Sticking Power
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POLITICS Sticking power ladimir Putin announced to the Rus- STEPHEN KOTKIN senior military officers, equivalent to lovsky argues that Russia, obviously no sian people in September 2011 that Putin's KGB types, to civilian posts, democracy, is also not sovereign. Rather, Vhe had decided to he their presidenl Gleb Pavlovsky whence they enriched themselves in the its system depends entirely on the global again, for a third term. Insulted by his pre- name of sovereignty and state security? Is economy, a variable Russia cannot control. sumption, as well as the now openly admitted GENIAL'NAYA VLAST' ! SLOVAR' not today's Georgia under Mikheil Saakiish- True, Pavlovsky deems Alexei Kudrin, until spuriousness of Dmitry Medvedev's four- ABSTRAKTSII KREMLYA vili essentially a one-man regime under last year the long-serving Finance Minister, year presidential interlude, much of educated 118pp. Moscow: Evropa. Paperback. which a tiny clique of associates holds sway the "Economic Surkov" for having pre- Russia seethed. In elections to the Duma on 978 5 9739 0207 0 over the executive, parliament and main empted economic risks to the system with December 4, United Russia, the regime's dis- Masha Gessen national television channels, with a constitu- the oil-money stabilization fund. Pavlovsky tributor of spoils, dropped seventy-seven tion altered by fiat and an opposition chased adds, in a further twist of the knife, that in seats, from 315 to 238 (out of 450), despite THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE from the streets with truncheons? We would contrast to the administrative "vertical" of recourse to brazen fraud. The latter, readily The unlikely rise of Vladimir Putin do well to understand that such regimes are Surkov "the budgetary-financial vertical of captured by smartphones, spurred public 314pp. Granta Books. £20. often feeble, even before they reveal them- Kudrin has been built and is functioning". protests on December 10, followed by further 9781 847081490 selves to be so, and yet they are not so easily Many other sobering arguments are voiced: US: Riverhead. $29.95. marches on December 24 and on February 4 dislodged. They wield numerous instru- that the system throws up "simulated dan- 978 1 59448 842 9 of this year, as Russians, despite bitter frosts, ments - tax police, courts, buy-offs - that gers - revolution, putsches, civil war. The turned out across the country in ever-larger Angus Roxburgh are useful only for certain tasks, like holding simulators are tolerated and sometimes numbers, exceeding 100,000 in Moscow. In on to power. Stalin excepted, the more paid"; and that "everyone has an interest in fact, demonstrations, strikes and railway THE STRONGMAN leaders in Russia have pushed for a "strong the current system - and everyone is dis- Vladimir Putin and the struggle for Russia blockades in Russia have been far more prev- state", the more they end up producing weak loyal to it! Everyone works as provocateurs 352pp. I. B. Tauris. £20 (US $28). personal rule and institutional mush. In the alent than generally appreciated, as Graeme 978 178076 016 2 of conflicts, which are settled with bonuses B. Robertson demonstrated in The Politics end, whether the current Russian regime from the pockets of other players". This, we of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing dis- Sean P. Roberts falls or survives, the colossal moderni/alion are told, is called "stability". sent in post-communist Russia (2010), using challenge will persist. Pavlovsky draws a telling contrast with PUTIN'S UNITED RUSSIA PARTY daily briefings dispatched by security offi- Russia's inventive electoral machinations Karl Rove's efforts under George W. Bush 240pp. Routlcdge. £90 (US $ 155). cials to the central interior ministry. Better 9780415669023 were immortalized in Andrew Wilson's Vir- to create a permanent Republican Party known is the circumstance that Russia has tual Politics: Faking democracy in the post- majority, which failed. The "Putin major- some 50 million internet users, and numerous Allen C. Lynch Soviet world (2005), still one of the best ity", he explains, encompasses people on the sites have long taken aim at Putin, corruption books in the field. Now, one of Wilson's col- state budget (such as pensioners), the work- VLADIMIR PUTIN AND RUSSIAN and misrule. ourful subjects, Gleb Pavlovsky, an adviser ing class, state functionaries and the security STATECRAFT whom the Kremlin recently threw under the Still, the Moscow eruptions shocked not 184pp. Potomac. £19.50 (US $24). services, and women. In other words, those just the complacent regime but also the pro- 978 1 59797 298 7 political bus, has written a biting assessment who bore the burdens of the Yeltsin testers, who began to carry banners such as of the regime he long served. Genial'naya "reforms", the losers of the 1990s, became "Mubarak, Gaddafi, Putin". A Mubarak scen- vlast'! Slovar' abstraktsii Kremlya (The the winners of the 2000s. The majority ario (a leader's forced resignation) differs stood out as utterly singular in writings on Genius of Power! A dictionary of the Krem- holds, provided the state budget can con- from a Gaddafi one (civil war and state col- Russia. Throw in Putin's KGB background lin's abstractions) takes the form of a mock tinue to find the largesse for its outlays, and lapse), of course, and neither prospect appears and all the lingering emotions and politics of imitation of regime insider-thinking, with the people continue to stay out of politics. in the offing. What i,s certain is that Russia is the Cold War, and Russia's ostensible singu- stentorian nonsense followed by © in the But now? If the election of 2000 institution- at an impasse, and has been since 2007, when larity becomes magnified. But the world text. Pavlovsky aims to settle scores with the alized the Putin majority, Pavlovsky con- Putin himself began hectoring the country knows myriad examples of personal rule, still more recently demoted arch-manipula- cludes, the election of 2012 will institutional- about the imperative to modernize. caudillos, juntas, in countries small and tor Vladislav Surkov, whose most famous ize the "permanent insulted minority". Boris Yeltsin, too, was once wildly popu- large. Did not Indonesia's Suharto appoint coinage is "sovereign democracy". Pav- Masha Gessen, in The Man Without a lar. But as early as 1993, the reported "yes" Face: The unlikely rise of Vladimir Putin, vote for his ham-handed "presidential" con- follows a different tack in exposing the nasti- stitution was inflated by Yeltsin's own pen, ness of the regime and those who greased its according to his former press secretary. path, yet should have known better (she Yeltsin's re-election campaign in 1996 omits Pavlovsky). Born in the Soviet Union, mobilized state coffers, a near-monopoly of Gessen moved with her family to the United television, and scare tactics about a possible States in 1981, returned to Russia in 1991, at return to Communism, while concealing the age of twenty-four, and became a fine from voters a heart attack the candidate magazine writer and author. Here, too, she suffered while campaigning. (Yeltsin spent employs a chatty, New Yorker-\ike style. "I much of his second term in hospital, woke up because someone was shaking me", referred to as his "dacha".) Putin's own she begins, setting the theme. Gessen, who experience in 1990s St Petersburg had discloses she has two children and lives shown him how Russian elections were won with another woman, counts herself a prime (or lost, as in his patron's case): with smear beneficiary of the Soviet collapse, which campaigns drawing on the slate budget and afforded her freedom and the good life of media, fake supporters to discredit candi- shopping for bathroom fixtures. During the dates, and other toxic tricks. By 1998, colos- 1990s, she was also robbed, however, and sal property theft, mass impoverishment, some of her friends were shot dead, which regional flouting of the federal constitution, spurs her to controlled anger and the search contract murders, separatism, terrorism, for someone to blame. Relying on her own self-serving oligarchs controlling the air- reportage, Oleg Blotsky's Russian-language waves, and foreign diktat had culminated biography of Putin (2001), and interviews in financial and psychological default. with people she tracked down who knew him Yeltsin had the decency to apologize when before he became a national figure - as well he stepped down early on New Year's Eve, as with the talented Paris-based journalist 1999, and named the little-known Putin as Natalya Gevorkyan (once tipped to record his successor. In effect, Putin will also Putin's autobiography), and the avuncular succeed in naming his heir - the same per- London exile Boris Berezovsky - Gessen son Yeltsin picked. denigrates Putin's Soviet-era KGB service. This one-man capture of the State has Vladimir Putin at Novosibirsk Academic Town Technology Park, February 17,2012 She taunts him for having been assigned to a TLS MARCH 2 2012 POLITICS "backwater of a backwater", then has Putin dent . realized that he now bore responsi- Westerners for assuming "Russia was just a years ago, hardly constituted the machine and his KGB pals secretly instituting a bility for the entire crumbling edifice of a Western country waiting to be freed". Then that supporters and enemies alike imagined. gangster regime already in 1990s St Peters- former superpower". Once, she acknow- he indulges his own disappointment, admit- This is the point, however, at which we could burg, which they subsequently manage to ledges that a governance "problem Putin ting he did not foresee post-Soviet Russia have used some political science to elucidate impose on all of Russia. How, one might was trying to address .