The End of History Didn’t Happen but the End of Freedom Looms, Klyamkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 6 – When the Soviet Union dissolved, many were certain Francis Fukuyama was right, that the world had come to “the end of history” and that there was no alternative to free markets and democratic systems. But instead, Igor Klyamkin says, Russia has monopolistic markets and monopolistic politics, threatening an end to freedom.

            The president of the Liberal Mission Foundation says he reached that conclusion long ago, between 1993 when the Kremlin used force to suppress the Supreme Soviet and 2003 when not a single liberal party gained a seat in the new Russian Duma (gorod-812.ru/konecz-istorii-ne-nastupil-nastupit-li-konecz-svobody/).

            Klyamkin continues with the observation that he and his colleagues, who formed the Foundation in 2000, did so and continue to act on the basis of the assumption that the recrudescence of authoritarianism is not the end of the story and that it is both possible and ethically necessary to struggle for freedom and democracy.

            At the same time, he says, his organization is committed to investigating problems rather than engaging in direct political action. Its members want to understand why certain trends have worked and others have not. Thus, “from the very beginning, liberalism and democracy in Russia are not only ideas which we would like to spread … but also a problem.”

            Initially, he and his colleagues were inclined to think that “the liberal project had not succeeded not just because of the special features of our society,” that there were problems with liberalism as such that made its achievement where it had not evolved already extremely difficult.

            That view continues to affect many even though failings and shortcomings of liberal societies elsewhere have only strengthened this argument. But increasingly, Klyamkin argues, he and his colleagues have focused on the fact that in Russia, there wasn’t any struggle for liberal democracy but rather for a political monopoly by those who called themselves liberals.

            Because they focused on the destruction of their enemies, they ceased to be liberals even as they proclaimed that they were; and consequently, by their actions, they did not advance liberal ideas and liberal practice but discredited the first and made the achievement of the latter more difficult.

            This too is not the end of the story as many Russians who do not call themselves liberals nonetheless value many things that liberals do and as an increasing number of genuine liberals have won out at the local level. But the problem is that Russia can’t be half liberal and half autocratic. If the country’s system remains an autocracy, liberal flowerings will fail.

            Klyamkin says that in his view, elections, their organization and conduct, represent the best way forward, not necessarily quickly but over time. They make competition acceptable and even valuable and thus represent a fundamental threat to the current regime, which is threatened by that even as it feels compelled to maintain them.

            Because this is so, he says, “the monitoring of federal and local elections at every stage, from the nomination of candidates to the counting of voting is one of the most important directions of the work of the Foundation.” Repeated elections can change a society, as they already have in Ukraine, even if they have not done so in Russia.