A very interesting interview with Dmitry Trenin, whom I consider to be the best analyst--bar none--on Russia's evolution.
The way he describes how Russia and its elite will "grow up" captures exactly my expectations:
[Dmitry Trenin]
We can talk about democracy as much as we like, but there's not much demand in our country for democracy. We've got a lot of consumers now, and that's a good thing. But these consumers haven't yet become citizens. One day they will, I hope. But it's going to take some time. When they do, then we can start talking about real democracy.
You could say that our country is authoritarian, because it is. It is mildly authoritarian. In politics, one group has a monopoly on power. But the people who really support this regime aren't really interested in politics. They're interested in the size of their salaries, what they can buy with their money etc. This is normal. People have the got the right to decide what interests them and what does not.
They did not bring communism down in order to establish democracy, but so that they could have food and freedom in their private lives - and they've got that, more or less. People got what they were fighting for.
[interviewer]
How can you turn consumers into citizens? What is it going to take?
[D.T.]
I think that the consumers need to get established. 15 years ago some of us were still unsure whether or not there was going to be a civil war, whether we might have to leave the country. Now that's no longer an issue. There's going to be no civil war, and no one's going to have to leave the country - or you can if you like. You can live in Moscow, and you can live in Voronezh. Everyone can go where they like - that's settled now. It's no longer a question of 'sauve qui peut'.
And once people settle down, they start trying to make things work. Look at the way the rich live in Moscow. It's fairly normal, fairly like life in the West. They've got decent cars. I look at the cars parked in the courtyard of my completely non-elite building in the centre of Moscow: they've changed a good deal over the last 15 years, and crisis or no, they go on changing. But once you leave your personal space, your house, you find yourself in a place which no one looks after. People regard that as the responsibility of various organizations, officials, councils, the building maintenance board, etc.
As long as you stay in your apartment it's fine. But as soon as you go out onto the stairwell things aren't so great. They may not be terrible, but they're not great. Considering what people earn, and what they could do, it could be better. People aren't getting their act together to improve things for everyone. Though in some respects this is starting to happen. People with cars - you know what a problem parking has become - don't want just anyone to be able to park in the courtyard, and so they decide to get together and put up iron gates, so that only people with an electronic key can enter. That's a small improvement for a small territory.
If you've got children - not a lot of those being born right now, but still - you don't want alcoholics hanging around their playground. You try and get something done about that. And so on and so on.
The way I see it is that people who live in a place and have decided that they're going to go on living there - in Moscow, Kostroma or wherever - are starting to want to do something to make it nicer.
No one is working on building democracy. Democracy grows out of a need, as I see it. You have to want to take part in a common cause. Democracy means a republic. As we do not have a republic, there's no common cause - everyone sticks to their own private affairs - so we don't feel much of a need for democracy. It'll happen. I'm sure will in due course.
[interviewer]
You mean the public will grow out of the private, from the ground up?
[D.T.]
Yes. People have different kinds of interests too, not only playgrounds. People who've made fortunes, who've got factories, newspapers and ships. They'd like to hold on to their fortunes, to pass them on to their descendents. Then some group comes along that's got connections with those who've got a monopoly on power and they try and take it away. And you start to resist. But you realize that resisting on your own is dangerous, pointless and useless. As an owner, you don't think in terms of revolution, of using rocks as weapons, you think about the law. You want law in the country, for everything to be done according to the law. Things were very different when those fortunes were made. That was 20 years ago. That's over now. From now people are going to want to start seeing that the law is upheld. I'm not saying that this will happen quickly, painlessly and easily, but I' m sure that's the direction in which we need to be going.
Then, though this may not have been what they set out to do, those elites will start building a nation. It'll come about as a by-product of their wanting to improve not literally the buildings they live in, but the social order, the common house of that elite. Whatever their taste or background, they'll find they have interests that coincide. And that's when a national elite will start to emerge, one whose interests are wider than those of a ruling bureaucracy governing a virtual, non-existent nation. One whose interests will be truly national.
We'll have to wait until then to get a decent foreign policy, in my view.
Very sensible stuff that dovetails nicely with my thinking that we're looking at the usual five-decade-or-so cycle post-"revolution," which for this version of Russia, dates back to the 1989-1991 period, meaning Russia's about 20 years old and we should look for the serious maturation that Trenin describes here in the 2030s time frame, meaning our expectations remain sensibly generational.
Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 10:08PM 
