DM: What is there not to understand? They are only too readily comprehensible.
MG: Everything is instantly clear to you young people, but I have seen a few things in my time, and I don’t find it quite so easy to know the truth about everything. And with the country in such a state… the Lord God Himself wouldn’t want to get involved. Even He hasn’t worked out what is going on yet.
DM: Well, sure. It’s the way it always is. We exchange the reforms for freedom, we exchange freedom for property, and the scope for democracy gets narrowed ‘in the interests of the people and democracy’.
MG: I’ll say it again, there are no grounds to accuse the president of being anti-democratic. I have been in his shoes and I can tell you that what Vladimir Putin has managed to do is in the interests of most of the people.
DM: Okay, let’s have some examples.
MG: Take education. The president is in favour of adapting it to the present day, but it needs also to be free and accessible. He intervened in the approach to reforming the public utilities to prevent radical changes being made at the expense of consumers.
DM: Meanwhile, the price of petrol is just soaring, right-hand drive cars are being banned, domestic manufacturers are again being favoured ahead of domestic consumers. Importing old foreign cars is being prohibited. Is that also in the interests of the majority?
MG: There are things in your list I would not have done, but the fact is that the president has to be involved in the battle for the domestic market. That is true also of the richest and most developed countries. See how they fight against letting us into their markets! The European Union has brought more than 60 anti-dumping lawsuits against Russia. Is that what they mean by ‘a new chapter in our relationship’? And at the same time, a third of farmers’ incomes in the EU comes from state subsidies. In other words, agriculture is being subsidized to make it competitive.
DM: Mikhail Sergeyevich, they have rich consumers who can get by without second-hand, seven-year-old Russian vehicles, but how is our motorist, on a Russian income, supposed to get by without old, but cheap and reliable, cars?
MG: Perfectly true, but we do need to stimulate and encourage our mechanical engineering industry. At present what we still have functioning is mainly the raw materials sectors, metallurgical and chemical industries. Everything else needs to be modernized, and that takes time and needs protectionist measures.
DM: Life is short, Mikhail Sergeyevich. People want to live now, to be able to drive a car. They don’t always have enough time to be patriotic.
MG: And the ‘life’ of a president is even shorter: four years, or at most eight. He needed to make a difference to the country, to let it feel it can get out of this quagmire.
DM: It seems to me there is a contradiction between what you are saying now and what you did as president of the USSR. Gorbachev started a political reform, aware of the fact that without political freedoms and free citizens it is impossible to build a free economy. Now you are to all intents and purposes giving approval to a constricting of politics. Alternatives are out of fashion; nobody has any time for them. Everybody keeps saying there is no alternative, the choices have been made for many years to come. The Federation Council has been all but abolished. The State Duma has become a completely obedient, rubber-stamping body. I repeat, is the price of successful reforms really a reduction of political freedom? Can we honestly say that?
MG: Well, you just have, so freedom of speech is not defunct.
DM: In conversation with you.
MG: Yes… The situation in Russia is so complex and contradictory that the solutions are necessarily also going to be messy.
What I have seen of the president and the conversations I have had with him convince me that he is committed to democratic governance and has no intention of establishing some kind of authoritarian regime along even the neo-Stalinist lines of the times in which you and I lived and worked. I have absolutely no doubts about that.
I often notice the temperature being artificially raised when these issues are discussed, but I am absolutely sincere in my present position of supporting Putin. I wish the president every success. I think people do instinctively sense that the man is determined to haul Russia out of the morass she is stuck in. There are, however, very substantial forces who would like everything to remain just as it is. The status quo is principally what has developed over the past 10 years. There is a struggle going on between those who have everything, and for whom reform can only reduce their unmonitored and uncontrolled revenues, and the majority of the population, who are not so much living as just surviving.
To tell the truth, I think our greatest misfortune is that people’s morale and faith in the future have been undermined. For us, for the Russian mentality, that is a painful and dangerous state to be in. The way Russia functions is that, if people don’t feel valued, if they are again pushed to one side, all these plans for the future will come to nothing.
That means that the whole idea of maintaining the status quo and continuing the inertia of the previous 10 years, with a clique in control of everything, would spell disaster for Russia.
The president is talking more and more about the need for policies of innovation, policies to support grassroots initiatives. In a little more than two years several times more constructive laws have been passed than previously, and they have gone some way towards creating a climate of legality, but you are saying that nothing has changed.
DM: Absolutely. It seems to me that nothing has changed because all the courts are being bought piecemeal and wholesale by large oligarchical organizations to make sure they deliver the right verdicts. Authoritarianism is when you cannot get justice through the courts. It is when justice depends on whether you are admitted to an audience with the president, whether you have his ear or are kept away from him. And is that not the way things stand at present?
MG: What you are talking about is a tendency Putin wants to reverse. The preconditions are in place now to move forward. The preparations for judicial and administrative reforms, the search for a balance in the allocation of powers to get both the regional and local governments functioning are all steps in the right direction. But just see the effort required for every step forward in all these matters.
Without judicial reform and without an effective, independent court system, we stand no chance of combating the bureaucracy and corruption. It seems to me that the president is only beginning to tackle this issue of fighting corruption. And what are we to make of all the bureaucratic delays in trying to get the Duma to pass an anticorruption law?