Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 14 – Vladimir Putin
and his regime are a logical reflection of the fact that “almost no one [in
Russia] wanted a real democracy with division of power and a vital civil
society,” according to Levada Center head Lev Gudkov. Consequently, it is possible to say that
“Russians have received what the majority of them wanted.”
In an interview with Radio Liberty, he
says that today, an authoritarian regime “with recidivist aspects of
totalitarianism has been established in Russia,” with the regime having “practically
a complete monopoly on the media” and with “information channels having been
converted into instruments of propaganda” (svoboda.org/content/article/27062161.html).
Moreover,
he continues, “all the authority of the political police has been restored and
in fact any normal political activity has been liquidated. No space in fact remains
for political competition and free discussion.”
And
Gudkov points out, “even a new ideology has appeared, one that didn’t exist and
almost Nazi in its character: this is the idea of the divided nation that must
be assembled under the roof of ‘the Russian world,’” one that trumps talk about
division of powers, responsible government, and elite circulation with “a
mythology of the organic unity of power and people.”
Russia
has developed in this way, the sociologist suggests, because “in 1990, no one
seriously raised the question about the transformation of Soviet society into
something democratic.” There was a lot
of talk, but most of it was about ending the CPSU’s monopoly of power. Fearful
of witch hunts, “no one raised the question of lustration.”
As a result, “power
was very quickly handed over from the union nomenklatura to a new grouping,
only anti-communist in appearance but one that kept in its hands all the
instruments of administration,” Gudkov continues. And that had an impact on
everything else, including the entire “construction of power.”
The political
parties which arose were “not parties which grew ‘from below,’ out of society
itself and thus represented the interests of various social groups.” Instead, “these
were simply various fractions of the nomenklatura which were competing and
struggling among themselves for power.”
The only people
who took the idea of reform seriously were the economists, Gudkov says. And
that promoted the redistribution of property with “its privatization into the
interests of the former second echelon.”
But “nothing was done” in the political sphere to promote the growth and
institutionalization of democracy.
With the collapse
in Boris Yeltsin’s level of support by the mid-1990s, the pollster continues, “expectations
for an authoritarian leader grew” alongside intensifying “conservative or
reactionary trends.” Yeltsin might have
chosen to try to recover his popular support, but instead, he decided to rely
on the force structures “and above all the political police.”
Consequently,
according to Gudkov, Putin’s elevation was entirely logical, but in fact it
would not have mattered that much “who became successor.” Others would likely
have moved in much the same direction. And whenever popular support declines,
such a Russian leader will rely on the police rather than trying to mobilize
people by democratic means.
This could not
have happened without a certain amount of popular approval or at least
willingness to go along. The
calculations of the president and the attitudes of the population were mutually
“reinforcing” and there is no way to decide which is the chicken and which is
the egg. “No propaganda could have been
effective if it had not relied on definite structures of mass consciousness.
The roots of this
mass consciousness, Gudkov argues, lie in the sense of loss Russians
experienced after 1991,and then the transformation of these feelings of loss in
a “masochistic” direction, one in which Russians and their leaders acknowledged
that they were not like others but bad while at the same time insisting that
others respect them.
“The result of
this became the growth of dark lowlife nationalism and xenophobia and
assertiveness in opposing oneself to the rest,” he says. Putin has exploited
these feelings “very effectively” while turning increasingly to repression and
the restoration of “institutions which existed in Soviet times, the
centralization of administration and the rest.”
From this perspective, Gudkov suggests that the reason
Russia did not become democratic is “because in general no one wanted this. No
one raised the question seriously about the creation of parallel institutions,
programs of political action and so on.” Some people talked about these things
but no groups have emerged which effectively act on them.
And
as a result, “whatever the nature of the regime and whatever propaganda or
demagogy it engages in, its main force consists of the fact that resistance to
it is very weak. There is no alternative – that is the main problem. Or there
is no faith in the possibility of an alternative,” Gudkov concludes.
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