Ironically, Ulyukaev’s own statement, made more than two decades before his downfall, turned out to be prophetic. In the case of the privatization of Rosneft’s block of shares (and many others), the decision-making was quite competent and did indeed “depend upon knowledge and experience but not upon voting results.” The problem was that the competence, knowledge, and experience of rent-seekers was much more important than the competence, knowledge, and experience of Ulyukaev and the other Russian technocratic reformers. While attempting to avoid the negative effects of politics on policy-making and “to achieve a ‘regime of non-interference’ of politics in other spheres of public life,” technocrats found themselves caught in a trap: policy-making was affected by more negative influences, while politics only aggravated these problems. Under these conditions, the technocratic cure became more dangerous than the disease of bad governance, and it remains to be seen whether Russia will find a more efficacious one.
Chapter
6
Success Stories
amid
Bad Governance
WHILE THIS BOOK DESCRIBES present-day Russia as a case of bad governance, the main objection to this description is related to the fact that Russia (both now and in the past) has demonstrated certain major achievements of state policies in various fields, and some state-directed projects and programs may be labeled success stories in international comparisons. Recent achievements of this kind have been analyzed at the level of several of Russia’s regions,1 of certain sectors of the economy (such as agriculture),2 and of some state agencies (such as the Central Bank).3 Their impact is important and visible enough that one should not dismiss these cases merely as minor and negligible exceptions, the specifics of which only confirm the overall rules of bad governance. At minimum, one must pose a question about the causes and mechanisms that allow major successes amid the grim picture of notorious inefficiency, ubiquitous corruption, and widespread rent-seeking involved in governing the Russian state. Moreover, the in-depth deviant case analyses of these outliers will aid in a better understanding of the general trends of bad governance through identification of its limits. In other words, when and under which conditions can the state happily turn from bad governance to good governance, at least for a while, and why may such a wondrous conversion occur in certain cases when in others it does not?
The literature on developmental policies beyond the global West has paid attention to “pockets of efficiency”4 or “pockets of effectiveness”5—state-directed priority projects that are intentionally designed and implemented under special conditions under the patronage of political leaders. Some of these projects have brought not only short-term successes but also major long-term returns and outlived their initial conditions and intentions. However, the list of possible causes of such success stories is quite diverse and includes several organizational, institutional, and technological factors, and quality of management and personnel, which often tend to be considered country-specific and context-bounded.6 Similar tendencies might be relevant for research on Russia. For example, in his comprehensive overview of innovation projects in pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia, Loren Graham focuses on the efforts of certain creative individuals and collective drivers of technological progress vis-à-vis the rigid system of state governance and the political and institutional environment, which was unfavorable for developmental projects.7 Although it is hard to object to these observations, his focus of analysis leaves unanswered the question of why state policies sometimes paved the way to major breakthroughs (such as the Soviet space project, briefly mentioned by Graham), while other times they resulted only in a waste of resources? The analysis of success stories faces not only the need for conceptual homogenization of a diverse empirical field even within the same country (let alone cross-national research) but also the framing of theoretical and disciplinary scholarly perspectives. For Barbara Geddes, the explanation of pockets of efficiency in Brazil and other Latin American states is driven entirely by institutional accounts;8 the comparative analysis of Michael Roll mostly focuses on the political leadership and organizational settings;9 and Graham, in turn, offers a path-dependent perspective on exceptional successes in Russia amid numerous failures.10 Thus, instead of generalization of analyses of success stories, the research agenda meets with increasing fragmentation.
This chapter does not aim to present universal and comprehensive explanations of success stories in Russia and beyond but proposes a slightly different view on the causes and mechanisms of these phenomena. I argue that effectively implementing priority projects and programs by the Russian state might be understood as the other side of the coin of bad governance. First, the political leadership under conditions of bad governance needs success stories of national development, not only in terms of policies but also as a tool of politics due to their effects on domestic and international legitimation of regimes and leaders. Second, the actual achievements of success stories may perform the functions of both material and symbolic conspicuous consumption in the eyes of elites and masses alike. Meanwhile, political demand for success stories provides certain incentives for policy entrepreneurs among mid-range and top-level bureaucrats who may pursue their upward career mobility and/or priority status and funding while also working toward achieving some broadly defined developmental goals.11 The problem, however, is that these incentives for policy entrepreneurs are often unsustainable because of their dependence upon patronage from political leaders, making institutionalization of success stories a difficult task. Moreover, given the fact that some success stories are often implemented under special deliberately designed conditions, their multiplicative effects, or trigger effects12—that is, the extension of success stories to other projects, organizations, sectors, or regions—are relatively rare. Due to these constraints, some success stories were short-lived, and their returns diminished over time: they not only failed to improve conditions of bad governance but in fact even reinforced the status quo. These tendencies are widespread in contemporary Russia and in its Soviet (if not pre-Soviet) past; they do not contradict the overall pattern of bad governance in the country and may even serve as inherent attributes of this politico-economic order.
The structure of the chapter is as follows. After presenting the case of one of the most well-known success stories in Russia, the Soviet space program, I discuss the role and impact of success stories under conditions of bad governance and emphasize their constraints, which are related to the priorities of the political leadership, the incentives of policy entrepreneurs, and the mechanisms for managing top priority projects against the background of a shortage of resources. Further, I focus on the dilemmas of state policies under bad governance in Russia and highlight the effects of diminishing returns of success stories due to these constraints. The prospects and implications of success stories for Russia’s development are considered in the conclusion.
“But We Are Making Rockets”
Before turning to an analysis of the story of success and the story of failure of the Soviet period, one important disclaimer is necessary. As argued in chapter 2, I consider bad governance in present-day Russia to be a product of interest-driven rent-seeking efforts of post-Soviet leaders and elites rather than an effect of various legacies of the past. At first glance, the focus on certain examples from the 1950s–1960s may seem to contradict this argument. However, the rationale of the case studies presented below is a little different. I refer to them in order to explore the issue of the causes of extraordinary achievements amid the overall mediocrity of the government’s performance, regardless of the nature of the poor quality of governance. Even though the political system and economic foundations of governing the Soviet Union after Stalin13 were quite different from those in Russia in the early twenty-first century, it would not be a wild exaggeration to claim that both the Soviet Union and present-day Russia have underperformed in terms of quality of their governance, albeit for different reasons and with different consequences for the respective countries. This is why looking at the relatively rare examples of outstanding overperformance of state-driven programs and projects in different political and institutional contexts may help us to understand why good apples may grow on bad apple trees, even though the trees we are looking at may be of different sorts.