By: Glen Johnson

Yesterday at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted Russian scholar Dmitry Trenin gave a talk to promote his newest book Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story, as well as offer his thoughts on the current news coming out of Moscow.  He spoke of the “Putin model,” which he aptly characterizes as a state/society pact of mutual non-intervention, whereby the state stays out of people’s personal lives to a remarkable degree but in return demands popular non-interference in politics.  This model has proved stable over the past decade, owing mostly to the fact that standards of living have risen along with energy prices.

While the private sphere of Russian life has flourished, all things public have stagnated.  Trenin provided the metaphor of the typical Russian apartment building as an illustration: if one were to look at it from the outside, it looks rather drab, an impression which will intensify as one enters and sees dirty corridors with rickety elevators.  But this is public space.  The scene will change dramatically when one enters an individual’s home in the same complex: it will be totally modern and extremely well cared for, and the courtyard will be lined with new foreign cars.  So far, Russians have not banded together to demand the restoration of the public sphere; they have not transcended the personal to the public.

How long this state of affairs will last is a matter of some debate.  Trenin thinks that the private sphere has already reached its point of saturation, and that social changes which have come about will inevitably spillover into politics.  This may come sooner rather than later, as he predicts the introduction of austerity measures following Putin’s return, necessitated by the likely drop in  energy prices  in the coming months.  Indeed, the current Russian budget demands a minimum price of about 109 USD per barrel to be viable, and few expect this to materialize.  It is also uncertain how the public will react to the formal return of Putin, and if any backlash or resentment will manifest itself.  Much of the Russian blogosphere that I’ve seen has been negative, but one cannot read too much into this; as Trenin  put it, there are really two parties in Russia: the “TV Party”, which gets its information from the state controlled media and hence pro-Putin, and the “Internet Party”, which is more tech-savvy and politically hostile.  But there are signs that the monolithic political discipline that prevailed under Putin’s presidency is starting to be less pervasive, as seen with the Kudrin affair or the unusually spirited criticisms of  billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and his “Just Cause” Party.  As such, the coming months may portend more major political happenings.