The Stupidities Russian Bosses Utter are No Accident, Verkhoturov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 11 – Every few days a Russian official surpasses his colleagues by making an arrogant and ignorant comment about Russians, Dmitry Verkhoturov says. Sometimes these officials are punished, often they are not, but it is profoundly wrong to view these remarks as individual failings. Instead, they are part of a now well-established social trend.

            On the Irkutsk portal Babr, the Siberian commentator says that such incidents – and they number in the hundreds – occur because those who make them assume that they have the right to tell Russians “’how to live,’” an assumption that is deeply offensive to the Russian people individually and collectively (babr24.com/msk/?IDE=186771).

            That conviction on the part of the bosses in Russia today has its roots in Soviet times when officials and heads of major industrial centers were told that part of their responsibility was transforming illiterate and semi-literate peasants into modern workers, a broader task than just ensuring that they were able to perform their new jobs.

            That was one of the tasks of industrialization and Soviet leaders accepted it as such, as did most of the population. But most Russians today view this as something that was true then but can’t be true now: Russians have changed. They are more educated, and they know how to behave at least in their own terms.

            But their bosses remain closer to that Soviet past than many want to believe. Many senior officials now started their careers in Soviet times or were mentored by Soviet managers. Not surprisingly, they picked up many of the assumptions and values of their superiors, even if those assumptions and values are no longer appropriate or necessary.

            This is the source of “the extremely widespread self-confidence among the bosses.” They continue to believe as their predecessors did that they are to train their workers to be modern; and they see their comments, however offensive they appear to the workers themselves, as an appropriate strategy to achieve that end.

            Only when that generation passes from the scene will such offensive comments become less, but the process by which that will occur and the means by which the values of the current generation of bosses inherited from the past will be put aside is something that is going to require greater efforts than almost anyone can imagine, Verkhoturov concludes. 

            But unless the bosses change and soon, they are going to anger and alienate the population even more; and that trend carries with it the risk of a social explosion that could bring down the entire system.