![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
New York Review of Books - рецензия
Sep. 11th, 2016 08:29 amСчитается, что если твою книгу отрецензировали в New York Review of Books, то это типа очень круто, даже если эта рецензия написана сразу на девять книг, и твоей уделили в ней три абзаца. Сказать по правде, смысл таких рецензий с точки зрения потенциальных читателей находится за пределами моего понимания. Ну да доброе слово и Серому Дельфину приятно, тем более что рецензент похвалил меня не столько за то, что я написал, сколько за то, чего я не написал: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/09/29/real-power-vladimir-putin/
"According to Authoritarian Russia, by the political scientist Vladimir Gel’man, it is precisely such microstrategies of coping that help perpetuate Russia’s authoritarian politics. Like most politicians, Russia’s leaders are simply “rational power maximizers.” The difference is that they operate in a country almost entirely devoid of institutional and political constraints on elite behavior. Gel’man thus shows little interest in Putin’s worldview, or the views of those around him; in fact, he writes, “ideology as such has probably been the least meaningful factor in Russian politics since the Soviet collapse.”
Putin was able to abolish regional elections of provincial governors and instead appoint them himself, with impunity. His predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, brought in tanks to fire on the popularly elected Russian parliament and rewrote the constitution to fortify executive power, with impunity. Even Anatoly Sobchak, the law professor and first post-Soviet mayor of St. Petersburg (among whose protégés were Putin and his future sidekick Dmitri Medvedev), did not hesitate to dissolve the city council and concentrate power in his own hands, also with impunity.
These were assaults not on individual rivals, opposition parties, or independent media, but on the fundamental structures of the democratic process itself, and yet they generated hardly a ripple of protest. “Almost all success stories of democratization,” Gel’man notes, “result from constraints imposed on would-be dominant actors… by institutions, or by other actors, or sometimes even by themselves.” Rather than parse Putin’s speeches for signs of creeping authoritarianism, or endlessly cite the color revolutions as triggers of the Kremlin’s backlash against civil society, we should recognize that the Russia that emerged from seventy-four years of Soviet socialism was already deeply authoritarian before Putin set foot in the Kremlin."
Саму отрецензированную книгу можно приобрести здесь: http://upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36573
"According to Authoritarian Russia, by the political scientist Vladimir Gel’man, it is precisely such microstrategies of coping that help perpetuate Russia’s authoritarian politics. Like most politicians, Russia’s leaders are simply “rational power maximizers.” The difference is that they operate in a country almost entirely devoid of institutional and political constraints on elite behavior. Gel’man thus shows little interest in Putin’s worldview, or the views of those around him; in fact, he writes, “ideology as such has probably been the least meaningful factor in Russian politics since the Soviet collapse.”
Putin was able to abolish regional elections of provincial governors and instead appoint them himself, with impunity. His predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, brought in tanks to fire on the popularly elected Russian parliament and rewrote the constitution to fortify executive power, with impunity. Even Anatoly Sobchak, the law professor and first post-Soviet mayor of St. Petersburg (among whose protégés were Putin and his future sidekick Dmitri Medvedev), did not hesitate to dissolve the city council and concentrate power in his own hands, also with impunity.
These were assaults not on individual rivals, opposition parties, or independent media, but on the fundamental structures of the democratic process itself, and yet they generated hardly a ripple of protest. “Almost all success stories of democratization,” Gel’man notes, “result from constraints imposed on would-be dominant actors… by institutions, or by other actors, or sometimes even by themselves.” Rather than parse Putin’s speeches for signs of creeping authoritarianism, or endlessly cite the color revolutions as triggers of the Kremlin’s backlash against civil society, we should recognize that the Russia that emerged from seventy-four years of Soviet socialism was already deeply authoritarian before Putin set foot in the Kremlin."
Саму отрецензированную книгу можно приобрести здесь: http://upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36573
