Anderson Sobre Rusia

new left review 94 july aug 2015 5 perry anderson INCOMMENSURATE RUSSIA I t will soon be a quarter of a century since Russia left com- munism behind. Its present ruler has been in power for fifteen years, and by the end of his current term in office will have all but equalled the tenure of Brezhnev. From early on, Western opinion of his regime divided sharply. That under Putin—after a period of widespread misery and dislocation, culminating in near state bankruptcy—the country had returned to economic growth and political stability, was evident by the end of his first term; so too the popularity he enjoyed because of these. But beyond such bare data, there was no consensus. For one camp, increasingly vocal as time went on, the pivots of Putin’s system of power were corruption and repres- sion: a neo-authoritarian state fund amentally inimical to the West, with a wrapping of legal proprieties around a ramshackle pyramid of klep- tocracy and thuggery. This view prevailed principally among reporters, though it was not confined to them: a representative sample could be found in Economist editor Edward Lucas’s The New Cold War (2009), Guardian journalist Luke Harding’s Mafia State (2012), Standpoint contributor Ben Judah’s Fragile Empire (2013), but expressed no less pungently by a jurist like Stephen Holmes. For Lucas, Putin, having seized power with a ‘cynical putsch’, and maintained it with the ‘methods of terrorists and gang- sters ’, had ‘ cast a d ark shadow over the eastern half of the continent’. F or Harding, under Putin’s tutelage, ‘Russia has become bullying, violent, cruel and—above all—inhuman’. For Judah, Russia was ‘an anguished, broken society’ that is one of ‘history’s great failures’, in the grip of an apocalyptic system in which, since ‘Putin cannot leave power without fear of arrest’, the West ‘should ask itself whether it will offer him ex ile to avert blood’. For Holmes, ‘behind the mask of an authoritarian restora- tion ’ there was no more than the ‘lawl ess feeding frenzy’ of ‘an internally

Anderson Sobre Rusia

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