How many percent of power does the Kremlin have?

In the evenings, our authors write about what seems important to them. Today's letter is from Maxim Trudolyubov.

The insides of politics

Rene Magritte. Sensational news

Why is the budget not two -thirds, butonly 17.6% , why social networks still work and even the famous Matilda can be watched in the cinema - the questions are not so simple, given the huge potential of the authorities.

For many years, consistently and purposefully, the executive branch with the help of legislative stocks of powers and possibilities. This is a “potential power”: as in a walking myth that a person involves his brain only by 10%, the Russian state involves its prohibitive and repressive capabilities to about the same amount.

Something interferes with the classification of the entire budget, the closure of all the minimum independent organizations, the total militarization of the country and detain all opposition citizens, why do tanks stop halfway to Tbilisi? Why should the invasion of Ukraine be officially hidden? And the European University in St. Petersburg needs to be given for some reason. These decisions are unlikely to be made under the pressure of the opposition and public opinion. Public opinion in Russia is such a matter that usually approves of more or less everything. Meanwhile, some bargaining that people lead, whose faces we do not see, people hidden in the black box of Russian politics determine that the budget should not be closed by 23%and not by 44.1%, but by 17.6%. As a result of the unknown messages in the black box of the Russian policy of the opposition, Leonid Volkov, is arrested, released, and then arrested again .

A strange and unpredictable apparatus, drawing the boundaries of the system power, is inside the system itself. There is no instance or public force that could-talking from the standpoint of power-to call the Kremlin to ensure a specific share of freedom and openness. According to the formula unknown to us, he determines it himself. Or is President Putin himself sitting and calculating the share of his authoritarianism, that is, the share of his real power, which is actually unknown to us?

Our political leaders are not elected for an understandable time period, we do not have coalition governments, the popularity of the leader is not an obstacle to anything. On the contrary, it is a giant mandate in which there is nothing specific, but there is only a signature of the people - the bearer of sovereignty - the willingness to support anything: an empty check with a signature. Or maybe this signature is forged? And this greatly complicates the task of calculating the share of repressiveness: there is nothing to rely on!

The force that assumes the boundaries of the state power should be a complex mechanism. After all, it should be a computer that replaces a living and unpredictable bargaining. We can only judge the existence of such a computer indirectly. This is like in astronomy - we do not see an object, but by many signs we can be sure of its existence.

What else to read

1. The new book of the historian Timothy Snider “On Tyrania” (the books of Snyder in Russia have not yet been published, but perhaps in the foreseeable future it is this one in Russian).

2. The first part of the hard work of Stephen Kotkin about Stalin is the "paradoxes of power."

- Maxim Trustlyubov, Vedomosti newspaper observer and International New York Times, Inliberty Site