#7
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
No. 212
November 14, 2001
[translation from RIA Novosti for personal use only]
POLITICAL SCIENTISTS WARN PUTIN
By Lyudmila ROMANOVA
Hotel Alexander House again looked like the election centre of Vladimir Putin. The country's intellectual elite gathered there on November 13 to discuss what the president should do to become the people's choice in 2005.
On the one hand, political scientists worked on the scenarios of Putin's "soft landing" in the cabinet in two years. On the other hand, they tried to caution him from making mistakes that would create serious problems for his struggle for reelection. The main of such mistakes is the growing influence of apparatus opposition within the power itself. The political elite of Russia has been thinking about this since the beginning of the latest reshuffle period. But few people knew how to better tell the president about this.
Political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky found the form, which was approved by Sergei Markov, head of the Institute of Political Studies, Sergei Karaganov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, and even presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov, who preferred to keep silent but did not protest.
Pavlovsky found seven major threats that will seriously injure Putin in 2005, if not sooner. The first danger lies in the thesis, "No ideology other than personal loyalty to the president." Pavlovsky believes that this thesis must be "politically buried and remain true only for Putin's personal friends." It must be replaced with a broad ideological range and bureaucratic discipline. Another thesis, "the strengthening of the power vertical," should be amended, or else the internal apparatus tensions will spill from the bureaucrats' offices into the street and "the recent pogrom in Moscow, probably a spontaneous one, may prove to be a model of a new type of controlled destabilisation."
According to Pavlovsky, the power favourites are "the power of new apparatus destabilisation." In 2000-01, the authorities managed to control the system of putting pressure on itself, but today we are witnessing a reverse process, "an attempt to stop it from the kitchen entry." One proof of this is the settlement of accounts with the old timers, waged with the help of the Audit Chamber and the Office of the Prosecutor General. Virtually all political scientists agree that what is going on in Gazprom, the Railways Ministry, Alrosa and Yakutia is a commercial operation with far-reaching political consequences. One of them will be the restoration of a model of a "shadow state," which is a direct threat to Putin himself because eventually it can turn into a redivision of power.
The political scientists also stuck quite a few pins in the presidential team. Pavlovsky argued that it has become "clogged" and "congested," which is fraught with the creation of "extremist coalitions." But there is an alternative in personnel consolidation, which is not the same as "personnel routing." Political scientists recommend the president to treat cornered adversaries in a more humane way and to offer them a befitting way out of the corner before they crossed the point of no return.
One of such adversaries is probably Boris Berezovsky, who is mentioned in Pavlovsky's theses as a man with "pseudo-influence" and a kind of "populist permission for the unlawful use of force against randomly selected commercial and political rivals."
Next Article