Annotation
The disunity of society and the weakness of social ties were already characteristic of Soviet society, but the market reforms of the 1990s and state centralization of the 2000s not only failed to solve this problem, but also exacerbated it. The state institutions that emerged during the years of Putin's rule, to a large extent, turned out to be a reflection of precisely this state of affairs.The established political order is not only authoritarian; it simultaneously fixes the alienation of the elite from society and the absence of organic social ties within the elite itself. Within the framework of such institutions, successful socio-economic development is fundamentally impossible, and economic processes are associated with the reproduction and deepening of social entropy.
An alternative to the conservative scenario can be socio-economic reconstruction based on conscious political efforts to overcome entropy. The question is whether there is a potential in society for creating such a political project and on whom it can rely. Can a collective political will be consolidated to overcome inertia? Russian history has provided several examples of such a modernist upheaval by a politically organized minority.However, previous coups of this kind were purely authoritarian, and the specificity of the current crisis is that democracy is a necessary condition for overcoming social entropy and stimulating modern forms of economic development. Can a version of democratic and modernization populism be formed in Russia, by analogy with F.D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States?
The outlines of such a project are already outlined, and it is quite clear that without a simultaneous sharp increase in the economic role of the state, consistent political democratization and radical social policy, it is impossible to carry out a serious modernization of Russia. It is quite obvious that such an approach turns out to be fundamentally impossible from the point of view of liberal concepts, but it also quite organically follows from the strategy of the democratic left.Thus, the problem is not to form a development strategy on this basis, but to win the political conditions for its implementation. At the moment, such a prospect does not seem most likely. But if it fails to be implemented, then we return to the original version described at the beginning of the report.