March 23, 1999    
This Date's Issues: 3104• 3105  •3106 

Johnson's Russia List
#3106
23 March 1999
davidjohnson@erols.com

*******

From: DGlinskiva@aol.com (Dmitri Glinski Vassiliev)
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 
Subject: What Went Wrong in Russia? The Ravages of "Market Bolshevism"

This article is coming out in the April issue of the Journal of Democracy.
Most of it was published today in Moscow's Nezavisimaya gazeta.

--------

What Went Wrong in Russia?
The Ravages of "Market Bolshevism"

By Dmitri Glinski & Peter Reddaway (105660.3437@compuserve.com)

Dmitri Glinski (Vassiliev), a Russian scholar, is a research associate at
George Washington University, where Peter Reddaway is professor of
political science. They are the authors of a book provisionally titled
Market Bolshevism: The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms (U.S. Institute of Peace
Press). This article presents some of the book's conclusions.

On 17 August 1998, the collapse of the Russian market in Treasury bills,
the government's default on its debt, and the devaluation of the ruble, all
the work of the cabinet of "young reformers" that had recently been
extolled in the West, marked the end of an era in Russian history. Yevgeny
Primakov's subsequent appointment as Russia's new prime minister, at the
insistence of the Duma and over the head of the corporate establishment,
will probably be seen by historians as Russia's most substantive step
toward representative democracy since August 1991. This event undercut the
political influence of the two elite groups that, while frequently
quarreling with each other over slices of the budgetary pie, had jointly
steered Russia through the period of so-called reforms. Gone were the
enforcers of authoritarian market reforms, and so was the backroom
political influence of the self-styled "oligarchs"—the infamous Seven
Bankers and the chief executives of large semi-private monopolies in the
raw- materials sector who had reaped enormous benefits from the conduct of
"reforms" at the expense of productive manufacturing industries and the
nation's impoverished majority. Both groups had managed to portray
themselves in the media as each other's opponents, even as they cooperated
within the same governments and switched back and forth between positions
in government and major corporations. The always shifting balance between
these two groups was one of the basic traits of the "Yeltsin regime," as it
existed from 1992 to 1998. Thus even though Boris Yeltsin is still
president, only a few of the building blocks of "the Yeltsin regime" remain
in place.
To say, however, that this regime is gradually becoming a thing of the
past does not mean that it has already been replaced by something
qualitatively new. The old players will continue their strenuous efforts to
regain control over national policy making for some time, especially
through their dominance of powerful mass media and their influence on
Yeltsin himself, who is apparently determined to complete his term of
office no matter what it costs the country, even though his public approval
rating is around 2–3 percent. Any political jolts that may still be caused
by those groups, however, will be decidedly peripheral to the overarching
theme of the coming years—Russians' search for a strategy of national
recovery and development that will enable them to transcend the Manichaean
antagonism between "reformers" and "antireformers" that has paralyzed
society for the last decade.
Given that Russian elites across the board, lacking an inspiring vision of
the nation's identity and future, have been unable to steer the country
away from decline and bankruptcy, and that the utopian image of "the West"
as a selfless savior and sponsor has long since faded, Russians will need
to muster their internal civic and cultural resources to help pull the
nation out of its present troubles. (This widespread understanding is
reflected in the large billboards that appeared all over Moscow in late
1998: "Nobody will help Russia but we ourselves.") Such an internally
driven recovery requires a comprehensive analysis of the sociocultural and
political legacy of "the era of reforms." We must focus on the causes of
the decay of Russia's social capital, which appeared robust in the late
1980s but has now been weakened by pervasive mistrust and apathy, and on
the series of more promising alternatives that, had they been taken, might
have spared Russia from its present plight.

Democrats vs. Radical Marketeers

Let us begin by examining a misleading but widespread cliché: the
assertion that in 1990–91 political power in Russia was seized by
"democrats." Although this claim is at the least inaccurate, it has been
propagated by both wings of the Russian political elite—the radical
marketeers and the Communist opposition. Moreover, support for the
"democracy and market reforms" that were allegedly developing in tandem
became the mantra of U.S. government policy toward Yeltsin's Russia. This
position reflected an uncritical projection of the American system—based on
a "peaceful coexistence" between capitalism and constitutional
democracy—onto a nation with a fundamentally dif-ferent culture and history.
It is true that in contemporary Russia democracy, as both a set of
procedures and a culture, has been closely linked in public consciousness
to the notion of the "democratic movement," which between 1988 and 1991
united large numbers of unprivileged Russians from the most diverse social
and educational backgrounds. The historical evidence convincingly
demonstrates, however, that this democratic movement never succeeded in
achieving administrative power. In fact, the program of economic reforms
designed and im-plemented by Boris Yeltsin, Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais,
and their Western advisers ran counter to the most basic aspirations and
tenets of the democratic movement that had ensured Yeltsin's success in the
1989, 1990, and 1991 elections.
This broad-based nationwide movement, which had its roots in the political
underground of the 1960s and 1970s, appeared on the political stage as a
result of Gorbachev's reforms. It defined itself in opposition to the
political power and economic privileges of the Soviet oligarchy and its
mafia allies (most often without the marked anticommunism of the radical
free-marketeers, many of whom belonged to the Soviet establishment). This
movement aspired to broadly conceived demo-cratic values of European as
well as native Russian origin, rooted in the Russian ideal of "people's
rule," and advocated a more just and equitable society than the corrupt
system of "developed socialism."1 Apart from these common values and the
quintessentially Russian "populist" vision of a body politic without rigid
divisions between rulers and ruled, the movement had few clearly defined
programmatic goals. It was organizationally fragmented, encompassing dozens
of fluid groups and proto-parties without rigid ideological affiliation,
whose creeds ranged from communitarian traditionalism to liberal Marxism.2
In this regard, it was similar to other protest movements, such as the
civil rights movement in the United States or Poland's Solidarity.
Meanwhile, segments of the Soviet managerial elite, as well as
entre-preneurially minded officials in the Communist Party, the Komsomol,
and the KGB, were busily engaged in exchanging their administrative power
for semi-legally privatized economic property, a process that weakened the
Party's chain of command that had been holding government institutions
together. This weakening of the state and the subversion of its revenue
base effectively prevented those few, poorly organized democrats who had
entered politics at the national and local levels from obtaining enough
political and administrative power to block the abuses of the Soviet
nomenklatura and the largely illegal redistribution of public property that
was underway. The nomenklatura's interests were further enhanced by the
fact that its semi-private economic activities had for decades outpaced the
regime-thwarted development of civil society. In the era of Brezhnevite
"stagnation," officials had condoned or even tacitly encouraged the black
markets created by corrupt elite groups in association with the mafia, who
used détente to open channels to the Western economy. As for the activities
of the political opponents of the nomenklatura, they were almost invariably
suppressed. As a result, by the time of perestroika, the civic development
and self- organization of society lagged far behind the capitalist
development of the nomenklatura.
The allies and admirers of Russia's "market reformers" in the West failed
to grasp that by 1991, when the Soviet economy had already been in serious
straits for more than a decade, the real debate was not between "reformers"
and "antireformers," but rather between the proponents of different methods
of escaping an unworkable system. They were split along political and
cultural lines between democrats and radical marketeers, between populists
and elitists, between idealists and pragmatic manipulators. Even within the
group of resolute Westernizers, some were inspired primarily by Western
protest movements of the 1960s and the Prague Spring ideal of "socialism
with a human face," while others saw the West through the prism of the
Thatcher-Reagan free-market reforms. Ultimately, the cyclical para-digm of
Russian history, in which top-down reformers compete with proponents of
change from below, once again produced a zero-sum game, in which the
radical marketeers—with support from the Inter-national Monetary Fund (IMF)
and other Western institutions—won, and the democratic movement lost.

"Radical Reforms" and the Rollback of Democracy

The widespread cliché that "Russia has already gone through all the
revolutions that history allows her" may indeed be true for admini-strative
revolutions from above (such as Stalin's collectivization and Yeltsin's
shock therapy) but not for revolutions from below. In fact, except for the
case of February 1917 (when popular discontent was only one of the factors
behind the fall of the already incapacitated monarchy), no Russian
government of modern times has been brought down by protests from below.
Likewise, in 1991 the Russian demo-cratic movement was able neither to
unseat the rulers nor to promote the kind of reforms that it desired. In
fact, by 1990 it had virtually delegated the representation of its
interests to one of the warring factions within the nomenklatura—Boris
Yeltsin and his team. Pragmatically minded and unscrupulous, this group
benefited from the democrats' electoral resources and the appeal of their
anti-establishment rhetoric, and thus acquired a popular legitimacy that
was unprece-dented among politicians since the end of World War II. The
Yeltsin team, however, had no interest in using this legitimacy for the
purpose of advancing social reform without increasing economic inequality.
Instead, the democratic movement was used as a battering ram to destroy the
institutions of the Soviet Union, while Yeltsin built his own, previously
nonexistent state, the Russian Federation (centered around him personally),
chopping away those institutions and republics that were still loyal to the
Union and that he was unable to swallow.
Soon after their success in the August 1991 countercoup against the old
elite, Yeltsin and his allies in the entrepreneurial part of the
establishment took firm steps to preempt and thwart the further development
of the grassroots democratic movement, which threatened to reduce them to
transitional figures who were likely to be removed from the scene by the
developing democratic revolution. In particular, Yeltsin, Gavriil Popov,
and their associates encouraged splits within the movement, discredited its
potential leaders with the help of the Kremlin-controlled media, and
tarnished their image in the West by squeezing them out of the democratic
political mainstream and toward the "red-brown" periphery. Most
importantly, the wiping out by the government of most people's savings—held
in frozen bank accounts amid hyperinflation—effectively expropriated the
Soviet equivalent of the middle class, which constituted the social base of
the democratic movement (even as the reformers repeatedly promised, in
vain, to create a new middle class from those entrepreneurial groups that
benefited from the demise of the old one). By mid-1992, these policies had
ensured unchallenged domination over politics and the economy by an array
of clans that mostly came from the former Soviet establishment. Having
contributed greatly to the degradation of the Soviet system by their
ideological slipperiness, their mindless waste of national resources, their
envious attempts to emulate Western elites' patterns of consumption, and
their deliberate neglect of the needs and opinions of the population at
large, these clans were ruling Russia.
As a result, the influence that had been painstakingly won by civil
society and democratic institutions over the perestroika years was
substantially reduced, while the Kremlin adopted policies that were
contrary to the democrats' initial aspirations and goals. Instead of
pursuing an equitable denationalization of property and a level playing
field for law-abiding entrepreneurs, the regime accelerated the rush by
Soviet-era elites and the criminal underworld to carry out what Soviet
history textbooks called "the primitive accumulation of capital." Instead
of promoting the development of democratic institutions and a genuine
separation of powers, Yeltsin and his associates disbanded parliament by
force and tamed its successor, thwarted the development of an independent
judiciary, and reduced the power and revenue base of local self-government.
By 1994, they had established a regime reminiscent of Byzantine
authoritarianism.
Therefore, the labels of "democrat" and "reformer" often applied to
various factions within the Yeltsin-era elite are misleading. If one takes
the values and goals of the popular democratic movement as an indication of
what reform initially meant to unprivileged social groups, the Yeltsin-era
policies represented a rollback of reform, or a counter-reform. Yet,
remarkably, these reformers managed to appropriate the title of "democrats"
and continue to be acknowledged as such even by their opponents. As a
result, the words "democrats" and "democracy" have acquired pejorative and
even obscene connotations for ordinary Russians.
Opponents of the government, in their turn, acquired the equally
misleading label of "hard-liners." In fact, it was Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin,
Chubais, and their ilk who proved to be the real hard-liners, in their
implacable drive to impose unpopular policies on society. Meanwhile, some
of their opponents, including influential apparatchiki in the Communist
Party, acted as soft-liners, never really trying to reverse Yeltsin's
antidemocratic policies, from which they derived electoral and often direct
economic benefits. Those opposition groups that built on the sociocultural
base of the democratic movement (such as the social democrats led by
Grigory Yavlinsky or the enlightened nation-alists led by Sergei Baburin)
were less inclined to compromise with the Kremlin's policies. But their
efforts to change the system by parlia-mentary means were blocked by the
joint efforts of the old communist and new anticommunist nomenklatura.

Market Bolshevism as a System of Rule

Taking a longer historical perspective, we believe that an appropriate
term for Russia's rulers in the 1990s is "market Bolsheviks." In Russian
historical parlance, where the cyclical view of the nation's history has
deep roots, the word "Bolshevism" has long been used to denote a recurrent
pattern of political behavior and culture dating back at least to the time
of Peter the Great.3 Bolshevism in this sense is defined by the
self-confident, almost messianic vanguard mentality of a self-anointed
elite that feels entitled to impose its own understanding of progress and
development on the "backward" majority by wiping out traditional ways of
life and the sociocultural diversity of Russia's "multi-layeredness," or
mnogoukladnost'. Like their predecessors in 1917, the market Bolsheviks of
the 1990s framed their struggle against Russia's "backwardness" in such a
way as to portray the ultraconservative forces as their main enemies. In
reality, however, they often coop-erated behind the scenes with the
leadership of these "dark forces" to thwart grassroots democratic
alternatives that represented different, more tolerant, and more inclusive
visions of development and pro-gress.
In our view, this historical framework yields a more profound
understanding of the last decade than the soap operas about "democrats and
refomers" struggling against "dark forces." It throws some light on why the
intelligentsia and other unprivileged strata, who had been the driving
force of Russia's democratic movement and still, as the polls show, share
many of the democratic values of the 1988–91 period, have in recent years
provided their votes and intellectual support to those who oppose market
Bolshevism, including the most radical opposition. Finally, it suggests
that Yeltsin's successors, in their search for indigenous resources for
recovery, will eventually have to seek dialogue with the sociocultural
groups that stood behind the abortive democratic revolution. This will mean
reassembling, piece by piece, the social and human capital of grassroots
reformism that was mindlessly dissipated by the market Bolsheviks.
If Russia is to transcend the legacy of the market Bolsheviks' rule, it is
important to identify the basic elements of this rule that the leaders of
post-Yeltsin Russia will sooner or later have to confront. What follows is
a short list of the seven features that we see as fundamental to the
political and social order that existed in Russia from October 1993 to
September 1998. Although some of them have become less visible since
Yeltsin de facto yielded some of his powers to the Primakov government,
others have remained in force and may become even more deeply entrenched if
some segments of the post-Yeltsin elite find them suitable for their own
purposes. For this reason, choosing between the present and the past tense
in discussing the Yeltsin legacy is not easy.

1) A Legitimacy Vacuum. The failure during the "reform" period to
redistribute power and wealth in a way that would be legitimate by the
standards and norms of Russian culture is the present system's Achilles
heel. This lack of legitimacy corrupts the very foundations of the state
and influences the norms of human conduct in society, especially the way
that the general public relates to all manifestations of government
authority. Under Yeltsin, the state had abrogated its unspoken social
contract with the population, a contract that was deeply rooted—as a norm,
if not a continuous practice—in Russian history and culture. In particular,
the government had abdicated its responsibility to promote, or at least to
sustain, the general welfare and to guarantee a subsistence income for the
disadvantaged. The Yeltsin team implicitly recognized this in the 1996
elections, when it all but openly declared its candidate to be merely "the
lesser of two evils." As a result, to use Mancur Olson's colorful imagery,
Russians saw the government as just another in a seemingly infinite series
of "stationary bandits," whose fiscal demands amount to an extortion of
tribute, not to advance the public good but simply to enrich the "party of
power." Therein lie the roots of the revenue crisis, which can be resolved
only after the government's social contract with the nation, and the
legitimacy that flows from it, are restored. (To Prime Minister Primakov's
credit, he acknowledged early on that the central problem that his
government will have to deal with is this pervasive mistrust of the
authorities.)

2) A Privatized State. It is no wonder that the alienated majority
identifies the Yeltsin-era state with individuals and factions within the
establishment, most of whom have been putting their private interests above
those of the nation, and some of whom became indistinguishable in their
corruption from organized crime. Over the past five years, the shifting
balance of forces within this "mafia-establishment alliance" determined
most of the country's political and economic developments. In 1996,
Giulietto Chiesa remarked that "fighting corruption and crime in Russia
would mean no less and no more than changing the political elite of the
country." The present Russian government, whose key members, incuding
Primakov himself, come from what have tradi-tionally been the less corrupt
institutions of the establishment, appears to understand this. It seems to
be willing to prosecute some members of the Yeltsin-era elite for economic
crimes, insofar as it is possible to do so without disrupting the fragile
social peace and the admini-strative capacity of those government
institutions that are still successfully functioning. This will be the most
arduous task facing the Primakov government, and one fraught with serious
political danger. It seems, however, that the government's resolve in
fighting crime and corruption should draw active support from Western
officials and international institutions, including assistance in the
repatriation of illegally exported capital.

3) Market Bolshevism as Ideological Doctrine. The Yeltsin regime was not
merely pursuing a set of policies; like its predecessors, it had a
comprehensive ideology that was shared by most factions within the elite
and propagated by the various Kremlin-controlled media. This ideology
consisted of a peculiar blend of Social Darwinism (which sees the survival
of the fittest as a major law of social progress), the "postmodern" cult of
the autarkic self (which scorns civic obligations and community values),
and traditional Russian fatalism.
The elite used this ideology both explicitly and subliminally to remold
society in its own image. This reminds us not only of its Bolshevik
predecessors, but also of certain aspects of China's Cultural Revolution.
The descent of the Soviet middle class into poverty has already produced
some apparently intended cultural effects similar to those of Mao's policy
of "morally educating" city dwellers by sending them to do manual labor in
poverty-stricken villages. The mainstream Russian media presented the use
of brute force and backroom connections as the most rational method of
advancement, and public-sector employees such as teachers were often
portrayed as people whose limited skills and lack of initiative doom them
to low wages and perpetual but hopeless opposition to the brave new world.
This subtle but sustained brainwashing sought to involve as many Russians
as possible in the shady operations and get-rich-quick schemes of the
"casino economy," so that the elite's own abuses could be seen as merely a
reflection of the national norm. As a result of this propaganda campaign,
many Russians, especially the young, have gradually accepted the new system
as the normal way of life, or at least as a lesser evil, and have dropped
out of the public sector and the education system and into the shadow economy.
Since pensioners and the unprivileged intelligentsia were seen as the most
solid and sustainable base of the opposition, the media have also tended to
fuel anti-intellectualism and to foster a generation gap by patronizing, or
even mocking, the elderly. This generational chauvin-ism was openly
revealed by Boris Nemtsov's famous slip of the tongue: "Russia must enter
the 21st century only with young people."

4) Impotent Authoritarianism. The regime's persistent attempts to
strengthen its grip without addressing the legitimacy problem produced a
vicious circle of escalating autocratic centralization of executive power
within a government whose administrative capacity was pro-gressively
declining. Thus the buildup of presidential authority from late 1991 on and
the bouts of bureaucratic authoritarianism carried out by Yeltsin's string
of "iron chancellors" (from Gennady Burbulis to Chubais) were often
counterproductive from the point of view of administrative efficacy. Fiscal
anemia and the rise of market fetishism (which devalued the work ethic)
created an environment in which the administrative chain of command
dissolved not far below the top into a fluid agglomeration of private and
corporate interests, where shifting alllegiances between patrons and
clients prevailed over institutional loyalties.

5) A Partisan Constitution. Although the 1993 Constitution has not been
strictly observed and has not impeded the ongoing partial transfer of power
from the Kremlin to Primakov's government and the regional authorities, it
still remains a major stumbling block to national recon-ciliation and
democratic development. This is not so much because of its
superpresidentialism (Yeltsin's constitutional powers exceed those of the
American and French presidencies combined, and approximate the powers of
Czar Nicholas II under the 1905 quasi-constitutional system), but because
it has never been openly debated and accepted by most of society. It was
drafted as a partisan document tailored to fit the regime and to perpetuate
the new correlation of political forces in October 1993, and it was
promulgated under conditions of one-man rule, in violation of the
previously existing constitution and laws and in the face of strong
evidence that the results of the referendum on its approval had been rigged.
With the executive branch subject to few restraints and little legislative
or judicial oversight, the president and earlier governments have had ample
room to interpret the constitution in their favor and to violate it
routinely with impunity.4 Even the most moderate parties favor changing the
constitution, but since it was designed to be impossible to amend without
the consent of the president (who has predictably opposed any change),
every move to adjust the consti-tutional order is seen by the Kremlin as
destabilizing and revolutionary. Consider the very cautious attempt by
Yevgeny Primakov in January of this year to negotiate a pact between the
branches of government. According to this plan, Yeltsin was supposed to
renounce his right to dismiss the government and the Duma at his own
discretion and his right to appoint acting cabinets without parliamentary
approval; in exchange, he was to receive extensive guarantees of political
and legal immunity, and of his material welfare after the completion of his
term. The plan was first turned down by Yeltsin's inner circle, and then
considerably diluted with the support of some oppositionists who possibly
still hoped to join the government at Yeltsin's discretion. 

6) Dependency on the West. The dependency argument was origi-nally
developed by Western political economists and applied to Latin American
nations. Soviet scholars and analysts never spoke about Soviet economic
dependency on the world economic core, and it is scarcely openly admitted
in Russia today. Indeed, Russia still pos-sesses human and technological
resources that, in the past, would have guaranteed it a considerable degree
of economic self-sufficiency. Its current state, however, presents plenty
of evidence to support the dependency argument, and it is worth noting that
Western economists began using the term to define the Soviet position in
the global economy as early as 1986.
This dependency has two distinct elements: the objective structural
dependency of Russia's "pipeline economy" on the volatility of global
markets, and the cultural and psychological dependency of Soviet and
post-Soviet elites on the image of "the West" that has been nurtured from
both sides and continuously remolded to suit the interests and fears of
various groups within the Yeltsin-era establishment. These two elements
have developed autonomously, but are often difficult to separate from each
other.
Culturally, dependency stems from the hierarchical vision of the
world—characteristic of Russia's Bolsheviks old and new—that divides
humanity into "the West" and "the rest." This image of the omnipotent and
single-minded West has been a powerful lever in Russian politics. This was
particularly visible during the stormy confrontation between the Kremlin
and the parliamentin the fall of 1993, when the image of a unified "West"
standing behind one of the warring cliques was manipulated, with conscious
support from some powerful Westerners and passive acquiescence from others,
to ensure a winner-take-all victory for one side in the conflict, and to
deflect to "the West" the ultimate responsibility for the consequences of
the winner's actions.
One particular agent of this dependency, the IMF, has been at the center
of the debate about Russia over the past several years. We have argued
extensively that the IMF's policy prescriptions and lending to Russia would
not help its economy. By now, few would dispute that the IMF loans, as well
as the billions of dollars in U.S. aid given to the central government in
Moscow, went to prop up the political fortunes of widely detested and
inefficient reformers. For the majority of Russians and Westerners alike,
this was a waste of money and moral capital. It is, however, indicative of
the degree of the Russian establishment's psychological dependency that the
new government has apparently staked its success on continued IMF lending,
and that most Russian elites and the media have agreed to consider this a
measure of the government's success or failure. The problem with this
approach is that IMF loans come with conditionalities that all too often
have been harmful for the countries that obeyed them, as is nowadays
admitted by an increasing number of economists.
Another aspect of psychological dependency is the talk about the terrible
consequences of a default on sovereign debt, which some Russians see as
leading inevitably to Russia's eviction from the world financial system. It
is worth remembering that in 1931 Britain and France defaulted on their
sovereign debt to the United States, incurred in the course of World War I.
Of course, Russia's initial position vis-`a-vis international financial
markets is quite different. Yet it is also true that Russia's depression
has been much more severe than that of the early 1930s in Europe, and that
a significant share of these debts were incurred in the pursuit of
inappropriate policies that the IMF had advocated. Under these
circumstances, and given that Russia cannot pay its debts without risking
societal breakdown, writing off Russia's debt to the IMF would be a more
realistic and sensible solution than lending it more money. This would help
atone for the erroneous advice that has been stimulating anti-Westernism.
Whether structural or psychological, dependency is part of the reality
that Russians currently have to deal with. It carries both advantages and
disadvantages for various strata and political interests in Russian
society. Although the dependency factor played a key role in the rise of an
essentially antidemocratic regime in 1991–93, it also inhibited the Kremlin
from reducing such formal elements of democracy as comparatively free
elections and a parliament to mere tokens, which it otherwise would
probably have done after October 1993 or in March 1996, when Yeltsin feared
losing the presidential election. The elite's psychological dependency on
approval from "influential Western circles" translated into a panicky
reaction by the Russian press to Western revelations of abuses by a number
of "oligarchs" and government officials, which ultimately contributed to
the eviction of the Chubais clan from Russia's political Olympus.5
Similarly, it was the turmoil in the global financial markets that
triggered the Russian crisis, which culminated in an antioligarchical
"velvet revolution" initiated by the Russian legislature in September 1998.
This showed that upheavals in global finance can lead to the reshuffling of
the deck of Russian politics more quickly and thoroughly than domestic
events could do. At the same time, it is quite possible that conservative
elites in the financial and extractive sectors will try to regain their
power by appealing to ethnic nationalism, a strategy designed to insulate
their power and wealth from the vicissitudes of the global economy.

7) The indispensability of an autocrat. The personal role played by an
autocrat is pivotal in protecting the system of market Bolshevism from
factional fragmentation, administrative paralysis, and popular upheaval.
(In fact, such an autocrat seems to be an essential structural element in
any Bolshevik type of modernization.) The Yeltsin-era establishment is
fully aware of this; hence the desire of powerful groups to postpone
Yeltsin's departure, and their tolerance of his behavior and
pronouncements, even when these demeaned Russia, including its oligarchs,
on the world stage.
Today some of the Yeltsin-era financial and administrative elites would be
happy to engineer a smooth transfer of power to a new potential autocrat,
provided that he would treat them favorably. Some former associates of the
"oligarchs" and "reformers" now see Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov as their best
bet under the circumstances, and they have been flocking to his newborn
party. This is understandable, since in the early 1990s he was one of the
founders of the present system and played a pioneering role in privatizing
the state and shutting down and revamping representative institutions in
Moscow. All this helped him to install a heavily corporatist system of
governance in Moscow, based on the diversion of financial flows from the
rest of the country to the capital via Moscow banks. Judging by his
behavior in recent times, however, he has come to understand that the
current system is un-workable. Even if he were to accept the role of the
guarantor of the status quo for some of the crony capitalists, he does not
wield enough authority nationwide to assume the position of a legitimate
arbiter for the entire spectrum of interests. As a result, important elite
groups have apparently resigned themselves to the fact that Yeltsin's
political system is likely to sink with its founder, and are preparing for
the process of "de-Yeltsinization" (somewhat akin to the de-Stalinization
of the 1950s), which is likely to alter significantly the correlation of
forces in society. It will further increase the political leverage of
opposition parties and the legislature, as well as of civil society in
general, vis-`a- vis the executive, potential new autocrats, and major
corporations.

Missed Opportunities

In Russian perceptions of history, the belief that a course of events was
unavoidable or irreversible has more often than not prevailed over the idea
of reasoned choice. In the past two decades, Marxist-Leninist certainty
about "scientific regularities of development" and pseudo-Marxist economic
determinism have been steadily replaced in public consciousness by the
belief that Russia's present plight is the inevitable product either of
national culture, or of global developments beyond Russia's control, or of
both. As for ourselves, we share the view that history does offer
alternatives for both individuals and nations, and that their denial
attests either to a poverty of imagination or to a lack of will.
Evidence suggests that a peaceful democratic alternative to market
Bolshevism was available in 1989, 1991, 1993, and even afterwards. The most
important opportunity was missed in the fall of 1990, when a compromise
blueprint for democratic economic reforms, which would have required the
Soviet government to dismantle central planning gradually but retain a
single nationwide economy, fell victim to political feuds and mistrust on
the part of the IMF. In January 1991, the IMF advocated authoritarian
monetarist reforms not much different from those initiated at the time by
then-Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov. The major responsibility inside the
country for this failure lay with Boris Yeltsin and his team, who had
abandoned the program of economic reforms endorsed by the Russian
legislature and embarked on the path of large-scale speculation in foreign
currency, along with fiscal and financial warfare against the Soviet
central government.
Another chance for democratic reforms was missed in July 1991 at the Group
of Seven summit in London, when the leaders of the major industrial
countries did not provide a major aid package that had been widely expected
in the Soviet Union. This accelerated the trans-formation of the political
struggle between Soviet elites into a zero-sum game, and led to the
abortive August coup, Yeltsin's countercoup, his takeover of the
institutions of the Soviet central government without regard for the
concerns of other republics, and the abrupt, ill-considered, and
conspiratorially conducted dissolution of the USSR.
Still another chance was missed in October–December 1991, when the Russian
parliament, dominated by the nomenklatura and by Yeltsin loyalists,
approved shock therapy—yet another revolution from above—without
substantive debate, and then with great fanfare handed many of its
constitutional powers over to President Yeltsin.
One more opportunity for democratic reform was missed in December 1992,
when public opinion and political momentum were on the side of the
democratic nationalists and centrists opposed to Yeltsin, but their
internal division enabled Yeltsin to replace the Gaidar government with a
cabinet of lobbyists from the raw-materials sector led by Viktor
Chernomyrdin, whose policies accelerated Russia's industrial collapse.
Yet another chance was missed in September 1993, when Western leaders gave
unconditional support to Yeltsin's extraconstitutional acts (thus
frustrating the attempts of influential moderates to hammer out a
negotiated solution) and subsequently approved his use of force to disperse
the parliament that had brought him to power.
Still another opportunity was abandoned during the presidential campaign
of 1996, when the leading candidates opposed to the system of "nomenklatura
capitalism" failed to build a tactical alliance and were lured, one by one,
into negotiations with the Kremlin, thus enabling Yeltsin to secure a
second term in office.
At last, however, the comprehensive collapse of market Bolshevik policies
in August–September 1998 and the Kremlin's general loss of control finally
stiffened the parliament's backbone. As a result, Yeltsin found himself
compelled—for the first time ever—to yield to the Duma on a truly crucial
issue by nominating Yevgeny Primakov as the new prime minister. This was a
clear triumph for the principles of demo-cratic deliberation over those of
Byzantine maneuver and intrigue. Only the radicals on the Duma's extreme
flanks—the followers of Vladimir Zhirinovsky and those of Anatoly
Chubais—voted against Primakov. Thus for the first time since 1993, Russia
acquired a leader who enjoyed broad legitimacy and could play a
consolidating rather than a divisive role in Russian society.
In his personal background, world view, and mode of operation, Primakov
belongs to that section of the intelligentsia which takes the national
interest seriously, even if this means sacrificing its own personal or
group interests. It is also the only part of the ruling class that
refrained from taking part in the orgy of "primitive accumulation" and
preserved its independence from the clans of the crony capitalists. This
stratum constitutes a small bridge between the intelligentsia in the broad
sense (most of whom had lost all faith in Russia's previous rulers but did
not have enough power and governing skills to remove them from power) and
the enlightened wing of the nomenklatura, which does not oppose democracy
and is aware of the dangers facing the country. If this bridge can be
strengthened, it will provide a key to Russia's stabilization and recovery.
Given that Primakov is one of the few remaining members of the Moscow
elite who wield significant authority in the regions and with the armed
agencies of the government, a major failure of his cabinet, or its removal
by Yeltsin without the consent of the Duma and the regional governors,
would create a nationwide vacuum of authority. Russia would then resume and
probably accelerate its "muddling down" in terms of national unity and the
efficacy of state institutions.
Today the United States has a new opportunity—which it shows signs of
taking—to rebuild some trust among Russians by respecting their democratic
choices, however imperfect or undesirable their results may be from the
standpoint of some American elites. In the long run, this would serve the
interests of the United States better than futile and damaging attempts to
remold Russia in its own image.

What Is Not To Be Done

It is characteristic of the Russian philosophical and spiritual tradition
always to seek a higher (and ideally universal) meaning for the often
violent and self-destructive course taken by Russians at various points in
their history. We believe that Russia's recent experience does contain some
important lessons for other countries. While this century opened for Russia
with Lenin's recycling of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's question "What is to be
done?", most people would probably agree that in the course of this century
Russia has convincingly shown other nations what is not to be done.
The idea that Russian history provides graphic warnings of this sort has
been expressed by Russian thinkers in the past. In the 1830s, Petr
Chaadaev, a founder of Russian philosophy, suggested that Russia was among
those nations that exist "in order to teach the world an important
lesson."6 A century later, in the middle of the Civil War, the poet and
historical thinker Maksimilian Voloshin elaborated on Chaadaev's hypothesis
by inquiring:

Might it be our destiny to live out
Europe's latest dreams,
So that we can divert it
From its perilous paths?7

As if in accordance with these words, Russia in the twentieth century has
demonstrated the dehumanizing extremes of two global utopian visions based
on economic determinism—first, bureaucratic state Bolshevism, with its
command economy and one-party rule, and now, market Bolshevism. The
implementation of this new radical doctrine, aimed at a comprehensive
"marketization" of the economy, society, and even parts of government, has
led to the destruction of Russia's industrial base (built with tremendous
effort and sacrifice over many decades), a decline in its population, and
the danger of an irreversible criminalization and privatization of the
Russian state. This is likely to serve as a warning of the dangers of
dismantling democratically accountable government regulation of the economy
in the name of free-market dogma. If this experience diminishes enthu-siasm
in other countries for programs that seek to impose "progress" and
uniformity from above without broad societal consent, then the lessons for
which Russia has paid so heavy a toll will at least have served a good
purpose for civilization at large.

NOTES

1. Thus for example, a poll conducted in 1988 by Moscow's Perestroika Club
among its audience found that 70 percent of respondents saw social justice
as a paramount value. Alexander Lukin, The Political Culture of Russian
Democrats (1985–1991) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in
1999), 204–5. These broad aspirations were also supported at the mass
level. A late 1989 survey conducted by VTsIOM showed support for political
reform, but not for the "abandonment of socialist principles." This
evidence led Western sociologists to conclude that the failure of the CPSU
as an institution was not equivalent to the rejection of the norm of social
justice and, in fact, "may have been due . . . to its unwillingness or
inability to service the norm." Ada W. Finifter and Ellen Mickiewicz,
"Redefining the Political System of the USSR: Mass Support for Political
Change," American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992): 860–61. In a
sign of remarkable continuity in Soviet attitudes to their system, Soviet
emigré participants in the Harvard Project in the 1950s had also expressed
their discontent with the privileges of the communist elite, along with
support for some basic elements of the Soviet economic system, such as
government ownership of heavy industry.

2. It was only very late, in October 1990, that the better-structured part
of the movement, Democratic Russia, became institutionalized as a single
political organization. It did not represent the full spectrum of the
original movement, however, and by January 1992 it had already split over
the disintegration of the Union and shock therapy.

3. Cf. Maksimilian Voloshin's famous poetic line: "Peter the Great was the
first Bolshevik."

4. See an article by Viktor Luchin, member of Russia's Constitutional
Court, "Decretal Law," Yuridicheskaya gazeta (Moscow) No. 17, 1997.

5. In trying to counteract these revelations, prominent Russian
"reformers" used American aid money for Russia to pay U.S. public relations
companies, notably Burson Marsteller in New York.

6. Petr Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka,
1991), 326.

7. Maksimilian Voloshin, Stikhi, stat'i, vospominaniia (Moscow: Pravda,
1991), 137.

*******