Back when I was in grade school, there was
a popular riddle: "Name a childhood disease that starts with the
letter 'l.'" The answer was "leftism," from Lenin's famous 1920
tract "'Leftism' in Communism: a Childhood Disease."
To Our Readers
Has something you've read here startled you?
Are you angry, excited, puzzled or pleased? Do you have ideas
to improve our coverage? Then please write to us. All
we ask is that you include your full name, the name of the
city from which you are writing and a contact telephone number
in case we need to get in touch. We look forward to hearing
from you.
Mikhail
Khodorkovsky's most recent letter from prison, "Left Turn," which
appeared in Vedomosti last week, shows that you can catch this
disease no matter how thoroughly you've been vaccinated. There's
nothing wrong with leftism per se, of course. Many countries impose
high taxes on their citizens and use the money to help fund social
services, especially education and health care. And any politician
who wants to be popular has to lean to the left to some extent
because the majority of people in any country get more out of the
government than they put back in taxes.
For Khodorkovsky, the necessity of a turn to the
left arises from the need to legitimize privatization. He doesn't
want to understand that the average person, who is the chief concern
of real leftists, isn't ticked off because he was taken for a ride
-- swindled, robbed, humiliated or forgotten -- 10 years ago. He's
ticked off because he's being robbed and humiliated right now, kept
down by poverty and the lack of a level playing field. No matter how
you legitimize what happened 10 years ago, you won't change how he
feels about things.
You could try to legitimize the gulf between rich
and poor by pointing out that everyone enjoys equal opportunities.
This is exactly how a certain wealthy country with an equally
glaring disparity between rich and poor defends itself. This would
constitute a turn to the right.
You could also attempt a turn to the left -- to
higher taxes and greater equality. This would require, first of all,
a fundamental redistribution of property. Khodorkovsky wrote that
"major property owners needed a turn to the left no less than the
majority of the population" precisely because he himself is not a
leftist. For this reason, it's hard to take his argument much more
seriously than all the talk about market mechanisms during the
Yuganskneftegaz auction.
This discrepancy between theory and practice is not
the only thing Khodorkovsky shares with the "leftists" in the
Kremlin. They are also united by a messianic (or is it childlike?)
certainty that the most important thing is to choose the right
course and stick to it. Everything we know about economic
development indicates the opposite -- that the mechanisms for
changing course, which operate independently of the people in charge
of setting the course and sticking to it, are the most important
factor in development.
In his letter, Khodorkovsky notes that in the two
most successful post-communist countries, Poland and Hungary, the
left came to power after an initial period of right-wing rule. What
he neglects to mention is that in both countries the right
subsequently returned to power -- followed in turn by the left. The
right course is arrived at not when some wise and honest leader
chooses it, but when any leader, even a greedy and ignorant one, is
afraid of losing his job in the next election.
A meaningful turn to the left may well have been
possible after left-wing slogans carried the day in the 2003
parliamentary election. The voters' dislike for the rich was all too
easily manipulated by the regime for its own ends, however, and the
country set off down a third, intermediate path.
The current ruling elite now exploits the threat of
a turn to the left as it expropriates property from the last bunch.
Soon we'll catch up with Argentina and Venezuela.
Konstantin Sonin, professor at the New Economic
School/CEFIR, wrote this column for Vedomosti.
.gif){kind=spacer}
.gif){kind=spacer}
