Putin's Fourth Term
The Russian Presidential "referendum" is now behind us. I published an article on them for the Jacobin:
Putinism is increasingly exhausting itself as its internal contradictions become more visible. It’s easy to forget that it once had a certain élan. In his first two terms, Putin could point to the chaos of the 1990s and offer stability and economic growth in exchange for political acquiescence. Incomes rose, a post-Soviet middle class emerged, and Putin personally and institutionally consolidated power.
When this social contract became less tenable after the 2008 crash, Putin switched gears. Facing mass protests in 2011–12, he appealed to the so-called “silent Russian majority” with a more culturally conservative stance against the danger posed by “Western values” within Russia and without. This national cultural turn reached its apex with the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s support for separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014. Russia was now a great geopolitical player again.
But the “Crimea effect” yields diminishing returns. Seizing the peninsula remains popular, but the patriotic euphoria has lost its buzz. Military intervention in Syria has produced little fanfare to capitalize on. Cranking up tensions with the United States, though always a go-to move, brings only ephemeral returns. Russia as besieged fortress only plays for so long in such a cosmopolitan country, especially as its economy stagnates, real incomes shrink, and the political space to express grievances become narrower and narrower.
Today, all Putin can offer is himself. His campaign slogan reflects this: “A strong president is a strong Russia.” Putin is painted as the indispensable figure — not for ushering in Russia’s future, but for the survival of Russia itself. Or as Vyacheslav Volodin famously put it in 2014, “There is no Russia without Putin.” The object of the upcoming referendum is to reaffirm Putin’s two bodies — to deify his corporeal flesh and close the gap between himself and the body politic.
Indeed, Putin is really the only political institution in the country, though increasingly reliant on the inertia of his patiently constructed simulacrum of power. As the political strategist Gleb Pavlovsky recently noted,
In the minds of television viewers and even the Kremlin’s critics, the inertia of his former power reigns. Even today, the official campaign began in conditions of a lack of strategy, having lost command over the script, [but] the opinions of observers, their language and vocabulary are directed at “Putin’s campaign.” But there is no campaign.
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