The Russian State in the Time of Putin

Gerald M. Easter1

Abstract: As Putins second term ends, the tone of Western opinion toward the president has turned increasingly rancorous. Those who feel embittered by the emergence of semi-authoritarianism and crony capitalism out of the communist collapse might consider blaming the theory as well as the man. This article characterizes the post-communist Russian state and Putins legacy as state builder. Drawing on the Russian studies literature, the article looks at the underlying mechanisms that have long shaped statesociety relations in Russia. Using the concept of power resources as an analytical tool, the article attempts to illuminate these mechanisms and, in so doing, examines what is new and what is familiar in the post-communist Russian state.

n December 1999, just as Boris Yeltsin was about to depart the presidency, his prime minister and heir apparent, Vladimir Putin, made clear his purpose: Russia needs and must have strong state power, though I am not calling for totalitarianism. As his second term now comes to an end, most observers would agree that Putin indeed made the Russian state power stronger, at least more so than it had been under his politically inhibited and physically infirmed predecessor. But few would go along with Putins purported aversion to totalitarianism. Today, Westerners affixing labels to the contemporary political regime prefer concepts that recall some aspect of Russias authoritarian past: Putins autocracy (McFaul and Stoner-Weiss, 2008), post-communist thermidor (Sakwa, 2007, p. 23), post-imperial authoritarianism (Hanson, 2006), or neo-KGB state (The Economist, 2007). After more than a decade of discussions about whats new in Russia, Vladimir Putin has forced scholars to consider a different topic of conversationwhats familiar.
1

Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston College. In arriving at certain opinions about Russian politics and history, the author acknowledges the influence of David McDonald, founding member of the Cannons Colloquium, and Burton Miller, head of the Marlin Deviationist subchapter..

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Post-Soviet Affairs, 2008, 24, 3, pp. 199230. DOI: 10.2747/1060-586X.24.3.199 Copyright 2008 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.

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When taking in all that has happened in Russian politics over the past quarter century, it is tempting to put aside the APSR and go back to Klyuchevsky to gain a more insightful perspective. For Russian area specialists, who were earlier made to atone for their culture-laden, atheoretical ways, the concept of historical cycles may not seem so superficial after all. This is not meant to say that invisible cultural forces move across time and space to shape the attitudes and behavior of the people who live between Carpathia and Kamchatka. But there really are recurring patterns of power and wealth in Russia. Through the centuries, power tends to be concentrated at the very top of the state hierarchy and personalized in a chief executive. Still, the tsar was not the general secretary, who was not the president. Likewise, wealth tends to be subject to political whim and hoarded by politically favored cliques among the elite. But the serf economy was not the command economy, which was not the transition economy. Within Russias recurring macro-structural patterns of power and wealth exist particular variations in form. This article considers what is new as well as what is familiar about the organization of state power in post-communist Russia. The conceptual focus of the analysis is neither fuzzy cultural forces nor fictitious rational actors, but realist power resources. More specifically, the article investigates the reconfiguration of power resources in the Russian state in the time of Putin.

BEFORE PUTIN: POWER RESOURCES AND THE POST-COMMUNIST STATE

In the study of post-communist Russia, the state has gone from forgotten to focal point. In the early 1990s, the unexpected collapse of communist regimes in East Europe provoked a scholarly reaction, in which social scientific generalists derided area studies specialists for their failure to predict 1989. The field was rechristened the ideal laboratory and soon overflowed with theoretical concepts and research designs from neo-liberal economists, American behavioralists, and comparative transitologists, none of whom featured the state prominently in its analysis (Bunce, 1995; Goldman, 1997; Cohen, 1999; Hanson and Ruble, 2005). But this understated state did not last long. In the time it takes to publish a dissertation, real-life events once again overtook social science theory. By the end of the 1990s, Russian democracy was derailed and capitalism was corrupted, and the main culprit was the post-communist state. Since the fiscal crisis of the late 1990s, a scholarly consensus has held that the post-communist state is guilty for Russias wayward transition (Holmes, 1996). Disagreement quickly arises, however, over the nature of the offense: the state was too weak, too compliant, too avaricious. In fact, the Russian state was all of these things during the transition. Nonetheless, much of the recent scholarly discussion about the post-communist state exhibits a similar flawed assumption. It is supposed that the Russian state either isor should belike the ideal state conceptualized in the liberal

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intellectual tradition. From this perspective, state and society are depicted as autonomous entities, in which society is seen as an aggregate of individuals with competing interests, while the state is composed of politically neutral institutions charged with private conflict resolution and public safety. Scholarship on the post-communist state, in particular, was strongly influenced by the underlying, and often unstated, assumptions of this liberal worldview: individual rationality, blank slate institutions, statesocietal autonomy, and universal applicability. These assumptions prop up analytical concepts, such as state capture (Hellman, Jones, and Kaufmann, 2000) and contra-coercion (Jones Luong and Weinthal, 2004), as well as popular opinion on state-business relations, especially the harsh reaction to the assault on the Yukos Oil Company. A more realist take on the post-communist state, by contrast, was provided by Timothy Frye, whose research findings offer a persuasive argument that gently puts the kibosh on state capture (Frye, 2002). This study employs an alternative conceptual framework influenced by the realist intellectual tradition. This tradition takes direction more from Max Weber than Adam Smith (Held, 1983). In this scheme, the state is depicted not as neutral, but as an actor in its own right and in competition with societal actors over power resources. State and society are distinct units of analysis, but there is no assumption that they are inherently autonomous. From its early modern emergence to its post-modern perseverance, the state has been sustained principally by its ability to lay claim to the power resources of capital and coercion (Tilly, 1994). Capital here refers to the means of economic existence as manifested in kind, cash, or credit, while coercion refers to the means of inflicting punishments of a physical, economic, or social sort as manifested through agents of violence, bureaucracy, and law. Complementing coercion and capital are bureaucratic-administrative resources, which are included in this study as a separate unit of analysis, even though these resources are sometimes subsumed under coercion. Finally, the modern state is sustained by ideological resources, most notably variant forms of ethno-nationalisms and civic religions, which are expressed as socially binding normative narratives and sacred symbols that legitimate the modern states claim to rule. The communist state is distinct from earlier historical cases of state building in that the process begins with the state already in possession of an overabundance of power resources in relation to society (Roeder, 1998). Communist states came as close as any modern states in realizing a monopoly on coercion and capital, which, in turn, fostered an intensely administered society. Communist states, of course, were much less successful in cultivating ideological resources, despite their monopoly over cultural production. Because of this preponderance of power resources in relation to society, post-communist state builders did not have to make and realize claims on capital and coercion as did early modern and post-colonial state builders. As a result, post-communist society was lacking in economic, coercive, and organizational resources, and remained in certain critical respects dependent on the state. This is why a liberal conceptualization

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Table 1. Alternative Conceptual Schemes of Power Resources in the Russian State

Realist state in history Coercive Economic Bureaucraticadministrative Ideological Police state Concessions Patrimonialism Cult of state Liberal state in transition Rule-of-Law state Private property Rational-legal Civic nationalism

of state and society seems so inappropriate for understanding post-communist Russia. The notion of society in a liberal conceptualization is so much more meaningful, based as it is on the historical experience of enduring institutions rooted in society, which managed to stay independent of aggrandizing state authority. But this simply never occurred in Russia, where instead, societys institutions were an extension of state power. The imperial state could never bring itself to empower society. And, even though its elite was drawn from a mass base and it was committed to providing public goods, the Soviet state also never altered the balance of power between state and society. Todays post-communist state bears a much closer resemblance to this familiar state from Russian history than it does to the ideal liberal state. Unfortunately, it was the ideal liberal state that served as the underlying conceptual basis for too many academic discussions about the transition. Types of states can be distinguished by the organization and distribution of power resources within the state as well as between state and society. Using a conceptual scheme based on power resources, it is possible to contrast as ideal types the liberal state in the Russian transition and the realist state from Russian history. An outline sketch appears in Table 1. This article elaborates the ways in which the post-communist state under Putin managed to reproduce the organizational patterns of power resources that were long familiar in Russian history, rather than the liberal-influenced scheme that explicitly or implicitly informed scholarly assumptions and technocratic advice in the transitions literature. So what happened to the power resources of the communist state in Russia? The breakdown of the old regime exposed cleavages within the communist state elite. In this revolutionary situation, some state cadres chose to remain loyal, others voiced criticism, and still others headed for the exit. Defecting cadres tried to take with them the power resources with which they were entrusted in the old regime. They had access to a particular power resource under the old regime, but not a proprietary claim on that resource. Thus, defecting cadres seized the opportunity to switch loyalty to Yeltsins rival Russian state, in which they sought to validate their

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claim on the valued resources of the collapsing Soviet state. As a result, the newly independent Russian state underwent a process of fragmentation of power resources in the early 1990s (McAuley, 1992). In this process, central state actors lost their monopolistic claim on power resources to various elite subgroups, including regional state actors, who sought political autonomy and access to the economic resources located in their territorial domains; state enterprise directors, who made proprietary claims on the valued assets they manage; young apparatchiki, who left their formal positions, but not before diverting resources to new private ventures; and former security personnel, who used the old states coercive resources to start up private violence enterprises. In some cases, the states power resources were simply seized unilaterally, while in other cases, they were bargained away. By the early 1990s, the centralized structures of the Soviet state had given way to a neo-feudal mosaic of power resources (Shlapentokh, 1996). Throughout the decade, new elite actors sought to institutionalize their claims on the resources that they acquired from the central statewithout success. By 2000, the states central executive began to reclaim these dispersed power resources under the leadership of a new president, Vladimir Putin.

THE MAKING OF A POST-COMMUNIST PRESIDENT

Leaders matter. Of course political leaders operate within constraints, but constraints can be redefined. And the personal disposition of leaders is one of the factors that might cause such redefinition. How a leader chooses to employ the power resources inherent in the top post should have some impact, a little more or a little less, on the larger institutional setting over which he presides (Tucker, 1981, p. 30). In Russia, this observation is especially apt given the concentration of power resources to which political leaders have had access, no matter what the regime. For example, world war politicized pre-existing antagonisms in imperial society, but the personal actions of Tsar Nicholas II are routinely invoked to explain why this led to revolution. And just as Stalins paranoid predilections influenced the institutional shape of Soviet communism, so Gorbachevs liberal leanings instigated its unraveling. The reason why leader-centric analysis so often dominated the study of Russian politics is that leaders beliefs and actions made such a notable difference in state policy. While political leadership has been out of fashion with political science theory in recent years, any explanation of the Russian transition that does not explicitly account for the personal dispositions and ruling styles of its two presidents is apt to miss more than it will capture (Brown and Shevtsova, 2001; Breslauer, 2002; Colton, 2008). At the time he was handed the presidency, Vladimir Putin shared a view of the Russian state that had become commonplaceit was weak and ineffective. Indeed, the post-communist state was by now widely considered the root cause of Russias transition woes. While Putin is often depicted as a pragmatist instead of an ideologue, his leadership disposition

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toward post-communist statesociety relations was very much shaped by personal experience with the once-triumphant communist state as well as the embattled post-communist state. In particular, three formative experiences stand out: post-war Leningrad childhood; professional service in the KGB; and post-communist work in the Yeltsin administration. In Russia, the state has long put its stamp on society, shaping the form of collective action and the substance of social identity. From the time of World War II, Stalins regime propagated a Russian-infused brand of Soviet patriotism, which sought to cultivate an identity in which self-worth was entwined with state purpose, and no state purpose was higher than war (Weiner, 2000; Thurston and Bonwetsch, 2000). This officially constructed image was firmly embraced in post-war Leningrad (Kirschenbaum, 2006). Born only a few years after the fateful Leningrad siege, the young Putin came of age in a city that was badly battered, but defiantly unbeaten, a hero city. He was raised in a modest working-class household, whose sense of social status was enhanced by its connections to state service. Family lore boasted of the grandfather chef, who cooked for Bolshevik bigwigs, and the partisan father, who volunteered for frontline duty and harassed Nazi occupiers (Jack, 2004, p. 49). Putin was inspired as a youth by the regimes manufactured myths of intrepid soldiers and spies, who routinely bested their capitalist counterparts. In a now famous interview, Putin recalled how he tried to enlist in the KGB as a teenager, only to be told to come back when he finished university (Putin, 2000). Regardless of accuracy, the story is very much in keeping with the brand of Soviet patriotism that imbued the cultural milieu of working-class Leningrad at the time of Putins youth, and for which he now waxes nostalgic. Upon graduation from the law faculty at Leningrad State University in 1975, Putin fulfilled his early aspiration to become a chekist, joining the ranks of the KGB. The elite security agency was the ultimate state service organ, the heart of Soviet communisms well-ordered police state. The bureaucratic culture of the KGB was shaped by military-style hierarchy, professional esprit de corps, and sacred mission. It was a culture that had a strong sense of state service (Albats, 1994). The cause of the communist state was the cause of its coercive agents, one and the same. In the insulated world of the security forces, statesociety relations were depicted in Hobbesian terms. Left to itself, society would degenerate into a condition of disorder and self-destruction; thus, it was up to the state to act as a civilizing force, bringing social order and collective purpose. To fulfill its civilizing mandate, the state leaned heavily on its sword and shield. Such imagery was an essential element of the bureaucratic culture that Putin was socialized into. Putin served in the KGB for the next decade and a half. He joined the secret police bureaucracy at a time when its status within Soviet officialdom was ascendant as a result of Yuriy Andropovs capable command. Andropov was a confirmed advocate of state socialism, entrusting problem-solving to a professional and dedicated state elite, backed with coercion. By contrast, he was wary of reform socialism experiments, in

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which limited liberalization or democratization was supposed to cultivate societys energy and good will to reinvigorate the state project. He observed firsthand the ill effects of earlier attempts to get in touch with socialisms more humane side in Hungary in 1956. Like Andropov, Putin witnessed the explosive results of mixing spontaneous social movement with tentative state coercion in East Germany in 1989. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Putins German experience, in which a seemingly stable political regime hesitant to use force was suddenly toppled from below, might explain his heavy-handed reaction to opposition protests in Russia. Putin left the security forces in 1991, but as the president likes to say, theres no such thing as a former chekist. Finally, Putin was influenced by his professional experiences in the early post-communist period. He joined up with his former law professor turnedcommunist antagonist, Anatoliy Sobchak, in the Saint Petersburg city administration. Here he first tried to adapt to the uncontrolled conditions of the transition. But he was left incredulous and out of work, when a muddied gubernatorial election ousted his political patron from office. Putin next appeared on the Moscow stage. He arrived in late 1996 as an unknown, but in less than three years was appointed prime minister. His responsibilities during this time put him in the thick of the central states handling of power resources. As assistant to Pavel Borodin, he was involved in the management and sale of state property. As head of the Kremlin Control Department, he investigated the internal affairs of the state administration. As first deputy head of the Presidential Administration, he represented the center in relations with the regional governors. And as head of the FSB, he was entrusted with securing the loyalty of the police to the president. Putin became personally familiar with how the central states power resourcescoercive, economic, and bureaucratic were being traded, sold, and generally mismanaged during the Yeltsin presidency. In post-communist Russia, the states power resources were concentrated in the office of the president. And the political leaders personal disposition mattered in how they were deployed. Boris Yeltsin bargained away economic and bureaucratic-administrative resources and showed reluctance to mobilize coercive resources, with a few notable exceptions, for political or policy ends. This leadership style promoted new regional and economic elites. Under Yeltsin, the state resembled a medley of political and economic fiefdoms, in which the central executives governing capabilities often appeared enfeebled. By contrast, Vladimir Putin shared neither Yeltsins hostility toward the communist state nor his ambivalence toward his previous state service. Putins formative experiences shaped three inclinations, which distinguished his leadership disposition from that of Yeltsin. From his youth, Putin was inspired by Soviet patriotism; from his KGB career, Putin was inclined towards state socialism; and from the post-communist transition, Putin was convinced of the perils of society unrestrained.

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These formative experiences reinforced in Putin a preference for what David McDonald called the venerable notion of statehood, which has managed to maintain a determined hold on Russian elites since the time of the tsars (McDonald, 2007, p. 199). A product of this statist mentalit, Putin came to office convinced of the need to reassert the authority of the central state. He emphasized the need to rebuild the vertical structures of power, that is, to reclaim for the central state the power resources that it never formally relinquishedcoercive, economic, bureaucratic-administrative, and ideological.

RUSSIA, A NORMAL POLICE STATE

The state, V. I. Lenin observed, is a special kind of cudgel. V. V. Putin would agree (Tucker, 1975, p. 490). Perhaps the most obvious feature of the Russian state under Putin was the renewed readiness to use coercion. In retrospect, it is surprising that the first wave of transition scholarship was so neglectful of the states enormous reserve of coercive resources, especially considering how flimsy the new regimes civilian checks were. Instead, the analytical cues that Russian area scholars received from their more theoretically grounded colleagues led them on a search for signs of democracy, the market, and civil society. The secret police, meanwhile, kept a low profile. But even after emerging from behind the transition scenery to claim center stage, the agents of state coercion often are still not accorded a central role by scholars. Instead, parties, parliaments, and elections remain the feature attractions in recent Russian politics textbooks (Ross, 2004; White, Gitelman, and Sakwa, 2005; Hesli, 2007), with only a few exceptions (Waller, 2005). In a provocative essay, Shleifer and Treisman made the case that Russia was finally a normal country (Shleifer and Treisman, 2004). At one level, this seems true enough; there is nothing intrinsically unique about present-day Russiano great ideological mission and the transition is over. Contemporary Russia possesses a political and economic system whose essential features can be found in some variant form elsewhere (although thuggish single-party democracy and crony capitalism might not have been what those Russian citizens had in mind who expressed the desire to live normalno). Indeed, Russia is normala normal police state, that is. Coercion is a component of all political regimes; it is just more prominent in some than in others. As ideal types go, you wouldnt confuse Orwells Ministry of Truth with Smiths Night Watchman, even though they both involve coercion in defense of the status quo. While police states may come in various shades, the common characteristic would be the routine use of a political police force as an instrument of authoritarian rule, enforcing compliance through extensive surveillance, direct and indirect intimidation, and, if need be, unchecked violence. In Russia, this political institutional feature dates back to Ivan the Terribles loyal attack dogs, the oprichniki (Riasanovsky, 1984, p. 150 and p. 151). In its turn, the communist state did its best to follow Webers dictum by monopolizing the means of

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violence upon its territory. Western scholars made this one of the essential traits of the totalitarian caricature. The communist state was dedicated to the cultivation of coercive resources, which, in turn, affected the organization of society. According to estimates, the Soviet state employed five million in uniformed armed forces, one million in political and civilian police forces, and 10 million in military industry (Gaddy, 1996, p. 23 and p. 24). Moreover, the communist regime was considered to have been generally effective at keeping this extensive coercive apparatus under civilian political control. But political constraints on the coercive forces began to fray in the late Soviet period and were almost completely severed after the old regimes collapse.2 The post-communist period was marked by impromptu privatization and decentralization of the coercive resources of the communist state. Vadim Volkov counted 11,652 newly registered private security firms by 1999 (Volkov, 2002, p. 138). The several hundred thousand agents remaining in state employ, meanwhile, faced an uncertain future. Yeltsin broke up the KGB into a half dozen smaller agencies with more narrowly defined mandates. Without a cold war to fight or a proletarian dictatorship to defend, demoralized police lost their sacred service mission. With the state continuously strapped for revenue, security operations were curtailed, and personal livelihoods were crimped. And the possibility that there could be a settling of past accounts, as happened to some other communist bloc cops, left Russias police vulnerable to retribution. After the collapse, the police were released from Communist Party oversight. But they were not effectively checked by the new civilian political institutions. Early initiatives to subordinate the states security forces to parliamentary oversight were strongly resisted and ultimately came to naught (Knight, 1996, p. 40). Instead, the police were subordinated to the president. This arrangement was consistent with past patterns of power in Russia in which the police were placed under the personal discretion of the central executive and beyond the reach of politically independent and legally based institutional control. As it turned out, this development was the single most important feature in the institutional design of the new regime, although at the time it received scant notice from transition scholars. Yeltsin and the police shared a mutual interest in keeping the security forces insulated on the executive side. Still, Yeltsins authority over the security agencies was tenuous, and he was careful not to antagonize them. Putins authority, on the other hand, was more secure, though his professional background as a chekist effectively blurred the institutional line of civilianpolice relations.
2

Because there are so many coercive agencies, it can be confusing as to which ones we are talking about. To keep things straight: coercive forces is an inclusive term, referring to all police agencies and the military; security forces is a narrower term, referring to special police forces, and excludes the military and the civilian militia; and police refers more specifically to the secret police or the political police, the KGB and FSB.

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Putin sought to reconstitute and reinvigorate the fragmented and weakened security forces. Following the terrorist attacks in Moscow and Beslan, security agencies were recentralized, given expanded operational mandates, and allocated greater resources (Solomon, 2005). Reforms in 2000 and 2003 reconsolidated most federal coercive agencies back under FSB control, including border guards, intelligence gathering, and economic crimes; meanwhile, two-thirds of the 50,000-strong tax police force were reassigned to a newly formed narcotics control agency, headed by one of Putins Saint Petersburg KGB colleagues. Presidential decrees and Duma legislation consistently enhanced the surveillance and criminal investigative powers of the police regarding terrorist threats, tax evasion, foreign espionage, and political opposition. Since Putin assumed office, all coercive forcesthe military, civilian militia, and secret policereceived sizable funding increases approximating nearly 25 percent per year (Medvedev, 2006, p. 151). The police were always close to the locus of power in Russian politics, but not until Putin did they actually occupy it for themselves. In tsarist and communist times, the police served a state with a legitimate leadership and ruling ethos, to which they had only to subscribe not to provide. But the domestic political crisis that began at the end of the Soviet period destroyed these unifying institutions and symbols. Russias post-communist transition was marked by protracted elite conflict waged along personal, institutional, and ideological lines. The fiscal collapse of the post-communist state and terrorist attacks on home territory at the end of the 1990s were the culmination of this crisis. In a newspaper interview, an anonymous security agent recalled the view that the weakening of state power and unleashing of society in the 1990s had caused a real threat to the country, Russia was in danger (Moscow Times, February 8, 2008). The police got political, and stepped into the void. In some countries at times of crisis, the military is known to ride in on horseback to save the day. But there was no such tradition in Russia, where instead the police quietly cruised into power behind a dark-tinted Mercedes. Under Putin, Russias post-communist police state took shape, featuring: (1) new service mission; (2) enhanced policy role; (3) expanded political role; and (4) revised coercioncapital relationship. First, deprived of its historic mission in the battle between socialism and capitalism, the police needed a new raison dtre to fit transition conditions. By the late 1990s, the security apparatus finally embraced a post-communist service mission, dubbed the economic security of the state. This new national security concept explicitly linked state strength with economic conditions. The lesson of the fall of the USSR, noted one of the concepts architects, is that for a secure existence it is not enough to have a powerful military, if at the same time basic economic needs are not met (Senchagov, 2002, p. 58). According to the concept, the main security threats to the state were now the impoverishment of the population, the decline of the industrial base, and the rise of organized crime. The states security agents, therefore, must direct their attention to combating illegal

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economic activities, illicit trade, tax evasion, and official corruption. The 1998 fiscal collapse became the event that crystallized this new service mission for the police as part of its post-communist corporate identity (Easter, 2002). Second, the police assumed a larger role in both policy-making and policy implementation. Regarding policy-making, the states security agents effectively took charge of the civilian government. The taking of the government did not come in dramatic gun-wielding fashion, but rather incrementally, bureaucratically, and constitutionally. In the past, Russian central executives were supposed to acquire military experience; police experience was not considered a proper path to civilian political leadership. But in the final phase of the communist state this changed, beginning with Andropov, and was further legitimated by Yeltsins prime minister appointments. For much of Putins tenure, former cops dominated the states top policy posts: president, prime minister, and parliamentary speaker; even the defense minister was ex-KGB. With the security forces in charge, the governments agenda was increasingly taken up with enemiesat home, in the near abroad, and in the West. The movement of security personnel into civilian government prompted the introduction of an appropriately goonish monikerthe siloviki. Drawn from the Soviet power ministries in general and the Leningrad KGB in particular, the siloviki are routinely identified as the shadowy force behind the regimes increasingly authoritarian tendencies. The extensiveness of siloviki in the policy process is considerable, but their cohesiveness as a political bloc is doubtful, as suggested by the intense inter-agency feuding that marked the end of the Putins second term. Policemen were also deployed in interlocking directorates to oversee the policy implementation process. Russias police had not been involved in state administration in such an overt and intimidating manner since the time of Stalin (Kryshtanovskaya and White, 2003). Interlocking directorates connect the central executive to the sprawling and compartmentalized administration, using personal network ties among a cohort of exsecret policemen that radiate out from the state center to strategic formal bureaucratic positions. In this way, interlocking directorates provide an informal mechanism to facilitate policy coordination, information exchange, and resource allocation. For example, the Defense Ministry by the end of the 1990s was impenetrable and unaccountable to the state center. Putin successfully wrested control of the administration of the defense bureaucracy away from the generals. A former Saint Petersburgbased KGB general, Sergey Ivanov, was named defense minister. Ivanov recruited ex-police to assist, including the defense ministrys official representative to the Security Council, the head of the personnel department, and the head of the internal affairs inspectorate. Putin even tried to penetrate the opaque world of military finances, by audaciously appointing Lyubov Kudelina from the Finance Ministry to the post of Deputy Minister of Defense, overseeing military fiscal affairs. In similar fashion, the central executive used interlocking directorates to reestablish control over strategic revenue-generating

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state-run enterprises. Most notably, Gazprom employed former policemen as directors overseeing corporate management, exports, finance, personnel, and legal affairs. Third, by definition the police in a police state are a political instrument. But post-communist Russia is a peculiar form of competitive authoritarianism, which features semi-democratic elections (Way and Levitsky, 2002). The political role of the secret police, thus, was rescripted from curbing dissent to promoting partisanship. The ability of Putins security cohort to continue to control the government was linked to the electoral fortunes of the United Russia party. Here Putin succeeded where Yeltsin failed, by creating a nationwide conglomerate of local political machines that could get out the vote in parliamentary as well as presidential elections. The FSB was increasingly active on behalf of United Russia in parliamentary campaigns, using coercive resources to intimidate media outlets, harass opposing parties, and discredit political rivals. Finally, coercioncapital relations were transformed in post-communist Russia as coercion got a lot closer to capital. The first tentative steps toward market capitalism led to industrial collapse and social dislocation. The most valuable assets were grabbed by a small group of politically influential tycoons, whose commitment to promoting economic growth and fulfilling social obligations was lacking. Taking a cue from Yeltsins benign stance, the police were initially reluctant to interfere. Then the postcommunist state went bankrupt and a new president moved in. The states security agents were set loose on the new economic elite with a vengeance. They took up seats in the boardrooms of the richest corporations, making sure that the states interests were included in the bottom line. Coercion became a feature of state finance with the aggressive prosecution of tax evasion and criminalization of tax avoidance. Corporate compliance with tax obligations increased as a result of the states high-profile displays of coercion. But the involvement of the police in the economy runs deeper. The police did not uproot the system of informal takings of economic resources, but rather supplanted those who created it. The expanded operational mandate that went with the polices new economic security service mission provided an opportunity for coercion to gain direct access to capital through a new form of state predation. In this post-communist protection racket, the security forces profited from the creation of a quasiformal collections agency, staffed by former policemen and authorized to confiscate property from firms that are either in financial difficulty or in trouble with the law. The process has been called velvet reprivatization, suggesting the legalistic faade given to what is in effect a state-sanctioned extortion racket (Kommersant, November 30, 2007).

COERCION AND THE CONCESSIONS ECONOMY

In reaction to its atheoretical and insulated past, scholarship on postcommunist Russia was infused with a jolt of theoretically grounded and

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generalizable neo-liberal economics, in which society was viewed as an aggregate of individuals harboring similar desires and needs. A skeptical minority of scholars managed to study political economy questions without indulging neo-liberal assumptions (Goldman, 1997; Gaddy and Ickes, 1998; Woodruff, 1999; Johnson, 2000), but the more dominant academic trend was to go along. The neo-liberal autopsy on the socialist economy listed the states suffocation of societys natural economic inclinations as the main cause of death. Thus, the disentangling of the state from the economy to uncover the suppressed markets within became the transitions priority task. Many economic problems solve themselves, assured one enthusiast, markets spring up as soon as central planning bureaucrats vacate the field (Sachs, 1994, p. xiii). The departed communist state, however, bequeathed more than just economic planners. As it turned out, the unleashing of individual incentive in the service of market capitalism was a more complex task under post-communist particularities than theoretical generalists had supposed. Neo-liberalinspired economic reforms led to crony capitalism, organized crime, official corruption, insider trading, and financial scams. As a result, the critique of neo-liberalism is now its own sizeable literature, and in four varieties: denial, repentance, vindication, and scorn. Denial is expressed from those who long insisted that as messy as things might look, Russia had, in fact, constructed market capitalism, as growth and prosperity were only being concealed by deliberately deflated economic statistics, while any persisting problems were due not to neo-liberal plans per se, but to the illintent of those who implemented them (slund, 2001). Repentance is expressed by economists who early on advocated macro-policy radical reform, only later to acknowledge its shortcomings in the absence of accompanying institutional and cultural support (Ericson, 1998; Stiglitz, 2002). Vindication is expressed by economists with area studies training, who were consistently skeptical that manipulations of macro-level incentive structures would cause a shift in individual behavior that cumulatively would lead to the emergence of market capitalism (Goldman, 1996). Scorn is expressed in vitriolic fashion by analysts who view Russias neoliberal experiment as an imperialistic sham, which some of its leading academic proponents used personally to enrich themselves (Wedel, 1998). The Russian transitions unanticipated economic deviations were a direct outcome of the post-communist states unique historical path, whereupon it already possessed an overabundance of coercive resources. Post-communist scholars who took their cues from economists would have profited more from Schellings cool appraisal of criminal enterprise than Friedmans warm praise of free enterprise (Schelling, 1967; Friedman and Friedman, 1980). The ideal neo-liberal world may be one of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makersthose who create capital; but the real postcommunist world was one of cops, colonels, and racketeersthose who trade in coercion. Only a few scholars, however, incorporated coercion directly into their analysis of post-communist political and economic change (Volkov, 2002; Ledeneva, 2006). The end of the Cold War brought

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one of the largest demobilizations in history, which was mostly ignored because in the neo-liberal lexicon coercion is not an essential component in making markets. The coercive talent of the communist state did not fade away like an old soldier; instead it became a defining feature of the concessions economy. Economic reform did not lead to market capitalism in Russia, but instead led to concessions capitalism.3 While the contemporary Russian economy is multifaceted, the concept of concessions capitalism places the emphasis on what distinguishes it from command socialism and market capitalism. The economic resources of the communist state were not fully redistributed to society in the form of private property. Rather, many of the valued assets of the command economy were made into state concessions. Concessions capitalism is a kind of upstairs-downstairs economy in which upstairs are found strategic industries and public service monopolies in the form of large corporations that remain directly or indirectly subordinated to the state sector, while downstairs are found mass consumption retail and trade in the form of small and medium enterprises that are organized into a regulated private sector. This organizational scheme emerged under Yeltsin, but was consolidated under Putin. The Putin administration deepened state intervention into the workings of the upstairs economy, while, at the same time, it sought to curb state predation on the downstairs economy. Under Yeltsin, the new economic elite sought to convert its concessions into private property, but they were disabused of this aspiration by Putin. The economic resources found upstairs belonged to the state. Compared to Yeltsins improvised and personalistic approach, Putin fashioned a more corporatist-style arrangement to statebusiness relations, with the threat of coercion giving the state a distinct advantage in the bargaining process. Meanwhile, Putin took a different approach to the downstairs economy, delimiting the powers of local officialdom, lightening the tax burden, and streamlining the regulatory regime. But it is not so easy to maintain differing policies upstairs and downstairs. The restraint that the center urged on local state agents often went unheeded, especially when shown the example of unchecked coercion by the state center. While the small-business sector experienced modest growth under Putin, the Russian state is still a fiscal dependent on the wealth generated by the concessions economy. State concessions come mainly in three forms: (1) lucrative natural resources; (2) large manufacturing firms; and (3) public monopolies. After a steady decline in the 1990s, the state sector began to grow again under
3 Concessions are not unfamiliar to capitalist economies. The owner of a sports stadium concedes a space or privilege to a private firm to sell popcorn and soda. The concessionaire profits from the non-competitive market and in exchange pays off the stadium owner with a fee and share of the profits. The concessionaire does not own the space, it is a paid-for privilege subject to contractual agreement. Of course, Russian state concessions are not regulated by the terms of legally enforceable contracts, so the popcorn vendor has more rights than the oil baron.

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Putin, as indicated by the increase of state-owned shares on the Russian stock marketfrom 20 percent in 2003 to 35 percent in 2007 (Woodruff, 2007, pp. 1113). This increase was especially related to state intervention in the energy sector. Boris Gryzlov, the former militia-head-turned parliament speaker, made the point succinctly: The countrys natural resources do not belong to any corporation or particular person, but to all the people of Russia, which, in practice, really means the state (Moscow Times, October 30, 2003). In contemporary Russia, state concessions are not managed directly by state ministries and agencies, as was the case in the command economy. They are farmed out to politically favored corporate executives, who are charged with turning a profit while navigating the pitfalls of global capitalism and fulfilling state-determined social obligations. For those concessionaires who can manage all of the above, the opportunity for personal enrichment is great. And for those who either fall short or, worse yet, aspire for more, their economic holdings are vulnerable to confiscation. State concessions in Russia are regulated not by enforceable contracts, but rather by the personal discretion of high-level state actors. While concession capitalism is distinct from market capitalism and command socialism, it is not an unprecedented form of economic organization in Russian history, where those who controlled coercive resources have also long controlled economic resources. Instead of a division of coercive and economic resources between state and society, as occurred in some early modern European states, there was a concentration of these power resources within the Russian realm. The state claimed ownership over the most valuable assets in the economy and, as a result, determined the criteria for conferring elite status in society. To illustrate, from the 16th to 19th centuries, the Stroganov family maintained a mutually beneficial relationship with the Russian autocracy by acting as concessionaires. The Stroganovs were already wealthy Hanseatic traders who were forced to adjust to Moscows confiscation of the Novgorod merchant economy. It began with Anika Stroganovs salt concession, a valuable source of state revenue, and was expanded to include Grigoriy Stroganovs settlement of the Siberian frontier, which brought the family to a lofty position of economic wealth and political influence (Martin, 1995, p. 275). In wartime, Stroganov concession profits heavily financed a successful military campaign against Sweden, which led Peter to confer a hereditary baronage on the family. In peacetime, the Stroganovs built beautiful baroque churches and acquired art treasures for the Hermitage, which prompted Catherine to appoint Aleksandr Stroganov to the exclusive State Council (de Madariaga, 2005, p. 370). The relationship between tsars and Stroganovs reflected a system of wealth and power in Imperial Russia, which was manifested in state concessions and state service. The Stroganovs generally played the game well, but any leadership change meant that game rules could change as well, and fortunes and honors were revoked for those concessionaires who resisted. This system of power and wealth operated right up to the final years of the old regime. Sergey Witte employed a concessions strategy to

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facilitate industrialization in the late imperial periodfor example, in Russian railway construction and economic development of the Far East (McDonald, 1992). The concessions system bears at least some resemblance to contemporary relations between the post-communist state and the new business elite. Post-communist Russias concessions economy is defined by several features associated with Putins tenure, although they existed since the early 1990s. First, in the redistribution of the communist states economic resources, the line between public and private property was not fixed. Under Yeltsin, the state was generous in granting economic concessions, but was vague about formalizing proprietary claims of private actors and thereby creating a recognized protective boundary. With Putin, the line between private and public not only remained blurred, but also shifted to the advantage of the state. Second, the economic elite in Russia is not autonomous, but a state creation. Power and wealth relations may have been a bit fuzzy under Yeltsin, whose impulsive leadership style and frequent absences allowed favored business tycoons to gain influence in state policymaking, but the relationship between power and wealth was made crystal clear under the more resolute and steady Putin. Russias post-communist economic elite do not own their wealth, they are concessionaires. They lack the power resources to assert autonomy; they are too weak either to capture the state or to bargain with it as equals. Third, economic concessions come with obligations of state service, which mainly means revenue. Here, leadership style matters. The politically embattled Yeltsin was lax in forcing the business elite to fulfill its social obligations, but the politically secure Putin coerced the business elite to pay taxes to the state and to bestow gifts on the nation in the form of recovering lost art treasures, funding health clinics, and outfitting sports teams. Not to comply meant to risk losing it all. Russias post-communist economic elite comprises very rich concessionaires, not robber baronsmore like Stroganov than Rockefeller. The concessions economy is one of the major recurring structural patterns in Russia (Hedlund, 2005). It is the result not of some invisible cultural force, but of the organization of power resourcesnamely, the concentration of coercion and capital. The contemporary concession economy is sustained by the same three sources as was its imperial predecessor. First, the fiscal needs of the state are at the core of the concessions economy. Russian rulers have relied on fixed assets that could be directly taxedfur trade, land cultivation, and mineral resources. They have not been terribly bothered, past or present, to pursue moveable assets through indirect taxation of transactions, preferring instead to concentrate on fixed economic resources in a way that would yield readily extractable rents. Second, the political needs of maintaining a police state are also a factor, in that a main threat to the continued dominance of Russias semiauthoritarian regime of ex-cops is the emergence of autonomous centers of wealth in society. The state is covetous of its power resources, and is vigilant in not allowing them to move beyond its control; hence, for example, the Kremlins strong objection to privately funded and managed oil and gas

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pipelines. Third, the economic interests of the elite reinforce the concessions economy. State concessions generate considerable wealth. A business actor that seeks to restrain the state runs the risk of falling from favor and getting cut out of the spoils; this tangible threat effectively keeps economic elites divided from one another in their dealings with the state. And the central executive has long demonstrated skill at taking advantage of cleavages within the elite: old aristocracy vs dvoryanstvo; Sverdlovsk vs Dnepropetrovsk; and oligarchs vs siloviki.

PERSISTENCE OF PATRIMONIALISM
The organization of bureaucratic-administrative resources is perhaps the area in which there has been the least change over the longue dure. From the medieval court of the grand prince to the modern bureaucracy of the general secretary, the Russian state possessed a patrimonial administrative structure (Crummey, 1987; LeDonne, 1991; Rigby and Harasymiw, 1983). Patrimonialism refers to an ideal type of organizational scheme for a states bureaucratic-administrative resources. It is commonly distinguished from its ideal counter-type, the Weberian rational-legal administrative structure. The key difference is whether administrative practices are organized along personal or impersonal lines. The rational-legal scheme is defined by standardized operational practices, checked and rule-governed use of resources, recruitment on the basis of professional expertise, and insulation from political pressure. By contrast, the patrimonial scheme is defined by idiosyncratic operational practices, unchecked and discretionary use of resources, recruitment on the basis of patronage, and more direct exposure to political pressure. Again, these are ideal types; their application is based on observable tendencies across a state bureaucracy. Patrimonial administration was common to all early modern European states, altthough the rise of capitalism and military revolution pushed some closer to a rationallegal administrative structure (Brewer, 1990; Ertman, 1997). Russia was not one of them. The persistence of patrimonialism in Russia was sustained by two institutional features: the concessions economy, which meant that the state does not have to bargain with independent economic elites, and the concentration of political power in the central executive, which meant that the state does not have to bargain with autonomous territorial elites. As a result, power resources were concentrated in the central executive, who allocated them to strategic points in the bureaucracy. Around those points, patron-client networks formed. But the concentration of power and wealth created a conundrum for central executives: how to make sure that centrally-dictated policies were implemented at the lower levels of the expansive state bureaucracy? It was a dilemma for tsars as well as general secretaries, and now for presidents. In the early 1990s, the old regimes collapse caused the rapid decentralization of the states bureaucratic resources. Central control over territorial administration and state finances, in particular, became incoherent

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and incapacitated. The central-regional administrative command chain was broken. Under Yeltsin, some bureaucratic-administrative resources were reassigned to local leaders out of political consideration; others were simply seized in blatant disregard of the centers claims. The system of state finances, meanwhile, was divvied up among grasping ministers, emboldened governors, and connected bankers. This process was halted and reversed during the Putin presidency, which reasserted the central executives preeminent position in the state bureaucracy. When Putin famously vowed to strengthen the vertical lines of power in the state, he was returning to an institutional strategy of administration that was familiar in Russian history and the source of its persistent patrimonialismbureaucratic parellelism. Bureaucratic parallelism was long employed by Russian rulers as an administrative practice that complemented a state in which power resources were concentrated at and flowed from the top. The central executive delegated authority to lower-level actors in a vertical command chain. Lower-level officials were representatives of central authority; they did not have an independent claim to political authority. Imperial governors-general were the viceroys of the tsars, while oblast first secretaries were the prefects of the politburo (Robbins, 1987; Hough, 1969). In this system, the central executives principal means of control was vertically structured parallel bureaucracies. The states bureaucratic agents found themselves in competition with one another for the resources and favor of the central executive. In principle, bureaucratic agents would follow the dictates of their higher-ups in the formal command chain as well as keep an eye on their cross-located bureaucratic rivals, acting as diverse sources of information for the center. The strategy did not always work. In practice, bureaucratic parallelism fostered informal horizontally structured patronage networks, or family circles, which flourished around resource allocation points in the bureaucratic chain and insulated local officialdom from the prying eyes of the center (Fainsod, 1963). Putins pledge to rebuild vertical power in the post-communist state created a revised form of bureaucratic parallelism, with its own particular patrimonial tendencies. Maybe the most dramatic reversal of institutional fortunes in Putins reign involved territorial administration. Yeltsins ongoing political conflicts directly affected the center-regional relationship. He ceded bureaucratic and economic resources to regional governors in exchange for political support in battles against Gorbachevs Soviet Union, Khasbulatovs Supreme Soviet, and Zyuganovs Communist Party. By the second half of the 1990s, regional governors effectively became autonomous political actors, elected from below instead of appointed from above. Their once informal patronage networks were transformed into full-blown political machines, securing a grip on local elected office. Regional leaders now openly contested the center for a larger share of coercive and economic resources, and routinely defied central policy directives. Yeltsins strategy to hold it all together through informal ad hoc negotiations produced an uneven and contradictory federal structure.

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In Yeltsins administration, Putin headed an office charged with overseeing the implementation of central policy in the regions. What he learned in that post probably explains his priorities as president. In systematic fashion, he reasserted central executive supremacy in the territorial division of state power, reconcentrating power resources at the top. First, the new territorial-administrative layer, the federal district, reestablished the role of centrally empowered viceroys to oversee local affairs. In this case, the presidents personal representatives were recruited mainly from the security forces and focused attention on the recentralization of coercive resources (Petrov and Slider, 2007). Next, a special commission, headed by Dmitriy Kozak, was formed to impose clarity on the jurisdictional boundaries between center and regions. The unevenness in the federal structure was pressed out. The ad hoc special deals negotiated by the Yeltsin administration were terminated. The Kozak Commission outlined a series of fiscal reforms that effectively recentralized the states economic resources. The central executive was once again the main claimant on the most lucrative revenue sources. But the biggest change came in 2004, when the institutional independence of regional governors was curtailed. This legislation ended the popular election of regional leaders and reinstituted the presidents appointment powers. Thus, the underlying source of authority in territorial administration was returned to the central executive. With the concentration of power resources in the central executive, Putin effectively revived the practice of bureaucratic parallelism. It created a more centralized bureaucratic-administrative structure and at least the appearance of a more compliant local officialdom. While not all the central executives dictates are obeyed at the lower levels, it is difficult to imagine any regional leaders today making unilateral grabs for power resources or contesting the centers claim on power resources as they did so openly under Yeltsin (Stoner-Weiss, 2006). This practice was complemented by the announcement of major government initiatives to promote a rationallegal approach to state administration, including civil service reform, public administration reform, and anti-corruption campaigns. There is little evidence, however, that these reforms advanced much further than the rhetorical stage. The frustration of the central executive with the performance of the bureaucratic apparatus, which is genuine, is yet another recurring theme in Russian politics. A 2003 presidential decree on administrative reform that called for reduced interference in economic affairs, less duplication of functions, and clearer delineation of assignments could easily have been lifted from the pages of Partiynaya zhizn (OECD Economic Survey, 2006, p. 125). For tsars and general secretaries, the issuing of such proclamations was more often symbolic gesture than serious reform. Russias postcommunist presidents are readily enabled in the contemporary performance of this ritual by Western-based financial and non-governmental organizations, which like to convene instructional workshops at posh hotels and publish position papers in glossy bindings that promote campaign slogans transparency, meritocracy, accountability. But

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a state bureaucracy cannot be transformed from a patrimonial to a rationallegal type without first addressing the underlying organization of power resources. And, in the end, it has always proved a dubious undertaking for a central executive that refused to be institutionally constrained to impose a rational order over the rest of the state. Marc Raeffs description of Russian officialdom in the 18th century as a carousel of cliques, personal connections, and family alliances continues to resonate (Raeff, 1984, p. 46). But todays bureaucratic parallelism comes with a post-communist twist. Formerly, the central executive was on guard against the entrenchment of informal patronage networks, while now local political machines are an encouraged feature of a political system that conducts regular semicompetitive elections. Putins national party of power, United Russia, is built upon a foundation of co-opted regional political machines. Center regional relations under Putin are shaped even more so than in the past by mutual political interests. The president needs the regional political machines to churn out votes to win elections and maintain control of the central executive, and the governors need the presidents favor to stay in office and receive the valued resources now amassed in the central executive. With this added political incentive, locally based patronage networks have become fixed in the post-communist state bureaucracy. It is hard to imagine a policy area in which the Yeltsin presidency failed more miserably than state finance. The post-communist state started out with an underdeveloped fiscal capacity to operate in a transition economy. In his memoirs, Yeltsin acknowledged the incoherence of fiscal policy by recalling a meeting with his administration, the government, and the central bankalmost a year after launching shock therapy, at which they reluctantly agreed to stop acting unilaterally so as not to cause further financial havoc (Yeltsin, 1994, p. 219). But no one, it seems, abided by this decision. Fiscal policy was amended time and again by a collection of political, ministerial, regional, and business actors. The tax code in particular became a convoluted and contradictory set of rules as a result of numerous ad hoc interventions. Instead of enforcing revenue claims, economic resources were traded for political support to the detriment of fiscal capacity (Easter, 2006). Repeated efforts to enact tax reform and bolster tax compliance failed. Budget shortcomings were covered with increasingly reckless short-term borrowing. The Yeltsin system of state finance came to a crashing end in August 1998, when the bankrupt government reneged on its debts and devalued its currency. Surely, one of the most impressive accomplishments of the Putin presidency was its handling of state finances. This was one area of state administration that the president successfully reorganized in more rational fashion. Putin entrusted fiscal policy to Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin, who, like the president, was once a member of the Sobchak team in Saint Petersburg. Kudrin succeeded where others failedrestoring fiscal stability to the post-communist state. Obviously his tenure benefited from the coincidental boom in world energy prices, but his steady temperament and sound policies mattered too. Kudrin presided over a rate-slashing tax

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revolution, but he was no free-market radical. He was a cautious capitalist and staunch fiscal conservative. Kudrin resisted impassioned pleas for more radical tax cuts as well as more generous spending sprees, and instead built up the states capital reserves and paid down its foreign debts. The World Bank commended Kudrins fiscal prudence by naming him Finance Minister of the Year for 2007. Putin strengthened state fiscal capacity through a comprehensive overhaul of the tax system. In contrast to the 1990s, government ledgers registered a surplus every year of his presidency. The budgetary boom reflected economic conditions in general and the price of a barrel of oil in particular. Yet there was more to it. Tax compliance increased under Putin as a result of tax reform. The goal of tax reform, explained its chief architect, has changed little since Adam Smiththe tax system must be as fair and simple as possible (Shatalov, 2006, p. 780). Thus, the government enacted a major restructuring, which streamlined the tax code, drastically reduced rates, and applied uniform enforcement. Meanwhile, the tax administration was reorganized to concentrate efforts on the most lucrative income-generating sectors. Special departments for the largest taxpayers were created, with revenue agents placed inside the finance offices of these rich companies. Under former police chief and prime minister Sergey Stepashin, the Audit Chamber became a more effective instrument of fiscal control, especially concerning the misuse of state funds by bureaucratic and regional elites. And, of course, the states coercive agents were unleashed on the wealthiest corporations, whose contribution to the budget improved accordingly. The increase in takings meant the possibility of more givings. As a result, the economy was spared further deficit-induced financial shocks, while wages and pensions were paid on time and in full during Putins presidency. And with more economic resources at its discretion, the central executive reinvested in its elite power base, thereby reinforcing the preexisting patrimonial tendencies of the state bureaucracy.

CULT OF THE STATE

It is one thing to claim a monopoly on coercive, economic, and bureaucratic resources; it is quite another to legitimize that claim. By definition, any political system entails the unequal distribution of power resources. Some are just more successful than others in getting people to go along with it. Ultimately, the enduring states are those that are able to cultivate ideological resources that promote social acceptance of the political status quo, or cultural hegemony, to borrow a phrase. Whether a state relies more on quasi-voluntary or overtly coercive means to foster compliance with the obligations it imposes on society is directly influenced by this normative side of political power. In the modern political world of invented tradition, ideological power resources are often expressed through a cult of the state. The cult of the state is a component feature of national identity, but they are not the same. National identity also includes socio-cultural traits,

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while the cult of the state is about political power. The concepts of state and nation are entwined in the cult of the state. The cult of the state can be seen as a socialization process that involves the mystification of the source of authority, justification of the distribution of power resources, and sanctification of coercive resources. It attempts to give political power a moral authority by attaching it to a higher purpose which society has a stake in: the manifestation of a divine order, the embodiment of a nation, the instrument of historical destiny, or the defender of a way of life. It is expressed through multiple media, which may be initiated from below as well as directed from above: political ceremonies, rituals, and monuments for public benefit; historical folklore and national myth expressed in formal education and popular culture; and political propaganda disseminated through the mass media, defining the boundaries of discussion and assigning emotive labels. Constructing a cult of the state is something that all states do with the intention of shaping social identity and defining the cognitive borders of us and them, providing a model of social behavior that emphasizes self-sacrifice instead of selfishness, and legitimating the distribution of power resources in general and of coercive resources in particular (Marvin and Ingle, 1999). When the baseball World Series kicks off with a thunderous F-16 flyover, youre witnessing the cult of the coercive forces of the state, just as you would if you were standing in Red Square on Victory Day. If a state fails to cultivate ideological resources, then the socio-cultural bases of political power are apt to be shallow and shifting. Soviet leaders expended great effort and material resources to construct a cult of the state, beginning almost immediately with the retelling of the October Revolution (Corney, 2004). But over time, the Soviet cult of the state became less and less effective. A credible argument can be made that the collapse of the communist state, which so completely monopolized coercive and economic resources, was rooted in its failure to cultivate ideological resources (Robinson, 1995; Sherlock, 2007). For the last Soviet generation, official propaganda and political rituals inspired as much cynicism and derision as they did solidarity and enthusiasm (Yurchak, 2005). Its historical mission in doubt, the cult of the communist state underwent a demystification of power (Jowitt, 1983). Thus, one of the major challenges of contemporary Russian politics is the development of ideological resources to legitimate the status and claims of the post-communist state. While the topic of Russian national identity construction has been well covered by scholars, only a few scholars have focused more specifically on the cult of the post-communist state (Smith, 2002). In the process of regime breakdown, Yeltsin successfully hastened the decoupling of Russian national identity from Soviet political institutions (Brudny, 2000). As a symbolic gesture toward this end, Patriarch Alexey II was on hand to consecrate his inauguration as Russian president in 1991. But political strife and economic collapse characterized Yeltsins tenure, ultimately undermining early efforts to attach the new Western-inspired institutional structures to a reconstructed identity of the Russian nation.

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While Putin is often depicted as a non-ideological pragmatist, he did not neglect the ideological resources of the post-communist state. The president oversaw a concerted effort to refurbish the cult of the state, using familiar fragments of Russian political culture: (1) embracing familiar symbols of Russian national identity; (2) rehabilitating aspects of Soviet patriotism; (3) projecting an image of Russia as a Great Power; and (4) refitting the cult of political leadership with contemporary accoutrements. First, Putins political rhetoric depicts state and nation as being inherently bound to one another. This particular conceptualization, in which the state is seen as the culmination of national development, has a distinguished lineage in Russian intellectual tradition. It reflects a continental corporatist tradition, rather than an Atlantic liberal one, and is expressed in the work of Russias three great historians: Karamzin, Soloviev, and Klyuchevsky. When Putin invokes the concept of nation, it generally does not emphasize ethnic characteristics. Instead, Russian political history and cultural heritage are the unifying themes for the post-communist state and nation. So, instead of joining the West, Putin rhetorically returned Russia to its own historical path, as expressed in the notion of sovereign democracy. Building on his earlier concept of managed democracy, sovereign democracy displays unique Russian characteristics, not characteristics that other states might want Russia to conform to (Balzer, 2003). Meanwhile, the post-communist ruling elite has appropriated the opulent facade of the old aristocracy. The 2003 summer-long tercentennial celebration of the imperial capital, Saint Petersburg, provided a public stage on which the contemporary state reconnected with the legitimating symbols of power from the imperial past, scrubbed clean and painted fresh after decades of proletarian indifference. The Petersburg president oversaw the exquisitely detailed restoration of the Konstantinovskiy mansion to impress foreign guests and serve as a new summer palace. Tapping into Russian cultural heritage, Putin made political gestures to bring figures of national moral authority together with the post-communist state. The Orthodox Church is a kind of institutional embodiment of the Russian nation, and usually ranks among the most trusted institutions in popular surveys (McGann, 1999). Consistent with the past, the church hierarchy does not act independently of political power. Under Putin, the church was used to sanctify the states coercive resources through public ceremony. Patriarch Alexey conferred spiritual protection upon the tax police through the gift of the sacred Icon of Kazan and the appointment of Saint Matthew as the agencys divine protector. And ever since dropping in for his birthday in 2000, Putin has had nothing but good things to say about the nationalist author and celebrity dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who likewise speaks fondly of the president. In a Kremlin ceremony to celebrate Russia Day in June 2007, Putin presented Solzhenitsyn with a state award for his lifetime contributions to Russian culture. Second, the rehabilitation of Soviet patriotism was incorporated into the cult of the post-communist state, encouraged by Putins unabashed nostalgia. Under Yeltsin, Soviet patriotism fell into disrepute, and a partial

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cleansing campaign was conducted against the cult of the communist state, including taking down hammer-and-sickles, toppling statues, renaming boulevards, and putting Robert Conquest on television. But with the identity and status of so many people connected in some way to the old communist state, this rectification project could only be partial: when Saint Petersburg finally hosted a state funeral, it was for the last tsar, not the first Bolshevik. Putin publicly delved into this ambiguous legacy and made it okay to feel pride again in ones service to the communist state. Soviet patriotism was back in vogue, as indicated by the readoption of the Soviet national anthem (with new lyrics). Putins indulgence of Soviet patriotism, however, was selectivethe inconvenient proletarian class struggle was stricken. In the West, the revival of Soviet patriotism, especially the popular boost to Stalins place in history, is viewed by some as indication that Putin will soon resurrect the gulag. But this seems more hyperbole than reality. The cult of the Soviet state was heavily draped in military and national security imagery, much of which carried over to the cult of the postcommunist state. The designer of the worlds most popular firearm, Mikhail Kalashnikov, was lauded by Putin as a symbol of the creative genius of the people in service to the Fatherland (The New York Times, July 17, 2007). For Victory Day 2005, Putin staged the largest celebration of his tenure to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the sacred day, which marked the bitterly hard-fought Soviet triumph in the Great Patriotic War (Moscow Times, February 8, 2008). The president presided over a patriotic pageant of new military hardware, old veteran tributes, and solemn invocations for the 27 million lives lost. The event inspired new government initiatives to promote patriotism. A City of Military Glory award was created for those communities that made a valiant wartime defense and endured great sacrifice, but never received the prized Soviet accolade of Hero City. Also, the Duma authorized $17 million for a State Program for Patriotic Education, to encourage the youth to learn more about past military triumphs and reintroduce Soviet-style military games at school. Third, another feature of the cult of the state in Russian history was an attachment to its status in the world community of states. Under the tsars, Russia was an Empire, stretching across three continents at its peak. Under communism, Russia was a military Superpower and capital of a formidable political-ideological bloc. But post-communist Russia lost its lofty status: its territorial reach scaled back, its military might sapped. Russia went from hegemonic lord to humble supplicant. In his earliest statements in office, President Putin bemoaned Russias decline into the second and third echelon of states (Herspring, 2007, p. 1). He willfully sought to reassert Russias Great Power status by raising its voice in world politics, demonstrating its military might, and showing off its economic resources. From a rhetorical stance, Russia demonstrated a more independent and assertive opinion on a variety of international issues and adopted a testier and more defensive tone toward critical Western opinion. His administration likewise fanned the popular sense of offense to national

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pride and disgruntlement over diminished world status, vowing a return to the top. In military matters, Putin recovered from the embarrassing Kursk setback, and in his second term recommenced long-range bomber flights and made a territorial claim on the Arctic Ocean seafloor. Russia also propped up a new Eurasian-focused international association, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which, along with China and the Central Asian states, comprises a group of like-minded states with similar security concerns: territorial separatism, Islamic radicalism, and American unilateralism. In the world economy, Russia flexed its muscle as an energy superpower, using gas supplies to coerce non-compliant neighbors and make Europe acknowledge its dependence. Russias ruling energy elite is intent on affirming its status with a modern symbol of power and wealth the imposing Gazprom skyscraper in Saint Petersburg. Nothing says I own you quite like a 1000-foot tower of glass and steel. Finally, no cult of a Russian state would be complete without a cult of political leadership, both position and personality. In terms of position, the tsars long tried to reinforce their authority with monumental and ceremonial trappings of power inspired by their European cousins, who earlier had lifted them from the ancients (Wortman, 2006). An empire needed a Caesar, after all. Likewise, in post-communist Russia, the position of the central executive now resembles an image of authority borrowed from the West: the president. In this appropriated image of political leadership, the president acts as a modern corporate executive, operating in a democratic legal setting, managing large bureaucracies, and making complex economic and security decisions. He appears in well-cut business suits with a pricey Swiss watch instead of a braided military coat bedecked with medals. Brezhnev first claimed the title of president to legitimate his status in foreign relations. Gorbachev established the position as a seat of authority in domestic politics, even if his own tenure was ill fated. Yeltsin successfully elevated the position to the top of the post-communist state hierarchy. But Putin played the role as smartly as his Western counterparts. His education credentials in law and economics reinforce the image, even if he did not practice either (just as Clintons law degree and Bushs MBA do the same for them). Finally, Western presidents derive legitimacy from popular contests, which Russia now stages as well, although Russian presidential elections have become more ceremony than competition. The cult of political leadership has a personal side as well. The personalization of political power is yet another recurring theme in Russian history. Earlier, Russias ruler-princes were made into saints by the Orthodox Church. Hagiographic means of legitimation continued in the communist state, where the personalization of power was most famously expressed in a waxy-coated embodiment housed in the regimes most sacred political shrine (Tumarkin, 1997). Todays image of the Father Tsar is the daily Kremlin tele-op, in which the president acts as wise counselor or stern taskmaster with his ministers. It was a format created by Yeltsin and perfected by Putin. Compared to the larger-than-life effigies of leaders past, the personality cult of Putin is modest in scale. And while the Putin

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cult has official instigators, it is sustained by unofficial popular and commercial forces, as suggested by the Chelyabinsk bakery that quickly sold out of Putin cakes. Consistent with the pattern, a run on Medvedev portraits began as soon as he was named successor. And what did Time magazines 2007 Man of the Year think of that? I dont see anything shameful in the fact that bureaucrats have the portrait of their leader in their offices, Putin remarked, This is an element of statehood in the same way as a flag or emblem (Moscow Times, February 29, 2008). But just as the communist state in its late phase suffered from a dearth of ideological resources, so the post-communist state should not feel secure. It seems a stretch to expect that the cult of the post-communist state can invoke sufficient patriotic sentiment to paper over the economic hardship and social dislocation that is still a widespread feature of postcommunist society or to make up for the disrespect and corruption that commonly characterize the actual interactions of ordinary citizens with state officialdom.

CONCLUSIONS
After a decade of tumultuous transition, the Russian state in the time of Putin began to look more familiar. This article tried to discern what was old and new in the post-communist state by focusing on the reconfiguration of power resources. It found that the macro-structural organization of power resources in the contemporary state exhibits continuity with previous regimes in Russian history. It is not, though, an exact replica, as variation in form exists within a familiar-looking macro-framework. In the organization of coercive resources, Russia remains a police state, but the police today play a more direct political role than in the past and they have had to redefine their service mission. With economic resources, the main sources of wealth tend to be concentrated and organized as state concessions rather than private property, although today there exists an upstairs/downstairs variant of economic organization. Concerning bureaucratic resources, the contemporary state exhibits a patrimonial administrative structure, although now the fortunes of officialdom are connected to the electoral success of the party of power. And, in the cultivation of ideological resources, the state still sees itself leading the nation down a unique Russian path, except now it does so without benefit of divine will or historical destiny. In the past, this macro-structural arrangement of power resources supported the tsarist autocracy and communist partocracy in their own variant organizational forms. Today, this scheme sustains a new postcommunist regime typestatist presidentialism (Easter, 1997). This is a hybrid regime type, authoritarianism with selected elements of democracy, adapted to the more open post-communist conditions. It is statist precisely because the state continues to monopolize power resources while society, in the form of popular-based political parties, private wealth, and indepen-

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dent figures of moral authority, has insufficient resources to challenge the states monopoly or force the state to negotiate. This state presents itself as the embodiment of the nation, the civilizing force of society. It jealously opposes the establishment of institutional safeguards of autonomy for society, because it fears the emergence of societal-based actors who will put forth a counter-narrative claiming it is they who best represent the wellbeing of the nation. It is presidentialist in the way that the central executive is accorded access to a disproportionate share of the states power resources, which can be used with personal discretion without significant institutionalized countervailing checks. The presidency, however, is a Western, borrowed image of political leadership, which, in practice, does not formally delimit the actions of the central executive and leaves scope for personal disposition. The contemporary statist presidential regime shares these essential attributes with past regime types, resting on a similar distributional scheme of power resources between state and society. This is what is familiar. This article emphasizes that there are recurring patterns to the organization of power resources in Russia. Throughout its history, the agents of state authority have managed to claim a preponderance of power resources, especially coercion and capital. Russian history is notable for the absence of non-state societal-based actors with access to their own power resources, who could force state actors to negotiate and/or recognize their proprietary claim on the resources they held. The collapse of the communist regime provided an opportunity for a redistribution of power resources. But that process never reached the point at which there was fundamental macro-structural change. The gains of the new business elite were not reconsolidated into private property, while coercive agents were not effectively constrained by new institutional and legal checks. Unlike some post-communist transitions, Russia did not benefit from an elite consensus over the redistribution of power resources. Various efforts to formalize a new division of power resources failed. Counter-elites with a disposition to curb the power resources of the state in relation to society ultimately had minimal influence in shaping the new configuration of power resources. Instead, too many actors from the old regime maintained their access to the power resources of the communist state, especially its coercive resources. The central executives unchecked use of coercive resources was crucial in determining the way in which economic and bureaucraticadministrative resources were ultimately reconsolidated in the postcommunist state. By monopolizing coercion and capital, the state continues to be the main source of elite status. The best chance for those who aspire to power and wealth is to go along. In this way, elites remain both dependent on the state and divided among themselves, as was so evident during the Yukos Affair. For those who enjoy the benefits of this arrangement, there are few incentives to take the lead to initiate a fundamental redivision of power resources. In this regard, it has been noted that civil society, the institutional counter to the state, is weak in Russia, but how could it not be

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when there is no private property, regional autonomy, or independent church? The distribution of power resources at an elite level, in turn, has an effect at the popular level. Elites who are dependent on the state are not likely to develop deep roots in societya condition that further reinforces the concentration of power resources on the state side of the divide. All this does not mean that change is not possible. Of course, much has changed already. And if the personal disposition of the leader matters, then a new president offers an opportunity for even more change. What will happen to the Russian presidency under Putins successor, Dmitriy Medvedev, is not yet known: Will it remain the locus of central executive power in the post-communist statethe strong presidentor will it give way to a temporary regency or collective leadership? The crucial question concerning change with the next president will not be over policy reforms per se, but rather, institutional reforms that alter the macro-structural organization of power resources. As Putins second term comes to an end, Western commentary runs from disappointment to despair. The most vitriolic missives, it seems, are penned by those who spent much of the nineties going on about Russias new democracy, capitalism, and federalism. I think we can all agree that Putins legacy will not include his contributions to liberal democracy. But it is easy to blame the man and not the theory. Might we also agree that liberal assumptions about state and society, explicit with market-building economists and implicit with institution-building political scientists, had a detrimental effect on scholarly analysis of the Russian transition in the 1990s? And, if so, then might we also acknowledge that it would be useful to look deeper and comparatively into the Russian past to try to understand better what is happening today? Not so long ago, it was commonplace for scholars to point out the similarities that Soviet Russia had with its imperial and medieval predecessors, and, if they were really good, to explain the causal mechanisms of historical continuity. But this line of inquiry was beaten out of contemporary analysis by editorial boards and search committees, who insisted that Comparative Politics/Russian Studies conform to alternative narrative constructs, without questioning the appropriateness of the liberal assumptions about state and society contained therein. Capitalism had defeated communism after all. This trend made for theoretically tidy discussions in which non-area specialists could join in, and where keeping messy contextual caveats to a minimum was appreciated. Unfortunately, the context caught up and made most of these discussions seem more surreal than scientific. As John Lydon once put it: Ever get the feeling that youve been cheated? This article does not pretend that channeling Muscovite folkways will provide all-telling answers to contemporary Russia, but hopefully it will encourage consideration of taking a step away from what has been a clearly inadequate, ahistorical approach. As for the Russian state in the time of Putin, the main developments here can be understood quite nicely with reference to past precedent. Putin is a state builder very much in the gosudarstvennost tradition of previous

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leaders in Russian history, some of whom youve heard of. He personifies a segment of the post-communist state elite, whose views of state and society were shaped by their own state service in the old regime. He effectively adapted those state socialist inclinations with the more open conditions of post-communism. In doing so, Putin perfected a statist presidential approach to rule, which rested comfortably upon the familiar pattern in which power and wealth have long been organized in Russian history. This arrangement seems likely to endure for a while yet.

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