Russia

Russia is the largest country in the world. It spans eleven time zones and contains 148 million people, making it sixth largest nation in terms of population. It borders fourteen countries—eight of which were, like Russia, former members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—and the Arctic and North Pacific oceans. It is rich in natural resources, but its northern climate limits the amount of land available for cultivation and habitation. Russia's historic capital is Moscow. Peter the Great (1672–1725) moved the capital to his new city of St. Petersburg in 1712, and Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) returned the government to Moscow in 1918.

Until the twentieth century Russia was an autocracy ruled by czars. In March 1917, as the economy collapsed, popular unrest mounted, and casualties rose in World War I (1914–1918), Czar Nicholas II (1868–1918) abdicated . A provisional government assumed control, but before a constitutional assembly could convene the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, seized power on November 7, 1917. After a lengthy civil war Lenin established the USSR in 1924. Russia was the largest of the USSR's fifteen constituent republics, but the names Soviet Union and Russia were often—and incorrectly—used interchangeably. The USSR collapsed in late 1991, leaving Russia the largest of fifteen newly independent states. Russia occupies 76 percent of former Soviet territory.

soviet russia

The USSR was a totalitarian state with sovereignty vested in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). No other political parties or ideologies were allowed. The CPSU controlled all media, and censorship was common. Personal freedom was highly restricted. Individuals had little control over where they lived or their careers. Life revolved around the workplace, with schools, day-care facilities, medical clinics, and even vacation properties available only through workplace assignments. Travel abroad was extremely limited.

The CPSU controlled the economy through central planning and emphasized heavy industry and military production over consumer goods and agriculture. An extensive police network and the Committee for State Security (KGB) enforced discipline. All policies were decided by party officials, and a rubberstamp legislature, the Supreme Soviet, followed all instructions given by the Kremlin (the citadel of Moscow; the government of Russia).

In theory the highest authority in the land was the Communist Party Congress, consisting of some 4,000 party members from across the USSR. But because congresses met for only one week every five years, actual control was delegated to the Central Committee, a smaller body (around 300 members) that met twice annually. Day-to-day management was exercised by yet another group, the Politburo, whose members (around fifteen) met weekly. The general secretary chaired the Politburo, which had no formal organizational rules. Members were chosen formally by the Central Committee but served at the pleasure of the general secretary.

Although the USSR had presidents and prime ministers, real power was vested in the CPSU general secretary. There were no explicit rules for selecting or replacing general secretaries, and they typically ruled until their death. After Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) ruled ruthlessly as general secretary until his death in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) eased controls but was fired in 1964 when many of his policies failed. Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) replaced Khrushchev and served until his death in 1982. Brezhnev's immediate successors were elderly and ill, serving barely a year each: Yuri Andropov (1914–1984; served fifteen months) and Konstantin Chernenko (1911–1985; served thirteen months). Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931), the youngest Politburo member, became general secretary in 1985 and served until the USSR dissolved in late 1991.

Gorbachev surprised his Politburo colleagues by introducing numerous reforms. He sought to open discussion of alternative ideas, promote economic initiative, and shift the focus of power from the CPSU to the government. He introduced a new parliament, the Congress of People's Deputies, in 1988, along with a smaller standing parliament, still named the Supreme Soviet. In 1990 Gorbachev ended the CPSU's monopoly on power, but he still sought to control the reform process. He created a new, more substantial office of the USSR president, selected by parliament, not the people, and he became the first—and only—person to hold that post. The republics followed suit, shifting power from their first secretaries to new presidencies. In June 1991 Boris Yeltsin (b. 1931) became president of Russia through a popular election. A dual power situation ensued during which Yeltsin and Russia worked to wrest power from Gorbachev and the USSR.

Gorbachev's efforts to give substance to the USSR's purported federal structure provided Yeltsin with ample opportunity to challenge the Soviet president. After many rounds of negotiation and a popular referendum Gorbachev announced a new federal treaty that would be signed on August 20, 1991. The treaty created a Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics (substituting the word sovereign for the previous socialist) and tacitly acknowledged that the six republics refusing to participate in the negotiations (Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova) were free to enter or decline to enter the new political union. The treaty ceremony never took place. Hard-line Soviet leaders, fearing that the new treaty would mean the end of the great Soviet state—and their own power—seized power on August 19, 1991. Their ill-planned coup lasted only three days, during which time Russian President Yeltsin led a popular revolt against the plotters. By the time Gorbachev was released from house arrest, Yeltsin had emerged as the dominant political leader in Moscow.

During the autumn of 1991 Yeltsin put Soviet assets, institutions, and authorities under Russian control until it became obvious that Gorbachev had little left to govern. On the weekend of December 8, 1991, Yeltsin and his counterparts—Stanislav Shushkevich (b. 1934) from Belarus and Leonid Kravchuk (b. 1934) from Ukraine—declared the USSR dead. Gorbachev resigned the USSR presidency on Christmas Day.

independent russia

Yeltsin then began the simultaneous tasks of establishing a new state, a market economy , and a new political system. He faced two major institutional obstacles. First, Russia was still legally regulated by its 1978 constitution, although numerous amendments were introduced to place democratic reforms on a legal basis. Second, Yeltsin faced a sitting parliament that had been elected before independence and remained packed with communists. The Russian Supreme Soviet challenged Yeltsin's policies at every opportunity, particularly his radical economic changes (known as "shock therapy") and privatization. Finally, on September 21, 1993, Yeltsin dissolved the Supreme Soviet and called for elections for a new legislature in December. When parliament, led by speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov (b. 1947) and Vice President Alexander Rutskoi (b. 1945), refused to disband and attempts at negotiation failed, Yeltsin dispatched troops on October 3 to seize the parliamentary building by force. Critics accused him of turning from democrat to dictator. Subsequently, a new constitution was drafted for this revised Russian state.

constitutional structure

The Russian political system is defined by the constitution adopted in December 1993. It is a super-presidential system with a bicameral parliament, the Federal Assembly. The upper house, the Federation Council, consists of 178 seats—two for each of the Russian Federation's eighty-nine constituent units. The lower house, the State Duma, has 450 seats elected in two ways. Half the seats are selected in single-mandate districts, and the other half are chosen on a proportional, party-list basis. Duma members serve a four-year term.

The constitution vests tremendous powers in the presidency, and the potential for dictatorship is considerable. The president may serve a maximum of two four-year terms. The president nominates the prime minister, who then is confirmed by the Duma. The president may dissolve the government, call referendums, and issue decrees. The new constitution does not provide for a vice president.

The Russian judicial system has changed little from its Soviet days, and corruption remains a significant problem. Russia has three main courts: The constitutional court rules on constitutional issues, the Supreme Court deals with criminal and civil matters, and the higher court of arbitration deals with business issues. Individual defendants often are kept in pretrial detention for months or years. During their trials defendants are locked in metal cages in the courtroom, a measure that undermines any presumption of innocence. Defendants have few opportunities to appeal findings against them, but the state can ask for new trials without any concern over double jeopardy.

party system

Russia has a very weak party system. After one-party Soviet rule many Russians hesitated to join political organizations. The constitution prohibits the president from being a member of any party. Consequently, there is no one party of power. Instead, the Kremlin has hurriedly assembled parties for each Duma election, only to allow them to collapse before the next election. For the 1993 election the anointed party was Russia's Choice, which finished second behind the nationalist Liberal Democrats. In 1995 the Kremlin produced the Our Home is Russia Party, and the Unity movement was produced in 1999. With Kremlin support, Unity became a formal party, United Russia, in 2003.

Parties are consolidating slowly. Although nearly a hundred parties contested seats in the 1993 election, only twenty-three participated in the 2003 election. The constitution mandates that any party must receive at least 5 percent of the vote to claim a party-list Duma seat. But with so many parties, votes are scattered, and few parties can muster the required 5 percent. In 1995 nearly half the votes were "wasted" on parties that could not pass the threshold. A 2001 law reduced the number of parties by setting minimum membership levels for registration.

other players

Regional and business leaders have been key players in post-Soviet Russia. When Yeltsin faced opposition in parliament, he appealed to the leaders of Russia's eighty-nine regions and republics. He signed a series of bilateral treaties that gave the regions greater autonomy than was specified in the federal constitution. When one republic, Chechnya, refused to acknowledge Moscow's supremacy, the Kremlin launched two separate wars (1994–1996 and 1999 into the early 2000s) to prevent it from seceding from the Russian Federation. When the regional leaders became too independent, President Vladimir Putin (b. 1952), who was elected to the presidency in 2000 after Yeltsin's resignation, created seven super-regions overseen by his handpicked representatives.

The oligarchs, a powerful group of seven businessmen who had made personal fortunes from privatization deals, also influenced post-Soviet Russia. Anxious to protect their interests, the oligarchs backed Yeltsin's re-election in 1996 and handpicked his successor, Putin. For the 1999 parliamentary and 2000 presidential elections several oligarchs organized the governors into the pro-Kremlin bloc , Unity. As with regional leaders, Putin quickly moved to eliminate alternative power sources. He ordered the arrest of two oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky (b. 1946) and Vladimir Gusinsky (b. 1952), both of whom fled abroad.

presidential elections and succession

As of the early twenty-first century, post-Soviet Russia has had two presidents: Yeltsin (elected 1991 and 1996) and Putin (2000 and 2004). Both men have been accused of manipulating the political system for personal reasons.

Yeltsin's re-election bid was rigged to benefit his inner circle of advisers. Additionally, between the first round of voting and the run-off, Yeltsin had a massive heart attack, but this fact was concealed from Russian voters until Yeltsin had secured victory. He underwent quintuple bypass surgery in November 1996, contracted pneumonia, and was effectively an invalid for months. With no vice president, the daily business of running the country fell to Yeltsin's closest advisers and his daughter.

Yeltsin's last years in office were marked by a declining economy, rising corruption, and frequent turnover in the office of prime minister. The oligarchs soon turned on one another, fighting for assets and access.

As Yeltsin's second term neared its end, his family's complicity in a growing number of corruption schemes became problematic. On New Year's Eve 1999 Yeltsin abruptly resigned six months before his term was to end. As specified in the constitution, Prime Minister Putin—an ex-KGB agent and the latest of Yeltsin's string of prime ministers—succeeded him, with elections called within three months. As acting president, Putin's first action was to grant Yeltsin immunity from future prosecution. Putin won a landslide victory in March 2000 and was reelected in March 2004.

Putin's presidency has been marked by a series of moves to centralize power in the executive branch and eliminate opposition views. He began with center-periphery relations and then moved on to the oligarchs. Ignoring the constitution, Putin changed the method for selecting members of the Federation Council; rather than regional governors and legislative chairs taking seats, governors and legislatures now appoint representatives. Putin ordered the arrest of businessmen who challenged his authority and shut down media outlets critical of his policies. He also showed an increasing preference for appointing former military and security service operatives (siloviki) to key government positions.

subnational jurisdictions

After decentralization, Russia's constitution of 1993 provided a high degree of autonomy to its roughly one hundred groups of people. In addition to the central federal government, the many regional, or subnational, jurisdictions within the country were granted rights, status, and governmental power of their own. These jurisdictions include six territories (kraya); ten autonomous regions (okruga) and the separate Birobidzhan Jewish oblast, or province; twenty-one ethnic enclaves; and forty-nine other oblasts. St. Petersburg and Moscow also have independent city status equal to that of the oblasts.

Many of these jurisdictions have sought to secede from the republic of Russia and become completely independent states, largely because of ethnic concerns or desires to control resources, whether trade- or tax-related. The balance of power continued to shift away from the central government toward the subnational jurisdictions throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, but the ties between jurisdictions and the central federal government have largely remained.

Putin's rise to prominence coincided with the second war in Chechnya. In summer 1999 a new burst of terrorist attacks was blamed on the Chechens. Putin, serving as prime minister at the time, portrayed himself as a strong leader able to impose control (unlike the ailing Yeltsin) and launched a massive second campaign to rein in the rebel republic in October 1999. Numerous international and human rights groups criticized Moscow for the war's brutality, human rights abuses, and massive refugee populations. In October 2002 Chechen rebels seized a theater in Moscow, holding 750 cast and audience members hostage. Putin sent special forces to storm the theater, killing all the hostage takers. However, many of the hostages died from inadequate medical treatment when authorities delayed in identifying the gas pumped into the building to disarm the terrorists.

Putin declared victory in Chechnya in 2003, imposing a new constitution and installing his own candidate, Akhmad Kadyrov (1951–2004), as president of the republic. But the Chechens had not capitulated. Kadyrov was assassinated in May 2004, and in August another Kremlin candidate, Alu Alkhanov (b. 1957), became Chechnya's president. This election, which was criticized strongly by some independent observers, was followed immediately by a series of terrorist attacks blamed on Chechens: Two Russian airliners exploded simultaneously in midair, a bomb exploded at a Moscow metro station, and over 300 people (mainly children) died when terrorists seized a school in the village of Beslan.

Putin invoked the Beslan tragedy to justify a massive shift away from democracy in late 2004. He proposed a variety of changes to the political system, including replacing popular elections for regional governors with presidential appointments, ending single-mandate districts in the Duma, and giving the president an almost exclusive right to appoint and remove judges. Putin insisted that such measures would eliminate the corruption that had made Russia vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

economic and political transitions

The transition from the Communist Party–led dictatorship to a reconstituted Russia with aspirations for significant economic growth and a free and democratic government has not been an easy task. The severe economic difficulties of the late Yeltsin years have eased to some degree. As of 2004, the Russian economy had experienced six straight years of economic growth averaging 6.5 percent per year, investment prospects appeared to be recovering, and income was rising: Russia's per capita income in 2003 was estimated at $8,900, about the same as that of Malaysia and Mexico and $700 higher than the average for the world. Overreliance on resource exports and an archaic manufacturing sector remain as economic problems that will require solutions if Russia is to achieve its economic aspirations.

On the political front the authoritarian tendencies of Presidents Yeltsin and Putin, the evident corruption and abuse of power, and the ethnic and regional conflicts that plague contemporary Russia leave its citizens in what Freedom House rated as a "partly free" society, one in which both political rights and civil liberties ratings were 5 on Freedom House's 7-point scale, in which a rating of 7 indicates one of the least free nations in the world. Few observers would argue that the citizens of Russia in the twenty-first century have fewer rights than they had at the height of the USSR, but progress toward a democratic and free society has been limited.

See also: Gorbachev, Mikhail; Stalin, Joseph; Yeltsin, Boris.

bibliography

Dunlop, John B. The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Freedom House. "Russia." Freedom in the World 2004. New York: Freedom House, 2004. <http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2004/countryratings/russia.htm>.

Nichols, Thomas. The Russian Presidency: Society and Politics in the Second Russian Republic. New York: St. Martin's/Palgrave, 2001.

"Russia." In CIA World Factbook 2004. Washington, DC: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 2004. <http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/rs.html>.

Shevtsova, Lilia. Yeltsin's Russia: Myths and Reality. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999.

Shevtsova, Lilia. Putin's Russia. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003.

Ann E. Robertson