Translated material
Lake Tilly
These notes belong to the pen of one of those who are called "guardians", and are the subject of theoretical introspection. How to think, considering the value of the state, and the state that has developed in the end of the last twenty years? They were provoked by the publication in the last issue of the "expert" of the Inopa report on democracy and impressions from the last few events. I wrote them, present at a public discussion at the Polytechnic Museum - the famous audience of the amphitheater, where Bella Akhmadulina and Andrei Voznesensky read civilian lyrics with burning eyes and ladies in orthopedic shoes. Now here, in the Polytechnic, Sergey Shnurov performed - cord. The audience consisted of fans of the ruble and Leningrad groups. There was also a couple of brothers-stacks, looking like Kushchevsky Drains, and many people prone to sloppy-visible speech in scarves and a caste, called "hipsters" or "disagreed". They signed the notes-questions: "Girl in a green scarf." Shnurov style - laconic answers to the question posed - seemed evasive to them. They did not understand what they were talking with a person, scrupulously accurate in expressions. But when the young man’s question, the cry of a radical soul, "tell us how to be with Putin?!" The cord thoughtfully said: “Kill Putin in yourself,” the scandal indicated. The organizers, and among them, the apparatchik EP, whom the devil put on the stage to such seditious skeletons, were upset. But the audience came into ecstasy.
Meanwhile, the cord here quotes. His answer is the paraphrase of the famous saying of Zen Buddhist Lin Tsi: "You will meet the Buddha - kill him!" This Koan of Freedom in Russian means: do not let your phantoms make yourself! The singer urged the radical to free himself, to get out of the yoke of hatred. Koan is good for the Russian liberal opposition. She spent ten years in obsession with Putin, and now Nemtsov and Kasyanov,
Limonov and Kasparov people of the same topic - Putin! Putin! Putin! A rare guardian thought so much about the premiere, so stubbornly re -reading his old pager as they.
Nevertheless, the picture in the hall seemed to me politically terribly ambiguous. A meeting in the center of Moscow, freely discussing topics that are unpleasant for the authorities, is a sign of sustainable democracy. But the power of democratic Russia would not have found anyone in the hall who would have stood up for it publicly. But she, this low -sympathetic power, provided the framework conditions of this action. Sprout the thesis. If the heated audience directly here was formed by the "Committee on the leadership of Russia" (often a dream in this environment, and from the Polytechnic to the Kremlin - two steps along Ilyinka), further free discussions would quickly come to naught.
Comedy or catastrophe?
Reading the impressions of US diplomats from meetings with the Moscow "Non -West Adjustment", which was released by Assange, it is impossible to get rid of Dejavu. Washington officials describe those who disagree with true Kremlin squeamishness and in almost the same expressions - "slander ... sinking ... scatter ...". The main conclusion is the complete inadequacy of the liberals, their political paranormality. Faced with this UFO, you will not find out what is understood by the opposition.
The degradation of the liberal opposition is the drama of our model of democracy. The comicism of politicians, twenty years ago, on a career with the successful brothers of the post -communist countries of Europe, is not ridiculous. He calls into question the future of the Russian political system. Indeed, in a democratic model, the opposition is those who once replace old shots in power. The inability to bear responsibility for affairs accustomed the opposition to the comfort of irresponsibility. Their ranks are full of eccentrics who frightened the American ambassador by Bayerley with “terrifying cries into the microphone”. Looking at the strange community, the Kremlin could not help but wonder: "How, these are these will rule Russia? The more you know about Moscow liberals, the less ready to give them a move to power.
Over the years, state impotence of liberals has turned into a rule convenient for bureaucracy. This is comfortable for the apparatus. But there they cannot but be aware of the danger of a political vacuum on the right flank. Vacuum experiencing the onslaught of ultra -rationalists. The latter no longer hide plans to use rebranding into the camouflage "National Democracy" to penetrate the power. Casting has already begun and is going on for the role of Russian Le Pen.
In search of a counterweight, the authorities have repeatedly attempted to initiate the formation of a "sane" right -capacity party. All of them endure failure, which is not surprising. Playing with themselves on both sides of the boards, even a system of power sophisticated in virtual chess, will not be able to play with white figures as excellent as black as black.
Power, but not the state
Putin was considered a great achievement of Putin ten years ago - and it really was that he began the struggle for the deprivation of the violence of the 1990s, for the restoration of the state monopoly on violence. Because if the state does not have a monopoly on violence, there is no state. To a large extent, this struggle was successful. There was a vertical of power, which - by virtue of its general -stage format, territorially coinciding with the borders of Russia - began to be identified with the state. But is it so?
Tilly has a well -known formula for democracy - this is "wide, equal interconnected and secure consultations about political appointments and the development of a political course." Of course, this includes all types of parliamentary formation and all procedures of parliamentary and non -parliamentary consultations, debates, in the broad sense of the activity of the political class of democratic societies. Tilly paid special attention to the fact that this zone is not total, but local inside each state. It ensures the existence of a democratic state, but it itself does not create it.
The state does not grow out of these interconnected consultations, like grass, while it is not there. There is no state, but there are parties to conflicts - and each has some kind of power. So, there are all conditions for the emergence of Lake Tilly, only the lake does not arise. The problem is that we have almost all the elements described by Tilly. We have these networks. We all participate in them, agreeing on our interests. In Russia, there is no question at all that could not have been agreed on - that’s perhaps the shortest formula for our difficulties with democracy.
There is power, there is its vertical - but the state does not work. Regular state does not arise.
Today, power is provoked in order to prevent it from evading private conflicts. And she climbs into them, and getting into conflicts, the power is corrupt and repeatedly “reproduces” the mutual violence of the parties, reproducing its own monopoly on violence.
Russified Tilly
Inside the public networks themselves - the bases of our democracy - the wars of the new generation begin. Not with the hiring of machine gunners and not with a buying, as in the 1990s, judges and investigators, but with the involvement of the "state as a whole" - in fact, the very vertical.
On the other hand, the state monopoly on violence turns into an exchange with the prospect of a participant to win or lose. State power turns into a broker of itself. It will resell the same resource of protection and legitimacy several times - to different participants in the conflict, sequentially collecting rent from them. The principle is "We are not people? You can agree on everything!"
The side of the conflict that cannot withstand this is forced to swim from the conflict. And she was forced to pay for the fact that her opponent was the first to dress in the armor of power (since she had not paid before that to prevent him from doing this). The party to the conflict deprived of state support pays for the termination of the conflict, or is forced to surrender to her enemy and pay again. The capitulating cannot count on mercy. He has to swim from those agents of state power that are opposed to him by the enemy. Which additionally corrupts the relevant authority. The state monopoly on violence is reproduced, and in a dangerous form.
What does this lead to the democratic model of "Russified Tilly"? The selection of conflicts on legal quality disappears the first. On our "exchange", the authorities are abducted directly from the operating room. This leads to such obvious things as barbarization and degradation of the style itself, the atmosphere of the conflict, when the “struggle of social groups for their interests” infects the entire atmosphere of a democratic agenda. A strong state, in an indisputable form, retaining a monopoly on violence - and indisputability means proved and recognized by all its legality - some types of conflicts generally prohibit, for example, raiding.
We have raiders into a shuttle procedure that reveals the nature of the game. The authorities are waiting for the act of raiding to take place. Only after this (not earlier!) Encomes in the conflict and is drawn into it on the side of the corrupt participant. And then, standing on the "state point of view", decides that raiding is bad and the conflict should be crushed. Having removed the rent from one participant, it forces the conflict to extinguish, or even gets to the side of the enemy - having removed an additional fee from him. Finally, the triumph of law comes. In the intervention of the federal center or some state-minded industry, the case is subjected to legal analysis. And then the participants in the conflict, who have already paid all the costs of "agreement", are paid once again, because now the "dictatorship of the law" is turned against them.
Society of Agreements
What's happening? The power is drawn into public networks, searns and itself creates stagnant unlawful “tops” - “pockets” of corruption and violence, in which it is ultimately not interested in. Ultimately, power on the side of the law and order. But while this end account has not been summed up, the entire event row consists of these shuttle zigzags and creating these "pockets". The number of "pockets" exceeds the ability to monitor them and even more so to manual control. No participant in the conflict at any stage can find any disinterested person - without a separate, extremely difficult and expensive search for him. That is, the search for a person who is not interested in the conflict overloads the networks, like the calculations of the Soviet state plan, how much cucumber cream is necessary for the BAM construction zone.
Then manual control itself ceases to be manual - it is enslaved by a stream of reactions to these facts. And public networks completely change their nature. They become as public as semi -state, leading the assets of power to a non -public shadow.
The country continuously pays for expensive conflicts, simultaneously incurring costs for the rent that its functionaries - agents of regional and federal authorities withdraw from each transactions. Here is a handling crisis and a cost crisis. But most importantly, there is a strategic crisis, a crisis of the ability to develop a strategy and agenda. Because there are too many challenges.
Oddly enough, in this repeated, "post -Putin" reproduction of violence and state power inside public networks, the number of those who can dictate, create challenges sharply increases. And there is an interest in creating challenges. Now the vertical of power easily and predictably is drawn into conflicts - and the conflict participants have worked out the technology of creating challenges that lead to risk to them personally. The Khimkinsky Forest is invaluable - for analysis from this angle.
The described process, if the state forms, is not at all the same as that of Tilly. This state cannot be called weak as Russia was in the 1990s, where you could not find it when it was needed. But this state cannot be called strong, because it lends itself to manipulation at all levels, up to the highest. Here everyone agrees on everything - oh, this is not a gobbso war of everyone against all! Everyone is included in the game, everyone is interested in the system - and everyone is not completely loyal, being provocateurs of calls and conflicts by which they intend to get certain bonuses. Sometimes such a bonus, and losing, becomes life - as in the Magnitsky case.
Democracy by default
The Russian system (not only the system of government) developed as a result of a twenty -year struggle, only in the far outbreak of the struggle "for democracy." An autopsy showed: democracy without a state. The history of these twenty years is a cruel state improvisation full of political innovations. But the innovator’s dilemma is also known - the inability to tear himself away from what once brought success.
We love a story about the innovative garage of Wozniak, where two California nihilist gathered the first “Apple Makintosh” - the Embrion of the Global Business of Steve Jobs. This story is closer to us than it seems. Russian statehood is also collected in the Soviet hangar from unusual or stolen details. All innovators are thieves and nihilistic to the respectable of regular business. (Is it not because of our power is condescending to lighting?) The power will not get off from the mania to solve the problems of the future with improvised means. She also loves to prove - to us, the people, to the whole world - great Russia: also a sign of an innovator! It is they who adore presentations for investors, when investors do not go. Presentation syndrome is also characteristic of Russian power.
All this is not a mental procedure in the style of Lin Zi and not the political philosophy of Tilly. This is the subject of the struggle for a particular definition of the state in crises and in everyday life. The limits do not have eternal properties, they are not engraved on the diamond. Everything can be changed, everyone can be moved. The new Russian society is durable, but loyalty looks more exotic to it. The system has grown a living organism, a powerful social base with which it does not communicate and does not talk. Meanwhile, many cracks have split the once single "loyalism" of the zero decade. Some heavyweights-guardians have gone to security enterprises, others are unhappy with the methods used by the system (by the way, who is used? This is unclear, since the anonymity of solutions surpasses everything conceivable).
All this is heavy, then cruel, then in general normal - no one knows this exactly! - The social game goes in the dark. The political class is included in politics is not publicly, and allegedly allegedly not preoccupied with it, indulging in its own games and entertainment. But how difficult it is for the authorities to rely on the society that she also formed, which is akin to her and exists within her borders! Power is separated from what should be its support. She floats over her social base, busy with something far, implicit.
The authorities supply his instruments for him (the privatization of power has become indistinguishable from the vertical of power, and then it is indignant, watching how these tools use: corruption! Frushes with crime! Although the loyalty of the Russian society and its emphasis is much higher than it can be recognized. But the authorities cannot use this loyalty. It is disabled from its own social base, drawn into the “Retus of Reason”. equally divorced from society by an active, neurotic layer.
Today, the task is the manifestation of the democratic approximation of the system, the "publication" of the archive of its skills, principles and models. The guard must know the limits of what he protects. Institutes should know the interests on which they rely and who seek to corrupt them, and sometimes break them. The opposition is time to admit the fact that it acts inside the same institutions.
The discussion of these things, so unpopular, has become necessary today. Medvedev, in the New Year's congratulation, calling Russia the "young country", of course, meant the novelty of the democratic state. Twenty years of the existence of the Russian Federation have the right to become public political experience. Equal to a young official and young radical.
Lake Tilly
Tilly's metaphor is elegant: "Democracy is a lake." The point is that, looking at the lake, the specialist will easily explain the rules according to which it appeared, no mysticism. But how to attribute these rules to the neighboring valley, where, under the same exactly conditions, there is no lake? And there is a swamp, muck, a quagmire, like a rotten swamps where the dog Baskerville howls.
The lake is an event, a whim of circumstances, their game. The event may not come true, the game is easy to lose. A legal society is a meeting of accidents. In the story of Ray Bradbury met a man and a Martian. They hurry on business with one road, but each refuses to see the obvious to another. From their conversation you will not understand who is real, and who is the illusion or nonsense of another. Earthlings - an astronaut in the dead sands of Mars - or a Martian on the way home, to the cheerful villages by the lake? By the way, then Martian Lake Bradbury is not Lake Tilly? Real Russian democracy or is it a mirage, worse, propaganda in the desert? Neither political scientists nor propagandists will give the answer.
It will become clear as a result of the struggle for this state. And the democratic state, in fact, will develop as a result of the same struggle.
Published in the journal "Expert"