Washington Profile
www.washprofile.org
June 13, 2007
Russia Today and Tomorrow: An Interview with Boris Berezovsky.
Russian entrepreneur Boris Berezovsky talks to Washington Profile about Russia's place in the world today and looks ahead to its future.
Boris Berezovsky is a Russian entrepreneur currently living in political exile in London. Formerly, he served as deputy secretary of Russia's National Security Council and as a member of the Russian Duma.
Washington Profile: How do you see the future of Russia? What kind of country, in your view, should Russia ideally become?
Berezovsky: People like to talk about Russia in terms of concrete people: Putin, Sechin, Abramovich, Yeltsin, etc., and this mostly makes sense. But one has to account for the global changes that are underway today. Individuals can have a limited impact, some more than others, but they aren't able to change the vector of historical development. Even if they do so for a while, in time, we still see a return to the normal pattern of events.
Russia is undergoing a critical period in its development and today stands at a fateful juncture. On the one hand, Russia can once again turn toward a democratic political model and an authentic market economy, and away from a centralized market economy, thus putting itself in a position to compete in the international arena. Or Russia can fail to do this, and then simply collapse, like did the Soviet Union, of natural causes. These are the only two possible scenarios.
I should perhaps clarify what I mean by "revolution". A revolution is the transition from a less effective to a more effective political and economic system. A counterrevolution is the opposite, or a change from a more effective to a less effective system. Clearly, a planned, centralized economy showed itself to be less effective then a market economy. This is why Yeltsin dismantled the planned system and installed the roots of a market system, while dismantling the centralized political structure and implementing a democratic, or a self-developing, one. What happened during that time can be called a revolution.
The last 200 years have proven why a democratic, market system functions better than a centrally controlled government and economy: societies within the former system have outperformed those with the latter. For this reason, one can call Putin's accomplishments a counterrevolution. He replaced a democratic, self-organized political system with a centralized, as he called it, "vertical of power". As a result of Putin's installation of state capitalism, which is much like the system that was in place in Spain during the Franco years, or in Portugal under Salazar, Russia's economy became less efficient. If we remember, both Spain and Portugal have found themselves at the tail end of European development.
Washington Profile: The term "national brand" has of late entered the popular consciousness. For the West, Russia's brand consists of Russian dolls, balalaikas, oil. for Russians themselves, it is military strength, a great high culture... Which of these "brands" is closer to reality?
Berezovsky: This is not a very accurate question. In my view, Russia is multi-faceted. And I don't think that we can describe Russia in the primitive terms of dolls or Gasprom. A more interesting question would be what is Russia in today's modern world?
Those who underestimate Russia are deeply mistaken. This can be said about the current U.S. administration. For a long time, Tom Graham was the number one expert on Russia for the White House. I know him very well, he worked for many years in the American embassy in Russia and he gave the impression of an intelligent, thoughtful, and informed individual. But after he came back to the States and started advising this administration, he underwent a metamorphosis. He published a series of articles in which he asserted that Russia had lost its importance, that it's economically weak and is no longer a global player. This was in the beginning of Bush's presidency. Graham didn't grasp the fact that Russia would always be a powerful geopolitical force in the world just by virtue of its geographical position.
It's very difficult to be a strategist: one has to be born with a God-given talent. In the United States, there is a man who has this talent. He sees the whole global picture and sees it in perspective. That man is Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski very accurately predicted the global developments that we have been experiencing in the past thirty some years. He wrote a very famous book, The Grand Chessboard, where he noted that he, who controls Eurasia, controls the world. I agree with him completely. And Eurasia is still controlled by Russia. Even the convulsions of Putin's regime and all of its follies have only slightly tempered Russia's weight in the world. Here it's not just a matter of Russia's vast natural resources and geographic location, but also of its phenomenal intellectual potential. Russia is the absolute intersection between East and West, North and South, both geographically and genetically. So no matter what brand people put on Russia, it doesn't change how important Russia is in the world: Russia's significance is tremendous.
Washington Profile: In your academic past, you were a specialist in systems of governance and the algorithms of decision making.
Berezovsky: I guess you could put it that way. But actually I worked with the theory of multi-objective optimization, and its applications were in the sphere of decision making and governance.
Washington Profile: When you look at what is occurring in the world - how decisions are made and implemented as a specialist in this field, what is your impression?
Berezovsky: The world is undergoing a critical stage in its development, which is partly due to the intersection of a great number of contradicting processes.
Clearly, in the last two hundred years, we've seen an absolute advantage of self-developing societies over those controlled by the center. This model, which was laid out by the American founding fathers, although, really, was just copied from the Bible, turned out to be very effective. At the same time one must realize that these same democratic societies are in serious crisis, a crisis which began in the 1920's and 1930's, when Hitler came to power through democratic means, and this defect of democracy is still present today. The election of Hamas to the Palestinian parliament, for instance, was through completely legitimate means.
On the other hand we have rapidly developing China, as well as the vast Islamic world with its extremist elements. The Christian world underwent a similar period of crisis to what the Islamic world is undergoing today, but this occurred in a different time without weapons of mass destruction. This is why the parallel between the crisis of the Christian world and the crisis of the Islamic world is only partially correct. In this sense, radical Islam poses a grave threat to the civilized world. Russia is factor, and if placed on any one side of the balance, could significantly tip the scales in any one direction.
In the end, I think that the West is fated to have an alliance with China. This alliance will be not just of a strategic, but of a historic nature. It's important to understand that the philosophy behind China's expansion is drastically different from that of Europe. European expansion is aggressive, while Chinese expansion is evolutionary. That is why we will see a natural conversion of Western and Eastern civilization in China, and this process will be painless for the West. I should also stress that it is extremely important to find a common language with radical Islam, as it has the potential to impede the kind of historical evolution to which I am referring.
Washington Profile: Throughout history, many governments seeking to expand their global influence have had a driving ideology. Does modern day Russia have an ideology to offer to the world?
Berezovsky: Russia, unfortunately, has no such ideology. Part of the reason this regime is doomed is because it lacks just that. Three years ago I wrote an article in which I asserted that an alliance between the "left" and "right" in Russia is inevitable and necessary. This idea was criticized at the time, because no one thought that the left would join with the right, or vice versa. But I had something even simpler in mind, which was the creation of a unified front of those with ideas against those without ideas. It doesn't matter whether you are of the "left" or of the "right", if the goal is to change the current regime to a regime of ideas, then the only way to do this is to form a strategic alliance. This is, in effect, what happened when we saw Limonov in the same ranks as Kasparov.
Putin's regime is fated to fail because it has not proposed one new idea. One of the reasons for this is because Putin came to power as the successor to Yeltsin. "Successor" means "one who will continue the course of reforms". And if Putin turned his back on that, then that makes him a traitor. Putin couldn't return to a communist ideology, but he didn't propose an alternative.
In the world today, there exist only two ideologies: authoritarianism and liberalism. After all, at the crux of Western ideology stands not democracy, but liberalism. Democracy is simply a political system which allows for the implementation of liberal ideology. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had a communist ideology and a repressive system through which that ideology was carried out.
Washington Profile: Russia is seeking to be a major global economic player. What competitive advantages does Russia have in this regard?
Berezovsky: A country's economic success is based on mainly three factors: it political-economic system, its natural resource base, and its intellectual potential, in no particular order. Russia has no problems with the latter two, plus it has a vital geographic advantage. But it lacks an effective political and economic system.
Today Russia's economy is certainly more efficient than a command economy, but less efficient than the economies of the United States, Britain, France and Germany. Russia has all of the preconditions to become an economically competitive country in all senses of the word, but it can't fully capitalize on its advantages under the current governmental regime.
Washington Profile: Do you have a dream?
Berezovsky: I had a dream, one that I have almost completely realized. I wanted to remain a free and independent individual, and by "free" I don't mean free of responsibility. In my understanding of things, freedom should be governed by a system of internal restrictions, which can roughly be summarized by, well, the Ten Commandments. A liberated person is one who does not violate these ten restrictions, but otherwise does everything else that he desires. The Commandments are written in such a way that in following them any person is capable of achieving full self-actualization without infringing on anyone else's right to do so. I have reached this state and because of this live in full harmony with myself.
I want for Russia to be free as well. This for me means for Russia to become a country in which citizens and the law stand above the state, and most importantly, where a person has the opportunity to fulfill his potential. Ten years of Yeltsin convinced me that the people of Russia are ready to become free. They just aren't ready to stand up for this right every day. The path from slavery to emancipation consists of two stages. The first stage is the realization that it is better to be free than to be subordinate, and the second is to constantly fight for one's freedom. In the words of Goethe, "he alone is worthy of freedom and life who daily conquers them anew."