Return to normality and advanced democratization: scenarios for a normal Russia of the future. Part 3

The third part of the report “Return to Normality and Advanced Democratization,” dedicated to possible scenarios for political transformation in Russia and prepared as part of the project “Normalization Platform: Reclaiming the Future,” addresses an issue that usually remains outside the scope of political reform plans.

A “window of opportunity” for democratization, as a rule, opens in connection with a crisis of an authoritarian regime, but not all such crises lead to democratization. The likelihood of a favorable development of events is increased by the presence of a competitive democratization agenda, which is not limited by the exclusively liberal understanding of democracy, and the formation around it of a relatively broad and stable coalition capable of giving an appropriate vector to regime transition.

The results achieved at each stage of democratization will be limited and almost always compromise. And the result of a successful transition will not be the triumph of democratic ideals, but a period of structurally “weak” democracy, vulnerable to crises and attempts at revenge. Democratization is a long-term political and social process of the formation of new practices, new organizations and a new map of polity.

Nevertheless, democratization in Russia is by no means a pipe project, but, on the contrary, a return to the natural track of civil peace and political development. And recurrent democratizations are not a rare phenomenon in history; the same, however, as recurrent autocratizations.

See the first and second sections of the report here , the fourth here .

3. Democratization as a process: stages, forks, opportunities and limitations

“Window of opportunity” and regime transformation scenarios

Democratization projects written within the framework of the “big bang” concept are distinguished by both the radicalism of their solutions and their complete detachment from the question of how and under what conditions these solutions may be in demand and implemented. To answer this question, we propose to look at the problem from the opposite point of view - to imagine possible democratization in Russia as a political process that has its own logics, stages, intermediate goals and limitations.

A “window of opportunity” for democratization, as already mentioned, usually arises as a result of an economic, managerial or political crisis. However, only in a quarter of cases, statistics say, the crisis of an authoritarian regime leads to democratization (→ Geddes, White, Franz: How dictatorships work ). The early articulation of a realistic democratic alternative and the formation of a broad coalition in support of it, along with the experience of living in an albeit flawed democracy, are factors that can increase the likelihood of a positive outcome.

Moreover, even at the stage of maturation of the crisis, the demand for democratization of the regime will not be the only proposed alternative. Along with it, slogans of “tightening the screws” (further centralization of resources and powers), compromise in the form of a return to pre-war “soft-Putinism” ( “Putinism without Putin” ), as well as anti-regime slogans of “patriotic mobilization” - variations of the “Prigogine” anti-liberal and anti-Western agenda, including at the same time a strong anti-elite and anti-corruption rhetoric. (This is roughly what the picture of probable alternatives looks like today.) In this competition of alternatives, a pro-democratic coalition can mobilize supporters under the slogans of rotation of power, its decentralization, the fight against corruption and “dominance of the security forces,” demands for real federalism and normalization of relations with the West, weakening of political and fiscal pressure on business, representation of political parties, competition and “fair elections.” This agenda sets a fairly wide range of addresses to various aspects of dissatisfaction with the current regime.

The task of the democratic opposition will be to convince society that demonopolization - multilateral decentralization of power - is the main condition for returning the country to a normal, non-confrontational trajectory, allowing the removal of existing restrictions on economic development. That is, to form a broad and relatively stable coalition around this idea, which can become one of the leading political forces of regime transit and give it the appropriate direction. This coalition will face intense competition both for the “moderate dissatisfied” - with the party of “Putinism without Putin” - and for those opponents of the regime who are focused on the themes of social injustice and corruption - with the “patriotic” illiberal opposition. At the same time, the struggle for the periphery of one’s electoral base is a key factor in the success of the coalition, without which the discussion of the “optimal design” of democratization will remain only an academic exercise.

When forming a coalition agenda, it is important to take into account that democratization is not a project of revenge of the opposition (“last will be first”), and the liberal, pro-European party, which is still very significant in Russian society, is not the only bearer of the democratic idea and its only “legitimate representative.” On the contrary, the basis of the democratic order lies in a compromise among a fairly wide range of political forces regarding the rules of competition for executive powers. The ability of a concert of political players, representing not only the liberal, but also the conservative and socially oriented sectors, to achieve such a compromise is the basic condition for democratization. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the liberal democratic values ​​and aspirations of the most radically inclined part of society towards the regime and the democratic order as a set of rules for political competition and the use of state violence. These are different things and different political goals.

When discussing democratization here as a political process, we mean to draw attention to the logic of those mobilizations, confrontations and agreements (pacts) that move society towards an acceptable compromise and are then formalized in the form of legislative innovations. The legislative fixation of a new institutional design is not the starting point of democratization, but the result and consolidation of its important stage - the stage of regime transformation, during which a broad coalition in support of democratization may or may not emerge. In this sense, the crisis is truly a “window of opportunity,” which the democratic opposition does not always manage to take advantage of.

We do not set out to predict this or that development of events; in any case, it will turn out to be unforeseen in its turning points. However, based on a fairly broad historical experience of democratization, it is possible to identify some key forks and dilemmas that will arise in most real scenarios on the path to the formation and advancement of a democratic coalition to success if the impending crisis triggers regime transformation processes. In the most general form, the following stages of this process can be distinguished:

(1) growing signs of crisis and erosion of the regime: on the side of the population - an expansion of the demand for changes, on the side of the regime - fragmentation of the elite and debate between hardliners and softliners about ways to overcome it;

(2) managed, that is, initiated and controlled by the regime, or landslide, that is, caused by an acute crisis and collapse of the regime, liberalization;

(3) intermediate (in the scenario of controlled liberalization) or founding (in the event of regime collapse) elections in conditions of an unformed party system;

(4) a period of structurally “weak” democracy: the struggle over the reform of political design and new rules of market competition, reformatting of previous coalitions.

Bargaining or rebellion: liberalization from above vs. democratization from below

Scenarios of sudden regime collapse as a result of an unforeseen uprising from below, which the authorities fail to cope with, are by no means rare in history. As examples, we can recall both the anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and the “Arab Spring” of the early 2010s. In such cases, just a year and a half before the collapse, the authoritarian regime looks completely stable and even more inertially stable than the current Russian one. The suddenness of the collapse of such regimes is not accidental, but a natural excess of dictatorships (→ Kuran: Sparks and prairie fires: A theory of unanticipated political revolution ), so in this matter one should not rely on today’s intuitions.

At first glance, the scenario of a rapid collapse of the regime looks preferable, especially for the radical part of the democratic opposition, since it will be associated with a one-time and complete abolition of political restrictions (landslide liberalization). However, in reality it creates enormous uncertainty and offers little chance for the consolidation of a democratic coalition and democratization. Repressive autocracies, as a rule, come to the moment of their sudden collapse with a scorched field of public initiatives and alternative projects, blocked communication channels, disunited, intimidated and demoralized by participation in the “crimes of the regime” by the elites. The party coalitions created in such conditions on wheels and urgently for elections are largely random and unstable, and their split in the conditions of insufficient legitimacy of the new authorities is fraught with civil conflict, which, in turn, creates the conditions for a new autocracy. One can recall here both the failed experience of the Russian February Revolution of 1917 and the consequences of the “Arab Spring,” which became a kind of parade of failed democratizations after the sudden collapse of old autocracies.

A more common case is the scenario of a relatively long confrontation between the regime and the opposition in conditions of a growing crisis. In this scenario, the political process is often initiated by the actions of the regime itself. If problems in the economy grow at the first stage, as a rule, the regime tries to further strengthen control in order to force the centralization of resources in the hands of a narrow “coalition of violence” (the period of “tightening the screws”). If such a strategy does not reduce the crisis potential, this may lead to increased discontent on the part of the population and the formation of two factions in the ruling coalition - hardliners and softliners (hardliners and softliners).

The likelihood of such a scenario is determined by the fact that the reduction in resources intensifies competition for them within the ruling coalition. Proposals to “soften” the regime arise as an attempt by one of the factions to find wider support and redistribute resources in a way that is beneficial to itself - for example, by reducing spending on defense and security (which today accounts for up to 40% of the budget in Russia and literally sucks funds from the civilian sector). The likelihood of factionalization is enhanced by the fact that two main groups initially coexist in the ranks of the Russian elite: professional managers and businessmen, who grew up in an era of external openness and relatively soft internal rules, and the security forces, whose political influence grew in proportion to the strengthening of the policy of self-isolation and repression.

Scenarios in which liberalization is initiated by the actions of the regime itself are a widespread phenomenon. The goal of controlled, limited liberalization is to preserve the regime by reducing the level of discontent, increasing the return on economic measures, co-opting part of the opposition, etc. An additional factor is often external pressure, which is quite relevant in the Russian case: the position of softliners will reinforce the need for “detente” in the confrontation with the West, easing sanctions restrictions and returning the minimum trust of external investors. Although controlled liberalizations are aimed not at dismantling, but at preserving the regime, two thirds of them ultimately led to its fall, and one third to stabilization (→ Treisman: Democracy by mistake ). The Soviet regime resorted to a policy of managed liberalization twice - in the 1950s and in the 1980s: in the first case it led to the stabilization of the regime, in the second - to its collapse.

The “liberalization from above” scenario creates both opportunities and challenges for the democratic opposition. The weakening of censorship and repression and the “struggle at the top” open up the prospect of its partial legalization, structuring, more effective communication with the electorate and campaigns to mobilize its supporters. In conditions of growing economic instability and political uncertainty, the democratic opposition will be listened to by part of the regional elites, dissatisfied with the dictates of the center and under its repressive pressure, part of the federal civil bureaucracy, dissatisfied with the dominance of the security forces, a significant part of business that has lost export income and prospects as a result of Russia’s self-isolation, and, finally, a significant part of the population under 45 years of age in large cities, seeking to return to the track of modernization and openness and alien to the ideology of the “besieged fortress" with its endless prohibitions and restrictions. Such a coalition, from the point of view of its base, will have a significant chance of success if it demonstrates advanced organizational potential at a time when the hardliners are discredited by the failure of the “tightening the screws” policy.

At the same time, managed liberalization will be a great challenge for the democratic coalition. From the regime's point of view, its goal is to split this coalition into moderate and radical factions, co-opting the former and marginalizing the latter. Softliners will claim patronage for “legalized democrats” provided they disown radicals, in particular the “foreign opposition.” This will plunge the “democrats” into internal debates on attitudes towards the war, Crimea and the West. Endless controversy will undermine the possibility of forming a grand coalition. The primary task of the democratic opposition will be not to lose its most steadfast and determined supporters and, at the same time, not to alienate moderate critics of the regime and elite groups that sympathize with it.

To summarize, we can say that the fundamental fork in “managed / landslide liberalization” creates the following challenges to democratization:

- controlled liberalization is a manipulative process, but the success of the manipulation is not guaranteed, and the “gains” of the opposition in the process of bargaining with the regime may turn out to be irreversible;

- the main goal of the democratic coalition in these conditions will be new concessions to the regime under the pressure of its mobilization campaign and participation in elections on the most favorable terms for itself - such a struggle will serve to structure and consolidate the democratic coalition;

- the main challenge of managed liberalization is the split of the opposition, when its two groups - radical and moderate democrats - will be focused on polemics with each other more than on opposing the regime and achieving agreed goals - in this scenario, it will probably achieve the goal of “regime stabilization”;

— the main challenge of the sudden and rapid collapse of the regime (landslide liberalization) is the lack of structure of the opposition and its organizational unwillingness to retain power, which returns the country to the “vicious circle” of autocracy.

Transit vs. founding elections

Two liberalization scenarios - landslide and controlled - will predetermine two fundamentally different scenarios for the first elections with the participation of the opposition. In the scenario of a sudden collapse of the regime and landslide liberalization, the elections will be of a founding nature, the rules for their conduct will be more favorable for the opposition; in the case of controlled liberalization, the elections will not be founding, but, on the contrary, “transitional” (transit) and will be held primarily according to the rules developed by the regime’s softliners.

In the second scenario branch, the opposition will face a difficult fork in the road: agree to elections with a large number of restrictions and a high risk of loss, demand additional concessions, or boycott the elections. As a rule, however, “transitional” elections become an important round of political confrontation - a step towards the real legalization of the opposition, a demonstration of its organizational and mobilization potential, negotiating power and electoral viability. In the last years of the Soviet regime, elections of people's deputies of the USSR and supreme councils of the union republics played such a role. Where the opposition failed to achieve significant success (get at least 15–20% of the seats), the democratization process stopped (as, for example, in the Central Asian republics); where it was successful, it moved forward, facilitating the transition of part of the old elite to the side of the opposition. The scenario of controlled “liberalization from above” delays the goals of genuine and full-fledged democratization, but at the same time leads to a split or, better said, to a reconfiguration of the elites, creating the preconditions for peaceful transition and the next stage of reforms.

In the first plot thread - the sudden collapse of the regime - holding “founding” elections will also become a complex political maneuver. Society will be faced with the need to simultaneously solve three problems: 1) holding elections as quickly as possible to overcome the power vacuum, 2) correcting election legislation that is critically damaged by the current regime, and 3) forming a democratic “mandate” for the new government, that is, clarifying the constitutional and legislative restrictions for it - the very reforms that are discussed within the framework of the “big bang” concept. On the one hand, these reforms must be carried out by new, legitimate authorities; on the other hand, it follows from this that they will be chosen on the basis of the “old” mandate. This is the “chicken and egg question” of the new regime. At the same time, the solution to the second task—the reform of constitutional and legislative design—will provoke heated discussions and an increase in splits and divisions, that is, contribute to the fragmentation of the democratic coalition.

A possible compromise could be a two-phase transition, involving a legislative “rollback” scenario. At the first stage, the legislative design of the political system returns to the previous version - before it was “damaged”, elections are held on this basis, and broader political reform is carried out under the “new government”. This scenario has many disadvantages, but creates a framework for the continuity of the post-authoritarian regime and has the advantage of legalism. This scenario implies:

— cancellation by a legislative act of the Duma of the law on amendments to the Constitution of March 14, 2020, on the grounds that the procedure for introducing amendments prescribed by the Constitution was violated by it;

— cancellation of changes made to the election legislation since 2012, on the grounds that they limited the rights of citizens, and this is contrary to the Constitution;

— abolition of the “repressive superstructure” in legislation, changes in the criminal and administrative codes that diminished the rights of citizens and introduced unconstitutional repressive norms and restrictions; this will create a legal basis for a broad political amnesty;

— it is also desirable to adopt a special law on the prosecution of opposition to the people’s will and attempts to limit political competition; the law may stipulate the return of public control over de facto state media and in the media empires created during the dictatorship, the introduction of additional standards of transparency and control of the electoral process.

These changes create the basis for holding elections on the basis of fairly competitive legislation (the logic of “rollback” underlies the project “Sanation of Law” , which has generated a list of legislative norms that are subject to repeal). A nationwide poll vote on several amendments to the Constitution (terms of office of the President and the Duma, subjects of exclusive jurisdiction of the subjects, election of the Federation Council, expansion of the rights of parliament to form and control the government) may also be scheduled for the date of new elections), the results of which will become a kind of “electoral mandate” for the new authorities called upon to adopt them in accordance with the constitutional order.

In both scenarios—midterm and founding elections—they will demonstrate the organizational potential of a democratic coalition to mobilize the electorate, as well as its ability to bargain and compromise both among different factions of its supporters and in relations with competing political forces.

Transit dilemma: “blank slate” or broad consensus, tradition or revolution?

Many projects of post-Putin transformations created by representatives of the opposition community conceive of the optimal democratization scenario as a kind of re-establishment of the Russian republic and a decisive break with the post-Soviet thirty years, which is entirely regarded as a failure of “spoiled” democratization. Accordingly, its new attempt should begin “from scratch,” and the practical implementation of this should be the adoption of a new constitution, which will put a reliable barrier to the personalistic degeneration of democracy in the form of a parliamentary form of government.

In contrast to supporters of this view, the majority of the Russian population (including those who are relatively democratically inclined) are probably not inclined to view all 35 years of post-Soviet history as a “dead end” and a total failure of the post-Soviet project. The democratic process in itself is not a key evaluation criterion for this part of society. At the same time, the 2000s and 2010s were a period of growing prosperity and predictability for the majority of Russian households, a period of stabilization of government life and governance. In their view, “damage” and systemic political corruption are more likely associated with the last period - for some it is counted from the 2011 elections, for others - from the amendment of the constitution of 2020 or even from the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The idea of ​​correcting this “damage” does not cancel their post-Soviet Russian identity, which includes many of its symbols (tricolor, etc.) and institutions.

Moreover, many institutions of post-Soviet democracy appear to the median Russian voter to be quite rooted, perceived as natural and familiar, although subject to distortion and corruption. These primarily include the institutions of direct elections of the president, governors and mayors. For a wide layer of citizens, it is precisely the slogans of the return of direct elections of mayors, competitive gubernatorial elections, in which not Moscow appointees, but “our own”, local politicians, and the replacement of a popularly elected president, fill concrete content with calls for the restoration of democracy and democratic order. An attempt to abolish direct elections of governors in 2005 caused significant resistance and was eventually annulled, and the movement in support of Governor Sergei Furgal, elected in defiance of Moscow, was one of the most massive and resistant protests in defense of democracy, the driving force of which was not the liberal democratic, but a broader, populist understanding of it. Direct elections of governors and mayors are also for the median voter the clearest and most textured representation of the federalist dimension of democracy and act as a point of consolidation of the interests of regional elites and the population in defending their autonomy in the face of Moscow and the “vertical of violence.”

On the contrary, the institutions of a parliamentary republic, in which parties play a key role, look alien and suspicious to the median voter, given the fictitious or bastard nature of most parties on the Russian political scene for almost the entire 35 post-Soviet years. According to surveys, parties consistently rank at the lowest level in the rating of trust in various political institutions. This situation could theoretically change if the democratic opposition manages to construct a non-personalist party brand (something like the Polish “Solidarity”), which, having gained authority in opposing the regime and taking root at the regional level, will at some point become a symbol of “change.” But this will take quite a lot of time.

One way or another, it is trust in actually existing parties that can become the basis for increasing citizens’ trust in the parliamentary system, but it is unlikely that the opposite is true. It is difficult to imagine democratic mobilization and a broad democratic coalition united around the idea of ​​a parliamentary republic in today's Russia. And this is another important fork in the understanding of the processes of regime transformation. While ideologists of optimal democratic design leave out the question of the driving forces and mechanisms of regime transformation, for a real democratic coalition the question of the broadest possible mobilization of supporters will be the main one, and therefore it will have to deal with ideas about democracy that are in the minds of voters, and not liberal intellectuals.

But the point is not only in the choice between parliamentary and presidential-parliamentary models, but in the more general dilemma of regime transit. While radical democratization projects favor the revolutionary scenario of a “clean slate” and re-establishment of the republic, the median voter is more likely to prefer the evolutionist idea of ​​fixing and improving familiar institutions. The democratic coalition may be faced with a choice between its ideals and those institutional guidelines that are more familiar to the median voter and will encounter less resistance from elite groups who also fear revolutionary institutional changes. This does not mean that the question of the preferred political model in Russia should be resolved in favor of presidentialism, which means that the political logics of regime transformation and the legislative optimum can and will diverge, and the desire to resolve all issues “in one package” may be detrimental to the stability of the coalition.

The revolutionary concepts of the “big bang” and “clean slate” suggest that, unlike past attempts at democratization, the current one will bring quick and obvious results. Therefore, their authors tend to distance themselves from them as “unscrupulous”. The idea of ​​democratization as a long process, on the contrary, indicates the need to emphasize the continuity of new attempts and stages of democratization in relation to the previous ones, thus positioning and building an idea of ​​the democratic tradition and its rootedness in Russian political history. This strategy is more conducive to the formation of non-personalistic, indefinitely existing organizations - stable parties that survive many electoral and political cycles and acquire a significant “hereditary” electorate.

The nature and challenges of “weak democracy”

The most important feature of the “founding” elections will be that even with quite acceptable rules for their conduct, they will in any case turn out to be flawed for the reason that they will take place in the conditions of an unformed party system. Election coalitions will be created on the fly and in a hurry and, as a result, will be highly likely to be fragile and subject to mutations. Comparative studies show that both liberal freedoms and the institution of democratic elections arise at fairly early stages of democratization and are far from being a reliable guarantee of its success (→ V-Dem: Chains in episodes of democratization ).

The period of transit and the first post-authoritarian elections will almost certainly be followed by a period of “weak” democracy, when many practices will contradict written law, the party system will remain unstable and vulnerable to “capture” by oligarchic and bureaucratic groups, and the forces of revenge, which lost influence at the time of transit, will regroup, considering the existing balance of political forces inconclusive. Contrary to popular belief, especially among the Russian opposition, the main reasons for the “weakness” of democracy at this stage are structural, not personal, in nature.

In addition to the weakness of the party system, the lack of roots in new political institutions, and the instability of management practices, the most important factor in this weakness will be the distribution of property and the structure of the economy that developed in the authoritarian era. Twenty years of redistribution of assets in favor of “our own” (a narrow coalition of “personal union”) and politically loyal owners will be an even more difficult legacy of the Putin period than the perversion of democratic norms and militaristic ideology. This will be one of the main challenges to the new regime. While the discussion about the “privatization of the 90s” is already mainly historical in nature, the issue of the results of “Putin’s redistribution” will become a new minefield on the political agenda.

At the structural level, the extremely high concentration of capital in today's Russia, the monopolization of markets, the weakness of the private financial sector, the creeping nationalization of industry and the exaggerated role of the raw materials sectors constitute the ideal cocktail for authoritarian revenge. And solving this problem looks even more complex and explosive than finding a compromise on the basic principles of constitutional design. The actual appearance, institutional framework and limitations of Russian democracy will be largely determined by the results of the transformation of the market environment during the post-dictatorship period and what organizational type of capitalism will emerge as a result of this transformation (on the connection between the type of capitalism and political institutions → Yakovlev: From a hybrid model to a mobilization one ).

Discussions about optimal democratic design remain an important part of the project of new democratization, but in this section we have sought to move the debate beyond this framework and to outline the features of democratization as a political and social process. Democratization is not a “triumph of will” for die-hard democrats. Its central task and problem will be the formation of a plausible agenda for a broad coalition, which is not limited by the value frame of the “liberal party” and an exclusively liberal understanding of democracy, firstly, and the preservation of this coalition throughout several stages of regime transition, secondly. This agenda must have significant vertical depth, that is, resonate with both the elite and the median voter. The results achieved at each stage of democratization will be limited and almost always compromise. The stages of regime transformation themselves create such restrictions and often require the use of “intermediate” institutions.

Despite all this, democratization in Russia is by no means a pipe project, but, on the contrary, a return to the natural track of civil peace and political development. This return will not be a leap into a “bright future”, but a return to the practice of political struggle, during which the skills of mobilization, structured coalitions, the practice and rules of compromise, the contours of the party field are formed and a wide network of civil organizations is restored, that is, everything that becomes the basis of the political culture and infrastructure of democracy. Democratization is a long-term social process of the formation of new practices, new organizations and a new map of democratic polity.