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Politics and Democracy: The Iron Hand! Do We Need It?
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17577 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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7 / 1990 |
4,037 Words |
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An Interview With Igor Kliamkin and Andranik Migranian
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Literaturnaya Gazeta: Judging by your public statements and articles in the press, you support the idea that more power should be concentrated in the hands of the country's leader at this time of radical reform. Does it mean that you advocate an authoritarian regime?
Migranian: If I acknowledge the need to build up the leader's power during the transition from totalitarianism to democracy, that doesn't mean I like authoritarian rule. And yet I'm sure that a transition to democracy must go through such a stage….
Kliamkin: In general, we talk a lot about democracy today, but we say nothing of how actually to effect a transition to democracy. We talk of the problems of a market economy but say nothing of how to go over from a non-commodity economy to a market economy, from a unidimensional society, so to speak, it a multidimensional one. Yet the stage of transition is the crux of the matter.
Such a transition can be brought about only across the board. No one seems to deny that, but a complex transition is seen very abstractly: we've got one system, Stalin's model of socialism, which is characterized by a command style of economic management, a window-dressing democracy, and "monolithic unity" in ideology. Now this system must be replaced by another, in which economic relations based on financial and operational autonomy of enterprises would be matched by pluralism in politics, representing different interests democratically, and pluralism in culture, too. Well, unfortunately this mode of transition is nothing but a vague abstraction.
And the man in the street sees the problem of transition in approximately the same way. I cannot say that the general public has a clear picture of a democratic alternative. They only know that they reject what we have now. The typical idea is: "Life is good in the West, so let's do like they do in the West." But the Western democracies took centuries to evolve….
Migranian: France, for example, needed two centuries and a series of revolutions, dictatorships, mob rule, monarchies and republics. It took nearly two hundred years to prepare the class structure and the national character for democracy and develop the necessary political culture.
Kliamkin: At the first Congress of People's Deputies, the "democratic minority" demanded full democracy and right away. Seen in retrospect, that's understandable. The Deputies are, of course, tied to their voters, they must follow the logic of the spontaneous popular movement which, rejecting totalitarianism, is rushing off in the opposite direction, towards democracy. But democracy is perceived as a kind of photographic negative of totalitarianism. Hegel called this metaphysical negation.
Recent events show that large sections of our society have out grown their former structures, but haven't grown into anything fundamentally new. Not a single new structure capable of replacing the old one has taken proper shape as yet. And here I see the danger of the present situation, which I think is on the brink of crisis.
Lit. Gaz.: Would it be correct to say that the Congress of People's Deputies as a phenomenon is in itself proof that a new structure
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