Where is it more noticeable?

Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, awaiting a court decision on the second trial, gave their first face-to-face interview. In a conversation with Novaya Gazeta, they accurately and intelligibly described the key problems facing Russian society today.

Khodorkovsky was asked what key political, economic, and social challenges the 2012 president will face. He gave a lengthy answer:

“There is a growing contradiction between the declining potential of an unmodernized economy, on the one hand, the greed of the bureaucracy, on the other, and the expectations of the population, on the third.

The impossibility of modernizing the economy is determined, in turn, by the ineffective system of public administration with its archaic nature and total corruption.

For many reasons, the next crisis point will occur somewhere in 2015.

The list of problems is long. Among them (not in order of importance):

— exhaustion of the raw material growth potential. That is, we will no longer be able to produce, and prices will no longer provide the necessary increase in income;
— continuous reduction in the share of the active (working) population;
- the continuous growth in the number of security forces and bureaucracy, that is, that part of the working population that not only does not create products itself, but also redistributes it in its favor;
— extremely slow growth in labor productivity, since today it is not the real criterion for the success of managers;
- lack of industrial policy (everyone has already forgotten about the main directions put forward by the president) as a result of pouring forces and funds into projects doomed to failure aimed at competing with China and, in the future, with India in those areas where these countries have obvious competitive advantages (for example, low labor costs).

In general, for the future president the choice is simple: either the working population produces more, or the rest consumes less.

And within the rest of the world it’s even simpler: if the bureaucracy consumes more, that means everyone else consumes less. And vice versa.

Putting pressure on the manufacturer will not work. They will run away. They're already running.

...Until the thunder strikes, our elite will not cross themselves. The response to all presidential attempts at private changes will be sabotage. There is not enough determination for institutional changes.

This means an increase in prices, tariffs, utility bills; reduction of the actual list and quality of free services in medicine and education; raising the retirement age, devaluing social benefits; creation of uncompetitive industrial capacities of the third technological wave.”

Khodorkovsky also spoke about “leftward movement,” to which he dedicated his article “Left Turn,” written five years ago. According to him, “here we are talking about both environmental movements and a demand for greater social justice. Nationalist sentiments are an objective inevitability at the stage of building a national state. And we are once again trying to make a choice between an empire and a nation state.

And we will have to make this choice. But the art of ideologists, intelligentsia, and the entire elite lies not only in making the right choice, but also in being able to direct such social processes and sentiments in a positive, truly patriotic direction.

Not into chatter about how “we love Russia,” and certainly not into beating and humiliating those whom we ourselves invited to our cities, even because of our own laziness and stupidity. And, for example, in the infrastructural and cultural unification of Russian expanses from Vladivostok and Sakhalin to Pskov and Kaliningrad, in the fight against drunkenness, drug addiction, neglect of children and adolescents, and hazing in the army.

But you never know the real problems that need to be solved for the country and the Russian people to occupy the place they deserve? So that they envy us and want to live here, and not secretly despise us, so that we ourselves feel like a united people, and not random neighbors in a dorm that we have spat on.”

Khodorkovsky called nonsense the assertion that people in Russia are not accustomed to freedom. As a refutation of this thesis, he cited the fact that our people adapt well abroad. “But at the level of the state and public institutions,” he continued, “this is truly a scorched desert. The elite is lazy, and despite all the patriotic vocabulary, it is absolutely comprador. It should be noted that this is not only her fault. The existing rules of the game prevent even the elite from feeling their responsibility for the country.

There is no permanent and protected property, no permanent and effective social institutions, no generally accepted moral standards - ephemeral and temporary workers are everywhere. This is a very dangerous situation and needs to be changed urgently.

And this can only be done with the help of institutions, which should become institutions, and not simulacra - beautiful pictures for “export” use. The declared values ​​should become real goals of everyday work, and not routine slogans in the spirit of the “general line”. The people, the country and even the elite cannot develop normally in the conditions of imposed value and functional schizophrenia.

Precisely schizophrenia, because almost everything is not what it claims to be. Parties are not quite parties, trade unions are not quite trade unions. Courts are, in fact, not courts, property is not property, the law is only a topic for further reasoning and trade of law enforcers.”

Lebedev added that recently in Russia there have been no noticeable people who represent the pride of the nation, whose opinions are listened to by many, including opponents - people of the level of Andrei Sakharov and Dmitry Likhachev.

Khodorkovsky noted that a number of President Medvedev’s initiatives are encountering serious resistance when it comes to eliminating the “feeders” that promote corruption. Lebedev, in response to the question why courts and law enforcement officers often ignore Medvedev’s amendment prohibiting arrest for economic crimes, pointed out that no one suffered for ignoring this norm. In addition, he noted that the background of this problem is “the habit of the system or its representatives to certain types of benefits from this situation. Because the examples that you give everywhere and which I know as a prisoner (sorry): every second release to freedom is, do not forget, not just a release to freedom. This is usually on bail. The bags are registered. And, as I understand it, we have the so-called double-bail system: one bail to the court, and the other, in quotes, “bail,” to another place, then you go free! This, I would say, is one of the forms of half-racketeering, half-extortion, half-corruption. This practice can become a system. It’s just that now, I would say, people are getting used to it, they are looking for ways, forms, tools, they are choosing how to solve this problem. And when they learn, in the worst sense of the word, in the negative, to use Article 108 from the point of view of “business”, again in quotation marks, then formally people who will not sit in prison may feel better, but on the other hand , the level of corruption will only increase.”