Paul Goble
Staunton,
November 13 – Polls show that an ever larger share of Russians want radical
change, something that is unwelcome news for the core of the ruling elite,
Yevgeny Gontmakher says, because any change carries risk to those who launch
reforms; but it also carries even greater risks for those who assume they can
do nothing and survive.
At
present, those in favor of doing nothing in this core group of fewer than a
dozen people have a majority, as one might expect, given that they are all
people who spring from late Soviet time, the Moscow social commentator writes
in Moskovsky komsomolets today (mk.ru/politics/2018/11/13/samo-ne-rassosetsya-obshhestvo-gotovitsya-k-radikalnym-reformam.html).
They expected at
the start of their careers and they expect now that the Russian people will do
what they are told, grumble perhaps but do nothing to threaten the powers of
the powers that be. “However,”
Gontmakher says, “real life shows that over the almost 30 years of the
existence of a new Russia, something all the same has changed in the broad
popular masses.”
Many of these people and more
besides have believed that the television can compensate for the refrigerator
and that government propaganda can overcome any objections of the
population. But it has turned out that
“’the refrigerator’ has remained alive, and the popular masses, “all the same
want European-style wellbeing” however glad they were to take Crimea.
The first decade of this century
convinced Russians that real progress was possible; the second has called that
faith into question and with it, faith in the rulers who are supposed to
guarantee them a better life. All they
hear from those rulers now is “stability, stability and still more
stability.” That is no longer enough.
In the months since the presidential
election, Gontmakher says, and especially as the government has reduced
payments to the population in various ways and most controversially with the
pension reform, “the majority of the popular masses have suddenly understood
that the current troubled times are serious and for a long time.” And they
don’t want to put up with that.
“In these circumstances,” he
continues, “the ruling ‘ten’ if it follows logic and good sense has no choice:
the only option is reforms initiated from above,” including of the government,
the courts, and law enforcement, the decentralization of power and the
transition to real political competition, a reduction of the state’s role in
the economy, and more social spending.
Such a package could be “a program
minimum for the period up to 2024, when the country will face (I hope
[Gontmakher adds]) the next presidential elections. And before this, it would
be possible to create conditions for entering a new political reality through
the series of regional and local elections next year and the Duma vote in
2021.”
If things move in that direction,
the Moscow commentator says, “there could occur a peaceful, evolutionary, and
final transformation of all social institutions into a new system corresponding
to the challenges of the 21st century.” The currently ruling ten
perhaps could expect to retire quietly.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to
believe at least so far that this could happen.
But if it doesn’t, it is fairly clear what will: another cataclysm like
1917 or 1991 with crowds in the street throwing up new people even as they oust
the old. And that will usher in yet
another time of troubles “with the most severe consequences for the existence
of Russia as a state.”
“All the same,” Gontmakher
concludes, “I hope that this anti-utopia will not be realized. The instinct of
self-preservation and good sense more than once in world history has helped a
ruling elite to stop in time. That happened, for example, in many countries of
Latin America, in post-war France and in Italy at the start of the 1990s.”
“Are we any worse?”
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