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02.04.07
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Get In Step
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Comment by Aleksander Arkhangelsky
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Two mutually exclusive and yet inextricably connected events defined the threatening atmosphere of the past week. The Russian text of President Vladimir Putin's article “Universal Aspirations and Values,” written for Western newspapers on the occasion of the EU’s 50th anniversary, was published. And youth group Nashi staged an event in Moscow, called “In Touch With the President,” where cheerful activists asked members of the public to answer absurd questions (Do you believe that Kasyanov is preparing a revolution, and wants to “bring NATO peacekeeping troops into Russia to secure nuclear facilities and oil and gas pipelines”? Of course I do, since it’s absurd!). Anyone who answered in good faith that the United States would “take all measures to take control of Russian resources” got the opportunity to send a text message to the head of state. Somehow it transpired that most of those who sent a message wished the president well “during a third term.”
The main thesis of President Putin’s article was that Europe without Russia will never be at peace with itself – just as Russia without Europe cannot get rid of its “European yearning,” in Dostoyevsky’s words. Nashi’s main thesis, however, runs as follows: We are surrounded by enemies, and we need our own separate way, reliant on our own strengths and without recourse to the world around us – the Russian version of North Korea’s doctrine of juche.
These lines of reasoning cannot be reconciled. Just like one cannot combine the European, Russian, universal concept of the transfer of power with the Soviet, North Korean, Syrian principle of permanent enthronement with a golden crown. It won’t be of much help to bring up the indispensable American precedent, hanging a secular icon of Franklin D. Roosevelt in each room. At any moment you’ll get some clever clogs turning up and explaining that Roosevelt did not alter the American Constitution to fit himself – the two-terms rule was adopted after him, for one thing. And that at the time the backdrop to the third term turned out to be something that we do not want: worldwide, global war.
So it’s either universal aspirations and values, or a third term. These two ideas cannot coexist in one political space. Nevertheless, they are coexisting. This means the house is divided against itself and is only held together by the president’s earnest promises. In the fall of 2005, Putin for the first time said concisely and clearly that he had no plans to run for a third term or to change the law. It became obvious that we would see a fierce effort to persuade the indubitable leader to reconsider his decision, take back his words, bend the law around the circumstances of the moment, and become the guarantor of the powerful clans, not of the Constitution. And in this fight some friends would become worse than enemies.
Enemies have nothing to lose, while false friends have much. And they would stop at nothing. Not at cutting off their leader from the world, sowing dissent between him and the European elites and public opinion. Not at provoking a split inside the country, or corrupting and demoralizing the next generation – anything to force him to stay so he could not quit the throne. The reasons for this strategy vary, whether because the people are on their knees, imploring him with cries of lifelong love, or because the foundations are coming undone, and a long vacation can’t be taken. Even for just four years, until 2012, when the current president could calmly and lawfully come back to power, elected by civilized means.
Nashi are being cut loose: They are a controllable wave, a directed explosion. Who has cut them loose, how this will all end, and when the wave will peter out or – worse – turn back in the opposite direction are all interesting questions. There is one obvious question, however, that fully deserves an answer: Why is it now possible to bring so many ambitious young people together under brain-dead, half-witted slogans? What is keeping their diverse interests unified, forcing them to overcome their disgust?
If we look at what’s going on calmly and dispassionately, then we can see one principal, possibly fateful, problem. What has happened is not just a segmentation of society, its division into rich and poor. What has happened is something even more unpleasant. The social elevators that lifted upwardly mobile people of various classes and estates to the top of the social pyramid, regardless of their parents’ status and based exclusively on their personal qualities, have stopped running. The emphasis here is on getting to the very top – one can walk up to the second or third floors.
In the 1990s, one’s origins were of some significance. Parents could not give their offspring burned-up money, but they could help with their party and KGB ties. People could make it anyway without these connections if they had enough reckless drive, bravery, focus and some elementary luck. Possibilities abounded like never before. But then the successful put a barrier up for others, so it would be easier for those they called their own. Emigrants from the depths, sons of unsuccessful parents and daughters of insolvent entrepreneurs, found it harder and harder to break through the serried ranks of high-prestige classmates. The starting conditions are not simply unfair; they are wholly incomparable.
In the late Soviet era, the social elevators also slowed down dramatically; the nomenklatura system sieved out the children of others and drew in its own. But, for starters, there were a lot more exceptions than there are now. Communist rhetoric had to be illustrated by some successes among peasants and workers as exceptions to the party bosses’ rule. Secondly, there were wide career openings in the form of Komsomol committees. The shrewdest and the less scrupulous, the greediest and the less good-natured, could get into the system of Komsomol committees and start building a career ladder from scratch. Today, it seems, we are witnessing the restoration of this model, but in a harsher, more cynical form. There’s really no need to show edifying exceptions to the rule; and so it goes.
But one loophole still remains. Just one. It’s called youth movements, controlled by the administration and local authorities. Nashi, the Young Guard and others offer young people from Hicksville an elementary political deal: Sign up for our loan, and we’ll share a part of the social elevator with you. Whether that elevator will get you anywhere or not, we don’t know; but we do know that you don’t have another elevator, and never will. And we have no intention of giving you any other chances. Why should we? It is easier to enlist the supine masses instead of having a healthy civil society and being obliged to give something to the public.
That was how the system of oprichnina in the time of Ivan the Terrible worked. Granted, they didn’t know the word “elevator” back then. They preferred “service.” But this doesn’t change the point. Granted, no one held integration into the European space as their objective; most likely the opposite was the case. But now the aim has been set. The ideological lines of power and the lines of its supporters have diverged. That is the same as if the power cables had diverged from their pylons. Stay clear: Danger of death.
Alexander Arkhangelsky is a columnist for Izvestiya. The opinions expressed are the author's own, and not necessarily those of RIA Novosti's editorial board. |
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