The Putin System: An Investigation

by Enzo Reale (October 2019)

 


Faces of Russia, Boris Grigoriev, 1923

 

 

 

In the rest of the country, United Russia generally held positions, with some exceptions in the far east, where Zhirinovsky nationalists prevailed. In all, several municipalities, 16 governors, the parliaments of 13 republics and provinces of the federation, 4 deputies of the state Duma were renewed.

 

 

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1. The Protests

 

cancellation of signatures, the Kremlin reacted to the protesting climax first by the official rhetoric according to which any organized dissent is attributable to unidentified “external interferences,” then with the use of force and arrests. Both counteroffensives missed the objective, highlighting difficulties in interpreting the nature of the movement. On the one hand, the reference to the action of “foreign powers” and the risk of a return to institutional and social “chaos” of the 1990s is unlikely to take root in a generation of millenials that have not experienced Yeltsin’s reforms and the economic crisis of the first post-communist decade. On the other hand, the repressive action of the police and the judiciary seemed to have no clear logic, alternating between control tactics, massive detentions of protesters, targeted and repeated threats to political representatives more or less involved in protests (Sobol, Yashin, Galyamina, Zhdanov, Gudkov and the same Navalny), and releases and rearrests.

 

2. The Perspective of the Kremlin

 

tsar or to comply with protocols than to make effective decisions. Centralization becomes arbitrariness. The bureaucracy tends to become rigid; the Putin system contains elements of degeneration.

 

3. The Nature of the Regime: (Dis)continuity, Memory, Identity

 

Homo Sovieticus presents certain risks. According to the famous definition of the father of Soviet sociology, Yuri Levada, the characteristics of Homo Sovieticus are obedience, servility, and submission. Homo Sovieticus blindly believes in state paternalism and renounces any space of personal independence (adapting this way to the society built around and above him while the regime in turn depends on this type of person to perpetuate itself). It’s enough to read the magnificent collective fresco by Svetlana Aleksievic in her book Secondhand Time to realize that the definition was no longer valid, at least not completely, already in the last years of perestroika and that the concept of Homo Sovieticus had definitively dissolved in the general feeling of hope and fear of freedom of the Yeltsinian era. It’s true that the sense of loss nourished in some sections of the population created a morbid attachment to the past but it was not so much an ideological as a psychological association with Soviet history. The gap left by the “end of a world” was filled by the advent of Putin. Although initially he may have been perceived as a passing figure, a simple link in the transitional chain, Putin ended up embodying in himself that need for security and order produced by the emptiness and confusion of the first post-communist decade. A Soviet-style, gray but pragmatic official (a former KGB officer), he concentrated in his person the nostalgic feeling of those who felt orphaned of the country in which they grew up and of the only system they had known, even though it was tragic and oppressive. On this basis he built his political career.

 

 

 

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4. Russia Between Two Fires

 

Russian transition. We could date from the beginning of Putin’s second presidential term the time when he turned from a possible perspective of integration with the West into a Russocentric vision. With the help of the erratic policies of Europe and the United States, Russia understands that there is no common home from Lisbon to Vladivostok. And it reacts badly, beginning to think of itself as a country without friends, experiencing a growing feeling of isolation. Without a state ideology, victimhood prevails, and with it a certain desire for revenge. It begins an assertive, often aggressive, phase that leads to the war games in Georgia and Ukraine and to interventions in Syria and Latin America.

 

 

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Enzo Reale is an Italian journalist living in Barcelona who writes about international politics. His articles have appeared in Atlantico Quotidiano, L’Opinione, and Il Foglio and he is the author of 1972 (I posti della ragione erano tutti occupati). You can follow him on Twitter at @1972book.

NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast