February 07, 2018, 00:02 / Opinions

Perversions of the return of the oligarchs

Political scientist Andrei Kolesnikov about the bad historical experience of repatriation

Andrey Kolesnikov , program director of the Carnegie Moscow Center It is impossible to persuade a pragmatic business: everyone knows that the Russian government is not really a vertical, but a distributed blockchain

“Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, I received a postcard from the writer Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, from unoccupied France. He writes that his situation is terrible, he is starving and asks for help... Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, I am writing to you with an important question that worries many Soviet writers - could I answer Bunin’s postcard, giving him hope that what is possible his return to his homeland?

This is from a letter from Alexei Tolstoy, who himself returned to his homeland in 1923 and became a successful “red count,” to Stalin dated June 17, 1941. And after the war, Konstantin Simonov went to agitate defectors for Soviet power - he met with Ivan Bunin, there were rumors that the task was also set for the chess player Alexander Alekhine. There is a beautiful legend: Valentina Serova, as soon as Simonov went somewhere, whispered to Bunin: “Don’t agree under any circumstances.”

Nowadays, in order to promote emigrants - whether businessmen or artists - you don’t need the charm of the addressee of the poem “Wait for me...”. Moreover, most likely, the episode is fictitious. In the role of Serova, the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov speaks with the final directness: it is, of course, possible to return, even the president will be given a list of Bunins from business who want to return, but it is not the head of state who decides, but the law enforcement agencies.

And this is the honest truth. After all, even if the president publicly announces the possibility of returning, no one guarantees that, as Peskov put it, “questions for these citizens” will not arise. And then the head of state will throw up his hands - the investigation and the court are independent, the claims are not of a political, but of a financial and criminal nature.

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In this sense, Boris Titov in the role of Konstantin Simonov or Alexei Tolstoy is a somewhat comical, or rather, tragicomic figure. It is impossible to persuade a pragmatic business: everyone knows that the Russian government is not really a vertical, but a distributed blockchain. All structures are “independent”; the president’s words are ignored or they wait until he presses enter a second time. And if he doesn’t click, you can act “in accordance with the law.”

It is possible, of course, that Titov’s basic goal was to prepare a social base for the foreign Russian audience to vote for him - inside Russia, the electorate of the “Growth Party” can only be found with the help of statistical error. Actually, this week Ksenia Sobchak went to the United States; on Thursday she has a widely announced meeting at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University (formerly the Russian Institute). Putin probably has enough domestic Russian votes, although among our compatriots abroad there are no fewer Putinverstehers, “Putin understanders,” than in the immediate vicinity of their native aspens and willow bushes over the river.

In principle, the symbolic result of working with foreign Russian audiences was the information that Roman Abramovich applied for a residence permit in Switzerland, and then withdrew it. The air of freedom, unlike Professor Pleischner, did not turn Abramovich’s head - some new reasons appeared. Well, the richest still have some room for maneuver compared to the mini-oligarchs. In the spirit of Anna Adamovna from “Pokrovsky Gates”: “I’m all so angular, all so contradictory.” And for others, returning to their homeland under the guarantees of a business ombudsman is pure Russian roulette: they spin the drum of a revolver, bring it to their temple, and then whatever fate decides. Evgeny Chichvarkin, a man free from illusions about the next round of authoritarian modernization - a revolution around its axis with an accompanying deterioration in the situation of private business, spoke out most harshly on this topic: they say, as long as Putin is in power, I will return to my homeland only in a coffin.

And not only business: the ranks of potential defectors are increasingly replenished with new faces, and all sectors are represented. The Baltic countries and the District of Columbia are full of political emigrants, in Berlin there is no place for NGO figures with an active life position, for which, in fact, the security forces are waiting for them with “questions” at home, science has also been suppressed - in any case, Sergei Guriev risked appearing in Moscow only after he took a high position at the EBRD. And also in the field of ballet... After the Serebrennikov case, it became obvious that the “vacancy of a poet” is “dangerous, if not empty.”

“In 1937,” Tolstoy wrote to Stalin, “I met him [Bunin] in Paris. He then said that no one needs his art here, they don’t read it, his books sell in dozens of copies.” Well, at least he saved his life. The phrase about the meeting in 1937 sounded somehow symbolic... Actually, when in 1946 Simonov, having met with Bunin, returned from abroad, the story with Zoshchenko and Akhmatova began. If Bunin had any doubts, then after the decree on the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” they definitely disappeared.

The author is program director of the Carnegie Moscow Center