Having Lost Touch with Society, Russia’s Powers that Be are Afraid of They Know Not What, Solovey Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 16 – The powers that be in Russia, the roughly 100 people who run things, are increasingly afraid because they sense that something “extremely undesirable and potentially extremely dangerous” is happening beneath them, Valery Solovey says. But “they cannot understand what because they have lost their connection with society.

            Sociological polls in which the Kremlin puts so much faith, “do not help,” the MGIMO professor says, because today Russians are concealing their opinions from pollsters just as they did in Soviet times. As a result, the authorities are increasingly flying blind, fearful but they know not what (echo.msk.ru/programs/personalno/2331795-echo/).

                According to the Moscow commentator, something “evil” is growing in strength and intensity and there is the sense that the next two or three years will be extremely difficult because people will have to make choices that they do not want to make between good and bad. And they will be doing so as the authorities both increase repression and make mistakes.

            Solovey says that “the fall of United Russia will occur exactly as the fall of the CPSU did – precipitously and instantaneously. And all those who today are in it, not all but many, will say that they always were against it, that they in fact went into the party to destroy it from the inside” and so on and on.

            “This history,” the MGIMO professor says, “is repeated in all countries in all times in the same way. Russia will not be an exception.”  This is not about some historical cycle, Solovey says. Rather it is the result of the fact that the same causes typically lead to “one and the same” results.

            But that collapse of the current ruling structures will not lead to the disintegration of the country.  “The Russian Federation has no potential for disintegration. That is all a scarecrow.”  The Caucasus lives on federal money. “Where could it go?” The Far East has no ideas and consists of people more or less like those in central Russia. It isn’t going anywhere either.

            What is far more likely, Solovey says, is a change in the political system at the center beginning with certain changes in the Constitution.  The current basic law was adopted under Yeltsin. “Then Russia was weak and was forced to include in the Constitution certain things which in fact aren’t needed but which the West insisted on.”

            Among the changes likely to be coming, he suggests, are a lifting of the ban on a state ideology, the homogenization of regions and a reduction in their number to about 20, the formation of a state council to run things, and restrictions on personal rights and freedoms, Solovey continues.

            Work on this will occur during 2019, he says; and these changes will be introduced in 2020.

            The non-Russian republics aren’t going to like being absorbed into Russian regions, and that may lead the center to back away from going as far as it would like to lest it provoke an explosion. The course of events depends on what the center fears, what it knows and doesn’t know, and how the republics will react to any proposed change.