Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · EPILOGUE ·
Meiji and post-Soviet Russia compared
Chapter 12 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000: “Two Transitions Compared”
Russia’s decade of transition ended with a return to strong central power. Vladimir Putin, made prime minister in August 1999, led a second war in Chechnya, became acting president when Yeltsin resigned on 31 December 1999 and won the March 2000 election with 52.9%, setting up a comparison with Meiji Japan.
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The map above is the world of Russia and the former Soviet Union, February 2000 — Grozny falls; Putin takes power.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 2000 · Europe in 2000.
Part of IB History: Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia →
SHORT EXPLANATION
Russia entered a second Chechen war as Vladimir Putin rose to power. In August 1999 Islamist fighters crossed into Dagestan from Chechnya; two days later Yeltsin appointed Putin, a little-known former officer of the KGB, the Soviet secret police, as prime minister. September bombs destroyed apartment blocks in Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, killing about 300 people. Putin’s response was war, and Russian forces took Grozny by February 2000. He became Russia’s most popular politician. Yeltsin resigned on 31 December 1999, making Putin acting president and bringing the election forward; Putin won 52.9% in March 2000. Rising oil prices refilled the budget, helping fund his “vertical of power”, a chain of command from the Kremlin through governors, courts and television, rather like a company placing branches under head-office control. War, managed succession and an oil windfall helped rebuild the state weakened in the 1990s.
Japan’s and Russia’s transitions now invite comparison. Japan’s leaders from Satsuma and Chōshū governed together for forty years; Gorbachev and Yeltsin worked with shorter horizons and a divided elite. Japan built central authority, revenue, an army and industry before granting a limited constitution. Russia opened politics and markets before it had institutions able to tax, judge and govern a market. The costs also fell differently. Japan’s farmers lacked votes, and Taiwan and Korea later bore the costs of empire. In Russia, savers, pensioners, sick people and the borderlands suffered heavily. Both transitions ended with concentrated power and limited democracy. What each built is one part of the judgment; who paid for it is another.
The full story
On 9 August 1999 Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin prime minister. Two days earlier fighters led by Shamil Basayev had crossed from Chechnya into Dagestan, along the arrows on the map. Putin had headed the FSB, the KGB’s successor as Russia’s security service, since 1998. Within weeks the country faced a terrifying series of attacks: between 4 and 16 September bombs destroyed apartment blocks in Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, killing about 300 people. The government blamed Chechen militants.
The beginning of the war remains disputed. On 22 September residents found explosives in an apartment basement in Ryazan. The men who planted them proved to be FSB officers, and the FSB described the incident as a training exercise. No independent inquiry has settled the questions it raised.
Russian forces entered Chechnya on 1 October. After weeks of bombardment they took Grozny, later described by the United Nations as the most destroyed city on earth. Putin promised victory and became Russia’s most popular politician. Yeltsin’s resignation on 31 December made him acting president and brought the election forward. His first decree granted Yeltsin immunity from prosecution; in March 2000 Putin won 52.9% of the vote. War and a managed succession had carried him to the presidency.
Putin now had a mandate to rebuild central authority. He divided Russia into seven federal districts, super-regions supervised by presidential envoys, and ordered regional laws brought into line with federal law. The special treaties Tatarstan and other regions had won in the 1990s were wound down. Prosecutors pursued the independent television channel NTV. Oligarchs, tycoons who had turned wealth into political power, were told they could keep their fortunes if they stayed out of politics. The center regained power as the democracy of the 1990s narrowed.
Russia’s position abroad was changing as well. The 2000 map shows Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in blue: they were the first former Soviet-bloc members admitted to NATO, the Western military alliance led by the United States. Moscow resented their admission.
Both transitions began as revolutions from above, led by members of an old elite. Japan’s leaders were samurai, hereditary warrior-officials from Satsuma and Chōshū; Soviet reformers came from the party elite. A foreign threat helped unite the Japanese group. Within three years they abolished the domains, the lords’ semi-independent territories, then spent two decades building revenue, an army, industry and schools before granting a constitution with limited participation.
The Soviet sequence was different. Reformers opened politics first, and the republics gained elected parliaments while Moscow struggled to offer a working economy. The center lost control of them. Independent Russia then freed prices and sold state property before courts, tax collection and regulators could govern a market. Insiders captured many of the gains. Japan built a strong state before widening participation; Russia gained political and economic freedoms while its governing capacity weakened.
A state’s strength does not tell us who bore the cost of building it. In Japan peasants, mill girls, the Ainu of Hokkaido and the people of annexed Ryukyu paid at home; Taiwanese and Koreans later paid under Japanese rule. Russians lost savings, wages and lives, while Chechnya and other borderlands suffered war. Japan exported much of its cost. Russia lost an empire, built a market and then rebuilt a strong state at the expense of many of its new freedoms.
FULL EXPLANATION
Sequencing compared: authority, revenue, participation
What should come first: institutions able to govern, or the opening of politics to mass participation? Samuel Huntington argued for strong institutions first in Political Order in Changing Societies (1968). Japan’s sequence fits his argument. It abolished the domains in 1871, introduced conscription and the land tax in 1873, stabilized finances in the 1880s and granted a limited constitution in 1889. Russia moved from openness and elections in 1986–89 to the Union’s collapse in 1991, price liberalization in 1992, a constitution imposed after violence in 1993 and reconstruction of central power from 2000. But a promise to build order first can also postpone democracy indefinitely. Thomas Carothers warns that authoritarian rulers have used the “sequencing” argument for that purpose; Japan’s own path led to military rule in the 1930s. Japan built capacity at democracy’s expense. Russia gained freedom as capacity weakened, then rebuilt capacity while surrendering much of that freedom.
Leaders and elites: oligarchs of two kinds
An oligarchy is a small group holding power. Both transitions had one, but the groups used their power differently. The Meiji genrō shared formative experiences in the 1860s, came mostly from two domains and rotated the premiership among themselves for forty years. They checked one another too: Itō Hirobumi’s preference for parliamentary compromise restrained Yamagata Aritomo’s military authoritarianism. Ellen Kay Trimberger argued in Revolution from Above that their independence from landowners and merchants let them remake society without defending a particular class’s property. Russia’s two presidents worked with rapidly changing teams; Yeltsin had six heads of government in eight years. Its business oligarchs gained wealth amid a weak state. Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White found that many new elites were former Soviet officials who converted their positions into property. Japan’s leaders sought power to build a state; many of Russia’s new elite used a weak state to build fortunes.
Who paid: exporting and importing the costs
The COST chart shows where the wars of each transition killed people. Japan’s internal wars of 1868–77 were small beside its wars abroad, while Russia’s heaviest military losses came within its borders and at their edges. The chart leaves out two larger tolls. In Afghanistan, part of the Soviet old order described in chapter 7, an estimated half million to 2 million Afghans died in 1979–89. Russia’s 1990s mortality crisis killed far more than any of its transition wars: estimates range from under 2 million to more than 3 million excess deaths, mostly among working-age men, depending on the baseline and years counted; longer-period estimates are higher. The causes remain disputed. Elizabeth Brainerd and David Cutler stress alcohol and stress. David Stuckler, Lawrence King and Martin McKee linked rapid mass privatization to rising male mortality in a 2009 study, a link other economists dispute. Japan’s costs were heavy too, from farmers ruined in the 1880s to colonized Koreans and Taiwanese. Those who paid most in both cases had the least say in the decisions.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Chechnya’s interwar chaos and the Dagestan raid. Khasavyurt ended the first war without giving Chechnya’s elected president Aslan Maskhadov control over field commanders such as Shamil Basayev. Kidnapping for ransom became an industry. In August 1999 Basayev and Khattab led fighters into Dagestan in support of a local Islamist rising. Moscow could cite the raid as a reason for another war and present that war as defense against terrorism.
Yeltsin needed a successor who would protect him. Yeltsin’s circle needed a successor who could win and protect him. By 1999 he was ill and deeply unpopular, while corruption investigations threatened family and associates. Putin appeared to fit the requirement: loyal, disciplined and unknown to the public. As acting president, his first decree granted Yeltsin immunity.
The 1998 crisis discredited the reformers and the oligarchs. The 1998 default destroyed savings for the second time in a decade. Governments that had promised a quick transition to Western prosperity lost credibility, and many Russians associated democracy and markets with chaos, theft and humiliation. Promises of order spoke to that experience; curbs on oligarchs and independent media were popular with much of the public.
Oil prices rose again. Oil gave the government resources to rebuild. Its price had fallen to around ten dollars a barrel in late 1998, then roughly tripled by 2000. Revenue returned, wages and pensions were paid on time, and growth resumed. As in the 1970s, Moscow received resources that did not depend on reform; this windfall helped finance central power.
THE TURNING POINT
Yeltsin resigns, 31 December 1999. By resigning six months early on 31 December 1999, Yeltsin made Putin acting president and advanced the election. Putin could campaign as an incumbent while the Chechen war was popular. The ruling circle arranged the transfer, and voters approved it afterward. Open, chaotic politics gave way to a priority on restoring state power over political competition. Russia’s transition ended, as Japan’s had begun, with authority concentrated at the center.
What it changed
The centre reclaimed the regions. The separate bargains regions had made with Moscow in the 1990s gave way to federal districts under presidential envoys, control over parliament’s upper house and a requirement that regional laws match federal ones. From 2005 governors were appointed rather than elected. Japan’s abolition of domains in 1871 offers a softer parallel: both centers took power from regions. The difference is that the Kremlin reclaimed powers lost in 1990–91, while Japan’s new government took powers no earlier Japanese center had held.
The war in Chechnya became a long insurgency. Taking Grozny did not end the war. Fighting continued in the mountains for years, with terrorist attacks inside Russia. Moscow governed Chechnya through loyal Chechen leaders, Akhmad Kadyrov and later his son Ramzan. The counter-terrorist operation officially ended only in 2009, and human rights groups documented disappearances and killings on a large scale throughout.
Two transitions, two strong states. The institutions left by each transition shaped what later leaders could do. Meiji Japan’s emperor-centered constitution and powerful military allowed the army to escape civilian control; its empire expanded into China in the 1930s. Russia’s restored “vertical of power” narrowed elections, media and courts in the decades after 2000. Both states survived, while limits on democracy offered opportunities for later leaders to exploit.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — To what extent did the Meiji transition succeed where the post-Soviet transition failed?
By their leaders’ chosen goals, the Meiji reformers succeeded more clearly: within forty years Japan ended the unequal treaties, built industry, schools and a constitution, and defeated two great powers. By 2000 Russia had lost an empire, output had fallen about 40%, and millions of excess deaths had occurred. But the comparison changes when we ask what people gained and lost. Russia created a market economy and private property, held competitive elections for a decade and grew quickly after 1999. Japan’s achievements rested on authoritarian institutions, cheap labor and colonial conquest, and its state slid into militarism. Carol Gluck and Stephen Kotkin warn against judging transitions only by their end points. A strong answer names its criteria, compares leadership, sequencing and the international setting, and gives weight to the people, minorities and neighbors who bore the costs.
An interesting fact
In June 1996 Putin lost his job as deputy mayor of St Petersburg when his patron, the reformist mayor Anatoly Sobchak, lost re-election. He moved to the Kremlin property department, which managed presidential buildings and resorts. In July 1998 he became head of the FSB security service; in August 1999 he became prime minister, and on 31 December acting president. Less than four years separated unemployment from the presidency, one of the fastest rises of any modern head of state. He had never stood in an election before March 2000.
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