Pandemic has Demonstrated that Russia is Not a Unified State, Dmitriyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 20 – The actions the regions have taken after Vladimir Putin delegated to them responsibility for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic call into question claims about the existence of a single power vertical and show that Russia in fact lacks a single state, according to Russian commentator Andrey Dmitriyev.

            “From the time of the first lockdown,” he says, “it became clear that the coronavirus has revealed certain mechanisms of the formation of Russian power. And as things have turned out, the vertical which the Kremlin leadership is so proud of in fact does not work” (apn-spb.ru/opinions/article34206.htm).

            According to Dmitriyev, “we do not have a single powerful centralized state but a swamp” where each regional leader acts as he wants. Putin’s dominance of the political scene means that these differences are mutated. “But now just imagine what would happen if Vladimir Putin suddenly left this world.”

            Would the country hold together or would it fall into pieces? There is “only one sphere” where the government works “extremely actively” and in what appears to be a largely unified way. That involves the police. They are dispatched by the center; but they are up against regional elites that increasingly ignore everything else coming out of Moscow.

            As a result, one is justified in concluding, Dmitriyev says, that “the coronavirus has shown that there is no unified state in the Russian Federation, there is no social state, but on the oother hand there is in all its glory a police state.” And from that arises the question: can a police state survive if its chief departs?