Russia and Italy just go together.
Because Italy had the warmest relations with the Soviet Union of any Nato member state, Russia’s best-selling car was based on a Fiat and manufactured in a town named after the head of the Italian Communist Party.
But it’s no longer movies, Ladas and socialism that keep the two countries close today: Much of that is down to the strong links between Putin and Berlusconi.
They frequently host each other, and at one diplomatic function, ‘the two men found so much pleasure in the company of each other that they were more than two hours late for the press conference and cultural awards ceremony’.
But there is a much more insidious affinity between the two statesmen.
According to the Yugoslavian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, ‘both Putin and Berlusconi rule in democracies which are gradually being reduced to an empty shell’ by authoritarian capitalism.
Dissident sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky called the Putin regime a ‘neoliberal autocracy’; let’s not forget that many of the young economists that surrounded Putin in his first term were Ayn Randian free-marketers such as German Gref and Andrei Illarionov.
As the radical Eduard Limonov wrote, ‘The Putin regime is a liberal regime…Just look at Putin’s economic program: Low taxes, concentration of wealth in oligarchs’ hands, strict budgets’.
Like Berlusconi, who owns the largest commercial TV network as well as controlling the three main government channels, Putin runs the Russian media and a great deal of its business sector.
If, ‘in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king’, writes Zizek, then in Italy and Russia he is ‘a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive’.
The result – ‘Putin’s capitalism with ‘Russian values’ (the brutal display of power), and Berlusconi’s capitalism with ‘Italian values’ (comical posturing)’ – contains one important constant: the free market base.
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