Renewed Focus on Justice and Effectiveness Limited by Russian History and Culture, Analysts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 12 – When times are good, Russians want stability and predictability; and those were what the Putin regime offered in the first decade of its operation; but now times are increasingly dire, and Russians are more concerned about justice and effectiveness, two things  that the current regime is less willing and able to provide, Russian analysts say. 

            That creates new possibilities for various political forces, analysts surveyed by the Realist news agency say; but underlying Russian cultural and historical trends make it unlikely that this will lead to the rise of genuine opposition parties or a parliamentary system anytime soon that might provide them (realtribune.ru/news/authority/4428).

Instead, these analysts suggest, Russians both elites and masses will continue to seek “a new prince” who can promote what they want rather than “a new veche” in which elites will argue about what should be done and seek to attract support for this or that inevitably partial program.

Ilya Grashchenkov, head of the Center for the Development of Regional Policy, says that Russians have always wanted a prince rather than a veche because they want to be told what to do rather than be forced to take responsibility. “We are not prepared for ‘everyday democracy.’ We live in a permanent revolution each day fighting for survival and achieving the impossible.”

Russia’s “real ruling class,” he continues, consists of a few dozen people around the president. “One can call their fights inter-party but their parties are unofficial. Instead, they are called ‘towers of the Kremlin, clans,” or something else.  Only they engage in real politics in Russia today.

The nominal parties are businesses designed to support their leaders by extracting resources from the center. For that to change, they would have to gain resources from elsewhere and decide to take responsibility. The first is difficult because of the state’s control of resources; the second even more so because it would require a real cultural revolution.

Consequently, for the overwhelming majority of Russians, stability is more important than anything else. “People in Russia do not live but survive. They populate the country but they are not the subject of history. To survive is to win, that is the not especially clever slogan.  The Maslow pyramid is its foundation and our guide.”

Justice and effectiveness will become more important than stability and predictability, Grashchenkov says, only “when we cease to survive and begin to live.” That is true in Moscow and some big cities; but it is not true outside of them, at least not yet.  That shift will come but “not very quickly.”

Moscow political analyst Maksim Zharov says that “never in the entire history of Rus or Russia has the veche or a regency been a prolonged, legitimate, and effective means of ruling the country.”  That means that efforts to import parliamentarianism are doomed because “they will inevitably lead to the disintegration of the country.”

Of course, “real political struggle and competition of elites in our country is possible. But this will take place only when the elites recognize their responsibility for the country and its future and drive out those elites which are focused on primitive theft of the country and display social autism with regard to its people.” That hasn’t yet happened.

The About the Kremlin telegram channel says the narrative about the prince has much greater legitimacy among Russians than does that about the veche because it has been more successful in ingathering the Russian lands and because it is seen as controlling any pseudo-veche on offer.

The Master of the Pen telegram channel makes the same point: Russians view any Veche, regardless of its name, as “an organ the grand duke controls and therefore the legitimacy of the princely power is higher than the legitimacy of other power structures. A crisis creates demands for justice” but only stability the prince offers makes that possible in Russian eyes.

And Yaroslav Ignatovsky, head of the PolitGen Analytic Center, says that because that is so, “the consolidation of power in one set of hands in fact for the majority of the population still has greater value than any democratic forms, especially as there haven’t been any real examples of the latter in Russian history and don’t exist today in most countries of the world.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t real political fights as between the rentiers and the rest of the capitalist class, but it does mean that these conflicts do not take place via the existing political parties, which today are “in deep crisis” and are more a business or sinecure for their leaders than real forms of political representation.

The social compact is beginning to fray, Ignatovsky says; and that leads to demands for justice and effective distribution and exploitation of resources. That is likely to push Russian politics to the left, but this will manifest itself in “spontaneous social protests” rather than organized political action.