Ideas of Russia without Putin – 24 hours |

Source: The New York Times

Translation: Innovator

USAin the “New York Times” newspaper “Without Putin Russia how will it be?” an article titled The author of the article is a journalist, Russia and Eastern Europe history specialist is Joey Neumayer.

Russia it has become a militarized, isolated, and corrupt country. Challenged by special services, destruction of talents, Ukraine A heartbreaking scene has emerged in this country, where hundreds of thousands of people fled abroad to avoid the war.

Many are impatiently hoping that this sad situation will end the president He is waiting for the day when Vladimir Putin leaves power. However, Russia is not a country that can change instantly with Putin’s death or resignation. Future leaders will have to dismantle and rebuild the structures Petey has exploited for more than two decades. This is not easy, to put it mildly. But some politicians are already making plans to deal with the problem.

At the beginning of November, representatives of the well-known Russian opposition in Poland, who were once represented in elected bodies in Russia of deputies “First Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia” was held with his participation. The congress was organized in the Yablonna palace near the capital Warsaw. It has a symbolic meaning: the first round table, which brought the end of communist rule in Poland, was held at the Jablonna Palace.

During three days of intensive discussions, the participants of the event put forward numerous proposals for the revival of Russia. Essentially, these discussions can be seen as an attempt to imagine Russia without Putin.

Undoubtedly, the main issue on the agenda of the congress is the Kremlin’s ongoing involvement in Ukraine military it was aggression. The participants of the event unanimously opposed the war. According to them, Russia will lose this war. It was not excluded that the conflict could lead to a nuclear disaster.

The participants of the congress agreed to an act of peace to end the war, as well as to prevent the recurrence of such situations in the future offer they did According to the proposal, the Russian army should be released, of Ukraine the occupied territories, including the Crimean peninsula, should be returned, military a crime investigation team should be created, compensation should be paid to the families of war victims and infrastructure damage. This broad commitment, which is calculated to end the policy of occupation once and for all, if it is implemented, can be considered as Russia’s farewell to imperialist history.

The proposal to root out this class by punishing destructive officials is also a serious innovation – something like this has never been done in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

According to the proposal put forward by the participants of the event, the Russian Federal Security Service, in collusion with “criminal organizations” such as state TV channels, and those who openly support the war in the state-government structures in the future. education they should be prohibited from working in their enterprises, as well as the voting rights of those people should be restricted.

In the projects adopted by the congress, individual groups, especially Putin, have openly refused the policy and are heavy crime In order to consider the issue of rehabilitation of offenders, it is envisaged to create a commission and open the archives of special service agencies.

The Russian Federation is currently governed in a strictly centralized manner. More than 80 subjects (republic, province, autonomous province, district, autonomous district, etc.) are all directly subordinate to the president, and the head of state has a lot of power.

During the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transfer of powers to local structures and the decentralization course were preferred.

“The First Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia” considers that approach correct. According to the proposal of the participants of the congress, the Russian Federation should be released, a new one parliament democracy should be established. The Congress recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination, believes that the future Russian state will be the people’s free should be formed based on the choice.

This is in stark contrast to the current situation offer it can open the way again to the realization of promises that were once made but not fulfilled. From Vladimir Lenin to Boris Yeltsin, Russian leaders have always put forward the idea of ​​abandoning centralism in order to gain support for themselves, but they abandoned it as soon as they secured their positions in power.

According to the Russian Constitution, all federal subjects have equal rights, but in reality there is a visible inequality between the subjects. To the latest facts – those who were taken to the war in Ukraine and there perished you can see it when you look at the identity of those who are. Most of these people are representatives of ethnic minorities living in poor republics such as Dagestan and Buryatia.

A return to the idea of ​​expanding sovereignty may result in the secession of the Chechen Republic, which Putin brutally enslaves, from Russia, and at the same time, other republics and regions will reconsider the issue of properly distributing resources and balancing relations with the center without favoring sharp separatism. This would make the country fairer and at the same time weaken Russian nationalism.

As for the economic sphere, the plans of the congress in this direction are quite mixed and contradictory. One of the projects is to fundamentally change the results of the privatization carried out in the 90s of the last century (that privatization led to the takeover of the square by Russian oligarchs), and the other is Putin’s 2020in , caused considerable dissatisfaction, social aimed at strengthening defense, which does not allow to eliminate the dependence of the Russian economy on the export of energy resources pension promises to cancel the reform.

There are loopholes in these proposals. With the privatization process free the 1990s, when elections were held simultaneously, brought wealth and power together. Now he took them separately political and it is wrong to consider economic reforms as different processes.

Other contradictory points can be touched upon. The main organizer and sponsor of the congress, Ilya Ponomaryov, is a leftist and technology entrepreneur. He was the only one who voted against the annexation of Crimea in the Russian parliament in 2014 deputy has been Then he left the country and got citizenship from Ukraine. Currently speaking Russian in Kyiv news leads the channel.

Ilya Ponomaryov, one of the scandalous figures of the opposition circles, justified the killing of Darya, the daughter of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, in August. Ponomaryov claimed that Darya was killed by a partisan army operating secretly on the territory of Russia.

His baseless statement made his colleagues in the opposition circles very unhappy. Even because of this, Ilya Ponomaryova was invited to participate in an event organized by longtime critics of the Kremlin, Harry Kasparov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. cancellation done.

Let us note here that there is a strong disagreement within the Russian opposition, and the views of the opponents on the future rarely coincide.

in Russia parliament there are many who call for establishing democracy and transferring most of the powers to local and regional levels. Among them is Khodorkovsky, the country’s best-known dissident, Alexei Navalny, who is currently rotting in prison. But neither Navalny’s partners nor Kasparov and Khodorkovsky attended the “First Congress of Russian People’s Deputies”.

Moreover, the legitimacy of the congress has been questioned. Some of the organizations opposing Russia’s aggression against Ukraine announced that the congress does not represent them.

There were those who questioned the legitimacy among the participants of the congress. Saying that transparency and equality among the participants were not ensured at the event, some of the congress representatives left by slamming the door of the Yablonna palace.

Such antagonisms do not help the implementation of proposals that do not have such a bad effect anyway. Let’s not forget that history has proven that radical changes often come from external or hidden sources.

end of the 19th century, 20at the beginning of the th century political all immigrant groups Europe He was planning the downfall of the Russian Empire. Among them was Lenin, who lived in Poland at the beginning of the First World War.

Now – in a time when the majority of the population is forced to remain silent, and those who raise the bell are deprived of work and freedom, it does not seem reasonable that radical changes will take place in Russia. But changes can happen at any moment, even at the most unexpected moment.

At the beginning of 1917, Lenin became pessimistic and said that he could not see the revolution. A few weeks later, the Russian Tsar was overthrown.

Like any country, Russia is more or less doomed to repeat the past. The time has come to take away the future of Russia.