Gleb pavlovsky biography
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What are the roots of Putin’s ideological worldview?
By the beginning of the 1990s Putin had developed almost all the ideas he espouses today. He’d only just started working in St Petersburg, but if we look at documentary recordings of the time, we see that he already had a whole series of attitudes concerning, for example, the idea that Russia’s struktur of ledning should be a unitarian, centralized state, and also his condoning the chinovniki [bureaucrats] taking bribes. That surprised many people, but it’s undeniable that he took a positive view of this. He even shared—and repeated—the scandalous thesis of the then mayor of Moscow, Gavril Popov, that bureaucrats had the right to a kommission on contracts.
There was also, of course, his fine contempt for the democrats of those years, who had received power for free, without a struggle, as if they had just found it in the street. So most of the ideas were already
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The politics of no alternatives or How power works in Russia
On 27 April 2011 the Russian Presidential administration announced it had terminated its contract with well-known “political technologist” Gleb Pavlovsky. His fall from grace was reportedly linked to “indiscreet comments” made about the 2012 presidential elections. A short while before, he was a guest of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, where we took an interview with him not knowing it would be his last as a Kremlin advisor. Our interest was not Russia’s political intrigues or the rumours about who would be Russia’s next President. It was Pavlovsky, the public intellectual turned political technologist, and his inside-outside perspective on Russia’s politics that provoked our curiosity. We were interested in Pavlovsky the historian, not the spin-doctor.
Born in Odessa in 1951, his early years were a classic story of a non-conformist young intellectual seduced by