Letter by MBK : Crisis of Liberalism

Extract of letter by MBK originally published by Vedomosti. Can be found here

Crisis of Russia's Liberalism
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
29.03.04

In an open letter published by the business daily Vedomosti Mikhail Khodorkovsky contemplates the fate of Russia's liberals, its businessmen, the authorities and its people.

Russian liberalism is facing a crisis: today, there is almost no doubt about that. If someone had told me a year ago that SPS (the Union of Right Forces) and Yabloko would not clear the 5-per cent voting threshold at the Duma elections, I would have seriously doubted the analytical and forecasting skills of the speaker. Today the defeat of SPS and Yabloko has become a reality.

Two candidates officially represented Russia's liberal forces at the presidential elections. One of them, the former communist-agrarian Ivan Rybkin, instead of conducting a clear-cut election campaign staged a cheap farce, which even the LDPR representative, Zhirinovsky's personal security expert Oleg Malyshkin, would have felt ashamed of.

The other candidate, Irina Khakamada, did her best to distance herself from her own liberal past, criticized Boris Yeltsin and campaigned for the building of a social state. And then, without a hint of embarrassment (and, perhaps, not without grounds) she called the 3.84 per cent of votes cast in her favor a big success.

Politicians and experts who shortly after the arrest of my friend and partner Platon Lebedev last summer spoke of the threat of authoritarianism, of the violation of laws and civic freedoms, now compete in their ability to spout honey-sweet compliments to Kremlin officials. Not a trace is left of their rebellious liberal ardor. Of course, there are exceptions, but they only confirm the rule.

Today we are witnessing the virtual capitulation of the liberals. And that capitulation, indeed, is not only the liberals' fault, but also their problem. It is their fear in the face of a thousand-year history, mixed with the strong liking for household comforts they developed in the 1990s.

It is their servility ingrained on the genetic level, their readiness to ignore the Constitution for the sake of another helping of sturgeon. Russian liberals have always been like that.

"Freedom of speech", "freedom of thought", "freedom of consciousness" — those word combinations are rapidly losing their meaning and turning into mere verbal fillers. Not only the common people but also most of the so-called elite wearily snub them, as if willing to say: everything is clear; it is just another conflict between the oligarchs and the president, plague on both your houses, where we have been so successfully turned into fodder for worms.

Nobody knows, and, in fact, nobody cares what is happening to the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko following their December defeat. The 2008-Committee, while claiming the role of the conscience of Russia's liberals, itself readily admits its impotence and says, nearly excusing itself, yes, there are only a few of us and the timing is wrong, so there is little hope of anything, but still…

Irina Khakamada's idea to form the Free Russia party from the remnants of Yabloko and SPS has not evoked any substantial public interest except for the excitement of several professional "party-builders" who once again smell easy money.

Meanwhile, the Russian political soil generously nurtures the bearers of the new discourse, the ideology of the so-called "party of national revenge", or PNR. PNR bears the traits of the featureless United Russia, of the self-complacent Motherland, reveling in its superiority over its less successful rivals, as well as of LDPR, whose leader has once again confirmed his exceptional political vitality.

All those people — sometimes sincerely, though in most cases falsely and to order, yet no less convincingly — hold forth on the demise of liberal ideas, asserting that our country, Russia, simply needs no freedom at all.

Freedom, in their opinion, is the fifth wheel in the wagon of national development. And those who talk of freedoms are either oligarchs or scum (which is, on the whole, the same).

Against such a background President Vladimir Putin is perceived as the most devout liberal, because from an ideological standpoint he is far better than Rogozin and Zhirinovsky.

And let us think this through: indeed, Putin is probably neither a liberal nor a democrat, but he is still more liberal and democratic than 70 per cent of our country's population.

After all, none other than Putin has reined in our national demons and prevented Zhirinovsky and Rogozin (or rather not them, because in truth they are just talented political players, but to the numerous supporters of their public statements) to seize state power in Russia.

Chubais and Yavlinsky, for their part, were unable to resist "the national revenge" — all they could do was sit and wait till the apologists of nationalist values such as "Russia for the Russians" threw them out of the country (as, alas, has happened before in our history).

That's how it is. Nonetheless, liberalism in Russia must not die. For the craving for freedom has always been and will remain one of the main instincts of man, be he Russian, Chinese, or Laplander. Yes, that sweet word "freedom" has many meanings. But its spirit cannot be eradicated nor extirpated.

It is the spirit of the titan Prometeus who presented man with fire. It is the spirit of Jesus Christ who spoke as the one who was right and not like the scribes and Pharisees.

Hence, the reason for the crisis of Russian liberalism lies not in the ideals of freedom, albeit perceived differently by everyone. This is not about the system, but people, as the last Soviet prime-minister Valentin Pavlov used to say.

Those who were entrusted by fate and history to guard the liberal values in our country have failed in their task. Today we must sincerely admit that, because the times of slyness are over, and to me, here in a dungeon of remand centre No.4 this is, perhaps, a bit more obvious than to those in more comfortable conditions......

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