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. Barely two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the presidency emerged as the pivotal political institution in Russia with the incumbent acquiring extraordinary powers. Second, the 1996 presidential elections demonstrated the already existing limitations on political competition and restrictions on the print and especially broadcast media and, following the contest, the further rise of the presidential administration and the growing influence of oligarchs in it (Huskey 1999, 82-86; Nichols 1999, 144-53). Yeltsin and Putin used their authority, among other things, to increase the role of the executive branch--particularly of the presidential administration--in overseeing the armed forces.

Why has the role of presidents become the overriding factor in Russian civil-military relations? What explains the differences between the relationships Russia's two post-Soviet presidents, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, developed with the armed forces? What powers does the president currently enjoy vis-a-vis the legislature in terms of overseeing the armed forces? To what extent has parliament been successful in asserting its prerogatives regarding the military? I will attempt to answer these queries and argue that, instead of establishing civilian oversight of the armed forces shared between the legislative and the executive branches, Yeltsin and, especially, Putin created a system in which civilian control has become synonymous with presidential control.

I proceed as follows. First, I explain why the aforementioned events in 1993 and 1996 were turning points in Russia's political development and how they affected Yeltsin's relationship to the armed forces. I continue by assessing the changing character of what have effectively become presidential institutions in Russia: the Security Council and the power ministries. Then I turn to examine the changing role of the Russian legislature vis-a-vis the president's growing influence. In the last part, the analysis focuses on President Putin's relationship with the armed forces.

Some substantive and terminological caveats should be mentioned here. First, my emphasis is on the presidents' relationship with the armed forces proper, not on the various security services--such as the former KGB--whose members have comprised a disproportionately large share of the political elites under Putin or on the details of defense reform. Second, unless otherwise specified, the "generals," the "top brass," and the "military" refer to individuals and entities of the "Russian army," a term I use to mean the entire armed forces (including all branch services).

Yeltsin and the Armed Forces

Although the coup attempt of August 1991 actually took place a few months prior to the collapse of the USSR, it seriously affected the development of Russian civil-military relations (Lepingwell 1992; Serebriannikov 1992). The coup was conceived and supported by a group of politicians opposed to democratization and committed to the preservation of the Soviet Union. The plotters--whose ranks included a number of top politicians including Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov--were unable to impose their will on the commanders of Moscow-area military detachments who carried the day by convincing their subordinates of the coup's folly. The army's decision not to support the overthrow of Russian President Boris Yeltsin effectively prevented a successful coup.

The military's part in the political upheaval underscored the dilution of civilian control over the armed forces that had begun under Mikhail Gorbachev. The last Soviet president--under pressure by a number of domestic constituencies, including the army's high command--actually invited serving officers to become politically active in the late 1980s. He encouraged internal debate in the ranks of the military, asking serving officers to voice their views and otherwise participate in politics. The army turned out to be most responsive: soon, independent officers' assemblies sprang to life that began by criticizing the media's disparaging treatment of the armed forces and then proceeded to publicly denounce the government and even Gorbachev himself (Varennikov 1987; Klay 1993; Odom 1998, 353-62). In the waning days of the Soviet Union, military elites exploited the weaknesses of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) leadership and acquired a great deal of institutional autonomy: they actively opposed, obstructed, and/or publicly criticized state officials and policy more or less with impunity. This was a major departure from Soviet civil-military relations in which the army enjoyed no autonomous political role. To be sure, the party showed its appreciation to loyal and prominent generals by extending to them memberships in the CPSU and state bodies to reward them and to cement their reliability but not to bestow any independent political role on them.

Yeltsin did have the opportunity to reverse the trend of the military's growing political presence. Right after the 1991 coup attempt, he issued a decree that abolished Communist Party organizations in the armed forces, the KGB, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Nonetheless, he did not support laws that would forbid serving officers from standing for election to legislative bodies. Passing such legislation probably would have been difficult because, by 1992, officer-politicians had become well integrated into the Russian legislature and three of them had even chaired important parliamentary commissions. The generals backed him vis-a-vis Gorbachev in late 1991 and he had far more important items on his agenda than reforming military politics. Still, Yeltsin fundamentally acquiesced to the army's increased political presence. A crucial defect of Russian civil-military relations is that the vacuum created by the elimination of party-based control has not been filled with institutionally balanced civilian oversight.

Yeltsin had little understanding of or interest in security issues and, given the catastrophic state of Russia's finances in the early 1990s and the absence of an obvious external security threat, he thoroughly neglected the armed forces. Conditions in the army had quickly become appalling, to the extent that soldiers had to be sent berry picking and mushrooming because the army could not feed them, hundreds of thousands of officers and their families--many just having returned from abroad--had no proper place to live, and money could not be found for the maintenance of weapons or for the fuel to operate them. Even though the armed forces endured abuses typically seen as textbook motivations for revolt--drastically reduced budgets, occasionally humiliating treatment by political leaders and the media, and deployments unpopular within the military itself a coup was widely regarded as unlikely, primarily owing to the Russian officer corps' institutional culture that for long has viewed military rule as wholly illegitimate (Barany 1999; Taylor 2003).

At the same time, Yeltsin's rule was synonymous with the increasing political clout of generals, such as Aleksandr Lebed, who posed a credible challenge to the president's reelection efforts in 1996. It is important to understand that they were independent politicians who carved out their own political niches against Yeltsin's wishes and their political prospects were limited only by their own talent, ambition, and opportunities. (Under Putin, by way of contrast, generals who acquire political office are presidential appointees whose hold on their position is entirely dependent on staying on their patron's good side.)

In the early 1990s, the Russian executive and legislative branches battled for the domination of civil-military relations, and the outcome of this confrontation had been the gradual evolution of dramatically increased presidential powers, in effect, a form of superpresidentialism (Colton 1995; Kliamkin and Shevtsova 1999). In a study published in 2000, Steven Fish wrote that the concept of superpresidentialism denotes a form of democratic but, more frequently, a type of semi-democratic regime (Fish 2000, 178-79). It is different from autocracy to the extent that regular and reasonably free elections are held. Superpresidentialism suggests an anti-institutional bias given that an extremely powerful president has no incentive to promote the building of institutions that could potentially challenge him later. In polities where power is dispersed among political institutions, politicians are often guided by an institution-building imperative (Anderson, Fish, Hanson, and Roeder 2001, 83-84). In contrast with moderate presidential and semi-presidential systems, Fish goes on, superpresidentialism is characterized by

   a huge apparatus of executive power that overshadows other state
   agencies and the national legislature in terms of its size and the
   resources it uses; a president who controls most or all of the
   levers of public expenditure; a president who enjoys the power to
   make laws by decree; rules that make impeaching the president
   exceedingly difficult or impossible; a legislature that enjoys
   little real oversight authority over the executive branch; and a
   judiciary that is appointed and controlled largely by the president
   and that cannot in practice check presidential prerogatives or even
   abuse of power. (Fish 2000, 178-79)

The contemporary Russian polity may be best described as superpresidential authoritarianism where elections have become increasingly devoid of genuine competition and the legislature more emasculated. The institutionalist concept of path dependence is also helpful to understand the particular evolution of the Russian political system. Successive constitutional decisions political elites took in the late Soviet period and at the birth of the new Russia--such as the ambiguously differentiated roles between the legislative and executive branches and the vague power relations in the triangle of the government apparatus, the Supreme Soviet, and the president that, in effect, led to the September-October 1993 crisis--put its political development on a path that was difficult to escape (Colton and Skach 2005, 117-19).

Yeltsin's face-off with the legislature in the fall of 1993 was a major turning point in Russia's democratization process. To put an end to the prolonged conflict between the Kremlin and the Supreme Soviet (the parliament), he issued Presidential Edict 1400 that disbanded the legislature, called for new elections, and scheduled a constitutional referendum (Nichols 1999, 77-82). The hard-line members of parliament responded by deposing and impeaching Yeltsin and installing an acting president--Yeltsin's Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi--and a new "government" (complete with a "defense minister," General Vladislav Achalov). Both sides demanded the army's support. Rutskoi, a bona fide hero of the Afghan war, urged his fellow officers to take a stand against the president--in essence, inviting a mutiny--while Ruslan Khasbulatov, the Supreme Soviet's chairman, declared, "We must have military units here today ... not just men in military greatcoats, but military units" (Pravda 1993). Finally, army units came to Yeltsin's rescue but reluctantly and, in fact, only after he agreed to give in writing his unconstitutional order instructing Defense Minister Pavel Grachev to storm the White House where renegade lawmakers took refuge (Yeltsin 1994, 278-79).

At this point the period of advancing democratization stalled and, with the December 1993 constitution, a new superpresidential polity began to take shape in which the legislature's influence had gradually decreased. To be sure, I am not suggesting that all remnants of democratization dating from the mid-1980s had disappeared in one fell swoop following the 1993 crisis. Rather, I contend that since then the arrow signaling the direction of Russia's political trajectory has pointed not toward further democratization but toward an increasingly authoritarian model. The 1996 presidential elections constitute another landmark on the way to superpresidential authoritarianism. Given the machinations of his advisors and Yeltsin's own inclinations, the fact that elections were held was a surprise to many observers who believed that it would be postponed or even canceled in favor of some other method of elongating the president's tenure in office (McFaul 2001, 302-04). The elections not only signaled the completion of Russia's transition from communism but also confirmed the relative balance of power between political institutions. More specifically, they heralded the increasing restrictions on the media, the growing influence of the presidential administration, and the increasing clout of the oligarchs along with the emasculation of open political competition and the advancing marginalization of political opposition in general and the opposition in the legislature in particular. Following the elections, Yeltsin enjoyed "what are probably the strongest legislative powers of any elected president in the world" (Huskey 1999, 177; Shugart 1996). These trends only accelerated with the beginning of Putin's presidency.

Notwithstanding his extensive powers, Yeltsin repeatedly broke the law and trespassed on the legislature's prerogatives even prior to 1993. For instance, the September 1992 Defense Law required the president to obtain parliamentary consent for top military appointments, but Yeltsin did not abide by this rule. Although amended hundreds of times between 1991 and 1993, the constitution was nonetheless clear in denying the president the right to dissolve parliament, yet that is precisely what Yeltsin did on September 21, 1993. The new, December 1993, constitution--one of the practical outcomes of the president's victory over the Supreme Soviet two months earlier--reflected the emerging power configuration. It shifted responsibilities over the armed forces once possessed by parliament to the president and endowed him with near-dictatorial powers. A January 1994 presidential decree subordinated all "force organs" to the president. In spite of his enlarged authority, Yeltsin broke the law once again in December of the same year when he ordered Russian troops to invade Chechnya. He violated Articles 8 and 88 of the constitution by informing neither the Duma nor the Federation Council (the legislature's lower and upper house, respectively) prior to taking action. To make matters worse, in August 1995, the Constitutional Court created a troubling precedent by refusing to rule against the president, concluding that the use of armed forces in Chechnya was legal.

Although by and large Yeltsin ignored and neglected the army's rank and file, he repeatedly courted the military leadership at times critical to his own political fortunes and failed to deliver on his promises once the generals agreed to back him. Until his October 1993 clash with the legislature, he was relatively effective in gaining the armed forces' support with assurances of pay increases, the disbursement of overdue salaries and benefits, and increased military prerogatives in defense reform. On the eve of the 1996 presidential elections, for instance, Yeltsin found it expedient to placate the army leadership by ordering payment of overdue wages, increasing salaries, and promoting all five senior commanders to the rank of army general. The 1996 Defense Law further reduced the legislature's powers vis-a-vis the armed forces. Moreover, the law granted the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff fundamentally equal status that virtually ensured that they would compete for decision-making authority. This troubling and confusing situation was only resolved five years later when modifications in the law clearly subordinated the General Staff to the Defense Ministry. In mid-1997--around the time Duma Defense Committee Chairman Lev Rokhlin started to organize his All-Russia Movement to Support the Army, which openly called for the president's legal removal (Herspring 2006, 127-29)--Yeltsin once again promised military personnel quick financial relief. In the meantime, the army succeeded in "forging a new identity as a presidential institution, answerable only to the Commander-in-Chief and relying on his special attention" (Baev 2002, 133).

An even more important method Yeltsin employed to appease the top brass was to permit them to make decisions directly affecting national security without extra-institutional interference. Perhaps the best example of this aspect of his rule occurred when he allowed the army leadership to draft Russia's military doctrine as a reward for coming to his rescue in the fall of 1993 (Lloyd 1998, 124; Trenin and Malashenko 2004, 104). In other words, he bought whatever military support he did enjoy by promising not to interfere and thereby virtually ensured that no meaningful defense reform--adamantly opposed by the generals--would take place. He insisted--in response to foreign pressures--only on the expeditious withdrawal of forces from abroad and drastic cuts in the army's manpower. He was careful, however, not to press for the downsizing of the military's central administration that, as a result, had become even more bloated vis-a-vis the rest of the armed forces. It must be noted that force reduction does not equal reform: it enhances neither the effectiveness nor the combat readiness of the armed forces; it just makes them smaller.

Yeltsin's hands-off approach to the military also allowed the rise of a culture of unprecedented corruption in the military that would have been unimaginable in the Soviet era and, in fact, has become an important attribute of Russian civil-military relations. Furthermore, the extensive corruption undermined the military's cohesion, as it created a chasm between those who could profit from the lax supervision and those who could not. Although drug trafficking and the sale of arms was a well-documented problem already during the Afghan war, extensive criminal activity began during the army's withdrawal from Eastern Europe in 1990-1993. Officers and soldiers openly sold uniforms and memorabilia in the region's markets, along with, a bit more surreptitiously, a wide range of arms from Kalashnikov submachine guns to tanks and heavy artillery pieces. It was around this time that President Yeltsin declared that the "embezzlement of weapons and military hardware ... has acquired menacing proportions" and that the "corruption in the organs of power and administration is literally eating away the body of the Russian state from top to bottom" (Herspring 1996, 175). For example, Admiral Igor Khmelnov, commander of the Pacific Fleet from 1992 to 1995, had sold sixty-four ships from his fleet to India and South Korea (Turbiville 1995; Galeotti 1999). Since then the situation has improved little: in 2004 the office of the chief military prosecutor registered 15,000 criminal cases compared with 12,000 in 2002 (RFE/RL 2005). And, in a November 2005 speech at the Ministry of Defense, President Putin strongly criticized the chronic corruption and "unbridled thievishness" in the armed forces (Miasnikov 2005).

Yeltsin appears not to have fully recognized the magnitude of the army's problems--and thus the need for substantive defense reform--until its disastrous performance in the First Chechen War. According to former Prime Minister Yevgenii Primakov, in 1995 the president even contemplated resigning because of the fiasco in Chechnya (Primakov 2001, 58-60). His overall approach to defense reform, not unlike other policy areas, was disorganized and erratic, driven by momentary political expediencies rather than some thoughtful assessment of the country's long-term defense needs. For instance, he decided in 1992 to reduce the length of compulsory military service from twenty-four months to eighteen months without serious consultation with the top brass. This decision had to be reversed in 1995 owing to manpower shortages. Another example was his promise--announced with much fanfare during the 1996 presidential campaign--to end conscription by 2000. It is hard to imagine another pledge that would have been more popular. Still, a decade later, the end of the draft is a fanciful dream; in fact, it is being expanded with the elimination of nine of the twenty-five draft-deferment categories, although the length of service will be reduced to twelve months from the current eighteen in 2008.

Yeltsin's preferred way of dealing with defense reform was to establish, with much publicity, committee after committee to study a particular issue and then, apparently, forget about the problem. Ordinarily, these groups were composed of top politicians to demonstrate the supposedly high priority of the matter on the presidential agenda to an electorate that had become increasingly cynical about the corruption-ridden armed forces. In a short time, however, most of these governmental and presidential committees had faded away without accomplishing anything tangible. Events also seem to have conspired against Yeltsin. In 1997 he did approve a package of defense reform ideas one of the committees presented to him, but the state's financial meltdown in the following year prevented its implementation (Baranets 1997, 260-64). Another, even more significant factor that would have also precluded its completion was the military's opposition to it. Yeltsin failed to consult the very institution he intended to transform prior to issuing the decree in July 1997 on military reform.

The political and economic turmoil in 1998 presented another major challenge to Russian democratization and economic transition processes. Yeltsin's attitude toward the army did not change, however. In August 1998 he announced that he would take direct control over military policy in order to ensure that officers and soldiers were paid. Throughout the crisis, Yeltsin met repeatedly with Defense Minister Igor Sergeev who assured him of the armed forces' loyalty. By the end of his tenure, political upheavals, a sharp decline in popular and elite support, and poor health had weakened the president. Sergeev--one of Yeltsin's few superior choices in personnel--was duly rewarded for his allegiance with a promotion to the rank of marshal in November 1997. And yet, even this action displayed the president's unpredictable decision making, given that he declared earlier that no one would receive that rank in peacetime.

The president's impulsive dismissal of several prime ministers, starting with the firing of Viktor Chernomyrdin in 1998, actually had a positive overall effect on the armed forces. The reason is that no Russian government had paid less attention to the military than Chernomyrdin's. Not surprisingly, the top brass endorsed all prime ministers who succeeded him. In turn, Sergei Kirienko, Primakov, Sergei Stepashin, and Vladimir Putin (prime minister, August-December 1999; acting president, January-May 2000; president, May 2000--the present) continued to confirm Sergeev in his post. During his short tenure, Primakov took charge of financial levels and vowed that the army would not have to go for months without pay in the future. After a career spent entirely in the internal police and security apparatus, Stepashin elevated national security on his cabinet's list of priorities, especially owing to NATO's 1999 spring war against Yugoslavia, which reawakened Russian political elites' concerns about national defense and their interest in pan-Slavism. In June 1999, Yeltsin was eager to share the political rewards of the surprise deployment of Russian troops in Kosovo, particularly after several weeks of humiliation at the hands of NATO leaders who had ignored his appeals to call off air strikes against Serbia, one of Russia's historic allies.

The myriad of organizational shifts during his reign betrayed not only Yeltsin's informal "checks and balances" scheme but also his confused and volatile approach to military-security affairs. In order to strengthen his own, highly personalistic control over the military, he relied on casual exchanges and networks and thwarted the evolution of structured, balanced, and stable mechanisms of civilian oversight. Yeltsin concentrated decision making on these issues in his personal staff and, more broadly, in the burgeoning presidential administration. He subordinated to himself a number of security organizations to offset the influence of the armed forces and encouraged rivalry between the Ministry of Defense and the other constituent parts of the "power bloc." The key objective of civil-military relations under Yeltsin was the safeguarding of the president's personal power.

Presidential Counterweights

In the 1990s, civilian control over the Russian armed forces had developed as a loose arrangement of checks and balances created by Yeltsin, who--when his interests so required--played off individuals and institutions against each other. The president set up and/or leaned on several institutions to aid him in controlling the armed forces. Some of these, most importantly the Security Council, have endured and have become important loci of power under Putin. Some have faded into irrelevance, yet others were abolished as suddenly as Yeltsin launched them, highlighting his erratic leadership style and the specific political contingencies that justified their formation in the first place.

The Security Council

The Security Council (SC) was originally established by Gorbachev, although during his tenure it met infrequently and enjoyed little influence (Huskey 1999, 22). Its members--the relevant power ministers (defense, foreign affairs, interior, etc.) and other high-ranking defense/security officials--are appointed by the president, who not only chairs the council but also selects its secretary. Under the constitution the SC was supposed to resolve strategic tasks, devise military policy and doctrine, and consider outstanding issues with the former Soviet republics. A short time after coming to power, however, Yeltsin had decided to transform the SC into a sort of presidential consultative-advisory body. Consequently, a 1992 executive decree established it as an administrative organ that coordinated the work of power ministries and monitored the implementation of the executive branch's decisions on security issues (Davenport 1995, 6). Since 1994 it has enjoyed a significant but shadowy role in deciding defense, foreign, and security policy, although bureaucratic infighting has often reduced its effectiveness. First and foremost, the council has been a loyal presidential institution supporting the executive's positions--no matter how ill conceived they may have been--vis-a-vis the legislature over defense and security issues. For example, at its November 27, 1994, session the SC voted unanimously to invade Chechnya even before discussing the issue.

During the first fifteen months of Putin's presidency, there were indications that the SC might become an important policy-initiating and policy-debating forum devising new approaches and concepts. In late summer 2000, just before the Kursk submarine accident, the council prepared a report on defense reform that called for the reduction in size of the regular armed forces (by 350,000) and of the various other power ministries (by 250,000) and, more generally, deep cuts in all branches of the armed forces (Golts 2000). Hopes that the SC might emerge as an engine of defense reform were soon dashed, however. The report had the unintended consequence of uniting defense and security chiefs on the SC and beyond--for the first time during Putin's presidency--in their unyielding resistance to real, substantive defense reform. At the September 27, 2000, council meeting, major proposals about defense restructuring were shelved owing to the generals' opposition.

At the beginning of Putin's tenure, the SC had become the institutional bailiwick of the entrenched security-defense elite, Putin's primary support base. The fact that in the first year of Putin's presidency it had gained unprecedented political clout was largely because in Sergei Ivanov--who was appointed as the SC's secretary in November 1999--Putin found someone with apparent dynamism and unquestioned personal loyalty, a person "he felt a kinship with and trusted the most" (Vendil 2001, 86). Once Ivanov left the SC to head the Defense Ministry, the overall political influence of the former diminished. It is not engaged in formulating national security strategy despite the fact that this is supposed to be its main prerogative. It has become neither the locus of civilian oversight nor an institutional sponsor of defense reform for the perfectly commonsensical reason that many of its members are directly threatened by those very same prospects.

The Power Ministries

The underlying reason for President Yeltsin's strong support of the power ministries (other than the Ministry of Defense, that is) was his disappointment with the reluctant backing he got from the Defense Ministry in October 1993 and, consequently, the need to cultivate more dedicated instruments of power. He succeeded in removing the paramilitary units of the power ministries from parliamentary supervision and bringing them under presidential control. These uniformed bodies are made up of the dozen or so organizations spawned by the KGB, the Ministry of Interior (MVD), and other Soviet-era armed formations. Aside from MVD troops they include the units of the Border Guards, the Presidential Guards, the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Prosecutor-General's Office, the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information, and a few other organizations. In 1996, the combined manpower of these forces exceeded 2 million (Knight 1996; Savinkin and Hansen 1999; Glikin 2000; Kolpakidi and Prokhorov 2000). Their numbers have decreased little in the past decade: in 2005 the MVD alone employed 1.4 million uniformed personnel.

In order to build an effectual counterweight to the regular armed forces, Yeltsin selected the commanders of the paramilitary forces based on their personal fealty to him and rewarded them according to the Kremlin's perception of their usefulness. He had followed the political maxim, divide et impera, with remarkable skill as manifested by the growing enmity between the Russian army and the paramilitary formations. The president created a system under which the various branches of the regular armed forces (army, air force, navy, strategic rocket forces) had to compete for resources and conscripts not only with each other but also with the siloviki. During Yeltsin's tenure the power ministries had tended to dominate this rivalry: they were dramatically strengthened in terms of personnel and equipment. For instance, in 1994 the army received five helicopters, in contrast to the fifty obtained by the MVD troops (Meyer 1995, 324).

Generally speaking, the siloviki, who comprised one of the most privileged social strata in the Soviet era, had the most to lose by democratization. It was not surprising, then, that they were eager to be enticed by Yeltsin and his successor. The numerous paramilitary forces posed a special threat to Russian democratization because the only real civilian control over them had been exercised by the president, not the government, and because their use in domestic scenarios had not been clearly regulated. In Russia's superpresidential authoritarian system, the president and the presidential administration are the most powerful components of the executive branch whereas the government essentially serves at the pleasure of the president and wields little autonomous influence. The leaders of the paramilitary forces are easily dispensable, as was shown by the example of Ministry of Security Chief Viktor Barannikov, a presidential appointee, who was promptly replaced by a more compliant colleague when he refused to break the law for Yeltsin in 1993 (Galeotti 1995, 165-66; Medvedev 1998, 103). During the 1998 crisis, Yeltsin once again turned to the power ministries by instructing Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin to put MVD units on alert around Moscow. In the end, the political resolution of the crisis did not require their deployment.

One of the public justifications of building up the power ministries' troops was to allow them to make substantial contributions to fighting in internal contingencies. This was especially important because, if nothing else, the embarrassing tragicomedy of errors that was the army's December 1994 assault on Grozny must have convinced politicians that the military was incapable of suppressing the insurgency in Chechnya. So, in a sense, the Kremlin was forced to take on other militarized structures to do what the regular armed forces could not. Armed units of the MVD, the Federal Counterintelligence Service, and various other power ministry formations were also heavily involved in the fighting in Chechnya from the beginning. Still, the coordination of these disparate units--as the First Chechen War had clearly exposed--had been remarkably unsuccessful owing largely to the SC's incompetence. The political leadership must have recognized--given the many blunders committed by the generals--that incompetent military commanders should not stay in place indefinitely. Consequently, in the Second Chechen War, operational responsibility was transferred to the FSB in 2001 and to the MVD in 2003. Another purpose behind relieving the Defense Ministry of its command was to underscore that this was an internal matter of the Russian state.

The security services have seen a tremendous increase in their institutional stock since Putin's ascent to the presidency. Yeltsin needed to cultivate them as an institutional counterweight to the regular armed forces. The rise of the siloviki (who, of course, include Defense Ministry personnel) under Putin, however, can be explained by his own background and unusually rapid rise in the political hierarchy which precluded the possibility of methodically building up his support base. He appointed leading members of the power ministries to an astonishingly large number of important political positions. As the president has brought under his control a growing number of organizations--from media outlets to regional administrations--more and more of the siloviki have ended up with jobs of political consequence. FSB, Ministry of Defense, and MVD bureaucrats have come to make up an unusually high percentage of the governing elite (e.g., 33 percent of the federal government, 35 percent of all deputy ministers, 58 percent of the SC, 70 percent of presidential envoys) (Kryshtanovskaya and White 2003; Kostiukov 2003). According to a 2006 Russian Academy of Sciences study, 26 percent of the current Russian elite are individuals formerly affiliated with military institutions (RFE/RL 2006). There are now thousands of siloviki at all levels of government. In Mikhail Gorbachev's administration in 1988, power ministry personnel comprised 5.4 percent of government personnel and 4.8 percent of the top leadership. In Putin's Kremlin the corresponding numbers were 32.8 percent and 58.3 percent in 2002, and they have only increased since then (Vasilev 2003; White and McAllister 2003). And, a far higher proportion (21 percent) of his staff comes from his home region than in the case of his predecessors (Kaftan 2003).

"Militocracy"--the term some Russian sociologists have come to use to depict the contemporary Russian polity--is a somewhat misleading concept, however, because there are many more bureaucrats with prior employment in the internal security apparatus than in the army, and the two groups differ in various ways (Baev 2004). There is no doubt, however, that both security services personnel and members of the regular armed forces are vastly overrepresented in state administration. The most privileged institution is the FSB, the direct successor of the KGB, where the president had spent most of his career. In 2003, more than 6,000 former KGB officers held senior positions in the state apparatus (Bovin 2003). On occasion, Putin has held up the high morale of the FSB--and other security services--as an example for the military to emulate. As a result of administrative reforms in mid-2004, the FSB's status was made equal to that of a ministry. Putin has given access to political influence to many former security officers but not necessarily because of some diabolical scheme to transfer the state to them. Rather, he appointed a large number of siloviki owing to his personal conviction that these individuals were professionals, had useful administrative and organizational skills, and possessed the corporate values and integrity he was looking for (Sakwa 2004, 61-68). In sum, these people are "straight shooters" whose personal loyalty Putin could be confident of. At the same time, from the perspective of democratic development, security officials are not the sort of individuals one could expect to promote transparency in politics, the accountability of public figures, or a robustly independent civil society. Given Putin's authoritarian predisposition, this is hardly a reason to overlook them. Defense Minister Ivanov, a close associate of the president and another KGB veteran, has given many of the top posts in the Ministry of Defense to former comrades.

The Legislature's Function in Civilian Control

The process of the gradual emasculation of the Russian legislature mirrors the two milestones of the country's political development I identified earlier. Still, even after the successive decreases of its prerogatives in 1993 and 1996, the parliament remained an institution that had managed to safeguard some of its independence. Even in terms of military affairs, opposition parties in the Duma could put forth serious proposals--for example, regarding defense reform--and maintain a strong autonomous presence as late as 2003 (Barany 2006, 613-15). Essentially, Russian presidents were interested neither in sharing their authority with parliament in general nor in jointly controlling the armed forces in particular. In the past fifteen years, gradually growing executive power has been concomitant with the diminishing political influence of the legislature. The contemporary legislature's very limited role in overseeing defense-security affairs, then, is directly attributable to superpresidentialism and may be the greatest failure of Russian civil-military relations. In the current Duma, elected in 2003, the pro-presidential United Russia (UR) party controls more than two thirds of all seats. The rest of the deputies belong to a few smaller parties favored by the Kremlin and to some miniscule and routinely vilified opposition parties. All twenty-nine Duma committees are chaired by UR members. In short, whatever robust parliamentary opposition existed was eliminated in the December 2003 elections.

The democratic institutions of the First Russian Republic (1990-1993)--the Congress of People's Deputies (CPD), the presidency, and the Constitutional Court--were grafted onto the preexisting and undemocratic Soviet-era basic law through various amendments (Moser 2001, 76-77; Andrews 2002). The 1,068-member CPD elected a much smaller working legislature, the Supreme Soviet, that had discharged day-to-day legislative duties. Prior to the introduction of the presidency in 1991, the first chairman of the Supreme Soviet was none other than Boris Yeltsin, who used his position to great effect in his battles with Gorbachev over the status of the Russian Federation. Once the presidency was established, it was superimposed onto the existing parliamentary system without the necessary constitutional changes to limit legislative power. This shortcoming, in turn, had become the source of institutional conflict between the legislature and the presidency. The problem, in a nutshell, was that Yeltsin felt that the Supreme Soviet--elected under the old Communist rules--was not a democratic and representative body, while the parliament suspected him of autocratic ambitions (Shevchenko 2004, 64-102). Not surprisingly, prior to the September-October 1993 crisis, the president and parliament had been locked in a political battle for authority over several major institutions, including the armed forces (Remington 2001).

Following the 1993 presidential-legislative conflict, the power of the newly created Duma to oversee military affairs has been greatly reduced (Chaisty and Schleiter 2002). The 1993 constitution removed controls over the armed forces once possessed by parliament. For instance, the legislature lost its authority to appoint top military leaders. Duma members did have the opportunity to use whatever limited power they still enjoyed to control the military budget, especially in 1993-1996, the period between the new constitution and the 1996 Law on Defense. Instead, legislators--most of whom have little knowledge of or interest in the details and technicalities of defense matters--chose not to engage in concrete problems or priorities and appeared to agree with the military in their aim to avoid even the most needed defense reforms. An important, although often overlooked, reason for this is that regulations require parliamentary deputies who serve on the Defense Committee to sign a secrecy act. Their signature on this document confirms that they recognize that they will view classified materials and understand that they can only travel abroad with special permission. This, in turn, virtually guarantees that the committee would be staffed with retired military officers because few Duma members want to serve under such restrictions, particularly when they are seldom keen on dealing with military affairs--and potentially intimidating generals--in any case. The Duma, as a whole, therefore, is neither "cleared" nor "competent" to seriously engage in military-security issues.

The 1996 Law on Defense was a further major step toward authoritarianism, as it denied the legislature virtually all checks and balances over national defense policy. As a result of the law's ambiguities and loopholes, the president could now commit Russian forces even without consulting the Duma. This bill entrusted only two important powers to parliament pertaining to the armed forces: to pass the defense budget and to write pertinent laws (Barany 2007, 158-89). Although the law required the president to report to the Federation Council, he was not, in fact, accountable to it. Legislative oversight is also thwarted by the fact that no law prohibits military officers from serving as Duma representatives and in government (i.e., in both the legislative and executive branches) simultaneously. Because Yeltsin succeeded in creating a highly personalized nexus with Duma leaders, poor personal relations between the Duma Defense Committee (DDC) chairman and the Kremlin tended to be particularly detrimental to the committee's work in particular and for civil-military relations in general.

The long-serving DDC chairman, Andrei Nikolaev--a former army general who was also the commander of the Federal Border Service and was elected to the Duma in 1998--had rarely been afraid to speak his mind, yet he managed to remain on Putin's good side. In early 2002, for instance, he announced that the military was undergoing not a reform but rather "an absolutely thoughtless reduction of the armed forces that is dangerous to the country" (Interfax 2002). Nikolaev and a few other Duma leaders--such as Boris Nemtsov--interested in defense reform repeatedly pointed to the significance of the Iraqi army's inferior performance against U.S. forces in 2003 because of the Russian military's many similarities to Saddam Hussein's low-morale and low-tech forces. They explicitly used the war to call attention to the inferiority of Russian forces and the necessity of their speedy and radical reform (Weir 2003; Isachenkov 2003).

During the first few years of the new millennium there were indications that the DDC might be able to improve the prospects of civil-military relations and of defense reform. Led by Nikolaev and a number of knowledgeable members on its roster--among them retired General Eduard Vorobyev and Alexei Arbatov--the committee made concerted efforts to increase the transparency of the budget process and to introduce legislation pertaining to defense reform. After the 2003 elections, most of the outspoken DDC members with defense-related expertise were gone, however, and with them, the promise of an activist and skilled DDC. One expert suggests that the committee now acts much like a military lobby trying to get the government to allocate more funds to the armed forces and, in exchange, gain some influence with the generals (Betz 2002, 500).

Perhaps the most significant power that the Russian legislature still possesses vis-a-vis the armed forces, its license to formulate and oversee the defense budget, is gravely compromised for several reasons. Although the Duma is formally responsible for overseeing the budget (as well as the Ministry of Defense in general), it has no effective means at its disposal to study and investigate how disbursed funds are spent. There is no mechanism for legislators to carry out any sort of budget control or to acquire illuminating details about the expenditures proposed by the Defense Ministry. The Russian constitution does not permit parliamentary inquiries and thus further restricts the legislature's potential investigative role. The Duma can ask the Audit Chamber to look into how ministries spend their funds, but this is infrequently done and even a damaging outcome seldom results in anyone being held accountable. Members of the legislature who do not serve on the DDC have virtually no access even to the inadequate and manipulated information that exists on how the ministry's budget is actually spent.

Changes implemented in the Duma's working rules after the 2003 elections have made matters worse yet and underscore the authoritarian nature of the Russian polity. One of these changes was to marginalize seasoned legislators in favor of those with demonstrated political loyalty to the Kremlin. For example, the Budget Committee chairman, Yuri Vasilev, was not only new to the committee but new to the Duma itself. His lack of experience, compared with his predecessors as committee chairs, hints at the Putin administration's decision to reduce the Budget Committee's already limited influence and "ensure that control over budgetary decision-making remains exclusively in the executive branch" (Remington 2004).

The second major role regarding the armed forces the legislature has retained after 1996 is its function to draft pertinent laws (Shevchenko and Golosov 2001). Not surprisingly, there are several problems in this respect as well. For years, legislators had argued that a law outlining civilian control over the armed forces was not necessary and, moreover, in adopting such a law "the parliament would be exceeding the limits of its constitutional authority," maintaining that "under the Constitution of the Russian Federation all military matters are the sole prerogative of the president and the government" (Ivanov 2001, 13). In terms of legislative work, under Yeltsin, the practice has been the following: the Office of the President proposes a law that consolidates oversight authority in the executive branch and rejects at the same time parliamentary measures aimed at dividing responsibility between branches of government (Ulrich 1999, 81). Since Yeltsin's exit from the political scene, the legislature has been far more reluctant to trouble the Kremlin with objections. Whatever legal regulations have been drafted or adopted are often replete with ambiguities or fail to determine basic questions (Arbatov and Chernikov 2003). New laws and regulations--such as the recent legislation on reducing the number of draft deferments and the period of conscription--are the result of initiatives from the executive branch, not that of independent parliamentary deliberations.

The biggest problem is, however, that regulations are routinely ignored or violated, even by the president himself. Moreover, as in most authoritarian states, laws can be easily made and changed to suit the Kremlin's wishes. So, for example, the 1996 Defense Law was quickly amended in 2004 to rearrange institutional responsibilities between the Defense Ministry and the General Staff in response to their ongoing turf war. Still, those who anticipated that real defense reform would soon take off once the wings of the General Staff were clipped were disappointed because the amendment had not altered the principal reason that had allowed military elites to stall reform in the first place: civilian control over the armed forces is, of course, still not balanced between the executive and the legislature in Russia. Thus, the legislature's remaining two prerogatives of lawmaking and budget passing have become less meaningful forms of oversight, owing to the general shift toward authoritarianism in Putin's Russia.

The departure of the Yabloko party and especially the Union of Rightist Forces (SPS) from the Duma following the 2003 elections foretold the further weakening in the legislature's ability and willingness to pressure the president on defense policy. No political formation had tried harder to move defense reform to the forefront of the government's agenda than the Nemtsov-led SPS. The party had organized dozens of meetings and demonstrations across the country and applied relentless pressure on politicians not to ignore the restructuring of the armed forces. Nemtsov clearly saw through the generals' opposition to reform and their manipulation of the president. In late 2001, for instance, he pointed out that "our generals deceived our president and slipped him a plan" that would further harm the prospects of defense reform (Interfax 2001). The legislature no longer benefits from the active presence of numerous politicians who were not only tenaciously committed to defense reform but also were some of the country's few civilians knowledgeable about military-security issues. This is all the more troubling, as the pool of independent civilian experts on defense matters so important for democratic civilian control is, by and large, missing in Russia. When nongovernmental organizations proposed the formation of an expert group for civilian control over the armed forces, Deputy Defense Minister Lyubov Kudelina insisted that the "Chamber of Public Accounts, General Prosecutor's Office, and courts check them regularly. There are also inspectorates in the Armed Forces. Why do we need any other controllers?" (Defense and Security 2001). She "only" neglected to mention that none of these institutions were independent of the government.

Under Putin, the legislature has turned into a pliant tool of the presidency. It has become essentially a rubber-stamp institution without the power to force useful reforms through at any level if they are opposed by the executive branch. The UR party thoroughly dominates proceedings. In November 2005 the legislature approved a bill in its first reading that would drastically restrict the activities of the nearly 450,000 domestic and foreign nongovernmental organizations active in Russia, presumably in an effort to bolster national security, by 370 votes to 18. The second reading of the bill--characterized by Steven Solnick of the Ford Foundation's Moscow office as "a nasty piece of work" (Myers 2005)--resulted in a vote of 376 to 10. As one expert lamented, the "Russian parliament is now little more than a Kremlin-controlled puppet show" (Shepherd 2005).

Putin and the Military

"Putin possesses few of Yeltsin's inhibitions against the unbridled use of executive power" (Colton and Skach 2005, 120). Even after Yeltsin's capture of superpresidential powers, his successor has managed to significantly expand presidential authority. Under Putin, Russia has become a centralized bureaucratic-authoritarian state. The presidential administration, at the center of political power, wields influence similar to that once enjoyed by the secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU; the symbolism that it occupies the same complex of offices near the Kremlin on Staraia Ploshad is probably not lost on many (Timchenko 2005). During Putin's reign, prime ministers, their governments, regional governors, and local bureaucracies have become far less powerful than under his predecessor. For example, in the last several years, the previously dual presidential and governmental oversight of the power ministries has been replaced by the consolidation of presidential control. According to a Russian expert, "politics in Russia today is court-driven and essentially Byzantine" (Trenin 2005); and, the court is headed by Putin, the modern tsar.

The Russian president is a pragmatic bureaucrat with few scruples when it comes to eliminating his real or potential political opponents. Lilia Shevtsova, the dean of Russian political observers, actually prefers to call Putin's rule "bureaucratic authoritarianism" (Shevtsova 2005, 322-52), although I believe that the "superpresidential authoritarianism" designation is more appropriate with its emphasis on the tremendous power of the president. In any event, his temperament seems ideally suited to serve his main objective of strengthening the state. The pervasive "securitization" and "militarization" of government at the highest levels have been complemented by the appointments many of Putin's former colleagues from the St. Petersburg city bureaucracy have secured in the state administration. In 2003, 21 percent of the Russian political elite came from his home region, a much higher percentage than in the case of any of his predecessors (Kaftan 2003). Given these individuals' statist and conservative attitudes and values, they have inevitably influenced domestic and foreign policies in a particular way. Putin has pursued a predictable and cautious personnel policy. Instead of impulsively hiring and replacing his subordinates like Yeltsin, he has chosen them with care and has been reluctant to fire them until clear evidence has compelled him to do so. He refereed the protracted internal strife between the Defense Ministry and the General Staff with remarkable restraint and intervened only in 2004 when the incessant recalcitrance of the latter's chief, Anatolii Kvashnin, had left him with no alternative. And, he nearly always compensates the high-ranking officers he does sack, including Kvashnin, with choice jobs in the federal bureaucracy to preempt the disgruntlement of prominent generals and to ensure their personal loyalty to him.

The issue of defense reform has dominated civil-military relations in the Putin era even more so than in the 1990s. As Alexei Arbatov argued, given that the "president's power is unmatched," it was "entirely up to the [president] whether true military reform takes place, or whether the military bureaucracy continues pretending that reforms are under way" (Novye Izvestia 2004). In other words, even though the main direct cause for the absence of radical reform has been the opposition of the military leadership, the ultimate reason in a superpresidential authoritarian regime as Russia's is, by definition, the chief executive. In fact, Putin came to power with the apparent resolution to radically transform the armed forces which he identified in 1999, as acting president, as a top priority. As time went on, however, his resolve to force the implementation of radical defense reform down the throats of his generals has seemingly evaporated for numerous perfectly sensible reasons.

First, Putin has been exceedingly popular among military personnel--even more so than among the general population--and alienating such a large support base by forcing the military to put into practice an unpopular reform would not be wise. Second, without the high command's backing, who could the president entrust with the implementation of defense reform? Third, it is hard to see that Putin would force the very generals who supported his decision to reinvade Chechnya and managed the first stages of the war to implement a reform they oppose. In fact, it has been argued that the Second Chechen War became the reason for and the instrument of burying military reform with enthusiastic backing from the top brass (Baev 2001). Fourth, Putin knows that there is no consensus on defense reform among the political-security elites. Therefore, a resolute executive campaign for a drastic makeover of the military establishment might not make for good politics.

Fifth, an underlying reason for the military's successful opposition of defense reform is that Russian presidents have not been able to curb the armed forces' organizational independence, the magnitude of which would be unparalleled in any democracy (Golts and Putnam 2004, 144-47). In Russia, only members of the military could acquire specialized expertise relating to defense and security issues, and thus they have been able to portray themselves as the monopolists of such know-how and have attained a high level of administrative and operational autonomy. Sixth, there is a long-standing reverence to the military in Russian culture that dates from at least as far back as the reign of Peter the Great (1705-1725). For much of Russia's history since then, the armed forces have been a highly respected institution that successfully protected the state and the nation. Putin has behaved deferentially toward the military, frequently paying homage to the armed forces, their history, and their role in the country's successes, and he wants to enhance the age-old societal reverence toward them.

Finally, an obvious though often overlooked point is that there are many pressing matters confronting Putin and the Russian government; reforming the armed forces is just one of them. Considering the magnitude of the numerous other challenges Russia faces makes the delays in the transformation of the military establishment easier to understand. In sum, the argument is not that the president and political elites in general could not succeed in getting the army to execute state policy abhorrent to them: it has been done several times before. Rather, the point is that combined with other concerns and priorities, defense reform faces a daunting set of obstacles and loses its privileged spot among the other items on the state's to-do list.

Still, Putin's apparent frustration with defense reform has been shown by the conflicting signals he has given to the military leadership. Depending on the occasion and the audience, at times he calls for its acceleration whereas at other times he proclaims that it has been, in fact, concluded. He has expressed his displeasure to the top brass repeatedly and pleaded with them to speed up work on reform proposals and implementation. He demanded that consultations between the Defense Ministry, the Finance Ministry, and other government agencies be wrapped up and previously agreed-upon timelines be observed. He also used major conferences at the Ministry of Defense to appeal to the officer corps to "take an active part in reforming the entire military organization of the state" (Golotiuk 2001). In a July 2005 SC meeting, for instance, he chided department heads and security agency chiefs for not having "managed to implement the agreed military reform programs" (RIA Novosti 2005). Incidentally, this was two years after he and Defense Minister Ivanov declared the military reform "completed." Actually, as politicians like Boris Nemtsov suggested several years earlier, Putin had realized that the generals resolutely opposed reforms and, perhaps, he had grown tired of fighting them (Isachenkov 2002).

At other times, however, Putin applauded the army leadership and its "advancement of the defense reform." By early 2004 he had stopped mentioning both of the two major reform imperatives: further manpower reduction and the armed forces' full professionalization. Instead of insisting on tangible results of reform implementation and punishing the inappropriate conduct of some generals, he found ways to appease them (Herspring 2005b). For instance, he brought back a number of Soviet-era symbols--something Yeltsin categorically refused to do--such as the old Soviet anthem (albeit with different words); resurrected the armed forces' emblem, the red star; and decorated retired military leaders popular among the top brass, such as the former defense minister and erstwhile coup plotter, Dmitri Yazov.

Similarly to his predecessor, Putin has made sure to entice the armed forces with promotions and other rewards just before elections. Prior to the 2004 presidential vote, for instance, he did his best to project a tough-guy image calculated to appeal to the military-security people as well as the general public. He made extravagant efforts to court the " 'khaki' vote," going on a high-visibility tour of military exercises and installations. The president spent three days overseeing a military exercise near Murmansk, then traveled to a cosmodrome in northern Russia to witness the launch of a rocket carrying up a military satellite (Vladimirov 2005). He has flown on supersonic bombers, submerged in nuclear submarines, sailed aboard numerous military vessels, and observed joint-force maneuvers, often while donning the uniform of the appropriate service. Needless to say, cameras are seldom absent from these events staged to show the president's closeness to the armed forces.

Professional military personnel can also be counted on to appreciate his uncompromising attitude to crises. To them, Putin's approach to violent conflicts must look particularly appealing in comparison to that of Yeltsin and his prime ministers. It is hardly a leap of faith to presume that few members of the armed forces were happy with the Chernomyrdin government's pleading with Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev after he and his men captured a hospital and took more than one thousand hostages in June 1995 in the town of Budennovsk in the Stavropol region. Putin would have almost certainly ordered the special forces to annihilate rebels no matter the cost or collateral damage. In calamities such as the Moscow theater siege in 2002, the hostage crisis at the Beslan school in 2004, or the attack on Nalchik in 2005, the president's main objective was not saving civilian lives but liquidating all insurgents (Dunlop 2006).

Just as importantly, Putin has also managed to improve the remuneration of professional armed forces personnel even if not nearly all the announced wage increases have been instituted. Although real benefits for officers and soldiers have declined as a result of the cash-for-benefit scheme introduced in 2005, the massive poverty of officers characteristic of the late 1990s and early 2000s has been more or less eliminated. Moreover, in November 2005 the president announced--and in his May 2006 State of the Nation address reiterated--additional funding for military housing, pay raises totaling 67 percent in the next three years, and measures to increase veterans' pensions (Putin 2005). In short, although the conditions of officers are far from ideal, they have a lot less to complain about under Putin than they did under Yeltsin.

Another noteworthy aspect of Putin's reign is that he manages to come off well out of virtually any conflict by pawning off responsibility on others and retaining his popularity. Neither the disaster of the Kursk nuclear submarine in 2000, nor the long-drawn-out Chechen conflict, nor the numerous other crises throughout his presidential tenure seem to have had any serious prolonged impact on the population's high esteem for him (Barany 2004). According to one November 2005 poll, 73 percent of Russians approved of his job performance and he remained the country's most trusted politician by far--41 percent of respondents trusted him while the runner-up, Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu, enjoyed the confidence of only 14 percent of those asked (Interfax 2005). A July 2006 opinion survey found that Putin enjoys the "almost limitless support" of citizens, with as much as 84 percent trust in him (Itar-Tass 2006).

In short, Putin has remained--by any objective measure--extremely popular in a political system he has steered toward autocracy. The main reason for this seemingly odd outcome is that Russian society, by and large, remains conservative and far more interested in stability and improving living conditions--political and socioeconomic goods that Putin has been able to deliver--than the niceties of democratic freedom and governance (Lynch 2005; Pipes 2005; Levada 2007; FOM 2007). It was none other than the deposed oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who recently observed--in a Siberian penal colony--that Putin "is probably not a liberal or a democrat, but he is more liberal and more democratic than 70 percent of the population" (Kotkin 2006, 33).

Nevertheless, it is hard to disagree with Pavel Baev, who contends that the "military-security [realm] is the area where Putin has his worst record of success while encountering the most damaging challenges to his leadership" (Baev 2003, 38). His reluctance to antagonize the military is not a sufficient justification for the absence of serious defense reform. The bottom line is that, for Putin, the incentives to transform the armed forces are far outweighed by the enormous risks and, as Dmitri Furman of the Moscow-based Institute of Europe opined, the "simply insurmountable" difficulties that he would encounter (Furman 2003).

Conclusion

During the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, the trend of deteriorating civil-military relations that commenced under Gorbachev had continued. Yeltsin acquiesced to the officer corps' political role, permitted the evolution of a legal framework that, in fact, legitimated that role, and--as long as the top brass did not encroach upon presidential prerogatives--allowed them to run the armed forces as they saw fit. As a result, the generals succeeded in circumventing the radical defense reform Russia had needed and developed a culture of corruption and abuse of power unprecedented in Soviet-Russian history.

Under Putin, some of these trends have been slowed down or halted. He has further cemented the armed forces' identity as a presidential institution. With his success in restoring state power and establishing an authoritarian state that prizes order and stability above all, the military leadership, too, has been brought under increasing control. For example, instances of insubordination by generals have greatly diminished and the military's overt opposition to state policy under Yeltsin has become muted and more or less limited to its continuing resistance to the implementation of substantive defense reform. At the same time, Putin has reestablished the armed forces as a favored institution of the Russian state. The material circumstances and employment conditions of armed forces personnel have undoubtedly improved since 2000. At the same time, the army is under firm civilian control, but in contemporary Russia this simply means presidential control.

What has superpresidential rule meant for civil-military relations.> One of the defining aspects of superpresidentialism is the restriction of legislative authority, without which there can be no institutionally balanced control over the armed forces. Because both Yeltsin and Putin equated civilian control over the military with presidential oversight, they denied Russia the benefits of an autonomous (that is, independent of the executive branch) parliament continually prodding, criticizing, and supervising the armed forces. Because the presidents have not shared the responsibility of managing the armed forces, they cannot shift the blame for the military's actions. They have not only failed to promote legal instruments that prohibit the political activism of military personnel but have actually encouraged the generals' political presence in concert with their own political interests and appointed military men to important political posts. This sort of executive role, in turn, has fostered the institutional decay--the gradual erosion of institutional rules and norms--in Russian civil-military relations.

Assessing Russian military politics with the help of the conceptual lenses provided by Alfred Stepan confirms the reputation of superpresidential systems as being conducive to the evolution of problematic civil-military relations. Stepan's typology of the army's institutional prerogatives reveals that the Russian armed forces' political role is troublesome in two important respects (Stepan 1988, 94-97). First, the army does not provide the legislature with the type of detailed information that would allow actual oversight of the defense budget. Second, contemporary Russia is a standard case of Stepan's sixth military prerogative: "active duty military officials fill almost all top defense sector staff roles" and civilians are essentially shut out from this occupational field. In several other areas, one would place the military's institutional prerogatives somewhere between the "high" and "low" grades established by Stepan. For instance, although there are no uniformed military personnel in ministerial positions in the Russian cabinet, there are plenty of officers in prominent political posts. Also, the armed forces enjoy a "major role in setting the boundaries" of promotions even if the Russian executive does have considerable latitude in this regard. In contrast, the Soviet army, of course, was under a strict system of multifaceted civilian control, its budget was entirely dependent on the CPSU's decisions--although the high command naturally lobbied for growing defense outlays--and its generals did not hold independent political positions.

Ultimately, in a superpresidential system, the blame for the shortcomings of civil-military relations should be placed at the doorstep of the president. Similarly, as long as the armed forces are not held truly accountable by shared civilian authority, the prospects of substantial defense reform will remain grim. Without the introduction of institutionally balanced civilian oversight and consistently applied enforcement mechanisms, it would be unwise to expect military elites to embrace the kind of defense reform their country needs. Russian political elites, as one expert has written, "insist on the generals' political loyalty in exchange for their minimal involvement in defense matters" (Trenin 2004, 225). In the meantime, the country's institutional arrangements and networks of corporate interests practically guarantee the continuation of the status quo. The Russian military is under the control of an extremely powerful president and its generals enjoy a political position similar to that of generals in other authoritarian states.

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ZOLTAN BARANY

University of Texas

Zoltan Barany is Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Professor of Government at the University of Texas. He is the author of Democratic Breakdown and the Decline of the Russian Military (Princeton University Press, 2007) and The Future of NATO Expansion (Cambridge University Press, 2003).