All authoritarian regimes are based on a mix of coercion and inspiration, fear and promise, trickstery and grand narrative. But to be successful, authoritarian leaders need to stand for something. The more convincing their ideational offer, the less coercion they have to use and the cheaper and more lasting the system is likely to be. Thus, the autocrats of this world routinely use various ideologies – from Islamism to communism and from monarchism to anti-colonialism – as their ideological foundations. But the moment they exhaust their ideational drive, their countdown starts. This is the situation Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, finds himself in.

What Putin stood for?

Over the years Putin became associated with a set of ideas he stood for and campaigned on. These ideas were convincing and appealing to most of the Russian public. When he came to power in 1999-2000 Putin’s key selling point was the promise of wiping out terrorism and fending off threats to Russian territorial integrity. With a new war in Chechnya raging and bombings of apartments blocks in several Russian cities including Moscow this was both urgent and salient.

In the 2003-2004 election cycle Putin launched and then rode a wave of anti-oligarchic sentiment with promises to fight corruption, clean up the economic system and squeeze the super-rich. As part of that campaign Khodorkosvky was put in prison. The 2007-2008 campaign season was all centred on Russia’s newly found geopolitical greatness and ‘standing up from its knees’, as the phenomenon was advertised by pro-Kremlin loyalists. It was all expressed through intense anti-Western hysteria invoking the dangers of US-sponsored a colour revolution and geopolitical encirclement. This is how over the years Putin chipped into the ideological profile of what could conventionally be termed as Putinism.

Reality Checks

But Putin has nearly run out of ideational appeal. He has preciously few new ideas to oil his frailing political system. Read the rest of this entry »

The existence of divisions among Russia’s democratic forces is proverbial. But the same can be said of Russian nationalism. Nationalism is a movement that is not only increasingly split between an imperial, expansionist and (sometimes) cosmopolitan version, on the one hand, and an introvert, defensive and anti-immigrant one the other, but also in the throes of mutation as it attracts moderates and democrats who would previously have given it a wide berth.

This presents different challenges for everyone. The Russian government fears that a nationalist-democratic consolidation on an anti-Putinist platform would make a much more formidable adversary than the ‘official’ opposition allowed in parliament. Russian democrats also have their own dilemmas as their flirtation with nationalism is on the verge of evolving into a marriage of convenience, a combination that could produce either their elixir of life or a toxic poison.

From imperialist to defensive nationalism

Nationalism is like software that can run on different platforms – from Windows to Android. As nationalism normally has little to say about economic or social policies, it can easily merge easier with other left- or right-wing ideologies, increasing exponentially the number of mutations to which it can be subject. Read the rest of this entry »

OpenDemocracy.net: The preliminary results from Russia’s parliamentary elections are bad news for the Kremlin. Putin’s pet party, United Russia, got slightly less than 50% and it lost its constitutional majority in the Duma. That translates into a 14% fall from the last elections in 2007 for a party that had never seen its share of the vote decline at federal elections. The question now asked is a simple one: is this just a temporary setback or the beginning of the end for Edinaya Rossia and the Putin consensus?

By the standards of Western democracies, falling just short of the 50% mark after three years of global economic crisis and 12 years in power would be a stellar victory. But in Putin’s Russia this is a serious setback for two main reasons. First of all, the elections were neither free, nor fair. Evidence of ballot stuffing is already swirling around the internet, and the election campaign was heavily biased in favour of United Russia. Federal TV channels and local authorities worked hard to persuade and pressurise people to vote for United Russia. Under normal campaign circumstances and with no ballot stuffing Putin’s party would perhaps have got somewhere closer to 30-35% of the vote. The authorities know that. This is hardly a rock-solid foundation for the supposedly Teflon President Putin who wants to be a fatherly leader of the nation for a life-time. His lifetime. Read the rest of this entry »

A visa-free regime with the EU is perhaps the one thing that most Russians want most from the EU and is a key priority for Russia’s EU policy. The EU and Russia have agreed on a set of ‘joint steps’ towards a visa-free regime. The issue of visa is hugely important for the EU as well. It resonates with domestic debates on immigration. It also poses huge logistical challenges for EU member states. The highest number of EU visas in the world is issued in Russia and in the top ten EU consulates worldwide judged by the number of visas issued, nine are in Russia. So, here are two blog posts looking into some of the issues related to the perspective of EU-Russia visa-free travel. The first deals with the state of play in EU and Russian visa policies, and the second will deal with the perspectives for visa-free travel in the future. Read the rest of this entry »