ABSTRACT
Vladislav Surkov is at it again. Surkov, who has seen his prominence wane in recent years after being widely regarded as the Kremlin’s eminence grise during Putin’s first two presidential terms, has recently become front and centre in Russia’s on-going contestation over Ukraine. Surkov was one of the first Russian officials targeted for sanctions by the American government after the 2014 Crimean dispute (US Embassy, 2014). He did not waste the opportunity to demonstrate his particular brand of cultural bricolage. Upon hearing of the American sanctions, Surkov stated, ‘The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing’ (Pomerantsev, 2014b). Such a statement demonstrates Surkov’s ostensible regime function: pro-
viding readymade sound-bites on Russian culture and geopolitical posturing for Russian public consumption. However, alone such an utterance does not disclose the broader economic function Surkov plays, and has played, in Russian state capitalism. Indeed, while US sanctions might not prevent Surkov from enjoying the products of Shakur, Ginsberg and Pollock, they will prevent him from travelling to the United States and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to learn about the commercialisation of scientific innovation, like he did prior to the Russian government’s declaration of support for the Skolkovo Innovation Complex in 2010, a private-public partnership for which Surkov was the Russian government’s point person prior to his public spat with a representative of the Russian Investigative Committee (Kramer, 2010; Dolinskiy, 2013). Surkov’s handling of the Skolkovo portfolio was but one of his economic
legacies. While scholars have focused on Surkov’s role in the formation of regime-sanctioned ideology, little attention has been paid to Surkov’s broader economic function within Russia’s state apparatus. As a self-declared public philosopher during the first decade of the 2000s, Surkov developed and propagated the Putin regime’s official narrative of domestic and global affairs. My argument in this chapter is that in addition to preparing the ‘political’ elements of the ‘Putin Project’ – the consolidation of the domestic political
apparatus and Russia’s return to prominence in an emerging multipolar world order – for Russian public consumption, Surkov has also been instrumental in rendering Russian capitalism acceptable through the appeal to Russian cultural motifs. Indeed, Surkov should be viewed as a complex lynchpin in Russia’s Putin-era ‘state capital nexus’ (van Apeldoorn & de Graaf, 2012b), rather than simply contributing to the Kremlin’s attempts at attaining discursive hegemony. Far from merely an exercise in conceptual gymnastics, Surkov’s articulation
of a ‘post-post-Soviet’ – the period encompassed by the Putin era – public political philosophy can be understood within the context of Russia’s transition from state socialism and global superpower to state-guided capitalist power integrating into the capitalist – but multipolar – global political economy. As Surkov reworks themes and motifs associated with Russian culture and civilisation to serve regime imperatives of political economy, he may be considered one of the foremost institutionalised organic intellectuals1 of the Russian state, advocating for the continued modernisation of the Russian political economy by appealing to the Russian public through the language of cultural particularity. This chapter distances its assessment of the Putin regime from the terrain
of cultural essentialism to a reading of culture and civilisation which emphasises the complicatedly co-developing semiotic and extra-semiotic dimensions of official Russia’s stance on contemporary world order. It demonstrates how appeals to Russian uniqueness serve to legitimate Putin’s political and economic projects – including that of economic modernisation (see Chapter 3) – and investigates how Surkov’s thinking contributes to a regime-sanctioned challenge to American universalism by providing a framework for non-Western national development. Its format is as follows. Section 2 surveys recent thinking on ideas and culture in both political economy and Russian studies literature and argues that Surkov’s and the Putin regime’s selective appeal to Russian cultural traits is better understood not as exemplifying essential features of Russian political culture but as securing legitimacy for projects of political economy. This has at times entailed a negation of Russian exceptionalism and at other times its celebration. Section 3 investigates Surkov and the structure of Kremlin ‘political technologies’ in the context of Russia’s rise. Section 4 demonstrates Surkov’s recent trajectory with a focus on his role in managing the Skolkovo Innovation Complex. Section 5 serves as a conclusion.
