Russian Democracy: Is There a Future? (Event Transcript)

McFaul Transcript.PDF

Michael McFaul
"Russian Democracy: Is There a Future?"
January 18, 2001

Summary by Danielle Lussier

MELISSA CARR: On behalf of the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project, I would like to welcome you to our seminar. Michael McFaul is going to lead us in a discussion entitled, "Russian Democracy: Is there a future?" This is a topic that SDI has been following through our publications and programs for over ten years now. SDI''s current thoughts on this topic are outlined in our publication, Russia Watch. The lead article, "Buttressing Russia''s Democratic Freedoms" outlines some of our thoughts on this topic.

In ongoing efforts to deepen democracy in Russia and to build barriers against potential democratic backsliding, SDI is engaging in discussions, like the one today with our colleagues, as we develop ideas for initiatives that can be taken in Russia and initiatives that can be taken by internal actors outside of Russia to try to deepen democracy in Russia. We are pleased to have the opportunity for this seminar today, and we welcome input from all of you as we go forward in the coming weeks and months.

Today we are very fortunate to have Michael McFaul join us in this ongoing discussion about the future of Russian democracy. Mike is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an Assistant Professor at Stanford University. He is probably one of the most well known commentators on Russian political events. He also works as a consultant for many agencies including USAID, the National Democratic Institute and CBS News. As many of you know, his work focuses on Russian politics and electoral behavior, political and economic reform in post-communist countries and US-Russian relations. Together with Tim Colton at the Davis Center, Mike has directed a project involving public opinion surveys of the Russian electorate. In today''s talk he will draw on some of the recently available data about attitudes toward democracy and democratic institutions in Russia.

As those of you who know Mike well are aware, he is extremely prolific. So I am not going to try to list all of the numerous books and articles that he has written. But I would like to draw your attention to a few which are particularly relevant to our topic today. Recently, Mike joined the other experts at the Russian and Eurasian Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to publish an excellent report called "An Agenda for Renewal: US-Russian Relations." This report outlines opportunities for the new administrations of both the US and Russia to renew their relationship and makes some concrete recommendations for US policy in that regard. In the summer issue of Demokratizatsiya, Mike McFaul and Sarah Mendelson published an article called, "Russian Democracy: A US National Interest." It outlines the case for why democracy and helping to strengthen democracy in Russia is an important item on the US national agenda. This summer we can look forward to his next book which is called Russia''s Unfinished Transition: Political Change Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin."

I would like to thank you, Mike, for coming. We will begin the seminar with a presentation from Mike, and then we will open it to discussion and question and answer.

MICHAEL MCFAUL: Thank you very much. A footnote to my book that is coming out: we just had another meeting with the editors yesterday. We changed the title to Unfinished Revolution. This was a big victory for me. I hate the word "transition."

I was here to talk to a group of generals this morning. Somehow SDI got wind that I was going to be here, and they asked me to talk about— they are very excellent, by the way, I highly recommend the essays in the latest SDI report about Russian democracy in the future. So, one, I have already given a two-hour talk, and I do not really want to talk for another two hours. And, two, I do not have many new things to say about this topic. So what I want to do instead is, three, just start very briefly with some basic things that I think that this very learned room will know. And then, I''ll turn to the survey data that you mentioned. I just want to present a lot of data— some of which I do not, myself, understand. It is very contradictory in some ways about Russian attitudes toward democracy, and I hope that it will provoke a discussion. I am very curious to hear people''s own hypotheses about why there can be such contradictions in this data.

Before I move to mass attitudes, let me start, as we always do, with elites and institutions and "is there a future?" As you well know, Putin has been a very busy man in the last year. In the economic area, which I will not talk about, he has proposed a lot of things and brought together teams. Lately it seems to me that they have run out of steam. They have not done a lot. But there was a lot of energy, especially in the first parts of his administration.

In foreign policy likewise, and much to my surprise, by the way, because I would not have predicted this, he has been extremely active. He has been all over the world, in nasty neighborhoods and nice neighborhoods; he wants to be a friend to all people at all times. But, even if you compare his lengthy list of activities on the foreign policy side, what is most striking to me is how much attention he has given to the political side and to really trying to change the way that Russia is governed in rather fundamental ways.

Here, again, I think you know the list, but let me remind you of the list of things that have suddenly come into play in the last twelve months under Putin. It started with Chechnya— a kind of new attitude of how to secure borders, shall we say? I think the most important thing to understand about Chechnya, and there are a lot of nasty things to understand about it too, but in terms of the political situation in Russia, Putin destroyed the myth that Chechnya is invincible, that the Chechens are some sort of supra-natural historical fighters. He really changed the frame by which they look at that question, in my opinion, in a negative way. But he has definitely changed the way they frame that question.

The second big change was the Duma elections, and the absolutely extraordinary performance of Unity. It has fundamentally changed the relationship between the president and the parliament. We never had a parliament where the pivot— that is the party that forms a majority on almost all issues— I have started to look at these votes— and it is in the range of 90%. The pivot group that forms the majority is Unity. That is a fundamentally different political situation than we had with Yeltsin and the parliament. People say that the parliament was not important, and that it didn''t really matter under Yeltsin. I would argue with that. Not today, because I do not have time. But I would just illustrate that so many people put so much money into this election. Gazprom supported over 70 candidates and 55+ of them are there today. You don''t make those kinds of investments in institutions that do not matter. They made those investments for a reason, and they have fundamentally changed that relationship.

Third, the Federation Council. You know the changes, so I will not go into them. They are rather radical and rather unclear as to what they mean for Russia''s future. There is a big disagreement in Russia today, splitting liberals and communists on both sides of the aisle on this. The implication of reform is no longer a left-right issue. But it is a tremendous reform that many people expected he would do.

Fourth, center-regional changes and the seven super governors. The dynamic there has changed rather fundamentally in the first twelve months of Putin''s reign, which I consider starting circa October 1999 not March 2000. The whole approach: the taxation, the distribution of resources, and the Kremlin''s very energetic campaign in key places against certain governors.

Fifth, the media. In my opinion the destruction of NTV is absolutely atrocious, as is the information doctrine, and the self-censorship that is going on. If anything, it is the thing that troubles me most about Putin, and his attitude towards opposition has been this rather ruthless campaign against everybody. I suspect that we are just in the initial phases of this battle.

Seventh: the oligarchs. The all-powerful oligarchs that we have talked about "ruling" Russia. At one point two years ago, I went to so many talks on Russia that I was beginning to think that I was back in the Soviet Union because we had this notion of the powerful capitalists controlling the state and that seven guys ran everything. In twelve months, Putin has made us question those assumptions and really put oligarchs on the defensive. Whether good or bad I leave for discussion, but he has really pushed that back and challenged our assumptions on that one.

Eighth: political parties. It has been a bad twelve months for parties and party development in Russia. It started with Unity, this virtual party, out of nowhere, four or five people, some of them I know very closely, basically put in charge to create this thing. And they got a quarter of the votes three months after organizing this campaign. That is not a good sign for party development in Russia. Yabloko is now almost out of business. I do not think that they will survive until the next electoral cycle. The Communist Party''s resources are vastly depleted. You see it particularly in the gubernatorial elections that are going on right now. But the Communist Party is living on old capital. It has not revitalized that capital. And I suspect, as a political force in Russia, we will not talk about them. Probably they will make it to the next electoral cycle, but most certainly not two electoral cycles. LDPR, of course, was never a real political party. It was just the party of Yeltsin, the party of the KGB. It still is. It does not have much of a future.

The only good sign on the political side is SPS, the Unity of Right Forces, that finally managed to organize as a group. Yet, time will tell whether they survive to the next electoral cycle. They are very divided in terms of how they feel about Mr. Putin right now. A small ray of light, but a very small one that may be just a flickering candle to be blown out two or three years from now.

Then, more generally, parties had less control over the electoral process in 1999-2000 than they did in any previous electoral cycle. We all know that about gubernatorial races and presidential races where parties are not principle players. What is striking and damaging to me is how the parties are not growing in influence even on the party list election - to say nothing of single mandate elections. Their role is declining, not increasing. That is a bad sign. The new laws that they are talking about in terms of this party law will further debilitate parties, not strengthen them.

That is the laundry list. You know the list. It all looks bad to me in general. Before turning to society, I want to take a step back and ask what this means about our previous assumptions about the Russian political system. I think it is worth reflecting on for awhile. In fact, many of you know, Steve Cohen and I have had some disagreements over the decade. I have been rereading his Bukharin book for entirely strange reasons that had nothing to do with this. Forgive me if this is a cartoonization of his views of Bukharin and the Russian revolution, because I know it is. I probably will hear about it if I say this.

But as I read that book, I read his interpretation as, "you know the revolution happened; it wasn''t so bad. There was a trajectory, and there were good guys who could have pushed this in the right direction - Bukharin of course was the hero. But then somebody else came along - Stalin - and the revolution went the wrong way". Right?

I ironically find myself being the Steve Cohen of the second Russian revolution. That is, I thought the revolution was good thing. The trajectories were in the right place. I was not so sure about the leader of it - Yeltsin. For me Gorbachev is part of the ancient regime by the way. He started things. He got things moving in the right direction. But then Yeltsin came along, and now there is this radical break. The question is, is Putin Stalin in that kind of classic way? Is he just a transitional figure? But I find myself being kind of on Steve Cohen''s side. You know, wishing Stepashin— Stepashin is the Bukharin of this revolution. If only he had held on for three more weeks, the trajectory could have been different and this revolution could have gone the right way.

Now, remember that in the debates about the Bolshevik revolution, there are two sides besides Cohen. One says, things are going okay. Lenin and Stalin, you know the True Believers and the Communist Revolutionaries said, "Eh, this guy is doing the right things. What is the big deal? Why are we getting so excited about these short-term aberrations? It is all in the name of the good." I won''t mention people who believe that, because it is kind of unpopular to mention that publicly. But there are people who do. In fact, some of them work at the Carnegie Endowment.

Then there are those that said, "This is a giant mess. This was never a revolution before. To believe that this had any prospect of being a progressive thing was wrong." Just as people said about the Bolshevik revolution. And, Putin proves that they were right. You hear, "this is what we always should have expected. Russians are always this way. All this was a temporary aberration and now we are back to continuity. We are back to where Russia always was."

I think that is wrong. I stick to the Cohen school of thought, if you will, for this revolution. And, I am not so sure if Putin is Stalin yet. I will get to that in a moment. But I do think it is important to question our previous assumptions about where we thought the thing was going now that we have had this regime change.

Let me offer you a couple of short-term reconsiderations that I think we need to make. One is I really think we had the balances of power wrong in talking about the Yeltsin era. Me too. I am as guilty as anybody. I am not pointing fingers at anybody. We misinterpreted weak leaders in the Kremlin as being a weak state and a weak system as a whole. You have read the hundreds of articles on Russian state weakness that were published in the 1990s. I know I was one of them. I published a few myself. I think we were wrong about that. A corollary to that is that we overestimated the power of some of the new actors on the scene and the whole oligarchic model of governance - that the oligarchs were controlling the state, and that was the way the system worked.

I think we now see that we may have had that balance of power wrong. The state, as an actor, and I mean it in the broadest sense now, was a much more powerful actor when it wanted to be, and in certain spheres like elections, exerting control and controlling secession. All of those kinds of things. And, the oligarchs who we thought to be these super powerful folks were not the robber barons of the 19th Century. In fact they were much more temporary figures. And, the fact that two of the seven can disappear in six months time suggests that that Marxist notion of the relationship between capital and the state was wrong. It was the other way around. They were parasites on the state. And if the CEO changes in the state, they can get rid of things (snapping fingers) like that.

Another way of putting it is that we assumed a very weak state and weak society. In fact I think that the state is a lot more powerful in a predatory way. And society is as weak as we assumed. That is the bad news. The media, and the space of independent, economic or political activity in Russia is a lot narrower and smaller than I think that many of us, including myself, assumed when we were looking at the previous regime. And now look at it today. Look at some of the things that we took for granted as being autonomous. The media: it turns out independent, privately owned media in Russia is virtually non-existent. Even NTV almost does not exist and most certainly is not independent of the state. The stock market: I think that should be obvious now. When two state-owned companies account for over 50% of all the stock market, where is the private sector there? That is a virtual stock market if there ever was one.

I could go through the list. But I think, at least for me, we thought of the state being weak and destructive and disappearing. It turns out it was a lot more robust than we thought.

Second, we placed too much emphasis on continuities. We thought that "the end of revolution thermidor...we are now in a balance...we are now in a new equilibrium," as political scientists like to talk about. I think we overestimated how fast we got to the equilibrium. If you recall, and I sat on many of the panels when the change from Yeltsin to Putin happened, everybody said, "Nothing will change. Everything is the same. He is the prisoner of the old system." That to me was an overestimation of the possibility of that system.

There are analogies to the Brezhnev era and the feudal era, that this is just much of the same. Well actually, I think it is a lot more dynamic. I still think that the revolution is a more apt metaphor and most certainly we are in the thermidor. But those of you who study revolutions know there is a lot more history to come after the thermidor before you get to some kind of stable equilibrium.

Third thing. To develop this revolutionary and thermidor metaphor for a moment, I do think we can now say that we have some things right, and we can move on. Let me just mention briefly what they are. One: the communist-anticommunist divide is over. Many of you know that I thought that happened a long time ago, in 1996. But that debate is over, done. There is no need to talk about it any more. The debate about the market vs. the command economy is over. KPRF now supports the market. There is a debate about what kind of market. And, as I am going to show you in a minute that the people are a lot more skeptical towards the market than the elites are in a way that I am surprised by this late in the day. But I think that it is over.

My second point is that, likewise, communist-national and all those ideological frameworks are also over. Principles do not matter in this thermidor period of the revolution. This is very typical of other revolutions, where these ideological, "at the battlefronts," and "on the barricades," really are the wrong way to think about the new regime. Maybe here at Harvard, because you are all smart people— it doesn''t get in the way of your analysis, but back in Washington, I can tell you that communism is a ghost that is not going to go away very soon. I am still amazed by the role it plays. I would actually be a little bit more provocative in the interest of being provocative. I think we have to start thinking about the communists, and people identified as the Communist Party, as maybe part of the solution for what you call "back-sliding," and "barriers to back sliding"--rather than as part of the problem.

When Tikhomirov, the governor, wins in Volgograd, for instance, is that a good thing or a bad thing for democracy? Five years ago, we would have all said that it was a bad thing. I am not so sure anymore. I could go into that if you are interested. But what it means in terms of principles being over, I think there is an upside and a bad side to that. To remind you, I do believe that Yeltsin was a revolutionary figure. Ideas did matter. And the most important one was anticommunism. He knew that when he was doing anti-democratic things, that he was going against his own set of ideas. It doesn''t mean he did not do it. I can tell you as a good Catholic, I say it all the time, "It does not mean that being a good Catholic stops me from sinning. But I sure know when I am doing it; I am sinning." Right? I think that was true of Yeltsin as well.

In this new a-ideological, and I always use "a-ideological" rather than "anti-ideological" time, principles don''t matter. And, nobody would call doing these anti democratic things a sin anymore. As I believe the things that Putin does, he does not see them in that way at all.

So in this new anti-ideological, thermidor, whatever you would like to call it, period, I think it is going to be much more about cost-benefit analysis - is this a good thing or bad thing for me personally— and not about ideology.

Let me end on the elite side - to say that that is a possible positive thing to think about Putin. I cannot think of many positive things to say about Putin these days, but that is the one thing that I would say is positive. It is not a restoration— not to take a tired metaphor too far— he is not seeking to restore the ancient regime. He is actually a pragmatic guy fusing things from the old and the new, just like in all post-revolutionary situations— taking off the table symbols from the old with the new, in a very pragmatic way. Therefore that means that if the cost of moving against democracy rises, he may reconsider the kinds of initial forays that he has done against it.

Let me just end on the elite side on that. Because of this indifference, I would call it, to democracy, not a pro-dictatorial orientation. I think that he can be pushed and pushed off of some previous positions. In the last several months, we have seen bits and pieces of that. First, the governors'' elections. We saw the nasty way he handled Rutskoi, which was antidemocratic in the blatant, most obvious sense. But we have not seen a dozen Rutskois. On the contrary, we have seen several instances where the Putin candidate lost. The results were ratified and everyone recognized them. It helped, by the way, in the instances that the so-called party of power was divided, and where his own representative Pulikovsky, in some of the elections, were supporting people that the Kremlin were not out in the Far East. That is a good sign. We should not assume that all governors are just going to lie down. They backed away in the first instance, but now you see them coming back, particularly in the fact that they are willing to let some of them serve for a third term suggests that we are going back to compromise, not confrontation.

Second, on the media, I don''t want to mislead you, I think that what we have seen has been awful. I am struck by the process by which they have gone about the cracking down on NTV in particular. If it was just restoration back to dictatorship, they would gave just gone in and taken it a long time ago. What would stop them? That is what Stalin would have done, after all. Right? He would not have gone through the courts. Well, maybe he would have. But, I am struck by the process that has created openings for NTV, particularly for what I consider to be a very successful PR campaign in the West. It is very orchestrated, it is done on purpose, and they have media firms and lobbyists working very hard in Washington. It has created an opening, which did not make this a slam dunk. I don''t know how this is going to end. But that, to me, is interesting - that it wasn''t just, "Okay now you are all arrested and NTV is going to be under our control." And, the orientation of the news broadcasts on NTV have not yet changed.

Third: regarding court decisions, more generally, I think there is some hope on this. The [Alexander] Nikitin case, the fact that the courts are being more assertive. The fact that the fear— this is the paradox— the fact that people are saying, "We are going to prosecute those who don''t do things the right way." And so there is a lot of uncertainly about the rules of the game now. So now, suddenly the courts, and by the way, Central Election Commissions at the regional level are fearful about, "Well, am I going to be arrested or not? Am I gaining this right?" So when you don''t know what you are supposed to do, what the powers that be want you to do, you follow the word of the law to a T. And I think in certain elections, we have seen that happen in a way that frankly did not happen even under Yeltsin— That could be a bit of a stretch.

Fourth: the oligarchs. I think unfortunately they are a check on Putin. Unfortunately they will have to be simply because there are no other independent sources of power within Russia. Now, I think they are all on the defensive. Gazprom most certainly is. RAO-UES most certainly is. Abramovich is the only one that isn''t. But, if I were him, I would not be sleeping quietly because that could change.

I have to say though, I am struck by how aggressive the campaign was in the beginning, and how it has now backed off. Six months ago we all said that [Alexander] Voloshin was going to be running Gazprom. Well, it has not happened yet. Maybe I am getting too much into the short-term, and maybe that will happen, and maybe they will all be liquidated in two years. But, I am struck by how Putin, after an initial foray against him, is now kind of backing away, and now is in a more, "Let''s do business. Let''s negotiate," not "I am going to liquidate you."

Finally on that, I would say more generally, I have been impressed by Putin''s indecisiveness over the last several months. Let me remind you what we all said about this guy, "He is a man with a mission. He is a military guy— He is going to be very decisive." I have been struck by the opposite recently. When battles happen, be them within the military, between the oligarchs, between his own government, for example between Mr. [Alexei] Ulykaev the Deputy Finance Minister and Mr. [Andrei] Illarionov, he does not go in and settle the score. He has not done that.

Yeltsin of course used that strategically. That was his whole tactic: personnel games and playing people off each other, and then come in decisively and move one way or the other. Perhaps Putin has learned that from Yeltsin. I am struck by the opposite, by the lack of decisiveness. I do not know exactly why, but I think it is because he lacks a game plan on what he wants to do with power. He has the means and ends mixed up. My liberal friends in Moscow for instance, in trying to propagate to me all the reasons I should love Putin, and believe me I have had many long propaganda sessions with many important people in the government, many of them you all know well. They are always saying, "Well, he is going to consolidate power because then we are going to do economic reform, and that is what we need." For me, it seems like for Putin the end is political power, the means might be market reform. But if market reform does not work on that, then he can move to some other means. And that once he has accumulated power, the "for what" is still left undefined. Therefore that is why we see a lot of indecision.

That is not a very long list in terms of barriers to backsliding. Perhaps you have a longer list. It is a rather depressing list, I would say, in terms of elites and institutions, but I want to spend the next 15 minutes to end on a different note and to take a much longer view. I want to look at societal attitudes toward democracy.

The view in Moscow, and the view propagated by some of my colleagues at "polling firms," that poll and give data to support this, is: "This whole experiment with democracy was a giant disaster. Russia was not ready for it. We see the results. Therefore, what Russians really want is a strong dictator to come in, fill the vacuum, and do the economic reforms that will make us a growing a prosperous nation." So, we have seen polls published, I know who published them, that demonstrate this— that people really want the market, but they really do not want democracy. People talk about it being a Russian cultural predisposition towards authoritarian rule and imperialism. By the way, this is also a line you hear in Washington too. "This is the way that Russia always was, is and will be." And therefore, Putin is the right guy for the right time because he can be that leader, but at the same time do these market things that the people also want.

I want to show you some data. What I am struck by, ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union— and this by the way goes against some of my own assumptions back in the early 1990s— is that the progress in terms of changed attitudes on democracy has been quite striking. In this latest survey that Tim Colton and I did - much higher on a lot of things than I would have predicted when we went into it. Whereas support for the market is a lot more mixed. And there are some rather contradictory things on the state, but especially on the market.

I want to focus, though, on attitudes towards democracy. (See Table 4 below). In the first one, we ask: "The Soviet Union should have never, under any circumstances, have been dissolved." You see the big numbers that we all know. I am sure everybody in this room knows. Fully agree is 37%, Agree is 35%. Disagree is 12% and completely disagree is 1%. Indifferent and disagree are very small numbers. That sounds like people in Russia don''t like the system that they live in, and they don''t like democracy. Right?

Table 4. Agreement with Statement, "The Soviet Union Should Never under Any Circumstances Have Been Dissolved," 1999a

a Interviews before 1999 parliamentary election (N = 1,919 weighted cases).

Well, not exactly. Second question. "The political system that exists today in Russia is a democracy." (see Table 1 below)

4% fully agree
15% agree
39% disagree
13% completely disagree

There is a big disagreement with that. Only 19% agree with that. The majority, of course, disagrees with that. They do not think that the system that they live in in Russia is a democracy. We, by the way, asked this question in lots of different ways because the way you ask this question really loads the kind of results you get. I am going to show you all of them just to show that I am not loading it in a certain way to get the results I wanted. Tim and I spent a great deal of time trying to avoid it.

Table 1. Agreement with Statement, "The Political System That Exists in Russia Today Is a Democracy," 1996 and 1999 (percentages)

a Interviews after 1996 presidential election (N = 2,472 weighted cases).
b Interviews before 1999 parliamentary election (N = 1,919 weighted cases).

Note: Percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding.

"On the whole are you satisfied or dissatisfied?" Here we gave a four-point scale. You can see that 50% say dissatisfied. 21% are completely dissatisfied. So they do not think that they live in a democracy, and they are not satisfied with the democracy. That makes sense right? (see Table 3 below)

When we move away from asking just questions about what is, and move to questions about what should be you get some different answers. "Do you, in general, support the idea of democracy, or do you come out against the idea of democracy?" We wanted to dichotomize it first, and say, "Are you for or against?" You can see, overwhelmingly, when you ask that kind of question, 63% support, 18.6% are against. Interesting. It is hard to say for almost 20%. We''ll just leave it at that for now. (see Table 6 below)

> Table 6. Attitudes Toward the Idea of Democracy, 1999-2000

a Interviews before 1999 parliamentary election (N = 1,919 weighted cases).
b Interviews after 1999 parliamentary election (N = 1,846 weighted cases). Note: Percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding.

Then we asked the Churchill question. "Democracy may have many problems, but it is better than any form of government."6% fully agree. 39% agree. 19% are indifferent. 15% disagree. 2% completely disagree (see Table 6 below). I just want to reflect here that these are people who are living in a state that is called a democracy, but yet they understand that it is not a democracy. But when you ask about the norms of democracy, they are making a categorical distinction. To me, that shows a pretty high level of understanding of their own circumstance, and what might be. But maybe I am wrong about that, and I want to hear how there might be other ways to explain what seems to be contradictory data.

"What kind of political system, in your opinion would be most appropriate for Russia?" Now look at this. (see Table 4 below)

Democracy of the Western type— 11.7%
The political system that exists today— 11.3%
The Soviet system that we had in our country before Perestroika— 46.6%
I will just refrain from commentary. I am hoping someone can explain how that squares with this question, asked on the same day. I can tell you the methodology if you are interested. I think it is pretty robust.

"Is the democratic system an appropriate way for governing Russia?" (see Table 5 below)

7.8% - very good way
50.6% - fairly good way
18.3% - fairly bad way
6.1% - very bad way.
I have an explanation for it, but let us discuss it rather than get in an argument about it.

Here now is a comparative question. "In a democracy, citizens have more control over their leaders than in non-democratic systems." You can see the vast majority understand. (see Table 7 below)

8% fully agree
42% agree
13% disagree.
2% completely disagree. Disagreement is very low there.

The question you hear frequently from critics of Russian democracy in Russia, "Democracies are indecisive and have too much squabbling." That is a bad English translation of our Russian. Here, now we are getting into an area, and you are going to see this on a series of slides, a little more balance between the two. We are asking people to make trade-offs, not just ideals. But here, still, more people disagree with that statement than agree with that statement. (see Table 17 below)

6% fully agree
27% agree
34% disagree
5% completely disagree

"Democracies are not good at maintaining order," a line I hear frequently from my Putin advisors. Well, it turns out that the Russian people do not agree with that. Here again, what I think is going on is that they are understanding that their system is not democracy, but they do not accept these principles that we need to go to some other kind of non-democratic system to get the things that they want. (see Table 16 below)

4% fully agree
27% agree
31% disagree
3% completely disagree

I am going to get to the strong state ones in a minute. We also asked a lot of questions about specific institutions and the way they work. I didn''t bring all of them because it is fairly straightforward. In all of these, the overwhelming majority is dissatisfied with their institutions, and they do not trust them. The two exceptions are the Russian Army and the Russian Orthodox Church. But when you ask people about the necessity of these institutions— political parties, by the way, rank at the lowest in terms of trust, and there is a lot of disdain in our polls for political parties.

But then you ask them to talk about "how necessary are political parties to make our political system work?" On a 1 to 5 point scale, you can see that big numbers, almost a solid majority, say that they are necessary (see Table 14 below):

31% responded with a 1
20% with a 2
21% with a 3
7% with a 4
11% with a 5

So they do not like them, but they are necessary. Sounds familiar to me, as an American.

Moreover, "Competition among various political parties makes our system stronger." Again, you see that most people understand that (see Table 15 below):

4% fully agree,
35% agree.
24% disagree
6% completely disagree

By the way, if I broke this down in terms of voter association, I didn''t bring those in the interest of time, but on the disagree, 70% of those voted for the Communist Party in the last election. So it also breaks down very neatly in terms of where voters are.

Really quickly on the values: Democracy is a heavily normative word and at the same time what it means is poorly understood. I would say that is true even in this country. It is an abstract concept. But when you ask about specific values that we identify with democracy, here are those kinds of questions (see Table 8 below). "How important is freedom to follow any religion?" 70% say that it is important compared to 26% who say that it is not important. The overwhelming majority says that it is important in Russia. This is Atheist Russia; this is dictatorial, "We want a strong leader. We want a paternalistic state."

Table 8. Importance of Rights and Freedoms to Russians, 1999 (percentages a)

a Interviews before 1999 parliamentary election (N = 1,919 weighted cases).
[The following discussion relates to Table 8 above]

"How important is the freedom to elect a country''s leaders?" That is a giant number - 85%. What is really striking about that is that even among the communist electorate, the majority of them are part of that 85%. That, to me, is a very striking, robust outcome. I am not sure you would get that high a number in the United States.

"How important is freedom of the press? Radio? Television?" Again, giant numbers - 79%

"How important is freedom of expression?" 85%. Very small numbers say that these are not important. Again, we are dichotomizing it: important or not important. But, I think that that is interesting.

And, this question about ethnicity: Remember Weimar Germany thinking about this question and democratic attitudes about Russians vs. non-Russians. We asked ethnic Russians, "Russia should have certain advantages over all other nationalities." (see Table 13 below)

9% fully agree
17% agree
47% disagree
13% fully disagree

You can see that a solid majority disagrees with that statement. I have individual breakdowns on certain ethnic groups if you are interested as well.

"It is the duty of each citizen to vote in an election." Again, a solid majority.

"The rights of the individuals must be defended even if guilty people sometimes go free." (see Table 9 below) Now we are getting into the trade-off questions.

9% fully agree
36% agree
25% disagree
4% fully disagree

Again, it is a little more divided. Not everybody agrees with that. Comparatively, think about what the polls might be in robust, old, liberal democracies. But even on a very sophisticated question about democracy, you see that you have the majority support.

Finally, on the attitudes question. This is not exactly right. We probably should have asked a different kind of question to get at this. But on Chechnya, "What do you think about the Chechen problem?" (see Table 12 below) One denotes that "we should keep at all costs." Five denotes that "We should let it leave Russia." You will notice that they are almost the same numbers on the extremes and the distribution is relatively equal between the two.

32% responded with a 1
12% with a 2
14% with a 3
6% with a 4
27% with a 5

By the way, if you correlate this against Putin''s voters, there is no correlation one way or the other. There is almost the same breakdown for Putin''s voters. Putin''s voters were not pro-"Keep Chechnya at all cost" voters. There is a much more complicated story. People think that we voted for Putin because of Chechnya, it is more complicated.

Also on the strong leader thing, which, myself included, we often times think that there is a big demand for it. That is what the Russians want, and that is what they are getting, so that is good. "Should the president or the parliament be stronger?" (see Table 10 below) There is no strong support one way or the other. This, to me, was one of the most striking outcomes. One is "the president should be much stronger." Five is "the parliament should be much stronger." It is striking to me that it is almost the same numbers. 17% say the president, 15% say the parliament, and, 45% go right in the middle saying that they should be equal in power. That should sound familiar. It is called checks and balances. By the way, you break the voters down as communist vs. non-communist, the communists tend to be more pro-parliamentary for the obvious reasons that that is where their party is most powerful.

On the center-periphery debate in Russia. "Should the center or the regions be stronger?" Again, balance of power, checks and balances (see Table 11 below)

Everything should be decided in the regions, 6%
Most questions decided in the regions, 23%
Some in Moscow, some in the regions, 53%
Most in Moscow, 10%
Everything in Moscow, 6%

Now we get to the questions regarding order versus democracy and versus rights. People often say, and I have written this before, "Yeah, they believe in the principles of democracy. But when it comes to law and order, they are willing to sacrifice those principles for law and order." It is a little more complicated story.

"How should order be brought about in Russia?" (see Table 19 below) A one is "Order at all costs" and a five is "Order without violating rights." That is a badly worded question in some ways, because of course I could see why we would get a weird distribution on that that.

(1) Order at all costs, 15%
(2) 7%
(3) 12%
(4) 10%(5) Order without violating rights, 51.3%

But it is striking that the "order at all costs" is a very, very small number. I will save commentary for later.

"In order to bring about order in the country, are you prepared to support declarations of emergency?" (see Table 14 below) Well now we see a little more support for that. But a solid majority still is against that.

10% support
76% oppose

Table 14. Attitude Toward Measures "To Bring About Order in the Country," 1999 (percentages)a

a Interviews before 1999 parliamentary election (N = 1,919 weighted cases).Note: Percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding

"Is having the army rule Russia an appropriate way to govern?" A giant, solid majority said "no." Only 14% say it is a very good way or a fairly good way to rule Russia.

"Is having a strong leader who does not bother with parliament and elections an appropriate way for governing Russia?" We used that wording very specifically because we wanted to give people a chance to say, "We need that strong leader, and to hell with those talking boltuni in the parliament." So we were asking it in the way that we would get big results on number one and number two. And, you can see, "very good way," was 12%. "Fairly good way" was 32%, "fairly bad way" was 27%, and "very bad way" was 15%. That is a pretty equal distribution if you dichotomize the variable.

"What are you willing to sacrifice in order to have order?" (see Table 14 above) I already showed you that in terms of individual rights, people are not very enthusiastic about it. But when we get to institutions, they are a little more sympathetic. They don''t really like them anyway, right? "To bring about order in the country, are you prepared to support the banning of certain political parties?" Two thirds are ready to do that. We did not ask which parties.

69% support
18% oppose

"To bring about order in the country, are you prepared to support censorship of the press and television?" (see Table 14 above)

32% support
53% oppose

More are not prepared to do that than are prepared. I will remind you that in the opinion polls that the president''s folks do, which you read all the time in the press, "Do you support the arrest of Gusinsky?" "Yes!" "Do you support the destruction of Berezovsky?" "Yes!" "Do you think he is a criminal?" "Yes!" Big solid majorities. When you ask the question in this way, it looks a little different.

Finally, and I should stop, but I have a bunch more on the economy if you are interested. Let me just end with a few slides on the economy. This slide I thought was also very striking (see Table 18 below). "In a democracy, the economic system runs badly?" Again, that is the propaganda of the Kremlin right now, "democracies cannot make the economy run." It turns out that Russians do not support that idea at all. Again, I think it is a fairly sophisticated understanding of their system, our system, and what their system is not.

3% fully agree
16% agree
42% disagree
5% completely disagree

There are some very curious things on the economy, but there is some relationship, which I will talk about in a moment. "What should be done with the Russian economy?"

"We should accelerate market reforms." Nobody supports that.
"We should continue market reforms but less painfully." 42%

"We should, for the time, being retain important elements of the socialist economy." 23.5%.
"We should return completely to the socialist economy.

And, ¾ of the people voting for the last two voted Communist Party. One can read that table in very different ways. I am struck by the low level of support for the market, not the other way around. Maybe that is just because I did not understand in the old days, but I was stuck by that.
Also now on the protectionist proclivities, let me just compare two really contradictory slides "We must defend our industry against competition from foreign firms." Hard core, 76% agree with that. But then we asked, "Should Russia attract foreign investment in its economy?" The majority also agrees with that.

COMMENT: I don''t see any contradictions, actually.

MCFAUL: Okay, we''ll get back to it.

When somebody says that this is just like the United States, that was the end of my remark. That, to me, is what is amazing about these attitudes. I agree. I think they are different in certain places about the United States, but the big story that does not get told about Russia, and maybe it is because of the tremendous work that SDI has done. But these are radical changes in a society in a very short period of time. At a time when what happened to them personally was incredibly negative. That is important. This is just not, "Well democracy has been good for me; I am richer today than I was ten years ago." It is not that kind of short term, very unsophisticated— we would call it pocketbook-voting kinds of ideas. This is real transformation in terms of attitudes towards democracy.

The sad part of it, of course, is that those in power are moving in the opposite direction. But I would say, so that I can end on an optimistic note as I always try to do, we may be in a short-term aberration about Russian democracy. And I am very pessimistic about the short term. But any time you get those kinds of robust numbers for democracy, it is always a matter of time. Whether it is months or years. Poland had to wait a decade after December of 1981. There these numbers were much more robust in the pro-democratic way. But I think that this is a pretty long-term positive future for Russian democracy.

Thank you.

CARR: Thank you very much for that overview, and for drawing out in the beginning, in particular, some of the things that we need to reassess about our assumptions at this stage in the game. I think that is particularly helpful. All of the very important data collection that you and Tim Colton have done really enriches the picture of what is happening. One thing that we at SDI always are aware of is the fact that across the 11 time zones and 89 regions of Russia, trying to figure out exactly what is happening is very challenging. But you have helped us in that. I also particularly appreciate the optimism at the end about democratic attitudes, the compliment to SDI aside. I certainly agree that that is incredibly important. I hope that we can figure out some of the contradictions and explore them in discussion. I would like to open it up for questions or comments.

MARSHALL GOLDMAN: Let me just begin with the last slide about the investment, and then go back to earlier ones. I do not interpret it the way that you do, as necessarily being optimistic. Even though I would agree that the American response would probably be much the same. We wanted the Japanese to build Toyota here; we did not want to import them. So you want to protect local industry, but you want to welcome investment.

I think in the case of the Russians, it is fair that they want to protect local industry. This has been very clear since 1998. But they want investors. But, I think their attitude toward investment is somewhat different than ours. I hope it is different than ours. That is, they think: "Give us the money. Do not tell us what to do. We will just take your money and do it. And then let''s screw you." This has been happening in the oil companies.

So I think that is slightly different. There may be some who say that in the United States. But basically it is, "Come in Toyota. You produce. The governors will give incentives." And then they do their thing.

ALLISON: Remember the railroads.

GOLDMAN: I am saying the current— In the earlier period, sure, we took the British investment. But today I think it is different. And maybe the fact that it existed in the 1890s is again not such positive comment either.

MCFAUL: I agree. I would just say that you are reflecting the way that Russian enterprise managers think about investment. I am not sure— and we did not ask the question that way. You know, "You want foreign investment so you can steal— " We probably would not get a good answer. These are mass attitudes. These are not what those looking for foreign investment think. This is what the population as a whole thinks.

GOLDMAN: I agree. I understood this. But I think the population feels the same way. "Don''t tell us what to do once the money comes in." They want investment.

MCFAUL: How would you know that? How could you find that to be?

GOLDMAN: Well, because the general attitude— without survey obviously you can''t do it. But in the discussions— When I go there, I don''t talk only with oligarchs. They tell me, "We just want the money, but then don''t mess around with us."

MCFAUL: I don''t have the data on it, but I would disagree. I actually think that a lot of— having worked on privatization and defense conversion, and spending time in factories, they actually want a place that works and provides a job. They don''t want to steal money and say, "screw you." I think the attitude toward the Western investors— management vs. those that may be able to benefit are very different. So I would not necessarily say that they had the similar attitude. "If I can get a job, I don''t care." And this by the way, I would guess, not knowing about America, is the same. If you polled people about Toyota, "Yeah, we are afraid of them." But if you live in the town where Toyota is providing jobs, suddenly who owns it becomes less important to you than whether or not you have a job. But I don''t know. I am only speculating.

GOLDMAN: I think that is a good point, because I have talked to people in factories, for instance the Gillette factory. The workers there are very pleased. But at the same time, and I think maybe you could say the same thing about an American worker, we would still just like them to put the money in, but we would still like to do it our own way.

Now, going back to the earlier thing, I almost had a feeling I am at two different talks. Not the latter part, but the first part. On the one hand, I heard you saying that Putin was strong. In the second part I heard you say that he backed off, the oligarchs will still have to deal with him because they are the one source of opposition. Everyone else is weak. To some extent, I am not sure how the two mesh.

MCFAUL: They don''t, and that is precisely what I want to decipher.

GOLDMAN: Okay, well then I got the message. (Laughter) But I do want to take off after the oligarchs because this is something that I have been looking at in great detail. I would not accept the notion, or I disagree with you about the notion that they seem weak and Putin is all-comprehensive. Now, I say that and I think it would be stronger if I said it before 1998, but that is the point. In other words, they were all weakened except for Alfa Group, and even they were weakened a little bit in 1998. I think you were focusing on two of them disappearing, that is Berezovsky, and Gusinsky, but Smolensky has disappeared and Vinogradov has disappeared. But to the extent that the economy and the financial crisis undercut them, they weren''t as strong as they were before. And I think that makes a difference.

In the case of Gazprom, Gazprom is still a state industry. And we are not through, by the way. Vyakhirev''s term comes to an end this fall. They got rid of Chernomyrdin. They are weak, but you look at the others: Butakovsky survived, Potanin is back up again. You mentioned Abramovich but you should also mention Deripaska. They are as strong as ever doing their own thing. I see Putin going along with them, even encouraging them and facilitating in terms of what they are doing.

Finally one last word about NTV. You said that you expected that if Putin were really strong, he would have gone after NTV, putting him in jail, a la Stalin. Well, two of them have been put in jail. Not just Gusinsky, but the treasurer was just put in jail and the others have been hauled in, one after another. And it seems to me that this is a struggle. Here, of course, it does show that Gusinsky is weak, but Gusinsky is weak in large part because of the 1998 recession, where advertising was simply destroyed. He made the investments, and got himself caught short. So I think you have to distinguish what is economic and what is political.

MCFAUL: Excellent points. I think it is far too early to have any definitive statements about the nature of Russian political economy under Putin. I deliberately wanted to go one hand to the other hand because I am not prepared to do it, and I am very skeptical of anyone who is. I think it is too early, and I could go on for a long time about that.

Let us talk about the oligarchs as a great example of that. And what I meant about the strength of the oligarchs was on the political side, not them as companies. I see it actually as a very positive thing that the ones you mentioned, Deripaska, Khodorkovsky and Potanin, all have in common that they today seem themselves first and foremost t as CEOs and secondly— and I would say third, fourth and fifth in terms of their priorities— as political backers.

What is interesting about the ones that are weak now is that two years ago— I don''t know, maybe some people called Berezovsky a CEO, I most certainly didn''t see him that way, and Gusinsky.

GOLDMAN: Berezovsky is fair, but Gusinsky is certainly a CEO. He created those things.

MCFAUL: Okay. Fair enough. He created them— or somebody gave him money. That is a different debate. But what I would say is new about this, what I was critiquing in terms of reasserting and challenging our old assumptions was the Marxist model of how politics worked in Russia. That is, that seven rich guys sat at a table and said, "This is what we are going to tell the Kremlin to do." What I am struck by in the Putin period is how that model does not seem to have a lot of play. What has happened is that the weakest financial folks also were the most political actors, and they are the easiest ones to destroy. Right? So it is not Potanin, Khodorkovsky, Deripaska. He has not tackled the strong ones.

By the way, I would make the same argument about the governors and presidents. He has gone after the weak ones. Rutskoi was the weakest of all the governors that he could pick on. He did not go after Mr. Shaimiev. Let''s not overestimate the power that Putin has to do those things.

But the second thing I would say is that those oligarchs who survived 1998 and who are well on their feet are precisely those who are not trying to play political roles. Deripaska is a little different because he is running; he has interests out in Nizhni, and they want to win that election. He wants to create a regional fiefdom. But it is interesting, even their strategy, which I think is a very wise one, is to do that in the regions— not play in Moscow. I would submit that it is just a different model than the old model of five guys controlling the Kremlin.

We may disagree, but it wouldn''t be the first time.

GRAHAM ALLISON: Mike, I apologize for missing the first part, but I enjoyed the second part. I agree with Marshall that it is unclear what the theme is here since you are going in many different directions simultaneously. I think the theme is that it is very confusing, and there are different positions, and that all of us, probably, have become more modest about elections. On the oligarchs, I will make a small comment, and then I have a different question.

I would agree with your conclusion in the discussion with Marshall that if you look at the two that Putin has targeted, these are two people who played politics; that was their main business. Gusinsky ran a campaign against Putin in the 2000 election, and I think that is what the story of NTV is about. It is not surprising that Putin responded when he came into power, particularly since NTV has outstanding loans to companies controlled by the state. Nixon was similarly vengeful, and so was Roosevelt. But the U.S. has different political institutions in which those things could be expressed. But I think it is not surprising that the oligarchs who were playing politics get treated in one way and people who are not playing politics have been treated quite differently. It will be interesting to see what happens to the others. But they clearly have been ducking with respect to politics. Khodorkovsky now says, "I am not interested in politics, I don''t know about politics." And Abramovich is even trying to say, "I am a crusader now, as an angel of assistance. I am not doing politics."

But back to the question. It seems to me that the hardest question as we watch this continuing revolution - I think that is the right metaphor— is compared to what? When we look at your slides, it is even interesting. We were all kind of thinking, "Well, as compared to whom?" What would Americans say? That has got to be a very strange comparison. Here is a democracy that is old and advanced. How about Ecuador or China? Or Hong Kong or Taiwan? Or Singapore? Or some other place? I think partly that your thesis is compared to "what we thought." But it is always difficult to tell exactly what we thought. It is good to go back to say what we wrote, to try to see comparisons. But I think as you are trying to look at the current, I''d say, as compared to what analogies. I would be very interested in what comparative or when we are trying to see what is significant about a finding, how do I judge it, as compared to what?

MCFAUL: It is a great question. I see a couple of my former students, and they know how I do it. I compare it to other great revolutions. I start and I tell you why you shouldn''t compare it to Bolivia on the economic side, and why you shouldn''t compare it to the Latin American/South American transitions to democracy. I think you go back and if you think of our revolution, where the agenda items were much smaller by the way than the Russians - Russians had to deal with three fundamental issues: the nature of the polity, the nature of the economy and where were the borders. Right? In our great revolution, we only dealt with one of them: the nature of the polity. Well, no, you could say the nature of the borders in terms of fighting independence, right.

Then, the most brilliant men that history has ever known, if you believe

COMMENT: Our own propaganda. (Laughter)

MCFAUL: I was going to say those things that are inscribed all over Washington. I am new to Washington, so I am constantly marveling at these kinds of statements. They drafted a constitution, which how many years after the Declaration of Independence did it take? And that brilliant document still failed. It led to civil war. They thought they were making compromises that would avoid that, but the institutions they designed turned out to be a tremendous failure. I think. That is the way I would interpret that.

So, yeah, I agree. To put the Russians up to that comparison, I think is a legitimate. And I would say the first design at political institutions— I am just repeating the argument in my book— the first design that they had for new political institutions under Gorbachev failed. The second design under Yeltsin failed, and the third design has stuck, but with a lot of nasty scars because you had a protracted, confrontational transition rather than a negotiated one.

That is where you are now, and the real question is: will those institutions stick beyond the balance of powers that created them? I will be honest; social scientists are terrible at making those kinds of predictions. The democracy literature talks about the two-turnover rule. Twenty years, and all this kind of junk. But you know, having just finished the book and having tried to read all the literature on it, I don''t think we are very good at it. And I most certainly am no good at it.

I would say that the saving grace of the basic set of institutions that are in place is that in order to overturn them, you usually need two things to happen: you need an alternative project— that is a different conception of how to do it. And you need powerful individuals who embrace those ideas. That is when you get revolutionary situations. When two sides, with two alternative ideas for how the polity should be governed, are at the barricades and have something to do about it. Let me make it clear. You need the alternative project, and you need the power. There are Marxist/Leninists probably in our midst - you have them here; we have them in California— who want to have the revolution, but nobody really cares about them because they don''t have any power. Right? A better example would be countries I used to work on - South Africa - where there was also a revolutionary/economic project there during the transition, but they were not powerful enough. So their interests could be ignored.

In Russia, and the reason that I think the transition has been so protracted and incomplete, is because the balance of power throughout this struggle has been relatively equal. Transitologists say that is the perfect "ripe for resolution" when you get negotiations. Stalemate and then we negotiate. I have the exactly opposite conclusion; when the balance of power between two radically different ideas are there, that is when you get conflict.

Let me just illustrate it for a minute. When the balance is in favor of one side or the other, there is no fight. In Poland there was not really any big fight. Nor in Uzbekistan. Everybody understood what the distribution of power was at the time of transition. It took one election in Poland. But once it was completed— I think there is a big mythology about the Polish transition - that is was this pacted transition to democracy. It wasn''t pacted. It was pacted in the first instance. They got the power; they realized where the distribution of power was, and they dictated the rules. And you had a choice. You could either play by the rules or not. That was just the way it was. It just so happened that the dictators in that instance were democrats who adhered to democratic principles. But had they been something else, you would have had a different kind of transition. Uzbekistan is the exact same case in the opposite direction. There was no fight. No battle. No armed struggle. Everyone understood what the balance of power was and they weren''t fools to fight.

Russia to me is where the distribution of power was relatively equal. Each side thought they had a probability of victory because of that equal distribution. The balance of power was uncertain. So having gone back and talked to these guys in 1991 and 1993, both sides of the barricade thought they had some probability of winning. You wouldn''t fight otherwise, I don''t think, if you knew you were going to fail.

But because of those two very long protracted battles, then you got to the third phase where one side, Yeltsin''s, dictated the rules. He couldn''t dictate them entirely the way he wanted. There were certain self-constraints he had to make for the opposition to acquiesce, but that to me is where you got the rules. But that is a bad sign, because that means that they came from this distribution of power that were dictated.

In the book I talk about the fact that Yeltsin fading as a political actor was very important for letting the institution stay in place. It got very close in 1996; he was tempted to overturn the rules because he didn''t think he was going to win. But, I talked to Chubais about it; they just calculated if they could win, or, could they lose. There was uncertainty about whether they could win through the extra-constitutional means; they called it "Plan B" at the time. So they decided to go with this other thing. Then, that was a good thing that he faded from the scene.

What makes me nervous is that Putin has radically upset the balance of power in the second Russian republic. He has, I think, the ability to undermine those rules again. But I have gotten off into a long digression.

In terms of "compared to what," that is why I am so surprised by this part of the story. On the institutions part, we took 200 years to get our institutions, and they are still imperfect. Democracy is somewhere where you get, you are always in transition. Just look at the incredible thing we just went through in our own country. We have a lot to do in terms of improving our own rules of the game. I suspect Russia will have several bumps along the road before there is a stable institutional setting there. What I am struck by is that societal attitudes have changed much faster than I would have predicted, because we generally assume as political scientists that we change institutions and that changes attitudes as a result of the institutions. Here it seems like attitudes are ahead of the institutions.

QUESTION: I just want to talk about the meaning of the apparent support for democracy. At one level you could sort of look at the changing attitudes. We assumed that they changed since the Soviet period. Maybe they didn''t, I don''t know, in both optimistic and pessimistic sense. Because if they changed so radically in the pro-democratic direction, they could probably change the other way, if the circumstances changed. Of course the difficulty of these surveys is that it is difficult to know, for instance, maybe you support freedom of the press, but what are you willing to do about it? And how strongly do you support it? That is one thing.

MCFAUL: Well, on "strongly support," that is why we use the five point— We try to capture that.

CONTINUES: But it is one thing to say, "I really support it," but then the fact that Putin is able to say, "Well, do you support the freedom of press." Fine, you support the freedom of press, but what if freedom of press means supporting some dirty oligarch. It is pretty easy for him to reframe it in such a way that people forget about their support for freedom of press. It would be interesting, for example, to see how many of those people who strongly support freedom of press, would say, "Well, Gusinsky, he is a dirty oligarch. I support the freedom of press in principle, but not when it comes to dirty oligarchs." In other words, that suggests to me a sort of shallow support.

MCFAUL: Two things on that. One, your second question first, which is, "what are you willing to do about it?" Without question, we don''t have good stuff on this. This is a survey mostly interested in electoral attitudes. We didn''t talk at all about electoral attitudes today. We could do that another time. But other people, James Gibson, has done surveys on, "What are you willing to do about it." And, yeah, the numbers are very low. There aren''t many people willing to sacrifice their lives and the lives of their sons and daughters for freedom of the press. I think that is true. And that is a bad sign, right? It means that if it happens, there might not be a lot of resistance to it. And I would just add another layer to that and an even more negative picture: the institutions that might be the mobilizers of that are incredibly weak. There aren''t civic organizations and the usual laundry list of institutions of intermediation that we would hope would be there. They are very weak.

Having said that, again, as Graham said, "compared to what?" If you phrase the question the way you just did to Americans, wouldn''t they answer it the same way? Are you prepared to support a dirty, thieving, and no good, businessman who owns the New York Times in the name of freedom of the press? Of course, you are going to get the result you want on that. And by the way, I would say that in the stuff that I have looked at - and we have more on this particular question, because it was of particular interest during the campaign - Russians don''t associate Gusinsky in the same way as Sakharov— as a defender of the free press. Neither do I, by the way. So for us, because of what is going on, I mean, I support Gusinsky and his battles with the Russian government right now, full stop. I think it is atrocious what they are doing to him. Especially two years ago. Had you done a poll in this room and asked people, "How many people in this room think that Gusinsky is a fighter for democratic rights in Russia?" Pre the battle and pre the 1999 election. I don''t think you would have seen very many people saying, "Oh yeah, he is right up there with Sergei Kovalev. He wasn''t. And therefore, in Russia, you are asking a lot of the narod, if you will, to make those kinds of associations. It doesn''t mean it is good or bad, I am just not surprised by that kind of outcome.

QUESTION: If you could just comment on important lessons learned in terms of US policy towards Russia from the last decade and their possible application for perhaps mid-course corrections in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

MCFAUL: You should have come to my talk this morning when I talked to the Generals about this. I would say a couple of things, I guess. There are lots of lessons learned in terms of what we should have learned. In fact I am writing a book about this now, American Policy Towards Russia in the 1990s. So invite me back in a year when I have completed the work on that, and I will tell you more. I would say in general, I think there were a lot of good things done. I think it is really easy at this moment in the revolution to say, "Oh, it was awful— US-Russian relationships are all privatization, theft, and democracy. It didn''t work— " I understand all of that. As a student of revolutions, I can tell you that expectations are always unmet; it doesn''t matter what revolution you have to live through. It is awful. The revolutionaries never live up to the things that they think they are going to do when they are opposition.

Having said all that, in terms of lessons learned to move forward, I still believe fundamentally that the transformation of Russian society— and here I mean the whole thing— is the most important thing in terms in US-Russian relations and our security relations vis-à-vis that country. I have had this debate with my colleague and friend Condi Rice for a decade now. I heard her speak last night down in Washington, and I am very optimistic that a lot of the real politic rhetoric that they had "pre" the campaign suddenly seems to be softening. I cannot quite tell what the reason for that is. We can talk about that later. But, I think to go back to that, and to say, "all the stuff that I just told you about democratic attitudes doesn''t matter, and what really matters is geo-strategic whatever," would miss the big picture. In the picture, we need to translate these attitudes into a more democratic and market oriented state in Russia. I think that is the alliance, if you will, between them and us.

We failed them at various points along the way, I think. We put too much emphasis in state-led reform, for instance. I think the experience in the 1990s, in some ways, several colleagues who worked on that had a kind of Leninist view themselves. You use the state to crush the ancient regime and the old institutions and create space for organic new economic institutions first and foremost to grow. Well, it turned out that that didn''t work so well.

I think going forward, we should put much more emphasis on the societal part and stop trying to reform Russia vis-à-vis the state, particularly because the Russian state doesn''t want that kind of interaction with us anyway right now. I will end on that. I could go on forever. Invite me back, and we can talk about that.

CINDY: I have a question about the title of your book. It''s called Russia''s Unfinished Revolution. You said transition, but you don''t like the term. In light of these great data you just presented, and also the way you answered Graham''s question, the data seemed to show that this is very much a transition. What you saw was the shocking contradiction between the people''s attitudes towards democracy as such and the way that they think democracy or the type of political system they have in Russia is operating. It is exactly what you saw in the transitions in Southern Europe and Latin America. I think we can almost go number by number. So a comparativist who has been thinking about those transitions sees this and thinks, "Well, great," but they don''t see it as anything shocking; they see it more as a confirmation of the fact that this is very much a transitional non-consolidated democracy. So I was just interested in that aspect of why you resist "transition" so much as a characterization of what is happening.

And, I know you are interested in radical myths of change, but yet this dimension at least seems to support the idea of keeping within transitology study.

MCFAUL: Great question. Buy the book. You''ll see. I come from Stanford. Philippe Schmitter, Terry Karl - we are all transitologists out there. So I overstated the case to make a point. In fact, if you read the book, it takes place within the framework of the transitions literature. I focus on actors instead of structures, and elite packs. The two points of departure I make are: first— the nature of the agenda of change. And I believe fundamentally that the agenda items before Russia''s transitional leaders were just much bigger than they were in Portugal. That is what I mean. In Portugal, you didn''t have to make private property. That is a pretty hard thing to do. You didn''t have to deal with end of empire. I guess you did in Portugal, but I think it was a more enormous concept in the Soviet Union. That is what I meant about that.

What the book argues is that those two agenda items actually become the salient ones that dominate what the political leaders in the Soviet Union and Russia had to think about. First. They had to in some ways get resolution on those, and it was resolution brought through confrontation by the way. But they fought over both of those issues before they actually got on to the business of thinking about they polity. And incidentally, there are issues that are not divisible. One of the big things about transitions literature is that you have to compromise and give a little bit and get a constitution that you are appeasing certain interest groups and things like that. It is a negotiation and dividing the spoils.

When you talk about things like "empire vs. not," or "command economy vs. not," they are not very easily negotiated things. They are indivisible goods. Maybe you think differently. I don''t. I think they are things that tend to polarize people, and they most certainly did in Russia, I believe. And therefore it makes finding a negotiated solution difficult. That would be my first point.

The second one about the balance of power. Where I take issue with that literature is that the assumption that an equal distribution of power between the ancient regime, you know the soft-liners in the ancient regime, and the moderates in the movement, the democratic opposition, you get negotiations when the balance is relatively equal. It has to do with spending too much time in Southern Africa. We talked about Angola before coming in, where I used to work on and live. They have had a pretty equal distribution of power in Angola for a long time, and it sure hasn''t led to democracy. Based on that, looking around the world seeing equal distributions, you see that it is not a sufficient condition to get an agreement. You got very close. My book deliberately has as a metaphor behind it the transitions literature. You get very close. The 500 day plan. The 9 + 1 agreement. You get very close to pacts, and then they don''t work. And that kind of contingency, which of course we social scientists hate and don''t know how to deal with, is to me very close, and yet it goes a different way, which then has implications for not getting liberal democracy in the end. The final argument is that because of this protracted confrontational non-negotiated transition, you get illiberal democracy, not liberal democracy.