Dmitri Furman, Dvizhenie po spirali: Politicheskaia sistema Rossii v riadu drugikh politicheskikh sistem, 2010, Moscow, Ves’ mir, 168 pp., 250 roubles, ISBN 978-5-7777-0480-1
When Vladimir Putin, Russian president from 2000 to 2008 and prime minister since 2008, announced he would again seek the presidency in 2012, it seemed overwhelmingly likely he would once more glide to victory. Eligible for two more consecutive terms, whose length has been constitutionally extended to 6 years, Putin could conceivably remain in power until 2024 – making his tenure as long as that of Tsar Aleksandr I. The upheavals that followed the parliamentary elections of December 2011, however, began to sow seeds of doubt about the smoothness of Putin's return to the Kremlin – and indeed about the long-term viability of the system over which he presides.
But what kind of political system is it? Western observers tend to see the Putin regime as an alarming, neo-Soviet phenomenon, representing a stark change for the worse from the flawed but democratic pluralism of the Yeltsin years. Dmitri Furman's Spiral Motion: The Russian Political System alongside Other Political Systems presents a lucid challenge to such conventional views, and offers insights into the country's possible future trajectory. Furman, who passed away in July 2011, was Russia's leading comparative political scientist, unusual among his peers in viewing his country mainly alongside other former Soviet states, rather than looking for European or American parallels. Seeking to identify features and dynamics that span much of the post-Soviet space, he developed the concept of ‘imitation democracy’: a type of regime in which formally democratic legitimation systems and ideological statements coexist with a total absence of actual alternatives to the present regime. From Belarus to Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan to Russia, the period since 1991 has seen the emergence and consolidation of political systems in which it has been impossible for the opposition to win power.
These ‘imitation democratic’ systems developed out of a fundamental contradiction: the mismatch between the new governments’ supposedly democratic goals and the yawning lack of popular legitimacy for their programme of capitalist transformation. In the case of Russia, Yeltsin increasingly resorted to undemocratic means in order to force this through – notably launching a military assault on the democratically elected parliament in October 1993. But as Furman makes clear, the post-Soviet space was strewn with comparable confrontations, most eventually won by presidents who then moved to consolidate their positions, blocking any possible challenges to their rule.
In Furman's view, then, the neo-authoritarian turn that so distresses Western observers of Russia did not begin with Putin, but with Yeltsin. Many scholars, both in Russia and outside it, draw a sharp line between the two leaders – the former seen as an erratic but essentially democratic statesman, the latter a sad reversion to Soviet type. But Furman provides a different view, seeing the entire two-decade span since 1991 as the unfolding of a single process, within which Russia's post-Soviet presidents embody distinct phases of the same overall system. The ‘revolutionary’ period of destruction of the old regime in the 1990s was followed by one of consolidation in the 2000s; Putin, as the beneficiary of the political heavy lifting done in the 1990s, represents the logical continuation of those trends rather than a break with them.
Furman devotes two substantial chapters, occupying the bulk of the book, to the emergence and consolidation of the ‘imitation democratic’ model in Russia, with a third describing its ‘golden age’ – the high-water mark coming in 2008, when Putin's smooth handover to Medvedev, his nominated successor, demonstrated the president's complete control over the political system. The remainder of the book is devoted to that system's likely futures. Here Furman again stands in contrast to the doom-laden pronouncements in much of the mainstream media. For he argues that the regime's very solidity inevitably brings ossification – much as it did for the USSR. Two factors make the current regime more vulnerable to its own internal contradictions than the Soviet Union: firstly, Russia today, unlike the USSR, is supposed to hold meaningful elections, making the contrast between democratic façade and alternative-free reality all the more acute. Second, compared with Communist period, there is a gaping absence of ideological justifications for the regime (the concepts of ‘managed democracy’ and ‘sovereign democracy’ proving too patently hollow to function). Like their Soviet predecessors, moreover, Russia's current rulers are increasingly losing touch with reality.
Such a system, writes Furman, is inevitably headed for a crisis. He outlines two possible outcomes: either prolonged political turmoil followed, eventually, by the construction of a genuinely democratic system; or the installation of another ‘imitation democracy’. He does not say which is more likely; it seems clear the first is more to his liking, but the second should not be discounted. As growing numbers of ordinary Russians express their dissatisfaction with the farcical prospect of permanent Putinism, Furman's incisive analysis can only become more topical.
Tony Wood, New Left Review, London, UK