A Russian coup

By Maxim Trudolyubolv

What's behind the calls for Putin to hold early presidential elections.

MOSCOW — St. Petersburg has seen an attempted liberal coup. At least, that’s how one might describe a debate that began late last week at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s answer to Davos.

Alexei Kudrin, former finance minister and current chairman of the Committee for Civic Initiatives, an NGO, called for an early presidential election at the event. The next presidential election is currently scheduled to take place in the spring of 2018.

It’s a delicate, byzantine kind of coup. On the one hand, Kudrin and other reform-minded figures like German Gref, the CEO of Sberbank who sat on the same panel with Kudrin that morning last Thursday, June 18, are suggesting that Russia’s economy is in a bad shape. On the other hand, they hold that Putin himself is beyond reproach and that he is the only person who can turn Russia around. In order for structural reforms to be politically acceptable, Kudrin later explained, reformers need a strong mandate. And to get such a mandate, they need an electoral victory. And who, except Putin, can win an election in Russia?

Don’t ask why the current government’s mandate, ensured by Putin’s constantly publicized 86 percent approval rate, is not good enough. One explanation might be that Putin cannot simply dismiss the current government, led by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, because of his carefully guarded personal loyalties. If an early election is held, Medvedev’s government will resign and a new president will appoint a new prime minister who will then set about forming a new government. Kudrin does not hide the fact that he would like to be considered for the prime minister’s job. 

The inspiration behind the early-election-and-reform drive is Nursultan Nazarbayev, a veteran post-Soviet politician and the unchallenged leader of Kazakhstan for the past 25 years. He held an early election of his own in April, one year ahead of schedule, winning a grotesque 97.7 percent of the vote. Following his win, Nazarbayev came up with a detailed plan for structural reform that caused German Gref to experience “culture shock:” “This is one of the best documents I’ve ever seen. It’s comprehensive and logical. Kazakhstan will be a different country if they manage at least 50 of the 100 ‘steps’ laid out on the plan,” Gref said last month at the Astana Economic Forum. 

Kazakhstan provokes envy in Moscow

In 1999, Gref headed the think tank responsible for drafting the reform plan for Putin’s first term as president. A long-time Putin confidante, Gref served as the minister of economics and trade between 2000 and 2007. One can be certain that he briefed Putin on Nazarbayev’s plan, which outlines “100 Concrete Steps to Implement Five Institutional Reforms.” In addition to giving the country a sense of direction, Nazarbayev said that the “100 steps” can also be used as a checklist to track Kazakhstan’s progress on five key reforms: building a professional state apparatus; introducing the rule of law; supporting industrialization and economic growth; ensuring the county’s special identity and unity; and forming an accountable government. 

These are only declarations, of course. But this is nevertheless the kind of plan the Kremlin’s pro-reform party, including Gref, has been talking about for years. The difference is that Kazakhstan is actually implementing it.

Many of Nazarbayev’s “steps” sound more like Singaporean or Chinese reforms than European or American ones. The plan purports to achieve accountability without democracy or freedom of the press. It encourages civic participation but only at the local level. It promises the rule of law, but mainly for commerce and within strict limits: The planned financial hub in Astana will have special legal status as a common law jurisdiction, and will introduce English as an official language on its territory. 

The “100 steps” plan is non-Western and decidedly not post-Soviet. It signals Kazakhstan’s political and cultural break with the post-Soviet Russian sphere and aspires to take up an Asian model of development.

Sanctions against Russia are hitting us too because we are interconnected

One can dismiss Nazarbayev’s move as purely tactical. With the economy deteriorating, he undoubtedly had less trouble getting re-elected in 2015 than he would have had in 2016. “Sanctions against Russia are hitting us too because we are interconnected,” Erbol Zhumagulov, an independent film-maker and journalist in Kazakhstan, told the Moscow radio station Kommersant FM. “The situation with political stability is uncertain too: The Russian-speaking minority [about 22 percent of the population] sees Putin as their president.”

But Nazarbayev does not seem to be playing a short-term game. Kazakhstan has made a cautious but unequivocal step in the direction of strengthening its sovereign stance vis-à-vis Russia. “The Eurasian connection is not the only political direction for the Kazakhstani elites,” says Alexey Malashenko, chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Religion, Society, and Security program. “It’s possible that it soon won’t be the main one. While the Russian project for Eurasia is rooted in the past, the Chinese Silk Road Economic Belt project promises a path to the future.”

It was, after all, in Astana that Chinese President Xi Jinping announced his Silk Road initiative in 2013. Since then Kazakhstan has become the first stop on the “Silk Road” and the two countries have signed over $37 billion worth of trade deals. Two new transportation corridors are planned as part of “100 steps,” and one of them will bypass Russia.

Kazakhstani elites have been contemplating a move eastward for years. But only now, after 25 years of authoritarian rule and a significant decrease in the size of the Russian minority, down from 38 percent in 1989, does Nazarbayev apparently feel confident enough to go through with it. The situation in Russia helped him make up his mind. His reform program may provoke envy in Moscow, but it was Moscow that spurred Kazakhstan to search for an identity of its own in the first place.

Caught between two modernities

Putin’s assertion of ethnic solidarity, or Russia’s obligation to protect “all Russian speakers,” as a justification for his Crimea land grab caused deep anxiety in Kazakhstan, whose population of 17 million now includes 3.7 million ethnic Russians. The Kremlin’s goal of protecting Russians who live outside the Motherland contradicts his desire to create a viable Eurasian economic union. Putin has never clarified which countries should consider their Russian-speaking populations “protected” by the Russian Federation. Large Russian-speaking minorities, aside from Ukraine and Kazakhstan, are found in Estonia, Latvia, and Belarus. 

Just like Ukraine has drifted westward away from Russia, Kazakhstan will drift eastward. And as soon as Russia’s leaders realize that the Kazakhs are departing just like the Ukrainians did, they will have to deal with an “eastern situation,” a more complicated problem for the Kremlin than the current, more familiar, western crisis. Many top-ranking Russians have long persuaded themselves that the West betrayed them. They are disappointed in democracy and look down upon what they see as the decay of Western civilization. They pay deference to Asian modernization projects, but only because they don’t know very much about them. They are less prepared for mischief coming from the East than from the West. 

Russia now finds itself caught between two modernities. The Kremlin has abandoned Western approaches to modernization, but has not yet found a viable alternative. As the Kremlin wearily observes the old European model of modernity continuing to develop to the West, it watches in disbelief as a newer, younger version rapidly emerges on its southern and eastern borders. 

It’s hard to imagine that Putin will subscribe to any of the principles that his reform-minded viziers are trying to sell him. Service-oriented, transparent states modeled on Singapore are as foreign to him as the human-rights-worshipping societies of the West. And according to the rules he himself imposed on Russia, Putin is the only person who can make that choice. Nothing prevents him from accepting Kudrin’s proposal and calling a snap election next spring. But once he wins, he won’t be obliged to follow any reformist agenda. Putin does not owe anything to anyone. Only real reform in Russia can change that.