Staunton, January 13 – Yevgeny Gontmakher,
a prominent Moscow economist and commentator, has invoked one of the most
powerful images available about the ways in which the human spirit can overcome
ever the harshest and most repressive regimes: “like a blade of grass breaking
through concrete.”
As anyone who has been on a sidewalk
knows, the concrete always looks terribly strong, but the grass always manages
to break through and break it apart. And in “Moskovsky komsomolets” yesterday,
Gontmakher says that that is exactly the situation Russian society finds itself
now relative to the Russian state (mk.ru/social/2015/01/12/korni-travy-ne-vykosish.html).
The Moscow analyst says he has “no
illusions” about the prospects for political protest. Few Russians think that
such protests would achieve much, and few are interested in taking part. The
reasons for “such apathy” are obvious: the systematic suppression of any
competition in the political system and the state’s propaganda “against any
democratic values.”
|
The government’s propagandists
have found a ready market for that campaign in large measure, Gontmakher
says, because under the cover of democratic slogans, the Russian elite
privatized the country’s wealth into its own hands in the 1990s, something that
has left Russian skeptical of the whole idea of democracy and willing to
believe Russia can go its own way.
But that doesn’t mean that it is
time “to bury” the idea of Russian society, he argues, and then Gontmakher suggests
that the current crisis is likely to become the occasion for its rebirth,
albeit in a way that many, including the regime, may not expect.
According to the Moscow
commentator, “the population of Russia can be conditionally divided into
several groups in terms of their social-political behavior:” the activists who
do what their name implies, the watchers who sympathize but don’t act, the
beggars who expect the state to give them things, and the lumpen who don’t
expect anything from anyone.
The first group numbers no more
than three to five percent, the second, 20-25 percent, the third, “no less
than 50 percent,” and the fourth, 20 to 25 percent. In the looming crisis, the activists will
become more active, but “what is no less important,” others, including the watchers,
will as well to defend their positions regarding employment and health
benefits.
In sum, he says, Russia can expect
to see “an essential outburst of public non-political activism at the micro-level,”
which the authorities may not count as such but which they will be unable to
ignore. Much of it will be in cities and in the non-Russian republics “where
the traditions of mutual assistance have not yet entirely disappeared.”
When oil prices were high, the state could buy everyone
off, but now that they aren’t, it lacks that capacity and thus faces what
will be for it “an unwelcome surprise.”
The Russian people were prepared to be quiet as long as they were
taken care of, but once they aren’t, then things have changed.
The
government can’t treat such amorphous actions the way it has treated NGOs. It
won’t be able to declare them “foreign agents” or arrest the leaders of groups
that will form and reform on a more or less constant way.
More important
still, Gontmakher says, this new “activism ‘from below’” won’t be easy to
categorize. Terms like liberal, conservative and state supporter won’t matter
very much because in this case people “will be concerned with the
self-organization of their own lives” and well-being.
Gontmakher
says that one welcome indication of this is that the support for Russia’s
annexation of Crimea and for Putin is combined with “extreme hostility to the
state as an institution.” Russians don’t
associate Putin with the state: Instead, they see him as “a phenomenon
apparently completely different, already not human but mystical.”
“But does
this mean that such a kasha will be preserved in the heads [of Russians]
forever?” the analyst asks rhetorically. “Hardly.” Eventually people are
going to demand answers and resources, and while those demands may first be
levied at lower levels of the state, they will eventually focus on Putin as “the
supreme arbiter.”
Putin and
his regime will thus face a fundamental choice: either they will have to
adopt ever harsher measures against the population or allow the emergence of
civil society “2.0.” If they do the first, anger at the powers that be will
grow and a color revolution becomes possible, one that would make what is
happening in the Donbas look like child’s play.
That makes
the second possibility more likely at least in the longer term because “as is
well known, the grass roots have the ability to grow sometimes even under
asphalt,” and even the most outstanding ruler “will not be able to “organize
an eternal winter in Russia,” Gontmakher says.
|
|
|
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment