The Time of Bells
Interview with Eduard Ponarin on the 10th meeting of the Valdai Club
The 10th anniversary Valdai Club Conference has just finished. Valdai Club is a prestigious non-governmental organization which assembles experts on Russian foreign and domestic policy. Many high-ranked Russian and European officials participated in the Conference this year; Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi were among guests of the forum. Director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research Eduard Ponarin was invited to take part in the Conference. He shared his impressions about his trip to Valdai in the interview for LCSR website.
- Valdai Club is a very prestigious organization; leading Russian policy experts and public officials are invited to participate in its meeting. How can one become a part of this elite group? What kind of achievements should one have to be invited?
E.P.: I have no idea. I think, there are permanent members of the Club who were invited by the organizers 10 years ago and they’ve retained their status simply because they were the first to come. And then the Club invites experts to participate in its activities and perhaps some of these people stay as new members, but frankly I don't know. I think there are no precise criteria. I guess I got this invitation simply because I was a part of the project on the Russian elites that was prepared for the Valdai club by a group of LCSR researchers and our foreign colleagues. I know that the report was sent to the Kremlin and maybe they liked it there. At least I know that the Valdai club organizers, Svetlana Mironyuk and Sergey Karaganov, seemed to like it.
- This is a real success for the Laboratory.
E.P.: Yes, it is. It does increase the Lab's visibility and adds to the prestige. I should also say that our report on elites was popular at the Valdai Club meeting: they brought 200 copies there and all of them got distributed.
- Will you please share your impressions about the forum in general and tell about the major events that took place there.
E.P.:There were two types of events during the meeting. Firstly, and this is what the Valdai club was originally about, it was a series of meetings with the leaders of the Russian Federation and the expert community including foreign analysts from the United States, Europe, China and Latin America. The most numerous groups were the Americans and the Chinese experts. Among high-ranking guests were Vladimir Putin; Sergei Ivanov, Chief of Staff of Russian Presidential Administration; Vyacheslav Volodin, First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration; Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister; Ramazan Abdulatipov, the head of Dagestan; and Sergei Shoigu, Minister of Defense.
The second type of events were discussion panels as at any other conference; there were five panels and two more special sessions. The opening session was moderated by Karaganov and it was devoted to the issue of Russian identity. Also there were a couple of sessions devoted to Syria and the Middle East which were moderated by Vitaliy Naumkin, Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies. There were two sessions at Iversky Monastery located on an island in the Lake Valdai. Representatives of three major confessions delivered speeches there; each confession was represented by the second person within its official hierarchy. There were representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, Muslim and Judaic establishment.
The organizers tried to represent all major ideologies - liberalism, nationalism and socialism - and find a common ground for them. Karaganov did his best to find a compromise between Alexey Kudrin and Alexander Prokhanov during the discussion at one of the sessions, which was not easy. Karaganov suggested that Kudrin and Prochanov are both interested in Russia's well-being and that was why they had something in common after all. That was his message. As for my general impression, I think that one could discern, simply from being there, where the country would be moving in the next few years. It seems that the country's leadership wants to have a pivot to Asia which is not like Obama's military one, perhaps, more of the economic kind, focusing particularly on cooperation with China. They also want to establish a kind of Eurasian core via the Customs Union. They are suspicious of the West, in particular, of the United States, and they want to create a new ideological project, probably a nationalist Russian project. Its parameters are not certain yet, they are still under consideration, but I think they want an imperial project rather than an ethnic Russian project. Russian elites have always been cosmopolitan and therefore they are more likely to construct an imperial project. Too many people of very diverse backgrounds are part of the Russian elite and therefore they simply are not ready for an ethnic version of nationalism.
- Did the participants of the forum have any opportunity to get their message across to the president or other prominent officials? Do you think that some of their advice will be useful for formulating the Russian policies?
E.P.: There was one important feature of this particular session of the Valdai club – there were quite a few people from the political opposition, including Vladimir Ryzhkov, Gennady Gudkov, Irina Khakamada, Kseniya Sobchak, and Ilya Ponomarev who kept asking difficult questions to the Russian officials. Once again, I want to emphasize that the purpose of the organizers was to try to unite all political forces representing different ideologies, like Prohanov and Kudrin, and to find a compromise, because the agenda of the session was to help finding a new Russian identity.
- You are a representative of an academic institution while generally the participants of the Valdai meetings are experts on practical politics. Does this invitation mean that nowadays the Russian authorities have an increasing need in assistance of social scientists to resolve strategic problems?
E.P.: I don't know if they really feel this need but it seems that they're open to communicate with people from the academic community. I was not the only one from HSE, there was Sergei Aleksashenko who is from the Moscow campus of HSE, and also Karaganov himself is now the dean of the Department of International Economics and International Politics at HSE in Moscow. There were not that many academics on the Russian side, but quite a few on the American and Chinese side, I even met a few people who I got to know previously at various conferences, mostly in the US. By the way, Oksana Antonenko, who is a British analyst, is a permanent member of the Club. She is an academic working at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. There also was Daniel Treisman who is a professor at UCLA; he is also a member of HSE Board of Trustees. There were quite a few academics from China, Shanghai and Beijing, as well as many journalists and analysts. Some European politicians were invited, for example, Romano Prodi and François Fillon.
- Are you planning to collaborate in some ways with the Valdai club in future?
E.P.: I don't know but, hopefully, yes. For one, our report on elites was a success. Svetlana Mironyuk, in her interview discussing the results of this Valdai club session, said our report was one of the brightest. Secondly, I participated in the debates in the first panel on Russian identity. My comments were very warmly received by Karaganov and also by Pavel Andreev, the Executive Director of RIA Novosti. I don't know if anything further comes out of this, I have no idea how it works. Let's just see what happens.
- Thank you for the interview!
by Ekaterina Turanova, research assistant at the Laboratory
for Comparative Social Research