Performing Political Opposition in Russia by Laura Lyytikainen

Author:Laura Lyytikainen [Lyytikainen, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317082293
Google: 9wExDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-10-04T04:30:33+00:00

The official view on democracy: sovereign democracy

Sovereignty and democracy: in this understanding two different phenomena are evaluated. Sovereignty is positioning the country externally, in the world; it is a possibility to exercise one’s internal and external politics independently, without interference. Democracy is a way of organizing society and the state. This is entirely directed inside the country. (Putin 2006; Suverennaia demokratiia 2007, 45)

In Putin–Medvedev-era Russia, the government has actively sought to install a particular notion of civil society and democracy as the hegemonic interpretation of state–society relations. Russia’s system of governance has been described by western scholars as ‘virtual democracy’ (Wilson 2005), ‘managed democracy’ or ‘stealth authoritarianism’ (Hahn 2004). Putin’s vision of civil society, in which social organizations are under the firm authority of the state as the highest executive leadership, has been called quasi-civil society or even pseudo-civil society (Evans 2006a, 149). Furthermore, Richter (2009a, 41) suggests that ‘Putin and his entourage adopted the rhetoric of civil society and bent it to their own purposes’. These evaluations are often made from the perspective of comparing Russian civil society to the normative western liberal ideal of what civil society and civic participation should be, and seeing these as universally applicable. This understanding tends to see civil society as an independent and separate counter-force to the state and emphasizes individual liberties and civil society’s surveillance of the state (Pulkkinen 1996).

However, according to Hemment (2012), the Russian state’s official discourse on civil society is based on a view that the idea of civil society introduced to the country by the western-identified agencies in the 1990s is in fact flawed and oriented more towards western interests than those of the Russian state and its citizens. With sovereign democracy, the Russian government has proposed a vision of civil society, which is linked to state sovereignty (gosudarstvennost’) and in which self and nation are indivisibly connected (Hemment 2012; Richter 2009b). Western civil society development projects in the 1990s emphasized the importance of free civil society in the democratization process, and the concept of civil society has continued to circulate in Russia even after the international foundations withdrew their activities (Hemment 2012, 244). Civil society remained an important ideological signifier, but the concept morphed into new meanings in the country’s modernization projects and in the context of the government’s rhetoric of sovereign democracy (Hemment 2012, 244).

As a part of the struggle to define civil society in Russia’s ‘own terms’, the government has strongly condemned the foreign support to Russian NGOs. According to Putin’s former advisor Gleb Pavlovskii, striving for western grants has forced organizations to accept foreign concepts of rights which are not efficient in protecting the interests of Russian citizens (Evans 2006a, 150). Statements about the ‘Colour Revolutions’ also show the government’s suspicion towards the West. Russian state officials have represented these popular uprisings in Central Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), known as the Colour Revolutions, as part of a western conspiracy and portrayed as a revolutionary threat to the country. Additionally,

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