Carnegie Moscow Center
The international financial crisis may help sustain Russia's political and economic system in the short-term or it may usher in rapid change. Regardless, it is unsustainable in the long run.
The Kremlin maintains control over the Russian media by exerting pressure over media tycoons and station owners while avoiding direct repression. As a result, although the national media serves as a tool for government propaganda, there has been relatively little popular discontent.
Recent Russian protests are likely meant to test the response of the authorities rather than indicate people have reached their breaking point.
Russia's economic dependence on declining oil revenues has prompted calls to diversify into other industries, but the first step to economic stability is diversification within the oil industry.
Due to the current economic crisis, Vladimir Putin is facing, for the first time since his rise to power, the prospect of real political instability. Although Putin has depended on a ‘vertical’ type of government, the logic of this crisis demands flexibility, effective feedback, and broad dialogue with the nation.
Russia must aim for modernization and use its foreign policy to achieve rapprochement with Europe, North America and the economically and politically developed world at large.
Preventing Russia’s economic, social, and political collapse requires effective leadership, cooperation and patience, and government acknowledgment that the crisis has domestic dimensions.
Weakened by the economic crisis, President Medvedev and the Kremlin do not want to risk any chance of allowing popular dissent to develop in Russia's regions. But by attacking its opponents the Kremlin is showing its helplessness. Before the crisis it had hoped to modernize the country, now it must resort to damage control.
The past three months have been a turbulent time for the Russian Federation, marked by the Russia-Georgia conflict, global financial crisis, and U.S. presidential elections. Carnegie's Nikolai Petrov explains how the government’s response has illustrated that modernization from above will not occur in Russia.