The best hope for a functioning constitutional democracy in Russia and other CIS countries has always been the emergence of a middle class. As the American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out in 1960, in his seminal work, “Political Man”, only a large middle class has the education, leisure and financial self-interest to truly hold a government to account.

Members of the middle class are more likely to have travelled abroad and been educated abroad. They are more likely to identify themselves with Anglo-European democratic culture, and more likely to aspire to see a similar political system in their own CIS country.

Some political scientists, such as Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria, have gone so far as to say trying to make a constitutional democracy without a large middle class is pointless – like building an aqua park for those who can’t swim.

In his 2003 work, “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad”, Zakaria suggested that the best functioning democracies were those which, unlike Russia, had not rushed to extend the franchise universally. Those which function best now, such as Chile, Thailand or South Korea, had gone through a period of capitalist dictatorship, until the middle class had developed to a point where it demanded greater rights and freedoms.

He wrote: “Capitalism created a middle class that then pressured the government to open up the political system. It nurtured an independent civil society that has helped consolidate democracy. These dictators were not trying to create democracy. But in modernizing their countries they ended up doing so anyway.”

This is probably the strongest liberal argument in support of authoritarian capitalist regimes like those of president Putin and president Nazarbayev. It is the one I heard from Grigori Marchenko, former central bank governor of Kazakhstan, who is the architect of the financial boom which is helping Kazakhstan’s middle class double in size every year.

Marchenko told me: “If you look at the East Asian countries, it was when GDP per capita hit around $5,000 to $6,000 that the middle class became politically aware, and political parties representing its interests grew in power. Kazakhstan is not quite there yet. We need four or five years of uninterrupted economic growth.”

It is strange one hears this argument so rarely in support of Putin or Nazarbayev from western commentators, considering how mainstream Lipset’s theory is. Why are we happy to welcome authoritarian capitalist regimes in Asia, but not in Russia? Why did we think, after centuries of passivity, the Russian population was suddenly going to leap into political maturity?

Not everyone, it should be said, agrees with Lipset’s theory of the importance of a middle class to democratization. A new essay in Foreign Affairs by two academics from New York University, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs, suggests Lipset’s theory might be out of date.

The authors write that authoritarian regimes like Russia and China are growing increasingly sophisticated, and are managing to suppress the conditions for democratization, without suppressing the conditions for economic growth.

They give as an example the Kremlin’s control over all national TV, and the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In China, they point to the Chinese government’s control of the Internet. Such moves, the authors claim, stymie the emergent middle class’ capacity for ‘strategic co-ordination’, i.e. their ability to unite and come to political consciousness. Thus democratization is delayed, perhaps put off altogether.

I know little of China, so will leave that example aside. But the little I know of Russia leaves me unconvinced by their arguments. First of all, controlling national TV and throwing Khodorkovsky in jail doesn’t seem particularly sophisticated to me.

Nor do I think such moves succeed in pulling the wool over the middle class’ eyes in Russia. The Russian middle class is well-educated enough to know how vacuous Channel One news is. But they don’t rely on it for their information. As business people connected to the global market, they need reliable information that will guide their investment decisions and won’t make them look out of touch to their foreign partners. So they read Kommersant, they listen to Echo Moskvy, they watch Ren-TV and RBC.

The Kremlin makes little effort to control these information sources, precisely because the educated middle class is still a small minority. This is the important point Bueno de Mesquita and Downs miss: neither Russia nor China fulfil the basic criteria for democratization laid down by Lipset, that of having a sizeable middle class. A Carnegie Foundation report in 2002 suggested the middle class was just 7% of the population. The consultancy firm Premier-TGI thought it was at most 19%.

Bueno de Mesquita and Downs suggest that the middle class in Russia is being out-foxed by the authoritarian Kremlin. A more convincing explanation is that the middle class feels its interests are at this time best served by a relatively business-friendly authoritarian government. Putin is providing the stability and economic growth which is the main priority after the turbulence of the Yeltsin years. If democracy was less managed, members of the middle class perhaps feel, then Zhirinovsky, Rogozin or Zuganov would be in power.

However, if the government made consistently bad decisions which led to recession, the middle class may decide the government no longer serves its interest, and begin to organize against it. A more serious concern, for democratization in Russia and Kazakhstan, is that these countries’ large oil and gas reserves will mean their economies will perform well over the next few years even if their governments perform badly, so the middle class will be lulled to political inactivity, like Ulysses’ lotus eaters.

I don’t agree with Bueno de Mesquita and Downs that Putin’s campaign against the oligarchs can be taken as evidence of authoritarian moves to squash the emergence of a middle class. Oligarchs are not necessarily friends of the Russian middle class. They build up monopolies that hamper the development of medium-sized business.

Lipset likes to quote Aristotle’s description of three main forms of government – oligarchy, tyranny and democracy. What we are seeing now in Russia is not tyranny squashing democracy, but tyranny squashing oligarchy. Constitutional democracy is unlikely to emerge for a few more years – perhaps around the time Khodorkovsky himself emerges from jail.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

August 23, 2005