Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 9 – Many are now talking
about the need for another Perestroika after Vladimir Putin leaves the scene,
but few are focusing on what needs to be done so that such an effort will not
fail in the same way that its predecessor did and lead to the rise of a new
Putin-style regime, Dimmitry Savvin says.
But for those who do not want to see
yet another cyclical development in which hopes for change are dashed and a
neo-Soviet authoritarian system restored after only a brief interval, as has
just happened, knowing what needs to be done and how it should be must be the
focus of attention now, according to the editor of the conservative Riga-based Harbin
portal.
Otherwise, “the neo-Soviet
nomenklatura-oligarchic leadership … having satisfied society with a more or
less illusory liberalization will inevitably move toward the restoration of dictatorship”
and will thus repeat what happened between 1992 and 2008, Savvin argues (harbin.lv/vysoty-kotorye-nam-neobkhodimo-vzyat).
He suggests six areas in which those
who hope for irreversible reforms of the Russian system need to be thinking
about now in order to prevent the restoration of a neo-Soviet dictatorship after
only a few years of apparent success of the democratic project:
First, he argues, the country must
engage in thorough-going decommunization, “the total destruction of the Soviet
ideological-propagandistic and symbolic system. All communist symbols must be completely
and immediately prohibited” and everything associated with that system
immediately banned.
Second, he calls for the restoration
of legal succession from historical Russia by means of the convention of the Constituent
Assembly.
Third, he says that lustration is “the
only means of realizing not a nominal but a real change of the ruling stratum
and the creation for the formation of a national elite.” This also must be done
quickly and radically or those who remain from the old system will inevitably
coalesce and undermine the new.
Fourth, there must be moves to
restore property so as to radically privatize the economy and create a new
middle class. (Savvin has already discussed this and so does not go into
detail. See harbin.lv/reanimatsiya-russkogo-pravosoznaniya as discussed at windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/09/restoring-legal-culture-in-russia.html).
Fifth, Savvin
argues, there must be created a parliamentary system with only a weak
president. The experience of the last 30
years shows that where parliaments are strong as in the Baltic countries, democracy
and capitalism flourish but where presidential systems have been established,
dictatorship and state control of the economy and society have been restored.
The often-invoked argument of Ivan
Ilin that there must be a national dictatorship for any transition is wrong:
any such dictatorship won’t give way to democracy: it will keep itself in power
and there won’t be the transition it is supposed to make possible, the Russian
conservative commentator says.
And sixth, the population must arm
itself both to defend those forces that seek to create democratic institutions
and to constrain those in the current regime from thinking that they can
repress the population without consequences. If the siloviki know that the
people will shoot back, they will behave differently.
These six ideas, Savvin says, are
goals rather than a program for specific action. At present, “we are at a stage
when ideological and propagandistic work is extremely important” and talking
about these principles is critical. What steps will have to be taken and when
will be dictated by events but hopefully will be informed by these ideas.
Unless the new movement toward
democracy and freedom is informed by them, Savvin concludes, Russia won’t
experience a genuine liberalization but only “a short-lasting breathing space
and after ten to fifteen years, we will return to another neo-Soviet dictatorship.”
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