Polemic at the end of the year

In the last days, before the New Year's offensive, which is believed to be the year of the beginning of the economic breakthrough of our countries into the future, the debate about how this breakthrough should be, what the modernization tactics should be. It is important that we are not talking about a strategy, because the modernization strategy has already been determined by President Dmitry Medvedev (the modernization program that is ahead of Russia should not be carried out by authoritarian methods, but by democratic methods). So, the issue of tactics remains. It was she who discussed the two political husbands of the stormy 1990s, however, now, occupying high posts, Evgeny Gontmamer and Anatoly Chubais.

A brief summary of the polemic

It is hardly worth retelling the arguments with which they operate, and the conclusions, to which the polemists come in the end. In the end, anyone can independently study both the open letter of Gontmamer Chubais and the open answer of Chubais Gontmacher. However, for the lazy, we are ready to present a summary of the controversy. Gontmamer: Political liberalization should precede economic modernization, since otherwise any good undertakings will sink in the swamp of bureaucratic arbitrariness. Chubais: First of all, it is necessary to modernize the economy, and political liberalization will seem to be applied by itself when an intellectual "middle class" will appear along with the modernized economy. Nothing more in these two letters, which Russian manager-managerial economists for some reason made the public, are not contained.

However, why they published these letters quite understandable, each of them, as they say, is now leading his own game, trying to convince the authorities that it is his tactics of the modernization update of our country that is the only possible and the only one is crowned with success. However, the reaction in the Russian Internet community has gone. Some solidarized with Gontmacher, others supported Chubais. Nevertheless, it is obvious that, being realized, neither the tactics of the gontmamer, nor the tactics of Chubais’s good will bring. And this, as it seems, the Russian government understands.

The experience of democratic modernization

Why, neither the gontmaker nor Chubais will make the Russian Federation happy? And they will not make her happy because both of these thinkers do not possess the most important methodological tool of the Marxist - dialectical thinking. In essence, speaking of the same thing, they do not understand this. This is what it means to leave Marxism for the sake of mechanicist liberal schemes, involving a strict division into “black” and “white”, “bad” and “good”, “right” and “left”. You stop thinking dialectically, and as a result you lose the vision of the prospect of development of the country.

Of course, Dmitry Medvedev was never a Marxist (although he studied at the Leningrad State University in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but by that time Marxism was already expelled from the departments and faculties), but he has a masterful skill of dialectical thinking so useful for the statesman. What our president says about modernization, if we distract from the verbal husk that he is forced to surround his speech. Russia needs modernization. It can be implemented either from above (authoritarian) or from below (democratically). In Russia, modernization was mainly carried out from above (Peter I, Stalin). This path has always been made to huge victims, since the authorities have always forced the people to modernize. That is why modernization from above has never been married. After several decades, the modernization impulse came to naught, and the country was in the same, or even in a worst position than to a modernization jerk. Currently, a little more than 140 million people live in Russia, and their number is constantly reduced (although in 2009 a small population growth has been outlined). In other words, the implementation of modernization by authoritarian methods will simply destroy the country that will cease to exist not just as geopolitical reality, but in general as reality.

This means that the path of democratic modernization, modernization from below remains. And here, as it is not strange, Russia has a successful historical experience (modernization of the late XIX-early XX centuries), which was initiated by Tsar Alexander II and continued under his successors to Count Witte. As a result of this modernization, Russia became one of the most dynamically developing capitalist countries, in 1913 it was part of the five most industrialized countries and prepared in the next few decades to overtake its Western partners in industrial growth. It would probably have happened so if it were not for the First World War and the revolution caused by it, which destroyed all the conquests of the previous few decades of development. Why at present no one recalls this experience of Russian modernization is not entirely clear. It is probably believed that he was unsuccessful. But how “successful” the experience of authoritarian modernizations was also not remembered. Meanwhile, domestic thinkers should analyze the experience of pre -revolutionary Russia, because it can become the guiding star that will bring Russia to world leaders of the 21st century. However, as it seems, when President Medvedev speaks of democratic modernization, he means the modernization of pre -revolutionary Russia, when he says that the commandments of modernization should become part of the personal culture of each person, he means what happened in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.

Gontmaker's project - Chubais's answer

But still, the result of the modernization of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century was the universal devastation generated by a revolution and the civil war. This is precisely the danger of democratic modernization. In other words, if, by carrying out authoritarian modernization, the country risks and remain in the state of Ahides, which is not able to catch up with the turtle, then democratic modernization is fraught with the destruction of all social retrains and counterweights. And it is hardly worth thinking that the current Russian government does not understand this. She, taught by bitter experience, she understands all this perfectly, does not know this only “demrice”, which, in principle, is not capable of any mental activity.

But back to our debaters and try to apply their tactics in the paradigm of the strategy proclaimed by Dmitry Medvedev. First of all, we analyze the consequences of the tactics of Evgeny Gontmamer. The result is quite predictable. We saw him in the 1990s. A society, deprived of any internal restrictions, since as such generally significant social values ​​have not yet been created, will go into a variety. New oligarchic clans will be born, which will tear out pieces of state property and parts of the stabilization fund from each other. The parliament, like the government, will be incompetent, having lost their legitimacy under the criticism of the “liberated” media. The country will gradually rot, decomposing into the components. The picture is familiar.

Another picture, but no less terrible is drawn if you submit an incarnation of Anatoly Chubais’s proposal. We are really waiting for a mass purchase of foreign technologies, the construction of concession enterprises and a significant economic growth based on foreign loans and foreign investments. But all this splendor will give nothing to Russia, which will, as Dmitry Medvedev claims, finance foreign enterprises, instead of forming a domestic high -technology market. As a result, the class with which Anatoly Chubais connects the revival of our country, the "scientific and technical" intelligentsia will never arise. And therefore, to say that our country will become one of the world leaders is hardly worth it. We will eat technological scraps, while there is enough money, and when they end, it is with handouts.

What is proposed by the current Russian government? And it is proposed to build an industrial policy based on small and medium -sized businesses, which is accompanied by slow, gradual political concessions, so that the country will not again be distinguished. This, on the one hand, will allow creating a production culture, bringing the country out of a state of sleepy oblivion and laziness, and on the other hand, to create a political culture of moderation, which was so lacking and lacking Russian society. All this will allow us to preserve the country without turning it into an ordinary European country, which domestic liberals dream about. It’s time for them to understand that either Russia exists as part of the political reality of the world, or it turns into an ordinary European country.