Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 8 – The anti-corruption
protests in Russia and the anti-vagrants tax ones in Belarus are “the direct
result of the end of the social contract” between the regimes and the population,
itself the result of “a general crisis in the post-Soviet space” that has
emerged as a result of “the final exhaustion of Soviet economic resources,”
Vitaly Portnikov says.
Georgia passed through this crisis several
years ago, the Ukrainian commentator says, but now along this difficult path is
moving “not post-Soviet but post-Maidan Ukraine.” The time has come for Russia and the others
because as Dmitry Medvedev there no longer is any money to do otherwise (7days.us/vitalij-portnikov-ten-ganti-ibeli-budushhee-rossijskogo-protesta/).
These social
contracts vary in details among these states, he says; and in Ukraine there
have been as it were “two contracts. One of them, the preservation of statehood
and sovereignty, was connected with the interests of the west and center of the
country. The other, social, above all was connected with the interests of the east
and south.”
Yanukovich broke the first contract
by stopping the process of European integration, and Ukrainians rose in revolt
in 2013-2014. The second, social contract, has not been restored up to
now. But those who live in the second
paradigm don’t have “the potential for revolt” that the central and western
parts of the country do.
As a result, “despite all the apparent
instability of the current Ukrainian authorities, they are much more stable
than are those of ‘stable’ Russia and Belarus,” Portnikov says, because the
latter two still are based on a social contract which the government is no
longer in a position to fulfill.
Now that Russians and Belarusians
are beginning to recognize this and are turning to politics, he continues, the
authoritarian regimes in Russia and Belarus are responding as one would expect:
“with repressions” because “they do not know any other methods” to try to
suppress public anger.
But over the longer term, “such
methods can be effective only if there is sufficient money to fulfill the
social contract.” And as of today, neither government has a sufficient amount
of funds to do so. Thus, both Russia and Belarus are entering into am
ever-worsening downward “spiral” of events that will lead to versions of “’the
Arab spring’ and (or) civil war.”
In
sum, “Russia which now is actively participating in the destabilization of
Syria can itself be transformed into an enormous snow-covered Syria but with
nuclear weapons.” They are the only thing
which “forces the West to do everything it can so that Russia will not collapse
or even collapse peacefully” as did the USSR but the West now lacks the money
to feed Russia.
The
future of Belarus is certain to be very different, Portnikov argues. There,
Lukashenka’s regime will collapse and the country will move in a European
direction either immediately or after a relatively brief Russian occupation,
which will “only increased the future gap between these two countries” as the experience
of Russia with Ukraine has shown.
“But
in Russia itself,” it is a mistake to speak about one single trend common to
the entire country. There, things will vary region by region, not just among
the non-Russian republics but also among what are now de facto Russian ones in
which are “functioning completely independent state machines.”
The
complexity of the country means, Portnikov argues, that it is completely
impossible to predict the shape of the collapse, its chronology, the future
borders of Russia and “the very model of rule of this country or countries.” But it is obvious already that the breakdown
of the social contract in Russia will as it always has lead “to a revolt and
the collapse of the state.”
It
is somewhat perverse that one has to remind Russians and Russian rulers of this
in the centenary year of the 1917 revolutions, Portnikov suggests, but clearly “the
Russian powers that be like the Bourbons after the restoration have forgotten nothing
and learned nothing either.”
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