Mr. Pavlovsky, Effective Policy Foundation president, is adviser to the chief of Kremlin staff.
Present-day Russia has got accustomed to a quiet, uneventful political life. But unlike America, Russia is not beyond oceans, and so ought not to think it is invulnerable. Certain groups in Russia will always be out to torpedo the country merely because they have ideas of their own on how Eurasia should be.
Today, politics need new tools. Russia cannot go on forever patching up Boris Yeltsin's system, which, in fact, was the Soviet system turned inside out. President Vladimir Putin has proclaimed the State of Russia. Now, we must make it, says Pavlovsky.
Russia must provide a democratic basis for its nation's political self-organization, and open the road for free men and women to offer their views to the public. The construction of new Russian statehood needs final brushstrokes. Political parties alone can do it after they find common language with all groups of the utterly misled people-in-the-street. Gleb Pavlovsky is firmly convinced on that point.
"So long as we have no strong and reliable network of political parties, we shall stay doomed to an unjust regime, with shadow groupings for the say-so," he warned.
A vast ocean of people on the government staff, in media outlets and in the business community are pretending they speak on President Putin's behalf to the accompaniment of newspapers who now cry 'Hooray to Putin!' now, 'Down with Putin!' Meanwhile, they are buying up this country on the quiet-and some hope to subdue the President, someday."
Leaders are forced to take a wait-and-see position in countries whose political community is passive and corrupt. In today's Russia, graft is not a mere arrangement-it has made a social class. The nation's political future depends on resistance the population and its political forces can offer to corruption, said Pavlovsky.
