It looks as if the debate about the social contract continues. Let us recall how it began.
Russia's entry into the world economic crisis prompted some experts and public personalities to declare that the "tacit contract" between the authorities and society needs to be revised. Those who initiated the discussion proceeded on the assumption that the current contract is both social and economic in character. They claimed that Russian citizens had voluntarily traded their rights and freedoms for higher living standards. However, now that the crisis is upon us, the oil bonanza has ended and incomes are falling, the contract should be declared null and void and citizens should get their rights and freedoms back.
The authoritarian system (which, it was claimed, was created during the eight years of political development) should become more open. The initiators of the move toward a new contract were reminded that in 1999-2000 when the "tacit contract" was concluded, the effect of the high oil prices had not yet kicked in, and that therefore it would be wrong to say that freedoms had been exchanged for incomes. The features of political development over the past eight years were not discussed and the discussion faded out, but not because it was illogical in the format proposed - rather, because of political considerations. Democracy has one uncomfortable feature: it presupposes the existence of a civil society, but the very possibility of a "trade-off" disqualifies citizens and renders further talk about the need to expand democracy meaningless.
The current round of the discussion was triggered by the change of emphasis in the anti-crisis policy, when it became clear that the Government's financial potential was limited. The position of those who advocate a revision of the contract became more definite and less odious, although it is still ambiguous. This time the "non-monetary" element of the social contract is recognized (based on the results of opinion polls). However, they try to retroactively change the original premise - namely, they deny that the current social contract implied that the citizens renounced some of their rights and freedoms in exchange for a share of the oil profits. They are being disingenuous, as that was exactly how the advocates of revising the contract interpreted it and still interpret it. In daily discourse among experts (though not in well-considered and balanced articles), the social contract is interpreted as a swap of political rights for incomes.
Yet today, as before, the prospects of the contract being terminated are linked with an alleged waning desire of the Putin majority to support the Government if the Government proves unable to fulfill its social and economic obligations.
How is that possible if the "non-monetary" element of the contract appears to be recognized? This is how: no one is demanding to be given back what was never taken away from him, as the populace believes. The "populace" only demonstrates its adherence to democratic values through opinion polls. The "people" has been somewhat, but not completely, reinstated: voting in the Duma and presidential election does not count because, according to the authors, everything there is decided by Agitprop, the administrative resource, and "paternalistic handouts".
On the positive side, the current discussion is much more open. Revision of the social contract is merely a pretext for breaching the subject of changing the current political system. The system is portrayed as closed, hidebound, and obsessed with self-preservation, a depiction that enables the critics to position themselves as courageous champions of reform who challenge the reactionary system. They pull no punches in stating that in connection with the crisis the system must (in a gentler version, "will have to") be changed. True, a problem crops up. On closer inspection no intentions to put the system in "deep freeze" have been discovered. Openness to change was built into the system from the start. Moreover, change started long before power and society became aware of the world crisis, from the time of the transition of power and indeed earlier. The new President and the new power structure are the first step. The second step is amendments to the Constitution and the third step is Medvedev's package of political reforms.
This is not a fight of brave reformers against reactionaries, but attempts to jump on the bandwagon of the reform that is already underway. Where do we go from here? It looks as if it will be the same as at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s: the reform will develop into a revolution, i.e. the collapse of the whole system. The truth is that in the current political system, those who advocate a revision of the social contract have been marginalised. The main feature of the political reform that is under way is its conservatism: it spreads change over time, allowing society to get used to it and the transformed institutions to become entrenched. Another important feature is that it keeps radicals and fringe groups on the sidelines. This is what makes them angry. They cannot afford to recognize the ongoing political reform because, first, it won't bring them any benefits, and second, it deprives them of their claim to be reformers. Therefore, they declare Medvedev's package of political reforms to be a "travesty" and the preceding amendments to the Constitution are interpreted in a way that defies common sense: "They want to prolong their power and enjoy the material benefits." But what is an extra year for the President and the State Duma from the point of view of prolonging power? Is it worth the effort? When the task is indeed to prolong power, it is tackled in a different way: by introducing a third term or by declaring presidency for life, as the late leader of Turkmenistan did.
Greater openness is also manifested in a more detailed description of an alternative to what is portrayed as a closed political system. It is becoming a little clearer why the system should become more open after the social contract is revised. While the present system draws its support mainly from the social majority, the alternative system draws it from the elite. Some of the advocates even make no bones about the fact that they regard the second half of the 1990s in Russia as a model. They argue that a system that relies mainly on the elites can survive even if the approval rating of the Russian President is very low (5%), provided it is geared to the interests of influential elites. All of this makes it clear that the alternative project amounts to a restoration of the former regime of the oligarchs.
Perhaps they feel that enough time has passed - a whole 10 years - and much has been forgotten, which makes it possible to propose a restoration of the old system. (There is some logic to this: they claim that since citizens are indifferent to the political system and care about nothing but wages and benefits, you can sell them any system, including a new edition of the old model). And already a sympathetic "tanned" Barack Obama of America proposes a "reset" of our relations. An interesting time coincidence. For all the differences between "reset" and "restoration", they have one fundamental thing in common: both imply amnesia, i.e. a renunciation of previous experience - arguably the most valuable of our new assets - in the development of political institutions and in building our relations with the external world.
For the benefit of those who may not remember, let us say that Boris Yeltsin's low approval rating was proof of the exceptional weakness of the system that was propped up by the elites. Only a real threat of a Communist comeback embodied by the KPRF (aside from the prodigious personal qualities of the individuals who turned the election campaign around) helped to translate the puny 5% into victory in the second round of the 1996 election. But how the winning coalition split apart and what followed makes for some grim recollections. For those who do not remember, let us say that the system relying on elites is extremely unstable and tends to fall apart. By the late 1990s Yeltsin's polycentrism had outlived itself and had been rejected by all its participants. The jelly-like political system decayed in spite of the generally favourable external conditions: the comparatively non-aggressive West engaged in converting Eastern Europe into Central Europe; freedom, as embodied by NATO, had not yet moved so close to our borders; there were no American missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic, no anti-Russian regimes on our Western borders, and even the war in Chechnya was perceived by the West as the fight against separatism and terrorism.
For those with short memories, let it be said that the main feature of the "oligarchic model" is a weak central government. A grand contract between state and society is replaced with a multitude of small and individual contracts with those who happen to possess temporarily important resources. In the latter model everyone is constantly making agreements with everyone else only to tear them up, to the delight of those for whom life is an endless gamble. Of course, the agreements are reached within a narrow circle (of the successful ones): "sovereign" oligarchs and governors, bureaucrats "in transit" to becoming businessmen, deputies, lobbyists, and mobsters. There is no room for ordinary citizens in the network of small elite agreements; what works is money, political technologies, and the administrative resource, which, if the system relying on elites is restored, will not go away. That resource will simply be divided up into pieces and returned to where it was invented: to the governors and mayors of large cities.
The advocates of restoration do not seem to trust other people's poor memory, so along with preparing a comeback we see attempts to whitewash the model and its main protagonists. First, they mumbled something about an aristocratic republic. Now a new term has been coined, "the development elite". The expression captures an important and new social need, yet on closer inspection one finds that the content of the new word is old: it is the same active but socially irresponsible groups. Energy, self-confidence, a sense of purpose, a readiness to take risks, and orientation toward achievement are the assets of that group. An important ingredient in their success is a low level of social sensitivity and contempt for all people outside their own narrow circle. In their years of triumph some representatives of that group facetiously compared themselves with "Alpha males," dominant animals surrounded by an obedient herd.
The "Alphas" are the heroes of "narrow projects" (whatever their scale may be) and are well-suited to playing the part of a specialised elite. However, such people are eminently ill-equipped to be political leaders, since otherwise, "development" would be confined to the offices of ministries, major firms, and "gated communities" of the rich. Restoration of a system with a weak centre implies legitimisation of social irresponsibility. There too much of it in modern life as it is, but in the oligarchic model social irresponsibility is still the norm: "He who doesn't make it is late."
Unfortunately, things will not be confined to a restoration of social irresponsibility. The inevitable participants in endless talks and non-binding agreements among the oligarchs are separatists, nationalists, and terrorists, a fact that is unavoidable in a country where the ethnic majority coexists with titular small ethnic groups. All of this means that along with the demise of a relatively stable political system, the danger of residential houses being blown up together with their residents will come back. Residents living cramped and miserable existences in blocks of flats will be most at risk. The main victims of the restoration of the oligarchic model will be the social majority, whose interests will be ignored across the entire spectrum, from economics to security. Upon closer scrutiny, this is the "new-old" project. Russian voters who are said to be indifferent to democratic values rejected that project in 1999-2000 because they sensed that a political regime based on an alliance of a weak central government with strong elites leads to the disintegration of the Russian state, in the course of which the main casualty will be the majority without modern personal resources.
This period was when the foundations of the current social contract were laid. It led to a political compromise in which there was room for both the wealthy minority and the socially weak majority. Fortune would have it that the figure of then-President Vladimir Putin was at the centre of that contract. The social majority accepted the new institutions and practices of the active minority, but was in return guaranteed respectful treatment, attention to its interests, and a slowdown of change in order to make it less traumatic. The political opportunities of the elites and the active minority associated with the old parties, the media, and NGOs were limited, and the social majority did not care much about it. Unlike the elites and the minority with massive resources, the ordinary citizens did not feel that they had been deprived of anything. The social majority did not feel that it was part of the political system in the 1990s, which it refused to perceive as democratic, and with good reason.
The system's openness could benefit only the wealthy groups merged with parts of the fragmented government, and their interests alone were taken into account in decision-making. The social majority perceived the system of the 1990s as "closed", almost in the same way that some representatives of the wealthy majority perceive the current political system. This may be why in the period when the strength of the social contract (or whatever one may call it) was not open to doubt, the attitude of those who felt "excluded" toward ordinary citizens and the Russian state became extremely negative. Authors who wrote on non-political topics were particularly candid. Expert publications were replete with euphemisms: the majority was portrayed as a mass indifferent to the values of democracy, incompetent in civil matters, and relying on the paternalism of the state, ever ready to support a "strong fist" and an easy target for Agitprop manipulations.
On the other hand, perhaps the citizens, and not only the elites, are right and the openness or otherwise of a system should be judged also on the basis of its openness to signals from the social majority. If the citizens support democratic values (which is recognized) and do not feel that they have been short-changed (which is also recognized), then perhaps the system sustained through such a contract should not be described as "closed"? Perhaps the ordinary citizens, far from feeling that something has been taken away from them, believe that they have been given or are being given back something very important, something they thought was eluding them? For example, a sense of belonging to the country in which they live. To the wealthy minority, which is accustomed to solving its problems individually or at best through the actions of a narrow group, the values of the majority may seem to be something ephemeral. For the majority, the resurgent sense of oneness with their country may be an important resource that lends meaning to their lives, along with a sense of security, confidence, and strength.
The debate about the social contract is sure to continue, but some interim results can already be discerned. The basis of the current social contract is the wish of the majority to prolong the collectivism that reigned on Russian territory, the wish to remain a people with its own state. The contract rests above all on the foundation of patriotism, the recognition of the high value of sovereignty and the independence of the Russian state, although it of course also has a social and economic dimension. The main subject of the contract concluded between the Russian electorate and Vladimir Putin has no expiration date. It is a contract on the guarantees of a new Russian statehood that implies strong central power supported by the social majority.
The existing political system is not the fruit of bookish minds or office intrigues. It has been built up step-by-step on the basis of the positive and negative experiences of the 1990s. In addition to recognizing the importance of a strong central government that has the support of the majority of voters, some other elements of that experience can be identified. The political system must be consolidated at the national level. Direct involvement of market agents and regional "managers" in public politics is counter-productive: politics must become strictly party politics. The experience of the 1990s created an awareness that the West plays two roles simultaneously in its relations with Russia - that of both a partner and a rival, regardless of whether Russia's foreign policy leans toward that of Andrei Kozyrev or Yevgeny Primakov. In its relations with a powerful partner-rival, Russia must be strong and independent (sovereign). The political forces that failed to derive any lessons from the experience of the 1990s must have the right to express themselves within the framework of the law, but they should not be allowed to take part in government and have a say in the making of key decisions. They have other goals and values and should thus be treated in roughly the same way that the Communists were treated in the West in their time: they should be kept on the periphery.
A political system built on the basis of the experience of the 1990s has a growth potential and is development-oriented. The vector of the conservative political reform suggests that the existing system, which is even now not closed to the interests of the social majority and much of the minority (whatever critics may say, only elections validate opinion polls) will gradually become more open, not to the old elites (elected governors and businessmen with their own political resources) or the old parties associated with the conflicts of the 1990s, but to the new elites and the new parties that sprang up in the beginning of 2000s: United Russia, which faces the test of the crisis, and other emerging parties. The conservative political reform is designed to make the break with the unstable, dangerous, and unfair "oligarchic" policy irreversible.
One contribution to the discussion on the social contract was the recent interview by Gleb Pavlovsky, in which he suggested that a "revolution at the top" could be in the works. Those who advocate a revision of the social contract interpreted this comment as a sign of fear in the face of new, alternative projects and a penchant for conspiracies. We have already discussed the question as to what extent the restoration of the "regime of the oligarchs" can be considered to be a new project. The current state of the social contract does not give any cause for concern: the social majority is not going to terminate it, nor is the political leadership. Mr Pavlovsky explained that he was only issuing a warning: in the conditions of the crisis, problems and troubles may arise not "on the street", but in the corridors of power. The appearance of professionally validated calls for scrapping the existing political system (or claims that it will collapse itself) certainly attests that such warnings are not irrelevant.
We are talking about attempts to goad the political leadership toward trying to find a way out of the crisis through a rapprochement with the elites. For this to happen, it is necessary to prove that reliance on the social majority no longer works. What is the meaning of a change in the political model that inevitably involves a change in political course and personnel changes at the top? It is called a "coup d'etat", not to be confused with a conspiracy. Accusations of a conspiracy are nothing if not a knee-jerk reaction of an interested party to outside interference. This is one instance when expert opinion becomes part of the struggle over the political course and the political system.
It is hard to say what prompted Gleb Pavlovsky to issue this warning. This specialist in "charming" the information field is unlikely to explain anything. We can merely guess. As has been noted, the discussion of the social contract was revived in connection with the change of accents in the anti-crisis policy. The leitmotif is the need to bring in the resources of the market; the Krasnoyarsk Forum in late February is widely regarded to have been highly productive, and we see that it has had great resonance. At the forum, the "party" of those who advocate a revision of the social contract, as its own representatives have admitted, for the first time in many years did not challenge the Government on ideology, and it was noted that the renewed rapport between the "party" and the Government did not include any associations with Prime Minister Putin. After the forum, the anti-crisis policy's liberal accents in the discourse of the professional community expanded into a "liberal project" involving a contract between government and business that was in turn to replace the contract between government and the social majority, which is allegedly being undermined by the crisis. The liberalisation of the economic policy, through some clever manipulation of concepts, became political liberalisation: it was initially declared to be marginal and practically hopeless, but was then smuggled in as a component of the "liberal project".
What should the social discourse be like in order to not generate an expectation of the revision of the foundations of the Russian statehood and contribute to the declared goal of coping with the crisis? Anyone who took part in scholarly seminars will know that there are not all that many truly competent experts. By contrast, there are more than enough "generalists", or people with brilliant ideas who easily move from one field of social sciences to another, from the anti-crisis programme to the political system. (The legacy of the Soviet ideologisation of social sciences at the expense of expert knowledge is likely to be with us for a long time yet). The presence of semi-professionals and politically engaged experts can turn a specialist seminar or brainstorm into a conversation on general topics that is useless in solving concrete tasks, but it can easily become a training ground or an assembly of the representatives of "progressive public opinion" who can take stands on a wide range of issues. The post-Soviet semi-professionals and experts with brilliant ideas are direct descendants of the perestroika-era journalism that liberated social thought but then burst its banks, smashing the state that had committed itself to renewal. I am talking about trends and not concrete individuals. Taken by itself, journalism is incapable of great creativity or large-scale destruction. In this instance the destructive potential was created when a broad and unnatural coalition emerged between the corrupt Brezhnev nomenklatura, energetic but irresponsible elites, and free-for-all journalism (as one author put it, "they started actively winking at each other"). Such things have happened before and not only in this country - one need only read de Tocqueville on the place of "philosophers" and "men of letters" in pre-revolutionary France. Because change in a modern state is something constant and natural, everything must have its place: journalism should be confined to the pages of social and political publications that discuss general issues, and experts should take part in scientific seminars and brainstorms. And policy, if it is to be responsible, must become professional, which means it must be party policy.
An anti-crisis policy needs new resources, which must be found, created, and harnessed. The limited financial resources of the state make market resources connected with business more important, but this is no reason for revising the social contract and changing the political system. The public benefits that the state delivers are not only economic; there are other benefits that Russian citizens need and value, such as the quality of management, justice, law and order, and security. These non-economic benefits are so far in short supply and are equally relevant for the wealthy minority and for the social majority, which is far from wealthy. A turn toward creating these public benefits is another reserve of the anti-crisis policy, a political resource that the state can create to overcome the crisis. Public dialogue in search of new anti-crisis instruments is only possible on the basis of common ideas and common values. Discussing the possibility (necessity, justification, and inevitability) of dismantling the foundations of the current political system sealed in the social contract is not part of the anti-crisis dialogue. It is something different.
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Alexei Zudin is a political scientist. He was born in 1953. He graduated from the Historical Faculty of Moscow State University in 1975. From 1975 to 2001 he worked at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and International Relations. Since 2001, he has been Associate Professor in the Applied Political Studies Faculty at the State University - Higher School of Economics.
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