Liberalism and Neo-Patrimonialism in Post-Communist Russia

Richard Sakwa Department of and International Relations, Professor of Russian and European Politics, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent “Though individuals may have possessions without government, the way a dog pos- sesses a bone, there is no private property without government. Property is a socially protected claim on an asset—a bundle of rights enforceable in courts backed by the coercive power of government.” Mancur Olson1

Introduction The public-private distinction in the early twenty-first century is one of the most important issues in understanding contemporary political practice in post-communist Eastern Europe. In the epigraph above, Olson draws attention to the ancient Roman distinction between possessio and dominium, and the distinction can be applied not only to physical things but, also, to the ability to exercise political rights. Russians may today have become citizens, but how effectively can they exercise these rights? The sphere of private life and consumption has now been secured against the depredations of the former communist regime, but the public aspects of citizenship are still far from being fulfilled. The distinction between the public and the private raises fundamental questions about the nature of political power and the ways that traditional struggles to establish and defend liberal freedoms are being played out in this region. For many, the fall of signaled the delayed reassertion of the onward march of liberalism that had been so rudely interrupted by the triumph of the revolutionary communist challenge in 1917. Others were not so sure. Liberalism presupposes spheres of life that are—as it were—“pre-political”; where the writ of government power is proscribed and where the individual can develop and defend their rights. The idea of a sphere of private concerns is at the heart of liberalism, but the degree to which liberalism can sustain an active public sphere is another question. Rights-based liberalism is certainly far from triumphant in large areas of the post-communist post-Soviet world, and even less so the philosophi- cal basis to legitimize an active public policy within the framework of liberalism. Instead, an economistic view of liberalism appears to have

1 Mancur Olson, “Why the Transition from Communism is so Difficult”, 21 Eastern Economic Journal 1995 No.4, 437-461, at 458. William B. Simons, ed. Private and Civil Law in the Russian 327-346 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 328 Richard Sakwa triumphed, with private property accepted but with a stunted develop- ment of a public sphere.2 At the same time, the patrimonial elements in the definition of public power inherited from the Soviet system still exercise a profound effect. Richard Pipes argues that the roots of patrimonialism reach back into the Tsarist era.3 The state remains the largest employer, and the government does not easily restrain its hegemonic ambitions even in the economic sphere. On the basis of the Russian example, this chapter will argue that three fundamental principles of social organization remain in tension. The division is not only between state and market, but the whole ensemble of interactions that define both. The old-fashioned Soviet purposive nature of political power has given way to a new purposiveness of the post-com- munist regime: not to build but to build the market. At the same time, the profound tutelary role of the state remains deeply embedded in political interactions and social relations.4 Bonds of mutual self-interest transcend the distinction between the public and the private, between state and private property, and between individual rights of citizenship and the imperatives of state construction. The struggle to build com- munism gave way to “the transition” to capitalism and liberal under the presidency of Boris Elt’sin in the 1990s. Rather than organic development, Russia embarked on yet another state-sponsored moderniza- tion project. Under Vladimir Putin in the 2000s, the reassertion of state authority appeared—to many observers—to signal the re-establishment of a patrimonial state that blurred once again the distinction between the public and the private.

Three Orders In contrast to earlier “revolutions from above”, the current re-modern- ization project is different because of its complexity, with some elements perpetuating earlier patterns of heavy-handed anti-liberal dirigisme, but other processes directly repudiating what are perceived to be traditional features of Russian political culture.5 Under Elt’sin and Putin, at least three orders have emerged—each in tension with the others. The firstis the tra-

2 See Jerzy Szacki, Liberalism after Communism, Budapest 1995. 3 Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, Harmondsworth 1974; see, also, Richard Pipes, The , New York 1991. 4 Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy, , DC 2001. 5 The idea that Soviet structures have been progressively restored as part of a natural process of “social regeneration” has been advanced by Alexander Zinoviev in numer- ous works. See V. Lupan, Russkii vyzov, translated and with an introduction by A. Zinoviev, Moscow 2001, 139-140.