New York Times - 11.06.2001

 

New York Times

Putin Grows in Job, Raising the Question: For Good or Ill?

By Michael Wines

OSCOW, Nov. 5 — Now that the rush of praise for President Vladimir V. Putin's recent bold turn toward the West has begun to subside, it may be useful to examine the case of the Kremlin and Nikolai Yemelyanovich Aksyonenko.

Mr. Aksyonenko, who runs Russia's hugely powerful Railways Ministry, is under federal investigation for corruption. That is not new: the ministry is famously corrupt. Mr. Putin made Mr. Aksyonenko squirm almost two years ago, in his first weeks as president, when he publicly denounced the ministry's suspicious juggling of railroad freight rates.

But then, he did nothing. This time, after Mr. Aksyonenko complained of a vendetta, the president icily demurred: if prosecutors have the evidence, he said, then they should file away. Mr. Aksyonenko suddenly took a leave of absence. Few expect him to return.

Here is evidence that Mr. Putin, seen two years ago as a likely short- timer in the Kremlin, has grown mightily on the job. With a potentially crucial meeting with President Bush a week away, the problem — as it always has been with Russia's poker-faced president — is figuring out whether that is good or bad.

Does Mr. Aksyonenko's abrupt demise signal that Mr. Putin's pledge to build a civil society from the ashes of Soviet rule — a "dictatorship of the law," as he called it two years ago — is at last bearing fruit?

Or does it mean that Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer whose credentials as democrat have always been suspect, now holds such a grip on the levers of Russian power that he can dispense even with political titans?

In most societies, that would be an either-or question. "In Russian reality," suggested Igor Bunin, who heads Moscow's Center for Political Technologies, "there is not a contradiction between authoritarian rule and reform."

Some say Mr. Putin is becoming a Russian Augusto Pinochet, an authoritarian proponent of economic overhaul on the model of Chile's ruthless dictator of the 1970's and 80's. A better model, Mr. Bunin said, might be Charles de Gaulle, who ruled France as a right-wing autocrat, but managed in the end to deliver both democracy and the orderly dismantling of France's empire.

Mr. Putin continues to ride a two- year wave of popularity that has outlasted the predictions of even the most optimistic political experts. His performance is regularly approved by 7 in 10 Russians, even as the share who trust the presidency itself hovers between 2 and 3 in 10.

The president's supporters have established a major internet portal — www.strana.ru, owned by Mr. Putin's image-maker, Gleb Pavlovsky — and formed pro-Putin youth groups like "Going Together," which assembled thousands of young people here on May 7, all wearing T- shirts bearing Mr. Putin's image.

Criticism of the government on the nation's three major television networks has not vanished. But it has been sharply muted in the last year, as two networks once controlled by Kremlin opponents have fallen under the government's sway (the third is government-owned).

Last week, the Kremlin's emergencies minister and political broker, Sergei Shoigu, announced that Mr. Putin's faction in Parliament, Unity, would soon merge with two other major factions. The aim, Mr. Shoigu said, is to unite "all healthy political forces, and all of society, for the sake of a single purpose: Russia's prosperity."

The daily newspaper Izvestia, once a Communist government mouthpiece, described the goal another way: "a movement, a front, a league — the C.P.S.U., in effect." The initials stand for Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

"The system of checks and balances which existed in the Yeltsin years has completely disappeared," Mr. Bunin said in an interview. "All the formal structures of power remain — the Duma, the Federation Council, the media, the businessmen — but their substance, their content have been eliminated."

Few would argue for a return to President Boris N. Yeltsin's final years, in which the Kremlin was frail and corrupt and Russia seemed to teeter on the edge of chaos.

Mr. Putin has managed to stabilize both the government and society, revive the economy and initiate a series of measures, from pension-system changes to property rights, of which Mr. Yeltsin's pro-Western reformers could only dream.

But the means to that end are another matter. Mr. Putin rose to power on a surge of nationalism inspired by an especially brutal war in Chechnya, and built a working majority in Parliament, through a 1999 election campaign noted for its own political toughness.

He has defanged what were known as "states within the state," the fiefs once run by mighty governors of Russia's 89 regions, winning legislation that stripped them of their seats in Parliament's upper house, the Federation Council. He has sapped their control over patronage by dividing the nation into seven superregions overseen by presidential aides who control federal money and jobs.

Parliament's lower house, the Duma, blocked virtually all of Mr. Yeltsin's political initiatives and, in his final year, very nearly voted to remove him from office. Under Mr. Putin, the Communist Party has lost control, and the new majority is pliant: the Kremlin's fiscal 2002 budget passed virtually without changes.

Federal prosecutors have moved selectively and ruthlessly to evict the Kremlin's opponents from positions of power. Mr. Putin's two most vocal critics among Russia's media barons, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris A. Berezovsky, now live in exile to avoid criminal prosecution. A Moscow- based broadcast network populated by Mr. Gusinsky's old co-workers, TV-6, is also under legal assault.

Some Russian experts say the current inquiry into Mr. Aksyonenko, and rumored investigations of officials in the Customs and Fisheries ministries, signal a new Kremlin effort to replace the last of Mr. Yeltsin's holdovers with Putin loyalists.

Mr. Putin's supporters say he believes in a strong state, but not an autocracy or a personality cult — that he is too modern, and too Western, to be a strongman.

Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor who is one of the leading Russia experts in the United States, says Mr. Putin's portrait is not a black-and-white affair. He noted, a little ruefully, that he and others had once warned that Mr. Yeltsin was accumulating a dangerous arsenal of political and legal powers.

In fact, he said, it is Mr. Putin's unchallenged power that has allowed him to do much of what the West now praises, including promoting some inarguably democratic reforms.

Besides new private property rights, the Kremlin is bent on establishing a new labor code and a stable banking system with deposit insurance, which most experts see as a prerequisite to serious investment.

Parliament is about to pass a judicial reform package that would quadruple the salaries of judges, introduce trial by juries nationwide and improve the independence of bodies overseeing judges.

In his overture to the United States and Europe this fall, Mr. Putin committed Russia to the war against terrorism, opened the doors to ending standoffs over the expansion of NATO and missile defense, and declared that Russia's aim was full- fledged membership in the family of Western democratic nations.

Much of Russia's elite, and no small part of its populace, have yet to embrace that goal. "That demonstrates that he has a high degree of confidence in himself," said Lilia Shevtsova, a political analyst at the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It was quite courageous at a time when Russian society is split and the establishment is split on the question of a Western alliance."

Mr. McFaul suggested the coexistence of both pro-Western and authoritarian traits in Mr. Putin form a contradictory picture open to misinterpretation.

"There are positive and negative trajectories moving side by side," he said of the president. "Both sides in this debate oversimplify."

"Still, the most troubling thing to me is that there are no really serious political opponents — not as a party, not as an alternate political figure. That, to me, is a scary thing."

Ms. Shevtsova concurred. "He's created a political desert," she said.