Phewdalism

This article in Newsweek seems to give a helpful if exaggerated picture of what the authors term a “new feudalism” in Russia. This term gives a bad name to European feudalism but I can’t come up with a better one yet.

For one, this sentence:

From the mightiest oligarch to the lowliest common citizen, every aspect of every Russian’s life—their right to a home, their car or work—increasingly presupposes some form of crooked relationship with the state and its servants,

is hardly accurate in its totality (and plainly wrong by itself) but depicts a state of things that might become real if some of the ugliest trends in Russian society continue to their logical apex.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *