A sustainable democratic breakthrough in Russia needs a combination of pressure from below, elite commitment to structural reform and extensive encouragement from abroad, according to Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center. But none of these essential drivers currently exist, she told Democracy Digest.
More likely scenarios are continued stagnation or a “systemic crisis and implosion, with unpredictable consequences,” she told a Washington meeting. Russia’s political elite understands that the current system impedes the modernization required to avert systemic crisis, and diplomats privately concede that Prime Minister Valdimir Putin has become a liability.
Elite “self-interest, complacency and intellectual incapability” militate against any serious attempt to address the country’s emerging economic and demographic crises or to prevent the “really dramatic degradation” of Russia’s rural and peripheral communities spreading to those cities that retain some degree of dynamism.
Shevtsova is one of several Russian liberals who write in today’s Washington Post that, contrary to the assumptions of Washington-based “realists“, most Russians want democracy and rule of law.
The United States has “ignored the problems of democracy and civil society” in their country, they suggest, complaining that “now Obama is essentially being asked to treat Russia as though it is incapable of democratic transformation.”
U.S. efforts to promote democracy in Russia as “counterproductive and ultimately serve only to discredit Russian democrats by helping the propaganda machine color them as agents of the West,” write Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Center polling and research group, Igor Klyamkin of the Liberal Mission Foundation, the Indem Foundation’s Georgy Satarov and Shevtsova.
They welcome a reset of U.S.-Russian relations but not a form of engagement that turns a blind eye to the Kremlin’s authoritarian nationalism and Russia’s democratic regression:
[S]our relations with the United States always limit the space for liberalism in Russia. We believe Russia dearly needs to expand all sorts of ties with the United States and the West, but such cooperation must not come at the price of U.S. refusal to understand what is happening in Russia, or allowing Washington to ignore the fundamental nature of the Russian political system….
There is no indication that President Dmitri Medvedev is “ready to get out of Putin’s pocket”, Shevtsova told her Washington audience. While some Western observers and hopeful liberals took comfort from his promise to review Russia’s restrictive NGO law, he has placed his first deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov – the law’s architect – in charge of the process.
Similarly, Medvedev’s appointment of a commission on historical falsification shows that the Kremlin is “trying to control the present by controlling the past”, she said.
New history textbooks describe Stalin as being an “effective manager”, notes Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007. Why, he asks, “would today’s Russia, which boasts a democratic Constitution and which has officially condemned the mass killings and imprisonment during the Soviet period, guard the secrets of the failed, bankrupt totalitarian state so diligently?”
The NGO law review process was disappointing but a “reasonable compromise” in current circumstances, said Yury Dzhibladze, director of the Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.
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