Reading Russia: The Rules of Survival
In an attempt to explain the Russian Revolution to Lady Ottoline Morrell, British philosopher Bertrand Russell once remarked that Bolshevik despotism, appalling though it was, seemed the right sort of government for Russia. “If you ask yourself how Fyodor Dostoevsky’s characters should be governed, you will understand,” was his not-sosubtle point. In explaining the recent resurgence of authoritarianism in Russia, most political theorists have abstained from referring to Dostoevsky’s novels or Russia’s authoritarian political culture. They have a better explanation. It was not “soul,” it was “oil.” The “oil curse” has replaced the “soul curse” as the most popular explanation for Russia’s current state of affairs. High oil prices have been blamed for democracy’s failure and Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of authoritarian rule. The facts fit. During Putin’s time as president from 2000 to 2008, Russian oil and gas companies earned in excess of US$650 billion more from their exports than they had in the previous eight years under Yeltsin. The breakneck pace of economic growth gave Putin a free hand politically, and he used it without compunction to entrench the power of himself and his circle, unhindered by weak and shallowrooted democratic institutions. Thus Putin’s Russia was conceptualized as a classic “petrostate”— strong and weak at the same time, brutally confident yet potentially vulnerable, and hostile to democracy. This picture of Putin’s Russia as an authoritarian oil state attracts many Western analysts because it seems to carry a promise that falling oil prices will bring regime change. What Russian liberals prayed for was economic crisis and cheap oil. Putin’s regime, they reasoned, may remain unchallenged as long as it can hand out petrodollars and improve the material well-being of the people, but
Russia's Transition to Autocracy
Under Putin’s rule, Russian policy has considerably hardened both domestically and internationally. It has gone from a mixture of oligarchy, democracy, and anarchy to a regime of autocracy with some fascist features, and from an effort to imitate and join the West to a verbal aggressiveness towards the United States and an effort to reassert Russia’s domination over its former empire. An important link between the two evolutions is to be found in the post-imperial nostalgia of the Russian population, in the neo-imperial ambition of its leaders, and in their fear of the spread of “color revolutions” among their neighbors.
Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion / Henri Bergson
[ed. critique sous la dir. de Frederic Worms ; dossier critique Frederic Keck et Ghislain Waterlot]