TRAC
Interview Transcript

Kirill Razlogov   (cont)

One of the cultural problems inherent of what's going on in Russia now is the conflict between the spiritual and the cultural position of Russia and the failures of the free market system.  I don't think that we can find any country, any culture, where the cultural elite was very in favor of the bourgeois kind of civilization.  They acted more or less as a moral counterpart to the world of the free market development.  In Russia, this contradiction is much more powerful because the traditional hero of Russian culture is a hermit--a hermit who goes out from real life and becomes spiritually powerful.  And this spiritual power makes him the hero of a large and ongoing thousand year cultural tradition.  From this type of cultural tradition, everything that is happening now is a total catastrophe because the system changes, and with the changes of the system, this kind of failure system is, I'm afraid, is going to collapse.

But in reality, it didn't collapse.  In reality, what was happening, when the changes started, when the reform started, there were two main vectors of the reforms.  One vector went to the economic liberalism and the free market system, and the second was a cultural renaissance.  The second was linked to the hermit as a hero; the first one was linked--if you are speaking about cultural systems and cultural systems--to a McDonald's or Coca-Cola culture.  The idea was for us that these two things are linked, but they don't go together.  And we can revive the great Russian Orthodox tradition and at the same time create a free market society.

Of course, in the reality, there was a conflict between them.  Either we could keep the great Russian cultural and spiritual tradition and this tradition allow the market society, or we could develop the market society, and McDonald's and Coca-Cola will support that.  They wouldn't like it, but that's how life works.  And we didn't still resolve this contradiction, because the cultural tradition seems to be much more important than we thought about it.  It can't be broken down in two, three, four years.  And we can think only about changing it specifically not directly, because direct action doesn't bring results, as we found out through recent developments.

That's why the society didn't react the right way to different means of changing the Russian economic and political structure.  The Revolution--the reformers--were led by economists.  The economists and Abel Aganbegyan is one of the most powerful economists in the country and one of the most intelligent people in this field--were considered the part of the scientific community which knew how to do and what to do.  But the only thing--and here I agree with people before me--the only thing they didn't think about and they didn't discuss was the population.  A friend of mine, a Frenchman who was part of one of our high governmental meetings between Russians, Americans, and Europeans, during the high points of the reforms in the beginnings of the 90's, was shocked by two things.  The first one, nobody cared about the French and nobody cared about the Europeans.  It was strictly a Russian-American discussion, or even an American-American discussion because Russia harbored people and America harbors people, and who cared about those French and Englishmen and Germans, whatever.  But the second thing which shocked him, that not once he heard the word population, not once he heard the word the people who have to do it.  The people reacted differently.  We did some research on the economic reforms and some practical projects in the field, so I can say it through practical experience.

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