oboguev

... it can further be illustrated by 2000 election campaign of G. Yavlinsky [...] Yavlinsky argued for milder, more humane, more fair and legal conduct of the reforms. A massive amount of funding had been dumped into his campaign in expectations of major electoral gains though unlikely to result in victory in 2000, but at least prominently positioning him as a leading candidate to win in 2004. Yet despite massive funding of the campaign, votes received by Yavlinsky did not move a single bit beyond 5.8% he always gathered, indicating that only this tiny fraction of electorate voted for him who were always voting for him anyway and that no amount of political marketing could make anyone else vote for Yavlinsky. In other words, it was a typical sectarian voting pattern: only sect members vote for their leader, but no one outside the sect can be convinced to vote for him.

What was the reason why voters did not cast votes for Yavlinsky despite his otherwise attractive and popular stance to revise cannibalistic “reforms” and get under control rampant corruption and crime de facto proclaimed as a state policy? It cannot be accounted for by his non-Russian ethnicity per se, as other politicians of identical ethnic background (though not receiving anywhere the same amount of political promotion and funding) were able to easily gain significantly higher popularity and positive response among the public once they exhibited pro-Russian national stance – such as for instance popular politician and member of the parliament general Lev Rokhlin or Yevgeni Primakov, who in September 1998 was appointed prime-minster by Yeltsin to save the economy after the crash and whose 9-month term as a prime-minister created the foundations of economic recovery that started in 1999 and lasted over the [early] Putin’s years. Primakov was hastily ousted out of power by Yelstsin to prevent the threat posed by Primakov’s rapid ascend in popularity – the ascent that was fueled not only by Primakov’s sound economic strategies, but also by his pro-Russian political stance. Eliminating thus ethnicity per se as the defining factor, the only plausible explanation for Yavlinsky’s massive rejection by voters is that his political position professes void in place of national identity – amidst acute national crisis, at that – and his posture towards Russian national existence can be summarized as a denial of such an existence. Yavlinsky effectively positioned himself as having no national connection to the Russians – a stance exactly opposite to what Russian voters were looking for, and denied the existence of plethora of acute problems that the Russians face and their grounding in [...]

... by pretending to be completely ethnically blind Yavlinsky effectively said to Russian voters that he was going to leave Russian ethnic interests unprotected and let hostile challenges to Russian interests on the part of ethnic clans to continue unrestrained. Moreover Yavlinsky effectively indicated he was going to cover these challenges up (by being blind to them); that fair and valid Russian interests were considered by him, Yavlinsky, as non-existent (since he could not see any such interests); and that justice was not for the Russians (since Yavlinsky’s blindness to matters ethnical did not let him discern the violations of just and fair Russian interests).

Yavlinsky’s group could have been apt for solving purely technical tasks of the social transformations: working out legal system, trade and industrial policies, regulation of securities market, rationalization of taxation laws, demonopolization etc. However being nationally sterile Yavlinksy and his associates were fundamentally unable to provide the guidance for building Russian national state. Even if Yavlinsky was somehow given a go at implementing his designs, they would have failed -- not because they were intrinsically wrong or bad (they were not, though some of them were naive), but because they were bound to fail without the framework of a national state and society.

Yavlinsky sought to treat the symptoms of the disease, but not its roots. Yavlinsky and his associates primary allegiance is to those very same groups [...] that seek control of political and economic resources of the country to an extent hugely beyond the share of the “social base” whose interests these groups represent in the country’s population, groups that are antagonistic to the prospect of Russia as Russian national state. Yavlinsky was not opposed to the fundamental goals and policies of these groups, he just wished to pursue them in milder, less radical ways.