"Moskovsky Komsomolets": "THE RULING TANDEM AGAINST CHAOS"
Medvedev and Putin are latter-day Kutuzovs
"Everything that is real is reasonable," said Hegel. Thus, when we are confronted with miracles, it always makes sense to look for an explanation. One of this year's political miracles has been the extraordinary stability of President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin's approval ratings. All the polls, focus groups, and opinion surveys conducted in various regions by various companies and centres, both officially commissioned and not commissioned, point in the same direction. People are less well-off, they are more nervous, and they do not have much trust in individual Ministers or the Government as a whole, the governors and political parties, the regional legislatures, and the Duma and the Federation Council. Nonetheless, the President and the Prime Minister are not losing any points in the popularity ratings. The broad masses do not associate their own problems with their performance and competence. Rather, in the opinion of the vast majority, they are like Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov in Tolstoy's novel War and Peace; they will not allow anything bad to happen and will not impede anything good.
In his novel, Leo Tolstoy marveled as to why, of all people, it was Kutuzov, in spite of all his foibles, lechery, sycophancy, etc., who became the proponent of the people's spirit. He marveled and never came up with an explanation. Cracking the secret of why Messrs Medvedev and Putin are "Teflon" leaders is less of a challenge. People are scared. Perhaps not everyone understands what the real risks are, but they sense that chaos is just around the corner. They have nowhere to escape or to hide. Only such huge structures as the state offer any hope of avoiding the extremes, preventing a famine, protecting people from the cold and other horrors - in short, the hope that somehow we will weather the storm.
Not everyone is ready to phrase it quite this way, but very many people feel it. The state also consists of people. The average man on the street cannot trust the police, the local bureaucrats and mayors and deputies of federal and regional legislatures. He watches them at work everyday and knows they will not protect him. The Ministers, who go about their own business and constantly divide things up with the state banks, do not offer much hope. Luckily, they are so removed from the ordinary people as to be almost invisible. The panic over the falling rate of the rouble, production grinding to a halt, and rising unemployment affect an ever larger circle of people. These factors are impossible not to notice, in spite of television's valiant efforts. Yet it is the ministers and governors who are responsible for the mess.
Thus, people subconsciously give the benefit of the doubt only to the President and the Prime Minister, who are off-limits, just like all the basic values of statehood: the language, borders, the Kremlin, etc. These two men embody the hope that the nation will stand its ground and will clip the wings of chaos. If necessary, the state may even come to the rescue.
Of course, such a collective unconscious has no connection with reason or a reasonable view of the world. The separation of the Ministers from the Prime Minister, of the governors from the President (the governors being directly responsible for the performance of their subordinates, whom they have appointed and now control) manifests the subconscious instinct of self-preservation. There must be something for people to lean on in times of crisis. Renouncing these props would be scary and meaningless. People know they cannot stay afloat by themselves, and you cannot have any hope for the better if you don't believe anyone.
Therefore, in spite of the growing economic problems, in spite of the dubious nature of some of the Government's decisions and obscure motives of the Government's moves on many issues in deciding who is to survive and who is to be allowed to die, the popularity ratings of the tandem will remain rock solid, whatever the tandem does. As long as the state in this part of the world does something to fulfill its functions, the performance of Messrs Medvedev and Putin will not be called into question. The reason is the people's instinct of self-preservation.
Objectively, the subconscious belief that President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin are the Kutuzovs of today is a great plus for the entire system. With risks indeed very high, such trust constitutes a massive resource. It gives confidence to the managers of various levels who are not scared of "direct contact" with the populace. It gives hope to the population. That confidence is the foundation on which the state rests. Let's face it - no extensive, stable, or efficient political and social system has been created over the past years. Many bogus institutions covered up a total vacuum. Cheap money was thrown at problems while competition was quashed by administrative resource. As a result, when the day of reckoning came, the huge state machine could produce nothing except confidence in Medvedev and Putin personally. Perhaps this was part of the game from the beginning.
However, if one thinks back to 1998, the situation today looks a great deal more stable. First, thanks to the universally maligned Mr Kudrin and the windfall oil profits, the country has reserves. Although there are always those who seek to spend the reserves immediately, the money stashed away by the state defused many problems. Second, Boris Yeltsin, who really tried to build something new and whose name has thus become a codeword for endless changes, was unable to play the role of a universal comforter. Messrs Medvedev and Putin, who conversely embody a lack of change and a return to the age-old principles, are turning out to be very useful in times of crisis. The fight for stability now takes the form not of a fight for stagnation, but a fight for survival.
Thus, the collective trust in the President and the Prime Minister is something to be cherished, at least while the "danger period" continues. There is no other comparable reserve in the political sphere. On the one hand, this can be seen as the sad outcome of the preceding five years - a lot of puffing up of cheeks, demagogy, and lies, but very little accomplished. On the other hand, we should be happy with what we have.
If this is so, if the people have such trust in both leaders, the leaders should be keenly aware of their responsibility. Trading this unlimited trust for politicking aimed at staying in power forever, or for putting all the country's wealth in the hands of cronies, trusted people, etc., would be depravity pure and simple. Trading the possibility, before it is too late, of building relations with foreign politicians and together winning the race against time for a display of force by sending two bombers to Venezuela. Trade a serious conversation for starry-eyed programmes allegedly planned for decades ahead. (The "Holy 2020" adopted less than six months ago is now buried beneath a mountain of newspaper trash).
Of course, all these things could easily be justified by the current situation, by business interests and messianic tasks, and by putting all the blame on the Americans, and so on. In any case, it would mean exchanging something large and genuine for something small and false. Do our leaders have enough fortitude to face their responsibilities honestly, or are we going to be exposed to more talk about "modernization", "sovereign democracy"? This is one of the key turning points for Russia in the period of the global economic crisis. You cannot build a solid future on lies; this should be one of the lessons of the crisis.
Alexandra Budberga
