BORIS KAGARLITSKY, MOSCOW
ARE YOU HIM?
If you follow the American television series “Lost” you will get my idea. In the series a group of the airplane crash survivors take shelter in a hatch where they have to enter the code into the computer every 108 minutes. They don’t know the effect of this operation but believe that if they fail to push the button in time something disastrous will happen. They meet every new character appearing in the hatch with one and the same question: Are you him?
It reminds of the current situation in the Russian government – one is about to ask any official appointed to a senior post in the Cabinet: Are you him? Shall we greet the Successor or shall we wait a little longer?
Viktor Zubkov, however, only profits from all this ambiguity. Will he after all become the Successor or not, his task as Prime Minister becomes easier, for his new colleagues have to take him seriously with the view to his possible presidency.
It was quite another story with ex-Prime-Minister Mikhail Fradkov. No one believed that this man with the face of Heinrich Muller (as performed by Leonid Bronevoy in the legendary Soviet television drama “Seventeen Moments of Spring”) would become successor of Putin – Otto von Stirlitz of the same movie. Now that Zubkov has taken the office of Prime-Minister, we can see the difference.
But don’t you fancy that the new Cabinet will bring about new policy. What can be revised is the status quo in the Russian high-rank bureaucracy. In the days of Fradkov’s premiership the Cabinet fell far from the ideal of a close-knit team or top-down management system. Each ministry had its own priorities and goals, with Premier Fradkov being only a coordinator. When there was a need, the Kremlin gave impetus to this or that process and all the controversies could only be resolved via the presidential administration.
In this regard, the current reshuffles should not be accepted at face value. Mikhail Zurabov and German Gref’s dismissals are not only due to fiasco of their programs. They both had to carry out unpopular reforms that were doomed to failure from the start. And judging by the composition of the new Cabinet, the unpopular political reforms will be continued. One group of neoliberals in the government has been substituted by another, with the only difference that the latter are less known and thus don’t arouse public indignation… so far.
The problem with Gref and Zurabov was not that they were the least effective ministers of the former Cabinet. Their ministries had independent agendas and programs of actions as well as independent visions of what to do. Gref made Russia’s accession to WTO his personal challenge, Zurabov charged himself with unpopular social reforms. The two reformers were persistent and so to say mission-oriented, they ignored the pubic opinion, but as a result this “personified” approach failed both of them. Their persistence turned against them when the system they were working for changed its priorities. It turned out that the both ministers were not team-oriented and even incompetent.
The new Prime-Minister came as a symbol of unity of the bureaucratic system that has one leader and single agenda. But will this end up in higher efficiency? Evidently, unless the political priorities change, the results will be the same. As for Zubkov, it is in his interests to make the Cabinet more efficient. This will make his ratings as a Premier and more people will see him as a Successor. Who knows, maybe Putin will also appreciate his efforts.
But while we all closely follow the show “Guess who”, the incumbent President might have just the same doubts as one hundred forty million citizens do. He might as well want to ask “Are you him?”
For better or worse, we’ll learn the answer in about six month.
Boris Kagarlitsky is Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements
October 5, 2007
|
