Modernization in the epoch of binary democracy is reminiscent of a can with the 2018 expiration date. The next President, who will start working on his agenda this year, will sit in the Kremlin at least until 2018. This reminder was given by Dmitry Badovsky, Mikhail Vinogradov, and Dmitry Orlov in their report titled "Conservative Modernization." This modernization will be sooner "conserved" than conservative. The authors hope for the preservation of Vladimir Putin's majority as a mainstay of government stability and simultaneous evolutionary modernization. If their hopes are justified, we are bound to enter into another stagnation era. We will get almost the same 18 years of Putin's rule as we did under Leonid Brezhnev's. In Brezhnev's time, many also feared to do anything with Brezhnev's majority alongside sluggish attempts to modernize-e.g., the 1979 resolution or the 1982 comprehensive programme for the development of scientific and technical progress.
Incidentally, the authors are right that there is no social impetus for modernization, and it will have to be carried from the top down on condition of "the dominance of the paternalistic order." Political scientists are looking for the source of the national coalition for modernization-a "negligible minority" as the initiator of the modernization idea-but for some reason find it in the United Russia (UR). As they rightly point out, the main aim of any political efforts should be to "avoid a conflict-prone consolidation of the elite groups around any participant in the tandem." But who will then take the matter in hand and carry out modernization? After all, Bolivar won't carry double.
Willy-nilly, the authors of the report repeated a subtitle in the now classic book by outstanding demographer Anatoly Vishnevsky, "Sickle and Rouble. Conservative Modernization in the USSR," in which he studies the phenomenon of Russian-style reforms. Vishnevsky wrote about such combinations of the accursed Russian questions: "A great number of modernization projects for Russia were based on Agafya Tikhonovna's method: they all want to combine what is dear to their heart from the world of the sickle with what they like in the world of the rouble."
For all the piety of the tandem, political scientists are repeating the idea of their predecessors (from the National Strategy Institute). In the end of the last year, they invented a kind of a ghetto for the President, an ivory tower away from Putin's Russia, where he would be free to carry out his modernization till he drops out. Their colleagues are not averse to this idea of a "super ministry with considerable power." Apparently, in this case, the President will become the minister of modernization. German Gref was such a minister in the years of illusions about Putin.
Vishnevsky wrote that in the USSR, "modernization-related instrumental goals entered into an insurmountable contradiction with conservative social means <...> and modernization <...> deadlocked." In much the same manner, our authors are trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, but arrive at a conclusion about "the excessive costs of preserving the old order." Honesty prevails over piety.
Andrei Kolesnikov
http://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article/2010/01/13/222766
