Two events have joined together that are not formally connected – Sunday’s elections and Saturday’s protests in St. Petersburg against a 400-meter skyscraper, popularly known as the “gasscraper.” They came together on a symbolic plane, but also in political practice. Because they both answer the question of who rules cities, to what degree public opinion is influential, and whether any kind of change is possible. And they answer these questions much more cruelly and precisely than the numerous media rumors about the head of the Kremlin’s administration being replaced.
Let’s start with Moscow. Yuri Luzhkov was proving to the higher authorities that it is he who rules the city, he and no one else but him. Hence, if you try to replace him, you will end up with trouble. And if you don’t try, you’ll get what you want. And we did. A one-party Moscow City Duma, encrusted with a handful of Communists. In the end, everyone was cheated. Both those who, like Solidarnost, thought that it was possible to be an oppositionist on the city platform and to partake in the process. And those who hoped, like Just Russia, that a Kremlin label on participating in elections would somehow influence the city’s governing system. And those who supposed, like Yabloko, that it is enough to support Luzhkov with a smile while softly criticizing his shortcomings. And those who, along with Just Russia, bet on their candidate Galina Khovanskaya’s meritorious authority. And even, it seems, the Kremlin’s political technologists, who wanted a majority, but not a farce worthy of Turkmen Bashi. Everyone was shown that in order to partake in the Moscow useless Duma (since it now has only one function, to serve as Luzhkov’s subsidiary resource), you just need to be utterly loyal to the powers that be, whatever the name of those powers. In Moscow, for example, those powers are called Luzhkov.
Of course, it would have been impossible to achieve such stunning results without the massive indifference on behalf of Moscow’s inhabitants, who are ready to uphold anything against change. Whoever it comes from. If people think of themselves as citizens, they push through electoral committees and do not allow any large-scale forgery. And if they don’t feel that way, then what is there to do? Then we’ll just paint what we want. And maybe we won’t even have to paint much, when only those who don’t want to change anything show up to an election, while those who do want change sit it out at home. Because there is no “against all” option. Because there is no competition. We’re fed up with these, and those weren’t allowed to run. All in all, just because.
But first of all, any interest in what was happening was artfully and forcefully extinguished, and secondly and most importantly, in societies where a democratic tradition is absent the responsible elites consciously formulate the axiological requirements, by involving others in a discussion, by developing a neighbor-like democracy, when municipal problems are resolved by a mutual effort. In Russia, nobody took care of this. In the 1990s because there was a widespread illusion that everyone and everything was engulfed in a civil pathos, and nobody thought that it was a temporary splash that needed to be turned into an even, calm current. In the 2000s because it seemed easier to govern that way, just divide and rule. Luzhkov expressed the logic of the 1990s when he laughed in the faces of the Supreme Soviet deputies – you won’t fire me because you were not the ones who hired me! Muscovites elected me, and only they can dismiss me. And he also expressed the logic of the 2000s, by hypocritically lamenting the fact that only two parties made it into the Duma, and immediately clarifying that he is one of the founders of United Russia and therefore cannot be fired. If the authorities ever think about it, he will respond with “you wish!”
A talented and sensitive person, no less. However, Yuri Mikhailovich must serve another historical purpose – he works as a litmus paper. His example demonstrates to us the kind of re-distribution we’ve arrived at, the price we paid for the decisions made or not made. In the early 1990s he demonstrated the powerlessness of the Supreme Soviet. In the later years of that decade – all the beauties of a municipal socialism that relies on pensioners and desk pushers. Without values, without ideals, but with interests. In the late 2000s he demonstrated, quite vividly, the whole hopelessness of a vertical arrangement. The bureaucrats were told to stand at attention, all of the flows were passed on to serious people in uniform and without it, and we ended up with an irreplaceable mayor, who made loyalty so highly concentrated that it can make the authorities sick.
Everyone realizes that the Moscow clan must immediately be replaced, and all of the necessary levers of power to do this are there. But every day, it gets harder and harder to use them. The city really is under their control. Even if you decide to and do change them, what will you end up with? Either the replacement will lose, and you along with him, or he will be able to defeat Yelena Baturina’s scheme, but then he will grow so powerful that he will inevitably turn into a competitor, a new center of powerful might. The same can be said about Murtaza Rakhimov, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, Eduard Rossel, and so on down the list. It is possible that the federal authorities will make the decision. But this decision will be so painful and so risky, that it will inevitably lead to a chain of consequences, in the political sphere as well as in the governing one. And maybe they won’t make this decision. And this will also have consequences, despite personal will and systemic desire.
The same is true about the Okhta Center. Rosokhrankultura’s (Russia’s Culture Preservation Agency) belated but clear and unambiguous conclusion that the tower cannot be built in the place that was chosen for it, multiplied by St. Petersburg inhabitants’ civil activity, presents the federal center with a very difficult question: what’s to be done? To go in the direction of the people and of culture means to repudiate Mayor Valentina Matviyenko’s decisions. They appointed her, they overcame the resistance of the masses, and now they show her her true place? The resource is very much administrative, the decision – democratic. How contradictory. And vice versa: to pretend like nothing is happening, like there was no 3,000-strong protest and no verdict from the Culture Ministry, would mean to unambiguously support the city’s government and dear Gazprom, and to create an epicenter of tension. Which contradicts the vertical practice of stabilization.
The diagnosis is the following: the country has okhteochondrosis with a nerve pinch. An administrative dislocation of the vertebra, a pinched political nerve. There is a referral to the services of a bonesetter. Otherwise, there is a risk of paralysis caused by pain shock.
