Preface
It was Mark Zakharov’s cult film, “To Slay a Dragon”, that gave me the title of this book. In the film, the archivist, in justifying his conformist views to his Knight, said, “The only way to get rid of someone else’s dragon is to create your own”. And that’s exactly how we live: first of all, we tolerate for a long time being tormented and oppressed by a foreign dragon (in reality, it’s our own, but it’s an old one), then we finally rid ourselves of it – and create a new dragon of our own. But after a while this one becomes old and foreign to us. I am absolutely convinced that this vicious circle of Russian history can be broken, and that Russia is fully capable of living with its own mind and its own conscience, and without dragons. But in order to do this, the young knights of the revolution must bear in mind that it’s not enough simply to slay the old dragon, even though this in itself is no easy task; it is vital also not to grant power to a new dragon, and one that may prove to be even worse than its predecessor. This book is about how this can be achieved in Russia.
As a country we’re in a difficult situation. Society already understands that “we cannot go on like this”; but at the same time we’re frightened that “things will be worse”.
Aside from the president, the powers-that-be fear that there isn’t a good way out; but simply hope that “suddenly we’ll find a way”.
The opposition has an overwhelming desire to sweep away the regime; but has no concept of “what will happen next”.
Because of this, I believe that it’s essential to explain clearly to the people what we’re proposing and what answers we’re offering to life’s key philosophical questions. People have the right to know what to expect if they stand alongside us, and particularly what are the principles for which it’s worth giving up a quiet life and risking their freedom and the safety of those dear to them.
But there is one thing we can say for sure: the time for burying your head in the sand and for turning a blind eye to the most serious social issues – that time has gone.
“We’re not interested in politics, we’re only concerned about people turning our yard into a dumping ground”; “we’re not interested in politics, we just don’t like despotism”; “we’re not interested in politics, we’re just concerned about artistic freedom, corruption, free access to the internet”… Yes, the time for such lovely little cunning phrases has gone. If you’re “not interested in politics”, then just stand on the sidelines and wait. Maybe they’ll be in a good mood and be so kind that they’ll give you something; but with the way things are today it’s more likely that they’ll kick you down and you’ll be the last to be carried off.
But if, on the other hand, you really want to stand up for your rights and the rights of others, then that means getting involved in genuine politics. It means making choices, and it means standing up to be counted, with all the risks that this brings.
I occupy a unique place amongst the ranks of the opposition (true, this doesn’t exactly make me jump for joy). I have huge managerial experience, having worked in the government and at the head of a number of the country’s largest companies, companies that were of strategic significance to the country, and that were linked to dozens of towns and villages which were solely devoted to these industries. But despite all this, I am deprived of the opportunity to carry out practical organisational work on the ground.
When they kicked me out of the country, the authorities slammed the door shut behind me and turned the key, making it absolutely clear that in the event of my returning I would face the rest of my life in prison.
At the same time, I am one of the very few who has personal experience (we could say, “fortunately, very few”, although this experience came with a high price) who has actually told Vladimir Putin to his face exactly what I think about corruption at the highest levels of government. And just a month after doing this I faced criminal charges and ended up being locked up for more than ten years (six in a prison cell and four in a labour camp). Added to which I staged four hunger strikes, including two where I refused to take even liquids; and I carried out all of them – until my demands were met in the case of three of them – as a sign of solidarity.
Ten years. That’s almost as much as my friend, Platon Lebedev. It’s immeasurably less than my colleague, Alexei Pichugin, who’s still in jail. It’s easier than the fate that befell another of my colleagues , the lawyer Vasily Alexanyan, who only a year after his release died from a disease for which he was refused treatment while in prison…
I have something to put before these authorities; some things that will be remembered and some things that must never be forgotten.
But this is exactly why I don’t want to talk about the past; rather, I suggest that we look to the future.
I don’t believe I have the right to juxtapose justice and mercy; to forgive or to refuse to forgive those whom I consider should be punished.
I certainly don’t consider myself to be the bearer of the ultimate truth.
Each one of us has his or her own experience, our own scores to settle and our own thoughts on the future. But by virtue of the way in which my mind works I have decided not simply to consider that, well, “it wouldn’t be bad if we were to change those who are in power”. I’ve constructed a practical plan of action as to what to do “after Putin”.
From the way in which I think of time (and I look on time differently after the period I spent in prison) I believe that this regime does not have much time left: no more than five or ten years. How it’s going to end, I don’t know. Probably along with Putin. After all that has happened in Ukraine, I find it very difficult to imagine that he will step down of his own choice and live out however much time God grants him on some paradise island somewhere. He simply won’t be allowed to do that.
One way or another, this regime will meet its end. When it does, there will be so much that will have to be put right! And it has to be done quickly. It would be wonderful if, when this moment arrives, society has already decided who we are and where we’re heading; in which direction our road is leading in this rapidly changing world…
Contents
Preface
Introduction to the Study of Dragons. My Path into Politics and What I Hope to Achieve
PART I: HOW DO YOU RID YOURSELF OF AN OLD DRAGON?
Chapter 1. The Strategy for Victory: Peaceful Protest, or Peaceful Uprising?
Chapter 2. Bringing the Protesters Together: Many Parties or a Single Party?
Chapter 3. How to Expand the Protest: Underground or In Emigration?
Chapter 4. The Point of No Return: the Street or the Commanding Heights?
Chapter 5. How to Organise the New Order: Constitutional Democracy or Democracy by Decree?
Chapter 6. How to Bring an End to the War: Fight to a Victorious Outcome, Capitulate or Seek a Compromise?
Chapter 7. How to Defeat an Internal Counter-Revolution: Purge the Old Guard or Try to Correct Them?
Chapter 8. How to Control the Man with a Gun: a Task for the Party or for the Secret Services?
Chapter 9. How to Create a Civil Service: Employ Our Own Weak Staff or the Best from Abroad?
Chapter 10. What’s Meant by “a Turn to the Left”: a Welfare State or a Socialist State?
Chapter 11. How Do We Achieve Economic Justice: Nationalisation or Honest Privatisation?
PART II: HOW DO WE AVOID CREATING A NEW DRAGON?
Chapter 12. The Choice of Civilisation: An Empire or a Nation State?
Chapter 13. The Geopolitical Choice: To Be a Superpower or To Consider the National Interests?
Chapter 14. The Historical Choice: Muscovy or Gardarika (which has nothing to do with Gaidar)?
Chapter 15. The Political Choice: Democracy? Or a Return to the Terror of the Oprichnina?
Chapter 16. The Economic Choice: Monopoly or Competition?
Chapter 17. The Social Choice: a Turn to the Left or a Turn to the Right?
Chapter 18. The Intellectual Choice: Freedom of Speech or Openness that’s Shackled?
Chapter 19. The Constitutional Choice: a Parliamentary Republic or a Presidential One?
Chapter 20. The Legal Choice: the Dictatorship of the Law or a State Based on the Rule of Law?
Chapter 21. The Moral Choice: Justice or Mercy?
Conclusion. The Dragon in Custody
Introduction to the Study of Dragons.
My Path into Politics and What I Hope to Achieve
Politics was never important for me in and of itself. Before I found myself locked up, I was involved in politics only inasmuch as I needed it for business; in other words, simply to achieve those economic goals that were my priority at the time. Then came prison. Prison is hardly the optimum place to discuss politics; but it’s a good place to receive a political education. And this was what I earnestly strove to achieve when I wasn’t occupied with the other tasks that are put upon you when you’re in jail.
At the very end of 2013, Putin took the decision to release me. Even though, as they say, “hope dies last”, I considered the likelihood of such an outcome to my ten years of incarceration as highly unlikely. To this day I genuinely have no idea what guided Putin’s thinking. Probably there was a number of different reasons. There was the forthcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, which he knew had to pass off in exemplary fashion. Then there was the personal request from the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, that he hoped would lead to some sort of reciprocal cooperation. And, of course, there was the human emotion of compassion for my dying mother, for whom this would be the last chance to see me.
I was aware of all of these reasons and weighed them up while rapid preparations were being made for my expulsion from Russia. I understood, too, that without Putin’s goodwill and wish for this to happen, I would never be set free; and also, that his decision upset a lot of people in his circle. Therefore, even though I honestly warned the FSB officer who came to collect me that I did not intend to hide myself away from people and keep silent, I had absolutely no intention of becoming involved in politics simply to seek personal revenge. As far as I was concerned, my account was settled in my personal relationship with Putin: he had sent me down, thus depriving me and my family of ten years of my life; yet he had also saved my life. Looking back on matters now, it’s perfectly clear that had he not acted as he did then, I would have been confined to a life behind bars to the end of my days.
So when I said after my release that I didn’t intend to get involved in politics, I was completely sincere. I never had any desire to be involved in politics just to prove something to Putin, and that’s still the case. Paradoxically, our personal relationship worked out in such a way that I even owe him something. He could have killed me, but he didn’t. He could have left me to rot in jail, but he didn’t. I haven’t forgotten this. I planned to engage in targeted human rights’ and educational activities. It seemed to me that there was sufficient scope to employ my talents and my experience in these fields; and my money could also be very useful. But the more I became involved, the more intensely politics infiltrated into everything I touched. What had happened? What was it that convinced me to turn away from my initial firm resolve not to return to the world of politics?
In order to answer that question, I have to explain what I understand by “political activity”, and what my motivation is to engage in it. In the exact and only possible sense of the word, politics is a struggle for power. Not necessarily power for oneself; it can be a struggle in support of someone else. If the meaning and the aim of political activity is not for power, then it’s not politics. It's fake. Or else the person making such a statement is simply not being honest with themselves and those around them.
People fight for power for two reasons. For some, having power is an end in itself. For others, power is an instrument to obtain other aims. Putting it simply, you can divide politicians into pragmatists, who need nothing more than power itself; and ideologues, for whom achieving power is simply the start of a process. These divisions are, of course, relative and not absolute, but it is useful to bear them in mind.
I was never interested in the concept of power as an end in itself; or as an attribute of the alpha-male; or as the possibility to dominate and enjoy one’s inflated position in the social hierarchy. I’ve been at the very top of society; and at the very bottom, too. I have long understood that formal power, there for all to see, is worth very little. And that real power, that’s often hidden from public view, bears no relation to the politician’s public position. For reasons that will be obvious, I was never interested in using politics as a way to get rich. I was and remained sufficiently wealthy not to have to think about where my daily bread was coming from, and in any case no one can ever earn all the money in the world.
But this wasn’t the main point. I’ve always been very wary – and remain so – of people for whom politics is an end in itself. The problem is that such people have no convictions – nor can they have. Convictions would have made them vulnerable, and made it difficult for them to achieve their goals. In general, other things being equal, it’s easier for an unprincipled person to come to power, as they are unencumbered by any considerations. Such a person can at one moment be “in favour of Soviet power”, and the next moment against; and in either situation they usually win. When there are too many politicians like this, society tumbles into a long period of crises.
Politicians who have convictions are a different matter, although here, too, nothing is simple. If fanatics come to power who hold ideas loaded with hatred for certain groups of people, then they become a threat not only to their own society but to mankind as a whole. Nevertheless, the world would remain stubbornly patriarchal if we didn’t have people in power who hold convictions that express the desire to change society. So the issue as to whether or not I should be involved in politics always brought me back to the question as to whether or not I held worthy convictions for which it made sense for me to go into politics; in other words, to fight for power. Not for my own benefit, but for the benefit of those forces which my convictions supported.
At the time that I was released from prison I didn’t see any particular reason as to why I should become involved in politics in Russia. I held the same general democratic opinions that were supported by hundreds of thousands of other Russians with liberal-minded views. Naturally, I agreed with virtually nothing in the political course that Putin was pursuing, but I wasn’t unique in that. I could express my convictions simply by supporting those whose opinions were close to mine, and this is what I did, even when I was in jail. There was absolutely no need for me to get involved in politics to do this. I didn’t think that I could add anything substantially new to what others were already saying and doing. However, the situation changed shortly after my release.
Literally two months after I was forced to leave Russia against my will, the country became a very different place. Or, to be more precise, it went back to being what it had been before Mikhail Gorbachev introduced perestroika. It was as if the coup plotters of August 1991 had been resurrected and had finally decided to create an alternative version of history. The unsuccessful attempts to crush the revolution in Ukraine, which were followed by the seizure of Crimea by Russia, and which in turn was accompanied by the igniting of a war in the Donbas: all of these events turned everything in Russia on its head. In the space of just a few months, politically Russia was thrown back decades. The first – and most important – reset had taken place. Putin and his circle wiped away everything that my generation had achieved when we had supported Gorbachev and Yeltsin’s attempts to change Russia. This went way beyond my personal conflict with Putin. Now we were talking about a fundamental difference in our views on the fate of Russia, its past, its present and its future. It was this that motivated me to become involved in politics, in a way that I hadn’t intended to, neither when I was in prison nor at the time of my release. It led me to a very simple solution: I had to defend the beliefs and ideals of my generation of revolutionaries. To make it impossible for Russia ever again to give up its future by turning back to its past and falling into the same rut from which, through enormous efforts, we had managed to drag it out at the end of the 1980s.
But how can we do this? For the majority of those who share my views the answer to this question sounded (and continues to sound) fairly straightforward: remove Putin and his clique from power. It sounds tempting, of course; but in reality it’s not that simple. We’ve already managed to get rid of Stalin; yet Stalinism has returned. We disposed of Brezhnev; but have gone back to stagnation. And we buried autocracy; and one hundred years later we’re living under an autocratic system.
I have absolutely no doubts that we can get rid of Putin. In any case, sooner or later he’ll depart this life: there are no immortal dictators. But Putinism, Stalinism and autocracy will keep returning to Russia again and again all the while that the socio-political and institutional preconditions exist for them. Although it’s always easier and more convenient to personalise evil, it’s not a question of individuals but of objective preconditions that allow anyone who reaches the pinnacle of power in Russia to become a Putin, a Brezhnev or a Stalin. This works even stronger than the laws of physics. Whether a revolutionary or an innovator or a liberator comes to power, they depart as a dictator, a satrap and someone who throttles freedom, because they’ve taken over power along with a pathetic cabal of corrupt henchmen. The specific name means nothing, because the reality of life in Russia breaks anyone. A specific example is that it wasn’t a case of Putin breaking Russia, but traditional Russia crushing Putin under its own weight. It was this understanding that Russia always seems doomed to repeat its own history that led me to seek a possible solution to this threat.
Gradually I’ve come to the deep conviction that the existing form of power in Russia simply maintains the traditional system of autocracy, and that without revolutionary change it will be impossible to escape from this autocratic trap. I’ve come to the conclusion that given Russia’s historical traditions and experience of politics, only a parliamentary form of government would be acceptable. Of course, we’re talking here about a proper parliamentary republic, and not the rubber-stamp version that was typical of the Soviet “parliament”.
In Russia, any other form of government, whereby all the executive functions of power are in the hands of the formal head of state, would inevitably sooner or later lead to the re-emergence of an autocratic and totalitarian regime. This would be for the simple reason that the cultural, economic and socio-political restrictions that prevent a state from sliding into the bog of authoritarianism, are simply too under-developed in Russia. Any individual, even the weakest, who found themselves at the top of the pyramid of power, would not be able to stop themselves from being seduced into crushing that pyramid beneath them. This makes it essential to slice the top off this pyramid.
I see my mission as follows: to convince those who share my views and wish to see Russia free – not just for a couple of months or even years, but for decades to come – that this can be achieved. But it will happen only once we have built a genuine federal parliamentary republic in Russia, with a developed system of self-government. It is vital to rid ourselves of a dictator; it is vital to investigate the crimes committed by this regime; it is vital to re-establish even the most basic democratic norms in the country and to bring back justice and the rule of law. And what is even more vital is that this is carried out in such a way that everything that we put back cannot be lost once more. That is possible only by moving to a parliamentary republic.
Building such a republic in Russia is far more complicated than overturning Putin’s regime. It calls for a genuine revolution, one that doesn’t simply scratch the surface of political life, but overturns the very foundations of the traditional Russian way of life. A revolution such as this demands massive efforts and sacrifices, it means taking risks and changing literally everything, from the bottom to the very top. But only such an all-encompassing revolution can provide Russia with the long-term immunity that it needs to rid itself of autocracy and the opportunity to build a new way of life suitable for the modern, post-industrial, global world.
It's important at this point to explain what I understand by “revolution”. I am absolutely convinced that revolution in Russia is inevitable and that it’s desperately needed. This doesn’t alter my extreme dislike of revolutions in principle, nor my deep regret that Russia has gone so far down an historic dead-end that the only possible way out is through a revolution. Any revolution represents a trial for a society, even when it brings with it a wonderful future. At the same time, a revolution does not necessarily mean street battles, storming buildings, seizing post-offices, bridges and the telegraph office. Such events are not indicative of a revolution but of an uprising. Yes, such incidents often accompany a revolution, but they are not essential and, what’s more, are not the main component of a revolution.
What I understand by “revolution” is a total reset of the fundamental principles of the life of a society, which completely alters the course of that society’s historical development. Whether or not such a reset of the fundamentals is accompanied by social explosions or whether it passes off without so much as a whimper is a secondary question. Most important of all is the result. In my opinion, Russia’s move to become a parliamentary republic is only the tip of the iceberg. By “parliamentary republic”, I mean the country being run by a government made up of representatives of a coalition of parties that control a parliament chosen by free and fair elections, and which, in turn represents a genuinely wide majority of society. At the foundation of such a republic lie fundamental changes to the most varied aspects of the life of society, the implementation of which is essential in order that the system of parliamentary democracy remains sustainable and stable. The most important of all these changes is the switch to a genuinely federal system where cities are self-governing. Only the cities can provide the political basis for a stable parliamentary republic.
In the case of Russia, a parliamentary republic and federalism are inseparable from each other. In order to drag Russia out of the rut of autocracy and place it firmly on a stable democratic trajectory, there has to be a move to a parliamentary republic. And in order to ensure that this parliamentary republic does not become yet another façade for autocracy, it must be strengthened by a federal system.
This is already a profound revolution: a country that for centuries has been accustomed to regard itself by looking from the top down, must learn to look at itself from the bottom up. The logic here is simple. There are practically no democratic political traditions in Russia; what there has been is basically anti-democratic. Civil society didn’t succeed in establishing itself properly, and today it’s been practically wiped out. Even if favourable – close to ideal – conditions were to arise (and I seriously doubt that this is possible), the re-establishment of civil society even to the levels previously achieved would take years. And this is bearing in mind that the previous level of civil society was very basic. At the federal level, just as at the local level, there is no party system. All the existing parties are either fake – created or dominated by the authorities themselves – or they’re marginal groups, united around their petty leaders and holding no serious weight among the majority of the population.
In such conditions, from where can a parliamentary system come with the stability needed to be an alternative to autocracy? Where is the necessary strength in such a feeble world? Only in the regions. It is only the regional elites with their local interests, their local self-awareness and with their regional links that have been built up over centuries that have the ability in modern Russia to be the potential subjects – and not objects – of politics. If they were to support a parliamentary republic, it will come about. If they don’t, it will simply disappear like yet another historic Russian mirage. A parliamentary republic is possible only if there is a proper federal structure, when local finances and local life in general is governed by those who live in the locality.
Why is the issue of federalism so important for Russia? It’s because with its cultural, religious and, of course, economic pluralism, Russia can be a unified state only under the cruellest of dictatorships, which crushes and levels out all local characteristics. Without such a dictatorship it’s impossible to bring under a single denominator places such as Moscow and Grozny; Kazan and Magadan; Kaliningrad and Khabarovsk; St Petersburg and Kemerovo. If we wish to have even a hint of democracy in Russia, we must allow for the existence of pluralism; and not simply economic, but political, too. Incidentally, the Russian Empire that is so revered by Putin’s followers was politically pluralistic. For centuries the European system of self-governance in Finland existed alongside the khanates of the Middle Ages that ruled Central Asia. Democracy in Russia means pluralism; and in modern times political pluralism can be achieved only through federalism.
Achieving this, however, is no easy task. Why is it that Russia has always been an overly-centralised state? Because if the centre showed any weakness and handed any significant autonomy over to the regions, petty little tsars would rise up in these regions, each of whom would prove to be greedier and more evil than the tsar in Moscow. So the people would ask Moscow to help defend them from these local satraps and the bandits whom they cultivated around them. And the power of the centre always relied on this. A weak tsar led to strong petty tsars; and a strong tsar meant the petty tsars were weak. How can this vicious circle be broken?
There is a way out. We need to introduce a third element, a force that is independent of these two extremes. This is something that everyone knows very well, because it’s the very force that in recent years the Putin regime has been trying above all else to crush. It is local self-government. A regional governor who’s taken power into his own hands while the centre was looking the other way, can be stopped by an independent and self-sufficient mayor or head of a local administration. If the local authorities limit the powers of the petty tsar, he or she will be obliged to become a regional constitutional monarch. And if not, the local authorities will instinctively seek the support of Moscow, thus strengthening central government. This will help to even out the system, because it will bring in the checks and balances that are essential for creating a genuine democracy.
The space for an independent judiciary arises only when this triangle of the local authorities, regional governor and central government is developed. By definition, the relationship between the parties cannot be ideal. There will either be constant war between them, or there will have to be an arbiter acceptable to all. It is absolutely impossible for there to be an independent legal system if the need for it is not recognised by the stronger side. Apart from the united local elites, there is no strong side in modern Russia: they’ve all been squeezed out. The centre, the regions and the local authorities will need rules and an arbiter who can watch over them all. In such a situation, perhaps the idea of a genuine independent judiciary might take root in Russia for the first time.
The arrival of a proper system of justice will mark the start of a gradual massive change in the relationship between the citizen and the state, and will create the conditions for the restoration (or, to be more accurate, building once more from scratch) of civil society in Russia. Progress in this will lead eventually to the final result: freedom, human rights, free and fair elections based on political competition, and stable institutions that support a state governed by the rule of law. But all of this and much more besides will not come all at once. Such an outcome can be achieved only by following a chain of events step by step. And the most important link in this chain, I believe, is the path to a parliamentary republic.
It is specifically this path – and not “the battle with a bloody regime” – that represents my goal, the pursuit of which has drawn me into politics. But the move towards it will not be swift and will require a great deal of patience.
Unfortunately, defining precisely the goal towards which we’re heading doesn’t guarantee that we’ll end up exactly where we want to be. We have to be aware of what lies ahead of us on this path. Clearly, we cannot expect anything good to come from the starting point to where Putin and his friends have brought us. Many of the prerequisites that are essential for the establishment of democracy in Russia simply don’t exist. This is often ignored by many very honourable people, who are idealists in the best sense of the word, and who really want things to be better…but in the depths of their souls they realise that things will simply be the same as they always have been. On the one hand, we have a terror machine served by an enormous number of functionaries who won’t give up their positions even after Putin goes. And on the other, we have a frightened society that has been oppressed by this terror, has lost its reliable social connections and is accompanied by a quantitatively reduced and qualitatively degraded elite. Obviously, we’re not going to be able to clear this ravine in one leap. We cannot avoid a period of transition during which the hangers-on from Putin’s old society will try to suppress us, while the growth of a new society will begin. This idea is there for all to see, yet as a rule it’s ignored in the general discussion about Russia’s future. But from the practical point of view it is the structure of society in this period of transition that’s the most pressing issue today.
The point is that any kind of transition in Russia, no matter from where and to where, is like being in a dense forest, in which it’s easier to lose oneself forever than it is to escape from it. What’s more, no one has yet managed to escape from it in the exact place where they’d planned to. This is why the period of transition has to be regarded very seriously. We can be sure of only one thing: the time available for the post-Putin period will be very limited. It must not last for more than two years, because that’s all the time it will take for whatever political force takes Putin’s place to gain people’s trust. If the transitional, or temporary, government manages to survive for two years, then one of two things will happen. Either it will have to introduce a cruel dictatorship for an unspecified length of time; or it’ll be swept away by the people. This is because during the period of transition it will be essential for the government to introduce a whole host of unpopular measures in the most difficult of circumstances. And this is even before we take into account such complicating factors as the resistance of the old ruling clans and the likely fall in the standard of living that accompanies virtually every revolution. A compromise must be reached with society.
Thus, it is essential to construct a reliable institutional framework for democracy in Russia. In my view this means creating a parliamentary republic, as well as a return to federalism and self-government under the rule of law. Paradoxically, the question as to whether or not these long-term political goals are achievable depends on the ability of the temporary government to obtain in the short term enough trust on credit from the majority. Without this they won’t be able to carry through effective – albeit in some aspects, unpopular – policies, aimed at defeating the opposition of the old clans and establishing the basis for a new statehood.
If the temporary government succeeds in establishing a strict “new course” then it would be realistic to consider that the long-term goals could be achieved. If, however, it’s unable to do this, and it slips into populism by simply carrying out the immediate wishes of the people, then we can forget about such ambitions. People's trust must be lasting, drawn out over a long period. It’s not difficult to gain the support of the majority over a short period of time. People grow weary of dictatorial regimes and in certain circumstances it takes just a spark to ignite passive dislike into active hatred. But such flare-ups quickly die down and the people can swiftly discard their new leaders. This is the weakness of the “Maidan-style” uprisings: the explosion happens easily enough, but the strength of the explosion is insufficient to carry matters through to their conclusion. In order to obtain lasting support, different, systemic decisions are needed, not just taking advantage of anger that’s been building up over a long period like social dynamite.
Considering all this, today we can at last make an accurate diagnosis of the 1990s. Surprisingly, this period has now once again become a subject of heated discussion. At that time, attempts to carry out lasting reforms failed. In my opinion this was specifically because the reformers ignored the essential task of enlisting society’s solid support. They naively believed that they could carry out changes while ignoring the views of the majority. At best, they assumed that they would remain neutral; in the worst case, they thought they could ride roughshod over any opposition. They chose a course of action that appealed ideologically to a small section of society that shared their radical “westernised” views. The economic beneficiaries of the reforms were also a very mixed – and at the same time tiny – group. The majority of the population not only suffered significant economic hardship from these changes, but the values that the reformers were preaching remained foreign to them. The inevitable outcome of such a situation was that society was alienated from the government and the path it was following. The consequences of this alienation were reflected in the mass support, initially a counter-revolution, for Putin’s reactionary political course. If we don’t want to repeat this scenario in the future we must not repeat the errors of the ’nineties.
An exceedingly difficult task will present itself from the outset to the temporary government: in a situation where there is a deep economic crisis and a fragmented society that is teetering on the edge of civil confrontation, how can problems be solved that have built up over many decades? How can such a government win the support of society for its actions?
If we put to one side any ideas for “a quick fix” based on the general dislike of the old regime (and experience shows that such dislike doesn’t last long), then all that’s left is to put into action a “left-wing plan” that would at least satisfy the fundamental economic demands of the majority of the population. It’s essential that the majority believes that the government’s actions strategically match their own long-term economic interests. Only then will the people be prepared to back the government in its difficult journey through the period of transition. In other words (and many people still fail to accept this) there’s a fairly simple calculation that has to be done that will limit any deep change in Russia: it will have to be carried out along with a “left-wing plan”. By “left-wing plan”, what I mean is that it must be geared towards the social and economic needs of the people; as opposed to the “right-wing plan” that satisfies the needs of the minority. Had the reformers in the 1990s not ignored the social needs of the majority of the people, it is quite possible that today we would not be trying to solve the problem of Putinism. If those who have set themselves the task of carrying out a political battle with the regime once again ignore the social and economic needs of the majority, they will never achieve their political goals.
Nowadays, everyone understands this. There are now no opposition forces that wouldn’t promise the Russian people social benefits and economic well-being along with political freedom and a state governed by the rule of law. Nevertheless, people don’t rush to believe such promises. For some, it’s because the 1990s are still fresh in their minds; for others, it’s because there are few concrete details in such promises, and much of what is said is unrealistic with the current state of the economy.
In order to win enough trust from the majority to carry out far-reaching changes, people shouldn’t be given promises of a wonderful life in some far-off future, but guarantees that will work right now. Strange as it may seem, such guarantees exist now, and can be presented to the people by a temporary government in exchange for long-term support of a reformist path. This involves returning to the people what was taken from them in the 1990s: namely benefitting from the extraction of natural resources, known as resource rent, and a fair distribution of property.
Resource rent is the principle source of wealth in Russia, both privately and publicly. Officially, resource rent today is controlled by the state; but in reality, it’s controlled by the mafia cabal that’s replaced the state. All ideas that are put forward regarding the fate of resource rent come back to one point: whatever force replaces the Putin regime has to ensure that the distribution of resource rent is done more fairly than it is today. In other words, the people will receive more than they do now. But since the Russian population has grown used to regarding anything related to the state with deep mistrust, they don’t believe in this crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, either.
But a completely different approach can be taken, one which excludes the state from its role as the distributor of resource rent among the population. In recent years, everyone has realised that there are two insoluble problems in Russia: pensions; and the unfair distribution of profits from the sale of natural resources. So why not solve one problem with the help of the other? Why not send profits from energy sales (which, in any case, are fixed separately from the rest of the budget) to citizens’ individual savings accounts, that could be opened directly in the Treasury? The sum that’s needed to pay fair pensions is almost exactly the same as the amount that goes into the budget from the exploitation of resource rent. So locking them together is totally logical. In one fell swoop, the Russian people are able directly to control resource rent, while putting a stop to feeding a gigantic bureaucracy and the mafia that’s attached itself to it. This is something that both can and should be done immediately after the temporary government takes over. It would open up a channel of political possibilities while implementing simple changes. This is the most important thing; but there is something else as well.
Clearly, it will be impossible in practice to restore trust between the state and society in the near future, unless the consequences of the unfair privatisation of the 1990s are removed. It’s a trauma that set in with the birth of privatisation, and one which will prevent the introduction of any measures to improve the health of the economy. It means that there’s no trust in society, not only for the government, but for the very principle of private property. Yet private property lies at the heart of any constitutionally-governed state. Largely thanks to the experience of privatisation in the ’nineties, the majority of the population see private property in Russia as the result of an unfair distribution of state assets. What’s more, this is also partly reflected in today’s situation, since a significant portion of public wealth is controlled by a small criminal segment that has crushed the state.
There are two reasons why no progress can be made on the path to democratic reform unless this totally parasitic property is wiped out. Firstly, if this property remains in the hands of the collective beneficiaries of the Putin regime it will be used to block any constructive activity attempted by the temporary government. And secondly, unless this property is confiscated it will be impossible to earn society’s trust; society won’t support any government that leaves this money in the hands of these people.
Therefore, the second essential social measure of the temporary government must be the expropriation of this parasitic capital from the Putin clan. The assets that are seized from them must be passed to public investment funds under the control of parliament. The income from the activity of these funds should be directed towards additional funding for social projects. First and foremost this should be for education and health care. This can be placed in individual savings accounts that will be opened for every citizen. This could be considered as a compensatory measure, as it would go some way to righting the wrongs that were committed by the state under its privatisation programme. So it would be a step towards re-establishing socio-economic justice.
In effect, Russia today lives under a state of emergency. There exists a regime of political terror. Any practical resistance to the authorities is paralysed. However, experience shows that this cannot continue forever. Any closed system ultimately contains within itself the reason for its collapse. Putin’s regime will be no exception. And even if right now it’s difficult to influence the longevity of this regime, it’s entirely possible to affect the pace of the post-regime recovery. This will largely depend upon the speed of reaction by the elites as to what is happening; on how much preparation is done to rethink Russian history; on there being a clear and achievable goal from those seeking change; and, even more importantly, on there being a detailed road-map for change.
The normalisation process after the fall of the regime will be made much simpler and swifter if a provisional consensus can be reached by society on all these points. The lack of such a consensus and especially the lack of an actual plan around which consensus can be reached will have a seriously adverse effect on society’s chances of repairing itself. Indeed, it may even make this impossible. Circumstances may well dictate that for a period of time – and this could be long drawn-out – spiritual and intellectual opposition may prove to be virtually the only form of resistance possible for the majority of those citizens who are opposed to the regime. But “otherworldliness” and the fact that this appears to be something abstract doesn’t lessen its historic significance. On the contrary, this is exactly where the frontline of the battle for the future of Russia lies today. Every action begins with a word; and it’s vital that this word is the right one and that it hits the target.
In today’s Russia there’s no place for politics and no motives for engaging in politics. But there will be in the future Russia. And it’s the thought of a Russia that confines Putinism to the past that inspires me to take up political activity. That future looks complicated. Putin will leave Russia with a difficult legacy that will mean future progress will not be easy. The path will be sown with the kind of historical traps that Russia has already fallen into on a number of occasions, and it’s ended up being stuck in them for decades.
I am convinced that the re-formation of Russia into a parliamentary and genuinely federal republic with strong local self-rule is the fulcrum that can provide the starting point from where we can cast off the curse of autocracy forever. At the same time I’m aware that reaching this starting point can be done in Russia only if we take the “left route”. My political goal today is to create a wide consensus in society both for the goal itself and for the methods by which it will be reached.
PART I. HOW DO YOU GET RID OF THE OLD DRAGON?
The vast majority of people live comfortably alongside the dragon until their final day; that being the day when they or their loved ones are killed, arrested or kicked out onto the street from their cosy little comfort zone. Love for the dragon is the natural state of affairs for the man on the street, which immediately becomes the main problem in any transitional period from dictatorship to democracy. It’s easier to get rid of the dragon than it is to defeat the ordinary person’s devotion to it. For this reason, getting rid of the dragon is not simply a lovely, one-act revolutionary show that ends with happy and joyous fireworks. It’s a drama that takes place over many acts, and has a complicated and sometimes tragic theme. And in each act of this drama, its actors must overcome difficult dilemmas, many of which don’t have straightforward solutions.
Chapter 1. The Strategy for Victory:
Peaceful Protest, or Peaceful Uprising?
What should be the strategy for victory in the battle against despotism? People who lived in the 18th, 19th, or especially the 20th Centuries would find it easy to answer this question. The strategy for victory is revolution.
But what sort of revolution? A violent one, of course. Marx wrote that revolution is the midwife of history. And one of the founding fathers of the USA, Abraham Lincoln, expressed it thus: “Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
The right of the American people to rise up against those who have usurped power is enshrined in the United States’ Declaration of Independence. Lenin and his supporters regarded revolution as the fundamental source of law and called for the enemies of the revolution to be judged according to their revolutionary legal consciousness.
But in the final quarter of the twentieth century everything became much more complicated. Revolutions, which over the course of 200 years had caused rivers of blood to flow across Europe, became unfashionable. And the collapse of the USSR and of the regimes in Eastern Europe that were linked to the Soviet Union created the illusion that victory over tyrants could be achieved without the use of violence. Perhaps not immediately, but ultimately violence was removed from the strategy of the struggle against despotism as something that was undesirable and even unacceptable. So what then was left in this strategy?
Peaceful protest was seen as the only acceptable and universal strategy for all times and in all situations. The aim was not simply a revolution, but it had to be a velvet revolution, a revolution in kid gloves. From now on protest could not involve violence, even if this violence were to be directed against a tyrant and his henchmen who had drowned the country in blood.
Up to a certain point this strategy of “non-resistance to evil by violence” worked; at least, that was how it seemed from the sidelines. The velvet revolutions developed into colour revolutions (although it would be more accurate to describe them as “flower revolutions”: “the Rose Revolution”, “the Carnation Revolution” and so on). Colour revolutions became the successful political technology, which led to the careful removal from power of authoritarian regimes without serious bloodshed; at least at the moment when power passed into the hands of the opposition. In the twenty years that passed from the time of the “self-dissolution” of the USSR and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the standard set by the colour revolutions became firstly the model for revolution, and then revolutionary dogma. But the consolidation of a dogma leads inevitably to stagnation.
It's necessary here to point out one thing: any revolution, even a velvet one, doesn’t take place without violence, or, more often, without the clear and imminent threat of violence, which leads the regime to prefer to seek a compromise. It’s this preparedness of the regime to compromise, and not the desire on the part of the revolutionaries to find a compromise with the regime at any cost, that makes velvet revolutions possible. As a result, such revolutions succeed only when they are up against outdated dictatorships – authoritarian regimes that are run by the children or even the grandchildren of their founders.
Recently there was a revolutionary situation in Belarus. This was a crisis of the new era that the opposition tried at first to solve by the old rules, using the methods of the colour revolutions: coordination, mobilisation, solidarity, psychological pressure and the moral support of the West, occasionally strengthened by a little financial help.
Previously, as a rule, this set of actions had proved sufficient for a dictatorship to capitulate. But in Belarus, things “didn’t quite work out that way”. The opposition were coordinated, they mobilised, they demonstrated unprecedented solidarity, they brought powerful psychological pressure to bear, and they had the support of the West; but all this came to nought. The regime drowned the opposition in violence, and the support of the West was more than made up for on the other side by the help received from Russia. Increasing attempts to bring people out onto the streets did not bring the opposition any closer to success, as a result of which general dissatisfaction grew with the outcome of the revolution.
Against this background, both in Belarus itself and beyond, there was inevitably a discussion about the strategy of protest in a situation where regimes fail to give ground, and where there’s no possibility of outside intervention (clearly, no one was going to start a nuclear war with Russia for the sake of the Belarussians’ freedom).
This gave rise, on the one hand, to doubts as to whether adopting solely peaceful methods for the struggle really is a universal and effective solution in any revolutionary situation. On the other hand, there were concerns that calling for non-peaceful methods could lead to the protest being discredited in the eyes of both the population and the international community. This would lead, in its turn, to inevitable defeat. So opposition arose to both peaceful and non-peaceful protest. In my view, this is a completely false dilemma.
In principle, can there be non-violent protest in a non-democratic state? Under despotism there are no legal boundaries for protest; that’s why it’s despotism. Any citizen who is genuinely protesting against a dictatorial regime (and not simply taking part in a mock protest as agreed with the authorities) is already breaking the law. If meetings, marches, demonstrations, pickets and other forms of public political activity are forbidden, then a single step outside these with the most peaceful of intentions can turn violent, because it’s likely to lead to violence from the authorities. This will provoke resistance, even if it’s passive, such as someone being beaten by the police who’s protecting their head from the blows of the police truncheons.
So under a dictatorship the types of protest that we automatically call “peaceful” or “non-peaceful” don’t differ from each other at all. Any kind of public protest against the usurpation of power has the potential to be non-peaceful, even though the level of violence can be very different, from virtually nothing to something serious.
In some circumstances, the level of violence that is acceptable for the participants may be very low, in others it could be quite high. But in all cases, the threshold is not zero. If it were, people wouldn’t take part in protest actions on principle. When we have dictatorship on one side and genuine protest against it on the other, we’re increasing the chances of a violent clash by calling on people to disobey the laws laid down by the dictatorship.
I believe that the question about peaceful or non-peaceful protest overshadows a much more significant question, and leads the discussion off at a tangent. The question is whether in principle we consider that revolutionary violence is legitimate. It’s only when we’ve answered this question that we can proceed to the next one: what is the desirable or non-desirable form that said violence can take? In my opinion, there can be only one answer: yes, revolutionary violence is legitimate.
If we analyse the position of those in favour of “only peaceful protest” then it quickly emerges that more often than not behind the beautiful and peace-loving words lies an attempt to defend the idea of the illegality of revolutionary violence in principle. This is a dangerous delusion. If you regard peaceful protest as meaning that you reject on principle any revolutionary violence (and that is how many people naively see it), then you will be in good company with any dictator. Doing battle with any dictatorship is, therefore, completely impossible.
Throughout the history of mankind, no dictatorship has disappeared without coming under the clear or hidden threat of force. A dictator’s never stepped down just because they were tired. If it wasn’t violence itself, then it was at least the threat of violence that always played a decisive role in the victory of the revolution. It’s another matter that the threat of violence has nearly always been more effective than blatant violence.
This is not simply a question of humanity. If a revolution starts with violence, it will end with it, too. And if a revolution ends in violence, then that will never be the end of it. A violent revolution almost inevitably produces a dictatorship in its wake that sets out to crush any counter-revolution. This must be borne in mind by anyone who – contrary to those who believe only in peaceful protest – calls for a swift transition to a violent struggle.
Nevertheless, as the experience of Belarus showed (and bearing in mind that the Russian experience promises to be even more striking), if the regime is prepared to open fire on its people, then a demonstrative and early refusal by the opposition to use violence as a way of seizing power will be counter-productive. Unless pressure is put on the authorities that there will be direct foreign intervention, restricting protest to simply applying psychological pressure can never bring down a regime that is prepared to go to any limits to stay in power. This is the case even if the protest has the support of the majority of society. For this reason, the concept of peaceful protest as a total and absolute rejection of revolutionary violence is nothing more than dogma. If you turn away completely from violence in principle, then you turn away from revolution.
In reality, not only is revolutionary violence legitimate, but historically it has always and everywhere proved to be a source of the new legitimacy. Revolution and constitution always go hand in hand. Had there been no violent revolutions in the world, constitutional order would never have been established anywhere. This must be borne in mind even when you look back over many centuries.
If the constitutional order collapses, then frequently the only realistic way to restore it has been to return to the use of revolutionary violence. This was why the old constitutions contained the people’s revolutionary right to rise up, and devoted so much attention to the people’s right to carry arms. Anyone who tried to seize power had to understand that all that they had taken from the people by force, could be taken back by the people by force, because a nation that rose up had greater legitimacy than a despotic regime had. These are hard truths. It is the ABC of revolution. And it has to be learnt by heart. If, that is, you wish to be victorious.
However, recognising the legitimacy of revolutionary violence as a means of struggle against a dictatorship does not mean that you’re immediately ready in practice to resort to this violence. Recognising the possibility and the legitimacy of using violence in a revolutionary struggle with a dictatorship is a strategic question. Employing or not employing violence in a concrete situation and, if you do choose to employ it, to what extent and in what ways – that’s a question of revolutionary tactics, and that can be decided in very different ways.
Often the deliberate refusal to escalate the violence in order to avoid massive casualties is the only correct solution, especially when the majority aren’t ready to take action if there’s no revolutionary situation in the country. But transforming this decision into a dogma, a conviction that in any circumstances your protest must remain peaceful is the same as voluntarily giving in to the dictator and, in effect, giving up any realistic struggle for power. The regime should always be under pressure, aware that if any force is used there will be a counter-force, and that every crime will be punished. Only in such circumstances will those in opposition to the regime have any hope of success.
Nevertheless, peaceful pressure can only rarely be as peaceful as its proponents might wish it to be. Any peaceful protest that isn’t backed by some kind of violence can still ignite the authorities and lead them to employ their own forms of violence against it. This can happen for a wide variety of reasons. It may be because of the collapse of the structures of power, because of the depletion of resources (in such a situation a strike can be a very useful show of strength), or for various other reasons. However, there is the danger that if a regime collapses because it’s run out of resources, then the ones who gain most on the battlefield will be the looters, be they criminals or mercenaries. In this case, the protest movement will find itself having to use violence against a third party.
One thing alone is clear. The protest cannot be held back from within. If the revolution has a built-in restriction on how fast it can go, it will never get off the ground. Once they’ve started, the leaders of the protest must always be ready to take the next step. Once you’ve called people out onto the streets, then you have to accept that by that action you’ve already made revolutionary violence possible. It’s a different matter that as a tactical move you may call upon your supporters temporarily to hold back.
Calling for violence when there’s no revolutionary situation is just as much a betrayal of protest as completely refusing to use violence in a revolutionary situation, when this is essential to bring the revolution to an end. The latter would be the same as leaving the movement leaderless and at the demands of fate. As a rule that will lead to the swift defeat of the revolution and even greater violence and casualties, and not for the sake of the revolution but for the counter-revolution. This is why protest should, of course, always try to remain peaceful; and it will remain so if there is convincing evidence that you are prepared to answer violence with violence if necessary.
Chapter 2. Bringing the Protesters Together:
Many Parties or a Single Party?
Everyone knows the well-worn metaphor of the broken arrows. It’s been passed down through the ages. A wise leader (or a tsar) first demonstratively shows how easy it is to break a single arrow. He then helplessly throws up his hands after trying to break a whole quiver of such arrows all at once. It’s become a hackneyed image; but its basic message remains true. When any kind of protest is united, it’s this unity that’s the key feature that makes it effective. Few would argue with this; but each person tends to understand in their own way just what that unity actually is. Unity can be demonstrated by a multitude of voices. But sometimes everyone needs to sing with one voice.
This is exactly where the democratic opposition has slipped up in Russia today. When they speak, the leaders of all the supposedly significant protest movements say they are in favour of “unity”. Indeed, it would be very odd to hear them declaim that they’re against a wide front in the struggle with the dictatorship. Yet many of those who talk about unity, are guided in practice by a different principle, one that was put forward in similar historical circumstances by Lenin: “Before we can unite…we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation”. The danger of this slogan is that in the process of putting all their efforts into demarcation, the ultimate goal of unity slips into the background. This is exactly what we see happening today in Russia.
If we look back at history, we can see that protest movements have succeeded by following various paths. Among these, we can pick out two types of successful revolutions. Some were carried out by close-knit groups of like-minded people, united not only by their similar political views, but who organised themselves on pseudo-military lines. This gave them a structure on which to build the new state after their victory. Other successful revolutions were carried out by a wide coalition of the most varied political forces, linked by only a fragile political bond. This bond rarely survived the actual revolution.
If we look more closely at this, we realise that very often the tactical tasks of the revolution, such as the seizure and consolidation of power, were carried out more effectively by pseudo-military, conspiratorial organisations (resembling religious sects in their structure), rather than by political parties in the strict sense of that term. But the strategic tasks that the revolutions had before them, notably tasks of a democratic nature, were better solved where a coalition of diverse forces stood at their head, having been brought together by the moment and the circumstances.
Knowing this, you might think that all responsible political forces would try to create a broad coalition. But in practice this doesn’t happen. Either coalitions aren’t formed or, if they are, they quickly fall apart. Unfortunately, there are strong objective reasons for this. History shows that the more aggressive the dictatorship and the more merciless the regime, the fewer chances there are for a coalition to come together and triumph. This is understandable. The regime recognises that the unity of the opposition forces represents the greatest threat to its existence, and so does everything in its power to prevent the opposition from uniting, including supporting secessionist sentiments among their opponents. If the regime has to choose between “irreconcilable elements” and “the most irreconcilable elements” among the opposition, strangely enough they tend to choose the latter, even though this risks bringing about their own downfall. This has already happened once in Russian history, at the start of the twentieth century.
We must never forget that there is not only a tradition of autocracy in Russia, there is also a tradition of Bolshevism, with sectarianism and schismatics within the revolutionary movement. Each of these traditions is closely linked to the other. In the country’s history, Bolshevism has played no less a tragic role than autocracy, which it first destroyed, then reincarnated in a more sophisticated format. For the vast majority of our contemporaries, Bolshevism and Communism are one and the same thing. But this is not the case. It’s possible not to be a Communist – even to be an Anti-Communist – and at the same time remain a Bolshevik. What’s more, if Communism in Russia appeared largely by chance, Bolshevism grew out of the very roots of Russian culture.
Bolshevism is a movement which developed out of Russian populism, [through movements such as the narodniki – Tr.] and not through liberal ideals. For Bolshevism, as for autocracy, it was the state that was the “social demiurge”, not society. But if autocracy aimed to preserve society with the help of the state, Bolshevism wanted to use the state to turn society inside out. The Bolsheviks never needed allies when they were in power; they simply needed power itself. Bolshevism is very tenacious, and can take on the most unexpected forms. It’s not only Leninism and Stalinism, but also, for example, it can be Yeltsinism in its most extreme form. Unfortunately, many of the reforms of the 1990s were carried out in the same cavalier, Bolshevik ways as Soviet reforms had been, although at the time this was not so obvious. And today we can see the rise of a neo-Bolshevik mood in the Russian protest movement. This philosophy and ideology is becoming increasingly attractive as the regime becomes ever more restrictive.
Neo-bolshevism’s strength lies in its being aimed at literally creating an army of like-minded people who are ready to act harmoniously and in an organised way as the centre commands. Lenin called this “a new type of party”. Such an army is much more effective than an amorphous and shaky coalition in solving political issues in conditions of the civil war that the regime is currently waging against its own people. But there’s another side to the coin. War creates fertile ground for neo-bolshevism to flourish strongly through violence. That’s the environment for neo-bolshevism, which is why – consciously or unconsciously – it’s always geared up for war. Neo-bolshevism’s response to the civil war that the dictatorship has declared on the people is to launch its own civil war. It puts out a fire by using fire of its own in response.
The Bolshevik tradition in the Russian protest movement presupposes that the unity of the protest should depend on a single party. This means that the nucleus of the protest movement must be ideologically and organisationally homogenous, governed from a single point at the centre by a leader or a group of leaders. The nucleus may be surrounded by hangers-on, but any alliance with them is merely temporary and opportunistic. For neo-bolshevism, betrayal of such allies is the political and ethical norm. A reliable ally should totally merge into the party, politically and in an organisational sense. The party is not there to represent the interests of society; it’s meant to be the driving force between the leadership and the revolutionary class.
Naturally, if we’re talking about an armed uprising or a war then organising the protest movement this way is ideal. But the problem in such circumstances is that for the neo-bolsheviks the war becomes an end in itself. If the situation develops relatively peacefully they’ll have no chance whatsoever of coming to power. Indeed, they simply cannot come to power; they can only seize power, when things have broken down to such an extent that all the institutions of the state have ground to a halt. That’s why the two principal slogans of neo-bolshevism always have been, and remain, “the worse things are, the better”; and “anyone who is not with us is against us”.
Paradoxically, as a radical tendency in the protest movement, neo-bolshevism assists the temporary stabilisation and strengthening of the regime. Thanks to the neo-bolsheviks, the only possible change can come about through a violent coup, carried out at the moment of the regime’s final ruin. This happens when there’s a total collapse because of war, a huge ecological disaster or some other similar cause. Because neo-bolshevism sees itself as the main beneficiary of such a situation, it stops the protesters from uniting and prevents any handover of power that might take place before such a collapse or in a less violent way. It deliberately supports the regime in the belief that it will eventually bury it. It is because of this support that it’s valued by the regime.
In most instances, neo-bolshevism represents a dead-end for the protest movement, since the conditions necessary for its triumph simply don’t align. But on those rare occasions when war, or some other catastrophic event brings down the regime, and the neo-bolshevik sects are presented with the opportunity for a successful coup, it invariably ends in a civil war and a new dictatorship, sometimes even more cruel than the one it’s replaced. This comes from the very nature of neo-bolshevism, which believes it’s essential that only a small section of the population should seize and hold power. Is this the revolution that awaits Russia? Is such a victory over the current regime worth dying for?
An alternative to neo-bolshevism could be a protest coalition: a multi-party, multi-faceted, protest; a collection of various political groups. Of course, a coalition is not the best form of organisation in a war. But the basic principle of a coalition is this: better to unite sooner, than allow the situation to become worse. Uniting the opposition creates the conditions for a change of regime before the moment of complete collapse arrives. The price of the fall of the regime is measured in the number of lives victory will cost. And we cannot be indifferent to what this final price will be.
A coalition is always a compromise. A coalition brings together radical forces, less radical forces and even those who may lean towards cooperating with the regime. Neo-bolshevism is inevitably radical. Yes, it also seeks compromises, but only tactical ones, designed to achieve a particular result and then they’ll deal with these “hangers-on”. This is why all historical unions that the Bolsheviks have formed have always ended badly for their temporary allies. The principal slogan of a coalition is in direct contrast to that of the neo-bolsheviks: “all who are not against us, are with us”. We don’t want the result of the revolution to be post-revolutionary ruin, but a post-revolutionary democratic state, governed by the rule of law.
If someone is prepared to make compromises before the revolution, they’ll be ready to make them after the revolution, too. But someone who refuses to make compromises ahead of the revolution will be even less likely to agree to them after it, and will become a revolutionary dictator. In time, a revolutionary dictator becomes simply a dictator, and a new revolution will be needed in order to get rid of them. This is the vicious circle that Russia has been living in for more than a hundred years. And if the most radical revolutionaries are not prepared to unite with those who are neither radical nor revolutionaries, then that simply means that the ground will be prepared for an eternal Putin.
Of course, there are different kinds of compromises, too. We need to strike a happy medium between the kind of single party structure that leads to neo-bolshevism, and the sort of multi-party structure that results in a mere talking-shop where nothing is done. There will be times in the revolutionary process where we will need military leaders. But alongside them there must be an organ of power which gives legitimacy to the leaders’ revolutionary authority and that prevents them from rising above the revolution and society.
The creation of a revolutionary coalition is the most important task of the opposition, notwithstanding its unpopularity among the protesters. In reality, a coalition will bring closer the sort of revolution that the majority of the protesters want to create and, most importantly, this will guarantee that the revolution will not end up in a new dictatorship. Compromises will be possible and essential in order to create a coalition. As well as having a radical centre, every successful revolution has to have broad and less radical support around it. That is what links the revolution to the people. Without this, success is impossible to achieve.
Chapter 3. How to Expand the Protest:
Underground or In Emigration?
Protest is a subtle and complicated issue.
On the one hand, it’s impossible to create it or artificially encourage it. It arises all by itself and proceeds under its own steam. Protest leaders have to follow this momentum carefully and try not only to move with it, but anticipate each next step, so as always to be in the right place at the right time.
On the other hand, in order to be in a position to do this, it’s essential to be in a state of permanent readiness, by maintaining links with the people and being fuelled by their energy, whilst passing on the right ideas to them. And leaders may have to be in this state of readiness – while being unable to act – for a long time. Years. Maybe even decades. It’s not easy to do, both psychologically and purely technically.
Naturally, the question arises: where should the leaders be while they wait for the protest to gain sufficient strength to launch into its political orbit? This is a difficult question to answer today; and tomorrow it will be even more difficult. We’ve witnessed how, in just a few years, the regime in Russia has gone from being shamefacedly authoritarian to being openly fascist; and then, as if this were not enough, it has blatantly embraced Nazism. I should add that my use of these terms is entirely nominal, because we’re talking here about something purely Russian, something that’s grown out of the country’s history; therefore it can be compared only superficially with what we know from Europe’s experience of fascism and Nazism. This will have a multitude of consequences, but one of the most important from the practical point of view is that in this new situation the possibilities for legal political activity will be at the very least severely limited, or they may even disappear completely.
It is vital to be aware of this now and adjust our thinking appropriately. Many of the legal and semi-legal institutionalised methods of protest have already disappeared. Those media platforms that could more or less freely criticise the authorities have been shut down. For the Russian secret services, the internet has become the kind of battlefield that short-wave radio was during the Cold War. The regime is trying to drown out “the voices”, [one of the principal foreign radio stations that broadcast into the USSR was Voice of America; others included the BBC, Radio Liberty and Deutsche Welle – Tr.] and the people (or, to be more precise, an ever-decreasing active segment of the population) are trying to come up with new ways of obtaining the truth. The opposition is facing the same fate as the dissident movement, forced by repression to the very fringes of society.
There’s no single view amongst the opposition as to where and how to carry on the struggle under such conditions (some even tried to avoid looking into the future that’s now come to pass). All talk tends to focus on two options: emigration or going underground. There are those who consider that the only way to oppose the regime is to leave the country. Others, though, suggest that the sole way of maintaining the link with the protest movement is to stay in Russia.
As is often the case, both groups are right in their own way. It’s essential to fight this neo-totalitarian dictatorship with all available means, both underground and in emigration. So rather than argue about where the real opponents of the regime should sit, we have to think how best to unite the forces of all those who are working for Russia’s future, both inside and outside the country. The best place for a member of the opposition is where they can be of maximum help for the cause at any given moment.
We have to begin by looking at modern-day reality. In the era of global electronic control, the possibilities for illegal underground work are greatly restricted, not only compared to what the situation was like in Tsarist Russia, but even compared to the Soviet Union (although at the time it seemed that such possibilities could not be more limited). In order to be hidden from the view of the secret services nowadays, members of the opposition have to demonstrate all the skills of secret service agents. In reality, this is extremely difficult. By its very nature, the underground is a path that only a very few exceptional individuals can follow. You have to have a natural inclination for this sort of life and show no emotion. From the outset you have to be prepared to spend a huge amount of your life in prison, or even to die for the sake of an idea. Talk of having a “wide underground movement” is simply utopian.
So what does this leave? First and foremost a game of cat and mouse with the authorities in the legal sphere. Even in the harshest totalitarian systems, the regime has to leave a few gaps for the legal activity of society. The regime will, of course, try to control this completely from within, but externally it’s supposed to appear as the activity of working “social institutions”. A classic example of this in Soviet times were the pseudo-social organisations known as the arts’ unions (of writers, artists, cinematographers, journalists and so on). Later, during the years of perestroika, some of them did play an active role in pushing forward changes in society. In the broad “game of chess” that the opposition is having to play with this regime – a regime that has finally put a halt to the legacy of Gorbachev and Yeltsin – every such union, every such “cell” that has been created and maintained by the authorities for its own purposes should be regarded as a tiny piece of society that must be taken over. If the opposition doesn’t do this, society will remain in the hands of the authorities.
The regime is also constantly looking at the alignment of forces. It could simply ban everything; but the more it bans, the harder it becomes to control the situation. It has to find a balance. So it leaves a few gaps where it considers that the plusses outweigh the minuses. It’s those places that the opposition should concentrate on, dashing from one to another. Because all the time some windows will be closing while others will be opening.
Working in conditions of limited legality will impose certain barriers. Clearly, we’ll have to learn again the language of Aesop’s Fables and choose our words very carefully. Anyone who suggests they are seeking power will be wiped out by the regime, but some possibilities will remain open for those who are “not aiming for power”. Therefore it will be essential to limit one’s ambitions.
One of the opposition’s main tasks will be to entice back those who have been recruited by the state. Those who are extremely intolerant towards those they consider as “loyalists” have to think about this. Today, it is only from abroad that the radical opposition is able to speak out. Yet the oppositionists lump together anyone who doesn’t share a radical opinion; anyone who’s adapted to the regime or who partially accepts it; or especially anyone who is a part of the regime, albeit not one of the worst. And all of these people are harshly criticised as collaborators. meaning that the only voices that will be heard will be those that are in the grey area. If the opposition wants to continue to be heard it has to learn to speak to those in the grey area.
When it comes to influencing public opinion, no kind of underground work can take the place of what can be done legally. The long struggle of dealing with totalitarianism bears this out. Therefore, striking alliances with those who are undecided is one of the most important conditions for success, as these are the very people who can open up the legal approach, even in the most adverse conditions. What might be meant by “alliances”? Firstly, attracting onto our side those whom the regime still allows to write and to speak. Secondly, laying the foundations for working inside those organisations that the regime has created to give the impression of the existence of a civil society, and forming within them groups of sympathisers. And thirdly, in developing independent work in those areas that the regime finds it difficult to wipe out immediately: the defence of people’s rights, social help, charity, educational work, economic initiatives and so on.
What else can the underground do? Undoubtedly, prepare public acts of protest. Not so as to “seize power”, but to show the flag and other symbols that will keep the movement alive. Of course, this also includes maintaining in readiness communication and organisational links so that if there is any change in the political situation they can emerge swiftly from underground and become a normal political organisation. Finally, there is assistance for those who have been arrested and for their families. In this instance we must bear in mind that in present circumstances financing any illegal work from external sources will, in effect, be impossible, fraught as it is with instant disclosure and sanctions. So all local activists and organisations that have managed to survive will have to be self-financing. But this in itself will reduce the number of such organisations.
Nevertheless, if the Russian state continues to develop as we’ve seen in recent years, sooner or later the opposition will have to acknowledge that the focal point of its political work will have to take place abroad. They have to look at this soberly and start to prepare for it psychologically. Recent experience, including what happened in Belarus, illustrates that the only place that at least the coordinating hub of opposition activity can be based is outside the country. Any attempt to create it internally will be smashed by the regime. It's only abroad that the work of the independent opposition media can be fully rolled out, although the spreading of its content within Russia will be a separate challenge. (But in order to put out reliable information, you also have to create reliable ways of producing it.) It’s abroad, too, that projects to teach activists how to prepare for the future Russia will have to be formed. And it’s only outside Russia that the necessary financial resources can be organised and that Western public opinion can be influenced.
Trying to operate from abroad, of course, is always a compromise. But the problem is that those who are going to try to live on inside the country will have to make even more of a compromise. I believe that we’re going to have to change our usual attitude to political emigration and see flight from the country as something essential, and thus stop dividing the opposition into the categories of “those on the ground” and “those abroad”. In this way, emigration can simply be considered as a second front in the struggle against the regime; and if the situation becomes too dreadful, it may even become the main front. There must be clear mutual cooperation between those who are fighting inside the country and those carrying on the struggle from abroad. It’s only with such cooperation that the opposition’s two fronts can survive and operate.
But those who are operating abroad will have extra problems. The regime will inevitably describe these political emigrants as spies and saboteurs who are in the pay of foreign secret services. And that’s only part of it. They certainly won’t have an easy relationship with the governments and secret services of those countries where they try to establish their bases. History has shown that European governments are not exactly thrilled about having opponents of the Russian regime operating on their territories, because it’s a headache they could do without. It also creates extra problems in their relations with the Kremlin.
It seems clear that there’s going to have to be a division of labour. From a certain point, any open discussion about the model for the new Russia will be possible only somewhere where the dictatorship is not operating. But the spread of free ideas from outside will be difficult. It will be done by those who are courageous enough to carry on the struggle inside the country. We have to be prepared for a significant period of time when the protest will have to be kept on hold before it can be released into the political sphere. It’s essential, therefore, that we ensure that during this period our work is well prepared. The more we’re able to do now, the less will need to be done later.
Chapter 4. The Point of No Return:
the Street or the Commanding Heights?
`At which moment does a revolution become irreversible? Many suggest that it’s when you “take control of the streets”. But is this so?
“The street” was and remains the principal mantra for the liberally-minded Russian intelligentsia. They see their mission as bringing the mass of the people out onto the streets. But frequently this isn’t the best thing to do. More often than not the people act less upon the call to action from the intelligentsia than to hidden hints that come from the authorities. This was the case in Gorbachev’s time, when a split in the Central Committee of the Communist Party led to the success of the largest mass meeting ever seen in Russian history. Sometimes, the people will take to the streets themselves, as happened at the start of the last century, when the intelligentsia were left in their wake, barely able to catch up. But it’s even more serious when the intelligent leaders of the revolution don’t know what to do with these masses of people who’ve taken to the streets. And the less intelligent ones understand, but prefer not to speak out about it. That’s how it’s come about that since Lenin’s time no one has been prepared to speak openly about this matter. This is no one’s fault. At first, there were serious reasons for keeping quiet about this; later there was simply no need to do so.
Why do political leaders call people out onto the streets? As discussed above, there are two main situations where this happens: for peaceful or non-peaceful protest. In this context we don’t need to look at peaceful protest. If there’s some hope that the dictatorship will step down under psychological pressure (for example, if the leaders have become decrepit, if there are splits among the elite, or if the regime is afraid that there’ll be foreign intervention), then people go out on the streets simply as a demonstration of their strength, and not as a way of overthrowing the regime. In such a situation, the opposition leaders use the mob on the streets as a tool when negotiating with the representatives of the regime to discuss the terms of capitulation. But it’s a completely different situation when it’s clear that there will be no capitulation, and that the regime is ready to open fire on the people.
When matters have reached such a peak that the most vicious measures might be needed to overthrow the authorities, the call to take to the streets becomes a call for the attack to begin; it’s an open call for an uprising. This is an extremely responsible step to take. In such a situation, the leaders must be prepared to take charge of this attack and to follow all the rules of revolutionary and military science. If not, then they have no right to call the people out, because such a move would simply provoke the authorities and senselessly send people under a hail of truncheons and even bullets. If you’re going to lead an uprising it's not enough just to want people on the streets. As Lenin wrote – the only person in Russian history to have led a successful revolutionary uprising – organising an uprising is an art and you have to learn how to do it. An uprising has to be prepared in advance. It’s not something that’s decided on the spur of the moment.
The reason for calling people out onto the streets in a revolutionary situation is to seize the commanding heights. Despite how it may seem in the utopian dreams of the armchair leaders, “the street” is not important in and of itself. It’s simply a way of directing unarmed or poorly armed people at a crucial moment and bringing them together as a critical mass at one or in several places. There needs to a sufficient number of people in order to persuade the regime’s local commanders at these previously appointed places not to take retaliatory action.
Over a hundred years ago a revolutionary who went under the pseudonym of Postoronny, or “the Stranger”, rapidly dictated to his colleagues in Petrograd his advice on how to organise a revolutionary uprising. Some of his advice is now out of date, but parts of it remain relevant:
“An armed uprising is a particular form of the political struggle, and one that obeys certain laws. You need to think about them carefully. Karl Marx embossed this truth wonderfully, when he wrote that an armed ‘uprising, like a war, is an art’.
Marx outlined the main rules of this art thus:
Never play at an uprising; once it’s begun it’s essential that you know that you must carry it to its conclusion.
It is vital that in the right place and at the decisive moment you have much greater numbers of forces. If you do not then an enemy that has prepared and organised better will annihilate the rebels.
Once the uprising has begun, you must act with the greatest decisiveness, and most certainly go on the attack. ‘Defence means the death of an armed uprising.’
You must try to surprise the enemy, seizing the moment when his forces are scattered.
You must achieve even small successes every day (you could say every hour if we’re talking about actions in a single city); this way, whatever happens, you’ll maintain morale.
Marx summed up the lessons of armed insurrections in all revolutions with the words ‘of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary tactics in the whole of history: courage, courage and once again, courage.’
Relating this to Russia and to October 1917, this means…
With the combined efforts of your three main forces – the navy, and the workers’ and military units – this means that without fail and whatever it costs in casualties, we must seize and hold in the first assault a) the telephone exchange; b) the telegraph office; c) the railway stations; d) the bridges.
We must divide the most reliable elements (our ‘shock troops’ and the young workers, along with our best sailors) into small units in order to seize the most important objectives. Also, they must be the ones who take part everywhere in all the important operations, such as…forming the units of the very best workers with rifles and bombs to attack and surround the enemy’s ‘centres’ (the cadet schools, the telegraph, the telephone exchange, and so on), operating under the slogan: we may all die, but we will never give in to the enemy.
Reading over these lines a hundred years on when you know the outcome, you begin to understand how important it is to acknowledge simple truths. Unfortunately, though, simplicity does not mean that it’s easy to assimilate them. Let’s try to consider this advice from today’s point of view. We can put Marx’ thoughts to one side, as these are philosophical ideas that are difficult to apply in every concrete situation. But it’s worth looking further into the advice about bridges, the telegraph office, the post office and so on. Of course, times have changed radically. The telegraph has sunk into oblivion; post has become e-mail; and bridges have lost the significance they once had. But this is not the point.
The first thing that remains as relevant today as it was then is that it’s essential to maintain the unity of political action, because if the uprising is broken up into individual sectors, each of them can be crushed individually. Lenin needed bridges in order to maintain this unity of action, but what this really means is transport hubs, which must be isolated and immediately brought under control.
Secondly, and even more important, is that the rebels maintain uninterrupted communication. In the modern world this means having control over internet and mobile phone providers, as well as protecting the means of transmitting signals (the control hubs, masts and so on). Without the coordination that this provides, the revolutionary masses quickly become just an ungovernable mob and they’ll be smashed to pieces.
Thirdly, it remains vital to control the traditional forms of mass communication: television, radio, newspapers and print. If they can’t be taken over, they must at least be neutralised.
Fourthly: it’s very important to prevent the regime from carrying out repressions and seizing the leaders from the crowd. In order to prevent this, one of the first things to do is blockade prisons and police stations, and release any comrades who’ve already been arrested.
Fifthly: the formation of an advance guard of units of well-prepared and, if possible, armed youths remains as important as ever. They should be able at least partially to prevent the security forces from acting and provide cover for the bulk of the people. Similarly, preparing and arming these units both with weapons taken from the security forces and with home-made devices, such as Molotov cocktails and so forth, is also of vital importance.
Revolution is a serious business, and should never be toyed with. If you’re not absolutely sure, don’t try to overtake history. If you’re not prepared to carry things through to the end, don’t even leave your room. Don’t start up any kind of movement. Just stay where you are. Don’t call people out on the streets if you don’t know which street to choose and where you need to go – and if you’re not prepared to lead from the front. But if you do make that call, don’t stop, even when there are casualties. Because if you do, there’ll simply be even more casualties and, worst of all, they will have died for nothing. If you feel that you’re capable of doing this, then prepare yourself. Being a revolutionary is a profession. And as with any other profession, it doesn’t tolerate amateurs. Preparing yourself means also thinking things through to their conclusion and not being afraid of the outcome, which could be far tougher than any of us might want.
Chapter 5. How to Organise the New Order:
Constitutional Democracy or Democracy by Decree?
An honest and principled person who is critical of the current regime in Russia is right to ask: what’s the problem in moving from a bad authoritarian state to a good democratic one?
Indeed, at first glance everything looks relatively simple. After the democratic forces have triumphed (however this is accomplished), the first step must be to call a Constituent (constitutional) Assembly. Next, a new Constitution must be approved; or, at the very least, the old one must have all of the non-constitutional additions removed. Then free and fair elections must be held to create the democratic authorities’ new institutions. This tends to be how everything works. But the reality is somewhat more complicated. We need to look carefully at the details of this plan to be aware of the many practical issues that will arise. And it’s much better to consider all this before we arrive at this juncture.
Common sense tells us that even in the most favourable conditions, the three most basic requirements of the new authorities – calling the Constituent Assembly, bringing the Constitution into line with democratic principles and holding free and fair elections – cannot be achieved in a day or even a month. You need at least a year, probably longer. And this is in ideal circumstances; that clearly won’t be the case for us.
We have to spend more time looking at these conditions, because they’re hugely significant. You don’t have to be a prophet to predict that when Putin goes many people will still retain the habit of living as they have under Putin. This means that genuine changes in life in Russia will take place far more slowly than we would wish.
Far too often we underestimate the power of social inertia. People intrinsically hang on to whatever it is that they’ve grown used to over a number of years. As a result of this, dilapidated organisations keep on working, even though you might have expected them to collapse under the weight of corruption and ineffectiveness. The system shows a miraculous ability to survive against all the odds. But then, when inertia finally takes its toll (and it can’t go on for ever), the system collapses drastically and in a way that’s difficult to control. The stronger the inertia is and the longer it lasts, the greater will be the risks that need to be overcome in the transitional period.
What can any temporary government expect when it attempts to drag Russia out of its past and prepare it for the future?
A sharp rise in poverty due to a worsening budget deficit and limited possibilities for financial flexibility;
Increased disintegration and the growth of a mood of separatism;
Opposition and sabotage from the old elite, especially from the military and the secret services;
Capital flight, directly or tangentially linked to the previous regime;
An increase in crime, especially with the redistribution of property;
A worsening in the international sphere, since the weakening of the situation inside the country will inevitably lead to greater pressure from outside.
In circumstances that will already be difficult, all of these factors could create “the perfect storm”. Whatever good intentions the temporary government may have, it will quickly find itself having to introduce emergency measures. It will have two concurrent agendas, one of top of the other, each interfering with the other. There will be the transformative agenda, aimed at creating the conditions in Russia for stable, constitutional government. And there will be the emergency agenda, that will try to maintain the political gains that have been won, while fighting off opposition from the old society and trying to bring stability to the overall socio-economic and political situation in the country.
Politics is a never-ending process. If this process splits apart, even if just for a few days, not even weeks or months, then chaos will inevitably reign in the gaping chasm this brings. And we’re talking here about a period of one or two years. Confusion and anarchy could produce an even worse regime for Russia than Putin’s. If we don’t think about this in advance, then someone could simply seize the power that’s being trodden underfoot. And whether they would then wish to share that power with anyone else is a serious question.
From a practical point of view, the success of the transformation will greatly depend not only on the effectiveness of the Constituent Assembly, but also on the competence of the government that takes over on day one of the revolution, and that will rule the country until a permanent government takes office following free and fair elections. This temporary government must be capable of closing the gap between the start of the democratic transformation and the point when these democratic changes come into force. Agreeing the goals and the tasks of the temporary government is more important right now than talking about future constitutional innovations. This can be discussed in the Constituent Assembly; but the temporary government won’t have time for that.
The phrase “after Putin” is a rather abstract one. “After Putin” could happen when Putin is still alive; or it could come many years after his death. We must not assume that another “Putin” – or an even worse example – would not come to power when Putin goes. And there could be many such examples. Opponents of the Bolshevik regime predicted its demise nearly every year, but it continued for almost 70 years. It’s a different matter that it won’t go on forever. There will come a time when civil society will be allowed to find its place in the political sphere. That will be the point when the transitional period begins.
To some degree it doesn’t matter who makes the first move, or how they do it. It could be someone from the ranks of the successors who, as Gorbachev did, will declare that, “we cannot go on living like this”, and will start to gradually loosen the screws on society. It might be a “traitor to their own class”, like Yeltsin, who manages to burst through to the highest echelons of power and build “a revolution from above”. It’s not impossible that it could even be a coalition of democratic forces, that carries out “a revolution from below”; although in a police state such as Russia, that, for now, seems unlikely.
Those are three possible scenarios for Russia, three different fates for her; but whichever it is, the first act of this drama will be the same. Out of apparently nothing a government will arise that will start to dismantle the old system, strictly on the top-down principle, and it will bring those “below” (i.e. civil society) into the political process. This government will not have the legitimacy apparently held by the old authorities, nor will it have the freedom of movement to do as it wishes. Its term in office will be brief, but notwithstanding this it will be faced by the most challenging and important task possible: to make the process of transformation irreversible and to save the country from disaster. Its mission will be accomplished when it forms a government with a new constitutional majority.
Judging by the experience of both Russia and other countries, history has shown that two years is the limit of trust that the people will give to democratic forces that begin a reform programme. After that, cracks start to appear, which is only to be expected. At that point, power has to be transferred to a newly-elected government (which rarely will have good relations with its predecessor), or the authorities can try to hold onto power with the help of “revolutionary violence”, overcoming opposition from the population who will now be even more firmly against the reforms.
The second option is what happens most often; but if that path is taken then the government will likely be forced to bid farewell to any plans it had for democracy and leave them until history’s next big event. This is exactly what happened in Russia in 1993, just two years after the overwhelming democratic revolution. Russia received its new Constitution on the back of the tanks which shot up the first parliament of the new Russia. This underlines that, however difficult it might be, it is vital to ensure that the first steps to reform are carried out in those first two years.
So the temporary, democratic government that comes to power after the Putin regime is over will have an historic mission. It will have to re-launch democratic processes in Russia and lay the foundations for a permanent constitutional government; one that is legally elected. The problem, however, is that it will have to carry out this mission in the most extreme circumstances. One of the greatest challenges of a transitional period after any lengthy authoritarian rule is that it is virtually impossible to avoid the economy – and politics in general – going into a nosedive. Thus, another mission for the transitional government (and one that is equally important) is not to allow society to descend into chaos.
We can be almost certain that no temporary government would be able to create the conditions for high standards of democracy. Furthermore, in the initial stages it is highly likely that they would have to abolish the old, ornamental, institutions, such as the State Duma and the Federation Council. A particularly tricky question will be what to do with the courts. Here, contradictions arise between, firstly, the irremovable and the independent; secondly, the need to carry out a radical purge of the corrupt personnel of the old regime; and, thirdly, between the rights of criminals, suspects and victims. At the same time, the government must maintain a course of democratisation, not allowing for any temporary restrictions to become permanent; ensuring that a Constituent Assembly is called and carries out real work; that a new Constitution is adopted; and that free and fair elections are held.
What sort of government will be needed to make progress along these various paths? In an ideal world, it would be a government of national unity, that included representatives of various political forces and was based on a consensus with civil society. Something along the lines of a “Coordinated Opposition Council” that had been granted power. However, in real life such an ideal is virtually impossible to achieve. Initially, when the movement begins there simply won’t be a readily-formed political force in the country that can be relied on and that genuinely reflects civil society. In its place, we have a plethora of political groups whose aims aren’t clear and whose legitimacy is dubious. Then even if there were someone who wanted to bring together such a political kaleidoscope as the foundation for a temporary government, nothing would come of it (as we saw with the “coordinated council” that was formed in 2012). Finally, whoever it was that took power at the start would have to be highly motivated in order to invite others to share power. So far, no one in Russia has been magnanimous enough to do that. It would be extraordinary to expect that to happen in the future.
Therefore, it’s highly unlikely that a temporary government made up of a coalition of the revolutionary forces could be formed that would represent a significant segment of civil society – however much we might wish for this to happen. It’s far more likely that power will lie in the hands of a single political force: it’ll be either the reformers from above, or the revolutionaries from below. And neither time, nor a simple desire will be able to break such a force.
In its turn, this will seriously increase the risk that the temporary dictatorship of this revolution will become a long-term project. So what can be done to prevent the process of building a democracy from stalling, and to strengthen it with a constitution?
Common sense suggests that in order to do this you need some kind of balance of forces so as to keep tabs on the work of the temporary government. But where can you find such a balance? Nearly all of the ornamental representative institutions of the old authorities have been discredited or are simply worn out. What’s more, when the revolutionary changes begin, their members will on the whole be against the revolution and thus not in a position to give any help at all. And it’s likely that given their current state it will be necessary to suspend the State Duma and the Federation Council. But it will be impossible to hold elections quickly for the new representative bodies. This will take months, at least, during which time every day will be precious.
However strange it may seem, it’s the present regime that has given us a possible solution. In the rush to guarantee their leader his permanent place in power, among other things they created a quasi-representative body, the State Council, and even gave it legal standing via the Constitution. The purpose of this organisation was to put the brakes on any changes. But if we were to change the personnel there, selecting people according to different principles, this counter-revolutionary organisation would become a revolutionary one.
In practice, the State Council could be reformed if the temporary government immediately filled it with representatives of civil society and the regions. For the transitional period it could be the political centre that keeps the authorities in check, and it could become the temporary emergency legal body and the controlling organisation of the temporary government. Furthermore, it would allow for a certain constitutional continuity between the old authorities and the new. The State Council could issue temporary decrees that would lay the normative and legal foundation for the work of the government in the period of transition.
The principles on which the State Council will be formed is the subject of a lengthy, separate discussion, that can really be had only when the general outlines of the transition will be known. But there can be no doubt about one thing: if the transition will be carried out strictly, then the only legitimate foundation for the formation of the State Council will be regional representation, since the legitimacy of all the other institutions of power will be in doubt. In this case, the State Council will be formed by the regional commissioners, probably elected or appointed by the local legal assemblies. It will also be clear that for the State Council to work effectively, it should be a compact governing body, operating on a permanent basis.
Thus, as a tandem of the temporary government and the State Council, the system of governance should operate for a long enough period to call a Constituent Assembly; determine its functions; introduce a new Constitution and electoral laws; and also run free and fair elections for the new institutions as defined by the Constitution. This should take no longer than two years. If not, then Russian history will simply enter yet another round of totalitarianism.
Chapter 6. How to Bring an End to the War:
Fight to a Victorious Outcome, Capitulate or Seek a Compromise?
This chapter was written almost a year before Russia unleashed the greatest geopolitical disaster in the last hundred years: the war against Ukraine. It may seem like a paradox, but the chapter hardly needed editing.
The temporary government that will have to dismantle the regime will be faced by a mountain of problems. But it’s already clear that the greatest of these will be to bring an end to the war with Ukraine. In reality, Putin’s regime has also dragged Russia into a war with the West.
The war with Ukraine is simply the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it and at its core is the global confrontation with the West, conducted anywhere the regime can do so. Militarism is the very essence of Putin’s regime. The only way in which it can stabilise itself is to conduct constant wars against imaginary enemies, both internal and external. War is the price to be paid for corruption. This gang of corrupt opportunists who seized and usurped power in Russia at the start of the century cannot hold onto their positions without a war, and they’re now carrying out their final one to try to defend the narrow interests of their clans.
Russia was back in a cold war situation with the West from the moment that Putin delivered his speech at Munich in 2007. And in February 2022 this war became a hot war. For now it’s being waged on the territory of Ukraine. But let’s not deceive ourselves. The assault on Ukraine is simply the first of a number of predetermined goals. This war that the Kremlin desperately needs in order to stabilise and maintain its fascist regime is imperialist, criminal and, of course, unjust. But as well as all the grief and suffering that it’s bringing to the Ukrainian people; as well all the grief that it’s bringing to the families of the Russian soldiers who are dying and being wounded in this criminal war that no one needs; as well as all this, it’s draining Russia of the resources that are essential for its development. This war is destroying the future of Russia itself. The war is the principal obstacle preventing the formation of an alternative strategy for the country’s development. Unless this crazy and exhausting war is brought to an end, there is no hope of moving to a constructive, creative and socially-oriented agenda. The problem is that bringing an end to this war is going to be far more difficult than launching it was. So for any temporary government, this will be a very serious challenge in the transitional period. This is also because ending the war in a careless and stupid way is no less dangerous politically than continuing it.
In theory there are only three ways in which the war could be brought to an end: victory; surrender; or some kind of compromise. Trying to win the current war with Ukraine would be a criminal and immoral act. Furthermore, if we understand that the real nature of this war and its ultimate goal is the defeat of the West, then we can see that it’s also a utopian ideal. If the regime could not achieve this at the peak of its powers, then it would be even more impossible for the temporary government to achieve this in the conditions of economic downturn and political instability that will follow in the transitional period. So in reality there are just two options that can be considered: unconditional surrender, or a search for more or less acceptable conditions for peace. But the problem is that after all that the Putin regime has done, finding any such conditions will be extremely difficult.
Having unleashed the war, Putin has effectively taken off the table any question about “the Russian world” [the so-called russky mir – Tr.]. The whole concept of “the Russian world” is now simply mired in aggression. What’s more, Moscow cannot play the role of being at its heart. We have to recognise clearly and decisively the consequences of what has happened, and not hide our heads in the sand like ostriches. Putin has taken Russian culture and Russian civilisation from the global level and turned it into something merely regional. What may have seemed just like a phase is likely to prove decisive, and history won’t revise that opinion. Against this general background, a separate issue is that Russian Orthodoxy has been turned into a regional, even a local, religion, that can have no pretensions about universal moralising or being “the Third Rome”. This is the world in which we will be living, and that won’t depend on whether Putin is there or not. Even if Putin departs the scene, none of this grandeur will return.
But there are even more serious consequences. Having witnessed Putin’s aggression, very many countries – notably nearly all of Russia’s immediate neighbours – will reckon that their safety can be guaranteed only by the dismemberment of Russia. The threat of the collapse of Russia is the principal result of Putin’s war that the temporary government will have to deal with. And this government is going to have very little time at its disposal. The only way that Russia can be maintained as a single, sovereign state is for the government to be proactive in all directions. The first thing it will have to do is make peace with all sides that have been drawn into this conflict; and then carry out a programme of federalisation. Federalisation is a subject for a separate discussion; but the question of peace has to be discussed here and now.
There’s a very simplistic view of this problem that’s popular among the liberal opposition. This is merely to cancel everything that Putin’s done. So: Putin started the war in Ukraine, therefore we must stop it immediately. Putin put his medium-range missiles on high alert in violation of a treaty: they must be destroyed. Putin built military bases in Africa: so they have to be closed down and the troops sent back to Russia. And so on.
I wrote the first draft of this book before the war. In it, I considered at this point the possibility of making decisions using as an example the problem of Crimea. But the war has changed all that. Today the confrontation has so deeply pierced Russian society, and the propaganda and mobilisation have had such a profound effect upon people’s consciousness, that it’s now impossible to imagine any gradual, long-drawn-out solutions. In the present, specific case, this makes the situation very straightforward: a genuine change of regime is now possible only in the event of a military defeat. This means that the Crimea problem, just as the wider problem of ending the war, can be solved only by way of a peace treaty. For now, I find it very difficult to imagine that Ukraine would be prepared to sign such a treaty without it being granted the full restoration of its sovereignty over the territories that were within its internationally-recognised borders in 1991. Of course, anything is possible, but unless Putin’s regime suffers a military defeat, it won’t be replaced in the near future.
A military defeat would signal the end of the war and one way or another it would resolve the issue of the annexed territories. But the peace treaty itself would not mean that everything would return to the way it was before the war. The division between Russians and Ukrainians and between Russia and Europe is now vast, and no single government is going to be able to heal this rift in the short term. Even less a temporary government that doesn’t enjoy great legitimacy or sufficient reserves of time or trust. The inevitable economic and political crisis that will result from a military defeat and the dramatic collapse of the economy will leave the temporary government in a position whereby it will have to solve the many ongoing problems using all the resources at its disposal; or else it will simply collapse, leaving the way clear for radical nationalist groups and other populists. At the same time, the Ukrainian government will have to demand just as firmly the resources to rebuild their country; and there will be no obvious solution for them to choose how to do this. Unfortunately, yet totally justifiably, today we can say with certainty that all the assets that have been seized – some 300 billion dollars, including the foreign assets of Putin’s oligarchs – should go to repair the damage caused as a result of the war. But I shall be extremely surprised if this satisfies Ukraine. At the same time, the inhabitants of Tatarstan and the Russian Far East, of Voronezh and the Baikal Region, are hardly likely to vote for increasing their own impoverishment, and not that of Putin’s oligarchs.
Someone will say, “let’s discuss everything”. Okay. Firstly, though, you need time for discussion – and time is going to be in short supply. And secondly, discussing the issues doesn’t mean reaching agreement on them. Right now, we don’t know what the position of the other side will be. After everything that’s happened between Russia and Ukraine under Putin – and, more widely, between Russia and the West – there will not be a great desire on the other side to seek a compromise. It’s more likely that Russia will come up against very strong pressure. At least, this is what the experience of the 1990s tells us. No one proposed a “Marshall Plan” for Russia then, and it’s highly unlikely that anyone will suggest one now. This all leads to the idea that the restoration of justice, that may appear to be a logical step, will be of benefit to some, while others will regard it as a shock and an injustice.
Now let’s look at the second part of the question of rebuilding: the political one. Is this likely to be popular in Russian society, even in that section of society that is prepared to support the temporary government in its efforts to dismantle the Putin regime? Probably not. Especially if the humanitarian aspects of a swift and unconditional rebuilding become immediately obvious. It seems inevitable that this will lead to a sharp rise in discontent, something that the forces of reaction will quickly try to use to their advantage. If this is so, the temporary government won’t last more than a few months. Politics is the art of the possible. Extricating ourselves easily from Putin’s war with the West – acknowledging that we were wrong and trying to return everything to the way it was – will, most likely, not be possible.
Many of those who believe in simple solutions refer to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, that the Bolsheviks signed with Germany when Russia withdrew from the First World War. They suggest that after the regime has been dismantled, Russia should conclude similar agreements with all those against whom Putin has been waging war. But the Peace of Brest-Litovsk is a bad example to choose. The Bolsheviks acted under conditions of an extreme force-majeure, when had they taken any other decision they would simply have lost power. And they were ready to break all the terms of the agreement at the first opportunity, which is exactly what they did after just a few months when a revolution took place in Germany. Taking advantage of the confusion this caused, the Moscow government seized back everything they had given away, including wiping out Ukraine’s independence that had been accepted on the fringes of the Brest-Litovsk agreements. Had it not been for the revolution in Germany, the Bolsheviks’ gamble may have had completely different consequences.
When all things are considered, the only possible scenario will be to move forwards, not backwards. Naturally, it calls for courage to admit one’s mistakes and call a spade a spade, including acknowledging crimes as crimes. Those who have committed these crimes must bear full responsibility for them and accept the consequences. But the way out of this situation must be found in keeping with the new reality as things are now. This is no simple task. In each specific case a balance must be sought between restoring the old justice and the creation of a new injustice; between acknowledging what is essential politically and turning away from what is politically impossible.
Returning to the most pressing problem, that of Crimea and the other occupied territories, then here we have two key moments in my opinion. First of all, we cannot simply ignore the issue and say that we’ve got rid of Putin but Crimea will be ours nonetheless. If we don’t solve this problem, the war will never end. Secondly, for the reasons cited above it’s also impossible simply to return Crimea to Ukrainian jurisdiction. Mainly because in practice it will be impossible to avoid violence on the peninsula after it’s restored to Ukraine. It'll be necessary to find some complicated solutions involving a gradual restitution with a third country as a guarantor.
Rejecting Putin’s legacy does not mean, unfortunately, that we can simply ignore it. The war represents the new reality, and the way out of it must be organised and properly thought through. In doing so, certain important principles must be observed, namely:
Old problems can never be solved simply by creating new ones.
Separate what is politically desirable from what is politically possible.
Understand clearly where the interests of Putin’s regime lie and where Russia’s national interests begin, and don’t solve the problem of de-Putinisation by damaging Russia’s national interests.
Approach each point separately, noting the unique difficulties of each one; don’t rush to find a universal, standard solution.
History has demonstrated that ways of solving many of life’s problems simply don’t exist yet; they have to be worked out afresh.
Time and political will are needed in order to solve many problems.
Chapter 7. How to Defeat an Internal Counter-Revolution:
Purge the Old Guard or Try to Correct Them?
Russia has gone through a difficult return to its Soviet past. It’s already passed the point of no return. There’s no turning back. The chain of events was thus:
Yeltsin pushed forward Putin as his successor
Putin gradually took over total power
There were creeping counter-reforms
The return (in effect) of state control over the economy, but indirectly – it’s less “the state” than “the mafia” (in other words, the situation’s worse than in Soviet times).
Taken together, this means that over a quarter of a century after Gorbachev’s perestroika, Russia has not only returned to the starting point of his reforms, but in many ways has gone back to a time many decades before this.
This Soviet restoration poses the practical question about the strength of these reactionaries, who are trying to extinguish any kind of reform or revolution and reinstate themselves in power. Putin and his closest circle are representatives of the second and third levels of the Soviet nomenklatura (the highest level have already pretty well disappeared and, in any case, wouldn’t be in a position to reinstate themselves to their previous positions). These people from the second and third levels slipped into the background, yet were waiting there, ready to carry out an ambush. When the opportunity arose, they came to the fore and tried to turn back the clock to restore the old ways of ruling, which they remembered well from their youth. Naturally, they did this by adapting to contemporary conditions, which meant first and foremost that they considered it essential to make themselves as rich as possible.
This is not a unique situation, of course. When a temporary government comes to power, forces linked to the old regime never disappear instantaneously from the face of the earth. Some of them will be eased out, but many will remain in place. And they won’t just remain in place; they’ll stay there with their money, their families, and with the old connections that they’ve built up along with their economic and social capital. They – or, to be more precise, already their second and third level officials – will also be awaiting the opportunity to establish themselves in position. This is why any new group in power always has to try to avoid being crushed by representatives of the old power. But how they can achieve this? How do they define the borders that are so essential for their political defence? How do they avoid going too far in defending themselves against the old terror without giving rise to a new terror? Where do you draw the line of reasonable sufficiency when it comes to suppressing an internal counter-revolution?
These are the questions that many are struggling with today, not in an abstract sense but precisely when they consider recent experience. When they examine closely the 1990s, people want to understand: what did we miss? What mistakes were made that have allowed the Soviet Union to return? By far the most popular answer is that it’s because we didn’t instigate a purge of the old guard. When we look at today’s political situation you could argue that not carrying out a purge was a mistake. But I wouldn’t rush to this conclusion.
In such circumstances, a purge means removing the rights of the old elite. How widely this reaches can vary, both in terms of the people affected and the rights that are taken away from them. If we’re talking about Russia, then probably the most wide-ranging purge was carried out by the Bolsheviks after the revolution. They enacted repressive measures against millions of people who fell into the category of the so-called “privileged classes” of the old Russia (the gentry, members of the clergy, army officers, the kulaks and others). A significant percentage of them were repressed in various ways or even killed, while millions of others were denied the right to take part in various activities, professions were closed off to them, their children were deprived of the possibility to be educated and so on.
But this is an extreme example. After the velvet revolutions in Europe, velvet purges became fashionable. They were on a much smaller scale and a lot more gentle in terms of the pressure they put on the old elite. Whole social classes were no longer included among those who were purged. Now it was rather about individuals who directly cooperated with the regime or who occupied specific positions in the hierarchy. These could have been officials (in the first instance, of course, members of the law enforcement bodies or the special services), judges, secret agents and other similar categories. The lists of these people differed depending on the country, but the general principle was the same: a change from class-based repression to specific professional or political categories.
Naturally, in modern Russia you won’t find many people who would want to repeat “the red terror”. But in terms of milder restrictions, such as those applied in Eastern Europe or certain countries of the post-Soviet space, there tends to be a different opinion. A significant proportion of the liberally-minded intelligentsia today would welcome such an approach. People look to the past and say, “we didn’t do this in the 1990s – and look what happened!” But before answering the question as to whether or not this should be done, it would be sensible to ask whether in principle it would be possible to do this in Russia. And the answer to this question is not as simple as it may seem.
This so-called “mild purge” is principally aimed at breaking the automatic production chain of the nomenklatura – a somewhat closed circle of professional bureaucrats who amazingly manage to reinstate their positions inside any power set-up following a revolution. There are many examples of this; and they all show that – in the countries of the former USSR at least – no purge is going to solve this issue.
Let’s start with the Bolsheviks themselves. Already at the beginning of the 1920s, just three years after the revolution and the start of “the red terror”, Lenin was complaining to his colleagues that the Bolsheviks had been unable to solve the problem of clearing out the representatives of the old tsarist state apparatus. He moaned that they represented the majority of Soviet state officials; that the new state apparatus was even bigger than the old one had been; and that it was suffering from every kind of bureaucratic illness. To be fair it should be noted that in the end the Bolsheviks did manage to overcome the opposition of the old elites; but this was mainly by terror, rather than measures that could in a narrower sense of the word be described as “a purge”.
The most recent experience of purges in Ukraine can also hardly be called encouraging. Firstly, it turned out that efforts to use legal methods for purging were in practice tied in with massive and often insurmountable difficulties. Then, it turned out that once all those officials who needed to be removed had been purged, the new authorities found that they had no one available to fill key posts. It is this factor that runs through all of the unsuccessful attempts at carrying out purges across the whole post-Soviet space. This is in contrast to the relatively positive experience of this method in the countries of Eastern Europe.
Russia’s problem (and, indeed, that of many other post-Soviet states) is that the political class and the cultural layer within it is not very big. As a result, the “substitutes’ bench” for filling these posts in any future administration is very small. There simply isn’t anywhere we could find a large number of judges, procurators or police, let alone bankers, financial inspectors and so on. And the further you go, the more difficult it is, because the work of the state apparatus becomes ever more complicated, and the tasks allocated to it ever greater. In other words, carrying out purges is all well and good in theory, but it rarely works in practice. It even became an insoluble problem for the Bolsheviks, despite their conviction that any cook would be capable of running the country. It ended up with the cooks becoming the bosses, but under them it was basically the old specialists doing the work. In reality, we need to find a different solution rather than purges.
And there is a solution. It turns out that when placed in the most varied circumstances, the very same people are capable of showing completely different results. The task should be not to change the people, but the system that defines the limits of their behaviour. This task can be split into two separate areas: removing the “first disciples” from the system; and cutting out unacceptable social and political work practices.
As accumulated experience has shown, trying to suppress the rights of social and professional groups when there are not the people in society who could take their place simply makes the situation even more complicated. One way or another representatives of these groups still manage to worm their way into the new social structure, causing serious moral and political damage to society. A useful method here may be to take a more personalised approach, that would help at least for a time to exclude the more odious characters from the infrastructure. We are, of course, not including here those against whom there is clear evidence to bring legal charges in connection with particularly serious crimes. Such individuals must be brought before the courts, in accordance with the constitutional guarantees.
We’re talking here about people who are not suspected of carrying out particularly dangerous crimes, but who were key figures in facilitating the work of the criminal regime. People such as those who sponsored the regime; who distributed its propaganda; who were in charge of the crucial sections of the apparatus of repression. Bringing them all to justice would be costly, even if it were possible; but to allow them to continue with their political activity would be dangerous. One solution could be to apply specific and targetted sanctions, that are, in any case, fairer than carrying out purges simply based on professional or social grounds. Some sort of “internal Magnitsky Act” could be used, that would allow for the regime’s “first disciples” to be excluded from the social infrastructure, albeit for a period of time.
Naturally, though, this is not enough. If you simply exclude the “first disciples”, then pretty quickly the second and third disciples will be striving to become the first. Therefore, a ban on the preaching of unacceptable social and political actions should be added to measures designed to combat internal counter-revolution, because such actions are inextricably linked to mass violations of human rights and freedoms. The processes of de-communisation and de-Stalinisation showed specifically the desire to do this. Many consider that these were two possibilities that were missed in the 1990s. This is partly true; but it’s not as simple as that.
In the 1990s, it was thought that outlawing the activities of the Communist Party should be the first thing to do under the banner of de-communisation. Yet this was a genuine political force that to this day is still supported by millions of people. Trying to do this inevitably divided society. Exactly the same thing would happen today, and it’s unlikely that it would succeed.
The fact is, terror is not an essential element in the basic idea of Communism. It’s just one of the possible ways in which it can develop, and one that, unfortunately, became the reality in Russia. Rather than splitting society by just outlawing labels, it’s important to strictly suppress attempts to spread and popularise the practices that are hidden behind these labels. When we’re talking about Communist ideas, what this means is roughly the following: preventing attempts to justify the great terror (and terror in general), to preach the violent expropriation of property, and to carry out genocide based on social or national grounds; in other words, everything that went to make up the dark pages of Russian history in the twentieth century. In some senses this is similar to the Chinese approach to de-Maoisation. Without actually attacking the figure of Mao himself (indeed, it’s still difficult for them to make an unambiguous assessment of him as a national leader), the Chinese Communist Party had to condemn very severely the extremes of the Maoist terror, including the so-called Cultural Revolution and the twists and turns in the battle against private ownership.
So it’s essential to strike a balance. On the one hand, we have to defend the new authorities and not allow for yet another return to the previous regime; but at the same time, we also have to avoid a split in society and a civil war, that would, in any case, lead to the return of the regime, albeit somewhat later. Carrying out a purge is not a dogma but a general idea; and how it’s done has to be in accordance with the situation at a given time and place. A purge for its own sake doesn’t lead to anything positive, nor does it protect you from a counter-revolution.
Chapter 8. How to Control the Man with a Gun:
a Task for the Party or for the Secret Services?
At times of stable development, the work of genuine or even ornamental institutions hides the violent nature of any state. But its true nature never actually goes away. When it comes down to it, even when the state is complicated and multi-functionary it remains a machine for violence. To be more precise, it’s a machine for legitimised violence, since it’s only the legitimacy of the violence that it employs that differentiates the state from just any armed group that enforces its will on those around it by force. But when a time of change replaces that political stability, and when the old way of life collapses but has yet to be replaced by something new, the violent nature of state power comes to the fore.
So an enormous problem faces any temporary government in the very first days of its existence: how do you control “the man with a gun”, or, as we’re used to saying these days, the siloviki? Today, they’re wrapped up in an enclosed system, where they all keep a beady eye on each other, and Putin himself watches them all at once like a hawk. But once Putin goes, the circle will break, and dozens, if not hundreds, of scattered armed and organised groups will be left to their own devices. They might recognise the authority of the temporary government, or they might place themselves on the side of the reactionaries; or they may even try to take power themselves, although this last one is unlikely as there’s never been a tradition in Russia of this happening.
If events turn out this way, they will inevitably have a whole host of negative consequences, the most serious of which could be a counter-revolutionary uprising or a slide into civil war with the potential for the state to split apart. Thus, from the first moment it becomes a task of the greatest urgency for the temporary government to encourage the senior and middle-ranking commanders in the power structures to join them. It’s no less than a matter of life or death. However well set up the system is of democratic institutions, it would take only the slightest failure for this question to become the most urgent. All we need do is look back to the day in Washington when Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol Building and remember how great were the efforts of both sides in the democratic USA to cooperate with the leadership of the Department of Defence and the Chiefs of the General Staff when they were deciding whether or not to call out the National Guard.
This question of having control over “the man with a gun” was in the background of every change of leader in a totalitarian state such as the USSR, too, with its well-established system of the ideological inheritance of power. The success of the coup against Lavrenty Beria in 1953 was greatly helped by the army remaining loyal to the Party and Soviet leadership represented by Nikita Khrushchev and Georgy Malenkov. Khrushchev’s fall from power nine years later was in no small way aided by his being betrayed by the then leadership of the USSR KGB, which supported Leonid Brezhnev, who was already heavily backed by the army. A significant factor that assisted Mikhail Gorbachev when he came to power in 1985 was that he was seen as the protégé of the former head of the KGB, Yury Andropov. In his early days this guaranteed the loyalty of the KGB leadership, helped by the neutral position adopted by senior army officers. The refusal of the KGB’s Group Alpha to storm the White House in August 1991 was the death knell for the plans of the State Committee for the State of Emergency – the GKChP – to turn back the clock to hardline Communism. One way or another, any change of power has inevitably involved the question of who controls the men with the guns. You won’t find this question widely discussed in text books about democracy, but there isn’t a single democracy in the world that would have managed to survive if, in each instance, this matter hadn’t been decided beforehand.
In Russia this has happened in accordance with its centuries-old traditions and way of life. As a rule, this involves preventative violence, sometimes very clearly displayed, at others more behind the scenes. In 1953, the conflict reached an intense phase, and Beria and his closest supporters were effectively eliminated with no investigation and no trial. The situation with the GKChP passed off without bloodshed; after being arrested and imprisoned briefly, those who took part in the coup attempt were released and were even given the chance to take part in the new Russia’s political life. If the forces are successfully aligned, the issue can be settled by simply replacing the old leadership with a new, more loyal one. But it can be difficult to put in place such an arrangement.
In any case, within a matter of hours of its being in power, the temporary government has to carry out a “vote of confidence” among the siloviki, demanding from them total acknowledgement of the government’s legitimacy. If such an acknowledgement is forthcoming, the problem is removed and it allows time for a gradual strengthening of political control over the structures of power. However, should there be any doubt expressed, or, worse still, any opposition, the temporary government has to act harshly, even physically neutralising those who refuse to acknowledge its authority (in the best case, this would be by carrying out arrests; but even this may prove to be difficult). All of this is possible, though, it’s all been done before on a number of occasions, and there is no other way of accomplishing this. Either the new authorities show who’s boss, or they’ll be destroyed; if not immediately, then soon afterwards. Politics is a cruel business, and if you don’t acknowledge this then you’re simply not telling it as it is. I believe that this is unacceptable, because ruthless honesty must be the basis of the new politics.
So, in the shortest possible period of time the new authorities must bring the power structures under their control. If they are incapable of doing this, then they don’t hold power. And there’s no point in trying to work out in advance exactly how to do this: there are no ready-made recipes for it.
But there’s another important subject. There’s no problem with using force and putting a “man with a gun” in charge. The problem arises with how do you put a stop to that. Who makes the decision about the removal of the old siloviki and how this is carried out? Who makes the decision about the appointment of the new siloviki? The new leader, who’s the head of the temporary government? That would mean that he would be Russia’s new dictator. Firstly, because if he’s responsible for blood being shed (if it is indeed shed), then there’s no way back. And secondly because any new people whom he personally appoints will be beholden to him alone in the future.
We’ve already seen an example of this happen with Boris Yeltsin in 1993. There was an unsuccessful coup attempt and Yeltsin showed that he could be tough (at least from the point of view of the technology of the struggle for power), not allowing the seat of power to be dragged out from under him and suppressing the uprising of “the people in the White House”. As a result, he personally filled all the key governmental posts with those who were beholden to him. It then seemed that he didn’t have to do anything else. Having put his own people in all of the ministries of power, he no longer needed to engage in politics and the art of compromising – but without this, genuine politics no longer exists. After 1993 Yeltsin just pretended to play at politics, holding onto power mainly by strong-arm methods. And then he passed on the baton to the one who had managed this best.
How can we avoid this trap? How do we guarantee the success of the revolution without slipping back into the old ways? It seems to me that one of the possible ways of doing this is to delegate decisions to do with sanctions on the siloviki to a specially-created structure that is formally separate from the temporary government. Earlier I touched on the question of how a State Council, formed on a mixed regional and party principle, could assume power were there to be a temporary breakdown in the work of the representative and legal authorities. Inside this State Council a military commission could be set up, that would be a special emergency body, temporarily granted the authority to make decisions about the removal and appointment of the leaders of the power structures, as the representative of the temporary government and in the interests of the defence of the new authorities.
Such a division of powers could prove to be a workable and useful idea and would prevent the concentration of too much power in the hands of the head of the temporary government; power that he could, as a result, use not for society’s interests but for his own. No revolution passes off without the use of violence in a more or less mild form. But the use of force can rapidly lead society into a new authoritarian cycle. This vicious practice has to be stopped, or else the terror will never end. One way to do this, in my opinion, is that right from the start there should be an agreement that the new authorities will seek to delegate the process of taking decisions about the implementation of repressive measures.
This is the main thing. The details may vary, and exactly what they will be can be agreed upon later. I discussed one option above: decisions should be taken by a special commission of the State Council about the leadership of the power structures on the recommendation of the temporary government. The State Council is a temporary organisation, but one from which should come the complete constitutional division of power. But if no measures are taken to achieve this, all that will come of it will be violence and terror under new slogans.
Chapter 9. How to Create a Civil Service:
Employ Our Own Weak Staff or the Best from Abroad?
There is one reform that should be started immediately: administrative reform. It might seem that in the transitional period the temporary government will have many other urgent tasks to tackle. But if you’re going to deal with something, you must have the active tools with which to do it. If the government doesn’t have on its agenda the creation of a properly functioning state apparatus; if all of its plans will simply sink into a bureaucratic quagmire; then it won’t be able to achieve anything.
The quality of the state apparatus of a future government may seem of secondary importance when the future hasn’t yet arrived. This may be why today this question lies on the fringes of the public’s attention. But it’s well known that after any change of government this quickly becomes one of the most important issues – yet by then it’s too late to discuss it. What tends to happen is that the new authorities rush to the old state apparatus for help. In order to avoid this, it makes sense to agree on the basic solutions to the question ahead of time.
Few people among the opposition worry about the effectiveness of the state apparatus for the simple reason that their thoughts are dominated by two problems with power in Russia: the lack of democracy, and corruption. Many of them honestly suggest that all you have to do is solve one of these issues and everything else will fall into order behind it. The Russian opposition seems to believe in the old Russian tradition of relying on luck when it comes to the administration of the state: once democracy prevails, corruption will simply disappear, and everything else will follow.
It's not difficult to see where such an idea comes from. In a situation where the main task for the opposition is the battle against an authoritarian regime – and, what’s more, one that is degenerating into neo-totalitarianism – it seems only natural that the principal item on the agenda should be democratisation. And to some extent this is true. But something that doesn’t seem so important today will become one of the biggest headaches tomorrow, when the temporary government starts to carry out its functions. The new authorities’ ability to survive and demonstrate their superiority over the old government will depend also on how they show that they can quickly and effectively construct an efficient state apparatus.
Unfortunately, democratisation in itself doesn’t create an effective state apparatus. This depends on the quality of the new bureaucracy. And democratisation can often complicate this issue. Contrary to what many people think, democratisation and improving the efficiency of the state apparatus are not only separate tasks, but ones that can actually interfere with one another. When democratisation takes place rapidly and spontaneously, discipline can slacken, unbalancing the institutions of state. This isn’t surprising. But it can be very dangerous as the new government is taking its first steps, if it doesn’t move to restore discipline and generally raise the effectiveness of the bureaucratic system. If democracy isn’t based on a properly functioning state apparatus, then it will simply discredit the very idea of democracy itself.
Despite what many people think, the unprecedented scope of corruption in Russia doesn’t represent an insurmountable barrier to building an efficient, modern civil service. On the contrary, having a properly functioning civil service would be the first step to overcoming corruption in Russia. Of course, it’s impossible to wipe out corruption completely in any country. We can see how widespread it is in the West; and, what’s more, how actively the Putin regime makes use of this to further its influence. But it’s well within the capabilities of the temporary government to bring down the extreme levels of corruption that we see in Russia today. So corruption shouldn’t be presented as an unassailable obstacle or the main problem.
Corruption in Russia today has been artificially created by the current authorities and supported by political means. If it’s not encouraged externally then it will genuinely reduce relatively quickly. The point is not that officials are inclined to take bribes, but that instead of battling against this inevitable phenomenon, the current regime relies on exploiting and cultivating corruption. In modern Russia it’s simply impossible not to take and give bribes, and anyone who doesn’t do this becomes doubly dangerous for the authorities. Corruption oils the wheels of Putin’s terror machine. Without it, this sort of state structure is incapable of operating. Remove the political motivation, stop seeding corruption from above as a way of controlling the elite, and you’ll see how the infamous and unsurpassable “Russian corruption” rapidly decreases to average world levels. Of course, it won’t disappear entirely, just as it hasn’t disappeared in America or in Europe, despite all the achievements of Western civilisation. But it will become a controlled evil, rather than an instrument of coercion. I’ve noticed that if corruption consumes more than two per cent of a state budget, it becomes a threat to the very existence of that state. In such a case it’s not corruption itself that you have to fight, but the system of control that has made it so huge, because if it’s not stimulated in this way then it simply can’t grow all by itself.
I can point to my own experience at YUKOS. When our team joined the company every level of management was eaten up by corruption. This was because it was planted at the very top. When the company passed into the hands of a private owner who wasn’t interested in stealing from himself, the natural motivation to spread corruption disappeared. A different matter was the technology, which was pretty basic. Each employee was given a proposition that it was hard to refuse: either you stop stealing and earn a decent salary; or you’re out, and in the worst cases legal action may be taken. If this isn’t just a game, but the real political line, everything is solved very quickly. It took us less than two years. This is why I don’t see corruption as an insurmountable challenge. But on the other hand, solving it doesn’t deal with the issue of competent management. An idiot who isn’t corrupt but is lazy can sometimes be more dangerous than a bright spark who’s corrupt.
From the very first days it will be essential to start creating the state structures as an independent task, unconnected with the work of building democracy or the battle against corruption. But in Russia there’s an extra, complicating cultural factor in trying to achieve this. The deep-rooted tradition of seeing any official just as a lazy thief, and one whose work could be done by anyone at all. What makes it worse is that not only is this impression widespread among the general population, but it’s shared also by a significant part of the educated urban population and the democratically-inclined intelligentsia. This is a real impediment when it comes to considering the work of the state apparatus as something serious.
This attitude to officials found its most grotesque form in the well-known Bolshevik view that any cook would and should run the state. Just a couple of years after the revolution, though, Lenin was complaining that the government had had to recall to its service a large number of officials who had earlier been dismissed. Each had to be watched over by a commissar. On a rather smaller scale, this happened again at the start of the 1990s. Thanks to the results of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s perestroika, a large part of the Soviet nomenklatura found themselves a place inside the new authorities. This was inevitable. You can’t just pluck managers out of thin air, or create them from scratch. When no others are available, you have to use those that you have, however unpleasant this may be.
This constant negative attitude to officialdom in Russia came about because for centuries managing people wasn’t seen as an art or a profession. And yet it’s one of the most complicated areas of professional activity. It needs lengthy and complicated training, and very serious qualifications and skills that come only with long experience. The philosopher, Max Weber, considered the training of an effective official to be one of the most complicated tasks there is, and one that costs society a great deal. He suggested that modern officialdom in Europe came about as a by-product of the development of capitalism, with its difficult cultural management. Overcoming Russian traditions in this area and the creation of a professional and modern state service should be seen by the temporary government as the starting point for working out the general approach to the formation of a civil service in the new Russia.
To pause briefly on the most general principles that should guide the temporary government in resolving this issue, I would underline four points:
Change the relationship to government service and officialdom as a social class. Contempt for bureaucracy (that’s understandable and easy to explain, and which even becomes hatred), should be replaced by a constructive and respectful approach. Officials and any state employees should be seen by society as people who are carrying out an essential role. If this isn’t the case, then the other side of the same coin is impossible to fulfil: people should be able to make demands of the officials.
Separate state service from politics. State service should be professional and apolitical. Politicians come and go, but this shouldn’t affect the civil service. The civil service should operate according to its own internal statutes and follow its own internal code of conduct, in accordance with which a career path should depend entirely on professional qualities, and not whether someone supports one political opinion or another. Officials should be chosen to serve predominantly on the basis of the results of open competition, and should be selected for promotion thanks to their achievements, also decided predominantly on the basis of competition. In brief, a civil service has to be created virtually from nothing in Russia, and as a separate institution of authority, capable of working with any political leadership.
Management and commercial (service) activity should be divided. The experience of successful civil services around the world shows that the more functions that the state outsources to commercial and non-commercial organisations, the more effectively the bureaucracy works. The ultimate aim of this is as much as possible to free up state employees from serving the population, so that they can concentrate on carrying out regulatory and control functions. It’s a big problem for the state that when it comes to management it holds a monopoly, detached from market forces. Therefore, everywhere possible market forces should be brought to bear on the state, so that the laws of competition apply there, too.
The regulatory and the control functions should be divided. This is a fairly straightforward idea, meaning that the people who make the rules are not the ones responsible for overseeing their implementation. These functions should be split between two separate institutions. This is the extension of the constitutional principle of the division of powers at the administrative level: at no level should any significant power lie in the hands of one person. As a spin-off, this is also a much more effective battle against corruption than are criminal measures.
Of course, I’ve listed only the most basic ideas for administrative reform, which is one of the most important tasks for any government that wants to build the new Russia. This reform cannot be put off. If there’s an effectively operating state apparatus, with carefully delineated functions and strict discipline, this will create the conditions for success in all other areas. However, there is one “technical” problem which will hinder its creation: personnel. And, as we know, it’s the personnel who decide everything.
It's impossible to build a new system of management without the right staff. But for various reasons all the available personnel always turn out to be unsuitable. Some are clever, cunning, well trained – but unable to work in a new way and aren’t prepared to learn new methods. Others are so set in their old ways that no talents they may have can possibly compensate for their deceitful mentality. There’s always been a shortage of personnel in Russia. It was always difficult to find a smart worker for any position, especially for state service. And as for finding a smart worker who’s prepared to operate within the confines of a system that doesn’t even exist yet – it’s virtually impossible.
There’s yet another awkward area: new managerial technology. If we don’t introduce this, we’ll never change the system. For now, the whole system of management remains totally archaic. An official’s work involves carrying out registrations; deciding whether or not to issue permits; and also allocating everything that needs to be allocated. Any thinking person could fulfil these tasks if they turned their hand to it. In principle, they could all be done by a tsarist-era clerk from the old Moscow order. They’d just need some computer training. Given that state functions haven’t changed fundamentally since that time it’s unlikely that they’d have a problem. But if we were to carry out the administrative reforms I outlined above, then the functions of the state apparatus would change radically. For this we need a particular type of professional that simply doesn’t exist in Russia – and never has done.
In the first instance we’re talking here about people who can arrange interaction between the regulatory authorities, state supervision bodies and the commercial sector, and who are prepared to take upon themselves the implementation of a significant amount of the state’s tasks. This is how the modern world works. I have in mind here especially various public-private partnerships. It’s impossible to imagine a modern state that doesn’t have these now. But without highly qualified specialists who already have serious experience of this, it’s impossible to set this up in Russia.
Where are we going to find these highly qualified specialists for state service? This is a dilemma that we’ve come across before. We could employ our own people, and try to train them on the job. Or, if we could overcome our phobia, we could open the way to state service for foreigners who already have advanced experience of such work. If we take a sober look at Russian history we will see that all of the key, fateful reforms have been solved this way. The pride and joy of the present regime, the Russian army, was created by foreign specialists at the time of Peter the Great. They were also the ones in the age of industrialisation who created the industries that today provide the army with its weaponry. At crucial moments the Russian government didn’t hold back from taking foreigners into its service when this was needed. And more often than not this approach justified itself.
The conclusion is simple: we have to follow both paths. We have to train our own people where we can and as thoroughly as we can; but while they’re training we mustn’t be too afraid or embarrassed to hire foreigners. If we wish quickly to change the quality of the civil service in Russia, we have to open the door to foreign specialists. Of course, we must put in place sensible safeguards, but I can see no other solution today, especially in those areas where there’s virtually no home-grown experience. In any case, we’re not talking about huge numbers of people. I believe that we would need between 3,000 and 5,000 specialists in the central structures, and half that number in the regions. But we mustn’t repeat the mistakes made under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. We have to invite genuinely the best professional managers and not “the boys from Chicago”. We have to hire the most progressive managers from international corporations and government structures all over the world, those who have practical, not just theoretical experience of management. We must give them the chance to work for us and teach those who’ll be working alongside them. I suggest that this will take about five years, ten at the most.
If we want quality, we have to be prepared to pay for it – both our own people and the foreigners. We must offer sufficiently high salaries, so that we can demand what we want from them, including total honesty. We’ll have to pay the foreigners more. But Russia is a sufficiently wealthy country that we can afford to employ in our service not simply the best from among 140 million, but the best from a few billion, selecting them on an individual basis. This, incidentally, takes great skill, and we shall also have to seek the assistance of true professionals to take part in the search. I have my own experience which I’m prepared to share. When I had to turn YUKOS into a leading international company, the foreigners whom I invited to join us were paid more than I was. Then, of course, I recouped the costs when it came to paying dividends. But that was much later. At first, we had a great deal to learn. And we paid well for this knowledge. There is no alternative.
To sum up, I repeat again that a comprehensive administrative reform of the civil service is an issue that brooks no delay. It must be a priority for whatever government comes after the Putin regime. The aim of this reform (that incidentally was one that Putin himself called a priority, and was one of his first total failures) is to turn an archaic, semi-Soviet, semi-feudal state structure into a modern system of management. In essence, Russia has to start from scratch to create a civil service independent of both politics and business. And in order to get it right, we need once again to do what we’ve done many times before in our history and invite into the Russian state service foreigners who have the necessary knowledge and experience. Incidentally, this will be easier for us to do than it was for our ancestors. The Putin regime has forced tens of thousands of talented people out of the country. These people have gained invaluable experience in Western corporations, and in the right circumstances can return to their Motherland.
Chapter 10. What’s Meant by “a Turn to the Left”:
a Welfare State or a Socialist State?
I’ve had a great deal of time to think about mistakes – both the ones I’ve made and other peoples’. But it didn’t take me long to find the greatest of them. Back in 2004, when I was contemplating how it was that we – and I personally – had ended up where we were, I wrote the first version of “A Turn to the Left”. At that time, this title may have seemed a little odd. You may think that a man who had been able to make use of all the advantages that the market economy gave to enterprising people would have been just the person to write about a turn to the right (in the economic sense). But long before my row with Putin’s regime crossed over to its open and acute phase, I had understood clearly that for Russia, with its history, its mentality and its traditions, a right-leaning, liberal policy would lead it into a complete dead-end. I still hold to this view today, fifteen years after that first article saw the light of day.
However, with hindsight much appears different from how it was, and so this calls for a fresh appraisal of the situation. Now I have a pretty good idea of what this left turn should begin with in Russia. So what’s changed? First of all, a pseudo-left wing political course has emerged from the Kremlin, something that clearly didn’t exist before. This copies, yet mocks, a left-wing agenda. How should we describe Putin’s regime? Left-wing? Or right-wing? I’m sure that the vast majority of people would say that Putin has a left-wing agenda. The state sector is developing; he fights against independent businesses; he’s created a complicated system of social rights and privileges; and so on. But in actual fact, it’s completely the other way round. Putin is actually continuing the traditions of the 1990s, and is following a radically right-wing political course. That’s why the need for a turn to the left has only increased in recent years.
In order to delve deeper into this question, we have to define what is “right” and what is “left”. And in today’s world that’s no easy task. Everywhere, not just in Russia, we see right-wing politicians acting like parasites of a left-wing agenda. A textbook example is Trump with his eccentric rhetoric. The borders between right and left are blurred; all definitions have been lost. In order to try to bring some clarity to this question, in my opinion, we have to concentrate on the main issue, and not get lost in the minutiae. And I believe that the main issue is social inequality. If a political course ultimately leads to the growth of social inequality, it’s a right-wing programme, however much they dress it up in left-wing rhetoric. But if it leads to a reduction in social inequality, it’s left-wing.
Let’s examine Putin’s social and economic policies from this point of view. Putin came to power on an anti-oligarch agenda, that theoretically was and remains one of the cornerstones of Kremlin mythology. But in reality the political course he’s followed not only hasn’t narrowed the gap between the rich and the poor, but has increased social inequality to levels never witnessed before. Putin has placed a huge amount of economic and political power in the hands of a very narrow stratum, made up of the higher, largely power bureaucracy and the criminal and semi-criminal “asset holders” who serve their interests. In place of the inequality that naturally arises because of a market economy, and that modern societies have more or less learnt to manage, Putinism has used the power it holds to create such inequality that an impenetrable wall has been built between the rich and the poor.
At every turn in Putin’s Russia, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer quicker than happened in Russia in the 1990s. But thanks to the growth in energy prices that resulted in a general rise in the standard of living, this process went unnoticed – up to a certain point. There was a lot of money around, and so the poor received a little “compensation”. However, for every rouble in social handouts that the president talks about with great ceremony in his annual address to the nation, there’s a dollar that goes into the pockets of Putin’s elite. As a result, the distance between the richest and the poorest strata of Russian society has been rapidly increasing. This process no longer goes unnoticed, because the regime has run out of money for the social sector. In the last few years in Russia we’ve seen the growth not only of relative poverty, but of absolute poverty. So over the course of 20 years Putin has been carrying out a radically right-wing policy, which can be seen objectively by the increasing stratification of society. I believe that this will lead to a dead-end, and represents a threat to national security, as ultimately this will bring the country to a social conflict faster than any imaginary “foreign agents”.
As well as the increasing rift between the incomes of the rich and the poor, that’s already in danger of causing an explosion, the whole system of distributing wealth in society is warped. Raiding businesses is the very essence of the system that Putin has created, and is one of the basic sources of inequality. The government’s direct interference gives rise to a latent (but no less widespread) redistribution of wealth in favour of those who demonstrate loyalty to the regime. This increases not only the degradation of the economic institutions, but also the moral principles of society. Any immoral behaviour in this system, be it lying, betrayal, denunciations and so on, is encouraged and financially advantageous.
The main thing that should be understood about social inequality in the Putin era, is that at its foundation lie non-economic factors. It’s artificially created inequality that’s supported by political violence. Consequently, the only way to fight this inequality is to eliminate the political factors that give rise to it. So all of the propaganda efforts that the Kremlin puts into this battle against poverty can be seen simply as a vicious insult. The main precondition for an effective battle against poverty in Russia is to remove the regime that has created and increased this poverty by its very existence. The regime has acted like an enormous pump, sucking the money out of the pockets of millions of its citizens and dumping it into the pockets of Putin’s millionaires.
How has this pump been constructed? How come this is what’s hoovering up the country’s wealth? The answer is pretty obvious: the regime exists and enriches itself mainly because there’s no control over the way it exploits resource rent. It divides up the profits from the sale of raw materials – oil, gas, metals and timber – in a completely arbitrary fashion, doing simply as it wishes and acting in the interests of a narrow circle of people. I believe that in order for Russia to be a state that provides for its people, it’s vital that society be given back control over its resource rent – that is, over the rent profits from the extraction and exploitation of the country’s natural resources. This is provided for in the constitution, but doesn’t exist in reality.
The idea of giving back to society control over resource rent isn’t new. Communists write and talk about this a great deal. The question is, do we genuinely give this control to society, or do we return it once again to the state? If we return it to the state, then once again control will be handed simply to another small group of people; just a different group this time. And even though the Communists’ idea that everything should once again be nationalised would be a fairer solution than what we have today, it would lead to be another historical dead-end for Russia. A return to the USSR would inevitably lead once again to a bureaucratised, static and inefficient economy, which is what destroyed the Soviet Union. This is inevitable with any gigantic state monopoly, especially in a country where the corporate culture is so undeveloped, where the officials are poorly educated and economically illiterate, and where, what’s more, there’s a centuries-old tradition of corruption and sabotage.
But this is not the only issue. The principal drawback in what the Communists are proposing of marching into the future by way of the past is the insoluble political bureaucratic equation: the more resources that are concentrated in the hands of the state, the greater is the state’s role in their redistribution. And the greater the state’s role in their redistribution, then the greater the quantity of resource rent society has to leave to the mercy of the huge redistribution system. This means that both from the point of view of society itself, and of each individual citizen, this whole reverse nationalisation makes no sense at all. The lion’s share of resource rent will be spread across the state’s huge power structure; another part of it will be wasted because of the inefficiency of the state monopoly; and the crumbs that are left will go to the people, and, what’s more, in return for their giving up on their rights as citizens. The question as to who will actually head up this machine for theft and deception – whether it would be Putin’s followers or Zyuganov’s followers or someone else – bears no significance for Russia’s fate.
How can we break this vicious circle and tear the rents from Russia’s natural wealth out of the hands of the criminal bureaucrats? I believe there is a solution, and it’s a fairly obvious one. It’s a different matter that it’s not much use to those who are currently in power, nor those who hope to take over power. The ones who would benefit are those in today’s Russia who are deprived of proper political representation, and whose voice, therefore, is never heard. I think that the only possible solution to the problem of what to do with resource rents in Russia is to lock them into the social needs of the population. This would cut out the state’s role as the middle-man in their redistribution.
And such a possibility genuinely exists in Russia.
If we roughly compare the recoverable profits that Putin’s regime receives today from resource rents with the amount that the government should be paying for pensions but cannot cover, then the sums are virtually the same. On the payments’ side we can also add in spending on medical insurance, that the government also isn’t able to meet, and which it therefore is constantly cutting back. So if this is the case, wouldn’t it be simpler to cut out all the intermediate stages and direct the windfall profits from resource rents – in the main, those from raw materials, notably oil and gas – straight to people’s pension and health savings’ accounts? When the need arose, either when they reached pensionable age or were ill, people would receive the necessary funds. What’s more, this would be proper sums of money, not simply the crumbs that prevent them from dying of starvation.
Technically, this wouldn’t be difficult to arrange. Already today, the windfall profits from the sale of raw materials are marked out, and come into the state coffers in a separate line from the companies that receive resource rent, so it wouldn’t be difficult to distinguish them (it would simply be a question of the inefficiency of Putin’s managers). Today they’re simply merged into the overall budget flow, and the government disposes of them as it wishes, spending them on crazy Kremlin projects or simply stealing them. But each month they should be divided equally into the savings’ accounts of every citizen of the country.
These savings’ accounts, pension and health, should be opened the moment a person is born, and last until they die. This would be a genuine privilege of Russian citizenship, and not an imaginary symbol of belonging to a great country. We have to create a situation where being a citizen of Russia would mean they you lived with dignity into your old age, and not just have the privilege of dying to protect “Rottenburg’s palaces” in a series of endless and pointless wars entered into by the regime. Today, resource rent drops into a black hole, where it’s redistributed in the most outrageous fashion to the beneficiaries of Putin’s regime. We must make this black hole transparent, so that every citizen can see and understand what’s happening with the national property that’s been handed down by our ancestors.
The sums of money that would be saved in these accounts would be very significant. All around the world pension funds are important investment vehicles, and I don’t see why Russia should be an exception. I suggest that surplus amounts could be held temporarily on the Russian Financial Index (a consolidated packet of Russian shares, traded on the stock market), which would in turn support Russian production. In this way a safety cushion would be created, that would genuinely help to turn Russia away from being a socialist state, where the country’s wealth of raw materials belong to the bureaucrats, into a proper welfare state, where resource rent belongs to the people, and comes under the direct control of society.
I’d like to repeat what exactly I see as the difference between the model of a socialist state – with no prospects for the future – and a welfare state. By this I mean not simply what is written in the Constitution, but what in actual fact is the only suitable way for the economic system in Russia today to develop. In a socialist state, production and distribution are in the hands of an inefficient monopoly, that does everything in the interests of a bureaucratic clan. In a welfare state, however, the state doesn’t take production nor distribution under its control, thus encouraging competition in all areas. The state’s responsibility lies simply in setting the rules in order to lessen social inequality.
On the surface, some of these suggestions reflect the slogans of the left opposition to Putin’s regime, and also to those spouted by the Russian Communists. These also call for the re-establishment of social control over resource rent; but, as I mentioned earlier, they propose doing this in the same way as the Bolsheviks carried out nationalisation, and putting control over resources into the hands of the state. Whilst I agree with the left insofar as it is essential to re-establish social control over natural resources, I cannot agree with the way in which they want to do it. As I see it, this wouldn’t even level out inequality, but simply turn it from an economic method into one dominated by the nomenklatura and their clans.
Unlike a socialist state, a welfare state doesn’t try to make everyone equal in order then to work out who are more equal than others. The aim of a welfare state is to give everyone an equal chance of development and success. Had I written this text 15 or 20 years ago, I would probably have put a full stop after that. But given the experience that I’ve gained today, I’ll put a comma. Equal opportunities to succeed should be given to all those who are ready to use them. But those who cannot do this, or just don’t want to, should be given minimal guarantees. Without this humanitarian component, no welfare state can exist, especially in Russia.
To summarise briefly, let me explain why I believe we need a left turn at the current stage of development of Russian statehood. We need it in order to remove the political factors that are leading to an explosive growth in social inequality, and start to follow a consistent path aimed at reducing this inequality. Naturally, I consider the most important thing that we need to do is to get rid of Putin’s system, with its “raiding by the siloviki”. This allows for the redistribution by non-economic means of national wealth among groups of people who are loyal to the regime, leading to it being concentrated in the hands of a small clique who are running the state.
Once this first condition has been swiftly carried out, the temporary government should resolve the question of establishing social control over resource rent. As I wrote above, I see the most sensible and efficient way of doing this as being the creation of life-long insurance savings’ accounts for the people, into which the windfall profits from raw materials should be paid in various amounts. Deciding this issue will be just as important as was the question of property that took place during the social revolution in Russia at the start of the twentieth century. But this time it must really be solved in the interests of the whole nation, and not just its “leaders”. This is the only thing that will give the temporary government the genuine support of the people as a whole, and create that political “safety cushion”, that will allow it to carry out all of the long overdue economic and political reforms.
Chapter 11. How Do We Achieve Economic Justice:
Nationalisation or Honest Privatisation?
The total restoration of social justice is impossible without the restoration of economic justice. In the widest sense of the term, economic justice is the most important part of social justice. And in the narrower sense, it signifies equality, not so much in the distribution of national wealth, so much as in having access to the basic means of production. In other words, it’s economic justice that gives people a more even chance of becoming rich.
The logic here is simple: those who hold the basic instruments for the production of wealth, inevitably have a massive advantage when it comes to their distribution. And this can’t be balanced out by any corrective measures such as taxes or subsidies and so on.
Therefore, the question of property – who should hold the basic means of production of national wealth, and on what basis – always had, has, and will always have the greatest significance for society. Whatever government takes over from Putin’s regime simply cannot ignore this.
There’s no need to explain that the privatisation process that began in Russia in the 1990s and in reality is still going on, led to the destruction of economic justice. In an instant it created a deep inequality for different strata of society in terms of access to the basic means of production. It proved very difficult to get rid of this. This is not only an objective factor that any future government has to face up to (as does the current one), but also it’s a challenge that it must tackle.
I should add from my own observations that for various post-Soviet generations privatisation was, and clearly remains, a serious psychological trauma that has left a deep scar on society’s consciousness. So in any crisis, the question as to who owns the bulk of Russia’s national wealth and why it’s in the hands of these people will always rise to the surface. And it will always be impossible to avoid answering this question – and so it should be.
Looking back with the advantage of hindsight at what happened more than a quarter of a century ago, I consider that the privatisation of the Soviet economy – or, to be more accurate, the removal of state control – was an inevitable and justifiable action. But I suggest that the way in which it was carried out was unacceptable for society; unfair economically; and dangerous for the economic and historical development of the country.
The post-Soviet privatisation de facto presented a very narrow circle of people with a great advantage by having access to assets. For a variety of reasons these people found themselves in a winning position: administrative resources were available to them; they had access to funds; their education; their age; and so on. On the other hand, the broad mass of the people had no possibility of taking part in the distribution of these assets. The man in the street was reduced to being a temporary holder of a voucher, that he either sold off to speculators at a low rate that didn’t reflect its genuine economic value, or who lost out on any value entirely by leaving it to his grandchildren as a memento of the era. Individual investments in the shares of investment funds were simply a myth, that was shattered by the economic crisis of 1998.
The successful privatisations that took place in Eastern Europe demonstrate that there was an alternative to the method that was chosen in Russia. But the decision taken in Russia was less a mistake than it was a conscious ideological choice. The government made its number one priority solving a political issue, not a social or an economic one. The aim was to pull the rug out from under the feet of the Communists, who were supported by the so-called “red directors”, by rapidly creating a new “class of owners”.
I think we can say that the Russian government of the time deliberately chose this method of privatisation, because it was the one that best met its priorities. At that time it hardly bothered anyone that as a result of this, economic justice was thrown out of the window and, as a result, social justice, too. Similarly, no one cared that this created the conditions for the rise of a crime-ridden economy and a mafia state. All of these “fruits” ripened about 15 years later, notably after Putin came to power.
Long before Putin, the authorities skilfully conducted the privatisation process, using it as an instrument to strengthen their influence over society. And a priori, the privatisation of strategically important facilities was a subject for political bargaining, something the government used to solve its own issues, that were frequently a long way from economic ones. Loans-for-shares auctions were no exception to this, that became a bargaining chip in the 1996 presidential election campaign.
As someone who was directly engaged in this game with the government as a representative of business, I had understood by the beginning of this century that the country had entered a social and political dead-end. It was vital to get out of this by putting right the results of this spontaneous privatisation. I began to speak out, saying that it was essential to take urgent and extraordinary steps in order to re-establish economic justice.
Soon after Putin came to power I suggested to the leadership of the country that we should look again at the issue of privatisation; in the first instance, of course, that of the loans-for-shares auctions. I suggested that the problem could be solved by bringing in a one-off tax for the main beneficiaries of the privatisation process. This could be done by way of contributions to a special fund for economic development, that would have been measured in tens of billions of dollars.
Unfortunately, not only was my initiative not supported, but it became one of the factors that led to my arrest. Later I and others realised that Putin’s regime had no intention of changing the results of privatisation; on the contrary, they planned to use them specifically for their own ends. This strengthened my sense of foreboding, and ultimately led me to the conclusions that I laid out in my article “A Turn to the Left”, that I wrote when I was in prison.
In the more than 15 years that have passed since the publication of “A Turn to the Left”, the situation in Russia has radically changed; and what began as a political error has ended up being a full-blown political and socio-economic disaster. Clearly, the measures that I suggested at the start of the century are totally inadequate today. Tough and serious decisions need to be taken, and political will and courage are needed to make them happen.
Twenty years of Putin in power show that the main beneficiary of the privatisation process that was launched at the start of the 1990s has been Putin himself. Once he came to power, he and a narrow group of people close to him – some of whom were directly linked to the criminal underworld – privatised not individual facilities or even the economy: they privatised the state itself. They turned the state into a weapon for their personal enrichment and for their own common use.
Today “the state” in the strict meaning of the word has ceased to exist in Russia. It’s become an enormous private militarised corporation, solving the problems of its principal shareholders. The whole world now knows about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Private Military Company known as the Wagner Group, and that it represents a miniature version of the whole of the Putin state. The state in Russia doesn’t defend the national interests, but simply serves the interests of the clan that rules it.
From the first days of its existence, this corporation in the guise of a state busied itself with what it regarded as the most important task: the redistribution of property to its main shareholders. This process, that’s been going on for just over 20 years, has brought us to the point where Russia’s fundamental national wealth is now under the control of a very small group of people; probably just a few hundred families. These people represent the backbone of Putin’s infamous vertical of power.
In a matter of years, Russia became the country with the highest concentration of capital. But this capital was tied in with power; if someone lost their access to power, then they inevitably lost their economic influence, too. So every business group that was close to the authorities in Russia became vertically integrated into the whole power structure, especially into the block of the power ministries. It worked the other way round, too. Every area of bureaucracy built up under itself its own business infrastructure. For Putin’s regime, money became simply a function of power.
At the same time, we can speak with confidence about the collective ownership of the ruling clan over the property it controls. Russia’s economy today is run along the principle of the thieves’ “collective fund”. It doesn’t matter who’s registered as the actual owner; what matters is who it’s “understood” to belong to. A perfect illustration of this is the story of the ill-fated palace at Gelendzhik. It was felt necessary to pass ownership from one member of Putin’s circle to another; but everyone knows that it doesn’t belong to any of them.
Putin and his team conducted an extra, secret, privatisation in Russia, by carrying out a secondary seizure of assets in their favour. They achieved this in two ways. First of all, Putin “re-recruited” the vast majority of the old “boyars” – the leaders of the former elite. These were the main shareholders of the financial and industrial groups that emerged in the 1990s. Putin turned them into nothing more than mere asset holders, dependent on his authority. Either they would carry out his orders, or they would lose their property. Next, Putin created a new “nobility” out of his servants; people such as Igor Sechin, Alexey Miller, the Rotenbergs or the Kovalchuks. They were given direct control over part of the state’s assets, as well as the assets seized from obstinate “boyars”.
In time, the difference between “boyars” and “nobility” virtually disappeared, and those titles now have a merely decorative meaning. Nowadays, nearly everyone who has a large fortune in Russia is fully and directly beholden to the ruling political clan, is an integral part of it, and de facto merely the holder of property that actually belongs to the clan as a whole.
This mafia-type property structure is completely incompatible with any pretence at building any kind of normal state system in Russia, at the basis of which should lie the principle of justice. It prevents the construction of any such system, and would destroy the efforts of any government, even if these efforts were completely sincere.
The longer this goes on, the more this parasitic system of collective ownership of property by the ruling clan is turning into an unbearable weight on society. This carbuncle that’s preventing the country’s development has to be removed, in the interests of Russian society and in the interests of Russia’s future. Many people understand this now. It’s discussed in kitchens, and in the smoking rooms of universities. It’s the obvious political imperative of our time, even if for now it’s hidden from view.
As soon as society wakes up, the first thing the people will demand from any temporary government is that they destroy the property held by this criminal gang that’s running the Russian state. And whether it wants to or not, the government will be obliged to do this. But how can it be accomplished without repeating the mistakes of those who carried out the privatisations of the ‘nineties? After all, maybe they wanted things to turn out better?
The most widely-discussed and perhaps seemingly most obvious way to proceed is nationalisation. It might appear to be the easiest solution: take it all back and hand it over to the state. But where will that lead us as a result? We’ll just go back to where we were: the USSR in the middle of the last century (and that’s the best case analysis). Once again we’ll have a huge, immovable economy, run by a sluggish bunch of officials, who’ll try to squeeze as many privileges out of the system as they can.
After nationalisation, these officials will once again become nomenklatura oligarchs, even if strictly speaking they don’t own the property that they’re controlling. This can end only one way: in exactly the same sort of crisis that finished off the Soviet Union.
There are better solutions that simply haven’t been tried. Russia doesn’t need nationalisation, but a new, honest and fair, privatisation. The temporary government’s task lies in creating a platform for such a privatisation to take place.
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