Russia: the revolution continues?
Provocation! A Postscript from 1994By Alexander Tarasov
Moscow, Centre for New Sociology and the Study of Political Practice
Phoenix, 1994 Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate
By Moshe Lewin
The New Press
New York, 1995 Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the Mirage of Democracy
By Jonathan Steele
Faber and Faber, London and Boston, 1994
Reviewed by Boris Kagarlitsky For a period after 1991, Western publishers refused categorically to publish books about contemporary Russia. Everything in the country was changing so fast, they said, by the time a book went to press, it was already out of date. Also, Russian historians and political scientists were not particularly good at keeping up with events. At best, it might be possible to publish an article within a reasonable time.
The coup in the autumn of 1993, however, gave researchers a respite. For two years, it became possible to "freeze" Russia. The political stability for which reactionaries of all parties had been calling for so long finally came to pass. For a year and a half, one could confidently leave the television set turned off. The faces on the screen were the same, and so was the news.
Now it is clear that this mini-stagnation epoch is coming to an end. Like any pause in a turbulent political process, this period has been extremely beneficial to researchers. Books providing preliminary assessments of the Russian reforms have now begun appearing.
Here I shall examine three of them. Despite differences in style, genre and approach, all three have a common feature: the authors view the events between 1989 and 1994 in the context of Russian history. The shocks which brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union, and which are now continuing in Russia, cannot be understood without reference to the events of 1917 and to the Russian history of the pre-October period.
The recent events do not represent a rupture or the beginning of a new stage, but a continuation or late echo of tremors which began in Russia much earlier.
@drop cap = The reference to history is emphasised in the very title of Jonathan Steele's Eternal Russia. This work takes the form of a chronicle of the dizzying changes of the years from 1985 to 1994, but in essence the author is far from certain that Russia itself has really changed. Indeed, he is convinced that the earthquakes which have shaken the surface of political life have not yet guaranteed a profound transformation of society.
Steele was a correspondent in Moscow for the British Guardian throughout the most dramatic years of perestroika. He witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, lived with us through Gaidar's "economic reforms" and quit Russia soon after the bombarding of the parliament.
The strong side of Eternal Russia is its journalistic accuracy. It contains a mass of detail which could hardly have been assembled by someone who was not describing events from day to day. During the 10 years that have gone by since the enthronement of Gorbachev, a great deal has changed, but even more has been forgotten.
As a participant in many of the events recounted, I found the most fascinating sections of Steele's book to be the chapters devoted to the early years of perestroika. Here familiar figures from the 1990s are shown performing in quite different roles. Yeltsin is still an aggrieved party official, and the "informals" are street activists demanding social justice. This epoch is only five years distant from us, but Steele's text reads almost like a chronicle from the Middle Ages.
Steele, however, writes not for Russians feeling nostalgic for the last years of Soviet power, but for a Western audience. The main task he sets himself is to dispel the myths that hold sway in the West.
@drop cap = The evils and outrages committed in modern-day Russia have long since ceased to be any secret in the West, and no-one has tried to conceal them. But they are all presented to well-intentioned Europeans as the inevitable price of establishing democracy and a market economy.
Steele takes a sceptical attitude here. All the calamities with which the transition to democracy and the market was accompanied in Europe are to be observed in contemporary Russia. All that is lacking is the transition. Analysts who have tried to justify what is happening in our country with references to European history have been unable, in Steele's view, to answer the main question: "where Russia was moving and whether it was advancing to democracy at all".
To the second part of this question, Steele's answer is an unequivocal "no". For the British journalist, the decade from 1985 to 1995 was an era of lost opportunities. The real democratisation of the first five years was replaced by just as obvious a slide toward a new authoritarianism.
For this, the author blames mainly the democrats themselves and the elites who should have consolidated in society such values as "pluralism, tolerance and the search for compromise". These people displayed neither respect for the law, nor a readiness to search for peaceful ways of resolving conflicts. In short, they proved totally incapable of ruling the country through democratic methods.
Surveying the political institutions of Yeltsin's Russia, the British journalist has no illusions concerning either their democratic nature or their effectiveness. At the same time, he considers the country's future remains open, and a return to the past is impossible. A new phase of development is beginning, characterised above all by chronic instability. Stabilising society will not be possible even with the help of authoritarian measures.
Steele succeeds marvellously in showing how the new Russian authorities arose out of the Soviet ones. Here, the events of the 1990s appear not as a rupture but as a turning point, a sort of natural recoil.
@drop cap = If the central question for the British journalist is the fate of democracy and civil society in Russia, the US historian Moshe Lewin and the Russian political scientist Alexander Tarasov are far more preoccupied with the question of what happened to the country's social structures.
Lewin, as the author of several classics on the history of the Soviet Union, could not fail to take up the question of why the Soviet Union collapsed. In Russia/USSR/Russia, he refers directly to his earlier work The Making of the Soviet System (his latest book might aptly have been called The Unmaking of the Soviet System). In principle, researchers have a very important need to establish such a historical context, but in this case one gains the impression that the historian has prevailed over the analyst. Reading the book, one has the strange sense of viewing contemporary events from the vantage point of the 1920s.
The collapse of the Soviet system is explained quite convincingly as the result of the limited and contradictory nature of the whole project of Stalinist modernisation.
Meanwhile, the defeats of the left are seen as the natural result of the ideological paradoxes of the Soviet system. Claiming to embody socialism, the system rejected socialism's fundamental principles; while carrying out major progressiver themselves in the principle of nationalization, and their power was, in fact, a product of this principle and practice. But the same bureaucracy was the main force interested in thwarting any socialist development, but also refused capitalism and thus contributed an additional source of ideological confusion. By refusing democratization, this supposedly anticapitalist — hence, seemingly left-leaning — system in fact provided a powerful argument in favor of even faltering market economies by successfully claiming for itself socialist credentials — but running, equally successfully, a conservative, at times reactionary system."
The undemocratic nature of the system which in the consciousness of the majority of the population was indissolubly linked to the concept of socialism was the factor which, in the final analysis, allowed the "choice for capitalism" to acquire mass support. It was the demand of the people for democracy that made it possible for the Russian "Westernisers" to lead the masses for a certain period.
When Lewin puts forward arguments such as these, it is hard to disagree with him. The trouble with his book is precisely the fact that most of the arguments had by the mid-1990s become common ground. This does not diminish in any way the author's standing as a historian of the USSR. The book's shortcomings are perhaps to be explained by the fact that it was based on articles and talks prepared at different timesfor various purposes.
Not so long ago, a great deal of what is now shared analytical territory was bold unorthodox interpretation. Now, gathered within a single set of covers, these writings no longer have the same impact which the author evidently anticipated when he decided to publish them.
Lewin concurs with Steele that the current period of the country's history has not yet drawn to a close. Reading Lewin's book, one also gains the involuntary impression that Russia is sliding back into the past, although the author avoids making one-sided judgments; he simply points to alarming symptoms of social disintegration, to the growth of nationalism and to a clear lack of attractive alternatives.
@drop cap = Unlike Lewin's work, Alexander Tarasov's Provocation! A Postscript from 1994 belongs to the category of works specifically intended to provoke arguments. As someone who was jailed and tortured under Brezhnev, the political scientist and commentator Tarasov is hardly likely to feel sympathy for the system that existed before 1991. Nevertheless, he decisively rejects the thesis that Russia is undergoing a transition to democracy, seeing the events of recent years merely as a particular phase in the evolution and crisis of the bureaucratic regime.
For Tarasov as for Lewin, what is happening now in Russia is a direct continuation of the history of the Russian revolution of 1917. The difference lies in the fact that in addressing the past, Tarasov is not so much seeking an answer to the question of why the Soviet regime collapsed as trying to suggest where the country is headed, basing his arguments on the general principles of revolutionary history.
The first half of the book consists of an analysis of the events of October 1993. Characterising what occurred as a government provocation, Tarasov simultaneously rejects both "conspiracy theories" and attempts by anti-Yeltsin commentators to justify the failures of the opposition.
Provocation, in Tarasov's words, is "a classic method of political struggle, which has existed as long as politics itself". Both the provocation and the way Yeltsin's opponents were taken in by it showed the level of political culture and moral responsibility of the contending sides in modern Russian politics.
In the second half of his book, Tarasov provides a more detailed description of the social and political regime that came into being after October 3, dwelling at particular length on the scale of the economic crisis, on the sharpening of the social contradictions and on the various turnings of the "criminal revolution".
Tarasov devotes most of his attention, however, to the formation of the new ruling class, which he describes as a "bureaucratic bourgeoisie". This new elite is substantially different from the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie of the West; it is organically linked to the Soviet past, and inevitably, perpetuates the traditions of the Soviet era.
@drop cap = The political system in Yeltsin's Russia is characterised by Tarasov as a regime of "soft Bonapartism". But what is involved here is not only the use by the authorities of Bonapartist methods of rule. Drawing a parallel between the French and Russian revolutions, Leon Trotsky described Stalinism as a "Soviet Thermidor". In Tarasov's view, the processes begun by the events of 1917 are still continuing in Russia; we are now said to be passing through the phase of Bonapartism.
This view, however, can be contested.
There is no disputing that Yeltsin has used Bonapartist political methods. However, the political process cannot be reduced to changes of technique. This is especially true for the reason that in Russia, as historians observed long ago, no process unfolds in a "pure", "classical" manner. Various phases and stages are superimposed on one another, become intertwined, or are fused indistinguishably. Tarasov's effort to put together a clear, "linear" construct is not always to his advantage.
Bonapartism normally acknowledges its nature as successor to a revolutionary regime; restoration, by contrast, tries to legitimise itself by declaring constantly that it represents a break with the revolutionary state, and by making frequent references to the pre-revolutionary past. In this sense, Gorbachev's year as president of the Soviet Union represented a failed attempt at Bonapartism. Yeltsin and his circle prospered for the very reason that after August 1991 they made an unambiguous choice for the policies of restoration.
Meanwhile, it would be a major error to see restoration simply as a return to the past. Restoration differs from counter-revolution — that is, from the simple negation of revolution — in the sense that it embodies elements of continuity with the revolution; its key aspects include an attempt by the new elites to secure their power and property through a compromise with their predecessors.
The policies of restoration are in many ways similar to those of Bonapartism. It was no accident that figures from the republican regime played the role they did in restoring the Stuarts in Britain and the Bourbons in France.
In Russia, however, it was impossible to restore the dynasty after 70 years. There was no longer anyone to whom property might have been restored; the majority of enterprises had been set up after the revolution. The old regime was restored by the new nomenklatura in the form of the Yeltsinite monarchical republic.
In Russia, paradoxically, the social and political niche which in Britain and France was occupied by the returning aristocrats was seized by the criminal world.
Tarasov and Steele describe the "criminal revolution" in detail, but neitopment with the social and ideological "recoil" of the bureaucracy during the first stages of the restoration. In the a>