"We must have a government that is accountable to the people, not the other way around"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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