In this course, Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, explains the events of modern Russian history and introduces its most significant actors—from Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin.
Why Putin?
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From the course by Калифорнийский университет в Санта-Крузе
Russian History: from Lenin to Putin
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From the lesson
Reform, Stagnation, Collapse, Rebirth?
Meet the Instructors
Peter KenezProfessor Emeritus
History
I am planning to talk about the Putin era.
First, I will want to describe the political system,
then the socioeconomic changes which occurred in this period.
And finally, about the foreign policy during Putin's tenure.
In the 1990s, especially the second half of the 1990s,
was a difficult era,
a difficult moment for the Russian people.
Yeltsin became increasingly an embarrassment.
His policies became a helter-skelter.
He changed the prime ministers, practically, every month.
He clearly was losing control.
In '98, Russia went through a financial crisis.
The ruble had to be devalued.
And that was the background in which Putin came to office.
Why Putin?
Well, Putin, because Yeltsin chose him.
Who was he?
When he came into office,
he was 48 years old.
Relatively speaking, a young man.
What was his background?
He came from an ordinary family,
certainly not part of the nomenclatura,
that is, the political elite.
From his early childhood,
he had an ambition to join the KGB, the political police.
And indeed went through law school.
Well, he was a reasonably good student,
but never an intellectual.
He was very much without intellectual ambitions.
But then, he ultimately succeeded in joining the KGB.
And after the bar,
he was sent to the German Democratic Republic,
to Dresden, where he worked some time.
It's an interesting question to what extent his service in the Secret Service,
in the KGB, actually mattered in the formation of his views and character.
My feeling is that it can be overestimated,
the significance of working for, I don't want to say secret police.
It was not of course a secret.
And then, when the regime collapsed,
how he felt about it that the regime which he served,
obviously with good intentions,
how he felt about it is difficult to know.
He came back to his birthplace,
that is, at the time it was still called Petrograd.
Later renamed - no, no.
Was still called Leningrad and later renamed Saint Petersburg,
where he got a job working for
his ex-professor in the law school, who knew him, of course.
Sobchak, who became mayor of the city,
and he was so regarded at that time as a major liberal force.
And so, Putin served in an administration which was regarded as liberal.
Why was he chosen?
Well, partially because he had at least some foreign experience.
He knew German, which had some significance in the Sobchak administration,
and he was entrusted with foreign economic contact,
which one would think,
gave him an opportunity to some degree of corruption,
whether he took advantage of that or not, it's not clear.
He served Sobchak and he worked on Sobchak's re-election.
However, Sobchak was not re-elected.
And then, he went to Moscow where he had
contacts through his acquaintances still in Saint Petersburg.
And those contacts remain very important for him in the rest of his career.
He was loyal to his friends and acquaintances.
And people that he knew in Saint Petersburg came to play
significant roles at the time
of the Putin Administration.
Why Yeltsin chose him as, well, first he served in the reformed political police,
FSB, where he was named to head it.
It was an odd choice because he was a relatively junior figure,
but perhaps precisely because he was a junior figure,
he was chosen by Yeltsin for this job.
And then, he was the last Prime Minister chosen by Yeltsin during the Yeltsin's tenure.
It has been debated why he chose him, according to some,
argued that Yeltsin saw him as his successor when he was chosen.
And Putin, it is said,
promised that he will not prosecute the Yeltsin
and Yeltsin's family for various, obviously, corrupt acts.
There is no evidence that this was,
in fact, the case.
And even so, even if it was,
there's no doubt that many other potential prime ministers
would have been happy to make the same arrangement.
The argument has been made that he was chosen by the oligarchs.
The oligarchs were people who became fabulously rich during
the Yeltsin era and managed to combine economic and political power,
the two are obviously intertwined.
Now, why the oligarchs would have chosen him?
It's not clear.
But we can say that Putin ultimately was an accidental.
Prime Minister non-accidental, president.
What happened was that on New Year's Eve,
at the end of the millennium, Yeltsin resigned.
And according to the Russian constitution,
it was the prime minister who was the temporary president.
Now, his resignation gave a great advantage to
Putin when it came to
the elections because he wasn't already in the position of power.
And the elections which were held three or four months later,
he was elected, something like,
52-54% of the vote.
Now, those elections were reasonably fair.
His major components, Primakov,
who had been prime minister, Luzhkov,
who was mayor of Moscow.
It is not clear that those people had a greater degree of support than Putin,
but he became president for the simple reason that Yeltsin chose him.
Well, what kind of political order did he establish?
The Constitution, Yeltsin's constitution of '94,
gave great power to the president.
It was a presidential administration.
Now, Yeltsin, because of his background,
because of his character,
because of what he was,
did not take advantage of the opportunities
for imposing his will on the political system,
which he was a different character.
He was in the position to use that essential power.
And what he was doing,
what he brought into being is sometimes described as illiberal democracy.
Illiberal democracy can be understood,
can be defined as a political order in which the form of democracy are observed.
Elections are held regularly.
There are other political opponents whose views can be articulated.
But nonetheless, the president,
the autocrat has power to make the playing field far from even.
Now, it must be said that the kind of regime,
the kind of ideology in which Putin believe was not a Russian specialty.
We see the same autocrat establishing themselves in at one time,
or another in countries of Eastern Europe, Turkey most particularly.
So what Putin was doing from the very beginning is to centralize power.
Centralize power meaning, that he eliminated potential opposition.
Where did this potential opposition come from?
Well, primarily the oligarchs,
the oligarchs whose economic and political power but such as to make an influence fail.
And some actually were there to question,
Putin's decisions and Putin one after another took steps which restrained,
eliminated these people and all of them at one time or another
ended up out of the country and this potential opposition was overcome.
I will return to this issue of the issue of corruption,
but it can be said that the very outset Putin
taking steps against the oligarchs, was very popular.
This was a wind or win situation for him.
The oligarchs were perfectly good reasons,
were unpopular and Putin taking steps against
them was welcomed by the Russian people.
And the fact that the most of them,
of the oligarchs happened to be Jewish,
made the removal all the easier.
The other restriction of power which might have been in the Putin era
was that Yeltsin made substantial,
and meaningful efforts to decentralize the political administration,
and made the governors of various Russian provinces elective officers.
Now these different governor in different parts get better or worse jobs,
but by and large they were little stars in their own district,
some of them really fabulously corrupt but Putin was doing,
imposing on the districts a new set of bureaucratic offices
of a super governor which was responsible
for several provinces and thereby limit the authority of the governors.
And then finally, a couple of years later,
he simply made the governorship appointed officers in which the local administration,
the local legislature had the opportunity to oppose.
But by and large from that point on,
the governors were appointed officers.
Well, the changes which were occurring,
the political changes which were occurring once again were imposed from above.
The involvement of the Russian people of carrying out these changes remained very remote.
The legislature function, there were political parties and unlike Yeltsin,
Putin came to be associated with a major political party United Russia,
and this political party had advantage of having the state support,
the PR behind them and thereby
the United Russia has remained in control of the parliament
from the first days to the last in the Putin era.
Further,
Putin restricted the power of the independent media.
That is, during the Yeltsin era, newspapers,
television stations, presented a whole variety of use.
Putin made sure that the most significant news source namely television,
came to be taken over by those who supported Putin and removed those oligarchs who
owned television stations and the state took them over
and thereby made a major step of limiting the political views,
and political opinions which were and could be expressed in Russia at the time.
So in that sense,
it came to be an autocratic form of government in which
political views could be expressed successfully only under limited circumstances.
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