Government seeks public support in the face of the crisis
Society must consolidate, study the Government's anti-crisis plan and accept it in order to cope with the crisis together. This was the appeal Prime Minister Vladimir Putin launched yesterday to the leaders of political parties, representatives of the business community and members of the Public Chamber.
Experts believe that consolidating society will not be easy: society is fragmented, apathetic and largely convinced that the Government should solve all the problems itself. The prime condition for coping with the crisis is consolidation of society and government, Vladimir Putin said. In the past, when Russia faced serious challenges it succeeded in achieving consolidation, he said.
"I would very much like to see society as a whole react adequately to what is happening and jointly work out a complex of measures to counteract the current difficulties connected with the crisis", the Prime Minister said.
Speaking on the fringes of the meeting, the Secretary of the Public Chamber, academician Yevgeny Velikhov, admitted it would not be easy to consolidate society. "There is a sense of mistrust in the authorities, which breeds apathy. But it is necessary to rearrange the mood and come to grips with the crisis", he told RBC Daily. Mr Velikhov was vague when asked what exactly ordinary citizens had to do in order to respond to the Government's plea. He thought a while and said, "For example, they could call a meeting and remove the head of a municipal entity who has embezzled public funds".
Judging by the tone of the Prime Minister's speech the authorities expect citizens to act in the opposite manner: at the very least people should not take part in protest rallies in the event the crisis worsened. The period when the state and civil society in Russia were seen as opponents is behind us, the Chairman of the Federation Council, Sergei Mironov, said yesterday.
The past year and a half have brought great changes to the consciousness of the elites, political scientist Dmitry Badovsky believes. "At first the authorities refused to admit there was a crisis, then they said it had strictly financial roots and would not affect the masses of the people, then they said that yes, the crisis is here, but we have so much money stashed away that we have nothing to fear," Mr Badovsky said. Now the authorities realised the scale of the crisis and they naturally appeal to the citizens for support.
Consolidation does not mean "taking an oath of allegiance to the Government", said another participant in the Government meeting, the head of the RUIE, Alexander Shokhin. The task of civil society is control over power, he recalls. Mr Shokhin welcomes public discussion of the Government's plans, and he asked Vladimir Putin "to apply the same technology to other Government initiatives". For starters, to announce which of the measures proposed by the RUIE have been incorporated in the anti-crisis plan.
Russian history has seen many attempts to consolidate society from the top. One thinks of the call of Minin and Pozharsky to defend Russia against its enemies, and Joseph Stalin's appeal to the people as "brothers and sisters" at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. In more recent Russian history, the referendum on the preservation of the USSR and the August 1991 coup attempt come to mind.
"It is unlikely that society today will respond to a call for consolidation from above. It is a call that leads nowhere," political analyst Konstantin Simonov believes.
By Rustem Falyakhov