TWENTY YEARS after the fall of the Berlin wall, Russia remains as Sir Winston Churchill described it: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Russia’s complexity has contributed to an American debate in which policy preferences too often shape analysis rather than analysis driving policy. It’s not a sound basis for decisions when key American interests and goals are at stake.
One doesn’t need to be a Russian domestic radical or a foreign Russophobe to see major flaws in the way Russia is ruled. The country’s president, Dmitri Medvedev, has catalogued its problems: “an inefficient economy, semi-Soviet social sphere, fragile democracy, negative demographic trends and unstable [North] Caucasus,” not to mention “endemic corruption” defended by “influential groups of corrupt officials and do-nothing ‘entrepreneurs’” who want to “squeeze the profits from the remnants of Soviet industry and squander the natural resources that belong to us all.”
Russia’s problems are fundamental to its political system, which, while officially democratic, is perhaps best understood as popularly supported semiauthoritarian state capitalism. Russia is clearly not a Western-style democracy, though its citizens enjoy considerable freedom of personal expression, with the level of liberty inversely proportional to the potential impact of criticism. The state dominates “strategic sectors” of the economy like energy and defense, but political-business clans have retained much space to pursue their parochial interests, including through the state’s administrative machinery. As throughout its history, Russia is dominated by a ruling class: originally aristocrats, then Communist Party nomenklatura, and now a combination of senior bureaucrats and business leaders, including former Soviet managers, ruthless-yet-effective younger entrepreneurs, and outright criminals who took advantage of the decay, collapse and anarchy of the 1980s and 1990s.
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