Intelligent.ru articles
The Parlous State of the Nation
Right now, President Putin’s team of speechwriters must be hard at it preparing his State of the Nation address for the year 2006. What he is going to talk about is all too easy to predict. Pundits are saying already that he will outline a program of action for his successor, as this is the last year before the country goes into a period of sustained hysterics over impending Duma and presidential elections a year later.
Putin’s natural wish (or better say his intention) will be for the successor to continue his own policies, so he may dwell again on the recurrent themes of his presidency, like doubling the country’s GDP (a much criticized goal, so he may go easy on that); the fight against poverty, corruption, the omnipotence of a corrupt bureaucracy; against terrorism, international and otherwise; against the rising threat of racism and fascism; and, most importantly perhaps, against the deplorable tendency of the Russian nation to die out.
The economy is sure to figure prominently: firstly, how fine we have been doing in terms of annual growth rates, and what will have to be done to speed up that progress, to make the lavish inflow of petrodollars work for the benefit of the whole nation, not just a few fat cats. There may even be some talk of the need for a breakthrough, for more ambitious tasks to be set. Hitch-your-wagon-to-a-star sort of thing. The four national projects – maybe more. Restructuring the economy away from dependence on natural resources, moving toward a post-industrial, science-and-technology-based economy, and a society to match.
All very sound stuff, perhaps, but somehow I catch myself losing interest even before I hear any of it. There are certain basics that I am sure Putin is not going to discuss, and these are in my view far more important for the state of the nation.
Some twelve years ago The Moscow Times printed an opinion piece of mine entitled “The Mercedes Class and the Metro People: A Divided Nation,” a pessimistic overview of the characteristics of the principal classes in contemporary Russian society. Here is what I saw as the salient features of the emerging middle class: “a disregard, blatant or latent, for the social contract, for such things as law and moral conventions, mostly seen as annoying impediments to grabbing the good things of life like flashy cars, chic villas and vacations in the Canaries.” Russia’s lower classes did not fare much better in my opinion piece: “Protestant or similar work ethics take hundreds of years to evolve, while it has taken just a few decades of socialism to knock out of the masses’ heads any vague, if natural, leanings toward honest work …” Finally, my own class, the Russian intelligentsia, with its “traditional ethos of ‘suffering for the people’ as the ultimate good,” could no longer be relied on as “a beacon for all the other classes, refining manners and tastes and ideas,” for the simple reason that that intelligentsia had become “more myth than reality.” True, in a recent lengthy article in the Russian version of intelligent.ru, “Apologia for the Russian Intelligentsia,” I tried to overcome my own doubts on this score, but only with middling success.
Twelve years is a long time, especially in periods of revolutionary change. In roughly the same length of time between 1920 and 1930, Stalin nurtured a whole new class, the nomenklatura, the Party bureaucracy, later dubbed Partocracy. They were a murderous bunch who terrorized and exploited the majority of their own people, and only one thing could be said for them – they killed, and some of them died, not just for their class privileges (though these came first for most, no doubt), but also for the state they served and the ideas they (well, let’s say enough of them) believed in.
In the past twelve years (especially since about 2000), the killing and dying has been on a more modest scale compared to the 1920s and ’30s, while the thieving, organized and spontaneous, has proceeded on a scale the world has hardly seen to date. The process produced a full-blown upper middle class (better known as the oligarchiat) and a struggling middle class proper. Though their basic characteristics are still as formulated in 1994, an expanded definition may be offered: The upper middle class are those businessmen-cum-politicians and bureaucrats-cum-businessmen who have stolen enough to buy real estate in the West and send their children to be educated there; the lower middle class are the bureaucrats and business people who are only dreaming of, and/or working toward, these laudable goals.
It follows, with mathematical accuracy, that there is no national elite in Russia; that “national elite” hereabouts is a contradiction in terms. Once a person has worked or thieved his/her way into the middle class, especially the upper crust of it, “real life” for them is out there in the West, while Russia is just a place where they earn/steal enough to maintain a western style of life. Roman Abramovich, with his Chelsea football club and multi-million yachts and Air Force One-type aircraft, is just an extreme example – there are about a hundred thousands of mini-abramoviches around.
Putin’s rule is associated with certain positive developments in this area, at least at the very top – the change-over from the openly comprador, predatory bunch of thieves to the more Russia-centered series of clans. But the oligarchic nature of the system has remained intact, and with it, the basic flaw of Russia’s society: it is a divided nation, with an ever growing gap separating the privileged from the unprivileged. Even while residing and managing their affairs here in Russia, both the viciously comprador section of the upper crust and the Putin bunch of gosudarstvenniki, sovereign-state-oriented oligarchs and mini-oligarchs, take care to erect physical walls between themselves and the rest of the nation, settling in compounds shielded by high fences and armed guards from the surrounding Russia which they observe in passing through the one-way windows of their limos. The “patriotic” demagoguery of the politicians they buy does not fool anyone.
Now, what about the “working classes,” twelve years on? Nothing new about them. There are hundreds of thousands of job vacancies in Moscow alone, and mostly Turks, Azeris, Tadjiks, Moldavians, Ukrainians and such to fill them. What social initiative the great sections of Russia’s “working classes” have goes into petty stealing and drinking the proceeds away. Paradoxically, the lower classes share with the upper crust outright contempt for or, at best, indifference to the land they live in: observe the vandalism, the latrine-like condition of public places, the mounds of litter right at their doorstep.
However, the characteristic of the working masses that evokes the greatest pessimism, I would even say desperation, among my circle, the liberal-democratic intelligentsia, the “democrats of the first wave,” the people who started Perestroika and are thus responsible, at least morally, for all that followed, is the apathy of those masses.
Let me remind the reader that one of our slogans in the 1980s, those that we democrats then used to rouse the masses, was fighting the Partocracy’s exploitation of the working people. At those huge rallies of the late 1980s we pointed out, in voices of thunder, that in the West the share of wages in the final product was as high as 80 percent, whereas in the Soviet Union it was a mere 36 percent, and often lower than that. Merciless exploitation, we yelled. Let’s do away with the Communist regime, and live like they do in the blessed West. Okay, we did away with the Communist regime – and what happened? We all know what happened – West-aided-and-abetted, Gaidar-and-Chubais-implemented “democratic reforms.” Result? In 2000, a Russian’s worker’s share in the cost of value added product was 12 (twelve) bloody percent. Three times lower than in 1985!
But – do we hear of rallies of protest, of street marches, of trade unions organizing million-strong demos in defense of the working people’s right to decent wages, to a decent life? A dozen women here and there go on hunger strikes over wages that have not been paid for years sometimes, that’s about all we hear. Talk of the Russians’ patience. With this kind of patience – though, as I say, the right word is dour social apathy – Russia is surely headed for a dollar-a-day subsistence living standards. There are exactly two ways out of a situation like that: slow or not so slow death of the nation – or a repeat of 1917. So what do we do, wait for 2017?
I guess Putin will soon say many inspired words and set wonderful tasks for his successor and the country as a whole to achieve. Maybe he should be thinking more of the kind of people who would be capable of achieving them, and of ways to instill a new (actually millennia old) morality in an elite and a populace that have lost their ethical bearings.
I just don’t believe he has in mind the right man for the job to be elected as his successor. There simply aren’t any around.
A Tale of Two Post-Soviet Elections
By Kirill Pankratov
In Ukraine the presidential party was handed a huge, resounding defeat – the result of the widespread disgust with corruption, incompetence, government infighting and failing economy. In contrast, the Belorussian strongman Lukashenko is genuinely popular.
Last month important elections took place in two former Soviet states – a presidential poll in Belarus and, a week later, parliamentary elections in Ukraine. The contrast between them could not be greater. You've seen it all on major TV news channels. In Ukraine – a noisy, lively campaign, with a dozen of competing parties, a sea of colorful banners and billboards, a Babel tower of speeches and political programs. In Belarus – a dour campaign by an authoritarian regime, with Soviet-style TV, and a suppressed opposition.
And now consider a different view. In Ukraine the presidential party was handed a huge, resounding defeat – the result of the widespread disgust with corruption, incompetence, government infighting and failing economy. In contrast, the Belorussian strongman Lukashenko is genuinely popular. Even if elections were totally free of manipulations, and the opposition was given all the air time that it wanted, Lukashenko would have gotten an overwhelming majority – most likely above 70% (in the official vote he received 83% of the total). These are the realities (and paradoxes) of the post-Soviet world. It's never a black-and-white picture, nor a very pretty one.
Belarus's elections came first, on March 19th. Lukashenko obviously freaked out thinking that the young opposition activists supported by the West would try to arrange another “color revolution” similar to Georgia's in 2003 and Ukraine's in 2004. He imposed heavy-handed controls over the borders, the media and the key opposition figures. Yet his position was incomparably more secure. First, even with his plebeian manners and frequent slips of the tongue, he is a more charismatic figure than those ousted by the above-mentioned colored revolutions. Second, the opposition completely lacked effective and popular leaders. Third, aside from the vague notion of “democracy,” Belarus is economically better off than Ukraine, not to mention the post-Soviet pauper Georgia. The economy is stable and growing. The state bureaucracy is meddling but relatively competent; streets are clean and well-paved; roads are better than in nearby Russian regions; and the state health care system is functioning well.
Belorussians are tough, hardworking people thriving on a relatively small Piece pf land, full of deep forests and swamps, without access to a sea or mineral wealth. Belarus got most of its radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl nuclear powerplant explosion (which technically happened in Ukraine), but unlike Ukraine it didn't whine and beg for aid at the EU doors. During WWII Belarus lost some 25% of the population. It was the scene of some of the war's very toughest resistance. In many other regions in Eastern Europe – the Baltic countries, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, western Ukraine – Hitler's armies obtained plenty of recruits and supplies that added strength to the Nazi war machine. In Serbia and Belarus, on the other hand, dozens of German divisions were tied up by courageous and tenacious guerillas, suffering terrible losses. After the war, Belarus became the industrial and agricultural powerhouse of the Soviet Union. Its living standards were among the highest in the former USSR, about 20-30% higher than in Russia and slightly better than in Ukraine.
The opposition was preparing for the protests long before the election, regardless of the results. In the style of the previous “color revolutions” they trained youth activists, brought in tents, generators and heaters. Immediately after the announcement of the preliminary results – just 6% for the most radical opposition figure, Milinkevich, a physics professor, and even less for the assorted collection of other candidates – the opposition began to organize a protest in one of Minsk's main squares. The first night about 10,000 people participated – a tiny fraction of the “Maidan” gathering in Kiev in December 2004, but nevertheless pretty large by Minsk standards. The government surrounded the area with police, but let the gathering continue. Over the following three days the demonstration fizzled down to a few hundred people. It continued to dwindle, but Lukashenko apparently lost his cool and on the fourth night ordered police to arrest the remaining demonstrators. The sweep went very smoothly. The next day another opposition candidate, Kozulin (triggering a bitter split with Milinkevich) organized a procession march towards the prison gates, where the arrested demonstrators were being held. This time things ended up rougher – the OMON police blocked the way and in the scuffle several demonstrators were seriously hurt.
The Western and the Russian liberal media floated plenty of sob stories about the “brutal suppression” of the demonstration by the “tyrannical ruler.” Yet from the TV and numerous internet reports, the crackdown was actually milder than, for example, in the case of the current youth demonstrations in France. About the same time seven people were killed in “democratic” Georgia, where police broke a riot by prisoners protesting horrible treatment and medieval conditions. It was barely mentioned in the Western media.
In Ukraine things were very different. The election campaign had the feel of some wild village festivities from a 19-th century Gogol story. Ukrainian politics is an unbelievable circus. Suffice it to say that there is not one but three tiny “Socialist” parties (not to mention a Communist one), ranging from spineless political whores of the party of Alexander Moroz, to a fiery pro-Russian leftist Natalia Vitrenko (which has got some 2.95% of the vote – suspiciously just a few hundredths short of the 3% entry barrier). Victor Yanukovich, the opponent of the current president Victor Yushchenko, was supported in 2004 by Putin's government and regarded in the West as a Kremlin puppet who was consigned to the dust bin of history after his loss to the “genuine democrats” of the “orange” camp.
This analysis proved completely wrong. A few months after coming to power, the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko government started to unravel. Yanukovich, on the other hand, consolidated his block into a solid party, the “Regions of Ukraine,” in the south-eastern industrial heartland, away from Kiev.
Russia was frequently blamed for meddling in Ukraine's affairs before the 2004 elections – by giving last-minute preferences to the incumbent candidate Yanukovich (some sweet trade deals, easing immigration restrictions, etc). This year, the US did exactly the same for the Yushchenko's government. A week before the elections it rescinded the Jackson-Vanik amendment for Ukraine (the amendment is related to Soviet-era emigration restrictions; it hasn't made any sense for 18 years now, but is still applied to Russia). About the same time the US announced it was giving the green light to Ukraine in its talks to join the WTO, which had been stalled for many years. All this is 100% hypocrisy – but so is much of American politics anyway.
The elections delivered a crushing blow to President Yushchenko's party. It came in third, after Yanukovich and Tymoshenko. The elections also revealed a country sharply divided into geographical regions – not just East and West, but into three parts. Yushchenko's support is concentrated in the extreme west, the area which was a part of the Hapsburg Empire. Never before in recent history had Ukraine's leadership represented such a small part of the country. Yanukovich's power base is predictably in the regions where nearly 100% speaks Russian as a first language. The central part of Ukraine voted for the wild and wily time bomb known as Yulia Tymoshenko.
It is likely that both the Ukrainian and Belarusian regimes are unsustainable in the long term. In the case of Belarus, vaunted stability can last only for so long. Eventually people grow tired of it – of seeing the same Soviet-era collective farm director every day in the evening news. But change is also problematic. Nationalistic opposition is so marginal, it has very little chance. Yet Lukashenko isn't putting forward any names which could succeed him. At least Russia's Yeltsin in the late 90's had repeatedly thrown new figures on the center-stage to see what would stick. Eventually he chose the previously unknown Putin, but not before trying many others. Lukashenko seems to be all alone so far.
In the case of Ukraine, consider this: a weakling president, with his head in the clouds and his powers curtailed even more by last year's political reform; the Rada (the parliament) with no stable majority – a swamp of corruption and special interests; an impotent, and frequently changing government. Sharply higher prices for Russian gas cripple inefficient industry. EU membership is a pipe dream, because of growing centrifugal tendencies in Europe itself. The Yushchenko government's drive to join NATO is rejected by some 80% of the population. Ukraine can't decidedly turn either East or West, and as a result alienates both sides with its unpredictability and reversals. In the end, probably some other middling but at least politically competent figure will arise, able to forge a weak compromise and balance of powers. A regime similar to that of President Kuchma of 1995-2004 again? Just a year ago this seemed impossible – a scenario decidedly left behind in the past. Today it is much more likely to happen again. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This article appeared in the Exile on April 7, 2006.
Democracy and Human Rights
Democracy and respect for human rights, just as for all the other liberal values, go together – this seems to be the accepted wisdom. A careful student of the spreading of democracy, however, can easily prove that this is a mere fallacy, an assumption that just does not square with facts. Not in the Soviet Union or Former Soviet Union, anyway.
In the post-Stalinist period, the Soviet Union remained an extremely undemocratic, totalitarian country, an evil empire, to quote Ronald Reagan. Freedom of speech, zero. Freedom of political associations, ditto. Freedom of conscience, ditto. Freedom of travel, ditto. We all know the list of those iniquities. But, consider the ultimate human right – the right to live. When did this right enjoy greater respect – before or after the democratic revolution, the overthrow of communism, and the collapse of the “evil empire”?
Don’t tell me; let me tell you. In May 1987 I paddled in a seven-foot-long kayak along the western coast of the Caspian, starting at Samur on the border between Dagestan and Azerbaijan and finishing in Sumgait. I traveled solo, spending the nights on the beach, sleeping in the kayak and feeling absolutely safe, though sometimes my sleep was disturbed by sturgeon poachers. In the daytime they were not averse to taking a pot shot at a strange boat apparently heading for their nets, but I had the sense to paddle straight for the shooters, to show them how tiny my ridiculous boat was, and how innocuous the solitary wanderer. They then remembered that a traveler is the Prophet’s gift to the faithful, and treated me accordingly. The trip was tough but great, and I promised myself to start next year in Sumgait and continue southwards.
Well, I never did, nor am I ever likely to do. Next year “Sumgait” became a word that dripped blood and inspired horror as it hit the world's papers and TV screens. At that time Azerbaijan and Armenia were already at each other’s throats over the disputed territory of Nagorny Karabakh, with Popular Fronts, the first shoots of democracy, so to speak, active on both sides. In February, Azeri mobs rampaged through the streets of Sumgait, killing, raping, maiming, beating up Armenians and plundering their homes. Horror stories quickly reached Moscow of pregnant women's bellies being ripped up, and similar atrocities. Some 30 people were reported dead, and 197 wounded and beaten up. The Azeri police let the pogrom run its bloody course for three days, before unarmed federal troops were sent in – only to be attacked by mobs armed with knives and iron bars. There were more casualties, this time among the troops. Russians, mostly.
And that is the whole thing in a nutshell. The lifting of totalitarian, imperial order, the rise of “democratic” Popular Fronts all over the outlying regions of the Soviet Union aroused the basest instincts in the “demos” of those lands, varying only in the degree of bestiality. The nice phrase to describe those feelings was “aspirations of sovereignty.” In sordid fact, it was bestial nationalism; it was pure Nazism. If you did not belong to the “titular nation” or ethnic group, you had no human rights at all. Certainly not the ultimate human right, to live.
Ask Meskhetian Turks. In 1989, just as the First Congress of People’s Deputies, then the highest achievement of democracy in the Soviet Union, was winding up, a murderous conflict erupted in the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan between the local population and the Meskhetian Turks deported there during the Second World War. Sixty thousand of them had to be flown out of Uzbekistan, leaving behind about a hundred killed by the Uzbeks, and taking with them about a thousand injured. Their original homeland was in Georgia, on the border with Turkey – but could they be brought back to Georgia, which was then staging mass rallies and hunger strikes in support of democracy? Even vague rumors of such a move nearly sparked violent protests among the local Georgian population. So the Turks had to be scattered over the vast, long-suffering Mother Russia, many of them in Krasnodar Territory. Here, they are not treated by the local Cossacks with exquisite courtesy, that is true, but pogroms? Killings? Not on your life. Still, their plight is laid at the door of Russia, and there is a lot of noise about a hundred of them being resettled in the US. Not in their native Georgia, though. Their native Georgia is a beacon of democracy now; a democracy that stops short of permitting these people to go back to their ancestor’s land. It would be a good idea for Amnesty International to inquire into the matter, but somehow I feel certain it won’t.
OK, Meskhetians are a small people. Now, what about the fate of millions of Russians and Russian speakers (who could belong to any of the 100 plus nationalities of the Soviet Union) in areas where those ethnic Popular Fronts were active? Was Amnesty International ever interested in those millions? I doubt it – yet their human rights were abused routinely and most horribly. Many lost their lives or were maimed during pogroms. Many more lost their jobs, their apartments, and all their property, as they fled for their lives from lands where their ancestors had often lived for generations. Still, all that was in a good cause, the overthrow of communism and the destruction of the Soviet Union, so presumably Amnesty International had no business poking its nose in these laudable processes.
Chechnya is the classic case, of course. In 1991 Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Chechen himself and at the time Yeltsin’s right-hand man (later mortal enemy), supported the “democratic” General Dudayev's coup against the local “partocrats” in the hope of creating a puppet – and produced a Frankenstein monster. The rape, plunder and murder of anyone passing through Chechen territory had begun already in 1990, but with the coming of Dudayev it all became institutionalized. Dudayev’s first edict was on the right of every Chechen to carry arms, and an out-and-out ethnic cleansing was carried out immediately forthwith. Several hundred thousand non-Chechens – those, that is, who hadn’t been shot out of hand or hadn’t had their throats cut – scattered through the vastness of Russia, their misery totally unrecorded by any Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Then came the long series of massive hostage takings and pillaging in adjacent Stavropolye by Chechen bands; the raid on Budyonnovsk in 1995, with Basayev’s gunmen shooting people in the street for fun, like partridges, then taking a thousand patients hostage in the town hospital and using women nearing childbirth as human shields – literally lifting them on windowsills and shooting at the troops between their legs; Raduyev’s raid on Pervomayskoye, with another bunch of hospital patients taken hostage and dozens dying; the 1999 attack on Dagestan, and the residential blocks blown up in Buynaksk, Moscow, Volgodonsk in the same year; the commuter trains blown up near Kislovodsk; the Dubrovka siege in Moscow in 2002; the later spate of bombings in Moscow; the Beslan school atrocity in September 2004. Not to mention little things like the slave markets and zindans, holes in the ground for keeping slaves in, in virtually every Chechen village; the beheadings of Russians, New Zealanders, or any other infidels who have no human rights at all in the eyes of these subhumans. Careful, Roy – the politically correct West is chary of calling them terrorists, even. No, they are merely “separatists,” or their own proud self-appellation, “mujaheddin.”
Do we hear much about the human rights violations by these “separatists”? God forbid. Whenever human rights and Chechnya come up in Western discourse, it is always about the awful human rights record of the Kremlin, and of Russians generally, against those angelic Chechens.
No doubt about it – human rights watchers are very selective in deciding what to watch and what to let go unnoticed. In the above, I touched only briefly on the human right to live and the way it fared in the transition to democracy. There is yet another big chapter in this odyssey – how the human right to a dignified life was trampled on in the course of the plunder that transition to a market economy turned out to be; how the lives of millions of people degenerated and were cut short by the privations which that process entailed. Again, do we hear much from the human rights watchers about these violations of the rights of millions? No, but we hear a great deal about the sufferings of one of those plunderers; the billions he had stolen clearly weigh more than the sufferings of millions on the peculiar scales used by our honest human rights watchers. And no wonder – democracy is at stake! Putin is backtracking on democracy!
You know, lots of people here wish he backtracked some more. In America, that was called stepping on the corns of “the comparative few who seek to retain or to gain position or riches or both by some short cut which is harmful to the greater good.” The numbers of Russia’s billionaires are growing alarmingly – which means that the plunder goes on. So if Putin is serious about backtracking in the FDR spirit, he ought to, for starters, do something about Russia’s tax system, which some people call the most barbarous and anti-social in Europe. Such a move would show that he really respects the right of human beings, his fellow-countrymen, to live in dignity, not squalor. And it would be approved by about 90 percent of Russia’s population.
That’s democracy enough for me.
Linked from 19/4/2006 Journal