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Putin’s style was anti-political and technocratic
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confronted by the need to reconcile conflicting
interests and views, he proved a highly adept politician
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Putin was able to reconcile policies and groups that
in an earlier era would have been in conflict, notably the working class and
the middle class
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enduring and astonishingly high levels of Putin’s
popularity barely dipped lower than 70% throughout his two terms
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he was able to provide solutions to the challenges
facing Russia
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these solutions may not have been ideal from the
perspective of democratic theory, but they allowed a stabilisation of the
political order
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Putin was a transitional leader; his leadership
represented a distinctive type of neo-authoritarian stabilisation
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the system that he built was inherently contradictory:
it did not repudiate the democratic principles of the new constitutional
order, but it did not allow the full potential of the democratic order to
emerge
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The Debate over “Sovereign Democracy” (Vladislav Surkov) |
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the free play of societal political competition was
restrained, but the principles of pluralism were not repudiated
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the concept also provided the ideological
justification for greater self-reliance in international affairs
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it conveyed greater confidence in the country’s
ability to solve its problems on its own terms
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Favourable Economic Climate |
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state capture by the oligarchs was repudiated and
relations between the state and big business were normalised
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Russia took
advantage of the commodity-price boom of the early twenty-first century
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the price of a barrel of oil rose from $18 a barrel in
1998 to above $100 in early 2008
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Russia as
the world’s second largest supplier enjoyed healthy budget surpluses
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it was able to build up significant reserves as well
as creating a Stabilisation Fund
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