Andrew Wilson of the European Council on Foreign Relations has a piece on Transitions Online which takes a look at some opinions of Gleb Pavlovsky and Yevgeny Gontmahker to debate what the Pikalyovo incident did and did not teach us about politics in Russia.

Pikalyovo was also an attempt to address the inefficiencies in Putin’s authoritarian project by creating what Russians call obratnaya sviaz (“reverse connection”). The system works, but only just. Russia still needs a modernization project, albeit not the “prosperity project,” backed by good finances and sound macroeconomics, which the Putin-Medvedev tandem was originally supposed to implement. Not only will Russia have to proceed with fewer resources, it will have to tackle the flip side of a stronger state, what even Pavlovsky calls “severe monopolism in all social spheres,” not just in government and the economy, but in the mass media and in society at large. The intermediary structures he helped set up are passive and inert, particularly “the party,” now normally referred to in the singular as in the days of the CPSU, i.e. United Russia, which, unlike the CPSU, is mainly a vehicle for governors and lower bureaucrats to advertise their loyalty. Hardly anybody in the Kremlin belongs to it. Moreover, the stasis extends to society as a whole. After the “20-year crisis” of the 1980s and 1990s, “all social spheres are static. There is a conservative mood, even in business. There are no risk takers. The atmosphere is against innovation.”