Why I admire Putin

Russia's political and economic structures are corrupt and enfeebled and only President Putin is capable of effecting change
for the better. The West needs him to succeed, argues Will Hutton

Special report: Russia

Will Hutton
Sunday August 13, 2000
The Observer

Building a state is a monumental, precarious and rarely peaceful business. Even some states we now consider natural parts of the landscape
are recent creations which have stood on the edge of disintegration within living memory. Losing the colonial war in Algeria nearly brought
France to its knees. From South Korea to Argentina, Greece to Egypt, it's a similar story. The panoply of flags, rule of law, orderly changes of
government, civil peace and relative economic stability are all recent and hard-won achievements. And although it is now lost in the sands of
time, Britain, too, had its share of civil war, murder and division before the contemporary British state emerged at the end of the seventeenth
century.

It is in this context that Vladimir Putin, this week celebrating his first year in office as first Prime Minister and latterly as President, should be
judged. In the West, Putin is now seen as the butcher of Chechnya, the ex-KGB stooge with a scant regard for democracy, liberty and market
economics, whatever lip service he pays to its principles. As he appoints his old security friends to key Ministries and offices, we should be
wary of another instinctive authoritarian rebuilding his power base in Russia. We should hold our noses and keep our distance. Putin is the next
Pinochet.

But has the West been misreading the Russian leader? Cast Putin as a state builder, the necessary if insufficient precondition to establishing a
successful capitalism in Russia, and you start to see him in a different light. Moreover, he begins his endeavours from a disastrous starting
point. Russia moved from a crumbling Tsarist structure to an authoritarian police state in one jump. After its collapse, there is no system of
contract and property law; no impartial bureaucracy or judiciary; no common glue holding civil society together; little sense of governmental
legitimacy.

He is constructing a state on a site where the old, corrupt outgrowths of communism still flourish and in a country with more than 100 ethnic
groups, some of whom, like the Chechens, do not accept any authority or legitimacy beyond their ethnic boundaries.

The often forgotten advantage of communism was that, whatever its massive failings, it did offer a unifying ideology to a part of Euro-Asia
otherwise riven by vicious ethnic hatreds. Tito, for example, never accepted the economistic interpretation of communism that implied no role
for markets or private enterprise; he expressly ran Yugoslavia as a mixed economy. For him, communism was the perfect political doctrine for
holding a fissile, ethnically divided community together; ethnic cleansing was ideologically outlawed.

Many professional middle-class Russians took the same view about the Soviet Union. At least communism kept the ethnic menace at bay and
could hold the country together effectively. The endless parades in 1945, piling up German battle standards in Red Square, were a
self-conscious repetition of what Tsar Alexander had done after victory over Napoleon, propagandising communism's effectiveness as a
substitute for an orthodox state.

The events of the last decade amply justify the fears about Russia's governability. The small army of ideological free-market economists who
argued that the sole preconditions for a successful capitalism were private property and flexible prices were not simply economically naïve,
they were political innocents who had forgotten their history. Of course, in the absence of a strong centre and no cultural, ethnic or political
reason to be loyal to Moscow, the governors in Russia's cities, provinces and federal regions would spend money like water to keep their
restless, poverty-stricken and ethnically diverse populations happy without collecting taxes, the heart of the still massive government budget
deficit and proximate cause of the high and volatile inflation rate.

And, of course, capitalism in a state that could not offer even relative price stability, impartial justice, trustworthy banks and the rule of law would
quickly collapse into quasi-banditry. Add the ghastly economic legacy of communism, with its massive inefficiencies, and the whole cocktail was
likely to deliver what it has - economic collapse and a vacuum of political authority on a titanic scale. On one calculation, 80 per cent of
businesses and 60 per cent of the state are said to be corrupt; even those figures could be an underestimate. In this respect, the infamous
'oligarchs', the Mafia-style bosses who dominate Russia's business through gangsterism, are as much the symptom as the cause of Russia's
ills.

Putin not only understands all this, he says so openly and is acting to correct it. His state-of-the-nation address to the Duma last month was
astonishingly frank. The Russian government and state processes are the principal causes of 'raging corruption', the outflow of capital and the
'dictatorship of the black economy', he said. What was impeding economic growth were the twin enemies of criminal business and corrupt
officialdom. Yet there was no going back to a command economy and communism. The only way forward was capitalism, but, paradoxically,
that required strong political authority at the centre, an authority that would be strengthened rather than weakened by free media scrutiny, the
rule of law, democratic competition and impartial administration. Who can disagree?

Putin is acting extraordinarily bravely in the circumstances. He has appointed seven federal super-governors charged with curbing the
autonomy and spending of 89 provincial and regional political bosses. This is not just a political but an economic necessity as their spending
now constitutes 40 per cent of all public spending. On top, he has insisted that all taxes should be collected centrally, a privilege which the
regional governors guarded jealously against all Yeltsin's efforts but which they have now ceded to Putin. No concession at this juncture on
autonomy was ever possible to the Chechens; it would have undermined the entire effort to re-engineer the Russian state.

Having concentrated tax-raising powers in the centre, he has signalled he intends to exploit his new authority. A fortnight ago, he held his
infamous meeting with 21 leading 'oligarchs' in which he read the riot act - there could be no more tax avoidance, no more shipping money
abroad and no more doing deals by literally holding a gun to people's heads. Already, he grimly warned them, he had permitted the temporary
arrest of Vladimir Gusinsky, a Murdoch-style media mogul and challenged Boris Berezovsky, the businessman closest to Yeltsin. More would
follow. Last Thursday, as good as his word, Russian tax police raided the headquarters of the giant oil company Sibneft, run by another of the
oligarchs close to Yeltsin and hitherto untouched.

All this is to serve a 10-year plan of economic reform, sequencing investment first in manufacturing and later in high-tech industries, raising
growth, curbing inflation and cutting the budget deficit. The plan, modelled on what the Japanese and South Koreans have done, is criticised by
free marketeers as too statist, but as their advice has been so calamitous they have little or no credibility. Yet even to get near achieving it,
Putin is having to reconstruct a state; he's showing every sign of possessing the vision and nerve to pull it off.

He is doing what has to be done within extraordinary constraints and in an
extraordinary environment. We need him to succeed.

© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 2000

Hum, this could be fun!

No thanx I don't smoke...

What's happened to this board, It's stale...

Lmenexe is actually attempting at voicing his political opinions. LOl...

So how's the boyfriend?

I comming to Geneva next week, u want to meet? In a public place ofcourse.... LOL...

Good article Kim.I hope Putin suceeds in his endevours,the Russian people deserve it.

Chorny Volk,

Yes I completely agree, The Russian people deserve it for killing, raping and maiming.
It is a fair reward, Im sure you agree.

YOOOOAAA!LOL
A POLISHED ARAB ASSSSSHOLE ARRIVED!!
HOW'S STINKING EMIRNET?
BTH, A POST FROM BBC ABOUT ARAB PROGRESS...LOL..A YOUNG ARAB ASSSHOLE COMPLAINED ABOUT BANNING OF WEB TELEPHONY IN THE EMIRATES AND CALLED EMIRATES SERVERS PATHETIC.....LOL
A POT CALLING KETTLE...........
LMAAOO

By Kim Arx ( - 137.138.245.65) on Friday, September 8, 2000 - 12:03 pm:
Why did I know YOU would respond.
How are the camels?
It hasn't been that long!


You sound like a bit of a crafty jew or one with jew blood in her? How are the bagels?

THIS MENTAL CLINIC REFUGEE CONRAD SOUNDS A BIT OF A CRAFTY BUM OR ONE WITH A BUM BLOOD IN HIM.

Hi Kim! Thanks for the article.
Putin seems to be a rare courageous politician.
If he succeed,he will "make" History.

very cool of you, baron, very cool. you must've been reading w/o comment for awhile.


===


and idiot antisemite BACON:


get a LIFE


get a MIND


get the HELL OUT OF HERE!


-_-

Did you guys see Putin on Larry King last night?Very articulate man and very well informed.Klintoon can't hold a candle to him.

finally..lol..something's worth reading, heh..hello.

Kim,
are ya online?

I am now!
_____________________________________________

Conrad, I like my bagels with smoked salmon and mayonaise. Do you know if that's Kosher? As you are such an expert on judaism....

Allam, sorry I have a conference in Marathon next week! Shame!!! I know a great club though: "Rev d'eau". Fred will know what I mean!

___________________________

Chorny, I agree.
Hi Dimitri, l'menexe, Baron, Fred - how goes it?
Kim

deep in the night for you, mum.
=
the poor, poor, BACON....reduced to 'bagelish' ethnic insults? mind you, always directed at a _female_, o nutless BACON. and mind you, always WRONG.

but the poor, poor BACON doesnt come here for anything but SCORN and ABUSE. 'nyah nyah' he says.

dumbass =koff= 'anti-semite' wouldn't know a 'real' semite [HOO HAH!] if they ran him over w/a steamroller.

the truth is revealed in his confusing you, kim, with _another_ DMS female,[we know who] who has become his grand obsession over these months...he cant stop thinking about her, cant stop writing about her; post after post, his ardor in vain....verily, he _longs_ for her.
"the love that dare not speak its name..."
=
the poor, poor BACON...

hock-PTUI!!

-_-


[+1?]

Awwwwww, that's too bad Kim...

But I gotta ask you, Who the **** eats mayonaise with Salmon. UGGGGGGGGGgggggggggg. just the thought of that makes me wanna puke all over Dimitri's rather larger round Rooskie noggin... lOL..

You Europeans just love that sh!t... "Extra Mayo - 'please'"