Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 17 – The West does
not understand Russia, but it does understand very well indeed Russia’s elites;
and as a result, it has seriously miscalculated in its dealings with Moscow
about Ukraine, according to Boris Kagarlitsky, who argues the elites are ready
to capitulate in the face of sanctions but the Russian people never will be.
In fact, the Moscow analyst says,
while increasing sanctions may increase the willingness of Russian elites to
find compromises, they “not only will not frighten the population of Russia but
on the contrary will push” all other Russians in the opposite direction and
make them more anti-Western and anti-elite as well (stoletie.ru/vzglyad/elity_gotovy_kapitulirovat_627.htm).
Although the West and the elites
assume the population will always be passive, in fact, that is not the case,
and popular anger at anything that ordinary Russians view as a capitulation
will be something the Kremlin will have to take into account. Indeed,
Kagarlitsky says, this divide between elites and masses will form the core of
Russian politics in the months ahead.
The Presidential Administration
understands this, he says, but the government and even more the Russian liberal
elites on whose views the West relies do not.
And consequently, the West’s own actions instead of pushing Moscow in
the direction it hopes for are in fact pushing the regime in very different
ones.
And he argues that in this conflict,
Moscow’s liberal intelligentsia will find itself in an ever weaker position
because its support of the West on Ukraine means that it “has isolated itself
from society and even from those of its strata which a year or two ago were
ready to listen to its arguments.”
The West’s sanctions have been “ineffective”
and counter-productive in several ways. They have allowed the government to
shift the blame from itself to the West for the crisis that was coming in any
event. And they have convinced both those in the government and many in the population
that everything would have been well if they had just continued on as before.
But while the sanctions could have
Moscow with the excuse it needed to get out from under certain harmful WTO
restrictions, to seek to boost food production at home as part of its import
substitution drive, and to revise its general economic course, that has not
happened because of the way in which sanctions have become “an alibi” for the
regime.
According
to Kagarlitsky, “practice measures for import substitution and the
modernization of the economy are not being taken, the development of
infrastructure as before is limited to talk about several super-roads and
super-ambitious projects which will not give anything to provincial Russia
which is suffering from elementary roadlessness.”
There is a reason Russian elites aren’t prepared to do
anything to help correct the situation except talk about making concessions to
the West: their “way of life, ideology, culture, and private interests” are all
in that direction. Their money is abroad and so too are their interlocutors.
They aren’t listening to the Russian people who are unhappy that
they are not being given more help but who are insistent that Moscow make no
concessions on Crimea as some in the elites are quite prepared to do, assuming
as the West does that the Russian people will go along with anything the elites
tell the masses to do.
“But,” Kagarlitsky says, “the population of the country is in no
way as passive as it seems to bureaucrats in the capital. It is just that so
far, the majority of the citizens of Russia prefer not to rock the boat for the
completely understandable reason that the people have something to lose” and do
not want to take risks.
The people rocking the board, he suggests, are the government
bureaucrats “not only when they try to reach agreement with the EU on the
lifting of sanctions but also when they conduct all kinds of ‘optimizations,’
which are killing education, health care, science and transportation.”
“Sooner or later,”
the Moscow analyst says, “they will have to pay for all of this, and the
political price will be extremely high.”
For the moment, it is clear that “Russian elites are seeking a
compromise with the US and the EU without reflecting about whether they will
retain the trust of their own people.”
And
he predicts that “very soon they will disscover that the price of such a
compromise could turn out to be their own political death.”
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