Institute of Modern Russia

Sergey Karaganov, a prominent political figure during the Yeltsin era, offered a similarly offensive public answer, referring to Satarov’s letter as "nonsense."

Sergey Karaganov

What is the essence of this heated argument between two well-qualified and well-established representatives of the Russian cultural elite? Why did this argument begin at the end of 2011 and not at any time earlier? Though Valdai’s reports – all of them no less controversial than the most recent one – have been a part of the political agenda for the last seven years, they have never led to such public quarreling.

Since 2004, Valdai, established by an initiative of then President Vladimir Putin, has been run by Karaganov. The reason Putin needed such a club to unite experts is obvious, especially since it was the Prime Minister himself who set the rules and conditions for the Club members. In essence, Putin offered a compromise to Russian and Western experts. Judging from the content of subsequent reports released by Valdai, the compromise went as follows:

1. Club members meet annually to offer their recommendations. Those recommendations are later summarized in the aforementioned reports issued under some cunning if not ambiguous titles. For example, this year’s report is called "Russia Should Not Miss Its Chance." This title represents both the experts’ anxieties that good luck is fleeting, but also the acknowledgement of the fundamental fact, held as true by the report’s authors, that Russia is lucky to be under Putin's reign.

2. Members are free to criticize the weak points and faults of the country's administration on the condition that each individual member also complies with the main talking points of the Club.

3. The main talking point is that the existing "personalized" power system (which lately has been openly referred to as "counter-revolutionary") in the Russian Federation is the only possible, essential and required framework of power in the country. Not only for today but also for the foreseeable future. The recommendations in the report follow in the same vein. According to the recommendation 8.2.2, for example,"to maintain the personalized nature of power in the short-term is risky. But there's no alternative for the country, since the people have yet to ‘earn’ the right to real freedom and democracy. When they got it from authorities in the early 1990s, the first thing our fellow countrymen did was destroy the government of the USSR, the former Russian Empire. By the end of the decade, they were close to disintegrating what was left of it: the Russian Federation.”

The perspective that the “personalized” nature of power should be maintained in the short-term is exactly how Putin sees the future of Russia. This view on the country's future is supported by Karaganov and, it seems, shared by all the other expert members of the Club (none of whom, to my knowledge, have made any objections.)

As I wrote in my recently published book "A History of One Renunciation: Why There Will Be No Nazism In Russia," Russia's expert community (being part of the country’s cultural elite) settled for "Putin's compromise" offered by the regime, thus beheading the opposition. As mentioned in the previous essay, the opposition has no chance at winning unless it has the country's intellectual elite among it's leaders. The recommendations of the Valdai Club resemble the fraudulent elections under Central Election Commission Chairman Vladimir Churov: the main thing is not the members' opinions (or how they voted), what matters is who summarizes their statements (or who counts the votes). Churov's role in the Valdai Club was eagerly played by Karaganov.

Karaganov's recommendations from paragraph 8.2.8 come down to one simple thought: as far as eye can see, Putin is Russia's fate and future. That's what this country and society is all about since "they have not earned real freedom yet." Putin was not at the helm in the early 1990s, and look, they went and ruined the country. He came to power at the end of that decade and didn't let them disintegrate "what was left of it."

Here is the logic of Putin's compromise: the first thing Russian society seeks to do when left without strict "personalized" control is to dissolve the country. It doesn't matter which country exists to dissolve: in early 90s, society had only the communist USSR to ruin. This logic seems quite natural for the nationalist ideologue Alexander Prokhanov and for Prime Minister/President Putin, who see the breakup of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.

Moreover, during his 2011 Q&A with Russian citizens, Putin openly confirmed that had he been in Gorbachev's place, he would have joined the State Committee on the State of Emergency, the group that attempted an unsuccessful coup in 1991: "We should have fought consistently, persistently and fearlessly for the territorial integrity of our country instead of hiding our heads in the sand." Even though Ukraine had already voted for its independence at the all-people's referendum, all the Baltic republics had already declared independence, and Russia itself had stated the supremacy of its legislation over the laws of USSR? What other options did this leave Putin-Gorbachev except for "persistently and fearlessly" unleashing a civil war by setting up another State Committee on the State of Emergency?

But that's Putin: what do you expect from him? The Communist Empire or the Russian Federation is all the same to him since it’s all "our state." But here we are talking about the intellectual experts of the Valdai club, about Karaganov himself, who claims in his writings that the USSR was self-genocide for Russia and declares in his response to Satarov that he "stood to and continues to support the Gaidar reforms which broke down Communism's spine." How could this man possibly equate the breakdown of the Soviet Empire to the situation that the Russian Federation found itself in at end of the 1990s? But he did equate them with the help of Putin's hefty phrase, the "disintegration of our country."

In the context of the communist monster of the USSR, this phrase sounds even more comical coming from Karaganov, who admitted in the same response to Satarov that "aesthetically, I personally feel more kindred to [Valeriya] Novodvorskaya and, of course, [Victor] Shenderovich."

Karaganov’s very cloudy reasoning leads paragraph 1.3.1.5 of the Valdai report, which attempts to explain exactly how Putin’s "personalized power structure" saved the Russian Federation at the end of the 1990s from disintegration, which was allegedly a real threat at the time. If what Karaganov says is true, then Putin's trick was simple: "The bureaucracy got a sort of carte blanche for its thievery, on the condition that they contributed to the restoration of the country." Doesn't this sound absurd? Why would thieves contribute to the termination of theft?

As a result of saving Russia from disintegration in such a paradoxical way, "corruption," argues Karganov, "became the very core of the system." Is that the very "luck" we should by no means let go? (Not to mention that this "luck" is liable for some of the world’s worst "corruption that is now at the system’s core," as well as for the considerable increase in Russia’s heroin consumption, and the rate at which mental and behavioral disorders and the number of HIV-positive citizens has been growing in the country over the past decade.)

These kind of astonishing and improbable suppositions constitute the majority of Valdai’s November 2011 report, designed to summarize Putin’s ten years of rule.

All this took us away from the main subject of our essay, which is not to expose the contradictions and paradoxes in the report (quite an easy task, as the reader can probably tell), but to tell the story of the argument over these paradoxes between a longstanding member of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policies, Georgy Satarov, and the chairman of this Council, Sergey Karaganov.

It is obvious that I fully share Satarov's indignation with the contradictions of the Valdai report and totally agree that it "posses no intellectual or ethical virtues whatsoever." Only one circumstance bewilders me: since this report is at least the seventh (!) in row to describing the situation within the terms of “Putin's compromise,” why has the argument on this subject only just started? Georgy Satarov only thought to speak skeptically in December 2011: ”Does the Council for Foreign and Defense Policies bear any responsibility for this document? Does the Council share the terms of this document, its evaluations and recommendations?" All his rhetorical questions ended with one ultimatum: "If yes, I demand to be excluded from the members of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policies."

While it is possible, it would be difficult to assume that Satarov never read a single Valdai report. Could Satarov have been totally unaware of his colleague Karaganov's political opinions? How could he have not know that the a pact with the devil had already been made, and that apart from his "aesthetic" preferences, Karaganov's political views are perfectly in line with “Putin's compromise”? How could he have not known that "the first dozen of years of the third millenium," which in Satarov's mind "will be seen as the most shameful, the most disgraceful period in all of Russian history," are for Karaganov nothing but the only possible and necessary system of management for Russia?

Of course Satarov has always been well aware of these facts. The reason he wrote his open letter so recently lies elsewhere: the bubble has finally burst. Could it be an accident, a coincidence, that this argument took place right before the unprecedented mass protests in Moscow that all bore the motto of "Russia without Putin"? Could Putin’s notorious compromise with the expert community survive such a burst of public resentment?

That was another sound lesson for this community: the cultural elite, if it wants to be a true elite, needs to lead the masses and not be led by them. Because excessive caution can harm one’s reputation as much as hastiness.

Coming back to the explicitly offensive public answer Karaganov gave to his colleague, it is important to point out that in the beginning, he tried to snap back: "It is nonsense," he writes. "I am not intimidated...and I've never sucked up to any leaders, neither Soviet nor Russian. That is why I'm ready to accept rebukes from an unfortunately small amount of Russian citizens, whom Satarov is not a part of." Towards the end, though, Karganov’s tone changes greatly: "Dear Georgy Alexandrovich, dear Zhora [Russian diminutive for Georgy]! Let us age decently and let Russia go forward, rather than squabble about the past." Karaganov's letter (as evidenced by the tone in the beginning) was not written in Christian humbleness, but knowing the reality that Putin's compromise with the expert community is dead. And the argument in question is happening by its tomb.