Institutions are crucial to the modern economy, too.
Business that were originally founded and run by individuals became
institutionalized in the second or, the latest, third generation. Successful
new businesses of the past two decades are run as institutions from the start.
They may have a flamboyant founder as their public face, but their operations
are managed by faceless professionals.
Institutions are, actually, a mark of civilization. The
philosophers of the Enlightenment, while pondering the emergence of the state
and society, wrote about the surrender of natural freedoms to institutions
which create and enforce rules and laws, and ensure continuity of order and knowledge
past the lifespan of a single generation. In effect, law-based society and
civilized society are synonyms.
In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia destroyed
traditional institutions and abolished rules and laws. Religion was declared to
be fake – the opium for the people – and not only the religious doctrine was
debunked by the communist ideology, but the Church as an institution was
physically eliminated. Other institutions were either destroyed – such as the
aristocracy – or fundamentally altered – such as the universities, the cultural
institutions, the army, the courts, the police, etc.
Instead, the new government proposed to create different
institutions and different laws – based on class consciousness. This actually
meant arbitrary rules which could be interpreted freely by each person claiming
to have that vague class consciousness.
New institutions were duly set up and the country was soon
crawling with bureaucrats working for them – but rules and laws, which are the
essence of institutions, remained extremely weak and arbitrary. The Basic Law,
or the Constitution, was completely rewritten a number of times, moving from
Russian Constitution of 1918 to the first Soviet Constitution of 1924, and from
Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 to Brezhnev’s Constitution of 1977. Then there is
the current Russian Constitution, which has been altered a few times and
disregarded on any number of occasions.
There are only two real institutions the Soviet Union
managed to create. One is the criminal fraternity with its own iron-clad rules
and regulations, and the other is the Cheka-FSB in its various chameleon-like
incarnations. Both are, by their very nature, operating under the radar and
above or outside the law. Nevertheless, both proved stronger than any other
Soviet-era institutions and are now fully in control in post-Soviet Russia.
The result has been the remarkable personification of power
in Russia since the Bolshevik takeover. It is fantastically ironic – because Vladimir Lenin and his cohorts thought that they were putting history on an objective
scientific course.
Society should be developing the way nature works, where
spring follows winter, summer comes after spring, etc. In theory, there is
absolutely no room for a great leader – only for a manager seeing that the
natural order of things takes place. And yet in every communist society one
thing remains immutable: every leader gets his own personality cult, big or
small.
In a way, the Soviet-era doggerel – “goodbye spring, hello summer, thank you
for this, dear Party” – actually says something terribly profound about the
Soviet system.
What Russia failed to do during the Boris Yeltsin years was
reestablish the institutions of civilized society and inculcate respect for
rules and laws into its citizens. And thus we have another “great genius”
personifying power in Russia.
It is far worse than before.
Stalin was a pathological
tyrant and a homicidal maniac, but he was an extraordinary person. A gangster
in his youth, an autodidact and a genius spinner of spider webs of intrigue, he
rose to absolute power all by himself. His successors Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev
also personified power – but their personality cults were completely fake,
created by the official media outlets and not shared by the population.
The personality cult of Vladimir Putin is a thing apart.
Rarely so much has been claimed for so little. Putin is an absolute zero, a man
without a face, as Masha Gessen’s book put it. Putin had achieved nothing
before being picked for presidency by a clique of powerful men and women in
Yeltsin’s Kremlin. In his 15-plus years in the Kremlin, he has learned
nothing and has done nothing but worked on his fitness program. His strategic
thinking is nonexistent, his tactics manage to be evil and idiotic at the same
time. It’s painful to listen to him talk about economics.
And yet he is loved by many Russians who genuinely believe
that this gray nonentity is a politician of a true historic stature and a giant
among Western political dwarves.
Another salient feature of post-Soviet Russia is complete
disdain for any kind of laws. This is why the country is drowning in
corruption. This is why there is wholehearted approval of crimes committed by
the Russian state: the jailing of Pussy Riot, the killings of journalists and
opposition leaders, the bloody “rescue” of hostages in Dubrovka and Beslan.
This’s why there is total indifference when government
officials get away with stealing billions of public money. It seems that every
Russian knows that in their place he or she would have done exactly the same
thing.
Few people seem outrage when Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin
repaves the entire city with his wife’s tiles. Just as Putin personifies power
in Russia, now his buddies personify the state-owned companies they were
appointed to head – Gazprom, Rosneft, Russian Railways, Russian Technologies
and others. They use them as though they were their private fiefdoms,
permanently keeping both hands in the till. This is why Russian companies are
fundamentally different from businesses around the world.
The lawlessness of the annexation of Crimea is what Putin
supporters can’t get through to their heads. In fact, in a large measure their
admiration for this act of aggression stems directly from its disregard for
laws, conventions and treaties Russia itself has signed.
Not surprisingly, many Ukrainians have taken to call Russia
“the Horde.” Its disregard for any laws is what makes Putin’s Russia different
from a civilized country.
Unfortunately, Ukrainians are also heirs to the Soviet-era
destruction of the institutions of civilization. In Ukraine, we constantly hear
complaints about Petro Poroshenko, Arseniy Yatsenyuk and other politicians.
Ukrainians think that different people should have been holding offices and
seats in the Rada, and in general personifying power in their country.
The point is that Ukraine needs to be rebuilding its
institutions – or rather, in most cases, creating them from scratch – and
instilling respect for the law into its citizens. Who holds the offices will
then become a matter of secondary importance.
