Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, September 24, 2010

Are the details meaningful?

When Putin moved from the presidency to the premiership and the constitution was changed, most commentators thought that Putin would be heading back to the presidency at the next election. Nothing seems to have changed.

Why Russia needs me

VLADIMIR PUTIN… had a fun summer… He took a spin on a Harley… had a go at flying a firefighting jet… fired darts at a grey whale, and most recently drove thousands of miles across Russia’s tundra in a canary-yellow Lada accompanied by dozens of foreign-made security cars and two spare Ladas—just in case…

In any democratic country such public-relations stunts could have been mistaken for part of an election campaign. In Russia, where political competition is long gone, they are part of Mr Putin’s political housekeeping, helping to keep up his image as a good tsar who is the flesh and blood of his people…

More than two years into his presidency, Dmitry Medvedev seems no more powerful than when he was, in effect, appointed to the job by Mr Putin…

Only the state and its guardians are capable of taking a country of Russia’s size and history forward, the argument goes. As Vladimir Yakunin, the head of Russia’s railways and a former KGB officer who is close to Mr Putin, argued in a letter to The Economist last week, state capitalism of the Chinese kind “simply works better”. Russia’s past attempts to “reject all history and tradition, combined with the blind imitation of foreign experience, impeded the country’s political and economic development for 20 years.”

Yet the real problem is not that the state in Russia is too powerful or ambitious, but that it fails in its basic functions of providing adequate health care, security, justice and infrastructure. At the same time, corruption has become institutionalized…

The main role of the state, to Mr Putin and his entourage, is to keep political order; or, to put it differently, to protect the state and the vested interests of its bureaucracy…

Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed.

Do you know about the NEW fourth edition of What You Need to Know?

Labels: leadership, politics, Russia