Political and Social Thought in Post-Communist Russia

Axel Kaehne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134165162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia russa

This is the first comprehensive study of Russian political and social thought in the post-Communist era. The book portrays and critically examines the conceptual and theoretical attempts by Russian scholars and political thinkers to make sense of the challenges of post-communism and the trials of economic, political and social transformation. It brings together the various strands of political thought that have been formulated in the wake of the collapsed communist doctrine. It engages constructively with the numerous attempts by Russian political theorists and social scientists to articulate a coherent model of liberal democracy in their country. The book investigates critical, as well as favourable voices, in the Russian debate on liberal democracy, a debate often marked by eclecticism and, at times, little conceptual discipline. As such, the book will be of great interest both to Russian specialists, and to all those interested in political and social thought more widely.

1
Introduction

‘Politics’, Michael Oakeshott once wrote, ‘is the art of knowing where to go next in the exploration of an already existing traditional kind of society’ (Oakeshott 1991:406). Trying to rebut the ‘ideologically oriented’ re-crafting of social affairs, he emphasised the relevance of existing social structures and norms from which the citizens of the polity would glean some intimations as to where to go and how to proceed. Although such a moderate conservatism might reverberate increasingly well in Western societies, Russia currently neither has the privilege nor can it afford such a moderate conservatism since it lacks any established and widely accepted rules of the political game. While the conservative critique of political liberalism in the West aims at preventing the dissolution of an already existing and highly valued political fabric that evolved over centuries, Russia knows only a caricature of politics in its ideological deformation. Thus Oakeshott’s warning against an understanding of politics as a formulaic project presupposes that liberal politics are firmly constituted. But what about those societies like Russia which so far have failed to successfully establish liberal politics throughout their history and in the 1990s, exiting the disastrous Communist experiment, are faced with a choice of instituting ad hoc liberal institutions? If Western liberals have expressed growing discontent about unfettered liberalism of late, and a ‘mitigated’ liberalism is dependent on existing well-established politics, where will they turn? Is there a fast lane for learning the liberal ‘vernacular’? And are such political linguistics suitable for societies in transformation at all? Or are some societies simply doomed to remain averse to political liberalism for the foreseeable future suspended in a semi-authoritarian no-man’s lands?

Looking at the situation in Europe’s former Communist states, the picture is varied. Some societies have managed in the wake of the collapse of the Communist regimes to revitalise their political traditions, peeling off, as it were, the veneer of Communist politics and thereby baring the healthy (or not so healthy) past political arrangements. Russian society, however, has faced a different challenge since 1991 (King 2000). The furrows of the Communist project ran deeper here and the veneer is thicker, rendering it impossible to declare a simple ‘return’ after an ‘accident’ that had lasted more than seventy years. Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has been a country in search of the meaning of the suffering that Communism had exacted over the last seven decades. Since neither a simple ‘return’ to pre-revolutionary times nor a consensus on an entirely novel modern Russia seemed to emerge for a long time, Russian historians and political scientists had to do it the hard way: to come to terms with, and try to make sense of, the Soviet experiment, and thereby address the needs of the present.

The magnitude of this change can barely be glimpsed using the terminology employed by Western political scientists. What Western and some Russian scholars call a triple transition (political, social, economic) is in fact nothing less than an attempt to grasp the complexity of the current processes by neatly packaging them into workable ‘spheres’ of society, each following its own rules and hence requiring its own particular treatment. For Russian historians and political scientists the terminology of transition is often not much more than a euphemism for an intellectual challenge that stares them in the face every day, while they try to make sense of the quandary that is called post-Soviet politics. For many ordinary Russians it has been an existential challenge that could never have been anticipated when Russia embarked on something that, back then, was innocuously termed perestroika.

Beyond recriminations for current problems, Russian academics were caught in a dilemma. Most of them had worked under the Soviet regime, where accommodation with the authorities would take various forms: some honestly supporting the regime; others paying lip service to the Communist creed; a few ‘internally emigrating’ as a means of salvaging their academic independence. Yet any way of living under Sovietism called for explanations, and so the search for new historical interpretations was always bound to possess a (in the West rarely noticed) personal dimension. Russian historians and political scientists had often been socialised in a totalitarian society that had tried to ruthlessly obliterate any remnants of the past. Hence recapturing a lost tradition was, and still is, for Russians often synonymous with a denial of their own upbringing, aggravating an already existing enormous confusion of values and day-to-day principles of life. Although this personal dimension of the Russian transition is not part of the subject-matter of this book, it has left its mark in the re-forging of interpretations by historians and political scientists and it has not gone unnoticed that often paradigms may have simply been replaced, while patterns of thought persisted (Iadov 2003a; Zhuravlev 1999).

Thus, carving out a meaningful interpretation of Russia’s history from under the rubble that totalitarianism has left behind is an intellectual, just as it is a personal, challenge and such an intertwining of problems is particularly relevant for the liberal project on which Western observers hope to see Russia embark. Since the concept of freedom cannot simply be understood as an absence of external impediments, it has a personal dimension that reaches deep into the question of identity and ‘interpreting yourself’ in a rapidly changing environment such as Russian society in continuing transformation. Seen this way, the situation of the Russian historian may very well encapsulate the complexity of the problem of how the national process of identification and self-interpretation coincides with the personal dilemma to create a meaningful and reconciled vision of a good life in transition. As tempting as it may seem to be to gain some insights into the process of transformation by peering into the mind of a Russian historian, this present study is not a work of discursive reconstruction of historiography, but an attempt to determine the chances of liberal politics in Russia from the outside perspective by analysing the interpretative devices employed by Russian theorists and historians. The book will try to show that the way Russians theorise liberal politics under the conditions of transformation (or initiation of politics per se) can be hugely instructive for Western political liberalism. In other words, the way others think about politics tells us something about the way we ought to represent the case for a liberal political order, the way we narrow down or inflate our own tradition, and which components of our tradition we have lost or decided to deem insignificant. Looking at somebody else’s political and social vision is, as I will suggest, a valuable path for re-evaluating our own way of thinking.

Yet there is another reason why it would be appropriate to consider the personal dimension of the Russian transformation in the context of political theory. Over the last decade or so political scientists have emphasised the role of political and social actors for the success or failure of political transformations. This new emphasis has, I believe, revealed a potential intersection between the work of social theorists and political scientists that can and ought to be explored further. Although political scientists usually do not make use of elaborate conceptions of human agency that go beyond highly schematic descriptions of ascribed intentions or motivations of political actors, social theorists have long invested an immense amount of work into this field, which still seems to remain an untapped resource for transformation theorists. Human agency, so my argument runs, can furnish us with a focal point for understanding societal transformations from whichever perspective we chose to view it, be it that of the social theorist or the viewpoint of the political scientist. Though the various notions of human agency are a familiar ‘playground’ for social theorists, transformation theorists may be more reluctant to acknowledge a more fully sketched concept of human agency.

As theorists usually do, I will say very little about the actual prospects of political liberalism in Russia for the current time. Although I believe that the categories of theoretical inquiry do intersect with those of political science, and I will sketch one of these junctures in Chapter 10, there will be no analysis of the chances to establish liberal politics in Russia. The reason for this is simple. Theorists may at times be participants in a wider public debate on politics, but the objective of their work is, as Oakeshott would put it, to reveal the postulates of theoretical thinking as a reflective activity, not to contribute to or engage in political activity itself. As Oakeshott rightly pointed out, the characteristics of political agency are different from the postulates of any theoretical enquiry. The former may or may not be reflective, may or may not be launched from correct starting places, but, above all, it proceeds from a contingent situation into which the agent is ‘thrown’. Political action reflects this contingency and the historian is tasked to reconstruct this interplay between contingency and available resources for the agent’s understanding. Yet theoretical (as distinct from historical) debate proceeds from a different launching pad. It reflects on the postulates of human and civil agency. It asks for the prerequisites of our understanding of a ‘going-on’; it thus does not require us to react to a previous activity (i.e. a judgement), but is interested in dissecting what it is that allows me to understand human and specifically political action. Just as this is the proper locus of political philosophy, so it is the seed of universality. Here lies the justification for the mainly descriptive thrust of this book: analysing the way in which Russian scholars think about liberal politics may point to shared resources of universal social and political theory. Whether this helps political liberalism in Russia is another matter altogether.

Finally, and crucially, I do not intend, nor could I manage, to present a comprehensive account of contemporary Russian political philosophy. Russian scholarly activity and output has increased considerably since the days of perestroika and academic efforts have not always congealed around identifiable themes. To many observers, Russian academic discourse often still looks like a cacophony of voices rather than a disciplined engagement with each other’s arguments. That does not deny that, at times, significant debates have evolved, but that pursuing a comprehensive portrayal of most of them would dilute the focus of this study unnecessarily.

Furthermore, there have been important voices on the political spectrum in Russia that have mostly come from a position conventionally hostile or adverse to liberal politics, which equally receive short shrift in this book. Some of those were formulated from the orthodox perspective, others from the far left. I believe that the revival of Russian conservatism (while drawing on some of the most important and interesting Russian philosophers) may constitute in the long run the most valuable contribution to both the political spectrum in Russia and the politico-theoretical and philosophical scene. So far, however, most of those who have attracted much public attention for their arguments of conservative drift seem to be heavily ideological and often exclude themselves from serious scholarly debate (cf. the works by Alexander Dugin). Others simply lack any consistent philosophical thesis (cf. Auzan 2004, 2005). Therefore this study will confine itself to those formulations of political liberalism in Russia whose proponents have more or less adopted a broadly benign and approving attitude towards liberal politics. Bearing in mind that liberalism can denote many things in Russia, such approval of political liberalism in general is not tantamount to an endorsement of any liberal political party or (least of all) the liberalisation project as pursued by the Yeltsin administration in the 1990s.

The book is divided into two parts. The relationship between the two is that a repaired account of universal political liberalism requires us to integrate ‘alien’, in this case Russian, concepts used in the theoretical debate. It would, however, be misleading to suggest that the material presented in the second part could somehow sustain the theoretical thesis formulated in the former. This is not my intention nor, given the nature and foci of the Russian debate, would this be methodologically sound. Rather, my argument is simply that an increase in referentiality between the Western theoretical debate on political liberalism and its Russian counterpart is indispensable for a reconstructed universalism of liberal politics. For this purpose the second part will present a broadly thematic account of the Russian discussions, which will allow Western theorists to familiarise themselves with the different terms of reference of the Russian debate.

The first part of the book (Chapters 3–5) contains a selective account of the Russian debate on political liberalism in the first post-Communist decade. It is grouped around various themes that either have special relevance to Russian scholars or have crystallised as focal points of the debate. After an overview of the theoretical positions is provided in Chapter 2, the first theme to be explored is the views of Russian scholars on the appropriation of Western concepts and ideas in Russia’s intellectual past and present. The third chapter underlines the importance which Russians attach to the ideas of civility and culture, while the fourth chapter deals with the complex notion of civilisation as espoused by Aleksandr Akhiezer. His work has been one of the most fruitful engagements with Russian history for historiography as well as sociology, and Chapter 10 will try to distil some lessons for a universal political theory from his conception of Russian statehood. Chapter 8 will introduce mainly the thought of the eminent Russian political theorist Boris Gurevich Kapustin on modernity and political liberalism. His notion of modernity as an ‘experiment’ echoes the thought of Hannah Arendt and may present a particularly helpful starting point for a further exploration of common ground between Western and Russian social and political theory.

Theoretical explorations of chaos and political liberalism by the philosopher Aleksei Alekseevich Kara-Murza and the political scientist Valentina Fedotova round up the portrayal of the Russian debate in Chapter 9. The penultimate chapter will briefly summarise the presented Russian positions and provide some co-ordinates for assessing the relevance of these views for a revaluation or reconstruction of the universal nature of liberal Western political theory, thus closing the circle by returning to the initial theoretical argument made in Part I of the book.

All translations from Russian into English are my own. I have used the Library of Congress system for transliterating Russian words. Within quotes I have only included Russian transliterations when the Russian original would allow alternative translations.

2
Positions

Much of past and contemporary Russian political philosophy has been preoccupied with the deep divergences between the Western ideal of liberal statehood and the existing Russian political order (for excellent overviews see Ignatov 1996; Novikova and Zizemskaia 1994/1995 and 2000; Zizemskaia 1999; and, of course, Walicki 1992). The chasm between these two traditions and the possibility of bridging this gap has been a major, if not the most prominent, theme in Russian state theory, past and present. Historically, the question of this divergence between Western norms and Russian reality was posed as the problem of how to bring about a limitation of political power in Russia without having enjoyed any lengthy tradition of intermediary institutions that would have contained, or completely prevented, the unhampered exercise of absolute powers concentrated in the hands of the Emperor. Or, in other words, political power in Russia never reached the stage of feudalisation and therefore was never able to utilise the mitigating effects of gradually institutionalised contractual relationships (Sashalmi 2002). It never experienced or comprised the elements of mutual assistance or benefit that could make inroads into the indivisible justificatory centre of power. This might be misleading if it is taken as evidence for not only absolutist but also strong pervasive power. In fact Russia experienced throughout its history a persistent weakness precisely because the failure to develop feudal contractual arrangements required its rulers to exercise power in a much more immediate personal fashion than did their Western counterparts. Il’in et al., summarising the pre-Petrine state–society relations, write:

The absence of legal codes of authority … the lack of regulation of the hierarchy of governing institutions (the legislative non-specification of the authoritative structure in the pyramid of power) engendered a non-legal [nepravovoi] type of government of the country on the basis of a tax-class system. The foundation of social interaction was constituted by obligation, which was emasculated in any civic and legal sense.

(Il’in et al. 1996:30)

In other words, although formally indivisible, Russian statehood was nevertheless continuously afflicted by a striking weakness in implementing and exercising its political will.

The present chapter will try to give a brief survey of the theoretical positions as they have been formulated by Russian historians and theor...