Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 10 – One of the chief
sources of support for the current Kremlin leader is that government propaganda
has managed to convince a large number of Russians that if and when Vladimir
Putin ever leaves office, their entire world will end and the Russian
Federation will fall into pieces, Andrey Stolyarov says.
Russians need to recognize, the
Russian writer says in a Rosbalt commentary, that neither of these things will
happen when Putin departs. The world Russians live in will not cease to exist,
and the Russian Federation will not disintegrate into pieces like the Soviet
Union did or into a Hobbesian war of all against all (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2019/08/10/1796400.html).
Do Russians need Putin now?
Stolyarov asks rhetorically. The answer, he says, is “quite simple” and
negative as one can see by considering what he has done in the past and what he
is incapable of doing in the present and what others can do now and why his
departure will in fact help them rather than hurt them.
Every political leader has a task
which he must resolve, the writer says.
Putin had sought a task when he came to power, to “minimize chaos … stop
the general disintegration, stabilize the state … and create a reality where
new rules of life would be clear.” By
2008, he had on the whole achieved all that.
“A new ‘Putinist’ Russia arose which
fully satisfied the majority of Russians,” who compared their situation then
with their lives in the 1990s. But by achieving his first task, Putin put in
place the needs for a very different one, not the restoration of order but
rather the development of the country.
That he was not and is not capable
of, and as a result, Russia has entered the longest period of stagnation in its
history compounded by growing international isolation and a sense among elites and
the population that the situation isn’t going to change anytime soon as long as
Putin is in charge.
The Kremlin leader can keep things
stable but he can’t develop the country. “His active potential is exhausted. A
different politician, one oriented on the future, and not on the preservation
of the rotting present” as Putin all too clearly is, Stolyarov continues. So
the answer is that Putin was needed but isn’t needed any longer.
But will the country and its
government disintegrate when Putin leaves? The answer to that question is an
equally loud “no,” the Russian writer says. The much-discussed clan wars within
the elite are not nearly as problematic as they were: clan heads have become more
restrained not because of Putin but because they now that their actions could
make things worse for themselves and not just others.
The belief that Russia will
disintegrate along the lines of the USSR is equally exaggerated, Stolyarov
says. Some republic leaders may dream of
becoming presidents of independent countries, but they are very aware that “Russia
has a strong army, the Russian Guard, and the FSB. The cost of trying to secede
could be very high.”
No one is likely to be inspired by the
example of Chechnya in the past or the Donbass now, he continues. But even
more, he says, there is no reason to think that the Kremlin will weaken when
Putin leaves. There is a collective Putin even now that will continue and act
more closely according to its interests than Putin is.
Given all this, Stolyarov says, “there
does not exist any need that [Putin] continues to be the head of Russia.” In
his view, the people and the elites could easily agree to “thank the president for
his self-sacrificing work, present him with the order ‘For services to the
Fatherland’ First Class, put a bust in the yard of the apartment bloc where
Putin lived as a child and so on.
If only he would leave. But this
discussion is purely theoretical, Stolyarov says, because Putin has no plans to
do so voluntarily and no one seems to be in a position to force him to do so
against his will.
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