"Sovietization by Stealth," by Konstantin Sonin
Moscow Times, October 4, 2005, page 10
[...] The question of what led to the collapse of the Soviet Union now gives rise to heated debates only among professional political scientists. But the question is not as academic as it might seem at first glance. To understand why, consider a purely economic event that took place last week -- Gazprom's acquisition of Sibneft.
Your assessment of the Sibneft deal -- as well as of state-owned Rosneft's acquisition of Yuganskneftegaz, state-owned Unified Energy Systems' planned purchase of a large stake in Power Machines and the possible acquisition of Norilsk Nickel by state-owned diamond giant Alrosa -- will depend to a large extent on how you explain the downfall of the Soviet Union. If spies, Star Wars and geopolitical forces were to blame, then everything's fine.
But if the main reason for the collapse was economic, then we're in trouble, because this means that we're expending our own money and effort to rebuild the very same Soviet system of industrial organization and management whose ineffectiveness, so obvious in the final decades of the Soviet era, led to such regrettable consequences.
If this is the case, all the government's talk about economic stimulus, private property and transparency that economists love so much is pure nonsense. In effect, this means that the old Soviet-era Oil Industry Ministry, Nonferrous Metals Ministry and Medium Machine-Building Ministry have become the driving forces behind Russia's new economic policy.
It would have been nice if the authorities had bothered to tell us that they had set a course -- and not just economically -- back to the U.S.S.R.
Then again, not telling us is very much in line with the Soviet style of leadership, a haughty disdain for the governed that seemed to say: It doesn't matter if you believe us or not, we're still going to do it our way. [...]
More recently, media critic - and Izvestia opinion page editor - Alexei Pankin wrote about the "undemocratic" selection process at work in the TEFI Awards, Russia's equivalent of the Emmys:
"Television Awards and Democracy," by Alexei Pankin
[...] [A]fter 10 years of experimenting, the academy instituted a procedure that the Communist Party rejected back in 1985: the roll-call vote. The voting now works like this. Three groups of 12 electors are selected at random from the body of 130 academy members. These electors in turn vote publicly for their favorite programs. "There's no way the selection is random," one academy observer told me after noticing that the voting groups included employees of the same stations whose shows were nominated for various awards.
Moscow Times, November 22, 2005, page 10
I must admit this hadn't occurred to me, but given the authority of my source, I decided to check out the allegation. I asked one of the academy members if the selection was actually random. He clearly assumed that I wouldn't have asked unless I knew something, so his reply was evasive: "I have no proof to the contrary." Based on that reply, I began to think that he must know something that he could not or would not say without betraying an academy secret. And now I am sharing my own doubts with the readers of this column, leading you perhaps to question the integrity of the country's top television awards.
This story has much in common with the history of Russian democracy. Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, we received the full range of democratic rights, and since then we citizens have combined our efforts with those of the state to turn those rights into a joke. Even if an election were free and fair these days, no one would ever believe it.
1 comment:
Ineffectiveness of Soviet economic policy is well known and discussed, especially in the West. It is a fact that by the time USSR was falling apart it was bankrupt from tiring to compete in arms and space race against US. It baffles me that people with high education who truly want to make the country a "great" nation would stir it in the same failed direction.
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