What is to be done when former-KGB warriors turn their swords and bugs against one another? Cherkesov's case exemplifies Putin's nightmare. But if your instincts betray you, you go back to even deeper ones.
Now that Putin's people have left their predecessors' neo-liberal ideas behind and feel disenchanted with the ex-KGB clique, the task is to recreate an omnipresent political party that controls the security services, the administration, business, and much else. This party will be centralized under personal leadership and will reduce the state to a legal fiction.
Preaching nationalism, its managers will believe in their universal competence, as opposed to KGB-style professionalism and corporatism. former president Boris Yeltsin forbade party cells in state-controlled institutions by decree. Putin's lawyers will reverse that decision; the party will have cells or committees in every factory, corporation, military unit, university department, etc. Integrated by the leader's charisma and party discipline, party members will direct and unify the desolated country.
This is Putin's plan. Like former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, the only other KGB man to rule Russia, Putin will become the party's general secretary. As in the Soviet era, state and governmental officials will be reduced to party ciphers -- the role that president Medvedev will play under general secretary Putin. And, of course, being general secretary carries no constitutional term limit.
In the end, Putin has what history left him: not ideas, just a faction yearning to consolidate its grip on power. Lenin and Trotsky needed a party to make their ideology a reality; Putin and Medvedev are devising an ideology to solidify their party.
It is a bizarre ideology. Accusing warriors of being traders and traders of being thieves, it shuns its Marxist origins. It will subordinate all who really do work -- traders, warriors, journalists and others -- to party ideologues whose sole job is to search for enemies.
Alexander Etkind, a Saint Petersburg native, is reader of Russian literature at Cambridge University and a fellow at Princeton University. Copyright: Project Syndicate,
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