Potemkin politics and post-Soviet democracy
VIRTUAL POLITICS. Faking democracy in the post-Soviet world. Andrew Wilson.
332pp. Yale University Press. Pounds 20 (US $40). - 0 300 09545 7.
Reading Andrew Wilson's Virtual Politics: Faking democracy in the post-Soviet world, I began to doubt whether Machiavelli's Prince would have lasted one day in contemporary Moscow. Wilson describes a political realm in post- Soviet countries where nothing is as it appears to be. Rival parties on the left and right end up as mere fictions, virtual representations flickering across television screens with fake addresses, phone numbers, staff and following.
Muck-raking journalists are really hired "hatchets" contracted by political technologists to smear rivals. Academic research and political exit polling are manufactured for the highest bidder. People amassed in rallies turn out to be paid extras. Even historical events are performed for future textbooks.
The political coups of 1991 and 1993 which together unseated Mikhail Gorbachev, led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ended the Cold War and established Boris Yeltsin as President of an independent Russia with an executive-heavy constitution were apparently staged dramaturgiya. Acts of terror, such as the nightmarish 2003 siege of the Moscow Dubrovka Theatre, were fabricated by security forces for political purposes. After the show, the coup-plotters and surviving terrorists were quietly allowed to go free, until their next performance in a new drama.
Wilson's contention is that democracy in the post-Soviet states has been staged to cover up the wholesale theft of state property and the general commodification of politics. Vladimir Putin's recent abbreviation of democratic institutions, then, is only the outward manifestation of a command-style governance that has dominated in Russia for centuries. Stepping into the debate over whether the post-Soviet states are semi- authoritarian or semi-democratic, Wilson argues they are neither. Instead the countries of the former Soviet Union are sites of "virtual politics", where authority is invented and "political technologists perform the basic mythology of the state".
From the start, Wilson asserts, democracy in Russia never had a chance. In Poland, an electrician took over the reins of state from the Communist Party.
In Czechoslovakia, an ex-con poet moved into Prague Castle. In Russia, however, instead of outsiders, it was the apparatchiks, successful party functionaries, who created the "opposition" in the waning years of the USSR. Wilson credits Aleksander Yakovlev with founding the complement of liberal and pro-Western activities and parties, while Yegor Ligachev countered with conservative and nationalist groups. Neither man struggled to see his convictions enacted into law and governance. Rather, both laboured to create for an unwitting populace and gullible Western observers an illusion of a multi-party system. Wilson notes: "The representation of late Soviet politics as a struggle between reformers and die-hards, democrats and authoritarians, good guys and bad, was the greatest illusion of all . . . .
