Paul Goble
Staunton,
September 27 – The government’s pension program, now approved by the Duma, may
prove to be “a Pyrrhic victory for United Russia,” Aleksey Verhoyantsev says,
because while it has not sparked the mass protests many had hoped for, it is
leading to “the rebirth of ‘the red belt’ of regions in 2019.
That
term, of course, refers to the regions with decaying industrial infrastructure whose
populations reliably voted for communist candidates in the 1990s and could do
so again, even to the point, the Svobodnaya
pressa commentator suggest, of provoking “an upsurge of separatism” in those
regions (svpressa.ru/society/article/211684/).
“The authorities relaxed
too much when they saw that the anger of the population over pension reform did
not lead to mass protests,” Leonty Byzov, a scholar at the Moscow Institute of
Sociology, tells the journalist. They
assumed that that meant the whole issue would soon be behind them. But there are compelling reasons to think
that will not be the case.
No one should have
expected mass demonstrations, the sociologist says. “The people of pre-pension
age who are the most directly affected by the reform are not inclined to show
their anger by taking part in meetings.” Russians in general “do not see much
sense in meetings, especially people who are already not young.
Such people “have seen a lot in
their time and understand that decisions are taken without them and that going
into the streets won’t change anything,” Byzov says. But what we are seeing
now, he says, is the rise of protest voting, “and this has happened even more
quickly than might have been predicted.”
The situation in the Far East and Siberia
has “long been tense and unstable,” he continues. “The system of power is
failing, and people see that the federal center either cannot solve their
problems or devotes little attention to them.” They want someone to do
something, and they may turn to regional elites.
“From this,” Byzov continues, “it is
only one step to regional separatism when not ethnic borderlands but Russian
ones will oppose themselves to the federal center. In the best case, if the
Kremlin doesn’t draw conclusions, this can end with demands for some kind of
special rights” for this or that region.
According to the sociologist, “the
regions had cause for dissatisfaction with the federal center earlier, but the pension
reform poured oil into the fire because it hit the very core of the Putin
electorate, people over 60 who had always supported the authorities” in the
past but now feel cheated.
Their votes in the recent elections “can lead
to a chain reaction, one in which failures for the authorities in one place
will become a model for voters in others. That is, people are beginning to
understand that the system is ‘’a paper tiger,’ with which one can fight and
achieve something.” Unless Moscow recognizes this and makes changes, things can
end badly.
Moreover, and in addition to this, “a
regional elite coming to power against the will of the Kremlin will begin to claim
that the people are for it and that it has a right to a certain independence.
In political science this is called a split of elites” and it has real
consequences for rule.
Regional elites or at least portions
of them “always can use popular dissatisfaction in their interests against
another part. As a result, regional
groups will present the center with extremely serious demands” because one is
speaking “not only about regional business elites but also part of the regional
siloviki who may join them. And this is already serious.”
Another expert with whom
Verkhoyantsev spoke is skeptical that this change will occur in the radical
form Byzov suggest. “I do not think,” Sergey Vasiltsov, a former KPRF Duma
deputy who now heads the Moscow Center for Research on Political Culture, that
the Russians will take cross this line. They haven’t earlier and are unlikely
to do so now.
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