Vladislav surkov likes to play intricate and complex games. But in the end, he lost at a game that was as crude as it was simple. On May 8th the Kremlin announced that Mr Surkov, who held the position of deputy prime minister in the government, was resigning. As the political mastermind for Vladimir Putin for most of the 2000s, Mr Surkov engineered a system of make-believe that worked devilishly well in the real world. Russia was a land of imitation political parties, stage-managed media and fake social movements, undergirded by the postmodern sense that nothing was genuine. Mr Surkov called his creation "sovereign democracy," a term whose vagueness revealed its flexibility. It kept the surface of Russia's managed political system calm until December 2011, when opposition to Mr Putin's rule broke into the open.
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