This is the main – indeed, the single – reason why I consider that a parliamentary republic is the preferred option for the Russia of my dreams. We have messed around too much by experimenting with personalised models of power, which is why today we need to boldly cut right to the bone. However many times we’ve played with the Lego bricks of the Russian political system, we’ve always ended up with the same result. It’s like the old joke about the worker stealing all sorts of spare parts from the factory. Whenever he got them home and started putting them together, he always ended up with a Kalashnikov rifle. Similarly, however many presidents of Russia you try to put together from various constitutional bits and pieces, you’ll always end up with a tsar.
Even though a presidential republic is usually considered to be the opposite of a parliamentary republic, considering the very many formats that you can find of both presidential and parliamentary systems, understanding the subtle differences between them is not so easy. The key question ultimately is the depth of the separation of powers and the exact way in which this is laid out. There’s an extra dimension provided for the separation of powers in a parliamentary republic: the division of power within the executive branch of government, into the head of state and the head of the executive.
So in a parliamentary republic we have this extra dimension of democracy. And the division of the executive can be very varied. The head of state can be a completely nominal figure (such as the British King, as in other constitutional monarchies); or they can play a specific political role as an arbiter (like in modern Italy); or they can carry out an important and even decisive role in power (as in France, which is a very specific type of presidential-parliamentary republic). There are no general rules or set standards in this issue.
The choice of a specific type of parliamentary republic is the key question in creating a reliable constitutional structure. To a large extent, forming an efficient model demonstrates great skill in constitutional creativity. All the successful working models of democracy have come about as a result of a creative instinct and a deep understanding of the peculiarities of a national culture.
The reality is that societies show much more clearly defined individuality than do individuals. Nevertheless, there are certain principles that can be used in any circumstances to create models that work.
One of the basic principles for building a parliamentary republic is that there’s a relationship between parliament and the government. Whatever different types of parliamentary republic there might be, one factor is always a constant: both the chairman of the government and the whole government are beholden to parliament, which appoints them and can get rid of them.
Why is this important in Russia specifically? Because parliament’s shares will immediately rise on the political market. The same shares that until today have been classified as worthless on the Russian institutional exchange. They were bought up only by “bears”, playing for a fall. If parliament becomes the only body that can appoint and fire the government, then the hour of the “bull” will come to Russia. And at that point not only will parliament’s shares rise, but all those of the democratic cluster linked to it.
If parliament occupies the central institutional place in Russia’s political system, then the value of a member’s seat will also rise, leading to the same across the whole electoral procedure.
This would also mean that holding elections for candidates based solely on their personal appeal, as usually happens with Russia’s presidential election, will become much more difficult. Along with this, the value of regional representation in both houses will also rise sharply, because the quantity and quality will be directly related to satisfying the daily needs of the local population. In other words, the system of federal relations will have true significance, instead of the current situation, whereby in the strictly centralised, unitary state it’s a mere bauble. In its turn, this will pull up with it the compensatory development of local self-government, with the aim of not allowing Russia to return to feudalism and the appearance of individual principalities.
So the switch to a parliamentary republic is the key element that can pull along with it the whole chain of democratic events.
Naturally, the change to a system of parliamentary democracy from autocracy and the strongly centralised personal system of government that’s existed in Russia for centuries, will be a political shock. But it’s an unavoidable and essential shock.
The move to a parliamentary republic is the only real possibility to relieve the political system in Russia, and this is why – and for no other reason – this demonstrates its superiority over a presidential republic.
“That’s all well and good,” the opponents of a parliamentary republic usually reply, “but do we have the right to carry out such experiments in Russia? It’s a massive country with a very specific way of life, and people are used to the idea that power is personalised. People won’t understand or value your well-intentioned plans, they will neither be able to take advantage of this parliamentary democracy, nor would they want to, and the whole thing will collapse into anarchy and chaos. Added to this, Russia is still an empire, a huge melting pot, in which representatives of the most varied nationalities and confessions are mixed together, and they’ve never been citizens of a nation state. If you take out the figure of the ruler who’s the very personification of power (however they’re called), the country will break into pieces!”
How do you answer that one? These are not risks that have been simply dreamt up. They exist. The problem is that they don’t grow any less when we switch from one personal regime to another. If we don’t alter the way Russian statehood develops, then every subsequent regime, however much it promises, will in a few years or even months inevitably become an autocracy. And each autocracy will be worse than the previous one; we can have no doubt about that. And in the end what happens is exactly what the opponents of parliamentary democracy are afraid of: the country will fall apart. But by then there’ll be no hope of saving it and it’ll be forever. At least a parliamentary republic would give us the chance to fight.
All of this comes down not so much to a practical political choice so much as an ideological one. Do you think that an attempt to break the personalised model of governance in Russia creates unacceptable risks? If you do, then you’re absolutely right.
But then a question arises. What are your essential disagreements with the pro-government forces that hold similar positions? Of course, in order to save Russia, they propose preserving “cave absolutism”, while you hope to rule for a long time with the help of “enlightened absolutism”. But 500 years of Russian absolutism have taught us that “the grey ones” are always followed by “the black ones”.
The personal model is like a political drug for Russia. No one denies that the country firmly adopted this a long time ago, way before Putin came along. Coming off such a drug could break society; and it’s not impossible that the process could even lead to life-threatening situations. But does this mean that we should therefore simply accept this political dependency and not try to turn away from the needle of autocracy?
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At this point in my first draft I had written a number of paragraphs that I later had to delete. I wrote them long before “Tereshkova’s amendment” was added to the Constitution. I admit that I wrongly assumed that there would be a rather higher intellectual level among the people (or person) who were examining the options for such a change; but I’m ready to reassess the talents of my opponents.