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3 - Political power and factionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Richard Sakwa
Affiliation:
University of Kent, Canterbury
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Summary

In the exit from communism many had called for a ‘firm hand’, even of the Pinochet type where political liberty is traded in exchange for economic growth. Others stressed the Bonapartist features of Putin's rule, a system defined in Marxist terms as ‘an authoritarian government that temporarily gains relative independence and reigns above the classes of society, mediating between them’. Medushevsky, for example, has developed this model, arguing that the presidential representatives at the head of the seven federal districts (polpredy) acted as the functional equivalents of Napoleonic prefects. Zyuganov also argued that ‘In recent years Russia has seen the emergence and strengthening of the Russian variety of Bonapartism. The regime emerged as a result of a fierce power struggle between clans of oligarchs. It is trying to balance between comprador capital and the mass of the population robbed by capital and the bureaucrats that are in its service.’ He insisted that like all Bonapartist regimes, it was unstable and could not resolve the fundamental problems facing the country. Our model suggests that rather than a clear-cut Bonapartist regime, balanced between the established bureaucratic classes and the nascent middle class and bourgeoisie, the presidency seeks to retain its independence by manoeuvring between factions and quasi-class structures. The presidency has a dual valence: applying elements of the liberal democratic lexicon while itself remaining outside the norms of accountability represented by that tradition; an ambivalent position that fostered the shadow practices of the administrative regime.

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The Crisis of Russian Democracy
The Dual State, Factionalism and the Medvedev Succession
, pp. 85 - 130
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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