HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

Another version of autocracy seems to be the simplest solution for many, including opponents of the Putin regime; but in reality this is a very unreliable option. A regime that is static and stable thanks to tough centralisation and where the authorities have unlimited power sooner or later will lead to trouble in society. Such a system will be able to extinguish this only by creating distractions in the outside world. Even without this, war is a fundamental component of autocracy, upon which everything else is constructed. And autocratic regimes, including the Bolshevik one, are unstable in the long term (their apparent stability is only relative). They are built on the constant search for a consensus among the elite through democratic centralism. This has a significant vulnerability: as the number of participants in the process increases, the number of connections between them increases geometrically. And the single point – the head of the system – who should take the final decisions becomes no longer capable of acknowledging or taking into account all of these various opinions. As a way of solving this problem, the centre turns to unification – totalitarianism – which once again sets in motion a whole complex of historical problems.

In any mid-term perspective, Russia’s system of autocracy has a clearly defined militaristic profile. This is almost completely independent of the ideology it starts out with or the personality of the national leader. As the system matures, the ideology takes on a radically nationalistic appearance and the leader becomes a military ruler. If the West were to prefer an autocratic (static) civilisation for Russia, it would be choosing an inevitable recurrence of the crisis with the unavoidable consequence of aggression directed against the West itself. Each subsequent crisis would be greater than the previous one, and overcoming it would lead to the threat of sliding into an uncontrollable nuclear conflict. We’d be falling into an absurd endless historic downward spiral, where each subsequent version of Russia was worse than its predecessor.

The alternative to an autocratic, static, civilisation could be dynamic, federal, parliamentary stability. What I am proposing would create a dynamic political balance between a limited number of subjects of the new federation (up to 20), with the central authorities playing the role of arbiter and director. The difference between the autocratic and federal models for stabilisation lies in the mechanism for solving conflicts. In the autocratic model, all internal conflicts would be dealt with by the central authorities crushing them using illegal political violence, and the more this is detached from society, the more effective it would be. On the other hand, in the federal model all internal conflicts would be decided by a constant search for innumerable temporary compromises within the confines of a specially-created legal and political framework. In this instance, the central authorities could de facto  be even stronger than in autocracy; but this strength would be demonstrated by the authorities’ ability to control the framework, not control the players within the framework.

The problem with the federal model is that it’s complicated and fluid. It’s a model of constant conflict that’s laid in the foundation of the political system as part of its terms of reference. There’s just one advantage of the federal system over the autocratic one: internal disturbances don’t accumulate, but are constantly resolved swiftly within the permanent struggle of the elites. As a result, there’s no need for external aggression as the only possible solution for the long-term stability of the system. However, to ensure that the uninterrupted resolution of the disagreements that are continuously emerging among the elite are not put down by the fear of repression, the mechanism of a rigid super-presidential republic with a shift in the balance of power towards a non-executive central government is not suitable. If this were so, there will always be the temptation to return to freezing conflicts “according to concepts” and stabilizing the system in the habitual way. All it would take would be for there to be one strong ruler and the system would inevitably slip back into the old rut. I believe that the federal system can work exclusively in the format of a parliamentary republic; in other words, as a federal parliamentary republic. The parliamentary system of government answers two demands in the best possible way: it allows you quickly to resolve regional conflicts among the elite, and doesn’t allow the system easily to slip back into the old rut.