By Chrystia Freeland
In the early Putin era, the Acemoglu and Robinson approach was very much a minority view. As recently as 2008, an essay in Foreign Affairs by another pair of influential Western scholars laid out the ‘‘conventional explanation for Vladimir Putin’s popularity’’ thus: ‘‘Since 2000, under Putin, order has returned, the economy has flourished, and the average Russian is living better than ever before. As political freedom has decreased, economic growth has increased. Putin may have rolled back democratic gains, the story goes, but these were necessary sacrifices on the altar of stability and growth.’’
But in their Foreign Affairs essay those scholars strongly disagreed: ‘‘This conventional narrative is wrong, based almost entirely on a spurious correlation between autocracy and growth. The emergence of Russian democracy in the 1990s did indeed coincide with state breakdown and economic decline, but it did not cause either. The reemergence of Russian autocracy under Putin, conversely, has coincided with economic growth but not caused it (high oil prices and recovery from the transition away from communism deserve most of the credit).’’
The essay’s authors concluded with a prediction about Russia’s future that fits neatly within the framework of extractive versus inclusive institutions and labels Putin’s Russia the former: ‘‘The Kremlin talks about creating the next China, but Russia’s path is more likely to be something like that of Angola — an oil-dependent state that is growing now because of high oil prices but has floundered in the past when oil prices were low and whose leaders seem more intent on maintaining themselves in office to control oil revenues and other rents than on providing public goods and services to a beleaguered population.’’
Acemoglu and Robinson are pretty tough on Western experts, officials and business people who, they believe, are too easily seduced by the leaders of extractive regimes, particularly ones enjoying temporary bursts of prosperity.
But the 2008 Foreign Affairs essay highlights a very important exception. One of the authors of that devastating critique of Putinism was Michael A. McFaul, the new U.S. ambassador to Moscow. That appointment, lauded by many inside and outside Russia for utilizing the skills of an acknowledged Russia expert, may be one reason to be hopeful about Russia today.
