Russian Paradoxes - take 3, over and out...

I’ve been thinking of how to wrap up this serial blog about Russia for quite some time now, and fortunately stumbled upon two impulses that fit very nicely into where I’d like to take this. So yes, I am aware that this is a very biased way of selecting your data (whatever fits in with your preconceived ideas), but hey, this is my blog. You don’t like it, just go back to surfing porn or eBay… or was it porn on eBay you were surfing? Anyways…

The first impulse was a blurb that Reuters put out from Medvedev’s recent Far East visit (think he was out in Kamchatka or sth) – quoting him as saying that Russia must reform its power structure, seeing that currently too much authority and responsibility is centered in the Kreml. Say what?! Exactly.


The second impulse was a pretty mediocre, yet quite intuitive interview in Hospodařské noviny with a Russian (almost nameless) sociologist, carried out by Czech TV’s Moscow correspondent, Jozef Pazderka. Though not too well structured and not too carefully thought-out, it still resonated with my own impression of the present situation. To wit, that underneath the big macho façade and the verbal (and not only verbal) muscle-flexing, there’s a lot of nervousness and uncertainty among Russia’s top-notch movers and shakers.
So without any further ado, I’d like to slowly but surely tear apart and contradict everything I’ve written in the previous blogs (well, maybe not everything), and put it all back together again, in a way that further highlights what I really think should be guiding us when thinking about the recent developments in Russia.


Dissociative Identity Disorder, or, Russian Quadrophenia
In practically every news item or analysis piece that you read about the invasion of Georgia (or for that matter, about practically any political event/issue), commentators inevitably fall into what I would like to term the falacy of the unitary actor. I say inevitably, because the tendency to do so is a well established convention, not only in political science, but also in language in general. That is, people consider each and every state as one single, unified, uninterrupted whole. No creases, no cracks, no bumps, no soft spots – just one single and coherent agent. [Russia], [the US], [France]; or, in case they feel like putting a face to the name (or is it a name to the face they’re trying to put?), then they say [Putin], [Medvedev], [Bush]. Within each state, news and politics are always more diverse and multifarious – you have the government, then the parliament and the opposition, you have big business, the army, various groups within the population, the media, civil society or some modicum thereof, as so forth. However, externally and internationally, each and every state is reduced to a single face, a single voice, a single agency. I would claim (and I probably ain’t the first one to do so) that this metonymic technique of reporting, which is at one and the same time also a way of understanding political events, works on the basis of the same displacement of the acting/speaking subject that makes possible the custom of saying “the White House”, when you actually mean the US executive. Not only is it convenient, but it is also a precondition of the rational-actor paradigm (it’s hard to be rational and predictable when there’s more than one actor involved) and in general, it helps to keep things tidy – in the news, in history books, and in people’s minds.


But nothing could be more removed from reality than this unitary-and-rational actor model, as the case of Russia (and please forgive me for lumping it up into a single Rus-sia again) clearly demonstrates.

First of all, you have to consider the inherent structural duality of the regime, which introduces some multiplicity or at least duality into the equation. While this duality could be somewhat discounted by the fact that Russia is indeed a federal state (which lends a factual, objective license for some degree of polyphony), its formal federalism still does not account for what lately appears to be an orchestrated effort to speak in (not always harmonic) two distinct voices. I can’t possibly be the only one who still recalls how Medvedev was marketed as the soft-spoken and sensitive counterbalance to the roughshod Putin, when the former was inaugurated as president. So from the start, there is this Good-Cop/Bad-Cop twist built into the whole set-up. So a strcuturally two-tiered government takes a degree of potential duality and carries it all the way to a dissonant and idiosyncratic executive dichotomy. Hardly your normative federal power structure.


And apropos the Mellow Medvedev hype, I was thinking of squeezing in here a comparison with another at-the-time semi-unknown politician, who entered the spotlight of haut politics among a general murmur to the effect that surely he won’t be as raucous as all that… but then I realised there is a fundamental flow in the analogy. Because the cocky von Papen marketed his young “Drummer” to Hindenburg under pretence he (von Papen), as by-far the more experienced and seasoned politician, would personally rein in the young maverick, tone him down, and merely use him to giddy-up the masses and gain favor for the conservative government in the eyes of the public. Whereas Hitler was a radical who was expected to mellow out as he stepped into office, the allegedly mild Medvedev was packaged as a pussycat who was expected to remain a pussycat following his inauguration. “He’s only Putin’s puppet, perfectly harmless,” the foreign correspondents and so-called experts insisted. So yes, the comparison is somewhat flawed, but, two things: (1) is the assumption that pussycats always and ever remain pussycats any sounder than the assumption that mavericks mellow out? What we are asked to believe (and this is essentially the same as what von Papen asked Hindenburg to believe in), is that a strong and experienced politician can surely handle the younger, unknown statesman that he is introducing into high politics; (2) maybe it’s me, but some of the satements Medvedev came out with during the invasion of Georgia sure didn’t sound all that mellow to me, so I’m not sure ‘moderate’ would be the most suitable adjective for the current president of Russia. And how about the way Medvedev chose to welcome Barack Obama into office as the US president elect? Looks like it’s just a matter of time before this moderate nut takes off his shoe and start knocking on his desk in the UN Assembly… And who will rein in the not-so-moderate Medvedev in case he feels like taking a walk into wilder territory? Putin? Heck, Putin is more likely to match and top any belligerent move Medvedev could come up with. But I digress…


Second, I couldn’t help noticing that despite the constitutional/structural guidelines that should regulate the president/prime-minister division of labor, Vlad and Dima are very fond of crossing-over when it comes to their duties. Two examples would suffice here. As noted by Petr Kamberský in Hospodařské noviny, the first official reaction to the Georgian crisis (i.e. the first public appearance of a high-ranking Russian official after the invasion of the Russian army into Georgia) was made by Putin on Russian state TV. Which was in fact strange enough, since Putin is the prime-minister, and therefore you would expect him to worry mostly about internal affairs, and leave foreign affairs to the president. Kamberský saw this as proof that the Russians don’t really consider Georgia to be an object of its foreign policy, but rather an internal issue – and the tone of some of Putin’s and Medvedev’s comments were in fact often very “hey, this is our business, you guys in the West, butt-out!”. A few weeks later, again, it’s prime-minister Putin who goes out to rub cheeks with Timoschenko, the blonde Princess Lea look-alike from the Ukraine, with whom he discussed the Krim peninsula situation and how the Ukraine should (in its best interest, of course, wink-wink, nudge-nudge) revert its gaze towards its long-term Eastern ally. So I’m no expert on Russian constitutional law, but isn’t this sth the president should be doing? And don’t tell me that prime-minister Putin had nothing better to do, with foreign capital flying out of Russian banks faster than the speed of light, and the Moscow stock-exchange going roller-coaster way before Wall St. sent the cue for the full outbreak of the global financial crisis.


So they are a priori presented as two complementing opposites, they have a tendency to seriously trespass into eachother’s responsibilities, and now Dima goes one about how too much power is concentrated in Moscow (which is not a very subtle way of criticising Putin’s way of running the show).

So what is one supposed to make of this schizophrenic word salad?

They say one thing (territorial intergrity, no to Kosovo), they mean another (go ahead and take Kosovo, we'll take Georgia); the guy who's supposed to take care of internal affairs goes on diplomatic missions abroad; the guy who's supposed to be moderate show his teeth; they flex their muscles and then cave when the stock exchange goes kybosh and oil prices plummet.

So what am I saying here and where is this blog going? Not sure, but I'll wrap up by listing the questions that interested me when writing this up.

First of all, is there something - anything - specifically Russian about this, or is the incongruence of words (statements, but also constitutions, laws, etc.) and deeds an inherent trait of any state? I would say YES. It is a general trait of the fairly loose organization commonly known as a state; and it's only the current situation in Russia that makes it more clearly visible.
What do I mean by the current situation? Well, for starters, they've been (or to be more exact, they were) on the horse financially for the past several years. And their inflated oil money $$$, coupled by the perceived decline of US power, are now traslated into new political ambitions. Or in other words, they've become a little too big to fit into their old, post-1991 borders. And as they spillover, the many cracks and fissures in what we nonchalantly and everyday call The State are made visible. And as they spillover, they rely on the already-crumbling-and-irrelevant notions of The State, and simultaneously negate these very foundations. They go across official borders, in order to defend unofficial borders (spheres of influence, client states); "We will have no foreign intervention here!" they say, while intervening abroad; "We'll turn off the faucets!" they say, and globalized economy turns the faucets off on them.
Second, when we say [Russia], [the US], [Sarkozy], we're basically saying so because we want to make things easy, and not have to say: "If there are states, and if states are unitary actors, and if Russia/the US/Sarkozy is one..." every single time we observe, report, discuss and act upon events that occur around us.
Third, would it be useful, or even possible, to talk about the psyche or the Self of a state, or a nation, of a culture? We do so every day, with the simple and familiar noun acting as the placeholder for amorphous thing that we call a state. In the same manner that we use the simple noun or name, in place of the amorphous thing that is the Self. So if we refer to the Self of a state, would it make any sense to conceived of this Self as anything other than a de-centered, split Self? I think not, and the Russian case, with all its sympotms, is what I got going for me.