Russia After Communism

Rick Fawn, Stephen White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135290856
• Print ISBN:
  9780714652931
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism

Russia's transition from communism holds great significance not only for itself but also for the wider world. This collection of essays examines the spectrum of Russia's transition since 1991 - considering not only the pattern of events but also what the changes have meant for Russians themselves.

Ten Years On, What Do the Russians Think?

STEPHEN WHITE

Formally, post-communist Russia is a liberal democracy. There are secret and competitive elections, held at regular intervals. The new Constitution, adopted by referendum in 1993, prescribes the absence of any official ideology, political diversity, and multiparty politics. There is a separation of powers, and an independent judiciary. The classic liberal freedoms are all secured: freedom of speech, movement and assembly, freedom of conscience, and equality before the law. In the event of any disagreement, international norms take precedence over the laws of the state itself. There are freedoms that go beyond the practice of many liberal democracies, including the requirement that official bodies make available any information they hold on private individuals unless national security dictates otherwise. And there are freedoms that have a particular resonance in post-communist conditions: freedom of entrepreneurship, and the right of private as well as other forms of ownership.The new constitution even begins, in words that are hardly accidental, ‘We the multinational people …’.

But ten years or more into post-communist rule, it is less clear that Russia has moved beyond an electoral to a liberal democracy – a distinction that has become increasingly important as older divisions between democracy and totalitarianism fade into history.¹ There were repeated threats, for instance, that elections would be cancelled, particularly in the spring of 1996 when it seemed that Boris Yeltsin would be defeated by his Communist opponent. ‘Why risk everything’, as Yeltsin’s bodyguard put it to the press, ‘just to have some people put pieces of paper into something called a ballot box?’² The president himself, who was ‘always inclined towards simple solutions’, had ordered the preparation of decrees that would ban the Communist Party, dissolve the Duma and put off the election; only the appeals of his daughter and chief of staff persuaded him at the last minute to remain within the bounds of the Constitution.³ Yeltsin took just over a third of the vote in the first round of the election, but had a decisive majority in the second; there were indications that he would not, in fact, have surrendered his position to a Communist opponent, even if he had been defeated.⁴ At all events, the task was now to prevent such challenges in the future. In the December 1999 parliamentary election the Kremlin’s most serious rival, Fatherland–All Russia, was defeated, with considerable assistance from state television. Then an early retirement, followed by an abbreviated campaign against the background of a Chechen war, provided what was almost a dynastic succession for Yeltsin’s chosen successor, Vladimir Putin.⁵

What, a decade or more after the collapse of communist rule and of the USSR itself, did ordinary Russians make of it all? What, first of all, did they make of the Soviet system under which almost all of them had grown up? How much, and in what ways, did they think the political system in which they lived had changed since 1991? What commitment did they have to their new democracy compared with other forms of rule? And in what ways did they think they could influence its decisions, if at all? With all its limitations,⁶ it is survey research that can most readily answer questions of this kind; and the discussion that follows is drawn for the most part from a nationally representative exercise of this kind, conducted for the present author and associates in the spring of 2001.⁷ We look first at retrospective assessments of the Soviet period, and then consider wider patterns of values, before concluding with an examination of the opportunities that exist for ordinary Russians to bring their views to bear upon the formation of public policy. This is an exploratory study of the range of evidence that is provided by a national survey conducted ten years after the end of communist rule; given the unprecedented nature of the changes that have taken place over this period, it seemed appropriate to take a broad view and to allow ordinary Russians, so far as possible, to speak for themselves.

The Soviet System in Retrospect

Russians have shown little inclination to return to the Soviet system when they have been given the electoral opportunity to do so. But this is not to say that they reject all aspects of their communist past. In earlier research, the present author and associates found that ‘job security’ was the most widely valued feature of Soviet rule (29 per cent); but there was also praise for the way in which ‘peace between nationalities’ (24 per cent) and ‘economic stability’ (22 per cent) had been maintained. Very few (just seven per cent) thought the communist system had no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Correcting the Incorrigible? Russia’s Relations with the West over Chechnya
• Censorship in Russia, 1991 and 2001
• Ten Years On, What Do the Russians Think?
• A Liberation from Emancipation? Changing Discourses on Women’s Employment in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia
• Mujahedeen, Mafia, Madmen: Russian Perceptions of Chechens During the Wars in Chechnya, 1994–96 and 1999–2001
• Church and State in Contemporary Russia: Conflicting Discourses
• Developments in the Russian Language in the Post-Soviet Period
• The Russian Media in the 1990s
• The Evolution of Russian Foreign Policy in the 1990s
• Abstracts
• Notes on Contributors
• Index