The second half of the title does not mean that I want to whitewash someone. Personal responsibility cannot be canceled. I want to speak about something different. I want to speak about the important topic, without comprehending of which it would be senseless to hope for our progressive movement towards normal statehood.    

Just try to imagine the unbelievable. The President (who else if not him!), indignant with the scale of bureaucratic lawlessness and corruption, makes an announcement that all the state apparatus (top officials, ministers, governors, judges) is fired and offers a tender for filling all those positions. He complicates the conditions, and decides that all candidates must pass qualification exams and be checked with polygraph detector, and must have good list of merits. 

Question: would the general picture change after that? Would the new apparatus really serve society and not their superiors? Would the bribery, humiliation, tortures etc. go down after that? Possibly, it would be so at the initial stage. But actually I think that after a year (and probably less than a year) we would come to face same issues. Why?

One of the options for answer: it’s because such are our culture and traditions. A famous Russian satirist writer said “What do we want to do when we get to the top? We want to spit downwards.” Well, undoubtedly the quality of society is reflected on the quality of the state governing apparatus. But this is not fatal. 

Second option of answer: it’s because being in power makes one unable to yield to temptation. Well, this seems to be closer to reality. But it’s all over the world that officials and politicians are subject to temptations. Then why the level of corruption and arbitrary rule in Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Spain or South Korea is much lower than with us? Of course, there politicians, high ranking officials and even judges also get involved in scandals. But all of them there know that any scandal will result in resignation at best and in sentence at worst.  

Then another question arises: why is it so? Can it be that Sergei Ivanov is right when he repeats constantly that our values are different from the western ones? Of course, every country presents its own national features. And the generalized West is not so homogeneous in cultural terms. The experts show us the differences between British and French, American and Japanese, German and Spanish democracies. But no value exists that could be a justification for any nasty thing done by a high ranking public servant. Of course, such a “value” cannot exist in Russia either.   

But it’s exactly something like such a “value” that is being imposed on us, sometimes in a very cunning way. The notion of “democracy” being interpreted very broad during last century, it’s only single institutions, convenient for the authority, that are marked out inside the whole contents of the term. They say to us “What else do you want? Do we have alternative election? Yes, we do. Do we have public organizations and parties? Yes, we do again. This is what we can call a democracy. And as for “western-type” democracy, we just cannot have it because it might cause us to destroy one other. ” This is why “our democracy” can only exist in a form similar to the self-government system at school where children are allowed to watch keeping order during intervals, but the question of making repair at the school building is only decided by the principal. 

In reality there is only one criterion enabling us to tell “democracy” apart from “democracy + adjective”. A prominent political thinker of the 20th century, Carl Popper, formulated that criterion: democracy is such a form of state structure where bloodless change of power is possible through election. What does it mean?  

First, it means political competition where people themselves define the course of the national policy using the election system. Second, this is about the lack of monopoly for power. In economics, the victory in a competitive struggle never means the winner will stay alone in the market. The same must apply to the politics. With a democracy no one can be thrown away from the domestic politics. This applies not only to the parliament, but also to the president. Whatever broad powers he were invested in, he still must stay under control.  

And how can people control the president, government and the new political force in power? First of all, this is possible to be done through opposition, i.e. parties that failed to become winners at this stage.   

And how can they exercise the control, in their turn? They can do it through parliamentary enquiries, participating in making the state budget, exercising control over public spending and so forth. A good example of normal practice of a parliament is the recent decision of allotting special guard for the US presidential contender B.Obama who is guarded now with the personal order from the US home security secretary. And that decision was taken after consultations made to a special commission of the Congress. But giving the opportunity for parliamentary parties to control the executive power and the president means that newspapers, radio, television and internet must be able to provide the society with all necessary information, including exposing sharp practices. It comes naturally, as getting hot information is in the nature of the media and promoting that information is in the nature of the opposition.

Exposing the evils and shortcomings of the authority, the normal opposition has an opportunity to come to power and it is interested in showing impeccable approach. Through such a process a positive selection of the state apparatus can be provided. Respectively, seeing that “political pendulum” really works and the powers really can change one into another, the courts, enforcement bodies and special services would come to work in a different way. They would just see that for them it is ineffective to work in accordance with the political order and not in accordance to the law.       

Today’s complaints by the media about not being listened to, whatever scandalous things they exposed, is one of the indicators that the system described above does not work with us. And it cannot work, because it does not exist here. It does not exist not due to the current state of the society, but because the current structure of power only reduplicates inevitably the Caesarism, i.e. the regime that eliminates all the positive aspects of separation of powers.   

I will finish with what I started. The scheme spoken about by me here is the principal scheme of making the power liable to check by people. Of course, the scheme requires more concretization. But the main point is that as it is ridiculous speaking about different circuitries for “western” or “Russian” wireless, the same applies to democracy. It’s just senseless to say about “western” or “Russian” democracy. Democracy is the instrument for getting the principal goal – that’s protection of human dignity. The mankind has not invented any other instrument so far.     

We shall be looking for “strong arm” till we create the system of political competition. Some benefiting from “strong arm” approach, most of us will be staying insignificant people for the authority and we shall be easily ordered about and deprived of even that little we possess. I must repeat here: there is no sense blaming the current authority for that. Replacement of the power would lead to same results. The authority will not learn to respect the society and to serve it until the society puts the power under conditions where it can be controlled.  

The author is the Doctor of Law, the chair at the constitutional and municipal law department at the Higher School of Economics.

Mikhail Krasnov,
specially for Novaya Gazeta