Superpresidentialism and the Military: The Russian Variant

In any type of polity, the relationship between the executive and the armed forces is a quintessential institutional link. In most democracies the control of the military is the shared responsibility of the president, his or her government, and the legislative branch. Although the presidential role may be paramount, the legislature is usually responsible for several essential functions of controlling the armed forces such as passing pertinent laws, setting the defense budget and overseeing its proper disbursement, debating the nomination of new military leaders, and ensuring that the executive branch does nor overstep its constitutionally delineated boundaries. In democracies--especially in presidential systems--the chief executive as commander in chief enjoys broad powers over the armed forces. Still, in this relationship there are certain intangible variables that strongly influence civil-military relations. A recent study analyzing the connection between American presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to George W. Bush and their military leaders finds that leadership style matters greatly and presidents who evidence genuine respect for the military's organizational culture are likely to develop a far more effective rapport with their armed forces than those who do not (Herspring 2005a). In praetorian polities--such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile through much of the 1970s and 1980s--the president is usually a leading general whose direct control of the armed forces is limited only by the arrangements within the military hierarchy. In such states the legislature's function in civil-military relations, to the extent that it possesses any role at all, is ordinarily a pro forma approval of decisions taken by the executive branch in order to lend them a (very superficial) sort of legitimacy. This article sheds light on a case of presidential-military relations that is quite different from the two types at the opposing ends of the democratic-praetorian spectrum sketched above. My focus is the evolution of the executive-military nexus in post-Soviet Russia, a polity that emerged from over seven decades of state socialism in 1991. The Russian army is one of the largest in the world, it is ostensibly an ally of the United States and NATO in the "war against terror," and it controls a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons and an enormous albeit to some extent dilapidated conventional arsenal. The proper civilian oversight of Russia's military is, therefore, a serious concern not only for the Russians but also for the world around them. Contemporary Russia is certainly not a democracy, unless one uses that term so generously as to apply to virtually all states that hold elections no matter how skewed and inconsequential they might be (Fish 2005, 15-20). During the past decade, Russia's polity has been depicted as "managed democracy," "presidential democracy," "controlled democracy," and so on. Pinning different modifying labels onto "democracy," however, only obfuscates the reality of the Russian state's fundamental authoritarian nature (Collier and Levitsky 1997). Russia is not a full-fledged dictatorship, however, given that local elections are still contested, opposition groups--though harassed--still exist, and a few media outlets do remain that provide critical commentary on public affairs. I argue that, within a decade after the proclamation of the new post-Communist state, Russia has gradually become what I call a superpresidential authoritarian polity, that is, a fundamentally authoritarian state in which the president has managed to concentrate extraordinary powers in his hands. Two political events may be considered as the defining milestones of this process. First, following the September-October 1993 conflict between the legislature and President Boris Yeltsin, Moscow's political trajectory has been characterized by increasing centralization, the growth of executive power, the corresponding decline in the legislature's influence, and the steady erosion of human and civic rights and freedoms. …