The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy by William J. Dobson Page A

have. Russia is a country of extremes,” he says. “All societies should be [understood] by practice, by reality, and by clear logic. Just because the
New York Times
is publishing an article about this …” He trails off for a moment. “It is not for Kremlin people. All these newspapers who publish so many articles about the direct connection between the monopoly of United Russia and the high level of corruption, they publish hundreds of articles about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.”
    His attempt to cloud the connection between his country’s political system and its rampant corruption is classic Kremlin spin. But the political operative doesn’t sugarcoat everything. He admits that the political body he is a member of, the Duma, is essentially a rubber stamp and has no say in how the country is run. At one point, he even jokes that the Russian parliament should be renamed “the Ministry of Lawmaking”—just another appendage of Putin’s rule.
    Gleb Pavlovsky agrees. “Practically, we can say that we have the democracy of zero reading,” he tells me in his corner office overlooking the Moscow River. “When the law comes into the Duma for hearings and readings, almost nothing changes in the law.” At the time, Pavlovsky was one of the Kremlin’s top political advisers and the head of a consultancy called the Foundation for Effective Politics. He has been working as a political consultant longer than just about anyone else in Russia, and he acknowledged, before I could, that there is no shortage of rumor about the work that he has done. “There are a lot of myths around my activity and my involvement in this or that thing,” he told me, adding that is why the Russian press likes to refer to him as the “gray cardinal.”
    Pavlovsky is short and stocky, with closely cropped hair, and he is dressed entirely in black. In the corner a television is on, replaying a speech Putin delivered earlier that day. Indeed, the then prime minister loomed large in Pavlovsky’s office. Although he said he worked for Medvedev—his third Russian president after Yeltsin and Putin—a large portrait of Putin hung on the wall, and there were no photographs of anyone else. In the early 1990s, Pavlovsky worked for organizationsthat supported democracy promotion initiatives, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute. He refers to that time as his “major political experience.” “In fact,” he told me, “my career has been based on the experience that I gained working in those independent democratic organizations.” His critics would agree. They say, however, that he spent that timelearning about Western democracy promotion efforts so that he could better understand how to subvert them and later maintain Putin’s monopoly of power. In 2006, the Ukrainian Security Service banned him from traveling to Ukraine because of allegations that he had created Russian-focused NGOs that interfered with the country’s presidential elections. When I asked him how he would describe his work, he remained vague about what he does but not for whom he does it. “I generate ideas for the resolution of internal problems. During the last ten years, my almost exclusive client is the presidential administration.”
    I asked Pavlovsky if the stability that Russia enjoys could, in fact, be a false stability, and if the system as it is devised cuts itself off from feedback, new talent, and competition. “The considerations that you just expressed are very similar to Putin’s considerations of stability,” he replied. “That’s actually what he thinks about.” The trouble is that when it comes to political competition, he said, there is really no one who can compete with Medvedev and Putin. Pavlovsky believes Medvedev and Putin understand this problem and that the next step is for there to be a “contest of ideas.” This contest, he says, “is going on almost permanently in the Kremlin, in the think tanks, in