As a critic of the mainstream approach to international development, I applaud Vladislav Surkov for not only highlighting culture's importance, but for placing institutions in their proper, subordinate, context.

Yet, it is precisely my sympathy for "sovereign democracy" that leads me to warn against excessive reliance on political culture to project the reforms that Russia should undertake. For one thing, political culture has a tendency to degenerate into static formulas that are inconsistent with historical reality, simply because cultures must evolve to survive. The difficulty of identifying a cultural standard when that standard is itself evolving, has led most political scientists to abandon political culture as an impractical analytical tool. A second problem that arises is the tendency to deduce political cultural values retroactively from existing support for government policies (post hoc, propter hoc).

Surkov's analysis suffers on both counts. He deals with the first by using the "fuzzy logic" characteristic of political culturalists, arguing that there are certain "irreplaceable characteristics of political culture" while simultaneously saying that its main features may already be outdated. In the same vein, he bases his choice of three main characteristics of Russian political culture on the indisputable successes of the Putin era. More typically, however, this logic has been used to assert Russia's inability to develop any type of civic culture because of centuries of authoritarianism.