Regional barons

One of the main functions of the state is the provision of the population, and first of all to business, power services, that is, services for the production and maintenance of order, defined and understandable to all the rules of the game. The establishment of such rules, as well as control over their implementation, make the state legitimate in the eyes of the population. And just these rules, and most importantly - the procedures for their execution, today are extremely blurry. It becomes more and more obvious that a certain important element of the state structure, which it developed in the post -perestroika years, was lost and not replaced by anything. This will be discussed about this by the disappeared element of the political system. His name is the regional elites, and above all-the Governor's Corps of the 1990s. It was these elites who created the administrative market, which, having transformed, continues to function to this day. It is significant that, despite the demonization of the “dashing 90s”, the governors of that time continue to be perceived by the population of many subjects of the Federation as a “real” power.

Our reasoning will be based on the concepts of “administrative markets” (Vitaly Nayshul, Simon Cordonsky) and “power entrepreneurship” (Vadim Volkov).

On the way to the administrative market: in search of a power operator

The end of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s took place under the sign of a radical weakening of power institutions, final decay and previously not particularly effectively working management mechanism. Bureaucracy and the “political layer” diverged further. The policy was debit, losing the levers of real management, and the bureaucracy, on the contrary, was politicized, more and more clearly realizing its own interests, which did not coincide with the interests of the principal. The failure of perestroika is not least connected precisely with the expectant position, which was taken by the bureaucracy of the Gorbachev era. As Nayshul convincingly showed, by that time local officials had largely privatized the powerful functions of the state, so that any decision made at the top, before being implemented, took place a complex process of bargaining. And since the main slogan of perestroika - the fight against privileges - directly contradicted the interests of the bureaucracy, any activity of the reformers was blocked. Their signals simply did not reach the addressees. That is why the only politician of the “Middle Circle” who elected the “charismatic”, fundamentally non-intent-institutional type of communication with the population, Boris Yeltsin, came to power.

However, the consequence of the victory of this type of political communication was the collapse of the state mechanism. Instead of the exchange of power for property, which, according to the ideologists of the post -perestroika, would avoid civil conflict, the process of chaotic decay of society developed. Kirill Koktysh described that period as the “balance of weaknesses” - there were no strong in the new Russia. In any case, in the legal field.

In the absence of “strength”, the main technology of survival was the “shadow”, the truly “folk” privatization of their own workplace, the basis of which were laid down by non -juni (stiffs of socialist property) of the Soviet era and an early cooperative movement. The all -winging barter until the payment of salaries with irons and coffins became a form of legalization of such privatization, and what Sergei Damberg called “privatization of biography” - its ideological basis. Having worked at the enterprise for 15-20 years, the employee begins to feel him “his own”. This is manifested not only and not so much in the “team's sense” from the management textbooks, but in the belief that the enterprise must (!) Solve the employee’s everyday problems, serve as a resource to solve them. If it does not want to do this, the employee has the right to help himself. Of course, at the expense of the same enterprise. This position in 1995 was held by respondents who participated in a survey, which the author, with the support of the Cultural Initiative Foundation, conducted among residents of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok.

I had a lot of fifteen years in the depot. I plowed not for fear, but for conscience. Both in the workshop and in the trade union committee. Well, in your opinion, I did not deserve an apartment to make my son. In my opinion, I really deserved it ...

(respondent, man, 43 years old, unconverted higher, trade union figure).

Similar opinion in the same cycle:

Yes, the machine is the office, and the orders are private. Everything is so. Just think, no one needs him. Students practiced. We brought him to mind. Yourself. All organized themselves. Now we ourselves earn. A (name of the enterprise. - L. B.) here is not in business. This is ours, we will earn money

(Man, 41 years old, higher education, teacher).

This kind of representation served as the basis for large -scale and effective networks. On the basis of networks, an informal hierarchy was formed, according to which “folk privatization” took place.

We all knew: the old man (director. - L. B.) does not even leave the office. And only she has access to the office. She steers everyone. This will be accepted, but this is not. She determined - to whom they would refuse, and who would slip through the light. Who was friends with her, everything could get, everything got away with him ...

(respondent, a man of 48 years old, higher education, ITR).

In the most difficult situation were employees of the state apparatus, the only resource of which was delegated to them and partially privatized by them. Here, “privatization of the biography” also took place: in particular, the claims of former party functionaries to power in the regions were based on it (“I gave the region all my life ...”). The problem is that it was the formal power institutions that broke up, giving rise to all new “centers of weakness”. Nevertheless, the “inertia of subordination” preserved since Soviet times, that is, the habit of fulfilling or at least respond to the requirements of the power body, allowed the bureaucracy to survive difficult times, completely privatizing formal powers, at that time, not particularly in demand by business. As a result, for a long time, bureaucrats were almost deprived of the possibility of “force” and order through force.

Instead, its main manufacturers were organized criminal groups (organized crime groups), and the people are “roofs”. Vadim Volkov wrote so convincingly and vividly about these “power entrepreneurs” [1] that we can only briefly retell his thoughts. Business, and just society, is in dire need of a certain system of general and understandable rules, in the external ordering force, the only alternative to which is the Hobbovian "war of all against all." The criminal roofs, themselves do not need formal law, were just able to create such rules - cruel, not at all democratic and not humane, but at that time there were simply no others.

It was the criminal roofs that began to perform judicial and regulatory functions, and to perform quite efficiently. So, in an interview, taken in 1999 (the project “Changing the behavior of the economically active population during the crisis”, carried out with the support of the Ford Foundation, No. SP-99-2-10) in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the respondent said that the “reception of Jema” is working in the city-a local “watchman”. In it, unlike legal instances, the problems of the population were really solved. Residents of other cities of the Far East mentioned similar "receptionists". Interestingly, few of the businessmen had the attitude to the “roofs” negative. This institution was necessary, and this was fully aware.

But as soon as the first any large enterprises were launched into several regions, and even more so carried out export-import operations, crime began to fail. The reason is simple. With all the horror stories about the criminal communities who have shared Russia among themselves and the fate that performed it at secret gatherings, the organized crime group actually remained local operators who served a certain economic object (port, customs corridor, etc.), and all their attempts to enter the new territory were blocked by the competitors there.

The illegality of organized crime groups was also a significant problem, since foreign companies demanded that the Russian partner have at least some official status. It was then that the state again entered the stage in the person of employees who privatized a certain power (functional, bureaucratic, etc.) state resource. It was the regional bureaucracies that turned out to be effective suppliers of power services that cover the territories of more than one subject.

This resource (legality, the ability to coordinate interregional and intra -regional interests, coercion to execute certain rules of the game) and was put up for sale. Its quality turned out to be generally higher, the nomenclature of services is wider, and the price is lower than that of organized crime groups. Since each official-seller was satisfied with a small fee, the total expenses (for bribes, “friendship”, etc.) also turned out to be, as a rule, not too significant. In any case, at that time, they, as the entrepreneurs noted in an interview, were much smaller than tribute to “roofs” or white payments. And at the same time significantly more effective, since they made it possible not only to avoid sanctions by the state, the threat of which by the end of the 1990s has already become relatively real, but also to get the necessary service: establishing relations with a partner, returning debts, protecting from competitors and preventing new players to the market, acquiring social status, including the Enformment mechanism.

The era "regional barons"

So, in the second half of the 1990s, the main operators who provided order services were “regional barons”, that is, the governor's level of power. The price of the service consisted of an official’s income (bribe, rollback) and its costs in the production of the service itself. These are offers above the standing chief, legitimizing the act of privatizing the state resource, as well as the purchase of services of conjugated power (administrative) operators. The limiter of the price of the service was solvent demand. When “in two throats”, the economic agent went into the “shadow”, under the cover of criminal operators, changed the localization of business, and completely stopped economic activity. So, in the first years of governorship, Sergey Darkin, when the prices for administrative services rose sharply in Primorye, almost a quarter of all firms registered in Vladivostok changed their place of registration.

The market of power services itself had a rather complicated hierarchical device. During the “parade of sovereignty”, the vast majority of permits has gone to the regional government. The function of the main legitimator of economic life on the territory of the subject was performed by the governor. It was he who was the supreme “resolution” for both power operators and for economic agents. At the "lower level" level, the level of local communities, the "red" (police) roofs, partly continued to compete with the criminal ones. But the latter, in the end, either grew up with the authorities or were replaced from business. Note that they were replaced by completely economic methods. It is significant that in the 1990s, less than a dozen criminal cases were instituted throughout the Far East under articles related to organized crime. Everything was made easier: according to the respondents, a kind of “governor cartel” was created, access to which was regulated by regional authorities. The enterprises, admitted to it, received serious preferences, and all the others automatically turned out to be less profitable and were supplanted from the market. Following them, their criminal “roofs”, which lost the “feed base”, went after them.

Since the main source of legitimation of the power of the governors at that time was direct elections, the administrative market was forced to levy a rather serious “social tax” in favor of the population. Pal Tamash wrote about “bought loyalty” [2] , but in the period under review it was only partly. Of course, the “social tax”, which was taxed by the business, was a way of buying the loyalty of the main legitimator - the population. But in addition, the assessment of the governor’s work depended on the quality of the provision of administrative services to them in the most important gray areas for the population, that is, in sectors such as education, healthcare, etc. It is clear that in our case the “governor” is not a position or a person, but a supplier of power services in a certain territory. The structure of power and persons, it is clothed with it, can be different, hence the different options for political regimes in the regions, but the essence of the administrative market does not change from this.

The federal government was also included in this market. First of all, do not forget that the center had the right of “second investment”. Of course, the first - a popular election - was the main, but the federal center could create serious problems to the obstacle to the governor. A striking example of this is the freezing Vladivostok: in the mid-1990s, the city left several times without warmth and light due to the tough position of Moscow in relation to Governor E. I. Nazdratenko, in which the local housing and communal services gained multimillion-dollar debts. Accordingly, in the direction of Moscow, not only white (at that time was insignificant) deductions, but also part of the “real” income. So to speak, legitimation tax.

At the same time, the Damocles Sword “Second Investigator” forced the governor to constantly prove to the center that he should not intervene in the “internal affairs” of the region. Ethnic originality, confessional specificity, and the geographical and climatic features of the subject were used. In the Far Eastern regions, the efforts of local media, “researchers” and other rulers of the Duma created an apocalyptic picture of the region perishable and almost captured by the Chinese, to intervene in the affairs of which with its insignificant electoral meaning is more expensive. Far Eastern horror stories willingly replicated the federal press. As a result, an unspoken agreement was concluded: we (the center) do not climb into your nightmare, steer ourselves, but for this, provide maximum loyalty in the elections. For “domestic consumption” other horror films were used: Moscow is selected, the Chinese would have already captured everything for a long time, if not for the wise policy of the regional government. Unfortunately, the author does not have direct data regarding the situation in other large regions of the country. However, indirect ones suggest that the mechanism was approximately the same everywhere.

The inclusion of the center in regional administrative markets was also due to the fact that by that time enterprises of a national scale had already been working in full swing, which needed the rules of the game common to the whole country.

For all its vague, such rules existed, and the central government exercised control over their compliance. Thus, the federal center provided a kind of “international law” in the implementation of interregional transactions.

But in the early 2000s, this completely viable system began to collapse. After the restoration of export duties on raw materials in 1999, primarily for oil and gas, in the hands of the central government there was a resource that has repeatedly exceeded the total resource of any region. This predetermined the "sunset of regional barons." However, by no means a single -motive, but lasting to the middle of the zero.

Sunset "Regional Barons" and the search for new game rules

At the beginning of the zero, when the price of oil made a historical jerk and the federal government was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief, she suddenly found that she was not managing the country at all. The federal government in this case means a political group associated with the new president at that time. The old federal government - the so -called family and the oil and gas and other raw material business - controlled using the same mechanisms of the administrative market, that is, a system of informal practices and agreements. The center was a kind of arbitration judge in conflicts between the heads of regions, as well as between governors and mayors of the largest consumer cities. The new government was not included in the system. Actually, the authors of the Putin project from among the representatives of the old ruling group counted on this. They hoped under the new, “made” by the president to finally secure the role of the All -Russian arbitration judge. But they miscalculated.

And the point here is not the unique “charisma of Putin”: the fact that it is a product of modern PR technologies is not any doubt today, but in the banal ignorance of her own country. As a result of the reforms of the 1990s, significant-up to half-part of the population was among the outsiders. And these people perceived members of the ruling groups at that time as personal enemies. There were a lot of those who form and expressed public moods - writers, journalists, and other representatives of the cultural establishment of the Soviet era. As a result, an extremely wide Antelcinian coalition was formed, seeing his leader and defender in Putin.

Однако недовольство вряд ли выросло бы во что-то большее, чем глухие проклятия в адрес «семьи», если бы не мощная (по крайней мере многочисленная) прослойка бюрократии, в 1990-е годы отстраненная или почти отстраненная от участия в административном рынке. Так, например, министерство образования в минимальной степени контролировало вузы, которые научились обеспечивать себя сами, создав достаточно емкий, даже в условиях демографического спада, рынок образовательных услуг — по существу рынок дипломов. То же самое происходило и в ряде других отраслей.

Иными словами, как уже говорилось, неформальные отчисления в пользу федерального уровня были незначительными, поскольку основные решения принимали местные власти. Эти-то отчисления центр на рубеже веков и начал повышать всеми доступными способами, прежде всего постепенно усложняя систему лицензирования федеральной властью местных структур. В результате цена административной услуги для бизнеса выросла, и приобретать ее на месте стало невыгодным. Вместо «розничной торговли» порядком и силой, осуществляемой на региональном уровне, возникли единые центры продажи таких услуг — федеральные органы власти. Губернаторский уровень управления оказался просто-напросто лишним. Особенно в случае, когда федеральные трансферты существенно превышали собственный бюджет региона.

Все это сделало замену выборности губернаторов на фактическое их назначение актом почти рядовым. В регионах стали складываться новые механизмы функционирования административного рынка теперь уже федерального уровня. В нем была задействована та часть местной элиты, которая успела (сумела) вписаться в федеральные управленческие или политические структуры, в местные «дочки» всероссийских предприятий, прежде всего госмонополий. Но за два десятилетия реформ региональная элита уже вполне сплотилась и «приватизировала» регион (по тому самому старому советскому принципу: двадцать лет жизни ему отдано!). Внутрирегиональные связи элитных групп, даже включенных в разные структуры, оказались сильнее внешних. Ведь это многолетние семейные и личные контакты, связь одноклассников и выпускников одного вуза.

Ну и что, что он теперь в... (название органа власти. — Л. Б.). Мы с ним уже десять лет по выходньм вместе паримся. Наши жены дружат. Что же нам теперь из-за работы ссориться? Работа есть работа, а жизнь есть жизнь. В жизни друг другу всегда поможет.

(респондент, 52 года, образование высшее, государственный служащий).

Соответственно региональная элита, взаимодействуя с федеральной, действует, как правило, достаточно согласованно. Как и в советскую эпоху, идет сложный торг с центром, только в отличие от 1990-х годов местная элита выступает уже как «младший партнер». Роль «нового» губернатора в этих играх может быть различной. Один из вариантов: губернатор выступает неформальным лидером местной элиты, вне зависимости от принадлежности ее членов к тому или иному институту. Это характерно в основном для назначенцев из местной среды. Яркий пример — губернатор ЕАО А. А. Винников, бывший мэр города Биробиджана. Впрочем, «чужой» губернатор, приняв местные правила игры, тоже вполне способен стать таким лидером. Другой вариант — «чужой» губернатор, который обладает достаточным ресурсом, чтобы подмять местную элиту. Таким ресурсом может быть укорененность в федеральных элитных группах («связи в Москве»), неформальный контроль над значимой отраслью бизнеса в регионе и т. п. Здесь можно упомянуть губернатора Амурской области О. Н. Кожемяко, некогда «выдавленного» из Приморья Дарькиным, но сохранившего и приумножившего хозяйственный и силовой ресурс. Возможно, что таким лидером суждено стать и В. В. Миклушевскому, недавно вступившему в должность губернатора Приморья. Пожалуй, наименее эффективная стратегия: губернатор в роли агента по отношению к принципалу — федеральному центру. В этом случае административные игры идут своим чередом, но уже помимо формального главы региона.

Одно из последствий фактического уничтожения регионального уровня власти — чудовищное усложнение государственной машины. В стремлении все держать под контролем центр создает все новые и новые контрольные органы. Но проверяющие из местных действуют, как правило, заодно с местными структурами, приезжих же либо покупают, либо демонстрируют им потемкинские деревни. В попытке переломить ситуацию над одними контролерами ставятся другие, над ними — третьи, и так до бесконечности. Местный же бизнес, точнее та его часть, что не успела вписаться в федеральные структуры, постепенно либо выдавливается из страны, либо умирает. Что касается населения, то оно из категории покупателей административной услуги переходит в категорию продавцов нового ходового товара — лояльности. Однако крайне востребованный в период предвыборных баталий, в другое время этот товар вряд ли найдет покупателя.

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[1] Волков В. В. Силовое предпринимательство. М.: Летний Сад, 2002.

[2] Тамаш П. Неформальность в постсоциалистической экономике. См.: http://www.indepsocres.spb.ru/library/neform_soder.html