Below are a excerpts from a couple of things I've read recently which address the role of "political technologists" in contemporary Russian politics. In order to save space, I have not indented the excerpts; hopefully it's clear where they begin and end.
Pavlovsky from the Left
From: Chto delat
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2008 12:50:32
To: [Alain Badiou]
Subject: Lettre des activistes russes concernant votre prochaine visite en Russie
Dear Comrade Badiou!
We are Russian activists and leftist intellectuals. We know and value you as a philosopher and intellectual who has not surrendered in the face of the current neo-capitalist reaction. In your public statements, you have on many occasions expressed your allegiance to the great contemporary liberation movement, of which we also consider ourselves to be a part. [...] [I]t has come to our attention that Gleb Pavlovsky’s foundation (The Russian Institute is a branch of this foundation) has invited you to visit Moscow this coming April. This news dumbfounded those of us here who know and appreciate your work and your political stance. We have long dreamed that you would visit us in Russia. But a visit under these circumstances would be worse than no visit at all. It would compromise you and us, your readers and supporters.
What is at issue is the person of Mr. Pavlovsky, who is not only one of the principal ideologues of the Putin group, but is also a cynical “political technologist” who several times switched his political orientation during the nineties. He has now settled on an ultra-rightist version of nationalist and imperialist conservatism, and is busy erecting the Putin personality cult. You might wonder why he decided to invite you of all people. The answer, however, is obvious: the Russian regime has decided, on the ideological level, to develop a new strain of anti-westernism based on Russian nationalism.
This is motivated, in part, by the real imperialist pressure exerted on Russia by the EU and the US; in part, by the discomfort that liberal demands to observe human rights and legality in general creates for the regime. Therefore, Putin and his ideologues have an objective interest in recruiting western oppositionist intellectuals to an international front that would support them. At the same time, it must be understood that Putin is no Chavez. As opposed to the latter, Putin and his ideologues systematically anchor their appeal in rightist values: nation, order, the fear of revolution, Russian Orthodoxy, cultural anti-modernism, etc.
[. . .]
Gleb Pavlovsky is one of a number of notable intellectuals who chose the career of “political technologist” in the nineties. During the crisis in the universities and the intellectual vacuum that formed after the discrediting of Marxism, many members of the intelligentsia chose to engage in paid PR work, motivating their choice via a combination of watered-down postmodernism and social constructivism. As they would put it, all meanings are artificially produced.
In 1996, Pavlovsky — who was a dissident in Soviet times and an active liberal during perestroika — became the principal beneficiary of the Kremlin’s ideological commissions. In the early years of the new millennium, he became even more powerful when his foundation, The Foundation for Effective Politics, engaged in the propaganda and informational support of the Putin administration. It is this foundation that developed the fundamental ideologemes of the regime: “stability,” “the Putin majority,” etc.
Whereas in the nineties Pavlovsky justified himself in the postmodernist spirit, as we have mentioned, in the new decade he has become a frank collaborationist and a businessman trading in propaganda, exploiting the impoverished social and economic status of Russian intellectuals and thus turning them into cynical servants of power. At present, Pavlovsky hosts the television program Real Politics, on which he propagandizes extreme anti-westernism and the Putin personality cult. He also manages the Evropa publishing imprint, which among other thing has issued a series of books exposing the idea and phenomenon of revolution. Recently, Pavlovsky organized a roundtable entitled “Putin’s Enemies”—a farce that made open reference to the Stalinist show trials.
Dear Comrade Badiou! We have no doubt that your visit will be used by Pavlovsky to legitimize the Kremlin, which aspires, mostly unsuccessfully, to intellectual hegemony. In the spring of 2007, Pavlovsky’s foundation invited Slavoj Žižek to Moscow. It is conceivable that this leftist thinker didn’t know beforehand the context in which he would be speaking. In the event, however, he participated in a seminar entitled “The Limits of Democracy” and sat at the same table with court “political scientist” Sergei Markov, who as a television commentator praises the wisdom of Putin’s decisions, and with Pavlovsky himself, who doesn’t himself believe a single word he utters. Pavlovsky and Markov spoke about the need to “limit” democracy, in the sense of Putin’s “managed democracy.” It all resembled a bad comedy and forever discredited Žižek in the eyes of Russian (leftist or liberal) intellectuals. If you do visit Russia, this context will hinder any attempt on your part to polemicize and discuss the views of those who have invited you.
We do not mean to say that Russia is lost for good, or that it is of no interest. Russian society is still lively, anarchic, critical, highly educated, and intellectually hungry. It possesses the will to transformation and a consciousness of the need for struggle. At the present moment there is a growing network of organizations and groups that, we hope, will consolidate into a new anti-liberal, communist movement. For this to happen we also need international cooperation. In particular, we take as a guide your ideas, whose universalism impresses us, dwellers of the semi-periphery. We would like to engage you in conversation. But your visit to Pavlovsky would disenchant many activists. We ask you, therefore, to weigh your decision again.
[...]
Chto Delat/What Is To Be Done Platform
Forward Socialist Movement
Pyotr Alexeev Resistance Movement
Carine Clément (Institute for Collective Action)
From: Alain Badiou
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:42:47 +0100
To: Chto delat
Subject: Re: Lettre des activistes russes concernant votre prochaine visite
en Russie
Dear Comrades,
I thank you for your serious and well-argued warning. I have just returned from Greece and I will have to examine your arguments in more detail. They already seem quite strong to me. I will notify you of my decision in the coming days. If you believe that there is a real possibility of my coming to Leningrad, then we can go this route. I thank you again for your vigilance. And be assured that I have no wish to serve Putin’s interests!
Fraternal greetings,
Alain Badiou
4 February 2008
* * * * *
In his last letter, dated 17 February 2008, Alain Badiou informed us that he had turned down Pavlovsky’s invitation to visit Moscow and that he planned to come to Russia in the spring of 2009.
Note that the guys at Chto Delat' also had good coverage of the MGU Sociology Dept controversy, a subject which we at Scraps of Moscow had occasion to cover last year and which remains interesting, not least because of the possibility that it was that controversy that first put exiled journalist Natalia Morar' on the Kremlin's radar.
Pavlovsky from the Right
The other article I wanted to highlight is one which is worth reading in its entirety if you are interested in contemporary Russian domestic politics. Some of the more insightful passages are excerpted below. I have added my own links to outside sources where appropriate, replaced footnotes in the original with hyperlinks and omitted citations from the original where it was impossible to hyperlink them.
Ivan Krastev, Democracy's "Doubles"
Journal of Democracy, April 2006
Ivan Krastev is chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and the editor-in-chief of the Bulgarian edition of Foreign Policy. He is also the research director of a project on “The Politics of Anti-Americanisms” coordinated by the Central European University in Budapest. [...]
If I were to choose the two major protagonists of the new antidemocratic politics, I would put alongside Hugo Chávez not Vladimir Putin but Gleb Pavlovsky, Russia’s premier political technologist. Admittedly, Pavlovsky and Chávez make a strange pair. The latter is a passionate former army officer, with a talent for expressing public sentiments, who loves elections even more than coups and spends his free time running a television show. [...]
Pavlovsky, by contrast, is an intellectual with a talent for manipulation and political engineering. Far from loving crowds, he fears them—though he also recently started a TV talk show. These two men — Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s populist president, and Gleb Pavlovsky, Russia’s ultimate political manipulator — best symbolize the major challenge to democracy today. They are freedom’s enemies from within both democratic discourse and the institutional framework of democracy. The ex-colonel and the political technologist are the faces of the antiliberal doubles of democracy.
Democracy According to the Political Technologists
In a Kremlin world dominated by mediocre apparatchiks, KGB officers, and ruthless oligarchs, the political technologists might look like people from another planet. They come from the milieu of the intelligentsia and the world of alternative culture. Gleb Pavlovsky is a policy intellectual and a former dissident who was persecuted in Soviet times for his “reformist delusions.” Marat Gelman is an extremely successful art-collector and gallery owner and one of the gurus of the Moscow arts community. Sergei Markov is an internationally respected academic. They all have the biographies of typical Russian Westernizers. Pavlovsky worked with George Soros and his Open Society Institute in the early 1990s and briefly acted as editor of a Russian version of the Journal of Democracy. Markov was a fellow in the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and coauthored a book with Michael McFaul [the book is ironically titled The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy and is available on Google Books]. Gelman was a favorite source for Western journalists working in Moscow. They were Russia’s liberals. In the early 1990s, they proclaimed their belief in free and fair elections, limited government, democratic pluralism, and independent media. Today, however, they have all become “political technologists.”
In his scandalous political thriller The Politologist, written in the best tradition of conspiratorial realism, Alexander Prohanov, a leader of Russia’s patriotic opposition, gives us the most sinister and at the same time most profound psychological portrait of the Russian political technologist. He is a creature from hell: cynical, disloyal, ambitious, and greedy. He is highly creative and deceptive at the same time. He is the hostage of his ambition to manipulate others. He is the consummate social engineer, but also a tool of Kremlin politics. He is a tragic figure — confused, scared, and insecure. In his own view, the political technologist is the savior of democracy in Russia; in the view of others, he is its gravedigger.
In Moscow, the way you define the meaning of “political technologist” is a significant indicator of your political positions and moral taste: “Political technologist” can mean a policy analyst or political consultant; it can mean an expert in “black PR” or in contaminating the political environment; it can mean a Kremlin insider or political provocateur. Contrary to the common view of the Western media, “political technologist” is not simply the Russian term for “spin doctor.” What makes political technologists a different species from the other election strategists or PR consultants who have populated the strange world of Russian politics is their direct or indirect connection to the Kremlin. The Russian political technologist resembles a Western political consultant in the way that the electric chair resembles an armchair.
Political consultants in the West (however low one’s opinion of them) work with independent media, and their trade is influencing these media. Political technologists are experts in manipulating dependent media. Political consultants in the West are experts at winning votes for their candidates; political technologists are also specialists in winning votes, but they take matters one step further—they are also specialists in “creative counting” of the votes. A political consultant works for one of the parties in an election and does his best to help that party win; the political technologist is not interested in the victory of his party but in the victory of “the system.” His goal is not to maximize the vote for his client, but to obtain an election result as close as possible to the percentage of the vote that the Kremlin has planned for his client.
In other words, political technologists are those in charge of maintaining the illusion of competitiveness in Russian politics. As Andrew Wilson puts it, “Post-Soviet political technologists . . . see themselves as political metaprogrammers, system designers, decision-makers and controllers all in one, applying whatever technology they can to the construction of politics as a whole.” Their role in Russian politics recalls that of Gosplan in the Soviet economy. They are the ideologues and the symbol of Russian managed democracy. They operate in a “world of ‘clones’ and ‘doubles’; of ‘administrative resources,’ ‘active measures,’ and ‘kompromat’ [compromising information]; of parties that stand in elections but have no staff or membership or office . . . of well paid insiders that stand as the regime’s most vociferous opponents; and of scarecrow nationalists and fake coups.” [fn 6] Political technologists are the principal enemy of democratic pluralism.
Political technologists play several different institutional roles at one and the same time. They run think tanks and speak as experts on behalf of the public good. They are also consultants who speak the language of business and deny any political affiliation with their various clients; this does not prevent them, however, from also presenting themselves as independent political commentators who interpret for the public what is going on in Russian and global politics. When it becomes necessary, the political technologist, as a sacrifice of last resort, is even ready to take a public job. In 2003, just before the parliamentary elections, Marat Gelman was appointed as deputy director of the public television station ORT-Russia to help ensure that political parties would gain the electoral results that were planned for them. In the wake of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Modest Kolerov, Pavlovsky’s deputy at the Center for Effective Policies, joined the presidential administration as head of the new “anti-Orange” department dealing with the post-Soviet republics. The political technologist can be found everywhere in the policy process, performing all kinds of jobs. In his role as “gray cardinal,” Pavlovsky urged the Kremlin to adopt new legislation that would create a body known as the Public Chamber in order to control Russia’s NGOs. In his role as a policy expert he supported the move, and then in his role as an independent political commentator he explained to the public what a wonderful policy the Kremlin had initiated. The circle was closed.
Those who question the real importance of political technologists, contending that they are less influential in Kremlin decision making than the siloviki or the in-house oligarchs, fail to recognize that the political technologists’ impact is greatest in framing political issues and not in lobbying for concrete policies. In this sense, the political technologists can be analyzed as a collective player in Russian politics, despite the fact that in real life political technologists constantly compete with and often passionately hate one another. It is their shared view of the nature and the goals of current Russian politics that makes the political technologists so revealing with regard to the nature of the political regime in Moscow. Their interest is the interest of the system.
Manipulating the Media
The type of political regime that governs Russia today would have been unthinkable in the pre-television age. The art of the political technologists lies in replacing the political representation of values, interests, and ideas that is at the heart of liberal democracy with the media representation of a nonexisting political reality that is at the core of managed democracy. Their ideology is a Molotov cocktail of French postmodernism and KGB instrumentalism. What the political technologists have borrowed from the postmodernists is their intuition of “the unreality of reality.” What they borrowed from the rich tradition of the Soviet secret police were the technologies that can make the unreal real. The role of television and m in establishing managed democracy in the post-Soviet states is perhaps best captured by a poster that one Ukrainian youth carried in the streets of Kiev during the Orange Revolution in late 2004. The poster read: “Kill the TV in yourself.” [interestingly, this later became a rallying cry for the nationalist Eurasian Youth Union as well]
A common thread in the otherwise diverse ideological views of people like Gleb Pavlovsky, Marat Gelman, and Sergei Markov is their militant antirevolutionism and their self-proclaimed break with the traditional politics of the Russian intelligentsia. In Pavlovsky’s words, “Our position on revolution is simple: no revolutions and no encouragement of revolutions.” The demonstrative cynicism of the political technologists is intended as a direct challenge to the idealism of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia at the beginning of the last century. Their open ambition for money and status is the opposite of the culture of self-sacrifice and the attachment to nonmaterial values of the old Russian intelligentsia. Their project of excluding the people from political life runs directly contrary to the old intelligentsia’s mission of giving power to the people.
The political technologists believe that their mission is to save democracy from the antidemocratic impulse of those on top and from the populist egalitarianism and communist nostalgia of those below. For them the government is the only real liberal force in Russia. In their eyes, “Liberal democracy is nothing more than a mechanism of elite control through the use of elections, parties . . . and most importantly, ‘the independent media.’” They have fashioned themselves as the postliberal postintelligentsia.
[...]
In hindsight, two events appear to have been critical in shaping the emergence of Russia’s managed democracy: Yeltsin’s bombardment of the Russian parliament building in October 1993 and his victory in the presidential election of June 1996. The attack on parliament convinced the elites of the undesirability and limited effectiveness of violence. The reelection campaign convinced them of the power and effectiveness of manipulation. Managed democracy was justified as the best way to prevent a communist restoration. For this reason, it appealed not only to some Russian liberals but also to Western governments, whose greatest fear was that Yeltsin would be defeated by the Communists. The establishment of managed democracy in Russia would never have been possible without the endorsement of the West. It was the decision of Western governments to endorse Yeltsin and not to insist on fair elections that brought to life the current regime in Russia.
Read the whole article here.
