Russia Profile
www.russiaprofile.org
April 7, 2008
The Will of the Small
If Putin Failed to Eliminate Ubiquitous Corruption, Why Should Medvedev Succeed?
Comment by Alexander Arkhangelsky
In the early 2000’s, a serious problem was diagnosed: small business was too boxed in. Inspections. Inspections. Inspections. (Bribes. Bribes. Bribes.) It is unable to push through the great bureaucratic wall on its own; it’s the supreme power that is supposed to break through with the help of big loyal businesses. A few of the more “advanced” newspapers, as if by accident, simultaneously published pretty and impressive diagrams: the small businessman and the grand structures he is supposed to get stamps and signatures from; arrows leading in all directions; envelopes and briefcases of cash are delivered to all offices…The verdict was harsh back then: whoever dares harm the small ones again, will have to deal with the mighty merciless state. The small ones applauded.
Last week the elected president who has not yet assumed office (this is the official title of Medvedev right now) visited Siberia, and held a meeting of the State Council in Tobolsk. There, he boldly and principally defined the problem of small business, again. Medvedev’s words made a big impression--it has been a while since anyone had spoken with such certainty about the necessity to stop “feeding” the police, the sanitary inspection, the firefighters and all the other self-proclaimed inspectors, and about inspections as a legalized form of robbery. Something is still perplexing in this case, and it is not the spoken words or doubts about the sincerity of the good intentions. It is not how the problem is posed, but the conditions for its solution.
There is a reason why the attempts (and there were attempts) to clean up the great mess in the small field failed, even though there was already enough money and less terror, and the elites were reigned by an atmosphere of oil bliss and gas euphoria. Why is that? Because you just can’t put the police in the modest position of the law’s servants – and at the same time to let the “clique” pillage the largest corporations and use the courts as an instrument for solving momentary political problems; you can’t make the firefighters just put out fires, while you let the security services create danger outside of Russia and operate controlled businesses within its sacred boundaries; it’s rather hard to wean the sanitary inspectors off abundant mangers while you feed and entice frisky political analysts, obedient youth leaders and producers. It’s either-or. Like in the popular joke: Father, either you should take your cross off, or put on your underwear.
And here’s another question: is the successor left with any leverage he can apply to reform the situation, to break the system of total corrupted control over society, money and power? If even the stronger (in the organizational sense), harsher and more universally recognized leader did not succeed, what are the guarantees that the newcomer will? Yes, the administration model that is being built during this last month is much more complex and three-dimensional than the one that has been in use until now; and any complexity stands in the way of totality and helps fight bureaucracy. The breaches in the ties that hold together the Russian society are objective; the authorities are trying to make up for them by using the two-component construction: the 90 000 000 of the population that watch Channel One don’t have any access to resources and are not interested in the global world, should recognize themselves and their notion of the state in the image of the nearly departed leader, soon-to-be prime minister; the 50 000 000 that live an active life, tend to be independent and will continuously conquer the virgin territories of the Internet, will be able to identify the successor as their leader. The inevitable dialogue between the two unequally subdominant leaders and their contradictory union will symbolize the union of the two parts of the Russian society; the distribution of power between the first and the second is supposed to reflect the correlation of the real forces in the country. One is supported by the significant majority but holds a formally less important office; the other is backed by the key minority, but has constitutional privileges; all of this softens the acuteness of the contradiction and creates the much needed leeway in the decision-making process.
But the system has already been erected. And it doesn’t matter why as of right now. Owing to or contrary to intentions and plans. What matters is that it has been formed, securely tuned and tested, interconnected and incredibly stable. It is endowed with a powerful self-preservation instinct; it is used to being reckoned with and to the fact that it (and not the scattered elements of society) is balanced out by the acting power. It does not intend to go down without a fight. And even if an indirect threat to its full-fledged, guaranteed existence turned into a series of demonstratively notable crimes, from Kozlov and Politkovskaya to Litvinenko, what can be expected if its sentence is pronounced aloud?
In essence, this (and not the distribution of powers and conflict of interests and personal strategies) will become the main problem of the present. Will the political power that obtained its rights by bureaucratic means be able to win a spot in the sun from the silovik bureaucracy, and – in the conditions of an inevitable increase of prices, a shaky situation in the world and increasing economic disparities– to clear the grounds for building the future? Which, as of right now, is concentrated in small fields, from business to public initiatives, from improving everyday life in the regions to the family. This power will be heavily interfered with. On the inside and from the outside, by being dragged into solving problems that have nothing to do with the country’s real interests. Like, for example, the matter of amateur recognition of Abkhazia and Ossetia, which is fraught with bringing on the counter-matter of Chechnya.
If this new power is able to overcome the pressure of circumstances, it will be viable, and can be interacted with not only in the Internet. Argue with it, agree with it: that is, live in the same historical space. And only then we will see a multitude of new configurations. We will feel the energy of new movement from the dying politics toward the regenerating life. Well, and if not, the experience of surviving in unpleasant circumstances will have to be applied once more. The experience we’ve been gathering for a long time, hoping that it would never come in handy.