In an ornate great hall of the Kremlin Sunday, Vladimir Putin will pledge to serve Russia. With this oath, Russia’s second democratically elected president begins the arduous task of completing the Russian revolution of the 1990s.
Much progress has been made in the decade since the Soviet Union collapsed and Boris Yeltsin was elected head of the modern Russian state. But today’s Russia, in the words of a key Putin adviser, is “stagnated in a semi-reformed state.”
Putin’s legacy will be lustrous indeed if he can complete the reformation. He has been acting president since New Year’s Eve, was elected to a full four-year term six weeks ago and has already demonstrated his leadership acumen with legislative victories on long-stalled arms control treaties.
Conditions could hardly be more auspicious as Putin, 47, begins his formal term. He is a new president–of a new generation–with a new legislature that appears as eager as he is to effect change. Russia’s economy is growing and the troublesome military campaign in Chechnya–for now at least –has quieted.
After years of quarreling between Yeltsin and a Duma controlled by Communists determined to block any change, Russians want strong leadership and they also have displayed a recent impatience to get on with it.
Now it’s up to Putin to lead. That means turning this semi-reformed nation into a modern functioning state with a prospering economy. What Putin needs to do is precisely what Yeltsin couldn’t. He has a critical window of opportunity to be bold and must seize it. The need for critical reforms hasn’t lessened; they will be neither easy nor painless.
Leading the list is tax reform, which would slow the still precipitous capital flight and encourage both domestic and foreign investment. But close behind are guaranteeing private property, strengthening the rule of law, overhauling entrenched bureaucracies and confronting the power of the oligarchs who enriched themselves in the mass privatizations of the 1990s. Putin also must formalize the central government’s relationship with the nation’s 89 regions and republics, including the devastated Chechnya.
And that’s just the internal agenda. Russia also must come to terms with being a Eurasian power in a post-Cold War world–the U.S. will not always like what that means.
There is reason for cautious optimism as Putin takes the oath of office. But this is Russia, after all, whose thousand years of melancholy history overflow with dashed hopes, disastrous economic experiments and brutal repression.
