N.L. Khananashvili. Fair or forum?

Introduction

Looking at yourself in the mirror after a long break is fraught with unpleasant surprises.
Robinson Crusoe (from unreleased).

I participated in all fairs of the Volga Federal District (VFD), as well as in both forums. Since it is impossible to cover everything that happened at the 2003 Forum, a fragmentary picture of the author’s impressions, conversations with participants, and rumors over the past three days has emerged. The correctness of subsequent conclusions depends on how well we can construct an overall panorama from these puzzles .

The author made some attempts to influence the emerging organizational project called “Forum-2003”. But almost none of the proposals were implemented.

Part 1. About the technical and substantive elements of the Russian Forum - 2003

If everything is bad, then it is customary to say:
"There are large reserves."
Anonymous source in the Kremlin administration.

Let us first note a number of positive aspects.

We must pay tribute: the schedule, although not without slight confusion in intermediate options, turned out to be very convenient to use. In Togliatti, it was difficult to navigate the ongoing events, since the list of ongoing events was displayed not in a time scale, but in a territorial one, i.e. according to the sites where this or that action took place. As a result, in order to understand exactly where I would like to go and participate, it was necessary to leaf through the entire album with the schedule. Now all simultaneous events were located side by side, and making a choice was incomparably easier.

Those arriving (arriving) were met in a fairly organized manner and transported promptly. By analogy with Saratov 2001, participants were provided with accommodation on a motor ship; moreover, as many as three motor ships were chartered: the Rus and Lenin docked with each other, as well as the Andropov standing at some distance.

- “ You can only get to Lenin through Russia, and Andropov is looking after all this ”;

- “ Rus has been turned into a passage yard .”

But the ships themselves turned out to be more than required. Apparently, each of them was no more than 1/3 full. Actually, it was precisely this kind of monopolistically nationalized structure (according to our information, it was not possible to attract business money for the 2003 Forum) and could not be economical. In addition, everything related to the costs of holding the 2003 Forum still remains a closely guarded secret. In general, the very fact of financing the entire Forum 2003 project from one source should at least arouse increased public attention and create appropriate tools for public control. And then the question arises: why then was it necessary to devote so much time to the topic of a social contract between power and business, if it does not participate with its resources exactly where it really can and, I believe, would like? But there was a bitterly comic explanation for the reason for the arrest of M. Khodorkovsky, who visited the Forum in Nizhny Novgorod on the evening of Friday, October 24, 2003, which I heard on the last day of the Forum from one of my colleagues: “Khodorkovsky was arrested for participating in the Forum.”

The next “program number” was a terrible sound background. It seemed that it couldn’t be worse than in Perm 2000. However, there are no limits to “perfection”. The sound cacophony of all the boxes noticeably unnerved the participants and sometimes made it impossible for them to communicate normally. Not being an acoustics specialist, I can say that the problem was solved very simply: it was necessary either to raise the barriers to the ceiling, or to cover the boxes in which the forum events were taking place with some kind of caps (even paper ones).

In the substantive part of the event, I will note one very important and at the same time dangerous trend that has emerged and gained noticeable force in Nizhny - “methodological mess”. A person not familiar with the current semantic content of the concept of “negotiation platform” may not have noticed anything. However, since previously it was the NAN Foundation (in this case, the President of the Foundation Oleg Zykov) who became the developer of this term and the partnership format at the Civil Forum 2001, the use of the label “negotiation platform” in the absolute absence of content adequate to this label was perceived as outlandish. (By the way, then, in 2001, the negotiation platform on juvenile justice was successfully held in the Supreme Court, which resulted in a set of agreements agreed upon by the parties to promote juvenile justice and introduce juvenile technologies into state law enforcement practice.) For example, the “negotiation platform "with the title "Russian society as the author of its development strategy" (in the first case, the quotation marks mean a pseudo-format) was not such at all, but was a platform for a multilateral conversation or, more precisely, a panel discussion. The breadth of the range of questions posed - from " 1. What requirements should the country’s development strategy meet ” to “ Russia and the strategy for the development of society: lessons from the past ” (for some reason these two questions turned out to be in exactly this order - first and last, although it is obvious that the lessons of the past should be learned first, and then think about strategy for the future).

In between the named positions were listed:

2. Development strategy: who can be the customer, author, foreman;

3. What are the main points of consensus among socially active groups of the population and elites regarding the direction of the country’s development;

4. Setting agendas and development directions:

a) the active part is civil society;

b) passive part - population;

c) business elite;

d) bureaucracy

(a strange typology, isn’t it? - N.Kh.)

5. What are the main fork points that will determine the main directions of the country’s development in the near future;

6. Russia’s place in the global division of labor.

Agree that there is simply no room for a negotiation platform here - this is pure discussion, unfortunately, as it turned out, poorly structured.

It is not at all excluded that tomorrow, using the new (almost like the world, more precisely since the time of J.-J. Rousseau) and today’s fashionable term “Social Contract” in its modern interpretation, many such agreements will arise, in which a list of vaguely formulated declarations will appear , which the parties will not be able to understand, much less fulfill... And then, as usually happens with hits, this format will become annoying and worn out like an old record, inapplicable in practice. Or, even worse, someone, tired of the devaluation of the concept, will say that no one needs any social contract, they say, there is a Constitution. And the format itself will be first discarded and then, in my opinion, undeservedly forgotten.

Concluding this topic of the “social contract” format, the following should be noted.

Firstly, as a format, the social contract appeared in the form of the position: “Signing a social contract with preliminary discussion” in the topic: “Formation and implementation of social and legal policy regarding childhood in the Russian Federation.” This format, as well as the text of the draft agreement, was prepared by the NAS Foundation. The agreement was not signed. However, in my opinion, there is no need to be overly upset about this, since a very important discussion of this document took place between both of its signatories in the future (Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Government for Social Issues G.N. Karelova and the Chairman of the Civil Society for the Children of Russia union ", Chairman of the Human Rights Commission under the President of the Russian Federation E.A. Pamfilova). Discussion of the text made it possible to make the discussion substantive and, I dare to hope, became an important prologue to its signing and implementation in the near future 2 .

Secondly, it is very important that in addition to the platforms where the topic of the social contract itself was considered, there were also those where the diversity of its content was essentially discussed. Thus, at the presentation of the project “Civil Society: Seven Breakthrough Technologies”, held by the Perm Civil Chamber together with the Society for the Development of Entrepreneurial Initiatives (presenters: I.V. Averkiev, S.G. Makovetskaya), the substantive elements of this very agreement were proposed, namely civil: expeditions (that is, research. - Author's note) , discussions, negotiations, cooperation, expertise, legislative initiatives, control . Actually, this is, at first glance, an exhaustive list of actions that together constitute the Social Contract.

Thirdly, we should not forget the fact that without a meaningful and textually drawn up social contract, it is pointless to expect any initiative from the authorities. Therefore, textual documentation is required, allowing one to count on the possibility of subsequent addressing this document to any of its signatories.

The second significant point that attracted the attention of the author of this article and, unfortunately, again left a not very positive impression, was the evening, as it were, final voting on the work of round tables and other formats of the Forum. I immediately realized that this method was not for me. I understand that voting can be captivating, and this actually happened and is still happening: the external attractiveness of “ voting democracy ” is very great. But this is where such democracy differs from “ participatory democracy ,” which is that it creates only a “glimmering” (i.e., flashing with the frequency of elections) illusion of citizens’ own involvement in what is happening in the country. However, if we perceive the Forum not as a field for a near-political struggle of different opinions, victory in which is determined through a public expression of will, reminiscent of the first Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, but as a place for searching, and through the same discussions, but mutually agreed upon decisions, then voting should not be allowed in any case what situations? A voting that takes place over the course of a whole day, the results of which are calculated “Bolshevik-style,” by eye, and without the voters being familiar with the full range of opinions expressed during past actions, unfortunately, can directly negate the positive content of the entire event.

The next impression is the upcoming elections. There was a very clear feeling that although a separate platform called “Participation of non-political organizations in the election campaign: mechanisms for promoting interests, responsibility” was devoted to this topic, politics was not the only place where they talked about politics. For example, at the previously mentioned event entitled “Russian society as the author of its development strategy,” the topic of formulating a strategy for its subsequent implementation by the current President of the Russian Federation was actively discussed. In this case, only one figure was assumed. This purposeful lack of alternative scares me personally, since there is no more fruitless undertaking than building (or rather, adjusting) a strategy for an existing political leader. It is also a pity that this event considered mainly strategies focused on already developed foreign models, on digital economic indicators (for example, such as doubling GDP), and secondly, on the pursuit of a dubious leader, in which the catcher, like Achilles, in Zeno's problem, as is known, he will never catch up with the turtle.

In the first case, when we try to achieve certain economic indicators, we become hostage to the numbers, fascinated by them, and not by the processes taking place in the country. At the same time, it is well known that figures in the conditions of poorly developed sociology and poor in terms of information indicators and therefore weakly reflective statistics can easily be brought into line with our aspirations - without connection with reality.

I have no doubt that if we take into account all the hidden resources that are currently not taken into account by Russian statistics (say, the same volunteer resource of the NGO community or shadow resources of business), then GDP will increase almost instantly and very noticeably.

And also, colleagues, answer the rhetorical question: who needs a doubling of the gross domestic product (GDP) of Russia over the next ten years if, for example, in the eleventh year Russia as a state collapses? I don't need it. For me, there would have been no increase in GDP at all during these years, if we had then developed steadily for many hundreds of years. And talking about reforming the public administration system and doubling GDP is the same as carrying out acceleration and restructuring at the same time . We already tried this once...

Trying to catch up with someone only generates tactics of constantly falling behind. And today we find ourselves not where we would like, but at the beginning of the 20th century, at a point close to the Great Depression. However, there, in the USA, they found their own Roosevelt. But in another part of the Earth, for the same and equally difficult period of history, they found their own Hitler...

By the way, about horror stories. (This is what I don’t like, but it turns out that this topic arose objectively, as they say, regardless of my consciousness.) During the Forum, a topic suddenly emerged that I didn’t even pay attention to at first, and in vain - the discussions there among the participants Forum sociological surveys. I came across two questionnaires: one on ratings of various Russian political figures, the second was a “sort of” survey questionnaire, with a wide range of questions of both an ideological and functional-substantive nature. True, I did not answer them and now I am ready to explain why.

To be continued

Notes:

1 The article “Life between Forums,” partly devoted to preparations for the upcoming Forum 2003, is posted on the website of the NAS Foundation .

2 A socio-technological description of this format, which makes it possible to fairly correctly judge its qualities and promising capabilities, is given in the article “Description of a social contract as a social technology (using the example of a draft agreement on the formation and implementation of social and legal policy regarding childhood in the Russian Federation)” on the NAS Foundation website here or here .