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Déjà vu in Orange
Some four years ago there was a bit of social unrest in Russia. Mikhail Zurabov, then minister for healthcare and social development, carried out a reform that affected masses of old age pensioners, replacing benefits in kind - free medicines and the like - with their monetary equivalent. Those handouts proved far from equivalent and brought no benefit to anyone - except, as some pointed out bluntly, to the private companies controlled by Mr. Zurabov himself, who did not even bother to reject the slur. Some old age pensioners then took to the streets in protest, but the rallies were pretty modest and limited to the big cities, and they soon petered out as the government reacted to them successfully if ham-fistedly. More money was poured into the breach to appease the losers. Many pensioners in rural areas, who had never enjoyed some of those benefits-in-kind - like vaguely heard-of, free accommodation at luxury rest homes, free bus trips (in areas where buses were nonexistent), free telephone calls (where there were no telephones of any kind, free or otherwise), etc. - eagerly welcomed those financial handouts as rare windfalls. Finally, Mikhail Zurabov, the third most hated politician in Russia (after Chubais and Gaidar) was kicked out of the government, which soothed the enraged pensioners' feelings no end. The unrest was history, no longer of interest to anyone except for an occasional analyst. To me, the most intriguing feature of those events was this. While the protesters appealed to the powers-that-be, for which read Putin, to put right the injustice inflicted on them by a hated member of government, certain forces in this country and elsewhere were just as eager to use the protests as a means of overthrowing the "Putin regime." Sergei Kurginyan, a theater director turned political scientist, said at the time that he knew for a fact that the protesters in Khimki, Moscow's satellite town, were well paid for their "spontaneous action" by well-wishers who preferred to stay out of the picture. The identity of those well-wishers was no big secret, though. The oligarchs, the cats who had grown obscenely fat in the Yeltsin years, along with the politicians and bureaucrats servicing them, were then having their toes squashed by Putin's siloviki. They obviously hoped to ride on the crest of the social protest and do as much damage to the "Putin regime" as they could, if not derail it entirely. Recall that that was the time of the "colored revolutions," most notably the "orange revolution" in Ukraine. Boris Nemtsov, a leader of Russia's pro-oligarchic Union of Right Forces, wrapped his neck in an orange scarf and peacocked it as an advisor to Ukraine's "orange" President Yushchenko, inspiring hopes of spreading the orange fires to Russia in many an oligarchic breast. There was no dearth of that sort of wishful thinking in the better paid media outlets over here. And not just in Russia, either. In that year of protests, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace produced its Policy Brief #41 entitled "Putin's Decline and America's Response," by Anders Eslund (Aslund). In that document Aslund dreamed of a "popular uprising through escalating spontaneous protests" by Russia's "uncommonly irritated" population "inspired by the recent revolutions in Ukraine and the Kyrgyz Republic." Other flights of Aslund's fancy included an anti-Putin coup: "within Putin's KGB circle, Putin is not considered the leader... The powerful men surrounding Putin may conspire in a putsch against him." There was plenty more in the same rancid nonsense vein there. Well, four years later, Putin is still running Russia, in tandem with Dmitry Medvedev, the president of his choice, while Anders Aslund, I suspect, is still predicting Putin's speedy downfall - the more so that the current situation in Russia is fraught with even worse social unrest than before, for the crisis that is upon us is of an immeasurably greater magnitude than Zurabov's well-calculated idiocy. As I see it, though, the crises of 2005 and 2009 are identical in at least one respect. These days, as before, the masses affected by unemployment and fear of an overall drop in living standards are looking up to Putin, Medvedev and the "regime" in general to see them through the bad times, to maintain the political stability and, above all, the modicum of economic prosperity that they came to take for granted in the eight Putin years. Contrariwise, the "Kremlin critics," the "Other Russia," the have-beens of the 90s, the "orangists" of all hues are again hoping to use the dissatisfaction of the masses - properly organized by those same "orangists" - to throw the country into political turmoil and in the ensuing chaos make a grab for power. Another common feature is that the "orangists'" main critical thrust is again directed at Vladimir Putin - president then, premier now. Putin has mishandled the current economic crisis, he therefore must resign or be fired by President Medvedev - that is their tune now. The Kommersant-Vlast' magazine (#6, February 2009) asked a dozen or so public figures, "Will Medvedev Sack Putin?" and published their answers - mostly negative but there were also some eagerly positive and quite revealing ones. The tune was then enthusiastically taken up by that prolific litterateur and prominent representative of the Chatterbox School of political science, Dmitry Bykov, in the Sobesednik magazine (#7, February 2009 - of which the English version was for some reason posted on Johnson's Russia List twice, on two successive days). To these must be added countless essays - produced by a whole cottage industry, in fact -- both in Russia and abroad looking for, or better say inventing splits between Russia's "authoritarian" premier and its "liberal" president.
Of the "orangist" respondents to the
Kommersant query I would particularly single out just a couple. One is Boris
Nemtsov, waving the same old orange scarf as in 2004-2005 and insisting that
getting rid of Putin is the easiest thing imaginable: "Finding the typist Well, Messrs Nemtsov, Zlobin and the like may think and say whatever they please. I think that President Medvedev is no fool, still less is he a bloody fool. Whatever views he may hold about handling what is politely referred to as the "economic downturn," he certainly realizes that dislodging a premier who leads the biggest party in parliament and in the country at large (see the results of the March 1 elections) looks a touch suicidal. At best, that would lead to the comic opera situation like in the Ukraine, where premier and president are publicly trading four-letter insults, with the parliament (Rada) lustily joining in and regularly enjoying a punch-up around the lectern. At worst... For someone who toyed with Molotov cocktails in two coups in the jolly 90s, even thinking about that "worst" is unbearable. That's the whole trouble with the "orangists" - Nemtsov, Khakamada, Kasyanov, Berezovsky, Kasparov and a host of others eagerly supported by the Russophobic forces in the West who see them as the only "true" opposition to the Kremlin: they are calling for a political upheaval at a time when only a stable political structure, however unsatisfactory, can control the raging economic chaos. Adding political turmoil to the economic one is a recipe for Russia's self-destruction - but do they care? The worse for Russia, the better for them. In fact, only economic collapse and political upheaval can offer them any chance of regaining the power, prestige and prosperity they had before Putin and his bunch swept them aside. Let me put it in the crudest terms possible: anyone who is now calling for Putin's resignation, or painting fanciful scenarios of his, or Medvedev's, unseemly political maneuvering, is an enemy of Russia - or should have his head examined. As simple as that. Speaking for myself, I have been as critical of Putin's economic, and at times social, policies as anyone else. I described his dictum "Russia is an energy superpower" as gobbledygook at a time when oil cost $140 a barrel. Most recently, I focused on the more comical aspects of the Putin government's handling of the economic crisis (see my skit "Crisis as Circus"). However, even as I wrote the latter, I was fully aware that it was easy to be cynical about those bloopers - but what would one have done, oneself, given one's thieving, oligarchic-bureaucratic environment and the inbuilt deficiencies of Russia's economy? After all, this economy is not unlike that of Brazil as it was some time ago, when its well-being depended on just one commodity - coffee. The world drinks more tea, less coffee - and Brazil's economy is in tatters, that's how it used to be. In our case, it's raw materials - oil, gas, metals, timber - and they have been the mainstay of our economy not just under Putin or Yeltsin or whoever, but for ages. Even with the best of will, it will take decades to change this situation, and if someone says the ongoing crisis is the best of times to start the process, permit me to doubt their wisdom. Again: what would I have done in Putin's place right now? It would be hard to resist the impulse to give Finance Minister Kudrin a mighty kick in the pants, if only for his touching trust in the likes of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac - but who would I put in his place? Another member of the present government's economic unit? But he/she would simply be making the same Kudrin-style moves, probably with even less skill. Or - perish the thought - the Communist Sergei Glazyev? Brilliant economist, no doubt about that, but he would be sure to try something revolutionary, Communists do have that tendency... No, thanks, some other time perhaps. There is, of course, the ubiquitous Boris Nemtsov now talking of conducting secret negotiations with President Medvedev, but these are meant to be about ousting Premier Putin, and if this were a Goethe tragedy, a Voice from Heaven would give a mighty guffaw at this point, for wasn't Boris Nemtsov kicked out of his office as vice premier a decade or so ago by none other than the late not-much-lamented Boris Yeltsin, and the country still failed then to avoid a national default... No, I had better leave these matters to the current duumvirate - and object strenuously to any attempt to supplant it. Pen or Molotov cocktail or whatever it takes in hand.
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