cc >> Welcome to the Global Hot
Spots Series. This is a partnership between
the Division of International Studies and the Wisconsin Alumni
Association that brings faculty to talk with the community about
some of the interesting things that are going on in the world
and going beyond the headlines on thought-provoking issues.
I want to introduce today's speaker who's Yoshiko Herrerra.
She's an associate professor in the Department of Political
Science and the director of the Center for Russia, East Europe,
and Central Asian Studies at the UW Madison.
She received a BA from Dartmouth University and her doctorate
from the University of Chicago, and she taught at Harvard
University from 1999 until 2007. Her research interests include
politics in Russia and the former Soviet states, social
identities, nationalism, regionalism, ethnic politics,
identity related variables in public health and demography,
norms and institutional change, bureaucracy and constructivist
political economy. She is also working more
recently on xenophobia and contemporary Russian
nationalisms. She teaches courses on
comparative politics, social identities, and the politics of
the states of the former Soviet Union.
Please join me in welcoming Yoshiko Herrerra to tell us
about Power and Protest in Russia: What's Next After
the Presidential Elections. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Well, thank you all very much for inviting me.
I'm very happy to be here today. I wanted to give a little bit of
a background to the situation in Russia in that many people may
have seen that recently on March 4th there was an election for
president of Russia, which is going to be a six-year term, and
there were a lot of protests associated with that election
and a lot of protests associated with parliamentary election in
December 2011. And I want to give you a sense
of the political situation in Russia in terms of why people
both supported the president and the governing party and why
there was so much protest because one of the key factors
that's interesting to people is that there were pretty
fraudulent elections four or five years ago in December 2007
and in the spring of 2008, and those elections, though
fraudulent, did not get very much attention.
So one of the interesting aspects of Russia is you have in
some ways a repeated situation with the election but a very
different outcome this time in terms of people's reaction to
it. So I want to give a little bit
of background of what the situation is in Russia and why
there is support and also a great deal of protest against
the current regime. So most people know that Russia
is the largest country in the world in terms of area.
Its population is very large also.
142 million, approximately. And it's economy is also pretty
large and is mostly dependent on energy resources, as a lot of
people know. What's important for us, though,
is to understand how Russia emerged from the end of the
Soviet Union. The Soviet Union broke up in
1991, and that was the beginning of Russia as an independent
state in the post-Soviet period. So there were a number of
problems that beset Russia as a country right after the
emergence of the end of the Soviet Union.
The number one problem, there were three problems that I'm
going to talk about, but one key problem was the political
instability in the country. So this is a picture of the
former parliament building in Russia which was bombed by the
president in 1993. So President Yeltsin bombed the
parliament in 1993 after a couple of years of protracted
struggle with the parliamentary over issue of where the power
was going to reside in the country between the executive
and the legislature. And this instability at the
center was just one indicator of the overall instability in terms
of not having a federation treaty and a constitution,
having to rebuild all the political institutions,
essentially, that emerged after the end of the Soviet Union.
So one big problem in the country is political instability
that even though Yeltsin is president in the 1990s and has a
certain amount of legitimacy, there's still quite a lot of
instability that people are living through in the 1990s.
Another big factor for the country is that in addition to
the disputes between the executive and the legislative
political branches, there was also a number of nationalist
sovereignty movements. The most famous of which is the
one in Chechnya, and there were two wars in Chechnya, one from
1994 to 1996 and another that was renewed starting in 1999
actually really under the leadership of the current Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin. So Chechen wars, and this is a
picture of the capital city of Chechnya in 1996 which shows the
devastation of that city. If you look at it today, it's
been largely, that particular city has been largely rebuilt.
But these Chechen wars in an exercise in really excessive use
of force by the Russian federal government against this
separatist region which had an affect on other regional
sovereignty movements in terms of sending a message that Russia
was unwilling to give up any territory and that there wasn't
going to be a separate Chechnya. And, indeed, Chechnya remains
part of the Russian federation now, and even though it remains
a fairly difficult region in terms of economic and political
situation, it's more or less under federal control at the
moment. So there were two Chechen wars,
and the first was '94-'96, but this is one of the things that
people in the 1990s were dealing with.
In addition to the central political problems there was
also this problem of regions. The biggest factor, though, that
weighed on people's minds in the 1990s was the failed economic
reform. So this picture is of a
Rolls-Royce in Moscow, and you see there's a gentleman here
with an old-fashioned crutch. This is a very common scene in
Moscow, actually. Even today you see Lamborghinis,
you see Maseratis, you see cars that I rarely have seen in
America all over the city of Moscow because there is an
incredible, incredible level of inequality that has developed
since the end of the Soviet Union.
So when people look back at the '90s, even though they say, yes,
we had this level of democracy and we had elections that were
somewhat competitive, what we also had was a lot of political
instability. We had this war with Chechnya,
and we had, in many ways, failed economic reform.
Their economic reforms were meant to create market
infrastructure by liberalizing trade, by privatizing a lot of
industry, and by stabilizing the financial system of the
government in terms of collecting taxes and, more
reasonably, spending. In many ways, the 1990s failed
in economic reforms, and it culminated with the financial
crisis of 1998 where essentially the state, after not collecting
taxes for seven or eight years, finally went bankrupt and could
not pay its bills and had a major financial crisis.
So that is the context of the 1990s that brings us to Vladimir
Putin. So President Yeltsin abruptly
resigned on New Year's Eve 1999 and picked somebody that no one
had ever really heard of, Vladimir Putin, to be his choice
for the upcoming 2000 spring presidential election.
Now, Putin, as I mentioned, had been one of the backers of this
second Chechen war, but what Putin brought to the country was
this idea of strengthening the state.
So the first thing he was going to do, his number one objective,
was to improve the economy. And to reign in the so-called
oligarchs. So there's a lot of these
so-called oligarchs are robber barons, people who had made a
lot of money in a very short amount of time, and some of them
have been very close to the Yeltsin family.
Putin was going to systematically reduce their
influence, and he did that by exiling the two most powerful
and by jailing the one who was the third in line.
Khodorkovsky was jailed in the mid-2000s and remains in jail.
And it's a little bit of a cautionary tale for currently
the third richest man in Russia, the 18th richest man in the
world, Mikhail Prokhorov, who ran against Putin in the
election that Putin's history with the oligarch has been to
take a pretty strong stand against their involvement in
politics as well as their position in the economy.
So he had an interest in improving the economy, and he
also was interested in controlling the region.
So not just Chechnya but all of the other regions of Russia as
well. So he strengthened a number of
electoral rules that made it very difficult for regional
governors or regional parties to compete, in the end outright
banning regional parties and eliminating the election of
governors altogether. So that was one of the ways of
reducing independent power sources.
And he also changed the electoral system such that
parties would have to compete across the entire country.
They couldn't compete only in one region which, when you're
the largest country in the world, is a formidable barrier
to forming a party. And he also got rid of single
member districts which were independent districts which if
you won the majority you could get into the congress.
In our political system we have single member districts.
Whoever wins a districts gets into the congress.
He got rid of those and replaced it with a proportional
representation system where you have to be a member of a party
and people vote for parties rather than individuals, and if
a party gets over 7%, it gets into the parliament, and if it
doesn't get over 7%, it doesn't get into the parliament.
But what this means is that an independent person not
associated with one of the parties that's going to get over
7% has no chance of getting into the parliament.
Each of these rules in themselves would not be
something people would look at and say, oh, that's a terrible
thing. You could make arguments for
proportional representation versus single member districts,
but in the context of this basically strong program to
control regional authority, it's fitting with this movement
toward authoritarianism. So that's the point three about
control of the legislature and the parties.
And the final thing he wanted to do was to really reign in civil
society, to make it difficult for people to protest, difficult
for people to organize, etc. So you might say now why would
anybody put up with this? Why would anybody want somebody
to come in and reduce the level of democracy, reduce the
freedoms in civil society? Why would anybody want to do
that? This chart shows the annual GDP
growth rates for Russia in the 1990s.
I'm sorry this is very weak here.
1990s versus the 2000s. Now, if you look at the Putin
era, that's this red line, and that shows the break between
when Putin came in versus when, just getting another clicker
here, when Putin came in versus his predecessor.
So the red is negative growth, and the blue is positive growth.
Now, who gets credit for this? Well, what really happened is
the price of oil went up, and Russia is a major exporter of
energy. So you could say, well, you
know, this isn't that much better but anyway, you could say
it's not really Putin, it's just the price of oil, don't give him
any credit. But what people in their
everyday lives see is that they had almost 10 years of negative
economic growth, and that's following the economic kiss of
the end of the Soviet period followed by a trajectory of
unprecedented positive growth in the early years of the Putin
regime. However, there was a financial
crisis in 2008 which resulted in a dip in 2009, and I'll talk
about that a little bit later. Even though Russia has
recovered, that's one of the things that shook a little bit
of the faith in Putin. But this economic recovery under
Putin's reign is one of the primary reasons that people
think, wow, when I think about what was life like before Putin
and I think what is life like under Putin, most people,
economically, are much better off in the 2000s than they were
in the 1990s. And so that's a huge factor in
people's understanding of the political situation.
If you look at the aggregate size of the economy, this black
line is the 1998 financial crisis.
And people in the '90s were talking about this decline in
the overall size of the economy during the 1990s and how it
would be impossible to even get back up to the level of the
Soviet Union. And you see that actually within
a couple of years of this high oil prices under the Putin
regime they had already recovered back to the period of
1991, and even with the financial crisis the overall
size of the Russian economy is just much bigger under the Putin
regime than it had been under Yeltsin.
Now, this, oops sorry, this chart differentiate Putin versus
Medvedev. Dmitry Medvedev is currently the
president of Russia because one of the things that Putin did is
he was elected in 2000, he was reelected in 2004.
So he served two four-year terms as president.
The constitution prohibits a third term.
And, interestingly, instead of changing the constitution even
though he had about 80% approval rating at the time in 2008,
instead of changing the constitution what he did is he
picked somebody he thought would be extremely loyal to him to run
as president who would then appoint him as prime minister.
So they switched roles, and Dmitry Medvedev became president
in 2008, and Putin became prime minister in 2008.
He waited out his one term until 2012, and then they switched
roles again with Putin as winning the presidential
election in March of 2012 with the understanding that Medvedev
should be the prime minister. But, as I'll talk about later,
this idea of the tandem presidency and this switch did
not turn out to be very popular with people after 2008 because
after 2008 and especially with the financial crisis a lot of
people's understanding of the direction of the country changed
a bit. But going back to the economy,
in addition to high oil prices, Putin went on a systematic, he
had a systematic campaign to strengthen his authority.
And part of that is about this cult of personality.
I wish I had time to show you some of the videos associated
with these. But what he would do is he would
go on vacation, take his shirt off, say look what a tough guy I
am, I'm able to take care of the country because I'm such a
strong leader, literally. And this reverence for him was
not limited only to Russia. He's the 2007 man of the year by
Time magazine. And a lot of people looking in
2007-2008 at the height of his popularity are saying, hey, he's
done a lot of things. He turned around the economy.
He collected taxes. That's something that was not
done in the Yeltsin era, so you have to actually give him credit
for reforming the tax system. He got rid of the oligarchs, and
Russia seems to be turning around.
Now, I would say it's sort of ironic in that Time magazine
calling Putin man of the year for 2007.
This is a time when most political sciences are saying as
of the December 2007 elections, Russia is no longer a democracy.
If there is any doubt, the December 2007 elections
solidified the case that it is not a democracy.
And meanwhile, the west is saying, hey, man of the year.
So there's a kind of confluence of his own popularity in the
country and in some ways western support for the regime at that
time. But a critical factor is that
he's still pretty popular in the end of 2007-2008.
In addition to supporting his own image, he really cracked
down on civil society. So this is a picture of one of
the communist protestors. He had reduced, essentially, the
kind of people protesting to be old age pensioners who had sort
of communist leanings and that were not necessarily taken
seriously. However, as it turns out, some
of the things he really wanted to do, such as monetizing
pension payments, so that is giving people money instead of a
free pass or some kind of money instead of free medical care,
turned out to be incredibly unpopular.
And even at the height of his popularity, he was not able to
do that because when they did try to monetize these pension
payments they would get pensioners out on the streets
protesting at the regional level.
Now, a lot of people didn't pay attention to this because Putin
seemed like he building a very strong state.
It seemed like he was very popular, and it's one of those
things that people who studied pensions were following it, but
it wasn't followed that widely in the news.
But it turns out, when you look back you say, yeah, the state
was not actually as strong as we think it was because even at the
height of his popularity he was not able to do one of these
critical economic reforms. In addition to that aspect, they
also supported, the state also supported youth movements,
nationalist movements. This one is called Nashi where
they would get thousands of students out in support of the
government. They give them trips places,
give them t-shirts, give them various things in order to get
further state support. So this is all when things are
sort of going well for the administration.
They are moving along in the economy, and everything seems
like it's going okay. But with the 2008, and this is
the idea of Dmitry Medvedev here as the puppet of Putin, this
tandem executive, what starts to happen is that there is a
solidification of authoritarianism in the sense
that the elections become non-competitive.
So in the 2008 elections, for example, the only people allowed
to run in the parliamentary elections are parties either
supportive of the government or fake parties that have been made
up by the government in order to introduce the idea of
competition. The regional politics have been
completely controlled at that point, and there's one party, a
party called United Russia which is Putin's party, that has
pretty much taken control of both the legislature and the
executive. So if you go back to remembering
Yeltsin bombing the parliament, by 2008 we're in a completely
different situation here where the parliament and the executive
are acting as one. There's one single party
operating. There's one person that seems to
be controlling both the prime ministership and the presidency.
So you might say, well, that looks pretty secure, and a lot
of people would have said this is a period of very strong
state, Putin looks like he's going to be in power for a very
long time, what could go wrong with that?
2008 financial crisis exposes the fragility of the Russian
economy. Even though you have to give
Putin credit for having a finance minister, Aleksei
Kudrin, we set aside a financial stabilization fund, a sort of
rainy day fund for taking in money from the oil revenues and
setting them aside in case of a financial crisis.
Even though they did do that and they actually weathered that
storm a bit better than some other countries historically,
what it exposed is how connected to oil prices in the world
economy Russia's economy is and how little it had actually
changed in the 2000s. So people kind of woke up and
said, well, it's true we have been getting higher wages, and
it's true I was able to renovate my apartment and I am better
off, but gosh, this economy is just living off of oil, and
nothing really has happened. Even though Putin had made as
part of his plan the idea of modernizing the economy,
diversifying the economy, and reducing corruption, people saw
by 2008 none of that had been achieved.
And corruption in particular became a bigger and bigger
issue. It's something that people talk
about all the time on the street now.
If you have a call-in show where people talk about what's
happening in the country, every other comment is about
corruption. In addition, this
diversification just did not happen.
And you think, gosh, he had 80% approval rating, he had all this
legitimacy, this personality, and still they're still doing
the same thing, they're still relying on energy resources.
So a lot of people are saying he really did not do what he said
he was going to do. This is supposed to be good
management of the economy, and it's really not happening.
So this was one of the primary cracks in the system that's
exposed in 2008. In addition, even though the
regime had supported these nationalist youth groups, what
they didn't anticipate was the rise of a lot of xenophobic
violence that they had not seen in the past.
So this is a riot that happened in downtown Moscow in response
to a soccer match and an ethnic Russia guy was killed at this
soccer match, and his supporters organized a kind of memorial
rally right downtown. This is the Kremlin right here,
and they organized this rally right in the very heart of
Moscow. And they're doing Hitler motions
with their arms, and shouting all kinds of ethnic statements
like Russia for ethnic Russians, etc.
And the government is watching this saying, wow, things look
a little out of control. And they called in a huge police
presence, a huge presence of interior ministry troops, and
what they get is a enormous fight between all these young
nationalists and the police where they essentially have to
just force people into the metro stations.
And there's all these videos of people in the metro stations
just beating up anybody they find on a subway car.
And it turns into a huge disaster.
But what it also exposes is that this is in December of 2010,
so this is only one year before the recent elections.
So just one year before the December 2011 elections you see
that in downtown Moscow the government is unable to even
keep order. So it's another signal that
people are saying you have corruption, you have this
oil-based economy, now you have this kind of out of control
nationalism, and who is in charge of that?
What's happening? Finally, enter Alexei Navalny.
This is probably the most charismatic person in Russia
today, maybe the only charismatic leader right now in
Russia today. So he is a blogger, and he is a
real estate lawyer. He also had a postdoc at Yale.
He is an interesting person, and what he did is he had a website
where he would post government documents from privatizations or
other deals that the government had done to show people who
benefited, how whoever got something was connected to
somebody else, and he would have little questions on his site
saying, what do you think of this?
And one of the questions he had is, do you think the governing
party, United Russia, should be better known as the party of
crooks and thieves? And he gets initially 10,000
people to say yes, and people ignore this and say, well,
10,000 out of a country of 142 million, that's not that many.
But now the governing party is known as the party of crooks and
thieves. That's what people call the
party. And it is very bad when it
becomes fashionable for the governing party to be known by a
label like that. So Navalny, he was not himself a
politician. He was just somebody that was
trying to expose this corruption who had sort of had enough of
it, but what he represents is younger educated person, no ties
to the 1990s liberal elite, a completely different force
that's saying I'm tired of the corruption, I'm tired of the
lack of modernization in the country, and I want something to
be done about it. So Navalny becomes a very
important figure in the course of 2010-2011.
All right, so that takes us to the 2011 Duma election.
Duma is the word for the parliament there.
And a very interesting phenomena happens there.
The Duma had been dominated by four parties.
The United Russia governing party, the communist party of
the Russian federation which is a successor to the communist
party of the Soviet Union. It's considered an opposition
party but it's not a serious opposition party because they
never get more than approximately 20% or so of the
votes, and so the communist party, they're never going to
take over. There's never going to be enough
support for them. They're somewhat like, I hope
there's no Ron Paul supporters here, but a little bit like that
in that you have a dedicated corps of people who are very
unlikely to get a majority. So they're not really a threat
to the governing party, and that's why they were allowed to
exist. The liberal democratic party of
Russia is nationalist party. It's not liberal; it's not
democratic; it's headed by a sort of clown-like figure
Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Another party that's sympathetic
to the government, always votes with the government, and hence
was allowed to exist as an opposition party.
And then you had this fourth party called fair Russia, which
is a fake party set up as the government as an opposition
party. So what the people Navalny and
other democrat opposition types did was to say what should we do
in the 2011 election? We know that our party, if we
start a new party, it's not going to get, A, even on the
ballot, we're not going to get media time, and we're not going
to probably make this 7% threshold.
So what should you do in this situation?
What you should do is vote for one of the four parties but not
the governing party because if you don't vote or you vote for a
party that doesn't get in, it's essentially a wasted vote in
that the votes that are there get divided amongst the four
parties. So people on mass vote for this
fair Russia party which raises its seats by a third to a half,
and they also voted for the communist or the liberal
democrats. So in the December 2000
election, you see a big drop in the government support because
people were voting for those other parties.
But why they were doing that is out of almost a fabulistic
recognition that we can't really change the whole system, but we
can at least send the government a signal that we are
dissatisfied with the current situation.
And not only that but you get also the protests.
So this is a person, this is a lot of media outlets where
people had tape over their mouths essentially saying I
don't have a vote. It turns out the word for voice
and vote is the same, golos in Russia.
So this is saying no vote, or no voice too.
It has a double meaning. And you have thousands of
people, this is 50,000 people downtown Moscow on December
24th. So throughout December people
were protesting the parliamentary elections and the
massive fraud that they thought happened during those elections.
If you skip through to the March 2012 elections, you see that you
might say, well look, despite those protests, Putin got 64% of
the vote so he won, the protests weren't really very effective.
The candidates in the presidential are similar in
terms of parties to the previous one with one exception.
So you have the communist party competing, and their leader,
Zyuganov, is the same person who's been running since the
1990s. Same one that ran against
Yeltsin in 1996, so a kind of consistency there.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky in the liberal democratic party.
Sergey Mironov, who himself in 2008 said I personally, even
though he ran against Putin, said I voted for Putin because
he would do a better job than me.
So that's a level of independence of these kind of
candidates. But the other candidate was
Mikhail Prokhorov, who was an independent and got 8% of the
vote. Again, you might say, well,
these elections Putin still won so what's the big deal, what has
changed? But what has changed is, number
one, the two elections allow people who study elections
two data points. That is, more than two,
but two big points to compare. So one of the things people
compare, for example, is this is the turnout, this is a chart of
turnout for the December 2011 elections.
And what you have here along the bottom is the turnout rate.
So it goes from zero to one. One meaning 100% turnout.
And on the vertical axis you have the support for the
governing party. This is in the parliamentary
elections. And you can see here that
there's basically a linear connection in that the higher
the turnout, the more the support for the governing party.
Why is that? Because there is massive ballot
stuffing. So people filled out ballots in
advance and they put them in the ballot box, and so wherever
there's more turnout, there is greater support for the
government. Unfortunately for the people who
did this, a lot of people videotaped this exact process.
So, for example, an election point would be at a school, and
these poor teachers who were asked to do this who did it at
the school would show up on Saturday, the election is on
Sunday, and people have videos posted on YouTube of teachers
with a stack of ballots and marking off ballots on the
Saturday before the election. It's very hard to explain what
you're doing with a pen and a stack of ballots on the Saturday
before the election. And those people, their faces
are on the school's website, so it's very easy to see exactly
who's involved here. In addition, the government
releases its own turnout data that would show, for example,
turnout would be in the course of the morning at 8 AM, 10 AM,
noon, every two hours. And so you have two electoral
stations, one of them around 4 PM has about 41% turnout,
the other also like 41%, 42%, and then by 8 PM one of them
has 80% turnout. Or even worse, the turnout goes
up in just the last two hours which would mean something like
a thousand people showed up in the last two hours and nobody
noticed it. So there were all kinds of ways
that people could see this is fraudulent, but the connection
between turnout and support is one of the key ways.
But even more important is that when you look at the
presidential election, sorry, too many clickers here, when you
look at the presidential election, you see this is the
turnout versus support for Putin in the presidential election.
A completely different graph. Now, statistically, this is very
hard to explain. Why would you get, in December,
a certain pattern of turnout and a completely different pattern
in March? What happened to people?
Why did so many people stay home?
Why don't you have the same kind of relationship?
And that's where we see the effect of these protest and what
people have done. So you see that in the city of
Moscow, for example, the support for Putin was only 45%, not 64%.
You might say, well, that's one city.
But it's the center Moscow. It's the capital Moscow.
It's where a lot of young educated people are who are not
supporting the regime, and that's a big problem for the
regime. So the pattern of turnout
changed in such a short time. That's one indication, but
there's other indications. This, for example, looks at data
on St. Petersburg where there's suggested to be a lot of fraud.
And in St. Petersburg you have a case where normally you would
have what's called a normal distribution of turnout that you
would have the number of electoral stations, so a small
number are going to have very low turnout.
Then the medium number stations is going to have whatever is the
median turnout. And then you'll have fewer
stations that have extreme. So when you think about it,
you're going to have some stations where there's a lot of
turnout, some where there's very low turnout, and the majority
are going to be in the middle. And that's how you're going to
get a median. But here what you have is you
have the median turnout, which is around 58%, but then on the
far end, oops, sorry, on the far end, you have all these stations
of near 100% turnout. So this kind of distribution,
it's impossible to kind of explain why would you get that.
Why do you have all these stations with almost 100%
turnout? And when you combine that with
anecdotal evidence or other evidence like regions like
Chechnya where I showed you that devastation.
So Chechnya has 99.8% turnout with 99.3% people voting for
Putin. Does that seem reasonable?
[LAUGHTER] There's no way that can be the
case. There's no way in a war-torn
region with all those refugees you would even get close to that
level of turnout, and there's no way you would get that level of
support for the government. So when people put it together,
they use the government's own data, the turnout levels and
other things, to see that there was a tremendous amount of
fraud. So I'll just wrap up with saying
where I think Russia stands now. It's still an authoritarian
country. Putin is still going to be sworn
in in May as the president for a six-year term.
So that's probably going to stay.
But these democratic protests since December I think have had
an effect. They've had an effect on
people's overall understanding of what's happening the country,
of their own efficacy of what they can do, and of the
possibilities for taking action, for example, in upcoming
regional elections and things like that.
One of the things Putin gave up in between the two elections was
the idea of having regional governor elections.
So regional governors are going to be elected again, and you can
imagine that there's going to be pressure in those areas to have
more fair elections. On the economy, even though
Russia has had growth for almost 10 years with that recession in
fall 2008, it still fundamentally a natural resource
economy, and overall when you ask people in the country what's
happening in the country they use the word stagnation which is
the word they used about Brezhnev in the '70s.
And it's not so much that people don't say yes, the 2000s were
better than the '90s overall What they're saying is we want
more than that. So it's about their relative
expectations. They're looking at eastern
Europe and they're looking at China, and they're saying you
look to the east, you look to the west, and everybody's doing
better than we are. So we have gained but there
should be more. And people have this sense of
stagnation, and they want a change in leadership because of
that. And that's one of the reasons
why the switch of Putin/Medvedev and back to Putin/Medvedev was
so disappointing to people. Not that they doubted Putin's
political power, but they said it's clear they have no vision
for the future. They have nothing to offer but
the same thing that they've been doing before.
The state is much weaker now even though the executive and
legislature are under one-party control.
You can see even from the Duma elections in December that they
have a much lower majority than they had before.
Even though oligarchs are civil society remain relatively
limited and weak, the level of legitimacy in the government,
that is the right to rule to people on an every day basis say
yes, these people deserve to be in power, that level of
legitimacy is very low right now.
That's something that I think is almost going to be impossible
for Putin to regain, especially when so many of the younger
educated active people do not believe in the regime.
So this low level legitimacy is a very important factor in the
overall strength of the state. And then, finally, I will just
say that this issue of nationalism remains a big
question because who is going to capture that nationalist
sentiment before Zhirinovsky's LDPR party had been the
so-called nationalist party, but an interesting thing happened
since December which is that the nationalists and the liberals
have come together in these opposition protests.
Not everybody is happy about that.
Some of the liberal opposition do not like being associated
with these, in some cases, really neo-fascist elements, but
they have come together to protest the regime.
And an interesting figure in this is this Navalny again, who,
in his youth, made various anti-Chechen, sort of
nationalist remarks. Now that, on the one hand, makes
him suspect against liberals, but on the other hand gives him
enormous credibility amongst these youth nationalist
movements. So he is a very important figure
to watch. I think Prokhorov, I might not
have mentioned, he's the owner of the New Jersey Nets.
That's how most people in America know him.
He also is the kind of person that has a lot of support from
young educated people, so I think he's another person to
watch. And I think I'll leave it at
that. And we have time for questions
now. Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
>> I have a question on the role of the press.
We read about so many reporters being murdered, does social
media have a greater impact now than the reporters?
Could you just enlighten us a little on that?
>> Yeah, that's a very good question.
The media actually, it's sort of a multi-faceted issue in that
you have TV, you have print media, and you have the
Internet. So TV is almost totally
controlled by the state, and that happened early on in the
end of the '90s, early 2000s. The newspapers remained in a
little bit of an ambiguous position in that they weren't as
controlled as TV stations, but also there was some control
there, and there was this murdering of journalists who
worked primarily for print media and who did exposes and things
like that. Now what people would say about
some of the print media is they'd say, well, in Moscow,
these newspapers, who reads those, they're not that
important. So even if there's a little bit
of freedom of the press, they are, overall the regional
newspapers are very controlled. And then the Internet, a lot of
people just thought a lot of people don't have the Internet
so it's not that important, social media doesn't matter that
much, but I think that there is a kind of confluence of forces
here in that what social media is doing is saying everybody can
be their own reporter. So there's power in numbers.
So instead of the journalists on the front lines going out and
exposing fraud and being the only person to talk about it,
it's hundreds of teenagers all over saying we're going to go to
our schools, and we're going to look our teachers in the eye and
say are you going to stuff ballot boxes.
So it's a different understanding of reporting, of
saying, really, are you going to do that because these are our
fellow citizens. So I think that that changes the
idea of what reporting is. And when you have videos that
are posted online that lots of people see and it's hard to even
get rid of them even if you wanted to take them off, that
kind of gives stories a little bit of a life of their own.
So it remains a difficult place for journalists, although there
are a lot of journalists that operate.
For example, Yevgeny Albats is a pretty well known
opposition journalist. She has a magazine called
New Times. And she's one of these leaders
in this opposition movement, and I asked her, well, aren't you
afraid of being shut down? And she said, how are they going
to shut me down? Are they going to steal my
laptop? Because everything is on a cloud
server. Are they going to go into our
offices and take this or that? We have things everywhere.
All of our material is in different places.
We have people working for us in different places.
And short of actually jailing her or worse, she said I'm going
to keep going with my magazine. And so there is a threat of
violence against journalists and that's definitely there, but I
think that was a little bit more of a problem when there was less
decentralization of media. But now with this opening up, I
think that, hopefully, that would provide a little bit more
cover for the journalists that are working.
Yes? >> Party of crooks and thieves,
please say that in Russian. [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
>> There is some debate over whether it should be crooks
or swindlers. Vor, I think, is clearly thief,
but - could be, I don't know. Some people will say swindlers,
some people will say crooks, some people will say some other
term. So there's some debate over the
translation. >> I've read that there's
corruption at a local business level so that if somebody wants
to be an entrepreneur they have to pay in order to stay in
business. That was quite some time ago
that I read that, but is it still true?
And if it is, to the extent that it is true, what can they do
with their economy to establish a culture of production rather
than living off of resource taxes?
>> Yeah, this is a really important question.
A lot of people try to figure out how you can combat
corruption. What's the answer?
Why are people corrupt? For example, why do people take
bribes? Do they take bribes because of
some kind of moral weakness? Do they take bribes because they
need the money? Do they take bribes because it's
not really a bribe, it's just sort of a gift?
Let's say school teachers in America get gifts from students
around the holiday or the end of the year, is that a bribe or is
that just a thank you? So you could say it's just a
thank you, it's not a bribe. Well, some people would take
that further to say when a government official does
something for you, you give them a gift.
This isn't a bribe. This is just saying thank you
for your help. Some people would say, well,
maybe, like you go to a doctor and they say you have to bring
your own medicine. It's not quite that bad like it
was in the '90s, but you had to bring your own food into a
hospital, bring your own medicine, bring your own this or
that, and that's because they had a lack of supplies.
So there's not quite such a situation like that.
And then there's just plain thievery, of somebody saying I'm
sitting in this position, I control who gets a building
permit or not, and I want you to give me money in order to do
what I should be doing for free. So there's a whole range of why
people accept bribes. And there's not a good answer as
to how to stop it. There's some interesting
examples, say, in Georgia, in the state of Georgia, the
country of Georgia, where they have really reduced greatly
corruption and bribery among judges by paying judges a lot
more money and giving judges a pension with a no tolerance
policy. Saying if you accept a bribe,
you lose your pension. And for most judges this pension
and their pay is so great that they're not interested anymore.
And they've done quite a lot toward reducing bribery and
corruption amongst judges. But traffic cops in Russia, for
example, remain this kind of paradigmatic case of bribery, of
just stopping people, this idea of selective enforcement of the
law. You're driving down the street
and you're stopped and they can just come up with a hundred
different rules to say that you have broken.
And you either pay on the spot or you have to spend a lot of
your time fighting it or something like that.
Now, they have tried to do something about that, but they
haven't been very successful. I would say one thing that's
interesting is there's a lot of variation across government
agencies in how corrupt they are.
So you just take fire inspection versus sanitation inspection.
So there's a lot of variety in the bureaucracies.
But it is also the case that it's not just the state taking
bribes but it's also other firms.
So some firms have become very interested in secure property
rights, not because they fear state predation, but because
they fear other firms. So they want a strengthened
government and system of laws to protect other firms from
stealing from them. But it's not, I don't think, and
I'm not sure others have a good answer as to how you can change
that overall. But it's very important,
especially in the case of education.
For example, there's just widespread corruption in passing
college entrance exams and grades and things like that.
That's very undermining of, not just people having to pay extra
money, but it's completely undermining of the educational
mission.
>> I wonder if you have a take on the relationship between
Medvedev and Putin? Whether Medvedev is really any
different or how he felt about being, in effect, demoted to
prime minister and whether, in fact, the prime minister has
influences likely to be substantially reduced or the
same or what? >> Yeah, this is a good
question. Medvedev is picked largely
because of his sort of internal constitution of loyalty.
He's incapable of standing up to Putin.
That's one of the reasons Putin picks him.
So some people thought if he only stood up to Putin last
year, but yes, if he was a different person he might have
done that. But being the person he is, it's
very unlikely that he can stand up to Putin.
Now Putin sort of went, I think, a step to far in that he had
held out the possibility that Medvedev might have a second
term, and then he decided against that and forced Medvedev
to make the announcement that Putin was going to replace him
as the presidential candidate which people saw as an extra
level of humiliation that was not really called for.
But Medvedev has virtually no legitimacy and no support
anymore amongst any segment of the population in Russia.
But he is, technically, the head of United Russia.
So he has an office as head of United Russia which makes him
the normal candidate for the prime ministership.
Now Putin could choose somebody else, but it's not going to be
that easy to get rid of him even if he did want to get rid of
him. And some people think, well
Putin could do something interesting like pick his old
finance minister, Aleksei Kudrin, to become prime
minister. This would be sort of a bold
move to show, okay, I get the message, we should do something
different. But, again, there's no evidence
that Putin has really gotten the message.
There's no evidence that he's saying, I think he's worried,
but there's no evidence that he's saying yes, it's true, I've
made mistakes. He's not really this kind of a
self-conscious, oh, I understand what needs to be done sort of
person. So I think that probably the
country would be better off if, like as a short-term solution,
if Medvedev were not appointed prime minister.
If they were to pick somebody else who had some better ideas
about doing something about corruption, about managing the
economy. But I wouldn't say it's a zero
chance, zero percent probability that that could happen, but I
would say it's probably more likely than not that Medvedev
will nevertheless remain prime minister even though he's
unpopular and even Putin probably doesn't support him
that much.
Oh, I think they want the microphone because they're
taping. >> With oil prices remaining
pretty high right now, I would presume then that we'll see some
pretty good economic growth or economic growth would at least
continue there, and with that economic growth, more
legitimacy. That's my first question.
>> Well, I think that's right. I think, for example, I'm sure
Putin is saying I hope there's a war with Iran because anything
that would drive up oil prices is going to be good for his
regime and good in some ways in the overall economy of Russia.
So it's true that an economic crisis would have a very
destabilizing effect on the regime.
But I would say even though the government is going to benefit
in some ways from high oil prices, I think in some ways the
genie is out of the bottle in that a lot of people are looking
around and saying hey, I'm not going to give you credit for
high oil prices. I'm going to look at the economy
and say what have you done besides oil?
Where is the diversification? Where is the modernization?
So I think it does help them, but it's probably not going to
be enough to satisfy the substantial criticisms that are
out there. >> But doesn't that take a
certain level of sophistication among the electorate?
>> Yes it does, but it's the most sophisticated people who
are against the regime right now.
So that's right. But these charts that I showed
you, for example, on the fraud, these are charts posted by
people on the Internet. These are not western social
scientists who have done this. So the thing is, Russia has a
lot of smart people, has a lot of technically talented,
qualified people, and these are the same people that are saying
hey, why do I have to go abroad to get a job?
What's wrong with the scientific and educational infrastructure
in this country? And why are we falling behind
when we have both the resources and the talent in terms of the
population? So it's true that it's a
sophisticated argument, but I would say that there's quite a
lot of, it's the middle class really, the upper educated
middle class that is the most dissatisfied with the regime.
>> And second, relations with the United States, can you
briefly talk about that. >> Oh, sure.
Under the Obama regime there was a reset which was trying to
reestablish sort of friendly relations between Russia and the
United States which had really gone south, especially after the
short Georgia war between Russia and Georgia, and some of the
aftermath of the presidential campaign rhetoric, etc.
So the Obama Administration came in with the idea of
a reset in Russian/US relations which, in many ways I would say,
had some concrete successes. It had some concrete successes
in the New START Treaty and also very critically in negotiating
the Manas Air Transport Center in Kyrgyzstan.
So not everybody knows that every single troop going in and
out of Afghanistan goes through Kyrgyzstan, through the Manas
Transport Center. Thirty percent of the fuel in
Afghanistan goes through that transport center.
That fuel is largely purchased from Russian, and now via
Kyrgyz, companies. So that Manas Transport Center
in Kyrgyzstan is absolutely critical to the US effort in
Afghanistan, and Russia played a big role in agreeing to various
aspects of that arrangement there.
Kyrgyzstan has its own problems. It cannot ignore Russia's
interest in the region even though it's an independent
state. So there were some significant
successes, I would say, in the reset.
Putin and Medvedev sort of each would play, they would sort of
have a good cop/bad cop routine when things would happen.
So for example, in the bombing of Libya, Putin would go to a
car factory and say, oh, this is so terrible, this is illegal and
horrible, and Medvedev would go on the Internet and say, well,
Gaddafi's a bad guy, something had to be done.
So they would give these kind of mixed messages.
A lot of people thought there's going to be this return to
negativity with Putin, and this is going to be a way to shore up
the regime. But as I mentioned with this
nationalism factor, it's not really clear that that's going
to work as well as it has in the past because a lot of the people
who are against the regime are very pro-western.
So just saying you're against the United States or against
Europe or against that, you're kind of giving this
anti-modernization message which is exactly one of the things
that people wanted. Now, I will say the current
ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is actually a political
scientist from Stanford University.
He was on the National Security Council.
From a scholar point of view, from a political science point
of view, we think this is fantastic to have an ambassador
who is very smart, very on top of the scholarly literature
on democratization, on parties, on regime change, etc.
So I think in terms of who we have in place as an ambassador,
and somebody who speaks Russian and knows quite a lot about
Russia, that's a very important aspect of the relationship which
I think is good. The US was very muted in its
response to the presidential election.
There was a short statement congratulating the Russian
people, which I was puzzled about that.
You can read it in different ways.
Congratulating which people? The people who won, the people
who protested? [LAUGHTER]
It's hard to say. So I think it's a little bit
early to tell what is going to happen.
Probably people will try to see what happens in the US after
this year's election, and that may have a bigger effect on
US/Russian relations. >> Could you go on and explain
the relationship between the EU and Russia and China and Russia?
I'm just trying to see who are the friends, who are the enemies
of the Russian state. >> Yeah, well you're really
pushing me a little bit out of my confidence, but I'll try to
give you an answer. So the EU and Russia, the EU is
very important to Russia in terms of trade.
Now, one interesting development that's happened in Russia is
that Russia's major gas company, Gazprom, has made a number of
deals with French, German, and Italian energy companies.
And this is happening on a firm to firm level.
So German, French, and Italian companies want gas, and Gazprom
wants to sell it. So Gazprom is interested in
selling gas to Europeans because they're paying a world rate;
whereas, Gazprom's gas that it sells internally is at a highly
subsidized rate. So, in many ways, this firm to
firm action is what is determining a lot of the
infrastructure of economic relations there.
So, for example, this Nord Stream, which some in eastern
Europe called renewed Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the
sense that they thought Germany and Russia are going around the
interest of eastern Europeans in putting together this pipeline,
that is going through despite the protests of people in
eastern Europe. That's still happening and
that's largely because of this firm to firm connection.
So what's interesting there, I would say, is that it's not so
much what does the government of Russia want, what does the EU
executive or parliament want, what do the leaders of
particular European governments want, but what do the firms
want? I think that's a very important
thing to think about in this context.
Even in the case, for example, of the US fuel supply to
Afghanistan. Even in difficult periods of
US/Russian relations, Russia was still supplying the fuel, and
from what I talked to with people in the Manas Base, they
said they fulfill the fuel contracts.
They deliver on time and what they're supposed to deliver, and
that's what we care about. So to some extent, some people
on the ground are not so concerned about whether the
governments are getting along. Firms are concerned about
whether they're selling their products and getting paid and
making money. So with Europe, you can look at
the overall trade situation. Russia just joined the WTO, the
World Trade Organization, which has been something that's been a
sticking point for a long time. So there is some debate over
whether Russia will actually benefit from that or how it will
exactly play out. But, clearly, China, in some
ways, is a rival to Russia. On the other hand, if you
believe in balancing international relations, you
should think that Russia and China should get together
against the west. That did not happen during the
Soviet split, the height of the Cold War.
I'm not sure we should expect it to happen now if it didn't
happen then, and we probably have to look at other factors
that are going to determine those relationships.
Russia doesn't have any, you can't point to any super tense
issues between Russia and China the way, for example, Russia
with Japan has this issue with the Kuril Islands which Russia
took during World War II. Japan wants them back, and until
that's resolved there's not going to be a really great
relationship between Russia and Japan.
So there's not something like that with China, but Russia is
weary of the huge economic resources that China has, the
population, the immigration and migration into the far east.
There's a lot of distrust between the two countries, I
would say. So you can't look around and
say, oh, here is the natural ally of Russia.
It's not clear that China would be more of an ally than the
United States, for example. So it's a fluid situation, I
would say. >> We have time for one really
quick question. >> I read that there's been some
movement in Russia toward asking Syria to make some changes.
Can you say what you think the possibilities are for getting
the Syrian situation resolved. >> Yeah, that's a very good
question and an interesting case.
So Russia currently supplies weapons to Syria and Syria has a
pretty good army. And Syria is an important
conduit for Iran into Lebanon and Hezbollah.
Syria's a very important country in the region.
Now, a lot of the rhetoric during the protest in Moscow and
in other parts of Russia in December up until March and
after had to do with this Arab spring Some supporters of Putin
would say we don't want to have an Arab spring here.
And they're looking around saying we don't, in general,
want people on the streets to kick leaders out of power.
We don't really want that example.
So we'd prefer for the existing leadership to maintain their
power. So you can see just from that
point of view they don't have a huge interest in seeing the
Assad family overthrown. Right?
So that's one factor. On the other hand, do they want
to be seen as supporting a really brutal crackdown?
No, they don't necessarily want to be seen that way.
On the other hand, do they want to send some kind of subtle
message to their own people to say, hey, if we're willing to
support Assad in Syria, you draw the conclusion about what we
would do here. Now I don't actually think that
the Putin Administration would have the support of the military
to have the legitimacy to have any kind of military crackdown
on young people in the streets of Russia.
So I don't think that's a big possibility.
But I think sending a message of support for other dictatorships
is probably the more likely message that they want to send.
But I wouldn't rule out some kind of negotiated deal between
the US and Russia, and not necessarily so public but
something that would be some kind of middle ground where
maybe Russia wouldn't have to come out and say they support
the opposition in Syria but they maybe quietly stop supplying
arms. But of course there's a
financial cost to that too because they're making money off
of those arms sales. So I think it's a very
complicated situation, but the deck is a little bit stacked in
favor of continued Russian support for the regime, I think.
>> Well, great. Thank you very much.
>> Thank you all for coming. [APPLAUSE]