26.04.09

Yesterday the United Russia Four November Club should have presented to the public a report titled "Assessment of the State of and Prospects for Russia's Political System in 2008." The report turned out not to be ready. The conference participants proposed discussing in the meantime individual reports by the authors. Experts reached the conclusion that the contemporary political system in Russia is underdeveloped and needs to become more sophisticated.

Moderator Valeriy Fadeyev, director of the Institute of Social Planning (INOP) and chief editor of Ekspert magazine, announced that "the discussion is no less important for the report's compilers" than the texts being prepared. He called on experts to get more actively involved with their ideas in drawing up the final version of the report.

Meanwhile, the 600-page monograph, which is what the report threatens to turn into, will be the first attempt to dissect national political history. Let us note that this is a procedure which has long been routine in the West, where major research centers engage in compiling analytical works like this. It is for the moment impossible to assess the result of the INOP's efforts, but the propositions of some authors of the collection are worthy of particular attention. This is a question of citizens having a real need, which they outline, for the authorities to conceive a society with a more sophisticated structure than they currently think it has.

Valeriy Anashvili, chief editor of the Logos literary and philosophical magazine, for instance, notes what he calls "a colossal shortage of theories about building parties." "People who talk today about the party system and even those who take part in it have a very weak conception of the tendencies within the contemporary electorate -- how it is built up, what needs it has, how it functions between elections." This kind of theory, Nezavisimaya Gazeta 's interlocutor laments, is completely lacking in our country.

Anashvili is convinced that "politicians and political scientists to a large degree use a set of concepts from the 19th century in discussions about the party system." "They apply to contemporary structures what they have read in textbooks about the political systems of the past. They think that parties in our country are arranged according to the same designs." The problem, the expert notes, is that reality has gone far beyond this, and attempts to grasp that reality with conceptual efforts or even through efforts at party building will more and more suffer a fiasco, "simply because these are completely different processes: what is happening in the heads of political scientists and politicians, and what is happening in reality."

Another participant in the discussion, INOP Deputy Director Mikhail Rogozhnikov, is convinced that political and social systems plainly need to become more sophisticated and structured. He declared to Nezavisimaya Gazeta 's correspondent that elites are lacking in Russia, for instance: "It is said that they should unite on the basis of consensus and that this is a guarantee of future effectiveness. In fact they are lacking or almost lacking in our country." "Elites are representatives of their social environment," Rogozhnikov notes, but "our deputies, for instance, do not consider themselves representatives of any social groups." "A consensus of such elites is fruitless. It would lead only to the formation in the upper echelons of some sort of interest group...."

The expert is convinced, therefore, that social groups should become more sophisticated so as to form their own elites within their own cores.

The process of becoming more sophisticated should also affect civil society. Despite the presence of a large number of non-governmental organizations, people are extremely disengaged in their daily lives, the expert notes. They feel only to a small degree as if they belong to any sort of community: "Ideological and political preferences need to become more structured. The ideological chaos which exists in party programs and the heads of voters, who dash from party to party depending on accidental circumstances, should be overcome. Otherwise a people which organizes itself politically and is in a position to establish full-fledged democracy will not exist."

The lack of a society organizing itself, Rogozhnikov says, leads to a paradoxical and at the same time legitimate situation when the "upper echelons of power, however democratic they may be from within, are forced to assume functions which are not yet being fulfilled within society."

Let us note that the low degree to which society organizes itself deprives it of the very mechanisms for self-regulation which have long been put in place in developed countries and which are an essential condition to protect citizens in any situation. Their significance increases particularly in a crisis period. The disengagement of the people leads to an absence of control over the authorities.

This is precisely why, for instance, we are not seeing civil protests in cases of the most odious violations of the rights of individual members of civil society, or erroneous actions by the government toward individual social groups.

The authorities also distinguish themselves by their primitive approach to social regulation. The upper echelons do not for the moment realize the need for a more sophisticated approach to today's political realities, such as the concept of an opposition. A most important weapon in the self-regulation of society has been turned into a monster, equated almost with treason, and any critical declaration about the authorities gives rise to shock. In a society that is organized in a sophisticated way, this does not happen. Simplicity in politics is a synonym for primitiveness. There is hope that it will be overcome.

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Source: Nezavisimaya Gazeta