Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005
From: Kevan Harris <kevan@jhu.edu>
Subject: Interview with Georgi Derluguian
excerpt
INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR GEORGI DERLUGUIAN,
Ph.D.
By Kevan Harris
13 October 2005
[Full text at
http://www.nodoctors.com/derluguian.html]
Georgi Derluguian went out of the frying pan and into the fire, so to say, from the civil war in Mozambique in the early 1980s to the break-up of the USSR in 1989-1991. As a newly-minted former Soviet citizen, he headed to University of Binghamton, NY, and studied under Immanuel Wallerstein, Terence Hopkins, and Giovanni Arrighi, who are associated with the framework of world-systems analysis. After several misadventures, Georgi ended up as Associate Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, sullying the minds of undergraduates but also pursuing his research on the former Soviet republics, most of which have had bumpy roads since their independence (or lack thereof). His most recent book, Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World Systems Biography, is an explanation of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and also an illuminating (and quite humorous) account of some of the personalities that emerged from that period. One of them, who Georgi met personally, was Musa Shanibov, who helped found The Confederation of the Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus and was the secret Pierre Bourdieu admirer - thus an amateur sociologist as well as guerilla intellectual. More importantly, he situates the Soviet Union and its breakup in a larger global context that so many accounts lack, or misconstrue with a rather blighted and Manichean perspective. We sat down at WNUR studios in Evanston, Illinois, for a discussion about world-systems analysis, the nature of the USSR, the role of ideology, and the areas he's been visiting for over a decade....
KH: Since you focus on the Caucasus region in your book, let's turn to its development as a point of interest. You write that a section of the lower intelligentsia in the USSR and its satellite states, who shared pretty similar backgrounds and lifestyles before 1989, ended up on extremely different paths after 1991 with various results for post-Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe, the Caucausus, and Central Asia. Many accounts I've read either attribute this to "cultural differences" going back centuries, or to conspiratorial musings involving the US, the FSB (the KGB's inheritor), or George Soros. What is a better way to view these post-1989 transitions in lieu of the wide variety by which they've been occurring?
GD: The transitions after 1989 brought a major proof of the validity of Wallerstein's division of the world into core, semi-periphery, and periphery. If one wanted to see what is a peripheral state how periphery is different from semi-periphery one has to look at the trajectories of the former Republics of the Soviet bloc countries. There was a semi-periphery near the Western core these are a belt of countries which all bordered, directly, on the European Community, on Western countries. This belt began from Estonia, through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, to Hungary and Slovenia the most successful part of Yugoslavia, maybe I would call it the luckiest part. So, in those countries, if we look 15 years later, where they are today, they are basically where they had been before Communism. They're not as agrarian as they were 60 years ago. But these countries were economically and politically dependent on France, Germany, Britain or Austria before the First World War. Or many of them were direct possessions of those countries. Now they're independent states, but they're once again depending quite directly on what they call now "Europe," which in fact is basically that places like Poland or Hungary switched, and I would say, fairly profitably, their dependency from Moscow to Berlin and Paris.
So the majority of these countries became semi-peripheral once again, in the sense that, well, take what happens with their integration into the West. It's either their industries are now subsidiary - in parts they de-industrialized, in parts they re-industrialized by becoming subsidiaries of Western European industries. But, there is a growing and very sobering realization that Hungary, or Poland, are not going, in the next generation at least, to catch up with the core of the European Community the inner circle of Western Europe. Instead, Poland and the Baltic Republics and such, became something like Ireland, at that status or perhaps of Portugal. And historically, this is where they had been before, and this is not so bad, after all, which prevented a lot of ethnic violence. In the book, in one of my chapters, "The Nationalization of Provincial Revolutions," I cite a mind game. If you asked an expert on Communist countries, back in the 1970s, what would be the bloodiest and most acute nationalist rebellions in the Soviet Union had Moscow ever relaxed its control, the answer would almost certainly be in the Baltics, or in Western Ukraine. People would not think about Armenia. Well, some people spoke about Uzbekistan, but, there was no anti-Soviet rebellion in Uzbekistan. People thought that Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan would rebel against Russia because they were Muslim republics, but none of them did. You know, if there was any violence in Central Asia it was among the muslims Tajiks killing Tajiks in the Tajikistan civil war from 1990 to 1997- or it was Armenians vs. Azeris, but there was very little of anti-Russian activity.
Where it could have been, of course, was in the Baltic states. They had many structural features similar to say, Croatia. The usual predictors of ethnic violence would be, well, history of ethnic animosity plenty of that in the Baltic states. Borders changed in imperial high-handed fashion well, all over this area Lvov, the center of Western Ukraine, had been, during the last 70 years, an Austrian town, a Polish town, a Soviet town, and then, a Ukrainian one. Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was actually in Poland before 1939 it's not just a border village; it's the capital of a European country that changed hands several times in the 20 th century. And, let us not forget the legacy of extreme nationalist, or perhaps "native fascist," guerilla movements, such as in Western Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, against the Soviet power let us not forget just how bloody the Second World War was there: the Holocaust, the extermination of Jews, of Poles. It was a terrible legacy. So, if you look in what are called the usual "historical factors," the Baltic states should be a congregation of demons, and yet nothing happened.
This is because, briefly, that those places have been incorporated into Europe, or at least, into the local elites the enlightened part, or perhaps, the more opportunistic, wing of the former native Communist elite. Lithuanian, Estonian Communists, and the aspiring political class coming from the ranks of the native intelligentsia you know, for example, filmmakers, playwrights who became political figures in 1989. These people very rapidly made a deal they understood if they kept together, and kept things smooth and nonviolent, if they controlled their own masses they might be able to gain access rapidly into the West, and turn their back on Russia. That's also why there are such vociferous anti-Russian and anti-Soviet sentiments in the Baltic states, Poland, and to a certain extent parts of Ukraine. They hope that this is the way of breaking loose from Russia, their dependency on Russia, and get integrated into the West which is not such a bad prospect after all, being dependent on a country like Germany these days.
Now, what happened in the Caucasus and Central Asia well, two things. One the one hand, they did not have much prospect of getting integrated anywhere. When those places were falling apart, it did not seem that anybody really cared very much. They were considered to be too bizarre, too far away, too exotic; blamed on national character and everything. Secondly, it is true that the social structure there was quite different from the structures in the more developed parts of the Soviet Union, like the Baltic states, or in Russia itself. In Russia, and in large parts of Ukraine, the population is predominantly old today the demographic transition from peasant dynamics. Lots of children in each family, cheap labor, young people in the demographic pyramid, the young people who provide the major fighting force in wars, were reduced, within just one generation, in both Russia and Ukraine, due to, of course, war, and traumatic industrialization; this was reduced to having, perhaps, one and 1/2 children per family. This gives you by the 1980s and 1990s a demographic structure with a lot of old people, also educated, predominantly mature well, what are the Russians today? They are mature, urban, and they live in look-a-like small apartments in big towns. Something like 60% to 80% of Russians live in big towns.
But what is happening in places like Armenia or Uzbekistan: there, the industrialization was much more recent. It never really encompassed the entire population. However, it was enough to destroy the traditional patriarchal, agrarian sector. The result was a huge amount of people squeezed out of the countryside and coming into towns. Of course, this was not just a Soviet problem what is happening in towns like Istanbul, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Shanghai, Lagos, Kinshasa, all around the world we have a massive de-ruralization going on. People are no longer rural, and they come to big towns, but what do they become there? I find it quite amazing that we even don't have an agreed-upon term or label, let alone a good conceptual understanding, of what is effectively the largest and fastest growing social class in the world. We call them, variously, "marginals," "underclass," "lumpenproletariat," though I think that the term "sub-proletarian" is better. Sub-proletarian means that at times these people earn wages, but they sometimes also have small patches of lands where subsistence is important. They often engage in so-called "informal activities," ranging from contraband at least, as viewed from the state to outright crime, like drug smuggling. They also participate in many market activities so they have market incomes, subsistence incomes, they earn wages, and they expect, and receive, charities. In Islamic countries, they could go to a mosque, or in the Soviet Union they relied on social provisions, pensions, child and maternity leave subsidies, whatever the socialist governments could offer them. But this is a very volatile category of population. These people are suspended between the certainty of rural life and the certainty of established urban life. They are in between, a very uncertain and marginal space.
For example, their life careers I spent some parts of the book explaining life trajectories they're very choppy. Many men in this social group, probably one in five or six, spent time in jail. So they view the state as mostly a hostile agent, something to be avoided or to cheat upon, and also something that belongs to the people who have a much better life, and who possess larger social and symbolic capital. In this sub-proletariat are usually the people who are atomized but sometimes, they can be mobilized, or they mobilize themselves. The situation of the breakdown of the Soviet government in 1989 up to 1993 had, for several years, a revolutionary situation without a revolutionary outcome, the way I see it. There was a paralysis of central authority which sent the bureaucrats scurrying in every direction, trying to create safe landings for themselves. In the process, they were devising various strategies of legitimating their offices but there were essentially two strategies. One is to become a "national" bureaucrat - so, saying they are a ruler of an independent state - "you cannot remove me, I control a seat in the United Nations." The other strategy was privatizing resources "you cannot remove me because my factory is no longer state run, I run my factory." In this process, the last generation of Soviet bureaucrats needed alliances with the people who could provide them ideological justification for what they were doing. That's where we get nationalist intellectuals. Also, though, we get enterprising criminals the people who could make holes in the walls of the collapsing state, and who could facilitate, or short-circuit, the privatization of assets. They could also, of course, help in mobilizing the rowdy, "undisciplined masses" from the sub-proletarian suburbs. This is where we get the main source of ethnic violence. Essentially there was a massive panic, not unlike the "Great Fear" during the French Revolution, where all kinds of bizarre occurrences were going on people engaged in brawls, riots, pogroms, horrific violence, sometimes, where when you study it little closer it seems these people were acting in a state of paranoia. They were killing because they believed that otherwise, they would be victims the next day.
So, to return to the question, when the Soviet government got paralyzed in 1989, the former semi-peripheral countries reverted back to being semi-peripheral. They re-invented their dependencies with Western Europe. And it's easier to re-invent something that had been there before. For Hungarians, it was much easier to re-connect with Austrians because there had been a legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Likewise, for the Balts, it was much easier to reconnect with Germany because they had been German-influenced, and their elites had mostly been German, for the past several hundred years. So these kinds of legacies do play a role. Elsewhere, in Central Asia and the Caucasus, as I said, there was very little hope of getting anywhere. So when the house is collapsing on your head, people start grabbing whatever valuable there is, and jumping out the windows. As it turns out, these people belonged to different families, and nationalities, but lived in the same house. So they start quarreling over who is going to grab what, and who will be first to jump out of the window and get a sovereign national state, and who will not get a sovereign national state. I've documented in the book instances when ethnic conflict was produced precisely by the realization that tomorrow, you might wake up in someone else's new national state. And you'll be a minority with a very problematic citizenship. In addition, as in the case of Abkhazia, the prospect of privatization was a major aggravator of ethnic conflict because people realized that tomorrow someone will own everything here, and it might not be you. This is because you don't have access to the ruling bureaucracy; precisely because you do not belong to the titular nationality of that new state. So, what are you going to do? Try to create your own state. Opt out of the state that's how you have a matreshka effect (KH: as in the Russian dolls) where Georgia, for example, secedes from the Soviet Union, and Abkhazia and Ossetia secede from Georgia. This leads to a series of wars, but I am surprised how few, really, there were. It could have been much bloodier, but as I said, Russia and Ukraine stayed out, the Balts left very fast and thus smoothly integrated into the West. So we saw flickers in the periphery, but if you look closer at what happened in places like Abkhazia or Chechnya, it is horrific.
KH: Ah, this leads to my last question. In the November-December 2004 issue of New Left Review, Tony Wood editorialized in "The Case for Chechnya" that "Liberals . have been divided between those who accept the devastation visited on Chechnya as a regrettable bump in Russia's difficult road to a stable democracy, and those who actively endorse Putin's war." At the same time we are seeing some of the most hawkish Republicans in the US either explicitly or implicitly supporting the Chechen cause, as well as the staunchly anti-imperialist crew which Wood speaks for in the NLR editorial. Is this simply acquiescence to Russian brutality and war crimes because of uneasiness with the shift in the Chechen rebels' rhetoric and actions, or has the situation on the ground changed to where the anti-imperialist camp needs to take another look at who's fighting who?
GD: I describe Chechnya as a case of a long decaying revolution. The Soviet Union ended up in complete chaos, a revolutionary situation which had no revolutionary outcome. But I am not saying this from the usual leftist position, with a revolutionary outcome as something to be hailed, or that liberation would have ensued. There are different revolutionary outcomes. Bonapartism, for instance, was one. There could also be a liberal revolutionary outcome, or a proletarian one. I think that what most people in the Soviet Union hoped for was some kind of social-democratic outcome. Not a violent revolution, but institutionalization of what had been available de facto before 1989. To make explicit that people control their workplace, to gain more control over selection of their political leaders, and freedoms of speech, expression where they could, at least, without fear of harassment by secret police, discuss and debate public affairs. But, perhaps even to just say nonsense if they wished.
Chechnya was part of this process. What actually began in 1991 in Chechnya was a democratic revolution. There were a group of local intellectuals who managed to connect with opportunistic elements of Chechen nomenklatura. Also there was the trauma of genocide, since the Chechens went through an experience which could be described as genocidal - in 1944 they were deported to Central Asia for allegedly supporting the Nazi invasion. I don't think Stalin meant to kill them all, but he did want to tame and teach them a very harsh lesson, and then transform them into a mass of pliable Soviet proletarians. It was an attempt to disaggregate the Chechens as an ethnic group, and pour them into the mold of a cosmopolitan Soviet citizen. That's why they were also dispersed into exile. But it did not work the Chechens proved extremely resilient. And thus a major grievance existed, among the many others that were present and exploded when the flood gates were opened. All these grievances flowed in a torrent which flooded and submerged Gorbachev. He promised a lot, everything to everybody, and could no longer fulfill his promises. That was his undoing, because this was very rapidly eroding his legitimacy as an effective leader. So in 1989, Gorbachev's authority collapsed, and no alternative authority emerged.
It still took a chaotic year and a half for reactionary forces inside the Soviet Union to attempt a coup, which failed in 1991. The result of that inside of Chechnya was that the local party elite blinked. They lost control for a few days, and the police simply stood aside and waited. This was when the local Chechen intellectuals plus elements from the mid-ranking bureaucracy, the nomenklatura, hoped to become the new, enlightened leaders and unseat the bad, old guys in Chechnya. Also there was the population which had a genuine grievance, and wanted to redress it, even if only symbolically, by having an independent Chechen state. If 1 million Estonians could have a state and be viable, why not 1 million Chechens?
I disagree with Tony Wood in his simplistic description that Chechnya should just become independent today. Independence could be a solution, in such a case, if there were functioning state structures. Independence could create a possibility to pour external resources into Chechnya but so far it does not look like there is anybody in the world who is even genuinely willing to perform the sort of nation-building in Chechnya which is now failing in Iraq and Kosovo. Therefore I sympathize with the political and human sentiment of Tony Wood but I cannot agree with him. Because what is happening in Chechnya is that all kinds of possibilities for ending a revolutionary situation have successively failed. Chechnya is a paradigmatic case of why revolutions no longer usually develop in the world. They happen, but they do not develop into revolutionary outcomes. What are the possibilities for ending a revolution? Arthur Stinchcombe, in his great article "Ending Revolutions and Building New Regimes," lists several possibilities. It can end in democracy, in dictatorship, in foreign occupation, in national independence, or it can end in a corrupt regime what he calls caudillismo for some Latin American states. All of these outcomes, except for the last one, require strong states. As Stinchcombe himself says, revolutions end when there emerges a political structure into which enough political bargains can be built so that people get a deal out of the revolution. A revolutionary outcome does not mean that everyone gets what they wanted, but at least enough to make predictable expectations of what life is going to be like tomorrow, or ten years from now. And this is when revolutions usually end, and a new regime emerges.
It could be a democracy, but again this requires a strong state. We have plenty of examples of shallow democracies in the former Soviet Republics. Look at Russia itself, or so many others, where formally there is a competitive democracy, but in reality the people have no say and remain aloof. They're very cynical regarding their politicians, and they're right, because the politicians can do very little, they do not control much. People elect parliaments, but the parliaments are quite meaningless because they don't have much of a budget, and do not have effective levers of political implementation. But ironically, the same is true about dictatorship. Why are there so few dictatorships in Eastern Europe today? Because dictatorships also require a strong state. You have to have, at least, a really effective police, and also, preferably, some kind of welfare provision to reward your supporters. So you have weak emulations of democracy in these places. As for foreign occupation, well today the right of foreign occupation is reserved for very exceptional countries, and they remained rational enough, at least until recently, to understand that East European assets could be controlled without direct occupation why bother occupying Uzbekistan or Belarus? What are you going to get from there? That's why they prefer a native regime who can get its act together, than bearing the economic and political costs of colonialism. So occupation is pretty much out of the question, and what remains there is national independence, but states are so weak in some areas that this is meaningless.
The last option is where you have caudillismo emerging. In the case of Chechnya, this kind of caudillismo is very violent. As the state disintegration was very severe in Chechnya, there are some peculiarities. There was a de facto Russian settler regime established in Chechnya in the 1950s, when the Chechens were in exile. The oil industry there created many good jobs and fairly good housing, by Soviet standards, so many Russians, uprooted by the recent war, came to Grozny and received housing there. When the Chechens came back, it turned out that there were 250,000 Russians controlling the majority of the good positions in town. This lasted until the late 1980s. When Chechnya proclaimed that it is was a national independent state in 1991, a typical situation of many decolonizing countries occurred, where settlers began leaving in panic, wrecking the governance structures. So Chechnya was already a half-wrecked state by the time Russian federal forces invaded it in 1994. In fact, that was a major pretense for the invasion "look, it is a mess anyway so let's go and fix it," as Yeltsin promised. For Yeltsin, of course, the promise was that he would show force, through an assumedly effective government, and thus was itching to use his inheritance from the Soviet Union what used to be one of the most formidable armies in the world. So, why not use it if nothing else worked? He did not appreciate just how badly that army had decayed, like everything else around him. The Russian army is part of the state, and if the state had been decaying and demoralized, the same for the army.
So, this is what happened, a tragic situation where, instead of restoring a Chechen state by force, they wrecked the last vestiges of statehood in Chechnya. And during the second war, after 1999, the Russians adopted a strategy which they thought was very smart using elements of the Chechen resistance, who previously fought against the Russians but were lured to the Russian side, as death squads. But when you use, basically, pirates and rogues as death squads and you entrust local power to them as the occupational authority, the result is that you destroy whatever is left of regular governance structures. So Chechnya is one of many instances where there is no ideology any longer.
I want to summarize this, why don't revolutions come to conclusion in the world? Revolutions have been driven by the idea of taking over the state and using it for something. You take over a state today for what? Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Chechen President just after the revolution in 1991, tried to nationalize the oil industry, like everybody's supposed to do after revolutions and use the proceeds to finance the new state. His economic minister ran to him and said, "Dzhokhar, these days you do not nationalize. You privatize, because otherwise nobody will invest in this place! Moreover, we are not yet recognized by the United States, and they are not going to recognize us if we appear to be a socialist dictatorship." Thus Dudayev tried to privatize, but who is going to invest in such a peripheral and insecure place like Chechnya? So he only got really shady gangster capital, scavenging capital. No new investment, just taking whatever was left of the oil infrastructure, or selling copper wire for scrap metal that used to be in the trams. So the result is that we no longer have situations in the world that are conducive to stronger state power. And we don't have ideologies that effectively can mobilize the people, give them a hope that building a stronger state government would bring results tomorrow. But we still have rebellions, people rebel, and when the old regime flees, as happened in Ukraine, very few people have a clear idea of what to do next. And here is where we started this interview, and can end; today we have a lot of criticism, and there is a lot of discontent around the world, but no coherent alternative strategy anywhere. I only hope that writing the books I wrote, and by clarifying what actually happened in the former socialist states, we could be able to analyze what is the wreckage of our time, and what to do with it. I'm quite certain that there will be more revolutions, and we know a lot about revolutions today. They're happening still, but I'm not sure that revolutions in the future will be about national states. There might be more and more pressure to create several tiers of authority, more internationalized, but at the same time much more localized authority. So the national state will survive, but it will become one of several tiers of administration, and administration is necessary for democracy. If there is no administrative apparatus to implement democratically adopted decisions, then democracy discredits itself.
Kevan Harris is a graduate student in sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at kevan@jhu.edu.