Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 18 – Simon Kordonsky,
a sociologist at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, says, as his host Valery
Vyzhutovich at the Yeltsin Center put it, that “not one of the social strata,
including the highest, feels confidence in its prospects or has any guarantee
of stability in the future.”
Consequently, the scholar suggested
in the course of a lecture on the nature and structure of the Russian social
system that “all strata [in the country] live a day at a time and are concerned
only that tomorrow will be like yesterday and that nothing will be changed” (znak.com/2018-01-18/sociolog_simon_kordonskiy_o_voyne_sosloviy_v_rossii).
There is a major difference between
classes and strata, Kordonsky says. The former
are “groups which arise in the market” as a result of which there are
differences in ownership and consumption, while the latter are groups “which
are created by the state for various reasons but mostly for the neutralization of
threats.
Tsarist Russia was based on social
strata and the Soviet Union was as well because in the latter, “the so-called
classes of workers, peasants and employees were groups created by the state.”
With the collapse of the USSR, these strata lost their raison d’etre and
classes began to emerge, with real rich and real poor.
But before the process of class
formation could be completed, Kordonsky says, the government intervened to
restore strata, albeit ones defined in different ways. That process was
completed, he suggests, by the 2003 law “On the system of state service” which
created categories of those who “do not work but serve” and “in exchange receive
strata privileges.”
Today, the sociologist says, Russia
has both “class differentiation by level of consumption” and strata
differentiation by the share of resources it controls for distribution.” Given
that strata are created to respond to threats, those strata which do the most
to counter whatever threat the regime deems most important get the greatest amount
of resources.
The new strata are relatively
closed, and it is almost impossible to move from one to another. In Soviet
times, one could but not now. The only thing possible to “spin in one’s own
world. Moreover, he continues, the situation in Russia today is extremely interesting
because there is a single criminal code rather than separate ones for each
stratum as in tsarist Russia.
But the code is differentiated in
its application by the punishments meted out to members of one or another stratum. And for that reason and others, strata
self-consciousness is not fully formed. That takes not 20 years but “two or
three generations. Whether the country with such as strata structure will live
that long,” he says, is something he cannot now say.
With the Khodorkovsky case,
Kordonsky says, “the liquidation of entrepreneurship and the market was begun
and the state began to officially dominate the situation” on the basis of the principle
“not of equality before the law but equality before the boss who distributes
the resources.”
That is driving businesses and people out of
the public space. Over the last year, some 300,000 small businesses have gone
into the shadow sector, something Kordonsky says is not a bad thing. Moreover
and in part as a result, “approximately 40 percent of the population capable of
working doesn’t deal with the state and lives outside of the state.”
Today, he continues, “the
liquidation of the stratum of budget employees via ‘transfer to contract’ is being
liquidated, and its former stratum privileges are disappearing. This is part of a much larger trend, one in
which “the state is leaving from the lower levels” of public organization,
forcing the population to act on its own.
In health care, for example, with the
end of government support for many medical facilities, people are turning to apothecary
shops and informal healers to take care of their needs. “The population is curing itself without
turning to the government system of health care,” Kordonsky says.
Because of this exit from public
life, Moscow often does not know what is going on in the country. Its estimates
of population are ten to fifteen percent below the reality. Indeed, Kordonsky
says, the real population of Russia may be 160 million rather than the much
lower numbers typically cited.
But at the same time, because stratas
get resources only if they are able to show that they are confronted by
threats, officials are various levels are often overstating problems, be it
unemployment, diseases or anything else, so that they can get more money. The
center seldom has a way to find out the truth.
This in itself, the sociologist
says, “a threat to social stability … Money from the budget goes to the
neutralization of threats which don’t exist … People from below write reports:
give us resources because we have all kinds of problems. And the person sitting
above him and reading theses papers have the sense that everything is bad in
the country.”
That
is made worse by something else, the scholar says. “Those theories which are used for the
description of our reality and explaining it are entirely and completely
borrowed from somewhere else. This is a specific Russian phenomenon and the source
of many problems” and has been since tsarist times.
Peter I borrowed from the Dutch
experience. The Bolsheviks borrowed from Marxism. “And now we borrow very not
very adequate theories about the market, democracy, management and everything
else.” Those theories lead people to conclude that everything in Russia is bad
and must be changed rather than to an understanding of what is.
“Over the last 30 years,” Kordonsky
says, “we have had 60 reforms, and not one of them has led to the desired
result. This is a result of a negative attitude toward our reality, an
unwillingness to accept the country as it is, and a desire to remake it
according to some foolish scheme beginning with Marxism and ending with
contemporary democratic ideas.”
According to the Russian
sociologist, it is time to “stop reading translated pamphlet and borrowing down
before these authorities.” Instead, he says, Russians must recognize that they
do not know their own country and seek to remedy that before they decide how it
must be transformed.
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