Total Putinism

What will Vladislav Surkov be mediated after resigning from the Kremlin

In the 1950s, Hungarian Gustav Shebesh created the concept of the so-called “socialist football” (Golden Hungarian team), which was further improved by the Dutchman Rinus Michels, becoming the founder of “total football”. This revolutionary strategy proceeded from the fact that players should be able to replace each other in various positions, regardless of the initially chosen role of the defender, midfielder or striker.

However, in the broad masses, this phenomenon is more associated not with the names of Shebesh and Michels, but with the personality of the legendary captain of the “orange” Johan Kruyff (or Kroof), who moved throughout the field during the match, taking the balls, making gear and effectively completing the attacks. This is what I remembered while reading the first interview of Vladislav Surkov after his departure from the public service.

In my opinion, during his long political career, he did something similar with Russian politics, creating a model that can be called a “total system”.

She, without a doubt, requires a thorough objective analysis without unnecessary emotions. However, at first I would like to say a little about the founder of the founder of this complex and contradictory phenomenon.

Studying various materials about Surkov, I often had to deal with such descriptive expressions as “Gray Cardinal”, “Kremlin Richelieu” and the like. Given the fact that the mass (especially television) Russian analytics is based on conspiracy theories, this can be treated with understanding.

However, analysts with practical experience working with officials of various levels and classes perfectly understand that real policy is much more boring and primitive. Simply speaking, then the expectations are closer to the series “Card of the House”, and reality to the “Western Wing”.

The “gray cardinals” were always and everywhere: from San Francisco to Canberra. Rasputin had a similar status under the royal family, Bernard Barukh was such in the era of Franklin Delaino Roosevelt, Walter Montagil and Dick Cheney played this role in the Carter and Bush Jr., and Dannis Ross “twisted the threads” under Clinton. Of course, each of the listed characters had a serious weight and a certain influence, but where does the “gray cardinalism” have to do with it?

One of the American founding fathers James Madison was sure that a big policy is the processes that are the prerogative of an organized minority, so it should not be available to the eyes of the unorganized majority until a certain time period. Hence the various stamps of secrecy and other similar elements that help to understand the real state of affairs.

Unfortunately, the ranking of certain persons seems difficult due to the lack of objective indicators of the degree of “influence”. An artificial PR to create an image through media and one -sided films (for example, “Power” about Dick Cheney) cannot serve as such as definition. In the end, there remains a boring work on the analysis of everyday life, which disappointed those who sincerely believed that the Rockefellers and Roosevelta Jews, and not the Germans and the Dutch, and Bush was not a “dumb village” (even if so, he had a father, who went from Congressman and the director of the CIA to the President), who correctly fulfilled the orders of Cheini.

Russian political culture has its own specifics, but the essence of this does not change much.

The nuance is that one person - President Vladimir Putin determines the vector of long -term strategic development.

If you look at this from the point of view of historical sequence, one can take this even as a pattern.

In this situation in the hands of the ruler, the amount of power is concentrated, which, in my subjective opinion, makes it impossible to emerge real “gray cardinals” (because this automatically implies the presence of a constant threat). The paradox of Surkov is that he was one of the ideological founders of such a configuration and, as he himself admits in an interview, lost his place in it.

In the United States, Alexander Hamilton tried to create a similar system for President George Washington, but his “influence group” lost the duo Madison-Jefferson. Taking into account the fundamental contribution of Surkov to the formation of what is called the "long state of Putin", I personally doubt that the Ukrainian case was the global reason for his departure.

His answers are a set of ciphers, the keys to which he himself has. The specially selected contradictions are obvious. The Ukrainian direction is only one of the projects for him. It is clear that the next curator will somehow rely on tactical programs developed under Surko. Still, too much effort, time and resources were invested in order to now make sharp turns. In an interview, he emphasizes that the case “cooled”, the stage of routinization has come, which is not so interesting to him.

Perhaps this is precisely the change of context, because it is difficult to imagine strategic changes on this track. It is unlikely that President Putin decided that the Ukrainian question should not be a priority for foreign policy, and it was time to weaken the grip. It is even less believed that one of the episodes of political life could become a determining factor for such a fateful step. As an ideologist discussing politics by the categories of “deepness”, he would not leave real motives on the surface. Eidoologists, with their answers, always give rise to even more questions, and it is obvious to me that this particular mission was pursued by this conversation.

In my subjective opinion, the theme of internal transformations is the most exciting for him, since it was to the question of the constitution that he answered with the words “he read what was in the news.” It is very difficult to imagine that one of the key architects of the modern Russian political system is so not so interesting to the future of his “brainchild” that it was limited to news reports.

With the naked eye we can see that it refers to the conditional system of Putinism as a work of art and his main achievement (even called it a global political life hack).

The current constitutional changes are actually the institutionalization of most elements of the model of sovereign democracy that Surkov promoted.

Perhaps hence the comparison with Steve Jobs, who created Apple not only as a business, but also as a conceptual tool to achieve more serious goals (change the world). His enthusiasm for the idea, fanaticism and uncompromising, according to members of the board of directors, have become a threat to common interests. According to Steve Wozniak - the once close friend and co -founder of Apple - Jobs knew about intrigues against him, was suppressed and decided to leave a place of his own free will.

John Scully, the former CEO of the corporation, writes that Jobs was offered to leave because of his destructive impact on the workflow, after which Steve took a long vacation (meditated), but continued to be the nominal president of the company.

There are too many parallels in two episodes to think that the example with Jobs Surkov cited by chance. In fact, you can’t just leave the system that you created, especially when we are talking about big politics. With Apple, everything ended with the return of Jobs, who at first also denied the possibility of his Cambem.

Time will tell how the story with Surkov will end, and whether the design of Putinism can withstand the upcoming stress tests. It seems to me that his calm is due to the fact that he knows the problematic places of this model better than others, and at the first crisis, the system will ask him to return (again an analogy with Jobs). Not just that Vladislav Surkov emphasized that he was a Putinist “partly heretical” and prefers to work in the genre of counterrealism.

The editors do not always share the opinions and assessments of its authors