Neo-Feudalism Explained (The nature of Russia today)

Many Western experts today portray Russia as a country spiraling down into totalitarianism, slowly (or not so slowly) following the path of the Soviet Union, whose authoritarian regime crumbled under growing pressure from an emerging civil society. Prevailing opinion attributes this authoritarian U-turn to the nature of the contemporary Russian political elite. Members of this elite (as argued by many Western analysts, including Ian Bremmer) are recruited disproportionately from the so-called siloviye structury, that is, the law-enforcement bodies and security services, which trace their roots to the Soviet-era military and secret services.1 These assumptions join to offer what is on balance a rather optimistic read of Russia’s mid- to long-term prospects: Either Russian civil society will re-awaken and save the day, as it supposedly did in 1989–91, or the current elite will grow old and leave the stage. Either way, positive change is on the horizon.

Unfortunately, all of these assumptions are wrong. Contemporary Russia is not a candidate to become a Soviet Union 2.0. It is a country in which citizens have unrestricted access to information, own property, leave and return to the country freely, and develop private businesses of all kinds. Of course, severe restrictions in the political sphere remain in place, and the country, as President Dmitry Medvedev himself recently said, “only to a certain extent, not fully”, meets the standards of democracy.

Clearly, this arrangement—economic freedom coupled with political constraint—does not please everyone. To the standard American mind it suggests that something has got to give. This, too, is wrong. Some Russians do give voice to dissatisfaction with the current regime and the widespread abuse of power by police authorities, local officials and oligarchs closely connected with the ruling bureaucracy. Yet the system seems fundamentally solid and durable.

Agrees with what this author had to say on a Russian site:

Bottom

...But how did it happen that those leading us for the last twenty years (for our own good of course) through the desert of “unpopular reforms” and ending up, as it now appears, making a mess of entire country, how is it these Moseses, who also live according to these same concepts, how is it that they all become billionaires and multimillionaires? Those at the top, and their ideological servants, have found reforms and the results of reforms to be rather popular.

Russia’s economy is not developing, and it is not because retirees are suffocating it or a few students shamefully receive scholarships, and it is not even because of the 26 palaces that were built for our “national leader” - the capitalization of just four of the most famous mansions that he personally created, brazenly and shamelessly in front of the whole country from the slush funds of Abramovich, Timchenko, Kovalchuk and Rotenberg, is only in the tens of billions of dollars.

Russia’s economy is not developing because there can be no creative impulses in this dead environment that the reformers have created, an environment in which the entire chain of command, from the national leader on down to the district policeman, is swollen with stolen slush funds and property is granted out of loyalty to the feudal overlord...

(SNIP)

...There have been worse times in Russia, but there has never before been a government that was so petty, paltry, vulgar, and greedy. Tolerating it, and even more so working with it and trying to fit within its structure is merely living in constant national disgrace. We do not notice it anymore. What we have done is gotten used to it, and we now take for granted that which we should never have gotten used to.

These two monsters complacently discuss, as if sitting side by side on a park bench, how they will go about maintaining us for another unpopular 12, 18, 24 years. Every day the Kremlin triumphantly mocks the Russian people, demonstrating that they are proof that Russia is incapable and unworthy of better government.

What a long, frosty February this has been, and the downtrodden Russian troika dashes off to nowhere. Other peoples and other nations have overtaken it. We are once again at the bottom, but is it the bottom for the regime, or the bottom for Russia? It does not give an answer.

Andrei Piontkovsky

http://www.grani.ru/opinion/piontkovsky/m.186425.html

21.02.2011 10:26

The article is a lo..o..ong way of saying that Russians are retar... sorry, late in their social development, which is fine as long as the majority of them likes it.
What is not fine is a widespread among Russians believe, supported by official propaganda BTW, that they somehow are divinely chosen to spread their incomprehensible wisdom to other nations. This prophetic complex is a perversion of “world revolution” idea that everybody there was obsessed with under the communists.
As popular saying in Ukraine goes, Russian paradox is to sit chin-deep in a crap, yet looking at everybody else from top down.

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