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Putin? Really?Time magazine gives Vladimir Putin way too much credit for Russia's economic recovery.

By Michael McFaul
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2007, at 7:55 AM ET
Vladimir Putin. Click image to expand.

As an exercise in journalism, Time's annual selection of a "Person of the Year" has always been a strange ritual. Although the magazine annually devotes gobs of resources and dozens of print pages to selecting and reporting on a winner, the editors take great pains to emphasize that the choice is not an "honor." Rather, as Managing Editor Richard Stengel explains, the selection goes to "the person who has most profoundly influenced the world during the past year, for better or for worse." That Stalin and Hitler are previous winners underscores Stengel's point.

But leaving aside the value of journalists engaging in a process that is a "subjective one," which includes "no measuring stick or algorithm" but just "feels right" and ends up choosing Stalin (twice), this year's selection of Russian President Vladimir Putin is particularly odd, if only judged by the criteria that Time editors themselves establish. The selection of Putin is based on a theory about recent Russian history that is simple, powerful, and wrong.

In the 1990s, so the Time story goes, Russia was a place of lawlessness, economic depression, and instability. In the last decade, however, Russia has become a place of order, economic growth, and stability. The cause for the change: Putin. As Stengel theorizes, "Individuals can make a difference to history, and Russia's Vladimir Putin, our choice for 2007, proves the point."

Time's theory about Putin and Russia contains three central flaws. First, the positive change so trumpeted is exaggerated. Second, the positive change that has occurred between the 1990s and the last several years has little if anything to do with Putin. Third, the Time theory that Putin's democratic rollback has been a necessary condition for achieving stability and growth—they call it the "grand bargain"—is simply wrong. In fact, there is no evidence at all—and most certainly not in the 36 pages Time devotes to Putin and his Russia—that greater autocracy has caused either order or growth. Autocracy's re-emergence under Putin has coincided with tremendous economic growth but has not caused it. If anything, Putin's autocratic turn has reduced the economic gains from what they would have been had democracy survived.

In proving Putin's greatness, the word stability appears most often in the Time coverage; on his "report card," this is the only subject in which Putin gets an A. But finding evidence of this new stability, both in Time's reporting and in reality, is difficult. Time writers conflate "central authority" with "stability," a real no-no in my business of political science, since there are lots of autocracies in the world that do not provide stability (think of Angola, among other examples). Lower crime rates, less corruption, fewer terrorist attacks, better health conditions, or more secure property rights are some conventional measures of strong, stable government, yet Putin's Russia has made amazingly little or no progress on any of these indicators, despite eight years of economic growth.

The only hard evidence of stability in the Putin era is economic growth. During Putin's tenure, growth in Russia has averaged an impressive 6.7 percent; real disposable income has increased by more than 10 percent a year; consumer spending has skyrocketed; unemployment has fallen from 12 percent to 6 percent; and poverty, according to one measure, has declined from 41 percent to 14 percent. Russians have never been richer. Public opinion polls show that this economic growth, after a decade of recession, makes Russians feel more stable and better off compared to the Yeltsin era.

But did Putin have anything to do with this recovery? Surprisingly, for a theory based on the role of the individual in making history, Time's writers use almost no "action verbs" to describe Putin's economic policies. And there's a reason that Putin seems like an observer, rather than an actor, in this central drama of his era: It's because he was one.

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Michael McFaul is a Hoover fellow, professor of political science, and director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at Stanford University. For elaboration on the Putin myth, see his article with Kathryn Stoner-Weiss in the January/February 2008 edition of Foreign Affairs.
Photograph of Vladimir Putin by Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

I find myself agreeing with most of this article. But it leaves two significant questions for me that are as yet unanswered:

Have food prices stabilized under Putin - and if so what impact does that have on the overall perception of "stability?"

Has the government of Russia really changed in any significant functional structure in the last 5 hundred years?

I ask about the latter because from my perspective, Rodina has perhaps changed the color of her stripes, but she has largely been an oligarchic autocracy with a centrally ordered economy for some 500 years. Sure the level of control and how the oligarchs and their autocratic leader are selected has changed somewhat in form - but I would argue it has not changed in structure.

This leads me to question what the Russian people want. And from the various "man on the street" interviews I've heard and read, and from the comments of my friends and relatives in Latvia, it seem to me that the Russian people are most comfortable with their government when it doesn't require a lot of input from them and in return provides them with a SENSE of security and stability. I'd be interested in what the author thinks of this viewpoint.

As to the former question of food price stability - this I would suggest, is a large part of what contributes to the sense of security and stability for most of the Russian population. I would suggest that if one were to look at when the greatest level of political instability occurred in Russia it was associated with periods of dramatic food price instability. Inflation of college tuition and luxury goods - while a damper on a middle class's aspirations, doesn't threaten to drag them into poverty.

Food price inflation OTOH does. And once the middle class feels insecure, you've lost control of the population.

I would argue that Putin has focused on stabilizing food and energy prices within Russia, and it is from THAT stability that the sense of security and stability derives for the average Russian. Thus the more objective measures of security as suggested by the author, will never accurately measure the citizens' sense of security.

--degsme

(To reply, click here.)

(12/26)

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