The former Soviet president Gorbachev said that Russia should resume the perestroika. “We have come to a point now where it has been stopped. Politics is increasingly becoming a simulation. We need a new governance system for the nation,” Gorbachev said in Moscow while giving a public lecture at the RIA Novosti news agency’s office. According to him, Russia needs “the real elections, not an imitation exercise.”
Russian authorities reacted quite severely to the statements by the first president of the USSR. In particular, the secretary of the ruling United Russia party’s General Council Sergei Neverov responded to the proposal by stating that “Gorbachev had a perestroika initiated once that caused us to lose our country.” Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov remarked: “We hope to see no more perestroikas in this country, as we have had enough of them.”
The political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky told the Russian service of the Voice of America that Gorbachev’s proposals “to resume the perestroika sound ridiculous and irresponsible at the same time.” It was a rather odd statement from a man who helped Putin to power, then worked for the Kremlin, but now is by and large unhappy with the regime, too. Besides, he could not be unaware that all countries are constantly carrying out reforms, which was exactly what Gorbachev meant speaking about a new perestroika.
On the other hand, Gorbachev’s proposals have been supported by the Russian opposition. “People may call the return to democracy in Russia whatever they want,” the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov maintains. “Use of the ‘perestroika’ or any other word is up to individual’s taste. For Gorbachev, the former term looks natural since he invented it. Without political reform, without rotation in office, without limiting the powers of omnipotent presidency, without strengthening the role of parliament and regions, without reintroducing elected governors and mayors, as well as an independent judiciary, Russia has no future. Russia has no future without political reform and does not want to die with Putin.”
As for those who caused the country to be lost, opinions differ. For example, Andrei Kolesnikov writes in his The Shadow of Perestroika: “We lost our country not because of Gorbachev’s actions, but because of Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s. Some did not lose their country at all, but on the contrary, recovered what they had lost. These latter live well without their former ‘older brother’ who is burning with the fire of nostalgia for Heroes of Labor and tortured nightly by phantom pains of an empire where the sun never set...”
According to him, the government’s main efforts are currently directed at self-preservation. “Therefore,” Kolesnikov believes, “Putin has no use for a perestroika as he obtains political rent from the warm memories of the late Soviet stagnation. Of course, neither has his team which obtains its political rent from Putin’s own popularity. A perestroika is needed, however, by the Russian people, the well-publicized new historical community which many are unsuccessfully looking for now under a street lamp in Poklonnaya Square or under a tank at the Uralvagonzavod. It is needed to get out of our current state, which some call a recession, others a stagflation, and both opinions are correct. It is needed also to break the cycle of incredible lies being manufactured around the elections that undermine the authorities’ legitimacy and to stop the spread of an absurdist ideology that creates fake Cossacks and believers who are taking offenses at everything all the time but proudly wear Ready for Labor and Defense of the USSR badges on their chests and sing Mikhalkov-written anthems that frequently mention Stalin whom they like very much. We need a perestroika to stop the repressions in the public space, ranging from actions of the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia Bastrykin whose henchmen drive journalists to a forest where the boss threatens them with assassination, to persecuting all civic activities, including that carried out by NGOs. If not for Gorbachev’s decision to launch the perestroika, the Soviet Union would have collapsed before 1991, just because of its organic decay. If not for Yegor Gaidar-led liberal reforms in 1992, Russia would become another Belarus by now already. We have not completed our perestroika and reforms. Putin has proved to be no Pinochet, but he is very much a latter-days Franz I, the Austrian emperor who placed any obstacle he could think of on the path to industrialization, because he saw the working classes as a source of ‘revolutionary contagion,’ long before Marx and political manipulators who staff our presidential administration today.”
The Day asked the Kommersant FM radio station’s editor-in-chief Konstantin Eggert to comment on the developments around the former Soviet president’s statements.
HE CLEARLY SAYS THE CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA NEEDS DEMOCRATIZATION OF POLITICS…
“I do not believe myself that the perestroika destroyed our country. I do not consider it a disaster. I think that the Soviet Union was doomed in any case. As for Gorbachev’s statements, he clearly says the contemporary Russia needs democratization of politics, reviving the competitive media environment, and improving confidence in the state institutions. In no way this is a repeat of what happened in the late 1980s.
“Naturally, he employs his usual style and puts it in the terms that are familiar and understandable for him. He considers himself a historical figure, and rightly so. He mostly extrapolates the experience of the late 1980s to today’s Russia. To some extent, he is correct, but on the other hand, the conditions today are markedly different compared to the Soviet Union. Nobody is talking about ongoing collapse of the Russian state now.”
How can you explain the Russian authorities’ strong reaction to Gorbachev’s statements?
“This reaction is explained by the fact that the modern Russians’ view of the 1980s and 1990s, that is, the perestroika period, is shaped, to a large extent, by the negative individual experiences of a significant part of Russia’s population. These people experienced great hardships during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moreover, for the past 13 years, the Russian state propaganda has been constantly speaking about the disaster that befell the Soviet Union and horrors of the perestroika and quite often even of the Yeltsin years. It has impacted the public consciousness and become part of the contemporary political discourse.”
Every country needs reforms, whether called a perestroika or by other names, and other countries do carry them out... Therefore, Russia needs them too. Why do the Russian authorities oppose reforms?
“It looks like the authorities fear that reforms will deprive them of the power they are wielding now. That is it.”
How would you explain then President Putin’s recent initiatives to erect monuments to Heroes of Labor and reintroduce school uniforms?
“Probably, the government decided to rely on the people who are largely positive on our Soviet past and rather conservative in their views. This is not surprising. And by the way, this would be okay if it was part of the free competition on the political market, and not a result of the dominance of one political force, that is, the United Russia party, and, in fact, of one political leader. I think that reliance of the authorities on the people who oppose change and see stability as the current government’s greatest achievement is quite obvious here. It is, of course, a risky course in the medium term, because without change, without modernization, including social modernization, any socio-economic progress is going to be hardly achievable.”
Indeed, there was much talk of partnership with the West to further Russia’s modernization even during Medvedev’s presidential term. Can such a scenario of the country modernizing with the West’s assistance be realized under Putin?
“No. Putin’s administration has no time at all for any such projects. We must be honest about it. The Russian president’s overarching view is that the West can be a partner in some cases, a rival in some others, and perhaps even an enemy in some again. However, any partnership should come only from the shared interests. Such is, for example, Russia’s partnership with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.”
