The democratic movement will gain mass support only if they’re able to take a firm and unequivocal position on this question. All financial and fiscal questions have to be solved by increasing the pace of growth of the economy, lowering the cost of corruption and introducing an inheritance tax; but not at the expense of the reserve for benefit payments, which must be left untouched.
To sum up, at the current time the tactical left-wing agenda of the democratic movement could be presented in two parts. On the one hand, phasing out over-consumption through a basic confiscatory tax on the inheritance of overly large fortunes. And on the other, guaranteeing to maintain (and even gradually increase) basic social benefits, primarily in healthcare, education and social security.
Over the last few years, the falseness of the regime’s social policy has been exposed for all to see. The left-wing programme has become a series of ritual excuses. Whilst they’ve continued occasionally to speak of their “national projects”, in reality the government has waged an actual war with its own population for the “optimisation” of social spending. Almost a third of educational and medical establishments have gone under the knife. They’ve even stabbed to death the sacred cow of the socialist past: the low pensionable age. And child benefit has all but faded to nothing because of the devaluation of the rouble, becoming just another miserly routine benefit, and so on.
But another sacred cow has survived: the windfall profits of the ruling clan, that have successfully passed through all the de-offshorisation, the capital increasing both when the funds were taken out of the country, and when they were brought back in. The height of cynicism was the massive redemption by the state of illiquid assets at inflated prices from well-fed entrepreneurs and granting budgetary compensation to those affected by sanctions.
This latter looks particularly disgusting against the background of “the parmesan war”: the counter-sanctions that “bombed Voronezh”, by removing from the middle class their access to quality food products. In this way, and in conditions of a crisis and an undeclared war against the West, the regime managed to realise in practice a typical right-wing agenda: making the poor suffer to compensate the rich. It was less a question of “Crimea is ours” than “Crimea has been taken at our expense”.
If these tendencies continue (and there’s no reason to suppose that they’ll change radically) then the subject of “the turn to the left” will become as relevant as it was 15 years ago. Social division will grow at triple the pace, now not only at the expense of the “new rich”, but also at the expense of the recently-created “new poor”, whose well-being has fallen dramatically as a result of crisis optimisation brought about by the undeclared war. And the subjects of poverty, social inequality and the unjust distribution of resource rent will return to the top of the political agenda. But the regime that’s sunk into a war to try to gather in the slivers of empire will no longer have the ability to take hold of this agenda.
We can assume that the resistance movement will again face the same dilemma as it had at the start of the century: should we make a “turn to the left” and take the democratic path, or choose the ideas of the right and face yet more political isolation?
In conditions of rapidly increasing inequality, when left-wing ideas are gaining ever more adherents in society, reckoning on coming to power by democratic means on the back of a right-wing and ultra-right-wing programme, that’s frequently libertarian, that acclaims the joys of the “small state” and the potential of the free market – this is all an absurd utopia. Acting in this way, that part of civil society that’s most ready to take on the fight risks disappearing forever from the political stage, and passing not just into the stalls but to the upper circle. The stage will be taken over by comedians and speculators.
Once again today we are facing the same conditions as there were when I wrote “The Turn to the Left”. For the opposition it would be an inexcusable luxury to pass up this chance to return to the world of live politics, instead of playing games on Facebook.
If a democratic coalition with a left-wing agenda is unable to come together, then the chances that there’ll be a peaceful transition of power by democratic means aren’t great. The regime will continue to hang by a thread until that thread is cut by a revolution from below, and on the wave of that revolution new Bolsheviks will come to power. If this is the case, there’s a real risk that Russian history will slide into yet another downward spiral, and as a result Russia will disappear from current world history.
Chapter 18. The Intellectual Choice:
Freedom of Speech or Openness that’s Shackled?
Whenever the conversation in Russia turns to discussing the political regime, those who try somehow to classify it inevitably end up with cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the regime appears undoubtedly authoritarian, repressive and even totalitarian. Those in power are irremovable; the opposition has no chance whatsoever of winning through elections that are merely a formality; any citizen can fall foul of police thuggery at any moment, even if they’re not involved in politics in any way; but if they are involved in politics then they’ve even more chance of being beaten.
It used to be possible to write about all this relatively directly and openly online, and even in certain mass media that was reasonably easy to access. The authorities could be criticised, you could carry out independent investigations, dig the dirt on senior government dignitaries and so on. And basically, they got away with it, although there were individual cases where certain outstanding journalists lost their lives. But such things happen in other countries, too; in recent years, for example, this has occurred in Slovakia, Bulgaria and Malta.
It should be noted that until recently, you could express your opinion in Putin’s Russia more easily than you could in the USSR, even in the most liberal times. Ekho Moskvy Radio, Novaya Gazeta newspaper, the “Rain” [Dozhd’] television channel, a comparatively open Internet and much, much more would have been simply unimaginable in the Soviet Union. You could have been locked up for a long time even for dreaming about such a thing. This is why many people spoke and wrote about Russia as if it were a reasonably free country; at least as a country where there was freedom of speech. Was that justified?
The problem is that freedom of speech in the literal meaning of the words is the highest legal and constitutional principle that the government must adhere to. This freedom is guaranteed by the full force of civil society, and is built into the policy of the state. But there is no such freedom in modern Russia. In its place there is a space, the borders of which are strictly defined by the state, with whose permission, and under whose watchful gaze a native called “Glasnost” is permitted to exist. This old museum piece lives on a reservation allotted to it on the edge of a police state. It’s there to amuse gawkers from the capital or visiting tourists.
Life in the reservation depends entirely on the will of the state: it could shut it off entirely at any moment, but for some unknown reason of its own it hasn’t done this. Apparently, the danger of closing the reservation (with the fuss that this would cause, the need to distract the gawkers with something else, etcetera) for now is considered more dangerous than the threat this openness might bring to the regime. The situation didn’t just happen in an instant but built up historically under the influence of a multitude of factors that were varied and at times contradictory. In order to understand how to get out of this situation and, more importantly, where it might lead, it’s essential to give a brief description of how it evolved.