Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

After the Duma elections of December 2012, when the oppositionist blogger Aleksey Navalny denounced United Russia as the partiya zhulikov i vorov (party of swindlers and thieves), Putin is relying more and more on building the People’s Front, while letting Medvedev take on the job of purging and “modernizing” United Russia. One of Medvedev’s “modernizing measures” was a proposal to give opponents of United Russia the opportunity to express their views at the “Civil University,” a new educational project for party members, launched by him on March 27, 2013. “If these are people who criticize the party for some mistakes, tricks, lack of activism, for some issues or others, I believe that would only benefit us,” Medvedev said.^[45]

This does not mean, however, that Putin was willing to give Medvedev a completely free hand to modernize United Russia. When Putin prepared to use United Russia as a machine for the presidential elections of 2012, Gleb Pavlovsky, head of the Effective Politics Foundation and a close ally of Putin,^[46] said that United Russia needed “to develop a new level of management,” some kind of superstructure above the existing leadership. This new group would be a sort of personal cabinet of Putin’s. One might be tempted to compare this proposed new structure with the old Politburo of the CPSU, but that comparison would not be totally valid. The Politburo was a collegial organ of shared power that was formally controlled by the Central Committee. The superstructure, suggested by Pavlovsky, is not an organ of shared power, nor is it an organ that is formally controlled by the party. It would be the personal camarilla of Putin, who, although he resigned as chairman of the party in May 2012 and never was a member of the party, would stand above the party and avail himself of the party structures. The proposed personal cabinet would be an instrument in his hand to direct the party machine and use it for his own aims. Putin’s special position in the party, proposed by Pavlovsky, would come close to the Führerprinzip.

Gleb Pavlovsky belongs—with Vladislav Surkov—to the most influential “political technologists” behind Russia’s new “electoral democracy,” in which many techniques are used to achieve the preordained results: falsifying elections, erecting legal barriers, harassing opposition parties, monopolizing the media, absorbing other parties, and creating fake parties. These techniques are not new. Many are used by other autocratic regimes that want to maintain a more or less democratic façade. However, the way in which the Kremlin tried to manipulate existing parties by creating new parties, showed, indeed, an interesting resemblance to the “political technologies” used by Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy. According to Emilio Gentile, in post–World War I Italy, “the conquest of the power monopoly was achieved in different phases that coincided with the expansion of fascist supremacy in the country. In the first phase, Mussolini set up a coalition policy with the parties that were ready to collaborate; at the same time he did everything to disintegrate them.”^[47] Renzo De Felice described Mussolini’s attempts “to ‘empty’ the traditional parties” by offering their leaders attractive positions in his government or in the state bureaucracy.^[48] In the elections of April 6, 1924, Mussolini went so far as to present two lists, a broad “ministerial list” that also contained the names of non-fascist candidates, and a “list bis” of the fascist party. These two lists combined gave him an absolute majority of 66.3 percent.^[49] This result is certainly impressive, but it is still 4.8 percent less than the combined votes (71.1 percent) of United Russia and its “list bis,” A Just Russia, in the December 2007 Duma elections.^[50]

Another Pseudo-Pluralism: The Diarchy at the Top