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26.11.07
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The Honest Boxer
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By Freek Van der Vet
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Grigory Yavlinsky Makes Another Run for the Presidency
“What is the compromise in the situation when you are told: ‘you keep silent and we’ll permit your existence in return?’” asked Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky in an interview with Kommersant Vlast in 2005. For the 55-year old politician and his party, the past few years have been a struggle for survival. It is almost miraculous that he could uphold his party’s democratic ideals in a country where politics have become a game of smoke and mirrors. For Yavlinsky, a former boxing champion, it is a choice between following his own political way or playing by the rules of President Vladimir Putin, who practices judo. In this sense, the Russian political game is not a fair sport: Yavlinsky is boxing in a ring where the rules of judo count—no punching allowed.
Yavlinsky knows that it is important to play fair and uphold his reputation as a respected reformer, so the democrats will continue to value honesty, fairness and equality as they continue their campaign. “We do not always win, but we have never deceived our voters and we never stole anything from them,” Yavlinsky reminds the readers of Novye Izvestia. In the upcoming elections, he will stand little chance against whichever candidate is backed by Putin. Nevertheless, determination and perseverance have kept Yavlinsky alive in Russia’s political arena. But how long will Yabloko and its founding father be able to survive outside of the parliament in Russia without making concessions?
Yavlinsky was born in the Ukrainian city of Lviv in 1952. His father, Alexei, was an officer who began his military career in the North Caucasus, and his mother, Vera, taught high school chemistry. The young Grigory took up boxing classes and twice became the national junior boxing champion, in 1967 and 1968. Despite his successes in the sport, he soon swapped boxing for his studies at the Plekhanov Institute for National Economy in Moscow. In the meantime, he married and his first son was born in 1971. While making the step from sports to economics, Yavlinsky chose the future of a scientist and developed a strong desire to reform the Soviet Union’s economy during his career.
After graduating and until 1984, Yavlinsky worked for the Labor Research Institute of the Committee of Labor and Social Issues. When it became clear to him that the Soviet planned economy was stagnating, he wrote an article that predicted an economic crisis in the near future. But the paper was never published, and Yavlinsky came under surveillance by the authorities. He was forced to give up his job at the commission.
However, the affair around the article did not influence his further political career. In 1989, Leonid Albakin, the chairman of the State Commission of the Soviet Council of Ministers of Economic Reform, invited Yavlinsky to join his commission. During that time, Yavlinsky co-wrote “the 400-day plan” that denounced the socialist planned economy and opted for a fast execution of liberal market reforms and large scale privatization of the state companies. But this plan for economic transition also advocated securing minimum wages, social security and pensions—an aspect that later “shock therapy” radical transition programs lacked. This plan was rewritten and renamed “the 500-day plan.” Yavlinsky’s program was initially supported by Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, but was discarded by the Supreme Soviet. There were other programs, but none of them was adopted. Yavlinsky resigned from his chairman post because he was unable to realize his ideas about Russia’s economic development, but he did continue working for the State Duma. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Yavlinsky, together with others, founded Yabloko with the goal of pursuing his desire to make Russia a democratic country.
In 1993, Yavlinsky hastily formed the Yavlinsky-Boldyrev-Lukin bloc to participate in the first parliamentary elections in Russia. Later, in 1995, the party was renamed Yabloko. The social ideas that Yavlinsky developed as a scholar and an economic reformer shaped the agenda of the party, and he guarded those ideas well. Yabloko has always fought for property rights, an independent media and legal system and fair elections, as well as against corruption. But these goals are not widely supported by the citizens of Russia anymore, and Yabloko has lost many of its voters.
Yabloko’s constituency has been shrinking since 1995, the year the party reached the peak of its popularity. This happened not only because of growing bureaucratic repression and imbalanced media attention, but also, as political analyst David White argues, because of its failure to recruit new members. In 2003, Yabloko was unable to overcome the 5 percent barrier for minimum representation and left the State Duma. The party has suffered from a lack of visibility largely due to its limited media access. Yabloko First Deputy Chairman Sergei Ivanenko even considered the idea of boycotting future elections as an act of resistance. At the same time, Yabloko has been restricted on the regional level. First, the party was barred from participating in the regional parliamentary elections in the Karelia Region. Then, Yabloko was excluded from local elections in its traditional stronghold of St. Petersburg in January 2007.
According to Yabloko members, the party’s protests against the construction of the Gazprom skyscraper and the shady negotiations that surrounded it, led St. Petersburg governor Valentina Matviyenko to prevent the party from participating.
For Yavlinsky and his party, walking the narrow alleys of Russia’s legal labyrinth while avoiding falling into the trap of making use of juridical shortcuts and corruption has been a difficult task. Being ideologically pure does not matter in Russia today, however, since party politics is orchestrated from above. “Those who end up in the Duma or a regional legislature are those whose presence there serves the purposes of the authorities,” Yavlinsky told Novaya Gazeta.
One serious misstep may have been the party’s cooperation with big business. Yavlinsky and Yabloko lost some of their moral status during the Yukos affair. The party had a long-standing relationship with the Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky and lost about half of its available funds just before the 2003 Duma election, when Khodorkovsky was arrested on charges of tax evasion. With this hole in its budget, the party’s 2003 campaign could not have gotten off to a worse start. The Yukos affair, and the dramatized trial of Khodorkovsky that followed, left a mark on the party and led to a debate among party members about Yabloko cooperating with big business.
Yavlinsky’s determination for reform led him to develop a reputation as a politician unwilling to compromise, and he has become very careful about his partners. He has had offers in the past to work within the government: in 1996, Yavlinsky was offered the opportunity to unite with General Alexander Lebed in a campaign against Boris Yeltsin and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, but the negotiations failed. Next, Yavlinsky suggested Yevgeny Primakov for the post of prime minister in 1998, but, after Primakov got the job and Yavlinsky was offered a ministerial post in Primakov’s cabinent, the leader of Yabloko rejected the offer and accused Primakov of corruption.
Recently, two parties joined forces with Yabloko: the political arm of the Soldiers’ Mothers movement and the Greens. There were hopes that this coalition could grow into a democratic front, but all negotiations of cooperation between Yabloko and Russia’s other major liberal party, the Union of Right Forces (SPS), have failed. Yavlinsky claims that the parties have moved in different directions since the early 1990s. In his interview with Novye Izvestia, Yavlinsky calls SPS “neither an opposition party, nor a democratic party.” According to him, SPS is a “neoconservative pro-government party.”
A united opposition is an illusion in contemporary Russia. Yavlinsky also does not believe in cooperating with The Other Russia, a coalition opposition movement headed by National Bolshevik Party leader Eduard Limonov and former chess champion Garry Kasparov, calling it a “totalitarian cult” in an article in Kommersant last June. “Mr. Kasparov is a very smart man. And he is a champion of the world. But in chess. Not in everything,” said Yavlinsky in an interview with Reuters. But Yabloko’s cooperation with grassroots movements is important and indeed may be a necessity for regaining the visibility that the party has lost.
The Yabloko branch in St. Petersburg, however, has worked with the National Bolsheviks and participated in a local Dissenters’ March in February. This cooperation faced fierce criticism from Yavlinsky, who said: “People who call themselves National Bolsheviks are for us unacceptable, because Nazism and Bolshevism were the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.” Yavlinsky seems to have made it clear that Yabloko has to follow its own path.
Yavlinsky has always valued his role as Yabloko’s sole leader, but now younger members are beginning to ask about whether it is time for Yavlinsky to move on. “I think it is time for him to leave,” said a younger Yabloko member. “It is important not to be a leader of a democratic party one’s entire life. The arrangement of power needs to change not only in the country, but also inside of the party.” However, Yavlinsky’s greatest assest is his reputation as someone who will persevere for what is right, and this reputation will prove useful for the party in the upcoming elections.
Although there are no illusions about the outcome of the December elections, Yabloko will still participate. “There are no open and free elections in Russia. Nevertheless, participation is necessary for showing this to citizens and, after the victory, for improving the situation in Russia,” said Yavlinsky in a recent speech to the members of the Central Election Committee. And so, Yabloko will participate in the upcoming parliamentary ballot.
Politicians are optimistic by nature, but Yavlinsky knows that he will not win the presidential race. A recent poll by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) suggests that only 27 percent of likely voters would even consider voting for him, so it was a surprise that Yavlinsky was mentioned by President Vladimir Putin as one of the three leaders—beside Communist Party leader Zyuganov and Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov—who could be his successor. This will be the third time that Yavlinsky will run for president. In the 1996 presidential elections, he received 7.3 percent of the vote, finishing in fourth place; in 2000, he received 5.8 percent of the vote.
The former junior boxing champion, passionate debater and determined reformer is fighting another struggle he is unlikely to win, but he has not lost any desire to lead his country to democracy. So, he has written a new program, which partially refers back to the ambition of the “500-day plan.” As an economist, he likes using numbers. Consequently, his new program, called “Seven Steps to Equal Opportunities,” sets out the seven most serious problems Russia is facing today and the seven steps towards a solution. The problems that Yavlinsky has outlined are: an authoritarian, bureaucratic, clan-dominated government; dependence on raw materials; widespread poverty; denial of civil rights; ongoing criminal privatization; the prospect of Russia falling behind and becoming a Third World country; and the threat of a crisis that will lead to social upheaval and the disintegration of the state. Yavlinsky offers the people of Russia a new honest society.
But Russians might be afraid of more change, and many people consider the word “democracy” to be a negative one. The “democracy” of the 1990s was difficult for most Russians. Privatization resulted in hyperinflation, unpaid wages and the disappearance of social security. Incomes and savings disappeared while, at the same time, a new class of wealthy Russians arose and profited from the sale of national companies. Expectations for democratic development were suffocated. “People do not think in terms of the future. They think in terms of yesterday’s fears,” Yavlinsky said to Novye Izvestia.
Russia’s economy has been growing, which is partially what keeps Putin’s popularity high, but the growth depends on the export of natural resources. In an interview with Radio Rossiya, Yavlinsky said that this growth is “growth without development,” which “doesn’t lead to active social policies.”
Yavlinsky is still punching the high red walls of the Kremlin, but as The Moscow Times wrote, the presidential elections are “more akin to a scripted professional wrestling bout than a clean fight.” Therefore, March will show if principles will allow the boxer to wring himself free from the arm lock of the judo master. |
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