He was the great inspirer of the first two presidential terms of the Russian “tsar”. His is the model of the “imperial democracy” of the Russian president. He was left out of power for opposing Putin’s continuance in office.
Moscow () – The political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the main ideologues of Putin’s early years, has died at the age of 72 after a long illness. On behalf of the family, his friend Simon Kordonskij, a professor at the Higher School of Economics, communicated the news. The academic was the great inspirer of the first two presidential terms in the early 2000s, at the end of which Putin should have ended his pre-eminent role, leaving room for a change in power.
In mid-2000, during the first year of Putin’s presidency, Pavlovsky had promoted the creation of the “United Russia” party, accompanied by a dynamic youth movement close to the Kremlin. It was a model of “imperial democracy” that epitomized the need for a strong government and the “verticality of power”, terms that he elaborated to find a synthesis between the absolutist tradition and the great ethnic, social and even political diversity of Russia.
He was shelved by the regime in 2011 as Putin’s return as head of state for a third term was being prepared. After Medvedev’s interval, Pavlovsky instead advocated a second term for the “dolphin”, whom he tried to dress in the clothes of a moderate politician in his frequent and very followed interventions in the national press.
The political scientist came from the anti-Soviet dissident movement and became famous in 1974, when he refused to confirm in court the KGB accusations against his acquaintance Vjaceslav Igrunov, arrested for defaming the Soviet regime. At first, Pavlovsky collaborated with the secret services, but later declared that he had been forced to provide information and that he was no longer willing to submit.
In Moscow he became editor of the Investigaciones (Poiski) magazine, an activity that cost him his arrest in 1982. The authorities once again coaxed information from him about other dissidents, but limited it to those who had already left the country. Sent into internal exile in the Komi region, he returned to the capital at the start of Gorbachev’s perestroika, and became an early aide to future president Boris Yeltsyn. He met the American philanthropist George Soros, who funded the “Civil Society” program to further the spread of computer technology that in the 1990s was beginning to change the world.
Together with the businessman Vladimir Yakovlev, he later founded the journalistic cooperative El Hecho (Fakt), from which one of the most authoritative publications of Russian information emerged, the Kommersant newspaper, which in turn became one of the main references for the media across the country. He then decided to dedicate himself to the new science of “polittekhnologija”, scientific political science, in order to offer everyone the necessary tools to understand and participate in public life.
His Foundation for Effective Politics supported Yeltsin’s election campaign in 1996, greatly increasing a consensus that seemed highly uncertain and instrumental in his victory over the communist Gennadij Zjuganov. His initiative managed to unite the main oligarchs with the siloviki, the “men of the security apparatus”, laying the foundations for the system that Putin would later embody, whom Pavlovsky himself helped to elect as prime minister and later successor to the president. .
Increasingly excluded from the corridors of power, he continued to work as long as he had the strength to monitor and report on developments in Russian politics and its possible evolutions and living between Moscow and Austria. He was highly respected, but viewed with suspicion by all political orientations and public opinion itself, due to his closeness to power but also to his freedom of criticism. The last words of his that are remembered, even before the catastrophe of the war, were that “when the bottom is hit, it is time to expect the worst.”
