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LRB, Vol. 37 No. 3 · 5 February 2015
First Person
by Tony Wood
‘Sistema’, Power Networks and Informal Governance by Alena Ledeneva
Cambridge, 327 pp, £19.99, February 2013, ISBN 978 0 521 12563 5
The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen
Granta, 314 pp, £9.99, January 2013, ISBN 978 1 84708 423 1
Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp, £11.50, September 2014, ISBN 978 1 4767 9519 5
Nearly five thousand people have been killed in eastern Ukraine since
April 2014; according to Ukrainian government figures, 514,000 have been
internally displaced by the fighting, with another 233,000 applying for
refugee status in Russia (9000 have sought asylum in the EU). Peace
talks over the fate of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions have so far been
fruitless, and the ceasefire nominally agreed in September has been
patchy at best.
The effects of the Ukraine crisis on Russia itself have been visible
everywhere, from the thousands of refugees from Donetsk and Lugansk now
resettling across Russia to the fresh graves quietly appearing in
scattered villages, containing the remains of Russian conscripts killed
in eastern Ukraine – casualties Moscow prefers not to acknowledge. (Some
have even been retroactively discharged from the army, so that, for
official purposes, they weren’t killed on active service.) Relations
with the West have reached their lowest point in decades, and the
combination of US-EU sanctions and plummeting oil prices has started to
spread economic gloom. Between June and mid-December 2014 the ruble lost
half its value – its downward path mirroring the slump in the price of
oil, which went from $109 per barrel of Urals crude in June to $67 in
December. All this has been exacerbated by the Kremlin’s
self-destructive decisions. In August, Putin introduced retaliatory
sanctions against countries that had mandated measures against Russia,
the main effect of which has been drastically to reduce food imports and
raise prices, helping to push inflation to an official level of 10 per
cent, though some estimates put it at between 15 and 25 per cent. The
country was already in recession when, in late December, the central
bank forecast a further 5 per cent contraction of GDP in the course of
this year. Some Russians have now taken to amending the patriotic slogan
‘Krym Nash’ – ‘Crimea is Ours’ – to ‘Krizis Nash’: ‘The Crisis is Ours.’
Yet so far Putin’s handling of the situation remains broadly popular in
Russia. In fact one of the most striking things to emerge from the
events of 2014 was the mismatch between the Putin government’s position
domestically and internationally: surging neo-imperial popularity at
home, virtual pariah status abroad. While the Western media is full of
resurgent Cold War rhetoric, recent polls by the Levada Centre, one of
the few independent research outfits remaining in Russia, show
overwhelming support – 85 per cent – for the annexation of Crimea; they
also show that in November 59 per cent thought the country was ‘moving
in the right direction’, compared with 43 per cent last January. The
solidity of this domestic consensus, however, is likely to be tested in
the coming months by a combination of recession and rising prices, and
the hostile international climate will narrow the regime’s options
further. Putin’s presidential term runs until 2018, and the political
landscape has been carefully swept clear of viable electoral
alternatives, but his hold on power has begun to seem less unshakeable
than it was a year ago. Any sense of how Putinism will fare – is it more
likely to crack under external pressure than to erode from within, or
will it do neither? – depends on the view one takes of the kind of
regime it is.
Since the early 2000s, a number of terms have been applied to the system
over which Putin has presided. The Kremlin’s own ideologues have at
different times called it ‘sovereign democracy’ or ‘managed democracy’
(to which Russian wits responded by saying that either adjective was to
democracy what ‘electric’ is to ‘chair’). Scholars and journalists,
inside and outside Russia, have opted for other labels: ‘competitive
authoritarianism’, ‘virtual’ or ‘imitation democracy’, ‘militocracy’,
‘mafia state’. Medvedev’s chair-warming cameo between 2008 and 2012
added a new term to the lexicon – ‘tandemocracy’ – and for a moment
seemed to raise the possibility of liberalisation. But with Putin
reinstalled a cold front settled over Russia in the wake of mass
protests in the winter of 2011-12, and the autocratic features of the
system became even more pronounced.
The various labels for Putinism put the stress on different aspects of
the regime: its increasingly authoritarian bent, reflected in the
suppression of dissent and the spread of security service personnel
throughout the state apparatus; its hollow performance of democratic
rituals such as elections, emptied of any actual democratic content; its
artful manipulation of appearances through its grip on the media; its
endemic corruption, and the related entanglement of officialdom with
organised crime. Underpinning most Western analyses is the idea that all
this represents a sharp break with what came before: as the standard
story has it, the Yeltsin years saw the installation of a turbulent,
flawed democracy; Putin has presided over an anti-democratic turn –
even, for some, a regression towards state socialism. The tone was set
early on by Putin’s frequent mentions of the ‘vertical of power’: in
stark contrast to the apparent free-for-all of the 1990s, he established
a clear chain of command, firmly subordinating Russia’s regional
governors to Moscow and bringing the whole country’s administrative
structure increasingly under the control of the United Russia party.
This emphasis on central authority appeared to be echoed in the economy,
as the state moved to regain its hold over strategic sectors such as oil
and gas. By 2004, Putin appointees were in charge of seven companies
which accounted for 40 per cent of GDP – a phenomenon referred to as
‘Kremlin Inc’, and seen as evidence of a turn away from free market
capitalism towards a statist model. In The Man without a Face, Masha
Gessen concluded that Putin’s goal was a steady and deliberate
‘transformation of Russia back into the USSR’, while in Putin’s
Kleptocracy, Karen Dawisha insisted, in more excitable vein, that we
need to understand his rule as the triumph of a nefarious KGB ‘cabal’
which had spent the 1990s preparing for a creeping revanchist takeover.
The figure of the president has always loomed large in discussions of
the regime: in a country in which political power is not only highly
concentrated but deeply personalised, the preferences and whims of the
‘First Person’ – the fawning title of a book of interviews with Putin
published in 2000 – take on an outsize importance. Hence the attention
devoted to Putin’s career, from his youth in 1950s and 1960s Leningrad
to KGB spy work in East Germany in the 1980s; then a stint in the city
government of his native St Petersburg from 1990 to 1996, followed by a
move to Moscow and rapid promotion through the ranks of the Yeltsin
administration, culminating in his surprise appointment as prime
minister in 1999. The decade and a half of unrivalled dominance he has
enjoyed since then have only increased the gravitational pull he exerts
on Russia-watchers; he stands as both explanation and embodiment of the
country’s defects. Since his return to the Kremlin, the already
extensive literature on Putin and Putinism has had a growth spurt: in
addition to Gessen’s and Dawisha’s books, in the last two years alone
there have been journalistic accounts – Ben Judah’s Fragile Empire
(2013), Marc Bennetts’s Kicking the Kremlin (2014), Anna Arutunyan’s The
Putin Mystique (2014) – as well as analyses by academics and
think-tankers: Alena Ledeneva’s Can Russia Modernise?, Fiona Hill and
Clifford Gaddy’s Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Richard
Sakwa’s Putin Redux (2014).
New Year’s Eve 1999 – when Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV screens to
announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often
taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the
stability of the ‘Zero Years’, as the 2000s are known, the moment when
Yeltsin’s erratic improvisation gave way to the cold calculation
personified in Putin. Economically, the prolonged post-Soviet collapse
was followed by recovery after the 1998 ruble crash and then an
oil-fuelled boom, while in the media a boisterous incoherent pluralism
was replaced by deadening consensus. But there were deeper continuities
in the system both men commanded.
Politically, the ‘managed democracy’ of the 2000s was not a perversion
of Yeltsinism but its maturation. Faced with a fractious legislature –
the Congress of People’s Deputies elected in 1990 – Yeltsin bombed it
into submission in October 1993 and then rewrote the constitution along
hyper-presidential lines, getting it approved by a rigged referendum
that December. Even before that, he had sidestepped democratic
accountability by implementing much of the key legislation that shaped
the post-Soviet economy through a series of decrees – some of them,
notably on privatisation, drafted by Western advisers. Thanks to the
notorious ‘loans for shares’ deals of 1995-96, a handful of oligarchs
obtained vast holdings in oil and metals companies in exchange for
flooding the media outlets they owned with anti-Communist propaganda – a
vital contribution to prolonging Yeltsin’s grip on power, though
generous financial assistance from the West and electoral violations
also played their part. In Chechnya, Yeltsin moved to crush local
aspirations to sovereignty, unleashing total war against the civilian
population in 1994, though the Russian army had been fought to a
standstill by 1996.
On each of these fronts, Putin continued what Yeltsin began, starting in
the North Caucasus in September 1999, when he launched a vicious
counterinsurgency – officially labelled an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ –
to destroy any idea of Chechen independence, eventually imposing a
tyrant of his own choosing. Once installed as president, he made use of
the autocratic set-up he inherited to reassert central authority,
reining in regional elites by appointing plenipotentiaries to head seven
new federal superdistricts, okruga; five of the first levy were former
military men, underlining their disciplinary function (his first envoy
to the Southern Federal District, Viktor Kazantsev, had commanded
Russian forces in the North Caucasus). Fiscal reforms increased the
federal centre’s tax take at the expense of the regions, with Moscow’s
share rising from 50 per cent in 2001 to 70 per cent in 2008. In 2004
Putin further restricted their autonomy, abolishing elections for
governors and mayors (though these were partially reintroduced in 2012).
The national legislature had been put in its place by Yeltsin, though it
showed signs of rebellion in 1998, in the wake of the ruble crisis;
Putin brought it firmly to heel, streamlining the party system so that
by 2007 there were only four to manage, two of them, United Russia and A
Just Russia, the Kremlin’s own creations, while the Communist Party and
LDPR (the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia) hardly constituted an
opposition. In December 2003, Boris Gryzlov, the Duma chairman, summed
up its negligible role by declaring that ‘parliament is no place for
political battles.’
Bezalternativnost – ‘alternativelessness’ – was the triumphant
achievement of Putinism, but the hyper-presidentialism, dodging of
democratic accountability and use of force that made it possible were
the creations of Yeltsinism. There may seem to be more obvious contrasts
in the realm of economic policy between the 1990s and the 2000s: Yeltsin
implemented a radical programme of market reforms and mass
privatisation, seeking to dismantle for ever the state socialist system;
Putin moved to expand the state’s role. But this picture, too, needs to
be revised. Putinism has been driven from the outset by two parallel
impulses, one rooted in neoliberal principles and the other in a
strategic statism. From 2000 onwards, the government introduced a series
of measures designed to extend the reach of private capital rather than
curtail it: in 2001 a flat income tax set at 13 per cent; in 2002 an
employer-friendly labour code; in 2002 and 2003 tax cuts for businesses;
in 2005 reforms expanding the private sector’s role in education, health
and housing, and so on. But it has also sought to ensure that the state
retains control over key resources – primarily raw materials for export,
especially oil and gas. The result has been what the political scientist
Gerald Easter calls an ‘upstairs-downstairs’ economy: large strategic
industries remain directly or indirectly subordinated to the state,
while private enterprise takes care of the rest, from banking and
construction to retail and petty trade. It’s important to bear in mind,
though, that even the ‘statist’ component of Putin’s economic policies
hasn’t always required state ownership: privately owned companies that
work within the parameters the government has laid down, such as the
Siberian oil giant Surgutneftegas, have been largely left alone; those
that don’t – like Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos – have been attacked.
Even state behemoths such as Rosneft and Gazprom are organised like
private companies rather than Soviet-style ministerial enterprises,
geared primarily to pay dividends to shareholders – of which the state
is simply the largest.
Both aspects of Putinism’s economic policies – the liberalising thrust
and its apparent statism – share a respect for private profit-making: a
commitment to the capitalist model put in place during the 1990s.
Despite vowing in 2000 that the oligarchs would ‘cease to exist as a
class’, Putin presided over a massive expansion in their ranks: no
Russians made the 2000 Forbes list of billionaires, 87 did in 2007, and
111 in 2014. Vast inequalities have been a constant feature under Putin,
as the disparities in income and wealth that emerged in the 1990s were
consolidated and deepened in the 2000s. But while the model remained the
same, the personnel who benefited changed. The most powerful oligarchs
of the Yeltsin era made their fortunes mainly in banking, finance and
the media – Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Vladimir Potanin – but
the ruble crisis of 1998 drastically reduced their influence, and rising
commodities prices thereafter gave the advantage to those with assets in
the raw materials sector; the typical tycoons of the 2000s were oil and
metals magnates such as Vladimir Bogdanov of Surgutneftegas; Aleksei
Mordashov, who owns the steelmaker Severstal; and Mikhail Prokhorov,
co-owner of Norilsk Nickel. Then there were the ‘state oligarchs’,
government functionaries who joined the ranks of the super-rich thanks
to their chairmanships of state-owned enterprises, as well as the
members of Putin’s entourage who, according to a November 2011 report in
Novoe Vremia, controlled companies and assets worth between 10 and 15
per cent of GDP.
The Yeltsin-era oligarchs not only made off with state assets on the
cheap but also effectively privatised large chunks of the government
apparatus, in a phenomenon known as ‘state capture’. Under Putin, the
boot seemed to be on the other foot, as state functionaries came to own
swathes of private enterprise – ‘business capture’. But really both
processes were shifts in the balance of power between different portions
of the same elite. Since the start of the Yeltsin era, government and
business had been closely intertwined, with private wealth coming from
revenues that derived ultimately from the state: privatisation deals,
banking privileges, government contracts, tax and trade concessions,
arbitrage opportunities. The oligarchs who commanded the political
landscape in the 1990s owed their fortunes to this kind of parasitism,
rapidly acquiring enough wealth to purchase political power within a
state apparatus permeated by private interests. In 1996 Berezovsky told
one interviewer that ‘from my point of view, in general, power and
capital are inseparable’ – adding, after a pause, that ‘if something is
advantageous to capital, it goes without saying that it is advantageous
to the nation.’
In the 2000s, the direction of influence between the spheres of
government and business was reversed: on taking power, Putin laid down
new rules that oligarchs had to abide by, and later appointed several
key allies to the chairmanship of state companies. But the boundaries
between the two realms remained fluid and the same goals were pursued in
each. In 2008, Oleg Deripaska, CEO of Rusal, the world’s largest
aluminium company, declared: ‘I do not separate myself from the state.’
This fusion of profit and power is the reason protestations about
government assaults on private enterprise, such as those that erupted in
the West after Khodorkovsky’s arrest in 2003, are wide of the mark:
since the end of the USSR, the battles between government and business
have been struggles over particular pieces of property rather than over
the principle of gain. The system Yeltsin put in place was designed to
enshrine this principle, and Putinism was built to defend it. The regime
we see today is the fruit of their joint success.
*
In December 2010, word leaked out about a 74-hectare estate by the Black
Sea reportedly built for Putin himself, complete with
pseudo-neoclassical palace, amphitheatre, sports complex and three
helipads. The news was scandalous but unsurprising: aerial shots of the
enormous mansions belonging to government officials and well-connected
biznesmeny had long been a staple of blogs and Twitter feeds: Aleksei
Miller, CEO of Gazprom, is allegedly the owner of a thirty-hectare
estate fifty miles outside Moscow popularly known as ‘Millerhof’. What
was unusual about ‘Putin’s Palace’ was that a whistleblower from within
the elite felt compelled to reveal its existence, not that a government
official would have accumulated such colossal wealth.
For opponents of Putin such as Gessen, ‘the whole edifice’ of the regime
rests ‘on this one man’, and his pathologies are writ large across the
system. She claims Putin suffers from ‘pleonexia’, ‘the insatiable
desire to have what rightfully belongs to others’; for Dawisha, Putin
stands at the centre of a ‘kleptocratic tribute system’, through which
he and those close to him have made vast illicit fortunes. There is no
doubting the Russian elite’s endless appetite for self-enrichment, or
its corrosive effects on the country as a whole. Corruption has
metastasised, spreading to almost every sphere of life. State
functionaries at all levels squeeze the populace for cash. The sums
involved range from the small amounts demanded by traffic cops to the
levies of $1000 a month ‘lifted’ from small businesses by government
agencies (sanitary inspectors, fire safety inspectors, police and so
on). As for high-end political corruption, in the mid-2000s, $200,000
would pay for amendments to existing legislation; $500,000 would get
your own law custom-made; a false budget entry cost 4 per cent of the
sum involved. The INDEM foundation, a Moscow-based think tank,
calculated on the basis of surveys it carried out that the overall
amount businesses paid in bribes rose ninefold between 2001 and 2005,
from $34 billion to $318 billion, nearly a sixth of GDP.
Perhaps the most obvious symptom of corruption’s pervasiveness is the
entry into everyday speech of its distinctive lexicon: most Russians
will have no difficulty telling you the difference between raspil, otkat
and zanos (raspil – ‘sawing off’ – refers to money made through
fraudulent state contracts; otkat is a kickback; zanos is a regularised
cash tribute, either a flat fee or a proportion of turnover). State
officials who have their eye on particular sectors or kinds of business
are known as smotriashchie, ‘watchers’, and their areas as poliany,
‘meadows’, a bucolic image that brings to mind the old tsarist
institution of kormlenie, or ‘feeding’, in which officials supported
themselves at the expense of the local population.
Corruption is so pervasive that it doesn’t make sense to focus so
closely on Putin and his circle when seeking out its causes. Instead of
blaming individual ‘kleptocrats’ we need to look at the elite as a
whole, and the mechanisms that enable it to thrive. Ledeneva’s Can
Russia Modernise?, an ethnography based on interviews with 42
apparatchiks and businessmen, provides crucial insights. Ledeneva’s
informants all refer to contemporary Russia’s distinctive mode of
government simply as sistema, ‘the system’.* The term encompasses
almost all the things members of the elite are involved in, from petty
compromises to grand larceny, from affairs of state to the exchange of
favours. It covers what’s known as ‘manual control’, when the Kremlin
overrides institutional hierarchies to secure a particular court
verdict, say; or it can describe the elite’s wangling of privileges such
as migalki – the blue sirens that enable apparatchiks to thread their
way through the Moscow traffic. But what defines sistema is the
combination of formal rules and informal practices through which it
operates. One example of this is the way that members of the elite use
official resources for unofficial purposes and vice versa. State
functionaries, for example, depl0y entirely legal instruments – tax
inspections, bankruptcy laws, property transfer documents – to seize
hold of companies, banks, oil fields and so on. (The Russian elite is
intensely legalistic in its felonies, in the spirit of a local proverb:
‘For our friends we have everything; for our enemies, the law.’) The
capacity these people have to deploy formal and informal kinds of power
at the same time has been one of the most powerful factors behind the
growth of corruption: Ledeneva calls it ‘the core modus operandi of
sistema’.
The blurring of the boundaries between formal and informal authority has
its flesh-and-blood counterpart in the personalised networks that
connect members of the elite to one another. The Russian elite is often
described as an assortment of rival ‘clans’, grouped under descriptive
labels such as ‘Petersburg lawyers’, ‘chekists’ (former KGB operatives),
‘siloviki’ (men from the ‘power ministries’) and so on. But the
boundaries of these factions are fluid and subjective: the same people
can turn up on different sides depending on whose analysis you’re
reading and when. Other metaphors – ‘planets’ orbiting Putin at various
distances, ‘Kremlin towers’ ringing the ‘tsar’ at the centre, a standing
‘politburo’ of close advisers – are evocative but too schematic. More
helpful is Ledeneva’s suggestion that we see the Russian elite as a mass
of several different kinds of network.
The strength and quality of the connections within these networks
varies. Those closest to Putin are bound to him by strong personal ties:
his inner circle includes former KGB colleagues and people he worked
closely with in St Petersburg in the early 1990s, such as Igor Sechin,
currently chairman of Rosneft; Sergei Ivanov, the presidential
administration’s chief of staff; Viktor Ivanov, head of the Federal
Narcotics Service; and Nikolai Patrushev, Putin’s successor as head of
the FSB and current head of the Russian Security Council. With a second
group Putin has weak but still personal connections. Ledeneva calls them
‘useful friends’ and they include members of the Ozero dacha
co-operative, founded in 1996 by Putin and seven others, as well as his
old judo partners: Gennady Timchenko, whose firm, Gunvor, rapidly grew
from almost nothing to become fourth largest oil trader in the world;
and the Rotenberg brothers, Boris and Arkady, billionaire bankers who
among other things received lucrative contracts for construction
projects related to the Sochi Olympics. (These individuals, and the
companies linked with them, were among the first to be targeted by
Western sanctions in 2014.)
Now imagine that each of the people connected to Putin stands at the
centre of several networks of his own, spanning the realms of private
and professional life, bringing in friends, associates, relatives and
children. Here’s a brief sample of noteworthy family ties: Patrushev’s
son Dmitry is chairman of the Russian Agricultural Bank; Putin’s cousin
Igor was the vice president at Master Bank and now chairs the somewhat
opaque Fund for the Support and Development of Industry in the Regions;
the president’s nephew Mikhail is on the board of a gas company called
Sogaz; the former education minister Andrei Fursenko, now a presidential
adviser, is the brother of Sergei, another member of Putin’s dacha
co-operative and director of a Gazprom subsidiary. Parts of this
extensive web of nepotism have been mapped out by Russian journalists
over the years: in Vlast’ semei (‘The Power of the Families’, 2012), for
example, Marina Litvinovich focused on twenty of the top familial
‘clans’. The phenomenon extends all the way down to the local level: in
April 2011 the newspaper Vedomosti ran a story about the wealth and
power accumulated by the children of United Russia officials under the
headline ‘They Were Just Very Lucky’. Rather than seeing the Russian
elite as a set of clans or a single clique, in other words, we should
think of it as a system of alliances and interest groups stretching
across the country – a tangle of lines branching outwards in every
direction from the ‘vertical of power’.
The concept of a kleptocracy or a ‘cabal’ centred on Putin, then,
singles out particular individuals as being responsible for the
rapaciousness of the regime. The logic behind the US and EU sanctions is
that since power in Russia is both very centralised and highly
personalised, punishing a select group of people at its apex is
tantamount to disciplining the regime itself. This requires us to
believe that Putin and his circle are uniquely crooked – as if the rest
of the Russian elite weren’t driven by the same motives, or skilled in
the use of the same techniques. More important, it asks us to shut out
the wider realities of profit-making in Russia which are rooted in the
capitalist system that was imposed in the 1990s, at such cost to
Russians themselves but to much applause from abroad. That system is
something the West has no interest in attacking.
*
There is a memorable scene in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film Leviathan,
set in a small town in the far northern Kola Peninsula, in which the
town’s thuggish mayor pays a night-time visit to Nikolai, whom he has
ordered to be evicted from his home. Red-faced and drunk, the mayor
stumbles out of his chauffeur-driven car and says to Nikolai, ‘Vlast
nado znat’ v litso’, meaning ‘You should be able to recognise power’ –
though since the idiom contains the word for ‘face’ it implies
recognition not just of power but of its physical embodiment.† Dmitry,
the Muscovite lawyer whom Nikolai has invited to help him, tells the
mayor he has no right to be on private property, to which the mayor
responds by shouting at Nikolai: ‘You never had any rights, and never will!’
Leviathan has been called an unsparing portrait of Putin’s Russia, which
it is: all the cynicism and arbitrariness of the ruling elite are on
display. We see how the ‘vertical of power’ – a picture of Putin hangs
on the wall of the mayor’s office – is in practice a licence for
kingpins all the way down the chain to do what they like in pursuit of
their own private goals. The film’s protagonists have their lives
destroyed for daring to resist the whims of the local authority. But the
bleakest aspects of the film are the mysteries it leaves unexplained.
Why are Nikolai, Dmitry and the rest so defenceless in the face of this
miniature tyrant, who seems almost too comical to be truly intimidating?
Why is the system he represents so powerful, here and in the rest of
Russia? What’s holding it in place?
Much writing on Russia seems to suggest that the answer is simply Putin
himself, through some combination of authoritarian charisma, oil
revenues, nationalist demagoguery, media manipulation and electoral
fraud; or else it’s a criminal, semi-KGB elite that has managed to seize
the machinery of state and convince the country to follow it down an
anti-democratic path. But this is to mistake a symptom for a prime
cause. Putinism isn’t a corrupt, dictatorial structure imposed on a
helpless population; it’s embedded in the social, economic and political
realities of modern Russia, shaped by them even as it shapes them in
turn. One of the leviathans referred to by Zvyagintsev’s title is the
state apparatus, but when isolated individuals like Nikolai try to
oppose a crooked mayor, they are up against a far larger machinery – the
form taken by capitalism in post-Soviet conditions. The fallout from the
Ukraine crisis has greatly narrowed Putinism’s room for manoeuvre, but
even in the unlikely event of his being swept from power, the system
that currently bears his name could take on a different one and remain
little altered in its substance. It is all the more formidable an
adversary because it is both elusive and all-pervading, abstract and yet
substantial: it is both versions of the biblical monster that haunt the
screen at different moments in Leviathan – a black whale that surfaces
forebodingly from the sea, and a bleached skeleton embedded in the sand.
23 January
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