| "If you don’t have the guts to beat down Putin,
just beat it (from the country)!"- this was the call by a State Duma
deputy and member of the Union of Right-Wing Forces to liberal politicians
and political scientists who gathered for the Open Forum session on Tuesday
to discuss the arrest of YUKOS CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. After a heated
discussion the participants of the gathering fully backed Nadezhdin's call.
Gleb Pavlovsky, the chairman of the Effective Policy Foundation, unveiled
his plan to immediately dismantle the machine of Vladimir Putin's popularity.
On Tuesday prominent political scientists, journalists and politicians
gathered for an emergency session of the Open Forum to discuss the YUKOS
case and possible development scenarios for Russia for the next 10 years
in light of the abrupt change in the President's policy.
The atmosphere in the conference hall was gloomy. Some compared the
year 2003 with 1937, others draw parallels with 1565, the year Ivan the
Terrible established Oprichnina (his own independent territory). Most
political scientists forecast a new "Time of Troubles", and
the disintegration of the country.
Grigory Yavlinsky was the
first to call for the destruction of the system of "bandit capitalism"
According to the leader of the Yabloko party, this system has "transformed
our people's court into the Basmannyi court", authorizing unlawful
searches and questioning of Duma deputies, defence counsels and priests.
Yavlinsky offered his solution to the crisis, which is however, a priori,
impracticable. To begin with, Yabloko plans to initiate amendments to
the Criminal Code of Russia to restrict the use of such preventive punishment
as arrests of people accused of economic crimes. Yabloko also plans to
draw up a package of laws envisaging a tax amnesty for privatization deals,
as well as laws on transparent lobbying for political parties.
The package will also include anti-corruption laws, the Yabloko leader
added. He also called for the creation of a public television station.
Forum participants hailed this proposal above all, as everyone agreed
that the existing state-controlled television channels have long turned
into "Soviet television".
"I am ready to put my signature to any law that Grigory Alexeyevich
[Yavlinsky] has proposed," said SPS deputy Boris Nadezhdin. "However,
in the present Duma those laws will only obtain 50 votes: 30 from the
SPS and 20 from Yabloko. There are other plots afoot". In Nadezhdin's
opinion in order to overcome the crisis, firstly, forum participants should
try to explain their position to the President. Secondly, sociological
surveys truthfully reflecting public opinion must be published. "Let's
conduct such surveys, post their results on all analytical sites. Let's
show them that the people, as it transpires, want Khodorkovsky to be set
free." And if those efforts prove futile, Putin must go. "If
he [Putin] refuses to turn out all those chekists [security agents] and
prosecutors, one must set out to overthrow the President. This must be
done. Those who think this task is too horrible to tackle must get out
of the country," Nadezhdin said.
Gleb Pavlovsky, the chairman of the Effective Policy Foundation, and
the former head of Vladimir Putin's campaigning staff, called on forum
participants to help dismantle "the machine" of the President's
phenomenal popularity, built in 2000-2001. "Like any other machine,
it malfunctions. Putin's legitimacy exists within a narrow democratic
corridor. When he exceeds the limits he loses this machine. It is already
disintegrating, and I would urge those present to contribute to its disintegration,"
Pavlovsky said. And it is hardly a difficult task.
"We have no state. This is a project that Putin has promised to
implement, but Putin promised that he would implement it not on his own
but together with society. On this ground society may take over the process,
politely explaining to Putin what he should do. And on occasion you can
even explain it to him impolitely, as the President of the Russian Federation
has no right to quote the People's Commissar Yezhov, as he did yesterday."
"Yesterday," Pavlvosky explained, "Vladimir Putin quoted
the very famous words of the People's Commissar Yezhov, who said: "Let
the ninnies and whiners not shout about a threat to law which is guarded
by the Soviet prosecutor's office, for even if the Soviet prosecutor's
office errs in some way, the Soviet court will without a doubt restore
justice." Ezhov uttered these words three years before he himself
was killed, and his daughter starved to death."
In Khodorkovsky's arrest and the events that followed, Gleb Pavlovsky
sees one very important positive aspect: "Politics is returning to
the country, despite the efforts of everybody, including myself, who was
involved in freezing the process."
See also:
YUKOS
case
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