Politicians of the 90s - time to go out

It doesn’t matter at all whether the 2008 Committee will dissolve or not. It doesn’t matter anymore: they will merge into one political party “Yabloko” and SPS or they will live in their own apartments. The very minute Boris Nemtsov announced that he had accepted the post of adviser to the President of Ukraine (albeit on a voluntary basis), it became obvious: the politicians of Yeltsin’s call can be written off as scrap. More precisely, they have written themselves off, and their virtual presence as talking heads called “Russian liberals” only interferes with those who should come and will come.

Boris Nemtsov could not help but understand that by accepting the post of adviser to the head of a close, but still foreign state, he was eliminating himself from Russian public policy. In any country, under any regime, a politician’s decision to accept a political post in another country (and the position of adviser to a popularly elected president is a clearly political position) is nothing more than a declaration of disloyalty to his voter. There are no dual loyalties in politics.

I am writing this in no way to condemn Nemtsov: the meaning of any person’s life is to find happiness, and if this choice makes Boris Efimovich happier (and, in fact, why else would he take this risky step from all points of view?), then this choice is correct and acquitted.

Why Nemtsov agreed to Viktor Yushchenko’s proposal would not be worth discussing if he were a private person, an ordinary citizen of the Russian Federation. After all, we didn’t ask ourselves this question when businessman Kakha Bendukidze joined the government of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. Well, it was a shame, of course: there are two and a half people in the country with Bendukidze’s intelligence. Why did Kakha become Minister of Economy, and then Deputy Prime Minister of the government of a country in which the Kremlin’s thick-headed hawks see almost Russia’s second enemy after the United States? Why? Yes, I wanted to - and that’s the whole answer.

Boris Nemtsov, unlike Bendukdze, is not a private person, although he formally holds neither a party nor a government post in the Fatherland, but chairs the board of directors of Neftyanoy Bank. However, Nemtsov represents a whole generation of Russian politicians who entered the public sphere at the beginning of the era of “sturm and stress”, came on the wave of the romance of perestroika and were driven not so much by pragmatic as by completely ideological considerations. They represented the antithesis of the Soviet nomenklatura, the Soviet bureaucratic class, which replaced the political class, and for this reason they were primarily valuable. And Nemtsov, and Chubais, and Khakamada were classic “self-made people”, that is, people who made themselves, which in the previous Soviet (and current Putin) closed hierarchy, by definition, could not be - and for this reason they only received the right and became leaders.

The decline of the era of politicians of this generation came with the retirement of Boris Yeltsin. It came not because the president changed, but because they signed up for the “Russian Pinochet” project - they supported Putin, who mentally, and in his convictions, and in his human and professional experience, represented everything from which they started, that they sought to destroy when they themselves entered politics in the early nineties. Such conformism, no matter how you justify it, no matter how pragmatic cushions you put on it, is inevitably destructive - destructive both for the personality itself and for the image of the politician, which took shape in the minds of voters over a year or two. By publicly supporting and contributing to the destruction of NTV, by agreeing to the birth of a political monster called “managed democracy,” liberal politicians have given up on themselves. No matter how much the voter rejoices at trampling on the body of the oligarchs, he, the voter, does not like those who compromise principles. What is the point of voting for such democrats when it is more rational to vote for those who represent power and strength? In 2003 they didn’t vote.

Nemtsov’s departure from public politics is the logical conclusion of this process. Firstly, opposition politics does not bring money, and to exchange the mantle of a prince for the windings of a beggar requires very serious convictions. I once asked one of Nemtsov’s colleagues, who has been working for a large private company for a long time, why he does not return to politics, although it is obvious that working in business rather bothers him. He answered honestly and very correctly: “You can’t live on Rublyovka and call others to the barricades.” It is forbidden. Secondly, the liberals of the nineties became disillusioned with the people for whom they dreamed of building a democratic paradise. The people turned out to be somehow different, they wanted to move them to the Moon, if the people cannot go to the Moon, then they themselves should go into business or to Ukraine...

In short, the era of Yeltsin’s conscription politicians is over – this, as they say, is a fact. It is important that others, like Boris Nemtsov, understand this. They need to leave the public sphere. Their role is in the political behind the scenes. A role devoid of flowers, splashes of champagne and fanfare, but an extremely important role - if, of course, they still care about the future of the country.

However, there is also a pragmatic reason – one’s own survival. Intellectual, spiritual - including.