Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 16 – The Soviet
Union ended not with the August 1991 coup, Yevgeny Gontmakher argues, but
rather when Boris Yeltsin launched his attack on the privileges of the nomenklatura
by taking public transport and freely associating with the Russian man on the
street, something Soviet officials had not done for decades.
Now, once again, the Moscow
economist and commentator says, the Putin elite is dangerously isolating itself
from the Russian people, thus setting the stage for a populist challenge
against its privileges and its attitude that it has the right to all that it
possesses (mk.ru/specprojects/free-theme/2017/03/15/pogubyat-li-rossiyu-privilegii-chinovnikov.html).
The privileges of the Soviet
nomenklatura, Gontmakher points out, did not generate “open protests even from
the small number of dissidents … But the people living under conditions of a
chronic shortage of goods felt ever more negative about the party and economic
hierarchy.” Some in the intelligentsia even recalled “Leninist modesty.”
“Of course,” he continues, “such a
status quo when society is quietly angry about the privileges of the nomenklatura
but is afraid to go into the open with protests can survive for a very long
time.” There needs to be what people now call “’a black swan.’” A generation
ago that was Boris Yeltsin, “who was no dissident but rather a cadre party
worker.”
Because of his popularity, a commission
to study privileges was created under Ella Pamfilova. After nine months of
investigation, it reported its findings on July 6, 1991, and called for an end
to the corrupt use by officials of their official positions. But the USSR Supreme Soviet rejected its findings.
That might have been the end of it
except for one thing: Six days later, the RSFSR Supreme Soviet under the
presidency of Boris Yeltsin adopted the Declaration of the Sovereignty of
Russia and proceeded to move in the directions that the Panfilova commission
had called for.
Had there not been the failed August
coup, Yeltsin’s fate might very well have been different. “It is possible,”
Gontmakher says, “that the Soviet nomenklatura could have all the same turned
the course of events and the theme of democracy and freedom as well as that of the
liquidation of nomenklatura privileges could have been closed for a time.”
“But what happened, happened,” the
commentator continues, and “here it is necessary to not that the charisma and
popularity of Boris Nikolayevich then was built not on abstract slogans about
freedom and democracy but … on his intensions to liquidate the nomenklatura and
its privileges, something which was completely understood by all.”
Gontmakher says that he has engaged
in this historical exegesis because “the current situation about the way of
life of certain higher officials which has become the subject of public
attention recently in a certain way is beginning to recall the social processes
about the late-Soviet nomenklatura described above.”
One needn’t name names because “unfortunately,
this is a systemic illness of the current Russian state,” he says, be it the
misuse of government money for dachas, speeding official cars which drive
others off the roads, medical care available only for the elite, or all the
other ways the current elite behaves like the Soviet feudal nomenklatura.
If one fantasizes for a moment,
Gontmakher says, one might imagine that Vladimir Putin could take advantage of
this by very publicly giving up all but one or two of his houses or his special
medical care and thus setting a pattern for all subordinate officials and
winning him and them much support before the upcoming round of elections.
“I of course understand that my fantasies
will remain only fantasies,” the Moscow commentator continues. “But if
everything remains as it is now, then it is simply impossible to predict the
development of Russia even out only to 2025.
One only has to wait for the flight of the latest ‘black swan’” and for
all the radical changes one had hoped Russia had moved beyond.
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