TWENTY-FIVE years after he launched perestroika, the name that became synonymous with the economic reforms that ended the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev says Russia needs another perestroika and pins his hopes on President Dmitry Medvedev to achieve this. Experts agree that the challenges facing Russia today in some ways resemble those Gorbachev had to deal with in the 1980s.
Gorbachev first used the word perestroika, which means reconstruction or rebuilding in Russian, in his speech at the Communist Party Plenum a month after assuming the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985. The new Soviet leader told the nation that it was time to change. His idea of change was to modernise the Soviet socialist system to lend it a new dynamism or acceleration, as he called it, rather than dismantle it. Before long he found out it was impossible to effect economic transformations without weakening the grip on the power of the old-guard Communist Party cadre who blocked his reforms.
Gorbachev then embarked on political liberalisation, ending one-party monopoly on power and allowing multi-candidate elections. When he became President in 2008, Medvedev, too, stated that modernisation of Russia would be his main goal. In his annual state of the nation address in November 2009, he said the Russian economy needed to be reformed urgently to overcome its primitive structure, a humiliating dependence on raw materials and a shamefully low competitiveness.
Medvedev identified five thrust sectors that should act as locomotives for the modernisation of the economy: nuclear energy, space technologies, information technology industries, innovative pharmaceuticals and energy-production and -saving technologies.
It is true that Medvedev's modernisation agenda is very much different from what Gorbachev had proposed. Russia is no longer the over-centralised, non-market, state-controlled economy it was 25 years ago. But Medvedev is confronted with the same dilemma that Gorbachev faced. Like Gorbachev, he is aware that economic modernisation can only succeed in a democratic environment that allows free competition of ideas and enables people to assume responsibility for the state of affairs in their home village or town, and realise that only an active position can set the heavy machine that is government bureaucracy in motion.
Gorbachev, who will turn 80 in March next year, feels the democratic reforms he launched have suffered setbacks under his successors, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. I am deeply convinced the country can progress only on the path of democracy. But we have seen many reverses here in recent years. Democratic processes have stalled and often backtracked, Gorbachev wrote in an article to mark the 25th anniversary of perestroika. The state of democracy in Russia in recent years has been routinely criticised in the West, but coming from the architect of Russia's democratic reforms the criticism gains extra weight.
Gorbachev said Putin's system of managed democracy increasingly resembled the Soviet Communist system. Addressing a conference at the Gorbachev Foundation recently, he described the ruling United Russia party, led by Prime Minister Putin, as a replica of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], only worse.
These people have monopolised power and are primitive enough to be proud of it, Gorbachev said. The Soviet reformer laments the absence of any true division of powers among various authorities, as the executive authority makes all decisions and Parliament rubber-stamps them.
We have the institutions: we have a Parliament, though I am not sure you can call it a Parliament, we have courts. We seem to have everything, but we don't. It's like decorations. Russia is again facing the challenge of change, he wrote in the article.
When Medvedev, a young and forward-looking person, took over as President from Putin in May 2008, Gorbachev saw a new hope for reforms in Russia. He heartily embraced Medvedev's call for all-round modernisation of Russia but warned that unless Russia's political system was also modernised in order to unleash the creative instinct in every Russian, economic modernisation might fail.
Modernisation will not happen if people are sidelined, if they are just pawns. If the people are to feel and act like citizens, there is only one prescription: democracy, including the rule of law and an open and honest dialogue between the government and the people, he had said.
Medvedev has affirmed his democratic credentials many times in his first two years as President. He famously declared, freedom is better than non-freedom. In his programme-setting article Forward, Russia!, published last year, Medvedev said Russia would eventually have an extremely open, flexible and inwardly complex political system, one where parliamentary parties would compete for power as in a majority of democratic states.
However, so far Medvedev has made only cosmetic changes to the Russian political system, such as allowing parties that fail to clear the 7 per cent election threshold to get one or two seats in the federal and regional legislatures. The changes have done little to encourage political competition and do not challenge what Gorbachev called the monopolisation of power by one party, United Russia. Medvedev's timid steps in promoting democracy in Russia have disappointed many of his supporters, including Gorbachev.
There is a growing feeling that the government is afraid of civil society and would like to control everything, Gorbachev wrote. Responding to critics, Medvedev has argued that political reforms are already headed in the proper direction and that we will not rush these changes. He does not want his reforms to suffer the same fate as perestroika, which triggered the disintegration of the Soviet Union. For many Russians, Gorbachev himself came to symbolise the collapse of the superpower and is, therefore, reviled in Russia, in stark contrast to his enduring popularity in the West. Gorbachev's three attempts to launch political parties of the social-democratic tilt fell through as they failed to garner popular support.
A recent opinion poll showed that Russians have a perestroika complex they fear that Medvedev's reforms may provoke upheavals similar to what they lived through during the Gorbachev era. According to an opinion poll conducted by the Levada Analytical Centre, only 11 per cent of Russians are enthusiastic about Medvedev's modernisation programme because people are sceptical about his ability to transform the country without wreaking havoc on their personal lives.
In another nationwide poll held in May, 72 per cent of the respondents preferred stability, even if achieving it would involve some violations of democratic principles and restrictions on personal freedoms. Only 16 per cent expressed a preference for democracy. They can be excused for this apparent scepticism of democratic values, given their disappointing experiment with democracy in the early 1990s.
At the peak of Gorbachev's pro-democracy reforms in June 1991, Russians elected Yeltsin President of the Russian Federation, which was then a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. It was for the first time that Russians were able to elect a leader of their choice from among several candidates. And they chose a man who a few months later took advantage of a hard-line communist putsch against Gorbachev to pull down the Soviet Union in order to occupy the Kremlin throne. In the years that followed, Yeltsin plunged Russia into ruin and chaos.
Today, Gorbachev urges Russian society and the government to overcome fears of democratic reforms because fear is a bad guide in politics. He says Russia's new leaders must learn from the mistakes of his perestroika, when failure to reform the political system in time triggered the break-up of the country.
Our main mistake was acting too late to reform the Communist Party. The party's top bureaucracy organised the attempted coup in August 1991, which scuttled the reforms, he wrote in the article.
Gorbachev is not alone in calling for political reforms. The Institute of Contemporary Development, a liberal think tank whose board of trustees Medvedev heads, published a report early this year arguing that without credible multiparty democracy, political competition and a system of checks and balances Russia will not be able to compete in a globalised world.
Ideas of regime liberalisation are gaining support in a section of the ruling elite. In May, German Gref, the architect of economic policy in Putin's eight-year presidency, called for political reforms in Russia. The former Economic Minister and long-time ally of Putin, who now heads the state-controlled Sberbank, told reporters that Russia would need totally different political institutions to undertake economic modernisation.
Gref admitted for the first time that the failure to liberalise the political system in the early 2000s led to many setbacks in economic reforms. If I could go back to the year 2000, I would assign top priority to the reform of the system of government, Gref said.
Putin cautionsMeanwhile, Putin, who two years after relinquishing presidency remains Russia's most influential leader, recently warned against tinkering with the political system he had crafted over the past decade. He urged extreme caution in pursuing reforms so that Russia did not face the kind of turmoil Ukraine witnessed in the wake of the Orange Revolution five years ago.
Any effective political system must inherently have a healthy level of conservatism, Putin said. We simply must not allow the Ukrainisation of Russia's political system, just as we must not slide the other way towards totalitarianism and despotism.
Some analysts also warn Medvedev against a naive belief in the miraculous creative powers of the market and Western-style democracy that can somehow help modernise Russia.
Russia is going through a dangerous period, with President Medvedev potentially taking on a Gorbachev-like role in the history of the new Russia, much to the joy of the United States and its satellites, says political commentator Eugene Kolesnikov.
Another danger for Medvedev is that pushing too hard with reforms may undermine his chances of staying for a second term after 2012, experts warn. Medvedev and Putin have repeatedly stated that they would not compete against each other in the 2012 presidential election but would sit down and decide who of the two would run, on the basis of their performance. This means that notwithstanding their denials, the two leaders are still locked in competition.
On the one hand, Medvedev's modernisation agenda seems a perfect platform to campaign for re-election; on the other hand, it breeds fears of instability in some sections of the Russian elites who feel better reassured by Putin's reaffirmation of stability.
Earlier this year, Putin pointedly played up to these fears, stressing the importance of maintaining a balance between stability and development that enables the country to go forward, but at the same time spares society upheavals and does not frighten people with possible cataclysms.
A leading public relations consultant who monitors the views of the business community says Russian elites may prefer Putin to return to the Kremlin in the next round of presidential election.
Russia's leading businessmen, although somewhat tired of Putin, want him to return to the presidency because they feel that Medvedev may be too unpredictable and might rock the boat too much, cautions Vladimir Frolov, head of a public relations company.
A quarter of a century after Gorbachev struggled and failed to balance the pace of economic and political reforms, Medvedev finds himself in a similar bind. He is caught between the Scylla of too slow political reforms scuttling his economic modernisation and the Charybdis of hasty liberalisation undermining political stability. He needs the deftness to stay clear of the two monsters.
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