In addition, the failure of the police reform demonstrates that policies implemented by an entrenched bureaucracy do not allow for provision of incentives for real change, but often support the status quo. The “new” police remained an agency oriented around presenting appropriate statistical reports irrespective of the real situation regarding crime.77 The reform of healthcare demonstrates similar tendencies, with a two-fold increase in financial support in the second half of the 2000s failing to lead to improved quality of healthcare services.78 Although pressure from policy entrepreneurs in some areas (such as the educational reforms) has sometimes contributed to institutional changes, their effects are only partial due to resistance from interest groups and a series of organizational problems. The step-by-step process of implementing certain reforms makes policy changes even more complicated.
Yet not all policy reforms in Russia were doomed to fail. The Russian military analyst Alexander Golts has presented a vivid example of policy advancement in a rather unlikely environment in his perceptive account of successful military reform in Russia in 2008–2012.79 After a series of replacements of top officials who had done little to restructure the post–Soviet army and attempted to preserve the previous (oversized, inefficient, and costly) status quo in the governance and performance of the Russian military, in 2007 Putin surprisingly appointed Anatoly Serdyukov, then a son-in-law of then prime minister Viktor Zubkov, to be the new minister of defense. His tenure began with the episode of the Russian military conflict with Georgia in August 2008 known as the Five-Day War.80 This conflict demonstrated that the Russian army was not properly prepared for major ground operations due to technological obsoleteness and poor management and personnel quality. In a sense, even though the Five-Day War has been perceived as a Russian victory, this experience became a major exogenous shock that paved the way to serious reorganization of the military. Serdyukov came to the right job at the right time. He received carte blanche for many actions: he laid off many generals and officers (overall, almost two hundred thousand personnel were cut), reorganized divisions and battalions, restructured the chain of command to make it more modern and efficient, and greatly diminished the number of conscripts in favor of professional military personnel (kontraktniki). All of this had been unthinkable for many reformers after the Soviet collapse, but the political will and patronage of the leadership alongside perceptions of the urgent necessity of policy reforms served as major arguments for Serdyukov. To some extent, Serdyukov was able to achieve his goals despite fierce resistance from the military bureaucracy and its numerous lobbyists. However, his reform plans also included the outsourcing of many non-essential services previously performed by the military itself (ranging from construction to catering) away from the insiders of the Ministry of Defense and into the hands of external contractors. He also attempted to review the practices of state procurement for the military to combat overpricing arms and equipment. Such bold moves would inevitably mean a major redistribution of rents and hurt the vital interests of many powerful interest groups.81 It is no surprise that in 2012 Serdyukov fell victim to a major scandaclass="underline" an investigation against him was opened amid accusations of adultery with his mistress, Evgeniya Vasilyeva who headed a major department in the ministry. Serdyukov was fired, and his criminal case was closed after a lengthy procedure. Nevertheless, the military reform brought significant fruits, greatly contributing to the more efficient performance of the Russian army during the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and military adventures in Syria since 2015.82 Some of Serdyukov’s reforms, however, were weakened after he was replaced by Putin’s long-term associate Sergey Shoigu.83
In general, are successful reforms possible within the framework of the authoritarian modernization project? A positive answer should be heavily marked with serious caveats. If a certain reform is the top political priority of a strong and authoritative head of state, if a coherent team of reformers can be insulated from the major interest groups, and if the team implements consistent policy changes quickly and they bring immediate positive results, then this reform is possible even under conditions of poor quality of governance and inefficient institutional design. This combination of favorable conditions is quite rare, and this is why the success story of tax and budgetary reforms in the 2000s remains an exception. But the insulation of reformers from the influence of interest groups as such does not ensure the quality of policy proposals and their implementation: the costs of errors may increase. In addition, authoritarian modernization projects are often implemented by officials who are not interested in policy changes and have little, if any, incentive to promote them. Finally, the failure of some policy reforms can challenge the whole project of authoritarian modernization by undermining the president’s incentive to continue major changes. It is unsurprising that after the failure of the “monetization of social benefits,” the notion of reform became taboo among the Russian leadership.84 Later on, reforms were replaced by “national projects,” which proposed only an increase in financing without significant structural changes. When Putin returned to the presidential post in 2012, new rounds of large-scale socioeconomic reforms were not discussed, and after the 2014 annexation of Crimea they faded away from Russia’s agenda.
From a broad perspective, the Russian experience of authoritarian modernization, as represented in the wake of policy reforms in the 2000s, demonstrates that political leaders, even those who are interested in implementing policy changes, cannot repeat the experience of successful dictators. Those who relied upon an inefficient bureaucracy as the basis of their own winning coalitions85 are rarely ready to risk a potential political imbalance in the name of possible developmental success. Therefore, their reform strategy is often inconsistent, and the incentives to preserve the status quo are often overwhelming. In the best case, authoritarian modernization can result in a set of temporary and partial policy measures, which may at best bring only partial success in terms of the quality of governance. In the worst case, it turns into a demagogical smokescreen for the preservation of authoritarian power. As one can see, this was the case with the Russian experience in the early twenty-first century: the initial efforts of policy reforms that launched soon after 2000 later turned into words without deeds against the background of aggravation of authoritarian trends in the country. Yet there are no guarantees that possible democratization would create favorable conditions for socioeconomic reforms either; rather, it would provide new challenges. Still, I would argue that there is no reason to believe that policy reforms under the conditions of an electoral authoritarian regime and poor quality of the state can bring great fruits of improved governance in Russia and elsewhere.
Chapter
5
The
Technocratic Traps