Many western commentators are obsessed with Putin, alternatively demonising and lionising him, and fail to notice that these three objectives are not particularly novel or original. They are exactly the same as those of Boris Yeltsin, the first post-Soviet leader and his predecessor in the Kremlin. [...]
Yeltsin’s choice of Putin, which was to a large degree fortuitous—Putin was the protégé of the later alienated oligarch Boris Berezovsky—paid off. All three objectives were achieved: Putin was able to end the chaos of the 1990s, he reversed the economic downturn, and he left ‘the family’ (Yeltsin’s) intact with all its money. Putin now hopes in turn that his choice will be equally inspired. [...]
In the ten years after the Global Financial Crisis, Russia’s average annual growth in per capita gross domestic product was 0.3 per cent, against more than 7 per cent for China. Thus, in the past decade alone, the income gap between China and Russia doubled: while in 2009, China’s GDP in international dollars was about 3½ times that of Russia’s, the ratio is 7:1 today. [...]
In that context, the selection as Medvedev’s successor of Mikhail Mishustin, a rather unknown official among Kremlinologists, not only has an element of surprise (which Putin must relish) but, on reflection, makes sense. Who better to jump-start the economy than the person who was able to reform the notoriously corrupt and inefficient system of Russian taxation—so that it now looks, according to the Financial Times, as ‘the tax system of the future’? If Mishustin brings with him likewise technocratically-minded and effective leaders in their 40s and 50s, and if they remain politically shielded by Putin (the way the reformers in China in the 1990s were ‘shielded’ by Deng Xiaoping), Putin might just have a chance to reverse the circular economic history of Russia and produce an economic upturn.
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