Russia under Vladimir Putin

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Satire poster: "Glory to Stalin Putin the Great!"

The term Putinism is often used to describe the unique political system of contemporary Russia where all political powers and most important economic assets are owned by a group of former state security officials ("siloviks") according to many political observers. The system was established under leadership of Russian president Vladimir Putin and therefore named after him. . According to Arnold Beichman, "Putinism in the 21st century has become as significant a watchword as Stalinism was in the 20th" [1].

The privatization of Russian state and economic assets has been allegedly acconmplished by a clique of Putin's close associates and friends who gradually became a leading group of Russian oligarchs and who "seized control over the financial, media and administrative resources of the Russian state" and restricted democratic freedoms and human rights.

Political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky considers Putinism as "the highest and culminating stage of bandit capitalism in Russia” . He believes that "Russia is not corrupt. Corruption is what happens in all countries when businessmen offer officials large bribes for favours. Today’s Russia is unique. The businessmen, the politicians, and the bureaucrats are the same people."

Andrei Illarionov, a former advisor of Vladimir Putin, describes this system as a new socio-political order, "distinct from any seen in our country before". In this model, members of the Corporation of Intelligence Service Collaborators [Russian abbreviation KSSS] took over the entire body of state power, follow an omerta-like behavior code, and "are given instruments conferring power over others – membership “perks”, such as the right to carry and use weapons". According to Illarionov, this "Corporation has seized key government agencies – the Tax Service, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Parliament, and the government-controlled mass media – which are now used to advance the interests of KSSS members. Through these agencies, every significant resource of the country – security/intelligence, political, economic, informational and financial – is being monopolized in the hands of Corporation members." The ideology of chekists is Nashism (“ours-ism”), the selective application of rights", he said.

Former Securitate general Ion Mihai Pacepa believes that although chekism in Russia is nothing new, the current situation is different: "In the Soviet Union, the KGB was a state within a state. Now former KGB officers are running the state. They have custody of the country’s 6,000 nuclear weapons, entrusted to the KGB in the 1950s, and they now also manage the strategic oil industry renationalized by Putin. The KGB successor, rechristened FSB, still has the right to electronically monitor the population, control political groups, search homes and businesses, infiltrate the federal government, create its own front enterprises, investigate cases, and run its own prison system. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. Putin’s Russia has one FSB-ist for every 297 citizens." Vladimir Putin himslef admitted that "There is no such thing as a former KGB man" and that "A group of FSB colleagues dispatched to work undercover in the government has successfully completed its first mission." .

Russian politician Boris Nemtsov and commentator Kara-Murza define Putinism in Russia as "a one party system,censorship, a puppet parliament, ending of an independent judiciary, firm centralisation of power and finances, and hypertrophied role of special services and bureaucracy, in particular in relation to business"