Surkov's Sovereign Democracy

Vladimir Frolov Special to Russia Profile 08/05/2005 Sometime after Russia’s financial default in 1998, a prominent American analyst on Russian political affairs was asked a question at a seminar in Washington that many in the audience thought to be bordering on absurd – What would Russia’s attitude to the West be if it were to regain at some point its economic and financial prowess? “It would no longer take democracy lectures from the West,” was the analyst’s apt reply.

Today the analyst, who has since moved to the White House to set US Russia policy, has to deal with the effects of his prophecy. Russia, oozing with oil money, is busily building its own version of “sovereign democracy” and refuses to suffer Western democratic banalities lightly.

Vladislav Surkov, Deputy Chief of Staff to President Putin, and Russia’s equivalent of Karl Rove as a premier political strategist, recently described the “sovereign democracy” project at a closed-door gathering of “Business Russia,” an influential trade group of medium-sized businesses.

At a casual glance, Surkov’s vision for Russia’s “sovereign democracy” does not appear either original or exceptionally appealing. He talks about Russia’s uniqueness as a historical and geopolitical entity and the need for the country to walk its own “long and winding road” toward full-fledged democracy. He argues that despite globalization, an open economy and interconnected financial and information flows that are crucial to the country’s growth, the importance of the nation’s unique culture is likely to grow, not diminish, in the world of tomorrow. He emphasizes the importance of building Russia’s own democratic institutions, fully tailored to the nation’s complex historical and cultural traditions, and he advocates gradually raising the national political elite as the principal keeper of Russia’s unique democratic cultural code.

A lot of this rings familiar. The notion that each country is entitled to build its own version of democracy according to its own timetable has been used with varying degrees of success by autocratic regimes around the world. Some of them, like Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan and South Korea have actually succeeded in developing full-fledged democracies with a distinct national flavor. Some, like Singapore and Malaysia, have used it to grow into highly efficient and successful autocracies. And others, like Egypt or some the republics of former Soviet Central Asia, have used it as a cover to mask their continued slide toward state failure.

It is indeed tempting to dismiss Surkov’s “sovereign democracy” project as another autocrat’s dream to shield the country away from the democratic winds blowing in all directions. It would be easy and convenient to argue that the Kremlin is so scared of the “colored revolutions” in the former Soviet space that it has decided to isolate Russia from dangerous Western influences – that the entire preoccupation with “sovereignty” has little to do with countering real security threats to Russia, and everything to do with neutralizing domestic political opponents to the Kremlin and their supporters in the West. “Sovereignty,” in this argument, is simply a better sounding term for isolationism and closing the country down to perpetuate the Kremlin’s rule. Most likely, this is exactly how it is going to be portrayed in the West.

But it would be a serious mistake to view Surkov’s speech in such simplistic terms. In fact, his message is much more complex and is directed primarily at a domestic Russian audience, not for foreign consumption.

Surkov’s central point is that “sovereign democracy” means taking full responsibility for your country. For Russia’s business elite it means abandoning, even eradicating the mentality, as Surkov puts it, of “offshore aristocracy” – that comfortable feeling that were things to turn really sour in Russia it would always be possible to abandon the country for warmer climes and offshore bank accounts in the West. This is what he calls the “mentality of treason” and argues that Russia would be doomed if the nation’s elite were to continue viewing it as no more than “a plantation to skim profits from”. In short, he views sovereignty as the national elite’s ability to coalesce at times of crisis, not disintegrate into immigration, as it happened in the past.

Anticipating criticism for the strange caveat he has added to the term “democracy,” Surkov views democracy and sovereignty as not mutually exclusive, but mutually reinforcing. A flourishing democracy cannot exist without a strong, sovereign state. For Surkov, sovereignty does not mean isolationism. In fact, he says how wonderful it would be for Russia to “escape to Europe,” where, unfortunately, it is but an unwelcome neighbor.

He views sovereignty as a nation’s inalienable right to make up its own mind and, immune to external pressures, decide for itself how it is to develop. He also sees sovereignty in cultural terms as the nation’s ability to distinguish clearly between genuine political goodwill from abroad and hypocritical double standards, used as a policy tool to hurt Russia’s interests.

Surkov cites Ukraine as the most glaring example of political double standards used by the West to serve its geopolitical objectives. He sees no fundamental difference between the Kuchma and Yuschenko regimes, with corruption, nepotism and the fierce squabble for control over economic assets continuing to plague the country. He asks why the new Ukrainian government can talk with impunity about the renationalization of privately owned assets, while Russia has almost been turned into an international pariah state for lesser offences. And he wonders why Western traditions of due democratic process and peaceful transition of power could easily be swept aside to condone and even encourage illegal acts of violating the constitutional procedures of a sovereign country.

This is where the West needs to take Surkov seriously. The talk about lack of democracy in Russia will always ring hollow and eventually be discredited if the standards applied to Russia continue to be different from those applied to other states, particularly Russia’s neighbors in the former Soviet space. The West needs to take a closer look at its own democratic traditions and practices and recognize that some of them are in need of long-overdue overhaul and are not much different from what they see in Russia as glowing democratic deficiencies.

I hope the famous analyst in Washington will pay close attention to Surkov’s message.

Vladimir Frolov is the deputy head of the Fund for Effective Politics. He contributed this comment to Russia Profile.