Politics & Power Quote by Alexander Rutskoy

Accountability is the word politicians reach for when legitimacy is slipping, and Alexander Rutskoy knew exactly how combustible that moment was. “We must have a government that is accountable to the people, not the other way around” reads like a democratic platitude, but its real charge is in the reversal: the state has been treating citizens as the ones who owe explanations, obedience, sacrifice. Rutskoy flips the direction of moral debt, turning a dry concept into an indictment.

The line is doing two jobs at once. On the surface, it borrows the clean grammar of civic republicanism: officials serve; voters judge. Underneath, it’s a warning about post-Soviet drift - the ease with which a new Russian state could swap communist centralization for a different kind of unanswerable power, dressed up in elections and decrees. When Rutskoy says “not the other way around,” he’s gesturing at the familiar authoritarian logic: citizens exist to justify the regime, to endure austerity, to accept corruption as a toll for “stability.”

Context matters because Rutskoy wasn’t an outside dissident; he was inside the machinery as vice president during Russia’s early 1990s power struggles. That makes the quote less idealistic and more tactical: a claim to stand with “the people” against an executive center consolidating authority. It’s populist in the precise sense - not empty rabble-rousing, but a strategic attempt to relocate sovereignty from offices and security services back to the street-level public that was rapidly learning how little the state wanted to be audited.