HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

We can’t bring down from the Moon a different race and swop those we have for “ideal citizens”. Nearly all of our officials are corrupt; not because they were born to be such monsters, but because in the matrix that developed there was no other way to operate. If you didn’t steal, you wouldn’t survive. And we can’t simply sack all of our officials in one day. The ranks of those who could do their work are very thin. If anyone were to try to do this the country would become ungovernable in an instant.

Incidentally, Lenin understood this very quickly, when within 18 months Communist Russia collapsed into ruin and starvation. Even if we could sack all the officials and put in their places new and fresh people, we would very quickly see that these new people would rob the people worse than their former “masters”. We’ve seen this in Russia more than once. Our task has to be not to sack and ostracise, but to show people how to work in a different way. And that’s much more difficult.

This all encourages me to give my thoughts on two of the most important topics in the social discussion in recent years: purges and revolution.

Purges.  There is a partially justified view that the compromises of the revolution carried out by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, especially as regards the ban on the activities of the Communist Party and the purge of members of the USSR KGB, played a significant role in the history of post-Communist Russia and led us to where we are now. This seems entirely plausible, considering the role that former members of the KGB played at the start of the twenty-first century in decisively restoring the Soviet regime, and the opportunistic role that the self-appointed heirs of the Communist Party are playing today, rolling back the years to “Orthodox Stalinism” and the “populism of the Black Hundreds”.

Is there a lesson to be learnt from this for the future? When the regime collapses (and sooner or later it will collapse; it’s just a question of time), should we bring down a sword of punishment on all law enforcement officers, judges, prosecutors and so on? Should we finally ban the Communists, and at the same time remove the right to work in government service from members of United Russia, A Just Russia, followers of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and the activists of the All-Russian National Front?

It looks tempting. But maybe a warning sign is that when they did something similar in Ukraine and Georgia it didn’t really help.

For the reasons given above (“you can’t shoot them all”), there’d be no one left to do the work;

There’s no guarantee that those who take their places would be much better;

Many of those who work in the power structures these days carry out their roles honestly and, at great risk to their lives, fight against terrorism and criminals.

It’s true that our judges are all corrupt and bought out by lawlessness. But perhaps it’s not so much the fault of the judges as of those who’ve interfered with their work? If we remove the Kremlin gang, if you conduct a serious debrief, if you give professional people the chance to be both people and professionals… No, of course it’s much better to start afresh, with a new page; but where are we going to find this new page? Yes, and millions of our fellow citizens are not just dust…of course, you could just wipe them away and lo! There’s Stalin’s pockmarked mug staring back at you from the mirror…

I’m against a total purge. It’s never really been completely successful anywhere. The Bolsheviks went further with this than anyone else. They effectively carried out a purge using the meat-grinder of the great terror in 1937, but they still didn’t achieve what they’d set out to do.

As a rule, approaching everything with one and the same template rarely produces a good result. Of course, we have to conduct a thorough and large-scale investigation of the crimes of the regime and identify the key beneficiaries of the mafia state, the real culprits of the escalation of repression and despotism. These people must be judged and punished publicly and under due legal process (with all legal guarantees being observed; those very guarantees that they denied others), even if society then decides to grant them amnesty.

As for those who are less responsible for what the regime has done, they can be dealt with using conditional measures.

A different matter is the “institutional purge”, that should be carried out as strictly and consistently as possible. The point is not that KGB officers weren’t purged, but that the KGB itself was set up as a totally repressive institution that carried out the role of a second (sometimes the first) government. Such a purge is not a witch hunt, but a ruthless thinning out of a dense forest, which turns people into witches and goblins.