The COVID Biopolitics in Russia

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic as a biopolitical challenge that – along the lines of the contemporary academic debate on biopower – may be approached through the concepts of sovereignty and governmentality. Within this general framework, the authors look at the challenges Russia faces due to the corona crisis from the viewpoint of domestic transformations within the ruling regime, mainly focusing on center – periphery relations as a core element of the power structure in Russia that demands a stronger emphasis on governmentality. We outline several forms of regions’ distancing from the federal center: digital empowerment, the resistance of the North, and the demand for "people’s governors". Our main conclusion is that the relative administrative autonomy obtained by the regions reflects the ongoing process of decentralization of the Russian political system which will affect the structural characteristics of Russian federalism in the future.

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“…To put it differently, the COVID-19 crisis has shown that three Western democratic states and authoritarian Russia surprisingly shared basic attitudes typically exhibited by neo-liberal governments and grounded in scientific knowledge, rationality, and responsibility. Some scholars have indeed suggested that Russia is a hybrid regime, one that combines a technocratic and largely depoliticized neoliberal model of governance with a strong emphasis on exercising sovereignty (Makarychev et al 2020).…”

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“…1 Moreover, the pandemic has led to some transformations within centre-periphery relations. Contrary to the decades-long pattern of de-federalisation, since April 2020, regions and other sub-national authorities have been granted more powers by the Kremlin in an effort to tackle the crisis more efficiently, potentially leading to more decentralised governance (Makarychev et al 2020;Ferrari and Tafuro Ambrosetti 2020).…”