№ 2 - 2007
Pshizova S.N.
Politics as Business: Russian Version (I)

As consequence of the downfall of socialism which proved ineffective in the competition with liberal democracies of the West, came division of the world into “symbolic centre” and “symbolic periphery”. Search to reproduce the attractive Western model was all but the most important incentive of democratic reforms in post-Communist countries. However, in the course of being introduced into political practice, Western democratic forms lost their liberal-democratic contents. In Russia, the once declared striving for constructing democratic institutions, today turns out to mean just an imitation of Western standards – imitation accompanied by perfectly new practices being implemented. The attitude to politics as to business, characteristic of all the principal participants of the Russian political process, is interpreted by the author as manifestation of the fundamental process of marketization of the political sphere. The first part of the article, published in this issue, presents analysis of the evolution of the electoral market as one of preconditions for the turning of political market into a mechanism of joining political demand and supply.