Surkov’s National Idea
Khodorkovsky’s former pitch man
sells the Kremlin line
The ideas of President Putin’s chief political advisor and ideologist will begin taking a central role in the shaping of Russia’s young minds this spring as the words of Vladislav Surkov become required reading at one of Moscow’s biggest universities.
Surkov, former public relations point man for jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is widely regarded as Russia’s second most powerful figure, and a pamphlet of his speeches over the past two years, Principal Tendencies and Prospects for Russia’s Development Today, will be course material at the Moscow University for the Humanities (muh.ru). The 50-page monograph opens with a gloomy description of Russia after the splintering of the Soviet Union and then trumpets Putin and his achievements as saving the state.
Surkov, 42, is the architect of the Kremlin’s ideology of a firmly recentralized state and economy and the mastermind of the Unified Russia party, which took over the lower chamber of parliament in 2003. He also forged the nationalist Rodina party, created around the same time to drain votes from Unified Russia’s chief competitor, the Communist Party. As a result, Unified Russia now dominates the parliament, and alternative voices have been relegated to the political periphery, if not stifled entirely.
In the pamphlet, Surkov enumerates the achievements of the Putin era, such as making sure wages were paid on time and establishing the rule of law, and then evaluates Putin’s “democratization policy.”
“The president is returning the true meaning of the word ‘democracy’ to all democratic institutions,” writes Surkov. Putin, is “the ultimate democrat,” because “his policy is supported by the majority of people.”
Yet many critics say Putin’s Russia has become increasingly undemocratic, arguing political enemies are marginalized and a free press is virtually nonexistent.
Not so, says Surkov. Russia’s media are in a better situation than in the 1990s, when there was commercial censorship. “The Russian media will find a balance between freedom and order,” Surkov contends. “Nobody’s putting pressure on the media; everything depends on the journalist personally.” However, he paints “orange technology,” a reference to democratic revolutions in the Ukraine and other ex-Soviet republics, as posing a fundamental danger to Russia’s sovereignty. Russia’s best “medicine” against it, Surkov says, is the “formation of a nationally-oriented social elite.”
And it is toward this end that this monograph was published. The MUH, a long-distance higher education institution with some 140,000 students, approached Surkov about this project a year ago. Rector Mikhail Karpenko told the daily Vedomosti that the idea was “to give students in the regions primary sources on politicians’ thinking.” Other prominent political figures have lectured at the university. Chechen premier Ramzan Kadyrov is an honorary professor there.
But Surkov’s “textbook” takes things a step further, by pushing a politically-motivated interpretation of recent history as a means to planting his Strong State ideology into young Russian minds. The timing of the book with the forthcoming Duma and presidential upcoming elections is far from accidental. But then, as Surkov would be one of the first to point out, the Putin administration is a well-oiled political machine.
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