It is necessary to revive public space - there is almost none left in the country: Boris Grozovsky about the collection “Russia 2020: Development Scenarios”, published by the Carnegie Center

Russia 2020: development scenarios. Edited by Maria Lipman and Nikolai Petrov. Carnegie Moscow Center, Rosspen, 2012

Trying to think through future scenarios is very difficult. I realized this when I participated in the work on Strategy 2020. The other day, the result of a parallel project of almost the same name was published - thematic scenarios for a decade, prepared by experts gathered by the Carnegie Endowment. The six-hundred-page “Scenarios” may seem like an eclectic product: there is no single matrix given to the scriptwriters who thought through the present and future of the army, regional politics, economics, etc., in the collection. A good half of the works published in the collection are not scripts, but rather essayistic analyzes of what is happening and reflections on how the situation can and should unfold further.

It may even seem that each author (and the Carnegie Moscow Center has assembled a real dream team, including Nikolai Petrov, Maria Lipman, Alexey Malashenko, Natalya Zubarevich, Kirill Rogov, Fyodor Lukyanov and many others) developed his favorite themes. The result was a series of heterogeneous essays of varying quality.

But it is not so. Firstly, most authors are united by a similar perception of reality and common values. This is a lot. Secondly, in “Scenarios”, in the absence of a single matrix, more is revealed - several cross-cutting ideas that permeate the entire fabric of the book. They were not given to the writers as a given (“write what will happen if X happens, and what if Y”). And, it seems, they even appeared against the will of the authors. Simply due to the fact that honest reflection about the “fate of the Motherland” inevitably leads to certain constructions.

It seems to me that the most important of them is this: “In Russia there is not too little, but too much privatization.” This is not about whether it is possible to allow the right state-owned fuel and energy companies to buy up seaports and energy companies. And not about how many percent of Rosneft to sell in what year. The point is different: everything is so privatized (that is, it serves private or narrow group interests) that there is almost no common, public space in the country. It is captured by the state and private entities.

Most Moscow car owners, notes NES professor Sam Green with the insight of the “new Olearius ,” “privatize” Moscow courtyards and sidewalks by installing their cars there. Don't you agree? What kind of privatization, just nowhere to park the car? But on the windshield of the jeep, which often blocks the exit to the roadway for the residents of the 80 apartments of the building in which I live, there is a sticker stuck: “My car is bothering you, and do you want to talk about it?” Below is the owner’s mobile phone, and the sticker is decorated with the inscription “Federal Tax Service” and its emblem. Isn't this the privatization of public space?

“Public nature reserves are being turned into private hunting grounds for anyone with a helicopter,” Green continues with the naivety of a foreign traveler, “and the country’s forests are littered with the trash of countless picnics, as if the forest itself were a disposable item.” The result of this creeping privatization is a psychotic society, a hidden, suppressed aggression of all against all. Those who are forced to obey the law are unhappy with those who can live by special rules (they have helicopters, flashing lights, they can use a champagne bottle as a means of inquiry).

But aggression is destructive. People who are dissatisfied with the takeover of public space by private individuals, groups and the state demand that others obey the rules, but leave themselves the opportunity to break them if necessary. “These are ***s,” the passengers of the train explain to the driver the reason for using the stop valve (two men of Asian appearance hesitated and forced the driver to open the doors, not wanting to miss their stop). The tone leaves no doubt: dissatisfied passengers, if they found themselves in a similar situation, would do the same. People protest against inappropriate behavior in public space, but are not ready to behave differently.

“Politics grows out of society,” writes Green, but there is no society as such: there are crystallized, atomized subjects and groups protecting their individual achievements, whoever can: with security at the entrance, an armored car, a high fence, preventing competitors from entering the feeding trough, family ties in a regional administration or a federal state company. Politics in such public moods inevitably results in the alienation of government and society.

In such an environment, it is difficult to form common values and “expand the scope of trust.” But only with this can adequate reform begin, because whatever society is, so is politics. If changes in the country begin when society is not yet ready for them, and take place in the current atmosphere of political alienation (“everyone for himself”), they will not turn out to be either productive or democratic, Green is sure. If we manage to form a broad coalition for change, then it will not be a problem to discuss the design and carry out any reform - judicial, law enforcement, military, pension, social security, education, customs...

Until such a coalition is formed, periodically emerging calls to reform all this will be constantly extinguished by the interests of self-preservation of power groups, the opportunism of the elite and the general apathy of the population, notes Lev Gudkov. It doesn’t even matter who initiates the changes—the mature bureaucracy or society—still nothing will happen without trust.

Take, for example, the state itself. There is a lot of it, but it is weak, Nikolai Petrov proves: the illusion of omnipotence is created by the desire of a hypertrophied state to be present everywhere. The omnipresent state is confident that without it we will not figure out how much to save for a future pension, what films to watch, when to buy alcohol, how much to pay the authors of music downloaded on the Internet. But in reality, the state that is interfering with everything is broken by managerial paralysis: it wants to control everything, but blocks changes and can only “stand still, relying on raw material revenues.”

The political elite deliberately ruined all political institutions (elections, parliament...). But they make it possible to eliminate challenges to the dominant position of leaders. This system will be maintained until the costs of equilibrium exceed the benefits received by the elite, adds Vladimir Gelman, describing the institutional trap in which the country finds itself. The bad balance turned out to be self-sustaining. Even if tomorrow any group in the country’s leadership wants to carry out reforms that would increase the efficiency of governing the country and dismantle institutions that are incompatible with democracy and the rule of law, it will run the risk of worsening the situation of other ruling groups. Therefore, elite awareness of the need for change does not lead to action.

The publishing cycle is slow. The works collected in the book were discussed and prepared in the fall of 2010 - summer of 2011 ( the English version was published last November). But it did the book good. Publishing scripts for 10 years not immediately, but a year or two after creation, is a good move. It’s immediately obvious how correctly the “scriptwriters” saw the trend and assessed its dynamics.

In that old, cozy world in which the “Scenarios” were prepared, the freedom-loving Kudrin was still guarding Russian finances, the creative intelligentsia had not yet been imbued with revolutionary sentiments, and there had not yet begun to spark a spark between the state and civil society. But Nikolai Petrov could already see that the situation was worse than in the Brezhnev stagnation that Dmitry Peskov liked. Then the party vertical controlled the KGB vertical and vice versa. We have built a single kingdom of bureaucracy with a KGB backbone - the power vertical, unlike the party one, has more than restored the power capabilities lost in the 1990s. A structure with one support is unstable. Fearing loss of balance, the bureaucracy blocks any attempt at civilian control.

Paternalism is the reverse side of such a system, because, as Lev Gudkov emphasizes, power can maintain its dominant position only “by systematically suppressing citizens’ self-esteem, by sterilizing motivation and orientations to success, inclining people to the idea of “being simpler,” “being like everyone else.” " The result is that society lacks criteria for encouraging innovative behavior.

As a result, a state machine emerges that is inadequate neither to the object of control nor to the complexity of the tasks facing the country, Petrov notes. Certain parts of the state have been privatized (too much privatization!) by security and production corporations. The state becomes a corporation for the extraction and redistribution of natural rent. Having forcibly narrowed the range of non-state opportunities for the accumulation of private capital, Putin was forced to give the subordinates - the sovereign bureaucracy - the green light to feed from their positions, add Immanuel Wallerstein and Georgy Derlugyan in an interesting chapter on the history of the Russian nomenklatura.

The Carnegie Foundation's scriptwriters are hesitant to give a clear image of 2020. And it is right. Only isolated patterns are visible. For example, this: “The longer the retention of power remains the main goal of the Russian leadership, and its actions are situational and reactive, the more likely it is that development will occur through a crisis” (Petrov and Lipman). But sooner or later we will have to restore trust and win back public space from the state and the “masters of life.” Only then will politics begin that you won’t want to run away from.

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