MG: You are right. The current opposition in the shape of the Communist Party will be preoccupied in the Duma solely with self-preservation. The threat of dissolution will constantly be hanging over them, and that provides an opportunity for the government to introduce their plans and policies unamended, ignoring the fact that the present regime represents a numerically insignificant section of society. Everything is not, however, hopeless. The elected president and the government he has appointed are hardly going to get away with simply ignoring the interests of the vast section of society that voted against him and his policies.
DM: Oh, yes they will, and with the greatest of ease! There is no communication between the government and society.
MG: You forget that the regime has the instinct of self-preservation. If they do not change their policies, if people do not feel life is changing for the better then, ultimately, the ruling elite will lose all they have. The government is cynical, but it knows what is in its own interests. They have a lot to lose.
For the time being they are boasting about not changing course. They are trying to forget the methods they used to get that election ‘victory’. If the government starts thinking its win was an endorsement of its policies, a new, serious democratic opposition will very soon start to form.
If you look at who voted for Lebed, who voted for Yavlinsky, if you bear in mind the fact that 3.5 million people (and I imagine it was actually more) turned out and voted in the second round against both candidates, you will see there is a huge social base for a democratic opposition. Despite all the government’s efforts, their puppet parties are crumbling and will fall apart. There is a need for a genuine, natural coming together of people.
The Final Years of the Millennium
The Gorbachev Foundation’s ‘First Five-Year Plan’
In March 1997, our Foundation marked its fifth anniversary with a reception and round-table discussion. The main topic was the work of the Foundation and its search for a way to rescue Russia from systemic crisis. The meeting was attended by guests and partners: prominent academics, public figures, writers, press commentators and people from a broad spectrum of scholarly and artistic Moscow.
Opening the meeting, I thanked everyone who had worked with us all these years, and who had shown solidarity in difficult times when the very existence of the Foundation was under threat. It had been vital for the Foundation’s growth, and also very important for me personally. After stepping down from the presidency, it had been essential to create new precedents. Establishing centres of independent democratic thought and getting them to interact among themselves was crucial for Russia. The current political leadership and the bureaucracy were going to extraordinary lengths to prevent the assessments and conclusions of independent centres and the free press becoming available to society at large. Yet this was the only way to avoid at least the most unforgivable errors.
Given the increasing intimacy between the government bureaucracy and the mafia, it was more important than ever, no matter what the difficulties, to protect and cultivate the rudiments of civil society, and that was unthinkable without free speech and democratic thinking. Independent research centres and independent media could do a lot to preserve, develop and affirm democracy and democratic thinking in Russia. Without it, there was no way out of the situation in which we found ourselves.
For the moment, I said, we are very disunited, and that is how the government likes it. It tries to sow dissent between politicians and to split society in accordance with the divide and rule philosophy of ancient Rome. Let us try to find a way, I urged, to overcome this dangerous state of affairs. Our Foundation is open to interaction and collaboration with a great diversity of thinkers in Russia and abroad. Our mission is to work together to find a way out of Russia’s current crisis.
Here are a number of contributions by those participating in the round table. They reflect the range of opinions and assessments we heard:
Professor Boris Slavin: I see the Foundation as a unique organization striving, not just in words but in deeds, to develop pluralism of thinking. People of every intellectual orientation, proponents of conservative, liberal or socialist views can speak here and be published. People from a great variety of parties and movements come, and I think that in this way the Foundation is immensely important for democracy.
Professor Yelena Borisovna Vladimirskaya: I represent a sector of medicine dealing with treatment of the most terrible diseases: paediatric oncology and haematology.
So, back to 1991. In Russia, just 7 per cent of children recovered from the most common and terrible paediatric tumours, acute leukaemia. Fast-forward five years. Now the survival rate for recovery from this cancer averages 75 per cent. Nobody any longer begs to be sent abroad for a bone marrow transplant. We can do it ourselves in Russia.
Thanks to the Foundation, we have trained more than 200 paediatricians and nurses abroad. With the help of the Foundation we have held educational courses with top foreign specialists. More than 1,000 doctors from Russia and the former republics of the Soviet Union have attended these courses. In 18 centres, children receive treatment using modern technology, and the results are as good as anywhere else in the civilized world.
Of course, the Foundation on its own cannot provide all the finance for this work, but it does not need to. The Foundation has done what Mikhail Sergeyevich is outstandingly good at: it has drawn attention to us. Because we are associated with Gorbachev, people in the outside world want to help. There has been a steady flow of support.
Let me give an example. In 1991, the government of the time resolved to finance the establishment in Moscow of a department specializing in bone marrow transplantation. After the collapse of the USSR, we were denied funding to purchase equipment abroad. That is when the Gorbachev Foundation stepped in, taking responsibility for half the funding and raising a million dollars from around the world. I know there were donations from the Gorbachev family personally. A company built everything for us, and the Russian government donated a further one million dollars.
Viktor Rozov, author and playwright: The Gorbachev Foundation is a miraculously surviving relic of those hopeful, better times when Perestroika was just beginning. All of us were hopeful then, but I feel nowadays that I am living in a foreign country, a country where I am constantly afraid. I am afraid of decrees, of battles in parliaments. I am afraid we may be unable to overcome already very entrenched, dangerous tendencies in the state. Almost every strategic position has been seized and we ourselves are somewhere in the middle of all this. There is total lawlessness and some savage, barbaric, ignorant ‘new life’ with ‘new Russians’ is on the rampage.
Oh, yes, we have known brutal, terrible times in the past, but, forgive me, a more iniquitous and dishonourable time than the present day I have not seen in the course of a long life. Today I am afraid of people, and people have started to fear each other.
Alexander Panikin, businessman, CEO of the Paninter clothing company: I want to say publicly that our manufacturing company truly has grown from a seed planted by Mikhail Gorbachev. Ours may be the only cooperative in the manufacturing sector to have developed into a major, serious business group. Today we are able to put up real opposition to the dominance of foreign products on the market in Moscow and to some extent in the rest of Russia, because we have seventy regional representatives across the land.