POLITICS 7 Sticking power ladimir Putin announced to the Rus­ Sl EHlEN KOTKIN senior military officers, equivalent to lovsky argues that Russia, obviously no sian people in Septemher 2011 that Putin's KGB types, to civilian posts. democracy. is also not sovereign. Rather, Vhe had decided to be iheir president Uleb Pavlovsky whence they enriched themselves in the it~ system depends cntirely on the global again, for a third tenn. Insulted by his pre­ name of sovereignty and state security? Is econollly. a \ ariable Russia cannot control. sumption, as well as the now openly admitted G E N It\ L" NAY A V LAS T'! S L 0 V A R ' not today's Georgia under Mikheil Saakash­ True, Pavlovsky (keIl1~ Alexei Kudrin, until spuriousness of Dmitry Medvedev's fOllf­ ABSTRAKTSII KREMLYA viii essentially a one-man regime under last year the long-scn'itlg Finance Minister, year presidential interlude, much of educated 118pp. Moscow: Evropa. Paperback. which a tiny clique of associates holds sway the "Economic Surkov" for haying pre­ 9785973902070 Russia seethed. In elections to the Duma on ----- 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-sevell tion altered by fiat and an opposition chased adds, in a further Iwist 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 h,lS been built and is functioning". 978 I 84708 1490 protests on Decemher 10, follolved by further 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 ')n February 4 dislodged. They wield numerous instru­ 978 I 594488429 that the systcm throws up "simulated dan­ of this year, as Russians, despite bitter frosts. ments - tax police, courts, buy-offs - that gers -- revolution, put~;chcs. civil "ar. The turned out across the country in ever-I:1l r:er Anp.l1~ Roxburgh are useful only for certain tasks, like holding simulators are tolerated and sometimes numbers, exceeding 100,000 ill Moscow. In on to power. Stalin excepted, the more paid"; and that "e\eryone has an interest in THE STRONGMAN fact, demonstrations, strikes and railway leaders in Russia have pushed for a "strong the cllrrcnt system - and everyone is dis­ Vladimir Pl'tin and the struggle for Russia blockades in Russia have been far more prev­ state", the more they end up producing weak loyal to it' Eycryone \\orks as prmocateurs 352pl' I. B. lauris. £20 (US $28). alent than generally appreciated, as Graeme 978 I 780760162 personal rule and institutional mush. In the of conflicts. which are scttled with bonuses B. Robertson demonstrated in The Politics ----- end, whether the current Russian regime from thc pockets of other players". This, we t of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing dis­ Sean P. Roberts falls or survives, the colossal modernization are told, is calJed "stability". sent ill post-communist Russia (2010), using challenge will persist. Pavlov sky 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. Routledge. £90 (US $155). cials to the central interior ministry. Better 9780415669023 were immortalized in Andrew Wilson's Vir­ to create a permanent Republican Party I known is the circumstance that Russia has tual Politics: Faking democracy ill the 1'ost­ 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 i 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 I VLADIMIR PUTIN AND RUSSIAN and misrule. ourful subjects, Gleb Pavlovsky, an adviser ing class, state functionaries and the security STATECRAFT Still, the Moscow eruptions shocked not I 84pp. Potomac. £19.50 (US $24). whom the Kremlin recently threw under the 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 I testers, who began to carry banners such as of the regime he long served. Genial'naya "reforms", the losers of the 1990s, became I "Mubarak, Gaddafi, Putin". A Mubarak scen­ vlast'f Slovar' abstraktsii Kremlya (The the winners of the 2000s. The majority ario (a leader's forced resignation) differs stood out as utter!} 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 is 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. Pavlov sky aims to settle scores with the alized the Putin majority, Pavlovsky con­ II Putin himself began hectoring the country knows myJiarl examples of personal rule, still more recently demoted arch-manipula­ cludes, the election of 2012 will institutional­ about the imperative to modernize. caudillos. jlllltas, in countries small and tor Vladislav Surkov, whose most famous ize the "permanent insulted minority". Boris YeJtsin, too, was once wildly popu­ large. Did not Tndnnesia's Suharto appoint coinage is "sovereign democracy". Pav- Masha Gessen, in The Mall Without a lar. But as early as 1993, the reported "yes" Face: The IIlllikely rise of Vladimir Purill, 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 fonner press secretary. path, yet should have known better (she YeJtsin'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. Nell" Yorker-like style. "1 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 e\ecticlls \vere won with another woman, COllnts herself a prime (or lost, as in his patron' s case:: wi th smear beneficiary of the Soviet collapse, which campaigns drawing on the state 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, hO\vever, and sal property theft, mass imp:)Verishment, 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', Russian-language waves, and foreign diktat had culminated biography of Putin (200 I), and interviews in financial and psychological default. with people she tracked down who knew him Yeltsin had the decency to apclogize when before he became a national figure - as well he stepped down early on Ne\v Year's Eve, as with the talented Paris-based journalist 1999, and named the little-kncwn Putin as Natalya Gevorkyan (ollce 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 tbe State has Vladimir Putin at Novosibirsk Academic Town Technology Park, February 17,2012 She taunts him for having been assigl!ed to a TLS MARCH 2 2012 8 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 f0r the entire crumbling edifice of a Western country waiting to be freed". Then that supporters and enemies alike imagined. gangster regime already in 19908 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 sOllle political science to elucidate impose on all of Russia.