DM: What Duma are we talking about? This Duma?
MG: On corruption, yes.
DM: All that is needed is a phone call and the first, second and third readings will be completed in half an hour.
MG: You are wrong. If it was that easy… A draft law, as you know, has been in the Duma’s portfolio for a long time, but there is no sign yet of when it might be adopted.
I am not remotely interested in providing an apologia for the president’s policies. I have no need of that. I am not one of those who dance attendance on him and compete for access to his presence, but I know from the president himself what his position is on this matter. He is not susceptible to flattery and cannot be swayed by obsequiousness. What we are observing only testifies to a dire shortage of good people. The president did once say that finding suitable people was currently his main problem.
Russia has reached a stage where it is time to replace a survival strategy with a development strategy. Decisions are needed on many matters. It is essential that we should see a thoroughgoing development of small and medium-sized businesses. We need an industrial policy.
What is needed is not a dictatorial approach, but laws. We should support the president so that all of us enjoy success. We should support him. The president and all of us need strength and political willpower. People understand the president, and that is the crucial resource that will enable us to overcome all resistance.
That is how I thought and what I said in September 2002. What was behind my assumptions? Despite failures and mistakes, Putin had succeeded during those first years in gaining and retaining the confidence of the people. He succeeded in stabilizing the situation and beginning the process of emerging from the economic crisis, not at the expense of ordinary people but enabling them to feel the first, admittedly small, benefits of economic recovery. Wages were paid on time, pensions were increased, there was a gradual reduction of inflation; at the time, for most people, these things were crucially important. I had grounds for looking to the future with cautious optimism. However, the doubts, the questions and criticism expressed by Dmitry Muratov and shared by a substantial segment of society were by no means unfounded. Everything depended on what kind of fundamental decisions the president of Russia would take in the years ahead.
The zero years of the 2000s?
We have come to refer to the 2000s as the ‘noughties’, the ‘zero years’. May there not be an intentional or unintentional metaphor in that? Were these not wasted years for Russia, years of missed opportunity? No doubt the final verdict must be left to history. Much depended on the direction taken by the state and society in the first years of the decade, when everything was still fluid and there was heated debate about how the economy and social services – education, science, healthcare and the pension system – should develop. I followed these discussions closely, and often made my opinions public.
We needed to move from a survival strategy to a development strategy: that was the main point I emphasized in speeches, interviews, in numerous discussions within the Social Democratic Party and the Gorbachev Foundation, where politicians, experts and journalists assembled. There was concern that in some extremely important areas the policy of the state remained unclear. It seemed to offer no imaginative new prospects for developing Russia. Much of what was proposed by the Cabinet of Ministers I found plain alarming.
Economic policy came down to safeguarding macroeconomic stability and budgetary discipline, paying off the national debt and building up financial reserves. All that was doubtless important, but, without measures to stimulate the real economy or an effective industrial policy, all the achievements, like reducing the budget deficit, foreign debt and inflation, became an end in themselves and helped only to preserve the old structure of the economy with its dependence on natural resources. The recipes that economists close to the government came up with I found profoundly unsatisfactory. They understood market relations as meaning absolutely everything should be privatized, and that the state should abdicate its most important responsibilities towards the population. I found that unacceptable.
In 2001, I was approached by a large group of academics and educationists who were greatly vexed by the government’s proposed reform of education. Among them were people I knew well and trusted – people like Academicians Natalia Bekhtereva, Sergey Kapitsa and Boris Raushenbakh; the astronaut Georgiy Grechko; historian Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko; and political scientist Fedor Burlatsky. They believed this was the wrong time to introduce a reform; it was academically unjustified and would be disastrous for the Russian education system. I supported their view, and in September our appeal to the president and parliament was published in the newspapers. We raised the alarm, and time was to show that our concerns were justified.
Most seriously, we wrote, the proposed reform was based on false, completely unsubstantiated premises. It was, for example, asserted that Russian education, both in the pre-revolutionary and Soviet periods, was backward, poor and incapable of providing for the advancement of society in the post-Soviet period. In fact, we protested, Russian education was among the best in the world. It had been created and served by outstanding Russian educators, pedagogues and thinkers. The current ‘reformers’ were suggesting we should adopt a foreign, primarily American, system and privatize education. This would degrade it and open the way for a purely elitist educational system to benefit the rich.
In our open letter we criticized a number of specific aspects of the government’s proposed reform, which included the introduction of a so-called education voucher, a single school examination and ‘optimization and restructuring’ of rural schools – in reality, massive closures. We talked about the wretchedly low level of teachers’ and lecturers’ salaries.
Something that was totally unacceptable was the fact that the reform was to be imposed without open public discussion. Its proponents demonstrated offhand dismissiveness of the opinion of scholars, major specialists, and teachers and lecturers themselves. I remember we invited the ideologist behind this and other government reforms, the vice-chancellor of the Higher School of Economics, Yaroslav Kuzminov, to a round table at the Foundation. Speaking in a peremptory tone at the beginning of the discussion, he left shortly afterwards, showing a total disregard for the views of the participants. It was an attitude on the part of radical reformers that we encountered only too often.
In an open letter, we concluded that the reform as proposed was not needed. What was really essential was a series of emergency measures to enable us to preserve and develop the existing Russian education system.
Education, as an extremely important aspect of culture, should be one of the country’s strategic priorities. It should be accessible and free, from primary through to higher education in state educational institutions; that is, it should be financed from the state budget. Private education should be an optional extra and provide a level of education no lower than that provided by the state. It was unacceptable to force a state educational institution into the private sector. It was essential to revive the principle of education based on the fundamental, classical subjects and, above all, to restore fully effective study in schools of Russian language and literature, mathematics, physics, biology and chemistry. The state should support teachers and lecturers in higher education, paying them at least a living wage. School and further education teachers should enjoy the moral support of the country’s leaders and the mass media. It was very important to raise the authority of teachers, lecturers and professors. A top priority must be the allocation of financial resources to equip classrooms with information technology.