Staunton, Nov. 4 – The Congress of Peoples Deputies consisting of people who were elected to parliaments in the Russian Federation in the past but who oppose Putin and his war in Ukraine and are now in emigration could but likely won’t adopt a program as important as the one that allowed the Balts to recover their independence a generation ago, Dimitry Savvin says.
The editor of the conservative Russian Riga-based portal Harbin says he had high hopes for such a body which he proposed and even has taken part in discussions about what its first steps should be but that those hopes have been largely dashed by the way in which the primary organizer, Ilya Ponomaryov, has acted (harbin.lv/o-sezde-narodnykh-deputatov).
In a commentary timed to appear on the opening day of the meeting in Poland, Savvin lays out the reasons for supporting the convention of such a Congress and also the reasons why he fears it is on its way to being hijacked by some involved in ways that will preclude it from having the positive consequences he hoped for.
As the Harbin editor points out, he and his group are committed to a peaceful and gradual demontage of the neo-Soviet system of the Russian Federation, a commitment that requires the involvement of all democratic force and transparent democratic procedures for their operation now and in the future.
For that reason, he says, he proposed to Ponomaryov to create “a Russian Parliamentary Committee which would unite those opposition parliamentarians now in emigration. “This is a principally new model of political self-organization … [as] an assembly of parliamentarians is the bearer of authority, a de jure institution of state power.”
Obviously, there are many problems with the elections which brought them to office, but “one should not forget the experience of the Baltic republics where the Supreme Soviets in perestroika times became the locomotive of the anti-communist transformation there.” The Congress of People’s Deputies could play a similar role for Russia.
Moreover, Savvin continues, “having adopted legislative acts about the future constitutional and legal system opposed to Putinist neo-Sovietism, such a proto-parliament could and still perhaps can literally change the course of history,” approximately as the 1940 declaration of US Secretary Sumner Welles did for the Baltic countries.
Given this possibility, it is perhaps surprising that no one had tried to assembly such a meeting of deputies. But that can be explained “only by one thing: the extreme deficit of legal consciousness not only in the pro-Kremlin but in the supposedly opposition milieux. And this deficit, alas, hasn’t gone anywhere.”
That leads Savvin to pessimistic conclusions about this meeting and what is likely to come out of it. The problems with it have begun with the lack of transparency about who is involved in preparing documents, who is there – some are not deputies – and other irregularities that raise questions about the legitimacy of the body itself.
But the most serious problem is this: draft proposals for creating an executive committee of the Congress call into question the very possibility of this body remaining democratic. They suggest that the executive “will in fact not be controlled by the parliamentarians” and will operate “in the best traditions of the Politburo and CPSU Central Committee plenums.”
Not only will such a body ignore the parliamentarians but it will undoubtedly work just as the Politburo did to ensure that whatever it does will be approved by the congress because the executive committee will decide who will attend future meetings and who will prepare reports and resolutions for their consideration.
Savvin himself won’t be at the meeting because he was never a deputy, but if he had been, he would have attended in order to vote against any such developments. He urges those who do attend to focus on these dangers and vote accordingly. He says he doesn’t have much hope that will happen, but there is still a chance that a meeting like this one could prove to be a breakthrough.
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