Putinism

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Vladimir Putin in Crimea (2000)

The term Putinism ( Russian Путинизм ) is a political catchphrase that describes the political system in Russia and its actions, as it emerged under Russian President Vladimir Putin .

Content

Phases
According to the description of the Eastern Europe expert Richard Sakwa as Putinism, Russia's political system went through three phases before it developed into its current form from around 2011: The classic form with the phases of the restructuring policy from March 2000 to October 2003 and the phase of expansion of the The supremacy of the presidential administration until 2008 was replaced by the phase of the "tandem government" in which President Medvedev sought to strengthen the rule of law and liberal aspects against the preponderance of the presidential administration. Initially, liberals believed in Putin's progress, but over the years the conservative strata of the population in the peri-urban and rural areas became his supporters, while propaganda with its nationalism and traditional symbols military and Christian orthodoxy attracted the urban, young liberals as the fifth column of the hostile foreign countries. In 2011 the fourth phase, referred to by Sakwa as “developed Putinism”, began.

Sakwa emphasizes the continuity of the development, which began with Boris Yeltsin in 1991 and from the beginning showed certain authoritarian elements in the control of the political processes. "Both (Yeltsin and Putin) have tried to control the competing claims, namely the urge for political participation and social security on the one hand, and the fragmentation of post-Soviet Eurasia and the new security challenges at the international level on the other." secondary process to legitimize the status quo ”.

Samuel P. Huntington, on the other hand, argued in 2002 that Putinism “differs from Yeltsinism, which identified with the West ideologically and culturally. Putin is just a pragmatist. If it suits him, he cooperates with the USA, with the West. ”The exiled oligarch and one of Putin's greatest critics, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, describes the system of rule established under him as“ feudalist-criminal ”.

Phase of developed Putinism
In its developed form, Putinism showed "new methods of political management" after Sakwa: the strategy of selective coercion against leaders of the opposition such as Alexei Navalny , the strategy of restricting the right to demonstrate and the ownership of shares abroad. In the strategy of co-optation , the All-Russian Popular Front is the most important "co-opting mechanism". In the strategy of persuasion, ideological initiatives had been undertaken, "including a markedly anti-Western stance, closer ties to the Orthodox Church and advocacy for conservative cultural and family values." Sakwa diagnosed this phase as stagnating, suppressing pluralism and corruption marked. The alternative is “Putinism without Putin” as the fifth phase through sustained “pressure from democratic movements, accompanied by a revival of the constitutional state” or “revolution and collapse”.

“If there is Putin, then there is Russia. If Putin doesn't exist, Russia doesn't exist either. "

- Vyacheslav Volodin , October 2014

Comparison with other forms of rule
Marcel H. Van Herpen, director of the Cicero Foundation, compares Putinism with fascism and other forms of government. He finds similarities between Putinism and features of Bonapartism , Italian interwar fascism and Berlusconism . Alan Posener from the newspaper Die Welt (or probably Welt Online ) wrote in connection with the discrimination of minorities in Russia: "Putinism lives from creating foreign and domestic enemies and wrestling them down with propaganda ."

Similarities with Bonapartism
With the government system of Napoleon III. Marcel H. Van Herpen sees similarities in that Bonapartism was also characterized by an omnipresent secret service, censorship of the media, a formal multi-party system with the weak position of parliament and a striving for enlargement of the territory as well as military adventures. Putinism seems to Herpen more modern insofar as physical repression has been replaced by controlling public opinion via the media and election manipulation.

Differences to the communist dictatorship
The German political scientist Manfred Sapper sees four main differences to the communist dictatorship: Instead of the party there is “a multitude of clans, clans and networks ... that satisfy their material interests by controlling and controlling economically relevant resources such as the exportable raw material industries skim off »rents« from the proceeds. ”Furthermore, there is no longer any messianic ideology, arbitrariness and repression are on the agenda instead of mass violence and the limits are open, one can leave the“ Putin system ”. For Markus Wehner , maintaining power in a modern dictatorship rests primarily on propaganda (and not, as in the past, on violence).

Theoretician of Putinism
The politician Vladislav Surkov describes himself as one of the authors of this system .

Domestic politics

The concept has manifested itself since Putin took office in 1999 as the successor to the resigned Boris Yeltsin through the fight against organized crime , the financing of social and armaments expenditure through the nationalized exploitation of raw materials and through a priority of public order over individual freedoms. With the form of government of controlled democracy , the stability of state and society is to be achieved above all. This goes hand in hand with restrictions on the realization of human rights in Russia .

Foreign policy

According to Ulrich Menzel , a revisionist policy of establishing a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space is at the center of Putinism. To do this, Putin used political means (e.g. confrontation in the UN) as well as economic (e.g. energy raw material exports) and military methods (e.g. Ukraine war ).

The Putin government is critical of the role played by Western countries and alliances, and it perceives NATO's eastward expansion as a threat to its own security. After the intervention in the Caucasus War with Georgia in 2008 , power politics did not stop at the annexation of Crimea , an area of ​​the now independent state of Ukraine , in 2014 . As the German Chancellor Angela Merkel commented, “the law of the strong” is set against the “strength of the law”.

See also

Portal: Russia  - Overview of Wikipedia content on Russia

literature

  • Ronald J. Hill, Ottorino Cappelli (Ed.): Putin and Putinism. Routledge, Abingdon (Oxfordshire) 2013.
  • Marcel H. Van Herpen: Putinism: The slow rise of a radical right regime in Russia. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2013.
  • Richard Sakwa: Russian Politics and Society. Routledge, London, New York 2008.
  • Richard Sakwa: Putin's Leadership. Character and Consequences. In: Europe-Asia Studies, 60.2008, No. 6 (special edition: Power and Policy in Putin's Russia), pp. 879–897.
  • Richard Sakwa: The Dual State in Russia. In: Post-Soviet Affairs, 26.2010, No. 3, pp. 185-206.
  • Richard Sakwa: The Crisis of Russian Democracy. The Dual State, Factionalism and the Medvedev Succession. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2011.
  • Richard Sakwa: Modernization, neo-modernization, and comparative democratisation in Russia. In: East European Politics, 28.2012, No. 1, pp. 43–57.
  • Walter Laqueur : Putinism: Where is Russia going? (Original title: Putinism, Russia and Its Future with the West , 2015, translated by Klaus-Dieter Schmidt), Propylaen, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-549-07461-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Baines, Nicholas O'Shaughnessy, Nancy Snow (eds.): The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda Verlag SAGE, 2019, ISBN 9781526486257 , p. 493
  2. ↑ Richard Sakwa: Analysis: Developed Putinism - Change without Development. Federal Agency for Civic Education , July 15, 2013, accessed on December 27, 2014 .
  3. ↑ The Bloody Limits of Islam . In: Die Zeit , No. 37/2002
  4. ↑ Kremlin critic claims: Vladimir Putin is considering his withdrawal . In: FOCUS Online . ( focus.de [accessed on March 26, 2018]).
  5. ↑ Richard Sakwa: Analysis: Developed Putinism - Change without Development. Federal Agency for Civic Education , July 15, 2013, accessed on February 21, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Julian Hans: Without Putin, no Russia. Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 16, 2015, accessed on March 16, 2015 .
  7. ^ The Cicero Foundation ( en ) CiceroFoundation.org.
  8. ↑ Van Herpen, 2013, 203.
  9. ^ Alan Posener: No driving license for transsexuals in Russia . World online ; accessed on January 11, 2015
  10. ↑ Van Herpen, 2013, 7 f.
  11. ↑ Manfred Sapper: Putinism in Action ( Memento of the original from February 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / brockhaus.de
  12. ↑ Markus Wehner: Putin's Cold War: How Russia is driving the West in front of it . Verlag Knaur eBook, 2016, ISBN 978-3-426-43835-0 , Chapter 5: Russia's Information War
  13. ^ Peter Pomerantsev: The hidden author of Putinism . (The Atlantic). Retrieved December 19, 2014
  14. ↑ Lyudmila Alexejewa: Human rights: The rise and fall of Putinism . Welt Online , accessed December 21, 2014
  15. ↑ According to the democracy index, Russia is the most undemocratic country in Europe. Worldwide it is in the penultimate group of the “authoritarian regimes”. In addition to pushing back the opposition media, freedom of expression and the right to demonstrate is increasingly being restricted.
  16. ↑ Ulrich Menzel: Where is the world going? Federal Agency for Civic Education , October 21, 2016.
  17. ↑ Merkel in her government statement : Russia puts the law of the strong against the strength of the law (The Huffington Post), accessed on December 19, 2014