From: "Andrew Wilson" <awilson8795@hotmail.com>
Subject: Virtual Politics
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005
VIRTUAL POLITICS: ‘POLITICAL TECHNOLOGY’ AND THE
CORRUPTION OF POST-SOVIET DEMOCRACY
By Andrew Wilson
[Senior lecturer in Russian and Ukrainian studies at the School of Slavonic &
East European Studies, University of London.]
© Copyright Andrew Wilson
An earlier version appeared in the Kiev journal Krytyka.
It’s hard to open a newspaper or turn on the TV in the former USSR without reading or hearing about ‘political technology’. But the term is unfamiliar to most in the West, as is its bizarre cognate vocabulary of ‘clones’, ‘flies’ and ‘relay runners’ that describes the pseudo-professional variety of the local arts of political manipulation. But understanding this industry – and the political technology ‘industry’ is exactly that, with thousands of employees and dozens of companies offering different brands – is the key to understanding why democracy is so deformed in the region. The problem is not just that Vladimir Putin is President of Russia or that Mikhail Khodorkovskii is in jail; the prominent role of ‘political technology’ reflects a deep-rooted malaise in local political culture that will be much harder to alleviate.
‘Political technology’ is both feared and fêted in the region. Its most famous practitioners, like Gleb Pavlovskii of Moscow’s Foundation for Effective Politics (with the stress very much on ‘effective’), are often depicted as omnipotent; their schemes too clever to detect or too effective to oppose; their cunning plans always able to deliver another victory for the undeserving and dim-witted powers-that-be. Moscow’s most respectable agency calls itself ‘Nikkolo-M’ and puts a picture of Machiavelli on its business cards. The authorities, on the other hand, rely on political technology to stay in power. One local term that is familiar in the West is ‘managed democracy’, although in Russian this is upravliaemaia demokratiia , better translated as ‘steered’ or ‘directed’ democracy. But post-Soviet politicians are too lazy, too incompetent or too preoccupied with personal enrichment to do the actual steering. This is the job of the ‘technologists’. According to Pavlovskii, he and his kin ‘would go to Boris Nikolaievich’ [Yeltsin] in the 1990s ‘and say, “you can’t do this, but we can”’. Pavlovskii’s own CV includes helping organise Yeltsin’s Houdini reelection in 1996 and launching ‘project Putin’ in 1999.
Political technologists are clearly of a type with the new demiurges of politics in the West; spin doctors like Peter Mandelson or Jacques Séguéla, political attack dogs like the late Lee Atwater and ‘permanent consultants’ like Karl Rove. But their job is much broader. A dictionary definition of the role of a spin doctor would technically be that of an intermediary, who intercepts and spins a story between its genesis as real event and its arrival in the public domain via media (so those who generate their own stories are doing more than mere spinning). Washington’s K Street has some favourite particular tricks: the 2004 election being particularly noticeable for the use of proxies to attack opponents, like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or the People of Color United, and ‘527’ proxies like MoveOn.org to provide parallel funding to the two main parties.
Post-Soviet political technologists, on the other hand, see themselves as political metaprogrammers, system designers, decision-makers and controllers all in one, applying whatever technology they can to the construction of politics as a whole. Systemic deception is their speciality. They also see themselves as running ‘factories of thought’. Many are former KGB, their unique selling point their skill not just in surveillance but in planning so-called ‘active measures’. A significant minority are former dissidents, prone to over-intellectualising their role as post-modernist supermen recreating society’s infrastructures and ‘ultrastructures’ (i.e. semiotics and belief systems) in post-Soviet Year Zero. Neither type has much in the way of moral scruples. In the Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov’s 2002 novel Penguin Lost , the Russian ‘image-makers’ employed by the local Mafia boss turned politician are even worse than he is: ultra-cynical, overpaid and pretty useless, ‘bastards to a man’. ‘There’s hardly [a pre-prepared manifesto] we can’t use three times over’, they declare, ‘the main thing is to clear off before the successful candidate starts implementing them’. The ‘golden rule of the image maker is “Never be there for the result”. The client gives you hell if he loses, his rivals give you hell if he wins’.
How It Works
Some idea of political technologists’ tradecraft can be gleamed from their own peculiar terminology. Like spin doctors, they manipulate the media, often with techniques familiar in the West, like the stories they plant in friendly sources that become the accepted truth through the mere fact of their repetition. However, the local term kachka (‘toss’) is particularly evocative, both of the desired ripple effect and of its throwaway nature. A journalist or internet site that channels dirt is a slivnoi bachok (‘toilet pipe’). ‘Information wars’ and ‘black PR’ are also a global phenomenon, but are particularly vicious in the former USSR, where TV anchors and newsreaders are referred to as media-killers – with the widely-used Anglicism supposedly conveying an ersatz glamour (during the recent media storm over his son’s lavish lifestyle, Western reports expressed their shock at Ukrainian President Yushchenko’s reference to a local journalist as a ‘hired killer’ – he had the local term in mind). Black PR is also made ubiquitous by the impossibility of always working within deliberately arbitrary local law, so that all key actors are enmeshed within the system of kompromat (compromising materials); and by the deliberately partial application of that law. Local prosecutors are often dubbed PRosecutors (the joke works in Russian too).
The political technologists also create virtual objects - politicians and parties that are nothing more than media simulacra. The Communist Party of Ukraine (renewed), set up by extremely rich ‘oligarchs’ to take votes off the official Communist Party of Ukraine [old-fashioned] in the 2002 elections simply didn’t exist outside of the world of its TV adverts – a skilfully fabricated, and expensive, appeal to pensioners’ nostalgia. Its official address was a fiction, its phone numbers silent. And after the election the pretence was simply dropped. The party still ‘exists’ via its registration at the Ministry of Justice, but it has no leaders or rank-and-file. The ‘Party of Life’ created for the 2003 Russian elections was little more than a vehicle for money-laundering through rallies, concerts and party ‘receptions’. It only won 1.9%, largely because its own leaders weren’t much interested in its result.
Other creations have a reality half-life that allows them to fulfil more specific functions. Parties or politicians set up to steal an opponent’s thunder or USP are called clones . Parties or candidates with the same name are doubles . In one Ukrainian race in Uzhhorod in 2002 there were six candidates called Ratushniak; my good friend the Ukrainian MP Ihor Ostash had no trouble seeing off his rival Ivan Ostash in neighbouring Galicia, as ‘Ivan’ hadn’t been paid enough to persuade him to campaign particularly hard. In the mid-1990s the Party of Communists of Belarus, which was in opposition to President Lukashenka, found itself replaced overnight by the Communist Party of Belarus, which supported him in private; without anyone in the West really noticing. It sounds too much like Monty Python’s Life of Brian to care. Except that the image of two bald men squabbling over a comb was exactly the impression the technologists were trying to create.
Aleksandr Lebed, the ‘independent’ tough guy who won 14.5% in the 1996 Russian elections before a ‘surprise’ endorsement of Boris Yeltsin in the second round, was privately known as a relay runner , covertly financed to hand on his issues and electorate to a president too tired and unpopular to win the race on his own. In the 2002 Ukrainian elections, the technologists created Trojan Horses , ‘brand’ parties for Women, Youth and Ecology, the lower reaches of whose election lists were full of male, middle-aged businessmen and bankers, running some of the dirtiest companies (gas and chemicals) in the country. Flies are apparently unimportant micro-parties set up to take a small bite out of an opponent’s support. The easy criticism that post-Soviet states may have a hundred tiny political parties or more misses the point that much of the over-supply is artificial. Even on official figures, the Russian Communists were outspent in the 2003 elections by two obscure micro-parties, for ‘Pensioners’ and for ‘Social Justice’, that the Kremlin had helped set up to siphon off protest votes (the Communists spent $1.8 million, the supposedly penniless neophytes $2.4 million). The Kremlin’s technologists also backed Rodina (‘Motherland’), the Agrarians, the Party of Russia’s Rebirth, the New Communist Party, and a handful of left-nationalist parties like Rus and the Eurasia Union. A fly-storm can take a large collective bite; and the Communist vote duly dropped from 24.3% in 1999 to 12.7% four years later.
Cuckoos placed in rival nests are programmed to fake sibling rivalry, and to undermine would-be united oppositions or ‘round-tables’ by directing all their fire against the regime’s real opponents. The Ukrainian opposition set up a group known as the ‘Kaniv-4’ in 1999; only one of the four was really in opposition. The many-layered pie used to be a type of insurance policy. In the 1990s political technologists would run a variety of projects for the powers-that-be under various disguises, to give their clients more than one throw of the dice; as one-shot ‘official’ parties usually died a well-deserved death. Ten years later control techniques were more sophisticated and ambitions much higher. In the 2003 Russian Duma elections the technologists sought to control every part of the parliamentary spectrum; in the 2004 presidential election they sought to control every candidate, to varying degrees. Parties and candidates who were not susceptible to such control were kept out. The problem then became finding the best ‘credible loser’ to stand against Putin.
Political technologists have even been known to set up fake protest parties, exploiting the very public disillusion their activity has helped to create. ‘Antipolitics’ is just another brand to exploit. Vladimir Zhirinovskii has long performed this role in Russia with unrecognised skill. At the last Duma elections one part of the elite was granted license to criticise the other, with the ‘People’s Party’ playing the role of populist safety-valve that the Kremlin didn’t want to grant to real radicals. In the last days of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, the authorities tried to head off the rise of Mikhail Saakashvili’s National Movement by promoting a fake populist party, the Labour Party, in its stead. Its promise of free electricity for all helped it to outpoll Saakashvili in the 2002 local elections, and even in the fraudulent elections that sparked the 2003 Rose Revolution, it supposedly won 12% to peg back Saakashvili to 18.1%. Its demise as a protest party was only secured by its failure to protest at the fraud. Fake protest parties have been sold with the utmost cynicism, with brazen slogans criticising fakery elsewhere. Both Rodina in Russia in 2003 and the Communist Party of Ukraine (renewed) in 2002, which were both covert projects (fakes) to split the mainstream Communist vote, used the slogan ‘Vote for the Real Communists!’.
Nor are post-Soviet Communist parties what they seem. Usually posing as a radical break with the compromised and incompetent leadership of the Gorbachev era, older faces are usually present behind the scenes, making cynical deals with the new corporate capitalists they demonise in public. The Russian Communist Party now has as many rich businessmen ‘parachuting’ into its ranks as other parties, plus external sponsors seeking to ‘steer’ it in the right direction. The party received a massive $25 million from big business in the last election cycle – much more than it actually spent on campaigning. The 2004 Ukrainian election was only a close contest because the local Communists, who won 20% of the vote in 2002, were prepared to commit short-term political suicide by handing over their east Ukrainian electorate to the Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. The Communist leader Petro Symonenko won only 5% of the national vote, and in his home region of Donetsk, the working class stronghold that was once home to champion miner Aleksei Stakhanov, was awarded even less, with a laughably implausible 3.3% - allegedly because the Communist leadership had privately agreed to transfer 670,000 of their votes to the desperate Yanukovych camp.
This particular game cannot be played for too long. After a decade in which the mythical ‘Red Threat’ played well in the West (see below), local leaders have decided that Communist electorates are simply too big for other schemes they have in mind. In almost every post-Soviet state where there is active politics, political technologists have therefore created new pro-government Communist parties to split the left vote: in Belarus in 1996, in Azerbaijan in 2000, in Ukraine in 2002, in Russia in 2003, in Armenia in 2003 and in Kazakhstan in 2004. In Moldova the official ‘Communists’ have been in power since 2001, so the new left party set up in 2004 was directed against them.
Dramaturgiia
Political technologists also seek to programme what they like to call dramaturgiia . A difficult word to translate, it means something akin to the moving spirit of a work (a playwright is a dramaturg ); in this case the meta-narrative dominating a particular election or other event, such as appointing a prime minister or steering through some foreign policy crisis. Dramaturgiias need drama, and therefore often work like literary tropes. One of the best typologies of this aspect of political technologists’ work therefore comes from the Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, who claimed that there are only four basic devices in fantastic literature: ‘the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time and the double’.
‘The work within the work’ is the perversion of public politics into a series of obscure ‘projects’ run by the technologists. ‘The contamination of reality by dream’ occurs when their virtual creations become political ‘realities’ in themselves, as with Zhirinovsky or the nationalist puppet party Rodina, a Kremlin creation in 2003 that now threatens to become a major player at the next election cycle in 2007-8 (like Frankenstein’s monster, though a better Russian analogy would be Petrushka, the doll who runs away from his maker). With the ‘voyage in time’, events are restaged at a time either when their original meaning is lost or before they are most forcefully apparent, as with the ‘terrorist threat’ in 1999, when ‘Project Putin’ was launched with what was originally intended to be the ‘small successful’ second Chechen war. If that threat was hyped in 1999, it is now frighteningly real. Many unpopular leaders have been rescued by reviving a long-dead ‘Red Threat’. Boris Yeltsin in 1996, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbaev in 1999, Eduard Shevardnadze twice in 1995 and 2000, all won by demonising Communist opponents whom they had neutralised in private, either with money or with kompromat.
‘Doubles’ can be the above-mentioned clones. Another local favourite is the double object strategy, either the deliberate multiplication of the authorities’ weaknesses via their projection onto opponents, or the dilution of opponents’ best qualities or achievements by restaging them for the other side. After the Ukrainian authorities were enmeshed in a ‘cassette scandal’ in 2000 (when President Kuchma was caught on tape apparently demanding the kidnap of an opposition journalist), they replayed it on the opposition in 2002, although the ‘secret tape’ they produced featured Viktor Yushchenko doing nothing worse than scheming to get rid of the notoriously corrupt deputy chair of parliament. Some in the Western press also bought the carefully-spun argument that there were just as many ‘oligarchs’ funding the Orange Revolution in 2004 as there were on the authorities’ side. With some notable exceptions, it would have been a fairer criticism that Yushchenko’s supporters might seek to turn themselves into oligarchs once they are in power, but there was no ‘equality of thieves’ at the time.
Positive qualities can also be doubled. The firebrand Ukrainian left-winger Nataliia Vitrenko, leader of the fake ‘Progressive Socialist Party’, has twice been entrusted with well-paid ‘man-marking’ roles. In the 1999 election her job was to outdo Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz in his anti-corruption rhetoric. In 2002 and 2004 she was doubled up against Yuliia Tymoshenko, the eventual heroine of the Orange Revolution, another populist female politician. When he first became Prime Minister in 1999, Putin was promoted as both an anti-Yeltsin and anti-Primakov. Like the former, he was a tough-talking reformer, but his talk was comprehensible. Like the latter, he embodied the nostalgia-tinged old order, but its younger and more vigorous aspects.
The Yukos affair in 2003 was a perfect dramaturgiia , a powerful loadstone that realigned all parts of the political system, splitting the vote of parties that had ambiguous relations with big business, or which could be portrayed as having such (the ‘liberal’ party Yabloko, the Communists), and creating a powerful bandwagon effect for the Kremlin parties and their carefully-scripted virtual chorus condemning the ‘oligarchs’ on the other side (United Russia, Rodina, Zhirinovskii). So powerful in fact, that the technologists’ masters couldn’t resist the political benefits – and are still living with the economic consequences.
Dramaturgiias can also be mundane. The opposition to Putin in the 2004 election was deliberately confined to a narrow spectrum of political pigmies to create the impression that he was the country’s only serious politician.
A particularly striking piece of local terminology is the toad’s eye stratagem, the idea that the dim-witted electorate will follow whatever flashy show of staged events is paraded before it, just like the toad’s eye follows the moving object and forgets what was previously in vision. A related type of ‘work within the work’ is perevod strelki (‘switching the points’) to confuse both time and agency: shifting responsibility to blame the old regime, the IMF, the West or ‘extremists’ for society’s current woes; or imposing a new drama over an old, as with the Ukrainian authorities’ attempts to redefine the issues at the 2004 election after losing out at the dress rehearsal in 2002. Another stratagem is zelenye vorota (‘green gates’), the artificial polarisation of choice, usually involving the threat of après moi, le deluge , and/or ‘greater evil’ myths of democracy in danger or scarecrow nationalists taking power.
Why It Works
Even when it has apparently failed, as with Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004, political technology can be found on closer inspection to have played an important and insidious role. A close look at the twenty three candidates in Ukraine’s ‘Orange’ election shows that more than half were fakes. Four were ‘virtual nationalists’. The Russian political technologists wanted to demonise Viktor Yushchenko as a wild-eyed and Russophobic neo-Nazi. Unfortunately he wasn’t. So they paid four others to play the role instead, placing them prominently on state TV, usually just before Yushchenko’s slots, so they could give him their unsolicited support. Three other ‘left-wing’ candidates were in reality relay runners for Yanukovych, designed to stir up ‘anti-nationalist’ and anti-American sentiment in east Ukraine. Six more were so-called technical candidates also covertly funded by the powers-that-be. Their only role involved the ‘trusted persons’ that every candidate had the right to place on the election commissions, national and local. With the other seven fake candidates, this made sure that Yanukovych had a majority on all the committees – either to turn a blind eye to ballot stuffing or actually to help organise it.
Second, the political technologists successfully shifted the dramaturgiia in Ukraine. The issues that the election was apparently about – Europe versus Russia, West versus East, Ukraine’s internal divisions on these issues – are real enough but were only so prominent because the technologists thought they would win them the election. They were certainly not the main issues at the previous (parliamentary) elections in 2002, when the parties associated with a corrupt and unpopular government had done badly. Hence the otherwise inexplicable choice of the ex-con Yanukovych in 2004, and his marketing as both Putin-lite and populist east Ukrainian everyman; which convinced many voters to vote on geopolitics rather than issues of good government – and ensured that many reports in the West bought the same line.
But the Orange Revolution also demonstrated that the authorities and their pseudo-technological methods are not invulnerable. The aim is no longer the totalitarian paradigm of absolute control. Crudely put, alternative voices and forces can be tolerated so long as they are confined to intelligentsia circles that have little influence. The authorities simply need to get away with it, to convince enough people so as to survive. On this assumption, the system of virtual politics rests on four basic preconditions. The first, the dominance of an amoral and ideophobic elite to whom ‘everything is permitted’, can unfortunately usually be taken for granted. The second, the passivity of local populations, the structural weakness of civil society and the absence of a united and effective opposition was also the norm in the decade after Yeltsin sent in the tanks to crush the opposition in the Russian White House in 1993. Arguably, the most important effect of the Rose and Orange Revolutions has therefore been psychological, providing new vigour to apparently lost causes. The third condition is that the authorities control the commanding heights of the mass media to sell their dramaturgiia and present the technologists’ virtual creations as real – hence the recentralisation of state control over TV since the late 1990s. The fourth condition is the absence of any external counterpoint, namely effective foreign pressure or some alternative source of information supply.
Will It Always Work?
The four conditions are difficult to combine. The political technologists’ world is therefore not as solipsistic as it could be. To the extent that post-Soviet societies remain open at the margins, it is possible to distinguish the virtual from the real, and to track the genesis of particular ‘projects’ (though not all). And Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004 was able to happen because all four conditions met serious challenges. The elite was split. The oligarchs who had secured control of businesses that actually produced something were now interested in property rights and going legit. Only a minority were prepared to pursue the anti-Yushchenko campaign to a bloody conclusion (a violent crackdown was seriously contemplated in private). The opposition was of course unexpectedly strong, and the protests in Kiev were bolstered by thousands who were demonstrating not just for Yushchenko but for their own right to demonstrate, and for the authorities to respect a fair result.
The Russian technologists were also undone by their instinctive Soviet preference for mass producing propaganda via the mass media. And despite their post-modern pretensions, much of it looked distinctly old-fashioned, recycling Cold War themes of US imperialism and even the Nazi threat behind the opposition. This only served to increase the popularity of other channels, and the Ukrainian media market is more residually pluralistic than the Russian. The opposition also made extremely effective use of newer technologies: using the internet to change the news agenda, paging technologies to organise demonstrations, and their better understanding of the power of photogenic crowds to dominate the global media. The opposition also turned ‘political technology’ back against the authorities, if not to the same extent, skilfully selling a branded (‘orange’) message and selling an exaggerated version of Yanukovych’s weaknesses to receptive media. The foreign intervention led by Poland was dramatic and unexpected – including of course to many in Brussels.
But the real peculiarity of the Orange Revolution that confused so many observers was that the technologists had been partially successful, resulting in a clash of dramaturgiias, and in two different versions of events - good government versus bad, or east versus west - overlaying one another at once. Nevertheless, ultimately the protestors’ version of what motivated them on to the streets, namely the voting fraud that symbolised a corrupt regime, was just a little bit more real.
The Orange Revolution also demonstrated that political technology rarely works on its own. That is, it is both rarely used on its own and is rarely effective on its own. Post-Soviet politicians are still tempted to use the less subtle formula of a traditional authoritarian state: cowing the population, imprisoning the opposition and stuffing the ballot box. This is also dressed up as a pseudo-science of so-called ‘administrative technology’: such as the subterfuge used to win control of election commissions, the corruption of the judiciary to cull the ranks of the opposition, the invention of ever-more bizarre election hurdles for the opposition and so on. (In June 2005 Lukashenka issued a decree requiring all media, NGOs and parties using the words ‘national’ and ‘Belarusian’ to reregister or be banned). In some circumstances administrative and political ‘technologies’ are complementary, in others they are competitive. If the population is being harassed, there needs to be a good cover story. Ideally, if it’s good enough, they don’t need to be harassed. Other combinations are unstable, however. In Ukraine, for example, the authorities were assuming a month before the 2004 election that the technologists’ methods had guaranteed them victory. When Viktor Yushchenko surged ahead in the finishing strait, they had to over-rely on the crude and obvious fraud that provoked a new type of mass protest – and an attempted poisoning.
The balance varies across the post-Soviet states. Uzbek President Islam Karimov survived the protests in Andijon in May 2005 with a traditionally brutal authoritarian response. America’s commitment to global democratisation in Bush’s second term trumped realpolitik, and provoked a diplomatic break – though protests were more muted after the controversial parliamentary elections in the somewhat more open but oil-rich society of Azerbaijan in November 2005. Moldova’s elections have been and gone without a change of power, after Moscow failed to force out the Communist President Vladimir Voronin, whom they now see as too ‘pro-Western’ after his refusal to back their plan for a federal Moldova. Russian political technologists tried to catch him a pincer movement; setting up a fake party on the far left, Patria-Rodina which won 5%, and a curious amalgam of centrist opportunists, the Democratic Bloc, which won 28.5% before collapsing within days of the election. The Communists still triumphed with 46%, helped by their local control of ‘administrative resources’.
It is not yet clear what the President of Belarus Aliaksandr Lukashenka plans for his date with the voters in 2006. After the Orange Revolution he appointed Viktar Sheiman as his new Chief of Staff, the man who allegedly ran the death squad behind the ‘disappearance’ of Lukashenka’s most prominent opponents some five years ago. On the other hand, Lukashenka also appointed Yury Azarenak, a notorious ‘media-killer’ who specialises in black PR mocking the opposition, as deputy head of state TV and radio in June 2005. The most likely scenario in Belarus is that history will repeat itself. Lukashenka has always enjoyed a fairly stable plurality electorate of around 40% to 50%, but has traditionally added the extra he needs for an actual majority. The opposition normally polls less than 15%; so the political technology option is to run a fake ‘third force’ to prevent them occupying the middle ground. Currently that role is played by Aliaksandr Kazulin, the former rector of the Belarusian State University. The fact that he concentrates most of his fire on others in opposition suggests he is a relay runner for Lukashenka; though his aggressive Russophilia had led others to suggest he has private Kremlin support.
Lukashenka has grown used to first round victories, however, so he will also be tempted to win by simple intimidation and fraud. It is entirely possible therefore that the opposition might end up protesting against a fake majority for Lukashenka without being able to demonstrate that their candidate actually won.
And what will Russia do next? Its next election cycle is due in 2007-8, so it has a long time to plan after the Orange Revolution. The faking of ‘Kremlin pluralism’ for the Duma elections in 2007 is already a given. Political technologists have draft plans to divide the current mega-party United Russia into ‘Kremlin liberal’, ‘Kremlin nationalist’, and ‘Kremlin statist’ parties. Real protest parties will be kept out by the new 7% barrier for representation, and their strength divided by cloning if they get too close. For the presidential election in 2008 the Kremlin’s natural instinct is to arrange a succession or Putin third term well in advance and than stage a meaningless public contest with no actual contestation. What is widely dubbed ‘operation successor’ requires the right dramaturgiia, however, most likely the threat from extreme nationalists or Islamic terrorism. The Putin era is now too advanced to blame the old regime or the West (Lukashenka prefers to demonise the Poles).
Recent constitutional changes in Russia, such as the abolition of elected governors and of first-past-the-post elections for half of the Duma, may narrow the market for political technology. But other changes, in particular the higher barrier for Duma representation, will only make television campaigning even more important. And Russia will rely on political technology to keep the Orange contagion at bay.
Ukraine after the Orange Revolution is of course a vital test-case in building democracy-in-one-country. In the first six months of 2005 it was mainly the new opposition that clung to the techniques of political technology, reemploying the same Russian technologists to run black PR operations against the new government and launch a series of parties clustered around the post-Revolution democracy ‘brand’ (New Democracy, Democratic Ukraine, the People’s Party, the People’s Will) for the parliamentary elections due in March 2006. However, since the government crisis in September a vicious ‘war of kompromat’ has erupted between the Yushchenko and Tymoshenko camps. Which, unfortunately, is expensive; forcing both sides back into the hands of the ‘oligarchs’, while competing in public to be their biggest enemy.
Conclusions
Political technology is far from omnipotent. Much has been written about the import of Western ‘technology’ as a factor behind the current wave of ‘pastel revolutions’ (NGO networks, exit polling, copycat youth groups), but this is looking in the wrong place. The real weakness of the system of virtual politics in the former Soviet Union is that, unlike traditional authoritarian states, the point is not simply to trap the population in some kind of repressive box, but to trap them in the perception that they are trapped in some kind of box. To convince them that there is no alternative. The powers-that-be therefore appear secure so long as this system of information and thought control is maintained. Post-Soviet states are, however, vulnerable to key segments of the population turning off message, or switching channels to another message. The popularity of the current democratisation message means that domino effects are more likely until populations can be convinced to think within a new dramaturgiia, the most likely candidate for which is now the ‘Islamic threat’ in the region. For the next few years the authorities and their technologists will be striving hard to put this particular genie back in the bottle.
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