These are strange times in Russia. In just about any other country, Saturday night prime time TV means some light-hearted family entertainment – Baywatch, Saturday Night Live, the Muppet Show. But here in Russia, it’s Saturday night, so it must be… Gleb Pavlovsky!

Yes, tune in to NTV on Saturday night at 10pm, and you can watch Pavlovsky, the Kremlin’s favourite political technologist, faithfully expressing the Kremlin line on his own TV show, ‘Real Politics’. Maybe it isn’t that different to the Muppet Show after all.

The show is actually weirdly-compelling viewing. You watch it not for its independent analysis, but precisely for its lack of independence. You watch it to try and see what the presidential administration, which is close to both Pavlovsky and the programme’s editor, Aleksander Levin, is hinting at through its muppet mouthpiece.

Ivanov was a guest on the show, so could he be the favourite successor? Yakutia governors were criticized, so is the state taking aim at Alrosa? And so on. This kind of thing is interesting to me, a political analyst, though I doubt very much the Saturday night audience at large gives a damn. But NTV is losing so much money anyway, what’s a few more million rubles?

The show’s format is rather strange. They try to ‘sex up’ political discussions by using music from Pulp Fiction as they show, say, Mikhail Fradkov picking his nose. They also use three columnists, including one from Vedomosti who should know better, who present their information as if they were imparting highly confidential gossip which those in power don’t want us to know, rather than precisely the opposite.

But most of all they have the Glebster himself, sitting behind a huge leather desk lit by a small green Stalinist light, a small, plump, white-haired man in an oversized suit and scholarly glasses halfway down his nose, looking like a particularly malevolent mole. In front of him, a chess-board. To the right, a bust of Napoleon. And in his hand, a small black address book, which he plays with nervously and occasionally shakes to make a point.

The implication of the show is this –‘real politics’ is a Machiavellian business decided by an elite handful of cunning people like Pavlovsky himself, who know the moves and the gambits to play. These are the generals, the controllers of the secret levers of power – the Napoleons of modern politics.

This is indeed the view of politics that the show’s editor, Levin, holds. He explained it in a recent interview on Radio Free Europe: “politics is a sort of closed, elitist club, in which there exist certain internal agreements, and so on[…] it is a club with its own strict rules.”

So, what we get in ‘Real Politics’ is a glimpse into this elitist world, of power-brokers and puppet-masters, who decide the fate of all us hapless mortals.

I used to believe this model of world politics. It seemed to me, from the outside, that national and global politics really was a ruthless game of chess played by elites. Thus everything that happens in Russian politics happens because Gleb or someone else connected to the presidential administration moves a piece, or because some other hidden elite – the CIA, or Freedom House, or Boris Berezovsky – moves a piece against them. The actual pieces themselves – ordinary people – are powerless in these moves.

But recently I’ve been coming round to another point of view, a Tolstoyan one – politics is a chaos of billions of coincidences and personal ambitions and rivalries and impulses, and it is decided above all by the obscure impulses of ordinary people. And political technologists like Pavlovsky can pretend they can control these billions of mass impulses, via Nashi or adverts or prime time TV shows. But the masses do not run with the predictability of a machine – the phrase ‘political technology’ is an oxymoron.

I came across this passage in ‘War and Peace’, which I confess I am reading (and thoroughly enjoying) for the first time:

‘And yet [said Pierre] don’t they say war is like a game of chess?’

‘Yes,’ replied Prince Andrei, ‘but with this little difference, that in chess you may think over each move as long as you please, taking your time, and with their further difference that a knight is always stronger than a pawn and two pawns are always stronger than one, while in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes weaker than a company. The relative strength of armies can never be predicted. You may be quite sure,’ he went on, ‘that if things depended on arrangements made by the staff [ie by military technologists, the 19^th century version of Pavlosvkys and Markovs] I should be there helping them to make arrangements, but instead of that I have the honour of serving in this regiment with these gentlemen, and I consider that the issue of tomorrow’s engagement will rest with us rather than them…Success never has and never will depend on position, or equipment, or even on numbers – least of all on position.’

‘What does it depend on then?’

‘On the feeling that is in me and him…and in every soldier.’

Spin-doctors and political technologists may persuade others, and even themselves, that they hold the secret levers of power in their hands. But all the skill of Alaister Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, couldn’t stop a quarter of a million people marching in London against the Iraq War two years ago. And all Pavlovsky’s cunning couldn’t stop thousands of Ukrainians standing out in the cold for their right to vote their own leaders and make their own mistakes, as they did this time last year.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

November 30, 2005