Securitising Russia: The domestic politics of Vladimir Putin

Introduction

In early September 2004 schoolchildren in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, southern Russia, returned to school at the start of the academic year. As is traditional across Russia, the first day of school was intended as a celebration. Parents accompanied their children in a public parade, having spent the preceding days anticipating this annual rite of passage, preparing uniforms, buying flowers for the teachers, and reassuring younger children of the benefits and pleasures of school. Instead of the celebrations and tears of normal life, however, there unfolded in Beslan a tragedy observed with disbelief in Russia and across the world. Terrorists, long in the plotting of this attack, seized the school and took hostage children of all ages, parents, grandparents, and teachers. The school gym had been rigged with explosives, and here the women and children were taken. The men were separated off. A strict regime was imposed by the hostage takers, apparently fighting for Chechen independence. In the gym the captives were kept without water or food in the heat of the southern Russian summer, and the children undressed to cope with the heat. No one was allowed to sleep. Some hostages who protested too much or disobeyed their captors were shot. From Wednesday to Friday the siege continued. On the second day of the siege a small number of women with younger children were released, those with older sons or daughters having to leave them behind. The tragic denouement of the siege came on the Friday as, in confused circumstances, shooting began, some children attempted to flee, and Russian troops, along with desperate local civilians, stormed the school. Live pictures beamed around the world presented images of the bloodied bodies of dead, dying, and injured children. Hundreds were killed as the explosives in the school were detonated or they were caught in the crossfire as they tried to escape.

The human tragedy of the Beslan hostage crisis is difficult to comprehend. Amidst the stark facts are a myriad of individual stories of terror and grief, of survivors who lost parents or siblings, of families separated, of children deeply traumatised, of fifteen-year-old Inga Tuayeva, who was saved by the fact that she stopped to chat to a friend whilst her twin sister Inna went ahead and was killed, and of parents and relatives who for months clung to the hope that somehow their missing child had escaped the carnage.

A week after the Beslan tragedy, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, addressed an expanded meeting of his government, to which the leaders of Russia’s eighty-nine regions were invited. He spoke movingly of an event ‘it is impossible to think about without tears’. In the same speech he announced a series of measures apparently designed to combat terrorism. These included the decision to halt elections for Russia’s regional heads in favour of a system of presidential appointment, and the declaration that from 2007 onwards elections to the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, would be conducted purely on a proportional representation basis, with the existing constituency element removed.

The events of that one particular week in September 2004 in Russia serve to encapsulate the theme of this book. No one could deny the extent of the terrorist threat faced by Russia, given the tragedy of Beslan. Many observers, however, saw little connection between President Putin’s reforms announced on 13 September and the circumstances which led to the horrors of Beslan. Many liberal observers, in the West and in Russia, accused Putin of taking a step away from democracy under the guise of fighting terrorism. Others saw a strong president taking decisive action.

The balance between freedom and security is a familiar conundrum for governments across the globe in the twenty-first century, against the background of events like the Beslan tragedy in Russia, or the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 and on London on 7 July 2005. In the following chapters we consider the extent to which the domestic politics of Russia have been ‘securitised’. The securitisation of an issue occurs when a state takes measures beyond what is ‘normal’ on the grounds that a vital threat exists which demands such measures. In Russia this process of securitisation has been attempted across a range of policy areas, and terrorism is but one threat against Russia which has been cited in this regard. Political actors in Russia have also seen threats to key interests in such developments as, for example, illegal immigration, unconstrained media, non-traditional religious groups, and far-right political movements.

The process of securitisation is analysed across the key areas of Russia’s domestic politics in order to gain a deep understanding of factors driving policy formation in contemporary Russia. This is particularly pertinent since the rise of to power of Vladimir Putin in 2000. Putin has often been portrayed as bringing the approach of his former employers, the KGB (Committee for State Security), to Russian politics, and of rolling back some of the democratic freedoms put in place by Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. By using the securitisation framework, we are able to interrogate these overviews of President Putin and his administration in detail. What this approach reveals is a far more nuanced picture than is often painted. There are clear continuities between the Yeltsin and Putin eras; there are examples of moves to bring certain areas of policy into the security framework to which Putin has objected, and of moves to securitise issues which have foundered, despite Putin’s support, on the rock of judicial objections; and there are areas of policy where the talk of security has convinced many that urgent measures are needed.

In Chapter 1, the theoretical framework for our analysis is introduced, and the case for its use is put. The framework facilitates a conceptualisation of Putin’s Russia avoiding the democratic/undemocratic split which has dominated much analysis of the Russian Federation in the postcommunist era. A key element of this framework is the analysis of discourse, or how a policy issue is presented and the case for it being a security matter constructed. This emphasis on discourse is evident throughout the later chapters, with direct quotes from political actors being central to our analysis of the issues under discussion.

Chapter 2 then turns to one of the most often cited criticisms of Vladimir Putin, namely that he is an ex-KGB man who has populated his administration with ex-KGB men and rules Russia in the style of a silovik (a person with a background in the Russian force structures). The analysis questions the assumption that we can form an opinion of someone’s political stance on the basis of their former employment, and details the many different roles, career paths, and political views of former force-structure figures in Russian politics. The chapter also investigates the role of the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB (Federal Security Service), in contemporary Russia, paying special attention to the phenomenon of ‘spy-mania’, whereby an unusual number of espionage cases were launched against academics, journalists, and businessmen in Russia at the turn of the twenty-first century.

From Chapter 3 onwards we turn, on a chapter by chapter basis, to consideration of particular policy areas which have been the subject of attempts to securitise them. Each of these chapters can be read on its own as a study of Russian policy in a given area of activity; taken together they provide a coherent overview of forces at play in Russian politics today.

The clearest case for securitisation in Russia has of course been policy with regard to the conflict in Chechnya and its accompanying terrorism. Securitising moves in this area of policy are analysed, along with the counter-discourse used by the Russian authorities, which attempts to argue that the situation in Chechnya is becoming ‘normal’.

Chapter 4 focuses on securitising moves in relation to the media, investigating successful and failed attempts to bring the activities of free media institutions into the realm of a state-controlled security complex. From a focus on the media, Chapter 5 moves on to look at civil society more widely, presenting the processes by which such diverse elements of life as religious belief, football hooliganism, and offences against national dignity have all been the subject of moves – some successful, some less so – to make them matters of urgent national security concern.

Chapter 6 deals with the topic of migration. In Russia, as in many other states, the impact of immigrants on national life has been a sharply debated political issue. On the one hand, Russia more than most countries appears to be in urgent need of more people, given its dire demographic situation and prognoses of rapid depopulation. On the other hand, Russia, again more than many countries, has strong elements of the desire to protect its national identity, and even of xenophobia, within its political make-up. The balance between these two factors, both of which have been portrayed as vital threats to the well-being of the nation, is analysed.

All but one of this book’s chapters are written jointly by the main authors. Chapter 7 is the exception and is written by Julian Cooper, an economist specialising on the economics of the Soviet Union and Russia. It provides a detailed account of the on-off battle in the postcommunist era to subjugate the Russian economy to security concerns. The chapter argues that, although there are some signs to the contrary in recent years, for now the notion that economic policy should be a function of perceived security threats has not won the day in Russia.

In the final chapter, the preceding analyses are drawn together to bring out the key elements of the securitising discourse which are common across many policy areas in contemporary Russian politics. The chapter concludes by arguing for greater rigour, contextualisation, and differentiation in judgements of the Putin administration’s domestic politics.

1 Approaches to contemporary Russia

For most of the twentieth century Russia was markedly more authoritarian than it is today. Nonetheless, many observers of Russia in the first decade of the twenty-first century see a country increasingly moving back in an authoritarian direction, in comparison with the democratising moves and mood of the 1990s. According to this view, if the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin was the decade of democracy then a new century and a new president, Vladimir Putin, have seen a shift in emphasis. Analysts interpret this shift in different ways, with some seeing a move back towards Russia’s traditional ways, and others seeing a regrettable, or necessary, hiatus on the road to a fully-fledged democracy.¹ However, whilst there may be discussion about the meaning and extent of President Putin’s change in approach, that there has been such a change is no longer disputed.

In this book we argue that our understanding of a shift in the content of Russian politics can be served by refining our analytical approach towards Russia. Using a concept developed in the field of international relations, we show that many developments in Russia’s domestic politics can be effectively explained and analysed through the discourse of ‘securitisation’ and the use by Russia’s political leadership – in a wide range of policy settings – of the rhetoric of existential threat to justify actions increasingly perceived as authoritarian.

This is a book about domestic politics. We are interested in bringing to the fore the discussions and declarations of political actors in Putin’s Russia. The securitisation framework underlies much of our analysis, helping to explain how particular areas of Russian policy have become more authoritarian in recent years, and how other areas have been less susceptible to this shift. However, this book can also be read on a more straightforward level as an account of the changing face of Russian politics since the turn of the millennium. The areas selected for analysis are for the most part those commonly associated with moves towards greater state control, both in Russia and comparatively. There are chapters therefore on the Russian state’s recent policies in regard to the media, civil society, national separatism and terrorism (Chechnya), migration, and the economy.

In addition, Chapter 2 considers the increasing role of former and current security service personnel in Russian politics. The growth of people with a security background in key positions within the Russian elite is detailed, but, although counting former security service personnel in key positions is useful and indicative of a general trend, it can only take us so far before the question ‘so what?’ is asked. The securitisation framework provides an approach within which to answer this. It concentrates on policy initiatives and their source, investigating areas of policy which have been taken ‘out of public view’ and are dealt with primarily behind closed doors, with the security services taking the lead.

The concluding chapter considers the nature of the regime created under Vladimir Putin between 2000 and 2005 and cautions against too-rapid conclusions that Russia is returning to its past. It considers the institutional depth and political stability of the system of government established during the Putin presidency in the early years of the twenty-first century and argues that the plurality of opinions, organisations, and social groupings present in contemporary Russia militates against any assumption that the period of retrenchment experienced during these years has an inevitable permanence. Our aim in this book is to detail developments in Russian domestic politics whilst avoiding any sense of inevitability in terms of future scenarios. In other words, a ‘return to authoritarianism’ is not the only realistic option for Russia. There are other forces (the judiciary, the media, political opposition, the international community, global communications, big business) which may work against such a process. There are key events too, most notably the parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled for 2007 and 2008 respectively, which will open up political debate and promote political intrigue, even if in a limited or controlled fashion.

This opening chapter places developments in contemporary Russia within the empirical and analytical contexts of the post-Soviet period. There is an apparent duality about both of these contexts, and this duality is centred on the issue of democratisation. Since President Putin’s election in 2000, many observers have remarked on the ‘two faces’ of Vladimir Putin² – is he a democratic or an authoritarian leader? Legitimate though this question undoubtedly is, we argue below that its inherent duality arises partly from the dominant analytical frameworks of the post-Soviet era, and militates against a more holistic and explanatory understanding of the current Russian regime. The second section outlines the securitisation approach, detailing its features and assessing its applicability to contemporary Russia.

The two faces of Russia today

Using the terminology of democratic transition theory, difficulties arise in placing the Russia of the early twenty-first century on the democratic continuum. At the institutional level, the fundamental structures broadly accepted as features of democratisation under President Boris Yeltsin (1991–99) remain in place. The constitution has not been amended, multi-party parliamentary elections occur, as do multi-candidate presidential elections. In Russia’s regions, legislatures are elected. The major change which President Putin has made in regard to regional democracy is that since the beginning of 2005, the heads of regional executives (governors, republican presidents, and the mayors of Russia’s two ‘federal cities’, St Petersburg and Moscow) are no longer elected but are nominated by the President and approved by regional legislatures. This is a less purely democratic procedure than direct election, but in comparative terms is not undemocratic per se. Direct election of regional heads had only been in place in Russia since 1997, and there are other democratic countries where the heads of regional executives are not directly elected.

Legal provisions are in place in Russia to protect the fundamental rights and values of a democratic society. Russia remains signed up to the key human rights commitments of the international community. Under President Putin, post-Soviet Russia seems to have come of age when compared with the erratic foreign policy zigzags of Boris Yeltsin. Russia no longer appears to simply kow-tow to the West and to the United States in particular, and Putin draws close to the US or distances himself and draws close to other allies, whilst maintaining a good relationship with many states and presenting a picture of a stable country acting consistently in the perceived national interest.³

And yet, there is much that the summary outlined above misses. A quite different summary would end with conclusions increasingly accepted in the thinking media in the West, and exemplified by the forceful headline in a leading news journal in late 2003, urging that ‘the West should stop pretending that Russia is a free democracy’.⁴ Within the scholarly literature too, the early years of the twenty-first century have seen a growing focus on issues such as registration laws, barriers to the development of civil society,⁵ the presence of former KGB officers in the political elite,⁶ and the classification of a regime for which the simple term ‘democracy’ will not do, and so numerous other definitions have been pressed into service – definitions summed up by Harley Balzer and others as ‘adjectival democracy’ (for example, delegative democracy, incomplete democracy, electoral democracy, illiberal democracy, and so on).⁷

In the period 2000–05, the Putin presidency has been engaged in a process of ‘state strengthening’, or centralisation, whereby the control of the Kremlin over many aspects of life has apparently been increased. The regions are now overseen both by presidential plenipotentiaries and heads of executives who owe their positions to presidential appointment. The national broadcasting media are under the control of the state, either directly or through state-owned companies, and although allowing a plurality of views they are able to limit coverage of particular issues and to promote particular people and policies. In 2003 the Freedom House survey of global press freedom downgraded Russia from its ‘partly free’ to ‘not free’ category, a status which it has retained through to Freedom House’s 2005 survey and in all likelihood beyond.⁸ Since 2001 three independent national television channels, the respected national newspaper Segodnya and the news magazine Itogi have been either closed down or brought under government influence, although the printed press continues to be largely privately owned and to cover the full range of political viewpoints. Election campaigns have seen the use of state resources, including the media, to boost the chances of the regime’s candidates. Civil society has been hedged about by registration laws and occasional harassment by the authorities of groups deemed undesirable.

It is debatable to what extent such measures have managed to strengthen the Russian state. President Putin could be said to have too much and too little power, in the sense that he has so successfully centralised decision-making and dealt with political opponents that the ability of government to implement decisions has been damaged, since so few are prepared to act independently or with initiative. As the Moscow daily Moskovskii komsomolets put it after the tragedy of the Beslan school siege in September 2004, Putin is ill-served by advisers who ‘will never say anything critical or unpleasant’. As result ‘the fatal mistake of President Putin is that he refuses to understand that he has no instruments of power. He behaves as if … all his correct decisions will be immediately carried out.’⁹

Analysis of the strength of the state depends on a number of variables, most importantly on how one defines the state. Nonetheless, the preceding discussion of the process by which Putin has sought to strengthen the state suggests a Russia very different from the ‘country in which democracy and freedom and the rule of law thrive’, which US President George W. Bush cited as President Putin’s vision at the Camp David summit between the two leaders in September 2003. How then do we analyse the ‘two faces’ of Vladimir Putin and his regime, and how do we explain the political processes underway in Russia? How do we explore these apparent contradictions without oversimplification, and without succumbing to a priori assumptions about the nature of the Putin regime and of Russia today? More importantly for the political scientist, what tools are available to give us a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the Russian regime?

By adopting and adapting the ‘securitisation’ approach developed in the international relations sphere, we offer a framework within which to explain, analyse, and define the apparently more ‘controlling’ aspects of the Russian state. We do not presume an authoritarian edge to policy. In fact one strength of the adapted securitisation framework lies in its rigorous procedurally based classification and testing of steps in an apparently authoritarian direction. In later chapters we apply this framework to a succession of areas where elements of the ‘security state’ might be said by critics to have triumphed over the demands of democracy.

A two-way split?

It is too simplistic to argue either that contemporary Russia is democratic or that it is not. Such an argument does not take us very far in terms of understanding, and can easily lead into dispute over semantics and catch-all judgements. A more nuanced assessment, dealing with degrees of democracy in different areas of Russian life, seems preferable and yet in essence represents merely a slightly more sophisticated sectoral variation of the initial argument. Indeed any analysis which simply points to a democratic/undemocratic bifurcation in Russian political affairs misses a potentially holistic understanding of what is largely a coherent set of policies put forward by an apparently stable regime with substantial majority support amongst the Russian people.

Such a bifurcated analysis worked for much of the 1990s. It reflected the provenance of the Yeltsin regime in the polarised political – and sometimes military – conflicts of the Soviet break-up of 1989–93. It reflected too the ‘forwards not backwards’ banner under which Yeltsin and his team successfully fought to entrench their regime in the face of substantial popular opposition. However, some time in the years after Yeltsin’s 1996 presidential election victory, the defining split in Russian domestic politics between ‘reformers’ and ‘reactionaries’ became less and less significant. The opposition Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) not only looked ever more unlikely to offer a real alternative government to the voters, but it also increasingly accepted the changes of the post-Soviet era as given.¹⁰ By the time of the next set of elections (the parliamentary and presidential elections of 1999 and 2000 respectively), the issue of fundamental regime change was scarcely on the agenda. By then the central un-answered political question merely asked from which grouping in the political elite the new ‘party of power’ and new president would emerge.

The elemental ‘reform versus reaction’ politics which dominated Russia from the late 1980s until shortly after Boris Yeltsin secured his second presidential term in 1996 has now given way to a domestic consensus centred on a strong state, economic reform, and a new realism in international affairs.¹¹ Given that the political wallpaper in Moscow differs so markedly in the early years of the twenty-first century from that of just a few years earlier, so then the approach taken by analysts needs to respond to these changes. The working approach of this book is founded on two bases worth noting from the outset. The first is the rejection of any assumption that contemporary Russia will necessarily continue on a democratising path. This is not to deny – it would be foolish to do so – the achievements of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years in producing a particular form of procedural democracy with institutions recognisable within the democratic pale. Nor indeed is it to deny the flowering of a range of freedoms in this same period. It is though to move away from any teleological undercurrent in this regard. Whether Russia becomes more or less of a democracy in the coming years is not simply a factor of the impersonal forces of history, the prevailing will of the international community, or the tick-box options chosen by respondents to Russian opinion pollsters. It also has to do with policy decisions made by political actors in specific circumstances concerning a range of individual issues.

The second element of our approach is the mirror of the first. It is to reject the assumption that contemporary Russia is necessarily moving towards a Soviet-esque quasi-authoritarian society. Similar arguments apply as in the rejection of the democratising counter-argument. We shy away from the idea that just because Russia has repeatedly been ruled by a ‘strong hand’, it is doomed to continue in this vein. Nations can and do change. In the same way, talk of a thermidorian reaction after the revolution of the early 1990s may be beguiling, but to have analytical force it must ground itself firmly in empirical evidence.¹² What we are about here then is moving away from the dichotomy represented by, in the words of Steven Rosefielde, ‘those who deny Russia’s habituation to authority and privilege’ and ‘the counterthesis – Russia is trapped in a Muscovite authoritarian mold’.¹³

The adapted securitisation model offers an additional explanatory framework within which official actions which are both ‘reformist’ and ‘reactionary’ – to use the terminology of old debates – make sense. For much of this book the substance of our analysis moves away from the macro-level. It deliberately takes its eye off the big picture in order to concentrate on particular areas of policy and gain an understanding of the actual substance of politics. In the end this focus on a more mezo-level analysis of distinct policies then enables a different ‘big picture’ to be assembled.

Building on transition

We have argued so far that analysis of changing circumstances in contemporary Russia might benefit from additional conceptual and analytical tools. In some measure the situation is reminiscent of that found by analysts of the Soviet Union in the 1960s, when increasingly the totalitarian model seemed inadequate to many as an explanatory framework for a modern state with an educated society. New approaches were introduced, such as corporatism, convergence theory, and the ‘mono-organisational society’.¹⁴ The interest group analysis developed by Gordon Skilling and colleagues in the early 1970s is most akin to our work here, not because of any similarity in subject or conclusions, but rather in terms of its mezo-level, sectoral approach which then fed back into a macro-level conceptualisation.¹⁵

The predominant social science conceptualisation of Russia in the 1990s – that of a formerly authoritarian, even totalitarian, state with a centrally controlled economy engaging in a process of transition towards becoming a democratic state with a market economy – has been thoroughly explored by political scientists and area specialists. Transition theory in its various forms produced at its best a literature of considerable significance and insight, increasing our understanding of post-Soviet Russia.¹⁶ It is no part of our task here to gainsay the importance of that body of scholarly endeavour. At its crudest, however, transition theory is essentially predicated on a teleological linear dynamic, and through much of the immediate post-Soviet period major policy decisions in Russia were viewed in this light by a number of Western policy-makers and academics, who assessed each development in terms of its effect on progress towards a consolidated market democracy. Such an approach is less appropriate for conceptualising today’s relatively stable regime. Contemporary Russian policy no longer focuses on ‘transiting’ in the sense of institution-building