Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · 2000
Did the Meiji transition succeed where Russia’s failed?
The seminar question: “To what extent did the Meiji transition succeed where the post-Soviet transition failed?”
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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War made Putin, and the way it began still divides historians. Yeltsin appointed Putin, head since 1998 of the FSB, the KGB’s successor as Russia’s security service, on 9 August 1999, two days after fighters led by Shamil Basayev entered Dagestan, the arrows crossing from Chechnya on the map. Between 4 and 16 September bombs destroyed apartment blocks in Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, killing about 300 people. The government blamed Chechen militants, yet when residents found explosives in an apartment basement in Ryazan on 22 September and the men who planted them proved to be FSB officers, the FSB called it a training exercise; no independent inquiry has settled the questions this raised. On 1 October Russian forces entered Chechnya, and after weeks of bombardment took Grozny, which the United Nations later called the most destroyed city on earth. Putin’s promises of victory made him Russia’s most popular politician, and the war delivered him the presidency.
The short answer
- Chechnya’s interwar chaos and the Dagestan raid. After the Khasavyurt accord, Chechnya’s elected president Aslan Maskhadov could not control field commanders such as Shamil Basayev, and kidnapping for ransom became an industry. In August 1999 Basayev and Khattab led an armed incursion into Dagestan to support a local Islamist rising. The raid gave Moscow a reason for a new war, and it allowed Russia’s leaders to present the conflict as a defence of the country against terrorism.
- Yeltsin needed a successor who would protect him. By 1999 Yeltsin was ill, deeply unpopular and threatened by corruption investigations involving his family and associates. His circle searched for a successor who could win an election and guarantee the outgoing president’s safety. Putin, loyal, disciplined and unknown to the public, fitted that need, and his first decree as acting president granted Yeltsin immunity.
- The 1998 crisis discredited the reformers and the oligarchs. The default destroyed savings for the second time in a decade and ended the credibility of the governments that had promised a quick transition to Western prosperity. Many Russians associated democracy and markets with chaos, theft and humiliation. That mood created demand for a leader who promised order, and it made the curbing of the oligarchs and the independent media popular with much of the public.
- Oil prices rose again. World oil prices, which had fallen to around ten dollars a barrel in late 1998, roughly tripled by 2000. Revenue flowed back into the budget, wages and pensions were paid on time, and growth returned. As in the 1970s, oil gave Moscow resources that did not depend on reform, and this time the windfall helped finance the reconstruction of central power.
THE TURNING POINT
Yeltsin resigns, 31 December 1999. Yeltsin’s resignation is the hinge of the epilogue because it turned a decade of open, chaotic politics into a managed succession. By resigning six months early he made Putin acting president and moved the election forward, so that Putin could campaign as an incumbent while the war in Chechnya was popular. The transfer happened within the ruling circle, approved afterwards by voters, and it reversed the trend of the 1990s by placing the restoration of state power ahead of political competition. Russia’s transition ended, as Japan’s had begun, with authority concentrated at the centre.
What it changed
The centre reclaimed the regions. Putin’s federal districts, super-regions each supervised by a presidential envoy, his control over the upper house of parliament and his demand that regional laws match federal ones ended the bargaining federalism of the 1990s, in which each region negotiated its own deal with Moscow, and from 2005 governors were appointed instead of elected. The change echoed, in a softer form, Japan’s abolition of its domains in 1871. In both cases a weak centre became strong by taking power from the regions, though the Kremlin was reclaiming powers lost in 1990–91 while Japan’s new government seized powers no Japanese centre had ever held.
The war in Chechnya became a long insurgency. After Grozny fell, fighting continued in the mountains for years, accompanied by terrorist attacks inside Russia, and Moscow governed Chechnya through a loyal Chechen leadership under Akhmad Kadyrov and later his son Ramzan. The counter-terrorist operation was officially ended only in 2009. Human rights groups documented disappearances and killings on a large scale throughout.
Two transitions, two strong states. Meiji Japan’s emperor-centred constitution and powerful military later allowed the army to escape civilian control, and Japan’s empire expanded into China in the 1930s. Russia’s restored “vertical of power” narrowed elections, media and courts in the decades after 2000. Both transitions created states strong enough to survive, and both left limits on democracy that later leaders could exploit.
The full answer, argued
By the measures its leaders chose, Meiji Japan succeeded more clearly: within forty years it ended the unequal treaties, built industry, schools and a constitution, and defeated two great powers. Russia in 2000 had lost an empire, seen output fall by about 40% and suffered millions of excess deaths. Yet the comparison needs to be made with care. Russia did create a market economy, private property and a decade of competitive elections, and it grew quickly after 1999, while Japan’s success rested on authoritarian institutions, cheap labour and colonial conquest, and its state slid into militarism. Criteria matter: success for a state differs from success for its people, its minorities or its neighbours. Historians such as Carol Gluck and Stephen Kotkin warn against judging transitions only by their end points. A strong answer compares leadership, sequencing, the international setting and the distribution of costs, and reaches a judgement that names its criteria. The transferable insight is that a transition’s success depends on who is asked, and the answer of those who paid deserves equal weight.
An interesting fact
Vladimir Putin’s rise was among the fastest of any modern head of state. In June 1996 he lost his job as deputy mayor of St Petersburg when his patron, the reformist mayor Anatoly Sobchak, was defeated for re-election. He moved to a post managing Kremlin property, the department that ran the presidency’s buildings and resorts, became head of the FSB security service in July 1998, prime minister in August 1999 and acting president on 31 December 1999. Less than four years separated unemployment from the presidency, and he had never stood in an election before March 2000.
This is the study layer of Meiji and post-Soviet Russia compared, chapter 12 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000; the full index of the atlas is here.
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