Putin and Putinism

Ronald J. Hill, Ottorino Cappelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317967453
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After two terms as president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin handed over to his hand-picked successor Dmitri Medvedev on 7 May 2008, and became prime minister. As president, Putin moved swiftly and effectively to overcome the chaotic legacy of his predecessor, post-Soviet Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin. Focusing on rebuilding the authority of the Russian state, and taking advantage of the rise in world prices of the country's main asset – oil and natural gas – Putin won unassailable popularity at home and caused apprehension around the world, particularly in Russia's immediate neighbourhood. His methods of rule caused anxiety among liberals and democrats inside Russia and abroad. The legacy of Putin's presidency poses challenges that demand interpretation. He has not departed from the Russian or the world political scene, and the need to understand and come to terms with Putin's Russia has not diminished.

These essays by an international team of authors are based on presentations to a working conference held in Naples, Italy, in May 2008, supplemented by contributions from authors who were not present at the conference, in order to present a wider selection of views and interpretations of the Putin phenomenon.

This book was published as a special issue of Communist Studies and Transition Politics.

Rus United

Ken Jowitt

Castles

Vladimir Putin and his companions are attempting to articulate and consolidate a new Russian political identity, not simply enhance and stabilize Russia’s state power and their own.¹ The challenge is conceptualizing this effort in a more theoretical and less polemical vein than the current Manichean binary of democracy versus autocracy.

At present, Russia is an instance of indecisive political consolidation, of concerted but still reversible efforts to create a stable and viable Russian identity. All efforts at consolidating a new identity, whether personal or organizational, take place in hostile, not neutral or supportive, environments. Every effort to create a new ‘class of things’, a new way of life, requires, as Mary Douglas emphasizes, polarization and exclusion:² ‘a clear and opposed classification of members and opponents’. I can identify four consolidation imperatives integrally connected to creating a new identity that, when acted on, create a ‘castle’ identity:³

1. ‘distance’ from existing and alternative identities;
2. an equal stress on ‘difference’ from the same;
3. dominance over competing, ‘subverting’ identities – when the new regime has adequate power; when not, defiance as a substitute mode of asserting and protecting the nascent identity;
4. concretizing the new but fragile identity; concretization reflects the underlying anxiety of the other three imperatives.

The rationale for these ‘castle-like’ emphases is always the same: the imperative of shielding and nurturing a new way of life from what are perceived as powerful and insidious forces intent on penetrating, disordering, and contaminating the nascent new identity. The four features – distance, difference, dominance or defiance, and concretization – can be found in all efforts to consolidate a new identity, regardless of the substantial, even essential, differences in the particular identities and cases being studied.

Jehovah’s statement to the Israelites that He has made a clear separation between them and ‘the nations’ reflects the imperative of distance; they must not marry with them [contaminate yourself] because the Israelites are a ‘holy people’ – that asserts superior difference;⁴ and, of course, His promise to the Israelites that they will dominate their own territory concretizes their distinct identity. In formal terms, these castle-like imperatives inform all who seek to consolidate a new identity, not merely stabilize their environment and their own position.

Historically speaking, Putin and his cohort are attempting to create a ‘castle’ consisting of state mercantilism and state nationalism. This Russian neo-mercantilist ‘castle’ will ideally provide a barricaded site within which a Russian economy can be nurtured and shielded from what is seen as the intrusive and alien force of Americanization disguised as globalization – a ‘residential fortress’ within which a new Russian nation can be protected from premature exposure to powerful and ‘alien’ Western cultural identities, while allowing for the selective adaptation of Western features. The Putin elite foresees a Russian ‘castle’ with selectively raised and lowered ‘draw-bridges’ as a necessary condition for the development of a Russian civic polity, created under the auspices of a state-led, -nurtured and insulated dominant party capable of combining the universal of democracy with the particular elements of its own culture.

In this connection, the desire to create a party, United Russia, that will politically dominate for ten to 20 years is completely consistent with efforts to create a castle-like polity, and formally resembles developments after the Second World War in Japan, Germany and Italy; and also what happened in early nineteenth-century America when the dominant Democratic–Republicans provided three presidents over a two-decade period, all from Virginia, after an initial period of Federalism consolidation;⁵ and in twentieth-century Ireland where, after independence, Fianna Fáil was (and remains) the popular political hegemon and for a critical period of time De Valera concretized Ireland’s identity.

In no way does this mean that all forms of single-party dominance contribute to a vital political and economic entity. The Colorado Party ‘led’ Paraguay for 61 years with nothing to show for it other than favouritism, poverty and violence. And Brezhnev’s 18-year rule led to the melt-down of both Chernobyl and the Soviet Union. However, successful consolidation of a new political identity does require a critical period of political hegemony for the purpose of institutional definition.

If the effort of Putin and his companions is indeed to create a Russian neomercantilist ‘castle’ identity, then it should be possible to identify a consistent set of regime efforts and features emphasizing the imperatives of distance, difference, dominance or defiance, and concretization. Many of these actions and efforts will have multiple dimensions: they will speak to more than one identity-consolidation imperative.

Putin’s efforts to ‘distancè the new Russia from existing Russian features – cultural, social, economic and political – are pronounced and numerous. Take language, for example. W. Robert Connor in his study of fifth-century Athens makes this observation:

it becomes possible at roughly this time to learn how Athenians were speaking about politics. And since the way people speak often contains important clues to the way they act, the study of political vocabulary may prove a valuable instrument for understanding Athenian history.⁶

In the case of the present Russian leadership, the use of crude, blunt, at times vulgar language may be seen as a striking effort by the relatively weak Russian leadership to distance itself from the West with one of its few available weapons: verbal abuse. Given the difficulty of exercising equivalent power and the impossibility of exercising dominant power, crude language is an expression of defiance in a world that the Russian leadership considers both threatening and demeaning.

Ironically, the use of crude speech in pursuit of an edged distance from the West is given an inadvertent boost by the visceral hostility of Western and Russian critics towards the ‘sinister’ Putin and his gang of vulgar ‘provincials’ with their alleged combination of parochial inferiority and KGB sense of superiority. While presumably offended, Putin and his tusovka⁷ probably find this hostility helpful in their effort to distance themselves from what they see as the luring but demeaning West.

Nationally, Putin’s political style reflects the imperatives of distance, difference, dominance and concretization. Distance: a politician who despises politics, and likens politicians to Tampax salesmen; a political leader who heads Russia’s dominant party, United Russia, but refuses to join it. In this and many other ways, Putin’s leadership resembles the Patriot-King of the eighteenth century ‘who espouses no party, but governs like the common father of his people’.⁸ In insulating – distancing – himself from the very constituencies that support and admire him, Putin is Periclean. In the course of his entire career Pericles had dinner with a friend only once, and took a route to the Agora that enabled him to avoid anyone from his philoi, phratry or kin.⁹ Putin is no Russian Pericles; however, his behaviour in this respect is similar and has the same significance and rationale: distance and difference.

Domestically, the imperatives of difference, distance and dominance have been realized in great measure by creating a ‘vertical’ power which in good measure has replaced, or at least contained, the violently weak politically disconnected Yeltsin reality of oligarchs, parties, governors, paid media and near-secessionist regions.

The difference in leadership styles between Yeltsin and Putin can be likened to that between William Durant and Alfred Sloan in the developmental history of General Motors.¹⁰ Durant, known as Billy, presided like Yeltsin, in an indulgent, ineffectual, amateurish and emotional manner over a largely disconnected set of ‘enterprises’.¹¹ Durant was replaced by Alfred Sloan: tall, thin, dour and slightly hard of hearing – in short, a leader who placed a premium on distance, difference and dominance. Putin’s metaphorical (not physical) resemblance to Sloan had the same effect in Russia as Sloan did in General Motors. Putin–Sloan sent a powerful signal to their respective enterprises that a new ethos of discipline was challenging the existing ethos of indulgence. To change metaphors, but not comparisons, the jolly ‘Dr Watson’ (Yeltsin) gave way to the very different, distant and dominant ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (Putin).

Political language serves the imperatives of difference as well as distance. If, on one level, the vulgar and insulting statements by Putin and his cohort are ‘distancing’ tactics, at another level the Russian leadership’s idiom has a more serious significance in establishing ‘difference’ from the West. The Russian elite’s political language is pure Thrasymychus.¹² Its language portrays a world of struggle, of weak and strong, where justice is possible only between equals, and state interests, while often disguised by talk of soft power and human rights, are really and always about the pursuit of power and self-interest. From this perspective, exchanges of mutual interest are natural and the most states can achieve. Given this world-view, it is no surprise that the ‘unmasking’ of Western talk about democratic ideology and values is a persistent theme of the Putin elite. Putin’s ‘ideologist’, Vladislav Surkov, in typically blunt terms says: ‘I have a feeling that even if Moscow was run by a gang of cannibals, it would very quickly be called a democratic government if they took pains to give away the right things to the right people’¹³ – the right people being powerful Western interests. Putin’s view of the world is equally clear:

[we] need to build our home and make it strong and well protected … The wolf knows how to eat … and is not about to listen to anyone … How quickly all the pathos of the need to fight for human rights and democracy is laid aside the moment the need to realize one’s own interests come to the fore.¹⁴

Putin’s political dominance is evident in his ability to give up his presidential office and successfully designate his successor, without any evidence of factional or individual opposition. His personal dominance also concretizes Russia’s identity: Putin is the new sovereign democratic Russia. Again, the reference should be Pericles, who, as Thucydides noted, ‘by his rank, ability and known integrity, was able to exercise an independent control over the masses … in short, what was nominally a democracy became in his hands government by the first citizen’.¹⁵

To date, Putin has succeeded in creating a certain type of consolidation, based on international defiance and national predominance. To dramatize the quality of consolidation based on defiance I will risk an unlikely but evocative comparison between the Putin elite and American teenagers entering junior high school.

At the time when young American teenagers enter the seventh grade (age 12–13 years old) remarkable things happen. The door to their room, formerly open and parent-friendly (in Russia’s case to its ‘Western parents’), is now closed and often plastered with rude instructions to stay out. Inside their room is a barely recognizable person whose hair colour, music and language have become odd to the point of being nearly unrecognizable, and whose demeanour and behaviour is increasingly sullen, rude, even combative. From a pre-adolescent (‘neo-colonial’) identity blurred and entangled with their parents, a decidedly hostile process of identity definition and differentiation occurs. Belligerent distance, shocking differences, and defiance are typical. Analogous features abound in the Russian case, among them, Putin and Medvedev showing up in their black leather jackets to a rock concert, and Putin hurling hurtful, despicably juvenile insul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Abstracts
• Introduction: Perspectives on Putin
• 1. Rus United
• 2. Big Money as an Obstacle to Democracy in Russia
• 3. Pre-Modern State-Building in Post-Soviet Russia
• 4. Putin, Professional Politician
• 5. The Russian Elite in Transition
• 6. The Putin Phenomenon
• 7. Putin in Russian Fiction
• Index