Paul Goble
Staunton,
September 25 – “The chief secret of the Putin system,” Sergey Shelin says, “has
been the consonance of its utopia with the aspirations of the people.” But the
pension reform debacle reflected in the party of power’s defeats in the
September 9 elections show that “this no longer exists” and the Kremlin will be
forced to rule without that resource.
According
to the Rosbalt commentator, “the system of rule which Vladimir Putin so long
worked to put in place and almost achieved is the latest variation of a
bureaucratic centralizing utopia which from time to time arises in Russia.” Its
chief advantage is that for a time, the population falls under its spell (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2018/09/25/1734467.html).
Putin’s regime has
done in most cases precisely what ordinary people would like to have done or at
least managed to act as if it has, Shelin continues. “Even the crisis of
2011-2012 … did not shake this deep and warm feeling” of the population for the
ruler. Only a tiny and isolated minority of the capital intelligentsia became
disaffected at that time.
What did Russians want 20 years ago?
The commentator asks rhetorically: the restoration of order, sufficiency
without lines of the Soviet kind, and super power status. And the Putin regime worked hard to achieve
all these things. The population didn’t care about self-rule; and Putin oblige,
restricting elections and restoring appointments from the center.
But “our regime did not want to look
like a dictatorship … and so elections were restored, but in their Soviet
variant, albeit with a pluralist cover: That is, there were now more than one
participant but the winner was defined in advance.” All this won Putin even
more support for a time and convinced him that this could go on forever.
“This was a typical dizziness from
success, but it ignored to facts: that any utopia has limits, and that the
coincidence of the desires of those at the bottom and those on top may last a long
time but will not be eternal,” Shelin argues.
But economic problems and then the
pension reform plan had the effect of dispelling this utopia. “The Sovietized political
system” Putin has been using “bored the people much more quickly than it did
the last time,” and “the illusions that the masses would accept everything that
the bosses proposed” were shown to be just that, illusions rather than a
permanent reality.
The pension reform had “a domino
effect,” leading the population first to object to that and then to object to
the rulers who thought they could ignore the desires of the population
entirely. Russians have begun to view the regime as the problem and not just
the particular policy. And they voted against it on September 9.
The Putin regime has compounded its
problems in this regard, Shelin continues, by overdoing things. Its restoration
of order no longer pleases people but makes them angry. And as a result, the
regime has “also lost a monopoly on the dreams of the people.” And they voted against it, not for any opposition
but against the regime.
To be sure, the party of power won
out in most places, but it lost in four and it suffered declining support
almost everywhere, regardless of whether it offered young technocrats or old
cadres.
What follows from this, the
commentator says, is “hardly the flourishing of freedoms.” The political field
is a scorched earth. Opposition figures within the regime are distinguished
from the mainstream “only by the roles they play but in no way by the principles”
that inform them. And the regime can
always lock up the leader of the opposition.
But despite that, “in just a few
months, the system has ceased to look effective” as the realization of popular
utopian fantasies. “for the first time
in two decades, it has lost face. Now, it is simply powerful” but without that
resource. As a result, it can force people to do what it wants but it isn’t
capable of leading them.
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