Putin and Putinism by Hill Ronald J. Cappelli Ottorino

Author:Hill, Ronald J., Cappelli, Ottorino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Putin, Professional Politician

Rita Di Leo

Putin in Context

I have chosen to place Putin among professional politicians in the way Max Weber defines them in his ‘Politics as a Profession’.1 I would like to underline the closeness between Weber’s contribution on a scientific level and Lenin’s on a political level as regards his ideal type of professional revolutionary. In Russia’s post-tsarist era and in the 1918 Soviet Constitution, the two ideal types, ‘political’ and ‘revolutionary’ have mingled, and as history has demonstrated a professional revolutionary politician after the revolution set out to govern the affairs of state professionally. The political mission was legitimized by reference to a project of destruction of the past and the construction of the future – referred to as the change from capitalism to socialism and the construction of a socialist society. The present was characterized by civil wars, famine, social battles and internal political struggles. The form of politics2 that inspired the new elite was project politics, a project that required rules for its realization – and consequently, required intellectuals that thought them out and individuals that imposed them. Intellectual politicians were needed to create the rules; professional politicians were needed to translate those rules into reality; and a party network was needed as a means to bind the first and the second at the head of the country.

The Soviet experiment was put into action by professional revolutionaries who were inspired by a project that was carried forward by a stratum of professional politicians who were convinced of the complete legitimacy of the project, and this enabled them to face the other social strata: the bourgeoisie, the tradesmen, the peasants, the workers. The confrontation was based partly on force, and partly on an endeavour to reach mutual agreement: the aim was to convince the people on the lowest social rung of tsarist Russia to implement a project that foresaw the acquisition of the highest social rung for the people.

The 74-year history of the experiment shows that the original project had an unforeseen course in the sense that the People, its object, took over the reins and made changes in its specific interest, of a type far removed from the socialist–communist Utopia that inspired the intellectual elite of the professional revolutionaries. The Soviet People deviated from the original Utopia as soon as a new generation of professional politicians of popular origin arrived at the summit of the party-state. And from the heights of power they adapted the original project to the ways of the ‘ordinary’ People concerning the administration of economics, science, culture, and social relations.3 The People had two distinct influences on the government that have persisted: in terms of foreign policy, the continuing unwillingness to engage in competition with the other superpower; and in terms of domestic policy, the growing difference between the Soviet Union’s appearance and reality. Ideology has apparently lived on, with lots of intellectuals pontificating about the socialist past and socialist reality in the name of the ‘sovereign’ People.4 In reality, as the

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