Russian President Vladimir Putin's anointment of Alexander Medvedev to succeed him in what is supposed to be a democratic presidential election in March shows that Russia's leaders have not changed a whit. It looks increasingly likely that, as under Leonid Brezhnev, we will see the same names in the news for decades to come.
Gleb Pavlovsky, the Putin regime's leading ideologist, said the Russian system is perfect in all respects but one: it doesn't know its enemies. Indeed, it seems as if everyone in the Kremlin is reading Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist who taught that naming your enemy is the central mission of politics.
In the spirit of Schmitt, Putin's men designated a liberal party, the Union of Right Forces, as their ur-enemy. Its public meetings were broken up by armed police; its leaders arrested and beaten; Putin called its supporters "coyotes."
What is surprising is that this aggressive behavior occurred in response to no visible danger. Oil prices are soaring, as are Putin's approval ratings. His appointees control everything that matters, from Gazprom to the Central Electoral Committee. Since the pacification of Chechnya with violence and subsidies, the incarceration or emigration of a few financially viable opponents and the massive "social investments" of recent years -- which, under Medvedev's personal supervision, have bribed the population -- no credible force can seriously challenge Putin's men.
Yet their regime is in crisis and they know it.
Russia's economy is more dependent on gas and oil than ever before. Military reform has been reversed. Despite increasing incomes, Russians are less educated and less healthy than they were when Putin came to power; they still die at a shockingly young age. Russian involvement in world affairs is tainted by poison and corruption.
State monopolies undo what private businesses created. With more money, ill-educated bureaucrats hire more ill-educated bureaucrats; as a result, the regime fails to rule the country. The country is unruly, and its rulers know it. So they panic.
Putin's aim was to subject all power to the control of Russia's security forces. His generation of KGB officers watched the collapse of the Communist Party and all the governmental bodies that it "directed and controlled," including the KGB. Under Putin, the security service has had its revenge. Its people have become powerful, arrogant, and enormously rich. They have also become disobedient.
In 2004, General Viktor Cherkesov, then Putin's representative in northwest Russia, published an essay that glorified the KGB as the only unspoiled authority in a corrupted country. This essay, more than anything else, defined Putin's second term. In October, Cherkesov (now chief of one of the most obscure and powerful services, the Federal Anti-Drug Administration) published another essay in which he lamented his colleagues' degradation: warriors had turned into traders, he complained.
BETRAYAL
Earlier, generals from a competing service, the FSB (the modern KGB), had arrested Cherkesov's deputy for "illegal bugging." In a public gesture of despair, Cherkesov admitted the failure of Putin's project to reanimate Russian governance by subordinating it to the security services.
Cherkesov's deputy remains in prison. Most believe that Putin is unable to intervene in his defense. In the absence of Communist Party control, these security officers betrayed their corporate ethic and engaged in horse-trading, applying force when a trade did not go well. That this happens to ordinary Russians is clear; what Cherkesov revealed was that Putin's circle also confronts this situation.
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