You Should Know Who Vladislav Surkov Is

     I don’t think people consider the impact of Russian politician and business Vladislav Surkov enough.

Now, I’m not in shock if people don’t know him already, especially those outside of or not directly reading from the Kremlin; almost a guarantee for the many who live outside Russia. What was surprising to me was learning that Surkov had worked alongside President Vladimir Putin ever since his first election win at the turn of the Millennium over the incompetent Boris Yeltsin.

Post-USSR Brief

For some brief history, Yeltsin, the first President of the fledgling and capitalist Russian Federation, became so after the Soviet collapse in 1991 following Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberal policies of Glasnost and Perestroika. A failed coup attempt by Soviet hardliners would seal the USSR’s tomb (and their own) after 22 August 1991, before its full collapse the day after Christmas (26 December) that same year.

     Russia’s turmoil of the 1990’s, amidst concurring on the same timeline as what I dub the ‘Liberal Dream Decade’ in the Western sphere (roughly 1991-2001), was the pinnacle of what the end result of the Cold War dragged the nation into. Massive rise in poverty, successionist wars in Chechnya and, of course, the rise of Oligarchism to name a few consequences. The last of those being how a younger Surkov stepped past the Kremlin’s walls and helped oversee its desks.

Far from an ordinary bureaucrat or representative, Surkov has essentially been in lockstep with Putin ever since his ascension to President, unmoving after 2 decades with Surkov’s assistance as a revolving-door figure.

The West’s fault

Now, noticing an overlap between business and politics is nothing to bat an eye over, if you’re within either of those groups or aren’t the wiser, of course, given the unfortunate success of Neoliberal policy via Ronald Reagan’s America and Margret Thatcher’s Britain.

While they have most certainly fueled their respective partisan divides through chants of ‘individuals over communities’, creating endless clashes of ‘Elephant vs. Donkey’ and ‘Tory vs. Labour’ while I witness legislature and judiciary benefits blown to the black holes, the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation has never relied on the democratic principal for their own ‘electoralism’.

Creating the trap

     This next piece is undoubtedly what Surkov is most famous for, unless the shifts in Kremlin departments from Deputy Chief to Deputy Prime Minister and finally to Putin advisor are anything to write off.

No, you need to pay attention to these things, knowing the multiple backgrounds of Putin’s so-called ‘Grey Cardinal’, perhaps Russia’s most important Éminence grise. They provide important context to his electoral operations, most famously and, arguably, succinctly put in BBC documentarian Adam Curtis’ 2016 film Hypernormalization, in which he describes (from this snippet) the cohorts of ‘political technologists’ and their effects on the Russian state.

This descriptor is lifted from Peter Pomerantsev’s 2014 book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, which I find describes their influence of the Strugatsky Brothers’ sci-fi novels on their purveyance over Russian electoralism. Its dubbing is ‘Sovereign Democracy’. Made simple, the parties were manufactured from within the Kremlin itself, running a gamut from Liberal human rights to youth anti-establishment to neo-nazis, manifesting support from the vox populi into contained chambers that would eventually be nullified by reinforcing Putin’s candidacy and establishment.

     Curtis is keenly aware of Surkov’s history within the world of theatre, as all of you should still be, as was Surkov when using his ploys on the Russian population.

Put into perspective

In an interview for the Financial Times last year, Surkov spelt out the framework in stating, “We split the opposition into systemic and non-systemic. [The former] obeys the rules, laws and customs”, he says, referring to Kremlin-directed opposition parties”.

Analyzing his logos of disseminating manufactured politics and news reports, I found support from an ethos of ‘content over substance’, in that, “Most people need their heads to be filled with thoughts…You are not going to feed people with some highly intellectual discourse. Most people eat simple foods…Generally most people consume very simple-meaning beliefs…There is haute cuisine, and there is McDonald’s”.

Foreign affairs

     Not surprising following the initial invasion of Ukraine earlier this year under Putin’s command, the largest on European soil post-WW2, that Surkov helped generate upheaval back in 2014 during the Crimea annexation. A direct response to the Euromaidan protests from within Kyiv demanding for EU membership and to side with the West instead of the Kremlin.

Knowing this, as well as navigating Abkhazia and South Ossetia following the 2008 invasion of Georgia, I think Vladislav Surkov should undoubtedly be viewed as a professional meddler of this ‘Neo-Russomania’ in addition to that of mass communications.

His technocratic legacy, one birthed from his days in theatre, is something we can observe from Donald Trump’s postulation of ‘Fake News’ and the Brexit campaigns’ insistence of ‘rebelling against the tyranny in Brussels’ in their hyper-realism much like that of Curtis’s documentary. The end result of manufacturing opposition and the oppositions to that opposition.

Karmic justice (?)

On the contrary report, against all odds, Surkov is reportedly under house arrest following his departure from the Kremlin and for embezzling within Ukraine’s Donbass region; the same region he helped manufacture a rebellion for! What a twist!

     With all of this said, I hope you have learned of how important this man should be by now. Nowhere else, I now believe, could we have anticipated the acceleration of such tractable quantities and volumes of information than of this man Vladislav Surkov.

It should be key for every political scientist and activist to learn of his name. While he may have ended up biting the hand that fed him, presumably, there is still the question of whether it truly happened or not, which could simply be another return to form.

Regardless of this, his influence has been too great and developed for too long, and its about damn time we cite him as a progenitor to this post-truth era we now have to wade through.