Imitating Democracy, Feigning Capacity
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Description
That Russia's savviest political experts, including the contributors to this volume, still disagree radically about the stability or instability of the Putin regime reinforces their country's reputation as an enigma shrouded in mystery. Some Russia watchers colorfully suggest that the two bulldogs fighting under the carpet, immortalized by Churchill, are the siloviki's Party of Blood, a driving force behind Putin's adventurism in Ukraine, and the oligarchs' Party of Cash, increasingly apprehensive about Putin's poisoned relations with the West. This is no doubt a cartoonish oversimplification, but it also typifies the anxious search to discover some sort of key to an inherently bewildering situation. If the best-informed diagnoses are so uncertain, it is no surprise that politically feasible remedies remain elusive to the point that they are not even seriously discussed. To make matters worse, when Americans and West Europeans come to analyze Russia's rollercoaster trends punctuated by sinister palace intrigue, the country's fabled illegibility acquires a gratuitous layer of inscrutability. This additional obscurity derives in part from the forty-five-year standoff of the Cold War and the compulsion it bequeathed on the Western side to shoehorn all observed conflicts into the democracy–authoritarianism polarity. That such a dichotomy feeds American nostalgia for a moral showdown between the virtuous and the wicked is not its greatest defect, even though it is important to notice the inadequacy of idealizing one side and demonizing the other when studying, say, conflicts between an imperfect Russian government and unscrupulous privatization billionaires or violent Chechen separatists.
Source Publication
Democracy in a Russian Mirror
Source Editors/Authors
Adam Przeworski
Publication Date
2015
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Stephen, "Imitating Democracy, Feigning Capacity" (2015). Faculty Chapters. 791.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/791
