Russian Modernization

A New Paradigm

Markku Kivinen, Brendan G. Humphreys, Markku Kivinen, Brendan G. Humphreys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367567286
• eBook ISBN: 9781000226843
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Building on an original interpretation of social theory and an interdisciplinary approach, this book creates a new paradigm in the Russian studies. Taking a fresh view of Russia's multiple experiences of modernization, it seeks to explain the Putin era in a completely new way.

This book explores the paradoxical and contradictory aspects of Russia, analyzing the energy-dependent economy and hybrid political regime, but also religion, welfare, and culture, and their often complex interrelations. Written by a community of both Western and Russian scholars, this book re-affirms the value of social science when confronting a society that has undergone enormous and costly systematic changes. The Russian elites see modernization narrowly as economic and technological competitiveness. The contributors to this volume see contemporary Russia facing a series of antinomies, which are macro-level dilemmas that cannot be abolished, either by philosophical mediation or by immediate political decisions. As such, they are the tension fields that constitute choices for various competing agencies.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Russian studies, transition studies, sociology, social policy, political science, energy policy, cultural studies, and stratification studies. Professionals involved in energy, ecology, and security policy will also find this publication a rich source.

1Russian modernization

A new paradigm

Markku Kivinen and Mikhail Maslovskiy

Abstract

Building on contemporary social science, we intend to go beyond current Russian studies by creating a completely new paradigm in the field. In this chapter, we develop the conceptual starting points of this new paradigm and specify our methodological approach to modernity and modernization. Our critique of previous paradigms is not ‘flaw-centred.’ Rather we intend to show that Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory gives us instruments for methodological specifications that broaden the horizon towards more comprehensive research programmes. Previous approaches do not seem to find ways to examine both structures and agencies at the same time. Russia’s development is explained either as an inevitable structural process, or only as a result of the intentions of the actors. We argue that it is essential to be able to study modernization both as a representation and as a broader analytical category referring to basic structural challenges. For this, we need new middle-range theories and explanatory models. Our endeavour, however, is not only theoretical. Rather, we have developed the new paradigm in the context of interdisciplinary empirical analysis of the five major macro-level challenges of Russian modernization.

1.1 Relevance of modernization

The most recent call for Russian modernization has been associated with a speech by the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in his 2009 state of the nation address (Medvedev 2009a), although similar expressions were also present in President Putin’s speeches. However, the slogan of modernization became especially widespread during Medvedev’s presidency. In fact, it remains a common topic even today, although the public rhetoric has concentrated more on foreign policy challenges, while the outside world tends to see Russia slowing down reform efforts. In his presidential address of December 2014, Vladimir Putin emphasised economic growth, technological modernization, innovation, and international competitiveness as Russia’s top priorities. Only such factors, Putin argued, would secure for Russia a powerful and influential role on the world stage, and ensure its resilience as a nation (Putin 2014b).

The topic of modernization remains relevant because after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has had to rebuild its state identity and the associated political, social, and economic systems. The country has been forced to redefine itself as a nation, a state, and a society, vis-à-vis global development on the one hand, and Soviet and imperial Russian legacies on the other. Since the early 2000s, in an effort to consolidate power, Russia’s leaders have rallied behind a unifying conservative/neo-liberal ideology that has partly replaced, and partly built upon, Soviet and traditional models. A conservative turn and a simultaneous modernization effort seem like a typical Russian paradox. However, global social imaginaries and normative ideas concerning personal liberties, social-economic welfare, political freedoms, and the rule of law are all key elements for any 21st-century state as part of the evolving multi-level global order. Russia cannot avoid facing these global modernization challenges. However, we cannot explain Russian development only by this global normative horizon. We need a profound theoretical and empirical analysis carried out through state-of-the-art social sciences.

It is, of course, evident that when focusing on modernization we do not commit ourselves to the contemporary political project of Russian elites. Building on contemporary social science, we intend to go beyond current Russian studies by creating a completely new paradigm in the field. The starting points of this new paradigm are based on argumentation at five levels:

1.specifying our methodological approach to modernity and modernization;

2.showing the limitations of previous paradigms in the field;

3.reflecting on previous Russian discussions on contemporary modernization;

4.developing middle-range theories, explanatory models, and concepts based on Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory;

5.defining our understanding of interdisciplinarity.

Our endeavour, however, is not only theoretical. Rather, we have developed the new paradigm in the context of empirical analysis of the five major macro-level challenges of Russian modernization.

1.2 Relevance of structuration theory

In this book, we do not present all-encompassing and totalizing concepts of the Russian manner of modernization before the empirical analysis has taken place. Rather, we have two basic dimensions in our research setting. The first aspect is a generic theoretical approach found in Anthony Giddens’(1985) structuration theory. This approach has its strengths, as it can be used for generating concrete research settings concerning the various challenges in Russia’s institutional development. The second starting point is the understanding of Russian modernization as five fundamental challenges. We advance both theoretically and empirically on both of these aspects. First, making Giddens’ structuration theory empirically relevant, and second, trying to create synthetic answers concerning the major challenges of Russian modernization.

Several arguments can be suggested to support the view that Giddens’ theory should be the hard core of the new multidisciplinary paradigm (or research programme) in Russian studies (cf. Kivinen and Cox 2016).

First, Giddens’ theory is a synthetic social theory bringing together culture and power. However, his theory is not committed to any alleged master process of differentiation. Parsons’ evolutionary reflections, as well as the fundamental premises of the modernization theories of Niklas Luhmann (1997), insist that functional differentiation is a key process of modernity. For Giddens, the relationship between institutional complexes or sub-systems is not given at the abstract level of general theory. The setting of boundaries between institutional complexes is a matter of actors, and the internal logic of institutions always is, to a large extent, an empirical issue depending on actors’ understandings and the intended and unintended results of their actions. Rather than postulating pre-given theoretical answers, Giddens’ theory generates insight for concrete research settings.

Second, Giddens does not refer to fixed structures but points to the fact that structures come into existence and fade away in dynamic processes of structuration. In these processes, actors continuously change structures. Even Russian modernization should not be seen as some kind of evolution and development without the actors and agency. Furthermore, in this process people also observe themselves, modifying their intentions and executing their actions differently. This brings us to the research focus; the prospect of learning and changing the understanding of interests and intentions. If we want to study the institutions, we cannot view them straightforwardly as the institutionalization of pre-given values. Rather, we should conceptualize them as a multi-faceted tension field of various intended and unintended structuration processes.

Third, for Giddens, people’s power resources really do make a difference. People are not (not even in Russia) helpless victims tossed about by the overpowering ‘values’ or ‘systemic mechanisms’ of culture or economy. Rather they are knowledgeable actors who use their specific power resources in various and constantly changing ways. Because of contradictory interests, and the varying results of action, history at the level of nation-states and institutions will always have new beginnings – and then some periods of reproduction and continuous development based on established structural principles. This means that the functionality of the system has a rather limited timescale and is an empirical issue. In Russian modernization, general assumptions of functionality or differentiation seem almost completely lacking in any heuristic theoretical value. It is far easier to accept as a methodological starting point Giddens’ more modest ‘episodic’ conception of history.

All this being said, we have to acknowledge the abstract level and limitations of Giddens’ theorizing. First of all, Giddens does not give many concrete research examples of how structuration theory could be used for empirical analysis. The only major exception is his early analysis of classes (Giddens 1973). But even in this case Giddens constructs ad hoc dimensions of structuration without giving them any explicit theoretical substance. In our analysis of class, we accept the general idea of structuration but we also make an effort to conceptually specify various dimensions of class research based on reflection in the field in a more comprehensive and exact sense. This is our understanding of the research strategy of structuration in general (cf. also Nikula and Chernysh 2020). In this book, we suggest several other middle-range theories and research strategies to make the structuration theory empirically relevant, and even falsifiable.

The second point from where we have to go ‘beyond Giddens’ is the concept of contradictions. Giddens is influenced by the sociological conflict theory (Dahrendorf 1957; Lockwood 1964) when he argues that structuration has to be able to analyse institutions as tension fields. After the Cold War, there was a strong tendency in social sciences towards consensual and linear modernization theory, and, furthermore, conflictual approaches have not been much developed in this context or by Russian scholars. This makes Giddens’ emphasis on conflict relevant indeed. However, he does not elaborate any methodology for this idea. For this step of research, we suggest an approach where Russian modernization is conceptualized based on structurally determined key antinomies in which the agencies cannot avoid in making their choices. This is one of the cornerstones of our new paradigm, linking our approach to the tradition of conflict theory. Our conceptualization of antinomies is also linked both with the structuration theory, and with the need for an interdisciplinary synthesis. In fact, Giddens’ structuration theory can be interpreted as a social science ‘operationalization’ of Kant’s third antinomy of spontaneity and causal determinism. Interaction between structure and agency is thus a constituting principle of any society. However, in order to analyse the process of structuration in historically concrete societies, we have to go through empirical social sciences. Since societies are complex systems (as we will argue more concretely later), after the disciplinary analysis we need a new interdisciplinary synthetic conceptualization of antinomies. In our argumentation, antinomies in social sciences are not philosophical categories. They are empirically observable, macro-level dilemmas that cannot be abolished either by philosophical mediation à la Hegel or by immediate political decisions. Thus, they define the tension field that constitutes choices for various agencies. Choices are always many, and so too are agencies. Antinomies give us a new social science vocabulary for constructing new approaches, theories, and hypotheses. This is what we mean by a new paradigm: providing new instruments for suggesting theories and explanations for ongoing social processes.

From Giddens’ methodological limitations, it follows that we cannot see his explicit modernization theory as providing much relevance for our analysis of Russian or Soviet modernity. His concept of reflexivity as a key element of modernity looks more like a philosophical postulate à la Heidegger than a conceptual instrument for analysing structuration processes in concrete societies. We also have to specify concepts of agency and state. When we analyse the agencies we have to emphasize that social relations cannot be ultimately reduced to capacities of individual human subjects (cf. e.g., Thompson 1982; Tomlinson 1982; Johnston 1986). Rather, human decision-making and practice is always subject to the effects of specific organizational conditions of existence. This implies that agencies can be such entities as trade unions, NGOs, enterprises, as well as administrative structures or epistemic communities. People can act as individuals and their actions can have macro-level implications in social policy – for example, in Russia when people’s distrust of private pension funds almost eliminated them – but policy-making incentives and practices are institutional, and power resources are organizational. That said, we should also note that we do not see the state only as an agency that ‘exercises’ power. Rather we analyse the state as a set of locations where conflicts between agencies occur as a regulative mechanism comprising complex processes of decision-making, outcomes (intended or not), and mechanisms of reflexive monitoring of the results.

Box 1.1: On unintended consequences, in the Soviet/Russian context

Brendan Humphreys

There is an old saying: ‘Success has a thousand fathers, failure is always an orphan.’ In retrospect, claims of intention are as common as the disowning of failure. It is a useful point of entry into the dilemma of the unintended consequences of action, to which there are several references in the present volume.

In Robert Merton’s classic 1938 article, ‘The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,’ he manages in a remarkably short space to present the complexity of the problem, and the multiple variables within the equation. Some of these break down into pairings, such as unforeseen and undesirable, intended and anticipated, conduct and behaviour, action and objective situation, organized and unorganized, rational and irrational, success and failure, and rationalization and truth. A formidable list, just an overview of which shows that the ‘ever-present difficulty of casual imputation must be solved for every empirical case which is studied’ (Merton 1938).

As he formulated it, ‘The most obvious limitation to a correct anticipation of consequences of action is provided by the existing state of knowledge’ (ibid., 898). Merton’s seminal text continues:

We have the paradox that whereas past experience is the sole guide to our expectations on the assumption that certain past, present and future acts are sufficiently alike to be grouped in the same category, the experiences are in fact different.

As a consequence, he quotes Poincare: ‘prediction becomes impossible, and we have fortuitous phenomenon.’ These latter have been since listed – by no means exhaustively – as unexpected drawbacks, unexpected benefits, perverse results, and perhaps the most commented-upon phenomenon, the self-fulfilling prophecy.

In his Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder offers an example – born in the most brutal of circumstances – of a Stalinist self-fulfilling prophecy. It referred to the repression of the kulaks in the years 1929–1932:

The kulaks were peasants, the stubborn survivors of Stalin’s revolution: of collectivization and famine, and very often of the Gulag. As a social class, the kulaks (prosperous peasant) never really existed; the term was rather a Soviet classification that took on a political life of its own. The attempt to ‘liquidate the kulaks’ during the first Five-Year Plan had killed a tremendous number of people, but it created rather than destroyed a class: those who had been stigmatized and repressed, but who had survived. The millions of people who were deported or who fled during collectivization were forever after regarded as kulaks, and sometimes accepted that classification. What Soviet leaders had to consider was the possibility that the revolution itself had created its opponents.

(Snyder 2010, emphasis added)

In the present book, we use structuration theory in order to emphasize the methodological significan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface: Scientific method, and interdisciplinary approaches
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Russian modernization: A new paradigm
• 2 Modernization of the Russian economy: Fossil fuels, diversification, and the shackles of international political economy
• 3 Authoritarian modernization in post-Soviet Russia: Structures, agencies, and choices
• 4 Modernization of the Russian social policy: Social crisis, interventions, and withdrawals
• 5 Post-Soviet Russian culture: Anomy, desecularization and the conservative turn
• 6 Modernization of Russia’s foreign and security policy
• 7 Interdisciplinary synthesis: Antinomies of Russian modernization
• Bibliography
• Index