Argumenti I Fakti: Virtual nationalists

Argumenti I Fakti: Virtual nationalists

Published: 13 January, 2011, 04:06

No one decided to take the lead in “the national revolution”. The ultra-right wing protest, which was scheduled to take place last Tuesday on the Manezh Square failed miserably. The online mythical December 11 Movement failed to materialize. No one showed up to support “the Russian idea”.   

However, violent clashes, similar to those that happened a month earlier, could not have been repeated, among other reasons, due to the fact that by the scheduled start time of 07:00 p.m. the Square was blocked by Moscow’s OMON forces. A total of more than 2,000 law enforces were involved. Access to Red Square and Aleksandrovsky Garden was also blocked. Moreover, those who appeared to be suspicious to the police were arrested and escorted to police vans.   

As was later discovered, the detainees did not have any connection to the ultra-right wing supporters. They turned out to be ordinary passersbys, though some, who are at least somehow related to the nationalists, were also arrested. These people, however, are not associated with the real, but the “indoor” nationalists. We are referring to the leader of the Russian Image organization, Aleksey Mikhailov, head of Slavic Power, Dmitry Demushkin, and member of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration’s National Council, Vladimir Tor. Other nationalists were not observed at the Square, thus the blockade was removed by 09:00 p.m. and the city returned to its normal life.    

Later, while sitting in a police van, Tor told journalists over the phone that he was arrested at the time while he was peacefully talking with media representatives. The nationalist reported that there are 10 other detainees in the van. “A sea of police, OMON and police cars,” said Tor. “I, personally, came for a walk. According to rumors, Russian people were planning to gather here. Is that prohibited?” asked the detainee. “They said: let’s go. Those who did not listen were apprehended and taken into the bus by force.”

Note that according to the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs’ (GUVD) reports, a total of 10 people had been arrested. This figure was cited today by the head of the Information and Public Relations Department of Moscow GUVD, Viktor Biryukov.   

He failed to report to the press, however, the reason for the arrests.

“I am currently not ready to say under what article the arrests were made. They could bring them to the police units, have a preventative discussion with them, and let them go home,” he said. According to the head of the Information and Public Relations Department, law enforcement agencies will continue to operatively respond to each message about unauthorized protests and apply security measures in places of their anticipated conduct.    

Recall that reports about an allegedly impeding protest surfaced soon after the so-called December 11 Movement had appeared online. As was reported on the web, it was created in memory of the famous December 11 events on Manezh Square, when Russia’s right-wing radical youth, which was outraged by the murder of Spartak fan Yegor Sviridov, held an unauthorized protest against ethnic crime. It resulted in clashes with the police and a series of beatings of persons of non-Slavic appearance.    

The online-raging “Decembrists” promised that, from now on, they will gather on Manezh Square on the 11th of every month to sing Russian traditional songs and demand from authorities to intensify the fight against ethnic crime. Moreover, they promised to arrange “a national revolution”, “destroy the anti-national leadership”, and “expel all migrant workers from the country”.

© Autonomous Nonprofit Organization “TV-Novosti”, 2005 - 2011. All rights reserved.

Nezavisimaya: An innovative strategy for officials’ vacations overseas

Published: 13 January, 2011, 07:10

In 2011, Russian officials may receive a new benefit – a two-year overseas paid vacation with guaranteed job security to study in foreign universities. This original way of spending the public funds is provisioned under the “Strategy for Innovative Development of the RF until 2020”, drafted by the Ministry of Economic Development. No specific benefits for the economy or the society from the officials’ overseas travels have been identified in the Strategy. The new costly benefits – which will be available at the expense of the taxpayers, who often can’t afford normal education even in their home country – was considered by some experts to be, at the very least, “a strange measure”. Other economists noted signs of realization of the presidential policy of optimization of the size of the state machine in the overseas vacations.    

This year, the Economic Development Ministry began actively lobbying the next strategic national-scale document after the “Conception of Long-Term Socio-Economic Development of Russia” (KDR). While not denying that the KDR is in need of some serious revisions, officials managed to draft some new policies for the country’s economic development.   

The Ministry of Economic Development has published a draft of the “Strategy or Innovative Development of the RF until 2020”. The strategy mainly addresses the challenge of creating a so-far-unreachable innovative economy. The Ministry suggests it is necessary to create an innovative person – one who is flexible, easily adaptable to new modern challenges, and who is prone to continuous self-education of the citizen. Also, it is necessary to create innovative high-quality education in the country, an innovative scientific and business environment conducive to innovative business and innovative state control.     

It is noteworthy that the last item raised the most interest among independent experts. Indeed, it is the government – stagnant, idle, and fraught with corruption – that has, so far, been the main obstacle on the way toward economic diversification, modernization of the bureaucratic state apparatus, and its adaptation to today’s needs of the main consumer of state services – the Russian citizen.

According to Elvira Nabiullina’s ministry, the following measures will help improve the country’s public administration. First – providing a stimulus to state employees to increase their qualifications. The Economic Development Ministry promises that, during the time period until 2020, “opportunities [will be created] for state employees to go on extended leave  – of up to two years – with guaranteed salary and job security in order to receive classroom instruction while seeking a second Master’s degree and vocational education, including in foreign universities”.

Second – is ensuring openness of the Russian government to the outside world. State agencies, responsible for policy design, must create full-scale English versions of their websites on the Internet. It is being suggested to translate federal laws and governing business activity in the RF. And finally, introduction of such mandatory requirement for officials, seeking a high-level public office position, as being fluent in a foreign language, could also contribute to openness of the Russian leadership.      

In other words, the Ministry of Economic Development is suggesting turning Russian officials into “innovative people” at the expense of the public funds – funds of the tax payers, an overwhelming majority of whom cannot afford to have quality higher education not only overseas, but even in Russia itself. Now, the two-year study vacation, made possible with the public funds, will become the honorable duty of nearly every official.   

The Ministry of Economic Development has selected the following indicators for the realization of the new strategy. By the year 2020, 20% of all Russian officials must be fluent in at least one foreign language. In 10 years, 3% of all officials will have to receive yearly training overseas (today, such officials make up 0.01%). The share of individuals, holding high-level leadership positions who have received a higher degree from abroad, should rise from the current 0.5% to 12% by 2020.

In essence, other than these plans for the expansion of the number of educated officials, the strategy has no specific indicators and figures showing concrete benefits that will be derived by Russian society and business sector from the officials’ overseas studies. It includes only some abstract reasoning, which is more suitable for a philosophic utopian treatise about Russia’s innovative path. Meanwhile, the draft document does not contain any links to the real practice of Russian governance, to the ways the officials’ absence affects the GDP, the investment climate, and the rate of reduction of the corruption burden on businesses.

Meanwhile, the KDR, which was written roughly only three years ago, despite its shortcomings, had still described at least some concrete strategic goals. At purchasing power parity, the per-capita GDP was supposed to reach $20,000-$30,000 by 2020. The share of the high-tech sector was to make up no less than 17-20% of the GDP by the year 2020. Contributions from innovative factors to the GDP growth was expected to be at 2.5-3%. The projected average monthly salary by 2020 was more than $2,000.        

But now, three years later, the leadership has refused to take responsibility for its plans. It turns out that it no longer wants to assume any concrete obligations to improve the Russian economy, ones that are expressed in qualitative terms and are easily verifiable.  

Independent experts noted that in conditions in which Russia is forced to deal with a budget deficit, offering officials training abroad at the expense of the state looks strange, at the very least. “Indeed, the country has few high and mid-level officials with foreign diplomas. But the proposed measure will hardly significantly improve the quality of public administration,” says Irina Vorobyeva, an expert with the 2K Audit Business Consulting/Morrison International Evaluation Department. In order to ensure that the country has highly qualified leadership, we need to raise the quality of education in the Russian universities. “Meanwhile, the state’s hiring process needs to take place on a truly competitive basis, and not through connections and acquaintances – then, the quality of Russia’s governance will also improve greatly.”       

However, some experts believe that the Ministry of Economic Development’s initiative is not so extravagant. It is well in line with President Dmitry Medvedev’s proclaimed policy of reduction of the bureaucratic class in Russia. “The given strategy is mainly targeted at optimization of the number of public service employees. After all, without a significant increase of the public servants’ level of professionalism, this optimization is practically impossible,” says Andrey Prikhodko, director of the Tax and Financial Consulting Department at Intercom Audit. Thus, it appears to be that the money, saved by reducing the number of state officials, will not be used to cover the budget deficit but for the intellectual development of the officials who survived the “cleanout”.   

At the same time, FinExpertiza Consulting CEO, Dmitry Shusternyak, points to the fact that the strategy does not focus on providing additional training to officials exclusively overseas. “This possibility has been provisioned by the draft, but this is not a required option.”  

Shusternyak sees the main problem with the strategy in something else – the corruption component. “It could so happen that the costly, publicly-funded education will be received by the officials’ children and relatives. Therefore, there needs to be a fully transparent procedure for the selection of those officials that will be receiving additional publicly-funded training,” concludes the expert.

© Autonomous Nonprofit Organization “TV-Novosti”, 2005 - 2011. All rights reserved.