Crony Politics in Russia

Abstract

The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism, and the Medvedev Succession. By Richard Sakwa . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 418 pp., $34.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-14522-0). Political Consequences of Crony Capitalism inside Russia. By Gulnaz Sharafutdinova . Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. 296 pp., $38.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-268-04135-9). State Building in Putin's Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism. By Brian D. Taylor . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 392 pp., $99.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-76088-1). The three new books under review here provide rich material for pondering whether Russia has relapsed into dictatorship. In The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism, and the Medvedev Succession , Richard Sakwa (p. 1) discerns “an emerging consensus” among observers of Russia “that by…2008, Russian democracy was in crisis.” As usual, the word “consensus” papers over heated controversy. Some observers' vivid metaphors—“stillborn,”“demise,”“derailed,”“eternal Muscovy,”“faking democracy,”“highly closed”—say democracy has ended in Russia if it ever began (for sources, see Anderson 2010). To perhaps fewer others, myself among them, Russian democracy looks surprisingly robust, if very unsatisfying (for example, Treisman 2011; Ellison 2006; Bjorkman 2003). Declaring post-mortems “premature” (p. 1), Sakwa sides with those who see democracy persistent in Russia, but he considers it imperiled. For Sakwa, the danger facing Russian democracy is the existence of two separate and conflicting political contests. An electoral competition presses toward democracy but is continually subverted by a factional competition among appointees of the former President Vladimir Putin, whose weapons against each other are their arrest powers, leaked denunciations (the notorious kompromat , “compromising material”), and even occasional assassinations, but who act jointly, if not necessarily conspiratorially, to manipulate elections. Sakwa calls this conflict between contests “our dual-state model” (p. 13). Relying on the exhaustive reading of Russian commentary for which he is distinguished, Sakwa describes the factional infighting in detail. His investigation rounds up other than the usual suspects. Rather than undoing democracy, the infighting mainly aims at recovering economic assets accumulated during post-Soviet privatization by a very few super-rich oligopsonists (Russian oligarkh mistakes market power for political power). Thus the “oligarch” Mikhail Khodorkovskii remains in prison, not for heroically funding democrats to resist Putin's reimposition of dictatorship, but for introducing transparent accounting into his centerpiece Yukos oil company as a …