The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (6 page)

Meanwhile, Natasha Estemirova’s murder remains unsolved. Although there were witnesses to her abduction and her killers passed through at least two government checkpoints, the police have no leads. Indeed, the only thing that has changed since that day in July 2009 is the body count. There is no place for them on Popov’s graph.

Sergei Markov is often referred to as a Kremlin mouthpiece. It is not meant in a pejorative sense; it’s a fact. The fifty-two-year-old Duma deputy is a good talker, and he is frequently tasked with helping the Kremlin get its message out, especially to the foreign media. Markov is sometimes described as a former liberal who got too close to power and lost his intellectual independence in service to that power. Still, he has skills—fashioning arguments, a gift for euphemisms—that make him useful. But as a basic rule in politics, whether it’s within the White House, the Kremlin, or anywhere else, the messenger is part of the message. In using Markov as its mouthpiece, the Kremlin sends an unambiguous signal: swagger.

Markov looks more like a sparring partner than a political player. With short, cropped hair, a broad nose, and a sunken, hound dog expression, he rarely smiles, even when he delivers a quip that is intended to amuse. He exudes a cocky bravado as soon as he sits down, putting his three mobile phones on the table, as if to assure me: “We will be interrupted, and yes, I will take the call.” As someone who is supposed to reflect the Kremlin’s thinking, he hasn’t shied away from delivering rhetorical bombshells. In 2009,
he unexpectedly told a crowd of Washington policy wonks that his office was behind cyber-attacks on Estonia in 2007. The attacks that summer had crippled the backbone of the Baltic state’s Internet infrastructure, targeting its ministries, legislature, and financial institutions. In the aftermath, NATO committed itself to helping defend member states from such threats. Russia had always denied allegations of being behind the attacks, but Markov nonchalantly confirmed the charges, saying, “About the cyber-attack on Estonia … don’t worry, that attack was carried out by my assistant. I won’t tell you his name, because then he might not be able to get visas.” Later he added, “Incidentally, such things will happen more and more.” Whether his admission is accurate or not is almost beside the point. The bigger question is whether the Kremlin likes having Markov speak on its behalf despite these remarks—or because of them.

Markov and I meet at a Chinese restaurant a few blocks from the Kremlin. After we have settled in and he has ordered his noodle soup, I
ask him where the lines of political competition are in Russia today. Is it between his party, United Russia, and some of the quasi-opposition parties the Kremlin created? Does the legitimate but marginalized opposition have any voice? Does competition exist only within United Russia? Markov says it’s none of the above. Parties are just not part of the equation. “
We have no competition inside the party. We have competition outside the party,” he explains. “[But] it’s really fighting for power.”

In other words, it’s a turf battle. The political competition, to the degree it exists, is more a battle of financial interests than ideas. It’s a frank statement from a member of parliament. Sensing that it might be logical for someone who holds such an opinion to also see this as being partially responsible for the country’s incredible corruption, I ask if he worries if this lack of political competition is spilling over, drowning Russia’s economic performance. But Markov sees it differently. “Let me just say that corruption is not a good thing, but there are no strong connections between corruption and lack of development,” Markov says. “Of course, it should be fought against, but you know there are no strong connections between the lack of development and corruption, and there are no strong connections between political competition and the lack of corruption. So why pursue political competition if both of these connections are so uncertain?”

Markov isn’t simply being argumentative; he is expressing a central tenet of modern authoritarian regimes. A fundamental question is whether societies organized around more open and free political competition grow faster and provide better lives for their citizens than more stable, closed societies. The answer, which appeared to be yes in the aftermath of the Cold War, has clouded with China’s precipitous rise. China and the authoritarian city-state of Singapore are the most frequently cited examples, and Markov—as if on cue—mentions them both. “Look, look at China—no political competition but great,” he says, quickly adding, “Look at Singapore—no political competition but it’s great.”

The idea he is getting at is that strong, stable technocratic governments may not only be able to build a foundation for fast, efficient development but also have an advantage over democracies in doing so. The trouble is that authoritarian regimes have hardly proven to
be surefire bets to succeed economically. In the past forty years, on average,
autocracies and democracies have developed at the same rate. For every successful East Asian tiger, there are several authoritarian basket cases. Indeed, if you set East Asia aside, autocracies have had median per capita growth rates that are 50 percent lower than poor democracies.

Asian autocracies are, in many ways, the exception that proves the rule. The gulf that separates the stunning success of the Asian tiger economies from Russia’s malaise is staggeringly wide. For example,
when South Korea was a developing authoritarian state in the 1960s, manufactured goods made up 65 percent of its exports. By the 1970s, that figure had risen to more than 80 percent. In other words, its economy increasingly relied on producing tangible, real products that the rest of the world wants. Russian exports, on the other hand, are incredibly dependent on a single commodity—energy. In 2008,
oil and gas accounted for 70 percent of Russian exports. Goods and services made up just 1.7 percent of exports, with high-tech exports at a paltry 0.3 percent. Taiwan may have been ruled by a single party until the late 1980s, but when it was surging in the 1970s,
it kept state employment at a relatively lean 12.5 percent. In Russia today, the state remains bloated; the government and its
state-owned enterprises employ nearly 40 percent of workers. Or consider education. In its early days, Singapore made enormous investments in schooling and saw its number of students enrolled in high school triple between 1959 and 1972. Russia is moving in the opposite direction. Under Putin,
Russia’s annual spending per high school student put the country behind Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey. There is virtually no ingredient in the Asian economic miracle present in Russia.

If they aren’t citing Asian autocracies, Russian elites will mention another Asian powerhouse: Japan. Markov and other government officials I spoke with are enamored of the example set by Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The appeal is obvious: The LDP ruled Japan for an uninterrupted fifty-four years. In the same period, Japan rose from the ashes of World War II to become the world’s second-largest economy. Along the way, almost all political competition was little more than factional jockeying within the LDP camp, and corruption between political and business elites was commonplace. Russian
elites see something to admire in the Japanese example. For them, the secret to the Asian economic miracle begins with the political leadership in countries like Japan (or China, for that matter) holding on to power. If it hadn’t, if some other political force had somehow wrested control from the LDP or from Chinese Communists, then, in the Russian view, it surely would have mucked things up. But what the Russians aren’t willing to admit is that they may have it reversed, that the ability of their Asian counterparts to remain in power for so long might be based on something Russian political elites have not yet proven they can manage: sustained economic progress.

Markov is smarter, however, than to rest his argument entirely on modern exemplars of the Asian miracle, whether democratic or authoritarian. He also reaches back to the example of post–World War II Italy, a country that was long ruled by a single party, had high levels of corruption, and managed to succeed. “An extremely high level of corruption. Maybe [Italy] was the most corrupt country; almost every prime minister was under the control of the Mafia,” says Markov, growing more certain of his argument. “[Yet] Italy [had] great prosperity, development, and modernization. Italy was one of the leaders in postwar Europe.”

It’s true that political scientists haven’t established an iron law between a country’s level of corruption and its development. But if the devil is in the details, the details aren’t good for Russia. Corruption is so great in Russia’s case that it is cannibalizing the country’s growth.
Graft erases roughly one-third of the country’s GDP every year. The World Bank estimates that nearly half of the Russian economy is linked to some form of corruption. Russia finished 143 out of 182 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2011, below Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Syria.

I point out to Markov that just that morning I read that
the number of billionaires in Russia, according to
Forbes
magazine, had nearly doubled from thirty-two to sixty-two in the past year. In the same twelve months, almost all of the country’s economic metrics were in decline.
The national economy contracted almost 8 percent, its worst performance since the end of the Soviet Union. According to the World Bank, industrial output declined more than 10 percent, the manufacturing sector fell 16 percent, and fixed capital investment dropped
17 percent. Didn’t that underline the problem, especially given that we know how some of those billionaires earned their wealth?

Markov brushes away my question. “It’s the kind of capitalism we have. Russia is a country of extremes,” he says. “All societies should be [understood] by practice, by reality, and by clear logic. Just because the
New York Times
is publishing an article about this …” He trails off for a moment. “It is not for Kremlin people. All these newspapers who publish so many articles about the direct connection between the monopoly of United Russia and the high level of corruption, they publish hundreds of articles about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.”

His attempt to cloud the connection between his country’s political system and its rampant corruption is classic Kremlin spin. But the political operative doesn’t sugarcoat everything. He admits that the political body he is a member of, the Duma, is essentially a rubber stamp and has no say in how the country is run. At one point, he even jokes that the Russian parliament should be renamed “the Ministry of Lawmaking”—just another appendage of Putin’s rule.

Gleb Pavlovsky agrees. “
Practically, we can say that we have the democracy of zero reading,” he tells me in his corner office overlooking the Moscow River. “When the law comes into the Duma for hearings and readings, almost nothing changes in the law.” At the time, Pavlovsky was one of the Kremlin’s top political advisers and the head of a consultancy called the Foundation for Effective Politics. He has been working as a political consultant longer than just about anyone else in Russia, and he acknowledged, before I could, that there is no shortage of rumor about the work that he has done. “There are a lot of myths around my activity and my involvement in this or that thing,” he told me, adding that is why the Russian press likes to refer to him as the “gray cardinal.”

Pavlovsky is short and stocky, with closely cropped hair, and he is dressed entirely in black. In the corner a television is on, replaying a speech Putin delivered earlier that day. Indeed, the then prime minister loomed large in Pavlovsky’s office. Although he said he worked for Medvedev—his third Russian president after Yeltsin and Putin—a large portrait of Putin hung on the wall, and there were no photographs of anyone else. In the early 1990s, Pavlovsky worked for organizations
that supported democracy promotion initiatives, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute. He refers to that time as his “major political experience.” “In fact,” he told me, “my career has been based on the experience that I gained working in those independent democratic organizations.” His critics would agree. They say, however, that he spent that time
learning about Western democracy promotion efforts so that he could better understand how to subvert them and later maintain Putin’s monopoly of power. In 2006, the Ukrainian Security Service banned him from traveling to Ukraine because of allegations that he had created Russian-focused NGOs that interfered with the country’s presidential elections. When I asked him how he would describe his work, he remained vague about what he does but not for whom he does it. “I generate ideas for the resolution of internal problems. During the last ten years, my almost exclusive client is the presidential administration.”

I asked Pavlovsky if the stability that Russia enjoys could, in fact, be a false stability, and if the system as it is devised cuts itself off from feedback, new talent, and competition. “The considerations that you just expressed are very similar to Putin’s considerations of stability,” he replied. “That’s actually what he thinks about.” The trouble is that when it comes to political competition, he said, there is really no one who can compete with Medvedev and Putin. Pavlovsky believes Medvedev and Putin understand this problem and that the next step is for there to be a “contest of ideas.” This contest, he says, “is going on almost permanently in the Kremlin, in the think tanks, in different brainstorm centers.” But not in the Duma? “I’m afraid there’s no one to really argue with in the Duma. The problem is that in the non-systemic opposition there are not many heads you can really debate with,” says Pavlovsky. “They don’t have any ideas except one: when we were ministers, everything was great.”

The criticism is hardly fair. Opposition parties have to struggle to find anyone willing to give them financing because doing so can have consequences. They must learn to operate under rules that have made it progressively harder to win seats. Their attempts to hold rallies or public events are easily blocked by authorities, and they are completely barred from national television. Pavlovsky himself is credited
with coming up with the idea of the Public Chamber, an institution that exists to help supplant some of the role a parliament could play. He is considered an important draftsman of the political system as it exists. For him to criticize the opposition for not having ideas is a bit like a doctor complaining he doesn’t have any patients—because he already poisoned them. I tell him his criticism seems unfair since the opposition is forced to spend most of its time simply trying to exist. “You are right. We’ll have to risk [great political competition],” he says. “We’ll just have to make a choice in what we are going to risk and when we are going to risk it.”