resource state. Simon Kordonsky: the national idea in Russia is the identification of the enemy. - Actually, this is unfair.

I have had many different lives. I also worked in the presidential administration - from 2000 to 2005, first as the head of the expert department, then as a senior assistant to the president. I don’t want to talk about this included observation of the authorities yet, but it was very difficult. Although without this experience, I would hardly have been able to write the “Class Structure of Post-Soviet Russia”.

To speak not from abstract ideas, but “from life”, from social reality, from experience, including personal experience, is style. Simon Kordonsky, as if on purpose, went through all the layers of this very “social reality”, now and then resting on its paradoxes and oddities. He was expelled from Tomsk University several times, he wandered around Soviet Siberia without a residence permit and work, wrote dissertations to order and repaired apartments. They say that Yegor Ligachev himself (in the 80s, a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, who was in charge of ideology. - “RR”) ordered “not to take this Jew to work.” Kordonsky joined Tatyana Zaslavskaya, the strongest school of field sociology in the USSR, studied both alcoholism in the countryside and the party structure in the localities, lectured on “how life works,” even to KGB officers.

Thanks to sociological seminars for perestroika, he was already well acquainted with the circle of future reformers - Chubais, Gaidar, Aven and others, he saw how the transition to capitalism was being prepared, how "due to the betrayal of a number of top party leaders" the GKChP suddenly became a farce, and not Chinese or the Chilean version.

Kordonsky took part in the hasty drafting of the first liberal laws, but refused to join Gaidar's government. But then for five years he ended up in the administration of President Putin, from where, however, he managed to leave of his own free will. With a bunch of observations and questions.

In 2002, the law “On the system of public service of the Russian Federation” appeared, he says. - Then the law "About the state civil service". According to the law - and contrary to the Constitution - categories of people with a special status were created. Something swirled in my head: I did not understand why this was. I asked questions to serious people, collected seminars, scientists - to no avail. Retelling of Western theories. And then it came together in my head: these laws on the civil service system are the creation of a new social structure.

About the Kremlin and estates

Estates are groups created by the state to solve their problems. There is an external threat, which means that there must be people who will neutralize it, the military. There is an internal threat, which means internal troops and the police. There is a space threat - there must be space troops. There is a natural threat - there is the Rospotrebnadzor service. Estates are not professions, there can be people of different professions. Estates exist in any social system. This is preclass stuff. Classes arise in the market in a natural way, and estates are created by the state.

If the class structure is in power, a mechanism for coordinating interests between classes appears. It's called democracy. Parliament appears as its design. Democracy has a very practical function: to harmonize the interests of the rich and the poor. And in the estate system, the mechanism for coordinating interests is the cathedral. The congresses of the CPSU were cathedrals: representatives of all estates met once every four or five years and coordinated their interests. - What's the difference?

The difference is what's interesting. If there is a market, there are classes. Relations between classes need to be regulated. There are laws regulating these relations. The judiciary appears. And in the estate system, all this is superfluous. There is no market, but there is a distribution system. There is some person upstairs, he is called the president, the secretary general or the monarch - it does not matter. He is the supreme arbiter. After all, all the people to whom resources are distributed consider themselves offended. There are two types of complaints in our country: they took a lot and gave little. And all complaints are directed upward, to the supreme arbiter. They write to him and wait for him to decide there. And the arbitrator must bring justice, punish those who take not according to their rank, and give resources to those from whom they took a lot or who were given little. Now the resources are power, finance, raw materials and information. The state concentrates these resources at home and distributes them among the social groups that it has created.

Why are these groups needed?

Orderliness. For the authorities it is very important who you deal with. A person with two convictions comes to you, who holds a position in the executive branch of a subject of the Federation. Who is he? How should the authorities behave with him? The introduction of civil service laws coincided with the expulsion of those convicted from the system of power. Everyone who had a criminal record was expelled. Divided: there is an estate of marginals, limited in rights - that's where the judge belongs. And in power is another class, there should not be judged. There should not be a combination of these statuses.

Social stratification emerged in the 1990s. Teachers, doctors, the military - these were the Soviet estates, deprived of the flow of Soviet resources. And they ended up at the very bottom of the distribution hierarchy. Classes of rich and poor began to form. Class differences between the poor disappeared. Protest movements began - strikes, hunger strikes. It was necessary to put things in order. And what is the order? It is to feed, to provide the deprived with the resources they deserve. To do this, it was necessary to shrink the market - to withdraw resources from the market, so that they could then be distributed in favor of the orphans and the poor. We have been living in this process for the last decade.

The contraction of the market began with the "Khodorkovsky case": the transfer of all resource flows to the budget and their distribution in favor of both the surviving Soviet groups - state employees and pensioners - and new groups. And in order to distribute, you need to know to whom: teachers are entitled to so much, doctors - so much, FSB members - so much. The estate social structure in our state is needed precisely in order to ensure a fair distribution. It didn't exist, it had to be recreated. And the law "On public service" appeared. And subsequent class laws.

And all these classes now run into each other. What are the prosecutor's office and the Investigative Committee butting heads against? Share a resource. The gaming business, for example, was recently divided. Like they shared it. Inter-class wars are going on. The prosecutors with the judges, all lined up against the cops: the cops were protecting the business - and let's move them. And here it is, the Law on Police. Everyone has their own interests in the resource field, everyone needs an increasing flow of resources. And any decrease in the amount of resources creates a shortage, conflicts and a desire for redistribution. This is where the fight against corruption and its victims come in - those who are unfortunate, who were appointed scapegoats when the order in the distribution of resources changed.

But the class system in Russia has not yet fully developed: there is a form, but class self-consciousness has not appeared. After all, there must be class meetings, and class ethics, and class court. The system has not been brought to the end - and the classes have not completely collapsed, and the estates have not been completed.

About money and the market

We don't have any money. We have financial resources. Everywhere it is written that budget money - outside the framework of state investment programs - cannot be invested, they are written off at the end of the year. It's not money. You can't weld on them. To be able to make money on them, you need to take financial resources offshore: when you cross the border, they become money. And then they can be invested. Therefore, financial resources are taken offshore, where they are converted into money, which - already laundered - is invested within the country.

We don't have entrepreneurs either, but there are merchants who take risks in the administrative market in relations with the budget. These are completely different risks than in the market. Entrepreneurs have a risk - that you will go bankrupt if the goods are not bought. And here is the risk - that you will be imprisoned and everything will be taken away if you do not share. Entrepreneurs are not hierarchical, they can only be rich and poor. And merchants have a hierarchy: there are merchants of the first guild - members of the RSPP, there is a second guild - "Business Russia", and there are merchants of the third guild - members of "Opora". This is a purely estate division inherited from imperial traditions. Merchants, unlike entrepreneurs, work with the budget. They compete for government contracts.

All commerce is on a budget. Why does such garbage come with the 94th law - on public procurement? Because everything depends on it. All big business, to one degree or another, serves the state through the budget. There is also a small business, a survival business. But find entrepreneurs in any rural municipal district who do not depend on the district budget. You won't find. Everyone has been rooted out. This is the administrative market: status is converted into money. Power is exchanged for money. You convert status into financial resources, financial resources into money, and money into status again: you buy a place in power. And through the status you get access to the resource.

About corruption

This is a very interesting procedure, which is called corruption, but which is not corruption. The fact is that our estates are not hierarchized according to the law. It is not clear who is more important: law enforcement officers or civil civil servants, for example. And the form of hierarchization is the payment of estate rent. As a result, a hierarchy is built up: which estates pay which and how they take it. Until recently, prosecutors had a very high status, everyone paid them. And now they've been dropped. Why is a traffic cop paid? Not because the driver violated something there. But because, by paying cash to a traffic cop, you demonstrate the subordinate position of the class of car owners to the class of people with a striped wand. Without talking, they usually pay.

Now there is a rebellion in relations between drivers and members of the ruling classes, and this is also a phenomenon of class relations: the so-called “blue buckets” are rebelling against those to whom they are forced to pay, and against those who have special class rights to move - numbers and flashing lights.

So why is this corruption not corruption?

Relations in a class society are called corruption. And we have other relations, inter-class. Estate rent is the glue that binds different estates together: they have no other bond except for the mutual exchange of rent. This is not always done informally. For example, there is a licensing procedure. Here the programmer writes the program. He wrote - in order to sell it, he must license it in a company associated with the FSB. The cost of licensing is sometimes higher than the cost of the program itself. This is also a form of collecting estate rent. Procedures for licensing, accreditation, permits, approvals… You still have to pay for it.

Now in what is called corruption, very interesting processes are taking place. Look, in a normal market, the regulator is the bank interest rate, the price of money. And our resource system is regulated by the rollback rate. After all, if you have to pay for money, then you have to pay for resources, that is, part of them is rolled back in favor of the one who distributes the resources. The rollback rate is an analog of bank interest in a resource economy. There will be no rollback - the system will not spin. And the rollback rate is regulated by repressions against those who take it out of rank. Everyone is well aware of this. But the problem is that, unlike the bank interest rate, now these repressions do not have a “single emission center”. Therefore, the rollback rate is growing, and the economy is stagnating. The rule of the estate system - take it by rank. And now a lot of people do not take it according to their rank.

Is it necessary to fight such corruption?

It is very dangerous! This is not corruption, this is a form of communication of the social system. Extremely dangerous! Do you remember the Uzbek case of 86–87? They began, as now, to fight corruption - since then there has been a war there: the Gdlyany-Ivanovs have broken the social structure, a mess has begun, which continues to this day.

About estates

What is the door in your apartment? Metallic? Are the castles good? Here you lock the door and find yourself in a closed space - it is yours, personal. The estate is not a place, it is a social space, closed, fenced. All these dachas are the construction of estates. You will notice how they are built. Fence first. Then the house as a self-sustaining system: an autonomous generator, autonomous sewerage, water from its own well. Our country is a system of nested estates. What is the head of the regional administration? This is a landowner, planted by the supreme power, as under the king. Its function is to ensure that subjects vote correctly.

But it's not his property.

So in tsarist times it was not his. And this is not an imperial landowner, but a post-Soviet one. The imperial landowner was directly dependent on the emperor. And now we have a system of nested estates: the president appoints the governor, the governor actually appoints the heads of municipalities, who in turn appoint their vassals. And each was-sal acts as a landowner in relation to a lower vassal.

About power

Is the system you describe stable?

As long as there is a flow of distributed resources. The flow decreases - shortage begins. It holds the system together up to a certain limit, but when the limit is passed, it breaks down. This is how the Soviet Union collapsed. If prices had been released two years earlier, the USSR would probably have survived - there were enough resources, but the pricing system was non-equilibrium: meat on the market cost eight rubles, and in the store - two rubles. If they had made eight rubles, there would have been no shortage of meat. Once a resource is brought to market, a market price and equilibrium are established. In the USSR, they kept to the last, so Gaidar had to let go of prices. Although all the documents were prepared by the Central Committee in 1989.

What are we in short supply now?

And where did she go?

Dissolved. Find a person who will solve any problem. He's not around. They will rip it off like sticky, but they will not solve the problem. They'll put it up too. There is a market for imitation of power.

And who are they listening to?

But no one. Based on their own interests. You see, there is “in reality” and there is “in fact”. In reality, all places in power are occupied, but in reality there is no power. Everyone is looking for someone to give. It is not clear who to contact to solve the problem. Everyone asks: who has the power now? And she is not. Deficit.

Is it possible to “release the price of power”?

It means free elections. And there is no one to participate in the elections, because there are no people.

This is usually done by political parties.

We don't have political parties. There are class imitations. In Russia, the free market for power is the collapse of the state. Where will Chechnya go, what do you think? Or the Far East regions?

Was there a power deficit in the Soviet Union?

As long as the CPSU existed, there seemed to be no shortage of power: everyone could get their piece of power as a result of bargaining.

Why is it not so now?

CPSU is not. They were expelled from United Russia - so what? And under the CPSU, exclusion from the party is social death. In the USSR, it was clear how to make a career: he joined the Komsomol, then the army, came from the army as a member of the party, entered the university, got into the party committee of the university, from there to the district committee, from there to economic work. And from there, how lucky: either to the party hierarchy, or to the control one - to the prosecutor's office, the committee of people's control. And on this ladder it was possible to climb to the very top. And now there are no such elevators. People are locked in the bottom. There are corporate structures like Rosneft or St. Petersburg, but there is no dynamics in them. Have you noticed how many years people have been in power? There is no inter-class elevator. And how the deputies are now toiling! Someone was lucky - he went to the Federation Council. Someone went down to the regional level. And where are the rest? There is no interclass mobility. People are locked in their cages.

And when will the power deficit disappear?

Maybe he will disappear with the presidential elections. But if Putin does not go for repression, he will not make up for the power deficit. He will need to demonstrate power. And this can only be repressive in relation to their own circle. Otherwise, they will not believe him. Putin has a problem: the team he formed has collapsed, people have their own businesses. And all the rest look into their pockets, and Putin is just a resource for them. And it seems to me that now he simply has no one to rely on. Remember, a few years ago, the owner of the metallurgical plant did not come to Putin for some meeting on metallurgy. Putin says: “Oh, he got sick? Send doctors to him." And doctors with epaulettes went to him. The man got out. It was power, it was a rollback rate regulated by repressions.

And where does power come from?

She appears on her own. Such is the metaphysical substance. Like material, but like and not material. Passed from hand to hand. And no - there is nothing to transfer. Here, Putin formally transferred power to Medvedev, but it is not there: in fact, he did not transfer anything, a dummy. And where to get - it is not clear. Power is the consolidation of conflicting aspirations, and now there is no field for consolidation. All closed in the estates and guard them, so that, God forbid, not to lose.

About rallies

This is an ordinary Russian rebellion, only in an unusual environment. Remember, we have state employees, pensioners protested against the monetization of benefits? People were offended by the fact that a status resource was being taken away from them, converting it into rubles. Today's protesters have an instinctive reaction: people are offended that they are not respected. They thought they had an electoral resource, but they, as it seems to them, have been shown a fig. And the government is now thinking how to compensate for this violation of social justice.

So the injustice is allowed. Here the government is trying to restore justice. But he doesn't know how.

But why now?

So there is a lack of power. Well, what "tandem"? There cannot be two supreme resource managers in one resource state. Due to the lack of power, controllability is lost. And in order to restore controllability, the authorities are now forced to let go of the reins. The resource of information was monopolized, now it is being demonopolized.

There was panic. It took ten years for United Russia to be created as a political mechanism. No matter how bad he was, he ensured the legislative process, stupid laws were adopted, but somehow everything was organized. And now, as a result of competition in power and the deficit that accompanies competition, the political mechanism has broken down. United Russia does not have a constitutional majority, and many regional legislative assemblies do not even have a simple majority. And now it will be necessary to pass a bunch of laws. And they really wanted to avoid this situation.

Maybe the result will be politics?

And there are no groups whose interests could be represented. Here are those who came to the square? They have nothing in common except resentment. A political party is an institution of a class society. The parties represent the interests of the rich and the poor. And we do not have rich and poor, we have a completely different social structure. And the representation is carried out in a completely different way. This Duma is entrusted with parliamentary functions, which in principle it cannot perform. It is not yet a class council, but it is not a parliament either.

But I do not think that this turbulence is critical. The economy is normal, oil prices are high. There is something to plug the holes. There is absolute calmness in the regions. Now the government will be forced to negotiate, because it is necessary to ensure turnout for the presidential elections.

About the intelligentsia

In the Russian world that has now arisen, there is logic, but there is no place for the intelligentsia. Have you noticed how furious all our intellectuals are? They are redundant in this system. The mass mood to leave is a symptom of the fact that neither journalists, nor writers, nor filmmakers are needed. Everything can be imported. Who is reading you? The same as you. And in the Union, everyone read the Literary Gazette. And everyone knew the Taganka Theater. And everyone watched The Irony of Fate. And now this “space of intelligence” does not exist.

The intelligentsia are representatives of all classes who use their professional knowledge to reflect on the situation and fix injustice. And the intelligentsia addresses this reflection of its own to the authorities, drawing its attention to those who are deprived in the distribution of resources. This triad “the people - the authorities - the intelligentsia” is a diagnostic sign of a class society: the authorities take care of the people, the people are grateful to the authorities for their care, and the intelligentsia is rooting for the people and draws the attention of the authorities to their troubles.

Now, it seems to me, the triad is being destroyed. First of all, because the intelligentsia does not want and cannot recognize the class structure and develop appropriate class ideologies. As a result, the concept of social time, which integrates estates into the integrity of the social structure, is destroyed. We as a state now have no foreseeable future, only a reproduction of the present. The new estates have dismantled resources and assume that this will continue forever. And eternity does not imply reflection.

The intelligentsia exists only in a triad with the authorities and the people. If there is no power, then there is no intelligentsia, no people. The people are an intellectual construct. The intelligentsia exists because it is rooting for the people, because the authorities offend them. And in the absence of power, the place of the intelligentsia disappears and the people break up into individual real people with their own problems.

True, our government is very intelligent: powerful people perceive the country as an object for transformation, and not as a real organism. A continuous triumph of the abstract scheme over life.

About the role of personality in history

What? The role of personality in history? There is no such role. Not alone, so others. A situation arises - a person appears. The environment highlights it, pushes it out. Little depends on individual people. Especially in our system. Only another Pugachev may appear.

And now it might show up?

Now there is no basis for Pugachevism. Nevertheless, in places, all with some kind of streams. Except for the intelligentsia. In the country, in general, everything is normal - a natural process is underway: no matter what the authorities do, real owners and a market corresponding to them are formed below. There is a solvable problem of legalization of this market. And then, quite possibly, we will be able to move to a more or less normal economy without major upheavals. The market is not created, it is formed. And now, under this umbrella - oil, gas - a real economy is being formed, which is different in different regions. It should be so, it is a natural process.

Here people on Bolotnaya say: let's do it "as it is." But if big upheavals begin, it is quite possible that this natural process will once again stop. But in fact, “how is it” can only happen if you do nothing. Like Primakov. It seems that he did nothing, and the consequences of the default were removed very quickly. How? And hell knows. The system itself is lined up.

And how will things develop if nothing is done?

We will exist. Well, the instructions of the President and the Prime Minister are not carried out, well, no one listens to them, they write something at the top, and below everything happens by itself - and God forbid that it be so. Only by itself. If you do not interfere, everything will settle down by itself.

Do your students go to rallies?

I don't know of anyone who would go.

Are they intelligentsia?

They are trying to be her. I have a final lecture on the intelligentsia in my third year. The usual question: do you consider yourself an intellectual? I say yes, of course. The usual complaint at the end of the course is about me and me: I broke the picture of the world. They ask: what do we do with this knowledge now?

And what do you answer?

I say: these are your problems.

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

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.

Although the material is from 2012, it is readable - as if it were written yesterday.

I have had many different lives. I also worked in the presidential administration - from 2000 to 2005, first as the head of the expert department, then as a senior assistant to the president. I don’t want to talk about this included observation of the authorities yet, but it was very difficult. Although without this experience, I would hardly have been able to write the “Class Structure of Post-Soviet Russia”.

To speak not from abstract ideas, but “from life”, from social reality, from experience, including personal experience, is style. Simon Kordonsky, as if on purpose, went through all the layers of this very “social reality”, now and then resting on its paradoxes and oddities. He was expelled from Tomsk University several times, he wandered around Soviet Siberia without a residence permit and work, wrote dissertations to order and repaired apartments. They say that Yegor Ligachev himself (in the 80s, a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, who was in charge of ideology. - “RR”) ordered “not to take this Jew to work.” Kordonsky joined Tatyana Zaslavskaya, the strongest school of field sociology in the USSR, studied both alcoholism in the countryside and the party structure in the localities, lectured on “how life works,” even to KGB officers.
Thanks to sociological seminars for perestroika, he was already well acquainted with the circle of future reformers - Chubais, Gaidar, Aven and others, he saw how the transition to capitalism was being prepared, how "due to the betrayal of a number of top party leaders" the GKChP suddenly became a farce, and not Chinese or the Chilean version.
Kordonsky took part in the hasty drafting of the first liberal laws, but refused to join Gaidar's government. But then for five years he ended up in the administration of President Putin, from where, however, he managed to leave of his own free will. With a bunch of observations and questions.
- In 2002, the law "On the system of civil service of the Russian Federation" appeared, - he says. - Then the law "About the state civil service". According to the law - and contrary to the Constitution - categories of people with a special status were created. Something swirled in my head: I did not understand why this was. I asked questions to serious people, collected seminars, scientists - to no avail. Retelling of Western theories. And then it came together in my head: these laws on the civil service system are the creation of a new social structure.

About the Kremlin and estates

- Estates are groups created by the state to solve their problems. There is an external threat, which means that there must be people who will neutralize it, the military. There is an internal threat, which means internal troops and the police. There is a space threat - there must be space troops. There is a natural threat - there is the Rospotrebnadzor service. Estates are not professions, there can be people of different professions. Estates exist in any social system. This is preclass stuff. Classes arise in the market in a natural way, and estates are created by the state.
If the class structure is in power, a mechanism for coordinating interests between classes appears. It's called democracy. Parliament appears as its design. Democracy has a very practical function: to harmonize the interests of the rich and the poor. And in the estate system, the mechanism for coordinating interests is the cathedral. The congresses of the CPSU were cathedrals: representatives of all estates met once every four or five years and coordinated their interests.

- What's the difference?

- What's the difference? If there is a market, there are classes. Relations between classes need to be regulated. There are laws regulating these relations. The judiciary appears. And in the estate system, all this is superfluous. There is no market, but there is a distribution system. There is some person upstairs, he is called the president, the secretary general or the monarch - it does not matter. He is the supreme arbiter. After all, all the people to whom resources are distributed consider themselves offended. There are two types of complaints in our country: they took a lot and gave little. And all complaints are directed upward, to the supreme arbitrator. They write to him and wait for him to decide there. And the arbitrator must bring justice, punish those who take not according to their rank, and give resources to those from whom they took a lot or who were given little. Now the resources are power, finance, raw materials and information. The state concentrates these resources at home and distributes them among the social groups that it has created.

Why are these groups needed?

- Orderliness. For the authorities it is very important who you deal with. A person with two convictions comes to you, who holds a position in the executive branch of a subject of the Federation. Who is he? How should the authorities behave with him? The introduction of civil service laws coincided with the expulsion of those convicted from the system of power. Everyone who had a criminal record was expelled. Divided: there is an estate of marginals, limited in rights - that's where the judge belongs. And in power is another class, there should not be judged. There should not be a combination of these statuses.
Social stratification emerged in the 1990s. Teachers, doctors, the military - these were the Soviet estates, deprived of the flow of Soviet resources. And they ended up at the very bottom of the distribution hierarchy. Classes of rich and poor began to form. Class differences between the poor disappeared. Protest movements began - strikes, hunger strikes. It was necessary to put things in order. And what is the order? It is to feed, to provide the deprived with the resources they deserve. To do this, it was necessary to shrink the market - to withdraw resources from the market, so that they could then be distributed in favor of the orphans and the poor. We have been living in this process for the last decade.
The contraction of the market began with the "Khodorkovsky case": the transfer of all resource flows to the budget and their distribution in favor of both the surviving Soviet groups - state employees and pensioners - and new groups. And in order to distribute, you need to know to whom: teachers are entitled to so much, doctors - so much, FSB members - so much. The estate social structure in our state is needed precisely in order to ensure a fair distribution. It didn't exist, it had to be recreated. And the law "On public service" appeared. And subsequent class laws.
And all these classes now run into each other. What are the prosecutor's office and the Investigative Committee butting heads against? Share a resource. The gaming business, for example, was recently divided. Like they shared it. Inter-class wars are going on. The prosecutors with the judges, all lined up against the cops: the cops were protecting the business - and let's move them. And here it is, the Law on Police. Everyone has their own interests in the resource field, everyone needs an increasing flow of resources. And any decrease in the amount of resources creates a shortage, conflicts and a desire for redistribution. This is where the fight against corruption and its victims come in - those who are unfortunate, who were appointed scapegoats when the order in the distribution of resources changed.
But the class system in Russia has not yet fully developed: there is a form, but class self-consciousness has not appeared. After all, there must be class meetings, and class ethics, and class court. The system has not been brought to the end - and the classes have not completely collapsed, and the estates have not been completed.

About money and the market

- We don't have any money. We have financial resources. Everywhere it is written that budget money - outside the framework of state investment programs - cannot be invested, they are written off at the end of the year. It's not money. You can't weld on them. To be able to make money on them, you need to take financial resources offshore: when you cross the border, they become money. And then they can be invested. Therefore, financial resources are taken offshore, where they are converted into money, which - already laundered - is invested within the country.
We don't have entrepreneurs either, but there are merchants who take risks in the administrative market in relations with the budget. These are completely different risks than in the market. Entrepreneurs have a risk - that you will go bankrupt if the goods are not bought. And here is the risk - that you will be imprisoned and everything will be taken away if you do not share. Entrepreneurs are not hierarchical, they can only be rich and poor. And merchants have a hierarchy: there are merchants of the first guild - members of the RSPP, there is a second guild - "Business Russia", and there are merchants of the third guild - members of "Opora". This is a purely estate division inherited from imperial traditions. Merchants, unlike entrepreneurs, work with the budget. They compete for government contracts.
All commerce is on a budget. Why does such garbage come with the 94th law - on public procurement? Because everything depends on it. All big business, to one degree or another, serves the state through the budget. There is also a small business, a survival business. But find entrepreneurs in any rural municipal district who do not depend on the district budget. You won't find. Everyone has been rooted out. This is the administrative market: status is converted into money. Power is exchanged for money. You convert status into financial resources, financial resources into money, and money into status again: you buy a place in power. And through the status you get access to the resource.

About corruption

- This is a very interesting procedure, which is called corruption, but which is not corruption. The fact is that our estates are not hierarchized according to the law. It is not clear who is more important: law enforcement officers or civil civil servants, for example. And the form of hierarchization is the payment of estate rent. As a result, a hierarchy is built up: which estates pay which and how they take it. Until recently, prosecutors had a very high status, everyone paid them. And now they've been dropped. Why is a traffic cop paid? Not because the driver violated something there. But because, by paying cash to a traffic cop, you demonstrate the subordinate position of the class of car owners to the class of people with a striped wand. Without talking, they usually pay.

Now there is a rebellion in relations between drivers and members of the ruling classes, and this is also a phenomenon of class relations: the so-called “blue buckets” are rebelling against those to whom they are forced to pay, and against those who have special class rights to move - numbers and flashing lights.

- So why is this corruption not corruption?

- Relations in a class society are called corruption. And we have other relations, inter-class. Estate rent is the glue that binds different estates together: they have no other bond except for the mutual exchange of rent. This is not always done informally. For example, there is a licensing procedure. Here the programmer writes the program. He wrote - in order to sell it, he must license it in a company associated with the FSB. The cost of licensing is sometimes higher than the cost of the program itself. This is also a form of collecting estate rent. Procedures for licensing, accreditation, permits, approvals… You still have to pay for it.
Now in what is called corruption, very interesting processes are taking place. Look, in a normal market, the regulator is the bank interest rate, the price of money. And our resource system is regulated by the rollback rate. After all, if you have to pay for money, then you have to pay for resources, that is, part of them is rolled back in favor of the one who distributes the resources. The rollback rate is an analog of bank interest in a resource economy. There will be no rollback - the system will not spin. And the rollback rate is regulated by repressions against those who take it out of rank. Everyone is well aware of this. But the problem is that, unlike the bank interest rate, now these repressions do not have a “single emission center”. Therefore, the rollback rate is growing, and the economy is stagnating. The rule of the estate system - take it by rank. And now a lot of people do not take it according to their rank.

- Is it necessary to fight such corruption?

- It is very dangerous! This is not corruption, this is a form of communication of the social system. Extremely dangerous! Do you remember the Uzbek case of 86–87? They began, as now, to fight corruption - since then there has been a war there: the Gdlyany-Ivanovs have broken the social structure, a mess has begun, which continues to this day.

About estates

What door do you have in your apartment? Metallic? Are the castles good? Here you lock the door and find yourself in a closed space - it is yours, personal. The estate is not a place, it is a social space, closed, fenced. All these dachas are the construction of estates. You will notice how they are built. Fence first. Then the house as a self-sustaining system: an autonomous generator, autonomous sewerage, water from its own well. Our country is a system of nested estates. What is the head of the regional administration? This is a landowner, planted by the supreme power, as under the king. Its function is to ensure that subjects vote correctly.

But it's not his property.

- So in tsarist times it was not his. And this is not an imperial landowner, but a post-Soviet one. The imperial landowner was directly dependent on the emperor. And now we have a system of nested estates: the president appoints the governor, the governor actually appoints the heads of municipalities, who in turn appoint their vassals. And each vassal acts as a landowner in relation to the lower vassal.

About power

- Is the system you describe stable?

- As long as there is a flow of distributed resources. The flow decreases - shortage begins. It holds the system together up to a certain limit, but when the limit is passed, it breaks down. This is how the Soviet Union collapsed. If prices had been released two years earlier, the USSR would probably have survived - there were enough resources, but the pricing system was non-equilibrium: meat on the market cost eight rubles, and in the store - two rubles. If they had made eight rubles, there would have been no shortage of meat. Once a resource is brought to market, a market price and equilibrium are established. In the USSR, they kept to the last, so Gaidar had to let go of prices. Although all the documents were prepared by the Central Committee in 1989.

What are we in short supply now?

- Authorities.

- And where did she go?

- Dissolved. Find a person who will solve any problem. He's not around. They will rip it off like sticky, but they will not solve the problem. They'll put it up too. There is a market for imitation of power.

- And who do they listen to?

- But no one. Based on their own interests. You see, there is “in reality” and there is “in fact”. In reality, all places in power are occupied, but in reality there is no power. Everyone is looking for someone to give. It is not clear who to contact to solve the problem. Everyone asks: who has the power now? And she is not. Deficit.

- Is it possible to “release the price of power”?

- It means free elections. And there is no one to participate in the elections, because there are no people.

- Usually political parties do it.

We don't have political parties. There are class imitations. In Russia, the free market for power is the collapse of the state. Where will Chechnya go, what do you think? Or the Far East regions?

- Was there a power deficit in the Soviet Union?

- As long as there was a CPSU, there seemed to be no shortage of power: everyone could get their piece of power as a result of bargaining.

- Why is it not so now?

- No CPSU. They were expelled from United Russia - so what? And under the CPSU, exclusion from the party is social death. In the USSR, it was clear how to make a career: he joined the Komsomol, then the army, came from the army as a member of the party, entered the university, got into the party committee of the university, from there to the district committee, from there to economic work. And from there, how lucky: either to the party hierarchy, or to the control one - to the prosecutor's office, the committee of people's control. And on this ladder it was possible to climb to the very top. And now there are no such elevators. People are locked in the bottom. There are corporate structures like Rosneft or St. Petersburg, but there is no dynamics in them. Have you noticed how many years people have been in power? There is no inter-class elevator. And how the deputies are now toiling! Someone was lucky - he went to the Federation Council. Someone went down to the regional level. And where are the rest? There is no interclass mobility. People are locked in their cages.

- And when will the power deficit disappear?

- Maybe he will disappear with the presidential elections. But if Putin does not go for repression, he will not make up for the power deficit. He will need to demonstrate power. And this can only be repressive in relation to their own circle. Otherwise, they will not believe him. Putin has a problem: the team he formed has collapsed, people have their own businesses. And all the rest look into their pockets, and Putin is just a resource for them. And it seems to me that now he simply has no one to rely on. Remember, a few years ago, the owner of the metallurgical plant did not come to Putin for some meeting on metallurgy. Putin says: “Oh, he got sick? Send doctors to him." And doctors with epaulettes went to him. The man got out. It was power, it was a rollback rate regulated by repressions.

- Where does power come from?

- She appears on her own. Such is the metaphysical substance. Like material, but like and not material. Passed from hand to hand. And no - there is nothing to transfer. Here, Putin formally transferred power to Medvedev, but it is not there: in fact, he did not transfer anything, a dummy. And where to get - it is not clear. Power is the consolidation of conflicting aspirations, and now there is no field for consolidation. All closed in the estates and guard them, so that, God forbid, not to lose.

About rallies

- This is an ordinary Russian rebellion, only in an unusual environment. Remember, we have state employees, pensioners protested against the monetization of benefits? People were offended by the fact that a status resource was being taken away from them, converting it into rubles. Today's protesters have an instinctive reaction: people are offended that they are not respected. They thought they had an electoral resource, but they, as it seems to them, have been shown a fig. And the government is now thinking how to compensate for this violation of social justice.

- Why?

So the injustice is allowed. Here the government is trying to restore justice. But he doesn't know how.

- But why now?

So there is a lack of power. Well, what "tandem"? There cannot be two supreme resource managers in one resource state. Due to the lack of power, controllability is lost. And in order to restore controllability, the authorities are now forced to let go of the reins. The resource of information was monopolized, now it is being demonopolized.

Why were the votes faked?

- There was panic. It took ten years for United Russia to be created as a political mechanism. No matter how bad he was, he ensured the legislative process, stupid laws were adopted, but somehow everything was organized. And now, as a result of competition in power and the deficit that accompanies competition, the political mechanism has broken down. United Russia does not have a constitutional majority, and many regional legislative assemblies do not even have a simple majority. And now it will be necessary to pass a bunch of laws. And they really wanted to avoid this situation.

- Maybe the result will be politics?

- And there are no groups whose interests could be represented. Here are those who came to the square? They have nothing in common except resentment. A political party is an institution of a class society. The parties represent the interests of the rich and the poor. And we do not have rich and poor, we have a completely different social structure. And the representation is carried out in a completely different way. This Duma is entrusted with parliamentary functions, which in principle it cannot perform. It is not yet a class council, but it is not a parliament either.
But I do not think that this turbulence is critical. The economy is normal, oil prices are high. There is something to plug the holes. There is absolute calmness in the regions. Now the government will be forced to negotiate, because it is necessary to ensure turnout for the presidential elections.

About the intelligentsia

- In the Russian world that has now arisen, there is logic, but there is no place for the intelligentsia. Have you noticed how furious all our intellectuals are? They are redundant in this system. The mass mood to leave is a symptom of the fact that neither journalists, nor writers, nor filmmakers are needed. Everything can be imported. Who is reading you? The same as you. And in the Union, everyone read the Literary Gazette. And everyone knew the Taganka Theater. And everyone watched The Irony of Fate. And now this “space of intelligence” does not exist.
The intelligentsia are representatives of all classes who use their professional knowledge to reflect on the situation and fix injustice. And the intelligentsia addresses this reflection of its own to the authorities, drawing its attention to those who are deprived in the distribution of resources. This triad “the people - the authorities - the intelligentsia” is a diagnostic sign of a class society: the authorities take care of the people, the people are grateful to the authorities for their care, and the intelligentsia is rooting for the people and draws the attention of the authorities to their troubles.
Now, it seems to me, the triad is being destroyed. First of all, because the intelligentsia does not want and cannot recognize the class structure and develop appropriate class ideologies. As a result, the concept of social time, which integrates estates into the integrity of the social structure, is destroyed. We as a state now have no foreseeable future, only a reproduction of the present. The new estates have dismantled resources and assume that this will continue forever. And eternity does not imply reflection.
The intelligentsia exists only in a triad with the authorities and the people. If there is no power, then there is no intelligentsia, no people. The people are an intellectual construct. The intelligentsia exists because it is rooting for the people, because the authorities offend them. And in the absence of power, the place of the intelligentsia disappears and the people break up into individual real people with their own problems.
True, our government is very intelligent: powerful people perceive the country as an object for transformation, and not as a real organism. A continuous triumph of the abstract scheme over life.

About the role of personality in history
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- What? The role of personality in history? There is no such role. Not alone, so others. A situation arises - a person appears. The environment highlights it, pushes it out. Little depends on individual people. Especially in our system. Only another Pugachev may appear.

- And now it can appear?

- Now there is no basis for Pugachevism. Nevertheless, in places, all with some kind of streams. Except for the intelligentsia. In the country, in general, everything is normal - a natural process is underway: no matter what the authorities do, real owners and a market corresponding to them are formed below. There is a solvable problem of legalization of this market. And then, quite possibly, we will be able to move to a more or less normal economy without major upheavals. The market is not created, it is formed. And now, under this umbrella - oil, gas - a real economy is being formed, which is different in different regions. It should be so, it is a natural process.
Here people on Bolotnaya say: let's do it "as it is." But if big upheavals begin, it is quite possible that this natural process will once again stop. But in fact, “how is it” can only happen if you do nothing. Like Primakov. It seems that he did nothing, and the consequences of the default were removed very quickly. How? And hell knows. The system itself is lined up.

- And how will everything develop if nothing is done?

- We will exist. Well, the instructions of the President and the Prime Minister are not carried out, well, no one listens to them, they write something at the top, and below everything happens by itself - and God forbid that it be so. Only by itself. If you do not interfere, everything will settle down by itself.

- Do your students go to meetings?

I don't know of anyone who would go.

- Are they intellectuals?

- Trying to be her. I have a final lecture on the intelligentsia in my third year. The usual question: do you consider yourself an intellectual? I say yes, of course. The usual complaint at the end of the course is about me and me: I broke the picture of the world. They ask: what do we do with this knowledge now?

- And what do you answer?

- I say: these are your problems.

Russian history can never become history proper. 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.

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 play the old roles known to them in the retelling of intelligent social scientists, 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."

The 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 the same as in modern China. And Russia will look even more like the US.

Reformist speculation is an essential component of the prosperity-depression cycles. The Russian worldview is not self-sufficient and for hundreds of years it was built mostly on cross-country comparisons. The slogan "catch up and overtake" in different versions determined and continues to determine the actions of the authorities and the thinking of the elite. Reformers in different historical times set the task of making Russia like Holland, Germany, Sweden, France, Portugal, Argentina, Poland, Chile, etc. On this path, they were pursued and pursued by catastrophic failures, as a result of which the existence of citizens remains survival in cataclysms.

Peter's reforms, the liberation of the peasants, collectivization, industrialization, privatization, nationalization and monetization of benefits. The loser complex haunts progress-conscious observers. They want all the best and brightest: a strong and respected state, true democracy, civil society, market economy. And as a result of the implementation of their recommendations by the authorities, the result is - most often - worldwide distrust, coupled with a well-founded fear of the Russian bear, helpless autocracy, Soviet power and civil war, the fight against terrorism and sovereign democracy, an anecdotal political system, enemies of the people and harmful civil society organizations, widespread theft and corruption. The blame for this, according to observers, always turns out to be the authorities, who have not implemented their brilliant projects and concepts in the right way.

Russia is unique, like any other country. Its uniqueness, in my opinion, lies in the fact that almost any business that its citizens start, based on the best intentions, turns into its opposite. As they say in the people accustomed to this, everything goes through the ass. Or, in the words of a well-known strong business executive, politician and diplomat: "We thought it was better, it turned out as always."

Why? I tried to indirectly answer this question by proposing hypertrophied administrative-market mechanisms as Russian specifics. But in the synchronous theory of the administrative market, it is impossible to explain why the titanic efforts of the authorities to strengthen the state ultimately lead to some form of totalitarianism, and not lesser efforts to democratize the weakening of the state, sometimes its collapse. An attempt to explain, based on the ethnic determinants of the socio-economic structure of Russia and its history, was made by O. Bessonova. There are other ways and attempts at explanations, but for the most part they are variants of "conspiracy theory" that are not interesting.

The gap between what is observed and how it is explained is striking. The phenomena of our life have little in common with what should be, based on generally accepted theoretical schemes. This is largely why the argumentation in the usual intellectual discourse is built as a contrast between what is (terrifying, wrong) and what should be according to the theory professed by the debater. But at the same time, even the simplest ideologically and politically unaccented descriptions of domestic realities are still rare. Moreover, substantive knowledge of what is happening in the country evokes reactions like “this cannot be, because it should not be” and “there is no need to know this, because it will disappear in the course of reforms.” Instead of research, the thoughtless application of imported theories is replicated, suggesting, in exact accordance with progressive stereotypes, that Russia is the same country as those in which the methods were created.