Fascistoid Russia: Whither Putin’s Brittle Realm?
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The massive demonstrations that rocked Russia in the aftermath of the Duma elections of December 4, 2011, surprised everyone, including most Russians. But they shouldn’t have. The conditions for such an upheaval have been ripening as a result of the growing power and decrepitude of Putinism. It is likely that popular mobilization will continue, and that the regime’s days may be numbered.
Observers generally agree that the fraudulent elections, in which the pro-regime United Russia party won 49.3 percent of the vote, sparked the countrywide demonstrations on December 10th and December 24th, in which, respectively, an estimated thirty to fifty thousand and eighty to one hundred thousand people participated in Moscow alone. They also agree that President Dmitri Medvedev’s September 24th announcement that he and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would swap places via the March 2012 presidential elections set the outrage in motion. And finally, they agree that the leading role in the demonstrations belonged to Russia’s middle class and youth.
Although this story is correct, it is incomplete. The roots of the Russian uprising are found in the nature of the regime Putin constructed and in its inherent brittleness and ineffectiveness. Too many Western and Russian observers took the regime’s claims of stability at face value, causing them to miss the fact that Putin had actually built a profoundly unstable political system, one that was likely to decay, decline, and possibly even crash. As the early warnings of the December protests suggest, this may be starting to happen.
It was during Putin’s first run as president in 2000 that the question of whether Russia was a “managed democracy” or a “competitive authoritarianism” first arose. For those who thought it was a flawed democracy, the modifier hinted at authoritarian imperfections. For those who considered it a flawed authoritarian state, the modifier hinted at residual democracy. Either way, Russia was supposed to be a “hybrid” political system combining elements of both democracy and authoritarianism. For a while, the emphasis on hybridity made some sense—especially after Medvedev, the ostensible liberal, replaced Putin as president in 2008. Medvedev’s liberalism rapidly proved to be illusory, however, while his connivance with Putin to transform the March 2012 presidential elections into a sham put an end to notions that Putin’s Russia was anything other than an authoritarian state.
Except that that designation isn’t quite accurate either. Authoritarian states are typically ruled by faceless bureaucrats or dour generals. Putin, in contrast, has charisma and he is popular. This factor makes Russia sufficiently different from run-of-the-mill authoritarian states to qualify it as “fascistoid”—an ugly word indicating that its hybridity quickly shifted from some combination of democracy and authoritarianism in Putin’s early years in power to some combination of authoritarianism and fascism today.