Gleb Pavlovsky. Abstracts of the speech

Abstracts of the speech
at the joint seminar on September 5

Gleb Pavlovsky

Publication date: November 21, 2000

Russian University is the name under which the Center for Corporate Entrepreneurship appears in wider circles. At its core, this is a personnel initiative undertaken by a group of comrades who well understood that the time would come when these personnel would be in demand. Understanding has come a long time ago, but demand is just beginning. We can say that since 1996 we have been inventorying needs, working in line with the general trend. I would describe it like this.
Russia today is vacant as a state and as property. She is waiting for an owner, manager, entrepreneur. In this sense, you came on time.

But there is one problem. We are divided into two unequal groups of people. Some take the existing system of projects, ideas, representations, the system of descriptions of reality for reality itself. They are trying to change this list by adding themselves to it. For your project, by the way, this is not a theoretical question.
Others are managers who form the production cycle and maintain cost control, but do not have the funds to buy or sell anything.

When there is a political conflict between the so-called “owners” and the so-called “state”, the question arises who owns the property. If an attempt is made to request documents, they are usually not available. The property may be the property of any of the parties to the conflict. Usually it ends up in the hands of a strong party, but at the same time retains an uncertainty of form.

Is society interested in this? Does this encourage any new growth? This is an open question. We stand for rationalization. Let things be called by their proper names, let the owner be named, and his property named. Typically, property arises by laying hands on something that does not belong to anyone. This did not happen for us. We argue endlessly about privatization. It seems that now there is a second wave, but we didn’t have the first one. Hands are not laid on. And those who stand closer to the subject, that is, managers, should lay hands. Illegal encroachments on property are most provoked by the absence of legal ones.

I would like to turn to the concept of “entrepreneur”, which Sergei Borisovich speaks about.
An entrepreneur is one of the persons present in reality.
But we cannot say that entrepreneurs in Russia today are among the holders of existing resources, who deaden these resources and make them unusable.
In essence, we are dealing with a giant dump of resources that is maintained in this state. We cannot even calculate how many resources are wasted in this landfill. Russia today is like a densely populated landfill near Moscow, where there are no vacant lots, everything is divided into areas where strangers are not allowed. The only aspect of private property that we have is that people mark certain capitals as “impossible for others to use,” but do not use them themselves.
It is precisely this position of the deputy private owner that should be recognized as vacant.

But you can’t stay in this state for a long time. The state cannot tolerate this situation any longer. If society tolerates it, it will be to some extent absorbed by the activity and initiative of the state. In this case, the state will act first, whether society likes it or not.

This picture arose about ten years ago. There are several scenarios for the modification of Soviet mass consciousness. Today it makes sense to approach the issue practically. If this pattern continues, all your personal strategies will become irrelevant. You can attach yourself to peripheral holders within this picture, but you will never gain access to what they call property.
There is only one way - to change the picture. We are now faced with this complex, complex task.

There are many options. The scenario with the emergence of uniform informal rules of the game linked to legal procedures for legalizing its results is problematic. This is a strategy worth fighting for, but it is not guaranteed for you. Therefore, it makes sense to develop mixed strategies that would bring to the market auxiliary economic and political contours that are useful for the authorities in operational terms.

You enter the game facing a society paralyzed by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary elites. Today there is an opportunity to replace the old elite; this will succeed if you demonstrate the ability to generate action patterns and implement them.
Putin is building a framework stylistic model that is open to different forms of action. He is not a revolutionary, but he assumes that another will come onto the scene and emerge as the new sovereign. This is the field that is open today.

The state today is in an ideal starting position for you. It is not interested in today's system of ownership and domination. It will support those who manage to disrupt it constructively. Today we can construct Russia correctly.
We are creating a new sovereignty, which in the twenty-first century will be known as “Russian”.