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By the second half of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s first term in office, the news flowing out of
Russia seemed more consistently positive than at any time since the initial post-Soviet euphoria. The
economy was growing rapidly. Poverty was declining. A new, more productive, set of relations between
the state and big business seemed to have developed. Opportunities for businesses, foreign and domestic,
were growing. Perhaps Putin was strong leader Russia needed to complete its arduous journey toward
capitalist democracy.
That conventional wisdom, however, quickly unraveled after a police raid on a hospital in July 2003.
The resulting arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovskii’s associate, Platon Lebedev, marked the beginning of what
would be called the “Yukos affair,” in which Putin’s government dismantled the most famous private
company in the country and captured its main asset for the state. As the affair built, more and more
observers expressed concerns that Putin might be anti-democratic; in the words of the conference, he might
be “immobilizing democracy” in Russia. Many making such an argument pointed first to the fact that
Yukos’s leading figure, Mikhail Khodorkovskii, was at least dabbling in opposition politics at the time the
attack on his company began, so the assault might have a chilling effect on the development of Russian
civil society. Perhaps more substantively, the Yukos affair has raised concerns that private property itself
is under attack in Russia, signaling a return to state ownership, with an assumed deleterious effect on
independent political activity.
It is worth noting, at least in passing, that I have found this turn against Putin a bit suspect
intellectually. First, Putin was never firmly committed to competitive democracy in Russia, at least as I
understand the term. From the outset, he has sought to control the media (especially television), de-
mobilize real and potential opposition, and manipulate electoral outcomes. The Yukos affair did not
represent the beginning of this trend. Second, and conversely, his attack on Yukos—like many other Putin
policies that dismayed me personally—enjoyed significant popular support in Russia. In other words, it did
not necessarily contravene popular will. Finally, while it seems clear that some private ownership of the
means of production is in practice essential for competitive politics, it is not at all obvious how much or
what kind is necessary. It is certainly not clear that a gigantic firm, acquired and built up through
Convention