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25.06.07
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Life With Luzhkov
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Comment by Aleksander Arkhangelsky
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Time to Take Stock as Moscow Mayor is Reappointed
Before the end of last week, President Vladimir Putin put Comrade Luzhkov’s candidacy before the Moscow City Duma, and the Moscow City Duma will approve it. Political expediency has won out over personal enmity. During their joint visit to Kurkino district in northwestern Moscow, Putin ruffled the Moscow leader's pride before the television cameras, telling him that it's too early for him to start thinking about changing his job since he has unfinished business – restoring the rights to off-plan buyers who have been ripped off and balancing the rights of Muscovites and real estate developers.
Putin was effectively telling Luzhkov, “We'll keep you on, but not because you're good. We'll keep you on because one doesn't change horses in midstream.” Luzhkov, having already been in charge of Moscow for 15 years, is staying on. He's going for Brezhnev's record, and it's entirely possible that he'll break it. What will that mean for the city? Just what Brezhnev's 18 years in power meant for the Soviet Union.
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev wasn't the worst of leaders. At the beginning, he even had a reformist stance, or, at least, didn't get in the way. His love of life was stronger than his ideology; he allowed his comrades-in-arms to live well, didn't try to pester the common folk over their thieving, and drew the family circle into a realm of luxury.
But then Brezhnev began to lock the system in on himself. He didn't take the mandates away from the other rulers as such, but somehow, almost unnoticed, he reworked his country in such a way that without Brezhnev, the system of power was simply impossible. Almost bloodlessly, a peace-loving Soprano-type clan was put together.
At some point even this, however, was not enough. The gerontocracy decided to pull the country along with it into a warm, comfortable, bureaucratically velvet-lined coffin: Afghanistan began, and the system headed toward the inevitable finale, total collapse. In November 1982, Brezhnev died. Removing him from the Soviet power structure was like taking the cork from a bottle. Nine years after Brezhnev’s death, the Soviet empire collapsed entirely because it really was held together by his pledge of honesty – and nothing else.
As far as Luzhkov is concerned, he was unbelievably good during his first term as mayor of Moscow. Linked by political ties to the democrats of the first wave, internally he belonged to the Soviet trade and procurement environment. He quickly came to grips with the chaos of the city economy, making deals with everyone, from deputies to bandits, and drawing all the strings into his own hand.
St. Petersburg was left with nothing. Moscow attracted almost all of the large amounts of capital that circulated at the time, and the city began to breathe. In his second term, Luzhkov cleaned Moscow of its dirt; he undertook wide-scale construction projects and made his family the city’s contractor. I’m not talking here about the fact that the best contracts were gradually put into the hands of a certain leading lady; I’m talking about Luzhkov's subordination of the city’s economy under a single clan, at the heart of which stood Luzhkov himself. If you want to live and operate in the capital, you have to make a deal with that clan; if you don't want to, you're free to leave and head back to your village. During his second term, Luzhkov reached the outer limits of his incompetence, which is to say that he was tolerable, although somewhat superfluous.
But then Luzhkov got the idea that he could take a step higher and become prime minister – taking the helm not just of the city, but of the entire country. Many shared that belief, and in 1999 the business community mistakenly supported the alliance of Luzhkov with Yegveny Primakov and Mintimer Shaimiyev into the Fatherland political movement. Fatherland merged with the Unity party and became United Russia – and a downcast Luzhkov began a new term in Moscow.
Here he could do little else other than complete the construction of his family system of rule, tightening it to the point that it became impenetrable and irreparable. Now, any leader taking over his fiefdom will either be faced with an immediate systemic paralysis that makes the governance of the city impossible, or will be forced to submit to its internal laws and grow into the unalterable Luzhkovian world.
In such a situation, for the Kremlin to replace Luzhkov shortly before Duma elections and in the midst of a precarious succession would be akin to committing political suicide. Naturally, the only option is to curse and leave it all as it is.
And how is it all? A once varied, multifarious, free and undisciplined city is becoming increasingly like the character of its irremovable city leader. Narrow-minded, uncultured tastes win out in the architecture; the worldview of a midlevel Soviet boss dominates in relations between the city and its citizens.
From the point of view of the man in the street – and what other point of view could possibly be of importance in city life – the reappointment of Luzhkov is the equivalent of a court sentence: Bribes at all bureaucratic levels, the merciless cheek of construction raiders, a communist disregard for property if it has not been consecrated by the clan interests of the city authorities – all this will only grow from year to year.
From my window, I can see down Sivtsev Vrazhek Street, just behind the Foreign Ministry, two cars which just a few months ago were new – a Chrysler and an SUV. They belonged to families who refused to move out to the suburb of Mitino just because some corrupt construction companies took a liking to the land under their homes. One night, some men came, threw some bottles of lighter fluid into the cars and disappeared into the darkness. That's the Moscow way. Obviously, Luzhkov doesn't want bottles of lighter fluid being flung about in his capital, just as Brezhnev didn't want the Afghan war, but Brezhnev wanted the military-industrial complex to support him, and Luzhkov just as passionately wants insider companies to do what they want with the center of his city.
“What will the coming years with him be like for us? At least there will be a clear, predictable path forward. There won't be any vacillations or anarchy,” commented the first vice president of the Russian Builders’ Association in an interview with weekly magazine Ogonyok. “Old buildings that have outlived their day, like old boots, should be thrown away,” he added. “It's an illusion that we should preserve the historical appearance of the city. Where can that historical appearance be seen? In narrow streets? In the absence of parking? Let's oblige the builders to put up structures on demolished sites with historicist architectural elements... Don't hang on to the past. Buy a new car, apartment and boots. And your life will become better.”
What a precise formulation. This is the outlook of someone who was impoverished yesterday, but suddenly got his hands on a huge fortune. He is ready to trample over the property rights of others in order to observe his own rights and those of his friends. This is the Luzhkov construction philosophy. The first vice president of the Russian Builders’ Association has expressed it with a directness that would be impossible in the civilized world. In the West, the kind of frankness that betrays business in the eyes of public opinion would lead to an immediate discharge from the society’s elite circles to avoid any suspicion of their complicity.
In that context, it's amusing that this philosophy covers itself with references to the European approach, though it's unclear for whom those references are intended. But the late Brezhnev system also liked to refer us to the Helsinki Accords, to the principles of human rights, to its own constitution. How did it all end? We all know how.
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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