Judging by the charter that Svetov wants to adopt at the congress, that is exactly the case.

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This question turned out to be today’s record holder among questions with an attached donation in terms of the time I needed to answer: usually, if an answer is paid for, I answer on the same day. The fact is that I have no relation to the Libertarian Party of Russia, so I had to scour both of your charters — the one currently in effect, and the one Mikhail Svetov expects to adopt at the LPR congress, which will take place on November 2 in Moscow (I was sent links to the cloud, but for safekeeping, I preferred to move the documents to my own site). The reading was not easy, so I apologize in advance to those who may find the answer a bit boring; it is a very specific question.

So, if we rely on the letter of the charters, then both now and in the wonderful Svetovian LPR of the future, you have a typical oligarchic party where all real power is held by committees that control the mechanisms of their own reelection. The changes proposed to be made are, in essence, cosmetic:

• regional branches are prohibited from engaging in entrepreneurial activity (very strange for a party that, in theory, should treat entrepreneurship as a fetish).
• on the other hand, regional branches are allowed their own symbols, albeit in agreement with the federal committee (I didn’t even know that previously your charter had only one symbol for the entire party; this norm was violated left and right).
• the general meeting of a regional branch loses the right to expel members from the party (all power to the committees!).
• the general meeting of a regional branch loses the right to consider an appeal against expulsion from the party by the branch’s steering committee (the power of the committees is indisputable!) .
• the moratorium on the return of previously expelled members to the party is increased from three to five years (this reminds me of the constant extension of Disney’s copyrights for Mickey Mouse — it feels as if someone was expelled from the LPR whom they really don’t want back, and now they are extending the term during which this cannot be done).
• previously, the federal committee was dissolved if more than a third of its members left; in the new edition, it is more than half (if the dominant faction has an absolute majority, the opposition is in principle unable to block the committee’s work).
• a limit is introduced on the maximum size of the committees (increasing the administrative weight of each committee member)
• the federal committee will be able to suspend the powers of individual members and dismiss the party chairman (expansion of the dominant faction’s power).
• appealing to the ethics committee becomes paid. If you win the case, the deposit is returned. If you lose, the money goes into the party coffers. No sanctions are provided for those who made an unlawful decision upon which an appeal was won (very convenient, for example, to kick out the entire opposition from the party before the congress, and by the time the ethics committee reinstates everyone, the train has left, all decisions at the congress have already been made, profit).

I probably didn’t notice all the changes, but I hardly missed anything fundamental. Another feature of Svetov’s charter is that it contains two charters: the first part works until the party is registered, and the second part replaces the first in the event of official state registration of the party.

The volume of the documents is quite large. The current charter has 44 pages; the one proposed by Mikhail Svetov has 78 pages. Usually, when people draft such detailed agreements for joint activity, it speaks of an immense lack of trust they have for each other and a certain external force to which one can always appeal if something goes wrong in the joint activity. A charter is important specifically for an external judge who knows nothing about what is happening in the organization and for whom the map equals the territory. Organizations that are created naturally for the maximum efficiency of joint activity, and which do not intend to rely on someone’s external legitimacy, do not typically describe internal norms in such tomes.

A natural organization is characterized by first relying exclusively on informal agreements, then introducing some written norms as it grows, and then consolidating them into charters. An unnatural one, complying with the Russian law on political parties, is forced to take a template charter and demonstrate to the state that it lives by it. In fact, however, it will still operate within the framework of certain informal agreements.

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And now I will allow myself to deviate from the charters and quote a fragment of a lecture by Mikhail Svetov, given by him on October 16, 2019, in Novosibirsk:

The Libertarian Party of Russia today is the only organization that seriously says that the regions need to be given broad powers, transferred in such a way that it would be impossible for Moscow to take them away again.

Mikhail Svetov

Mikhail has been talking for several months, and especially often in the last month as part of his unprecedented tour across the country, about how the regions should impose a new federal treaty on Moscow. So impose it!

A regional branch of the party brings together local politicians who interact directly with local politicians representing other political forces. It is with them that they form coalitions and alliances, agree on the distribution of candidates by district and the order of speeches at rallies, or arrange to borrow equipment or use an office. Moscow in all this real regional political activity is a disorganizing factor that can only contribute to the disruption of agreements carefully built on the ground, but is almost never able to help. This is especially relevant for parties without centralized funding from above. If the main source of the party’s money is membership fees from ordinary members, then how shell-shocked by the vertical of power must one be to pay any attention at all to the whims of the Moscow leadership! He who doesn’t buy the girl dinner doesn’t get to dance with her.

The Libertarian Party of the Russian Federation does not need a charter. It needs a federal treaty. I will allow myself to quote again a fragment from the same lecture:

What is the libertarians’ criticism of democracy? That democracy adopts equal inconvenient laws for everyone. There is no such law that is equally suitable for Muscovites, Novosibirsk residents, and residents of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

Mikhail Svetov

Well, if it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist. Thank Mikhail for the useful lecture and do as he suggests. If you can manage to impose a new federal treaty on Moscow within the party, it will be the first step toward imposing it on Moscow within the state. If you can manage to limit such a mild and intelligent leader as Mikhail Svetov, it will be the first step toward limiting such a brutal and unpleasant type as Vladimir Putin.