The Spirit of Competition Must Be Resuscitated in Russian Public Life
The shortage of qualified personnel is becoming ever more poignant in Russian politics, as there are few other fields besides business where effective managers can be drawn from. These troubles are symbolic of the present epoch – as the country aims for new heights, there are few able to lead it toward a bright future.
Dmitry Medvedev’s fine-tuning process continues. Recently, the young president gathered his minions and posed a problem: how can we replenish the scanty personnel reserves? The minions sadly nodded; the president is asking an unpleasant question again, and, once more, they don’t have a good answer.
Just like the case with the fate of Russian diplomacy, the court system, and the topic of corruption, Medvedev has hit a sore spot. Personnel hunger is felt at all levels of the administration; the old guard has already bitten off their share and there’s nowhere to get new people from. If it is true that throughout the year we will have to replace 26 governors, then the kind of headache that is already torturing everyone responsible for new appointments becomes evident. One starts sympathizing with Vladislav Surkov: the president was very straightforward when he said: we are horrified every time we have to look for a replacement, and we hardly find one – but only Surkov knows how to find this person, where to dig him out of. Take Roman Abramovich, for example – he just shuffled off the heavy burden of the Chukotka governorship, and now he is forced to run for the Anadyr Duma. This is symbolic of the era we are living in. We have to renovate; but there’s nobody to renovate with. We have to rely on someone; but there’s nobody to rely on. We have to prepare for breakthroughs – but who can we put on the front line?
Actually, this is typical of any closed society--a sovereign, a communist or a transitional one. Transitioning from everyone knows where to God knows where. First, the old-line of well-born boyars is replaced with aristocrats “in state service.” In the closed space of historical self-reproduction, aristocracy finally extirpates itself and falls behind the demands of the changing times. The only solution is to convoke the States General, to abruptly open the staffing valves before they are torn off by the boiling energy; as a result, a revolution happens and the great usurper Bonaparte appears. And what if you don’t convoke them? Then there are few other options. Either a complete, consistent decomposition of the state, or an internal coup, where the strongest one wins – not as a result of competition or a replacement of the current regime, but as a result of conspiracy and mariticide. Thus, the figure of Catherine the Great emerges on the international arena--she was, in a sense, also a usurper, but one that the system recognized as its own, without colossal perturbations…
Then the swindlers and hoodlums crawl out to the rotten hill of the Tsarist regime; they devour each other, and in the process of permanent self-destruction new blood keeps flowing in, both literally and figuratively. Years pass, however, and the revolution plasma gives birth to nomenclature – essentially the same aristocracy, but with party badges and without the right to inherit ancestral lands. The nomenclature does not want to keep dying; it wants to live happily ever after. The perpetual sun of stagnation rises above the Fatherland, and the peripheral nervous system atrophies very quickly as a result. The nomenclature mockingly repeats the fate of the aristocracy, which had earlier duplicated the fate of the boyars; this is when the time of Mikhail Gorbachev comes, and he is forced to rip the dangerously explosive lids off the personnel boilers, to convoke the First Congress of People’s Deputies, and then we all know how it ends.
Naturally, this does not in any way mean that a new personnel reserve is unnecessary, and that Medvedev is wrong to talk about promoting able and efficient administrators based on public recommendations. It is needed, and he is right – after all, there is no other way to form elites. However, there was a significant contradiction in the news reports (maybe something was left behind the scenes?). Who gets drawn for the state personnel reserve? People who have shown their worth. Where is it possible to show one’s worth today? Only in businesses conjoined with the state, which teach to take into account the interests of the bureaucracy, preferably not at the expense of the business itself. In science? Much more seldom; science is organized in such a way that many fields of “self-showing” have been exiled abroad, and the mind of a Russian administrator cannot be formed there. In sports? A sports experience can be useful only for organizing certain areas of human life, but, let’s be frank, not the most important ones. When discussing an upcoming governorship, an Olympic gold medal is an argument “against” rather than “for.” Youth movements? Perhaps only for future functionaries of second-rate bottling; but for supreme state administration – obviously not, since the only people who can fully evolve and demonstrate their abilities in today’s youth movements are either pure cynics or catastrophic idiots. And neither type can validly govern a successful country.
Here’s a recent example of the latter’s creative self-revelation. The Library of Foreign Literature was accepting a gift from the Estonian president: a sculpture and a portrait of the great Russian humanities scholar, Yury Mikhailovich Lotman, who lived in Estonia. On the morning of the president’s arrival, the security guards found some members of the Nashi movement soundly asleep on the library roof. They had prepared a giant poster with patriotic contents to be thrown down over the façade of the library. Danger – keep out! And later their comrades in Red Army caps held a mass demonstration expressing their wrathful protest. Protest against what? Against the fact that Estonia honors the memory of the Tartu genius and a real war veteran? What personnel potential can be expected from the dim-witted hoodlums who are not capable of differentiating the subject of moving the memorial to a Soviet solder from the subject of Lotman?
But if it will be possible to feed the political personnel reserve only from businesses, then both are doomed. The businesses will be left with no effective management, while business, especially at the management level, teaches a person to think in terms of projects, not in terms of historical perspective, as politics requires. A project presupposes a quick launch, a strict realization deadline, a presentation of the product, and a successful closure. Politics, however, demands strategies and long-term breathing, which, of course, is interrupted during abrupt tactical maneuvers, but still gets restored and allows to keep moving forward.
So whether governorship becomes an elective office someday or not (after all, the hard-to-govern and very diverse India appoints its governors and is doing okay), electiveness as such, and competition in and of itself, must return to our public and political life. Otherwise there will be no personnel reserves; there will be nowhere to draw them from. Just like the free spirit of responsible liberty and informal competition must return to the media life in the form of competing ideas, not ratings, of personalities, not media masks. This area is likewise in an urgent state of crisis: the collapse of Russia’s television academy system is not only a consequence of a feud between television giants; it is also testimony to the fact that our old ways have become completely exhausted.
