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Darya Pylnova: Good afternoon. This is Glasnost Territory.
I am Darya Pylnova, and my guest today is
political analyst Andrey Kolesnikov. Hello.
Andrey Kolesnikov: Hello.
Darya Pylnova: Andrey, the events currently taking place are many:
the world economic forum in Davos
and the destruction of the Rechnik settlement here in Moscow;
the Yukos trial is picking up speed;
that included the questioning of witness Golubovich,
which lasted an entire week.
You specialize on analyzing the political system
and the fate of intellectuals in Russia.
What can you say about the most important events
that hold your attention?
Andrey Kolesnikov: Well, indeed, the most important events are those relating to Rechnik.
The Khodorkovsky trial is an eternal most important event.
It is obvious that passions are running high.
It is obvious that something extremely important is happening.
That is obvious, among other things, from the behavior of the prosecutor.
That is obvious from the significance
that is attached to the questions asked by Khodorkovsky and Lebedev.
That is obvious from the changeable behavior of witness Golubovich,
who is apt to correct his own earlier testimony.
All that shows a heating of passions as the trial continues.
Darya Pylnova: In addition, it shows, in my opinion, the state of affairs
that we have in a whole number of spheres:
they are business, the judicial system, and civil society.
Lilia Shevtsova, a political scientist, describes the topics discussed at Davos,
and the many analysts gathered there brainstormed
and came to the conclusion that there are three principal problems:
water, the environment, and civil society.
But Russia, all the same, is a totally different kind of an island state,
if ones speaks about politics and the economy.
What do you think it is important for people –
ordinary readers and viewers– to know in order to understand all
of what is happening in reality and why that in fact concerns them?
Andrey Kolesnikov: Hardly does an average person think
that water and the environment are things that concern him.
But they do concern him directly,
because, let us take water, for example, Baikal;
we remember the recent story about the permission to resume operation
on the pulp and paper mill, which will be poisoning this very lake.
That is big-time policy and big-time economy,
and that is the government’s decision.
I think that is Putin’s personal decision,
because that is a question that can be solved at the highest level.
That decision, I guess, is the wrong one,
because it is at odds with all kinds of environmental norms,
it violates sustainability and agreements –
it used to be considered that nothing could be touched there or polluted.
The very same Khodorkovsky trial,
which seemingly is something distant from an ordinary person,
all the same, concerns everyone.
Rechnik is an example of the violation of property rights;
Khodorkovsky is also an example of the violation of property rights.
As the end result, we see a violation of human rights,
the right to a home, and violation of the private-property right.
The lack of restraint as far as power entities are concerned stems
from the lack of restraint at the top, from the allowed selective use of law.
Darya Pylnova: How do you think the public views this?
Andrey Kolesnikov: The public is concerned with survival
and cares only about their personal private life –
that has been a peculiar feature over the past few years.
It is a feature of an unwritten social compact with the regime,
when people got their crumbs from the oil pie
but in exchange for that peacefully voted
or did not vote or lived their lives politically apathetic.
Darya Pylnova: By default.
Andrey Kolesnikov: By default.
I think that for the time being hardly can we expect a revival
of civic activeness, a civic awakening.
On the other hand, however, there are foci of this very activeness,
foci of realizing one’s own interests.
For example, last week, Business Solidarity, an organization, with the help of Vedomosti…
Darya Pylnova: Yana Yakovleva.
Andrey Kolesnikov: Right. … organized a drive for signatures in favor of amnestying those
who are in jail for economic crimes.
That is an absolutely right thing to do, because this cannot go on much longer.
We are talking about an active portion of the people,
who either bump against obstacles when they try to do something
or leave the country or are in jail.
Who will deal with the economy per se,
apart from oil and gas exportation?
Deep in their hearts, everyone understands that something is wrong,
but they do not want major changes to come about
and do not want to participate in any processes.
If achievements, including social ones, are brought to our doorstep,
we will gladly accept them.
If they are slow in coming, to hell with them.
Darya Pylnova: The mysterious Russian soul.
And what if we take a look at the economic component?
Experts say that the GDP has fallen by 8.7 percent
and the economic decline in Russia
is now the sharpest among the G-20 countries.
The industrial downswing, instead of the predicted 7-plus percent,
has already reached 10.8 percent.
And the so-called oligarchs continue having fun at both Courchevel
and you name it where else abroad, I mean,
again they had a grand New Year celebration.
How can this be explained? What’s going on?
Andrey Kolesnikov: That is explained, most probably,
by that the crisis is not over for some but is indeed over for others.
For those at the top, the crisis is over,
and that is true even in the economic sense.
I think that there is a consensus among economists
that there will be a growth this year, only a small one.
I would rather listen to a different opinion.
Igor Nikolayev, an RBC analyst, maybe the most pessimistic one,
was the only one who guessed about the depth
of the recession last year due to his pessimism.
Now he says that there will be no growth, not even a zero one.
There will be a small minus.
I would turn an attentive ear to this forecast.
The fact that an economic boom
and prosperity have come to the top is a different question.
For an ordinary consumer, in general, little has changed.
And this low inflation in our country is such an aggregated, generalized indicator.
It is like an average temperature of all the patients in a hospital.
In general, if we look at individual commodities,
the inflation there is stunning.
We all feel it.
Darya Pylnova: And then, there is a hospital of the presidential administration of affairs
and some district hospital No. 25.
Andrey Kolesnikov: Right, there are various kinds of hospitals.
Indeed, one of such economic indicators is the return
to Courchevel of the products of various spheres,
both high- and medium-level bureaucrats
and oligarchs of various levels. That is a bad sign.
It means that the crisis did not rid the economy of inefficient assets;
no lessons were learned from the crisis.
It means that we have come to have a more or less
normal equilibrium level of oil prices.
The crisis has failed to change the structure of the Russian economy;
it has remained a raw-material-based one
and will no doubt remain a raw-material-based one
and unmodernized, because talk about modernization is, in general,
talk about the modernization of technical devices and about nothing else.
Darya Pylnova: And, by the way, I want to go back
to discussing the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.
But before that, I want to remind our viewers
that Andrey Kolesnikov worked for three years,
in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the Supreme Court.
Does this work experience help you to better understand
all that is happening now both in politics and in the judicial system?
Andrey Kolesnikov: Well, yes, in part.
The judicial system per se, even in the purely emotional perception of it,
has changed very little.
Our judges, they even look the same;
I don’t know how this anthropological type preserves itself –
it is such a matron looking like an accountant
who holds the position of judge.
I have been surprised by this: our courts now look decently.
All are newly repaired or located in new buildings.
But the same waiting lines and the same people persist.
What matters is that psychologically,
in your mind you feel like you are in absolutely the same old Soviet environment.
I do not feel in these judges their aspiration to justice by all means
to serving justice in the lofty sense of the word as it is felt in the West.
Reminiscences of attorney Dina Kamenskaya, written a long time ago and published in the West, have come out recently.
The famous defense lawyer, who defended dissidents and was forced to emigrate in 1977,
writes at the beginning of her book
about how English court astounded her;
it astounded her by its grandeur and the weight of every word
and the look of the judge.
This contrasts so sharply with our petty kind of relationship
between people in our courts like.
That aura has remained.
And I see it in the trial of Khodorkovsky.
I see it in the absolutely unrespectable behavior of the prosecutors.
I mean, they are serious people from a serious organization,
and they act like that, like some fussy characters,
who yell to interrupt the questioning of a witness by the defendants.