Liu Yu on Russia and Illiberal Democracy

Liu Yu, “How Russia Became What It Is Today”[1]
 
Translation and Introduction by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
 This is one of the texts translated for the collaborative project with GreatFire on Reading and Writing under Chinese Censorship, as an example of something that was published online in China and subsequently taken down.
 
Liu Yu (b. 1975) is a professor of Political Science at Tsinghua University and a prominent commentator on democratization in China and elsewhere.  She did her Ph.D. at Columbia, held a post-doc at Harvard, and taught at Oxford for several years before returning to China, and thus is obviously fluent in English. 

She is a classic example of a public intellectual who has sought to reach an audience outside of academia through social media, and her first two books were collections of materials already published online:  Details of Democracy:  Observing Contemporary American Politics 民主的细节：当代美国政治观察 (2009) seeks to explain the realities of American political life to skeptical Chinese readers, and Democracy:  The State of the Art 观念的水位 (2013) examines the state of democratization in East Asia and Latin America.  As these titles suggest, Liu is herself a proponent of democracy, and she discusses the difficulties China’s rise has posed for liberals and democratization in China in a 2015 interview with journalist Ian Johnson.
 
The text translated here draws on research she did for her third volume, The Day after the Great Change:  Success, Failure, and Choice in New Democracies 巨变第二天：新兴民主的得失与选择 , published in 2023 by the Chinese University of Hong Kong (where mainland authors frequently publish if they have a hard time finding a press in China proper).  The topic is Russia as the prime example of what journalist Fareed Zakaria has called “illiberal democracy:”  countries that hold sham elections that allow strongmen like Vladimir Putin to claim that they have been chosen by the people, while most of their legitimacy comes from their personal charisma and, in Putin’s case, his crusade – now including a war, which Liu Yu does not mention – to “make Russia great again.”
 
Liu’s indictment of Russian democracy is quite thorough, and even includes a discussion of political assassinations of journalists and other regime opponents, both in Russia and abroad.  The parallels with China are obvious, even if Liu of course does not mention them.  I felt like Liu pulled her punches a bit at the end in arguing that freedom is a cultural habit that people have to cultivate so as to take democracy back from illiberal rulers, and, as already mentioned, she says nothing about the war in Ukraine, but otherwise hardly reads like it was written and published in China, whose leaders boast frequently of Sino-Russian friendship.  It is in no way surprising that the piece was taken down by censors when it was published in early 2023; what is surprising is that it was published at all. 
 
Translation
 
Russia's Failed Democratic Transition:  Illiberal Democracy
 
Of all of the countries in transition, Russia may be particularly noteworthy. After all, Russia is the main inheritor of the legacy of the former Soviet Union, which was one of the two hegemonic powers during the Cold War.  The collapse of the Soviet Union completely transformed the world’s political landscape, and the type of country and the type of democracy that would grow out of the ruins of the Soviet Union was not only of great theoretical significance, but also had a direct impact on the changes in the world’s geopolitical landscape.  On the battlefield there is a saying that "to capture an outlaw, first capture their leader."  In fact, social science research is not so different, and if we have a clear understanding of some of the most important countries, observing how they change and analyzing the logic of their development, we may also come to understand the trends and mechanisms of politics in general. 
 
Sadly, if we see political transformation as a leap from one side of a canyon to the other, then Russia has still not made that leap, even after 30 years.  On the contrary, it seems to have fallen into the canyon and set up camp, seemingly saying "I am not going anywhere!"  Putin's government and its supporters are following a “democratic path with Russian characteristics.”
 
For many who expected Russia to become a liberal democracy, however, Russia's democratic transition has been a failure. One of the hallmarks of this failure is the fact that since coming to power in 2000, Vladimir Putin has miraculously become the undefeatable ruler of Russian politics.  In fact, in the opinion of many observers, Russia's transition is not only a failure, but a classic failure.  What does this mean? It means that the failure of the democratic transition in Russia is not an accidental, isolated, temporary failure, but represents a type that many call “illiberal democracy.”
 
What does illiberal democracy mean? The concept was first popularized by the journalist Fareed Zakaria, who noticed a peculiar phenomenon in emerging democracies, beginning in the mid-1990s:  politicians who have been democratically elected to power, but who have freed themselves from institutional checks and balances and have consolidated their power by shutting down the opposition's space to speak and act.  In 1997, Zakaria published a famous article in Foreign Affairs called “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.”
 
In this article, he notes: “For almost a century in the West, democracy has meant liberal democracy, a political system marked not only by free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property. In fact, this latter bundle of freedoms - what might be termed constitutional liberalism - is theoretically different and historically distinct from democracy…Today the two strands of liberal democracy, interwoven in the Western political fabric, are coming apart in the rest of the world. Democracy is flourishing; constitutional liberalism is not.”
 
From this passage, we can see that Zakaria came up with the idea of illiberal democracy because he found that the development of democracy and the development of freedom do not necessarily go in lock step with one another. We often assume that democracy necessarily entails freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the marketplace, but Zakaria found that this is not necessarily the case in emerging democracies.
 
Therefore, illiberal democracy is a "one-legged" democracy. From the outside, it looks like democracy, in the sense that there are periodic elections that are occasionally somewhat competitive, which is what distinguishes it from traditional authoritarian systems.  At the same time, those who are elected go on to restrict political freedom and suppress the opposition parties in the name of democracy, so that the next round of political competition begins from an unfair starting line, which is how the elected rulers wind up entrenching their own power.
 
To use the analogy of a singing contest, in traditional authoritarian regimes there are none.  Some insider picks the winner, and the competition is over before it starts.  But illiberal democracy is not like this.  There is a competition, and the audience votes, but while contestant A is given everything they need to strut their stuff on stage, when it comes to contestants B, C, and D, either their mike is cut after the first two lines, or the lights go out while they are singing, so that while the audience does indeed vote, it cannot have a clear impression of any contestant other than contestant A, who naturally wins.  This is illiberal democracy, which does not do away with democracy, but instead simply distorts it.
 
Russia under Illiberal Democracy:  Authoritarianism and Political Assassinations
 
Contemporary Russia is regarded by many scholars as the archetype of illiberal democracy. It has the outer appearance of democracy in that it has periodic multi-party elections that are somewhat competitive; for example, in the 2018 presidential election, even if Putin won 77% of the vote, nearly a quarter of the electorate did not vote for him, but instead voted for other minor parties.
 
At the same time there is no denying that political freedom in Russia is greatly compromised, and even steadily declining.  For example, in 2013, Alexei Navalny (1976-2024), one of the more politically appealing opposition figures, ran for mayor of Moscow and won 27% of the vote.  In 2019, however, the authorities had learned their lesson and did not allow him to run, and even arrested him several times.  Because of such restrictions, although there are opposition parties in Russia, these opposition parties are basically examples of “the survival of the least fit.” No truly decent opposition party will accept such circumstances, and those that do stay around are fairly repulsive.   In the words of one critic, the candidates of these so-called opposition parties are often so bad that as a dissident, he can't wait to vote for Putin.
 
So if you can’t participate in elections, can you engage in peaceful demonstrations? It depends on the mood of the government. Opposition rallies require government authorization, which the government refuses to grant most of the time. If you go ahead anyway and a crowd gathers, then the government has no choice but to arrest you, and once you are arrested you have a criminal record,  and according to the law, someone with a criminal record cannot run for office. The logic is impeccable.
 
So if rallies and marches are out, is it okay to run an independent media outlet?  That depends on whether you misunderstand what "independent" means. Over the past 20 years, the Russian government has virtually wiped out the liberal media by buying them up, prosecuting them, revoking their licenses, arresting their investors, etc.  The Novaya Gazeta is one newspaper that did not submit and instead consistently persisted in its “perversity,”  but between 2001 and the present, six of its journalists have been mysteriously killed, the most famous of which was the female journalist Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006), who was killed in 2006.  This courageous journalist, who had followed the war in Chechnya and fiercely criticized the government's Chechen policies, ended up being shot dead inside the elevator of her own apartment building.
 
So publishing a newspaper is dangerous,  but what about a civic organizations? It's not impossible, but apparently you can't engage in “extremist” activities, and what “extremist” means is extremely vague.   Moreover, if an NGO is funded by international grants, even if it is just a research institute, it has to be registered as a “foreign agent.”  How does “foreign agent” sound to you? Not good, I would bet, which is the intended effect.
 
What about individual speech? Again, you have to be careful, especially if you are a person of some social influence. Mikhail Khodorkovsky (b. 1963), an oil tycoon and at one time Russia's richest man, dared to criticize Putin openly, and was subsequently investigated for tax evasion, fraud, theft, corruption…there’s always something that sticks.  He ended up being jailed for 10 years and fled to Switzerland once he was released.
 
Frequent political assassinations are perhaps the starkest footnote to the state of political freedom in Russia. The mysterious death of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, mentioned earlier, was not, in fact, incidental; assassination is almost a tradition in Russian politics.  The mysterious assassination in 1934 of Sergei Kirov (1886-1934), a member of the Soviet Central Committee, was the prelude to the Great Purge in the USSR; and one of the founding fathers of the USSR, Leon Trotsky, did not escape assassination after falling out with Stalin, although he fled all the way to Mexico.
 
Against this background, the contemporary phenomenon of political assassinations in Russia is not surprising. The most notable recent assassination was that of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov (1959-2015), who had served as deputy prime minister during the Yeltsin era, but who had been critical of the government during the Putin era, for which he had had been imprisoned several times.  In 2015, he was shot four times while crossing a bridge near the Kremlin with his girlfriend and died instantly. 
 
Prominent Russian opposition figures are often assassinated abroad, and often die in mysterious and bizarre ways, from radioactive poisoning, to death by neurotoxicity, to strangulation in an apartment, to being shot in the street, to suicide or fake suicide…Many of these mysterious deaths have in common that the crime is never solved – the trail is either not pursued or breaks down at some point, as if all political assassinations have an information meltdown mechanism where once a certain point is reached, the information erases itself. 
 
The Core of Illiberal Democracy:  Charismatic Leaders Become the Embodiment of Ideas
 
So as you can see from the above description, Russia has elections but little freedom, and these two elements combine with one other to create an illiberal democracy. A pivotal element in this combination is the charismatic leader: Vladimir Putin.  Charismatic leaders, in fact, are found not only in contemporary Russian politics, but also in almost all illiberal democracies.  This is not surprising, because in order to become the undefeatable commander, you must have personal charisma. We have all seen the media images of a shirtless Putin riding a horse, playing the piano, swimming in freezing water, practicing judo…working hard to win the hearts and minds of the people.
 
This is in stark contrast to the soporific leaders of the later years of the Soviet regime. One poll even showed that 1 in 5 Russian women wants to marry Putin.  One might ask why the Russian public would allow the government to suppress political freedom. Can the president win that many votes simply by riding a horse and playing the piano? Of course not. Russians are certainly not that naive.  Putin's appeal is by no means just because he's good at “striking a pose,” but because he's managed to portray himself as a spokesman for a set of values. Which values? Economic development, the fight against the powerful, and most importantly - national renaissance.
 
We know that if someone on the street is selling sour apples, we most likely won't buy them, but if someone puts a bunch of sour apples and a bunch of sweet cherries together and says: “Buy five pounds of apples and get five pounds of cherries for free!” then we pull out our wallets. This is called "bundled selling."  No matter what the country, it is not easy to sell an evil bill of goods to the population; suppressing dissent and the constricting political freedoms is an evil, and a tough sell, but when evil is sold together with the good, people are more likely to buy in.
 
In Russia, Putin was regarded for a long time as the savior of the economy. At the beginning of Russia’s transition in the 1990s,  Russia’s economy was suffering, but recovered at the beginning of Putin's rise to power, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 7% between 2000-2007.  Although this was largely the result of soaring international oil prices, it was seen by many ordinary Russians as proof of the Putin government's wise decision-making.
 
However, over the past decade or so Putin's image as an economic savior has declined. Why? Because international oil prices have fallen, despite Putin’s best efforts. Russia's economic growth has slowed considerably over the past decade, to the point that in the six years between 2013 and 2019, Russia's real incomes have fallen, and in 2019 they were down 10% from 2013. As a result, many analysts say that the Russian economy has suffered a “lost decade.”
 
Particularly embarrassing is the fact that this decline is in stark contrast to the development of some of Russia's neighbors in the former Soviet camp.  Russia's per capita GDP in the early 1990s was on a par with that of the three Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, and other Central European countries, but by 2019, the former boss had fallen significantly behind.   Some people believe that "the more authoritarian the government is, the faster the economy develops," but at least in terms of the fate of the former Soviet camp after the transition, this is not the case.  In fact, it is just the opposite. The three Baltic States and the four Central European countries that make up the former Soviet Eastern Bloc, are more economically developed and more politically democratic and liberal than Russia.
 
Putin has other cards in his deck besides the economy, including cracking down on the powerful.   Ever since he came to power in 2000, Putin has set his sights on Russia's "economic oligarchs."  As is well known, this group of oligarchs emerged in the Yeltsin era, due to the lack of fairness and transparency during the privatization of state-owned assets. After Putin came to power, he began to investigate and arrest many of these economic oligarchs who subsequently either went bankrupt or went to jail, earning Putin the reputation of "defying the powerful in the name of the people."  Of course, this image does not stand up to strict scrutiny, and some scholars have pointed out that Putin is not cracking down on all the oligarchs, but only on those who are "disobedient." In the international transparency ranking of corrupt countries, in 2019, Russia ranked 137th out of 180 countries, so the fight against corruption can't really be considered a strong point of Putin's government.
 
But it’s ok if neither the economic savior card nor the fight against the powerful card wins the round; Putin's real trump card is nationalism. For many Russians, the greatest trauma of the post-transition era is neither temporary economic downturns nor corruption, but the fall of national pride.  The former Soviet Union was a superpower with pretentions of deciding the fate of the world, and in its earlier history, Russia was an empire that straddled East and West, its sheer size an illustration of its fighting prowess. After the transition, however, Russia suddenly collapsed into a regional power, its economy shrinking and its culture withering away, while many of its small neighboring countries have hastened to join the European Union. It’s not difficult to imagine how devastated many Russians must feel.
 
It was in this very context that Vladimir Putin emerged. We all know Trump’s - "Make America Great Again" - in fact, Putin's sense of mission is the same – “Make Russia Great Again.”  And after coming to power, he launched a series of successful military operations.  The suppression of the Chechen rebellion in 2000, the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and frequent interventions in Middle Eastern wars…Such actions have allowed Russians to nourish the hope of national rejuvenation, as if the fading shadow of empire suddenly turned around and returned to history’s center stage.
 
Graphs indicate that the three peaks in Putin's approval ratings coincide with his three military campaigns.  The first occurred after the Second Chechen War; the second occurred around 2008, when Putin marched into Georgia and supported separatism in Abkhazia and South Ossetia; and the third followed the annexation of Crimea in 2014.  At these moments, Putin's approval rating soared to 90%, to that some scholars decided to give this rise in government support due to high nationalist sentiment a name – the “Crimea effect.”
 
Thus a political strongman cannot build an illiberal democracy solely by putting on a show or using his fists; he must also become the embodiment of an idea that can win over a significant part of the population. In Russia, the fulcrum of this idea is nationalism.  All nations needs pride, but for a wounded bear like today’s Russia, the desire for pride is particularly compelling. Putin's emergence catered to such a psychological need. The creation of  an illiberal democracy is not only a process of top-down manipulation, but also a bottom-up expression of public opinion.
 
Afterword:  Between Authority and the Will of the People
 
So illiberal democracy is essentially a form of authoritarianism/populism with authoritarianism at one end and populism at the other.  No matter how powerful a dictator is, he can’t get far on his own. By contrast, public opinion can be constantly amplified, intensified, and heated up by the charisma of power.  At the outset, nationalist sentiment in Russia may have been only simmering, but large doses of victimhood and revenge propaganda have constantly increased the heat, which has been at a boiling point for a long time now.
 
Sadly, illiberal democracy is by no means just a Russian phenomenon. It has become an epidemic among emerging democracies.  We have seen much the same thing in Chavez's Venezuela, Erdogan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, Yanukovych's Ukraine, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, and Duterte's Philippines. While the content of the specific ideas each leader peddles, the "sour apples" to which they are hitching their wagon all look more or less alike.
 
A charismatic leader wins power through elections, then then wins more votes by suppressing freedoms, and continues on this path after the next victory, thus creating a vicious cycle.  Democracy not only fails to restrain the abuse of power, it provides legitimacy for the abuse of power.
 
So Zakaria is right on this point: democracy and freedom can intersect, but they are not the same thing. Democracy is about norms that determine how political power is derived, while freedom is about rules on how to limit those in power.  Unfortunately, it may be easier to learn about democracy than about freedom, because the former is an institution while the latter is a habit. The asymmetry that makes it easier to redo institutions than to change customs is perhaps why emerging democracies often fall into the trap of illiberal democracy.
 
However, Zakaria misses the boat on one thing, which is that democracy has not been liberal democracy from the outset: both the French Revolution and the German Weimar Republic wound up being  illiberal democracies.  In fact, any country experiencing rapid political change can become disconnected from established political practices, at which point it can only stop and wait for customs to catch up. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to change in human political civilization; it must pass through the hearts and minds of millions of people.
 
Notes 

​[1]刘瑜, “俄罗斯为何走到今天这一步,” published on 天府精英集 on January 3, 2023.