19 February, 2012

Eurozine - The sense of an ending - Stephen Holmes, Ivan Krastev Putin and the decline of "no-choice" politics

Eurozine - The sense of an ending - Stephen Holmes, Ivan Krastev Putin and the decline of "no-choice" politics: By engineering rigged elections that nobody bothered or dared to protest, Putin managed to conceal his regime's deepest secret, namely that Russia, rather than being misgoverned, is governed very laxly if at all. Contrary to the predominant view, Putin's real power has never extended much beyond Moscow. Russia's strongman has been strong enough to prevent anyone from aspiring to replace him; but he has spectacularly failed in his attempts to rule his country. Putin is not the boss of Russia. It is more realistic to see him as a hostage to regional elites. He did not succeed in overcoming the weakness of the state. He succeeded only in hiding it to some extent. His vaunted vertical of power is a sham, boiling down to a guarantee of impunity to regime loyalists and a chance for his inner circle to ascend into a charmed circle of unimaginable wealth.

The latter arrangement is a different kind of vertical entirely, resembling the mountain climber's rope by which a few friends manage to pull themselves up and away from their less fortunate fellow citizens, as in Vladimir Vysotsky's 1967 film Vertikal. What puzzles any serious observer of Russian politics is not the ability of the elites to get things done or to impose their will, but rather their ability to steal the natural wealth of the nation with only minimal resort to violence. Putin has never been especially strong, in other words. But he has succeeded in creating a system that is relatively stable because it makes him look much stronger than he actually is.

Until now, that is.