March 2, 2008, marked the most uneventful event in Russian and, indeed, world politics—the election of Dmitry Medvedev to the post of the President of Russia. Having reached a cathartic pitch in the period immediately preceding the naming of Medvedev as the “successor” (preyemnik) to Putin, the speculation and suspense have been exhausted long before the elections. Yet, despite its profoundly anticlimactic quality, which left the Russian public absolutely cold and apathetic to a pre-fixed outcome, March 2 was a culmination of sorts. It functioned as a conclusion to a particularly insidious aspect of “Putin’s Plan,” the most ambitious aim of which was to drain the political sphere of uncertainty and risk that render it political in the first place. Smacking of the Soviet bureaucratic regulation of economy, the formal utopian core of the plan was the creation, by the year 2020, of a completely administered society devoid of antagonisms or disagreements within the chain of command, all the way down to local and municipal authorities.

Continue reading →