Simon Kordonsky: the national idea in Russia is the identification of the enemy. And then the real threat will be found.

Biography:

Sociologist, professor at the Higher School of Economics, member of the Council on Science, Technology and Education under the President of the Russian Federation, former senior assistant of the Referent of the President of the Russian Federation (April 2004 - October 2005); Director General of the Center for the Study of Civil Society Institutions; "was born on September 7, 1944 in Altai; graduated from Tomsk State University, candidate of philosophical sciences; sociologist, biochemist; from the beginning of the 80s he took part in the activities of an informal association of scientists who conducted seminars on economic problems at the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences ; from 1987 to 1995 - a regular contributor to the journal "Century of the XX and the World", was a member of the editorial board of the journal; since 1988 he worked at the Postfactum agency (head - G. Pavlovsky), 1992-1993 - agency expert " Post factum"; in 1992 he took part in the creation of the Institute of the National Model of the Economy; since 1996 - the head of the Eastern Center for Modern Documentation, also - an expert of the Effective Policy Foundation (FEP); since 1998 - director of the Center for the Study of Civil Society Institutions (TSIGO ); an expert of a number of international, state and commercial organizations; in July 2000 he was appointed head of the Expert Department of the President of the Russian Federation; after the reorganization of the Administration resident on April 1, 2004 was appointed senior assistant to the President of the Russian Federation, in October 2005 he was relieved of this position due to his retirement (Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of October 18, 2005); member of the Board of Trustees of the National Personnel Reserve Foundation; author of a number of published works, including Markets of Power: Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia (2000), Cycles of Activity and Ideal Objects (2001).

Simon Gdalevich was born in 1944 in Altai. In 1974 he graduated from Tomsk State University. Until the 1970s actively engaged in scientific activities.

S.G. Kordonsky gained the greatest fame in professional circles in the 1990s, in particular, at that time he actively collaborated with a group of experts who formed the reform strategy (the group included, among others, E.T. Gaidar, A. B. Chubais, V. A. Naishul, etc.). Since 1993, he has been the general director of the Center for Civil Society and Private Property Problems.

S.G. Kordonsky is the creator (together with V.A. Naishul) of a promising scientific direction that describes the specifics of the structure of power in Russia - the "theory of the administrative market." Author of a number of publications devoted to the analysis of various aspects of public administration, in particular, the book "Markets of Power: Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia", which received wide resonance in the expert and political circles of the country, which is devoted to the real political market in Russia.

In 2000, S.G. Kordonsky was appointed head of the Expert Department of the President of the Russian Federation, from 2003 to 2005 he worked as a senior assistant to the President of the Russian Federation. Currently, he is a member of the Council for Science, Technology and Education under the President of the Russian Federation.

S.G. Kordonsky is a professor, head of the department of local self-government at the State University - Higher School of Economics, and an expert in a number of commercial, state and international organizations. Regularly publishes scientific publications and analytical articles in the central media.

Since July 2006, he has been chairing the Expert Council of the Imageland Public Relation agency. Mission of Imageland PR agency.

Imageland Public Relations Agency, An Affiliate of Edelman sees its mission in promoting the integration of modern civilized standards of professionalism, efficiency and morality with the traditionally powerful, creative potential of Russian specialists in the field of public relations.

The agency considers one of the main tasks of its activity to be the integration of international and Russian experience in the field of public relations, bringing to Russia the best examples of effective Western technological approaches and bringing the talent, creativity and high adaptability of Russian professionals to a worthy international level.

Acting State Councilor of the Russian Federation, 1st class.

By the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of September 7, 2004, he was awarded the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, I degree.

Professional interests

Study of the structure of administrative scales;

Use of scattered information processing technologies for socio-economic analysis

Main works:

About 100 publications, including 30 scientific and three books:

1 Administrative markets of the USSR and Russia. M. 2000.

1. Cycles of activity and ideal objects. M.2001.

2. Crystal and jelly. M. 2002.

3. Markets of Power: Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia (2000);

4. "Cycles of activity and ideal objects" (2001)

5. "State, civil society and corruption"

6. "The social reality of modern Russia"

Sociologist Simon Kordonsky - about the war of estates in Russia

Dmitry Dukhanin/Kommersant

The famous Russian sociologist, professor at the Higher School of Economics, former assistant to the President of the Russian Federation Simon Kordonsky gave a lecture at the Yeltsin Center on the class structure of modern Russian society. Commenting on it, the moderator of the meeting, journalist Valery Vyzhutovich, emphasized that none of the estates, including the higher ones, feel confident in their prospects, do not have guarantees of further stability, therefore all estates live one day and care only about tomorrow being like yesterday and nothing changed. We bring to your attention fragments of Simon Kordonsky's lecture.

“The basic principle of our estate system is to extract rent from an often invented threat”

“If classes are groups that arise in the market as a result of the fact that someone is lucky and someone is not, someone in terms of consumption began to belong to the upper class, and someone to the lower, then estate is a group that is created by the state for various reasons, mainly to neutralize threats. In Russia, the estate structure was created in the time of Peter the Great, Peter's "Table of Ranks" is its expression ... Each estate was judged according to its own law until 1861. After the abolition of serfdom, the imperial class structure crumbled, raznochintsy appeared, recruited from different classes. Actually, the raznochintsy destroyed the Russian Empire ... The Soviet Union was also a class society, since the so-called classes of workers, peasants and employees are groups created by the state, that is, estates. In 1990-91, these groups disappeared, we now have no workers, peasants and employees, and a class structure began to form with the corresponding social stratification: the really rich and the really poor appeared. Moreover, privileged groups, the estates of the Soviet Union - military personnel, state employees, scientists, doctors - fell into the really poor.

The completion of the formation of the [modern] class structure was when the law “On the system of public service” appeared (2003 - ed.), which introduced three state service classes: civil servants, diplomats, military personnel, then nine or ten types were detailed, including law enforcement officers . These classes exist according to the law, these are people who do not work, but serve ... In return, they receive class privileges. There is, for example, an order from the Presidential Administration on room service for official delegations of various ports and railway stations, a list of 381 job titles. Further, there is a presidential decree on specific medical care for certain persons holding public office, according to this presidential decree, completely free medical care and drug provision for about two hundred categories. Further, our federal deputies are released from criminal prosecution. Actually, why did you go to the deputies before? Because they won't get sued, they ran away from the court. And they paid a lot of money for it, it reached $5 million for a seat in the State Duma...

... The last example of the appearance of a class is the bailiff service. Court decisions were not executed, the “cops” refused to deal with this “dirty business”, this was regarded as a threat, and the bailiff service was created, a law enforcement service that neutralizes the threat associated with non-execution of court decisions, as well as guarding the courts. And all the other estates that we have were created to neutralize some kind of threats or inherited from the Soviet Union. For example, the military service is engaged in neutralizing an external threat - the Russian army, internal troops, which have now become the Russian Guard, the SVR, the FSO and five other ministries and departments. That is, the basic principle of this system is to extract rent from an often invented threat. The same external threat: ten years ago no one threatened us. In order to consolidate the army and to make the law on military service work, an external enemy was needed, it was invented, now we are present at the flowering of the idea of ​​​​an external threat.

Nail Fattakhov / site

We have a class stratification in terms of the level of consumption, and there are class stratifications in terms of the volume of shares of distributed resources. The greater the threat that the estate neutralizes, the greater the share of resources that is due to it. For example, since it is believed that there is an external military threat, a significant share of the resources, more than other classes, goes to the army. And within the estate there is a stratification, similar to the class, in terms of the level of consumption. Let's take people of a free profession, that is, living on a fee: say, a political strategist who serves the administration of your region is not at all the same in terms of income than a political strategist who serves the presidential administration.

[In relations between estates] the formation of closedness is mainly taking place. I have an acquaintance who was a deputy, then a member of the Federation Council, and he had a dream to go to the civil service in the appropriate rank. Did not work out. That is, it is almost impossible to move from estate to estate. There is no mobility. There is an image of the Soviet Union with its class system and powerful elevators, which were provided by the party apparatus. And now I don’t see this, now there is only the opportunity to rotate in my stratum. Well, you can’t switch from law enforcement to military service and vice versa, I don’t know of examples of transition ...

... In order for a social structure to form, the external definition of an estate must coincide with self-definition. In Europe, if you ask a person: what do you do, what social group do you belong to? He answers immediately, instantly. They have their own state employees, entrepreneurs, government officials. We don't have that. I ask the billionaire, my old friend: Petya, what group do you belong to? And Petya says to me: I am a senior researcher ... I have a book about the estate structure, at the end - a list of regulations that introduce uniforms, more than 20 pages, 280 regulations, in my opinion. Have you ever seen a prosecutor in uniform? Unless in court: yes, it is supposed to. Or an employee of Rospotrebnadzor in a red uniform? Remember how once Onishchenko appeared [in uniform] at a solemn event when he was the head of this service? That is, there is an estate, but people do not want to be identified even by clothes. There is a class uniform, but latent - it hangs in the closet.

Law is also a very interesting situation. If in the Russian Empire each estate was judged according to its own law, then we have a single Criminal Code. But in any article of the code there is a lower measure of punishment and there is a higher one. And representatives of the lower classes are judged according to the highest frame: for a stolen chicken - five years. And representatives of the upper classes are judged according to the lower framework. That is, there is a class right, but also latent. There are stereotypes of behavior, also latent. At the celebrations on the occasion of the “estate day”, for example, on the Day of the Prosecutor’s Office or the Day of the Chekist, after that there is always a booze, and these stereotypes of behavior appear there, they are specific to each estate ... The formation of estates and estate self-awareness is a long process. A twenty-year period does not fit in any way, two or three generations are needed. Whether a country with such a class structure will survive, I do not know.

“Approximately 40% of the working-age population in our country has nothing to do with the state”

With the “Khodorkovsky case”, the liquidation of entrepreneurs, the market began, the state began to officially dominate: not equality before the law, but equality before the boss distributing resources ... Now we are all fighting for justice. There are two types of justice - egalitarian justice and distributive justice. Leveling justice is equality before the law, and inequality arises in the market, and all market structures strive for this state. Distributive justice is when the state distributes resources by creating groups according to their importance: the more significant the group is for the state, the more resources it is entitled to. Once it did not work for us, now we are repeating this situation, forming a social structure based on distributive justice...

... We have the RSPP, these are "merchants of the first guild." "Business Russia" - "merchants of the second guild." And "Opora Rossii" - "merchants of the third guild." If you find yourself within this corporate structure, you will have fewer problems. But if you have not found yourself, have not received a political "roof", then there will be more problems. Ultimately, one has to move away from this into the so-called "shadow" forms, although they are completely public ...

“Even the state corporation in our country is a fishing structure” Zamir Usmanov/Global Look Press

…Market structures in our country go into crafts. Fishing differs from the market, from business in that there are no “commodity-money-commodity” relations, there is work for authority, for status, for reputation, which is converted, among other things, into money - when you go to a “good hairdresser”, "good doctor" A significant part of our activity is fishing, non-market, maybe pre-market. I don't even know where we have the market left. Even a state corporation is a fishing structure, they trade. What does the Ministry of Finance do? It works in our pockets. We have monetarist financiers in power, they are not interested in the real economy, they are only interested in a penny. There was a penny from oil - they did not touch the people. When oil began to cost less, they climbed to rummage through our pockets. And they will continue to rummage around, because the situation will not improve. What does the Ministry of Health do? It trades by selling us its idea of ​​health, which does not coincide with our idea, mastering state resources and creating a threat to reduce the health of the population ...

… A lot of people go [into the "shadow" - ed.], in my opinion, 300 thousand small business organizations over the past year. They have not disappeared, they have moved into the “garage” form or into the “dacha” form, or into some other type of fishing, they have left the state, the state does not see them. And everyone is fine ... Approximately 40% of the able-bodied population in our country has no business with the state, lives outside the state ...

...Now there is a liquidation of the class of state employees, through a "transfer to the contract", while class privileges go nowhere. For example, starting from this year, higher education workers are switching to a contract, they are turning from state employees into hired workers. The same thing happens with doctors. State employees are disappearing, losing official benefits... You can see how our Minister of Health reports on the average salary: that the average salary is increased in accordance with the President's decree. But the real wages of doctors working at the bottom, if you do not take into account additional income, are falling. At the same time, it is enough to look at the castles in which the chief doctors of state clinics live, and it becomes clear where this money is going. This is one of the most well-to-do categories - chief doctors.

“The level of ignorance of one’s country is simply amazing”

From space, the illumination shows the boundaries between the regions: the space is not developed and not described. Moscow - yes: judging by the data of public utilities, sewerage, 30 million people shit in Moscow at a time. There are also radial roads, and between them is a wasteland, there is nothing. Within a radius of 100 kilometers from Moscow, we counted 40 settlements that do not have a status, are not registered, settlements without authority, without a postal code. With a certain size [of the population] they reach self-sufficiency, they can live without money, just on my own ... There are settlements in the country that live off the trade of adoption. We met this in the Novosibirsk region, in the Tver region - there was an interesting case there: a priest in a small area, there are practically no parishioners and, accordingly, a gathering. So he took on the upbringing of six children from the orphanage ...

... We arrive in the village: there is no index, there is no shop, there is no electricity network, transport accessibility is 3-4 months a year. What do people live from? Somewhere from furs, somewhere from fish, somewhere from the forest some kind of fishing. And life is built around this craft, they solve their problems themselves. The state is leaving the lower levels: at first, health care was at the municipal level, now it has been transferred to the regional level, FAPs have been deprived of the status of legal entities and merged into inter-district hospitals, while, of course, depriving budgetary resources and staff. But people need to be treated, so in the last ten years a system of informal health care has emerged. What do they say in pharmacies? Diagnosis, treatment, selection of medicines, health consultations. Our pharmacies are a full-fledged element of the informal healthcare system. There are practically no settlements in which there would be no sorcerer, healer. The population is treated itself, without resorting to the public health system. There is a newspaper about a healthy lifestyle, there is television, they also tell how and what to treat. And there are cases when doctors say: well, go and pray ...

Nail Fattakhov / site

… And this natural life is not the subject of research interest. We worked in Altai, in an area that borders Kazakhstan: a closed economy within the region, there are specific breeds of cattle and horses, they need a minimum of hay, because the snow blows in the mountains and the animals get their own food. The border with Kazakhstan is 8 kilometers, actually not guarded, these herds are driven to meat processing plants in Kazakhstan, and the money received is enough. Plus medicinal herbs, hunting. According to official figures, the population of the district is 10 thousand people, and the head of the administration said that when food stamps were introduced in 1992, it immediately became 14 thousand. Now there are about 20 thousand, and according to the census - 12 thousand. These are the results of one of our studies: we tried to check how the primary statistics used by the state are formed, and went home in small settlements of up to 50 thousand people. Rosstat data differ from what the [local] authorities themselves believe by 10-15%, the population is 10-15% more than Rosstat believes.

This was not a single study, 10 regions, 300 municipalities - and everywhere the same thing: we have per capita funding, the amount of resources that the regional center distributes to municipalities depends on the population, and the region is interested in downplaying the population. It is not clear - maybe there are 160 million people in the country? It is quite possible. (According to official figures - about 147 million - ed.). The level of ignorance of their country is simply amazing. And unwillingness to know how it works, our country.

And negativism in relation to how it works. People are sitting downstairs, at the level of district administrations, and you can get budgetary resources for next year, but only to neutralize any threats. How much I travel around the country, I do not see real unemployed, there are none. Official statistics - in my opinion, 6% of the unemployed, in the reports of district administrations, this figure reaches 15-20%. This is already a threat to social stability and justification for the existence of the Ministry of Social Protection. Money from the budget goes to neutralize the threat of unemployment, which does not exist… People from below write pieces of paper: give us resources, because we have problems accumulating. And the person who sits upstairs and reads these pieces of paper gets the feeling that everything is bad in the country. And people just want money. And it is not clear where the power ...

... Those theories that are used to describe our reality, to explain it, are entirely and completely borrowed from somewhere. This is a specific Russian phenomenon and the source of many problems. Peter I borrowed the state system from Holland, then the idea of ​​a just society was borrowed from Marxism. And now we borrow different, it seems to me, not very adequate theories about the market, democracy, management and everything else. Social scientists are engaged in trying to adapt the imported conceptual apparatus to describe our reality. Naturally, nothing works. Therefore, there is a feeling that everything is bad in our country: we do not live the way we should, we have no market, no democracy, no justice. There is a feeling, including among the authorities, which was brought up on these translated books, that it is not necessary to study our Russia, but to reform it. Therefore, over the past 30 years, we have had 60 reforms, and none of them has led to the desired result. This is a consequence of the negative attitude towards our reality, the unwillingness to accept the country as it is, and the desire to remake it according to some stupid scheme, starting with Marxism and ending with modern democratic ... We must stop reading translated books, stop bowing to authorities and proceed from that that our country is not described at all.

An interview with Simon Kordonsky is always interesting. As interesting as the vicissitudes of his biography. He is a well-known sociologist and field researcher, who at one time had to wander around the USSR, sometimes without a residence permit and permanent work. In 2000-2004, he headed the Expert Department of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation, and from 2004 to 2005 he was a senior assistant to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now a retired state adviser of the 1st class, he is the head of the Department of Municipal Administration of the Higher School of Economics (NRU-HSE). Already after leaving the civil service, his theory finally took shape, which describes Russia as a class and resource state, which remained essentially unchanged for centuries, despite the changing "signs" and decorations of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation.

- You wrote a lot about the class structure of Russia, your books and articles are devoted to this topic. Corruption is now permeated all spheres of society. In your opinion, is it more characteristic of a class society than a class society?

- I believe that in the classical definition of corruption in a class society simply does not exist. These are completely different relations, which, for lack of a conceptual apparatus, are called “corruption”. What we call “corruption” is the glue that binds the estates of our state into a single whole. In a class structure, society is not the same as in a market one.

The estate state is a state whose social and economic system is based on a "fair" distribution of state resources among the estates. The resource is distributed from top to bottom, representatives of the estates receive a “rollback” during the distribution of the resource corresponding to their position in the estate and the informal inter-estate hierarchy. An estate is a social group that occupies a certain position in the hierarchical structure of society in accordance with its rights, duties and privileges enshrined in custom or law and inherited. Sociologist Simon Kordonsky believes that estates are social groups created by the state for its own purposes, mainly to neutralize threats. He distinguishes the following titular estates in the Russian Federation: civil servants, municipal employees, military personnel (including the FSB and SVR), law enforcement officers (Ministry of Internal Affairs, courts, prosecutors), deputies, Cossacks. Other estates are in the process of formation or dying out (for example, state employees and pensioners).

- What do you have in mind? What is the difference?

- It coincides with the state.

- That is?

- Society is not separated from the state. The transformation that took place in the 17th century in the West did not happen here. Then the market, politics, science and technology separated from the whole - the state - and from each other. Under these conditions, in fact, society was formed as a kind of structure in which it is possible to build behavior that is not codified by class rules.
In 1917 and 1991, the class structure fell apart, then it was restored again, naturally with other classes. Now we are restoring the estate structure. The market space is shrinking. Attributes associated with the separation of the market from the state, society from the state, disappear. Only words that do not have subject referents remain from them. Here is one of these words - "corruption".

But we have social stability and distributive social justice, there are estates that are not hierarchized by law. That is, it is not clear who is more important (class society is hierarchical), state civil servants or military personnel, for example. There is no standard.

Probably, depending on the situation...

— Depending on the situation, and the situation is determined by who pays whom.

— How would you characterize such a typical situation-scheme: a company is applying for a government contract, an official sets out some conditions of his own, the company receives a contract and pays a “kickback”? In conventional terminology, this is called "corruption" ...

- In a market economy there is such a parameter as the "price of money". He determines everything. There are central banks that sell money to systemic banks at a price that is determined collectively. And systemic banks resell this money to retail banks at a different price with a “margin”.

What is spinning in our economy is not money, but financial resources that only look like money. Their essential difference is that the financial resources distributed from the budget cannot be "converted" into money. They must be mastered and written off. In our country, the dynamizing factor of this process, the turnover of financial resources, is the “rollback”. And there is a "rollback rate". It would be strange if resources were distributed free of charge. If in the Western economy there is a “price of money” (discount rate, bank interest), then in the Russian economy it is a “rollback rate”. And the "rollback rate" can vary greatly. The rollback rate is controlled by repression. If you take “out of order”, you fall under repression. It happens when the “rollback rate” is very low, as in Stalin's times, and there are times, like today, when it reaches 70%. But this is by no means corruption. It is a constitutive phenomenon of the economy. If there was no "rollback", then nothing would spin, would not work. There is no interest in distributing resources for free.

- Then what now looks like a fight against corruption, what is the essence of this phenomenon?

“This is another form of rent extraction. There are estates located below, there are those located above in the informal estate hierarchy, which, depending on the region, may be different. And the subordinate position of the estate is determined by the fact that members of this estate pay rent to representatives of a higher estate, as, for example, motorists pay traffic cops. They do not pay for violations, but for the fact that there is a “wand owner”. Exactly the same situation everywhere and in everything. Policemen pay prosecutors, judges and everything else. Such a hierarchy has developed. “The fight against corruption” is another superstructure on top of this system, when financial resources are first distributed from above in the hierarchy down through “rollback”, and then rent is extracted from below by the same estates. So "fighting corruption" is an additional way to extract rent.

- Theoretically, more or less understandable. But in practice. Why is the “fight against corruption” intensified right now?

- Because the "rollback" has exceeded all reasonable limits. As a result, the resource economy stagnates. Naturally, there is concern to reduce the "kickback rates". Repressions begin. But repressions, mind you, do not go by layers, as under Stalin. If members of the Soviet estate overestimated the rollback rates, then sometimes the entire estate was repressed. And now we have repressions - rather denoting action, and not the action itself.

- That is, now they are “putting flags”, roughly speaking ...

- That's right, the flags are set: this one here took too much, so he "went under the knife." But “under the knife” is also a figurative expression, since in a class society each class lives according to its own laws. We have a Constitution, according to which everyone is equal, and there are class laws of “public service”, according to which people are not at all equal. And members of many estates have preferences, so they do not fall under many articles of the code. For example, a prosecutor for an accident is tried "according to his" laws, and a simple motorist - according to other laws. This property of a class society, and no corruption. The courts are simply reproducing the spirit of the "law on public services" - contrary to the letter of the Constitution, which is experienced by many as an injustice.

Is this really unfair?

- Not. In a class society is not. A class society arises from the desire to provide people with resources, based on the principles of distributive social justice. That is, everyone deserves something. But for this we need to define the concept of "everyone". And here class concepts are included. A person is "everyone" insofar as he belongs to a certain class. To determine the place within the class, there is a system of ranks and titles. There is a real state adviser of the first class, there is a colonel general. They, of course, according to distributive justice, are entitled to more than an ordinary official.

- Is it possible in a society to combine classes, belonging to several at once?

- Teaching and research work is allowed to officials. An active official may be a pensioner. We have many officials at the HSE who, while teaching at the university, are also state employees.

- The number of class differentiations within a class society increases the stability of society and the state as a whole, or not?

- I do not know. Estates are needed in order to ensure distributive justice. The appearance of new groups means that an apparatus must be formed that "allocates" this group and ensures the flow of resources to it. That is, fragmentation should give rise to the growth of the apparatus and the differentiation of structures. For example, imagine that the priests have achieved their goal: serving God as a public service, which the president is talking about. This means that appropriate divisions will appear in all state structures, which will be engaged in servicing the service of God.

- That is, interaction with the new structure ...

- Yes. Financial divisions, economic divisions, administrative, political.

What can a quantitative overload of the state system lead to? The number of officials in the Russian Federation is now much greater than even in the USSR ...

- You see, it is very difficult to compare the Russian Federation with the Soviet Union. Because in the USSR there was a logical and simple structure: workers, peasants, employees. But they hierarchized within themselves. The workers of the defense plant in Moscow are not at all the same as the workers of the state farm in Kyshtym or Kyzyl. A peasant on an elite state farm is not at all like a peasant on an ordinary collective farm. And all of them were in fact employees - they all served the state. In this sense, everyone was officials in the USSR.

- That is, the system “shifted”, changed its color, the groups changed their occupation ...

- Changed. Very interesting things have happened. Since 2002, new estates have been formed, but at the same time, the old Soviet ones have remained. These are state employees, doctors, teachers, cultural workers, employees, pensioners. And now the system is trying to reset them. She wants to abandon the principles of social guarantees in the field of health care, culture and science, written in the Constitution, and bring them to the market.

“Won’t this destroy the entire estate system in its current form in general?

- Destroy, of course, but it's fine from my point of view.

"Great" in what sense? What awaits us? Can a state with a class social system develop?

- Not. It doesn't develop. In such a state there is no historical time. The problem with this system is that it has no future. There is only one real. And what is called politics in Russia is different interpretations of the past as a possible future. According to many of our citizens, "history once got ugly and went the wrong way." For some, this is 1917, for some, the Baptism of Russia, for some, 1937, etc.

What is called politics in Russia is different interpretations of the past as a possible future

- Many Russian publicists and public figures are trying to evaluate past historical periods, previous experience and extrapolate into the future ...

— Politics in Russia is almost always a fundamentalist attempt to reproduce the “good past” in the future. Except, of course, for progressives like Chubais, for whom there is no past at all, but only the future, which is built up from the material at hand only through their efforts.

- With such a structure of society, how were high achievements possible and possible in the future: victories in big wars, the development of science and technology?

- This society works only to neutralize threats. That is, mind you, we now have 35 ministries, departments and services that deal only with the neutralization of threats. These threats are ranked, hierarchized, and resources are allocated to them depending on the significance of the threat. It was exactly the same in the Soviet Union. But there was a great goal - building socialism. And there was an enemy, the main enemy, and, accordingly, all the threats were related to the state of the army. Therefore, all resources were directed to technological development. Thus, the second industrial revolution in Russia and the creation of infrastructure became possible. It was all formed since 1929, during the Great Patriotic War and after the war, and was associated with the presence of the main enemy. And in itself, the development of such a system without threats is impossible.

- That is, the first manned flight into space became possible because we have threats, and we need to give an “interesting” and not always calculated answer to them?

- Asymmetric answer - this is our "technology".

Asymmetric response, challenges and threats - this is Russian "technology"

— This means that despite our current deplorable state of statehood, such breakthroughs are possible in the future.

— Certainly possible. And everyone wants it. Everyone wants to come up with a national idea. And the national idea in our case is the identification of the enemy. Now there is competition in the market for finding enemies.

Politics in Russia is almost always a fundamentalist attempt to reproduce the “good past” in the future

“And then the real threat will be found?”

- And they are not real. They are all invented. True, some of them become real.

— But, for example, fascist Germany in the middle of the last century… It became a real threat, in any case…

- As a result of the joint policy of Hitler and Stalin, joint mistakes. After all, how much we have invested in the rearmament of Germany, the training of personnel ...

- But it was then connected with politics ...

- Correctly. So the main threat came from England. So it was necessary to look for an ally to neutralize it. So we found Germany.

- Now, by the way, we are also actively supplying resources to Germany and the European Union ...

- But not in the fight against the main enemy. When you talk to the military, they still think in terms of the main enemy, but politically there is no main enemy. Targets have been reset on attack systems. And that is why it is impossible to consolidate resources. There is a fight going on all the time around this. At one time it was China: Chinese expansion. They began to build something, defensive structures. Then another group won, which says that the threat to us comes from the Arctic.

— I want to ask a question related to your work in the civil service as the head of the Expert Department of the Presidential Administration. With such an understanding of Russian realities, how did you work there?

“He wasn’t there then. I came to work in order to see how it all works.

— Have you formed such a perception in the civil service?

- Not. Later. I've been a field sociologist since I was 70. I knew what was happening at the municipal level. That at the level of supreme power - I did not understand at all.

- In the context of our entire conversation, we see ongoing degradation, especially economic ...

- Not. I don't see degradation. The state is in decline. And at the municipal level, we now have very interesting processes that are difficult to describe. Almost every municipality has its own economy. That is, people in business (sometimes small, sometimes larger) begin to live their own independent lives. And they need the state as a source of resources. All officials from the regional level and below are inventing threats. They write papers stating that everything is bad: unemployment, the environment is bad, and the incidence is high. And that something needs to be done to neutralize these threats. There is no institutionalized filter that filters out invented threats in the state. The information that everything in the country goes badly “upstairs” and, in the end, after appropriate decisions are made, turns into a stream of resources going to neutralize threats.

All officials from the regional level and below are engaged in inventing threats

Interviewed by Mikhail Chernov

Simon Kordonsky

RESOURCE STATE

UDC66.3(2Rus),1 +67.400.5(2Ros) BBK 340.1

To 66 Kordonsky Simon Gdalevich. RESOURCE STATE: collection of articles. M.: REGNUM, 2007.108 p.

This work was supported by an individual research grant (06-010097) from the SU-HSE Science Foundation, 2006.

In the book, which is a series of articles of the last ten years, the author revises the prevailing ideas about the linearity of the development of Russian statehood and that after the collapse of the USSR, capitalism arose and is developing in Russia. He introduces the concept of a resource state and substantiates the thesis that, due to the peculiarities of its structure, periods of weakening and economic degradation and devastation (perestroika, thaw, revolution, civil war - up to disintegration) are replaced by periods of strengthening statehood, accompanied by "restoration of the national economy", - a phenomenon that is not quite adequately interpreted as economic growth. In this regard, the author raises the question of the limits of applicability for the analysis of the structure of the resource state of such concepts as law, democracy, civil society, economics.

ISBN 5-91150-006-X © REGNUM

© S. G. Kordonsky

Simon Kordonsky

RESOURCE STATE

Editor G. Skryabina

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Simon Kordonsky

RESOURCE STATE - FROM REPRESSIONS TO DEPRESSIONS 3

Cyclical nature of Russian history 5

The political economy of socialism and its legacy 9

Resource State 13

National idea as a rationale for the need to mobilize resources 15

Resource depressions and repressions

as a way to “put things in order” in the use of resources 18

Goods and money under the resource organization of the state 23

Types of resources 8 modern resource state 27

Self-management of resources: redistribution and plunder 29

The mythologeme of social stability as a form of legitimization of theft of resources 35

World economy and resource organization of the state 37

Stagnation and depression as phases of public life 39

About politics and political system 44

STATE, CIVIL SOCIETY AND CORRUPTION 47

Civil society as speculation 49

Civil society and its organizations 50

Russian phenomenon - unorganized civil society 52

Civil society institutions 54

Civil Society and Corruption 56

Fighting corruption as fighting civil society 57

The study of corruption as the study of civil society 60

IN REALITY AND REALITY 65

Distributed way of life as a substitute for society 72

Administrative market as a substitute for the state 77

Reforms and life: between "reality" and "actually" 80

1987 -1997: PER ASPERA AD ANUS 83

Still not quite Soviet power 88

Not a market economy at all 91

Reforms, reformers, civil society and other crap 93

Poverty as a commodity on the Russian market for a long time 96

Power media 101

Through thorns in the ass 103

resource state

The cyclical nature of Russian history

Russian history can never become history itself. It has been politically relevant for many years. And indeed, despite the fact that the epochs of change are once again turning into epochs of stagnation, and the state is either disintegrating or gathering again, Saltykov-Shchedrin remains a modern writer, Marquis de Custine's travel notes are read like reports, Chaadaev's letters are politically relevant. The texts of the speeches of some modern publicists could well belong to the fiery revolutionaries of the 20s of the XX century or the reactionaries of the time of Nicholas I.

Generations are changing, and in each of them the senile feeling of the “rut of history” is adjacent to the infantile desire to build another “bright future”. The times of the next “strengthening of statehood” bring with them a thirst for change, which, in turn, is replaced by a thirst for stability (including protection from theft, banditry and the arbitrariness of petty bosses), which occurs during times of state depression: thaws, perestroika, revolutions. There are fundamental works that describe the cycles of our history, but they do not make it clearer what these phenomena are and why there is no such pronounced cyclicality in the histories of other states.1

Citizens in the era of stagnation live with memories - sometimes their own, and more often strangers - about real life: anxious youth and great achievements, exploits on the battle fronts and great construction sites of socialism, the struggle for freedom and against anti-people regimes and other crap. And in the era of depression, they try to live a life other than their own, becoming like the types known to them from always relevant history: imperial aristocrats or politicians, Decembrists or populists, landowners or clergymen, Chekists and White Guards, nobles, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Cadets, dissidents, heroes of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, farmers or peasants. They lose known to them in re-

1 N.S. Rozov. The cyclicity of Russian history as a disease: is recovery possible? : V. I. Pantin, V. V. Lapkin. Philosophy of historical forecasting: Rhythms of history and prospects for world development in the first half of the 21st century. Dubna, 2006; V.V. Ilyin, A.S. Panarin. A.S. Akhiezer. Theoretical political science: Reforms and counter-reforms in Russia. Cycles of the modernization process. M., 1996.

Simon Kordonsky

" the tale of intelligent social scientists old roles, dreaming of returning to the past, which, not without their efforts, sometimes becomes the present.

Outside observers identify Russian phenomena with some stretch. Seeing in our everyday life various differences, such as archetypes of national character, signs of anarchy and democracy, totalitarianism and autocracy, a developed economy and non-commodity management, they build theories that are understandable only to themselves. Observers are confident that they know what was and is "really". Only "real" for everyone.

Russian phenomena are indeed somewhat reminiscent of book prototypes, but they are not identical to them, differing in Russian specifics. Observers see what they expect to see, but what they see turns out to be not canonical, not what it should be. Disappointment sometimes turns out to be so great that quite balanced people behave not quite adequately, probably believing that Russia is to blame for not fitting into their ideas about it. Let me remind you of the statement of a well-known perestroika publicist - a reaction to the success of the Liberal Democratic Party in the parliamentary elections: "Russia, you have gone crazy."

These same observers, especially their reflective part, most often represent the history of the country as a sequence of events in linear time - from the Time of Troubles to autocracy, from autocracy to revolutions, from revolutions to stagnation, from stagnation to perestroika, etc.? Periodic succession of dictatorships-prosperities by crises-perestroika is on the periphery of their attention, and reproductions of the past in the present are noted rather as incidents. Observers are aimed at a bright future, perceiving the repetition of the past as a punishment from God and the result of the fact that the same mercenary politicians are again at the head of the state, which they once were.

Modern Russia, from the point of view of such future-oriented citizens, is an ordinary country that once built socialism, and is now being modernized and becoming like other countries. This, in their opinion, is a country with an already market economy, the degree of state intervention in which is still high. If it is reduced, then everything will be the same as in other countries. Various deviations from the normative picture are explained by the fact that the country's leadership is not very economically competent and allows soviet forms of government. If this guide is learned, then everything will be more than normal, and the rate of economic growth - the main indicator that the apologists of modernization are guided by - will become

Simon Gdalevich Kordonsky(September 7, Gorno-Altaisk, Altai Territory) - Russian scientific and public figure.

He took part in organizing an informal association of scientists who conducted seminars on economic problems at the CEMI of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was an active participant in seminars and working groups on the formation of a strategy for market and liberal reforms in Russia. General Director of the Center for Problems of Civil Society and Private Property since 1993. Head of the Expert Department of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation in 2000-2004. Senior referent of the President of the Russian Federation in 2004-2005. Acting State Councilor of the Russian Federation, 1st class.

S. Kordonsky is one of the creators of the direction called "the theory of the administrative market." He introduced the concept of "fan matrices" into scientific circulation. According to Kordonsky, in Russia "cycles of weakening - strengthening of statehood have replaced the usual economic cycles."

The Western press quotes him as saying:

• "the function of an orphanage in Russia is to prepare marginalized members of society for the career of professional thieves and robbers"
• “People in Russia are resource recipients, not citizens”
• “foreign for Russians symbolizes life in paradise and that Russians do not want to become citizens, but simply live in paradise”

Monographs

• "Markets of power (administrative markets of the USSR and Russia)" (ISBN 5-942-82359-6),
• "Activity Cycles and Ideal Objects" (ISBN 5-921-80004-X),
• "The estate structure of post-Soviet Russia" (ISBN 978-5-939-47025-4),
• "Russia. Local Federation” (ISBN 978-5-973-90192-9) and others.

Notes

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• HSE tenured professors

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