Putin Even More Contemptuous of Experts than Some Western Leaders, Grozovsky Says

Paul Goble

Staunton, March 30 -- The contempt some Western leaders show for expertise is shared by Vladimir Putin whose regime ever less often consults with specialists, particularly in the social sciences, except on how to sell policies he’s already decided on, according to Boris Grozovsky, who works with the Sakharov Center and the Gaidar Foundation in Moscow. 

Social sciences, he writes, “including economics by definition cannot exist apart from policies. They are needed for the solution of both global and national problems.” And “in liberal democracies, scholars participate in political debates before, during and after the adoption of decisions (russian.eurasianet.org/россия-требуются-не-эксперты-–-визири).

In authoritarian regimes, in contrast, experts and social sciences as a whole have a significantly reduced role. They are not brought in before a decision is reached but after in order to play a role in implementing it or selling it to the population.  And those who cooperate are regularly rewarded, while those who don’t are punished.

But such cooperation with all its rewards while voluntary comes with a price: those involved in the policy process are not allowed to criticize the authorities, and they often must refocus their own research in directions that will not bring them into conflict with the regime, the writer says.

Such regimes, as Russian scholars Konstantin Sonin and Georgy Yegorov showed two decades ago, want loyalty above expertise and thus those who work with them are transformed from experts who bring their knowledge to the table into “viziers” who carry out what the powers that be want (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=630503).

Until Crimea, Grozovsky says, what had been “a shaky consensus” between the authorities and experts broke down. The authorities expect loyalty and will persecute those who are viewed as insufficiently loyal. The situation has deteriorated since then, especially after at the end of the 2010s, the Kremlin decided that protests were increasingly the work of the young.

According to the writer, the situation has become “a vicious circle,” one in which more protests by those connected with universities lead to more repression of professors and students which lead to more protests and so on. There is no reason to expect anything to change as long as the current constellation of power is in place.