Russia after the Cold War

Mike Bowker, Cameron Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138459083
• eBook ISBN: 9781317879220
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

In Russia after the Cold War the editors provide an accessible and comprehensive survey of the state of Russia at the end of the twentieth century, as it seeks to come to terms with its new status in the world community, the pressures and tensions arising from economic and social change and with the problems of ensuring a democratic future. Written by a specially commissioned team of internationally respected experts on contemporary Russia, Russia after the Cold War is ideally suited as a main text for introductory courses on modern Russia within a politics, Area Studies or combined social science degree.

Contributors:
Alexei Avtonomov, Edwin Bacon, John Berryman, Christoph Bluth, Michael Cox, Nadia Davidova, Mark Galeotti, James Hughes, Roger E. Kanet, Julie A. Lund, Nick Manning, Andrew Patmore, Anthony Phillips, Richard Sakwa, Peter Shearman, Mark Webber, Stephen Webber, Stephen White, Matthew Wyman.

PART I Politics

1 Transition models and democratisation in Russia

James Hughes

Introduction: What is transition?

The break-up of the Soviet Union on 25 December 1991 ended a four centuries old political regime of centralised authoritarianism based in Moscow. From being an expansionist imperialist state, Russia, the largest of the newly independent post-Soviet states, has become one of the great test cases of transition to democracy. Transition studies are a rather loose embodiment of political science approaches and ideas about the nature of political and economic development. A transition is defined broadly as the interlude between one type of regime and another. The common thread uniting the diverse transition approaches is a central assumption that the historical experience of transformation from authoritarianism to democracy and the emergence of capitalism in the states of Western Europe and North America in the eighteenth century provide generalisable lessons and an analytical framework for understanding and promoting similar processes of change and outcomes in other states. The basic premise is self-evidently normative and linear: that the values, structures and political procedures of advanced Western democracies are the most developed and should be transplanted. Critics of this developmental approach to the study of politics argue that it is ethnocentric and culturally bounded. What is indisputable is that the gradual ebb and flow of state development amidst the growth of the capitalist economy has resulted in the steady erosion of the political space for authoritarianism, culminating in the consolidation of democratic forms of government in most states in the course of the twentieth century.

Transition studies are a broad church within which we can identify two main schools: the 'functionalist' and the 'genetic'. The functionalist school is concerned with the study of the impact of long-term processes of socio-economic development, or modernisation, on the emergence of stable democracy. In contrast, the 'genetic' school focuses on the political contingency and the role of agents of change in the investigation of the genetic question of causation: how democracy comes into existence. These schools are not mutually exclusive, and, in fact, much of the more recent work on transitions takes an integrated approach, interpreting the two schools as mutually interacting and, in some respects, reinforcing.

Much of the transition literature and its hypotheses are derived from the application of these ideas to the comparative study of democratising change beginning in the early 1970s in authoritarian states of relatively homogenous cultures and diverse regime types and geographical locations, from military juntas to corporatist and patrimonial regimes in Latin America, South-East Asia and the Southern tier of Europe (O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986; Huntington, 1993). The lessons of these 'Third Wave' democratisations were subsequently applied to post-communist democratisation in Eastern Europe from the late 1980s. For a time in the early 1990s it was widely debated whether the collapse of communism had led to the triumph of Western ideas of liberal democracy and capitalism as the rerum natura, the fundamental basis of a natural order of governance. Such triumphalism rapidly waned as the multidimensional character and simultaneity of post-communist transitions made them a very particularistic and problematic variant.

The functionalist model

Social requisites and democracy

Functionalism explains the existence of democracy by its correlation with modernisation. The latter is seen as a necessary underlying condition for stable democracy. Seymour Lipset and Barrington Moore were among the first social scientists to stress the link between democracy and broad trends of capitalist development, modernisation and the growth of affluence: the latter broadly meaning the enlargement of the middle class and development of social protection and security for the working class. Lipset (1981, p. 31) encapsulated the idea thus: 'The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances are that it will sustain democracy'. Moore (1967, p. 418) simplified the notion further: 'No bourgeoisie, no democracy'. These social requisites are functional for democracy because economic 'abundance is a condition for institutionalizing the give and take of democratic polities', while an expanded middle class brings the informed participation and moderation in politics needed to counter extremist demagoguery (Lipset, 1981, pp. 460, 467). The significance of capitalist development and the pivotal role of the middle class in democratisation are contentious. For some the key attribute of the middle class in democracy is its association with the values of 'moderation, tolerance, and democracy' (Diamond, 1996, p. 22). Others take a less benign view of the role of capitalism and the middle class in democratisation, arguing that 'it was the contradictions of capitalism and not capitalists that created democracy' (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992, p. 300). By creating and concentrating the working class, capitalism immensely augments the capacity for working-class self-organisation, leading to demands for political change and social reform. The propensity of the middle class is not universally supportive of democratic change; indeed, historically there have been many cases when it preferred to reinforce authoritarian regimes when challenged by working-class demands for expanded political equality (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992, pp. 270-1).

Nevertheless, the linkage between modernisation and democratisation is now an accepted wisdom not only for transition studies but also in democratic theory. Dahl's classic study of contemporary democracy, for example, accepted the assumption that 'a high level of socio-economic development not only favours the transformation of a hegemonic regime into a polyarchy but . . . may even be necessary to maintain a polyarchy' (Dahl, 1971, p. 63). Similarly, a recent sophisticated quantitative analysis of states confirms that high levels of economic development correlate with the plural distribution of power resources which leads to democratisation (Vanhanen, 1997).

Modernisation and post-communist transitions

The collapse of Soviet communism has been subsumed within the empirical body of evidence deployed to confirm the functionalist hypothesis (Lipset, 1994). A more circumspect hybrid variant of the functionalist argument advocates that while economics alone does not explain the late twentieth-century transitions, economic growth and middle-class creation and enlargement were important factors. The most active supporters of the 'Third Wave' of democratic transitions from 1974 on, it is argued, were the urban middle class. Moreover, in communist states it was poor economic performance that undermined the legitimacy of rulers and the system (Huntington, 1993, pp. 54, 67, 179). Certainly, by many of the multivariate measures of modernisation (GNP, per capita and disposable incomes, level and type of industrialisation, level of urbanisation, education and literacy rates, health care, ownership of consumer products, newspaper readership, doctors per person etc.) Soviet society by the early 1980s was a modernised one (Lewin, 1988; Lane, 1992).

The context of Soviet-type modernisation, conducted in conditions of global competition with the rival ideology and system of Western capitalist democracy, created unsustainable pressures on the monist authoritarian political regime. The mismatch between a political structure built on one-party authoritarianism and the modernised, urbanised and well-educated society led to a fundamental opposition between the aspirations and expectations aroused by the communist party's ideological claim that 'developed socialism' was the 'most advanced' system and the increasingly obvious failure of the command economy to deliver the material abundance and diverse cultural goods required to satiate societal demands. The idiocy of the daily struggle in a shortage economy had important structural explanations (for example, the military burden on the budget of the cold war arms race, the absence of a market and its discipline effect on producers, inherent production quality and bottleneck problems, plan distortions arising from erroneous information flows, poor labour incentives and other 'human factors'). The point is that the revolution in communications technology and the radical narrowing of time and distance from the 1960s meant that Soviet citizens were increasingly aware of the growing political and economic gap with the West.

The contradictions and increasing ineffectiveness of Soviet modernisation, illuminated by key economic advisers such as Aganbegyan, were major factors informing the early stages of Gorbachev's liberalisation strategy of perestroika (Aganbegyan, 1988; Ellman and Kontorovich, 1992). The great turning point in the radicalisation of perestroika came when the disgruntled Soviet urban middle classes in many republics led the push for an all-out programme of democratisation by organising nationalist popular fronts and youth-oriented 'informal groups' to mobilise mass popular protests against monist authoritarianism (Hosking et al., 1992; Sedaitis and Butterfield, 1991). In the sense that modernisation pressures were an important factor initiating the transition in Russia, the functionalist argument would seem to be plausible. It is less convincing as a predictive model, however, if one examines the transformative impact of transition on social conditions. The functional model is flawed in not recognising that a systemic transition can devour the modernised social structures from which it is born, and Russia is a vivid demonstration of this phenomenon.

Pauperisation and de-modernising transition

If abundance, an enlarged middle class and a protected working class are social requisites for democracy, then what conclusions can we draw from the pauperising impact of transition on Russian society since 1991? The impoverishment of Russian society began during perestroika, when Gorbachev's mismanagement of economic reforms undermined the basis of the Soviet social contract. What had been an incremental deterioration in social conditions under Gorbachev was transformed into a cataclysmic downturn by 'shock therapy', launched under Gaidar's tutelage in January 1992. The severe cuts in state orders for industry, price hikes and a government-designed course of hyper-inflation to wipe out savings plunged the mass of society into poverty and severely debilitated the modernised social structure inherited from the Soviet era. A comparison of graphics of income structure among social groups in Russia in the communist and post-communist periods would show a diamond-shaped structure before 1991, with a burgeoning middle class and narrow income differentials, transformed into a sharply elongated pyramidical spike after 'shock therapy' in early 1992, with a polarisation between the mass of poor and a small, immensely wealthy elite. The transition period in Russia, therefore, has been marked by two distinct socio-economic trends: a sharp fall in output, and hence in average real wages, and a surge in inequality (McAuley, 1995, pp. 186-7). The official economic indices are sobering: between 1991 and 1995 GDP plummeted by 39 per cent, industrial output was halved and agricultural output fell by a quarter, while real average wages fell by 30 per cent between 1985 and 1995. After six years of economic management by reformers Russia showed its first marginal GDP increase in the first quarter of 1997 of 0.25 per cent. According to official figures for 1997, 76 per cent of the population earn less than $200 per month yet most price indices are at world levels. Even allowing for the unrecorded off-book activities of the shadow economy (notoriously difficult to quantify), it is incontrovertible that income differentials have been sharply polarised by the transition process. This is the key indicator of de-modernisation.

While a new middle class of sorts has emerged in Moscow owing to the concentration of economic capital and foreign investment there, Russian society as a whole is characterised by poverty, rather than abundance. Thus, the social requisites for democracy that may have been present in the late 1980s are now absent. The chances of Russia attaining the economic growth rates necessary to recover its prior modernised social class income structure are bleak over the short term. Furthermore, the 'structural adjustment' pressures demanded by IMF loan conditionalities are actually impelling the Russian government to pare back radically its social infrastructure expenditure. The fiscal crisis of early 1998 meant that such IMF conditionalities were strengthened for Russia to secure a $22.6 billion emergency loan in July 1998. This external pressure is a significant factor in the consolidation of Russia's de-modernising transition to the free market.

A novel adaptation of functionalism suggests that a different correlate, a specifically 'capitalist modernization', as opposed to modernisation per se, may be the crucial factor for the development of democracy. The new correlation here is with the property ownership and economic freedom of an emergent capitalist class, a factor that was largely absent in communist modernisations, particularly in Russia, and will take time to develop (Bova, 1991, p. 134). While it is true that there are now 40 million shareholders in Russia as a result of privatisation, the effects of this are largely negated by 'insider' privatisation and crony capitalism. Small networks of administrative and managerial elites used their positional power to capture economic assets via privatisation and to subdue competition by regulation and corruption. These 'rent-seeking' practices to protect, elite interests and to subdue competition were endemic and are denoted by the term ' nomenklatura privatisation' (Clarke and Kabalina, 1995; Aslund, 1996; Blasi et al., 1997). Consequently, by the late 1990s just seven vast business conglomerates (so-called 'financial-industrial groups') dominated the economy in a form of oligarchic capitalism, not unlike the 'robber baron' capitalism of the late nineteenth century USA economy. The Russian economy is also highly criminalised and permeated by corruption. Some 41 000 industrial companies, 50 per cent of banks and over 80 per cent of joint ventures are believed to have criminal connections, and the shadow economy is estimated to account for up to 40 per cent of the Russian economy (Finansovye Izvestiya, 18 February 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors and Contributors
• Preface
• A note from the editors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• introduction
• PART I Politics
• PART II Economics, culture and social policy
• PART III Foreign policy
• Index