Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Political theater in Moscow

Kathy Lally's analysis in The Washington Post suggests there is no politics in Russia, only theater.

Awaiting Russian presidential vote, is Putin-Medvedev rift all part of the game?

Less than a year before the presidential election, with the country ruled in deep secrecy, political discourse has been reduced to parsing every remark by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev for signs of their intentions…

“I believe there is no competition,” says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a member of Putin’s United Russia party and a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences who studies the decision-making elite. “Our politics are a theater. There are directors and a script. And for some reason they love it when the public says there are conflicts.”

Lilia Shevtsova, a mordant critic of the administration and a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, uses remarkably similar language in reaching a comparable conclusion. “There are no politics,” she says. “Politics exist where you have an independent media, attentive audience and unpredictable script. What’s interesting is that the Kremlin supports this story-telling.”

In the Soviet era, outsiders divined the workings of the Politburo by studying Red Square parades to see who was standing next to whom on top of Lenin’s tomb…

Today’s Kremlinologists rely on public comments that may eventually prove just as misleading…

Shevtsova… sees a resemblance between the Kremlinology of the Leonid Brezhnev years — Brezhnev was head of the Soviet Union from 1964 until he died in 1982 — and now. “We have personalized power now, as we did then,” she says, “and we all have to remain guessers. We still are wondering who is behind the curtain.”…

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Labels: leadership, politics, Russia