Putin's Labor Dilemma: Russian Politics Between Stability and Stagnation by Stephen Crowley

Author:Stephen Crowley [Crowley, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: law, Labor & Employment, Political Science, World, Russian & Former Soviet Union, History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9781501756290
Google: Ky39DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell
Published: 2021-07-15T14:02:33+00:00

Defending Stability in Tough Times

Putin came to power in 1999 as the prime minister serving a deeply unpopular President Yeltsin. While Yeltsin survived the wave of protests in the late 1990s, the entire Yeltsin government and entourage were, in the public’s mind, deeply implicated in the cataclysm of the 1990s, especially the huge increase in poverty and the rapid privatization that was widely viewed as enriching a handful of oligarchs. When Putin assumed the presidency in early 2000, many observers believed he was given the post in order to protect the Yeltsin “family”—those most closely associated with Yeltsin, including powerful oligarchs—from prosecution and possible loss of their assets.

As president, Putin soon made the promise of “stability,” in contrast to the chaos of the 1990s, a cornerstone of his claim to legitimacy.1 The perceived threats to that stability began early on. Already in 1999, the NATO bombing of Russia’s longtime ally Serbia outraged even pro-Western liberals in Russia.2 That action directly contributed to the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević the following year, in the first of the color revolutions. For Russia’s new leadership, this suggested a twofold threat to stability: an external threat, from Western governments seeking “regime change,” and an internal threat, in that foreign influences sought to provoke domestic populations into rising up against their own governments. The “Bulldozer Revolution” in Serbia was soon followed by the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003, the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, and the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan in 2005.

For the leaders of Russia and other post-Soviet states, witnessing governments in neighboring countries fall through mass protest was hardly a welcome experience. Thus, what has been described as the “creeping authoritarianism” of Putin’s presidency did not take place in a vacuum. Russian (and other post-Soviet) leaders began to engage in “preemptive authoritarianism,” seeking to eliminate threats before they arose.3 Putin’s government enacted restrictive electoral reforms in 2005 and a law to curtail NGOs in 2006. The Russian leadership created its own youth movement, Nashi, to counter the youth movements that were seen as driving the color revolutions in other countries. With such concerns in mind, Kremlin leaders began overtly to question the legitimacy of liberal democracy, alleging that it was a foreign influence alien to Russian culture.4

Given such anxieties over foreign intervention and youth-led protests, any threat from workers would appear to be a lower-level concern. As we have seen, however, the challenge posed by workers began before Putin came to power and predated any concern with color revolutions. By the mid-1990s, it was clear that the nonpayment of wages and the resulting protests reflected the failure of trade unions or other institutions to effectively channel the grievances of workers and others in a time of wrenching social change. As Simon Clarke noted at that time, this “underlies the dual fear that the bulk of the population will, in its passive moment, vote for the authoritarian leader who can make the most radical promises and, in its active moment, take to the streets in outbursts of mass civil unrest.

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