Alexey Nevzorov. "Down with autocracy!"

"Down with autocracy!"
Alexey Nevzorov

Date of publication: October 29, 2003

With the light hand of Liliya Shevtsova, the political regime in Russia received an innocuous political science nickname - elective autocracy . Even vindictive foreigners, who impute monarchical habits to us, repeat vying with each other: “Putin is a good Russian Tsar.” It turns out that not only Russian political scientists are strong in hindsight. What to take from the domestic examination, entangled in three Putins. She is still arguing about which of the Putins is real: Thermidor, Brumaire or Robespierre. But in recent times of political fog and questions “ Who is Hu?” everything was much simpler. I would even say more transparent.

At the beginning of our common term, the same Shevtsova put the young President on notice : “Putin must solve, as it seems to me, at least two tasks. One task is to separate capital from power. The second task is to get out of Yeltsin’s pocket, to get out of elective monarchy, from elective autocracy." Today, when the flies are finally separated from the cutlets, apparently the time has come to get out of grandfather’s stash. Perhaps the process went somewhat unexpectedly, almost like in a children's rhyme: “Putin came out of the fog, took a knife out of his pocket”... Well, we will soon see what will happen next.

However, as soon as the government, like a mechanical piano , began to carry out the tasks set by the intellectuals themselves, for some reason hysteria began among them. Sobs were heard, calls were heard in the spirit of Gaidar-93: “Hold hands, friends, so that we don’t perish alone!” Our literary-centric intelligentsia has always considered the President to be Nornstein’s “hedgehog in the fog.” Apparently, for the “sad, thoughtful expression on his face and glance to the side.” With gusto, “decent people” told how they found him in the courtyard of the St. Petersburg City Hall and brought him in a copier box to the Red Corner. How they fed the hedgehog oranges and chocolate and how they affectionately poked him in the side with a stick. But when they decided that the hedgehog had become completely tame and began to boldly grab its sides, thorns suddenly appeared!

Here came the calls from the right-wing liberals from the Union of Right Forces : “Do something with this man!” . They tend to see the problem in a specific person, and not in a political institution. However, the question is completely different: why is Putin today the leader of our “elected autocracy”? Because he's just a great Putin, a monarch by office or an elected president? Pavlovsky believes that “Putin’s monstrous popularity would not have become a real factor of power if it were not for the election of the main authorities. Putin is a leader precisely and only as an elected one among the elected.”

So, there is an opinion that in our current version of Russian “autocracy” (as a form of corporatism), it is “electivity” that is essential. And the “constitutionality” of the monarchy was not even achieved by impudence. However, actually existing corporatist relations have the remarkable feature that power is legitimized not only through formal institutions, but largely through informal relations. This is confirmed by Pavlovsky’s own remark that “the system is too institutionally weak to exist without a delegated authority - for example, the authority of Putin.” Without a guarantor of political communication, at least in the form of a “virtual solver.”

Indeed, what demand can there be from a formal legal institution in the form of the Constitution of a certain Erethia, which was written hastily and was somehow adopted. Here, a “strong position” in the form of reliance on the Constitution of the Russian Federation can evoke in public memory very funny circumstances of the constitutional referendum. In this “brochure,” the functions of the Prosecutor General’s Office are spelled out so sloppily that, due to such vagueness, it is the Prosecutor’s Office that has the greatest freedom of action and therefore is the most full-fledged political subject, “in word and deed of the sovereign,” answering the “central question” of our time - “who exactly has “We are being pursued today by politics, and can such a subject be created, given that there are all the constitutional prerequisites for this?”

Here, the revelations of the “neo-soilists,” who are ready, “ without leaving the soil of the Constitution of the Russian Federation,” to dismantle the temporary political mechanism of “Putinism,” may stumble upon revelations of a different kind. It turns out that for three years we have been fooled by the pop media machine, and now they are calling for us to engage in honest politics. Why don’t we hear from the drivers in response - for ten years in a row we have been fooled by some kind of “brochure”, let’s get down to business with the Constitution for real The thesis that “by going beyond the constitutional limits, its principate will lose its legitimacy, and thereby its own. dominance" works if formal legal institutions are valued by society higher than informal norms. But this is far from obvious.

The essence of the current problem is seen in another crisis in the relationship between new “imported” formal institutions and informal traditions rooted in the psychology of the people. Of course, one should take into account the importance attached to the elective principle. The institution of elections was used in Rus' even when filling the “royal position,” as, for example, in the case of the election of Boris Godunov or Mikhail Romanov by Zemstvo Councils. Note that a representative of the new dynasty could gain legitimacy only in this way. Thus, the tsars of the time of the “Troubles” who did not go through the election procedure - False Dmitry I and Vasily Shuisky - did not have sufficient legitimacy in the eyes of the people and eventually lost power.

But one should not overestimate the importance of elections; this liberal principle of the formation of power was rather a consequence of the syncretism of power, enshrined not only in a formal legal manner, but also informally - in the public consciousness. The figure of the tsar was perceived as sacred, and it is no coincidence that the phenomenon of “false impostor tsars” became so widespread in Russian history. As noted in the famous work of Pivovarov and Fursov, “here appeared Autocratic Power, united and indivisible, qualitatively homogeneous and essentially unique. Moreover, the only one not only as power, but also as a subject (mono-subject).”

Informal attitudes rooted in the public consciousness also influence the methods of political struggle. The rivalry of various interests fundamentally contradicts the idea of ​​“conciliarity,” which presupposes a kind of mystical unity of society. Today, the Duma, like the Zemsky Councils once upon a time, is not an arena of confrontation between different groups, but a tool for increasing the legitimacy of the autocrat’s decisions. This fundamentally distinguishes it from European parliaments, which are formal institutions of struggle for power, including against the monarch.

Such features of political life in Russia have given rise to informal “rules of the game,” which until now have been reduced to the following.

1. The bearer of supreme power is perceived as the personification of the entire society, and not of any individual faction; the elite cannot publicly fight against him. (With the exception of a brief period of “troubles” in the early 17th century, no interest group questioned the authority of the monarch.)

2. Various “groups” emerging at court intrigue against each other and compete with each other for influence on the monarch. They seek to discredit the enemy in the eyes of the ruler in order to reduce his influence on the royal person.

3. The monarch has always acted as an "independent supreme arbiter." (Even harsh critics from the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs recently called on the President to play the role of an “ethical arbiter.” Isn’t this a direct recognition by business of the role of government as a mono-subject.)

In Russian history, some Russian autocrats fell under the complete control of a purely specific “interest group,” while others skillfully maneuvered, not allowing any group to gain strength. Moreover, the victory of one of the elite groups does not outwardly contradict the principles of “conciliarity,” since its superiority was “sanctified” by the legitimate monarch. Similar “rules of the political game” developed at the courts of Western European monarchs during the period of absolutism, for example, in France in the 17th-18th centuries. However, this was a temporary phenomenon, since back in the 16th century in France there was a struggle between noble groups against the Valois dynasty, and not for influence on the dynasty.

The application made today to change the “rules of the game” means the long-awaited entry into the political sphere of our “third estate.” There are parliamentary elections ahead, where our “merchants” will try to defeat the “heroes” without conspiracies and shooting. If nothing comes of this and Khodorkovsky remains in prison, then after the New Year there is one more chance left. For example, on January 9, peacefully go to the Kremlin with portraits of Putin under the slogan “Down with autocracy!”

Then we’ll see if there’s enough gunpowder!..