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#34 - JRL 2008-122 - JRL Home
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2008
From: Sergei Roy <SergeiRoy@yandex.ru>
Subject: Re Sobell 2008-#120

Cohabitation à la russe. A Rebuttal to Vlad Sobell’s “The Putin-Medvedev tandem is a bad idea”
By Sergei Roy,
Editor, guardian-psj.ru

Only recently I wrote a piece titled “Tandemocracy, Tandemonarchy, or As You Like It,” in which the emphasis was on the as-you-like-it element. Talk of the Putin-Medvedev relationship as much as you like, I meant to tell the spin doctors so morbidly interested in this subject (almost as much as they were once intrigued by the “Who is Mr. Putin” conundrum), it will not matter much – for in Russia, the focus has shifted from the personalities and higher-echelon politicking to the issues concerning most men and women in the street, like the overheating economy, spiraling inflation, rising food prices, corruption, bad roads, disturbing changes in the education system, old age pensions – with rumors about raising the retirement age, how the world economic crisis will affect Russia, and a million others. The issue of who will run the country for – at least – the next four years has been resolved to the satisfaction and approval of the majority of the people, and the pundits can go on punditing to their hearts’ content, no skin off our backs.

The blow to this complacent stance came from where least expected. My very good friend Vlad Sobell, with whose analyses I have mostly been in one hundred percent agreement, has written an article “The Putin-Medvedev tandem is a bad idea” (JRL 2008-#120) -- with which I totally, the same one hundred percent, disagree. Since I know Vlad for a man fully possessing a quality for which I have a cherished phrase, intellectual dignity, his arguments are motivated entirely by an earnest, honest search for the truth and thus need to be looked into in the same spirit, and very carefully.

Here is Vlad Sobell’s view in a nutshell: “the best guarantee is the strict adherence to the letter as well as the spirit of the constitution. Since Russia's constitution does not provide for the concept of the tandem (or "diarchy"), Putin has stretched the law to an unacceptable degree.”

Let me first deal with the often too nebulous notion of the spirit of the constitution. I believe that this spirit is best expressed in the letter of the constitution, namely, that part of it which says that supreme power in the Russian Federation is vested in the people of the Russian Federation. (Incidentally, that’s the spirit of most constitutions, of which the U.S. fundamental law is a prime example.)

Now, the people of the Russian Federation were recently offered a plan for the transfer of the highest executive powers in the country from one individual to another without changing the constitution, though considerable sections of that same people insisted on such a change, which would allow an extremely popular politician – who even went by the sobriquet of a “national leader” -- to remain in office for a third term running.

In fact, a constitutional crisis was brewing. Various regional legislative assemblies and other influential groups of people and separate individuals came up with entirely legal and practicable plans for a referendum on this issue while other forces were dead set against it. The crisis was resolved through a firm stand taken by that most popular leader in favor of keeping the constitution intact, and a plausibly adroit move on the part of the most likely president-to-be who announced his intention to offer the post of prime minister to the aforementioned most popular politician.

In form, the March 2008 election was a presidential election. In substance, the people consciously (I stress this word, consciously) voted for a double ticket, so to speak, and they voted overwhelmingly in favor of the proposed arrangement. That double vote was democratic in the strictest sense, as it expressed the will of the majority of the people, the demos. No breach of either the spirit or the letter of the constitution occurred there – this has to be accepted for a plain fact recorded in terms of numbers of votes cast for the political configuration worked out to the satisfaction of both the elites and the masses. To describe this procedure as a “murky manner in which the tandem has emerged” appears to me to be quite unwarranted.

Actually, Vlad Sobell accepts this fact himself when he says that “most Russians actually want Putin to remain in power and would consider his withdrawal as absurd,” but he seems to regard this attitude of the Russian people as deplorable. He may be right, he may be wrong, the Russian people may be right or wrong, but this attitude has been clearly expressed through constitutionally defined, democratic procedure and should be accepted as such by anyone wishing to remain in the realm of Realpolitik, not to write another version of Plato’s “Republic” or some such excellent treatise.

Now for the charge that Putin has violated the letter of the constitution by establishing a “diarchy,” for which the Russian constitution does not provide. This calls for a closer examination of what the Russian constitution does provide for, and how it has been used and abused.

It is useful to recall at this point that the current constitution was adopted (in a very doubtful vote, as quite a few people claim) in December 1993, just a couple of months after an acute constitutional crisis between the legislative and the executive branches of government which ended in bloodshed and in which the executive/presidential branch emerged victorious through use of armed force, not through any constitutional procedure or other peaceful means as proposed at the time, say, by the chairman of the Constitutional Court. The constitution, though passed in such a hurry and under such a cloud, is a nice enough document, faithfully copied by Viktor Sheynis and other “democrats of the first wave” in the Constitutional Commission from the French and American models.

However, it also bears the unmistakable imprint of the earlier bloody events in the odd proviso that the president of the Federation is the “guarantor of the constitution” – a sort of rearguard action against the foe defeated in that recent upheaval. In plain language, the constitution endowed a single individual, the then president (and any future ones, but that was clearly a secondary factor) with the right to take up arms against any elements that could threaten, or were believed (apparently by the president) to threaten the constitution or, in even plainer language, the existing regime. (It may be noted in parenthesis that the victorious president subsequently proved a very miserable “guarantor,” permitting, through sloth, inaction and predominant concern for his own well-being and safety, the passing of hundreds of enactments by regional legislative assemblies that flagrantly contravened the federal constitution – not to mention the Chechnya fiasco. It fell to Putin’s lot to act as a real guarantor of the constitution and restore constitutional order throughout the country.)

Despite that curious proviso, this document, in terms of the distribution of powers between the legislative and executive branches, and between the various arms of the executive, follows on the whole the French rather than the American model and thus provides for a presidential-parliamentary republic, with the parliament’s, the president’s, and the premier’s powers rather equally weighted in a sort of cohabitation. The emphasis here is on the “sort of”: there was no exact parallel with the French system, in which cohabitation implies the president and premier belonging to different political parties.

However, an even-handed division of executive powers between the president and the premier was the theory or rather the intention of the constitution’s creators. In practice, Russia in Yeltsin’s times turned into a predominantly presidential republic – inevitably so, just as had been predicted by the more clear-sighted jurists and men of the Russian world long before the 1993 crisis. On 4 May 1991, while bills on instituting the post of president in Russia were being debated, Valery Zorkin, then chairman of the Constitutional Court, published an article on “Presidential Power in Russia” (co-authored with Yuri Ryzhov) in Rossiyskaya gazeta. There he expressed a truly visionary sentiment: in Russia as it then was, “a semi-presidential republic will inevitably degenerate into an irresponsible super-presidential dictatorship.”

This was particularly true of Russia after 1993. Owing to the chaotic, unstructured nature of the political processes of that time and place, the country’s parliament could not counterbalance the executive branch for the simple reason that the Duma was stymied, mired in internal squabbles between the Communist and plain populist majority and the pro-presidential minority. It could not therefore lend its support to the premier and strengthen his position vis-à-vis the president, even if it wanted to – which it did not.

The budget issue is a good illustration of the chaotic squabbles that prevailed at the time in place of orderly, constitutional separation of powers. The Duma regularly passed populist laws whose implementation would require expenditures three or four times greater than the country’s entire budget. Not unnaturally, the government, appointed by and accountable to the president only, paid little attention to the budgets as they were passed by the Duma, and regularly indulged in an operation called budget sequestration, while a regime that might be charitably described as cleptocracy flourished (some people, God help them, still view that period as that of efflorescence of democracy under the good, democratically-minded Czar Boris).

In 2000, that reign ended. However, under Putin Russia still remained a predominantly presidential republic, not a presidential-parliamentary one, for various reasons. First, as part of the Yeltsin legacy, centrifugal tendencies were so strong that they threatened to rend the country apart. As previously mentioned, this process reached a stage when the various constitutive entities of the federation passed regional laws and constitutions that virtually placed them outside the federation or made them only loosely connected with it. Centralization of political power, which came to be known as the consolidation of the “vertical of power,” was a must if the nation were to survive as an integral entity, not as a collection of territories, mere playgrounds for foreign political and economic interests. Second, Russia’s political life was still but poorly institutionalized, the Communist Party, a remnant from the Soviet times, being the only real political party, while the others were either assemblies of power-hungry bureaucrats and crooks or small “sofa” parties without much influence among the voting masses.

Now, it has taken Putin and his cohorts eight years to introduce a greater degree of structuredness and institutionalization in Russia’s political processes. They have not done it according to a scenario that, say, I myself would have preferred (see, e.g., my article “Putin, Russia after 2008: Plan A or Plan B?” posted on JRL in March 2007), but they have done it. Now several large parties are represented in the Duma, and the government can rely on the Duma majority. Moreover, the head of the executive branch of government now is, however formally, accountable to the parliamentary majority.

The whole picture is still pretty wobbly, the premier is still judged by his record as president rather than as premier or party leader, the party owes its popularity, however scant, to the national leader rather than vice versa, and so on. Still, if one looks at these things from a historical perspective, one cannot escape the sense of greater orderliness and general progress in an inherently disorderly sphere of human endeavor.

The political scene is assuming a more “European” look, you might say, like a Moscow apartment after evroremont “European-style renovation.” It is, in fact, becoming what the compilers of the 1993 constitution envisaged – a presidential-parliamentary republic, with the Council of Ministers, headed by a political heavyweight, ceasing to be a branch of the President’s Staff and morphing into a real political institution backed by a parliamentary majority. That is a clear case of the holy principle of separation of powers in action – in full accordance with the constitution.

Sure, the constitution does not provide for a “diarchy,” whatever that term might mean. But neither does that same constitution provide for anything like a “technical government” at the president’s beck and call – and that is what RF governments have invariably been called, “technical governments,” and what they have actually been, until now, with rare exceptions (see below on Primakov). To see the present cohabitation as a “diarchy” violating the constitution looks to me like a serious failure to understand either the letter of the constitution as it actually is or the country’s real political dynamics.

So far I have covered the themes relevant to the Putin/Medvedev cohabitation issue in fairly general terms, outlining my understanding of Russia’s prime constitutional dilemma, a super-presidential vs. presidential-parliamentary republic. Now for some specific charges against Putin as the instigator and designer of what is referred to as a “diarchy.” Here is the principal accusation: “while Russia has a new president (Dmitry Medvedev) and prime minister (Vladimir Putin), and while it has seen a comprehensive reshuffle of the entire administration, there has in fact been no change of leadership. Putin has ceased to be president, but supreme power has moved with him to his new post. This has been a theatre featuring a formal rather than real change.”

In interpreting broad terms like “leadership,” “(supreme) power,” “authority” and the like, it is useful, I believe, to distinguish between an individual’s formalized constitutional powers and his informal (actually formalizable, but this need not concern us here) moral-political authority, political weight, stature, etc. Only in this last sense can “supreme power” be said to have moved with Putin to his new post. The respective statures of the two leaders are what they are, and no one is in much doubt on this score. As for Putin’s formal, constitutionally defined powers, he simply activated or put into commission what has always (that is, since 1993) been there. As long as he remains within this constitutional framework, as long as he does nothing to undermine or usurp the constitutional powers of his presidential colleague, the powers are where they should be, and there has been no transfer of supreme power from one post to another.

Now comes the big question: Has he or hasn’t he? Done anything to undermine or usurp, I mean? Vlad Sobell believes he has. I don’t.

Let us consider the arguments for a negative assessment of Putin’s activities in the all too brief period since May 7. Here is one: “Putin has beefed up the government structure by appointing two first deputy prime ministers and five deputy prime ministers, a kind of Soviet-era Politburo, enabling him to focus on the big issues and strategy.”

A “Soviet-era Politburo” is a scary expression that had better be avoided if we wish to go beyond words, words, words. A “politburo,” or “junta,” or the “State Committee for the State of Emergency” (the by now safely forgotten Gheh-Kah-Cheh-Peh of August 1991) are indeed horrible things when they represent a monopoly on power that is a law unto itself. In a situation where there are multiple “politburos,” in the spirit of separation of powers, there is nothing scary – nor, I hasten to add, necessarily, intrinsically useful or effective – about one more such administrative structure, operating as it does along with the president’s “politburo,” otherwise known as the presidential staff or “administration”; the Duma “politburo,” with its chairman and a variety of chairpersons and faction leaders; ditto, the Federation Council “politburo”; the State Council; the Security Council; the Constitutional Court; and I am sure there are a few others that I forget.

In fact, increasing or cutting down the number of the premier’s deputies or first deputies (curiously, there are never any second first deputies or plain second deputies) is a bureaucratic game that has been played times out of mind. No special harm in it. If it really enables Putin “to focus on the big issues and strategy,” hooray for it. That’s what a premier in a real presidential-parliamentary republic should be doing, handling the big, strategic issues, not dealing routinely, on an everyday basis, with such world-shattering problems as providing a God-forsaken village in my native (well, as good as native) Stavropol Territory with drinkable water, as he did on two memorable occasions in his presidential capacity – and lost both times to the local Communist governor, Chernogorov, who apparently just would not be bothered.

On a more frivolous note, I am also all for the exact number of the deputies and first deputies that Putin has appointed. If I remember the Yngve hypothesis right, seven plus or minus two is the “magic number” of units at which human short-term memory optimally operates. Anything less, and you have a dearth of information and consequent erroneous decisions; anything more, and you slide into “white noise,” with still more errors.

Now for another charge against Putin the usurper: “He has also made moves suggesting that he intends to play a strong role in foreign policy, which according to the constitution clearly falls under the presidential purview.”

I believe a closer study of the constitution’s provisions on Russia’s foreign policy would help clarify matters. The constitution clearly states that the president of the Russian Federation defines foreign policy; he outlines the strategy. The implementation of that policy lies, however, within the purview of the cabinet, of which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a part. To insist that Russia’s foreign policy is entirely within the purview of the president, that it is an area in which the premier can have absolutely no say and should always stick to the policy of non-interference, is an error in terms of both the letter of the constitution and real-life, practical politics.

Let me recall a characteristic – and famous, or at least well-remembered – episode from the not too distant past, from the times of the Yeltsin rule, an episode that has been dubbed razvorot nad Atlantikoy “a U-turn over the Atlantic” in Russian political parlance. Premier Yevgeny Primakov, who was flying to the States for a meeting with Vice President Al Gore, ordered his plane to turn back on learning that NATO had started bombarding Serbia. This aerial maneuver, performed on the spur of the moment without consultation with President Yeltsin, defined nevertheless Russia’s foreign policy on this issue. Still defines it, as a matter of fact.

Sticking to the issue of constitutionality, Primakov was strictly within his rights, responding to an emergency situation in a way that he believed was best for the country and best accorded with the wishes of its people. He acted as head of a political institution with constitutionally defined powers, and fully accepted the responsibility for his actions.

There was no love lost between Primakov and Yeltsin, and the episode may have been a factor in Primakov’s eventual dismissal. Now, that dismissal also appeared to be within Yeltsin’s constitutional rights, but it was seen by the people as abuse of those powers, and the people were right, as is abundantly clear in hindsight: Yeltsin was merely choosing scapegoats for his own failures, changing premiers every few months while feverishly looking for someone who could secure his immunity after retirement. Some guarantor of the constitution, I don’t think!

Primakov’s dismissal came on May 12, 1999, and I remember the date so vividly as I was then doing some sailing on a tiny yacht, with a crew of four, on the Mediterranean, and May 11 is my birthday. Particularly, I remember the identical expletive we all breathed out, with a sort of groan, on hearing the news of the sacking of Primakov on the radio. True, our anger did not come from any cold appraisal of the unconstitutionality of Yeltsin’s action – our overriding emotional reaction (complicated, I avow, by the somewhat boisterous birthday party the night before) was to the injustice of the sacking of a good man doing a job to the best of his ability. In a different frame of reference, though, one clearly saw Yeltsin’s action for what it was – abuse of power and one of the many excellent reasons for impeaching that functionary.

I am not drawing any parallels here between the Yeltsin/Primakov setup and the Putin/Medvedev cohabitation. On a personal level and in terms of the alignment of political factors the situations are entirely, fundamentally different. What I am trying to say is, should Putin find himself on the spot in an emergency situation like Primakov’s, and should he act in a manner similar to Primakov’s, he would simply be acting within his constitutional rights and according to established precedent.

Of course, that precedent included a subsequent sacking, also carried out in formal accordance with the constitution. This is an eventuality that Vlad Sobell also considers, as he speaks of “Medvedev being able… to publicly overrule Putin” – in which, one assumes, the president might go to the ultimate length of dismissing his premier.

Here we are stepping into the area of the irreal and imaginary, where anything is possible. Possible, but, in my view, highly improbable. Not only because, not even mainly because Medvedev is far from being an idiot with a hankering for political suicide. The real reason lies in the nature of what I insist on calling cohabitation of two men who have been toiling, climbing, and fighting together, shoulder to shoulder, for 17 years, with both men having worked out over time a sure knowledge of the other’s reactions to any given situation. Even more importantly, though, they both have a common understanding of the reactions of the people whom they serve, and are aware that they can only go against the grain of those wishes and attitudes of the populace at their own peril – also in full accordance with the spirit and letter of the constitution.

However, this kind of rumination over possible scenarios is a bit like crying over milk that has not yet been spilt, nor is likely to be, ever. So far, Putin has performed nothing that would remotely resemble Primakov’s U-turn over the Atlantic. All he has done to date in the field of foreign affairs that seems reprehensible to his critic’s eyes, is a routine visit to France. “[It] cannot go unnoticed,” writes Vlad Sobell, “that Medvedev's European debut was preceded by Putin's visit to France, where he was treated virtually as the head of state. Surely, should Putin wish to really burnish the international prestige of his successor, he would have found ways of postponing his trip.”

Well, I don’t know. The way Putin was treated by the French is something that should be laid at the door of the Palais de l’Elysée, n’est-ce pas? Putin could not very well have muttered, “Hey guys, roll back that red carpet, will you?” As for the timing of the visit, I should think that, at those rarefied heights, who should go where and when is a matter of such imponderables as previous agreements, symbolic gestures, behind-the-scenes contacts, and so on, that only become known decades later. Judging them by what one gleans off TV screens as the events unfold seems a bit lightweight.

Indeed, Vlad Sobell’s is one way of looking at this event. Another might involve Putin testing the temperature of European waters before Medvedev dips his toes in them. A third interpretation would be something like this: President Medvedev of Russia going east, to China, while a mere premier visits Europe, might be a signal to Europe that Russia was leaning more to the east, with its inordinate appetite for Russia’s raw materials. The president and premier were giving a signal that Europe should not play too hard to get in the perpetual, not very musical chairs of hi-tech and oil-and-gas quid-pro-quos. (Such a view has actually gained currency over here.)

Vlad Sobell’s appraisal of the event – Putin eclipsing Medvedev’s hardly existing international stature instead of “burnishing” it – would be about the last scenario that would come, say, into my head. Only one person can “burnish” Medvedev’s international reputation, and that is Dmitry Medvedev himself; so far he has been doing exceptionally well. Putin is simply not in the business of burnishing reputations; he has his plate full without this additional chore. I absolutely disagree with the contention that “Putin's popularity will never be transferred to his successor, unless he takes decisive steps to that effect.” It is not Putin’s job to transfer his popularity to anyone. Anyone wants popularity, they earn it themselves, without waiting for someone to “transfer” it to them.

Other interpretations of the above event are also possible but just as little relevant to the issue in hand: Is Putin within his rights in continuing to play a role in Russia’s foreign policy? My answer is a definite Yes, he is. It is not just natural and constitutional – it is highly desirable. Wasting an asset like Putin’s reputation and stature in far from untroubled international seas in which Russia is sailing (consider for a minute the possibility of John McCain winning the U.S. presidential election in a few months, as just one tiny indication of rough weather to come) would be mismanagement in appalling taste. If the Russian populace saw President Medvedev guilty of any such wastage, for whatever reasons of his own, the consequences might be “unpredictable,” as Russian politicians have the nasty habit of saying when they know damn well what those unpleasant consequences are going to be.

Here we come to the most controversial point in the whole of Vlad Sobell’s discourse: his practical recommendation as to what Putin should do, to rectify his “strategic error.” Here it is: “Putin had - and still has! - another option: to promptly depart from the political scene (or at least ensure that he no longer is the locus of supreme authority) and thus transform his successor into genuine supreme leader, unambiguously acknowledged as such. While this might have fuelled more risks and potential instability in the short run, it would have placed Russia's political system on an entirely new and fundamentally more stable footing.”

This line of reasoning simply begs for a logical operation known as reductio ad absurdum. Suppose Putin does announce that he is sick and tired of a way of life where he cannot sneak into the nearest beer joint and have a couple of pints with the guys (something he actually complained of, however coquettishly). Suppose he does retire into private life. The question that would immediately arise would certainly be, Who is the best man in the whole land to fill that post? The answer would come loud and clear: Vladimir Putin, who else! Other questions might well be asked, like: Why the xxxx should we have a second- or third-best individual to run the affairs of RussiaCorp. when we have the best man available – and willing?

The man in the Russian street would surely ask these questions, and they would remain unanswered and unanswerable – because they would be purely rhetorical: that mythical animal, the man in the street, would not believe any answers. He simply would not accept them. Least of all perhaps the one that Vlad Sobell offers – that that would place “Russia’s political system on an entirely new and fundamentally more stable footing.” For this is clearly a pie-in-the-sky answer, and we have had enough of them ­ like Communism by the 1980s, from Nikita Khrushchev, or “new thinking for the Soviet Union and the whole world,” from Mikhail Gorbachev, to name just a couple.

That’s how the suggestion for Putin’s early retirement looks from the ordinary, human point of view. Now for the same problem in a “politological” – hated word – setting. In this harsh, non-Platonic world of ours, a change of the country’s leadership does not occur because the leader wants to swill beer in public without let or hindrance or because he has this enticing dream of putting the country’s political system on a “new and fundamentally more stable footing.” If he is any sort of leader at all, he works for this new system – like Putin has, without thought of retiring or even slacking.

Generally, a change of leadership involves (a) a change of the country’s policies and (b) a change of the team running the land. Neither change occurs at the leader’s subjective impulse: these upheavals are determined by the balance of political forces. Is there any reason to suppose that Russia’s set of policies, rather fuzzily described as The Putin Plan, must be radically changed? Who says so? Not the people of the land, who have expressed their approval of those policies, however dimly perceived, in numerous election campaigns and countless opinion polls. Similarly, the same people have expressed their trust in Putin’s ability to select and lead his team.

There are plenty of misgivings and even lots of anger about individual members of the team, as well as about certain aspects of the government’s policies – but what would you? It is useful to recall here J.K. Jerome’s maxim, “The weather is like the government – always in the wrong,” only of course it should be inverted. However, any sweeping, revolutionary change – what Vlad tamely describes as “risks and potential instability in the short run” – would be violently rejected by the same populace. You know why? Because they have had those “risks and instability” all their lives, they have had them up to their noses, and they positively cherish peace and stability, they dream of “at least a couple of decades of steady, uninterrupted development,” as President Medvedev puts it.

I know this in my guts, because I am one of these ”they.” And though I do try to keep this discussion on an intellectual plane, I have a sneaking suspicion that this gut feeling, mine and the people’s, is more important than the more theoretical schemata and desiderata for improving the country’s political system.

Vlad’s paper formulates a few excellent theoretical theses, like the following: “[A] democracy … is comfortable with the notion of conflict. Indeed, one of the key functions of democratic politics is to ensure that conflict, assumed to be inevitable, is resolved peacefully and that each controversial decision is made by those elected to take them in full understanding of the lines of authority and responsibility.”

These are beautiful sentiments, and there may be some truth in Vlad Sobells’s assertion that the tendency to gloss over conflicts among the country’s top functionaries may be due to a “harking back (certainly inadvertently) to Soviet Marxist delusions, which had it that the socialist order had banished the fundamental conflict of interests (while, of course, deadly dog fights were permanently taking place under the carpet).”

True, I might point out that there may be other, pre-Soviet and totally non-Marxist grounds for the assumption that “perpetual leadership harmony” is more desirable than continuous strife up top. Thus strife among leaders, as well as ordinary mortals, is quite deplorable to the engrained Russian ethos, which operates by the age-old maxim khudoy mir luchshe dobroy ssory “A bad peace is better than a good quarrel.” From this, the Russian point of view, a good peace between colleagues working in harmony as a tandem or crew or team (artel’) is even better. There are a great number of other concepts encapsulating this spirit, like the clerically sounding, Russian Orthodox sobornost’, only lamely translated as “communality,” which it would take a hefty volume to really interpret.

A discussion of these conceptual frameworks for politics or other forms of human activities is, I agree, a pleasing intellectual pastime in which one might indulge without doing much harm to anyone. I might even accept Vlad Sobell’s proposition – on a strictly theoretical level – that “too much security and continuity can be counter-productive… an organism never exposed to infection actually grows more vulnerable, as its immune system never comes to be challenged.”

What I have acute trouble with is the way these fine propositions apply to Russian life as I know it. “Too much security and continuity”? This must be said of some other Russia, not the one I live in. And when the suggestion is made that a few “risks and potential instability in the short run” won’t hurt Russia and will bring untold democratic benefits in the long run – if only Putin gets out of the way – my hair distinctly begins to bristle.

I don’t know, the trouble with me must be that I have a long memory. Too long and too vivid. Just let me look twenty years back, at a time when the people of the Soviet Union could have heard the first cracks of doom – if only they would listen. Why did the Soviet Union collapse? There were about a million factors, but two stand out, as more or less accepted by both the lay and the learned: the Soviet economy collapsed, and the national elites rebelled, aspiring for more goodies of life, like power and property, instead of serving communist ideals.

Let’s take the economy first. This is how it felt at ground zero level in about 1988: owing to the Gorbachev-Ryzhkov “reforms,” everyone’s pay packets began to fatten significantly, and everyone was in raptures – for a very short while. As labor productivity remained low to lousy, and defitsit or shortage of consumer goods all-pervasive, the increased pay packets were instantly spent on buying everything in sight, with the inevitable result that there was soon nothing much left in sight to buy – except vodka and hootch. I clearly remember coming to a shop and offering mere money for a fridge I wanted. The people there, both behind the counter and in front of it, looked at me curiously, as if they wanted to know whether I was really an idiot or just playing the fool. To get anything worth having, you had to spend nights in queues, go on endless, never changing lists, be issued metric meters of coupons – or pay through the nose at the back door, but even this seldom worked as there was simply nothing in the shops, they were all cleaned out.

Why am I remembering this? Just a few days ago interesting statistics came out. It appears that in this year of grace 2008 the average monthly pay reached the handsome sum of 17,000 rubles, almost twice what it had been the year before. Subtract about 15 percent for inflation (some say 20 or even 25, but never mind that, there will always be rancorous skeptics), and you still have a hefty rise, in real terms. Now, what about labor productivity? Sadly, it has remained exactly what it was 20 years ago: lousy to low. Economies are ruled by iron laws of their own, and a repeat of the end of the Soviet era performance appears to me to be inevitable. Nowadays, unlike in the Soviet times, there is of course the option of increasing imports paid for by the oil-and-gas dollars – if you really want to kill off your own economy most thoroughly.

Now for the other factor that brought down the Soviet Union: the nationalities issue. Again I will quote something that you could have read a couple of days ago and will certainly hear of today and tomorrow. Geydar Djemal, chairman of the Islamic Committee of Russia, has faced the Kremlin with a five-point ultimatum. The demands include “letting Muslims into politics”; giving them a chance to influence the country’s foreign policy, especially as regards Russia’s relations with the Great Satan, the United States of America; stopping persecution of Muslims, etc. Unless his political demands are met, he threateningly predicts that full-scale military action will erupt in the Caucasus (where “resistance is going from strength to strength”) and Russia will finally lose its Muslim regions.

According to its constitution, Russia is a secular state, not a theocracy. Muslims take part in Russia’s political life just like any other citizens, regardless of their beliefs. Republics in which Muslims are a considerable presence and form “titular nationalities,” like Tatarstan or Bashkortostan, are run by faithful Muslims and their leaders’ clans (with complaints often voiced that they are squeezing out from business and administration members of other faiths and ethnicity, even if the latter represent a majority of the population; but that’s strictly in parenthesis). Djemal’s ultimatum to “let Muslims into politics” is clearly a bid for a different kind of politics, in which a religious-based, Islamist party or parties would strive for supremacy in political life. Such a bid is not just violently unconstitutional but clearly extremist, yet it was taken up with gusto by various oppositionist media outlets, like Ekho Moskvy radio or papers with similar politics.

Now, it would be stupid to dismiss Djemal as a schizophrenic (some insist that he has been officially diagnosed as such) and rabble-raiser with an insatiable longing for staying in the limelight at any cost. Those poor Muslims whose unjust persecution, as per Djemal’s ultimatum, must stop, have been found in numerous specific cases to be disciples of Islamic schools operating here on very generous donations from abroad, especially from Saudi Arabia, and ostensibly devoted to the study of the Koran – which was unaccountably found to be wedded with insights into the proper ways of handling explosives. Such devotees somehow found their way into gunmen’s camps in Chechnya or underground groups preparing terrorist acts all over Russia. What price “too much stability,” one is tempted to ask…

I have indicated here just a couple of factors in Russia’s life as it really is lived here which prompt me to reject the idea of “risks and instability in the short term,” attendant on Putin’s voluntary or involuntary immediate retirement, for the sake of uncounted democratic boons in the future. Even if I discount the fifty years I lived in a somewhat unhealthy political atmosphere under the Soviets, those twenty years since the downfall of communism have been anything but risk- and instability-free. For one thing, in this last period I had to go to the barricades, in a far from figurative sense, twice, in 1991 and 1993, to defend democracy. Believe you me, being a hero is a nasty, fear-ridden business, and I would give anything to avoid a third go. I just hate to think that such an experience might prove inevitable should Russia be indeed lured into a period of “short-term risks and instability.” Start anything “short-term” like that in Russia, and your whole life will not last long enough, to wait out its consequences…

In conclusion, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Vlad Sobell for his earnest plea for honesty in politics, the way he understands them. He has made me see and formulate more clearly quite a few things about which I merely had a “gut feeling.” I must just as honestly say, however, that, if anything, the analytical process merely strengthened that feeling.