Russia's Futures

Richard Sakwa

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509524242, 9781509524235
• eBook ISBN: 9781509524273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Russia is back as a major force in global politics, but what does this mean? Is Russia the dangerous revisionist foe that meddles in Western elections and tries to subvert the liberal international order? Or is it a country precariously trying to maintain security and enhance prosperity at home, while re-asserting its place as a great power in the world today?

In this book, renowned Russia scholar Richard Sakwa explores current debates on Russia, placing them in historical context and outlining the fundamental challenges currently facing the country. Post-communist Russia had to grapple with a unique set of problems, including reconstituting the political system, rebuilding the economy, re-imagining the nation, and rethinking Russia's place in the world. The solutions are still being sought, but this hard-hitting study argues that the failure to create an international system in which Russia's transformation became part of a revised world order has made the search far more difficult than it may otherwise have been. Although Russia is one of the oldest states in Europe, in its contemporary guise it is one of the youngest. Russia has had many pasts and, given its size, centrality and complexity, it will also have many futures.

1
Getting Russia Right

Russia in a certain sense ‘lost’ the twentieth century in a period of false hopes, disappointed expectations, misery and ruin. This certainly is the judgement of a recent major collective historical project analysing the reasons for the presumed disaster. Some look to the erosion of national identity as responsible, while others talk of the loss of spiritual orientations.¹ The question has exercised many generations of Russian thinkers. Some were already analysing the problem in the early years of the century, when a premonition of the impending crisis seized the intelligentsia. Seven intellectuals issued the prophetic Landmarks (Vekhi) volume in 1909, with essays warning that the extremism of the radical Russian intelligentsia would lead the country to disaster.² As Nikolai Berdyaev put it in his essay: ‘The Russian intelligentsia distrusted objective ideas and universal norms on the assumption that they hampered the struggle with autocracy and service to “the people”, whose well-being was considered more important than ecumenical truth and good.’³ This populist inclination to ascribe a single undifferentiated view to ‘the people’ irrespective of facts has powerful echoes to this day. Alexander Solzhenitsyn examined the question in his various works, but notably in his multi-volume Gulag Archipelago describing the Soviet labour camp system from Lenin to Joseph Stalin. A slimmed-down popular version is recommended reading in all Russian schools today.

The sheer enormity of the events in Russia’s twentieth century still leaves much of the country speechless. The legacy of the various revolutions, wars and projects for the amelioration of the condition of humanity still shapes Russia today. There is no clear language in which to analyse Russia’s fate, since the various ideologies of the twentieth century – communism, nationalism, liberalism – themselves contributed to the traumas of the period. The modernist revolt against tradition and the traditionalist revolt against modernity combined to distil a heady cocktail that still leaves the country reeling. What are the ‘landmarks’ against which to judge the ambitions of the revolutionaries in 1917 and the consequences, and how to assess progress when measured against such enormous destruction? How do we balance the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany with a country that disintegrated under the pressure of its own contradictions in 1991? How do we measure progress in the post-communist era, when millions lost their savings, jobs and security in the turbulent ‘transition’ period in the 1990s? How do we balance the undoubted stabilization of the Putin period against the costs of the loss of accountability, the erosion of genuine constitutionalism, and a managed political process in which a power system stands outside the democratic procedures which give it legitimacy? These questions weigh heavily on Russia today.

What was it all for?

It is impossible to understand the Russia of today without some analysis of the historical context. History continues to weigh heavily, and shapes many current decisions. It is a history of war, revolution, development and disaster, the latter often self-inflicted. As Minister of Finance from 1892 to 1903, Sergei Witte masterminded a crash industrialization programme, focusing on railway building and financed in part through crushing taxes on the peasantry. Russia’s autocracy was humbled by defeat by the Japanese in the war of 1904–5, and then shaken by the 1905 revolution. A constitution was adopted in 1906 that tempered the former absolutism, but the constitutional monarchy remained unstable (above all because of Nicholas II’s refusal to accept limits on his autocratic powers) and was overthrown in February 1917. Nevertheless, in its final period the old regime oversaw Russia’s rapid industrialization. In the years from 1909 to 1913 alone its industrial output increased nearly five-fold, and by 1913 Russia’s economy represented 5.3 per cent of the global total. Russia was catching up with Britain and Germany, although it was already left far behind by the USA.

In 1914, this dynamic development gave way to a decade of war, revolution, and then civil war. Although on the winning side, Russia managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It ended up a loser of the Great War, and was excluded from the Paris peace conference in 1919. Instead, it plunged into revolutionary turmoil. The establishment of a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ government, as Marxists dubbed the Provisional Government, provided Russia at last with the potential for constitutionalism and dynamic capitalist development. The war had to end first, but instead of withdrawing, in spring 1917 the Provisional Government launched the ill-fated offensive in Galicia at the behest of the Allies seeking to relieve pressure on the French at Verdun and motivated by ‘secret treaty’ promises that a victorious Russia would achieve its historical goal of taking Constantinople (Istanbul). The campaign was disastrous, intensifying disaffection, and ultimately allowing the Bolsheviks to gain support in the army and factories, and above all among the peasants. Russia’s experiment with liberal democracy was over before it had really started, and on 25 October 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, and then brutally asserted their authority over the rest of the country.⁴ The elections to the Constituent Assembly brought a non-Bolshevik majority and when the Assembly met in January 1918 it was dissolved after one day (‘the guard is tired’), never to reconvene. After a savage civil war, by 1921 the Bolsheviks defeated their divided ‘White’ enemies, and by 1921 ruled most of the country. The whole Bolshevik ‘experiment’ in the end lasted a mere 74 years, from 1917 to 1991.⁵ In 1991 Russia became the ‘continuer state’ to the Soviet Union, assuming its legal and diplomatic obligations and responsibility for nuclear weapons, but was faced with the task of reconstituting its entire political and economic order.

The 1917 revolution opened up decades of crisis and development. It endured five massive economic catastrophes as a result of two prolonged invasions, a civil war, at least three major famines (1921–2, 1933–4 and 1947–8), accompanied by the collapse of historical markets and trading links. As a recent commentary puts it: ‘Without the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Russia might have suffered just three or even fewer disasters, like China or Germany. It might have become considerably more prosperous and populous.’ Russia failed to converge its per capita GDP and democracy score with Italy or Spain, and instead its ‘obvious peer is again Mexico and pre-1917 data look very familiar’.⁶ In other words, despite the vast effort and huge sacrifices, in comparative terms Russia after seven decades ended up roughly where it had begun. In the early years of the twentieth century Russia had been one of the fastest growing economies in the world and, following the defeat in 1904–5, it had also been rapidly modernizing its military forces, one of the factors that prompted the German High Command to start the war in 1914 rather than waiting for Russia to complete its modernization plans.⁷

Russia withdrew from the war, with the Bolsheviks promising ‘land and peace’. At the price of enormous territorial concessions Soviet Russia in March 1918 accepted the Brest-Litovsk peace with Germany. When Germany capitulated in November 1918, the country ended up on the side of the losers. There is no way of knowing whether a post-war Russia on the side of the victors in November 1918 would have resumed its strong developmental trajectory, or whether it would have succumbed to the developmental traps suffered by so many other countries with great potential, notably Brazil and Argentina. What we do know is that even before 1914 Russian civil society had been developing rapidly, and new patterns of social inclusion were being implemented.⁸ This was notably the case in Moscow, the old capital before Peter the Great moved it to St Petersburg in 1712. In Moscow, the pattern of native capitalist development, notably in textiles, as well as the strong influence of the Old Believers meant that trams, water and improved housing were laid on for workers.⁹ In other words, an evolutionary outcome may well have been able to resolve the political problems facing the country in the twentieth century. This is why so many in Russia today deny not only the necessity of the Bolshevik revolution but also of the overthrow of the monarchy.¹⁰ And this is why ‘anti-revolution’ is one of the cardinal principles of Putin’s ideology. In his Russia at the Turn of the Millennium (often termed the Millennium Manifesto), Putin argued that ‘Russia has reached its limit for political and socio-economic upheavals, cataclysms and radical reforms. Only fanatics or political forces that are absolutely apathetic and indifferent to Russia and its people can make calls for a new revolution.’¹¹ A traumatized nation largely agreed with him.

Russia developed enormously in the twentieth century, yet could it have achieved much more with different forms of social organization? As a counter-factual, that question is impossible to answer, yet it is worth asking. A Russia on the side of the victors would have shared the spoils and become established as part of the new order. Instead, Russia burned on the bonfire of world revolution, even though Joseph Stalin after Lenin’s death in 1924 focused on building ‘socialism in one country’. Russia, like the defeated Germany, became an outcast of the European state system. Nevertheless, the Soviet co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Introduction: Multiple Pasts and Many Futures
• 1 Getting Russia Right
• 2 Power and Ideas
• 3 Economy and Development
• 4 State, People and the Future
• 5 Making Russia Great Again
• 6 Russia’s Futures
• Conclusion: Russia as Challenger and Challenged
• Index
• End User License Agreement