Sultanistic Regimes Edited by H.E.Chelabi and Juan J Linz The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1998

The isolation of the Soviet peoples behind the Iron Curtain was mirrored by the isolation of Soviet studies within Western academia. These studies were treated by their practitioners as obscure and exotic, accessible only to those scholars and analysts with unique skills and knowledge. Such skills had to be developed through years of specialized study, the overwhelming majority of it, for obvious reasons, in the West. Contacts with the study of other areas of the world was rarely sought or encouraged.

Following former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the enforced isolation of the Soviet peoples ended. Yet, the isolation of post-Soviet studies to a considerable extent remained, and still remains to this day. Rather than undergoing a real intellectual opening, much of the discipline continues to refer back only to Tsarist and Soviet parallels in attempts to understand developments in the present.

The understanding of post-Soviet societies has been further muddled by the appearance of the new academic-political discipline of "transitionology" -- the study, or rather endlessly repeated mantra, of "transitions from totalitarian rule to democracy and the free market." Applied in a blanket way across a range of very different societies and political cultures, this, in my view, has obscured far more than it has revealed about the real processes at work in much of the former Soviet area. As John Schoeberlein wrote recently, "While development agencies still enthusiastically support a ‘transition’ in Central Asia, many sober observers are questioning whether it is right to refer sanguinely to a ‘transition’ when there is little idea where it might lead."

The central premise of "transitionology" as applied to the whole area from the Oxus to the Elbe is at best inadequate, and at worst idiocy. This presupposes the notion that there is such a thing as a "normal" country, and that normality is to be defined as the condition of a small number of states in North America and Western Europe in the last four decades of the 20^th Century. Moreover, of course, even these states differ very considerably among themselves.

The danger is that too many students, journalists and practitioners have fallen into a trap by adopting what a Russian friend of mine calls the "future desirable tense." The definition of the future desirable states that because it is desirable that the former Communist states should become free market democracies, it is therefore in some way inevitable that this should be so.

Of course, in the countries of Central Europe and the Baltic, such a transition is entirely possible (if still difficult) and has to a very considerable extent already occurred. Across most of the former Soviet bloc however, not merely have living standards and public services fallen (often disastrously) since the end of Communism, but a significant number of countries are actually less free than they were in the last years of Gorbachev. This is above all true of parts of Central Asia – and it may well go on being the case for a very long time.

The melancholy truth today is that there is absolutely nothing abnormal in the world about impoverished nations under dictatorial or semi-authoritarian rule. Even where the formal institutions of democracy exist, these are often extensively manipulated, and no more than facades for the authoritarian and exploitative practices of a variety of elites.

That is why people working on the former Soviet Union should read books such as Chehabi’s and Linz’s Sultanistic Regimes. Since it is based on a conference which took place in 1990, it mentions the Soviet Union only rarely – though it does devote some space to an analysis of Romania under the Ceausescus as an example of sultanistic rule by one family operating within the shell of a Communist system.

If such a book were to be written today, however, it would be extremely negligent if it did not analyze several post-Soviet states. For a number of the regimes now ruling former Soviet republics have taken on "Sultanistic" patterns identified in this book.

The term "Sultanism" was originally coined by Max Weber to describe "an extreme form of patrimonialism," involving "an administration and a military force which are purely personal instruments of the master." He distinguished this absolute discretion on the part of the ruler from traditional autocracies in which the sovereign’s will was limited by certain traditions, conventions and interests. The concept was developed further by Juan Linz, one of the authors and editors of this book, to help describe certain forms of authoritarian regime in the Spanish-speaking world of the 1950s and 60s, most notably that of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.

In Linz and Chehabi’s definition:

"The ideal type of a contemporary sultanistic regime … is based on personal rulership, but loyalty to the ruler is motivated not by his embodying or articulating an ideology, nor by a unique personal mission, nor by any charismatic qualities, but by a mixture of fear and rewards to his collaborators…The binding norms and relations of bureaucratic administration are constantly subverted by arbitrary personal decisions of the ruler. As a result, corruption reigns supreme at all levels of society. The staff of such a ruler is constituted not by an establishment with distinctive career lines, but largely by people chosen directly by the ruler. Among them we very often find members of his family, friends, business associates, or individuals directly involved in using violence to sustain the regime…"

"Sultanism" has been used to describe and analyze a considerable number of regimes in Africa and Asia, as well as Latin America and the Caribbean. Among the case studies in this book are the Somozas of Nicaragua and the Philippines under Marcos. The outward forms and institutions of these states of course often differed. As Richard Sandbrook has pointed out, Sultanistic systems have flourished "under a number of guises: civilian, quasi-military or military forms of government, one-party or competitive party systems."

How well do these patterns fit some of the states on the territory of the former Soviet Union? Clearly the legacy of Communism and Soviet rule makes for considerable differences from most of the "Third World" examples studied in this book. Whether in former colonies like the Philippines, or de facto American dependencies in Central America, none of them inherited the degree of centralized bureaucracy bequeathed by Soviet rule. In addition, very few had undergone quite the same level of rigorous "modernization" in its specific Soviet sense.

With one exception, the present rulers of Central Asia rose through the Communist bureaucracy, not through the support of the military or the talents for demagoguery, political patronage, and political leadership displayed by the "sultans" described by Chehabi, Linz and their collaborators.

On the other hand, as this book notes, a certain process of "sultanization" could be seen at work even under Leonid Brezhnev. In Central Asia, Azerbaijan, and even certain regions of the Russian Federation, local party bosses were essentially given free reign to govern in their own way and enrich themselves and their family members and entourages (above all from the stolen proceeds of state cotton production) in return for their suppression of all outward signs of dissent and local nationalism. This process has been extensively described by Arkady Vaksberg and others. Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev sought to check this trend, and wholly failed.

Since the Soviet collapse, of course, this process has greatly intensified. Under Yeltsin, it even seemed for a while as if Russia itself were heading in a "sultanistic" direction, with the government functioning according to the whim of the autocrat, and his family and business associates plundering the state and its natural resources. In Russia, however, this development never achieved anything like a fully-fledged form. Yeltsin himself (unlike Trujillo, Marcos or others) was simply too old, addled and uninterested in government to be able to develop a truly personal system of government.

Finally, it would seem that for all the battering it has received in recent years, in Russia the state tradition is still too strong to have a truly sultanistic ruler. For example, with all their glaring faults, the Russian armed forces and their commanders remain servants of the state, not of the President. Vladimir Putin also marks a move away from sultanism, and demonstrates the strength of statism in the Russian security services, of which he will always at heart be an officer. He may have strong authoritarian tendencies, but they are as a servant of the state. Should he have control over the succession to him as President, it seems overwhelmingly probable that he will choose another security figure, not a member of his own family.

The difference between Putin and a "sultan" is strongly reflected in his personality. The classic "Sultans" of the last century were larger than life characters, often monstrously so – gargantuan in their appetites for power, money, luxury and sex. Putin by contrast often seems if anything smaller than life. As has been noted, his reaction to the Kursk disaster, for example, was that of a middle-ranking civil officer waiting for orders rather than a leader.

But then, being ruled by mediocre but dutiful and patriotic security bureaucrats may not be the worst fate that can befall a country. Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, sultanistic tendencies are much more clearly marked, and by and large these countries are also markedly worse off than Russia.

The most extravagant growth of sultanism of course has been in Turkmenistan, where Sapurmurad Niyazov, or "Turkmenbashi" ("Father of the Turkmen") has introduced a cult of personality on a scale unknown since Stalin’s day. In Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, a much dourer character than Niyazov, has not developed a full-blown cult of personality, but his rule is just as dictatorial. Across the Caspian, Azerbaijan under Heidar Aliev is freer and more criticism is allowed, but the results of the elections are never in doubt. In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, while public debate is possible in these countries, Nursultan Nazarbayev and Askar Akayev have developed strongly personal, fairly authoritarian forms of government with their own families playing a very important role. The importance of these new dynasties was underlined by the marriage in 1998 of Akayev’s son to Nazarbayev’s daughter.

The failure of institution-building, and the importance of the dynasties, will become clearest – and most dangerous – when the existing generation of leaders begins to die off. In Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, and perhaps elsewhere as well, the rulers’ plan is for their sons to succeed them. This could spark furious resistance elsewhere in the governing elites, and, in the end, lead to the collapse of the existing state systems. One factor that these nascent sultanistic states have in common with others around the world in the past is that the sons are usually not people on the scale of their fathers. Like all successful political bosses (whether medieval monarchs or modern sultans) those of the elder generation learned the ropes of patronage from the bottom up. Only very rarely is it possible for the sons of such men to achieve the same skills, for they have simply not had to learn them in the same way.

As the Linz and Chehabi collection emphasizes, when sultanistic regimes die, they tend to die hard – precisely because there tend to be so few institutions around to provide for a smooth transition. The third chapter of this collection, by Richard Snyder, examines paths out of sultanistic regimes and – ideally – transitions to democracy. Here, parts of Central Asia look especially discouraging.

There is even less of a tradition of local constitutionalism or democracy than in the Caribbean or the Philippines – which is to say no tradition at all. And whereas in Uzbekistan, there is at least an old pre-Russian tradition of urban-based states, in the tribal histories of other republics even this is lacking. The new armed forces are a wholly unknown quantity when it comes to involvement in politics. And finally, in Uzbekistan at least (as Iran in the past) radical Islam is present as the last recourse of a desperate society if all other forms of state order fail.

This then is the real challenge facing the region: not of "free market democracy" versus "Communism" or "authoritarianism," but of whether these countries can develop states and bureaucracies based on the rule of law, or whether they will develop further in the direction of sultanistic systems, predatory states which prey on their own people for the benefit of narrow ruling groups and condemn their countries – like most of the countries studied in this book – to futures of economic and social decline. The answers will differ from country from country, but it must be said that at present, in few cases do they look very optimistic.

Editor’s Note: Anatol Lieven is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. His book Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power was published in paperback in 1999 by Yale University Press.

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