He calls her a “syslib” and effectively accuses her of justifying the regime. What do you think about syslibs in general?

анонимный вопрос

We are talking about last year’s posts (first and second) in Illarionov’s blog, which no one would have remembered if he hadn’t referenced them recently.

I find Illarionov’s meticulousness extremely useful when it comes to the scrupulous comparison of numerous eyewitness accounts of a large-scale event, based on which a consistent picture of what happened is constructed. For example, I was greatly impressed by his investigation into the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. However, when he turns his talent toward analyzing the nuances of one person’s word usage during a live broadcast, it starts to feel like a certain bias—much like vulgar Freudianism, where there is no room for cucumbers or cigars because there are only phalluses.

Illarionov, if I understand correctly, is the creator of the term “syslib,” and he defines it as a person who uses liberal rhetoric to strengthen a non-liberal political regime and justify non-liberal political practices. Like Chubais’s “bow down to the oligarchs; they pulled the country out of poverty.”

What is he incriminating Ekaterina for?

• Cossacks dispersing a rally in Moscow do not look as organic as they would in Krasnodar. Aha, so it’s okay to disperse them in Krasnodar. Syslib.
• The army in Turkey is ceasing to be a modernization institution. Aha, so Erdogan, then, is becoming a modernization institution. Syslib.
• There are many other minor nitpicks, and finally, the most important one. There is a correlation: the less bloody the removal of an authoritarian regime, the higher the probability of democratization. Aha, so the people on the Maidan are to blame for being shot. Syslib.

I have a feeling that Illarionov confuses the approach of a political scientist-researcher with that of a publicist, and every time he sees a statement about certain patterns, he immediately imagines what a person would mean by that phrase if they were a propagandist for the ruling regime.

Now, if Ekaterina were to state directly, for example, that the sovereignty of the individual is impossible or undesirable, and that only the sovereignty of some group entity, like a nation, is possible or desirable, then I myself would decide that this Shulman has gone bad; bring me a new one. But for now, she merely states that without a well-organized state, people feel somehow uncomfortable, which means the state is necessary. But preferably a liberal one, recognizing that very sovereignty of the individual. And as for the fact that this is an internally contradictory construction—well, what can you do, the world is complex, interests need to be reconciled somehow, so let’s build the institutions that allow us to do that.

In general, I would advise avoiding excessive purism. Let Lenin be the one to decisively distance himself before forcibly uniting everyone, while smart people are indeed better off practicing how to coordinate their interests and align them with their values. Ekaterina Mikhailovna is valuable above all as an inexhaustible source of political science memes. My personal favorite is her “all power to—nobody!”