Putin’s Much-Ballyhooed Power Vertical in Fact Consists of a Multitude of ‘Subverticals’ that Render the State Far Weaker than It Appears, Gallyamov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 6 – The Russian sate is “much weaker in reality than it appears to the outside” because it consists not of the single power vertical many like to talk about but rather of a plethora of “subverticals” which means officials must determine who is the critical figure in any particular situation, according to Abbas Gallyamov.

            Instead of applying laws and decisions equally regardless of who is involved, the former Putin speechwriter and now Putin critic says, officials act on the basis of their views about who is the most important and powerful figure in the case and thus undermine the power of the state, leaving it ever weaker (pointmedia.io/story/6ac3831875d0d3346a25cbc6).

            That may not be obvious to everyone all the time because the state’s coercive powers remain enormous, he continues; but it means that the state as an institutional whole is ever weaker since this coercion is used not so much to advance state interests as to promote those of leaders of one or another of “the subverticals” that form the regime.

            The former Putin speechwriter and now Putin critic says that a series of recent cases shows how this prevents officials from acting in the interests of the state and means that they will instead act in the their own interests or those to whom they are in fact rather than in law subordinate (pointmedia.io/story/6ac3831875d0d3346a25cbc6).

            That makes the state as a whole weak, something that is obscured much of the time because of the state’s enormous coercive power but that becomes critical when the state is subject to ever greater internal and external influences and thus acts not as a strong and integral state but as a congeries of groups, Gallyamov argues.

            A state is strong when “an official does not need to know who is behind the person applying to him: there is a single common procedure that must be used,” he continues. But in Russia, that is seldom the case; and the official’s “most important skill is to find out quickly who is behind whom” in each case.

            The more frequently that happens, Gallyamov says, “the stronger the state may appear to outsiders but the looser it is inside” and thus in fact the more at risk its survival in its current form becomes if it is buffeted as all states are by internal and external pressures.