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After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin implemented a political system of "imitation democracy," marked by "a huge disparity between formal constitutional principles and the reality of authoritarian rule." How did this system take shape, how else might it have developed, and what are the prospects for re-envisioning it more democratically in the future?
These questions animate Dmitrii Furman's Imitation Democracy, a welcome antidote to books that blandly decry Putin as an omnipotent dictator, without considering his platforms, constituencies, and sources of power. With extensive public opinion polling drawn from throughout the late- and post-Soviet period, and a thorough knowledge of both official and unofficial histories, Furman offers a definitive account of the formation of the modern Russian political system, casting it into powerful relief through comparisons with other post-Soviet states.
Peopled with grey technocrats, warring oligarchs, patriots, and provocateurs, Furman's narrative details the struggles among partisan factions, and the waves of public sentiment, that shaped modern Russia's political landscape, culminating in Putin's third presidential term, which resolves the contradiction between the "form" and "content" of imitation democracy, "the formal dependence of power on elections and the actual dependence of elections on power."
About the author
Dmitrii Furman's first book, Religion and Social Conflicts in the USA, was published in the USSR in 1981. In later years he became a leading scholar of post-Soviet political development, and theorist of "imitation democracy," publishing books on a number of former Soviet republics before his death in 2011.Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1.Tony Wood lives in New York and writes on Russia and Latin America. A member of the editorial board of New Left Review, he is the author of Chechnya: The Case for Independence, and his writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, n+1 and the Nation, among other publications. His latest op-ed for the New York Times is "Putin Isn't as Strong as He Looks."
Summary
Examines the history and functioning of Russia'a post-Soviet political system: an "imitation democracy."
Report
In the flatlands of post-communism, one exceptional figure always stood out. Uniquely, in the mind and character of Dmitri Furman the two distinct incarnations of the Russian intelligentsia came together, at a time when both seemed to have all but disappeared. Virtually unknown outside the country, and little registered within it, he was a scholar of comparative religion and an anatomist of the aftermath of the USSR who joined political integrity and intellectual originality in a body of work that addressed the fate of his country, and the past of the world, in ways that were equally and strikingly passionate and dispassionate. Perry Anderson London Review of Books
