Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 9 – A report by the
Inter-Regional Association of Young Political Scientists notes that Vladimir
Putin has changed his language to reflect is “commitment to stability above
everything else,” a conclusion that one Moscow commentator suggests fails to
capture just how dangerous Putin’s position is for Russia as a whole.
In an essay posted on the
LawinRussia.ru site yesterday, Vyacheslav Petrov says that the report –
available online at dropbox.com/s/o4qvp90tmrz5er4/Doklad_Putin_AMP.pdf – offers two conclusions, one “banal” and the other
incompletely developed because the report’s authors did not choose to draw on the
work of others (lawinrussia.ru/node/261492).
On the one hand, the report says,
Putin in 2000 presented himself as “a balanced combination of conservative and
liberal ideology.” And on the other, it
concludes that by 2012, the Russian president had shifted to authoritarianism,
dropped references to liberal values in favor of conservative ones, and talked
not about goals but about his directives to the elite.
Both of these conclusions but
especially the latter could have been much improved, Petrov says, if the young
political scientists had paid more attention to the ideas of more senior writers
like Georgy Satarov of the INDEM Foundation, Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s
ombudsman, and Gleb Pavlovsky, a leading
Moscow commentator.
Satarov has written, Petrov says,
that Putin’s obsession with stability is disturbing because it “clashes with
the demands for change which were clearly articulated by society in 2012.” What exists in Russia under his rule is “not
stability; it is stagnation” and a stagnation that points to decay and
collapse.
Clearly, when the authorities “constantly
talk about stability,” that raises questions not only about how fearful they
must be of any kind of instability but also and perhaps even more disturbingly about
“what they have in mind” for themselves and their country when they talk about
stability.
This observation in turn raises two
important questions, Petrov argues.
First, “has Russia achieved a balance of interests of various social
subjects and political forces?” And
second, does on observe in Russia “legal guarantees” of the rights of people to
advance their interests in the public sphere.
Russia’s problem is, the
LawinRussia.ru writer says, that the authorities and society answer these two
questions in different ways. “Let us
speak directly, the achievement of stability is not guarantee for the successes
of the authorities in vitally important spheres for the country.” Anyone can
see that “with the unaided eye.”
“More than that,” Petrov continues, “today,
when the world is not standing in place, stability as such cannot be a good
thing” because in this case it means to fall behind others who are advancing.
As Satarov has pointed out, one cannot quite understand how anyone would want
to stabilize a budget deficit, inflation, the shadow economy and other problems
Russia has now.
“What era” are the country and its
regime living in?” Petrov asks. Is it “a revolutionary one or a
post-revolutionary and restorationist one?”
Apparently, “the powers see for Russia (and for themselves personally) a
way out in restorationist breaking, stabilization, and the structuring of
growing revolutionary processes” by appealing to the inertia of mass
consciousness.
To a certain extent, the regime has
gotten away with this because of the behavior of the opposition, a group that
Lukinhas described as “running ‘ahead of reality’” and that Pavlovsky has
suggested may in fact be an obstacle on the path to the emergence of the kind
of genuine opposition Russia needs.
Both revolutions and restorations have
their own inertia, Petrov says, and both kinds of inertia are “dangerous for
society and the state.” The first leads to “chaos and the destruction of the
state,” something Russia has already experienced; the second, to “the illusion
of a return to those times where there weren’t any disorders.”
Moreover, the LawinRussia.ru writer
argues, “the shift from a revolutionary phase of development to a
restorationist one” also has a certain pattern.
In the best case, it leads to the institutionalization of revolutionary
change, but in the worst, as Lukin notes, it means that “stability instead of
an instrument of modernization becomes a substitute for it.”
Ever fewer Russians are inspired by
or even take seriously the statements of the Kremlin and its allies. “The old
system of political communications has exhausted itself and completely lost the
ability to mobilize the population,” Petrov says, evidence for which is the
recent increase in political anecdotes and the rise of websites making fun of
the country’s powers that be.
A decade ago, Putin was a fresh face,
and many Russians placed their hopes in him. But now he and his regime are an
aging brand, and he is trying to escape that through rhetorical changes. But
rhetoric is not enough, Petrov insists. What is needed is real political
competition to reflect the real divisions in society.
Putin can’t offer that without undermining his
own position, Petrov says, but if he pursues a policy that is nothing more than
stagnation, other forces will emerge and open the door to the kind of change
that the current Russian president’s power vertical and commitment to stability
above all else that the country needs and that he can delay but not ultimately
block.
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