HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

So the switch to a parliamentary republic is the key element that can pull along with it the whole chain of democratic events.

Naturally, the change to a system of parliamentary democracy from autocracy and the strongly centralised personal system of government that’s existed in Russia for centuries, will be a political shock. But it’s an unavoidable and essential shock.

The move to a parliamentary republic is the only real possibility to relieve the political system in Russia, and this is why – and for no other reason – this demonstrates its superiority over a presidential republic.

“That’s all well and good,” the opponents of a parliamentary republic usually reply, “but do we have the right to carry out such experiments in Russia? It’s a massive country with a very specific way of life, and people are used to the idea that power is personalised. People won’t understand or value your well-intentioned plans, they will neither be able to take advantage of this parliamentary democracy, nor would they want to, and the whole thing will collapse into anarchy and chaos. Added to this, Russia is still an empire, a huge melting pot, in which representatives of the most varied nationalities and confessions are mixed together, and they’ve never been citizens of a nation state. If you take out the figure of the ruler who’s the very personification of power (however they’re called), the country will break into pieces!”

How do you answer that one? These are not risks that have been simply dreamt up. They exist. The problem is that they don’t grow any less when we switch from one personal regime to another. If we don’t alter the way Russian statehood develops, then every subsequent regime, however much it promises, will in a few years or even months inevitably become an autocracy. And each autocracy will be worse than the previous one; we can have no doubt about that. And in the end what happens is exactly what the opponents of parliamentary democracy are afraid of: the country will fall apart. But by then there’ll be no hope of saving it and it’ll be forever. At least a parliamentary republic would give us the chance to fight.

All of this comes down not so much to a practical political choice so much as an ideological one. Do you think that an attempt to break the personalised model of governance in Russia creates unacceptable risks? If you do, then you’re absolutely right.

But then a question arises. What are your essential disagreements with the pro-government forces that hold similar positions? Of course, in order to save Russia, they propose preserving “cave absolutism”, while you hope to rule for a long time with the help of “enlightened absolutism”. But 500 years of Russian absolutism have taught us that “the grey ones” are always followed by “the black ones”.

The personal model is like a political drug for Russia. No one denies that the country firmly adopted this a long time ago, way before Putin came along. Coming off such a drug could break society; and it’s not impossible that the process could even lead to life-threatening situations. But does this mean that we should therefore simply accept this political dependency and not try to turn away from the needle of autocracy?

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At this point in my first draft I had written a number of paragraphs that I later had to delete. I wrote them long before “Tereshkova’s amendment” was added to the Constitution. I admit that I wrongly assumed that there would be a rather higher intellectual level among the people (or person) who were examining the options for such a change; but I’m ready to reassess the talents of my opponents.

The authorities chose to go down the most primitive, direct and blunt route.

Rather than reforming the Constitution, we saw its destruction, so that Putin could continue in the post of president. The result of this has been war, which has sparked the discussion again, with renewed vigour. Russia has two models of sustainable development: the static equilibrium model (autocracy), and the dynamic balance model (the federal one). Of course, Russia is under no obligation to develop. The alternative to sustainable development is stagnation and collapse. However, I believe that the stagnation and collapse of Russia that, understandably, those who are fighting against Russian aggression might wish for, could cause a drastic imbalance in the system of international relations, and create in the heart of Eurasia a group of aggressive and poorly-run (even out of control) bankrupt states armed with nuclear weapons. The genuine and desired choice for reliable players on the international stage is not one between the collapse of Russia or its continued existence, but one between the autocratic (static) and parliamentary (dynamic) models of its sustainable development.