ABSTRACT
In the first post-communist years the hypertrophy of Soviet power gave way
to the atrophy of the Russian state. The ability of government to impose its
will on society, to extract adequate resources and to sustain the symbols of
legitimate power weakened. Putin’s immediate and intense concern to revive
the Russian state emerged directly from his own background as witness to
the dissolution of the ideological structures that had sustained authority for so long and to the disintegration of the institutional sinews of government.
The overriding theme of Putin’s writings and speeches, as we have seen, was
the need to restore the ability of the state to act as an independent political
force, no longer at the mercy of oligarchs, regional bosses or foreign inter-
ests. In the previous chapter we noted that the restoration of state power
tended towards centralised reconcentration rather than pluralistic recon-
stitution. An interventionist executive, even if its aims were benign, entailed
the danger of recreating the traditional system of monocentric and bureaucratised power.
