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GLEB PAVLOVSKY ON PUTIN’S WORLD OUTLOOK
Interview by Tom Parfitt
Q: What are the roots of Putin’s ideological worldview?
A: By the beginning of the 1990s Putin had developed almost all the
ideas he espouses today. He’d only just started working in St
Petersburg, but if we look at documentary recordings of the time, we see
that he already had a whole series of attitudes concerning, for example,
the idea that Russia’s system of administration should be a unitarian,
centralized state, and also his condoning the chinovniki [bureaucrats]
taking bribes. That surprised many people, but it’s undeniable that he
took a positive view of this. He even shared—and repeated—the scandalous
thesis of the then mayor of Moscow, Gavril Popov, that bureaucrats had
the right to a commission on contracts.
There was also, of course, his fine contempt for the democrats of those
years, who had received power for free, without a struggle, as if they
had just found it in the street. So most of the ideas were already
present in this period, including signs of Putin’s opportunism—his sense
that there’s no need to go against the grain, that in fact you need to
go with it. Why fight a trend and use up your resources? You have to
take the resources of the trend and achieve what you want with them.
That instinct was with Putin from the beginning. He had also taken from
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic
Party of Russia, the idea that Russia should be divided up into
general-gubernatorstva—with a general-governor in charge of every
region. Yeltsin also dreamed about such an arrangement, but wasn’t able
to achieve it. It’s a very popular idea in Russia.
Q: In what sense were these ideas shaped by the collapse of the Soviet
Union?
A: Putin belongs to a very extensive, but politically opaque,
unrepresented, unseen layer of people, who after the end of the 1980s
were looking for revanche in the context of the fall of the Soviet
Union. I was also one of them. My friends and I were people who couldn’t
accept what had happened: who said we can’t let it continue to happen.
There were hundreds, thousands of people like that in the elite, who
were not communists—I, for example, was never a member of the Communist
Party. They were people who just didn’t like how things had been done in
1991. This group consisted of very disparate people, with very different
ideas of freedom. Putin was one of those who were passively waiting for
the moment for revanche up till the end of the 90s. By revanche, I mean
the resurrection of the great state in which we had lived, and to which
we had become accustomed. We didn’t want another totalitarian state, of
course, but we did want one that could be respected. The state of the
1990s was impossible to respect. You could think well of Yeltsin, feel
sorry for him. But for me, it was important to see Yeltsin in a
different light: on the one hand, it was necessary to protect him from
punishment; on the other, Yeltsin was important as the last hope for the
state, because it was clear that if the governors came to power they
would agree another Belovezhsky Accord, after which Russia would no
longer exist.
Putin is a Soviet person who did not draw lessons from the collapse of
Russia. That is to say, he did learn lessons, but very pragmatic ones.
He understood the coming of capitalism in a Soviet way. We were all
taught that capitalism is a kingdom of demagogues, behind whom stands
big money, and behind that, a military machine which aspires to control
the whole world. It’s a very clear, simple picture which I think Putin
had in his head—not as an official ideology, but as a form of common
sense. His thinking was that in the Soviet Union, we were idiots; we had
tried to build a fair society when we should have been making money. If
we had made more money than the western capitalists, we could have just
bought them up, or we could have created a weapon which they didn’t
have. That’s all there is to it. It was a game and we lost, because we
didn’t do several simple things: we didn’t create our own class of
capitalists, we didn’t give the capitalist predators on our side a
chance to develop and devour the capitalist predators on theirs.
full: http://newleftreview.org/II/88/gleb-pavlovsky-putin-s-world-outlook
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