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# There Is No Such Thing as a Voluntary Change of Power
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/nikakoi-dobrovolnoi-smeniaemosti-vlasti-ne-sushchestvuet/
- Published: 2024-12-02T14:56:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:31:55.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Museums, Observations, Society

Museum directors, television channel heads, editors-in-chief of magazines, radio stations and newspapers, presidents of academies, university rectors, heads of film studios and theatres: all of them change very rarely indeed. YOU can readily recall all the names yourselves. In the leading institutions the management typically stays put not for years but for decades, and sometimes you read the news that some director has died after occupying his chair for 40 years. Had there only been a longevity pill, might he have held it for 100?

And yet this does not seem to provoke any broad public discussion. Why should one person, be he ever so talented and distinguished (though usually he is not), be able, and indeed obliged, to occupy a leading post for ten, twenty or thirty years? What is more, the custom of sending directors into a very deep retirement exists, on the whole, all over the world. And in these circumstances the irremovability of those in charge does not become a subject of dispute, a pretext for démarches or a cause of mass discontent.

Every endless directorship is explained by the importance of a personal contribution, high professionalism, unique skills, reputation, efficiency and so on. If one wishes, in general, anything at all can be explained in perfectly reasonable terms. I have never read a news item saying that so-and-so spent twenty-odd years as a mediocre manager and, as luck would have it, refused point-blank to hand his post to a successor.

And naturally we all understand that hardly anyone will reproach the irremovable head of some top university, provincial youth theatre or dazzling gallery with his own unwillingness to leave. On the contrary, speaking of his many years in power, they will stress the selflessness of a man who devoted so many years of his life to so noble a cause. All this is so. And it is indeed clear that managerial work demands great energy and enormous labour, and is bound up with strain, responsibility, emotional and physical expenditure and the rest. Heroic toil. But, again, performed exclusively at the unspoken request of society, the profession, the institution or the art itself. Never out of any personal wish to lead, rule and hold sway for ever. Or if not for ever, then a little longer, and then a little longer still.

But that is when it concerns the various largest enterprises and institutions in the world. When the talk turns to the government of states, for some reason a quite different opinion prevails: the shorter the better, as though the director of a theatre, after two hundred and fifty seasons, had still not managed to achieve the purpose of his tenure and simply cannot leave the post, or else it is all over, total collapse, whereas a president and a prime minister must cope with a mere state in some five to eight years. Interesting, is it not?