Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, March 07, 2011

Comparative Neo-Feudalism

Awhile back, an op-ed piece I pointed to compared neo-liberal regimes. This one, by Vladislav L. Inozemtsev, a professor at the Moscow School of Economics, compares "neo-Feudalistic" regimes. Are they different from the neo-liberal ones? How? How are they similar? What does it predict about Russia's future?

Neo-Feudalism Explained

Many Western experts today portray Russia as a country spiraling down into totalitarianism… following the path of the Soviet Union, whose authoritarian regime crumbled under growing pressure from an emerging civil society. Prevailing opinion attributes this authoritarian U-turn to the nature of the contemporary Russian political elite. Members of this elite… are recruited disproportionately from the so-called siloviye structury, that is, the law-enforcement bodies and security services, which trace their roots to the Soviet-era military and secret services…

Unfortunately, all of these assumptions are wrong. Contemporary Russia is not a candidate to become a Soviet Union 2.0. It is a country in which citizens have unrestricted access to information, own property, leave and return to the country freely, and develop private businesses of all kinds. Of course, severe restrictions in the political sphere remain in place, and the country, as President Dmitry Medvedev himself recently said, “only to a certain extent, not fully”, meets the standards of democracy.

Clearly, this arrangement—economic freedom coupled with political constraint—does not please everyone. To the standard American mind it suggests that something has got to give. This, too, is wrong. Some Russians do give voice to dissatisfaction with the current regime and the widespread abuse of power by police authorities, local officials and oligarchs closely connected with the ruling bureaucracy. Yet the system seems fundamentally solid and durable. Its strength emanates from a basic principle: It is much easier for subjects to solve their problems individually than to challenge national institutions collectively. This is because what Westerners would call corruption is not a scourge of the system but the basic principle of its normal functioning. Corruption in Russia is a form of transactional grease in the absence of any generally accepted and legally codified alternative. Taken together, these transactions well describe a form of neo-feudalism…

The system works, too, in its own way. Built under Vladimir Putin, Russia’s “power vertical” provides a mechanism for the relatively simple conversion of power into money, and vice versa. At every level of the hierarchy a certain degree of bribery and clientalist parochialism is not only tolerated but presupposed in exchange for unconditional loyalty and a part of the take for one’s superiors…

All of this leads to two related conclusions. On the one hand, Russia has built a system in which the execution of state powers has become a monopolistic business. It is controlled mainly by friends and colleagues of the system’s creator, Vladimir Putin, and faithfully operated by the most dutiful and least talented newcomers…

At the same time, a huge social group wants to join this system, not oppose it (in contrast to the final years of the Soviet Union)…

The Russian elite has essentially “piratized” and privatized one of the world’s richest countries. It is so grateful for this privilege that it may insist on Mr. Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012 for 12 more dismal years. By then the young liberal cohorts on whom so many Western analysts pinned their hopes for change will have grown up. The mediocre among them will be part of the system. Most of the best of them, no doubt, will no longer reside in Russia.