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#10 - JRL 8216 - JRL Home
From: eugene_ivanov@comcast.net
Subject: RE: 8209 - Lilia Shevtsova/ Conservatism
Date: Thu, 20 May 2004

In her piece “The Truth About Official Conservatism” (JRL 8209), Lilia Shevtsova sets out to describe what she calls an official (“pro-Kremlin”) conservatism that is becoming, in her opinion, the major block on the road to liberal reforms. While assigning to the apologists of official conservatism pretty bold statements (“the authorities are always right”), Ms Shevtsova is surprisingly short on specifics: there are no names, no party affiliations, and no references to newspaper publications. One cannot help but wonder: are these people real or they are just ghosts in Ms Shevtsova’s imaginary political world?

Ms. Shevtsova does make a reference to a published article (“A Normal Country”, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004); however, her interpretation of this article would surprise anyone who did read it. The authors of “A Normal Country”, Harvard’s Andrei Shleifer and UCLA’s Daniel Treisman, argue that over the past 12-13 years, Russia has become and is now a middle-income capitalist economy with a political system fitting this particular level of economic development. Contrary to Ms. Shevtsova’s assertion, Shleifer and Treisman don’t claim that “Russia has a normal democracy.” Instead, they characterize democratic institutions in Russia as “incomplete, unpredictable, and subject to temporary reversals.” The goal of the article is not to support “pro-Kremlin” conservatism as Ms. Shevtsova alleges, but to highlight the remarkable progress Russia has achieved since the collapse of the Soviet Union, something that hopefully even Lilia Shevtsova would be willing to acknowledge.