HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

The normalisation process after the fall of the regime will be made much simpler and swifter if a provisional consensus can be reached by society on all these points. The lack of such a consensus and especially the lack of an actual plan around which consensus can be reached will have a seriously adverse effect on society’s chances of repairing itself. Indeed, it may even make this impossible. Circumstances may well dictate that for a period of time – and this could be long drawn-out – spiritual and intellectual opposition may prove to be virtually the only form of resistance possible for the majority of those citizens who are opposed to the regime. But “otherworldliness” and the fact that this appears to be something abstract doesn’t lessen its historic significance. On the contrary, this is exactly where the frontline of the battle for the future of Russia lies today. Every action begins with a word; and it’s vital that this word is the right one and that it hits the target.

In today’s Russia there’s no place for politics and no motives for engaging in politics. But there will be in the future Russia. And it’s the thought of a Russia that confines Putinism to the past that inspires me to take up political activity. That future looks complicated. Putin will leave Russia with a difficult legacy that will mean future progress will not be easy. The path will be sown with the kind of historical traps that Russia has already fallen into on a number of occasions, and it’s ended up being stuck in them for decades.

I am convinced that the re-formation of Russia into a parliamentary and genuinely federal republic with strong local self-rule is the fulcrum that can provide the starting point from where we can cast off the curse of autocracy forever. At the same time I’m aware that reaching this starting point can be done in Russia only if we take the “left route”. My political goal today is to create a wide consensus in society both for the goal itself and for the methods by which it will be reached.

PART I. HOW DO YOU GET RID OF THE OLD DRAGON?

The vast majority of people live comfortably alongside the dragon until their final day; that being the day when they or their loved ones are killed, arrested or kicked out onto the street from their cosy little comfort zone. Love for the dragon is the natural state of affairs for the man on the street, which immediately becomes the main problem in any transitional period from dictatorship to democracy. It’s easier to get rid of the dragon than it is to defeat the ordinary person’s devotion to it. For this reason, getting rid of the dragon is not simply a lovely, one-act revolutionary show that ends with happy and joyous fireworks. It’s a drama that takes place over many acts, and has a complicated and sometimes tragic theme. And in each act of this drama, its actors  must overcome difficult dilemmas, many of which don’t have straightforward solutions.

Chapter 1. The Strategy for Victory:

Peaceful Protest, or Peaceful Uprising?

What should be the strategy for victory in the battle against despotism? People who lived in the 18 th , 19 th , or especially the 20 th  Centuries would find it easy to answer this question. The strategy for victory is revolution.

But what sort of revolution? A violent one, of course. Marx wrote that revolution is the midwife of history. And one of the founding fathers of the USA, Abraham Lincoln, expressed it thus: “Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

The right of the American people to rise up against those who have usurped power is enshrined in the United States’ Declaration of Independence. Lenin and his supporters regarded revolution as the fundamental source of law and called for the enemies of the revolution to be judged according to their revolutionary legal consciousness.

But in the final quarter of the twentieth century everything became much more complicated. Revolutions, which over the course of 200 years had caused rivers of blood to flow across Europe, became unfashionable. And the collapse of the USSR and of the regimes in Eastern Europe that were linked to the Soviet Union created the illusion that victory over tyrants could be achieved without the use of violence. Perhaps not immediately, but ultimately violence was removed from the strategy of the struggle against despotism as something that was undesirable and even unacceptable. So what then was left in this strategy?