Land of Lost Opportunity
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
Land of Lost Opportunity Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate By Moshe Lewin The New Press. 368pp. $30.00. Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian...
...A leader appeared unexpectedly from an apparatus that specialized in producing apparatchiks," Lewin observes, "and then rose like a meteor on the world arena...
...Rival personalities and petty tactical conflicts have time and again obstructed real party development and popular appeal in Russia, and have thus left the task of mobilizing the populace to charismatic individuals—Yeltsin in office and Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky in opposition...
...Culture is not absolute destiny...
...Lewin sets the stage for Boris Yeltsin's descent from courageous democrat to closet despot, and Fish accounts for the feebleness of national resistance to this betrayal...
...What are the prospects...
...But instead of mustering mass support for a program of reforms, he found himself almost in a lonely solo performance and at moments even seemed a pathetic figure...
...Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse " WHAT HAS GONE WRONG in Russia...
...University of Vermont: author...
...This insight into ideology, what it meant and did not mean, is the crux of understanding the real nature of the Soviet system as well as the ironies of the post-Soviet experience...
...Fish does not seem to realize how much he is really in debt to scholars like Lewin who have demonstrated the contradiction under the Soviets between a rigid state and a changing society...
...39.50...
...Unfortunately, no human leadership could take a country that had known only the tsarist and Soviet experience and democratize it in short order...
...Yet what political saint could have evoked a functioning constitutional system out of the human resources at hand...
...He could have quoted former Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze's remark to Mikhail S. Gorbachev during a stroll on a Black Sea beach in 1984: "Everything's rotten...
...Democracy from Scratch is a detailed, on-the-spot investigation of the new political parties and movements that sprang up between Gorbachev's initiation of semi-free elections in 1989 and the August 1991 coup...
...The difficulties remain, as Lewin warns...
...The Russians who enlighten us today with an eager anti-Leninism and anti-Communism that is so pleasing to some Western conservative ears are engaging in a very interesting exercise of juggling," Lewin writes...
...In his view, Russia on its way to reform was not a "civil society with its established political parties, unions and interest associations," but "a myriad of complex, interacting, apocalyptic political campaigns...
...It suffered from "accentuated retardation" under a hierarchical elite that turned its Marxist ideology into "permanent hypocrisy," a form of "camouflage for the nationalist and statist ideologies which were the real credos...
...The bureaucracy survived Stalin and his purges and went on to co-opt the Communist Party, becoming "a full-fledged ruling class," albeit one that was "ideologically vacuous, demoralized and often corrupt," practically asking for a new revolution...
...Russia's 20th-century history, he believes, has been a struggle between the traditional peasant population and the equally traditional bureaucracy, with the latter ironically succeeding in modernizing the former (by urbanizing it) but not itself...
...Fish notes the classic sign of impending upheaval when the old leadership ceases to believe in itself...
...Bereft of either experience or resources, these people met with a wall of indifference on the part of the population at large, indifference instilled by the same Russian statist tradition that Lewin grasps so well...
...but as Fish shows, many Russians would like to see them overcome...
...They take the myths and lies of "a regime they knew to have been mendacious...
...But he is absolutely correct about the importance of parties for a functioning democracy?and the psychological immaturity of both the leaders and the led that foiled the development of meaningful mass parties in Russia...
...It has to be changed...
...Crime and corruption...
...Lewin takes the long view implied by his title, naturally enough for the most eminent authority in North America on the social history of the Soviet Union...
...The general reader may be deterred by its jargon-laden academic style, classifying theories, analytical models, and carping at older authorities...
...Therein lies the tragedy of reform...
...The present arbitrariness tempered by chaos that is the Yeltsin regime may be the best the Russian tradition permits in the short run...
...the theorists of political culture and modernization (strangely omitting Lewin)—in favor of the nebulous idea of a "movement society...
...The sad precedent of 1917 with its democratic hopes choked off by dictatorship in the name of a remote ideology is readily at hand...
...Industrialization, he shows, was not guided by real planning but by bureaucratic command—themethodof error and trial, we might say, turning eventually into "a mechanism of self-destruction...
...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor emeritus of history...
...the availability of Western models and advice, if they are not pressed too condescendingly and hence counterproductively...
...When I reached this passage in the book I thought that it referred to Boris N. Yeltsin, but it proved to be about Gorbachev—so alike have been the political trajectories of these two rivals for the untenable Russian throne...
...Lewin recognizes how prerevolutionary habits and postrevolu-tionary desperation shaped the Communist regime, its motives and its methods, whi le it kept the "shell" of doctrinal legitimation...
...Neither author addresses in detail the actual course of Russian reform since 1991, though they help explain its tribulations better than headline chasing through recent events...
...and then declare themselves opponents of what never really existed...
...The Soviet system was never socialist, as Lewin and many others on the Left understand it, but an "agrarian despotism...
...Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution By M. Steven Fish Princeton...
...The reasons for this disappoint-ing outcome, according to both Moshe Lewin (explicitly) and Steven Fish (implicitly) lie in Russia's history, above all the oppressive centuries of statism that still burden the country's attempts at change...
...A specialist on the Russian peasantry, Lewin never lets us forget the political inertia of this vast force, or the cruel, exhausting and ultimately destabilizing efforts of the Soviet regime to convert it into the foundation for a superpower...
...We have to beware of the old habit of judging rulers by what they say rather than what they do...
...There is a sad complementarity between the arguments of these two colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania...
...A Polish-born Red Army veteran, professionally formed in Western Europe, he sees through ideologies of every sort...
...an error particularly misleading for Russia, where saying and doing have rarely been in sync...
...The result is a post-Communist political vacuum occupied only by self-serving personalities who are restrained more by anarchy and mass indifference than by constitutional checks and balances...
...When the State cracked, there was no force or tradition either to restrain the Russians' anarchic individualism or to support institutions capable of containing revived authoritarianism...
...Lewin faults the country's reformers and their foreign advisers for neglecting all this: "Many excited, even frenzied observers plunge into this now-accessible present and imagine that it is self-explanatory...
...Still, there are grounds to believe in progress in the long run—the existence of a modernized population, though an impoverished and demoralized one...
...Lewin groups these essays into four sections to develop his subthemes: the peasant base, the industrialization, the bureaucratic Leviathan, and the impasse into which this contradictory heritage, simultaneously archaic and futuristic, led the Soviet regime...
...Thus, Marxist ideology in the Soviet Union paralleled in function if not in content the "false consciousness" of liberal ideology under capitalism that Friedrich Engels identified a century ago...
...Yet there are exceptions that show the possibility of healthier development, notably the success of legislative democracy and local autonomy in Volgograd Province...
...It is easy to say that an opening for democracy in the wake of totalitarianism has been squandered...
...Communist totalitarianism collapsed, and what have we...
...Fish's book, while very different in form and focus, nevertheless supplements Lewin's by examining the near background of this tragic debacle...
...The mythic nature of ideology, both Left and Right, is a leitmotif running throughout Russia/USSR/Russia, a reworked collection of articles and conference papers dating from 1989-91, plus some integrative chapters newly done for the book...
...the deep desire for democracy...
...Russia's current troubles remind us that democracy is more than just decreeing elections, and that the representative institutions of Western countries cannot simply be lifted up and carried to new ground because freedom has nominally been proclaimed there...
...This accurately describes a certain sector of the political activity that blossomed forth as Gorbachev eased up on the repression of pluralism, but it does not take account of the history that brought Russia to this point...
...It conveys a fascinating picture, however, of the fumbling and bumbling by would-be democratic leaders when the window of opportunity opened...
...Now, after Communism's demise, according to Lewin, the opposite fallacy has taken hold...
...ethnic vendettas, rule by decrees and tanks—a series of setbacks to brand-new democratic hopes less foreseen by Russia-watchers than the demise of the Soviet regime...
...Ideological differences among these nuclei of democratic sincerity were minimal, prompting him to ask why they did not coalesce into one or two broad forces with a real chance to exercise power...
...Consequently, the identification of any notion to the left of Adam Smith with the barbarities of Stalinism has suppressed the alternatives to laissez-faire capitalism that Western reformers have been pushing for a century and a half...
...Fish subscribes to the questionable assumption of some political scientists that genuine political party competition rests on unequal economic classes (which has never been the basis of the American party system, except for the era of the New Deal Coalition...
...The Soviet regime, Lewin says, fell of its own weight...
...300pp...
...In analyzing developments in Russia since 1985, Fish rather brashly puts down earlier varieties of Sovietology—the "state-centric" or totalitarianism school, the "revisionists...
...And that weight, Fish recalls, was sufficient to stifle the development of the kind of nongovernmental associational life necessary for democracy to function effectively...
...Fish spent a year and a half in the field studying four Russian provincial cities and the new democratic parties, including the Social Democratic Party of Russia, the Democratic Platform/Republican Party of Russia, the Democratic Party of Russia, the Russian Christian Democratic Movement, Democratic Russia, and the Democratic Union...
...His answer confirms the old notion about Russians when they have a shot at free politics: any three of them will split into amajority andaminor-ity...
Vol. 78 • May 1995 • No. 4
