As the political mastermind for Vladimir Putin for most of the 2000s, Mr Surkov engineered a system of make-believe that worked devilishly well in the real world. Russia was a land of imitation political parties, stage-managed media and fake social movements, undergirded by the post-modern sense that nothing was genuine. Mr Surkov called his creation “sovereign democracy,” a term whose vagueness revealed its flexibility. It kept the surface of Russia’s managed political system calm until December 2011, when opposition to Mr Putin’s rule broke into the open.
Friday, May 10, 2013
What the departure of Vladislav Surkov means for the government
Russian politics - An ideologue’s exit
As the political mastermind for Vladimir Putin for most of the 2000s, Mr Surkov engineered a system of make-believe that worked devilishly well in the real world. Russia was a land of imitation political parties, stage-managed media and fake social movements, undergirded by the post-modern sense that nothing was genuine. Mr Surkov called his creation “sovereign democracy,” a term whose vagueness revealed its flexibility. It kept the surface of Russia’s managed political system calm until December 2011, when opposition to Mr Putin’s rule broke into the open.
It was the emergence of the protest movement that cost Mr Surkov his job. He was blamed for not predicting or forestalling the protests last year. Some whispered that he had sympathies for the opposition—he once called anti-Kremlin demonstrators “our best people.” When Mr Putin returned to the Kremlin as president he demoted his former spin doctor to the prime minister’s office to oversee economic innovation, an effort linked with the previous president, Dmitry Medvedev (who is now tenuously hanging on as prime minister).
As the political mastermind for Vladimir Putin for most of the 2000s, Mr Surkov engineered a system of make-believe that worked devilishly well in the real world. Russia was a land of imitation political parties, stage-managed media and fake social movements, undergirded by the post-modern sense that nothing was genuine. Mr Surkov called his creation “sovereign democracy,” a term whose vagueness revealed its flexibility. It kept the surface of Russia’s managed political system calm until December 2011, when opposition to Mr Putin’s rule broke into the open.
