Category Archives: Russia in the media

Coverage of the war is changing, but it too often misses the mark in communicating complexity

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[this is an op-ed piece about op-ed pieces. It’s a long version of a newspaper piece for the Danish press]

Even as we move well into the third year of war in Ukraine, the media sphere, dependent as it is on the economy of attention seeking, is still pretty narrowly focused. I can read millions of works a week penned about military technology, grand strategy, geopolitics or even tactics, and much of it is good, informative and interesting. Yet, at least in English, I can read relatively little on the actual details of things like military mobilization in Ukraine and Russia. Or, for that matter, analytical summary of how the war affects the structure of employment, the relationship between war production and the rest of the economy, and logistics within the two countries. The fact that I know by name and even by sight the few people writing consistently well on these topics should itself be a cause for concern.

Now, that’s not to say that such analysis doesn’t exist or even that it’s truly in short supply. However, there are only a handful of organizations and individuals really putting resources into granular coverage of the political economy of the war and how it interacts with wider society. Usually we talking about lone researchers within organizations of a much larger staff, many of whom seem to be busy with little more than the diminishing returns of punditry on what Putin said or didn’t say in 2007, or what Zelensky ‘really means’ today. There is often great journalistic follow up on human-interest or human rights stories, but even these suffer from 1. Belatedness; 2. Distortion because of the way journalistic truth is produced in close contact with official sources, and 3. The Mutual-Distrust-distance between journalism and expert research.

One piece that got me thinking along these lines was an article with the click-bait title: ‘Ukraine is heading for defeat’. Of course, the author is not really arguing that. Now, I want to say right up that I think this is a decent enough article for Politico! (LOL to the folk who decided Axel-Springer Politico ‘leans left’). I think the journalist tries to cover lots of bases – breadth and depth that are often missing. Furthermore, it’s an opinion piece and pretty short. Let’s cut the guy some slack.

What exercised me though, and not only me, but more than one Ukrainian researcher, was the impression that only now can the media start ‘discovering’ stories for their readership like widespread draft avoidance in Ukraine and the gross human rights violations by the Ukrainian state in press-ganging. Once again, its unfair to pick on this one point in an article. The fact is, however, so much coverage is really not interested in the rights and opinions of Ukrainians, the social dynamic in the country. Which is a pity because attending to it might tell us more about the prospects for Ukraine withstanding Russian aggression than paying attention to prime ministers doing photoshoots with Zelensky sitting in the cockpit of a F-16 (this is Danish political snark).

The story of ‘draft-dodging’ is presented with a curious addition – that would-be recruits now spend their ‘afternoons’ in nightclubs instead of volunteering. Then there’s a few alarming quotes of key political figures in the war leadership. This, and other framings make it seem like the journalist is uncritically repeating the – frankly – political spin of the presidential coterie (Yes! Why not call it that!) in Ukraine. Spin: that there is a feckless youth that need to steeled by fire. Spin: that it’s not Zelensky who wants to mobilize more young people, but that his hand is forced. The fact is that those kids in nightclubs (in the afternoon!?) are there because they already paid off the commissariat or paid bribes for ‘medical’ exemptions. Conscript wars are class wars, after all. Even in a short article, a left-leaning journalist should be able to do better.

Whether we read something about Ukraine or Russia, the journalistic or think-tank product has been filtered through contact with various gatekeepers of knowledge. In this case it’s (too much) contact with people peddling the Ukraine president’s line. Once again, it would be better reader service to say that Ukraine is a complex political society and there are lots of competing centres of authority, interest and even ideology operating, regardless of war. I dunno, you could do a vox pop on what people think of press-ganging! (answer: it would cause cognitive dissonance among Americans, so we won’t do that). It would also be good to say that it’s normal in wartime for even most men to not want to die, even if their country is a victim. Someone commented on the forgotten history of draft avoidance during WWI. Journalism has to operate in tolerable frames of propriety – the idealised morality of the society it speaks to. Zelensky is the good tsar who cares about Ukrainians. The Russian General Staff are monsters shoving meat in a grinder. Both might be ‘true’, but does it aid understanding to rely so much on personalities and pretend we can have moral clarity by proxy?

The third point is my self-interested criticism as a person whose job it is to produce country-based knowledge (in Russian and Ukrainian). Journalists need an answer ‘now’, for sure, but don’t always make much of an effort to reach out to the genuine country experts for help. Here in Denmark, we have the luxury of a professionalized journalism. Most journalists actively seek out expert knowledge, accommodate the views, and even promote them, of scientists. Indeed here, the foremost Russian foreign policy expert won a public communication prize last year for his work with the press to bridge the divide between research and public.

However, we can always do better from both sides: open to the challenge of different kinds of knowledge. Journalists often have the multi-level connections that academic researchers can only dream of. After all, journalists can get up-close to powerholder much more easily. At the same time, academics often have the advantage of being able to devote time and energy in chipping away at issues in a holistic and systematic way – like social attitudes and responses to things like military mobilization in both countries. Furthermore, there’s a deficit of critical (in the sense of social scientific) Ukrainian voices in the press in the ‘West’. The fact that I’m writing this post stems from interacting with Ukrainians who just don’t feel comfortable with the future consequences of voicing these kinds of criticisms.

Finally, academics are more to blame than journalists. We still live in a world where academics are afraid of journalists (that they will distort things); are in a kind of dysfunctional envy-snobbery disposition towards them. We’d all love to see thousands read our work, to be able to make bigger knowledge claims with often less evidence, to get to travel to places more easily and report on them, to get to talk to powerful people and even just legitimately be present in ‘hot spots’.

A few final points about the vicious cycle of Ukraine coverage. This is itself a product of the interaction between simplistic media narratives and western elites who avoid confronting hard choices and instead flip-flopping on real commitment. Being Politico (Atlanticist, not left-leaning!), the piece can’t say out loud that US patronage is a zero-sum game. You want to sponsor Israel against Iran, sure: have some more Patriots. Ukraine comes to the window: ‘sorry, we’re out today, come back tomorrow.’ Now that the US military aid bill has passed, so many people are acting like we can breathe a sigh of relief and ‘move on’, yet, an attentive reading of even the Guardian reveals that only a fraction of the money ($8 out of $61bn) will go to Ukraine soon, and mainly to keep the state functioning. A lot of the rest will go primarily into the coffers of US corporations. And only much later materialize as materiel on the battlefield.

No, Ukraine did not turn your radiator off in Podolsk. Or, on the inability to think sociologically

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A plume of water vapor from a failed heating line in a Russian city, 13.1.2024

The framing of the catastrophic failure of heating/electrical systems in Russia as inevitably a Ukrainian plot perfectly underlines the ‘pundit problem’ coverage of Russia, which I recently tweeted about to the complete misunderstanding of most people.

Gonzalo Lira’s book collection, from the Ukrainian raid on his flat in July 2023

I tweeted a picture of the reading ‘desk’ of the deceased YouTube grifter-cum-incel-coach Gonzalo Lira – there were three books – two of them very person-focussed (with ‘P’ in the title). The point is not that those authors were ‘bad’ or part of the grifter universe of Gonzalo, but that they set the frame of reference for 95% of the debate on what is going on in Russia/Ukraine. It’s all about personal history, personal ideology and animus, personal networks of the elite, dodgy social psychology and even dodgier personal psychology.

That the central heating grids of many towns and cities in Russia are not fit for purpose has been written about endlessly in sociology and anthropology. Someone attending to even this narrow ‘sociology of physical networks and infrastructure’ might learn a lot more about the war, about Russian politics, about Russian people’s preferences, than a zillion more books about a wimpy lad from Leningrad who’s resentment and greed propelled us to the brink of WWIII (parody).

You don’t need to read my previous work (but you could) to be aware of how the state of heating infrastructure is *the* political issue in many towns in Russia. In the tweet about the heating failure, I joked about my non-published new book again, and I devote a whole chapter there to state infrastructure. You can read a mini-version of that in this free-view Incoherent State write up from a few years ago. But the reference text for sure is Stephen J. Collier’s Post-Soviet Social – an amazing insight into the rickety privatized infrastructures of Russia (for a critical yet supportive summarizing review see this by Johanna Bockman). Then there is the wonderful book by Doug Rogers on corporate provision of social services, The Depths of Russia. A close third comes Susanne Wengle’s Post-Soviet Power which chronicles the rushed privatization of electricity infrastructure.

To summarise, the seemingly too-coincidental-to-be-accident-failures of the heating network should be viewed in the context of the multiple social factors at play – far more likely than sabotage (in this particular case). First there is the privatization of a critical and vulnerable network. Heating plants feed communal hot-water pipes just below the surface which then have a single ingress to housing blocks – in a severe frost which penetrates the ground up to two metres, these can fail and effectively shut down the whole grid. Privatization, as has been demonstrated again and again, while not the proximal cause, leads to the sweating of former public assets and inadequate investment in long-term upgrades and even basic repair (in the UK where against the advice of most, water was wholly privatized a similar cascade of failures is occurring right now). Where assets at municipal owned, the starving of local authority financing has the same effect.

Then there is human capital “depreciation”. One thing preventing the catastrophic failure of networks like town heating systems was the intangible knowledge and good-will of former Soviet-era managers. These are dying off now leaving a hole in the metaphorical fabric of post-socialist governance. This was in any case a patchwork of personalized relationships between these non-political ‘specialists’ and politicians. The former often continued to work for the common good (a complex relationship I go into in my new book) after being excluded from the corrupt compact between local and federal elites. In my 2016 book, I undertook participant observation (anthrospeak for following someone around and working with them) of a heating network technician in Kaluga region. Without this 50-something guy working almost for nothing and effectively ‘managing’ the town’s heating supply the residents would have experienced annual outages of hot water. Most importantly, this man was only informally in charge and at any moment could have left or retired (which he did eventually). Yet the municipality gave him access to a car, driver and assistant.

There is loss of such human capital, but also general labour shortages – long a problem before the war. It’s not so much that the war drew down ‘low-skilled’ men away from maintenance (as many people argue), but that, as in line with the generally punitive and neoliberal labour compact in Russia, there has been mass flight away from poorly-paid municipal jobs like those maintaining essential infrastructure. Even the ‘well-paid’ gas and oil industries struggle to fill roles (for details, again, see the article linked below and my new book). Pay is woefully inadequate and conditions terrible. It’s also true that the war accelerated austerity policies sucking money away from infrastructure, but again, that’s the proximal, not main cause. As scholars like Ilya Matveev have been pointing out for years, Russia is an austerity state on steroids.

There is something to this point, it’s true:

Add to all of this climate change. I remember harsh winters in Moscow in the 1990s, but Russians have got used to much milder winters in the last twenty years. This, like so many ‘freak weather’ events was just a return to what used to be normal winters with prolonged temps below minus 20 in European Russia. Except there’s been 20+ years of looting and neglect in the meantime.

Finally, overlaid, but not overdetermining, is the centralized, reactive nature of Federal governance – content to let the country rot, only effective in extracting and lifting rents upwards towards the cosseted world of Moscow – which is not Russia. I address this as part of this piece I wrote a few years ago on ‘capitalist realism’ (doffs cap to Mark Fisher) – an argument that also features in my new book.

Back to punditry. The problem is not authors like Galeotti or Belton (though there are legitimate gripes with them), but the obsessive media attention to a super narrow framing, reductive to absurdity. Galeotti is a great example of a capable, seasoned and expert researcher (on organized crime and security studies) structurally trammeled by the war (and before) into providing ever more commentary to serve demand by the whole media assemblage of Russia coverage. People misread my tweets as equating grifters like Lira to specialist pundits. There’s a gulf between them, but their output inevitably ends up serving the same media ‘interests’/: obfuscation of complexity in cause and effect, preventing sociological understanding, ‘orientalization’ of the subject matter (making it exotic instead of what it really is – mundane).

To go back to my January 2022 post about the problems of punditry before the war, the issues I sourced there from various colleagues about Russia coverage remain the same going into 2024 (scroll to the bottom of the linked post to see these topics unpacked):

Structural weaknesses in Russian journalism and Western coverage.

Putin-centric coverage the tells us nothing (led by publisher and editor demand)

Detachment from in-country knowledge (our man may be in Havana but he rarely leaves the bar)

Presentism (as we see now on the war – endless mind-numbing takes on weapons and lines on maps)

Gresham’s Law (bad punditry drives out good, bad think-tanks out-compete good ones, bad scholars outcompete good ones)

Absolute paucity of non-metropolitan coverage, whether of Ukraine, or Russia.

Is Russia Fascist?

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A painting depicting WWII through Russian ‘eyes’ at a Moscow market in 2022

The fact that I’m writing a blog post about this topic shows how detached from reality the commentary on Russia is. It’s understandable, I guess. But shoddy, media-ready ‘analysis’ from public intellectuals that does its best to ignore any sociological knowledge about the country is just really lame.

Tim Snyder’s NYT piece is a mishmash of historical analogism that focusses on Putin and sidesteps scholarship on Russian society. Snyder claims Russia (what, all Russians?) is fascist because it has a ‘leader cult’; celebrates a ‘cult of the dead’ via Victory Day; and is hostage to a myth of an imperial golden age. Very little of the essay, in fact almost nothing apart from a passing mention of Z people and rallies actually pertains to Russia beyond the Kremlin and some ideologists of questionable relevance (‘not Dugin again!’, said one of my undergraduate students).

All of these things are ‘true’, but they don’t really mean what Snyder says they mean.

At home, Putin has always been an ambivalent figure and never enjoyed unalloyed ‘enthusiasm’, even among his voting constituency. There’s loyalty and respect, even among the ‘morally opposed’. But that’s not a leader cult. The fact that so-called political technologists had to create so much PR for him, rather than let it naturally develop, proves the point. The guy never had an iota of charisma. He could never build a following like Trump.

A ‘cult of the dead’? There’s been a few pieces on this in the media. They tend towards a dangerous culturalism (the libel that Russians have a genetic ‘Asiatic’ predisposition to devalue human life and value violent domination). What Snyder ignores is the sociological research on the ‘Immortal Regiment’ marches, by scholars like Gabowitsch. Russians marching with placards of their ancestors who fought in the war is mainly not even a patriotic statement. It’s a rare permission to express personal loss, to experience connectedness, and to give voice to frustrated feelings of a need for communal activity.

The ‘Imperial Golden Age’? Well, this is true to an extent. I’ve written in this blog in the last 3 months that this does motivate some to support the war. But these people are a minority and in any case exist more visibly in societies like the US, France, and the UK. The irony here of Snyder’s comment is that it ignores the bigger golden age myth in Russia: the time people really pine for is the 1970s – the period of détente, peace, and the cementing of non-Russian elite power in the future independent republics of the USSR. Hardly imperial fare.

In reality, Snyder merely projects yet another US-centric take on what’s happening. This reflects liberal anxiety about Trumpism, real white supremacism in the US, and the militarization and securitization of US and Western societies.

Shall we actually look at some definitions of fascism?

I re-read Ian Kershaw recently and anyone who wants to understand pro-war sentiment in Russia should read his account of German society in WWII.

Kershaw’s is not the only definition, but it’s pretty simple. Fascism is based on hypernationalism that’s violently exclusionary and racial; It’s violent towards all political enemies; it’s macho, disciplined and militaristic.  Optional features: social ‘renewal’ based on romantic utopian thinking; irredentism/imperialism; anticapitalism; corporatism (people know their place in society)

On Kershaw’s definitions we do find some fascistic elements to the Russian regime. But this comes up against the contradictions in ethnicizing Ukrainians. The whole point of Putin’s irredentism is that in his view Ukrainians aren’t really Ukrainians, they’re frustrated and misguided Russians (actually he probably doesn’t even believe this). Yes, they are ‘incorrect’ and errant Eastern Slavs, but the whole racialized perspective on Russian attitudes towards Ukrainians is, once again, a US-centric projection. The dehumanization of the ‘other’ is present among Russians and Ukrainians since the start of the war (but of course the anti-Ukrainian rhetoric in Russia was strong for a time now). But this is nothing to do with race or racism. Against Kershaw’s set of features, Russia is an insipid and equivocal ‘fascistic’ regime. Some of these features do not fit at all.

What about recent scholarship on ideology in Russia? Here we must turn, as Snyder fails to do, to Marlene Laruelle’s painstaking research. Her book is called Is Russia Fascist? Snyder commits perhaps the worst possible academic snub in ignoring it in his piece.

I know Laruelle’s work and I read her articles with my students every year. But don’t trust me, we can turn to the excellent reviews of the book. For example, this one by Roger Chapman. This is a positive, but critical review that unpicks Laruelle’s argument that Russia is a kind of illiberal state: rejecting global institutions, promoting economic protectionism and revaluing multiculturalism. Chapman questions why we need the term illiberal when in his view Laruelle could have just written ‘authoritarian/totalitarian’. The reason Laruelle does not use these terms is that in her view ideological diversity is still permissible and that coercion has some hard limits within Russia (so far).  

Laruelle (in Chapman’s reading) makes use of a different historian’s definition of fascism – that of Roger Griffin. According to Griffin, fascism is a ‘revolutionary-utopian form of nationalism’. It requires an anti-modern myth of regeneration involving the violent destruction of enemies. Enemies are racialized through an ideological doctrine that catalyzes mass mobilization to ensure domination of those enemies both at home and abroad. So far, pretty similar to Kershaw. Laruelle notes that by these criteria, “not only is Putin neither Hitler nor Mussolini, he is not even Pinochet”.

In a late-2018 piece for PONARS, Laruelle picks apart similar arguments Snyder has made before. She says his approach is comparable to those of an observer who would extrapolate from Charlotteville riots to conclude that white supremacists had an iron grip on US society. “Simplistic reductionist techniques and invalid reasoning further confuse the analysis—and bias policy responses.”

….

In my view, the ‘Russia is fascist’ argument is so far from the reality of Russian society that it amounts to dangerous disinformation. What do actual political sociologists find?

Political and social demobilization at every turn – even incorporation through a ‘party of power’ does not serve ideological purposes or help mobilize. On the contrary, incorporation by the regime serves its stasis and the continuing enrichment and insulation of the elite. With some visible exceptions (who now get a lot of undeserved attention) the elite is uninterested in ideology and even governance (so an Eichmann could hardly be found). There isn’t a banality of evil. Just banality. In some senses the ‘mafia’ metaphor is better (though I criticise it here and reprise an analysis of corruption as a ‘thing’ that drives the regime here). ‘Ideology’ and ‘causes’ are dangerous to this regime.

In actual fact, most Russians’ lives are profoundly depoliticized to an unhealthy extent. Ironically, here is where Russia is open to a charge of fascism: the idea of fascism as a creeping erosion of citizenship and the achievement of the aims of totalitarianism by procedural means. The irony? The scholarship of this ‘post-fascist’ fascism is about our societies.  About the UK, European states and the United States.

So, what is Russia as a political regime? Well, my recent take is here: an authoritarian neoliberal regime of some complexity. I argue that elements of this are present in our own societies and that many states are hurtling into the precipice Russia already occupies.

In Russia there are many forces of prefigurative politics, resistance and renewal, stacked against the seemingly dominant authoritarian power (the topic of my current book project!). Russian society has its share of neo-Nazi far-right forces which are both feared and leveraged by the elite. Other formations are far more visible and make Russia look more like….. Ukraine. There’s a liberal mainstream that dominates the ‘discourse’ beyond the state-controlled media and a strong communitarian strand of political thinking. Takes like ‘Russia is fascist’ ultimately show, once again, the unhealthy focus on the current elite, an elite that’s more and more disconnected from the majority. The invasion of Ukraine itself illustrates the intellectual, political, and institutional exhaustion of ‘Putinism’. But it proves little beyond that.

Why Russia is not a mafia state

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This week in a research event at Aarhus University I was asked to discuss with Lucia Michelutti her work on the mafia-like nexus of business-organised crime-politics in Uttar Pradesh. Her work is really thought-provoking and I recommend you check out her book on Mafia Raj.

Michelutti argues for the use of the term ’bossing’ to describe the partly performative work of criminal dons and wannabee mafiosi in India. This is because of the awkward absence of a word in English to describe the enactment of power: we have ‘to empower’ and ‘overpower’, but not a verb that clearly describes  power as a process. For Michelutti, ‘bossing’ by criminals-cum-politicians involves the mobilisation of performative competencies and which is subject to contestation in an unstable constellation of authority (and which lacks legitimacy), charisma, and local contexts (particularly community problems). The highlights of her talk for me were an elective affinity between delegated governance and organised criminality; starting from the premise of the ‘emic’ grounded use of language – ‘boss’ is the currency of talking about criminal/political entrepreneurs; mafia as a systemic yet amorphous reality, not a discrete organisation in itself.

This set me thinking about the use and abuse of the now common-place ‘Russia as a mafia state’. I was sceptical of Luke Harding’s book when it came out in 2011. Subsequent events have proved him right on some things (and me wrong). However, I still want to object to the looseness of the term ‘mafia’, and how it obscures more than it reveals. Quite reasonably, even ‘ordinary’ readers criticised him for not defining why Russia is a ‘mafia state’ when so many other corrupt, kleptocratic regimes are not. Broadly, Harding uses it to indicate collaboration of security services with organised criminality, to indicate the ‘kick back’ ubiquity of corruption to higher officials, to indicate the willingness of the state to use extortion against foreign states, or to indicate a general prevalence of extortion/protection relationships.

First a caveat: there are strengths to Harding’s book – the perspective of a person who feels the full sun-like gaze of the security services when they are let off the leash to harass a foreigner – see Kelly Hignett’s review here https://www.ceeol.com/search/viewpdf?id=61177. However, let’s not forget that Harding gets off lightly in comparison to many Russian victims of the state’s displeasure. Journalists of course write books and are professional writers. But I can’t be the only person to be disturbed (and of course made envious) by the attention these anecdotal, ultimately piecemeal and largely ‘readers digest’ accounts generate. For a critical review of Harding’s evidence-light work see a review of his book on Trump-Russia collusion by Paul Robinson: https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2017/12/02/collusion/ . Now, I’m not saying he wasn’t harassed by the FSB, just that in moving from journalistic fluff and anecdote to book-length serious analysis he, and most others, fall short (I haven’t read Galeotti’s latest). Harding at worst gives readers a version of Cold War 2.0 that seriously impedes better understanding of the everyday reality of Russia.

So, some basic problems with the term ‘Mafia’. Mafia implies an overall structuring of all activity towards the end of enriching the boss via captains, and clandestine activity linked to membership of an elect community with elements of charismatic leadership.  Okay, there’s a certain affinity here with descriptions of clientelistic and personalised relations, but why not just use that conceptual toolkit and ditch association with types of charismatic and in-group derived leadership as represented in popular culture by Vito Corleone, Paulie Cicero, or Tony Soprano?

The ‘true’ mafia ( of course they cannot be separated from their popular cultural depiction anymore because they in turn are influenced by that depiction) are only ever peripherally ‘political’, as Michelutti, points out (that of course, does not mean that they don’t buy politicians and political leverage). As a classic, yet parasitic ‘other’ to capitalism, mafias can only be defined in opposition to state structures. Most of all this is because they actively choose to occupy niches of criminality and employ physical violence, albeit in a limited way, that challenges the monopoly of violence that the state reserves for itself. Most notably coercion is of a limited nature (there is a ‘civilian’ category, ‘victims’ are mainly from the same ethno-cultural community). Indeed, that ‘anyone’ can fall victim to the rapacious raiding of business by the kleptocratic Russian elites, means that if anything, Mafia is too ‘soft’ a word!

For organised crime, ‘criminality’ is the keyword. But, in the diffuse, corrupt, dysfunctional and contradictory world of the rule and unrule of law in Russia, words like ‘extortion’, ‘bribery’, ‘racketeering’ lose their meaning, because if state actors take assets from you in a way you experience as illegitimate, it is by virtue of their superior command of legal-administrative resources, but most importantly, their ability to make what appears to us as ‘criminal’, merely accumulation according to a logic of nearness to other more powerful state actors plus the superior command of already existing financial resources. (Of course a bit of violence does help here – see the interesting work of Jacob Rigi on the ‘Corrupt State of Exception in Russia’).

Using the mafia label is unhelpful as it conjures for a Western audience an image of a Don, a clear hierarchy of made men, of grifting in secret and in fear of discovery, and of highly ritualised organisation of criminality. All of these things exist within the organised crime world of Russia, sure. But it is a massive stretch to make the leap from Goodfellas to The Kremlin. The ‘mafia-like’ practices of the state are both more organised (and less ‘illegal’) and more chaotic (influenced by political expedient rather than just graft), than that of any organised crime group. Indeed, in contrast even to the Sopranos’ ‘postmodern’ mafia, where charisma and tradition begin to fail to limit conflict or reproduce loyalty, the kleptocratic workings in the Russian state show an absence of a shared normative understandings of power and sovereignty. Despite Kordonsky’s work on ‘kick-back’ culture, there are no ‘made men’, nor is there a shared understanding of timeserving before becoming captain, and there is no honour, no chance of a ‘sit down’, and no percentage kickbacks with any permanence that would allow them to become informal rules governing ‘taxation’ or authority. What there is is an ever changing landscape of potentially equally powerful others, where the ‘rules of the game’ can change more abruptly than in any criminal conspiracy, and where there are also ever-present political, policy and governance goals distracting from – what I admit is the main task – making money.

Then we come to the ‘killing of enemies’ argument that people put forward because of Skripal, or Litvinenko. For the mafia metaphor to have explanatory meaning here it would require the state, security services and organised crime to have clearly demonstrable and densely redundant network characteristics over time. Even if it is shown that the Skripal was targeted because of his knowledge of organised crime in Spain linked to the Russian security services (I think that’s unlikely), a quick glance at the conflicting interests within the elite (and between security agencies), and the infighting of factions even at the highest level, the relative ‘weakness’ of the Presidential Administration to have its orders carried out, shows that such ‘networks’ would break down as soon as they arise, and could only be connections of expediency.

Take the Donbas – more a political project with hot and cold support from Moscow and a way of getting rid of nationalist and violence-orientated entrepreneurs. Most importantly, it is a huge drain on resources which has enriched only a few local players (hence the assassination of the them now). Not the actions of a ‘mafia state’ looking to get resources flowing upward from a ‘take’. The Skripals and Litvinenko before them are evidence of incompetence if nothing else. They remind me more of contexts like organisational rivalry, poor operational control, and opportunism, than methodical revenge. Certainly, the execution of these operations would embarrass any self-respecting professional hit man in the pay of a ‘mafia’.

Tony-in-the-pool-with-ducks-1

Tony says: ‘You call that a hit? My ducks could do better’

A British journalist discovered that if he writes critical articles in a semi-authoritarian state, the security services will target him. Sometimes there is a blurry line between activities the security services take against critics of the state and other corrupt activities. Sometimes the security services are not under control of the state, even though there are lots of powerful politicians who have a security services background. Particularly on the last point, it’s been shown by scholars like Bettina Renz that this background is largely irrelevant and to propose a ‘silovik takeover’ is a correlation-causation error.  To end, a similar reminder from Marelle Laruelle on the dangers of rhetorical techniques of facile association. I might come back to this as, in the first place, I started thinking about this topic because I am working towards the idea of the everyday ‘incoherent’ state in Russian, particularly in the workings of the lowest level of street-level bureaucrats.