On November 7th, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the SCPS Center for Global Affairs held a discussion entitled “Russia: When is the Next Revolution?” According to the panelists, the new revolution will originate inside the elites, and is likely to come at the end of Vladimir Putin’s current presidential term.
Vladimir Putin’s resignation was a key demand at the 2011-2012 protest rallies. According to the official figures, 53 percent of Muscovites voted against the “national leader” in the 2012 presidential election.
The panel featured a number of prominent experts on Russia, including Mark Galeotti, Academic Chair of the Center for Global Affairs; William Partlett, Associate-in-Law at Columbia University and Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution; and Alex Kliment, Senior Russia Analyst at the Eurasia Group. The discussion was moderated by Yanni Kotsonis, Director of the NYU Jordan Center.
Galeotti noted that Russia’s ruling regime is in decay, and suggested three reasons for it. First, in the last 10 years Russia has changed significantly, and the country is different from the one Vladimir Putin had inherited in 2000 – but the president fails to recognize this. The second contributing factor is the lack of ideas in the elites on how to deal with a changed country, and in which direction to go. Finally, Putin himself does not know what to do; being a conservative and a risk-avert politician, he has found himself paralyzed.
A contributing factor to the regime’s decay is the lack of ideas in the elites on how to deal with a changed country.
In Galeotti’s view, all of these reasons signal “the end of Putin.” He added that Russia will need to define itself during this next revolution: “Yeltsin was an excellent destroyer who swept away the old system, but as a visionary, he was a disaster”. There will likely be a “conceptual struggle,” but it is not clear who may prevail.
Partlett agreed that the elites will pay a key role in a future Russian revolution. He also focused on the legal issues and the endemic corruption of the Russian state: in his view, there is a paradox in the political discourse regarding the rule of law. On the one hand, Putin talks about formal legal reforms and the importance of legal institutions. On the other hand, corruption in Russia on his watch has increased tremendously. “Formally, it looks like window-dressing, but in reality it is bigger,” Partlett said. His explanation is that there is an informal contract within the elites, which binds them to be loyal in return for the perks of power. If they break this contract, they may face the formal law.
“Putin uses legal norms to enforce informal laws on the elite. And he has been developing this system since his first days in the Kremlin,” Partlett continued, “By establishing such a powerful institution as Rosfinmonitoring [the Federal Financial Monitoring Service], he managed to get ‘information dossiers’, or kompromat, on everyone. It’s a formal blackmail, a system that can be called ‘lawfare’.” He added that the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky is illustrative of the consequences of a breach of this informal loyalty.
In his turn, Kliment explored the business perspective of the pre-revolutionary situation. He noted the two competing views among the business elite: on the one hand, Russia continues to produce a lot of money, on the other, it produces plenty of risks. At the moment, while still investing, business leaders are mindful of the fact that Putin is losing his power (in the last presidential election – even according to the official results – he lost a very valuable asset, the support of Moscow); that he has lost the support of the middle class; and that he still has the backing of the elites that are bound by an informal loyalty.
There is a growing awareness among Russians of the scale of corruption and election-rigging, which creates the demand for change.
As Kliment pointed out, the days of abundance for most emerging economies are over. Today, Russia requires not just high oil prices, but continually rising oil prices. This new reality does not leave much room for political reform. At the same time, there is a growing awareness among Russians of the scale of corruption and election-rigging, which creates the demand for change. But the people do not want to lose their welfare and their financial and social benefits produced by an oil-subsidized economy. Neither does the political elite, which is becoming increasingly aware of Putin’s falling support. “No one is calling for revolution, and there will not be a revolution in a classical sense,” Kliment suggested; in his opinion, the next Russian “revolution” will come from within the elite.
Although the experts were cautious about forecasting the timing, they unanimously agreed that the most likely period for a revolution is the end of Putin’s current presidential term, scheduled for 2018.
