HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

All of the day-to-day management of the fund would be concentrated in the hands of the management company, which would have been selected following a tender, carried out in line with a special law. The management company would have just one goal: the efficient management of the company and the maximisation of profits, from where the shareholders would be paid dividends. When necessary, they should also prepare the fund’s property for a future privatisation – a normal, economically-based, transparent privatisation, approved by society.

It would be unwise and inadvisable for the funds swiftly to sell off the expropriated assets, since the sale of property during the crisis conditions of the transition period would inevitably happen only at inadequately low prices. We all witnessed this in the 1990s. Therefore, the property of the share funds should be frozen, and leaving them with compensation would be allowed only in exceptional cases and in extreme circumstances. In the future, and not before five or ten years, a new, honest, privatisation of these assets could take place, one that could be acknowledged as rational. This should finally bring an end to the long-drawn-out argument about the fate of the privatisation of the ‘nineties.

The task of the temporary government would be to give back to society direct control over national wealth, and destroy the parasitical property of the criminal gangs. If it’s unable to cope with this task, then it’s unlikely to win the trust of society for everything else.

PART II: HOW DO WE AVOID CREATING A NEW DRAGON?

The dragon isn’t actually a malicious person but a symbol for the state. It’s the type of state where its three heads – the legislative, the executive and the judicial – are firmly attached to the one fat, corrupt body of the mighty bureaucratic machine. And thanks to the unity of its heads, it can walk all over a fragmented society. In order to establish society’s control over the state, it’s essential, on the one hand, to unite society around the idea of citizenship (in other words, create civil society); and on the other hand, to tear all three of these powerful heads from the bureaucratic body and force them to live separately. This is no easy task. Because over the many centuries of Russian autocracy, these three heads have become such a part of this absolutist body that neither they themselves nor anyone around them can imagine how they can be made independent of each other. One reason why there’s a transitional period, therefore, is to learn how to do this. And if we don’t do this, then it won’t be a transitional period, but simply an operation to transplant the dragon’s heads. The dragon will survive, and after a short period of rehabilitation will once again return to its former ways. In order to prevent this from happening, society must take upon itself the responsibility for solving the most difficult problems that Russian history has set it.

Chapter 12. The Choice of Civilisation:

An Empire or a Nation State?

For the past 500 years, from the time of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, Russia has been an empire; that is, a country that’s made up of various parts that differ from each other in culture and in their socio-political make-up, and are brought together not so much by a desire to live together but simply by armed force.

All the generations that are alive today and dozens of generations who came before them have known nothing but empire, and couldn’t even imagine any other type of political system. And when the empire was weak, it usually led to turmoil, destruction and civil war, which all brought greater troubles than all the problems of the empire taken together.

Each time, the turmoil ended with the creation of new, more ambitious and more aggressive empires. The Romanov Empire took the place of Rurik’s Tsardom of Muscovy; and the Romanovs, in their turn, were replaced by the Bolsheviks. Between each of these periods there was a terrifying civil war. People in Russia have grown used to living in an empire. They trust it, and they see it as saving society from destruction and disorder.

What’s more, they don’t believe in themselves. They don’t believe that they can live without “a tsar” (it doesn’t matter whether he’s called the Emperor, the General Secretary, or the President) with his iron fist, with his police, his army and his officials. They don’t believe the promises of those who call for freedom and democracy, because on a genetic level they remember that the alternative to empire is turmoil, destruction and chaos.