If Putin has nightmares (and who knows, he may), Yanukovych’s dilemma—to escalate using force against demonstrators or else look for an exit—should feature in them. For there are lessons for Russia’s President in what is happening in Ukraine.
Putin cannot have expected what happened in Ukraine after his apparent triumph over the proposed Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. But in shoring up his own position in the Kremlin over the years, in effect he anticipated some of them well in advance:
First, he has deepened and thereby qualitatively shifted the personalized system of central control that has increasingly defined Russian governance since he first assumed the Presidency in 2000. Rivalry within the ruling group of course remains, but decision making has been absorbed into the Kremlin, and the government headed (if that is the right word) by Prime Minister Medvedev has been sidelined.
Second, he has since May 2012 overseen a major reinforcement of the security apparatus and legal underpinning for repression in Russia as and when needed. Yanukovych was too late in mid-January with the anti-protest, anti-NGO laws he aped from Russian prototypes. Putin and his siloviki have seen off the protests which shook their confidence in 2011 and 2012. Organized opposition in Russia is now at a low ebb.
Third, the Russian regime’s propaganda has beaten the anti-Western drum, and persuaded a great number of Russians that they need to rally round their leaders in the face of foreign plots. Even that woolly old sheep the European Union allegedly has it in for them.
And fourth, Putin’s return to the Kremlin has seen the end of discussion of market friendly reforms aired under the Medvedev Presidency, with their disturbing implications for political liberalization. Mega-projects, state corporations, and centralized micro-management are back instead.
None of these developments should have come as a surprise, though some foreign analysts once held out hope for a degree of liberalization instead. They represent the logical resumption of the course that Putin has long set. He made his feelings about the protesters plain at the time. And he was clear in the program he presented in his pre-electoral “campaign” that he saw the main role in the Russian economy remaining in central hands. He now insists that his program be implemented, pressures on the budget or not.
Putin may like to talk of the dangers of Orange Revolution, but he is in truth far better placed to guard against it than the feckless bully Yanukovych, who for a start has run out of money. Ukrainians, too, have far wider experience of exercising civic courage than Russians. Their political and economic systems are no doubt corrupt, and may well be more corrupt than those of Russia. But they are also more diversified, as is Ukraine’s mass media. Yanukovych would have to turn the screws down tight if he were now to try to regain control by force. And it’s far from clear that he’d succeed anyway, especially absent Russian help.
So why should Putin’s dreams be troubled by any conceivable parallel between Yanukovych’s fate and his own? Putin argues—he would, wouldn’t he?—that the unrest in Ukraine is the fruit of Western interference, and therefore yet another reason for Russia to defend her unique values. Perhaps he really believes that to be so. But he must also understand at some gut level that the turmoil in Kiev and indeed beyond it is not because the West has been active, cunning and organized, but because so many Ukrainians have come to resent the way they have been governed, and to despise those responsible for it. Ukraine is not the victim of a struggle between Russia and the West but the victim of its own misgovernance.
That is the parallel that should disturb Putin, and remind him of the 2011/2012 protests in his own country. It ought also to be a deterrent against any possible temptation on the part of the Russian ruling group to go any further than they have already done in supporting Yanukovych, particularly if he opts for the use of force under the excuse that his country faces an emergency situation. Even if domestic Russian reactions could be contained, and even if Yanukovych could restore “order” by such means, the overall effect would quite possibly be to reinvigorate the virus of civic activism in Russia.
Putin has presented the project of a Customs Union leading to a Eurasian Union as central to his current term. Its failure because of what is happening in Ukraine would be a blow. It is now certainly harder than ever to see a Customs Union, let alone a Eurasian Union, realizing the ambitions that have been declared for it by the Russians. But the project’s hold on the Russian people does not seem to be great, and its cost to the Russian Exchequer if implemented would be considerable. If Putin can bring himself to do it, perhaps with the consoling idea that Ukraine will come round to something like it in the end, it would be sensible for him not to press the issue further on Kiev. Putin’s partners in Astana and Minsk cannot be happy with the way that Moscow has tried to twist other ex-Soviet arms to compel them to come in.
Putin ought also to know that while he has locked himself into a political and economic trajectory that preserves, even deepens, the present personalized and arbitrary way in which Russia is governed, Russian society is changing. The demands for independent and accountable judges acting under clear laws, and for effective participation in government beyond the narrow circle of those with privileged access to the present group and its servants, for example, are eating into the habit of waiting for the good tsar to bring justice. Russia’s economic fortunes, too, have declined, undermining the implicit understanding that prevailed during the fat years of 2000 to 2008 under which political apathy was seen as an acceptable price to pay for rapid GDP growth.
The current truth is that no one in Russia now feels certain about where their country is headed, that the prospect of economic stagnation—or maybe worse—is less than Russia deserves, and that the idea that Putin will run again in 2018 is no compensation for that outlook. That gentleman is not however for turning. The risks of structural change to Russia’s present governing system are surely now such that the President is trapped by what he and his colleagues have created over the years, and reinforced since President Putin reassumed his place in the Kremlin in May 2012.
Such a prospect, and such a national mood, have their dangers. Muddling through, or even muddling down, may not trigger them. But there are plenty of Russians who fear for their country’s future, and some who would see a parallel arising at some time not unlike that which now haunts Ukraine. There are after all no effective channels now available which might act to allow for significant change from what has been wrought under Putin, unless maybe Putin willed it, and even in that unlikely event, who knows what the outcome would be?