Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Without doubt, this book will have a formative influence on future post-Soviet studies and should lead to re-assessment of many former findings on post-Soviet politics. To be sure, Wilson has neither introduced here any neologisms, nor produced a criminological study with entirely new data. Yet, he has still done political science a service by demonstrating in admirable detail how hidden control of information flows, party-building, and electoral processes by the powers-that-be has been perverting democracy, in the post-Soviet world, to such a degree as to create a relatively novel system of state-society relations in which fundamental democratic procedures are formally observed, but made largely senseless through their more or less sophisticated manipulation. Thus, Wilson does make here in so far a terminological innovation as he, in my reading, lifts the, until now, largely colloquial, peculiarly post-Soviet construct of "political technology" to a proper political science concept, i.e. to a term specifically designed to distinguish certain post-Soviet political practices from those political PR campaigns that are also well-known in the West. What to this reader seems particularly important in Wilson's argument is that he explicitly argues that "political technology" should only partly be understood as a radicalization of some dubious Western political practices, such as the massive negative advertising that has been typical of recent US presidential election campaigns. Instead, Wilson shows that "political technology" is, above all, rooted in Russia's and the other republics' Soviet past, namely in the peculiar manipulation strategies that the KGB and other Soviet bloc security services had developed in their fight against anti-Soviet dissent.

On the one hand, Wilson has thus strengthened the Soviet element within the construct "post-Soviet transitions" lending support to those researchers emphasizing the continued relevance of the area studies element--as opposed to cross-civilizational comparative approaches--in the study of contemporary Russia, Ukraine, etc. On the other hand, we might be dealing here with a case were post-communist studies can make a contribution to general political science: "Political technology" or "virtual politics," as introduced by Wilson, might be concepts that will travel to other regions of the world and could help us to understand better various perversions of democratic procedures by spin-doctors who might not have had the benefit of serving in the KGB, but who may still be comparably cynical and similarly original in the choice of their instruments for manipulating democratic processes.

This is, therefore, a book that one can safely recommend as being conceptually and theoretically innovative to both, political scientists dealing and not dealing with the former Soviet Union. Wilson's book is of additional value because of the astonishing amount of--partly, little-known--facts, dates and names that he has amassed here, and the variety of large events and small affairs that his narrative chronicles. Enlightened Russian or Ukrainian political scientists may find Wilson's emphasis on the role of "political technology" not very original, and be, at best, intrigued by the relative novelty of these phenomena to the comparative study of democracy. They will, I would suspect, still be impressed by, and able to learn from, Wilson's book because it is such a dense and well-researched description.