The speeches and essays of Vladislav Surkov – half-Chechen, one-time aide to Khodorkovsky, sometime novelist and current-day political technician – reveal a scary self-awareness.
by Richard Sakwa
12 April 2011
Texts 1997- 2010, by Vladislav Surkov. Moscow, Europe Publishing House, 2010. 144 pages.
".... With Dmitry Medvedev’s accession to the presidency, on 8 May 2008 Surkov was promoted to become first deputy chief of staff of the Presidential Administration. This indicated that democracy in Russia would continue to be “managed.” His main vehicle for this was the creation and sponsoring of United Russia as the regime’s pedestal party. He was also involved in the creation of Just Russia as a center-left social democratic alternative to the center-right United Russia, but it is clear that his heart was not in this particular project. Surkov’s philosophy from the first was that there is no real freedom in the world, and that all democracies are managed democracies, so the key to success is to influence people, to give them the illusion that they are free whereas in fact they are managed. The only freedom in his view is “artistic freedom.”
In an interview in January 1997, reproduced in this volume, Surkov enunciated a thoroughly statist perspective. Asked about the chances of economic growth, he insisted that “if genuine state management of the economy does not appear, there will be no economic growth.” He insisted that, as in war, national priorities should be established, and then it was matter of will to see them implemented. The spirit of Surkov’s thinking was unmistakable, and it would lead him to be one of the most eloquent defenders of Putin’s consolidation of the state and the leading advocate of the notion of “sovereign democracy.” Surkov can be defined as a “democratic statist,” and is thus not part of the “siloviki” faction, those associated with the security forces who advocate some sort of “iron hand.”
Even though Surkov may have conducted his period of military service with military intelligence, he is not one of the siloviki, but neither is he wholeheartedly one of the civiliki, the technocratic liberal faction which exercises a strong influence in shaping Russia’s economic policy. Instead, as a democratic statist Surkov is one of the main ideologists of the notion of sovereign democracy, the position stressing the society-forming and leadership role of the state while not adjuring the formal commitment to democracy. As a result, the regime under Putin was able to achieve the “nationalization of the elites” and the marginalization of what Surkov called the “offshore aristocracy....”
Richard Sakwa is professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, England.
This article is published by Richard Sakwa and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons license.
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