#1 - RW 3-11-05 - RW Home
RUSSIAN POLITICAL ELITE STILL POLITICKING WHETHER PERESTROIKA WAS A MUST

MOSCOW, March 10 (RIA Novosti's Larisa Saenko) - Russian politicians are still taking reforms, touched off by ex-USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, differently.

Reactions differ from hot support to categorical No at the conference Power and Freedom: 20 Years of Democratic Experiment in the USSR and Russia, attended by Russian politicians and experts.

The enthusiastic reaction to the democratic and market-economy reforms came from the Union of Right Forces chief ideologist Leonid Gozman, who is close to Mr. Anatoli Chubais.

"The process begun 20 years ago was a salvation for our country and humanknd", said Mr. Gozman, asking to pass his personal regards to Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev.

The father of "acceleration" and "perestroika" was not present at the conference.

LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovski as usually engaged in bellicose rhetoric decrying the liberal values artificially, as he said, brought to Russian soil.

He is sure that, in order to develop a party system, it was enough to half the CPSU and, instead of democracy and glasnost, give more freedom to small-scale enterprise.

In spirit he was echoed by the Rodina (Matherland) party ideologist Mikhail Delyagin. He said that "the Down syndrome-like degradation of society and wiping out the Soviet-times middle class" is the main outcome of perestroika.

Politicians and experts close to socialists also bitterly lament that the democratic freedoms have been separated from social guarantees and the market has turned into "oligarchic capitalism".

Echoing Mr. Gorbachev, who has of late been actively communicating with the mass media, many Russian politicians believe that the seeds of democracy have fallen on unprepared soil.

Head of the Effective Policy Fund Gleb Pavlovski thinks that the main problem in the 20-year-long reform of society was the gap between the vanguard of society carrying out reforms and the interests of the conservative majority.

Actually, most speakers did not doubt that, given all the pluses and minuses of the present model of statehood, Russia has been on the democratic road of development.