Glasnost Without Perestroika

Sometimes, an artist conveys a greater degree of realism in his work than he intended. It is difficult to say whether the decision to devote the State Council meeting on Friday to the subject of modernizing the country’s political system was made in response to the opposition’s outspoken criticisms over the fraudulent October elections. But in any event, the meeting is a direct reflection of the state of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s vertical power structure, which is showing more political cracks in its foundation.

President Dmitry Medvedev, Putin and the leaders of seven political parties served as the main voices in this political chorus. As usual, Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky played the part that he is so gifted at: court jester.  

“If some people consider themselves to be the ruling party,” Zhirinovsky said, “they should listen to criticism. You are up there on Mount Olympus with all the power, you have orchestras playing, you’ve got everything just the way you want it. But you should know that the people don’t love you. Learn this lesson once and for all: The authorities are never loved anywhere, especially not in Russia. People everywhere eventually grow tired of the authorities. To prevent that from happening, you need to bring in new faces, shuffle jobs around.”

It is interesting that almost every speaker referred to the Soviet Union — and always in a negative sense. Yabloko chief Sergei Mitrokhin said today’s political system is largely a simulation of the Soviet system, and its main defect is monopolization in the executive branch, the dominance of a single political party and the emergence of a dominant class of bureaucrats. Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov — who has always expressed his deep nostalgia for his party’s predecessor, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, said, “The CPSU was smarter, stronger and more competent than United Russia, but it could not survive by flying on only one wing, lacking a normal dialogue in a system where everybody carried out the orders of a single person without thinking.”

If the State Council meeting was an attempt by Putin, Medvedev and United Russia to exonerate themselves for the widespread violations during the October elections, it came off quite clumsy. Everything that Medvedev, Putin and State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov said can be boiled down to one conclusion: There is no conclusive evidence that the October elections were fraudulent, and the opposition’s criticism of the elections is a provocation, an attempt to shake up the country’s political stability. In other words, the Kremlin has dug in its heels and has taken a position of complete denial. Thus, it is clear that the authorities have no real desire to modernize the country, and this is becoming a larger and larger bone of contention with the opposition.  

Is Russia entering the initial stages of a

21st-century version of perestroika? If so, the biggest question is who will emerge as the modern-day Mikhail Gorbachev who will have to try to reform and modernize the country under the watchful, stern gaze of the country’s contemporary Yury Andropov?

Nikolai Petrov is a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center.