sociczlczgy czC the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Xnstitute for Comparative Strldies of Labor Relations-have been involved in monitoring the social consequences of this large-scale, government-organizgd Their data provided the first empiricat insights into the results of radical market reforms in the coal industry and in the Russian economy in general. The restructuring of coal mining pro=& exceptionally difficult not only because many mines were located in the Far North, where they afien served as the only employer ir-t town, but espedally because i t coincided with the general crisis of economic transition. This crisis has drastically cat into the resources available to alleviate the hardships faced by miners and their families; in addition, the weakenir-tgof the central state has muddled the rational use of existixzg resources, Measures intended to counteract the negative social consequences of indtlstrial restructuring were implemented only partlalty, and they did nat achieve their

proclaimed goats, A brief analysis helps ifjustrate the situation in the economically depressed regions and the emergence of the ""new poor" "1 Russia. The majority of miners in the six mining regions studied by Rt~ssiansociologists had uvarked all their Xlves in the same mine, with the average seniority reaching 22 years, Their mir-teswere closed and they were laid off, with two months or less advance notice. Becatlse of insuf5cient funding, the management could not pay in fuXI the wage arrears, severance pay3and various other compensations due to laid-off workers. Thus, in 2998, in the Primorye Territory>miners received 56 percent of the total sum they were c~wed;in the Kuzbass, 65 percent; in the Donbass, 71 percent; in the Tula region, 47 percent; in Perm, 85 percent; and in Vorkuta, 68 percent. From 40 percent to 80 percent of millers, depending on their region, encountered cr~nsiderabledisculties in trying to extract pqmrmt from management, and trade unions proved incapable of rendering any assistance. The objective lack of funds was often exacerbated by corrupt management: 111 a typical gambit, miners who wanted their money immediately would be told they coutd have half of their wage arrears and severance pay on tl-xecondition that they sign a receipt acknowledging payznent itz full. The mclney paid out to laid-off miners, even when they received all that they were owed, was insufficient to afXow them to relocate in Xess economically depressed regions or to radically change their way of life by starting ia small business or a farm. The way miners spent their severance pay is very revealing: From 59 to 88 percent of the respondents spent this money on food and immediate necessities, and only between 7 and 2 1 percent of the money went toward durable goods* According to official estimates, at least 50 percent of those emptoyed in the minitzg industry will be laid off by 2003. The managers of mines remaining itz operation have been carefully culling the best wc?rlers, Many of those laid off will remain permanently unemplrzyed, since only about 25 percent to 35 percent of those looking for jobs in the mining regons lza-ve a realistic chance of landing a job. The restructuring also yrc>vc>kedthe efirnination of various small enterprises established to provide complementary employment for women in mining towns. Almost no private enterprise exists in milling regions, and the sa-called programs of tc>caldevelopment have had a very limited success, far lack of int.estment funds. Attempts by the Independent MinersTrade Union to organize collective actions focused on the miners3plight have been tltterly tlnsuccessful. Miners are profoundly divided b e ~ e e nthose employed by tl-xe mining er~terprisesrernaining itz operation, and the unemployed. Moreovex; the effects of large-scale collective actic~nsare extremely limited and can even be counterproductive. Current demand for coal is low, and locally produced coal is often more expensive than the world market price, As for the railroad blockades itzitiated by srnall groups of miners in spring 1998,they had little effect other than to yrc>vc>keptlblic opinion against the miners.

224

Victor Zastavsky

The survival strategies of unemployed miners are familiar: They take on seasonal construction work; accept various temporary, menial jobs; and work their plots of land (except in the harsh climates of the Far North and of Vork~ta),~' The famous "victory gardens" that existed throughout Europe in the aftermat11 of World War II have now arrived in Russia. The mostly middle-aged former miners, whc~once held down well-paid jobs, are ncw surviving on meager unemployment benefits and waiting for old-age pensions. They have joined the emerging group of the ""newly poor.'"& sy~~drome of poverty, stagnation, and social patholae familiar from the Appalachian region, Newfoundland, and Sardinia is now being replicated in the mining regions of IXussia, The only "socialdemocratic" solution of the mir-ters"roblem might be to redirect state coal-mining subsidies toward relocation, retraining, and a massive job-creatic~nprogram. But the IXussian state can no Zonger afford s~rchsubsidies, and the magnitude of the problem is such that no itzternational assistance, however generous, is likely to substitute for societat self-organization. How do miners understand, interpret, and explain the unhXding reforms of the coal mining industry and the massive closure of unprofitable mines? One widely used explanation is a blankt accusation of corruption, aimed at the various upper strata of society-kom the local minilzg administration, to the coal indtlstry bureaucracy, to the central government. Such social critiqrre is of little crlnsequence, because no specific culprits can ever be identified by respc~ndents. Another popuXar explanation of restructuring is the "American conspiracy: available itz two versions: the economic one, biamitzg American coal producers for sq~~eezing out Russian competitors from the market; and the ""mi1i.t-ary-strategic" one, explaining the closing of unprofitable mines as an attempt to undermine Russia's minilitary-economic potential and turn the cotlntry into a source of cheap labor and raw materials, These interpretations testi* tfo the democratic forces9aiiIure to reach the broad population and to the continued strength of mass media outlets managed by unreforrned communists, Most importantly, these interpretations give cornfort and consotation to the new poor, since they create a liberating feeling of having discovered a secret, and most importantly, an external catlse of their suffering. The csmbinatir~nof the corruption and cr~nspirlzcytheories is especially appealing to the past-Sczviet mentality, turning the new poor into a mass social base of antidemocratic and antimarket political forces, and a danger for K~rssia's fragile democracy

Economic transition has produced enormous dislocations in Russian society. These dislocations resrrlted from a combination of deliberate state policy decomposition of the centrally planned Soviet econclmy, and the workings of marlcet forces, The ascendance of marlcet principles and tile development of a new labor market have hit certain occupational and territorial categories wit"niz the Russian

uvarking class particrrIarly hard-especially coat miners and workers employed by enterprises in the Far North and other unfavorable loations. As the militaryindustrial complex has lcsst the priority status it enjoyed in the former Soviet Union, vvorkers in defense industry have experienced the greatest decline, A study of ten formerljr "closed" cities that housed major production centers of the Ministry of Atomic Industry revealed that the initial transition shock was much stronger here than elsewhere and the decline in the standard of living of worlcers and specialists much more drastic and proforrnd than the average for the country. These most privileged groups of Soviet society now survive on incr~mescfose to or even below the official poverty Linea7" The anticipated decline and relative impoverishment of workers in the military-industrial complex, Far North enterprises, and resource-extractive industries such as coal mining testiEy to the essential market character of the transition. Brrt apart from groups that are experiencing an obvious downward social mobility, if we take the working class as a whc~le,it is too early to draw a net distinction b e ~ e e nthe winners and losers in the transition. Since the transition is far fmm complete, it is more productive to draw up a balance sheet of the gains and losses experienced thus far by Russian workers as a whole-esyecialy as current variations in income and occupational mobility m;ry be subject to change as the economic transition progresses. In this vein, the leading experts on the Russian working class, Gordon and Mlczpov; would include on the positive side of the balance sheet: the creation of real fabor unions, freedam to strike and take part in other forms of collective actic~n,and a general democratization of labor relations; the end to shortages, and the possibility of consumer choice; increased market penetration of modern manufactured and technological goods, with a~ltomobiieand telephone ownership becr~minga mass phenomenon; steady improvement in housing; increased access to cultural and political information and foreign travel, and greater choice in entertair-tment and leisure purs~xits.On the negative side, they would list the rise in unemplc~yment,and the falling incomes of the majority of the pr~yulation, due to decreasing reat wages and the purchasing power of pensions; toss of sayings accumulated prior to the early 2990s; and widespread delays in the payment of wages and pensions,'These empirically observable trends characterize the present Itussian society, in which a market economy has not yet started to function ""x~rmally~'~ but which is moving itz this direction. It is diffict~ltto assess how these trends will affect long-term economic prospects of garticutar social groups and categories. As Elartey Baker has aptly noted, perceptions, preconceptions, and political agendas play a major role in interp~"tngtrends in GDP and stlcial differentiation: "Pc~pulistpoliticians have an interest in emphasizing if not exaggerating the differentials; those in power wish to play down the extent of stratification.'"Wne can conclude, howevex; that even though a dominant pattern of ownership has yet to emerge, outside ownership is on the rise, and the present pattern of insider controt is gradually giving way to the external, control characteristic of market economies,77Assuming that tl~is

226

Victor Zastavsky

trend continues, the current pattern czf substituting wage reductions for unemployment is likely to ditninish, since outsider owners are much less inclined to engage in such practices. For the reasons czutfined above, no polarization of Russian society atong class lines has yet occurred. There is insufficient evidence to decide whether the next stage of the transition will prompt the development of class-based cfeavages or will facilitate the articulation of interests based on factors such as occupational groups, as has happened in postcommunist societies that have advanced farther tcward a market ecrznc>my7Thefirst decade of reforms in Russia has cr~nfirmed the general impression czf schoIars familiar with the Soviet system that the Russian transition will be a far lengthier process than that of East-Central E ~ ~ r o or pe the Baltic states. The currency devatuation of August 1998 was a major shack far the country. Qn the one hand, it dealt a heavy blow to Russian consumers, whose purchasir-tg ipc~werdwindled with the waning value of the ruble; the ranks of the potx swelled, On the other hand, the devaluation gave a considerable boost to Russian industry>protecting domestic producers horn foreign competition. Russia's industrial prod~lctionhas since grown, and infiatic~nhas stowed, New job creation has begun to compensate for the jobs lost in the inefficient and fiailing, inherited industry, although m~lchof the new jobs are ""off the books,""in the informal economy Most importantly, many Russian enterprises have begun tc>expand, often relying on their own funds. This development resembles the T"oXish experience of transition from central plannir-tg. Drzes this mean that the Russian transition has arrived at the turning point and has begun to exhibit the dynamics of (jutput, employment, and labor productivity that have been observed in tile East-Central E~~ropean postcommunist transition2'"udging by the growth in ~ u t k ~ tattained lt in 1999-2000, by the Russian population's growing confidence in and more optimistic assessment of the country's economic f~~ture,"bnd by the positive attitude of the international community tczward Russia" recent ecr>nc>micachievements, W can answer in the af5rmative, In contrast, political developments in Russia since the X999 and 2000 elections, as well as the contitzuing Russian-Chechen conflict, dampen even cautious optimism, We can expect the next stage of Russia" transition, under the leadership czf President Vladimir Pwtin, to be characterized by some farm czf liberal authoritarianism-the approach that the Russian political elite presently sees as most practical far addressing the country" ecrznomic and social di6culties.

I wish to express my gratitude to Professors I,eonid Gardion and L,ev G u d h v far their helpful comments and criticisms, 1. Hossibkii statisticheskii clrzl~egodnik:0fit.siiuZ'nnoe izdunie, 1998 (Moscow: Goskamstat RE, 19981,pp. 182-185. 2 , Ibid., p, 19.7.

3. Cbbzor eknno?niclitesknipalitiki a) Rassil za 1998 (Moscow: ROSSPEN j Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia], 19991, p. 261. 4. Jan JViniecki, ""The Inevitability of a Fall in Output in the Early Stages af 'l"ransition:" ,"iovietStudies 4 ( 19531 ), pp, 469-676. 5. Richard Ericson, ""Economics and the ltussiaifl 'I"ransition:" Slavic Review 3 (E'afi 19981, pp. 609-625. 6. Aleksandr Golov, ""RiXaso~eatsenki problem rossiiskogo abshchestva: Peremerly za god:" PJovgLZZU gazefa, March 2-8,1998, p. 4. 7. Ekonomicizeskie i sotsial?l-~ye peremeny: Monilorirzg ra'bshchestvennogo mneniia [hereafier, E.SP:MOMj 7 f 19931, p. 65; 4 (19941, p. 70; 6 (1994), p. 82; 1 (19951, p. 79; 3 (1095), p. 82; 2 ( 1997), p, 88; 5 ( 19971, p. 47; 4 (1997), p. 84; 3 ( 19981, pp. 90-91; 5 ( 1998), p. 57; 4 (19982, p. 68. 8. Nikotai Shmeiev, Aztntzsy i dolgi: Vchera i zavfra rossiiskikh ekonomicheskikh reform (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye atnasheniia, 1'394). 9. Joseph Blasi, Naya Krr>umova,and X3ougl~Kruse, Kremlin Capitalism: Priwi-izing the Rrlssiall Econotny (Ithaca, M.V.: Corrzell University Press, 19971, p. 178. 10. Osnavnye pokazateli deiatel"%nusl-iargarao3.rsliuzl~byzaraiatosi-i ur z'anwr'-dehbr"1997 god (Moscrsw, 1998), p. 5. 1 I . See Chapter 6 in this vc~lrrrne. 12, Uarry Ickes, Peter Murrelf, and Kancl-y Kyterman, ""End of the 'Tu~lnel?The Effects of Finar~cialStilabilizationin IXussia,'T~osr-SozrietAfain 2 6 19971, pp. l 18-1 19. 13. Leonid Kcjsals and Krzsalina R ~ k i n a Sotsiologiia , perekhctda h- rynku v Rossii (Moscow: Editorial, 1998), p. 97. 14. Ibid., p. 98. 15. Rostisfav Eapelyusl-rnikov,""RassiisEuii r y ~ ~ truda: a k Adaptatsiia bez restrukturizatsii,'" in Nekutclrye uspek1-y teorii perekhodnoi ekonamiki (Moscotv: IMEMC) RAN, 19991, pp, 85-141. 16, Sergei Auktsionek and Rostisfav Kayefy~sfinikav,""Iabaur Hoarding in Rtlssiax~Xndustry," Russian Eco~omz'cBarometer 2 1996). 17. Blasi, Kroumova, and Kruse, Krelnlin Capit-ulistn, p. 82, 1X. h t h r y n Hendley, "'Legal Development in bst-Soviet Russia:Tost-Soviet Afdirs 13, 3 {July-September 1997), pp. 228-251. 19. Sirnon Clarke and Verc~xlibKabalina, "fibatisation and the Stmggfe for Control of the Enterprise,'"in David X,ar~e,ed., Russia in Transition fI,andan: X,ongman, 19951, pp. 142-1 58. 20, b s a l s and Rpkina, Sotslologiia perekhoda, pp. 128- 135, 21, The interviews presented in Chapter l I of this book provide examples of this type of practice. 22. Leanid Gardon and Eduard Klapov, ""Stsiatogicheskii. i istoriko-sotsiatbyi vzgtiad Ila problemu bezrabotnitsy v Kossii 90-l& god(>vCin Mekorcsuye aspekty teorii perekhodnoi ekonotniki (Moscow: IMEMO RAN, 1999), pp. 162-172. 23. Veronika Kabalirxa and Tatyana Metalina, ""Stsial'nnye mekhanizmy politiki zaniatosti na rossiishrn predgriiatii:" Mirovaia ekonomiku i meztzdunarudny ortzosheniia 7 ( 1394). 24. Itya Zaslavsky, ""GorkikieIekars~a,cl~tobyvyzdor(>vet:"CIzeloz,ek i trrtd, 12 (1996). 25. If the minimum wage were 130 rubles per month, the permissible average wage at an enterprise would be 700 rubles. Let us say that an enterprise empit>jrecl5,000 workers at

228

Victor Zastavsky

an average wage of 1,500 rubles per month. That er~terprisekttotaf wage h ~ n dwc~uldhave been 1.5 Inillion rubles. Because the appropriate wage fund (according to governlnent star~dards)at that particular erlterprise woutd have been 700,000 rubles, the enterprise w(>uldhave had to pay a tax on the excess 800,000 rubies, 26. VIadimir Gimpelson and Douglas X,iypoldt, "Labour rrurnaver in the Russian Economy>"in liabalsr Mark41 llynamtcs in the Russian F'cderatian: OECll Proceedings (Paris: Cerltre for Goaperation with the Economies in Transition, 19971, p. 33. 27. Victor Zaslavsky, "From Redistributior~to Narketization: Social and Attitudinal Change in Ptlst-Soviet Russiatyn Gail l,ayidus, ed,, The New Russia (Boulder: Westview, 19941, pp. 115-142; Victor Xaslavsky, "Contemporary Russian Socieq and Its Legacy: 'Che Problem of State-Dependent Workers:" in Drtlno Cirancclii, ed., Social Chatzge and ,Wodemization: Lessons from Eusdern Europe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2995), pp. 45-62, 28. Sce ESY:MCM 3 (1993), pp. 24-28; 4 (1993), p, 6. 28. See ESP:MQM 2 (199K), pp. 75-76; 6 (1998), p. 68. 30. Ixtformatsiin Goskomstata RF j Rossijskc~jFederatsii], as cited in Izvesi-iia, Augtrtst 2 1 , 1999, p. 1. 31. Rossiiskii statislicilieskii ezl-regodtzih-:Ofil;cialkoe i z d ~ n i a1 9 , p. 189; Sotsialkoe polozhenie i urovenkhizni rzaseleniia Rossii: Statisticheskiz' sbornik (Moscc~w:Goskc>mstat, 19971, p. 52. The majority of ur~empioyedattempt to find work 0x1 their own; onfy a small ~lurnberregister with the state urlernyloyrnent agency. 32. Jadwiga Staniszkis, The Z)ynunzics ofrhe Breukilizrot.~gi"lin Eastern Europe: The Polish E x p e r i e n ~(Berkeley: University of C:alifrzrnia Press, 1991), pp. 38-72; Steven Solnick, Stealing the Sitate: Conrrol and Cotlapse in Soviet Itzs~ittitions([Iambridge: Warvard University Press, 1398). 33. See Victor Zastavsky, The eVeo-S@Zini&State: Cltzss, Ethnici~y,rand Consensus in Soviet Society, 2d ed. (Ammonk, PIJ',Y,: M ,E, Sharye, 19941, chs. 1,2,6. 34. Gimpets(>nand I'ippoldt, ""Labour 'Turl~t>ver in the Russian Eco~~omy,'>p.17-50. 35. Nikotai 1,apin and Liudmifa Belyaeva, eds,, Ditzawzih-a ~sennosteinraseleniia refomirue-moi Rossii (Moscow: Institut filosofii, RAN, 19961,pp, 103,115, 36. ESP:MOM 3 (1996), pp. 24,62,68. 37. Liudlnila KhaM~ulina,""?iubWektivl~yi sredllii Mass: Llobody; materialhne polozhelaie, tsennostnye arientatsii,'XSP:iMOiW 2 (1999), pp. 20-24. 38. Kosals and Rykina, Solsiolugiia perektzoda, p. 220, 39. Gafina Monousova, ""Pron~yshlennyerabochie v X-tassii: Adaptatsiia, differentsiatsiia, mrsbiihost:""Sotsioluykheskii zFzurnuE 2-2 (1998), pp. 209-223. 40, Vladimir GimpeIson and Douglas Lippoldt, ""labour Restructuring in Russian Enterprises: A Case Study,'TClECI> byorking Papers, vole4, x~o,69 (Paris, 1996), pp, 22-23, 41. Mac Weber, Econouuly and Society (Berketey: University of Caiiforl~iaPress, 1948), pp. 927-928. 42, Gatina M~nousovaand Matalia C;uskc>va, ""lternal Mobility and the Restmcturing of Labor:" in Sirnan Clarkce, ed., Labour Relations in Tro~~sition: Wages, Emykq~rnent,rand I~dmsrrkEConflict in Rwsiw (Cheltez~ham,U.K.: Edward EIgar, 19961,pp. 82-98, 43. VLadimir Gimpetsan and Douglas f,ippaldt, "Labour Restructuring,'". 22. 44, Sixnon C:larke, "IdabourRelations ax~dClass Formation:" in Cbrke, ed., Labour Rehlions it? jl"rkznsilion, p, 22, 45.Kosals and Rykina, Solsioriugiia perekhod~,p. 229.. 46. On the development of the ""social partnership" mmodet see Viktor Ki?marovsk~i, "Sta~~ovlenie sistemy satsialhogo partnerstva kdk satsialbnago instituta v Rossii:" in V, Ko-

xnarovsk-r;ed., SotsiaE'noe purtnerswo 1) perekilzadnom uhst~clzes~e: Opyt Rossii, Sotsiaf'notrudcjye issledovaniia, vol. 10 (Moscrjw: fMEhifC3, 1998), pp. 5-3 1. 47. Vlratter (:onnor, Tia~eredBanners: Labor, Conpicl; and Grporatistn in Pmmnzmunist Russia (Boulder: Wesmiew, 1996), p, 25, 48. Ikonid Gordon, nTudezhda i2i tlgruzu? Kubochee dvizhenie i pro$oiuzy v pereklzodnoi Rassii (Moscow: XMEMO RAN, 19951, p, 4. 49. ESP:~MOJM4 (1995), p. 78. 50, ESP:MCJiM 3 (19981, p. 6. 5 1. Uhsi, Kroumriva, and h s e , Krewrlin C;ilpit"alism, p. 107. 52. Ax~dreiIsaev and A f e k ~ ~ Shubin, ~ d r I3emokmtic-heskii sotsializm: Rzrdt~st~clzee Rassii (MQSCIW:Solidarnost: 1995); Ciordon, NadezRda ili ugroza? 53, Gardon, Pnlazhenie, pp. 34-36. 54, ESP:MOM 1 ( 19951, p, 78. 55. Izvesfiia, September 3, 1996, cited in Gordon, Pofrrzhenl'e, p. 39. 56. See ESP:M/lM 3 ( 19951,p. 9 1, ;4 ( l99S), p. 88; 6 (1996), p. 82; 3 ( 1999),p. 68, 57. Judith K~ttolbergand William Zirnmerman, ""liberal Elites, Socialist Masses, and Prc~blemsof Rr~ssianDemocracy:" World Politics 5 1 (April $9991,pp. 323-358, 58. Girnyelson and Lippoldt, "Labrzur Restructuring," p, 24. 59,Scholars who tend to ix~teryretthe Russian transition in Marxist terms and categories disccver that today's Russia is ill suited to such an analysis, As Sirnon CLarke has recognized, "Management does not yet confront the labor force as the representative of capital ccmfronting a working class." "Likewise, Clarke's prediction of the co~ning""polar confrontation betweer1 global capital and the Russian working ctass'%has no empirical grounding (Sirnon Gfarke, ""Iaxbaur Relations and Class Forrnatian,'"rin Clarke, ed,, Labour Refalions in Transition, p. 13). 60*Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizrr' i r$orv (Moscow: Navc~sti,1995), p. 460; speech by Uoris Yeltsin on the occasion of Ke~ner(>vo oblast's 50tl~anniversary; as reported in Nasha g ~ z (Kemerovc)), l ~ Jatluary 28, 1993, p. X. 61. Aleksandr Vc>dc>lazovand Leo~~id G ~ ~ r d o"Niozhdenie n, v demrikratiiu i obratno, ili kuda dvizhetsia shafiterskoe dvi~11enie:Wfkrytaiapoliriku, 9-10 f 1998), pp. 30-37. 62. Vodoolazov and bratno:"p. 30. 63. See far example, I,eonid X,opatin, Isroriin rtzbochego dttizhariia Kuzbassa, 1989-1991 (Kernerova: Idlast, 1995); idem, Rabocl~eedvizktertie Ktabusm v a~osptln-2inaniiaki!z ego uchaslnl'kov i ochevidrsev (Moscow: IMEMO, 1998); Vladimir Xlyin, Vlusr' i igol? Shkkhterskoe dvizhenie Vorkuy (1989-1 998 god71 (Syktr\rkar: ISX7'0,1998). 64, Fur a useful ovewiewI see Stephen C:rr>wley, ""Barriers to Collective Action: Steelworkers and Mutual Tlependence in the Former Soviet Union:" World Polil.ics 46 ( J z I ~ ' ) ~ 199121, pp. 589-6 15. 65. Miel~aelYarrow, T h e I,abar Process in Coal Mining: 'Ghe Struggle for Contro1,'"n Alldrew Zirnbalist, ed., Case Studiw in the 1,abur Pmcess (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979). 66. Ax~drewJanos, Politics arad Pckraulzgtns: Churzgiuzg Tlteories of Change in SochE SL-(ic-ienr-e (Stanford: S~anfordUniversity Press, 1986), p. 121. 67. Stephen CrowIey, ""Coal Miners and the "frar~sfornzatianof the USSR:" Post-Soviet Aflairs 13,2 ( 19971, p, 168. 68. 1,eonid (;ordon, Eduard Kloyov, and Igor Kozh~~khovsky, eds,, fiului plast: ,"ihakhterskaia zhhiznhn .fine restrzrktzarizatsii utrasli I, ubshcherossiiskikr!tperemen (1LiIoscow: Komplek-Progress, 1999), p. 52.

230

Victor Zastavsky

69, Leonid Gordon, ""Restrukturizatsiiaugalhnoii yromyshIentlosti isotsial'nnoe pulozhenie sha&teravF Gelovek i trud 10 (19971, p, 27. 70. Vadirn Borisov,Veronika Bizyukova, and Konstargin Burnysl~ev,""ConRict in a CoalMining Enterprise: A Case Study of Sudzhenskaya Mine:" in Ctarke, ed., Labour Relations in Tro~~sifion, p. 233. 7 1, GrnowIey, "Coal Miners and the 'l'ransformatiun of the USSR:". 189, 72. See Lev Gudkov, Kestruktcirimtsiia ugolhnoi pronzyshlennosti: iManl'toringsutsz"aZ'nj~ki?E posledst~iz'(forthcoming); (;ordon, Klopov, and Kwzhtrkhovsb, eds,, Krurai plast, 73, See C:hrtpter l l in this volume. 74, Vafentin rfikhonov; Zakrytye gclroda v alkryiom ubshcJaestve (Moscow: IN13 RAN, 1996),pp. 25-26. 75. Gardan, Klopav, and Kozhu&ovsky, e h . , Kr~ztoiptast, pp. 65-67. 76. Harley Balzer, "Russia's Middle Cbsses,'Tosl-Soviet Afairs 14,2 (19981, p. 167, 77. Blasi, Kroumova, and Kruse, Kretnlin Capit-ulistn,pp. 54-55,193-195, 78, Nikk Titma, Nancy Brilr~donTurna, and Brian Silver, "FVinr~ersand LJosers in the Postcornmunist Transition: New Evidence frarn Estonia: Post-Soviet Afairs 14, 2 (f99K), pp. 127-128, 79. For the ""standard'3theoreticai mr~delof the postcommunist transition, see Olivier Blanchard, The Ecunomicls ufPosf-Communisr Transition (C3xford: C3xford University Press,

1997). 80. See ESPMQM 1 (2000), pp. 57-60; 2 (200U),pp. 58-59,

Domestic I-low Women

Organize Surviva a North Russian City Michael Burawoy Uziwrsity of Calfornia, BerkeEey

Pave1 Krstav Institute qf Jtegiouzal Social Researc/~of the KOrni Repu blz'c, Syktpkur

Tatyana Lytkina Institute of Socioeconctrrzicand Eacsrgy hbke~rzsof the Nortiz, Syktykar

0

ne of the abiding puzzles of Russian life is how to reconcile an unprecedented decline in the economy, year in, year out, with the continual survival of its pop~llationsand the absence of social disturbances. Although all figtlres are disputed, calculations suggest that between 1990 and 1997 the gross domestic product (GDP) and industrial output feft bp some 40 percent, and capital i~~vestment fell by 75 percent, Accorditzg to ofgcial figures, in 1997,20,8 percent of the population was living in poverty. Yet at the same time we find neither massive starvation nor strikes and food riots, neither the destruction of society nor its explosion. Many are simply not surviving: Mortaiity rates are increasing at all ages. By 1995, the life expectancy of men had fiallen dramatically?tfo 58.6-the level of a century earlier. fn comparison, the life expectancy of women had fallen only marginally, to 7 1.6. The tmited Natic~nsHuman Development Report for Europe and the CIS estimates the hurnan cost of transition at 6 million male Iives.9e-

meen X980 and 1995, the crude death rate increased frc>m 1l to 15 per thousand persons. Heart attacks, cancex; infant mortality, and ttrberculosis have taken an increasing tcsll. With birthrates hiling at the same time, the Russian population is shrinking: In X996 alone, it decreased by 5.2 percent. Just as one can exaggerate the Russian capacity for survival, so too can one exaggerate the passivity of R~~ssian society. There have been and continkle to be outbursts czf collective action, episodic demcznstrations in Moscow and regional capitals as well as more widespread strikes, In recent years, teachers, miners, air traffic ccsntrollers, and municipal workers have struck effectively, But interestingly, these are occupations that still have bargaining power with lc~cafor federal governments. For the most part, the industrial workplace-the one place that organized solidarity tlnder the old regime-has been systematically eroded and forced back into defensive pastures when it has not actuaffy disappeared, Thus, although there is some mobilization, it is ephemeral, symbolic, and scattered, and certainly not crImmensurate with the plight that wcsrkers face in their everyday lives, In this chapter we describe how families in czne northern city make ends meet, and we explore the implications for social stability

InvaXutisn, Strategies, and Assets A new type of society is appearing in Rtlssia that statistical data cannot disclose. It is a n e ~ o r ksociety that is bczth resifient and quiescent, that adapts without mobiliization. Its origin lies in Soviet sodety, which is where we m~lstbegin our account. The Sosviet order was gotierned by central apprrspriation and redistribution of goods and services. In this order, the central place for pclpular selforganization was the workplace. Beca~lsethe shortage economy2 required that pnsduction have Bexible autonosmy, becaklse ideology gave centrality to the interests czf the working class, and because so much redistribution of goods in short supply took place through. the workpiace, that is where the most sustained cantestation of socialism took place. It was there that the heavy apparatus of oppression and atomization had to be most effective,.The party-state could blot out effervescence in all other p~zblicplaces but could not do so easily ir-t the workplace, Its ecr~ncsmicorganization cr~ntinuallyrecreated both dissent and solidarity, even as party, management, and union vigifantty usurped it, Eulogized as the vanguard of society, workers regularity took up the cudgels of immanent critique, challenging the worlershtate to realize its claims to eEciency, jtzstice, and equatity. And so frr~mtime to time workers went beyond skirmishes in the undergrowth, burst their chair-ts,and exploded onto the public scene. Still, the collapse of the old regime did not crlme from within the bowels of the economy but from above, Worker mobilization may have been a precipitating factor, at least in the Rz~ssiancase, but the rot had begun in the higher reaches of the party-state, which could not prolong its ideological pretenses. It implc>de& from above, along the fault Xines of its redistributive structure, Even before economic reforms began ir-t 1992, the realm of redistribrztion was beir-tg conq~lcred

by a host of intermediaries, who in taking their cut czf profits began to strangle prod~lction.Shock therapy initiated, in rapid succession, the liberalization of prices, so-called ~"ivatization, and stabilization. Markets Batzded into the vacuum created by the crumbling planning mechanism. But market expansion came at the expense ofproduction, The realm of exchange was invaded by traders, bankers, financiers, transportatic~nmonopofists, and mafia, all of whom mtlltiplied transaction costs to bring production to its knees. It declined grecipitousty, leached by these intermediaries and unable to compete with cheap imports, Enterprises defended themselws against the marlcet by retreating into barter chains, inter-enterprise debt, and wage arrears, Al'i the time output feizlX. We call the process of ematomic regression in which exchange eats up its own productive base economic irzvolution, For the purposes of this chapter, the essential point is that industrial production began tcz Iose its centrality in everyday life both as a loc ~ l of s solidarity and a source of economic sunkal. For many of Russia's workers, the fulcrum of eccznomic activity has mczved from workplace to family Xf economic involution describes how the market dissolved Soviet production, domestic ittvolzltl'on is the other side of the collapse. ft describes families horn the wrking class, cat off from a jiving wage, focusing more and mczre ecr~ncrsmicactivity in the l~ousehold,as they combine old routines into new strategies of domestic production, entering into mutual aid exchanges across households and exploiting oppcxtunities in wider trade. Xn our analysis we distinguish bel~nreendefensiw and entrepreneurial strategies of s~xnival.Each strategy has both a productive and a distributive aspect. Xn the realm of prodt~ction,defensive households keep their feet planted simultaneously in wage labor, subsistence production, and trade. We catt this the divers9cation czf the household economy. In the realm of distribution, defensive households exchange resources, money, food, and labor among themselves. We call this the strategy of sharing, At the same time, there are a few families whose response to itwolution is more pnrsactive than reactive, mczre entrepreneurial than defensive. Instead of minimizing risk: by diversi*ing their Iaibor activities, same fiamilies devoted themselves to one particular activity-trade, petty commodity production (e.g., making garm a t s ) , or even some form of service (body shop). This is what we call the concentration, czC the household economy, For such x family enterprise to succeed, however, the proceeds must accunzzllate ir-tstead of being consumed or redistribtlted. The goal is to reinvest resources in the focal economic activity. In short, domestic invo'fution can take place either thrc~ughdiversification or through concentration of economic activity; and economic products can be shared or acct~mulated.Reality rarely exhibits these strategies in their pure form but as mixed and hybrid expressions of the two basic types (see Fipre X I, I). S~zrvivalstrategies do not exist in a vacllum but are shaped by itzstitutions that define rules fbr deploying assets. If economic z'rtvolutiaus spells the demise of an institutional order in which strategies are narrowly confined, donzwtic involution opens up strategies by relaxing rules and liberating assets. J~ilstthir-tkof the multi-

FIGZJE f 1.1

Dimensions of Domestic Involution

Defensive Strategy

Entrepereneurial Stratcm

Production

Distribution

Ijiversification Go~~centration

Accumulation

Sharing

pie uses of the apartment, Before, it was a place of living and entertainment; now it is an asset that can be sold and bought, easily transmitted from generation to generation. It is also a possible workshop; its balcony can be used to rear pigs and chickens; or it can becr~mea source of rent, or a place for storing merchandise. The apartment" saXfinctlonallIp reflects the way the market has liberated the deployment of assets. There are fof-1r types of assets that are the object of wideranging strategies: *

* *

*

material possessions (apartments, cars, dachas); skills (edtlcation, professional credentials, physical skil'Is,etc.); social n e ~ o r k (the s network of relati-sres and fiiends to which individuals or households can appeal for help or to which they arc obligated); citizenship assets (claims that can be made on the state for pensions, child support, pubtic assistance, rent subsidies).

We use this framework of involution, strategies, and assets tc>explore the complexity, heterogeneity, and path-dependence of survival in contemporary Xxussia. Tllroughout we underline the ways in which itwolution has both compelled and facilitated inventive appropriatir>ns, mobilizations, and combinations of resources, leading in most cases toward defensive strategies, and in a few toward entrepreneurship,

Prom Workplace to Household Our disc~lssionso far has been more conceptual than historical. Strategies, hemever, cannot be understood outside the specific context of their enactment. However weak, there is still an itzstitutional environment to be negotiated, and rules to be fc3llowed. The resources wailable are sensitive to broad context as wet1 as tc>individuaX biography. It is czne thing to survive in the tundra, another in the taiga, and qrzite another in the balmy climes around the Black Sea. tt is important, therefore, to put flesh on the bones of ecr~nomicand domestic involution-to draw out the terrain on which. czur meive cases are enacted, Our first proviso is that the shift from workplace to household, from wage fabor to family fabor, is rarely excfusi.re; generally, a balance is struck between the two realms of economic activity To explore this changing balance, to contrast in-

dustriat with domestic involution, we chose to foXfow the fate of workers from two Octories in Syktyvkar>capital, of the Komi Republic. The Komi Republic is a northerly republic of Russia, lying to the west of the UraXs and stretching att the way to the Arctic Circle, It is the size of Catifornia, and has a population of 1.2 million. Long dominated by the grxlag, its economy is based on the extraction of natural resources: oil, coal, timber, and small quantities czf gas and bauxite. Syktykar sprang up in the 1930s as an administrative center for the archipelago of labor camps that stretched across the region. It has received successive waves of forced migmrion: the first, follc>wingthe expulsion of krrIaks from the rural, hinterland; the second made up czf ethnic Germans and Ukrainian partisans deported from the western borderlands during and after Mji>rl&War 11; the third, of war prisoners-both returning Russians and captured Germans, Even more important was the voluntary migration of Itussians from areas devastated by the war, and of those escaping the repressive order of collectivization. Since Soviet times there has been a continuous flow of people and resources between town and country, between Syktykar and rurat Komi. Migrants came to the area from all over Russia, seeking the higher wages offered by the state for labor in the nclrthern territories, Kc~mi-especially its three major cities (Syktykal; Ukhta, and Vorkrrta)-----becamthe home of polyglot communities, with various national and ethnic groups living cheek by jowl, On the demand side, Syktpkark economy expanded rapidly around its wood-yrr~cessingindustries-its huge paper mill built in the 1960s, and allied industries-and tl~enas a major administrative and educational center. Tc3day it has a population of a quarter million. Xn many ways, the two factories we have focused on-----thecity's garment factory and its f~zmiturefactory-are a study in contrasts. Under the old regime the garment factory, Red October, employed 650 workers, 90 percent of them uvamen, often recent arrivals from the rural areas.Worlcers could make up for the low basic wages with bonuses they achieved on the basis of their work performance and prodtlctivity (e.g., piecework bonuses), Red October" workers remember the fiactory fondly, especially the esprit de corps of its labor collective, Intense social activity centered aro~lndthe work brigades-outir~gs, celebrations, and much sharing c>ftrials and tribulations. This was a home away from home. The ft~mifurehctory, Polar, was a much newer enterprise, employing same 1,300 workers in its main division. NcwXy constituted out of a small workshop in 1982, it was tzoi~lsedin a single-story modern building and boasted a highly paid, young labor coltective ezf both men and women (albeit strictly segregated czccupationally by gender). It manufactured wall systems-an essential piece of furniture for all Soviet apartments, Being much newer and compc~sedof younger uvarkers, the Potar labor collective was not as solidary as that czC Red October, There was also more competition for the jobs at Polar, beca~lsepay and hinge benefits (access to housing, dachas, kindergartens, hofidzcy camps, and the like) were better.

Bath enterprises were privatized in 1992, becoming the property czf their own Xabor collectives, after which their economic fortunes rapidly deciitzed. Polar's decline was particularly steep and marked, since it had been one of the most prr3sperous factories in the city, Xt was declared bankrupt and liquidated in 1998-it rare occurrence even today, Red October, meanwhile, continues to eke out an existence. Many of its machines have been sold, one floor has been bought, and another has been rented out, Two floors still house its own production facilities, and a third is occupied by the admir-tistration.About 1SO workers are employed intcrmittently by Red October, receiving wages in the form of the garments that they produce, In this chapter we explore what has happened to emptoyees we first interviewed in 1994 and 1995. We argue that decisions they made in those years set thern on a path from which they have fot~ndit diEcult to deviate. As an aid to understanding the context, we have incfuded a short appendix that describes same of the economic changes that have taken place in recent yearschanges in wages, levels of employmrmt, and the official poverty line. These data help us understand the real and symbollic value czf the rubIe at different times." We also describe the types of p~sbtiicassistance (pensions, unemployment, and subsidies for tow-incr~mefamilies, aid to single mothers, and so on) that often figure prominently in family strategies, We began this project in 1994, focusing on what was happening to the worhrs at Polar, an enterprise we had first studied in 1991. In the t~lilightof crImmunism, b l a r effectively exploited its monopoly over wall system production, its easy access to raw materials, and its cozy relationship with the regionai ti~nber cr~nglomerate.Economic reforms plunged the factory into a precipitous decline, and by the end of 1993, uvarkers were already leaving in droves. We interviewed some of them, drawing names randomly from the enterprise register of employees, The interviews were open-ended, designed precisely to reveal the various strategies czC survival that they deployed. They were all conducted by Tatyana Eytkina-o&en accompanied by Michad Burawoy Eytkina's techniques of relentless prr3bing gradually revealed the complex and multilayered realities of wc~rkers" economic lives: the multipte sources czf earned revenue (wage Iabor, second jobs, work on the side, self-employment), and the diverse patterns of exchange bctween households (between relatives, neighbors, friends, and cr~workers).She carried a, set of interview guidehnes in her head, but took atczng no questionnaire, no tape recorder, no pen and paper. She wrote up these itzterviews immediately after they tr~okplace. Xn 1994 and 1995, Lytkina carried out 48 interviews with Polar employees; and in 1995 and 1996, we decided to extend the study to Red October, where she conducted a ftlrther 23 interviews. But in the latter case W did not gain access to the enterprise" list of employees, and we had to develop a snowba1f sample, We cannot claim that this sample is representative: At the time of our first interviews with thern, 21. (44 percent) of our Pc~larrespondents stilt worked at the furniture f'actory whereas only six (26 percent) of Eed October respondents were still employed at their flacility, The garment workers were ir-tterviewed on average a year

later than the furniture workers and therefore were less likely to be still working, as their enterprise was in a progressive decline. Our research strategy, therefore, was not focused on securing representativeness but on elucidating the intricacy of each individuaX case, with its own diachronic rhythm and specific context. From the 7 1 interviews, we selected l6 on the basis of their divers it^; and we then interviewed these individt~alsa second time (in certain cases, a third and fourth time). For this cihaptex;we chase five of these 16 to represent the range of defensive strategies, and four to represent entrepreneurial strategies. Since economic activity has been forced back into the household as the unit of production and reproduction, we turned to women as our interviewees. Wether due to their inherited homemaking skills or beause of their devotion to their children, the burden of family survival is borne by w m m . As interviewees, they were mare willing to talk about and better acquainted with jlousehoXd strategies, Exceptions notwitl~standifzg,men have become ir-tcreasingly redundant and demoralized, playing a secr~ndaryrole in the family, and therefore are less informative about the vvarkings of the household, If the changes in their life expectancy are anythir-tgto go by; working-class men have suffered more than women from ecr~nc~mic involution. Their career yosibifities have often shrunk more rayidfy than those of women, mast of whom occupied jobs in retail sales, banlcing, l-iuman services, and other sectors closer to the reatm of exchange, where wages are higher and more likely to be paid. The inheritors of the Soviet vvorking class are enmeshed in a netmrk society whose scattered nodes are female-dominated families, nuclei around which their husbands and orher kin orbit. These demoralized men and struggling w m e n whose goat is immediate survival do not attempt mass mobiiization. Instead they draw on the elastic social networks, the resources and strategies, that remain sedimented in the working-class households of today-the legacies of the Sc~viet regime.

Defensive Strategies We defined defensive strategies as the combination of diversification of economic activities within the household with the sharing of resources across househslds, By identi9ing the key assets that each family deploys, we can see how diversification and redistribution work. Each family tries to keep its foot in the labor market, having at feast one member who is emplo~yedeven if she or he receives no regular wage or only a minrzscule one. Each family receives same govmnment assistance, whether in the form of a pension (for disability, old age, or military service), unemployment benefits, or low-incr~mefamily supplements. Of the five cases, one activety exploits a dacila; a second has a dacha but does not have the resources to grow much there; and a third has a plot of land. The other two are reliant on small but more important exchanges with kin in rural areas, Housing conditions run the gamut from a dilapidated, condemned cottage to a modern three-room apartment received as part of the Soviet government" dispensation

for large families. Because economic involution has brc~ughtthe loss of many jobs, workers continue to seek an outlet for their skills in occasional jobs or work on the side.

&rimer: For a Roof over Qne? &ad5 The stereotypic Soviet citizen often has been described as dependent, bereft of initiative, passive ixz the face of adversity, helpless without state handouts, and jealous of those who enrich themselves, At first sight, Marina looked as though she fir the stereotype. W e n we interviewed her in 1995, she was still working at Polar, hanging on in the hope of early retirement (at the age of $52, to which she w u f d be entitled on the basis of her hamrdous work But she was denied this because her registered job classification was not designated as hazardous. Still she didn't lellrre-even though by 1995, wages had been irre-cgrrlarand falling for two years and most workers had already left, She complained a lot about all the stealing that was taking place at the enterprise, both by worliers and by managers, She recently had turned down a job in retail, since such work-sa she said-was immoral. At the age of 47, in February 1998, Marina was laid off. She received 1,500 rubles ixz kind (a divan), half of the six months' liquidation wages owed her by law At the time of our second interview (April 1999),she was stiff.waiting fc3r the remaining 1,500 rubles. When the six months were up, she registered at the Employment Agency in search of work but so Dr had found none. "Who wants to employ a pensioner,'\he says, ""when there are so many yclung people looking for work?" Sa she depends on monthly unemployment compensation of 375 rubies (75 percent of her regular wages-the amount provided for by law, for the first three months of unemployment) in food, and another 3 10 rubles in medical assistance for her sun, who has chronic asthma and gastritis, Marixza lives with her second husband, who also workd at b l a r until wages became irregular. He quit in 1993 for a construction company job, which also failed to meet his expectations, after which. he took a job caring for the Municipal Parks. Again he didn? last six months before ttrming to unemployment. That was in 1994. Nc~whe is working fc3r the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a joiner. He receives 300 rubles a month, more or less regularly, but again only in kind-a bus pass, food. The latest ixzsult was 100 rubles worth of so-called Humanitarian Aid, which was, as Marina described it, only fit fix their dogs. He used tc>do odd jobs on dachas, building stairs or bathhouses, but as Marina aslced rhetorically, " I a o has the money to pay for such work nowadays?" Marina and her husband have two children, a datlghter of 16 and a son of 1S. Marina frequently mentions her sun's disability, which often lceeps him out of school. She is proud of her daughter" outstanding academic accomplishments and is hoping that through cr~nnectionsshe mzly sornehc~wgo on to the tlniversity. These acconrplish~~~ents are all the more amazing, given their deplorable housing conditions. The four of them live in one room of a ramshackle, kame

cottage; Marina's sister, who receives the minimum unemployment benefit of 130 mbles," lives with her p u n g daughter in a smaller, adjoitzing room. Xt is difficrxit tc> cr~mprehendhow the six of them can exist tc>getherin this tin;v, dark, dank space.' They heat their room with a small stove, carry w t e r from an outside we11, and use an outhouse. Marina and her first husband inherited this cottage-originally; a duplexfrom its czwner. When they divorced, they split it equally. Iler ex-husband sotd his half, which lies abandoned and demolished; but Marina and her Cmily refuse to evacuate the other half, The land has been granted tc>a developer who is eager to erect a new apartment buiXding on this prime real estate near the center of town. But Marina won" budge. By Xaw her cottage cannot be demolished until ail registered there have been rehoused. At the time of the first interview, she had already turned down a modern ~ o - r o o mapartment, holding czut for the three rooms to which she was entitled. Since then she has been offered a two-room apartment in a frame building, and most recently, space in a hostel. As the offerings of the city council have become less attractive, she has become all the more determined to hold out for her three-room fantasy, knowing that ~lntifshe gets her way, she is denying some private developer sumptuous prcsftts. Their only other source czf sustenance is their dacha, bought some 15 years ago, soon after they married. Ur-rtil 2992, they used to raise chickns and pigs there, but they stopped because they didn't have the money for feed. At the first interview, they were still growing vegetables at the dacha; but by the second interview, Marilia was complaining that almost everything they grew was stolen. In the realm of dacha production, as in their income and their housing conditions, their life has prc~gressivelydeteriorated, Marina considers herself a troublemaker. At Polar she protested against the tlbiquitous stealing as w l i as her job classification. She has waged a yrr3tracted war against the municipaIlty far many years, in the vain hope ezf inzproving her deplorable housir-tg circumstances. BereA of material and skill assets inherited from the past, cut off from any redistributive netwc>rks,she is reliant on the state f'or the little income she receives, But she is hardly passive.

Tanya: Working the Kinship Networks m i l e Maritza plays her citizenship assets-unemploymea benefits, sick benefits, and housing rights-far all they are wc>rth,Tanya works on her social assets, , keep herself afloat, her diverse kin n e ~ o r k sto Taxlya is effectiveby a single mother. At the age of 44, she shares a one-and-ahalf-room apartment in a frame building with her daughter (20) and son (23).At the time czf the first interview (1995),she still vvarked at Red October, but only intermittently becrtause of her asthma and weak heart. Her pay, 200 r~ablesa month, was about half that of her cr~wrkers;and during the previous year she had seen cznly 70 rubles a month in cash, hwing rewived the rest in kind, at the factory shop. She finally left her job ir-t 1997 because of poor health. She now lives on her

disability pension czC 400 rubles. She used to dcz some sewing on the side, but stopped, fearing that the tax inspectors would discover this activity and take away her pension. Tanya" first husband died bp drowning, She shed no tears over it, since he was an illveterate dritzker and used to beat her. Her second fi~lsbandwas Bulgarian, a member of Kc~mi"B~tllgariancc>lony,"m e n communism ended, he returned home to Bulgaria, and soon began to send Tanya money. She had even spent six months with him there. At the tirne of the first ir~terview,she wanted to join him permanently with her daughter; later, she wanted to divorce him. Her life was in Kami, with her two children. Tanya's son was wounded while serving in Chechnya. At the tirne of the first interview>he had recently returned, a changed person from the gentle boy she knew. When his drinking sprees made him abusive and viatent, his sister and mother had to leave the apartment, He had been irrcgrxlariy employed as an electrician but he rarely saw any wages. Three years later, with tears welling in her eyes, she told us that a year earlier he'd been imprisoned for petty crimes. Tanya's daughter>in contrast-wen though. she too had found no permanent workbrought smiles to her face. The daughter was about to deliver a baby. Its father was a policeman with no desire to marry her. They hoped he would at least pay child support. So hew does Tanya get by? Her parents in the village neztrt>y help with food (vegetables and sometimes meat). Her mother can sometimes offer her money, since she runs a successful practice in homeopathic medicine, Tanya's eeldest sister atso helps her with clothes, and in an emergency, with money. As a social worker she doesn" earn much, but her husband had a lucrative job as plumber in a meat processing plant, until he had a heart attack and died the previous year, at 48. Tanya3sother sister, also older than her, used to work at Red October but is now employed at a kindergarten. She can't help Tanya materiaity but they have atways shared their sorrows and delights, Since the first interview?Tanya's retatic~nshipwith her mother-in-law by her first marriage had taken a new turn. As grandmother to Tanya's children, she had always he-lped out in small ways, She was of German descent, and like so many of Kc~mi'sethnic Germans, she had recr~nnectedwith her kin, She was now living with her brother in Berlin but continued to visit Komi, as she was employed in German automobile export. Slze proposed that Tanya marry her other son, the yclunger brother of Tanya" first husband, and that together with her daughter they move to Berlin. Tanya smiles whimsically at the thought, concfuding once more that her future is here in Syktykax; close to Eter o m family Tanp is not wc>rlting.Having inherited little from the past other than her sickness, she gets by on minimal support from the state and assistance from her close-knit Dmily (parents, sisters, and mother-ill-laMI),She is the center and beneficiary of a redistributive kinship network. Resignation mkes with the fantasy elf escape, as she contemplates her ft~ture;but the security of family ties wins the day,

Set@:The Single MotherJ@ Tanya became a single mother, but not through her c>wn choice-her first husband drowned and her second emigrated; but Sveta had made this a deliberate life decision. One might be surprised to discwer ""single mother" as a life strategy, especially as in Soviet times it was such a stigmatized status. As men become more of an economic liability, and as the distribution of public housing to families has virtually. ceased, Sveta's strategy has become more acceptable and more crlmmon. Sveta, now 37 years old, began her wrking life in the village as part czf a construction brigade, and then retrained in a vocational college for garment workers, Upon gradt~atingin X985 she tc~okup a job as a skilled ""cmtter" at Red October, M e n she began work at Red Octobex; Sveta received a place in one of its hostels-one of the better ones itz Syktyvkar, with a real community of women who wrked and lived tc>gether,S11e roomed with two other single wrkers. It was in 1989 that %eta and her two roommates c01Xectlvefy decided to become pregnant together. They each had a baby the followix~gyear, and in that itzgeniorzs way each obtained a separate room. Sveta took maternity leave in 1990. She was recalled in X992 because they so desperately needed her sklls. But by the time we interviewed her in 1995, her sittiation had deteriorated. In the prior six months, she had received only an advance of 70 rubles out of ber official wage of 320 rubles a month, She totzk the rest of her wages in kind, from limited ofkrings at the enterprise shop, As a single mother she received a little assistance from the state ("7 rubles), In 1995, she was atso wrking part-time with a friend, sewing nightgowns and men%underpants, and selling the garments through various shops in the city But this did not bring in much (between 100 rubles and 250 rubles a month). W e n we visited her again, in 1999, she said she had given up her job at Red October the previous year. But before quittitzg she had begrin workng a second job, as a cleaner in the tefect>mmunicatic~nsmc>nc>poly,Nt~wit had become her main job. The pay was not bad, at 800 rubles a month. UntiI recentty, she had received it in cash and regularly, but now she saw only 5Q0rubles ;a month. If worse came tc>worst and she was laid off, she was prepared tc>return to the cr~nstruction sites where she had begun. Sveta had given up the idea of sewing garments on the side, as she no longer had access to machines, and more itnportantty, her skills were tc>olimited tc>be competitive. Since her cleaning job only took up two hours a day (six days a week), she wished she had a dacha or even just a garden plot to grow food. But she never had the opportunity to obtain one, as Red October was tc>opoor to give them out to its emploves. Sveta admitted that without help from her two brothers in the village, in the form of vegetables, meat, and eggs, she didn? h o w how she would survilre. Slze regretted she cczuldn? help them more in return; but recently she agreed to share her room with her nephew, who is attending one of Sykty'irkark vocational colleges. Although the village is only three hours away by bus, travel is too expensive

to go there o8en. Still, Sveta always goes in spring, to help with planting potatoes, and she takes her eigl-rt-year-.olddaugl-rter there to stay a while during the summer holidays. The exchange with her native village has become more intensive as her situation has become more precarious. Sveta is adept at exploiting her ri$ts of access to state assistance, As the head of a lo~w-incomefamily, she obtains free meals for her daughter as well as a maintenance subsidy, paying cznly 44 rubies instead of l20 rubies for their room, In addition, as a single mother, she is entitled to another 140 rubles a month; but it's been a year since she last received it, The two skills Sveta inherited from the old regime-sewing and construetian-are of little use to her now The one asset she has managed to claim fmm the old regime is her rrstlm in the hostel. She canncst diversify her economic activities, and so she makes the most of her close relationships with her brothers as wd1 as her status as a single mother. Her decision to become a single mother, her departure for the cleaning job, and her willingness tcs find alternative work bespeak Svetak e e n r g and determination to make ends meet,

m e n we first interviewed Natasha itz 1995, both she and her husband were receiving unemylo-yment compensation, at 75 percent of their wages. Tcsday, unemptoyment compensation is set at the so-called rninixllum wage of 87 rubles a month, except for those who lose tl-reir jobs through liquidation or restructuring. Any job would pay better than that, so we were not surprised to learn at our second interview that Natasha had found herself new emptoyment. Natasha began her work career ir-t $970, at the age of $6, in what was then a small furniture shop and later became the modern factory of Pcslar, She w r k e d there 24 years. W e n wages became irregular and work stoppages more frequent, in $994, she quit her job. As a worker in the hazardous lacquer shop, she might have retired if she had stayed another four years; but instead, she opted for unemployment compensation for two months, and then found a temporary job as a paixzter, through her husband's sister. When this job ended, she agair-t was left unemployed. Her husband, 43 years old, had wcsrked as a carpenter in a focal construction company until pay became irregutar, whereupon he too left his job for one in the municipality-thanks, again, to his sister. Like his wife, he only lasted a few months before returning to the cr~nstructionindt~stry.Again pay became so irregutar that he left for unemployment, which together with his disability pension came to 500 rubles. At the time of the first interview they were both on unempfoymrmt, bringing in less than 1,000 rubles for a family of four-themselves and their I l -year-old twin daughters. Their income, therefore, was on a par with the poorest of our respondents; but their living conditions, as we shalf see, were much better, Their elder son, age 23, was living in a roam in a hostel with his wife and child. He w a r h d as a chauffeur for an enterprise director, which meant that he could

use the car for private purposes, Matasha's ddaughtex; age 21, used to work at Red October, and was living with her family in a two-room apartment (inherited from her husband" parents). Natasha would like to help her daughter but she can't even afford to feed, clothe, and buy school supplies for her two younger girls. The only plus ir-t her circrzmstances is the modern, three-room apartment she received through the municipal queue for large families. They have a plot of land where they grow potatoes, but they have no dacfia. They sometimes take the children to Natashbs parents%illage, where Natasha grows same food, and where her 'i".l-year-(>ldmother helys by knitting clothes for them. W e n we returned in July 1997, both husband and wife were employed; she, as a cook ixz a canteen, and he, with the Municipal Parks. She received a low wage of 350 rubies, with an occasional bonus of 100 or 150 rubles. His wage was much highex; at 800 rubles, but he rarely saw more than 200 rubles, with some of the difference being made up in food, Natasha said they were mucl1 better off on unemploymrmt, but when that ran out they had to find jobs. They were desperatety short of cash to pay far their children" needs. We interviewed Matasha agaixz in May 1999 and discovered that they were still in the same jobs. She was earning wages and bontlses of b e ~ e e n600 and 800 rubles a month as weit as subsidized meals, He was still receiving b e ~ e e n800 , and 2,000 rubles, on paper. Wages were usually paid ir-t kind (food and housir-tg maintenance). But in summer there was work ~n the side, which could bring in 50 rubles a day, plus a meal. On top of this her husband was receiving a disability pension of 300 rubles a month. They were still having difficulty making ends meet, and Natasha was making piandor her teenage daughters to go to technical cojlege, where they w u l d learn catering, In comparison with the first three interviewees, Naitasha had inherited more from the old regime. She had an extensive network of kin in town and country as well as a modern, three-roam apartment, At the time czC the second interview Matasha" son was trying to exchange the three-room apartment for a two-room ak3artment for his parents and a separate, singte-room apartment fc3r his family; He hoped to then combine this with his hostel roam in order to obtain a tworoom apartment, But the plan. came to naught, Even a seernir-tgly nonfungible asset such as an apartment can be traded in and the proceeds distributed among f'amily members, Although she appears to be better czff than Marina, Tanya, and Sveta, Natasha and her husband struggle daily to meet their family's basic needs.

Conwntionaliy, pensioners are the most dependent and deprived group in society, and thus the mast vulnerable to economic decline. One czf the paracloxictzf conseqkxences of economic involution is the relative prosperity of pensioners-at least, where the got.ernment distributes pensions on time and in cash, as it does in Komi. After they retire-men at 55 and women at 50-they often continue to work as cleaners, grzards, or dishwshers, or in other menial jobs. If they econo-

mize, they can live on less than their pensions and accurnutate or redistribute the rest. Thtrs, it is more common for pensioners to help their children than vice versa, Irina is 67 years old, She worked at Red October far 35 years and had been chair of its Sparts Club and its Trade Union Committee. She retired in X987 with the honorific title of ""prsonal pensioner>'\~srzallybestowed tlpon high party officials but sometimes on wrkers with distinguished careers. The title used to be accompanied by privileges such as free travel in the Komi IXepubIic, trips to holiday resorts, and the like. lrina lives with her secc~ndhusband in a tw-room apartment that he received through his uvtzrkpface, having given her own apartment to her 33-year-old da~lghterand family Her 35-year-old, married son also has his own apartment, where he Iives with his wife and son. Irina and her husband don't receive any help from either of her children, She receives 360 rubles a month as her pension. Until 2998, she was earning a sirnilar, additional amount as a dishwasher and cleaner at a local restaurant; but after years wcsrlcing there as a pensioner, she had decided that enough was enough, Her husband receives a sitnilar pension, plus a war vetman supplement, which tcsgether come tcs 500 rubies. In additicsn, he works as a night guard and yard cleaner at Syktykar Road Mrorks. He is suppased to get 800 rubles a month for this, but he's lucky if he sees 200 rtabies. He is owed 5,000 rubies in back pay. As Irina proudly announces, he is the breadwinner, paying for the apartment feiectricity and maintenance) and for basic necessities such as food, "Hie feeds me,"" she says, ""s why should X continue to work?" h t she qkxickiy adds, ""Ive never taken a single kopeck from him," She hits her own bank account, which she draws czn liberalty to help her children-especially her son, an electrician in the same company as his father, and his wifefe, who is a saleswc~man.Neither of them receive their wages on a regular basis, In the space of the three years betwen the two interviews, lrina had given her son 8,000 rubles for a car, 5,000 rubles for a garage (aka used as a pantry for her dacha prcsduce), and 3,000 rubles to her grandson for his studies. She had received 4,000 rubies as an inheritance from an uncle, and the rest of the 12,000 rubles she had saved horn her own earnings. Not content tcs sit idle, both are alss very active at their dacfia, which they bought in 1973, initially sharing it with Irinit's sister. Although it is not big-only 500 square meters-they are able to grow all varieties of vegetables and berries there, which they supplement with mushrooms that they collect in the forest and cabbage that they get from the state fiarm. The food gets them through the winter. With produce horn the dacha, they can also help both their children economize. Irina and her husband have diversified their activities in multiple realms, and distribute what they can to their children, Because wages in money are scarce and pensions are paid regularly; retirees seem tcs be atmost like a labor aristocracy, free of immediate obligaticsns yet with a monetary base from which to pursue czther sources of liveXihood, They can be judicious distributors af their tirne, their resources, and their income.

It is difficutt to summarize these cases. All five households are struggting to keep their heads above the risit~gwaters of economic ixwolution by various metbads. There is a correspondence, albeit a loose one, between the resources inherited from the old regime and strategies deployed in the new regime. It is better to think of these assets not so much as wielded instrumentally but as a field that shapes the parameters of strategies, As wage labor collapses, hr~usefioldsare thrown back on their various material, social, and citizenship assets; the formal skills they acqrxired under the old regirne are no longer of much use, Their defensive strategies, formed in 1994 and 1995, turned out to be amazingty stable despite the uncertain environment, A few households were more ambitious: Instead of diversieing their economic activities, they collectively concentrated their energies on one pursuit; instead of sharing across househc~fds,they attempted to accumulate resources-that is, not only to spend but also to invest. These were the aspiring entrepreneurs,

The household strategies we have explored so far have attempted to spread risk over state assistance, household sharing, and labor diversification, However; we found a few ho~~seholds switnming out to sea with the involutional tide, concentrating on a single econc~micactivity. According to involutic~ntheory, the most dynamic part of the Russian economy is in the realm of exchange; and that is what the four exceptional. women whose stories follow have managed to exploit, Investing their energies in trade and petty cr>mmc>dityprcIductic~nwas not something that they inherited from the past but: something they developed themselves, often driven to this entrepreneurial strategy by desperate circumstances rather than disposition or desire. The narratives that fc3ll0w highlight the dilemmas and risks of concentration and accurnutation, explaining why same stifl cling to their wage labor as a form of security despite nonpayment of wages. At the same tixne, there is more instability and risk-taking in the life choices of the four women W discuss below, involving switches b e ~ e e ndefensive and entrepreneurial strategies. The first two women had been employed by Red October. Mina contixzued to w r k there, but she was paid in kind; she had to becr~mean entreyrene~lrin order to realize a sufficient monetary income. Anna left Red October for a cleaning job but developed a dressmaking business at home. The second two women were emplo-yed at Polar, and they have been more successful. ttlba has moved from one retail store to another, and Valya has created her own business in the local market. Among our interviewees, only Va1j.a survives on self-employment without any wage labor.

As mentioned earlier, the transition to the market brought wide-ranging oppartunities in the sphere of exchange, horn high finance to petty trade. Indeed, in the

early years of the transition, Russia looked more like a flea market than a free market, Women in particular, but also teenage boys growing up in this period, were often drawn to cczmmercial activities and the cash nexus. Our first case of entrepreneurship describes such "trade an the sidem--f rst, on the part ofthe son, and then on that of the mother. Nina is 4 v e a r s old, married, with WO sons, She was recommrmded to us as a very popular supervisor at Red October. At the time of our first interview in 2995, she was officially. earnitzg 400 r~ablesa month but saw only TO of those itz cash, receiving the rest in goods from the factory shop, Her husband did better. As a carpenter in a large grocery store, he was earning I,CIOO rubies; but his wages, which he received in cash, were also being held up. The two of them lived together with their yclunger son in a WO-room apartment that they received from the municipality when their timber cottage was demolished. At the time of the first interview, the punger san, then 13 years old, had already embarked on an entrepreneurial career, He had begun by selling netvvagers, moved on to toilet paper, and from there turned to wicker baskets. He was providing for his own monetary needs and even loaning his mother mclney when she was short. These yrecrzcious btlsiness activities evcsked great consternation in his father, who thought his son shouId concentrate on his education. His mother, who had had socialist leanings ail her life and was therefore ambivalent about all commercial operations, nevertheless showd a f~lrtivepride in her younger bay, who was afready helping his family, Indeed, he helped her pay off her debts ham a trip to Cihechnya with the Soldiers%others to look for her etder son." Although suffering from the ahereffects of the war, Ninit" eider son was by no means as badly off as Tanyak. Today he is an elearician, working in a commerciaX enterprise and living with his wife and one-year-old datlghter in the apartment of his mclther-in-law, who has mcsved out to stay with her lover. m e n we returned in Apriil 1999 to talk to Mina, we discovered that she was still wrking at Red October and her husband was still at the grocery store. She had not seen any alternative to staying on. She didn't want to join the army of cleaning people, ex-employees of Red October, that had occupied the city's office buildings. In any case, she w u l d be retiring in three years and receiving a pension, Nina described the situation at Red October as foClows: There were still 250 wrkers there, laboring under work stoppages and irregular and pitihl pqment. The month before, she l-tad worked only nine days, With some amusement, she described her work brigade of 20 as including 20 disabled workers, three pensioners, and three who were about to retire. The piecework riystem existed as befare, but wges were no longer paid in money but in the bras, nightgowns, and shirts they produced, Most of her coworkers were ~lnhappyabout this system, since they fotlnd the garments diffic~~l t to sell. Tt] their complaints, management replied to the effect that they could like it or lump it. Nina, however, seemed to thrive on the system. She had been sa successft~Cat peddlixzg her wares at enter-

prises and organizations around the city that she owed Xkd October more than it owed her. Xn effect, she had become a small-scale trader, selling garments that she had paid for with work hours instead of cash. Her earnings were officially 500 rubles a month, but with this petty trade, we suspected that they were much greater. m e r e a s Nina had entered trade on the side, her yelunger son, now l 7 years czld, had given it up. His commercial activities led nowhere, providing him pocket money and the ability to assist his mother from time to time, but not an entrep~enetlrialcareer. He was embarrassed to csntintle with them, but it was too late to catch up czn his schoolwork. H i s teachers suggested he enter a vacationaf college in nir-tth grade instead of contintling with high school. So he entered the college for construction workers. Nina now regrets that she encotlraged his cornmerclal operations, and worries about his future, Apart from their wage labor and trade, Nina and her family were actively cultivating their dacha garden, which supplied two families-her own and her etder son"-with food through the winter, Her elder sun and his fiamily planned to spend the entire summer at the dacha tl-rat year, saving on the costs of travelitzg to and fro. Nina was close to her sister, from whom she tlsed to>borrow money in exchange for sewing dresses and nightgc~wns.But now it seemed she was not so short of cash; she was able to buy clothes for her younger son, and the previotls year, even a television set. They weren? stinting on food, and she even had some left over, to help czut her elder son from time to time. Nina was running an active, diversified household economy based on two m g e incr~mes,trade on the side, and dacha cultivatic~n.Her situation had actuatty improved over the last five years: Her husband was still bringing in cash, and she had given her own job an entrepreneurial twist. She had begun to share her gains with her kin, The one major cost she regretted was the sacrifice of her younger son" educat ion.

Anna: Between Wage Labor and Self-Employment" Mina's is a transitional case: Her job compelled her to become a trader ir-t order to realize a mclnetary wage. Annztk is the more tls~afcase, of formal employment suppiemenred by work at home, exploiting skills acquired at Xkd O c t o b e ~ Anna was born in Syktykax; ir-t 1964. After graduating from high school, she was immediately hired by Red October. Her mother, who was emplo-yed at f201ar, had wanted her to go czn to technicat college, but Anna had atready made up her mind otherwise. Anna took to Red October like a duck to water, rapidly moving tip the skill hierarchy. They pfioduced men" shirts by the piecework ystem, She brought horne what was then the very handsome wage of 350 rubles. She would often work weekends. She was very active in the social life of the factory, organizing tea parties, outings, collective holidays, and the like. She became a Komsomol leader, then a deputy in the City Cotlncil (I984f98T), a member of the Regional Council of

Trade Unions, and finally, a member czf the Communist party in 1986, which she quit shortly thereaher, in 1989. In 1987 she married a man wb~zhad ccsme trz the factory fmm the village. At one point, she even returned with him to jive in the village, dreami~zgczf owning a house and orchard there, BLI~ that was not to be,.Two months later, under pressure fmm her mother, they returned to the city and Anna rejoined her old brigade at Xkd B c t o b e ~She tczolc maternity !ewe in X988 and again in 199X. In 11392, the enterprise was priirratked to the work colfeake, but that event had little immediate effect on her life. In 1993, a new shop fbr military ~lniformswas opened; but soon afterwrd, the enterprise began to go downhifi. The first work stoppages occurred in 1993, and for the first titne she began to worry about her future. At the end of 1993, m g e payment delays began, initially lysnly for a few weeks, In 1994, the work stoppages became longer and longer, and in summer her department was closed for two months, The same thing happened in 1995. She quit work in July 1995. It was not easy to leave Red October and her brigade, but there was no future in it, Managers had started to steal equipment, uvarkers had begun, to leave, and the brigades were merged and reduced in size. fn 1996, after she had left, she recrzunted the sad story of rising debts and long delays in wages. The best wc3rkers had left, and Red October was forced to hire people without any skills, straight off the street. The only people who wanted to work there came from the unemployment office. They would work for a few months and then go back on unempfoyment, she said, Before she feA, Anna had taken on an extra job as ia janitor at the Telecommunications Center. She had got the job throu* a friend. m e n it became clear that she would have to formaXXy register this new job as her primary employment or lose it altogether, she left Red October, thitzkixzg she was moving into a more stable situatic~n.She received 400 rubles a month. This was a lozw salary, but at least she was paid regularly and in cash, She was earning as rnuch as at Red October and had more free time. What had once been a sideline had become her main job, As soon as she fee Red October, however, she began sewing garments at home. The first hurdle was to buy a sewing machine. Her husband opposed this enormous expenditure, but she overruled him. At the begixzning of 1996, she began to take in orders, expedited by her neighbor who w r k e d at a local tailor" artel and who was able to redirect work to Anna. Her first contract was to sew diapers for the city's maternity home. Then she began to take orders from other neighbars and friends, With the help of the same neigtrbor she worked otlt effective prices-about half the fiactory price-and then diversified her offerings from dresses and nightgowns to coats and suits, Since f m people could pay itz cash for their purchases, Anna also accepted payments in kind. At first (in 1996), this extra work brought in rnuch less than her "main job"" as a cleaning person; but by the end of 1998, the sit~lationwas reversed. On the one side, orders continued to grow, and it became hard for her to fulfil1 them. On the other side, her wages at the Telecommunications Center became irregular, and

her advance was lowered to a mere 60 rubles, Later there were layoffs, but she miraculoudy escaped them, and at the time of our last intervim (April 1999), she was earning 400 rubles, paid regularly each month, Her working hours were from 5 1:i"vt. to 10 F:M., six days a week; and although she was up to her neck in dirty rags, she couldn" give it up because l-rer dressmaking busixzess was not secure enough. She did not want to expand it too much, for fear of the tax inspector, who might put a stay to her business altogether, or of clients who might be too fussy or refuse to pay. She therefore took on orders only horn her circle of relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Because this working-class circle itself led a tenrzous economic existence, her business was all the more precarious. Annds husband has worked all his life at the Syktyvkar Machine-Building Factory (Sylct~vkarskiiMekhanichieskii Zavod, or SMZ). His formal wage in 1999 was 1,000 rubles, but he hadn't received regular wages since 1994. Compared to workers at other factories, he was doing quite well, becrtause he was at least receiving wages in kind. For example, in the month prior to our first interview in May 1996, he had received logs to build a dacha, and a lcilo czf butter. N e n workers protested that "they had nothing to put the butter on,""management added insuit to injury by giving each one 20 rubles (the equivalent of U.S.$4) out of the back pay they were owed, There were also some complex wage transactions. For example, the accountant at SMZ agreed tct ""payAnna for garments she had ordered by installing a telephone in Annak apartment. This would also serve as partial payment czf the wages owed to Anna's husband. Beca~lsetheir neighbors also wanted phones installed, and instalatic~nwould be cheaper for each if the phc~neswere installed simultaneously (it would cost 8,000 rubles for three phones), Anna suggested that the accountant arrange to have the three lines installed at once, and that the neighbrlrs pay her directly for their share of the expense, Btzt now there was tension, because Annit" neighbors were paying up very stowly. Xn 1998, Anna's husband also received ir-t lieu of wages a fridge, construction materials (agair-t,for a dacha), and an assortment of school supplies. He has looked around for other jobs but has found nothing better. The foundry where he worXts is one czf the few workpiaces that continrze to receive orders. In 1999, the cr~uptewas living with their son (11) and datzghter (seven) in a three-room apartment czn the ground floor of a frame house, The building was nearly 40 years old and badly in need of repair, especially after a gas explosion itz the kitchen; but Anna hadn't the money to fix it, and the municipality wouldn't do anything, Stilt, it was spacious. She had turned one czf the rooms into a workshop, where she sewed every day, She and her husband used to live with her mother in a tw-room apartment, before her mother received an apartment from PoXar and moved out, They exchanged their ~ o - r o o mapartment for a threeroom ~lnitin the same building. The prcvious o w e r s initially resisted the idea, but in the end their accumulated debts forced them to accede, Anna had to pay off a lot of bilk before they could nlove in, but the extra roam proved cruciat,

Anna received a large (1,000 square meters) plot of land from Xkd October in 2989, through a friend who headed the manpower department (po blatu), The trees were cut, the land was tilled, and over the preceding decade her husband had buiXt a cabin with materials he received in lieu czf wages, Much to the consternation of her husband, Anna insisted on reserving half of tlie land for flowers, the passion of her life; the other half was planted in potatc>es,cucumbers, tc>matses, and czther crops. Her mother and the children spend the summer holidays there, Still, Anna complains the dacha is not cost-effective, since travel back and forth is so expensive. She applies the same cash calculus tc>visits tc>her husband" family in the village, They haven't been there in two years because they have to pay not only for transportation but also for trinkets for all her nieces and nephews-all fc3r what, a sack of potatc>es? IXeTations b e ~ e e nhusband and wife have shiaed as she has become the major breadwitzner in the family and he has to beg for humiliating handouts fmm his bankrupt employer, At the time of our first interview>Anna thought their retationship was better than any other, very different from that b e ~ e e nher brother and his wife, who is always nagging him for money, At the end of the first itzterview>she said that although her husband had been opyt~sedto the sewing machine at first, now he was helping her with her work, At the end of the second interview, however, she complained that he was drinkitzg more and helping less: "When I married him in f987,I thought I was marrying a village lad, but now I have to coerce him even to work on the dacha. Wenever I aslc him to do anything, he starts bargaining, demanding cigarettes or something before he will help out. I don? knnow what has gotten into him." Anna had atways been an energetic leader and skilled worker. Her loyalty to Red October did not blind her to the need to seek alternative employment. With the encouragement of her neighbor and her pliant husband, she was able to stowty build up her own garment business. Depending on uncertain demand from her acquaintances, friends, and relatiives, its frlture is precarious, which is why she continues to do what she hates-namely, to clean fiosrs, Anna has not taken Valya" road to entrepreneurshipl because she has not been forced to rely on her garment busitzcss.

Vnlya: The S e v - M e Entrepreneur" The shift from worker tc>entrepreneur requires more than a mc>bili;~tionof assets material and social, skill- and citizenship-related. It calls for two strategic leaps: first, overcomitzg the disposition to play it safe by keepitzg one" foot in a number of niches; and second, resisting external presstlres to redistribute the wealth one accumuIates among poorer kin, neighbors, and friends. The shift from defensive strategies to entreprenerrrial ones is not something that comes about suddenly; it emerges elver a considerable period and often under the economic compulsion to survive. It was part desperation, part imagination that led Valya to become an itzdepcndent trader in the local markt.

Vaip was born in 1968, and at our last interview she was 31 years old, Her father had died in $973, after which her mother started to drink heavily. Her mother lost her parental rights, and Valya was taken to an orphanage at the age of five, where she stayed untif she was 15. At the time, she could not forgive her mother; but looking back on those orphanage years now, she thir-tksshe learned a great deal-especially, to be self-reliant. One of her teachers was like a second mother to her. She did welt in classes, had an active social life, received rewards and trips, and even became a Komsomol leader. She recalls how freely she traveled under cczmmunism, whereas now it's too expensive. At 15, Valya left the orphanage, returned to her mother" home, and entered a vocational college, where she received a professional certificate as ;a switchboard operator, She began worlting at the Central Telephone Exchange in 1988 but was soon forced to quit the job because customers complained about her rudeness, which Valya blamed on conflicts with her husband at home. Be that as it may; she quickly realized this work was not for her and took a job at f2s~far, working in the shop that lacquered the chipboard panels for the wall systems. During that tin~e she also enrolled ir-t courses at the commerce department of the timber ir-tdustry academy, but she had to give that up when her son became sick. Xn 1994, with work and wages both irregular, she left Pofar to work in retail sales at an agricultural supply store-a job she found through a friend of her mother%s,whcz happened to be the proprietor. There she met her second and current husband, who was doing some electrical uvtzrk, Together they left the store in 1996 beca~lsethe business was nearing bankruptcy, the conditions were potx (no sick benefits or maternity leave), and her husband was accused of stealing, Nevertheless, her two years at this store had taught her a great deal about retail trade, preparing her for her new occ~lpationas a trader at the town market. Another reason she had f'or leaving this store was that she was expecting a baby. When we interviewed her in 1997, she was living with her mother, an unemployed pensioner; her husband, aged 19, who was receiving minimal unemployment benefits; and her two children-a son of 12 and a, daughter czf one year. Out of desperation, in May $997, she started her o w trade in processed food, wrking from home, Like many of the traders at the nearby city market, she employed her own sefter-a neighbor who had been a bookkeeper but had recently been laid off. She had complete confidence in her new employee, who received a nominal m g e and a csmmission of 7 percent of the profit, Her hr~sbandtransparted the goods to and from the market everyday, having first collected them from the local wholesale centel: He borrowed the van of ;a close friend, whom they paid back in gas and maintenance. The markup on the wholesale price was much smaller, of course, than it would have been for fresh food products imported from distant cities. Many women participated in long-distance trade, gczing to Iufosct~wto buy goods and then reselling them at a higher price in the north, Vaip could not do this: Xn addition to paying her seller, she had to pay for her market space, taxes, and itztercst on the

money she borrowed (at 10 percent per month). She also w s forced to pay for protection. She nonetheless made a reasonable profit of about 2,000 rubles a month-a little mclre than the average mge, with the added advantage of its being actual money. m e n we returned two years later, in 1999, Valya's busir-tesshad expanded, but she was not living any better; She now cczntrolled four kiosks and emplc3yed salesw m e n at each of thern. In order to survive, she was paying them a very Xow official wage (500 rubles a month), but she gave them another 700 to 1,000 rubles tmder the table in ""br>nuses.'"She was still borrclwing money but had learned that it is best not to borrow from friends. The same rule applies to hiring: She judges potential employees on the basis of their references. Valya has her own car, a pager, and even extra storage space, but she has no ambition to open a retail store, She says if you need 15 official signatures just to open a kiosk, you can imagine how impossible it is to open a store. The previous two years had not been all clover, and she cr~ntinuedto live precariously on the margins. Indeed, in the second I-ralf of 1998, her child fell ill and she was forced to register on the unemployznent rolls, From the beginning, a critical asset to Valpa? business was her apartment, which was sittlated on the ground Roor of a rundown, tw-story frame apartment builditlg equipped with poorly functioning central heating. Its sir-tgtxlaradvantage was its proximity to> the town marker. In additiont it had three rotlms (though totaling only 36 square meters of living space). Vatya stored her goods in the coldcst room (the poor heating turned out to be an asset). In this way she was able to minimize cr~sts,including time spent in transpc~rtation,Valya and her f'amily lived in the other two rooms. M e n we interviewed Valya in 1997, her husband was helping her with her nascent business, Earlier his parents and two brothers had helped them out. But in 1999, Valya was fed up with her husband. She had hoped he w u I d at feast be available to transport produce, but he was arrested iFor drtanken driving and lost his license, As far as she was cr~ncerned,the only thing he had done for her was give her a daughter. That had given him the right to avoid military service f'or a ti~ne;but now that their darzghter was three, he had been called up. She was only too happy to see him leave. That wc3uld give her at least WOyears of respite. But she has not given up on men in genera!. Sl-re thinks back on her past, wondering whether she made a mistake in divorcing her first husband, and meanwhile has rediscovered her ex-lcrve~from her years at I2olar. Netreas the center of economic cooperation in the Soviet system w s the Iabor collective, it has now entirely shifted over to the household, in Va1j.a" case, She misses the security that came with state employment, better pensions, and holiday camps for children. Brrt she admits that the shortage economy had ifs problems and is glad to be free to przrsue her own line of business, She lives and works fc3r her children. She m n t s thern to have a good edtzcation, and she says she will do anything she can to give them a better life,

Luba: Turning Back from the Brink" It was desyeratic~nthat drove Valya into trade. Sitting at home with her newborn baby, she seized what opportunities were available to her-an apartment next to the marlt;ctpli-rce,and an unemployed husband ready to work at her behest. Even now with her business expanded, with a car and pager and several employees at her command, she stilt lives on the edge czf poverty, knowing that moving out of her ramshacMe wooden apartment is just a dream. If Valya tc>t~k the low road, Luba took the high road into retail trade. Still, like Valya, she confronted political and economic obstacles, which in the end forced her to give up the idea of developir-tgher own, illdependent business. She had to ont tend with not one but two male-dominated worlds: that of the former nomenklatura, who early on had secured monopotles in trade, and that of the extortionist mobs. Luba's social connections, material assets, and organizational skills took her farther than any of the other w m r m in our sample, but only because she led an abstemious, kopeck-pinching life, always a w r e of the precariousness of her family" existence, At 42 in 1999, tuba was ten years older than Valya, She haits fmm a village near Sykwkar, graduated h m a culinary colIege, and married a IocaX teacher who subsequently became a KGB officer. She saw him as her escape from the village and did nst expect the marriage to last the ten years that it did, She trzok a job at &far in 1984 with the explicit purpose of earning enough money to buy her husband a car. Then he was seconded to Usogarsk, and she went with him. There she became he-ad of manpc3wer in a local enterprise. m e n she discovered that he had been tlnfaithh i , she left him and returned to Syk~ki-rr with her daughter; leaving her son behind. Her husband laughed at her, saying she'd never be able to survive without him, But she was determined. '21recrver her old apartment from the KGB was her first and most challenging goall, especially as KGB oficers were not allovved tcz divorce, In the end she succeeded in recouping her former two-room apartment as wEl as her job at &tar, She also began receiving alimony from her ex-husband. As in Vatya's, the critical moment in Luba's career came in 1993, when Polar's fortunes began to decline, as evidenced by forced vacations, irregrxlar pay, and disorganized work. At oar first interview in July 1994, tuba expressed doubts about the enterprise" future, being critical of the way it had been privatized Cpassitzg into the hands of the collective rather than those of a single owner), She also had little ympztthy fc3r the factory" manpowr policies: the elimination of managerial positions, the merging of incompatibfe brigades, and the layoffs of the best workers (because they were p u n g and childless). Luba had a precr~cic~us understanding of efficiency and markets, She could see the future of k l a r as clearly as though it were written on the wail, As early as Febrtxary 1994, she began experimentixzg with work on the side, When there was no w r k at the factory, she wtltd travel to Mosct~wto buy goods that she could resell at llame in Sylctyvkar. It was through her friends that Luba joined the growing

numbers czf shuttte-traders, czr ctzeifnoki, at the same time that Vaip w s entering retail. As the factory was already paying workers in kind, she took one of the wall ystems in lieu of wages and installed it in her own apartment, selling the one she atready had. At this point, the child support she received for her daughter was her primary source of monetary itzcome. In July 1994, she took the critical step of leaving Polar. She saw no need to continue inhaling laquer f'umes. For what? For unstable employment? Those who stayed behind in polar were either supported by their husbands or were waiting fc3r early retirement. She was in neither position. Thrrsugh a chance encczunter, she found a job as a secretary in the Bulgarian consulate in Syktykar. The pay was good and in dollars, which at that time of soaring itzflation was a major advantage, She lasted three months there before resigning in the face of excessive demands and insults about her lack of education. But she had developed a taste for money, In Nt~vembershe tc>c>kup a job in a smafl, poorly maintained store, where she uvarked untit May 1995. She knew the manager as a friend from blar. The store had no f~zture,but she persisted nevertheless, earning money on the side and learning about the retail trade. Once more it was tuba's connections that gave her the next break. Many of her neighbors were connected to the KGB and had strong ties to local notables, It was through one such neighbor that Luba found a job in a new supermarket selling cr~nstructionmaterials. The store was o~wnedby the son of one czf the most influential politicians in the republic, The customers were wealthy, the profits were handsome, and her wages were considerable, especiaiiljr when she included the money she made on the side. Luba explained that the owner cheated the state out of its taxes, and the sales staff in turn cheated the owner of his profits. Withitz three months, she was able to buy a car and a television set, and she had saved u y enclugh dollars that she could then lend them out, at interest, to friends. These early years czf market expansion were indeed the golden age of retail-espedally that sponsored by the old nomenklatura, The olwner wanted tc> promczte her to manager at another branch, but Luba feared the resentment she m u l d face there as an outsider, She was especially wary of any such move when she learned that her owrz, manager, for whom she had the greatest respect, was being fired on accusations of having abscr~ndedwith c r n pany funds. Instead of accepting the promotion, Luba, together with two other senior sales-vvamen and their manager, resigned with the intention of setting up their own shop. As she said at the end of the secrznd intervier$ they were in a good position to start their own bushess, having the necessary protection, contacts, and money. This didn't work out, however, beca~lsethe manager decided to move into the kiosk business on her own. Luba felt betrayed, She was left without a job; so she too tried to set up a business on her own. She started her owrz, store, selling food, but the ""roof" "(protecticln) pi2yment"o the mafia, as wet1 as pqments t ~the > tax offrcers and to the fire department, were so high that she had to abandon the project after three months. Looking back on the experience, she realized that she shotlid have been more

willing to borrow money, To her that had seemed too great a risk. This is what separates her fram Valya, who perhaps was more desperate but also more flexible in adapting to the new market forces. Elaving given up the idea of her own business, she returned to being a saleswoman itz a store, fn 2997, her official salary was ;a meagcr 550 mbles; and at our most recent interview (in 2999), it was not much better, at 700 rubles. But that is beside the point, because she is able to sell her own goads on the side, without paying any of the associated costs (taxes, rent, or protection). In effect, like Mina, ttrba c ~ n d ~ r cher t s own trade on the o~wnerkpremises, pqing rent not in kind or in money but in hours of labor. On the side she also continues to lend out dollars to her friends at the standard interest rate of 10 percent per month. Lubak relationship with her domestic partner was very different from Valyak. In 1990, soon after returning to Syktykar, Luba had struck up an acquaintance with a man ten years her juniol-, She openly conceded that theirs was more an arrangement for cr~nvenienceksake than an affair of the heart, She did not want to register the relationsi~ip,having been disillusioned by her first marriage. She provides a roof for him, while he does all the "man" work"" aro~lndthe apartment. In 1997, he had a job at the Municipal Water Works, ttrba reported at our third interview that he used to contribute some 2,088 rubies a month to the household budget but of late had only been receivix~gan advance of 200 r~abies, She was exasperated with his pasivity. In the neighboring municipality, wcIrlers who had threatened to cut off water supplies had quickly recovered their wage arrears, Why couldn't he and his coworkers do the same in Syktyvkar?m e n we returned two years later, in June 1999, he had not been working for five months. He hadn't even received all the baclc pay owed him. Ele was using her car as a private taxi for hire, He had been dair-tg this for a number of years; "rrt sitzce losing his job, he was making more money at it than before-some 2,000 rubies in one weekend. But they lceared that he w u l d be caught by a tax inspector traveling incognito. So he did not do his ~lndeclaredtaxi-driving work during the week, Like Valya, Luba had no time for a dacha. W e n we asked if she had one, she shot back, in an insulted tone, ""Xm not 50 years old! my do I need a dacha!" "1 her eyes ;a dacha was for those who had no employment potential, who were no longer active-in other w r d s , for pensioners and others with plenty of tirne at their disposal. The dacha is the antithesis of the market world in which Luba lives and thrives. m e r e a s many of our informants could not afford a dacha, or co~lld not afford to cultivate their dacha, ttrba was the only one who dismissed the very idea of self-provisioning, Yet she does dream of returning to the village where she grew up; and goitzg to the forest to collect mushrooms and berries is one of her greatest pleasures. The cr~untrysideto her connotes an escape from the presstrres of the marketplace rather than a substitrrte economy, In our first three interviews with her, Luba's aspirations were focused on her daughter, who she hoped w u l d enter law school at the uni.rersity. In 1997, the daughter entered a local community college that prepares students far university, Etrba herself was plannir-tgto pay: the fees, which are exorbitant in Syktyvkar Uni-

versify" most prestigious departments, such as IN. In 1999, her daughter was working at a local photography business for a pittance of 350 rubles a month; but she was also enrc~lledin a correspondence cotlrse in cr>mmerce.She travels to Moscow twice a year for examinations. Luba would have preferred that her da~lghtertransfer to the college in Moscow as a ftiii-time student, but she could not afford to pay the tuition and living expenses there. Her son had rejoined them from Usogorsk in 1997, and in 1999 he was in his last year of high school. Luba was already scheming to get him an exemption from military service. She thought she w u j d be abie to bribe her way through tr:, a waiver with the help of a neighbor who worked at the tocat military draft center. She was unhappy with her son" progress at school, for which she blamed his stepmother in trsogorsk. But she cr~nsoledherself that at least her partner and her son were getting along well. Luba's closest kin are her sister, brother, and father. Her sister, five years yclunger than herself, is married to zt man who like Luba? ccsmpanion, is ernplayed in the Municipal Water Works department. Lvba regularly helps her sister out financially, In 2997, tuba reported that her brother, five years older than herself, was living by himself in zt hostel, divorced, and zt drunkard. Rather than give him money, which he simply spends on alcohol, she gave him ciotbes. But she was despairing of helping him, since when he was drunk, he sold his clothes for more vc>dka. In 1999, Luba told us that he was now serving a three-year prison sentence. Luba" father was still living in the village. Slze and her sister used to help him grow egetables and other crops; but since he had taken tip with a new partner, they rarely visited him, because of the tension b e ~ e e nthem and her. As to her relations with her own partner's relatives, Luba said, they ~lsedto be rather cool but had improved over time, as it became obvious what an effective and caring homemalcer she was. In $997, Luba compli-rixzedthat she no longer had any friends, only contacts. She tlsed to spill out her woes to her partner and her sister, both of whom had a ready ear; but they had so many problems of their own that she didn" want to overburden them with hers, In 1999, she was rumixzating about the future. She had plans of buying a plot of land and building a house in her home village, so that her children coutd have her apartment, Despite her previous failures, Luba has not given up the idea of opening up her own shop. ""The third time" a charm," she said, but she was only too aware of the very real prc>blemsshe wc3uld have to overcome. Luba did not follow Valya across the Kubicon into her own business, nor w u l d she consider bringing her partner into some jc~intbusiness, Instead she has withdrawn into a strategy of household diversification rather than concentration, deploying the managerial talents she ixzherited fmm the old regime in multiple commercial operations. Of all the women W interviewed, she is the cfosest to the energetic, self-reliant stereotype of the "new lxussian w n a n . " But she re-

mains focused on the future of her children, for whom she is ready to make any sacrifice, In crzmparing Nina, Anna, Valya, and Ltrba, we see both the risks and the imagination necessary to take the entrepreneurial road, Valya is the only one who has developed her owrz, business. Her family is completely dependent upon it, and paradoxicafly; their living conditions are the worst. Nina is forced into selling manufactured garments as a means of realizing her wages. She is unusual among her coworkers ixz peddting Red October's bras and dressing gowns, Anna clings to her cleaning job as a source of incrzme and an escape from home; but most impartantty, it is a shield to protect her mare lucrative work czn the side. She could expand her busixzess, but she fears depending upon it, because her clients are so poor, their livelihoods so trncertain, Of the four, Luba is the best equipped to develop her own business; but she has learned that the safest way is to conduct it under the ""roof" of another-the owner of the shop she looks after, She is only tc>o aware of the barriers to entrepreneurship posed by the joint conspiracy of mafia and governmental contrc~l, As economic involution has deepened, it has driven working-class families back into defensive strategies of diversificatic~nand sharing, It has also created czppartunities in the sphere czf exchange; but for the wrkers of Polar and Red October, such opporttrnities arc lirnited, being forrnd only at the lowest rungs of a politically clrganized ecr>nc>myof trade, prc>tectic~n, and banking. The most enterprising w n e n of the vvorking class are but the fodder of a vast, male-regulated economy of transactions that occ~lpiesspaces vaated by the party-regulated, redistributive Soviet eccznomy. Rtrssian society is increasingly polarized b e ~ e e na class of marginal households retreating to subsistence and self-provisianing, largely headed by women, and a male class of merchants and regulators.

The Newark Society In accrzunting for the startting failure of the Russian ecr>nc>mictransition, tmro social theories have assumed popular currenq: cuttural legacies and institutional collapse, Those who adopt the first perspective argue that the abiding legacies of crzmmtrnism have mired Russia in its dark past; those who adopt the second, that communism was so fragile that it collapsed like a house of cards, before IXussians had a chance to create a new order to take its place, leaving an institrrtional vactrtrm and normlessness. Our study czf srzrvlvat strategies suggests that there is some truth in both theories. We have shown how the inheritance of material assets, human skills, and social relations has shaped the terrain on which strategies are forged. The state continues to play a crucial redistributive role czf last resort. These legacies, however, don't work in a historical vacuum; they are not the leaden wei@t of tradition. They are more like magnets around which p~zorpeople navigate their lives. Individuals strategize around resources-housi~zg, occlupationaf skills, education, re-

Iations of kinship and friendship, and state assistance-which they inherit or lose, which they create anew or dissipate. We can say that there is continuity with the Soviet order in the taken-fnr-granted routines that organize the deployment czf resources, but these routines are combined in novel ways ilz response to the new circumstances, If resources provided a certain fixity to their lives, eccznomic involution transmits a radical uncertainty, which cantinually threatens to destroy the connection between means and ends. Instit~~tions have indeed collapsed-specificak the party and the wrkplace-and new institutions have yet to be consolidated. But an instittrtional vacuum is not the same as normlessness. People are throtvn back on kin and friends, a network society that devebops and sustains its own culture of diversification and reciprrscity. m e r e before institutions htsmogenized and directed behavior, today their disappearance has opened up new opportunities for many-sided activities and for sharing; and for the risk-takers, concentration and acc~~mulation. W a t marks Russian life today is the inxntiveness of what was its vvarking class. In the face of economic uncertainty, reactions have been remarkably stable and rational when looked at holisticalljr, which is why we can speak of strategies at all. At the same time, howver, the process czf economic involution has destrc~yed the grotlnds of collective solidarity:without creating new ones; the workplace has dissolved and been replaced by the household. If the old regime cr~uldcontain collective mobilization only by combining coercive strategies and individual inducements, the new regime has not created the institutional infrastructure to generate solidarities, and by the same t s k n does not require the same repression. io said czf prerevolutionary IXussia, civil society is "primordial As A ~ ~ t o nGramsci and gelatinous: and we can say: the same of postrevolutionary Russia. Instead of civiI society, today we have a netmrk society that absorbs the blows of involution but without bringing people together around visions that would propel them into collective action. Quite the opposite: Involution brings about the contracticm of time and space horizons so that cr~llectiveaction seems more and mclre irrat ionaf .

Appendix: Some Poverty Statistics for SyktyvkarfR fn order to itzterpret same of the ruble figures we have used in the text, the following data may be of use, The Komi Republic" sstatisticaf office regularly adjusts the cost of living for a single individual based on minimum calorific intake, interviews, and prices, We have tl-re average annual figure for Syktykar, along with the percentage of the Ktsmi Republic's populatic~nwhose incomes are below this poverty line (see Table 11.1). ?"here is an obvious arbitrariness about these figures, but they are calculated in the same way every year, so tlley are a good measure of change, Pensions have kept ahead of the poverty level, and in Komi, because it has a relatively young population with relatively l~ighlevels czf employment, they have so far been paid regularly. We also indude the average of-

TABLE f 1. f Living Standards hthe Komi Republic, 3 994-1 998 (monthly incomes ar expenditures,in new rubles)

Dollizr-Ku ble Exhur~geRate

Q/oPopttZntion Average Average W ~ g e Mz'ninzunt Below Mz'nintunl Pension 211 It~dustriitl Living St~tndnrd Standad (Komi Sector per It~dividzral ofLiving Republic) (Syktyvh~r) (Syktyvka'r) ( a n t i Republic)

"Figures are approximate excllange rates before and after Aufswst 17. SOURC:ES: ItZespztbEZJEa Komi v tsfrakh ['I'ibe Komi Kepubiic in Figures] (SyktMar: Goskomsrilt Korni, 1999);SotsiaE'no-ekonntnZc!~eskoepobzhenie goro&v i raiunoa, [SocioeconomicConditions in Cities and Regions] (Syktyvkar: Goshmstat Korni, 1999); ""lannye sluzl-ibyzaniatosti goroda Syktykara" [Data of the Employment C>fficeof the City of Syktyvfcarj (unpubIishe4).

ficial wage in the industrial sector. It has mclre or less kept up with inflation, which is of less significance than the nonpvymmt of wages, payment in kind, and job loss, We have managed to a-111the following figures on tlnemployrnent in Syktpkar (see Table 1 X .2). There is a secular increase in the number looking far work, aXmost twice as many as the registered tlnemployed. The gender composition of tlnemployment reflects the gender cr~mpositionof employment, Unemptoyment compensation fefI drastically in May 1996, when an emergency situation was declared in Komi. Until that time, provided they had worked no fewer than 25 days during the preceding year, those registered as unemployed couXd rewive: 75 percent czf their average wage for the first three months of unemployznent; 60 percent of their average wage for the next fotu months; and 45 percent of their average wage for the final five months. m e n the level of unemployment reached 5 percent in the towns and 6 percent in rural areas-the socalled emergency-the situation qkxickly changed, Only those laid off due to licltlidatic~nor restructuring had access to the old system; the rest would only receive the minimum wage, a laughable 87 rubies a month (plus 50 percent more for each child), This minimal support ends after one year, but it can be renewed for another year if after six months the individual remains unemplo-yed, Public assistance to low-income fiamilies is calcutated on the basis czC fiamily composition, sources of income (wages, pensions, stipends, disability pay, al-

TABLE 11.2 Unemployment hSykvkar, 1993-1998 (figwires far women are hparentheses)

1,ookingfar Work: Total 6,4 1 S (3,139) Blue collar 4,176 ( 1,648) 'blihite collar 1,734 ( 1,232) Registered Unemployed 1,300 (738) #

Employed

125,000

Sou~c:c: I>annye siuzhby zarziatosti gorod" S;yh-ryr~hraj Data of the Employment Office af tile City of Syktyvkr]. These figures have not been afficialty published.

irnony, and so on), and assets Cdacfia, apartment, savings, car, animals), and is cr~rrelatedwith the minimum standard of jiving. Since February 1997, the gcwernment has only guaranteed b e ~ e e n30 and 40 percent of the minimum standard of living, whereas before i t would supplement ir-tcorne up to 200 percent of the minimum. Public assistance takes many fi.,rms, from cash to kind, from subsidies for housing maintenance or kindergarten to free school lunches for cl~ildren,

My thanks to Jennifer Pierce, Ruth Milkman, and members of the Carnegie Czonference for their cornments and suggestions. 1. ??ansition 1999: &man Development Reportfor CAntrral azzd Easter?~E u q e and the CIXS (New York: United Nations Develayment Program, 1'399), chapter 4. 2. The Soviet economy is conventionaf ty understood as a ""shortage ecoxlomy33irswhich managers serrrch, queue, and bargaii~for supplies, and when necessary, substitute one input for another. In this type of economy, work is continually disrupted by shortages of ~nateriatsor their late arrival and by the breakdcjwn of inadequate machinerjr, requiring uvorkers continuafly to improvise. A capitalist ecoxlomy, in contrast, is beset by ""srpfuses.'" Here the constraint is not from the side of supply but from the side of demand, which has its own distinctive effects on the organization af work. 3. The nalnes of the two factories are fictitious, as are the names of our respondents. 4. Mf ruble figures are in tl-re new denomination that was introduced January 1,1998 ( 1 new ruble equals X ,000 old rubles), The exchange rates are presented in the Appendix, A5 a rule of rhumb, one can say that before August 17, 1998, there were 5 rubles ta the dollar, and after January 1,1999, there were 25 rubles to the dollar. 5. Marina (#48): Intenricws, July 9, 1995; April I, 1999,

6. This is calculated on the basis of the mirzimum necessary for a singte person to survive, plus 50 percent more for each child, Clf course, no one can actually survive on 80 rubles (about U.S.$3) a month. 7, About I0 percent of the population live in such cottages, but most othersbre in much better condition than Marina's. 8. "fanya (#69): Interviews, June 18,1996; March 30, 1999, 9. In the Soviet diys there was close diplomatic and ecanon~iccooperation between Bulgaria and Komi. Bulgarians settfed in one of the richest tirnberix~gareas of Komi and promoted the local economy with their labor. Half of tlle timber they cut, they to(& for tfiemsefves, giving the other half to Komi, tr~getherwith various foodstuffs imparted from Bulgaria, In 1996 this arrangement was ended, the Butgarians went home, and the Bulgarian consulate in Syktpkar was closed. 10, Sveta (#59): Interviews, J a ~ ~ u a30, r y 1996; March 13,1999. 11. Natasha (#45): Interviews, June 28, 1995; July 2,1997; May 11, 1999. 12. Irina (#56): Interviews, January 4,1996; April 12, 1999. 13. Wina fh"72): Interviews, July 15,1996; April 8,1999. 14. She traveled under the auspices of the Committee of SoldiersWothers, an orgax~ization formed at the end of perestroika to defend the rigllts of soldiers who were being abused in the army, They were very active in defending the interests of those serving in the war in C:liechnya, and sent delegations to retrieve wir prisoners. 15, iitr~na(#67): Interviews, August 22,1998; April 4,1999. 16, &lya (#IQ):Intemicws, July 8, 1994; July 15,1997; June 24,1999. 17. X;ubrz ($4): Xnterview~s,July 5,1994; August: 20,1996; July 18,1997; June 27, 1999. 18. We are gratehl to Svetlana Yaroshenko for stxyylying the documents on which this apyendh is based, and for hefpitlg us interpret them,

This page intentionally left blank

The Nation

This page intentionally left blank

The Redefinition of the Russian Nation, nternationa Security, and Stabi Igor Zevelev Georg-eC, Marshalf European Centerfor Security Studies

T

he failure to recrzgnize the difference between nation and state has been costly for studies of contemporary world patitics,' Nations and states have different organizational logic; they divide the global arena along different lines, and the interaction between the WO structures has increasingly prr>&uceddeadly confrlicts. This conflictual relationship warrants an analysis linking the concepts developed by students of nationalism to the explanatory apparatus of international relaticlns and security theory However, the nation and the national have an astonishingly undertheorized presence among international retations thearistse2 The most notable exception to this rule is the so-alfed Copenhagen School, which has made remarkable progress in attempts to recrznceptualize intaational security as a duality of state and ""societal securiv.'WQleWaever and Barry Bumn have argued that sovereignty is the name of the game for the survival of a state, whereas survival for a society is a question of identity. T h y point to the replacement of mifitary threats by conmms about the abifity tcz survive as a viable entity as the main reasan for ir-tsecurity after the end of the Cold Tu"Jar."n their framework of anatysis, the words society and nation are used almost interchangeably.' This analytic framekvork seems to work well when appIied to the Xtussian case, primarily for two reasons. First, many Russian political actors and ir-tte-llcctuals believe that there is a particularly evident discrepancy b e ~ e e nthe state and the nation in post-Soviet ilussia. Nation has had an almost exdusively ethnic connotation in Russian theoretical and political discourse, Xn this discourse, the Soviet Unicln cr~llapsedalong false borders because Russian lands as well as 25 million people had been usurped by a new Russia, Aleksandr Sutzhenitsyn, the

leading Xxussian writer and the most consistent anticc~mmunist,calls this devetopment "a colossal historical defeat of Russia."' Second, a grave existential threat tc> Russia Iotzms in nationalist discourse, The division of the Russian nation is viewed as an important component czf a broader apocalyptic picmre, Atelrsandr Solzhenitsyn describes "the decline of Russian national consciousnessP%nd argues: "The Xussian questionht the end of the twentieth century stands trnequivocat: our people he or not be? . . . If we persist in this way, who knows if in another centtrry the time may come to crass the word Russian out of the dictionaryTm7 The rhetoric of Gennadii Zpganov, the leader of the Russian csmmunists, is no less charged, He writes about the ""psslibifity of losing sovereignty l r a l of the looting of sacred national objeasP8 and spiritual and c ~ ~ l t ~ assets, The official documents cc>ncerningRussian sectrrity, however, do not say a word about any discrepancy b e ~ e e nthe state and nation, nor do they express concern about the threat of extinction. The National Security Concept signed by President Boris l"eltsin on December 17, 1997 declares the crisis-like state of the economy the major threat to the nationat security czf the Xxussian Federation, The solutions are seen in reform, stability, and deveIopment,' Why is there such a yrc3found discreyanq between these different visions of security threats to IXussia? Does this discrepancy constitute a threat in itself? Are there any grounds for compromise or any possibility of consensus on these issues in crzntemporary Russia? According to the Copenhagen School, a state must approach security as an aggregate that includes the societal sector.'" Leaders ir-ttegratethe various security sectors in their policymaking, and there is a single, integrated apprc3ach to security in potltical terms." The Russian government does not ignore potential security threats from society: On the contrary>the governmental approach is congruent with the nationalist view in that it identifies major sectrrity threats as emanating mostly from Russian society rather than from the international system. The problem is that the government interpretation of the bo~lndariesof Russian society and the major security threats is fundamentally different from that of the oppclsition. For the Russian government, society is the totality of citizens, The state and nation are conceptually merged,12The definition of security threats by the gcwernment is in line with Yeitsin's general potlcy of state-building, Uettsin made a commitment to democratic statehood and liberal nationhood ir-t the early stages of his political crusade far Russian independence. He maintained this commitment more or less consistently from X99 t to 1999." TTk choice may be explained by ""prsonality and ideational factorswM or by "~ructural"hctors (namely, weak, inartic~rlateRtrssian natic~nhoc~d).' ' For the communist and nationalist oppclsition, the people (roughly equivalent to nation in Rz~ssianpolitical discourse) is detached horn the state and from citizenship for two major reasons. First, a significant part of the Russian peoplesome 25 m i l l i o n w s cut off from the Xxussian state when the Soviet Union dis-

integrated, Second, Yeitsin" regime is perceived as a foreign occupation, alien tcz the people, Opposition in Russia bears an antisystem character (at least rhetorically), though it operates within the constittltic~nalframework. TheoreticalTy, liberal institution-brzilding may be replaced by a nationalist project q~liteeasily The situationai and constructed aspects of national identities on both micro and macro levels facilitate such changes. As Ilya Prizel has argued, "Wile the redefinition of national identities is generafty a gradual process, under situations of persistent stress even well-established identities can. change at a remarkable rate, and a people's collectiw memory can be 'rearranged3uite qrzielily.'"Turrently, Russia is under such a condition of persistent stress, and there is no reason to believe that the people and the elite will cling itzdefinitely to their old supraethnic traditions and liberal project of state-btlilding. Ethnicity could wetf becczme the cornerstone of a new Ilussiars nation. Are there any czbjective factors that might facilitate the substitution of liberal state-builditzg h r ethnicized nation-building in Rt~ssia'? X would argue that different perceptions of security threats are not based on any objective incongruity between the state and the nation in post-Soviet Russia. Particular political actors construct this incongruity, It must not be taken for granted that there is an agreement within a society and between states on what exactly constitutes nations in general. There may be competing visions of nationhood in any given cotlntry and among its neighbors. There may be a dialogue or conflict over what nations are present on a given territory. Different actors may contest the boundaries of nations. Such a situation might Xead ta the emergence of competing interpretaticlns of existing threats and security agendas by different theorists, political forces, and governmental agencies within a single state, and by different states and societies. If this is correct, discourse analysis, not the search for the objective boundaries of a natir~nor objective sectlrity threats, should be the approach used in analyzing threats and agendas. How, why, and by whom is somethir-tgestablished as a security threat? How, why, and by whom is a naticln defined? These are always political choices, not preordained realities. This argrxment takes us beyond the paradigm of the Copenhagen School. Barry Btlzan, Ofe Waever, and Jaap de Wilde, in formulating their framework for analyzing security defined identities as socially constructed.'Wowever, they suggested that identities could petri@ and become relatively constant elements to be reckoned with. Being strong sec~lrityconstructic~nists,they have admitted that they remain relatively weak social reXations constructionists, close to objectivism and Waltzian neorealism. There may: be two major explanations for this apparent inconsistency. The first is the legacy of artificial distinctions b e ~ e e nthe studies of identity and nationalism on the one hand and international relations and security on the other. The rapidly developing constructionist school of studies of the 'hationat" is a naural but probably insufficientfy known ally sf security constructionists. The second is lack of attention from theorists to transitional soci-

eties, which. is especially unjustifiable in view of the instability and insecurity inherent in the ""national3'"definition of identities. It may be natural for the Russian opposition, especially the radical opyc~sition, to refer more to nation than to state in national security discourse, as the defense of the state and its sovereignty would tend to strengthen those in power. For the opposition, it is more effective to argue that the nation is endangered and the present leadership is doing nothing about this situation. Nationalists typically assert that they must be brought to power in order to secure the survival of the natic~n."The natic~n,with its mixture of cr~nnectionto and separation from the state, is ideal for such czppc~sitionaXpolitical maneuvers," argued the founders of the Copenhagen Sclzool." Klx logic undergirding this assertion pRsupposes that there is an (~bjectivenation that has solidified and is crlnstant. In contrast, the analysis presented in this chapter suggests that the opposition constructs its own nation, apart from the state and nation that the government is engaged in btlilding. The opposition, throtlgh the democratic process, can place its ccznstrtrct and the alleged threats to its nation on the state security agenda. There may be, however, an alternative scenaricj. If the opposition feels that it shares respclnsibilitp with the government for concrete policies, it may adjust its views and perceptions in order to find a common ground with the government, The defense of the state then might become a part of the opyr~sition%security agenda. The sittrational and constrtrcted nature of identity and security make such adjustments possible. It is feasible to rearrange the discourse on nationbuilding, whereas it is close to impossible to change the cr~mpositionof an "c~bjective" nation. In R~zssia,in situations where the opposition does not feel responsible for policy, the gap between it and gcwernment o f en seems insurmountable. In cases where the czppclsitian does take part in concrete policymaking, compromise is possible. fn the making of Iforeign and security policies, an important instrument for including the opposition in decisionmatcingis the ratification of international agreements by the Federa1 Assembfy, During this process, the opposition may adopt a much more rational, pragmatic, and responsible approach than it would if its rrzle were confined to isstling rhetorical statements on general issues. This argument is supported by an analysis czC two important cases: first, the general perspectives expressed by Rt~ssianpoliticians on the country's identity, the aims of sec~lritypolicy, and internal and externaf threats; and seccznd, the debates over and ratification of the strategically important Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. The aim of the analysis is to show that shared responsibility over a vital security question can motivate seemingly opposite political forces to pufi together, Concerns over inwhere low ternational stability may cement a temporary coalition. Conversel~r~ p"ic>rty is given to the value of stability, a coalition of "&stabilizers" is likely to emerge,

Five Warfd~ieuvs The different political actors in Russia conceptualize the state, nation, and secmrity in various ways, and use those concepts differently, in various forms of discourse, The government develops concrete programs and official "concepts"";t-fie opyc~sitionuses party doc~lmentsand pamphlets written by their political and intellectual leaders. They have different visions of what Russia is, as well as of ifs major security threats and the airns and irlstruments of its security policies. In this sectic~n,gcmrnment documents and political programs of parliamentary and nonparliamentary parties and groups are analyzed in order to arrive at a typology of the major perspectives on nation-building and security issues. In addition, the respective political irnyc~rtanceand evolution of each of these perspectives in the period of 1992-1999 are assessed. The current political sitrlation in Russia places significant limitations on research and analysis of this kind, The gcmrnment is often erratic, and there are f'requent personnel changes, includii-rg those in the National Security Council and other security agencies. The multiparty system is still maturing. The number of groups claiming or having the status of a political party fiar exceeds what might be considered optin~affor informed decisionmaking on the part of voters, Fartythree electoral associations participated in the 1995 parliamentary elections. Thirty-five parties, mo>vements,and associations were represented in the Federal Assembty between 1995 and 1999, Coalitions and associations are formed, split, and dissolve on a regrxlar basis. Parties and movements appear and then disappear frorn the political arena before one can even take notice. Prc~minentpolitical figures migrate between parties and groups, Durna deputies are elected on one party list and then are registered as members of another faction. The key party fea8ers"iews might even be at odds with their parties3rograms. There is no party unity on many issues, Nevertheless, an analysis of governmental documents and political parties' positions can yield important insights for tlnderstanding the existing perspectives on nation-building and security issxres, as well as potiticaf options for the Russian government. The governmental documents and parties+rograms adeqrxately reBect the approaches that have crystallized within the R~lssianintellectual and political elites frorn X992 to 1999. Afthcrtugh the 1993 crisis and the subsequent adoption of tbe new constitution-as well as the 2993, 1995, and 1996 electic~ns-changed the relative strength of each perspective, these events hardly fed to the emergence of radically new ideas about nation-building and security polities. The framework of Russian theoretical and political debate remains basically the same even after the elections of 2999 and 2000. The analysis of gczvemmental documents and ideologies and the programs of various political parties, groups, and promitlent politicians leads to the condusion that there are ftve major persizectives, or projects, on building the state and nation in contemporary IXussia, as welt as five corresponding visions of interna-

TABLE f 2.1 Beliefs About State, Nation, and Security hRussia: Five Perspectives Aims of Securitj~

Definition State-builders ( Yeltsin's government; NDR" Yabloko)

Policy

ltussian preservation Federation of state (nation-state) sovereignty, stability

Mc~jar Threats economic crisis

Jnstrumerzt,c

Outcome

economic, political, mifitary

stability

political, military

instability

Restoratiox~isfs successor of (KPRP" LL,DPR3) tl-reUSSR (einpire)

strengtherling tveahess and enlarging and the state disintegration

Ethnonationalists people (intellectuals; (nation) x~onparfiamentary parties)

survival as 6'we')

disappearar~ce moral instability of identity (building of selfconsciousness)

Ilorninators

hegemony and dcjmination in the region

hostiIe neigl~bors

political, militarb economic

instability

(C>techestvo)

E~~rasian power (dt?rzhava)

Integratio~~ists (part of YeItsin3s government; ~nostmainstream political parties)

(:IS member one of the Soviet suaesmr states

Eurasian integratiorr

""'Vuguslav scenario3"

ecc,nomic, political, cultural

stability

WI)R-C>ur Horne Is Russia %#PRF-C:ommunist Party of the Russia11 Federation "tT>PR-X,iberaf flenrocratie Party of Russia SOLRCE: Author" compilation,

tional security;" They are: new state building, etfinonationatism, restr>ratic~nism, hegemony/dominitnce, and integrationism. The major elements czf these different visions of security are presented in Table 12. l. The cc>ncept of new state building, advocated by f2resident Yeftsin and the Democratic XXussia movement, dominated the officiaI paticy of the IXussian government in 1991 and 2992. The theoretical foundations of this concept were faid

in X992 by Valery Tishlcov, who was at that time Rt~ssianminister for nationalities as well as direaor of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of E"t1nology and Anthrt~polog.""" Xts essence was state-building through the creation and stabilization of new state institutions within the former borders of the RSFSR. Proponents acknowledged the inviolability of the borders between the former Soviet republics and advocated the development of relations with neighbaring states as fulty independent entities. They considered the question of Russian ethnicity politically insignificant and instead emphasized civic patrirztism. They likewise deemphasized the tl-romy issue of whether the Bolshevik-drawn borders of the XXSFSR were "nattlral" or artificial (many Russians believe their national borders inacctlrately reflect the real and much broader domain of Russian culture, language, religion, and traditions). The new state-builders view Russia as a modern nation-state whose pritlnary security policy goals are the preservation of its integrity and stability. The primary domestic security threats, in their view, are the economic crisis, organized crime, and disintegration; and in the ir-tternationalarena, NATO expansion, and failures of arms control. After the brealcup of the Soviet Union, several variants of resromrionism emerged among Russians-all of them virtuallj~ir-tdistir~grxishable horn itnperiaiism. The most influential party that effectively backs restc>rationismis the Communist Party of the itussian Federation. A less ""Sviet" version of imperialism was formulated by former Russian vice president Aleksandr Rutskoy, who drifted tcward a more ethntlnationalist stand after 1993, The most extremist interpretation of this way of thinking in today's Russia can be found in the writings and statements of the Liberal Democratic Party" leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky; The essence of the restorationist project is to reestablish a state within the borders of the USSR (or in Zhirinovsky" dreams, to expand it all the way to the Indian Ocean), Until that goal is achieved, restorationists advocate that the Russian gcwernment intervene to protect the rights and status of Russians living in the ""near abroad" (the non-XXussian states of the former Soviet Union) by whatever means necessary, it~cludingeconomic sanctions and threats of military intervention. Unlike most ethnonationalists, "hperialists" are modernizers. They fiavor a strong army, big cities, and ir-tdustrial development. Vladimir Zlzirinovsky dismissed the image of a Russia of "mall vifjages, forests, fields, accrzrdion player Pet&and milkmaid Marfa'bas a pretty fiction put out by the Communists in collusion with the literary establishment, airned at placating the peasants while suppressing the forces of real Russian natic~naiismwithin the elite and the tlrban populace." His IXussia is the Russia of historic might, world influence, and impressive riches, Zhirinovsky preferred the images of Russia pair-tted by artist Xlya Glazunov: not a cotlntry of drunken peasants but an ""empire, with shining palaces of Petersburg, great historical traditions and aci~ievernents,thinkers of gcni~~s, and the leading c~lture."~'

The 1994-1996 war in Chechnya significandy undermined the popular appeal of imperialism. Xt bemme clear that any attempt to implement the restarationist pnzgram might lead to a war that Rt~ssianswere not prepared to support. IXestorationists still see IXussia as an empire, They perceive major threats to Russia itz the weakness and disintegration of the state: The breakup of the Soviet Union was the first step tcward the possible eventual disintegration of Russia, On the internationat front, the West is stitt the adversary. In 2991-1993, the moderate variants of etitnonutionuEisnz were represented in the political arena by the Christian Democratic party, led by Viktor Aksyuchits, and the Constitutional-Democratic party, headed bp Milchail Astafiev, Later, between 1995 and t 998, Uerzhava, headed by Aleksandr Rt~tskoy;and the extremist National Republican f2arty of Rt~ssia,headed by Nikofay Lysenkc), became more visible in the ethnonationalist spectrum. For its theoretical underpinnings, this perspective rdies on the ideas of promir-tent Russian writers-particuXar1y Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Valentin Ritsyutin, and Vasilii Belov-and of mathematician and essayist Xgor Shafarevich, Many small, more extremist grotlps also have arisen, Pamyat being the most notr~riousamong them. These grt~upsare known collectively as the "Russian right," or the ""Black Hundred"Xike more moderate ethnonationalists, they emphasize the importance of Russian ethnicity for state- and nation-building. The basic dipference betriveen the extremists and the moderates is that the former cr~mptetely reject the "Western values" of democracy, human rights, and the rule of Xaw The influence of the Black Hundred is thus far limited; however, ir-t a time of social unrest their pr~pularappeal as well as the danger they pose might wtl increase. Both the extremist and the moderate ethnonationalist parties and groups were significantly weakened after 1993, when some were outlawed and their newspapers were banned. This mclve was due to the fact that many small, militant ethnonationatist groups had played an important role in organizing the defense of the Moscow m i t e Horrsc in September-October 2993, and had led attacks on the buiildings of the MOSCOW maytIralty and the Ostankino tefevision station. As the most wellorganized forces of resistanm to YeItsin, they were targeted h r repression. The primary goal of the ethnonationalist: political program is to ~lniteRussia with the Rt~ssiancczmmunities in the "near abroad" and to build a Russian state within the areas of settlement of ethnic XXrrssians and other Eastern Slam. The mental map of Russia held by Viktor Aksyuchits is characteristic of aXf ethnsnatir~nalists.According to him, the Great Russians, the Little Russians (Ukrainians), and the m i t e Russians (Xfelarusians) form a united [Xussian, people. The ftuture Russian state envisioned by Aksyuchits includes the territories of Russia, Belarus, eastern Ukraine, and northern Kazakhstan, This state would maintain confederal relations with other areas of compact Russian settlement, The entire territory of the former Soviet Union remains a zone of Rt~ssia"vital interestsS2Wussiamust assist the relocation of ethnic Russians from the "i~ear abmad" hclc to Russia and meanwhile defend their interests bp every available means, includitzg military ones.'"

Ethnonationalists define Xxussia as the Russian people, Russia is located wherever groups of Russians live. This perspective, in both its extremist and its moderate variants, assumes that state borders should be redrawn along ethnic lines. The major threat to security is the disappearance of IXusslian identity-the inevitable result of the current moral degradation of the people, The West is usually. portrayed as a hostile force. Ethnc~nationalistsdo not cr~nceiveof an important gfczbal role for Russia other than that of spiritual and moral stronghold, As a rule, they argue that the country must concentrate on its internal problems. Attitudes tcward the events in the ft~rmerbgoslavia have been the exception. Rhetoric of ""Slavic brotherhood" and calls for assistance to Serbia intensified during the NATO air strikes in spring $999,Most other political forces in Russia at the time were more concerned about the forceful establishment of the U.S.-fed "new w r t d order," and NATO" assuming the roie of pan-European policeman, than about preserving ia ""Savic brot11erhood." The hegemony and dominance tendency might be viewed as similar to the imperiatist perspective,. It is difficutt to draw a clear-cut division b e ~ e e nthe two schools of thought, though. the former has a number of distinctive feattires. Antcmio Gramsci was one of the first political scientists to write about hegemony in international relations, This tradition was Eurther developed bp IXobert Keohane and others." According to Gramsci, a country usually becomes hegemonic because other actors either willingly or subconsciously defer to it, even if they wish to do otherwise. The folfczuvers comply because they see both the leader's policy position and its p~stativepower as Iegitimateez6 Political scientists and international studies experts are divided on whether hegemony and dominance describe the same phenomenon. Those who believe that a distitzction exists between them claim that a country might involr~ntarily defer to an external power without accepting the legitimacy of its policy," The dominant power does not necessarily seek to create an empire bp absorbing dependent political units; it may be satisfied with subjr~gation.Unlike a hegemonic leader, it might tise more or less direct cr~ercianto achieve cr~mpliance. The theoreticat basis for a IXussian policy of hegemony and dominance over the ""near abroad" was first deveboped by Presidential Cotincil member Andranik Migranyan.'Vn more moderate, policy-sriented terms, this project was advocated by the former chairman of the Committee for International Affairs and Foreign Economic Relations of the Russian Supreme Soviet, Yevgenii AmbartsumrIv. Elements of hegemonyldominance rhetoric were also presmt in statements, articles, and reports bp Russian foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev;'The essence of the project is state-builditzg within the borders of present-day Russia, accompanied by the subjugation of other Soviet successor states and the creation of a buffer zone of prcztectcjrates and dependent countries around Xxussia. Russian diasgoras are viewed as a convenient instrument of Russian infltlcnce and manipubtion within the neighboring states. Between X996 and 1999, the most vocal advocate of the policy of hegemony and domitzatisn was Yurii Luzlhkov, the m;zyor of Moscow who relied heavily on

the political expertise of Konstantln Zatutin, his adviser and the director of the Instit~lteof Uiaspora and Integration. A political alliance forged in 1999 between the Otechestvo mclvement, which Luzhkov heads, and Yevgenii 12rimakov, may lead to a softening in Luzhkov" position. Primakov shares the views of statebuilders and integrationists and places an. especially high value on stability;When asked what politicat forces he considered the most responsible, Primakov responded, ""Xiff stlppclrt any forces that advocate stability>the strengthening of Russia, the strengthenir-tgof statehood, while developitzg market relations, a socially oriented economy, and democracy,'""" lt is noteworthy that stabif ity was placed ahead of aIf other principles, In 1997, an overt attempt was made ta incorporate ideas of hegemony and domination into Russian policy on the CIS. On the eve of the May 1997 CIS summit, the institute headed by Zatufin prepared a special report for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs." The mkistry rejected it, and Primakov immediately disclaimed any responsibility for the report, since it did not reflect R~~ssia's official stance. According to Zatulin, hczuvever, the repclrt made its way horn the institute directty to the president, and some of its ideas w r e itzcorporated into Yeltsin's speech behind closed doors during the summit," The major message of the report's explicitly hegemonic approach was that Rtlssiak moderate policies toward the near abroad c o ~ ~be l dreplaced by more assertive ones, In order to blunt the Soviet successor stateshnti-R~~ssian policies, R~~ssia ccz~lldstir up political instability and interethnic tensions in the regicjn. In November 1998, Zatulin was ef ected chairman of the Uerzhava Social Patriotic Movement, founded by Rutskoy itz 2991-1. The dominators had acqtlired a party base by taking over a formerly restorationist movement. Tl-rose who subscribe to the principle of hegernonyldomitzancc view Russia as a strong Eurasian power that should continue to dominate in the region. The major threats are seen in hostile anti-IXussian neighbors, IXegionaI groupings backed by the Western powers or by Turkey are portrayed as encirding Russia. The alliance between Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, herbaijan, and Moldowa (the socalled GUUAM) is viewed as extremely dangerous to XXussia. Integrationisnz is beir-tg developed by those who call themselves political centrists. In important respects, integratic~nistsare intellectually close to Gorbachev and his supporters-in particutar, to the amorphous Civic Union and its spinoffs. Later, the All-Russian Union "Renewal," "rgey Shakbray's Party for Russian Unity and Accord, the Democratic 12artyof Russia, and the Congress of R~lssian Communities advocated similar ideas. Xt is important to note that the integrationist project finds wide support also outside Russia, ir-t other successor states of the former Soviet Unir~n.Its most active supporter is President Nursuttan Nazarbayev of Gzakhstan. The goal of the project is the economic reitztegration of the former Soviet territories, and possibly their eventual military and political tlnion. Sc~mevariants of integrationism envisioned a confederation of the former Soviet republics, The project is very pragmatic, emphasizing economy and security and downplaying

more abstract components, such as identity>ethnicity, and nationhood. Supparters of this school of thought maintain that diasgora issues will become obsolete if the post-So>vietspace is integrated in the economic and security realms, Several major visions czf reintegration have been advocated: Nazarbayev's Eurasian union; Shakbray's confederation of three to four countries within the Commonwealth of Independent States; and Yavlinsky" economic union, All three visions are predicated czn the assumption that there is a need for supranational institutions, controlled economic reir-ttegration, and maintenance of symbolic political sovereignty accompanied by a high degree of cc~operation.Unlike the imperiaitst prgect, integrationism lays claim to a democratic program granting equal rights to all member states,. Reintegration is barred at present by the egoistic interests of the Russian pofiticat and economic elite; by non-Russian elites7ear of ltussian domination disguised under democratic rhetoric; and by the U.S. policy of supportixzg geopolitical pltrralism in Eurasia, Integrationists believe that the major security threat to IXussia is the ""lgczsfav scenario,""which may evolve if Eurasian countries do not cooperate on a wide range of economic, security, and humanitarian issues. The general outlook of integratlonists is generally benign and peaceful. New state-builders and imperialists were weU represented in the State Duma from 1995 to 1999. Four major parliamentary parties subscribed tc>one of these two perspecdves on nation-building: Our Home Is Rt~ssia.(NDR) and Yablokcz were state-builders, and the KPLtF and EDPR were restorationists. It is only nattlral that those who represented a "new" Russia and an ""old" %>viejetUnicIn were major political players: Their agendas were easily identifiable and comprehensible in election campaigns. However, it wo~lldbe a vast oversimplification to reduce the nuances of political struggle to these two schools of thought. Ethnc~nationalists, integrationists, and dominators were poorly represented in the Duma in their ""pure" h r m , but their influence on party politics had been significant and was increasing steadily, as their agendas were partially incorporated into the programs of the major parties. The difficulties ethnonationalists have faced in gair-tingdirect electoral support derive from their radicalism and exclusiveness, They cannot appeal to nsnltussians, mixed ethnics, many inteliectualls, or those who still identi6 with thir-tgs Soviet. The weakness of Russian ethnonationalism was well demonstrated by its failures in the political arena. Dczminatc>rsand integrationists also lacked appeal to the general public, since their ideas coutd not easily be wrapped up in catchy slogans. X contend that ethnonationalism, ir-ttegrationism, and dominatic~nlhegemcznyhave been gaining in inflt~enceand are taking over the intellectual leadership of the mainstream parties, The five projects of state- and nation-building summarized above are more or less "ideal" versions. Sc~meparty programs include features from several perspectives. There is a natural affinity between some projects. On the czne hand, these affinities might serve as a basis for coalition-buildir-tg.On the other, parties that

share similar views czn nation-building and international security might be at odds with each other on economic or sodal policy. In addition, differences on tacticaf matters mi&t part political forces with similar strategic goals. In the next section of this chapter, I argue that concerns about nation-building and security policies-that is, about domestic and ir-tternationalstability-may: in certain cases prevail elver all orher ccznsiderations among political actors, and thus may serve as a basis for coalition-building, Likewise, a shared lack of concern for stability (or ir-t extreme cases, a common, high value attributed to destabilization) mzly draw orher political forces closer dtlring disc~lssionsof crtncrete poticy issxres. In sum, a confrontation between coalitions of stability-seekers and destabilizers may to a significant extent shape nation-building and security discrlurse in future Rt~ssianpolitics. W ~ a malces t a certain vision of identity and nation-buildiizg desrabilizing? First of ail, if current state borders arc assumed to be illegititnate, then there is no place for stability. As a rule, the state borders are challenged during an attempt to achieve congruency between the state and nation. In David Laitin's words: ""The boundaries of states are territorially defined, and despite border wars? remain fixed over time, Classic theories of international relations assume fixed boundaries. But the bczundaries ezf nations are defined by the cultural stocks czf peopfe, and tllese boundaries are forever ambiguo~~s."~~ In the contemporary Russian cc>ntext,state-builders and integrationists are more likely to seek stability than are restorationists, ethnonationalists, or dorninators. The former do not advocate the change of borders or the use of force for solving problems with neighbors, and they have a more democratic political outlook. The implementation czf their programs wouId bring general international stability in Eurasia in the long run. However, ir-t the short run, the political arena may be reconftpred along tlntlsual and unexpected lines when a disputed issue is being decided. This happened during the debates over the IXussian-Ukrainian treaty in 1998-1 999.

Russia and Ukraine: Nation-Building and Bilateral Relations XXussian-Ukrainian relations are an ideal field for a constructionist exercise by Russian political actors. Malaysia, Sierra Leone, or Uruguay would be presented more or less uniformly in Russian political discourse as foreign countries, whereas Ukraine can be constructed in many different ways. It might be presented as an emerging European country, as a neighboring ir-tdependentstate, as a CIS member, as a culturalty close Slavic crluntry, as a part of historic; Russia, as a potential member of a hostile military affiance (NATO), or as the state ifiegally holditzg a piece of land belongixzg to Russia (the Critnea). Ail of these different visions of Ukraine were present in the public and political discrlurse on the Treaty czn Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ubair-te, or the ""Big Treaty:" as it was called ir-t Russia. The discussion boiled

down to such basic questions as what Ukraine meant to Russia, its nationbuilding, and its security.

Ukraine never before existed as an independent state within its current borders. Today" Ukraine includes immensely divergent regions, and its new identity is a work in progress. The state faces the task of making the new nation separate and distinct from others-most of all, from Russia, There are more than I l million Xxussians in Ultraine-the largest expatriate itussian population a n y h e r e in the former Soviet Union. Eighty percent of tl-rese Rt~ssianslive on the left bank of the Dnieper River, in Nc~vc>rossiya, and in Crimea. However, it would be a mistab to assume that the ethnic Ukrainian-Itussian cleavage is the key to understanding Russians' attitudes toward Uk-raine, The situation is much more complex and multilayered. In addition to the plight of ethnic Russians, Rt~ssiakpolicy toward Ukraine has been shaped by such diverse issues as the difficulty of acknovvfedging Ubair-tians as separate people; the territorial dispute over Crimea; the strategic Russian interests in Sevastopof and the Black Sea Fleet; the gesstrategic importance czf Ulcraine as a former Soviet border region; and fear of NATO-Ukrainian rapprochement. Russian cultural infltrence in the newIy independent states is manifested in three forms: the presence czf ethnic IXussians; the partial Xxussification czf the titular pop~llationduring the Soviet period; and the R~~ssification of non-titular, non-Russian groups. Tc~getherwith ethnic Russians, the latter now serve as a barrier to ethnonationalism in the newly independent states. Given the deeprooted and longstanding Russian infl~xenceir-t Ukraine, there are no unambiguotrs historical, cuftural, or gec~graphicboundaries separating Russians and Ukrainians," "Fifty-sixpercent of Russians in the Russian Federation consider Russians and Ukrainians one people." h Ukraine, about I 2-1 5 percent of all marriages are between Ukrainians and Russians. Many partners and children of mixed marriages shift their self-identification from census to census,7hproviding further evidence that cultural identities here are fluid. R~~ssians in Ukraineapart from those in Crimea and Cl;aficiaV-have not settled in separate, welldefined communities but as in Betarus, intermingle with other Eastern S l a ~ s . ~ ~ Their social conditions, culture, and political orientations closely resemble those of Ukrainians. IXegionat differences have given rise to greater problems than have ethnic differences, Ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians living in Eastern Ukraine, Nt~vc~rossiya, and Crimea (unlike Ukrainians in Western Ukraine) are predsminanrty Xxussian-speaking, tend to vote in similar patterns, and hold positive attitudes toward Russia. Accorditzg to survey data gathered by the Kiev International Institute of Socialog>in 183 cities and villages of Eastern Ukraine, betmreen 1991 and 1994,82 percent of the population used Russian as their language of convenience; 61 percent wanted it to have a stattrs eqtlai to Ukrainian as an official

"state" hnguage; 49 percent thought that Ukraine and Xxussia should unite to form a single state; and 72 percent of ethnic Utcrainians were Russophone~,~~ One of the many manifestations of these attitudes was a mc~veby legislators in the Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts to grant the IXussian language the same status as Ukrair-tian itz late 2996-early 1997, w h i c h a s support4 both by local Russians and by Ukrainians who spoke Russian as their first language, The local public prosecutors, however, suspended these decisions as violating the law on the Ubair-tian state language. Tbe ""gray: area" of itztermir-tgXing Ukrainians and Russians serves as a got~dbuffer to nationalism and smoothes away tensions in and around Ukraine.'"" Laititz has s h o w that specifically Russian-speakng identity grotlps are taking shape in many post-So~vietstates. Sc~meof these grclups are ethnicaly diverse and include individuals of the titular nationalities. This social formation will continue to play an important political role as newly established regimes seek to fashion nation-states within their reptrblican botrndaries, A major finding of Laitin" research is that the development of such a conglczmerate identity is the to assimilation of Russians ir-t the "near abroad." The inprincipal co~~ntertrend terplay between the ok3posite trends of assimilatit~nand the formation of "Russian-speakingness""may farm an important axis of social and political life in the post-Soviet states. Paradoxically, assimilation is more problematic in culttrraly proximate Ukraine than in Itatvia, Estonia, or K a ~ a a s t a n . ~ ' Xt seems odd to speak of ethnic Xxussians living in eastern Ukraine, Novorossiya, and Crimea-where Rt~ssianshave lived for centtrries-as a nonindigenous people or a minority, since there are no distkguishable divisions bemeen them and the titrrlar groups. This sifuation has thus far hindered an active interventionist policy of the Rtrssian Federation toward Ukraine in behalf of Russian diasporas there. The Ukrainian state, however, has taken a difterent view of matters ethnic, and has effecrivety launched a ""nationalizing""project. The preamble to the Ukraitzian constitution contains references both to "the Ukrair-tian nation" and to ""all the Ukrainian people.'"qn the post-Soviet context, where nation has a decidedly ethnic connotation, this wrding signifies a distinction between ethnic Uhair-tians and all others, Article 1 t of the constitution dedares, "The state promotes consolidation and development of the Ukrainian nation, of its historicat consciousness, traditions and culture; and also the development of the ethnic, cultural, lingrxistic and religious identity of all indigenous peoples and national minorities of Ukraine."""In other wclrds, the state sees its role not only as consolidating the new civic nation but also as promoting the national consciousness of ethnic Ukrair-tians. The St>vierstate's l~>n@ime policy of Russi%ing titular natic~nalitiesprompted nationalists in many of the Soviet successor states to adopt assertive language policies that not only affect ethnic Russians living there but also Russian-speakers among the titular nationalities. 12c>liticalbattles have been waged over these questions in Ukraine. The status of the Xxussian language is still a live issue both in Tocal and in state politics. Some local Ukrainian governments have used their au-

tharity to further decrease the legal status of Itussian, while others have done the exact opposite,44One of Ukraitze's m+r recent lingrxistic battles centered around television and radio broadcasting. On November 22, 1996, a cr~nferencewas held in Kiev, with the participation of government oflficials, which recommended ensuring a complete switch to Ukrair-tianby all state- and privately owned stations, on the grounds that "the negative consequences [of using a non-state language] are no Zess a threat to national security than are violence, prostitution, and various forms of anti-l-rkraitzian propaganda."45 Theorist Margaret Canovan has suggested that one method of transforming a population into a nation is by "mobilizing them for struggle, preferably against their former rulers.'"'In this struggle, culttxrc and language are the usual points of cr~ntention.From this perspective, the population of Ukraine hardly fits the deftnition of a modern, cohesive nation. The situation in Crirnea is different from that ir-t other areas of Uhair-te. Russians make up about two-thirds of this oblast, which was transferred to Ukraine by Nikita M1-trushchevin 1954, to mark 300 years of Rt~sslianand Ukrainian unity, The legal status of Sevastopol, an itnportant warmwater port on the Black Sea, is currently disputed by some Rt~ssianpoliticians. Demands for territorial autonomy were first raised in Crimea in 1990, and were quickly followed, in 199X, by demands for rerrnificatian with Russia. The presence of the Black Sea Fleet added a military dimension to the controversy. Political struggles over the status of Crimea within and between Simkropof, Kiev, and Moscow became an important part of politics ir-t the three capitals throughout the 19f30se4' In sum, the nation-building prcsject in Ukraine is not yet complete. Like many other Soviet successor states, Ukraine struggles tcz find a compromise between an ethnic-based justifiation of independence and the muliticultural composition of its pop~~lation. As Pal Kotsto has noted: ""Sructures [in the newly independent states] displ;;ty kcivic%s we11 as 'ethnic\elements. In country after country one finds these rival conceptions of nationhood dwelling ir-t an uneasy cohabitatian.""" A11 of the former Soviet republics have adopted ethnopofitical mythsJ"identif'ying each state as the homeland of a specific, "'indigenous" people, This is reflected in the names of the new states, their Rags, anthems, emblems, official histories and holidays, pantheons of national heroes, and language pc~licies,The independence acquired in 199t has been interpreted by most IocaX ideologists, politicians, and intelectuais-as well as by same Western scholars specializing in a partic~~lar republic-as the establishment of the ""pe"p1es"kontrof over their fate, However, independence was won in the name of a particuIar ethnic group and not itz the name of the multiculttxrat population living ir-t each republic. According to Pal Kolsto, "The titular ethnss is everyhere becoming "he state-bearinghationP3'ZntelXectuatly, this policy has relied on the X;tomantic historicist tradition in its presupposition that humanity can be divided neady into natic>nsand its stipulatic~nthat ct~fturallyor ethnically defined nations possess sacred rights. It has thereby downplayed individual human rights and due respect for mir-torities."

Xn Ukraine, the fate of ethnic XXussians, the role of the IXussian language, and the status of Crimea, Sevastopol, and the Black Sea Fleet represent a nexus of issues crucial to natic>n-building.Each of these issues is strongly related to Russia, To a certain extent, Ukrainian nation-building is shaped by the presence of Itussia, even when that presence is invisible, What about Russia, then? How does it view Ukraine? How do Russian leading political farces 'k~r>nstrmct" Ukraine in the political discourse? In the next section, 1 show htzw the attitudes of the IXusslian political elite toward Uhaine crystallized during debates over the ""Big Treaty."

mat _If mraz'ne to Russia? Russian-Ukrainian relations-particularfy the ratification of the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnershi y b e ~ e e nthe IXussian Federation and Ukraine-were ""scuritized" by rn+r political actors in Rt~ssiahorn t 997 to 1999, The Copenhagen School defines setrririzaeion as the recategorization of a poticy issue as crucial to the survival of a state or nation.52 The leading Russian politicians used extremely charged rhetoric when cornmenting on the ratification of the treaty. Sergey Baburin called it a ""c_-atstrophe f'or strategic reXations";';""Vliadimir Zhirinovsky, a "btack day in XXussian hi~tory"";~ and Y ~ ~ rLuzhkov, ii a ""srrender.""' iongovernmental organizations called for "unity and victory" and suggested that concerned citizens ""rise up like a wall against the regimes."" PPwblicists wrote about a threat to the "territorial security" of Rus~iil,'~ W a t was at stake? First of all, it is important to note that Ukraine is the most important country among the Sczviet successor states (and probably in all the world) for Russia" security, self-deGnition, and nation-buildit~g?This assertion has been made by such disparate authors as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn" and Zbigniew Br~ezinski,~'The preservation of the independent Ulcrainian state was proclaixned crucial to the security and stability of Europe by the U.S. secretary of defense. The German chancetlar declared, "No one wilt be abfe any more to dispute Ukrainian" independence and territorial integrity.""' The ""Big Treaty" poclaimed Russia and Ukraine hiendty; equal, and sovereign states whose relations are based on the ~"inciyles of mutual trust and strategic partnership (Article 1) as we11 as respect for territorial integrity and the inviolability of existing borders (Article 2). Russia and Ukraine proclaixned that they will not use their respective territrsries to the detriment of the security of the other side (Article 6). The treaty interpreted the rights of ethnic minorities primarily as the rights of these persons not to be discritninated against or denied the ability to express, maintain, and develop their distinctive culture (Article 12),"* This minimalist interpretation ofthe rights of minorities is in line with Article 27 of the 1966 Ur-rited Nations International Covenant on Civil and blitical Ri&ts, which requires no affirmative actic~non the part of the state. H ~ w e v ein ~ ;some of its other provisions, the ""Big Treaty" went Eurthex;calling for the two states to create opportunities for the promotion of ethnic, cultural, lingrxistic, and religious

distinctiveness (Article 12). The states took on obligations to create equal opportunities for studying Russian in Ukraine and Ukrainian in Russia (Artide $21, and to secure television and radio broadcasting of each other3 prtjgrams in their respective languages (Article 24). Generatty, the treaty provided a basis for international stability and the primacy of itzternationai law. The treaty was signed by f2residentsYeltsin and Kuchma in Kiev on May 31, 1997, It was ratified by Ukraine" Supreme Council on Janrzary 14, 1998, and by Russia's State Uuma on December 25, 1998 (by:a vote of 243 to 30). The Russian Cotlncil of the Federation vc~tedto ratify the treaty on Februav 17, 1999 (the vote was 106 to 25, with 17 abstentions), with the stipulation that the treaty would take effect after XJhair~e'sparliament ratified three agreements on the Black Sea Fleet. (Prime Minister Yevgenii Prirnakov proffered this condition in order to ensure the treaty" passage.) The treaty came into effect on April 1, 1999, when Presidents Ycltsitz and Kuchma exchanged the documents of ratifiation in Moscow. Heated debates over ratification of the treaty with Ukraine in 1997-1999 splintered the Xxussian political arena, demonstrating that issues of identity and nation-building are intertwined with questions of policy toward the ""near abroad" and of national security, Twc~coalitions emerged arrsund those who were f'ar the treaty and those who were against it* The first group included statebuilders, integrationists, and surprisitzgly, most restorationist-s, The second included ethnonatic~nalists,dominators, and some restcsratic>nists.On a personal level, it looked Zike a battle b e ~ e e nthe alliance of Boris Yeltsin, Yevgenii Primakav, and fgor lvanov (the government), with Gennadii Zyuganov and Cennadii Seleznev (KPKF), against the unruly coalition of Uurii tuzhkov (Otechestvo), Sergey Baburin (Russian All-People" Union [ROS]), Vladtmir Zhirinovsky (LDPR), and Aleksandr Lebed (Honor and Motherband), with numerous less important plvers on both sides. Analytically, the most interesting phenomenon was the split among restorationists: The KPRF found itself on one side, and the LDPK and ROS, on the other. The Russian ptlblic seemed to be against the treaty, for the most part. According to a poll conducted by the Aft-Xxussian Public Opinion Center on February 19 through 22,1999,45 percent of Russians believed that the Cotrncil of the Federaticm should not have ratified the treaty as long as the division of the Black Sea Fleet, the status of Sevastayol, and Ukraine" debts for IXusslian oil and gas remained unresolved. Ratification was supported by 28 percent, and 27 percent were tlndecided,"The demographic brerzkdc~wnof respondents shows a very anusual configlzraticzn of Russian public opinion toward the council's vote: Supporters were predominantly older than 55 years and residing in southern European Russia, Siberia, and the Far East (typically conservative, prc~communist constituencies). Xxatification was regarded as premature by the usrrally more liberal canstitrlency-nam@Ty, younger people, generally residing in the cities of northern European Russia, who had voted for Boris Yeltsin in the presidential election. An astonishing 78 percent supported the view that Russia should own Sevastop~l.~~

The key governmental agency that lobbied the parliament for ratification of the treaty was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its arguments were typical of statebuilders: Russia must recc3gnize an independent Ukraine as a part of the real uvtzrtd Russia lives in; without full and unconditionaf Russian recognition of Ubair-te and its present borders, the two countries corrld never have good reXatic~ns.The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was concerned with the scenario that cczuld develop if the treaty were not ratified: Ulcraine might ultimately isolate XXussia physically fmm western Europe. The goal of the treaty was to prevent the ernergence of a new, isolationist Ukrainian identity around the "Russian threat.'' To allay Ukrainian fears, the XXussian government emphasized in its public statements that all of the issues affecting bilateral relations between the states must be resolved by political means alone, and that the treaty would open the door for a long-term lease of the Sevastopot naval base for the Russian part af the Black Sea Fleet."' In early 1999, on the eve of the vote at the Council of the Federation, the Ministry of Foreign Affslirs warned that the rejection of the treaty wtrld push Ukraine cioser to NATO. Foreign affairs Minister Ivanov emphasized that nonratification would evoke negative internationai reactions and itzcreased tensions in Europe. He asserted that the treaty would create a favorable cfirnate for direct economic and cuftt~ralties between Russia and Crimea, increased trade with Ukraine, and ir-tfl~xenceover Ukrainian policy toward ethnic Russians." On the crucial day of hearings and vc~ringat the Ct;)~ncilof the Federation, on February 17, 1999, prime minister Prirnakov reiterated his firm support of the Russian foreign ministry, adding his considerable political weight to the side of the protreaty forces. His arguments emphasized that the treaty wc3uld serve the purposes czf stability and rapprochement with Ukraine, The executive branch fot~ndallies in the parliament not only among statebuilders (NUR, Yablokc~)but also in many restc>ratioaists(KPRF). In the State Dlxma, 107 of the 243 votes for ratification of the treaty belonged to the MPRE The arguments of the Communists differed in same respeas from those of the Russian diplomats and the prime minister; but they were in agreement that instability in the region was the ultimate evil. The views of the MPRF crystallized in heated polemics with other restorationist forces. In winter and spring 1998, a bitter struggle unfolded between the major restoratlonist factions-the KPRF and the BUS, headed by Sergey Baburin, the Duma's deputy speaker for CXS issues, It ended with Baburin" replacement by Svetlana Gsrpcheva, a Cc~mmtrnist,Disagreement about policy tt~wardUkraine, other CXS countries, and Russian diasporas led to this key personnel change, which immediately affected relations between Rz~ssiaand its neighbors. Baburin was oppc~edto the treaties that Russia had signed with Ukraine, Moldo>va,and Georgia, and he delayed their ratification, whereas the Communists favored immediate ratification. Saburin argued that those treaties did not sufeciently protect ethnic Russians in Crimea, the Transdniestria, and Abbazia. Even though the KPRF and IXOS are both restoraticznist forces, they differ significantly on tactical matters. KPRF policy contains noticeable integrationist components,

whereas IXOS leaders are more inclined to ethnonationitfism, Though Gennadii Zyuganov is also prone to ethnonationalism, most Communists see gradual economic reintegration, and the building of close and friendly political relations with CXS countries, as a way to achieve a strategic goal: The restoration of same sort of trnion between some of the former Soviet regrzblics. The Communists see any destabilizatic~nof the status quo in Eurasia as counterproductive for their long-term aims, Baburin, who shares with the Communists the strategic goat of restoration, is more indined to stress the grievances and aspirations of ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" and is less ready tc> compromise their wetl-being f'or the sake of an alliance with the current regimes czf 61s member countries, which he deems to be anti-Russian. This position might in part explain Baburin's evident attempt to craft a ccjalition of Russian ethnonationalist parties and groups. In December 1997, he participated in the Fourth Congress of Russian, Nationalists, the organizers of which included a number of extremist parties, such as Russian National U ~ ~ i (RNE) ty and the National Republican Party, and said that he would be ready to head a ""united national oppasition? In his report to the CPKF congress ixz April 1997, Zyuganov attacked those who had raised the iss~leof the disputed territories-the Transdniestria, Abkhazia, and especially Sevastopol and Crimea-in bilateral relations b e ~ e e nXxussia and Ubair-te, Mctldova, and Georgia: ""?"hose who deepen this division are trying to burn bridges and close the road to reunificatic~n."~ Evidently this acc~lsationwas directed, above atf, at Bablxrin and Luzhkov. Et is teiting that Zyganov supparted his position on this issue by referritzg to a broad vision of Russian nationhood and the boundaries of R~~ssia: ""lbroad historical and cultural terms, Great Russia is the Soviet Union? On the issue of disputed areas, specifically>he said: After ali, if you think about it, Sevastopol, and indeed C:rirnea as a wllole, as weH as such territories as, for instance, the Tlnliestr Region and Abkhazia, have "indefi~~ite" status solely from the viewpoint of the Belovezhsk;aya Pushcha accords. Fmrn the viewpoint of the results of the 17 Marcl1 referendum 01%the p r e ~ r v a t i o nof the USSR, there is nothing indefinite about it, Xr is xlecessary finaljty tr>dot the i's and cross the t's. There is l~istoricalstatehood of ltussia, and then there is its Belavezhs h y a Pushcha statehood. What does this latter consist of? It consists of a ri>ttenrung on a ladder leading downward-to Russids final dismemberment into minor "principalities'"""

This strict restorationist position, hawever, did not prevent Zy~ganovfrom incorporating many ethnonationalist provisions into his vision of the boundaries and membership of the Russian nation, especially when he addressed the issue of the Russian, diasparas. Integrationism became a common ground for a coalition between statebuilders and a number of restrsrationists. Seleznev, the Commtlnist speaker of the State Dlxma, strongly linked his potiticat image to advclcacy of a union between Russia and Beli-rrus,eventually to be joir-ted by Ukraixze, Svetlana Coryacheva, the

Communist deputy spealcer of the State Duma, argued that it was historically inevitable that Russia and Ukraine would draw closer to one another ir-t the near future. The problems of the Crimea and Sevastc>polwc>uld then be solved. If the brother peoples fought over borders now they wouXd be easy prey to czut~iders~~~ An important role in shapir-tgthe KPRF position was played by cooperative relatic~nsb e ~ e e nRussian and Ukrainian Commtlnists. Ukrainians strongly encrluraged itussians to rati* the treaty Those who opposed the tnlaty generally held a much more pessitnistic view of the prclspects for rapprochement with Ukraine, They did not believe that the treaty would stop the drift of Ulcraine toward the W s t and NATO or strengti~en pro-Russian political forces there, They also doubted that Ukraixze would ever favor integration with R~~ssia in any form. On the cczntrary, they believed it wc3uld try to ""seXI" its anti-Rt~ssianstand to the West for economic assistance, loans, and sectrrity guarantees."""n this context, the treaty would bring no advantages ta Russia, and it w u l d allow Ukraine to reassert its sovereignty over the disputed territories. Crimea, czr at least Sevastapol, must belong to Russia, argued those who opposed the ratification of the treaty on the grounds that it would legally. seal their secession, Sevastopol was pc~rtrayedas ""re city of Russia" miiiifiry gtory" and an entity legally belonging to Russia, as it had been an independent administrative unit subordinated directly to Moscow since 1948 and was not included in the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. The treaty" opponents also expressed awareness of NATO expansion as a security tl-xreat, but in a different way than did the treaty's advocates. The leader of the Congress of Russian Communities (KRO), Umitrii Rogozin, argued: In May 1997, in Kiev, owing to the eff-arts of oEctcials from Smofenskaya Square [tile Russian Ministry of Foreig~~ Affairs], Russian-Ukrainian agreements that left: Kiev3 way cfear tr>[join]NKFO were signed. As is knotvn, the charter of the North Atlantic alliance closes the door to mernbership in this military and political bloc far tl-rose countries that have territorial disputes. 'l?txtay?Russian diylomaq rerntjved the territorial issue regarding SevastoyoI and Crixnea from the agenda of relations between Russia and Ukraine,-"

Sergey Baburin argued that ratification w u I d open the door to NATO for Ubair-te and warned that NATO membership was its ultimate goal.72 In January 1999, opponents of the treaty achieved a temporary victory when Luzhhv persuaded the members of the CounciX of the Federation to postpone ratification ~lntifmid-February. Although this move did not prevent the ultimate ratification of the treaty, the cautiously worded declaration issued by the Council czf the Federation upon the treaty" ratification on February 17, 1999 did reflect the main concern of Luzhkov and his supporters: "Members of the Council of the Federation express their hope that the Ukrainian side will tlnderstand that dtle to historic, economic, ethnic, and social factors, lxussia has an objective and legiti-

mate interest toward Crimea, where ~ ~ ~ s s lconstitute ans the majority of the pop~Xation."~~ Bitterness evokrrrd by the perception that Ukraine has been lost foretrer and turned into an unfriendly country, as well as etknonationalist sentiments and ambitions of domination, united the opposition to the treaty, This group attribtlted very low value to stability in the internatic~nalarena. On the contrary, the antitreaty coaIition saw many advantages in instability. A 199'7 report issued by Konstantixz ZattrXin" instit~lte(a tl'tixzk tank that fcllrrnltlates Lrrzhkov's positions on all CIS-retated issues) argued: ""Ithe final analysis, one ought to understand that the disintegration of Ukraine can, cause problems far Itussia, But it is better to contribute to this option than tolerate a constant challenge from Ukrair-teand the erosion of our efforts in the near abroad.""'"?lhe repc>rt3satlthors did not shy away from striking historic parallels: ""X we want peace with Ukraine, we must test our foreign policy. Xf we are afraid of tests, we will not save peace -in Munich they did not, anvay. We will kill peace by betraying our people, our positions in Sevastopot, Crimea, and Ulcraine as a whole."7c It is interesting that Zyuganov, blamir-tg Lrrzhkov" opposition to the treaty on Zatufin, characterized the latter as a quintessential destabilizer. According to Zpganov, Zatulin spawned scandals and discord wilerever he went,76

flya Prize1 suggested that perceptions of identity:shape foreign policy In his view: "The emotional, albeit irrational, sense of natic~nand national identity plays a vital role in farming a society" perception of its environment and is an extremely important, if not driving, force behir-td the formation of its foreign policy because naticrnal identity helps to define the parameters of what a polity considers its national interests at home and abroad.'"T'Xlhis perspective is illuminating in cases where a political consensus on identity issues exists; but it may be ir-tsufficientas a description of societies where competing visions of naticmal identity are well reyresented in the pallticat arena. Xn such societies, the oppclsite may be true: Fareign policy may be an important factor ir-t the making of national identity, The postmodernist deftnition of foreign policy as the crlnstant reinvention of states" setf-definitions is especially applicabfe to countries with insecure identities. As David CampbeIl has suggested, ""Fotign policy is a political practice central to the constitution, production, and maintenance of political identity-'"' Campbell atso has asserted: ""Foreign palicy (conventionally understood as the external orientation of preestablished states with secure identities) is thus to be retheorized as one of the boundary-prodtlcing practices central to the prcldtlction and reproduction of the identity in whose name it operates,""'"f this theoretical framework is applicable to the case of the ratification of the ""Big Treaty: then it is safe to assume that Russian Communists-though not all of thernhave taken an impartant step in recognizing the permanence of Russia" current

borders, a step that may well entail a broad rethinking of national identity and securit y. Struggling through deep ecrlnomic crisis, further tlndermined by serious social problems, and handicapped by a weakened and disorganized army, IXussia, can hardly afford to implement any project that would stipulate an actual redrawing of ctlrrent borders. A significant part of the Russian political elite a p p e a s to agree that 1;tussia might not survive serious instability The sense of profound weakness itz Moscow has been one of the major sources of generally cautiio~~s foreign pc~licy.Military institutional colapse cr~ntributedsignificantly to this acknowledgment of real-world constraints by otherwise adventurous pcllitical forces and broadened the coalition of stability-seekers, In sum, when addressing crlncrete policy issues, crlncerns over or disregard fc3r stability were among the most significant fiactors around which political coalitions coalesced in Rz~ssiain the 19%~.Proforrnd differences on the questions of tiational identity and security notwithstanding, stability-seekers found a cr>mmonground when vital security questions were at stake. Agreements among competing palitical actors over concrete foreign policy issues may: lead to rapprochement on more f~rndamentatquestions, including the definition of national identity and of security, which in turn may provide a better basis for stability in Russia,

1. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, "Revisiting the Wational': 'l'oward an Idelltity Agenda in Meorealism?"hinosef Iapid and Friedrich Kratocl~wil,eds,, The Rerrim lure and Identity in IR T'heory (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996), p, 123. 2, Daniel Deudne)?;"Ground Identity: Nature, Place, and Space in Nationalism:" in ibid., p. 130, 3.0. Waever, B, Buzan, M. Kelsrruy, and P. L,ernaitre, Idcmritp Migratiout, rand the New Security Agenda in Europe Cldondon:Pinter, 19931, pp, 25-27. 4, Uarry Buzan, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde, Securily: A New Framework #AnaEysis (Raulder: 1 p n e Rienner, 19981, p, 119, Many critics, although admitting the merits of delinking the nation from the state, have pointed to the unsatisfactory attempt of the Copenhagen School to pack ""ientity'bnd ""narion'5inro ""sciety.'?ee L,alpid and Kratocl~wit,"Revisitingthe National? 'raward an Identity Agenda in Neoreaiism?:"p. I 19, 5. See Meicsar~drSolzhenitsyn, 2"he Rtlssitan Question rat the Eybd ofthe T~~enriefh Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 19951, pp, 88-89, 6. Ibid., p. 73. 7. Ibid., pp. 106-107. 8. Gennadii Zpga~~ov, Rossiya-Roditza mop:Ideolagi~~a goszrdars~vennogopat n'or izma /Russia Xs My Motherland: 'Che Xdeofogy of Stare Patriotism] (Moscow: Informpechat: 1996),p, 6, 9. For the full text of the document, see ""Kontseptsiyrz natsioi~al'nnoyhezapasnasti Rossiiskoy Federatsii" j'l'he Russia11 Federation's National Security Concept], Uipionzuricheskii).vc;rsrnik 1, Jrtl~uary1998, pp. 3-18. 10. See Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde, S e c u n ' ~pp, 170-171. 11. Ibid., p. 196.

12. This framework relies theoretically on the writings of Vafery 'Cishkov, former minister of nrttionalitics of the Russian Federation. Tishkov broke the Soviet tradition of befining a nation in ethnocultural terms and outlined it as a purely civic, political entity. See Valery 'l"ishkov, Efl'znicizy,Nationalism and Chnpz'crin and q$er the &vier Uizinn (London: PRXC?/UNRISDISage, 1997),especially pp. 3,33--35,230,250,260-261,275-276. 13. See (;eorge Breslauer and Catheril~eIJale, ""Kris Yel%sinand the Invention of a Russian Nation-State,'Tosr-Soviet Afaln 4, vol. 13, October-December 1997, p. 32 2. 14, Ibid., note 42. 15. See Igor Zevelev, ""The Russian Quest for a New Identity: Impgications for Security in E~~rasia:" in Sharyl Crass, Xgor Zevelev, Victor Kremenyuk, and Vagan Gevc~rgian,eds., Global Securiiy Beyond the ,Millennium: American and llussian Perspectives (1,ondon: Macmillarl, 19991, pp, 1 16-120. 16, llya Prizel, Natz'nrral Identity and Izorcign Pt~licy:Nalionalism and Leadership in Poland Russia, and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cagnbridge U11iversil.y Press, 1998>,p. 8.. 17, Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde, Seczlrit~p. 205, 18. Ibid., p. 129. 19. For the texts of political parties>rt,grams, see X A. Ofeshchuk, X Y E%ribylnvsky, M, N. Keitblat, Parlumenrskie partit, d~jizhenij~a, obW'edineniya:Istoriya, ideologiya, sostav rukovodyastzchikh organo~r,d q u t a purkamenla, ~ programmrzye doktlmenty [ hrliamentary krtics, Movements, Associations: Histofy, Ideology, Members of C;overning Bodies, Parliamentary Deputies, Program Documents) {Moscow: Paa~orama, 19%); Vladirnir organizal-sii, 1989-1995: I20X"tiPribylovsky, Russkit. natsionaEisticil-Eeskiei pravo-r~dz'kal'8ul)i.e nzeplty i teks;fy [Russian Nationalist and ]light-Wing Radical Organizations, 1989-1 995: Ilocrtments and "rexts],vol. 1 (Moscotv: knorama, 1395). 20. Tisl-rkovwas not pushing for the disintegration of the Soviet Union as was Gennady Burb~~fis; he was merety trying to deal with post-Soviet Russian reality. 21. l'rtid, January 1,1995, 22. Ibid. 23. Interview with Viktor Aksyuchits, leader of the Russian Czhristiriin Llemocratic Mavemerlt, in hnograficrheskoe obozrenie 4, 1996, pp. 125-226, 24. Ibid., p, 129, Cc~opemrionand Iliscord in the fiVorld Political 25. See Robert Keol-rane,Afi-er Hegerrrt~n~~: Econovzy (Prir~ceton:Princetox~University Press, f 984). 26. 1)avid Fursythe, T h e Intematiclnuliza fion rf H-iiumun Rights ((Lexin-ngZon,Mass.: L,exingfor~Books, 19911, p. 90. 27, Ibid., p. 91. 28. Mezavisimnya gazeta, Jatluary 12 and 15, 1994, 29, Izvestiiu, January 2, 1992; Mezfzdunarodnap zhizrz: March-April 1992. 30. Komsonzol'skaya prnl~da,May 5,1999. 31. SNG: Nachalo ili konets istorii ['l'he CXS: The Beginning, or the End of History] (Moscow: Xnstitut diaspory i integratsii, 1997). 32. Author's interview with Konstantin ZatuIin, stlmmer 1997, 33. 1)avid Laitin, Idcmritj~iin Formation: The Russian-Spcrukiag Pclpulations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca and London: Cornell Universiiv Press, 13381, p. 340. 34. For an analysis of various trends in historiography 01% this issue, see Hug11 SetonWatson, ""Russian Nationalism in Historical Rrspective:" in Ruberg Conquest, ed,, The Lust Fuakre (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 19861, pp. Empire: nj;llionality and the So~~iet 15-17.

35. The responses to the public opinion polls carried out by the Genter for the Study of Public (>pinion, cited in Interfax, October 27, 1997. 36. See Vladirnir Malinkavich, ""Russkii vopros v Ukraine'7lTbe ltussian Question in Ukraine], Orkryt~zyapolitl'lid, no. 9-10,1996, p. 77. 37. Itussians do constitute a separate community in Wstern Ukaine. Here, the attitudes of focal atrthorities and of politically active Ukainiart nationalists toward Russians are often hostile, leading to further dif-f-erentiationbetween Ukrainians and Rt-lssians.Far examples of the numerous media reports of harassment of Russians in Gallicia, see NezavGimaya gazefa, April 4, 1997; Kr~ssljvslrayllguaefa, April 29, 1997, For c~vemiewsof the situation of Russians in BeIarus and trkraille by Rtlssiaxl scholars, see R. A. Grigorieva and M, Yu, Marty~lova,"Russkoye naselenie BeIartlsi: t;;tnokuikurnaya situa&iya'"I'l'he Russian Pcjpulation of Befarus: Ethr~icand Cultural Situation], in V. X. Kozlov and Ye. A. Sbervud, eds,, Russkie v blizhnewt zarttbezitye [Russians in the Near Abroad] (Moscow: Institut et~~ologii i antropologii, E994), pp. 10-37; V. I. Koztov and M. V, Kwztav, "Russkie i rtlsskoyazychnye v BeIamsi i na Ukraine" "ussians and Russian-speafcersin Befarus and Ukraine], in ibid., pp, 38-52; and M. M. I,ebedeva, "Russkaya diaspara ili cllast' russkogo naroda? K prableme samoogredeleniya russkikh xla Ukraine" Russian Iliaspora, or Part of the Russia11 People? C h the Pr)robfernof Sdf-Daermination of Russians in Ukraine], in ibid., pp. 53-59. 38. I have borrowed from Ar~aeolLieven in usiilg the ward intermingling to describe the ethnic situation in Eastern Ukraine (see Licven, ""RestrainingNKTC): Ukraine, Russia, and the JYest:" Waslzingt-onQuarlerlp Autumn 1997, p. 65). 39, l?ominique Are1 and Vajerii Khmelko, ""TheRussian Factor and 'Territorial hlarization in Ukraine?"Narrimavl Review 9, Spring 1996, pp. 81,83,85,86. 40. See Liwen, "Restrailling NATO? p. 65. 41. See Laitia, Identip in Formation. 42, Ibid., p. 508. 43. Ibid., p. 510. 44, See Tfomirzique Arej, ""liax~guatgePolitics in Independent Ukraine: 'rewards One or 'Kwo State Lanpalj;es?,"Nationalitre'sPapers 23,110.3, September 1995, pp. 413-614, 45. Nezuvisima~~a gazefa, April 4, 1997, p. 5. 46, Margaret Canovd11,Nationhood and hlitl'cal T'heory (C:lieltenham, U,K,: Edward Elgar, 1996),p. 105. 47. For a more detailed discussion of the Criiinean question, see Jeff Chin11 and Robert Kaiser, Russians As the New Mktoritjl (Boulder: Westview, 1996), pp. 148-1 5 1; Anatal Lieven, CJkechnya: Embslone $Russian Power (Mew Haven: Yafe University 12ress,1998). 48. h1 blsto, ""Nation-Buildingin the Fc~rmerUSSK,"&trrnal ofl)emocracp 11o. 1, January 1996, p. 120, 49, This term is used by Walker C:onnor in his ""TheImpact of Hornelands Upon Diasparas:" in Gabriel Sheffer, ed., Modem Diasporas in International Potitics (New York: St. Martin's, 1986). 50. Koisto, ""Mation-Buildingin the Former USSR:" p. 131. 5 I. For more on Romantic views of r~ationhoocl,see Ganovan, Nalinnhaod and I""alitictnl Theory, pp. 6-52, 52. See Ruzan, Waever, and de Wilde, Secuny9 ppy,23-24,204. 53, Scrgey f3aburin, "L3ogovcjr s U krainoy nelkzy ratifitsirovat" lpboy tsenoy'" The Treaty with Ukraine Must Not Be Ratified At Any Price], Nezgvzl%irnaj~a g~zl& January 14, 1999, p, 3. 54. RFE/RL Newstine 28, vol. 3, pt. 2, February 18,1999.

55,Ibid. 56. Leaflet of the Patriotic Nro~nen"Union. 57. deicsey Plotnikov, ""Chm astalos' m rekstom: Dogovor s Ukrainoy i territoriai'naya bezopasz~ost'KF" "hat Was Left Out of the Text: The 'Treaty with Ukraine and the 'Territorial Secllriry of the RF], Nezavisimaya gaze&, March 4, 1999, p. 5, 58. A brilliant ax~afysisof Russian-Ukrairzian relations with a focrts 0x1 the issues of na-

tional identities is Anatol 1,ieven's Ukmine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry (Washington, I1.G.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1999). 59. See Sulzhenitsylil, The Russian Qtiestion al the End of tlze Tujentieth C;entury, pp. t: pp. 9G92; ax~didern, Xossiya v abvale /Russia in the Abyss] (Moscow: Rrtssky p ~ ~ 13981, 75-83. 60. See Zbigniew Brrtezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Prinzacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York; Basic Books, 1997),pp. 92,113,121. 6 1. As cluoted in Brzezinski, The Grand C"hssboard2p. 113. 62. See ""Uogovc~ro drrtzhbe, sotrudnichestve i partnershre mezhdu Rc)ssiiskoy Federatsiey i Ukrainoy7"iTxeaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership Between the Russian Federation and Ukraine j, Iliplon-2aticheskiy~jesivrik7,July 1997, pp. 35-43, 63, Intedm, February 26,1999. 64. Ibid. 65. Sce the speech by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs V. S. Sidorov in parlia~nentary llearings before the State 1)urna Committee an CXS AEairs and Relations with Compatriots, in IJipbmaticheskliy vestnik 5, May 1997, p. 43. 66. Igor Ivanov, "Moskva i Kiev dol~hnybytbuereny drug v druge'"EMascow and Kiev Ntxst Haye Confidence in Each Other],Nezavisimay~kg ~ z t aJanuary , 23, t 999, p. 3. 67. Johnsan's ltrissia List, April 25, 1997. 68. Ibid* 69, Interview with Alektiandr Sevastyanc>v,editor in chief, Matsional3n~jjagazetu 2, no. 14 (1998). 70. Alexey Pushkov, "Kcsrennoy proschet storonnikcsv doguvora Maskv i Kieva" [A Basic Miscatc~llationBy Supporters af the Treaty Between Mascow and Kiev], Nezavisimaya gazefa, February 17, 1999, p. 8, 71. Drnitrii Rogozin, Eitr;muZu rtzspada [Recipe for Disaster] (Moscow: Forum, 1998), p. 40, 72. Baburin, ""logovor s Ukrainoy nel'zya ratifitsirov~t'.~' 73,.Xaywlenie Soveta Federatsii v syazi s ratifikatsiey T>ogc>vc)rao druzhbe, sotrud~lichestvei partnerstve rnezhdu Kossiiskcsji Fedcratsiq i Ukraint>y L3eclaratiun of the Federal Go~jncijin Goxlnection with the Ratification of the 7"reaty on Friendship, Gaoperation, and Partnership Between the Russian Federation and Ukraine], L?ipEomaticheski~f vestnl'k 3, March 1999, p. 18. 74. SNG: Machalo iti konets istorii, p. 14. 75. Ibid., p. 16. 76, Jtxlie Cc>rvvir~ ax~dJan Maksymit~k,""Sparring over SevastopoI:" RFE/RL Newsline 29, vol. 3, pt. l, February 1999. 77. Prizel, National Identiy and Foreign Policy p. 14, 78. David Camybeli, kVriting Security: United States &reign I""nlicy and the Politics of Identity (MinneayuIis: University o f Minnesota Press, 19981, p. 8, 79. Ibid., p. 48,

Serving Mother Russia T h e Communist Lefi and Nationa i s t Right in the Strugg 1991-1 998 Veljko VujatiC, Qberlin College

By unifiing the "red" "eal [$social justice, which is in its owtr wax the earthly szibstnntiation of a "heavenly trzrtFzn-nawteIj5 tJzat "all are equal before on the extreme right, the various openly fiascist groups, with their numerous pamphlets and tabloids full of conspiracies, pagan and orthodox wrrior symbolism, and the ugliest anti-Semitic and racist propaganda imaginable. Ali of them fotlght, in their own way, for a tlnited, great, and indivisible Russia and against the hated democrats, ""faitors," and cosmopolitans. And all of them would, horn time to tirne, be bro~lghttogether in temporary coalitions that could not withstand the many ideological divisions and interests that separated them, Finally a fifth force should be mentioned: the various intellectuals and nationalist ideologists who tirelessly worked on producing new variants of the celebrated Russian idea, whether in the old, thick literary journals such as rviasl-t sovremennz'k or in compfetefy new publicati~l~s by the extreme right, such as Aieksandr Dugin" EEleuvtenty and Eduard Limonov" openly National-Bolshevik and "left fascist3' newspaper Lirnonka,17 X~weringover all of them was the most tireless of them all, the "nightingale of the General Staff'"and the editor of Den" (after October $993,retitled Zavtra)-Alehandr Probanov." Rarokhanov" Den' was intended to be the Aaion Frarrgaise of the Russian right: a journal that served as a forum for di~cussionand for the elaboration of a distinct patriotic language and style of thought. If he had not succeeded in saving the empire in this editarial endeavor, at least f2rokhano>vhad indeed ""fillfilled the plan.'"

The United Left and Right Opposition, 1991-1993 The story of contemporary 1;tussian nationatism, whether that of the Communist left or the Russian right, is one of rnany beginnir-tgs and no end. Were it not for the limited space wailable to us here, it could well begin with the emergence of Pamyrtt in 1986, or the publication of Mina Andreeva" notorious open letter headed ""Iannot Forsake My Principlesn-a neo-Stalixzist manifesto of antiperestroika forces published in Sovetskaiu Rossiia in March 1988;" or alternatively, with Shafarevich"~ISussofobia-the manifesto of aIt patriotic forces-published in two ir-tstallmentsin N ~ s hsovremennik itz 1989;'" or perbaps with the ill-famed "Letter of 74:" published by the members of the Unic>nof Writers in Literaturnaict Rossiz'tr on the eve of the 1990 elections to the RSFSR Cc3ngress of People's Dep~ztiies;"or with the convocation of a conference of patriotic forces for a ""great,

united IXussia" "hedl under the auspices czC the CV RSFSR in February 1991," Each and any of these dates would be, in its owrz, way, a good starting point for the story of ctzntemporary Russian nationalism and, indeed, several others could be taken as well.2' Yet there is a good reason for beginning the story ir-t the afiermath of the August 1991 coup and the fIetarian street processions ml-lrshplorinykh oc/~eredei),and the many others who were bound to suffer under conditions of sudden price liberalization and the traumatic beginnings of shock therapy. Egalitarianism, social justice, and the growing poverty of unprc~tectedsocial strata were the main themes of Anpilov's incessant mobilization efforts: Bread and cheese sho~lldbe available to all strata of the population, with the larger goal of preventing "a capitalist restoratit~n."~~ Xt was in this context of state collapse and the saciaX disorientation caused by the sudden liberaliization of prices that the first joitzt mass rallies of Communists, monarchists, and nationalists took place under both Soviet and Russian imperial banners. On February 23, 1992, various Communist and nationalist groups marched through. the streets of Moscow in celebration of the Day of the Soviet Army, an organization that had been unceremc>niiouslydisbanded only a month before, On its way to Manezh Square, the procession encountered heavily armed police cordons. The most determined activists broke through four police cordons but were nevertheless unable to reach the well-protected area around the KremIin. The heavy police casuafties were a clear indication that the organizers of the rally had provoked much of the violence." In the patriotic camp, however, this eruption of violence was taken as a cr~nfirmationof the antinational character of the democratic regime as weft, as an excetient oppclrtunity for renewed mobilization efforts. Den9eferred to the events of February 23 as ""Bloody Sunday: in a rather pathetic attempt to evoke the tragic event that preceded the revc~lutionof 1905.35 The wave of street activity resumed on March 17, 2992-the anniversary of Gorbachev" ill-fated referendum on the preservation of the Soviet Union. It was an occasion that brought together many of the democratshain enemies and almost 60,000 of their followers both from the Communist leA and the nationalist right, marching under the red Sciviet and the old imperial black, yeflow, and white banners, There they all were: farmer members of the USSR Congress of People" Deputies Sazhi Umalatova and the ""black colonel" Viktor Aiksnis," television journalist Ateksandr Nevzorc~v,General Makashcw; Zpganot. and Anyiltiv, Limonov, and Baburin. The strange amalgam of communist and nationalist sXogans, choreography, and political traditions was unprecedented: on the one hand, the singing of the Sciviet anthem with "all power to the Soviets"; on the other, references to the rally as an ancient XXussian ""aI1-people's assembty" "~vsenuror-lnoe wclze), accompanied by attacks on the government of "cosmopolitans.'% new, Kussian-style national socialism was clearly in the making.37 The rallies of February 23 and March 17 served as a catalyst for uni+ing Cornmunists and nationalists. The first joint declaration of the leftist and rightist opposition was written in response to the violence of February 23, It called for an investigation of the causes of the violence, made an appeal to army officers, and waged an attack on the ""Russophobic" mass media." This declaration was soon

f'ollowed by anothex; which appealed for national reconciliation and announced the ~lnificationof the opposition of left and right. The common hont of the "red" and the "white" that 12roklzanot.and Zy~ganovhad long advocated was becr~ming a ~eiltllty.~~ In June 1992, this unity fof-~nda new if short-lived organizational ernboditnent in the Russkii Natsionalhnyi Sobor (RNS; in English, Russian National Union), a new organization of the right, led by former KGB major-general Ateksandr Sterligov.") The RKNS defined itself as both anticommunist and antidemocratic, The democrats in power were "false demc~crats"-in reality, former "partt~crats" who had masked themselves first as perestroika liberats and Xater as democratic reformers. The language of RMS proclamations was full of scorn for these traitors to the homeland, who cleverly substituted anti-Russian sentiments for antiSoviet ones, tl-xusproducing a wave of Etussophobia that had resulted in ""dscrimination, humiliation, and in many cases terror of the Russian pop~zlation."" In a special declaration addressed to all compatriots, the RNS warned that Xxussians in the XZaitic states were becoming second-class citizens; in Central Asia, hostages and white slaves; in the Caucasus, vicritns of local interethnic connicrs; and in Moldovil, targets for bullets, "And we-a great nation-bowing all this, keep silent,"'"TTI.tismysterious Xxussian silence was explained by the informational and psychological, warfare being waged by the democratic mass media and Ueftsin" "roccupatic~ngoxrnment," who were working in colusion with international forces in order to transform Russia into a source of raw materiilis for "trransnationai capital.'""" The RNS's founding crlngress formulated the most pressing tasks of the patriotic movement: the unification czC ail patriotic organizations, with the purpose of restoring a unified Russian state; the organization of a mass patriotic movement in all regions of R~~ssia; the creation of regional Russian professional associations and other organizations; the restoration of state contrtzl over the economy, with the parallel development of national Russian entrepreneurship; an end to ""gnocide by hunger"; the creation of patriotic informational stnlctures and mass media; proportional representation for EXussians in state and cutturaf organizations; support for the Orthodox church; and lastly, the prevention of the selling of Russian national wealth. Most of these themes fot~ndtheir way into the resolutions czf the first czfficiilt, congress of the new party, held on June X 1 and 12, 2992-significantly coir-tcidingwith Russia's new Independence Day;" It was an occasion that brc~ughttogether virtt~allythe whole patriotic etite, from academician, Xgor Shafarevich,to village prose writers Valentin IXasputin and Vasilii Belorr, General Makashov, Zyuganov, select Cossack groups, and the fascist Barkashev. If the formation of the RNS was the first serious attempt to bring together yatriots of the right, its more centrist counterpart-1;tossii.sskoe Narodnoe Sobranie-was f o ~ ~ n d eind the hope of reconciling Russian nationalism with democracy, Its founders-Ilia Konstantinov, Viktor Aksyt~chits,and Mikhail Astafiev-had all left Democratic Russia in protest agaix-rstthe breakup of the Soviet state," Mainljr envisaged as an organization of national-democrats commit -

ted to a territorial (rossiiskii) rather than an ethnic (russkii) setf-definition of Russian nationhood, Rossiiskoe Narodnoe Sobranie never developed a mass base; but its significance cannot be gatlged by that criterion atone, At a time when the ban on the Russian Communist party had not yet been lifted and the various forces of the extreme right were attractir~gonly a marginal followitzg, these patriotic deputies could ensure that nationalist ideas would be voiced from the elevated stage of the Congress of People" Deputies. Henceforth, no one could claim that Famyat extremists were the only representatives of R~lssianpatriotism, And yet, the connections between this respectable parliamentary right and its more extreme rightist counterparts were in evidence as early as February 1992, when the Congress of Civic and Patriotic Forces first bro~lghtthe new democratic patriots together with the naticInalist right, The respectability of the February meeting was significandy enhanced by the participation of Russia" vice president, Aleksandr R~itskoy,whose speech to the congress was one of the first manifestations of his dissent from the cczurse of reform being pursued by the Gaidar go~ernxnent.~ An unprecedented ""dmocratic" experiment, Rutskoy stated, 47 was taking place in Russia, leading to "economic genocide" against the Rtlssian population, pensioners standing in lines for mitk, and hungry children in Xxussian schools. R~lssiaas an "organic civilization" was being destroyed, and Russians in the republics were being left to sink or swim. At the natic~nallevel, a crirninalized black market was being developed by businessmen eager to make a profit without investing work and prodtlctive energy. Instead, the vice president stated, Russia shc~utddevelop economic reforms centered on productic~nand stirntllated by adequate tax policies; sponsor the rebirth of its glorious army and the Cossacli movement; restore spedficaify Russian entreprenerrrial traditions (kqechestvu) and prevent the brain-drain of specialists to the West; defend the rights of Russians in the republics; and form a muttiparty system with distinct national colors. Rutskoy p~zrposcfixliydistanced himself from various neocomrnunist forces, arguing for an "enlightened patriotism" within the framework of the democratic order; but he left room for an alliance among various ""centrists," the parliamentary right, and the more extreme forces Iurkiing in the backgrounde4' The prospect of just such a coalition emerged in the aftermath of the Sixth Congress of People" Deputies (April 19921, whose participants witnessed the first seriorrs conhontation between '"Jeltsixz" government and the opposition."qy September 1992, the opposition had formed a cr~ordinatingbr~dy-the Pcjlitical Council of the United Opposition. AXI interparty differences were to be suppressed itz the name of swing Russia,"' On October 24, the long process of ideological and organizational unification c~llminatedin the formation of the National Satvation Front (FNS), a new umbrella organization for many nationalist and neocommunist groups." The president of its political council, Ilia Kanstantinor6, indicated that the projected social base of the FINS was among army officers, state security personnel, managers and patriotic entrepreneurs, Cossacks, and workers.j2

The program of the FNS was in line with its projected social base as welt as with the programs of its historical national-socia1is.t. predecessors. Thus, in the economic sphere, the FNS proposed a new ""satist-cczrporatist""cczurse: the ""profit motive" was to be rejected in the name of increasing national wealth; unemployment was to be kept at 2 percent; an end would be put to speculative privati~ation and cr~mpradorcapital; inter-branch cczrporations w u l d be formed in industry and agricutture; the domestic producer woufd be defended from foreign competition; the state would finance science and culture; and salaries would be based on prod~ctivity.'~ Flowever; the FNS coutd not realisticaily count on the support of more than 6 percent of the pop~zlationin Moscow (the majority were unskilled workers, pensioners, and men omr 45), and possibly even less in provincial Rt~ssia,where the patriots were poorly organized. Nor was the FNSk cause greatly helped by the many conflicts among its leaders and its dependence on communist organizatic~nsfor support." Nevertheless, the right" potential for creating trr3uble in alliance with such masters of street activity as Anpilov, and Stanislav T e r e k h o ~ , ~ ~ became visible on May t, t994, in the ixnmedilate afiermath of the opposition's defeat in the April 1993 referendtlm, Frustrated by their failure to undermine the still popular president, the activists af Trudovaia IXossiia and Terekhov's Officers" Union engaged in a veritable orgy of violence directed agair-tst the ""dmocratic farces of order.'" Anticipating more battles in the future, FNS leader Konstantinov asserted that the May events showed that only the "street czpposition" muId stop Yeltsin from violating the constitution and disbanding the ~arliament.~' Developments in the Russian parliament created a new political space fbr cc)operation b e ~ e e nthe center and the extreme right: Vice President IXutskoy and parliamentary speaker Rz~slanKl~asbulatovincreasingly depended on the nationalist and neocczmmunist parliamentary factions for votes; and the latter groups, to maintain their seats in partlament, needed to give an aura of democratic respectability and constitutionalism to their extremist agendas. This Weimar-like dynamic-especially given the tlnwiIfingness of the Constitutional Cotlrt to prosecute the August 1991 coup leaders, and i t s IiEfing czfYeltsin3 ban on the National Salvation Front and the Russian Communist party (restored in February 1993)-led tc3 an increasingly bitter conflict betwen the president and the parliament. Bath in their speeches and in their actions, 1;tutskoy and Khasbrzlatov were moving closer to the agenda of the nationalists. X f Rutskoy was repeatedly acc~lsingthe goxrnment of ctjrruption, he was also mo3ving ever mclre clearly in the direction czC the "IXussian idea," underscoring his background as a patriotic Russian officer, protesting the treatlnent of Russians ixz MoIdova and Ukraine, and mocking the customary democratic attacks on "Russian chatl~inisun."~ Khasbulatov, for his part, mostly restricted himself to ""dknding the constitution"; but he, too, could not reconcile hixnsclf ta Russia's role as ;a source of raw materials for the developed West and expressed his concern about this development in an interview published in Den: One month previous to that article, Prokhanov's

journal had published an interview with the president of Zxussiak Constitutionaf Court, Valerii Zorkin, also defending constit~~tionaXism.~' W e n the final ccznfmntatit~ntook place b e ~ e e npresident and parliarnrmt, toward the end of September 11393, the sudden dependence of the ""prZiamentary forces" an the activists of Anpilov" Tr~xdovaiaRossiia, Barkashev" Russian National Unity, Tereht-v-k Union of Oscers, and select Cossack groups and vc~lunteers from Trttns-Dniestria and Abkhazia, was no mere accident.*%ven if both Rutskoy and Khasbubatov were far from ideoiagical extremism,"?heir reliance on these new ""&fenders of ct~nstitutit~nalism'~ prt~vedfatal to their ause. The fate of the "Xspectable" prliamentarp right was seaied by General Albert Makashavp who lived up to his heroic reputation by smashing the doors of the detested Tel-Aviv-denP with the help of at rocket-launched grenade. All this effort was to no amif: On October 4,1993, the first ""march on Moscow" ended tdxn dismal, btoody failure. Paradoxicall-y,the main winners of October turned out to be those who were never taken very seriously either by the right or by the smrly confident democrats: the ""bffou'" Zhirinovsky, and the revamped Russian Communist party (now the Communist Party of the Russian Federation) led by Zyuganov. Together they would rnc>nc>pofizethe patriotic vote, marginalking their rivals from both the parliamentary right and the extreme right, as weft as those from Anpilov's sea-Stalixzist left.

Mastering the Politics of Resentment VIndimirZkirinovsky and the Liberal Democratic Party ofRussia The remarkable political autobiography of Russia" most succcssf~zlright-witzg populist begins with these wrds: I was barxi on April 26, 1946, in the city of Alma-Ata. It was Thursday evening, eieven clock, It was raining. This was the first spring after the war. We lived in a two-story buildixlg on Tlugansbia street, in a city that used to be cafled Vernyi and that was founded by Russian Cossacks in 1854. Russian people four~dedthat city. That is why I can always ri&tfully say that I wis born in Russia and among Russia~~s. Only later would Stalinist ukases first create a Kazakh ASSXI, then a Kazakh SSR, and in tl-rese CIS [Commonwealth af Independent States] times, even an independent state of Kazabstan. As if Russians were just fertilizer for the =;oil from whicll someone else's states shotrld spring, whife the Russians themselves need no state of their awn. For sorne reasan, Russians sl-rould not have tl-reir state where they were born and live, where their ancestors died, where they founded cities-as a rule, not as conquerors, for there was no state where the Russian Cossacks settled.""

Zhirint~vsky" fate, this paragraph suggests, was from the first day tied to that of the Russian people, a people now deprived of its territory and statehood through

a combination of Stalin" arbitrary decisions about national borders; democratic treason; and republican nationalism. At first glance, Zhirinovsws Last Tfzrust to the Souttz is a long record of personal suffering. Deprived of his fiather at an early age, living in a crokvded cornmunai apartment, watchixzg his mother toil to her deathbed for some extra scraps from the cafeteria that she cleaned, competing for her attention and these scraps of food with his lazy stepfathex;never happy in love, a victim of discriminatory policies that favored local Kazabs over ethnic Russians in Kazabstan, rejected as a yrcjvincial Rt~ssianby the children of the privileged Moscczw nomenklatura, many of them today's democrats-this is but a short list of the personal grievances of the self-proclaimed leader of the Russian nation." And yet, these are not solely personal grievances. After all, did not millions of Russians five in crc~wded communal apartments with overworked mothers and lazy stepfathers, with little food on the table, rejected as sacialiy uncouth. provincial youtl-rsby the children of the privileged? Did not everyone suffer in some way from the indignities of Soviet existence? Zhirinovsky" appeal must be understood in terms of his tlncanny ability ta crjnnect his own perscjnal and political experiences to those of his audience; to provide visible targets for the Xatter's social grievances; and to incorporate them into an aggressive national-imperialist program, whose fictional elements (Russian soldiers washing their feet in the Indian Ocean) give it the character of a fantasy of nationat redemption, Xn this sense, Zhirinovskyk language and message offer a classic illustration of the politics of ressentirnent, which as Liah Greenfeld has argued, has yrczvided the emotional fc3undation of nationalist ideologies in all historical latecomers, including X;tussia," h aatl such cases, the intensity of personal experiences of deprivation and margitzality is directly related to the need fc3r compensation and identification with the nation, and further strengthened by insecurity about the purity of one's ethnic background," Therefore, when Zhirinovsky says, ""Xrn just like you,""the meaning of his phrase goes well beyond pure demagogic poyulism. It is a reaffirmation of his belonging to a naticznal fraternity of us, me and you, the simpte Russian people-----whoare better than tl-xose others-whether they be foreigners, Americans, Kazakhs, Jews, persans of "Caucasian nationality%'\or the sundry political and social forces who are truly responsible for our suffering-tl-xe evit Communists, the treasonabte democrats, the snobbish. Muscovites, the how-it-ail intelf@nty TCIdismiss the Zhirinovsky phenomenon as the temporary and insignificant success of a populist demagczgue and scanda'Iousbuffoon is not only to refuse to analy~ethe sources of his appeal among different social constituencies but also to overlotzk a major factor in contempc~raryRussian politics: the sheer political weight of the country" external political defeat and economic collapse, with all of their sadal and psychological consequences-firsr: and foremost, the tlbiqtlitotls sense of national humiliation. The politics of identity is supposed to result in the empclwement czf the oppressed; and this is exactly what Zhirinovsky was the first to do in the Russian context, sensing the potential gain to be had horn mobilizing

the downtrodden and humiliated (not necessarily in an exclusively economic sense), giving them a sense of status-superiority on the basis of xzational belonging, and prr3mising redemption or rerrenge in the not-too-distant future. In this sense, Zhirinovsky has fulfilled an objective social-psychologicazf need, and if he disappears from the political scene, someone will inevitably fill the space he leaves behind. Zhirinczvsky" first political success came a year after the formation of his Eiberal-Democratic Party of Russia, when he so~lglztthe approval of the KSFSR Congress of 12eople's Deputies fc3r his nomination as a contender in Rt~ssia'sspcoming presidential elections, His speech was a stunning success: De+ing all expeaations, Zhirinovsky won the support of 477 parliamentary deputies-more than twice the requisite number (2 13), In the brief campaign that followed, Zhirinovsky traveled everyhere, attracting the common people and tirelessly repeating that he alone of all candidates could not be accused of destroying Russia; he was not of the no~rzenklatz-trm,but neither did he support the dernocrats>lans to destroy the country. To a strongly pro-Veltsin audience in CheIyabixzsk he stated prophetically: "Vote for him, . . . Five years hom now there will be new elections, and I will be back. And they [the dernocrats]will not, fc3r they will have nothing to say to you.""" five years later he retracted, wrning friends and oppclnents alike not to underestiixnate Uoris Nikolaevich: for the President was a cornpletely 'hystical figure,'' not guided by "the schemes of Friedman but by political intuition,"' and for that reason could not be defeated ""l> logic alone," Unlike some "villagc schoolteachers" "yuganov) and ""little boys from the capital's sspecial scih~~ol~" (Gaidar and others), he and Boris Nikt>laevichwere political ""mysticsm":vethat cczuld not have brought hirn popularity, atthough at Ieast he could say that be was consistent in defendirsg the empire. Between 1991 and 1993, the rest of the political right did its best to ignore and humiliate him, He often had to speak from a small truck, while Baburin, MaXcashov, Zy~ganovand others occupied center stage, They wouid not even let hirn into the National Salvation Front, altl~oughthe organization was supposed tc>be open to all patriots. Prskhanov" Delz'also ignored him, Zhirinovsky's own smalX newspapers-liberalf SokoE Zhirinovskogo, Pruvda Zhirinolrskogo, and luridicheskaia gazeta-in which he published his speeches and pnrsgrams, were read only by a few follo~wers.In this time of trouble, Zhirinsvsky travefed and spoke wherever and whenever be could, at borne and abroad, in Moscow and in the regions, just in order to stay itz the limelight. His ""p&tities of permanent elections" and the occasional scandal were wet1 calculated, albeit signs czf desperation."' After the elections czf October 19993, he finally had a good laugh at l-ris rivals' expense, W i f e the "heroes of October" were staring at their prison

bars or failing to collect signatures," he was busy appearing czn television, campaigning for the Duma, and-much to the shock of Moscow inteltectuais and democrats-celebrating his unexpected victory. Ncs one cr~uidignore him any longer. Zhirinovsky" stunnixzg success ixz the December $993 Uuma elections (22.92 percent of the party-list vote, bat none in single-member districts, underscoring the dependence czf LDPR candidates czn their leader) has been attributed to a variety of factors: his unabashed demagogic promises and personal appeal in a crisis-ridden environment; the effectiveness of his media campaign among tradecided and disoriented voters; his IXussian chauvinism and political autharitarianism;" the sheer fallout of the October 2993 events, which effectively discredited his nationalist r i d s or prohibited them from crjmpeting in the Duma etecticsns; and lastly, the ""protest vote" of those who wished a pox on both houses-the Kremlin as well as the House of Soviets. In empirical terms, the prcltest vote interpretation has carried the greatest weight: Only 35 percent czf Zhirinovsky's voters identified with his party or its program; relatively few had much use for his nationalism; and most blamed the democratic goxrnment (not the cr~mmunistpast) for their economic difficulties. On the more positive side, Zl~irinovsky" voters were predominantly lesseduated, middte-aged men with strong authoritarian values, and disproportionately from medium-sized or smaller cities, the wcsrking class in the deftmse sector, czr the unemptoyed.----in other words, from the geographical, social, and someti~nes""ethnic"priyhery (for example, the Far East and the Pskov regi~n).~Ward hit by the economic reforms and prone to seek an iron hand to resolve political problems, these were vczters who for the mast part distrusted the Gmmunists and did not wish to see a return to the past, even if they preferred same of its aspects to the present.'Thirint~vskyrepeatedly stressed that he represented a "third f'orcen7'k~een the discredited Communists and the new democrats, somewhat outrageousiy appropriating the labels "centrist" and ""Liberal" in the process, and his wters had received the message, Flowever, the conclusion that Z11irinc)vs)cy represented only the most ""marginal" "segments of the population, hostile to markets and democracy, is not entirely borne out by the facts. His .croters\economic attitudes were ncst very different from those of the average IXussian, and were significantly more favorable to the market economy than those of the average supporter of tile KPKF or the Agrarian party. Nor were Zhirinovsky" followers entirely hostile to the idea of democracy, although a full 31 percent among them thought that ""a strong leader should not be restricted by the law" "(as opposed to 21 percent of alf Russians, 26 percent of KPRF foflowrs, and I 8 percent of Agrarian party vc~ters).Finally, the sociai-educationai profile of the LUPI;?.demonstrated that a significant propartian of engineers, clerical. workers, and skiHed workers were attracted to the party." A cursory glance at LDPK party candidates-i.e., the leadership-shows a distinctly middle-class profile, with engineers, doctors, jurists, and prokssors predominating over the occasional officer or worker."

The view that Zhirinovsky" 11993 success can be attributed in part to a ""potest vote" "erns to have been borne out by his losses ir-t the 1995 parliamentary electic~ns.W e n the electoral campaign was longer and was conducted in a calmer atmosphere, giving rivals time to consolidate, ZlzirinovsEcy" party Lost about half of its electoral support, gainir-tg"only" H percent of the Duma seats chosen according to party lists, and only one seat in a single-member district race. But we should not florget that the LDPR competed successfulliy against the much better financed "parties of powel;""sucl-tas Gaidar's Russia's Choice and Chernomyrdin's Our Home Is Russia, and beat a direct rival for the nationalist vote, Aleksandr Lebed" Congress of Xxussian Communities, which fllliled to pass the 5 percent threshold. As a resrilt, the LISPIZ faaion held 51 seats ( I t percent of the total) itz the Secr~ndDuma, slightly more than Yavlinsky" Yabbiokc~.The LDPR also made strides in party-building, and actvanced its candidates in 83 percent czf the singlemember districts-even more than the best-organized party, the KPRF.:,'" Alone amclng candidates of the far right, Zl~irinovskysuccessfully cczmpeted in the 1996 presidential efecticjns, coming in fifth and winning a respectable 5.7 percent of the total vote, He undoubtedly wo~lidhave won a greater share were it not for Lebed, whom Zhirinovsky acc~isedof stealing votes from hirn, Still, Zhirinovslcyk share of the vote was weighty enough that Qrrganov briefly thought of courting him between the two rounds of the presidential contest, before deciding to try his luck elsewhere. In response, Zhirinc3vsb made a few strong anticr~mmunist statements, which along with Lebedk s o r e important endorsement of Yeftsin, certair-tiyhad an. impact on the election resrilts.'" Zhirinovskyk ssiccesses are hardly a matter of tuck, He has tapped into the sense of national humiliation more successfully than anyone from the right; appealed to distinct social constituencies; built a party organization; and projected a personal leadership style and a media profile, even if one not taken too seriously by most Wstern analysts, wha had little to say about him, and as is usual in such cases, largely ignored him. Zhiritzovsky" greatest weakness was and rcmair-ts not so much his pro-verbial extremism (arguably, media attention brought him more votes than he might have lost on account of I~isextremism) as the organizational dependence of his party on its leader. The Fifth Congress of the LDPR, itz April 1994, cemented his authority, maEng hirn the ~_?arty$ president for the next ten years (through 2004) and giving him the right to make alf of the inlportant party appoitztments,") Under these conditions, the leader has felt cr~mpelledto continue drawing attention by printing endless books with ever more apocalyptic titles, as well as a monthly bulletin about the work of his faction itz the U~rma." His tactics there have remained unchanged: In one speech, delivered in June 1995, he managed to insult practically the whole establishment, from the president to Gaidar, the army generals, and Yavlinsky-whom he accused of arranging the murder of Baris Pugo (one of the August I991 coup leadersl-and referred to Kybkin, LuzhkovI and Nemtsov as agents czf a ""Zionist, American-Xsraefi conspiracy" agair-tstRussia."

Should Zhirinovskyk relative success be explained by his strong and consistent ideological commitment, as Stephen Hanson has argued irs an ir-tterestitzgarticle that compares his and Zpganow" party-building efforts!" Perhaps, insofar as initial party buiXding is concerned. But if one pays closer attention to his ideczlogy, Zhirinovsky has been anythitzg but consistent. In his programmatic statements, genuinely liberal elements are mixed with frank endorsements of z~ozhdizm(the cult of the leader); ethnic slurs, with statements that Russia was always an empire itz which ethnicity did not and will not really matter; anticommunism, with support for the August 1991 putscfrists; and the emphasis on the market, with promises to protect aXI the poor, downtrodden, humiliated people of Russia. When it does not take the form of apocalyptic proto-fascist fantasies about ""last thrusts to the Soutb""or "last battles for R~lssiaPhis naticznalism is mundane, even banal: Nationalism is like having your own apartment, as opposed to being forced to live in an internationalist communal apartment. Yet this banal metaphor is tlnderstandable to all, and even brilliant, for it resonates with the experience of millions of IXussians: After all, who wants to live in a kommunulka and share his toilet and ditzing table with strangers? Limonov the litteratetlr and therefore the ideologist par excellence, who spent a lot of tirne wit11 Zhirinovsky?was repelled by this ideological hodgepcldge and left his shadow cabinet early on; but as a keen if eccentric observer, he f o ~ ~ n d Zhirins~vskyto be a genius of political entrepreneurship and a brilliant projvincial demagogue.----a Ixussian Huey Long, Aside from that, Limonov identified as one of Zhirinovskyk main strengths his willingness to culturalfy and aesthetically embrace the modern, in contrast to the hopeless traditionalism of Russian nationatists and Communists,k' Zhirinovskyt who grew up itz the kommunulka, takes it for granted that "beir-tg determines consciousness" and knows that the "Russian soul" alone cannot molve the world; consequently$he left the deadly combination of collectivism and the "Russian saul" to the Communists, their pensioners, and the village prose writers, In contrast, having spent some tirne in the discorh&que,Zhirinrwsky has attracted some angry young people and a few rock-and-roll bands, the political equivalent of a million pensioners, with more dividends to be had ir-t the future. Finally, let us never forget or tlnderestimate the power of ressentiment: One of the rnast surprising concfusions of an in-depth study of the self-identification of ethnic Russians, conducted by eminent Russian saciologiists itz 1995, found that the majority of respondents (61 percent) deemed Russians"'readiness to suffer through difficutties and ordeals" the rnast important trait distinguishing them from other ethnic groups. In contrast, many fewer thought Rz~ssianswere the carriers of a ""special historical mission" 0 1 1 2percent) or had a ""distinctly Russian" hsight into ""futh and higher meaning" "(20 percent)." The very fact that the sociologists decided to offer the first response as an option (a response, itzcidentally; that a Western sociologist investigating the ethnic self-identification of R~lssians w u l d never have thought of) speak vclltzmes; and the response says even more. fn the Soviet Ux~ion,everyone had to "suffer through. difficulties and ordeals" h r

at least several hours every day, Xf you need a reminder of what life was like, read Zhirinovsky" autobiography, brit remember: There is only one short step beween being an expert at suffizring and innicting it upon others.

G e n d i i Zyuganav and the Rise af "RussianCammmism'" The lessons that the pofitial right and the neocommunist movement derived from the October 1993 events were far from uniform, For those gathered arrsund Vrokl~anov" Den: October provided the pretext for creating a new nationalist "martyrology": The patriots wllo had laid down tl~eirlives "for Russia" "had been the first to sow the seeds of that revolt that w u f d lead, sooner or late&tcs the triumph of the just, patriotic cause." Others, lilce the defeated IXutskoy and Mfiasbulatov, tried to rebuild under changed circumstances or at least to justifi their positions, albeit with little effr'ct. 'Chose on the very extreme feft and right, Anpilov and Barkashov, in particular, would never openly chattenge the regime again. And yet, in some sense, the extremists even made gains. For instance, Barkash(w$ currency rose among pc~tentialfellow-travelers, who admired his heroism. At first, in hiding, he was aimost killed; subsequently he was arrested, and his organization was banned. Once the ban was lifted and Barkashov was freed as part af the general amnesty in Febr~iary1994, his newIy won ncstoriefy and patience at organization-building won hirn Inore followers, making IXussian National Unity by far the largest fascist movement itz Russia, with 53 regional branches and perhaps as many as 10,000 tcs 12,000 members by the end sf 1996.'7 Others grew more suspicious of hirn, especially the Communists: Having previously treated hiin as Russi;r"sheroic son, they quickly distanced themselves from this provc>catetlrbent on discrediting the Russian idea." Barkashtsv, for his part, despised the ""cqromiser" "lganov and ""re Jew" "irinovskyr His criteria of "R~issianness"were strict. Nevertheless, he indirectly supported Yeltsin in the 1996 elections: Let the democrats ruin the crluntry till the end, and then it wit'I be ours, he reasoned; Zyuganov wuXd only mix things up." His attitude did not bring him many friends among more respecthle patriots, but he never sought them a n y a y , instead preferring companions in arms (soramiki)-the ~fficial term used to describe the highest-ranked members of his movement." His btaclc shirts defiantly paraded through the streets af a Moscow suburb at the begixznir-tg of 1999, apparently with the help of some connectic~nsin the Russian interior ministry (MVD)-----adisturbing sign of where the sympathies of some officials lay" By that ti~ne,the recruitment of ""smpathizers" or ""sonnsrs" in ccoerckc state institutions had become an integral part of Barkashcw" tacti~s.'~ The former parliamentary right, too, was amnestied and reteased after October, an event much celebrated by Profianov: Rutskoy and Makashov itz particufar became regutar guests in the pages of Zavtm, Khasbufatcw, Zorkin, Achalc>\r; and the others were not left out; but all of them had lost their reputations and would never agair-t reemerge as fully credible actors an the national level. Not that

they did not try; almost as soon as they Xeft their prison ceXts, they formed a new movement, Concord for Russia [Soglasie vo itnia Rossii). But how could anyone trust those who had brought such havoc to the streets of fuloscc>wto suddenly bring about ""cncord""!"in comparison with its predecessor, the National Salvation Front, Soglasie was a truly harmless society of former judges, vice presidents, and parliamentarians in search of new sinecures. Not surprisingly, the new organization quicMy Faded, and its feaders dispersed."^ After an unsuccessf~llbid for parliament as the head of a still-new bloc with the pompous title Derzhava (Great Pcjwr), Rutskt~ysettled for a prt>vin"i" governslrskip in fall 1996, withdrawing to his native Kursk-not bad, for someone who might well have spent the rest of his life strolling itz the prison courtyard. Only Baburin and Makasbc~vremained truly active in the new Uuma after 1995: Baburin, posing as a figure of national stature, the deputy speaicer of the Duma, presidential material;" and Makashov, making openly anti-Semitic comments and thereby discrediting the KPKF just when it was becoming an almost respectable parliamentary party. Naturally, whatever he might have lost among the "pdliamentary communists," Makashov gained among members of the extreme left-right cczalition, who hailed hirn as a true ""patriot" and awarded hirn the ""Star of Stalin,"""" The ones who really profited horn the October events were Zytxganov and his reconstituted KPKE The otrtcome is sr>mewhatsurprising, given just h t ~ winvczlved Zwganov had been in the formation of the united left and right czpposition and the patriotic struggle against ""t1.e occupation regirne." "Jet his search for a modicum of respectability was observable early on. Anpils~vkstreet radicalism repelled Zyuganov, and the two never got along, although Zyuganov never minded taking an opportunity to address the masses that Anpilov had brought out into the agora. For all his hatred for democracy, Zp~ganovrealized that the regime still had a strong reservoir of credibility, in contrast to his own Communists, who had barely been legalized by the Constitutional Court ir-t November 1992. His organizational and agitprrzp skills, acquired through years of ideologicaX work on all leveXs of the partocracy, served him well; his conviction in the rightness of the cause, irnrnense energy, and self-confidence, even better. Zpgano>vkreal ambition was to combine the cadre organization of his party of the ""l&'hith the values of the ""right," The new party, he stated on the eve of its reconstittrtion in Febmary 1993, would be a ""party: of the people," not just the pnzletariat. Those cczmrades who clung doggedly to the "class approacW failed to appreciate the necessity of a ""t-lroitd platfrorm" based on a fusion of ideas of social justice with national-state itzterests, and they would fall by the wayside, This was because the main struggle in contemporary R~rssiawas between the ""liberal cosmopolitans" and the ""party of national statehood." Social justice, poputar rule, the priority of state interests, and patriotism were the common cornerstones of the Russian and the Soviet traditions and wcjuld help bridge the gap b e ~ e e nthe Communist Xeft and the nationalist right,"' Yet, just when the realization of these ideals seemed closer than ever, with Anpilov's proletarians of the Xeft and Barka-

shev's troopers of the right united in their desire to ""uphold the constitution,"" Zyuganov p~ibliclybacked down, calling on his supporters to refrain from provocationse9Weitherthe extreme left nor the extreme right forgave him this "cowardiceITThey supported his presidential candidacy in 1996 with great reluctance, if at all; Zyilxganov, for his part, correctly thought that the extremists he had crjurted in 1991 and 1992 would only damage his reputation, whereas many nationalists wouid vote for him a n y a y " Zp~ganov'sstature as the new general secretary rose ftrrther after his party was restored to parliamentary respectability, with a significant 12.4 percent of the vote and 14.2 percent of the seats in the new Uuma.""'Quring the next three years he til-clessly toiled on both the ideological and the organizational fronts, writing endless articles for Sovetskaz'a Rossiict, publishing several books on the Russian idea,'""drsciplining his party comrades in the Duma, and courting voters and legislators, The ideological influences of the political right on his tl-rinking were mclre than ol2vious: He borrowd from the fascist Meksandr Dugin the idea of a "mondialist conspiracy" against Russia, and argued atong Xines reminiscent of one of Mrrssolinik teachers, the Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini, that the world was divided into ""capitalist" and ""prc>letariannations:" not classes, The ideas of Toynbee and SpengXer, and even Huntington" '""clash of civifkzations:3iberaXXy coexisted alongside those of Lenin in his writings; and the Soviet-Russian past was glorified alongside ""Orthodoy, Autocracy, Nationality.'T"Ch history of the CPSU was rewritten as welI, with the ""heroic party" of Stalin, Zl~ukov, Stabanov, Cagarin, and other Soviet-Russian ""ytriots" conhonting the ""party of treason" represented by Trotsky, Mekhlis, Kaganovicb, and other cadres of suspiciously "cczsmopolitan'%ackground. From the last KGB director Kryuchko~ Zyuganov borrowed the idea that the destruction of the Soviet Union had been planned years beforehand by Western intelligence services, which had infiltrated the CPSU with "agents of influence" at the highest levels: Gorbachev, UakovXev; and others might not have worked for the CIA literallyr, yet they were somehow ""programmed" &c>mthe outside tc>weaken the party-state. Ho>wthe omnipotent and evil West achieved this feat w s never explained; but conspiracy theories, in any case, were never meant to demysti@social re?alityeNb2 The K12KF, however, was not Zhirinovsky" LDPK: Zpganov had tc> struggle hard to refashion himself as primus inter pares, Disturbingly, many of his cornrades either showed marked reformist tendencies or ""$ogmatically clrrng to the class approach." His second in command, Valentin Kuptsov, for instance, who represented the more pragmatic current in the party, pointedly attacked ""unthinking discipline" and ""breaucratic centralism" at the first KPLZF congress in February 1993; he also spoke about the "creative adaytatic~nof Marxism" D.> new circumstances, and underscored the need for collaboration with various "centrist" force~.~"?ncontrast, the more orthodox wing wanted to remair-t within the framewrlc of traditional Leninism, r+ecting Zplgancwk 'hationalist deviation."""M As a consequence, early KPRF programs represented an uneasy compromise between orthodox Leninist, reformist, and nationalist values and ideals, reflecting

the various tendencies in the party. Thus, the theses far the new KPRF party program claimed the Eeninist heritage btrt simultaneously conceded that the GPSU had bece~mecorrupt, failing tc>adapt to the demands of the technological revt~lution; the MPRF itself was defined as a party of "state patriotism, internationalism, social justice, and Communist ideals? The short-term collaboration with all patrit>tic forces, the program prr>mised,w u l d lead to the formation of a government of nationat salvation; the long-term goal was the restoration of sczcialism.'"' Nevertheless, the nationalist ir-tfluence was evident: An April 2994 KPRF congress resolution sharply attacked the ""csmopolitans in power," who were trying tc> mask themselves as "false patriots"; called for the unification czf all patriotic forces; and denounced the Belove~hagreement.'" Zyuganov, for his part, tried to appease the orthodrx wing by summoning Lenin as a witness. The ""bourgeois abuse of the notion of the people,""the great leader apparently stated, did not mean that the workiing class should isolate itself from the narod as a whole but rather lead it, In short, the focus of mobilimtion should not be on the prt~letariatbut on the Russian peopte and its struggle to restore the thousand-year-cztd state."" The official KPfZF program, adopted at the party's Third Congress C January 22, 1995), represented a csmprt>miseb e ~ e e nthe different currents in the party. Still, nationalist motifi were hardly absent. Thus, the attack on Western-style consrzrner capitalism was not waged from the point of view of the exploited wrking class but from that of the exploited periphery held hostage by a predatory "new world order." The cznly way out of this impasse was to ""activate the national liberation struggle of the Russian people," which in turn presupposed coob)eratir>n with various ""c-ntrist, truly democratic, and patriotic" forces, a deliberately vague formulation. In any case, the important point w s that ""re defensc of Russia's national-state itzterests organically flows into the struggle against colonial enslavement and counterrevt>lution, and for socialism and Sr>vietforms czf popular pouver.'Yor these and similar reasons, Russia should choose its czwn developmental path-one compatible with such traditional values as colleaivism (obs!~chz"rzffasr: sobornosty);patriotism, or ""Le closest mutual tie between the individual, society, and state" "erztzuvnost'); striving to embody the higher ideals of truth, good, and justice (duklrovnost'); and the equality and equal value of all citizens, independent of natic~nal,religious, and other differences (~zarodrzost".~"~ In September 1995, when the MPRF electoral platform was drafted, most references to Marxism-Leninism were dropped. Under the title ""Fr Our Soviet Homeland," the platform prr>misedthat the party would repudiate the Belovezh treaty and restore the ""ililegally dissolved" Soviet state; strengthen the country's defenses by rebuilditzg the military-industrial complex; replace the government of "natir~naltreason" with a coalition government of ""rational trust,'' led by popular-patriotic forces; and end IXussiak subservience to the West, The platform did not envisage ;a return to state sacialism. Although promising a crackdowrz,on speculative capital and crime, as w l l as a much stronger role for the state in social policy, the KPXXF pledged to respect priv"vae property and rejected old-style equalization policies (crruvirliEovka).Lastly, in a clear sign that the party was

counting on the nationalist vote, the ptatform lambasted Zhirinovsky, who, it stated, had supported Yeltsin and Chernomyrditz on ail key issues, failitzg to fulfil1 his ejectoral pr~mises.~"'" Zy~ganov,for his part, underscored that the party had rejected its earlier atheism and was open to all believers, particularly Russian Orthodox ones,"l" fn line with this shift in the directic~nof nationaiist values, a KPRF appeal on the very eve of the Duma elections called czn all compatriots, "'brothers and sisters," to vote for the party of the people: Neither the working class nor the vanguard was mentic~ned,although the party stogan-trud, vzarodovlastz'e, so~ializvtz(Tabor, popular power, sacialism)-signaled a contintzed commitment to same czf the basic tenets of socialism. l " The KPRFk new national-populist course, coupled with its distinct door-todoor campaign style, was an immense success: In the December 1995 elections, the party won 22.3 percent of the total vote, and 157 seats in the Second Dtlma (a f~ifl50of them in single-member districts), emerging as the largest parliamentary party (with a total of 34.9 percent of the seats), Yet even this was not a fuff indication of Camrnunist strength, as 'Viktor Anpilov" Trti&vaia Rossiia bloc won an additional 4 5 percent of the vote, almost passing the 5 percent threshold for entrance to the DumaeH2More impressive stiXI, the combined communistnationalist vote represented more than half of the total, vote, opening up the prcrsspect of a common candidate spt~nsoredby all patriotic forces in the upcclming presidential elections. As Yitzhak Brudny has demonstrated, it was predsely such considerations that determined the KPRF" sstrategy in the presidential race that follcrswed, althou@ Zpganov w s a w r e of the limitations of the procommunist vote."3 Nut surprisingly, when it was officially announced in February 2 996, Zyuganov" candidacy was endorsed in the name of the kp~llar-PatrioticForces of Russia, althotlgh there was little doubt that Communists would occupy the ""crzmmanding heights" in the new coalition."* In order to underscore its nationalist credentials, the communist faction in the Duma voted to renotlnce the Belot.ezh agreement-its most controversial move in the Russian parliament. Consequently, in Zyuganov? electoral platform all references to labor and socialism were dropped in fidvc~rof a set of broader nationalist ideals: Rossiia, ro~iz'nu,narod (Russia, homeland, nation), Evidencing the priority he gave to nittionalist considerations, Zyuganov emphasized that he was a Russian "both. by blood and in spirit,'" who had joined the Communist party because he was convinced that the "WO-thousand-year-old Communist i d e d k a s in harmony with distitzctly collectivist and egalitarian Russian traditions as well as with the true interests of the homeland. Were it not for his association with the KPRF; Zpganovk platform woutd be read as the manifesto of a conservative nationalist party candidate: the fatherland; the 25 million Russians left b e p n d LtussiaS borders; the traditional family (the right of women tcrs childbearing and a ""peaceful motherhoodnk the importance of preserving distinct Russian traditions, culture, and language; the endorsement of a mLxed economy, with various forms of prop-

erty; the priority given to questions of external security-where in all of this was communism? The only real trace of communist values lay in the broad emphasis on social justice and the struggle against the csmprador bourgeoisie that was robbing Rtissia of its resources and its people of their income."' Not for nothitzg did Probanov write itz his characteristically high-flow11 style that "the iccznographic image of WCIhorses, one white and one red, on Tnrhich (the Xxussian saints) Boris and Gleb sat, has become the metaphor of contemporary Russia, in whicl-r social and national energy are Rowing into each other, giving birth to absolutely new political mclvements, the largest one of which is destined to be Xxussian communism.'"""hlElis view w s seconded by the head of the Spiritual Heritage [Uukhovnoe Nasledie) think tank, Aleksei Podberezkin, who was in charge of elaborating a new state-patriotic ideology for the KPREH7The crlntemporary Xxussian idea, argued Podberezkin in a pamphlet explicitly endorsing Zy~iganov"candidacy, was encapsulated in the formula ""scialism -t- spiri tuality + crlntemporary scientific and technological achievements? This new emphasis on spirituality, added bdberezkin, in no way contradicted traditional communist ideals, for tl-re simple reason that communism and Christianity had sprung from the same roots and shared the same values."' But what about the kolbasnylt vopros, the fiamocrs ""susage questionm"?as not one of the main strengths of the Communists their social appeal at a time of rapidly growing social polarizatic~nlParadoxically, it was in answering the pressing questions of the ""material base" h a t the colllmunist campaign showed its greatest weakness: The spiritualization of socialism had progressed to such a point that the party" eeconomic prr3gram had been forgtltten. It remained unformulated until a couple of weelcs before the first round of elections."" By that time Zyrxganov somewhat comically ttrrned his attention to "Russian youth," k i n g ft;llly aware of the generational limitations of his electoratesi'"He also crlurted the patriots in a Iaist bid h r support at the first congress of his electoral coalitionNarodno-Patrioticheskii Soiuz Rossii (NPSK; in English, the bpular-Patriotk Union of R~ssia).~'" Yet it was not enough, When the votes of the first round were counted, Zyuganov came itz second, with 32 percent of the vote-little more than the cornbined vote of Communists and agrarians in the 1995 Uuma elections. Despite his attempt to combine nationalism with appeals for a mixed economy, Zpganov was still perceived as too "red" by most voters: A full 45 percent of Yeltsin's voters stated that their first motive was to defeat Zpgancx Tellingly, Zyuganov failed to attract the critical segments of the poputait-ion-the younger and better-educated urban strata. The stereotypical view of the Communist party, as a party of ""pensioners" with a strong base in the rural areas and among the unedtlcated, was confirmed, Xn only two categories-people over 55 years of age, and those without high-school education-did Zyuganov Dre better than Yeltsitz. Finally; the Zy~ganovvote was regionafly Iirnited: In additiczn to his failure to carry large tlrban centers, in the second round Zyuganov failed to capture even the mqority of regions itz which the nationalist vote was traditionally strong. However Rtissian

his new comm~nismmight be, the red Rag was too negative a symbol far many nationalist sympathizers."' m e n measured by another standard, however, Zyuganov was tremendously srxccessful: Only five years after the August coup, he had made the KPRF the largest opposition party in the new Uuma and had emerged as the most serious oppcxkion ct~ntenderin the race for the presidency, winning 40.2 percent of the vote in tile second round. Aside from controlling a number of parliamentary committees, the KPLZF had captured the chairmanship of the Second Utrma; and Zytrganov successfully monopolized the role of leader of the communistnationalist opposition, As one unsympathetic nationalist bitterly noted, Zyuganov had waged a much more successft~lstruggle for the commanding post in the opposition than he had against Yeltsin" '""crccupation go\pernment.""' That this was indeed one of Zyganov" m& goals became clear in August 2996, as he presided over the institutionalization of his electoral coalition, the N13SR, which was designed to further the transformation of the KPRF into a ""party czf patriots." Not surprisingty, the guiding idea. of the new movement was to combine social j~~stice with Russian patri~tism."~ Zyuganov, far his part, advocated a ""parliamentary road to socialism:" stating that the party should turn itself into a ""constructive and respclnsible oppasition.'Xertlizing that the MPRF was predominantly a party of "cultural traditionalists" and needed to expand its electoral base by moving toward the center, Zyugancw argued that ""ccnstructive conservatism" &should be the main ethos animating the party" future activity..,i2" Just what this meant in practice became evident only a few days later, when the Communist faction in the Duma voted in its archenemy>Viktor Chernomyrdin, as the new prime minister, provoking the first divisions in the MPSR, Baburin, for one, would have none of it, calling the communist action a ""sameful actD";nd Viktor Tiulkn, Anyilovk rival for leadership of the far left, asked Zpganov to remove the word communist from the name of his party,"' The MPRF's relations with Rutskoy were also far from idyllic, especially after the Communists advanced their clwn candidate in the Kursk gubernatorial election, only to backtrack: at the fast moment, letting the former vice president take the fieid.'27 Nor was the party" reputation among patriots enhanced by its further slide into ""unprincipled comprc>miseB the government budget in December 1996. Satisfied with the results of the Fail 1996 gubernatorial races, in which the MPSR claimed victory in 25 regons, Zyuganov saw little reason to call for new Duma e l e ~ t i o n s . ~ ~reality, V n as Steven Stlllnictc; has shown, the elections yrccduced a mixed result from the standpoint of nationwide parties and blocs, with regional considerations playing the most itnportant role."'" Worse still, the dependence of the goxrnors on the central governmrmt-especially those in the poorer regions, in which the Communists were more likely to triumph-gave them a strong incentive for cooperation rather than confmntation with the ""party: of power.""l0 For these reasons, the KPRF" December 2996 csmprc>misewith the government was widely understood either as a form of capitulation or as the first sign that the Communists were becomitzg a loyal opposition.

By April 1997, the parliamentary road chosen by the KPRF risked alienating sa many of its supporters that the Fourth Congress of the KPKF felt obliged to tlnderscsre the "irrecc~ncilable"albeit still ""rsyonsibfe" character of its opposition to the government, Thus, the future of IXussia w u l d be both ""geat" and ""socialist,"" twin goals that would be achieved in a presumably peaceful fashion."T"Ch ccslection of signatures on a petition demanding Yeltsin's rreignation, which aninlitfed KPRF members in yet one mare quasi-electorat campaign in summer 1997, resulted in another compromise, further disappointing radicals both inside and outside the KPRE Zyuganow somewhat tlnconvincingly justified the MPRF's new accommodatlrzn with the Chernomyrdin government on the grounds that Gazprom (which was headed by Chernornyrdit~)was one of the few large enterpriws in the country that still functioned and that maintained a bond between XXussia and Ukraine (the latter being dependent on XXussian natural gas supplies). At the same time, Zyilxganov emphasized, the KPKF" new, centrist image wc?ufd attract yotlnger people to the party. ""tieterans" ce~uldcarry the movement no tonger, and the Communists would have to show more Rexibility in their treatment of urban youth subcuttures, although retaining their commitment to traditicsnal Russian values."Vli~tlt none of these justifications appeased grassroots Communists, especially after the indecisiveness of parjiamentary Communists resulted in the nomination of the archfiberal Sergei Kirienka as prime minister in spring 1998.13' M e n the second congress of the NPSR convened in November 1998, it once more raised the specter of a final ""national-liberation struggle" of the Russian people against cc~lonialoppression, somewhat pompously cc~mparingits efforts to those of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Palestinian inrfada. Yet, upon closer inspection, the manifesto of ""ppular-patriotic7Yforces reveals a samewhat different picture: Behind the high-flown rhetoric of national liberation, one finds that the rebuilding of a ""great Russia, which will inevitably begin after the failure of the liberal revanche" (i.e., after Kirienko's dismissal and replacement with Primakov), cotlld not be achieved in the absence of "stable, civic peace, or a social contract." It was the purpose of such a contract to end the tragic divisions of the Russian people into "muttrally hostile groups." Lest it be thought that this was a way of giving in to the demc~craticenemy, the NPSR proclaimed that the achievement of civic peace coutd not occur until afl those who had brought Russia to the verge of catastrophe underwent a sort of Nuremberg trial. In the new, civic, patriotic Russia, there w u l d no longer be a place for various extremists of the ""right;"' such as Chubais, Chernomyrdlin, and ZllirinovskyeU4 And what would be the fate in this patriotic Russia of the various putschists, the officer Tereho>\r;the "heroic" General Makashcsv, the Nazi Barkashev>the protetarian tribune Anpito6 the ""nightingale of the general staff'' Probanov, the sundry heroes of the October uprising, and all those who had made a professic~nout of their hatred of "civic peace"? Predictably, to this question the NPSR manifesto offered no answer,

In the aftermath of the August 1991 coup, the cczmmunist-nationalist opposition went through several distinct stages. Xn the first and mast radical stage, between 2991 and October 1993, the united opposition of left and right political forces mczunted a cr~nsistentbut uns~~ccessful effort to subvert the regime throt~gha combination of parliamentary pressure and violent street activity, The fiailure of the first ""march on Moscow'' in i n ~ o b e r$993 significantly altered the eqkxatian, even if it sirnt~ltaneouslydamaged the reputation of the regime, The high cost of violence was a lesson that both the Communist left and the nationalist right took seriously3 with the conseqrrence that the "reevolutianary road" to power was largely abandoned, Xn the second stage, from October 1993 to the June 1996 presidentiai elections, Zyuganov" Communists and Zhirinovsky's natianalists prrrsued the parliamentary path to power while remaining firmly committed to a change of regime. Both had their moments of success-first Zhirinovsky and then the Communists. Tc3gether they demonstrated that the sympathies of a good baif of the electc>ratelay outside a ruling regime that had deprived them of their incomes and basic security and threatened their Soviet andlor itussian identity as welt. Yet the parliamentary road to power came at the price of institutiionaiiization and the acceptance of the enemy" rules of play. This became particularly evident in the third stage, which extended from 1996 through mid- f 999, The transformation of an antisystem party into an. electoral machine, as Kichard S a h a has argued,"* posed a classic Michelsian pnhlem for Zpganovk Communists. Wereas the KVRF" rhetoric was ohen revolutionary, its deeds were parEiamentary>and its electorate traditionalist and conservative in the classic sense of the words. Yet, from time to time, the Communists had to prove that they were indeed the party of czpposition, tl~reateningvotes of nuconfidence, collectixzg signatures for Yeitsir15 resignation, and even copying the much-hated American model by impeaching the president in 2999, Their failure on atrnost aX1 scares, however, only firrther alienated their radical constituenc.y,as the "moderates" among them looked for ways to retain their Duma seats and p"vi1eges by advocating statesmanship, "civic peace:bnd collaboratic~nwith centrist forces. Does this mean that the 1996 election indeed marked the end of polarized pc~litics,as Micbael McFat~lhas argued!""" Yes, insofar as this event legitimized efections in general as the only acceptable means of acquiring power; led to the institutionalization of the opposition; and demonstrated the potential appeal of strongman centrism, Ne~rtheless,one should not t~nderestirnatethe many sources of instability, from the dissatisfaction of the disenfranchised stzciai strata to the dramatic emnomic situation, the ineffectiveness of state authority, and the ambivalent attitude of the army and coercive state instituticlns toward democracy. To these internat fiactors must be added the widespread resentment

over NATO" expansion, not to mention ifs spring X999 bombing campaign over Yugoslavia, which provoked an intense, negative reaction across the Russian political spectrum. Under these conditions, Russian politics will inevitabty move in a more nationalist direction, even as more credible political actors marginaliize the most extreme nationalists and Commtlnists. In this respect, the most important cr~ntributionof the communist and nationalist opposition over the past decade is the development of a distinctive, nationalist rhetoric that relates Russids itzternal economic and social prc>blernsto its external humiliation at the hands of the West, The widespread sense of humiliation is a problem that aIX contemporary IXussian potitlcians must address if they are to remain credible actors on the political scene. Only within this broader ideological and political crlntext can Uadirnir Putin's recent politiaI campaigns and hard-line rhetoric be fulXy understood, On a deeper historical and sociological level, Russia's current plight can. perh a p d e s t be understood in light of a recurring dilemma posed by Western-style modernization. Many decades agcz, Karl Derxtsch described this dilemma in his characteristically lucid fashion: Western political theorists have seen the essence of the "mule of law33nits power to make life predictable. Yet, time and again, the JYesterxz w r l d llas beer1 surprised that its ""rule of law" "ems to be rejected by large numbers of pecjple outside the West, despite the obvious benefits of predictability which it seemed to bring to them, Perhaps now we can resolve this seeming paradox. Populatioi~smay have rejected the Western-style "rule of law" quite often because it did 1lc1t predict their future, or because it predicted for them a future of poverty, insecurity or subordination which they could not accept. . . . Yet, where predictability from contract failed ar became unpalatable, for whatever reasoll, men might still chotzse allother road to make life predictable, 'Chey might fall back on predictai7ility from identification and from introspection. Instead of contracting freely for prices, wages, ar emytaymer~tcondit i ~ l on ~ srigid abstrxt terms, they night prefer to have these terrns set and ~naniyulated ""arbitrarily" "by an authority which to them did not seem arbitrary because it seemed to them an autl-rority""of tl-reirown kind," run by persons like them~eives."~

X would like to thank all the participants of the Garnegie conference on "Rtissiaxl PoIitics: Stability of Disorder'' "hedl at fJC Uerkeley on May 15-16, 1999, for their useful comments and suggestions, X would also like to thax~kmy research assistax~tfrom Obertin College, Sarab Scannell, for helping me collect and orgarltize ~nateriaffor this chapter, as well as Andreas Urnland of Stanford University for supplying me with critical sources and taking an interest in my wr~rkon Russian nationalism. 1. Gennadii Zyganov, Ilerzhuva (Moscotv: Ixtformpechat: 19941,p. 33. 2. VIadimir Xhirinovsky, Pmtdnii $fagsonnu sever (MOSCOW, l"S,6),pp. 12-14.

3, Den: it is fess mlit knotvn, was also the xlame of a Sfavophile newspaper founded by Ivan Aksakcrv in 1861. For Aks&(>v's contributicm to the development of Russian ~lationalist ideologb see Stephen X,ukasevich, Ivan Akukoz: 7823-1886: A Study in Russian Thought and J""oJitl'cs(c&ber , t 6,199 1. 26, One of the ~noststriking features of post-1991 developments in Russia has been the resfative weakness OF rl-re state ~ Z Ydealing with political extremism, despite the existence of legislation prohibiting the open propagation of ""national and racial hatred." Most striking has been the release of the 1991 coup plotters, and rl-reamnesty of tl-roseresponsible for the violence of October 1993. On March 23, 1995, Boris &Itsin signed a presidential order ain~edat coordinating rl-re work OF all goverximent orgalls in the struggle against fascism and political extremism, and si~nultaneouslyirlsrructed the Russia11Academy of Sciences to come up wit11 a wcjrking definition of fascism; both initiatives have proven ineective. For an excellent overview of the IegisIatiw, judiciaf, and broader politicat problems of the struggle against extremism, see the il~ttroductoryessay in hrkhovskii, Bagp, and v Russii, pp. 7-68. Pribylovskii, Potibcheskii ~~kstrerniznz 27. A characteristic attempt to counter the demr~craticattacks on the right as a fascist force was undertaken by Sergey Baburin. On May 4, 1995, Baburin and a group of ""cncerned citizens" announced the Eornlation of their own Anti-fascist Patriotic Genter with the aim of saving ltussia from the threat OF fascism, which was defined by. Baburin as ""a form of international Russophobiae3%ccordingly,Baburin contii~uedhis defirlitiional exercise: Fascists are all those who oppress Russia-fls and are ""carrying out a genocide of the Russian people:" incfudling the ruiing atrthorities, a number of democratic organizations, and certain media outlets. See the butletin f"oEiiliches&iiekstremlzm v Rossii (Moscow: Fond "Grazhdanskoe obshcfrestvo,'"995), no. 1, pp. 1-2. 28, The minimat historical borders of Russia, from the standpoint of a ~~or~irngerial Russian nationalist, were outlined clearly by Aleksandr Solzher~itsynin his pamphlet Kak num obustroit20ssiiu (Leningrad: Sovetskii yisatel: t 3901, translated as Rebuilding Russia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Girolax, 1991). 29. Sankt-P"clerl~t~rgskie ~~edomosti, September 7, 1991. For the history of the fortnation of Baburin's Rossiiskii C2bshcllenarodnyi Soiuz and its programmatic documents, see Za ~~elikzrtu, edinzciu Rassiiu: Zslorlla RCjS v dokumert takh (Moscow: Novator, 1995). 30, Eduard Lirnonov, Litet-afcrmaiugazefa, October 16, 1991; Miaail Antonov, Liferatctmuia Russiia, October 10, 199I.

3 1, Den: no, 23, November 17-23,1991. 32. fin: no. 10, &larch 8-14, 1992, 33. Anpilov organi~edhis first rally on November 7,1991, the day of the October revolution, and subsequent ones in Llecember 1991 and in January,February;ancl May-June 1992. For hpilov's early goals, see the intervie~rwit11 him in Den: no. 6, February 9- t 5,1992. 34, See lzvestiia, February 24, 1392, for a good description of the violent rally. For a eulogy of Anpilov as the leader af the Moscow proletariat, see the brochure VikfijrAnpilov (Moscow: I%keia, 1992), 35. ""E;re vtzskresen'e,'"Ir>etz: no. 9, March 1-7, 1992, 36. Colonel Viiktor Alksx~iswas the leader of the Soiuz group of deputies in the USSR Congress of People's L3eputies and a key advocate of the introduction of a state of emergency in !ate I990 and 1991. Sazhi Umafatova was notorious for having proposed that Gtzrbachev r e s i p at the Fourth USSR Cong~sfiofPeople's Lleputies, She was also instrumental in organizing the Sixth Extraordinary Congress aC People" 1r)eputieson tl-re eve of the March 17 mfXy, attended by deputies who reft~sedto accept the Belovezh agreemerlts. See tl-re pamphlets Zapreshcherryi s "ezd and Suzhi Utnrsla~vu(Moscow: Paleia, 1992). 37. Soverskaia Kossiia, March 19 and 21, 1992; Literatttrvzaiu Rossiiu, Marcl-r 20, 1992; Den: no, 12, March 22-28, t 992. 38, Gvetskaia Kossiz'a, Febmary 29, 1992; Lien: no. 9, March 1-7, 1992, The letter was signed by virtualty the entire elite af the patriotic and neacomnunist camps. 39. ""UeMaratsiiao sozdanii ob"edinennoi oppozitsii;' Den: March 15-2 1, 1992, 40. Fur more on Aleksandr Srerligav, see VIadimir Pribylovskii, Vmhdi, pp. 99-102. His own views are summarized in Aleksax~drSterfigov, OpaEknyi gcrnergl svi&telS&uet (Moscow: Pateia, 1992), and in the newspaper Russkii Sobor, wlric1-r he hunched in early 1993. 41. "Materialy uchre&itel"nogos'kzda Russkcogo Natsiona1"nogo Sobora" (unpublished docrtment, Nizhnii Novgorod, Febrt~ary;1992). 42. Ibid. 43. ""Osnovnyeneatiozhnye deistviia Russicogo Watsianal'nogo Sobara,'"in Ibid. 44. ""Betzbrazhenie Rossii: Prograrnlna deistviia Russkcogo Natsionalhnogu Sobczra po spaseniiu otechestva'"urlpubfisl-red document, Moscow, June 1992). 45. Ilia Korlstaxltinov was a former leader of the LJeningrad Popular Front; Viktor fispcfrits was the head of the small Xiirzssiar~Christian Democratic Movement; MiUail Asrafiev was the leader of the equally smatl Gonstittttiox~al-Uemocr'dticparty. 46. Kutskoyk dissent from the gczvemment first became observable in late fall 1991, when he distaxlced kimseff from the ecoxlomic reform program proposed by the Gaidar government. By early 1992, Rutskcoy was sl-rarplyattading the imminent "Americanization'kaf Itussia in an article titled '"richastie u Mek1r)onaldsay'"zvestii'u, February 1, 1992). 47, Kutsktzyk speech as welt as the prczgrammatic statements of '"civic and patriotic forces'kcan be found in QbozrevateZ: no. 2-3, February 1992. 48. Extreme rightists, hotvever, remained unhappy with Rutskay" wavering between Yeltsin and rl-reopposition. See Vladislw Shurygin, ""Vtoroe litso:2lerz: no. 29, July 19-25, 1992, 49, For more on the meding of various bra~lchesof the tzpyosition, see IIr>en:~lo.26, June 28-July 4, 1392, 50. For the explicit defense of the constitutional struggle against Yeltsin's regime, see ""My-russkoe soyrotivlenie," L>at:no. 39, September 27-October 3, 1992. For more an

the politicaf councii ax~dthe aims of the united opposition, see ""Radi spaseniia Rc)ssii:" ,"io.t,etskaibaKossiia, Septelnbcr 19 and 22, 1992, 5 1. Sovetsskuiu Russz'in, Octaber 27, 1992; ""Vestnik FNSP Nasha Kossiia, no. 21, 1992; fin: no. 4 1, October 11- 17, 1992. 52. Sovetskaia Kossiia, October 17, 19992. 53. Sol~elskaiaRassiia, November 19, 1992. 54. Fur a good analysis of tl-reFNS, see L. I. rjadiani, Opoyyt-kakh sozdaniia v Russii Zewpravogtz bloka oppozifsionnj~khsil, 1989-1 996 (Moscotv: Xnstitut sotsiutogii RAN, 1997). 'The most important leadership collflict invczlved the struggle bemeen Afeksai~drSterligov ax~dGennadii Zy~ganov,which ended in Sterfigov" removaf from the leadership of the FNS. 55. Stanislav Terekjlov ft2unded the Union af Clfgcers in rjecember 1991. His argiar~ization took active part in most mass prcjtests of the united opposition, as we1 as tl-rewar in Trrzas-Dniestria. By spring 1993, '6erekhov was a member af the political council OF the FNS ax~done of its main organizers in Moscow For "ferekhov" worldvievv; see his speech to the aficers, "Idet tret'ia mirovaia voina:" Sovetskaia Russiia, June 23,1993. 56, According to press reports, more than 400 policemen were ix~juredin the fightizzg, 21 of tl-rem critically;Sec ,MoscowNews, May 9, 1993. Fcir reactions from the ""left-right" on this ""clemocratic provocatiun,'\ee Savetsh-ah Xossiia, May 4 and Nay 6,1993, 57. Narodnaia pravda, 1x0. 19, May 1993, 58. Rutskoy's collected speeches and articles from the period can be found in NeizvarObozrevatd: 1994). For his attacks on corrupy i Ru~;s&o~: L)olitZ'ches&iiportret (MC)SCI)\IV; tion, see pp. 43-97,209-237; for his reflections an tl-re Russian idea, see pp. 275-3135. For his mockery o f the democrats, see ""X-shovinist:" pp, 283-284. Rutshy" full conversion to nationalism occurred in the afterrllath of the Qctober everlts (see Alek~andrRutshy, Obrelenie very Moscow, 19951). 59. Khasbulatovk speeches can be found in El'tsin-Khasbulatov; Editzstvo, kompromks, bor'bba (Moscow: Tferra, 1994). For his commentary on Russia as a source of raw materiafs for the West, see his speech frcm July 28,1993 (in Ibid., pp. 465467). For his intemiew in L>at:see no. 35 (September 5-1 I, 19993).Prokhanav's interview with Zorltin can be found in Den: no. 30 (Auest 1-7,1993). 60. Far a general collection OF docllments on the October events, see JMOS~ZPU: Osen9-93: Kkmnikg prolivostoianik, 26 ed. (h4oscow: Resyubfika, t 995). For Qrekhov's ~~nsuccessl'ul attempt to take over the Unified Command af the Forces an tl-renight of September 23, see Izvestiiu, September 28 and 29, t 993, "ferekhov3sown report 0x1 the events Is in Sol~etskaia Rossiia, March 29, 1994, A goad sense of the mentality tzf tl-re defenders can he gatl-rered from B, Belenkjn and Efena Stnrkhova, I,istol~kiRekogu domu: AWoskswkieEetuclaie izdaniz'a, 22 sentiabrta-4 oktiabria 1993 (Moscow; I'ogos, 1993). See also the first issue of the "hnned" Det~:Clctober 1-7, 1993. 61. Kutskt>~i"version of events is presented in his Kruvavaiba osetz: Llnevnik sobytit' 21 scntiabria4 oktiabria 1993 goda (Moscow, 1995). 62. General Afbert Makashov of the Urat-Volga Miilitary District emerged as one of the most outspoke11opponents aF Gorbrzchev's perestroikrz in 1990. For his vicious attack an the democrats at the fa~~ndi~ssg congress of the CP RSFSR, see bTchredi;tel7?2yi s "ezd I"(owzmunisticheskoi parfii RSFSR: S&nogr?fiches&ii otchet (Moscow: Poiitizbat, 1991), vczl. 1, pp. 120-1 22, A year later, he unsuccesshlfy ran for the Russian yresider3c)r garr~eringonly 3.74 percent of the vote. His extremism found new venues in 1992-1993, wl-ren he participated in the war in Transdniestria, joined several oppositionat organizations, and made an ap-

peararlce at maxly street protests, 'Che culmination of his activity was the stormirzg of the Russian Central 'I"eLvisiol~statiol~in Moscc~w,Ostankino, on October 3, 1393. After this attack failed, he took part in tlie defense of the White Hause {the Russian parjiarner~tary building). Miraculously, he was later amnestied and reieased, and was even elected a deputy to tl-re Durna an the KPRF ticket in 1995. For a brief biography of Makitshov, see krkhovskii, Papp, and Pribytovskii, Puliticj~eskiiekstretnim a) Rassz'i, pp. 267-270. 63. During their two-week siege OF Ostankino in June 1992 {which er~dedwit11 tl-re intervention of government forces), the activists of Anyitov" r"frudovaiaRc)ssiia routinely used this epithet in reference to Russian Centrat 7"elevision. The epithet is an obvious antiSemitic play on the Russia11 word for ""television" "itelevidenz'ej. Makashov's attempt tr> fs~rciblyregain the Inass media "for the Russian people" occurred on the night of October 3. For a more detailed account OF these everlts, see Moskva: Osen-93, pp. 383-415. 64, Zliirint>vsky>Poslednii brosok rza p. 4. 65. Ibid., pp. 5-64. 66. Liab Gwenfeltd, Nationalism: five Roads to &Wodernity(Cambridge: Haward University Press, 1992). 67. Zhirir~ovsIcyaddresses the theme of his Jewish background in the first few pages of hsledniz' brosok, where he tries to de~nonstratehis ""pure Russian roots? For a discussion of the influence of this personal background on Zhirinovsky" politics, see Vladimir Sols~vavand Elena Klep&c~va,Xhirinovsky: Russian Fasdsnz and the Mukit~gof a Dictator (Iteading, Pa.: Addison-Jliesley, 19951, pp, 23-52. For more a n his early political career, see the c o l l e c t i ~of~documellts ~ Neizvestnyi Zhtrinovskii (Moscow: Panorama, April 1995). 68. For a hagiographic, albeit interesting description OF Zhirinavsky's 1991 campaign, see X. S. Kulikava and S. N.Pfekhaxlov, Fenomen Zhirinoz~sliago(Moscotv: Kontrotling, 1992). 69, Zhirinovsky, Poslednii vagon nu sever, pp. 28-29. 70. A good sense of these two critical years of his activity can be gathered from LJimonov,I,imanoa, pmtiv ZIzirinowkoyo, and his official bliograpl-xy t,y Sergei IJlebanov, Xhz'rinowky Kto onqMoscow: Evraziia-Nord, 1994). 71. Chief arnang these rival parties was Baburin's ROS, wl-rich had not collected the required ~lurnberof signatures, Some signatures ~nysteriouslydisappeared when the special police, allegedly searching for the fascist Aleksandr Barkashev iiz the lzfierxllatlr OF the October showdown, paid a visit to the headquarters of BaburirTs party. For the ROS point of view, see Za edintliu, veEikuit1 Rmsiiu, pp. 224-231. Baburin nevertheless won a seat in a single-member district ax~dcontinued to figure prominently in the Tluma. 72. Both the demagogic and nationalist components of Zhirinovskyk appeal are strc)x~gIystressed in Solovc~vand Kleyikova, ZIzirino~lskyA somewhat sensationalist, although fairly representative sdectiun of Zhirinovsky" soutrageaus statelnents is Graham Frazer and George I,;mcels, Absolute Zhirino-vskj~(Harmondswarth, U.K.: Perlguin, 1994). 73, Mathew Wyman, Bill Miller, Stepben White, and Paul Heyrsod, "Parties and \Soters in the Elections:" in Peter X,entini, ed., Elections and the Political Order in Russia { Budapest: Central Ellropean Universiw 19951, pp. 124- 142. 74. Stephen JVhite, Richad Rose, and lan McAllister, How Rrlssia Vom (Chati-ram,Mew Jersey: Chatham House, 19971, especiktfly pp, 141- 153. 75. "Eto my-tret'ia politicl~eskaiasila; Krasnoiarskaiu gazefa, April 14,1992, 76, Wymax~et af,, ""Parties ax~dVoters in the EIections," p. 128. 77. For the list of LDPK candidates as well as the party slogans and program, see Izrridiclzeskmiw szet-u, no. 40-41, 19%.

78, m i t e , Rose, and McAllister, How Russia Voles, p. 203, 79. Sce Yitzhak Bmdny, ""lPursuit of the Russian Presidency: Why and How Yeltsin W n the 1996 Presidential Election:Tc~mnzunisrand Post-Citmtnunisr Studies, vol. 30, no. 3, 1997, pp. 253-275. In fact, as Brudny demonstrates, Zhirinovsky's voters were more likely to vote far Zyganov than far Yeltsin, airhough they did vote for both. More importantly, Zygaxlov was stilit unable to win the overaff nationalist vote. 80. V, V Zhirinovsky, Poli~icheskaiaklassiku (Moscow, t996), pp. 61-62; LL3E"K: IdeoIaiin i palitiku (Moscotv; 1995),pp. 3-2 1. 8 1. Vlaidirnir Zhirinovsky, Poslednii udar po KossiG hsledniaia bitva Rossti (Mosccjw, 1996); A4y %10~r~difn Velikgiu Rossilu (Moscow: LJX>BR,1997); Es1i ne n?y, to kfo? (h4oscow: LDPK, 1998), 82. Speech to the Duma, June 21, 19995, ur~derthe title "My dolzhnyi imet' ob'kedinen11uiu tzypozitsiiu,'Travda ir:Fzirinozlsk~go~ 11o. 11, 1995. 83. Stephen Haason, ""leofagy, Uncertainty, and the Rise of Anti-Systern Pztrties in hst-Communist Russia:" ixz John Liiwenhardt, ecl,, &rry hlitics in &st-Chmmunhr Xussia (1,ondon and Portland, Ore.: Frank Gass, 199K), pp. 98-128. 84, 1,irnuauvprcativ Zhirinowkogo, pp. 126- 127. 85, I, M, KIiamkin and V: \i, Lapkit%,""liusskii vczpros v Rossii,'Tolis, no. 5, 1995, pp. 7S95. See table 3, p, 8.9. 86. See, for exa~nple,Sliamit' Sultanov, ""Nashie ~ner-e s narni v strt>iu,"My z' vvewrl'a, no. 48, Wove~nber1, 1993; Xvan fvaaov [pseudonyn~],"Qni srazhlzlish rodinu: Zalpiski razvedchika: Zavrra, 110s. 2 and 3,1993. 87. For mare on the development of Barkasbov's movement, see V, 1 , ~ a c h e vand V. Pribylovskii, Russkve Nalsiunaii'noe Edinsfija (h4oscow: Panorama, April 1397). 88. For examples of the initially positive reporting on Rarkashov in the communist camp, see Savetsknia Rossiia, January 4, February 12, March 5, 1994, For a change in tune, see the article "Order na edinstvc~,"Sovetsk-aiu Rossiia, October 25, 1994. For Barkashav's own explanation of the October events, see Zuvtrta, no. 2, f2ecember 1993, and no. 12, March 1994; and Alebandr Barkashov, "Ob uchastii dvizheniia Russkae Natsional'11oe Edinstvo v sabytiiaki~2 1 sentiabria-4 oktiabria 1993 goda,'3usskr"iV~st-ok~ no. 17,1993. 8%See his intelview with Prc>&anvunder the title "Rossiia-imperiia dufia:' Zavtra* no. 45, Nove~nber1998. 90, For Barkashov" iideolou and a description of the structure of his movement, see his brochure Azfiuku russkogo natsiorznlis,fta(Moscow, 1994). 9 1, ""Virtual3nyevoix~ys reaiknyrn natsizmom:" ItogI February 9,1999. Reflections on Hanson 92. See Stephen 13, Sfienfield, "The Weimar-Russia C:omparir;o~~: and Kopstein," Past-Soviet Aflairs, vol. 14, xlo, 4, pp. 355-368, 9 5 ""Soglasie vo imia Rossii: Clbrashchcl~iek grzhdanarn RI: levotsentristskt>ioppozitsii:" Soverskaita Russiia, March 19, 1994; Zavtra, no. 20, May 1994. 94. For a brief history of Soglasie, see Lladiani, O pr~pytkaktlzsozdaniia v Rossii levopravogo blolca oiypozifsionnj~klzsil, pp. 97-1 10. 95, See Sergei Baburin, "h iidu v boii:" Xavtrzr, no, 9, March 1398, an interview in which he anrlaur~cedhis intention to seek a nomination for the Russian presiderlcy. 96,111C3ctober 1398, Makashov operlly accused the ""kl;kes3%oEclestroylingRussia by ""s~cking the blood of indigen~juspeoples:' dtstrcsjiing tl~eir""idustry, agriculture, the army, Beet, and strategic nuclear forced-is status as a TJuma deputy added wight: to his commexlts, discrediting the KPKF leadership. For the integral text, see Af'bert Makashov, ""K rostovshclzikam ltassii:Yavt.ra, no. 42, 19998. For right-wing eulo@esand the ""Salin medal'"

a\varded to him I,y I%akhanov, see Zavtra, no, 44, November 1998; and no. 52, TJecember 1998. For the democratic point of view, see ltogi, Nove~nbtr17 and L2ecernber 22,1998, 97. Interview with Afeksandr Profianov under the title ""Prtiia naroda:"L>ar: January 10-16,1993. 98. 01% the night of October 1, Zygar~ovvolunteered to appear on Russian television, speaking out against public violence and the parties and movements that advocated it (Urban and Solovei, Russia's Cunzmunisfs of the Crossrouk, pp. 89-90). 99. For Zygaxlov's critique of extremism, see So~"(lrlsk@Za Rassiia, June 23, 1994, 100. The fi,nt;rresare from site, Rose, and McAllister, How Russia Voles, p. 123. 191. Gennadii Zyuganov, llrama vlasti (Moscow: Paleia, X 993); idern, llerzhuvu (Rrloscow: Informyechat: 1994); idem, 2% gurizontom (Masccjw: Infctrmgechat: 1995); idern, Rossiia i. sovren~e~zrz~~i rnir (Moscow: Obozrevatel: 1995). For h i s articles and interviews frc~mthis period, see Veritl v RossZ'E'U(Voronwh, 1995) and G A, Ziuganov o nfmntatic>nwith the rept~blic's militia. Earlier that pear, sixty people had been killed by a bornb that destroyed an entire apartment building; and another eighteen people were kilcd by a bomb in Makhachkala in September 1998. There have reportedly been ten attempts czn the life of the second most influential politician in the republic, the mayor of Makhachkala, Said Amirov. In Arrgust $998, the mufti of Uagestan, Said Muframmed-Hadji Abubakarov, was assassinated by a remc~te-cc>ntrollc;.d bomb that also lcilXed his brc~therand driver. Attacks on federal and republic troops in Uagestan also have been common: In Jtxly 1997, a bomb blast in the town of I(l.rasav).art killed nine policemen and wounded six, A Russian army base in Buinalcsk was attacked in December 1997, allegedly by a group of between 100 and $20 Wahhabi militants, Clashes along the border with Chechenbased militants increased elver the cotlrse of 1999, to the point where early that summer, for the first time since the end of the 1994-1 996 war, Russian forces be-

gan carrying out retaliatory strikes against alleged terrorist bases inside Ghechexl territory. Netierthetess, Dagestan has managed tc>avoid all-out anarchy and civil war. '21 the surprise czf Basayev and his allies, the August 1999 insurgents were met by overwhelming pop~llarhostility; even Dagestan" ethnic Chechens publicljr exp~ssecftheir oppositic>n.' Local Dagestanis demanded that government authorities allow them to form volunteer brigades to defend their homes against the invaders. As a result, the joint federaf and Dagestani operation to resist the incursion was suppt~rtedby the great majority of the R~~ssian pubtic. For the first time since Mrorid War 11, ltussians could credibly claim that their military was fightixzg on the side of "the people." After three weeks of fighting, federaf forces, Dagestani interic>rministry troo y s, and local self-defense units managed to force the guerrillas to withdraw to Chechnya. Federal forces followed up by launching air strikes against the Ckrechen towns of Vedeno and Urus Martan, where the militants were allegedly regrouping, which prompted Basayev to announce that his fighters ""rserved the right to retaliate throughout Russia."Wmcow ignored the threat and went on to attack the "Wahhabi" "villages in central Dagestan, tlsing artillery and air strikes to empty the villages czf both civilians and armed oppclsitianists. As this operation was coming to an end, some 1,000 to 2,000 militants from Chechnya entered Dagestan" Kazbek and Novolaksky raions, where the majority of Dagestan's Chechen-Akkins reside,") Again, however, the militants received little local. support, with Russian and Dagestani forces driving them back into Chechnya by mid-September. Tragically, afeer a series of terrorist bombings in the Uagestani city of Buinaksk, in Moscow and in Volgc~donsk,l;tostov oblast (in southern EZrrssia) killed almost 300 Russian citizens, the escalating violence turned into a fullscale war. With federal ofGcials blaming "terrorists" and ""bandits" based in Chechnya for the bombings, the public mood in Russia changed from righteous indignation at the ""Chechen ir-tvasion" of Dagestan to fear and fury, The Russian government, which had faced widespread p0p~1aropposition to the war in Chechnya frc>m 1994 to 1996, was under considerable pressure this time to resolve the ""Chechen problem" "decisively, The result was another invasion of Ckrechnya by Russian forces, which began in fate September 199% The fighting in the republic in August and September 1999 and the subsequent renewal of war itz Chechnya contributed to a further deterioration of social conditions in Dagestan. Authorities in the republic had to cope with anclther flood of rehgees, this time from western and central Dagestan as well as from Chechnya. The fighting also aggravated itzter-nationality:relations in the republic, above all becatlse of increased hostility toward focal Chef hens from many of Dagestan's other national minorities. Neverthefess, the repubtic" "stable instability" has survi'cred: There has been no general revolt agait-tstMoscow or Mabachkala, and the current Uagestani regime still retains the sapp~)rtof a majority of its citizens. My objective in this chapter is to explain why, despite afX the sources czf instability, large-scale and sustained violence has not come to Dagestan, and to assess

whether Uagestan" stable instability will last,'Wy focus czn Dagestan is predicated on the conviction that Moscow's concerns about the republic are well fc3unded. Excluding Chechnya, Dagestan is indeed the region of Russia where the risk of Irtrge-scale political violence is greatest. It is atso the key to Moscowk position in the North Caucasus, If intercommunal violence in this strategic reprrblic is avoided, and if Uagestan" political elite remains reasonably loyal to Moscr~.ty, then organized resistance in Chechnya will atmost certainly be contained vvtthin Chechnya's traditional borders, making another decisive military victory by the Chechens unlikely, If so, M ~ s c rmay ) ~ eventually work out a mutually acceptable arrangement on Chechnya's legal status with same kind of authoritative Chechen government. If Uagcstan implodes, however, Moscow's military and political objectives in Checfrnya will become even more difficult to attain, and the generalized ecanomic and humanitarian crisis in the North Caucasus will became even more ir-ttractable. This chapter is organized as follows: I first assess the general risk of large-scale, sustained politicat violence by focusing czn broad structural factors, stressing in particrx tar sadoeconomic considerations, the nattrre of political cleavages itz the republic, and regime type (consociationatism) and elite incentives. I then i d e n t i ~ the issues that are the most likely to provoke large-scale sustained violence if it does break out, as weU as the likely participants, by focusing on concrete political grievances and assessing whether those grievances are tractable or likely to intensify- Finally, 1 identify some early wamil.lg indicators and triggers of violence that are most likely to apply in the Dagestan case," l conclude that although Dagestan will remain vulnerable to episodic acts of political violence, the structure of the republic" pofiticaf cleavages makes it unXikety that there will be any general mobilization of the Dagestani population in the form of internal war between Dagestanis, a war of naticsnaj liberation against Mosco>w,or an Islamic holy war led by forces based in Chechnp,

Assessing Risks: Structural,and Background Fa~rors Dagestan (after postwar Chechnya and Ingushetia) is the IXussian Federation's poorest republic. In $996,per capita ir-tcome there was one-third the average for Russia as a whole. Dagestan had the highest ratio of rural tcs urban population of att of ZXussiak regions and republics: Xn f 98") only 44.0 percent of its population was urbanized." its highland peoples were even more rural-74-6 percent of Avars, 76.8 percent of Dargins, and 83.3 of tagins." Like other regions of Russia, Dagestitn has suffered from the inevitable pain of transition from central ptanning to a market economy; but its peak-to-trough economic decline has been particularly acute, in part becatise the republic" iindt~strywas heavily weighted toward military production. Virtually no large or medium-sized industriai enterprises are operational in the republic today.'Weal unemployment is estitnated at

over 30 percent, and youth unemployment, at 80 percent. The economy has atscz been hurt by the out-migration of Slavs, particularljr Russians, who lzad been overrepresented in management and other skilled positions, In additicjn, the repubtick external economic links were interrapfed during the war in Chechnya by the temporary closure of its border witMzerbaijan and by the itztcrxluption of railroad service, telephone links, and on occasion even automc~biletraffic tc>the north, Uagestan" economic prospects are poor. Its only significant economic advantages are its access to maritime trade on the Caspian; its rich fisheries (particularly in sturgeon); its location as a transit corridor for trade between Russia, and the South. Caucasus; and the pipeline bringixzg oil from Baku to the Russian port of Novc>rossiisk,"HtIweve~its fisheries have been depleted by widespread poaching and industrial pollution, to the point where environmentalists are concerned about the viability of the Caspian sturgeon population and its derivative caviar indt~stry;and its role as a transportatic~nlink has been tindermined by the turmoil in Chechnya. The war in Cl~echnya,as well as predictions of an impending breakdown of p~iblicorder, will continue to deter foreign investment-for which there is relatively little incentive in any case, given that the republic has no significant hydrocarbon reserves or czther potentially lucrative natural resources, Finally, and perhaps most importantly in the long run, Dagestan is very distant from international markets. As is the case elsewhere in the Xxussian Federation, agricrrfture here is handicapped by inadeq~lateinvestment in equipment and fertilization, poor storage and processing capacity, and an infericjr distribution system, More fundamentally, the climate and pervasive land scarcity make a substantial revivat of agricuttural production uniikcfy. Land hunger ir-t the republic has been aggravated by the high natural rate of poyufatic~ng r o ~ has , the republic" p~"wulationalmost doubled between 1959 and 1989. The forests and the smatX terraces tabariousty constructed in the past for growing fruits, vegetables, and grair-t were destroyed long ago, during tsarist military campaigns against the highlanders; and Sovietera cotlectivization again disrupted traditional highlander agriculture, driving many farmers to migrate to towns and cities in search. of another livelihood. Dagestank ecr~nomicdifficulties have cr~nflictingimplications for political violence in the repubtic, On the one hand, the shrinking economic pie makes distributional conflicts more intense, aggravating housing slzortages and raising the stakes of inter-group conflicts omr land. Economic hardship also make it difficult far state authorities to appease aggrieved parties; and it contributes to the spread of organized crime, which tends to emerge itz urban areas, along clan (tukJtum) and lineage {jin) lines, thereby reinforcing inter-clan and in some cases internationality enmity On the czther hand, Uagestan7sppverty makes it highly dependent on financial support fmm Moscow: Some 80 percent of Uagestan's ggovernrnent budget is covered by subventions from the federal government." As a result, separatists cannot credibly claim tl-xat the republic would be better off economically were it to become independent,

The Structure of Political Cleavages Dagestank extreme ethnic heterogeneity, and the impracticality of creating separate administrative territories for each ethnic group, help account for the fiact that it was one of the few autonomous areas in the USSR not to bear the name of one or two natic~nalities,Rather than "&longingm tcto a particular eponymotls (titular) nationality, the repubXic was treated as a form of collective property that more or less ""blonged"" to the republic's ten major "indigenous" "(kor~nnye?) nationalities: Avars, Aguls, Dargins, Kumyks, taks, Lezgins, Nogais, Rutuls, Tabasarans, and Tsakhurs, According to the Soviet system of ethnic classification (which underwent frequent changes), however, an additional twenty-four nationalities resided in the repubfic in 1989, the year of the last Soviet census. Several of these were considered indigenous but had their own ""hmelands" "elsewhere in the North Caucasrzs-most notably, the Chechens. The rest had external homelands outside the region, including Russians (9.2 percent, then the lowest figure for all autonomous republics and autonomous obXasts in the RSFSR) and Azeris (4.2 percent). Finally; the republic is also home to numerous ethnolinguistic groups that were totto small to receive recognition as "nationalities" by Swviet ethnographers but instead were treated as part of the dominant nationality in their region of residence." Linguistically, Uagestan" ethnic groups fall into three broad groups. The Northeast Caucasian language group (Nakh-Uagestani) forms one of three branches of the Paleocaucasian language family, which linguists consider among the oldest in the world (between 5,000 and 6,000 years old, in the case of Na&Dagestani),'" The many Nakh-Dagestani lallguages are spoken mostly in the interior highlands and are completely unrelated to other languages in the republic, or indeed, a n y h e r e else, Roughly two-thirds of Uagestan" citizens were members of Pateocaucasian ethnolinguistic groups in 1989. Most of the remaining one-third spoke eitlter an Altaic-Turkic language (Kumyk, Nogai, Azeri) or a Slavic language (mostly Russian), There was also a small community of Jews who spoke Tat., an Xndo-European language related to Persian that has i t s own literary tradition. With the exceptic~nof several tiny ethnolinguistic groups facing lineistic assimilation, it does not appear that Dagestani nationality and subnationality identities were weakening in tlze late Soviet period. Native language retention-a critical indicator of the survival of minority cultures-remained high for Dagestan's major nationalities. Among Avars, Dargins, Kumpks, and Lezgins, it was above 98 percent in 1989, showing virtuaffy no decline from 1959,""n addition, ir-ttermarriage among nationalities within Dagestan was relatively infrequent, particularly b e ~ e e nSfavs, Aftaie peoples, and kleocaucasians.'" Despite the extreme ethnic heterogeneity of the reprzblic, there has been very limited nationality-based political mc>bilizattic->n there since 199 1. Many other lines of cleavage are at least as salient as that of ethnicity. At the broadest level, residents of the republic in the Soviet period clearly had a measure of loyalty to

the USSR, as suggested by the fact that Dagestan voted overwhelming for the preservation of the USSR in the Gorbachev-sponsored referendum in March 2891. m i l e political identification with the more "Russian" Rt~ssianFederation today is much weaker, Dagestanis typically claim that their fel2aw citizens to some extent identil;y.with Uagestan as a multinational political entity. Below these "civic" orientations are at least three cultural clusters. First and largest is the cluster of peoples of highland origin (e,g,, Avars and Dargins) who speak various Paleocaucasian languages referred to colZectivciy as NaklrDagestanz",Many of these groups have migrated over time and ncw live in lowland areas. Islam is an impartant part of their life, although it is a farm of Islam that has been modified by traditional laws and practices. blitical appeals rooted in highlander, North Caucasian, pan-Caucasian, or Islamic loyalties have had greater resonance among the highlanders than among other peoples of the republic. The second-largest group is made up of lowland, T~~rkic-speaking, Altaic peoples-Kumyks, &eris, and Nogais (18.7' percent of the population in 1989Iq2' Typically referred to as "Tatars" by bytussians before the Bolshevik revolution, the Kt~myks,Azeris, and Nogais are culturally very different fmm Dagcstank highlanders, despite being traditionally Muslim. Except for the traditionally nomadic Nogais, they tend to be more urbanized and secularized; and rather than identieing strongly with other North Caucasian peoples, they are oriented more toward ""fellc3w Turks" in &erbagan, Central Asia, and even Turlcey, with their explicitly secutar regixlles. Despite the fact that Kumyks have been present in the rep~sblicsince at least the thirteenth century and were politically and culturall-)l dominant prior to the October 1917 revolution, highlanders generally do not consider Kumyks, Mogais, and Axeris as having a claim to being true Dagestanis equal to that of the ""indigenous" highlanders, Lastly the republic's Slavs (9.2 percent of the total poptllatic~nin 1989) naturally have a Rt~ssiancultural orientation. Religious clewages are also itnportant. Xn 2989, some 90 percent of the populatic~nbelonged to traditionaly Muslim ethnic groups-a fig11re that has prrhably grown as a result: of the in-migration of Dagestan" nno-Slavic diaspara and the out-migration of Slavs, Islam arrived in the rep~sblicbetween the seventh and eighth centuries but mot.ed only gradually from the IowIands into the highland areas, spreading in the mid-eighteenth century into what is today Chechnya and then on to the central and western North Ca~~casus,'WNiost Dagestanis were traditic~nallySunni Muslims of the ShafiY school." Sufisrn was widely practiced, and the Naqhbandi and Qadirii Sufi brotherhoods (wierds) were particularly influential, as in Chechnya. The Nogais, however, were traditionally Khanafi Sunnis," and many tezgins and some Dargins were Shia, as were mclst of the republic's Azeris. ltussians and other Slavic minorities were typically Orthodox Christians. Lastly, there is a small population of Jews, itzcluding the "Mountain Jews""lats.'" The extent to which these religious traditions survived seventy years of Soviet officiaf atheism and repression of religious beliefs and practices is difficult to assess. In the Soviet period, the urbanixd and better-educated towlanders were typ-

ically more Sovietized and more secular than the rural highlanders. Nevertheless, like Muslims else~vhereitz the former Sovkt Union, many Uagestanis adapted fslamic beliefs and practices to Soviet cr~nditions.Clerics fot~ndways to represent Islam as politically nonthreatening, and Xay believers engaged in nonpoliticized practices of prayer and visiting of shrines." Moreovex; although most mosq~lcs were destroyed in the Soviet period, the Muslim Religious Board fc3r the &rth Caucasus-one of four such institutions in the former Soviet U n i o n w a s located in the republic, which had been one of the Russian empire" centers of Islamic learning prior to the Bolshevik revolution. Althougb the Nszrth Caucasus Muslim XkXigious h a r d w s penetrated and closely monitored by the Soviet potiticai police, its location itz the rep~xblicgave Islam a visible presence and itzstitutiunal infrastructure that was absent in most other traditionally Muslim urban areas. As the Soviet regime grew more tolerant czf religion in the late 1980s, Dagestan experienced a dramatic Mttslirn revival that was arguably unmatched in the furmer Soviet Union and that is still in progress at p ~ e s n tAt . the beginning of 1999, there were an estimated 1,670 mmosqrres in the republic (most villages now have their o w mosqkxes), 25 medresses (Islamic schools), and nir-te Islamic schools of higher learning in the republic. The number of Dagestanis making the hadj to Mecca each year is reportedly in the tens of thausands, The republic now is hame to some 3,500 irnams and mullahs, and more than 1,000 Uagcstanis are enrolled in Islamic schools abrrsad." By most accounts, it is not religion but clan, lineage, and 27,ct.milythat constitute the most important lines of political cleavage ir-t the republic, Uagcstan's many ethnic groups are varis>uslyorganized. Clans (takhums, or teips in the case of the Chechen-A&ins) typically consist czf b e ~ e e nsixty and eighty families related by blood. Male members are honor-bound to defend fellow clan members and avenge wrongs, including by killing. Many nationalities also have sub-clan or ""lineage" affiliations @inor khel), members czf which are usuatty from a single family with an identifiable, if sametimes myrhia), progenitor and a common family name, The ja~rzaaa,on the other band, are tt~wn-based(hence, territorialized-untike the tukhur~zsor the Chechen teips) political communities with their own customary laws and leaders. Iczmauts, or village councils of elders that regrxlate relations b e ~ e e nclans and sub-clans, are the most irnmediate and visible authoritative body in the ever-).day lives czf most highlanders as we11 as of many lodanders (particrxfarly recent migrants from the highlands). Usrrally a jarnuat's jurisdiction is confined to a single large village or two tc>three smaller viljages. (It is interesting to note that much of the political conflict taking place in the republic is between jurnauts rather than nationalities,)lTl-re tukhurras likewise have their own elders for regulating intra-clan cr~nflicts.The rules and norms go.lrerning intra- and inter-clan disputes are informed by traditional laitvs and practices (udat), to a certaitz extent by Islamic law (slsaria), and when necessary, by civil (formerly Soviet, now Russian) law and the cczurts, Lastiy, there is a consciousness of difference between highlanders and lowlanders, between urban and r~aralresidents-in 1989, 56 percent of rl-re pop~llation

lived in rurat areas9"-and even, on occasion, between classes (especiallybetween eduated people in the professional and managerial classes on the one hand, and less-educated unskilled fabor and the ruraf dwtlers on the other). Datgestani society is thus characterized by a dense complex of cfeavages, mast of which are not cotcrminousunlike those tl-rat divided Armenians from Azeris in Nagorno-Karaba&, for example. A few lines of cleavage are cr~ssc~~tting, simultaneously incorpclrating different segments of the population: h r example, that of citizenship in multinational Uagestan; class identity; urban identity; or the occasionally strong identity s f being a Muslim," Btlt most are nested one within the other>like a Russian matriushka doll-Muslim, highlander, nationality, sub-nationality, janzuat, clan, village, and family-with political loyalties intensi+ing as the tlnit of identification gets smaller. As a leading Uagestani sociologist explained: I am from (the village) of Akhty. . . . [ S o ~ n e o from] ~ ~ e Akllty wcmld never identify himself as a LJezgin, One could say the same thing about Avars ax~dIlargixzs. The population of villages that llave become known in connection with the recent standoff with Nrallhabis-Kadar, h r a m a h i , and Chabanmahi-never identified themselves as TJargins. 'Chey belonged to the jarnuat. of Kadar and Karamakhi and Ghabanmaklli. . . . Magamedaii Magomedov, Chairman of t i l e State Council, is a Dargin, but he can't do anything with the Llargin villages of b d a r , Karamdli, and Ghabanmabi,'"

This complex of nested cleavages, and the intensity of local loyalties, make it very difficult to mobilize entire nationalities in the republic, let alone all of Dagestani society, Even in the nixzeteenth century, the charismatic leader Xmam Shamil, who used a combination of religious messilznism and cczercion to mobilize the highlanders, had to overcome jarnuat, clan, and village loyalties as we11 as opposition Erurn feudal principalities Cshumkulates and khanates) during his thirty-year struggle with the tsar's armies. Villages, janzaats, and principalities w u I d go over to the IXussians, attl~oughmany would later return to Shamil, depending tlpon the course of the war? the ability of tsarist generals to coerce or bribe local leaders, and the credibility of Shamilk threats against traitors," Today, the political salience of these village and jamat loyalties is reinforced by the remoteness of many village communities, the relative ease with which isolated highland villages can be defended, and poor cczmmunication and transportatic~n infrastructures within the republic.

Consocz"ationaEismand Elite Incentives A complicated and largely ixzformal system of distributing privileges and official posit-ionsaccording to nationality evolved in Dagestan during the Sot.iet period. These practices, which drew on preresrolutionary political customs, were reinforced and legitimated by the Soviet system of ethnic federalism and by Soviet

nationality policy. The use of informal ethnic quotas and balancing was more widespread in Uagestan than in any other region of the Soviet Union. Informal tlnderstandings arc>seabout the ethnic distribution of appointments of maytjrs, procurators, chiefs of police, judges, and so on, at the Zevels of the repubtic, cityltown, and district {raion).34 These practices have becczme more explicit and formalized in the post-Soviet period. In 1992, 1993, and again in 1999, referendums on the establishment of a directly elected president were rejected in the rep~zblic,with the opposition asserting that a winner-take-all electoral system would render ethnic pc~wersharing impossibie. Instead, Uagestan" first posrcomm~nisr constitution, adopted in $994,established a collective presidency in the form of a State Council comprising representatives of fourteen nationalities-the ten "Dagestani" nationalities, plus Russians, Azeris, Chechen-Alkins, and In an effort to encourage cross-nationality voting and to discourage the election of candidates with appeal to single ethnic constituencies, parliamentary deputies from the f'ourteen constitutionally recognized nationalities were to nominate three candidates hom their own nationality as their representative on the State Council; the legislature as a whole would then vote on those three candidates. The assumption was that radical nationalists would be unable to win suppclrt from the assembly as a whole, even if they managed to win nomination by deputies from their own nationality, In addition, the chair of the State Gjuncil-in effect, the rept~blic's president-coutd serve Eor only a single WO-year term, after which he or she would be replaced by someone of a different nationality The chair of the State Council and the prime minister were not alowed to be of the same nationality. In the wake of the constitrrtion" ratification, MagornedaXi Magomedov, a Dargin who had chaired the republic's Supreme Soviet in the late perestroika era, became the first leader of the State Council in 1994 and the republic" de facto president. However, Uagestan" first prime minister (Abdurazak Mirzabekov] was a Kumyk, and the leader of parliament [Pvlutihu Aiiev) was an Avar. Measures were also adopted to ensure a balance among the natic~nalitiesin parliamentary seats. Hrzwever, the drafters of the 1994 constittrtion rejected the Soviet model of e t h i c federalism, in which. the lines of electoral districts were drawn on the basis of national homogeneity, and each nationality coincided with a particular administrative territory. Instead, they redrew electoral district lines to divide national groupings among many districts, thus preventing political consolidation and mchitization on the basis of nationality, Deputies from certain districts were elected on the basis of a standard majoritarian system requiring a second round in the event that no candidate received a first-round majority. The remaining districts were designated as ""multinational" and were permanently assigned to particular nationalities in order to ensure balanced ethnic representation. Only a representative of the designated nationality could run in those districts. Therefore, to win an election, candidates w u l d have to win support from nationalities other than their own." The aXXocation of particular districts to particrxlar nationalities was accepted by the Dagestani electorate

as a means of avoiding inter-nationality conflict, and the specific aatlocation arrangement was likewise regarded as reasonable." The otltcome of the first parliamentary elections under the new constitution, which took place in early 1995, was parliamentary representation that atmost exactly matched the share of nationality groups in society, A second election was held in March $999,with sitnilar results. As others have suggested, Uagestan" regime generatly fits the model of "consociationalism" elaborated by Arend Lijphart to describe nonmajoritarian democracies with formal and informal rules for power-sharing among ethnic groups, such as those in the Netherlands, Belgium, and arguably, Switzerland." Kouvever, despite the international community's embrace of consociationalism as a remedy fc3r ethnic conflict, a growing body of social science literature suggests that ccznsclcirttionafisl-r~can be as much a source of interetllnic conflict as a solution,'" Consociationalism tends to politidze ethnicity, creating permanent political itzterests along ethnic lines of cfeavage and prejudicing ethnic cleavages over others (such as those of class, religion, region, and gender). In addition, there is inevithly an arbitrary qriality to what qkxalifies as a recognized group, which can lead to disaffection among nonrecr~gnizedgroups. The sustainability of csnsclciationaI regimes is also tied to a popular and elite perception that the affocatian system it provides for is fair and effective-a perception that can dissipate very rapidly, particularly &ere the retative share of different ethnic groups in the total population changes,"'" Many of the more negative conseqkxences of consociationalism have been evident in Ffagestan. Twenty of the thirty-fotir nationafities identified in the 1989 census are not represented in the State Council, and n.xany of Llagestan" myriad ethnolir-tguisticgroups are not constitutionally recognized. Critics have argued that the regime is an oligarchic and authoritarian arrangement that protects the position of incumbents while masquerading as a means to ensure harmony among nationalities." Critics also have noted that ethnic balancing violates Russia's ccznstitutic>nand the supposedly democratic principle of ""one-person, one vczte;"They advocate instead a directly elected president and a bicameral legisfature." finally; as discussed itz greater detail below, Magomedov has already managed tc>revise the ccznstituticsn to allow him to remain head of the State Council, thereby undermining the republic" consociationat bargain,

Informal Mechanisms for Conflict Resolution Dagestan's forxnai state itzstitutions arc complemented by informal conflict resolution mechanisms emplo-yed by village, clan, and ja~rzaatleaders, often with support from government czfficials, to maintain public order, By some reclconings, these ir-tformalmechanisms are rooted in the rep~iblic'smotlntaixzous topography and land scarcity and are thus typical of highlander cultures througtzotit the world." "agestank highlanders traditionally grazed their sheep in highland pastures in the summer, moving to lowland areas dtlring Uagestan" harsh wix-tters.

As a resrxtt, they would frequently cross territory that belonged to other jataa~ts or nationalities, which would lead to occasional disputes, Procedures to resolve these disputes became deeply entrenched in local cultures.44 As noted earlier, each clan and jnnzaat has its own council czf elders responsible for resolving internal and external disputes. Typically, crimes are punished by crompensation to victims, with families, clans, or jatnaats being (~bligatedto pay czn behalf of the guilty. If compensation is not forthcoming, then members of the victixn" family are honor-bound to retaliate agaixzst the perpetrator and his family. There is also the well-hown highlander tradition of the kzrnak, or ""loyal f'riendlhost:hho is honor-bound to protect a friend or guest and revenge any wrongs. These "Mood feud" "traditions generally act as a powerf~~l disincentive to violence and help ensure that csmpensatic~nrulings by elders are cczmplied with. In some cases, however, they have contributed to a prolonged sequence czf retaliatory violence,

State Capacity: Elite Coherence and State R w o u m Dagestan was the last autonomotls republic in Russia to declare sr~vereignty,doing so only in April 1991, At the time, reformers in Moscow viewed Dagestan as among the most conservative regions of the KSFSR-anti-perestroika, antidemocratic, antimarlet, p r o - C o m m u n i ~and ~ pro-Union. This impression was reinforced by returns from the March 1989 elections to the USSR Congress czf People's Dep~stiesand from eeleaions to the RSFSfZ. Congress of People's Deputies a year later, when Dagestanis voted (~verwhetminglyfor Commtlnist party candidates. In the referendum on the preservation czf the USSR in March 1991,83 percent of Dagestan's selectorate voted ixz favor of the Union, compared to 7 t percent in the RSFSR and 76 percent USSR-wide. During the attempted coup in Moscrow> in August 1991, Dagestan" political leaders indicated that they w u I d abide by the decrees of the Emergency Committee and ignore the counterdecrees of Ueltsin and his allies. Despite being czn the losing side in August 1991, the republic" political elite managed to survive the USSR's dissolution. They made clear that although they were suspicious of the Yeltsin government in MOSC~ZMP and generally hostile to its reform program, they wouIQ not insist on independence or greater autonomy, as were the Chechens and the Tatars, Accordingly, Dagestan signed the Federation Treaty sponsored by Yeltsin in March 1991-a treaty that both Tatarstan and Chechnya rejected, Under Magomedovk leadership, the elite represented itselk with notable success, as the sole guarantor of stability and ir-tterethnic harmony in Dagestan, champicrning ""multinationalism"" (mnoganafiionaEhostf)and opposing rapid democratization and marketination czn the grounds that radical reforms w u l d upset the republic's traditional power-sharing mechanisms. The Dagestani etite also appeafed to the legacy of Soviet multinatic~nalism(as distinct from internationalism), which observers claim resonated effectitrely with the p~lbIicand hdped explain Dagestanis' pplference for Communist (hence, tradi-

tional) candidates. Acccrzrdiizgly, the republic has retained many Communist symbols from the Soviet period, including a massive statue of Lenin on the central square in Mauachkafa. The pragmatism czC Dagestan" poatiticat elite, and above att Maicltachlcala's repeatedly expressed backing for the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, helps explains why Dagestan has received not only economic but also consistent politicat support from federal authorities in Mczscow. Notably, even before the b~lildupthat followed the fighting in Allgust and September $999, there were some 15,000-30,000 federal trcrops (rnc~stiyfrorn the Russian interior ministry and border guards) in the republic," AAZtI~oughtheir primary mission has been to police the border wit11 Chechnya and Azerbaijan, they can be called upon by Magomedc~vto defend the capital-as indeed happened, after some delay, in the standot"fwith oppositionists in Maicltachkalla in early 1998.46 Uagcstan thus has a reasanably unified political elite, with some coercive capacity and financial resources at its disposal to ccz-opt or repress challengers." In moments of crisis, the republic" eelite has respclnded effecdvely, including for the most part during the August 1999 incursion by Basayev and his allies." It has also been supported fc3r the mcxt part by the reptlblic" religious establishment, which along with its counterparts in North Ossetia, Chechnya, Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Xngushetia formed a "Coordinating Co~lncilof the Muslims of the Nctrth Catlcasus'Yn Atlgust 1998, with the mission of promoting Islam while combating Wal~habism.~~ On the other hand, state capacity itz Dagestan is clearly lirnited by the republic's eccr>nc>micproblems and by Moscow" Gnanciai difficulties, which limit the amount czf direct aid federal authorities can provide, Makhachicala is, howver, in no position to irnprove its financial position witho~ltM~tscowkh+. Xt is almost entirely unable to extract resources frorn the local ecr>nc>mygiven the cr~llapseof industry, the size of the republic's informal sector, the pervasiveness czf subsistence agriculture, and the importance of small-scale commodity trading. State atltcr>nomyis also limited: Clan, nationality, and organized criminal interests are well represented at all levels of government,""

Challengers and the Capacity to Engage in CalXective Palitical Vialens Nationality-Based Political Orga~knt-ions National movements formed late in Dagestan and failed to mobilize a significant pc~rtionof their national constituencies. The earliest to form was the Kumyk mczvement, Tengtik (Equality), which agitated for the formation of a separate K~~nnyk union republic or autonomous region within the KSFSR, Tenglik he-lped spawn a cczuntenncIvemrmt by the Avars, who accused the Kumyks of trying to reestablish the political donlinance they had enjoyed before the October 1917

revolution. MakhachkaXa made some concessions to the Kumyks, appointing several to prominent government posts, induding Abdurazak Mi~zabekov,who became the republic" first prime minister under its new ccznstitutic~n.Kunnyk demands f'or autonomy subsequently abated. Otl~ernational movements formed in 2990 and $991,the period of ""nationalist romanticism" in the USSR The Avars fc3rmed the Imam Sliamil I2eoplek Front; the Dargins, Sadesh; the Nogais, Birfik; and the Laks, Tsubars. None, however, were able to win sustained support from their national constituencies, and only a handful of their candidates hiwe won parliamentary seats. A partial exception has been the Lezgin national movement, Sadvat, which has organized several large demonstrations in opposition to the closing of the Dagestani-&erbaijani border. The border issue is of immediate concern to the Lezgins, who traditionally herded sheep across the border and maintained close ties to Lezgin communities across the Sarnur river. The border issue thus provides Sadval with an effective mozbilizing theme that other national mczvements lack. Xts continued pafiticaf prominence atso results from the tense relationship between Russia and Azerbaijan and from Baku's oh-repeated clairn that Sadval is being tlsed by Moscc~wto promote the secession of tezgin cczmmunities in Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, Sadval has been unable to win enthusiastic support from Eezgixzs on either side of the border for the unification with Lezgixz territories in Dagestan and &erbaijan or for the establishment of a separate Lezgin autonomy within Russia, and it has limited infiuence in Makhachkata.

Congress of Peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan (CPCD) Created iri April 2998 by then Actixzg Chechen Prime Minister Shamil Basayev, the CPCD actively sought the unification of Ghechnya and Dagestan in a single Islamic state.'"t formed an early alliance with an czrganization known as the Islamic Shura [Co~lncil]of Uagestan, led by an Islamic militant hom Dagestan, Magomed Tagayev-reputedly an ideologue of radical Islam in the North C a u a sus. Prior to the incursion into Dagestan in August 1999, however, C11echnya's president Asfan Mashadov repeatedly rejected the CPCX2's program, announcing several weeks a f er its formation that he ""deeyly respects the choice of the peoples czf Dagestan and Ingushetia" ta remain within the Russian FederationeS2 This statement contributed to a falting-out between Maskhadov and Basayev, who resigned as acting prime minister in early July 1998, The CPCU is opposed by the political elite in Dagestan. Xn mid-May 1998, the leaders of twenty political and public organizations signed a statement condemning the organimticln, and Dagestani authorities arrested a Basayev deputy in July 1998 czn the Dagestani-Chechen border on charges czC carrying an illegal weapon (he was released several days later). Evm before the CPCf>-sponsored inclarsicsn into Dagestan in Atlgust 2999, the organiz~tionhad little popular suppart within the republic. When Basayesr announced in late summer X998 that

CPCD boeviki (resistance fighters) would move into Dagestan to defend the three Wahhabi villages if they were attacked, a leader from one of the villages reportedly stated that Uasayev's statement was a ""provocation" "signed to encallrage viofe~~ce,~'

To officials in Moscow and MaXcbachkala, the most serious threat to stability in

Dagestan comes frorn radical politicized Islam and so-called Wahhabism, As noted earlier, rnost Dagestanis were traditionally adherents of Sufism, a mystical branch of S~znniIslam that entails the ""jaureying" of ;a disciple (the murid) under the tutelage of an adept (sj~eikh,~rzurs-slzid,pil; ustad, or orsha) tcward God.;' Sufis partially reject shuria law and are tygicatty tolerant of local practices and customary law (adat). Wahhabism, in contrast, is new to the North Cauasus. An Islamic puritan mot.ement that emerged in the early eighteenth century on the Arabian peninsula, Wahhabism was adopted by the Saudi royd family in 1744. Xt began to establish a foothold in the North Ca~lcasusonly after large numbers of Muslims began to make the hadj to Mecca in the Gorbachev era, Later, missionaries and mutlahs from IsXamic countries arrived in Dagestan, some czC whom may have been practicing Wahhabis. During the 1994-19% war in Chechnyil, a limited number of militant Wahhabis and XsIamic mujal~ideen,many czC whom had fought in the Afghan war against the Soviets, made their way to Chechnya to help the boeviki. Xt is doubtful that they numbered more than several htlndred.?' After the 1994-19% war, militant Mrahhabis managed to establish guerriila training camps in Ghecilnya and western Dagestan, and according to officials in Moscow and Makhachkala, began planning a jiirttzd (holy war) against Russia, There were also freqtlent reports that Mr?tIzhabi militants were receiving financial aid and weapons frorn abroad, particrrlarly from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. Wahhabis were also reportedly recruiting additional mujahideen in Central Asia (particuIarfy among Uzbeics), Afghanistan, and elsewhere-claim that were substantiated by Western journalists who returned to Chechnya in fail 1999 and reported a significant number of nc~n-Chechensamong Chechen resistance forces. Nevertheless, government officials in Mafiachkala assert that no more than 5 percent of Dagestanis consider themselves Wahhabi.'"t is, however, tlnclear just what is meant by W~hhabisnzwhen the word is used by officials to describe certain Muslims, or even by self-described Wahhabis," Until the recent crackdown, their stronghold was in the Btlinakslc raz'on in central Dagestan, including the three Dargin villages mentioned earlier (Karamakhi, Chabxnmakhi, and KadarIei9journalist visiting the area in early $998reported that rnost men, in accrzrdance with Wahhabi teaching, were fully bearded, and that most w m e n went about veiled in pubIic.j9It is rumored, hawever; that these three villages em-

braced "Wahhabism" only because Khattab is married to the sister of the leader of the local jamaut. To the extent that Wahhabism is ftnding a significant base of social support elsewhere, it appears to be among unemployed young mates, particutarly those who fof-~ghtin the 1994-1996 war in Chechnya and who remain loyal to their field crlmmanders and militia units. Wahhabism is, hs~wever,opys~sedby both the political elite and the Dagestani (and Chechen) Muslim-educated ulenza, who view Wahhabism as a threat to their itzfiuence and position. The Wahhabis also must (lvercome seventy years of assertive Soviet atheism and official presmre on religious beliefs and practices. Although, as noted earlier, XsZamic beliefs and practices survived in the Soviet period," most Dagestani men at that time drank alccztzof, smc~kedcigarettes, and prayed intermittently at best (although few ate pork); and Dagestani women rarely covered their faces in public (although they would typica11y cover their head with a scarf, particrxlarly in rural areas), Urban Dagestanis still find the asceticism of Islamic fundamentalism difficult to accept (particularly its proscription of alcohol); and highlanders are reluctant to abandon udut in favor of rigid sfiaria law, or to forswear their pre-Xslamic traditions and beliefs.

Proliferation of Weapons In the Soviet period, highlanders typically carried long knives (kinjskl), pclssessed swords handed dowrz, by their ancestors, and owned hunting rifles, They also prided themselves on wielding weapclns with skill, Today, autclmatic weapons, grenades, antipersonnel mines, and heavy machine guns are readily available for purchase on the black market, and local militants and criminal organiatic~nsare typically well armed." %viet weapons made their way into private and semiprivate hands in 1990 and 19% and in the early post-Soviet period, when the armories of the Soviet forces were raided and looted by irregular forces in Chechnya, Georgia, Abaazia, and elsewhere in the region. The Russian defense ministry actually agreed to distribute arms to the Chechens as part of a deal allowing Russian fc~orcesto withdraw safely from the republic. Later, impoverished Russian soldiers regularly sold weapons for profit, and many more were captured by the Chechen boevz'kz' in the 1994-1996 war, The Chechen government also reportedly purchased weapons from abroad. More recently, after the August 199fincursions into Dagestan by forces from Chechnya, firearms were distributed by government authorities to volunteer Ditgestani ""slf-defense" units, These events have crlntributed t r ~a substantial arming of the Dagestani population. Supporters of various czppositionists regularly carry automatic rifles in public. During their confrontation with Dagestani troops in March 2998, the Khachilayev brothers were abie to marshal some 2,000 armed individt~alswith automatic weapslns and grenade launchers." "kewise, the "Mrahhabis" in Kara-

makhi, Chabanmalclti, and Kadar mounted a vigczrous defense of their villages both in May 1998 and again in September 1999,

External Support The ability of foreign powrs (r~tlrterthan Chechnya) to interfere in Dagestank internal affairs is Ximited by various factors, The government in Bakrr, for exampie, is disliked even more by the Lezgins in the border region than is the government in Moscr>wor in Ma&achhla. Moreover, even though the Azerbaijani goxrnment has reason tu fear that instability cczuld spread across the border from Dagestan, it has to beware of takifzg steps that will make its powerful northern neighbor even more hostile toward it. Georgia has similar cause to oppose a destabiiizatlon czC Dagestan, although the Georgian-Dagestani border is largely impassable to wheeled transport, particularljr motor vehicles, As for Moscow?it crzntinues to support Magomedov, as it, too, has every reason tc>prevent violence and disczrder in the republic. The key source of external support for antisystem challengers itz Uagestan is Ctnecfrnya. In fact, the peoples of Dagestan gaw little support to the Chechens during the 11394-19965 war, although some attempts were made (xnosr;lyby ChechenAlikins) to block Russian military units moving into Chechnya from Dagestan in December 1994. There was little sympathy in Dagestan for D;.,hc>harDtadayev, the militant Chechen president, czr for Chechen radical nationatism, which at the time had little religious content and was primarily directed qainst Cfiechen incorporation into the Russian Federation, Morec>ver,Dagestanis had been frequent victims czf robberies and kidnappings at the hands OF Chechens in the years prior to the invasion, particularly on the vital railroad tinking Uagcstan and Stavropol, which Dages~anisand Azerbaijanis use trz bring vegetables and fruits to market in Moscc~w and cztl-rerRussian cities, Nevertheless, Uagestani officials were ca~ltiousin their response to the 19941996 war, Mahachkata took the position that although the war was deeply regrettable, Moscow" decision tcz invade was undersandable; and it quietly allovved Russian troops to use Uagestani territory to carry out operations in Cliechnya witbotrt (~bjectic~n, It also trzc~ksteps to mtrzzle Dagestanis who advc~catedsupport f'or the Chechens, arresting the pariiamentary leader of the Congress of Mountain Peoples and his deputr; and suspending publication of the jorrrnal lslamic Way for reprinting Dtrdayev" sstatemrmts.h3After the war, relations between MafiacErkaXa and the Chechen government improved when Maskhadov made clear that his government had no territorial claims on Dagestan, opposed Wahhabism and the CPGD, and sought a dialogue with Magornedov and other leaders of the North Caucasus, Nevertheless, anti-Chechen feelings in Uitgestan persisted, thanks to terrorist incidents and kidnappings blamed on Cl-rechnjra-basedmilitants, The A~lgust 1999 incursions only intensified these feelings. Accrzrdingly, the Chechens can expect littie help from Dagestan in their conaid with Moxow

Poldti~alGrievances, Issues, and Organimtiorrs Historical Memories and Trgditiolzal Ennzitr'es With the exception of Chechen hostility to Moscow and traditional enmity between Cossacks and highlanders, historical anixnosities between nationalities in Dagestan are limited." Prior to the Rt~ssiancrrnquest, ccznflict was common, but typically it was betsn~renjamuwts, shamkulates, or khanates, not between nationalities, Accordi~~gXy, the "ancient hatreds" ktween Uagestan's nationalities (often alluded to by political scientists)-even between highlanders and Turkicspeaking fowlanders-are not effective rnobifizers of inter-nationality violence in the republic. Traditional enmity toward Russia and Russians is also limited, Even the legend of Shamil and the nineteenth-century highlander resistance tc>Rt~ssian occupation has an ambiguous legacy today. SShaMxil was an Amr who managed to unite most of the highlanders in tl-reeastern North Caucasus (and briefly, Circassians and other highlanders in the western North Caucasus as well) in a war against IXussian penetration from 1834 to 1859. His methods of rule, hczwever, were harsh, and he encountered significant popular resistance to his ir-ttroduction of ascetic Sufism. As nored earlier, he atso had to deal with opposition from the traditional fetrdal aristocracy and with frequent defections of individual villages, jamauts, and clans to the Russians. Thus, although Shamil's struggle provides the Avars and the Cbechens-many of whose ancestc>rswere among Sharnil? snzurids (warriors)-with a potent rnptholot;-yof resistance to foreign domination, rnuttiple Shamil myths exist today that can be, and are being, appropriated by different political actors in the North Caucasus. Even official Makhachkala has tlsed the legend of Shamil, claiming he was toterant of national differences and at heart a democrat, to legitimate its consociational practices.'%

Tervitorial and Border L)ispute,s During the Rt~ssiancivil war (1918-1921), the highland peoples of the Ncrrth Caucasus took advantage of Moscowk weakness to establish a weak, territorialty ill-defined, but putatively independent state, the Mountair-t Republic (Gorskaia Resyubfika),"hSoon after the defeat of the m i t e s by the Red Army in 1921, the Garskaia ltespubtlka was dissolved and the Dagestan ASSR was established, Xnitialfy the ASSR comprised most of the territory of the Imperial-era gubernia of Dagestan as wefl as the Kumyk district of what had been Terskaia gubernia. In 1922, traditionally Cossack and Nogal tands in what had been Stavropol krai and Astralihan oblast were added to the republic,.Same of this territory was returned tc>Astrahan in 1938, but some 40,000 Cossacks still five along the left ((northern) bank of the Terek River in the north-central region of Uagestan. Accordingly, when highlander radicals began to agitate for an ixzdependent Uagestan at the end of the Gorbachev era, Cossack communities responded by threatening to secede from the repubii~."~

Other territorial disputes are resxrlts of the 1944 deportation czf the Chechens, fngush, and other North Ca~lcasusnationalities, allegedly for collaborating with the Germans. Arnong those deported were approximately 30,000 ChechenAkins from Aukhovslcy (since renamed Novczlaksky) raion in Dagestan. The deportations were followed by the dissolution of the Checl-ten-XngushASSK, when traditionally Chechen lands were made a part of Dagestan. Much of this land was restored to Checheno-lngushetia after its reestablishment in 1957, but Novczlalcsky and Khasavyurtsky raions were not. Moreover, when the rehabilitated Chechens returned to their villages in Nowfaksky raion after 1957, they discclvered their homes czccupied by Laks, many czf whose villages had been burned by Soviet authorities, wllo had then forcibly resetded them there. Predictably, the resettled Laks were unwilling to leave, having no homes to return to. The Chechens were therefore forced to find new homes in neighboring Kl~asavyurtskyand Khazbekov mions, where most Uagestani Chechens are now concentrated. Thousands of Avars subsequently mewed into Novolaksky raion in the 1970s, after their homes were destroyed by a powerful earthquake. Encouraged by the 1990 USSR Law on Repressed Peoples, Chechen communities began insisting in the late Gorbacbev period that they be allowed to return to their traditional villages. In 1992, thousands of Ckechens moved into Novolaksky raiolz without official permissian, and the foal media clairned they were intent tlpon driving the Laks and Avars otlt. Violent clashes took place between Laks and Chechens that fid, which prompted Makhachkala to decfare martial Iaitv in the district and to call in federal troops to restore order. Tensions abated aher the Dagestani gcwernment promised to ease restricticsns on residency permits for Chechens, to compensate the Chechens for financial losses, and to finance the resettlement of the Laks. However, lit& if any of the promised financial support was forthcoming, and the plan to resettle the Lalcs was resisted by Kumyks, who claimed the Laks were being resettled on traditional Kumyk lands. Accordingty, there are still significant tensions between Chechens and Laks and Avars, which were retcindled when Basayevk forces entered the region in September 1999.68 A n~zrnberczf other territorial disputes cut across Dagestank borders, Most notably, traditional Lezgin lands have been bifurcated by the republic's border with Azerbaijan. According to the 1989 censtls, there were some 205,000 Lezgins in Dagestitn and 171,000 in Azerbaijan. Flawever; Lezgin leaders have claimed that the Soviet census substantially underreported the total number of Lezgins, partic~llarlyin Azerbaijan, where Lezgins faced discrimination by Azerbaijani authorities and accordingly identified themselves as Azeris, The actual number czf ethnic Lezgins, they assert, may be as high as 600,000," As noted earlier, the tezgin nationalist group Sadval began calling for the establishment of a united ""Leginistan" "ortly after i t s formation in 1991, Convinced that Sadvat was being supported by Soviet-and later, Russian-secret services, Azerbaijani officials helped create an &erbaijani counterpart in mid- 1991, which was calted "Samur" (the name of the river running along the Dagestani-Azerbaijani border). The group immediately declared its opposition to any border revisions.'" Neverthe-

less, most Lezgins remain suspicious of Baku, partlcutariy after it attempted to draft Lezgins to fight in the war over Karabab. Retatic~nsbetween Dagestan and herbaijan are also complicated by the presence of some 45,000 Avars in northern Azerbaijan. On occasion, Avar leaders have demanded that Avar-inhabited areas of Azerbaijan be united with Avar districts in Dagestan, or even that a distinct, autonomczus Avar territory be established within Russia. Again, authorities in Baku claim that Moscow is encouraging these irredentist aspirations. A mixzor clash took place between Azerbaijani troops and Avars in July 1994, heightening tensions and raising fears in Azerbaijan that: Xxussia would attempt to seize Lezgin or Avar lands by force, The fact that Ee~gins,along with Avars, Uargins, A~eris,and other nationalities, have traditionally passed unencumbered across the border betrnreen Dagestan and A~erbaijanhas exawrbated tensions allczng the Samur River. The Rt~ssiangovernment attempt4 to establish full border control in late $992;but aher Sadval organized protest demonstrations in Dagestan and karbaijan, Moscow backed dc~wn, instead estabtishinga Iczose customs regimen by which locals could cross the border without visas. However; as relations between Moscow and Groznjr deteriorated in 1994 and ccjncerns grew in Moscczw about alleged smuggling of drugs and wapons across the border, the Ikssian government attempted to limit cross-border traffic, which led to clashes between tczgins, A~eris,and the Uagestani police, When the war in Chechnya broke out fater that year, Moscczw tried, albeit with limited success, tcz close the border endrely, These restrictions were later partially lifted; but Eczgins and other peoples in the region continue to resent the disruption ca~lsedby: what they ccznsider an artificial brzrder, and some have begun to agitate for the estabiiishment of a separate, autonomous republic within IXuss-irt,uniting all the peczples of southern Dage~tan.~' Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, Azeri merchants and track drivers have (~bjectedtcz the need to bribe officials fi-czm each of the many IXuss-irtnorganizatlczns involved in monimring cmss-border traffic. Moreover, they resent the fact that Azeri citizens, regardless of their nationality, are charged higher c ~ ~ s t o m dt~ties s than Russian citizens, Lastly, MOSCOW and Baku have been at Iczggerheads over the management of the w t e r resources of the Samur River. Tensions along the border reached a high point in late 1998, and the Rz~ssian media began trz speculate about a possible border war with &erbaijan."

Demographic Pressures Overalt population growth in Dagestan has been high but with considerable variation among nationalities, due to out- and in-migration and to differences in birthrates and morbidity. Mr~stnotably, between 1959 and 198% the Russian share of the population fell bp mare than half, from 20.2 percent to 9.2 percent,73 By $989,Dagestan was one of only four ASSIls in the RSFSR that did not have a Russian majority in their major cities,74In the period since, there has been a steady out-migration of Xxussians and other SIws from the republic, particularly of skilled workers, enterprise managers, and technicians. There has aXsa been a

significant inflc~wof ""Dagestani" poeoples, in part because of discriminatory treatment of "Carzcasiizns" in the rest of R~~ssia. Slavs who remain feel increasingljr marginalized. Demographic change has affected interethnic relations in rural areas in particular ways. The traditional economy of the highland peoples, with its intense cultivation of very small land plots, was disrupted by forced collectivization under Stalin, which drove many into collective and state farms in lowland areas. The movement of highlanders to lowland areas ir-tcreascdat the end of the 2"35s, particularly amcrng Avars and Dargins. So\piet authorities encouraged this internal migration because official doctrine held that traditionat highlander ways of life were ir-tcompatiblewith ""cfveloped socialism." The settlement patterns of Dagestank internal migrants were not ccznducive to assimitation or cuituraX amalgamation. Elighlanders relczcating to lowland rural areas tended to remair-t compactly settled, often domitzating entire kolkhozy (collective fiarms) or reconstituting entire village cr~mmunities.Thcrse who did not relocate have typicatty maintained close ties with their family villages. They have thus retailzed their highland traditions, induditzg intensive cultivation, which has threatened the agricultural practices of the sheep- and cattle-herding Nctgais and Kumyks. Moreover, because ""indigenous" Avars and Dargins were the particular beneficiaries of Soviet affirmative action policies-in contrast to nonindigenous "Tatars," such as the Kumyks-the former dominated official positicrns even in traditionally Kumyk territories. The Kumpks have thus resented their loss of pczlitical control, whicl-r helps exglaitz why Tenglik pressed in 2990-1991 for the establishment of a separate Kumyk autonomy," Similarly, the Nogais became a small minority in their traditional steppe grazing lands in the north.'The fact that the Kr~nnyksand Nogais constit~ltedsuch small minorities in these areas, however, tzndermined both the legitimacy and the practicality of their autonomy aspirations, which have since abated, The most significant destabilizing demographic factor itz recent years has been the influx of internally displaced persons (IDPs) into Dagestan from Chechnya. The nrzmber of Chechens in the republic increased rapidly, from some 13,OOO in 2 959 to 58,000 in 2 989. To this were added 2 50,000 Chechen fDPs by mid- 1995. Many later returned to their homeland; but an estimated 5Q,OO040,000 remain, which has contributed to housing shortages and inadequate social services and made Chechen demands to return to their pre-1944 homes itz Novolaksky raion more urgent. Tt] date, however, most IUPs from the renewed warfare in Chechnya have fled to Xngushetia, not Dagestitn-in part, because the border with Dagestitn has been sealed off by Russian and Dagestani troops, and in part beause the Dagestani population is less willing to accept another influx of Chechen IUPs in the wake of the violence in August and September, Demographic changes have complicated relations with other neighbors. Land scarcity and population g r c j ~ halong , with the republic" dismal economy>have driven many Dagestanis into Stavropol krai in recent yearse7T'X"1-re strain this has placed on the Stavropol economy and government budget, along with frequent

cattle- and sheep-rustling and kidnappings bp Chechen raiders, has contributed to deepening anti-highlander sentiments among Russians in the region, which helps accc3unt for the popularity of conservative nationalism and indeed outrij;ht fascism in Stavropol krui as welt as farther west, in Krasnodar kl-tai,'K

Ethnic and Class Inequalities Economially, Russians, Kx~nnyks,and Nogais have suffered disproportionately in recent decades. Hozwever, they constitute a weak and divided minority and thus pose Xittfe threat to public order, The most pailtically significant tensions over group ineq~zalitiesare betwen Dargins on the one hand and h a r s and Lezgins on the other, The Dargins are disprrsportionatefy represented in the republic's executirpe czrgans, which is where key decisions are made about appointments and the ailoation of government benefits. Magomedov is a Dargin, and so too is Said A m i r o ~the maycjr of Mabachkala, The Dargins are, however, less numerous than the Avars, and both Avars and Lezgins resent Dargin political domination of the rep~zblic.Avar parliamentary deputies therefore took the lead in opposing the amendments to the ccznstitutic~nthat allrwed Magomedf:~~ to prolong his term of czffice.

Early Warning S i p s and Likely Triggers Polidcal Successio~ Magcjmedov has been a skiIIfut political leader, Like other former communist cappumt-cftiki in the Soviet successor states, he has used his nomenkEatura tics to good by effect. He has been particularly adept in c[>-opting much of the oyyt~sitic~n handing out czfficial posts and state subsidies. EIowever; his second and final (at least, according to the current constitution) term will end in 2002; or he might be assassinated or die of natural causes in the interim. At some point, he will have to be replaced, which will immediateiy raise issxres of ethnic balancing and fairness. Replacing him with someone of a different nationality, as the constitution prescribes, risks unsettling the elite and might require a new pact on the ethnic distribution of power. Xxeylacing him with another Dargin, czn the other hand, would be a clear violation of consociational norms and would be resented by Avars and Lezgins in particular, If the elite manages to reach an agreement on a successor and a shuffling of portfolios, the Ditgestani people wilt likely accept it. If not, elite conflict could lead to violence and regime breakdown.

Violation of Consociational Ruks and Prach'ces By the Dagestani Elite As the end of Magomedov" two-year term as head czf the State Council approached in June 1996, he managed to convince two-thirds of parliament to

amend the constitution and extend his term of czffice to four years. Ele again lobbied successfully for a constitutionai amendment, ir-t March 2998, that allowed him to serve a seccsnd four-year term. Oypositionists vigorously csbjected tc>these maneuvers, claiming that Magomedov headed a corrupt and exploitative elite and had been ineffective in overcoming the republic" problems. Prior to the events of August and September 1999, there were signs that Magomedot.2 grip on power was weaicenimsg, including episodic anti-Magomedov demonstrations and marches on Makbachkala to demand his resignation." The rene~vedwarfare in Chechnya, however, will probably bot~sthis pc~pularsupport, as Dagestanis concfude that any political instability in Makhachkala is undesirable. Nevertheless, Magomedov may again violate the informal norms of consociational democracy when his term ends in 2002 by engineering another constitutional amendment; or he may even attempt to remain in office i1tegatt.l);which could end the consensus among Mabachkaia's elite.

IlGConsidered Palicy Changes in Makhachkala and M~sr=otu Until September 1999, the Dagestani gczvernment bad been circumspect in dealing w i t b h e highlander communities that challenged its authority. For example, in 1998, it struck a cornprrsmise with the "Wahhabis" in Karama&i, Kadar, and Chabanrnakhi, Makhachkata has also redirected revenrze from Moscow to local governments and jamaut councils.""ne result of this policy of accommodation and csmprc>misehas been to undermine Ma&achkala? control over local gcwernments and tcz make it more difficult to implement an effective economic reform program. Howcvel; reaching out to local elites has at the same time made it less likely that a tlnified opytzsition will emerge, Magomedovk pdicy csf compromise and co-optaticln will likely persist despite the federal government" assault on the Wahhabi vilages ixz September 1999. However, if Makhacfikala changes course and is seen as clearly favoring one natic~natityover anclther, then internationality relations in the republic could deteriorate. Moscow" p d c y toward Dagestan has been driven above all by its desire to keep the Chechen conflict from spreading. For this reason, the suspicion felt by pro-Veltsin politicians in Moscow toward the nornenklatzlra elite in Makhachlcala qkxickly gave way to appreciation for Magomedov and his conservative and profederatic~npolicies, Accordingly, Moscow continued to subsidize the Dagestani government and repeatedly made clear its political support for Magomedov." Since early 2998, it has supplemented this approach with a growing stress on ""law and order.""KIn May of that year, Mosccsw established a special headquarters in Stavropol to coordinate federal law enforcement agencies in the North Caucasus. ft also placed the region" interior ministry troops, army units, border guards, and all other federal fc~rcesin the &rth Catlcasus tmder the command of a "speciaI administration*'"i"fko months later, this special administration oversaw military exercises in Dagestan that ir-tcluded the participation of federal interior mixz-

istry troops as well as units from the Ministry for Emergency Situations, the Federal Security Service CFSB), the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information, border guards, railroad troops, and defense ministry troops." The intelligence services were afso encouraged to become more active in gathering itzteliiigence in the regan." At the same time, the showdown with the Kl~achifayevbrothers in May 1998 prompted federal authorities to launch a much-publicized crackdown on crime and corruption in the republic." A special investigative team was sent to Makhachkala, which ordered the arrest of Magomed Khachilayev for his role in the May events and for illegal wapons possession,""Other prominent Dagestani officials, including Nadir Mhachilayev, were also placed under investigation." The itlvestigation of Nadir led the Russian State Duma for the first time tc>lift the immunity of one of its deputies. &dir fled to Chechnya, and after expressing his opposition to the August 1899 incursion, by Basayev's forces, reportedly participated in the defense of the Wahhabi villages in September, was wanded, fled tc>his native Lak region, and was finalfy arrested by federal auth~rittes.~" Accompanying these "fim hand" mxncures by Moscow were rene~vedefforts tc>ameliorate the republic" economic crisis and humanitarian suffering. A "Program for the Economic, SociaX, and Palitical.Development of the North Caucasus Region up to 2005" was drafted in Moscow itz 1998; and in the summer of that year, the Security Council announced the formation of a special federal agency f'or coordinating federal social and economic programs in the region. These plans suffered a setback d ~ l to c Russia" August t 998 financial crisis, which also affected Dagestan's eecr>nc>my,aggravating the shortage of medical supplies and leading to predictions of inadequate food supplies over the winte~'"Despite the crisis, howeve&the federal government continrzed to provide Makhachkala with substantial financial support, Moscow" policy toward Dagestan could change if Russia is either decisively defeated or is decisively victorious in Chechnya, or if extreme rightists or extreme leftists crime to pclwer in Moscow Advc~catesof a ""frrm hand" might then attempt to limit MakhachkraXa\ autonomy thereby undermining the &agile pailticat balance in the republic,.They might also reduce federal subsidies to the region or redraw Russia" internal borders in an effart to etirninate the ethnic republics altogether."" further deterioration of the federal government" fiscal balance could atsa force Moscow to reduce or even end its financial support for Makhachkata, Such changes, yarticulariy if rapid and [~bvious,might induce the Dagestani etite to defend their prerogatives by becoming openly defiant of Moscow, even to the point of armed resistance to Russia's presence in the republic.

Conclusion At best, Dagestan" stable instability will persist for years, if not decades, and Russia will have to cope with unrest on its southern border regardtess of the outcome of the current conflia in Che-chnya. The Dagestani economy is cteeply depressed

and is unlikely to recover substantially in the foreseeable Euture. Economic hardship will make it very difficult to reduce organized crime. High and variable birthrates will strain the Dagestani governmrmt's ability to provide adequate public services and minimal social protections, and they will intensi@ inter-nationaliv disputes and put pressure on Dagestan's consociational practices, Finalfj: the republic's extreme heterr~geneitymultiplies the potential ccznflicts betrnreen nationalities, sub-naticznalides,clans and sub-cfans,jamaa~,villages, reiigiorxs groups, crirninal organimtions, and other political actors in the rcprzblic. The cayacity of the Dagestani government t r ~ameliorate these yrr3blems will be limited by its difficulties in collecting taxes; its financial dependency on an impoverished kderal government in Moscow; and the poor professional standards and inadequate resources of the local police and federal and republican trr3ops on Dagestani territory, Political extremists will continue to have ready access ta highly destructive weapons. Moreovex; it is very unlikely that Moscow will able to restore order in Chechnya in the fvietand Soviet past, and they have acquired considerable poputair legitimacy. Abandoning them now would be unpop~llarand might well precipitate civil war. Moreovex; no institutic>nal arrangement, whether it be affirmative action, ethnic federalism, cultural or territoriat autunclmy or consociationalism, can guarantee interethnic harmony in p l ~ ~ rsocieties, al Inevitably, elites have to manage intercommunal cc~nflictsthat arise omr the distribution of valued goods and symbols; and effective management requires responsiveness to changing social norms, demographic conditions, and political preferences. In general, then, it is extremely unlikely that the republic" ecc~nomicand political problems wilX be significantly ameliorated for the foreseeable future, On the other hand, sustained large-scale politial violence is also unlikeljr, The republic's great variety of national and sub-natic~nalgrczups, as well as the strengh of clan, village,jammt, and religious identities, make it very difficutt: for pan-highlander, pan-Caucasian, or pan-Islamic appeals to resonate with the Dagcstani poputaticln. Nor do the Dagestanis wish to see the death and destructicsn visited L I ~ C Chechnya come to Dagestan. Even more unXikety is the emergence of a politically potent ideology of Dagestani nationalism directed at the establishment of an independent, multinational Dagestani state. Ten (or at best fourteen) nationalities, not one, are considered the primary ""owners"of the repubIic, and colfective ownership by multiple groups creates significant collective action problems and

I ~

makes legitimation on the basis of ""seff-determination'' very probIematic. Nor is it likeljr that one national group will be able to mobilize its constituency and establish political hegemony. Were such an effc)rt to be made, there wc)uI& be a countervailing mobilization and balancing alliances among others, As in India, the great multiplicity of ethnic and reiigiorxs cleavages therefore contributes to the resilience of an otherwise brittle consociationaf system. Nevertheless, if the best case for Dagestan is stable instability, the worst-a complete breakdown of p~lblicorder, and sustair-tedlarge-scale violence-cannot be ruled out. I have identified a number of possible triggers of violence: political succession; a violation of the formal rules or inhrmat practices of consociationaiism; a renewed attack, this time more successft~i,by mifitants from Chechnp; a sudden and substantial cutback in federal subsidies; an unsuccessful use of force to impose Moscow" writ on recalcitrant regions; or a decision by Moscow to revoke Uagestan's autonomy, Any of these could provoke large-scaleviolence, But if the etite in ~Vabachkalaremains tlnified and plays by the r~lfesof the csnsclciational game, and if the governments in Makhachkalla and Moscow continue to express their commitment to multinationalism and itzterethnic cooperation, then the repubtic" stable instability will very likely persist.

1. Kliattab is usualily described ethnically as an Arab, but there has been speculation that he may be of Ghechen or Gircassian ancestry, Like radicat Nt~sIiinselsewhere, however, he considers himself a member of the Islarnic community (the umtnu) and above national or ethnic identity, and he accordingly refuses to disclose his ethnic bacbround. 2 , More specifically, most residents of the region are Inembers of the Andi and L2ido subgrot:,rrysof the Avars. 3. 'l'he only other sigr~ificanttransportation arteries between the North and South Chucastls are the Georgian Military Highway, built by the Russians in the nixzeteenth century thri>ughthe Daryal gorge and over the Krestayi pass in the central Caucasus range; and the Black Sea coastline af Abkfiazia, which is even less negotiable than the coastal plain of Ilagestan. Both corridors have been interrupted t,y the conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and the railroad line through AbkErazia joining ftussia and Georgia is no tanger operationaf . 4, In July 1997,the federal government completed a 78-Elometer railroad spur b e ~ e e n the tow11 of KarIan-Yt~rtin Stavropol kmi ax~dthe flagestani town of Kizlyar, As a result, trains from elsewhere in Russia can 11ow enter L>agestan without first passirlg through Cihecfinya. 5, 111 1937, the Russian and Czhechen governments, along with the Russian pipdine company Transneft, entered into an agreement to restore the Row of oil through the pipeline and to give Grozny a share of the transit fees, However, the inability of the Clrechen goverxirnent to prevent illegal thefts of ail from the pipeline or to provide effective security- for Russian maintenax~ceand repair crews meant that the pipeline operated O I T intermittently. ~ ~ It was shut down for most of 1999. 6. Nezavkimaia guzeiu, August 20, 1998; Girrrent Xligest of the Pust-Soviet Press (henceforth, Chrrent I>igest) 50,11o. 33 ( 1998), 14,

7. Separate"mafia" goups reportedty control different parts of the Ilagestani ecoxlorny: For example, the Dagestani press refers reelarly to a ""caviar mafia," a ""crtstoms mafia:' and an "oil mafia." 8. See the statement of the National C:ouncil of the C:liechen-Awns (rKAR-'KASS, August 11, 19999). 9. XFFIXI, Net~sline~ August 27, 1399. 10. According to local reports, tl-re militants involved in tl-re first incursion were more ethnicality mixed than those of the second, with the former incfuding larger x~umbersof Llagestanis and men from outside the Caucasus, and the latter being primarily Chechens. 1 I . I follow nlrrch ofthe fiterature on collective politicalt violence in degnirsg large-scate violence as more than 1,000 deaths per annurn for two consecutive years. For those doing quantitative ar~atysisan violence who need an operatianalizable dependent variable, 1,000 deaths per anliurn is generally a reag~~iabte, atbeit arbitrary, tlireshold. It fails, however, to account for the size of the groups involved; 1,000 deati-rsa year in conflicts between very large ethnic groups is not the same as 1,000 deaths for small ethnic groups, in terms of threats to group survival or the extent of ethnic mobilization. 12. My approach in what follotvs is generally informed by the wark of Rarbara Harff and "l'ed Rohcrt Ciurr under the "ILiIinorities at Risk""and "hiled States" prcjjects at the University of Maryland. See "kd Robert Gurr anit Nichael Hmton, "Minorities Report (1): Ethnopolitical CZonBict in the 1990s: ktterns and Trends'" (Coliege Park, Md.: University of Maryland, Cerlt-@rfor International Devetapment and Conflict Management, Minorities at Risk Project, 1994); and Barhara Harff and 'red Robert Gurr, ""Systematic Early Vlrarning of Humanitarian Emergencies'"fCotlege Park, Md.: University of Maryland, Genter far International ileveloyment and C:onflict Management, Minorities at Risk Project, 1997). 13, Robert J, Kaiser, The Geograpi"z),ofivariunalism in Russia and the USSR (Prir~cetan: Princeton University Press, 1994),203. 14. Ibid., 2 12. 15. Finarzsoqte izvestiia, 330 January 1997; C;tirre?ztDlgtlsf 29, no. 5 (1997), 14, 16. The symbolic importance af the pipeline, and its perceived iinpfications for Russia's presence in the Caucasus, far exceed its financiat importance, which is likely to be meager. 17. In 1994,843 percent ofthe republic's budget revenues were cavered by transfers from the federal treasury-a higher percentage ekan for any other sut3ject of the federation June 29,1995, p. 53). other tl-ran Ingushetia (Segodnia, June 7, 1985;FBIS-SOV-125-S, 18. Far example, there are at least 14 mtrtuallly unintefligible langrtages related to "Avar'LAndi, Akhvakli, Archi, Baguial, Beshti/Kayutchi, BatliMi, CZhamaIa, Gbinukh, Gc~doberi,(;unzbi, Khvarshixz, Karati, Tindii, and TsezilI3ido-the speakers of which w r e required to identifji themsefves as '"Bvar'yin their internal passports, Likewise, the republic's second largest nationality, the Bargins, can in turn be divided into Ilargins proper, Kubachins, and Kaitags, In other cases, Soviet ethnographers were accused of creating ethlaic cleavages where none existed. For example, L,ezgin nationalists claim tl-rat Aguls, Rutuls, 'rabasarar~s,and a'sahtxrs are in Fact aI1 f,ez@i~s and that the languages they speak are no more diEerent from I ~ z g i nthan, for example, Andi is from Avar (Roberr Bruce Ware and Enver Kisriev; ""F)oliticatStability and Ethnic 12arity:m y Xs There kace in TJagestaxll:" paper presented at the American ktitical Science Association conference, Washington, n.c,,A U ~ U " to, 19971, 19, JohannliiNichoIs, "War and the Politics of Noli-Nat~~rlral Language Endangerment in the Caucasus" baper praented at the conference ""Institutions, Xdentitb and Ethnic Con-

Aict: International Experience and Its XrnpIications for the Caucasus," Ul~ilidersityof Gdifornia at Berkeley, May 2-3,1997), 54-41. 20. Giser, Itke Geography ofNationulistn, 273. 21. Ibid., 3 13. 22. The republic's Turltic-speakng people could in fact be treated as mernbers of separate ""cviilizatiax~s":"Che Nogais were traditionafly x~ornadicpeoples of the steppe, like the Kyrgyz or Bashkrs, whereas the Kumyks and Azeris were sedentary and more urbanized, with relatively wefl-estai~lishedfeudal political systems prior to the Russian conquest, See Sergei Arutiunov, ""Explaining the Absence of Ethnic (l:onflict in Russia's Republic of Ilagestaxl,""paper presented at the conference on the "Pc~liticsof Identity,""University of California at Berkeley, March 4, 1996. One could alm treat the Cossacks, with their free frontier traditions and long-standing presence in the republic on the one hand, and more reccllt Stavic immigrants on the other, as members of separate civilizatiul~alclusters, despite the fact that both are Slavic ancl traditionally Clrrhodox, 23. Paul B, Her~ze,""Xslarn in the North Caucasus: 'Che Example of C:hecEtnyan "axlta Monica, Cafif.: IUND, 19995). 24. Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wisnbrrsh, Mysttcs and Onzmissars: S ~ f i s min the Sovier Uizzcln (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 25, There are four main legal branches of Sunni Islam: Shafi'i (which is traditionafly Inore accepting of Sufism), Khanafi", Khanbali'i, and Mafiki'i, 26. Ronald Wixman, The Peoples of the USSR: An Ethnographic Handbook (London: Macmilan, 1984). The Mountain Jews and 'rats were treated as a single nationality in the 1989 census. 27. Mark Saroyan, *Winoriries, Mtillaks, and &Wor;lerrri~: Reshaping Otnnzunity in the Former Soviet- Union, ed. Edward W, JValker (Berkeley: University of California, International and Area Studies, X 997). 28, Nezavisimaia gazefa re(iian).;April 27, 1999, 29. Enver Kisriev, "The Historical and Anthropological Roots of Negotiation Grzfture in Llagestan and C:hechnyal>yaper presented at the CzonRict Management Crrzuy Lecture Series, Cambridge, Mass., Septen~ber3, 1998, 30, hiser, The Geography ofNarion~listz,203. 3 1;. In general, the tendency is for those still resident in highland and rural areas to have greater foyality to territorialized political commrrnitiies (the jamaat and village), whereas l~ighlanderswho have migrated to cities and towns tend to be organized along clan and family lines (Sergei Arutitrnov, personaf communication, University of California at Uerkeley, April 28, 1999). 32. Kisriev, ""The Historical and Axlthrogologicaf Rc~ots:"4. 33. Moshe Garnmer, ""Co~nyetingHistorical Narratives in Dilgestan and C:hechnya and Their Use of a National Hero:""paper preserlkcl at the Fourtl-rAnnual Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Mew York, April 17, 1999. 34. Sergei Arutiunov, ""Ephining the Absence of Erl~nl'cConflict in Russia's ltepublic of Ilagestan'" and Robert Ghenciner, IJuglaestara: Tradition and Sirrvivai: Caucasus World (New York: St. Martin's, 1997). 35. Ax~naNatveeva, ""Dagestan:" Former Soviet South Rrie$ng, The R o p l lgstitute of International Afairs; 1Ztlssia and Eurasia Programme May 13, 1997. 36. Robert Bruce Ware and Enver Kisriev, "Dagestan's Ethnic Electoral System: 'Che Selection of the Secol~dPeople" Assembly," unpublished paper, 1999. 37. Matveeva, "Dagestan."

38. Arend Lijphart, Ilemocruty in Plural Societies: A Otnpargtive Exptiorgtion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Ware and Kisriev, ""Ilitical Stabilitym";and Kobert Bruce Ware and Emer Kisriev, "Ethnic Parity and Plemocrtttic Pluralism in Dagestan: A Consociational Approach:" paper presented at the Fourth Annual C:onventictn of the Asmciation for the Study of Nationalities, New York, April 15-17', 1'399, 39, Ian Lustick, ""Sability in Deeply Divided Societies: Consociatiox~alismVersus Gontrof," MrUrld Politics 3 1, no. 3 (1979):225-244; Brian Barry, ""The GonsociationalModel and lournu1 of i""olz'ticalResearcl?.3, no. 4 (Ileceml-ter 975):393-41 1 ; Its 13anger~,~?~trrapean Paul K, Brass, ""Ethnic Czonflict in klultiethnic Sucic?tics:The Consociatio~~al Solution and Its Critics,""in Ef!zgiciy @andNatiunarlisnz: Theory and Conzpurison, ed. Paul R, Brass f b n don: Sage, 1991),333-348; and Steven Ian Wilkinson, "Consociational "l'heory and Ethnic Violence,'>paer presented at the Fo~rrtllAnnual Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, New York, April 15-1 7, 1989. 40. Indeed, changing demographics and the strain they placed on consociationat practices was one of the factors behixld the breakdotvn of faebaxrseseconsociationafism. 41. Mulrammed-Arif Sadyki, "Will the Ilsrssiarr South Explode This Summer?:' NG Stsenurii, May 13, 1998, 1-3, 42, Segohz'a, June 26, 1998; Current Digest 50, no. 26 ( 1998), 13. 43. Arutiunov;""Eplainirsg the AE?sence." 44. Kisriev, '"fie Historical and A~lthropologicalKr>(zts,'X4, 45. The precise number of federal troops has been diBcult to determine because kderttl oEcials are understandably less than forthcoming with such information. An article in Dud in early 1998 asserted that there were about 20,000 federal troops and t 5,000 Dagestani militiamen (miliaz'i) in the republic (Rid, January 9, 1998; Current I>igest 50, no. 2 (1998), 13). Other sources, however, give lower figures, Moreover, Moscow beefed up its troop depfoyments in the North Caucast~siirs late 1998 and the first half of X999, and then dramatically increased them after the events of August and September 1999 and the rex~ewedfighting in Cahechnya, 46, Interior Ininistry trrzopsl including members of the elite Alpha unit, took up positions around the city during and aAer the crisis, securing goverrzmentat buildings, main ri>ads,and bridges (Kowrmersant-Llaib May 23, 1998; Cmrrent I)igt3.st 50, no. 2 1 ( 1998),3. 47. 1 do nor mean to deny the considerable tensions between political factions in Mabachkala, as highfighted by the conflict with the Khachilayev brothers and t,y resistance from various political factions ta Moscow's efforts to crack down an crime and corruption over the past year, But Magomedov has been careful not to directly threaten the privileges and interests of political clans: Far example, he has allowed the Russian prosecutor general's office and interior ministry to take the lead in the recent anticorruption campaig~~. 48, For example, Mabachkala officials were ge~~erally credited with having played a constructive role in trying to end the hostage crisis in Kizlyar in 1996, and they managed to defuse bat11 the takeover of the parlialnent building in spring 1998 (see Enver Kisriev, ""Seirttrre of the House of Government:' Bufbrin: Net%%~orfc an EthnoZogita:ntMonitoring and Early Warning of CJonflicl [Cambridg, Mass., Conflict Maxrsagement Group, September 19981, 19-26) and the confronttttia~~ with the three "Wallhabin"#ages several montlls later without resort to farge-scale violence f Nezuvisimuiu ggzeta, September 3, 1998; Cmrent Digest 50, no. 35 [ 1998], 17). 49, Izvestiia, A ~ ~ g ~10,1098; rst G'urrenr Digest 50, no, 33 ( 19981, 14, However, prior to his assassination in ~nid-1998,Dagestank head mufti, Said Muhammed-Hadji Abubakarov,

openly expressed reservations about Magomedov; which led some of his stxyporters to accuse the Dagestani government of having ordered the assassination. 50. Matveeva, "Dagestan.'" 51. An earlier organization, the (:onfederation of Mountain Beopges (Hi@landers) of the Caucas~ls,later renamed rl-re Confederation of the Peoples of the Caucasus, played an ixnyortant role in I3;tgestani and North Caucasian palitia in the early yost-Soviet period but has since became essentially irrelevant, 52. RFE/RL Newsliincr, May 112,1998, 53. Nezavisimniez gazeta, Aufswst 27, 1998. 54,Bennigsen and Wimbush, Mysi ics and Gmmissars. 55. Carlotta eccmbcr8,1998.

73, UntiI the early l380s, there was net in-migration of ethnic Russiax~sto the North Caucasus, in large part because of the climate and resorts on both the Caspia~tand the Black seas. Mar~ymigrants were retired military officers attracted by the climate, excellent and cheap food, and beaches, "l'he rapid outBo>wof Russians from the re@onbegan during perestroika and accelerated as the region became increasingly crime-riddell and impoverished with the Soviet cotlapse ax~dthe 1994-1396 ws:74 settlement in the North C:aucasus will be pursued through social and economic measures, combined with a detertniinatiox~to use all the Inanpower and resources at the state's disposal to safepard law and order in the North Caucasus and in Ijagestan in particrzlar" {(fegodnica,May 26, f 998; Current X>igest50, no. 21 j 1998]:4), 83. Izvestiia, July 28, 1998; Currettr Xldgest 50, no. 30 ( 1998):10. 84, Izvestiia, May 20, 1999; Gicrrent I>igest 5 X , no. 20 ( 1399):16. 85. There was speculation in Dagestan rl-rat the confrontation wit11 the Khachilayevs was deliberately provoked by Moscow in order to provide an excuse to Xaunch an anticormptiolt camyaip, wl~ichof course sewed the dual p u r p ~ of s shoring up Magomedov politically (Nabi Abdultaev, ""Uagestani Regime Uses Feds to Undermine Opposition, Faces I"rc>tests,'~~~stZ'~~$te of East- West Stzldla Regional Report, September 17, 1998; and idem,

""Fderal Crackdowxl in Ilagestaxl Contin~es,~Vmst.iruie c$ Fusl- West StgidZPs Regional Xeport, February 11,1999). 86. Nabi Abduitaev, ""Elilnic 1,eader's Arrest in Dagestan Causes Popular 13isturbar1ce:" InsfilufeofEast- West Studies Regional Report, September 10,1998. Nadir was not arrested, because tl-re Russian constitution af-fords irnrnur~ityto deputies af the federal parliament, Supporters of Magomed, who was a depuq in the TJagestarli parfiament, stxbsequently appealed to the Dagestar~iconstitutional court, arguing that the ltussian federal constitutian afforded irnmuniv to deputies of republic yarliamerrts as well. The court rejected the arwment, L3emr1nstratior~sin Mawachkala and elsewhere prompted blesnikc~vto remove his prisoner from Makhachkala tr>Pyatigorsk, in Stilvrapol krai, 87, 'Khese include Ciadzhi MaMlachev, the republic"^ vice prime minister and a leader of the Avar national movernerlt; ltuslan Gadzhibekov, the mayor af the city of Kaspiisk, near Makllachk;tla, and an ally of the Khztchilayevs; Esenbolat Mag~medov~ the director of the 13agestani branch of the Wstern Caspian Committee on the Fishing Industry; and Sharahtdiri Musayev, then head of the republic's Pension Fund. Musayev?hotvever, managed to escape arrest by fleeing Mau-rachkalafor his family village. 88. Mabi Abdullaev?'Wadir and Magomed Klhacfiifaev: Politicians for the New Russia:" Jamatown I;clzt~dafiunPrlSnz, Clctober 1999, I I ~ 18, . part 2, 89, Radoslav K. Petkov and Matan M. Shktar, ""Rrrssiaxr Regions Afier the Crisis: Coping wit11 Economic 'Kroubles, Governors Reap Political Rewards" "(paper presented at the Fourth h ~ n u a Conver~tion l of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Mew "York, 15-17April 1999),7, 90. I beliek~ethat tl-rese outcornes are unlikely, however. Vlrhatever goverximerIt is in office in Moscow wifl probably try to work with whomever is in power in Makhachkirla.

This page intentionally left blank

About the Contributors Victoria E, BonneEE is professor of sociology and director of the lnstittlte of SIavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Callfornia, Berkeley She is the author of Xconogrqf~yof flower: Soviet hliticul Posten Uirder Lenin and S t a l i ~(1997) and coeditor (with Lynn Hunt) of BEyond the Cull-~lralTurn: New Directions in the St~ulyof Sociey and Hislt7ry (1999). Slle is currently working on a study of Russian entrepreneurial culture. George Mi: Breslnuer is ChancelIor" Professor of Potitical Science and Dean of the Social Sciences, at the University of California, Bcrkeiey; He is the author or editor of eleven books about Soviet and post-Soviet politics and LZrezhnev as Leaders (1982) and foreign relations, including K/zrushc[~ev and the forthcoming Corbuci~evand Yelt-sirt;us Leaclers, Michml Burawoj) is professor and chair of the department of sociology at the University of CaXiiFomia, Berketey. He is the coauthor (with Janos Lukacs) of The Radiant Past: 1tZeoEog.y and Reality in E-luyz.gary"soad to Cupitatukistn (1992) and cczeditc~r(with Kathryn Verdery) of U~zcertainTransition: Etlznogruphies of Change in the Posl;Socialkt Worl~.t(1998). For the last decade he has been studying Russia's descent into the market. Manuel Catells is professor of city and regionat planning and yrr3fessor of sociology, University of California, Berketey. Between 1989 and 1999 he conducted research in various areas of R~~ssia on issues of technological modernization and ecr~nomicdevelopment. He is the author of twenty books, including the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Societ3 and Culture (Blackwell, 1996/2000),translated into Russian by the Higher School of Economics f2ress. M, Steven Fish is associate professor of pclliticitt science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the atlthor of Ueuvtocracyfuom Scmtch: (qpposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1995). He has published articles in Con?parati~lehlitical Studim, East European Volitics and Societies, the Journal of Democracy, fist-Soviet Afairs, Sluvic Review, and other journals. His research interests include cr~mparativepolitics, regime change, political parties, social movements, and electoral pafitics. Cliflord C, Caddy is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, with a joint appointment in the Foreign f20ficy Studies prr3gram and the Center on Sc~cial and Economic Dynamics, He is the co-author, with Barry W. Xckes, of Russia? Virtual Ecunonzy (forthcoming) and the author of The Price of the Past: RurniaW&aggle witlz the Legacy ofa Militarized Econctnv ( 1997).

360

ABOUTTHE CC)NTRIRU~C)RS

B a r y IiV; Ickes is a professor of economics at the Pennsylvania State University, director of research at the New Economic School in Moscow, and chairman of the board of the National Council for Eurasian and East ELITOpean Research. He is the co-author, with Clifford G, Gaddy>of Russia3 Virtual Economy (forthcoming). His articles have appeared in the Anzeric~nEcono~rzicReview, Rand k u r n a l of Econctmics, and Foreign Afiairs, Emma Kisekovu is a re~arclI.1assodate at the Institute of Slavic Studies and at the Institute of Urban and Regional Dcvelopmmt, University of California, Berkeley*Formerly; she was assistant direct~~r of the Institute of Ec~nomicsand Industrial Engineering, IXussirtn Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, and deputy director of the Siberian International Center on Regional Development. Among other pi~lblicatit~ns, she is cc)-author of The co.1212lkpseoftlze Soviet Union: the View h r n the X~forn-rationSociety (Uniwrsity of ., 80 Honor and Motherland, 28 1 IBM-Kvant, 128-1 29 Ickes, Barry W., 7,103-125 Iliuklzin, Viktor, 90 itliberat democraq 35-36 in~peacl-rment, 45 imperialism, 27 1,275 Independerlt 'li-ade T;nion of Miners, 2 15, 223 individual ri&ts, cases for, 71 i~ldustrialism currency devaluation and, 226 decline of working class and, 20 1 mr~vingfrom state to private control of, t 76 rc~otsof virtual ecoxlomy in, 104-l 06 inequality. See social instability informal economy*220-206 information technology, 126157. See also f nternet ceHutar, sateliite and wireless tdecarnmunications and, 134-135 cojmputer netwtjrks and, 135- 137 crisis in, 129-13 1 dualization theme of, 152 fc2reign dependence and, 129-130 foreign investment in, 127-130, 133-1 35 Xnternet development and, 135-142

Ir~ternetsociety and, 142-149 micrt>electrt>nicsand, 126-1 35 military's infltrence on, 127, 128 (>vemiewof, 7 PC industry and, 129,130-131 relationship of state ax~dnet axld, 143-151 security ixnyiicatians o f crisis in, 131-132 telecommunicatians and, 132-1 35 Ingusbetia, 168 Inkombank, 180,185-1 86 instability. See social instability institution-building>43-53 ethnicii~and, 266-267 macrostruct~~ral vulnerabilities in, 44-46 micrt>institutionalismand, 4 6 4 8 personalism axld, 24,43--44 personalism vs. ratiu~~alizatiu~~ and, 48-49 Yeltsin's influence on, 4-8 integrationists centrist orientadan of, 274-276 restorationists and state-builders and, 283-284 views on states, ~lationand security by, 270 Intel, 128 International Data Corporation (IWG), 130 International Monetary Fund (IniIFf, 7 Internet, 135-1452 business and, 154 development in outiying regions of, 148 TJirect13C: techxlolog and, 138 educational uses of, 130, 136-137, 140-142,145-146 global cl~annelsfor, 137-1 40 gfobat developmer~tof, 141- 142 impact 01% society by, 147-149 hrlguage, art and humor an, 143-144 media and, 148 networks far, 135-137 noncommerciaf use of, 140- 142 ( > V ~ P Y ~ Cof, W 135-137,151-153 problems of, 144, 148-149 statistics on devetogment of, 139 statistics on users of, 139, 142-147

status of (April 2000), 153- 154 traffic exchange on, 137 values of, 146-1.17 Internet Exchange (IX ) nodes, 137 Internet-Russia Charter, 142 Ixtternet Traini~~g Centers, 141 interpretative authority, 62-S3,SS investment, foreign microelectronicsand, 127- 130 social bfack holes and, 169 telecornmunicatiuns and, 133-1 35 involution, econornic defensisre sulvival strategies and, 237-245 defined, 9,233 entrepreneurial survival strategies and, 245-257 extent of, 233-234 housing and, 238-239 kinsl~ip~~etw(>rk and, 239-240,243 hck of collective action and, 258 mr~rtalityrates and, 231-232 network society and, 257-258 pc~verty"atistics and, 258-260 self-employment and, 247-250 self-made entreprmeurs and, 250-252 single mathers and, 241-242 state assistance and, 242 strategies and assets of, 232-234 trading and, 245-247 turning back from the brink and, 253-257 twtj-earner households and, 242-243 using resources in, 257-258 wage labor axld, 247-250 worker mobilization and, 23;?1233 wc~rkingpensioners and, 243-245 frcm w(>rkplaceto housellold, 234-237 Idarn, 33 1-333,340-342 Islamic Sfiura [Council] of Dagestan, 339 Israel, 26 Ivanov, Igor, 28 1,282 IX (Xnterriet excl~ange)nodes, 137 Japan, 169 j-rtdiciktf conduct, 68-7 1

_IztdicriraE Review Case, 64

practice, 65 review 62-63 selection, 66-67 jurispmdence, cconstitutional, 71-73 Kazmin, Andrei, 188,19X Kelsen, Hans, 72 Khachilwv, Magomed, 349 Khachilayev, Nadir, 349 Kfiabt~llina,LJiudmila,2 10 Khashuhtov, Ruslaa, 39,300-301 Khodorlavsky, Mikhail, 179-180,188,191 Kiev Internatiul~alInstitute of Sociology, 277 kinship networks, 239-240,243 Kiriedo, Pxirne Minister Sergei, 91, I87 Kiselyova, Exnma, 7, 126-157 Kivilidi, h n , 165 Kolsto, Pal, 279 b m i Republic, 235,259 Komsamol entrep reneurship, 179- I8 I Kconstantinov, Ilya, 299-300 Kornukov, Chief a'lr~atolii, 90 Korxhakc~v,Aleksandr, 40 Kosais, L,., 161-162 Kosovo, 94 bstikov, Vydchcslav)3 9 4 Q , 41-42 Kozyrev, Andrey, 273 KPKE See C:ommunist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) Krasuzaiu zvezda (newspaper), 83,84,85-86 Krdvchuk, I,eanid, 29 KEtO (Car~gresso f Russian Communities), 274,284 K r ~ t u Ps a ~ 19,23 , 1-261 Kuchma, honid, 30 Kukulev, 1,X, 183 Kulakov, Lt, Gen. VlaQimirFedorovich, 84 Kumyks, 338-339,344,346,347 Kuptsov, Valentin, 309 Kuznetsov, Col. Gen. Leontii, 83 Kvasknin, Gen, Anatoli, 94 LJaks,344 language Dagestan3sretention of native fanguage, 331 Wakh-Tjagestani,331,332

Russian laxlguatge in Ilagestan, 332 Russian la~lguagein Ukraine, 277-279, 280 'Yurkisll, 332 Last Thrusr m rlze SoutIz, 302 law>59-77 civil and common hw and, 60 constitutiorlaf.frameworks of RGC and, 42-65 constitutianaf justie axld, 61-62,74-75 judicial and extrajudicial behavior of ItCC and, 68-71 patterns of ccmstitutional jurispmdence in ItCC and, 71-74 politics and, 74-75 questions about ItCC and, 60-62 statutory gt~idarlceof RCC and, 65-68 I;fwenforcement fundir~gfor?160 gray zones and, 162- 163 hck of, t 8,23,36,159 Law on C:ooperatives (19881, 178 Law on Enterprises and Entrepreneurial Activity, 178 Law an Individual L&or Activity ( 19861, 178 Law an ltepressed Peoples, 344 LAW on State Enterprises (1987), 178, 180 LLlPft. See Liberal llemocratic Party of Rtlssia Lebed, Gczvernor Aleksandr, 91,164,188, 28 I LegislativeAssembly of Kaxelian Republic, 64 legitimacy crisis, 18-20 L~zgins,339,344-345,347 LJiberat T3emocratic Party of Russia (LDPR) new Rtlssian nationalism and, 10,294 regime Iegitimaq and, 18 restorationist policy and, 275 success of, 305 VLadimir Zhirinovsky and, 361-307 LJiinonov,Eduard, 294,295,306 LJstiev, Vlad, 165 1,ireraltdrnritia Xossiia, 294 Lithua~lia,30 LJogc~VA%l,, 186

Lukiaxlov, Axlatali, 19 Luzhkov,Yurii hegemor?iy/dornina~-rce and, 273-274 treaty with Ukraine and, 28 1,284 using Illternet for campaign af, 149 IJysenka,Paikolay, 272 Lpkina, Tdtyana, 9,23 1-26 1 ~nacroecc~nomics, 44-46 mafia. See oligarchs Maggs, Peter, 64 Magornedov, Magomedali, 335,337, 347-349 Mafiahkald, 327,338,339,347,348-349 Makashov, 308 market distance, 106 Maskhadov, Asian, 339 mass rallies, 297-298 MC1 rlehvork, 137 Meciar, Prime Minister Vladmir, 2 1,23 media, 148 Menatep Bank, 180 Merlatepl ltasprorn, 185-186 microelectronics,See also Internet crisis in, 1211-13 1 overview of, 7 security irnpjicatiul~sof, 131-1 32 telecommunications ancl, 132-1 35 1nicroinstitution-bui1ding,46-48 Migdal, Joel, 24-25,211 Migranyan, Anduanik, 273 migration, voluntary and forced, 235 Mikron, I27 military farces, 78-200 corruption within, 8 6 8 1,82,83-84 decline of, 7,23,7&82 distribution of arms to Chechens and, 34 l education for, 85-86,87 future Lmpgicatiuns for, 91-95 goals for refom in, 79,86-87 inadequate fi~ndingfor, 79-80,84-87, 88-9 1 information technology and, 127, 129-130,131-132 integration of, 91-93 interservice rimlry and, 88 hck of yolar~gpeople entering, 85-86

nuclear tveayaxls and, 87, 121, 129-130, 131-132 afficers, bhming spate and society, 86811 officers, inabijtity to exit, 80-81 afficers,an l~ardsl-riys, 82-86 officers, on reform process, 87-9 1 afficers, political activism of, 90-91 personx~elquestions within, 85-87 p w r living ccjnditions and, 82,85-86 poor morale of, 78-82> 86,89 revc~lutionwitl-rin,8 1-82 violent practice of dedowhchinu in, 80, 82,8485 virtual ecotiomy and, 119-121 "I"e1tsirzkaayyrc~achto, 24,40,92 Ministry of Cornmunicatians, 133 Ministry of Foreigxl Affairs, 282 ~ninoritics,295-296 Mirc~nenko,Viiktor, 179 Mirzabekc~v~ Abduradk, 335 Mitterand, Franqois, 50 Mongolia, 19-20,2 1 monotoniciry of refc2rm, 106-107 Montesquieu, l5 mortality rates, 23 1-232 Mo$c-owN~zw, 146 iMoshvskil:KonsomoZets (newspaper), 82 Most-Bank, 185 Most C;roup, 186 mothers, single, 24 1-242 Mc>untainRepublic (C;orskaia Kespublika), 343 Movement to Support the Army, 90 Muslim ktigious Board for the Nortl-r Caucasus, 333 Muslims, 33 1-333 MXhKs (youth housii-rg compIexes), 179 Nakh-Dagestani la~~guatge, 33 f ,332 Narodno-PatriotischesfriiSouiz Rassii (NPSR), 3 13 Nash sovremennl'k,294 Nash vybar-Itassii (Our Choice is Russia), 185 Nasser, Garnal Abdul, 24-25 xlational defense. See military forces Nationat Democratic Party of hilongdia,

2X

xlationaf identiw 9- X O ~ l a t i o ~integrity, ~al 117 laatianaIist apposition, 266-267,268 ~lationafistright ( 199 1-1998), 290-325 August 1991 coup and, 281-295 ban on CPSU and, 296 communism and, 307-3 15 democratic patriots emerging from, 298-299 (;ennadii Xpganov and, 29 1-292,296, 307-3 15 I,DI?R and, 30 1-30? national socialism emerging from, 297-298 neofascist right and, 293-294 new causes for, 295-286 new Russian nationalism and, 294 parliamentary statists and, 2513 role in defining Russian nation, 266-268 Soviet State's dissolution and, 285 suznmary of, 3 15-3 16 uniting with opposition left, 284-30 l Vladimir Xhirixzovsky and, 292-293, 30 1-30'? Natianaf Republican Party of Russia, 272, 283 Natianaf Salvation Front (FNS), 299-300 NKYCJ Kosovo and, 94,132 nuclear weapons security and, 132 political response to, 273 Russian military and, 83 Russian-Ukraine treaty and, 284 NKl'O-Russia Charter, 44 Nazarba~iev,President Nnrsultan, 274,275 x~eofascistright, 293-294 vleteratctrQ,144, 147 laetizens, 7 ~letw~jrk society, 257-258 Mew Russians, I 76 new state b~~ilding, 269-27 1,275 ~Vezavisinzui;u gaze fa JNG) (newspaper), 82 Nezavisi'moe ajoennoe ohuzrenie (NV@ newspaper, 83,84 Nogais, 332,346,347 vlomenklatura privatization, 175- 176, 180, I82

North Caucasus, See Ilagestan Novolahky, 344 Wovosibirsk Scientic Xnternet CCnter, 141 Nozryerusskie, 176 WPSR (Narodno-Patriotischeskii Souiz Rc)ssii), 3 13 WPSR (Popular-Patriotic Union of Russia), 313 NrY1"Ms(centers for scientific-technical creativity of youth), 179 nudear weapons deferzse capabilities and, 128-130 deterrence and, 87 economic dilemmas and, 121 security impiicatians and, 131-1 32 oligarchs background information on, 190-193 definition of, 176 eznergerltce of, 185-1 87 entrepreneurs and, 188 filzancial crisis of August 1998 and, 188 Onexirnbank, 185,187 Clpen Society Institute, 140, 141 Open University of West Siberia, 145 organized crime, See crime, organized Otechestvo movement, 274,28 1 Our Choice is Rtlssia (Nash vbor-fiossii), t 85 Our Hame is Russia (RII>R),275,282 fitmyat (Memory) movement ethnicity and, 272 ethrlic proportionality and, 283-294 Rossisskcje Naradnoe Sobranie vs., 299 Panin, Col. Gen. IIia, 86 Banov, Lt. C:ol. Anatoli, 8 1 parliament C:ommunist left ( 1991-1998) and, 300-30 1 ccjnstitutional pcjwers of ( 1978),62 new statists and, 293 October 1993 and, t 8 political parties of ( 1995-1"399), 275-276 past-communist countries and, 22-23 president and, 300-30 X

regiine fegitirnaq and, 18-15? weakness of, 2 1-22,45 parjiarner~tarystatists, 283,284 Party for Russian Unity and Accord, 274 Party of Unity and Accord, 185 patriarchal feadership, 37-42 PC industry. See information technology pensioners, 243-245 personalism anti-institutianaIism and, 24 benefits of, 43-44 c11 rrent crisis and, 36-38 defined, 39 rnacrostruct~~ral vulnerabilities and, 44-46 Russian bureaucracy and, 48-53 &Itsin's leadership style and, 38-39, 42-43 "I"eItsii11'smentality and, 46-48 Yettsin's patriarchy and, 39-42 Podberezkin, Mexei, 3 12 Pcjlttnd, 19-20,30 Polar factory privatization and, 236,238,253-254 Soviet regime and, 235,238 political capitalism, 209 Politicat C:ouncil of the United Opposition, 299 political partics elections of December 1999 and, 4 entrepreneurs and, 185 Internet use and, 150 legitimacy oQ X 8 organized crime and, 165-166 post-communist countries and, 2 1 RGCysjurisdiction and, 65 sll~ggishdevelopment of, 20-23,365 tyyoloa of, 9 world-views of, 269-276 Yelsink affect on development of, 46 politics, 59-77 constitutianal justie and, 61-62,74-75 devkant bureaucracy and, 164-165 differer~cesbemeen nation and state in, 265 Xnternet and, l53 lobbying and business assc~ciatiunsand, 182

military and, 7%-79,91-92 nation-buiMing and, 269-276 oligarchs and, 176, 185-187, 188, 190-193 orgar~izedcrime and, 160-162, 164-166 political capitalism and, 209 RCC and, 66-62 RCC, constitutionaf frameworks and, 62-65 RCC, constitutionaf jurisprudence and, 7 1-74 RGC, judicial and extrajudicial behavior of, 68-7 1 RGC, statutory guidance of, 65-68 rcde of entreyrenetlrs in, 176 Russian-Ukraine relations and, 280-285 security and, 269-276 shado>weconojny and, 160- 162 Popstov; Oleg, 40 Popular-htriotic Union of Russia (NPSK), 313 Potanin, Vladirnir, 186,186187,192 power. See superexecutive power presidentiatism. See superpresidentialism price liberalization, 105,297 pricing systems, IQ&XOS Prirnakov, Prime Minister Vevgcny circle of ekes and, 188 Russian ol,igarchs and, 187 stability and, 4,274 superpresidentialism and, 3 1 treaty with Ukraine and, 281,282 private sector, 116- 117 privatization. See also entrepreneurs affects on labor of, 206-207 barter and, 113-1 14 behaviaraf adaptation and, 1I I delayed restructuring and, 118-1 19 deviant bureatrcracy and, 163 enterprise transparency and, 112-1 13 future implications of, 114-1 16 infusion of value and, f 14- 11S Karnsornal entrepreneurs and, 179-1 83 macrc)structural vulnerabilities and, 45-46 max~ufacturingsector and, 114 national integrity and, 117 orgaxlized crime and, 163-3 65

policy ineffectiveness axld, I I I private sector and, 116-1 17 public sector and, I 17-1 18 relational capiral and, 107-1 10 shock tl-rerapyand, 47,104, I 10-1 X. X., t 10-114,183 shrinkage and, I I S- l X. S srabilil-y and disorder axld, I 16-1 19 telecornlnul~icatiomand, 133- 134 tight money and, 113- X I4 virtual econojny trap and, 119- 121 Prize!, Ilya, 285 Procedural Irregularities Case of 1996,72 proceduralisn~,35-5 8 Prokhanov?Aleksandr, 29 1-292,294,3 12 The Protestant. Ethic atzd the Spirit of C~pitalism,189 protest vote, 304-305 public communicatiox~snetwork, See information technology public sector, 117-1 18 public trust, 18 Putin, Vladimir, 4 Radaev, Vadim, 161 Radlov; V., 16l rationalization, 4&49 RC6 (R~~ssian Constitutional Court), 59-77 constitutional framewcjrks of, 42-65 constitutional jurisprudence oE 71-74 constitutional justice and, 6 1-42,744-75 first Gonstit~~tional Court, 59,6I--68, 71-73> 74 history of, 61 judicial and extrajudicial behaviur of, 68-7 1 judiciaf nomination i,y president for, 67 politics and law and, 74-75 powers far amendments to, 62 questions abczut, 60-4 1 second Constitutional Court, 59-75 REElLINE network, 136 Red October factory conditions after privatization, 236, 239-240,24+247,248-250 conditions of (1999),24&247 conditions under Soviet regime, 235, 236237,241-242,244,247-248

referendum, o f spring I991,17 reforms. See also relational capital budgetary constraints and, 106-108 market distance and, 104-107 monotonicity of, 106 nature of, 106109 privatization and, 108-109 stability and disorder and, I 16-1 19 virtual economy and, 1012,119-121 regulatory institutions, 36 KELARN netwcjrk, 134 relational capital enterprise transparency and, 112-1 13 reforx~~s and, 1 07-109 shock therapy axld, I 10-1 11 shrinkage and, 11S- I IS tight money and, 113-1 14 KEICOMILIEMOS n e ~ r ~ r136 k, rejigions, Ilagestan, 332-333 ressentirnent, 306-307 restorationis~n Durna influence of, 275-276 essence ofj 27 1-272 policies regarding Russia-Ukraine 'rreaty, 282-283 security axld, 270 Reynofds, Sarah, 63 RXPPJ rretuvork, 136 KME (Russian National Unity), 95,283, 294,307 KMS (Russian National Union), 298 R0CI"I"(hssian Public Center for Information 'I'echnologies), 139 "Rock tl-reVote'kampaig~~, 21 Radionov?It;or, 40 Rogozin, Ilmitrii, 284 Rakhfin, General Lev, 82,90 Romania, 30 Raosevelt, Franklii~Ilelaxlo, 50 KOS ( Russia11 Ali-PeopjesWnion),28 1, 282,296 Kossislikoc Narodnoe Sobranie, 298-299 RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Repubf ic), 27 1 RUXE (Russian Union af fndustriatists and Entreprmeurs), 183, 189 rules OIT standing, 64 RUNNet nemork, 136

Russian All-PeoplesW~nion(RC>$), 28 1, 282,296 Russian Cer~terfar Public Opinion Research (VFsIOM), 202,204,2 10 Russian Constitutional Court. See RC6 Russian Constitution of 1393,6O Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), 150 Russian language. See Iangt~age Russian ~lation,265-289 defined, 265-268 discrepancy between state and nation and, 265-266 etl~nonationaIismin, 270-273,275-276, 283 ethnopolitcal myths o f Soviet republics and, 279 hegemonyldominaxlce in, 270,273-276 integrationism in, 270,274-276, 283-284 nationalistic consciousness in, 266 national sociaiism emerging in, 297-288 nation-buiiding and security in, 269-276 new Russian nationalism and, 294 restoratiunis~nin, 270,271-272, 275-276,283 security threats to, 265-268 state building and, 269-271,275-276 suznmary, 285-286 Ukraine and, 27G285 wrirlbviews of, 269-276 Russian National Union (WS), 288 Russian National Ul~ity(RNE), 95,283, 294,307 Russian Public Genter for Xnhrmatiox~ 'I"echnc~j:,togics (RC>CT"f"),139, 140 Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (KSFSK), 271 Russian Supreme Court, 64-65 Russian "bilateral Commission for the Regulation of Social and I,abor Relations, 2 14 Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE), 183 Russofobia, 294 Rustcsw, Tlankwart, 26 Rutsk{>y,Alexandr den~ocraticexperimer~tand, 299

ethnonationalism and, 272 parliament vs, president and, 300-301 restorationism and, 27 1,274 Sadval, 346345 Sakharov; Andrei, 38 Samsonov,"rTidor,40 Samur, 344-345 satellite telecommunications, 134-1 35 SRS-Agm (Stolichny Rank of Savi~~gsAgroprombank), 181,185- 186 securitization, 280 security, 265-289. See also mili~aryforces ethr~anationalismand, 270-273, 275-276,283 hegemonyidorninance and, 270, 273-274,275-276 integrationism and, 270,274-276, 283-284 nationalistic conscicsusz~essand, 266 nelbvark services and, 150-1 5 I, I53 new state building and, 269-271, 275-276 restoratiul~isznand, 270,271-272, 275-276,283 Russian-Ukraine relations and, 280-285 surnmary of, 285-286 threats to Rt~ssianand, 265-268,271 Ukraine and, 276-280 wc~rfdviewsand, 269-276 hgoslavia and, 275 Seteznev, Gmnadii, 28 I, 283-284 self-employment, 247-250 separation-of-powers cases, 7 I Sergeev, T3efense Minister Xgar military refc2rm measures of, 79,85-86 military technofogy and, 132 war in Kclsovo and, 94 Sergeyev,Victor M,, 7-8,158-17 1 Sevastupol, 279,280,281,282,284 shadow ecananly, 160-162,205-206 ShaMrray; Sergey>274,275 Sharnil, 343 shares-Eor-foans auctions, 185-1 86 Shariet, Robert, 6,59-77 shock therapy ecullomic recctlnfiwratiom and, 47,183 incomplete shock therapy and, t 10-1 I I

rnonotonicity of reform and, 106-1 07 tight molley and, 113-1 14 virtual econoiny and, 104 showdown of October 1993,lX shrinkcage, l 15-1 I6 shuttle-traders, 254 Sixth Congress of People's rjeputies {April 13921,299 Skuratov, General Yuri, 165 Slovakia, 2 1,23 S~CIVCZ k nari>du(A Word to the People), 292 Smolensky. Alehandr, 181, 186, 192 social black holes, 159, 167 social instability, 158- X 7 l. See also crime, organized; involution, economic alternative state and, 165-X67 bureaucracy az~d,163- 145 cooperation dilemma and, l62 criminal behavior and, 159 gray zones and, 159,162-165 net users and, 141-142 network society and, 257-258 non-Russian ethnic groups and, IS7 overview of, 7-8,15&160 security threats and, 266 shabc~weconomy and, 160-142 sociaf black holes and, X 59, l67-169 social networks and, 162- 163 sources of, 3-6 suznmary of, 169 unemployment and, 203-206 virtual economy and, l 16-1 19 working class and, 209-2 I3 social movement Internet and, 147-148,151-152 slllggish development of, 2 1-23 Yeltsin and, 43 social welfare. See welhrisrn societal development, See social movement software industry, 130 Sogltasie VC) ixnia Rossii (Concord for Russia), 308 Solnick, Steven, l79 Solzhcnitsy~~, Aleksandr, 265-266 SORN-2,150- X S 1,153 Sort?,George, 150 SOVAM Teleyort, 134

$;avelskak Xassiia, 294 Soviet regime collapse of, 265-266,295 roots of virtual ecol~omyin, 106106, 120 wc~rkingcfass cox~ditionsdurixzg, 235, 236,241,244,247 SF-TIEMOS netwr~rk,136 stability, 59-77,265-289. See also Dagestan constitutional justice and, 61-62,74-75 ethnonationalism and, 27&273, 275-276,283 hegcmonv;ldorninanceand, 270, 273-274,275-276 integratiax~ismand, 270,274-276, 283-2134 policy making and, 268 RCC:, constitutional fraznew~rksand, 62-65 RCC, constitutional jurisprudence and, 7 1-74 RCC, judicial and extrajudicial behavior and, 68-7 1 RCC, statutory guidazlce and, 65-68 restaratior~isrnand, 270,271-272, 275-276,283 Russian-Ukraine relations and, 280-285 secol~dRussian republic and, 41 security threats and, 266 state buildiz~gand, 269-27 1,275-276 surnnxary of, 285-286 Ukraine and, 27&280 virtual economy and, 116-1 19 wc~rfdvietvsand, 269-276 Stalinism, 25 Starovoitova, Gafina, l S6 state building, new, 269-271,275 statisticaf surveys computer netwtjrks and, 139- 140 Interrzet, groups using, 142- 144 Internet, values of user, 146-147 hck of funding for, 202 poverty in Syktykar and, 258-260 Russian-Ukraine differences and, 277-278 urlernyloyrnent and, 209 Stavrc)yoI, 34&347

Slealing like Slate: Control and C"olEugse in Soviet r'nstilutions,179 Sterligov, Aleksandr, 298 StoIichny Bank of Savings-Agroprornbank (SBS-Agro), 181 St. Petersburg, t 65 strategies of survival, 233 strikes, 8,2 13-214,216-2 18 superexecutive power, 15-34. See s tperpresidentialism ~ superpresidentialism, 15-34 defined, l6 other presidential systems and, 19-20 overview of, 6 paradox of, 17- 18 pathologies of, 28-3 1 post-communist countries and, 16, 29-30 regiine fegitimaq and, 18-20 societal organization and, 20-23 state institutions and, 23-26 unaiccountabie officiatdom and, 26-28 Supreme Soviet, 17-1 8 survival strategies callective action and, 258 comparing defensive and entrepreneurial strategies, 233,250 defe~xsivestrategies, 233-245 diversification and, 237 entrepreneurial strategies, 245-257 government empit>jieesand, 117-1 18 housing and, 238-239 kinship ~letwr~rk and, 239-240 network society and, 257-258 overview of, 9 resources and, 257-258 self-employment and, 247-250 self-rnade entrepreneurs and, 250-252 single mothers and, 241-242 trading and, 245-247 turning back from the brink and, 253-257 two-earner households and, 242--243 wage fabor and, 247-250 wr~rkingpensioners and, 243-245 Syktykar etl~nographicresearch from, 235 poverty statistics for, 9,25&260

'l'atars, 332 tmtion callections, 117-1 18 excess wage taxes, 208 exemptions, 128-129 revenues, 23, 113, I t 7-1 18 technology. See information technology 'l'eIecommunicationsiEnternet Project, t 30 telecc>m~nuniciltions structures, 132-135 'l'eIeglobe International, 138 telephor~esewices, 132- 133 Tenglik (Equality) national movement, 338-339,346 Ter-Petrossian, I,evon, 29 tight moxley, 113- X 14 Tilly, Charles, 26 titufar ethnos, 278-279 trade unions, 2 13-2 18 attitudes toward, 2 15-2 18 economic goals of, 2 18 Iegliskation for, 2 I4 new vs, old, 2 14,2 15-2 16 obstacles to activism in, 218 role of, 213,214-215 strikes and, 2 16-2 I8 warker's sights and, 2 13-2 14 traffic exchange, 137 trar1sparenc)r 1 12-1 13 'Ransparency International, 27 'l'reaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership, 268,276,280 Trophy Art Law 73 'Ruduvaia Rossiia (Working Russia), 293, 294,297 'l'umanov-Baglai Court, 7 1-73 Turnanov, Chief JusticeVladimir cases decided 1% 7 X -73 cc>nstitutiur~at jurisdiction and, 64 extrajudicial behavior of, 68-70 bwidance of RCC by, 7.4 interpretive authority of, 62-63 'Turkish lanpage, 332 Tu tabatin, Atex, 139-1 40 'l'wentieth Congress of the Komsomol, 179 Ukraine ethnic and regional diff-erencesin, 277-278

nationalizing project of, 278-279 new identity of, 277 Russian language in, 277-279 Russian relations with, 27G280, 280-2135 'l'reaty on Friersdsbip, Cooperation and Partnersl~ipand, 280-28 1 treaty with Russia and, 281-285 unempIc>~iment, 203-206 coal industry and, 223-224 employment services and, 209 excess wage tax and, 208 government subsidies and, 205,242 inforxslal econoiny and, 205-206 labor relations and, 203 privatization and, 205-206 rates o f assistance and, 242 redundant ernyloyees and, 206-207 sociaf yrc~blernsoQ204 statistical suweys on, 209 Sykrpkar and, 259-260 wage reduction trade-off and, 204, 206-209 UNICOR network, 136 Union af Democratic Forces (UBF), 2 1 Union o f the Russian People, 293 Union of Writers, 294 United States, 130, 131 value destruction, 104, 105-106 value infusion, f 1P- 115 values, 146- 147 Varennikov; (;eneraf Vafentin, 291 Vasilev, Drnitrii, 293-294 Viinogradov, Vladimir, 179-1 80,186, 192 violent entreprer~eurship,177, 181 virtual eccmojny. See econc>my>virtual Vitruk, Justice Mikolai, 63 avoiding past mistakes of RCC:, 67 cllanging RCG3sjurisdiction and, 65 constirtxriox~aljurisdiction and, 63-64 extrajudicial behavior of, 68 Vc~lkc~v~ Vadim, 177,181 Volsky, Arkadii, 183, 189 235 voluntary migrLltio~~, Voronitl, f ,l.. Gen. Aleksandr, 83

(VTsION) Russiaxl Center for Public Opinion Research), 202,204,210 Vujacit, VeXjlco, 9-10,29%325 Vy&irev, Rern, 188, 192 Waever, Ole, 265 wdge labor, 247-250. See atso involution, economic wage reductions, 206-209 wage tax, excess, 208 habis about, 327 attacEng vithges of, 328 camprornises with, 348 threats to stabifify and, 346342 Vlraiesa, I,ech, 19-20 Waliker, Edward W., 10,326-357 weapons, 341-342 Weber, Max, 188- 189 welfarism Dagestan and, 330 do>wnsizedmilitary forces and, 88 poverty in Sykrpkdr and, 259-260 virtual economy and, 7 m i t e , Stephen, 18 wireless tetecommunicatim, 134- 135 Vlrolcott, R, 129 uvomen, See domestic inwlutian A Word to tlse People (Slovo k narodu), 292 wcjrking class, 201-230 coal industry and, 8,219-224 eRects of currency devaluation cm, 226 gay in wdges for, 210 new divisioz~swithin, 209-2 13 new middle class and, 2 10-2 11 numerical decline of, 201-203 on-tlse-job training and, 2 11 private firms and, 2 10-2 11 skill levels of, 2 11-2 13 sociat instability and, 226226 Soviet era and, 2 10,232-233 statistical data an, 202-203 struggle af, 8 surnnxary of, 224-226 trade unions and strikes for, 2 13-2 18 u~~employrnent and, 203-206 wage reduction trade-ofEs and, 206-209

from workplace to househofd, 234-237 %[orking Russia (Trudovaia Rossiia), 293, 294,287 Nrorld Bank, 135

Y2K disaster, 153 Vablc>ki>,166, 185,275,282 brygin, Vice Admiral V., 86 Vazt>v,Marshall Llmitrii, 291 Yeltsin, Boris, G ad~ninistrativeorgar~izatiunof, 50 autobiography of, 38 cornnyt officialdom and, 27-28 court pacsking plan of, 67 entrepreneursl~ipaxld, t 88 Internet and, l49 legitimacy axld, 18-20 military technoloa and, 132 new state building and, 269-271 oligarchs"ejection of, f 86 patriarchal leadership of, 39-42 personalism and, 17,38-39,4344,48--53 political parties and, 22,354 Russia's hyt,rid economy and, 10.3 state-building policies of, 266267 suspension of the first RCC by, 6 1,74 treaty with Ukraine and, 281 use of military force by, 24,40,72,92 vulnerabilities of, 24,4@8 Yeltsin, Tatiana, 40 youth affect of virtual economy on, 118-1 19 defeat of Gennadii Zy~ganovin election of 1966 and, 312 military forces and, 85-87 "Rack the Vote" ccampaip in Sluvdkia and, 2 I Yeltsin's ernbrae of, 48 Yugoslavia, 275

aslavsky, lflya, 208 &sl;llvsky>Victcyr, 8,201-230 atulin, Kanstantin, 274,285 Zavarsin, Gen. Vibor, 94 Zlenograd, 127-1 28 Zevelev, Xgor, 9,265-289 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 30 1-307 autobiography of, 301-302 coal miners\upyort of, 22 1 elections and, 303-304,305 follt>wersof, 304 ideology of, 271,290-281,282-293, 306 I,I)PR and, 294,303,305 political career of, 302-303, 303-304 power of ressentiment and, 306-307 protest vote and, 3614-305 treaty with Ukraine and, 28 1. Zisk, Mirnbcrty Marten, 7,78-100 Zorkin, Chief Justice cases decided 1% 7 1-73 extrajucficid hehavior of, 68 parliament vs. president: and, 30 X suspensicjn of the first KCC and, 74 ZijrEn Court, 71-73 Zyganov, Genxladii, 307-3 X 5 ideology of, 3 11-3 12 KPRF and, 308,309-1 1I, 314 presidentid election of 1996 and, 31 1-313 right-wing ideolou of, 290,291-292, 296,308-309 security axld, 266 success of, 3 f 3 treaty with Ukraine and, 28 1,283, 285