#19 - JRL 8046
Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2004
From: Eric Lohr <elohr@american.edu>
Subject: Russian Transformation in Historical Perspective

An article of mine was just published in Spain (in Spanish) and has not appeared in print in its original English. If you'd like to put it on your list, I have attached it to this message. The citation is: “La transformación rusa en su contexto histórico,” La Vanguardia Dossier 9, (January/March 2004): 6-13.

[http://www.asfaru.org/pagines/rusiaenlavanguardia.htm]

Russian Transformation in Historical Perspective
By Eric Lohr
Assistant Professor of History at American University.

There is a popular sense in Russia and abroad that communism was a temporary aberration, and that the current transition is a return to Russia’s traditional or natural path. This is clearly true in the realms of religion and culture. The restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church has drawn upon both the physical remains of church buildings from the pre-revolutionary era and the deep pre-revolutionary cultural legacy of the church in literature, art and music--legacies that continued in the emigration abroad. But the church and culture are exceptions. Only to a limited degree can the political and economic transformations of Russia reasonably be seen as returns to pre-communist traditions. They are nearly without exception radical departures from the entire history of Russia. Russia has never had democracy or private ownership of land, and really only became a full participant in the global economic system for a few decades prior to 1914.

Russia was already an empire before it built up its state structure. One could argue that Russia is for the first time attempting to become a nation-state. These transformations underway in Russia are truly revolutionary. Or are they? The term “revolution” comes from the concept of completing a full circle and in a sense returning to the place one started. The history of revolutions certainly reveals strong elements of this concept. The American colonies broke away from Britain and established a legal and governmental system that remained deeply rooted in British traditions and institutions. France changed much in its great revolution, but also saw the symbolic return of its monarch and emperor in the form of Napoleon, and the revolutionaries arguably did more to continue the efforts of old regime kings to expand the centralized state than introduce a fundamentally new order. The Bolshevik revolution returned the country to autocracy and serfdom after both had been eroded by a series of reforms under the last tsars. The point is that every major revolution to one degree or another has returned to the longer term patterns of a national history--it is an aspect of revolution that is inherent even to the term itself. Why should Russia in the 1990s be any different?

The classic case against revolution was presented by Edmund Burke in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” Burke argued that revolutions cannot suddenly transform the long term trajectory of a national history and that the costs of their violence therefore cannot be justified. The core problem is the presumption of revolutionaries that laws and principles are universal and that institutions are transferable. In Burke’s view, only reforms that are rooted in a country’s own historically-evolved laws and institutions can bring real and lasting reform.

It is hard to find a Burkean commentator on the revolutionary transitions of Russia. Western conservatives--who more often cite Burke than liberals--saw nothing salvageable at all from the entire communist era, and tended to call for the complete destruction of all existing institutions in order to start the transition from a blank slate. Proponents of rapid transitions to the market have often been willing to compromise on the goals of rapid democratization, but have done so in tactical terms, assuming that further progress could be made once private property and the market were in place. Rarely if ever has anyone claimed that a Burkean strategy of gradual reform, building upon historically-grounded Russian institutions would be the best possible approach. The gradualist critics of transition looked more to the model of social democracy in Europe, and to the highly speculative counterfactuals of the kind of communism Nikolai Bukharin or Mikhail Gorbachev could have brought to Russia had things been different.

Of course a modern follower of Burke would be very hard pressed to come up with a strategy for Russia. The communists systematically destroyed private property in land, representative government, civil society, freedom of speech, the market economy, and links to the world economy--all things which had just begun to emerge prior to the Bolshevik takeover in 1917. It is hard to find an institution or practice that is appealing or usable from Russia’s communist past.

In short, we know two sobering things. First, the history of revolutions tells us that countries will revert to their native historically-evolved institutions and traditions. Second, Russia has few attractive historically-evolved institutions and traditions upon which to build a gradual transition to democracy and an open market economy. This brings us to a most difficult question: how should we respond to signs of the resurgence of traditional patterns in Russian politics that we don’t like? I would argue that we should not embrace the return of traditional autocratic patterns, but we should also not be surprised or despondent. If Burke is right about revolutions--and the world has yet to see a revolution to prove him wrong--the Russian “transformation” will take decades or centuries, not months or years.

AUTOCRACY AND PROPERTY

Seen in a long term perspective, the evolution of the Russian polity in the 1990s seems somewhat more comprehensible. As the Russian state of Muscovy was built from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, a few distinguishing features emerged and enabled the state not only to survive, but to flourish and expand. At the center of this remarkably successful emerging state was autocracy. Autocracy gave the tsar the ability to overcome noble resistance to the mobilization of resources for warfare and proved to be the key to Russia’s survival and steady expansion at the expense of states with a more oligarchic form of government.

The central concern of the autocrat was to ensure the loyal service of his elite. To this end, the principle became firmly established that wealth was not to become a source of independent power and noble status as in the West. Land grants in sixteenth and seventeenth century Russia were entirely conditional upon continued loyal service, and originally were meant to provide noble cavalry with the means to support themselves, feed and armor their horse, and provide serf foot soldiers for military campaigns. If a noble refused to serve, left the country, or showed signs of political disloyalty, his estates could be confiscated by the tsar for redistribution to more loyal servitors. Such were the origins of the Russian “service state,” the principles of which were carried to even greater extremes during the Soviet era, when the ownership of property was almost completely abolished, leaving only service to the state as the means to wealth and power.

The principle of conditional ownership of property became so deeply engrained that even in the decades prior to World War I, when Russia embarked on an impressive industrialization drive, corporate charters were still handed out by the tsar on the “concession” principle. According to this system, the tsar permitted selected corporations to engage in prescribed activities not according to universal laws of corporate governance, but rather, on the basis of an individual legal agreement that was revocable at the tsar’s discretion. This greatly reinforced the reliance of businessmen upon the state. In the Soviet era, when all large-scale economic activity fell under the control of the state, it is unsurprising that the experiments of both the 1920s and 1980s allowing limited domestic and foreign private businesses were both deeply rooted in the concession principle.

Given the persistence of these historical patterns, it is hardly surprising that the attempt to declare democracy and a freely competitive market in the revolutionary times of the early 1990s did not fully succeed. The revolution quickly returned to the old principle that wealth is bestowed only upon the condition of loyal service. A new elite of self-fashioned “oligarchs” acquired the businesses that made them into billionaires through the infamous “loans-for-shares” debacle of 1995, when huge state-owned companies were essentially given away. That is when Mikhail Khodorkovskii acquired his controlling share of the oil firm Yukos for 309 million dollars, a firm that the market valued at more than 20 billion dollars only a few years later. Those who bankrolled Yeltsin’s 1996 presidential campaign and provided supportive television coverage found plenty of opportunities to expand their fortunes even more. Under Yeltsin’s weak leadership, the predominant approach was to grant property in order to gain or reward support from oligarchs. Vladimir Putin took a tougher approach, stressing negative reinforcement along with positive. Early in his presidency, he brought the oligarchs together for a famous meeting in which he made the deal explicit. If the oligarchs stayed out of politics, then he would not touch their wealth.

The recent crackdowns on Boris Berezovskii, Vladimir Gusinskii, and Khodorkovskii--three of the biggest oligarchs in Russia--have many causes, but the most important by far is that each broke the agreement to stay out of politics. Berezovskii and Gusinskii were both major players in the media industry and both swung from support to opposition of the president. Putin’s decision to crack down on these two oligarchs before others sent a clear message that he would not tolerate critical independent television stations, and more generally, that the oligarchs would have to abide by their agreement or lose their fortunes. The primary explanation of the recent arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovskii is the same: he broke the pact and began to fund liberal opposition parties and even made some moves suggesting that he might be thinking about running for president.

Putin’s policies toward the oligarchs have shown that Russian high politics is returning to an old pattern that is fairly unique to Russia. For centuries, autocracy has reigned in one form or another, because it provided the best means to mobilize the country for war, because it enjoyed a measure of popular support, and most of all, because it provided an appealing alternative to the chaos of state collapse. Russia is currently emerging from its third great “time of troubles.” The first was a protracted civil war from 1605-1613 that led to the occupation of Moscow by the Poles and the division of the Russian elite into warring factions. The great settlement of 1613 began the Romanov dynasty. The leading nobles intentionally restored autocracy as the best means to prevent another catastrophic division among themselves. The second time of troubles was the period of war, civil war, and revolution from 1914-1921. Again, it was thought by many that the Bolshevik autocracy could restore order, expel the foreign interventionists, and end the horrific violence of the time. Now, in the midst of Russia’s third time of troubles, after a decade of one of the deepest and longest economic depressions in modern history, a period marked by chaos, crime, and lawlessness, Putin’s appeals to establish a strong state have great resonance. Whether he wants a modern autocracy is up for debate, but he surely is showing little reverence for democratic principles and there is little reason not to think that historical patterns are reasserting themselves.

The appeal of the strong rule of a single leader is also grounded in a deep tradition of popular opposition to oligarchy, expressed in the old Russian saying “better one tyrant than several.” The classic example is the succession crisis of 1730, which has many parallels to the current conflict between Putin and the oligarchs. In this crisis, a small elite group of advisors to the tsar established de facto control of government upon the accession of the thirteen year old Peter II to the throne. This group formed the “Supreme Privy Council,” which was dominated by two of the leading noble families, the old Golitsyn and Dolgorukii boiar (elite noble) clans. Dmitrii Golitsyn was well read in British political theory and in 1730 he tried to formalize the informal powers of this council and challenge the unlimited nature of the tsar’s power. Upon the death of Peter II, he led an effort to impose a formal set of conditions upon the reign of the new tsar Anna that failed miserably. Many historians have interpreted this as a great lost opportunity to limit the autocracy. But the reason for its failure is also important. The entire broader nobility mobilized against the imposition of the conditions and joined with Anna to support her dramatic act of tearing them up in front of an assembly of nobles after her accession. The fear was that the two clans would monopolize political and economic power in the country and that it would be better to have a strong autocrat who could maintain a broader distribution of power and wealth.

Putin had his own dramatic moment of tearing up the conditions after his accession to the presidency. Though he owed a great deal to the financial support and baldly propagandistic media campaign in his favor supported by media mogul Vladimir Gusinskii and other oligarchs, he quickly turned on them. First, he gathered them together to declare that they must stay out of politics if they were to retain their ill-gotten economic empires. Then he backed up the threat by cracking down on Berezovskii, Gusinskii, and Khodorkovskii--each of whom had continued to dabble in oppositionist politics. The crackdown on these oligarchs has been widely denounced in the western press as undermining the principle of private property, the rule of law, and giving favor to the state and security forces over private business. In Russia by contrast, it has been quite popular. According to an early November poll by the Moscow-based ROMIR-monitoring, 54 percent of Russians approve the arrest of Khodorkovskii, while only 13 percent see it as negative.

LAND REFORM

While the property of oligarchs is proving to be far from inviolable, Russia may be on the cusp of a much broader and perhaps ultimately more significant transition to a regime of private individual ownership of land, something Russia has never known on a broad scale. For centuries, the communal system of agriculture prevailed in most of the country, even in the decades following the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, when the land was sold to communes rather than individuals. Vladimir Putin has often compared his efforts at land reform to those introduced by Peter Stolypin in 1906. Stolypin’s reforms gave peasants a chance to become individual land-owning farmers. But the few who took advantage of this opportunity lost their property during the agrarian revolution of 1917 and were reabsorbed by the communes. The Bolsheviks abolished all private ownership of land in the countryside and in urban areas.

One of Putin’s most impressive achievements has been the passage of a comprehensive new land code which has the potential to create firm legal guarantees of land ownership. This is a particularly important reform for cities, as it will remove the uncertainty of ownership of the very land upon which a business rests. Agricultural land remains a greater problem. The new code does not create a fully free market in agricultural land. Stipulations remain that the land must remain in agricultural use, that foreigners cannot purchase agricultural land, and that Russian individuals cannot acquire large amounts of land. But perhaps more significantly, the average rural inhabitant is too poor to purchase land, and most of Russia’s land is located in climates that are unable to support farming in a competitive market. Ironically, it seems that only a major influx of state subsidies will facilitate a rapid transition to private property and a free market in land in the countryside.

THE RISE OF THE RUSSIAN NATION

One of the most prominent themes of Yeltsin and Putin has been a stress on building a Russian nation, and in fact, for the first time in its history, Russia is becoming something close to a nation-state. Historically, the Russian state formed when Russia was already an empire, and the multiethnic nature of the state prevented it from becoming a nation. While ethnic Russians were often favored under tsars like Alexander III and Bolsheviks like Stalin, both the imperial and Soviet regimes were generally uneasy about explicit expressions of Russian nationalism. In the Soviet Union, every republic had its own separate communist party except the Russians; the orthodox faith, always closely associated with Russian national identity, was quashed; and Russian identity was subsumed under the broader Soviet identity fostered by the regime. While the Russian nation was subsumed under tsars and soviets, Russian nationalism had a long, nearly continuous history under both. The Soviet Union collapsed when Boris Yeltsin withdrew the Russian Federation from the Soviet Union. This dramatic act was widely accepted in no small part because of the increasingly popular view of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others that the Soviet empire stifled Russians. Of course the loss of empire has not been popular and in the years following the collapse, there were calls to revise the new borders from people like Solzhenitsyn, who wanted Russia to include Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine and Kazakhstan and vice-president Alexander Rutskoi in 1992, who made provocative speeches in Crimea claiming that it should be part of Russia rather than Ukraine. Despite some dangerous moments, Russian leaders have been remarkably constant in their commitment to the principle of the inviolability of the borders of the Russian Federation. This consistent policy has helped to avoid what could easily have turned into a very violent set of succession wars.

On the other hand, the refusal to compromise on this policy has also carried a heavy cost in the form of the disastrous Chechen wars, initially launched by Yeltsin for symbolic nationalist reasons rather than out of any real desire to keep this alien nation in the Russian Federation. The refusal to redraw any borders has also led to a lost opportunity in the Far East, where Japan has offered major aid and investment in return for a negotiated return of some or all of the Kurile Islands that the Soviet Union annexed at the end of World War II. The costs already incurred in trying to maintain the new borders and the sensitivity of Russian opinion to the loss of empire make it unlikely that any compromise will be made in the future, ensuring that Chechnya and perhaps other minority regions will remain areas of tension, if not outright war. Moreover, the presence of large minorities of Russian-speakers in many of the successor states to the Soviet Union has created a dangerous source of potential future revanchism. However, Russia seems to have made a decisive break with its imperial past. It has even rejected the numerous appeals of Belarus to rejoin the Russian state. On balance, the turn away from universalizing ideologies of empire to the particularly Russian themes of the new nation have probably reduced the threat of further conflict between Russia and her neighbors. According to Burke, the relatively successful revival of the Russian nation is logical, for it draws on historically-evolved culture and traditions of a people. The revival of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian culture is integrally related.

BACK TO CHURCH AND CULTURE

In some sense, the Church has simply gone back to its pre-Soviet status, emerging with all the problems and positives of the Russian Church a century ago. The church hierarchy has become extremely conservative and has not tolerated liberal theology, priests, or hierarchs. Church and state have resumed the unholy collaboration that marked the church from 1721 to 1917. At the Church’s request, the government has harassed non-orthodox faiths, particularly the Baptists, Evangelicals, and other “non-historic” Russian faiths. More money has been spent on restoration of opulent structures, like the massive Church of Christ our Savior on the Moscow River, than on the dire needs of society. Despite all this, the restoration of the church is slowly bringing a remarkable transformation of the country. Millions of youth are now learning their ethics from the New Testament rather than from the cynicism-inducing double-talk of the Soviet ethics taught in the communist youth league. A whole new generation of young priests and deacons with wispy beards is filling church altars. While many are obsessed with procedures and rituals, many are deeply socially-engaged, both in the lives of their parishes and in the problems of the broader community. For all its faults, the church is bringing a major spiritual and ethical revolution to the country.

In some sense, religion and culture are better yardsticks by which to measure the Russian transformation. After all, Russia has never been known for its economics or politics. Russia’s “Golden Age” and “Silver Age” refer not to times of economic boom, but to its cultural high points in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Central to the tremendous cultural output of that era was the tortured engagement of Russian thinkers with the West--their struggles to define their faith, identity, and philosophies in universal, yet specifically Russian terms. While Russian cultural institutions and cultural production collapsed in the 1990s, signs of a renaissance are appearing. The film industry provides a good example. For nearly a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, only a handful of Russian films were made and screened in Russia each year. But the industry is recovering, and in 2003 domestically-produced films comprised 20% of all films screened. “Bimmer,” by the young director Piotr Buslov, is setting records for box office receipts, and “The Return,” by first-time director Andrei Zviagintsev, is winning critical awards in unprecedented fashion. Finally emerging from the economic difficulties of the 1990s, and with over a decade of experience of artistic freedom, all fields of the arts and culture are poised for a creative explosion.

Culture, religion, and the Russian nation are making a strong recovery while the transitions to democracy, private property and the rule of law have languished and even given up ground. Burke would not be surprised.