Andrew Wilson of the European Council on Foreign Relations has a piece on Transitions Online which takes a look at some opinions of Gleb Pavlovsky and Yevgeny Gontmahker to debate what the Pikalyovo incident did and did not teach us about politics in Russia.

Pikalyovo was also an attempt to address the inefficiencies in Putin’s authoritarian project by creating what Russians call obratnaya sviaz
(”reverse connection”). The system works, but only just. Russia still
needs a modernization project, albeit not the “prosperity project,”
backed by good finances and sound macroeconomics, which the
Putin-Medvedev tandem was originally supposed to implement. Not only
will Russia have to proceed with fewer resources, it will have to
tackle the flip side of a stronger state, what even Pavlovsky calls
“severe monopolism in all social spheres,” not just in government and
the economy, but in the mass media and in society at large. The
intermediary structures he helped set up are passive and inert,
particularly “the party,” now normally referred to in the singular as
in the days of the CPSU, i.e. United Russia, which, unlike the CPSU, is
mainly a vehicle for governors and lower bureaucrats to advertise their
loyalty. Hardly anybody in the Kremlin belongs to it. Moreover, the
stasis extends to society as a whole. After the “20-year crisis” of the
1980s and 1990s, “all social spheres are static. There is a conservative mood, even in business. There are no risk takers. The atmosphere is against innovation.”

Pikalyovo was supposed to spark an inert bureaucracy into life. The
search for “reverse connection” has also led to some outreach to civil
society, but one that will be very different to the kind of
liberalization advocated by Russia’s surviving liberals, men like
Gontmakher and Igor Yurgens, the head of the Institute of Contemporary
Development, the think tank currently favored by Medvedev. Gontmakher
has recently argued that the system needs “Khrushchev-ization” – like
Khrushchev after Stalin, Medvedev (or Putin) needs to break with the
system he helped create. In his first year in office, Medvedev has
managed to maintain the impression that he is
all-things-to-all-liberals, and that he might be willing to create a
bigger tent, bringing in some survivors from the 1990s. In fact,
Medvedev’s job is to promote a “soft form of cooptation.” The new
Kremlin-sponsored “liberal party” Right Cause and the new Civil Society
Forum are designed to prevent liberals reaching out and making common
cause with protestors. Medvedev’s job is to persuade civil society to
play along, or it will be subject to re-control by real hardliners. The
regime needs NGOs to improve the upward information flow, but the chief
Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov, who was responsible for the
original law restricting the operation of NGOs in 2006, made the terms
of the bargain crystal clear at the last meeting of the Civil Society
Forum in June. Civil society leaders are requested to provide concrete
proposals on specific policy areas, but should not think of getting
involved in politics and should not speculate about the system as a
whole.



There is, as yet, no real sign of any second summer of perestroika.
Medvedev has yet to prove that he is some kind of chrysalis liberal.
The Institute of Contemporary Development, which has become the first
port of call for Western visitors seeking to spot the first green
shoots of reform, is in fact complaining it is starved of money,
resources, and influence. Russia’s gamble is to keep with the system it
has for now. It has run down its reserves, but kept most of its money
in the bank, and is banking on oil price recovery to lift it off the
rocks. The one thing Russia is not doing is using the crisis writ large
as a new form of shock therapy. Russia had had too many shocks
recently.

Last 5 posts by Robert Amsterdam

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