Putin’s regime has been described as a post-modern dictatorship. This intriguing Atlantic profile by Peter Pomerantsev of Vladislav Surkov, one of the architects of the Putin system, helps explain why:

One of Surkov’s many nicknames is the “political technologist of all of Rus.” Political technologists are the new Russian name for a very old profession: viziers, gray cardinals, wizards of Oz. They first emerged in the mid-1990s, knocking on the gates of power like pied pipers, bowing low and offering their services to explain the world and whispering that they could reinvent it. They inherited a very Soviet tradition of top-down governance and tsarist practices of co-opting anti-state actors (anarchists in the 19th century, neo-Nazis and religious fanatics now), all fused with the latest thinking in television, advertising, and black PR….
In the 21st century, the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk with phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime…
Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: During the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act.
Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watched him give his speech to the students and journalists in London, he seemed to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he stepped back, smiling, and said: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle….

But the performance in which they are playing those rules is a tragedy. And not such a post-modern one either.

The whole charade, of course, is yet another reminder of the intellectual, political and moral vacuum that seventy years of communism left behind, a vacuum being filled by, well, sometimes it seems by just about anything.

Speaking of which, Politico reports from eastern Ukraine:

…Dremov is a 37-year old former bricklayer who has emerged as the savior of Stakhanov, a hitherto-forgotten mining town in the northwest corner of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic. What is interesting is that the commander has styled himself in complete opposition to his fellow separatists in Luhansk and what he calls its “shady businessmen,” who deal “money, power, and ceasefires with the Kiev ‘junta.’” Dremov has offered Stakhanov citizens an alternative vision—a new, socialist, neo-Soviet “Cossack” republic that works for the people, especially the poor and elderly. And, as goes without saying, one that ignores any talk of a ceasefire deal.
It’s a call that falls on easy ears in Stakhanov. Named after the Soviet shock worker famed for record coal production (fallaciously, historians say), the town’s best days are long behind it. For a start, this most-famous-of-all-mining towns no longer has any working mine to speak of….

A new, socialist, neo-Soviet “Cossack” republic establishes itself (maybe, it’s not difficult to believe that Russia is involved somewhere in all this too) in a city still named after a bogus Stalinist hero, a name of which the survival speaks volumes of the nature of a part of the world that has yet to emerge from the ruination that the Soviets left behind, a region lacking the foundations essential for the creation of a society that could see the predators off.

And the predators have now arrived.