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How Putin Invented The New Authoritarianism

"Russian Diplomat’s Sexist Attack On Pussy Riot"

Jan 28, 2014 @ 03:37 PM 9,712

Melik Kaylan, Contributor

I cover conflicts, frontiers and upheavals mired in history.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

In my previous blog I dwelt on the misdeeds of Putin in provoking and possibly planning the destabilization of Ukraine. I thought it not hyperbolic to dub him 'the greatest Lord of Misrule in our time'. In strictest accuracy he doesn't deserve the euphemism – it's too good for him. The term once described a master of ceremonies for a kind of Saturnalia in which common folk and nobles suspended social norms and indulged in riotous fun. Fun is not on Putin's agenda. When he incites chaos, he does so to redouble repression in its wake.

When I last checked, the blog had notched up close to 26,000 views so it evidently touched a chord. I spoke about the list of places that have suffered from his attentions such as Chechnya, Georgia, Moldavia and Ukraine. For a lot of folks with a split-screen take on the world, Putin has the right to interfere in that swath of territory to protect Moscow's sphere of interest and to prevent the West from encroachment. That leaves all the other places where he has cast his shadow by example. Putin has set precedents of misrule in Russia that others have followed chapter and verse, paradigms nobody would have dared institute in the post-Cold War world had Putin not tried them first successfully with no effective repercussions from outside. In effect, he showed every budding autocrat in the region and beyond, how to roll back human rights and freedoms with impunity. He has singlehandedly set up a counter-polarity to the standards of the free world. And he has furnished a ready-made set of arguments for anyone taking his path - with a fog of vaguely-justified, ultra-contrived rationales about stability, foreign interference, terrorist threats, religious standards and the like.

To begin with, he took the ramshackle crony-capitalism of Yeltsin and turned the oligarchic system into an instrument of state control. He reinvented the command economy or, rather, the pyramid economy where economic output flows upwards into the state's hands not through efficient taxes but through arteries of patronage. All business above a certain size must fall into line politically and pay into the corruption vortex. There's no room for an independent economy. We see the model thriving throughout the near abroad, in the Caucasus, and across Central Asia in the former Soviet Republics. We see it in Belarus. Increasingly in Hungary. In this, as in other Putinist governance techniques, nobody has learned lessons more effectively than Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Hence the huge construction projects farmed out to friends, family and loyalists. Hence the corruption investigations now pulling Turkey apart.

Putin was the first to move against free media ownership. He preferred to control television channels and allowed some laxity in newspapers. The former reached many more people while the latter furnished a dumbshow of opposition. Even then, journalists often got killed, jailed, beaten up or threatened. This model we now see popping up in various degrees everywhere outside the West, not least in Turkey. At one time, we all thought the multiplier technology of satellites, the proliferation of television channels, simply made information control impossible. Turned out you could get cronies to own all the channels. We thought the internet made authoritarian rule impossible. Turned out, that even social media could be muzzled or flooded with disinformation, as is happening in Turkey. The harrassment and closure of democracy NGO's as foreign agents started in Russia, and spread quickly to Egypt even in the Arab Spring period.

It was during the second Chechen war under Putin that journalists first got deliberately targeted, kidnapped and killed. Indeed, it hadn't happened en masse before. Journalists were always everywhere too valuable to the rebel side as independent observers. Suddenly, in Chechnya for the first time, the principle didn't apply largely, it seemed, because of the influx of jihadists. Nobody could understand how Chechnya had got flooded with Jihadists who weren't there during the first war. Now we see the model repeated in Syria with (Putin's client) Assad releasing AQ sympathizers so he could paint all the opposition as terrorists – while attacking journalists. In Afghanistan, we have President Karzai just recently releasing Taliban types from prison. In each of these cases, we are witnessing cynical tricks and techniques of manipulation which, after the Cold War ended, after we thought nobody would get away with such things again, we first saw in Russia. Under Putin, we might all remember the Russian apartment bombings in 1999 which killed 293 people and served as a casus belli to launch the Second Chechen War. Many many people in Russia and abroad believe the FSB was behind the bombings.

Then there's the deliberate, dangerous, corruption of language that has become widespread in just a few years. We see Erdogan and his party in Turkey referring to Gezi Park protestors as terrorists. We see Yanukovych following suit with Euromaidan. We see the military in Egypt going in the same direction but further along the path of bloodshed. In many of these instances, we hear reports of provocateurs pretending to belong to the opposition doing the kind of damage that justifies tough measures. These measures lead to the abrogation of democratic freedoms, and ultimately to the suspension of democracy in all but name.

Putin was the first to re-resort to Soviet era propaganda about foreign spies and outside interference causing unrest within. Until he did so, legitimacy invested popular protest movements as being eruptions of free expression against authoritarian corruption. In public speeches, Putin framed them as sinister phenomena organized by nefarious forces from without. His stance has now been mirrored across the region and beyond. Chavez in Venezuela immediately got the message. Erdogan talks of dark international conspiracies, the “interest-rate lobby” and others. Yanukovych, the Egyptian army, Morsi before them, Mubarak before him, Belarus's Lukashenko, all blamed such forces before cracking down. Some, like Assad, harbored foreign forces and paid the price and then blamed outsiders for civil war. The same may yet happen in Turkey, just to add to that country's troubles under Erdogan. In his excellent book about Jihad in Central Asia, the most informed writer on the subject, Ahmed Rashid, itemizes how the Kremlin fostered Islamic militants along the borders of the 'stans' to threaten their new statehood. Reason? To create a need for Kremlin control via Russian peacekeepers. The area's dictators appreciated the excuse to keep hold on their power.

Putin also invented the model of the democratically elected permanent leader. The rewriting of constitutions to stay in power, the removal of legal checks and balances, the dictatorship of populism over democratic institutions and opposition voices – while constantly keeping the playing field unbalanced in order to keep winning elections: all that was Putin's gift to the world. Include in that list the constant intimidation of opposing political figures as is happening now in Georgia. From Georgia we have come to understand that the only democratic leaders are those that allow themselves to be elected out.

No doubt many readers, in order to avoid reasoning, will mock my arguments with “sure, blame everything on Putin” or “it's all Russia's fault”. I do not, of course, say that the Kremlin engineered all these contemporary political evils directly. There's no doubt also that the debacle of Iraq by the US and allies gave him plenty of moral cover. The West, too, has a lot to answer for. The bungling, myopic naivete in assuming that democracy will out and will win whatever the internal conditions or external hostility has caused disasters. But the West does not operate for the sake solely of power and control. My point is that Putin set the example at a time when state repression seemed all but banished from human affairs, if the state in question wished to have any pretenses to democratic standards. Putin it was who first launched the counter-revolution. He made it stick, gave it legitimacy. He furnished the techniques and the language. He invented the post-Cold War freeze on democratic freedoms.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/melikkaylan/2014/01/28/how-putin-invented-the-new-authoritarianism/#5b43ea4628f4