Russia as a postmodern society

...then those who yearned for independence (Chechnya) had to be repressed...

...Take, for example, the domain of politics and such a pivotal simulacrum as the Russian Federation...

...This is why it manifests irresponsibility, contempt for universal law and morality, and a loss of "productivist" orientation...

...Some of them are negative, pointing to what cannot happen in Russia as long as its postmodernity prevails...

...But this certainly cannot disqualify Russian postcommunism as a postmodern condition...

...No matter how long the turmoil in Russia lasts, no return to communism can occur...

...Never and nowhere but in Russia has the task of de-postmodernization emerged so far as the sine qua non of national survival...

...Still, they did support his "course of reforms" because they "rejected the possibility of going backwards" and no other alternatives except this unacceptable one were visible...

...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 21 POLITICS ABROAD • This development might also generate new interest in the practice of civil disobedience...

...To begin with, the Federation has no (legal) reality whatsoever...

...But the incapacity of the opposition to put forward a political agenda focused on depostmodernizing the country should also be attributed to the unprecedented novelty of the problem...

...After all, despite the proliferation of all kinds of "post," hardly anybody speaks seriously about the implosion of capitalism, or the Central Intelligence Agency, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...

...What emerges instead is a world of simulacra, of free-floating 18 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 signifiers detached from what they once signified...

...To insist that exposed corrupt officials be ousted, even though they are likely to be replaced at the present juncture by no less corrupt colleagues, is another...

...It never struck the leaders of the opposition that discussing all these matters is meaningless inasmuch as the subjects of these discussions—private property, political power, social and other rights, Federation, and so on—have already "imploded...

...BORIS KAPUSTIN is visiting professor in the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale...

...Parodies and implosions can be brutally oppressive...

...Unless the electorate re-establishes itself as a "people"—as it managed to do in 1989-1991—unless the capacity for political action beyond voting is regained, elections in Russia will have little significance except for the personal careers of the members of the political class...

...The slide into postmodernity means the collapse of modern life...

...In fact, the two are equally legitimate manifestations of the imploded power of the center that produces agony and convulsions on the (former...

...They cannot be removed except by a political will realized in concrete revolutionary actions...

...Quite often the institutions simply become "unfamiliar," both to their staff and to outsiders, and are no longer recognized by them...

...S S ECOND, "market-oriented" rhetoric has shaped and circumscribed the political and ideological reaction of the opposition, rendering it impotent...

...Can people have any other attitude toward a parliament that adopts laws that blatantly contradict the federal constitution...

...And so civil disobedience, in the first place, represents a defiance of the general mode of uncivil disobedience that is now the true modus operandi of the postmodern condition...

...Needless to say, neither of these objectives was achieved by this swindle of incredible proportions...

...At 20 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 interests of the majority" I F ALL THESE familiar modern causes of un rest and all the methods of political mobi lization based on them don't seem to operate in the postmodern condition, what can be said about postmodern politics...

...This was confirmed internationally by the removal of Russia from the blacklist of nations with nonmarket economies (July 1998...

...10-11 (1998) p.36...

...It has exhibited little capacity for self-reflection and its conversion into postmodernity occurred in a different way...

...But what passes for power in Russia today (that is, imploded power) is first of all impotence in everything necessary for the functioning of the state and second, a kind of Foucaultian omnipresence that seduces, cripples, and tarnishes all independent initiatives, all forms of autonomous life...

...In Russia, capitalism turned out to be a product of postmodernity rather than modernity...

...First, those who were reluctant to leave the empire (like the former Central Asian republics) had to be "forced to be free...

...By the same token, no other alternative to the present condition looks practicable in the foreseeable future...

...Forcing some to leave and forcing some to stay, this is not an incomprehensible paradox...

...If the inputs consist of ironic detachment, apathy, corruption, and frustration, then no other outputs can be expected than the forms that political power takes in Russia today...

...Today in Russia disobedience in the forms of contempt for, or evasion of, the law, has become nearly universal...

...The negative conclusions are as follows: • The spontaneous development of Russia will never be able to transform its present criminal capitalism into a productive capitalism...

...Institutional practices begin to parody themselves, and then this parody turns into the acDISSENT / Winter 2000 n I7 POLITICS ABROAD tual mode of their continued existence...

...This mood was brilliantly, although involuntarily, evoked by Martin Malia in the conclusion to an article in Journal of Democracy (April 1999): "The only possible policy has been tried, and it didn't work, or at least didn't work in the way anticipated...

...I think this will prove to be true for the 1999 parliamentary and for the 2000 presidential elections...

...1 take these figures from an essay by Lev Makarevitch, "Year 1998: The Bankruptcy of the Russian Financial-Economic System," which appeared in Obshchestvo i Ekonomika (Society and Economy), No...

...Irony proves to be good for nothing, its only practical result being the consolidation of power by local autocrats...

...Nonetheless, I want to conclude by suggesting that in the context of postmodernity civil disobedience is likely to have several distinctive characteristics...

...The only way to change things is to escape from the postmodern condition, to remove its basic prerequisites and constituents...

...What is known in Russia as "arrears on wages" means, in fact, that wage labor has to a very large extent been replaced by corvee or serf labor...

...Perhaps this mode of (self-) transformation is actually or (some time in the future) may be exemplified in certain contemporary societies...

...Every occasion, however insignificant, should be used to practice resistance to Russian postmodernity...

...This phenomenon contributed importantly to the single most impressive result of the market-oriented reforms—the drop in the proportion of wages to gross domestic product from 49 percent in 1990 to around 18 percent to 20 percent in 1998...

...Both these forces complement one another as perpetuators of Russian postmodernity...

...Here we come to my tentative positive conclusions: • The cultural-ideological battle against the closure of the future has to be joined...

...According to the president, these reforms have been carried out unceasingly for nearly a decade...

...When something like them seemed to happen— Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms from above, known as perestroika—it turned out to be a shocking failure...

...It must be demonstrated that possibility did not disappear from history after the collapse of Soviet Communism, that there really are alternatives to "the only possible policy" of Yeltsin's regime, and that these are worth struggling for...

...The drop continued at a faster pace after the August crash...

...22 n DISSENT / Winter 2000...

...The latter question switches our attention from the laws of history to actual historical events and from uniformity to diversity—from the anticipation of some single modernity to the analysis of multiple modernities...

...periphery...

...From January 1998 to January 1999 national production went down by 4.5 percent, whereas the average real wage plummeted by 40 percent...

...National labor productivity, the key indicator of economic efficiency, fell in comparison with the Soviet past by more than one-third, and the last hope for the emergence of a "society of proprietors" was irredeemably destroyed by the August crash...

...Postmodernity can be interpreted benevolently as modernity turned reflectively to its own foundations and (presumably) capable of transforming them...

...only 6 percent can imagine themselves participating in politically oriented actions (and only a negligible minority of this small group did in fact participate...

...Was not this treaty devalued in its turn by forty "exclusive treaties" concluded separately between the Kremlin and different regions of the country...

...In the second place, and even more important, civil disobedience is a way of fighting for a new social and political order—one that we can rightly call just and rational, therefore, legitimate and postpostmodern...

...This is how they are experienced whenever they are inescapably actual, whenever they are not limited, as in the contemporary West, to the realm of sensibility and to "a generation for whom scarcity seems remote, a generation preoccupied with liberty rather than necessity" (Pauline Rosenau...

...Was not the importance of the constitution undermined by the president himself, who sponsored the conclusion of the dubious Federal Treaty meant to be the foundational document of the federal state...

...It would be optimistic and naive, however, to think that the rhetoric of market-oriented reforms disseminated by "democratic reformers" and accepted by communists as a reality they pretend to struggle against is just a whirlpool of signifiers referring to nothing real...

...After all, opinion polls indicate that among the supporters of the communist leader Gennadii Zyuganov, 60 percent believe material well-being to be of supreme importance, whereas political liberty is thought to be less valuable...

...This is important to keep in mind if we are to understand Russian postmodernity, which represents an astonishing regression in comparison with both its Soviet past and all internationally accepted standards of modern life...

...A A NOTHER FEAT Of implosion and parody was provided by the sweeping voucher denationalization of the Soviet stateowned property...

...According to one nationwide poll, 34 percent of Yeltsin's supporters said that they could not "adapt themselves to the new life...

...What can the opposition do if people are reluctant to protest after their average real wage has been reduced to eighty dollars a month...

...The modern institutional structures that "implode," that is, explode inwardly, are more likely to lose their meaning than to collapse physically, although the latter may happen as well...

...Soviet modernity slid into its postmodern condition through a series of events that had very little, or nothing at all, to do with those modes of transformation familiar to us from modern history—revolutions from below, reforms from above, wars of national liberation, conquests by foreign powers, and so on...

...THE AUGUST 1998 financial crash and its aftermath shattered all conventional schemes for explaining Russian postcommunism...

...Can they regard with respect a state whose sovereignty and independence are mocked by the existence of other sovereign and independent states on its territory...

...The dilemma "democrats or communists" has long since become obsolete...

...The August crisis revealed that policies and strategies based on the idea of "transition" have not worked...

...TheoretiDISSENT / Winter 2000 n 19 POLITICS ABROAD cally these are well-known: the fusion of pub-the same time, only 8 percent of the nation lic and private, unbounded privatization of in-believes that the course of reform serves the dividual concerns, the collapse of political representation, the "death of the subject" resulting in subjectless individualism...

...or rampant crime...

...If this analysis is correct, several conclusions follow...

...Some are positive, addressing in a tentative way the question of what can be done to liberate Russia from postmodernity...

...Consider the economy and the market-oriented reforms...

...These people decided the outcome of the struggle in 1996...

...When postmodernity is real, or is the dominant component of reality, it is hardly compatible with liberty, but only with the licentiousness of those who are suitably positioned in the danse macabre of the exploitation and impoverishment of everyone else...

...To this question and to all it implies politically I want to oppose another question, namely, "What is happening after the disintegration of Soviet modernity...

...Only 3 percent of the adult population of the country took part in any kind of strike in 1996-1998...

...Procedural democracy, even if brought to formal perfection, cannot by itself produce or facilitate the radical changes that Russia needs...

...These differences will not disappear spontaneously...

...HAT CAN be done in order to makewRussia less inhospitable to change...

...73 percent of all transactions in the real economy take place on the basis of barter, because of the unreliability of market institutions and the desire to hide revenues and basic assets from criminal extortions...

...During 1999 real incomes probably fell further by 15 percent to 18 percent—this time despite a modest growth of industrial output...

...Yet with all these achievements, two-thirds of total national production continues to be realized outside the sphere of money POLITICS ABROAD circulation...

...As for the fluidity of coalitions, it is not easy to find in Russia coalitions that are not fluid...

...The dissolution of the "evil empire" is another example of the same kind...

...The infrastructure of the market, including such key institutions as private property in capital goods, commercial banking, convertibility of national currency, unregulated trade in most articles of public and private consumption, and so on, has been practically completed...

...Today communists and other opponents of the government focus only on the pace, scope, and "grounds" of privatization, on the forms of the division of power, on social rights vis-a-vis civil and political rights, on the structure of the Federation, and on the problems of the Commonwealth of Independent States...

...I want to look at Russian postcommunism as a version of postmodernity —since it was brought about by the collapse of a distinctive version of modernity known as "Soviet Communism...

...the dramatic degradation of national health care, social security, and education...

...Its supreme legislative body by a vote of 250 to 98 on March 15, 1996, renounced the earlier abrogation of the treaty that established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, thus proclaiming that the USSR still exists and that Russia is an illegitimate state...

...The aggregation of social forces and the experience of collective resistance are more important than the achievement of immediate material results, for the aggregation and experience might eventually produce what some sociologists call the "return of the actor...

...The Communist Party is one of very few exceptions...

...Massive popular protests have not been brought about either by declining life expectancy...

...So what is the Russian Federation after all this but a free-floating signifier detached from whatever is associated in modernity with a state, whether fully sovereign or something less...

...Or, better perhaps, they "worked," but brought about the results opposite to those they were expected to yield...

...Officially, this operation was meant to put into practice Margaret Thatcher's utopia of a "society of proprietors" and to boost economic efficiency...

...Perhaps the single most important difference between Russia and the West is (following Craig POLITICS ABROAD Calhoun) that in the West modernity is still so diverse that what is called postmodernity is really a subtype of the modern, whereas for Russia the opposite is true...

...Postmodern politics loses its critical edge completely when it finds itself in the real environment of postmodernity...

...shortages of electricity and hot water...

...it expresses a new awareness of Russia's "times of trouble...

...Postmodern politics may have some critical edge when it confronts the still predominantly modern reality of the West...

...The most primitive forms of subsistence economy have been revived and flourish all over the country, serving as a source of survival for at least fortytwo million people, the 29 percent of the population who find themselves beneath the official poverty line.* It is not enough to say that "market-oriented reforms" actually shrank the monetarized economy and expanded modes of production that are conventionally identified as "premodern," "precapitalist," or "archaic...

...namely, the closure of the future and of history...

...Observers should be perplexed by Russia's amazing political tranquility in circumstances that would bring explosion to any modern nation...

...The latter can hardly be viewed any longer as an instance of "modernization" or "transition" (however hazardous) from something blameworthy or undeveloped to something laudable or mature...

...This means that the dilemma "market or nonmarket" is intellectually shallow and politically harmful...

...But this party is still strikingly postmodern in other respects, for example, in its ideology, which is a wonderful pastiche of Leninism, Russian Orthodox piety, liberal parliamentarism, and visionary "postindustrialism" reminiscent of the nearly forgotten writings of those whom the ideological guardians of the party used to call "bourgeois sociologists...

...it has to be replaced by the problem of choosing politically among different types of capitalism and different modes of linkage to other spheres of society...

...However, this did not and does not bother its citizens, because neither the "new Russia" nor such a pillar of democracy as the Russian Parliament is taken seriously...

...All this, however, has been completely overlooked by the communists and the other major opponents of the "democratic reformers," partly because of their vulgar Marxist intellectual background, which made them insensitive to issues of this kind, and partly because their own constituency embraces individuals who are more thoroughly privatized than the rank and file of Yeltsin's camp...

...But this question does not provide a sufficiently radical departure from the modernization/ transition schemes...

...Its central elements— ironic detachment, fluid coalitions and temporary issue-oriented alliances, ideological pastiche, the affirmation of local customs and practices at the expense of vast projects, and so on—serve in Russia to reproduce postmodernity rather than to resist it...

...The elimination of alternatives is a crucial dimension of the (Russian) postmodern condition...

...The emergence of a postmodern condition should not be understood as "an advance over the modern one" (Zygmunt Bauman...

...The mood stemming from the elimination of alternatives is widespread enough in Russia to have secured Boris Yeltsin's re-election in 1996, and this after the catastrophic war in Chechnya and after his conspicuous failure to keep any of the promises he made in 1990-1991 and later...

...the apparent defenselessness of the country (of the 1.2 million members of the Russian armed forces, fewer than 100,000 are combat ready...

...What went wrong in Russia...

...Among Yeltsin's supporters only 30 percent share this opinion...

...If we compare it with what still prevails in the West, we will find a difference in types of capitalism rather than in stages of evolution of one and the same entity...

...The so-called August 1991 putsch turned the repressive organs of Soviet totalitarianism into jovial participants in a fantastic carnival that seemed to be masterminded by Mikhail Bakhtin rather than by the actual members of the grotesque junta...

...What is tragic about Russia is that forces that make for modernity are either missing from its political arena or too weak to shape its history...

...Were it so, the logic of progress would be preserved, thus making impossible the appearance of postmodernity as something genuinely different from modernity...

...Ironic detachment, for example, is exactly what characterizes political attitudes of those 70 percent to 80 percent of voters who systematically ignore the local elections that have been taking place in different regions of the country since 1996...

...Probably the most appropriate metaphor to capture the nature of the Soviet slide into postmodernity is Jean Baudrillard's "implosion...

...The outputs of procedural democracy will not be substantially different from its inputs...

...To defend a neighborhood park from being turned into a construction site for the villas of the nouveaux riches, even if the chances of success are slim, is a good example of such an occasion...

...Chechnya is not the only example of such paradoxes...

...this is the popular question these days...

...Nothing is available but the present, which, it goes without saying, has to be "improved...

...First of all, despite its intellectual poverty, this rhetoric has proven its efficiency as a method of deconstructing all alternatives...

...At the same time . . . it is clear that someday, in some form, Russia will have to resume active marketization and privatization...

...These "reforms" also undermined such a critical cornerstone of capitalism as wage labor...

...However, Soviet modernity belongs to a differe-rit type...

...This is exactly what has happened in Russia in most domains of its national life...

...None of these events took place...

...Like most postmodernists, these autocrats wish to abandon the universal (federal law) and are strongly in favor of local customs and practices ranging from polygamy in this region to Soviet-style collectivism in that one...

...The markers of implosion are clear now...

...If we understand reality as the result of the social processes accepted as normal in a specific context, then we can grasp how "market-oriented" rhetoric, although mirroring nothing, helps to shape and sustain the postmodern reality of Russia...

...At the moment it may be premature to discuss this possibility in greater detail...

...It still suggests that there is a right course of development, which should be followed, all current deviations from it notwithstanding...

...Never and nowhere has the potential for anger created by the appalling degradation of national life been so efficiently defused as it has been in Russia...

...This has little to do with the laws of history or the imperatives of modernization, but much to do with the absence of political subjects capable of willing such alternatives (the difference between "willing" and "longing for" should not be neglected...