Experts sum up results of protest year at Interfax press conference
MOSCOW. Dec 6 (Interfax) – Politicians and experts, who attended the presentation of a research study of the Civil Society Development Fund at Interfax on Thursday, made interesting or even paradoxical comments on the protest movement in Russia that marked its first jubilee.
The “white ribbon” movement saved Russia from a social outburst, political expert Leonid Polyakov told the press conference.
“If there had been no such protest – the white ribbon protest in cities – we would have run the risk of a period of serious social destabilization,” he said.
Neither the movement leaders nor the authorities intended to play the role of social stabilizer for the protest movement, Polyakov said.
“It is a trend to call everything a Kremlin project. If it had really been a project of the authorities, it would have been the most genius project of all because the blocking of a major social outbreak requires great mastery,” he stressed.
In the opinion of Polyakov, the authorities should support the “white ribbon” movement. “The authorities should invest in that movement, carry it on. Just for the sake of preventing the rest of Russia from bursting,” he said.
Another press conference speaker, Maxim Shevchenko, said that the liberal protest of the “white ribbon” movement was a local phenomenon in the Russian capital city and it did not give sufficient attention to the problems of provinces, which had been piling up for decades.
“This is an absolutely egoistic movement of Moscow city intellectuals who imagine themselves as a part of Europe and are prepared to represent the rest of the country but not to share the rights possessed by “the new Europeans” in the center of Moscow,” Shevchenko said.
He called the Moscow protest actions as “a revolt of new Europeans” and said regions were fighting for their rights and independence and Muscovites “were rejecting the most protest-minded part of the country.”
Many Russians across the country support the political personality, President Vladimir Putin, just because they have no alternative, political expert Gleb Pavlovsky said.
“The problem is that Putin won after he had fallen out of popularity. That is the problem. It is the same as Soviet advertisements of trunks or “saving money in a savings account” where there was nowhere else to save the money in,” he said.
The authorities should evaluate their policy because current trends may lead to a deadlock in certain areas, Pavlovsky said.
“The authorities need a profound and fair analysis of the new difficult situation, in which they have stopped being maneuverable and their strategies have stopped being interesting. Everyone has one’s own leeway and uses it in one’s own legal way: the Investigative Committee in its own and the media in its own,” the expert concluded.