|
|
|
|
Legitimacy and the Russian Federation: Transition or Continuity?
Institute on East Central Europe
March, 1997
In considering the process of transition underway in the Russian Federation, one issue which we must consider is the legitimacy of the new order which has replaced the Soviet regime. This essay shall outline the question of legitimacy in Russia today and steps back from the usual narrow focus of the transition literature to a longer historical perspective and wider theoretical examination.
The best starting point for approaching the question of legitimacy is a classic formulation of the question. In Dictatorship over Needs, Feher, Heller, and Markus argue that the Soviet regime went through a process of change while legitimating itself. The authors define the historical moments representing the critical junctures in this process of transformation. In explaining the different methods used by the Soviet regime Feher, et al. adopt Max Weber's classic framework of the three archetypes that political regimes rely on to establish their legitimacy. These archetypes are defined by Weber as the rational, traditional, and charismatic. 1 In addition, the archetypes become a hierarchy in Weber's analysis, due to Weber's assumption of what he perceived as the progressive use of rationalism over the charismatic and traditionalist forms of authority. Thus, Weber lays the groundwork for later modernization theorists to argue that as history progresses, see regimes that develop authority from traditionalism and charisma will give way to regimes that derive authority and legitimacy from a rational hierarchy of laws and beliefs.
But as Feher, Heller, and Markus point out, the Soviet Union reversed this process and instead attempted to establish its legitimacy on the basis of the last of the three archetypes, rational grounds, then regressed into charisma and eventually into traditionalism. 2 Weber argued in his classic formulation that the archetype of legitimacy employed by a regime will have profound effects on the social institutions of the society concerned. Thus, if Feher, Heller, and Markus's thesis is correct, we can expect to see that changes in the regime's method of establishing legitimacy will lead to new ideological constraints as well as imperatives in Soviet policies toward social institutions. We should expect to see changes in Soviet policies coinciding with the junctures that Feher, Heller, and Markus define as being points of change in the Soviet regime's method of establishing its legitimacy. Therefore, we can test their hypothesis by examining Soviet policy toward social institutions and compare this policy to the method of self-legitimization that was used by the regime during different points in Soviet history.
A logical choice for studying this interaction with social institutions is the case of Soviet policy towards the family. The family serves as a useful focus due to the fact that no other social institution in Soviet society has experienced a more radical change in its treatment by the regime. This radical change was the rehabilitation of the family into an example for all Soviet citizens to follow after originally being assaulted by the new regime as an institution to be eliminated. As will be demonstrated, an analysis of Soviet policy towards the family reveals the shifts in the method of legitimizing the regime that Feher, Heller, and Markus define.
In addition, this comparison illustrates that studies of the changes in Soviet policy toward the family over the regime's 74-year history tend to ignore the fact that the family became recognized as an agent of socialization useful to the regime's maintenance of legitimacy. Despite the strong evidence in such studies as Prewitt and Dawson's that the family is one of the most important agents of socialization and (to a lesser extent) also one of the most important agents in political socialization, 3 other studies such as Geiger's The Family in Soviet Russia, or David and Vera Mace's The Soviet Family, 4 only fleetingly discuss the effect the family has in reinforcing the regime, and instead primarily discuss the family's role in resistance to the regime. Therefore, the importance of the family as an indicator of change in the regime's overall realignment toward new methods of legitimizing itself has been overlooked in favor of attempting to establish the parameters of the family's autonomy from the regime.
Beginning our examination in the early period of the Soviet regime, we discover one of the polar extremes in Soviet policy towards the family. This period, which attempted to use rational grounds (in the sense of utilizing a developed ideology as a source of legitimacy), was one of great hostility toward the family. Ideology dominated the policy of the Bolsheviks as they came to power, prior to their forthcoming experiences in practical political matters. As a result, the goals of the early regime were focused on the immediate building of a new society, and the promise of this coming utopia served as the basis of the regime's legitimacy. Therefore, in dealing with the family the Bolsheviks looked to the writings of Marx and Engels.
This reliance on ideology led the Bolsheviks to an assault on the institution of the family. As Geiger points out, Marx and Engels regarded any family in future society as "essentially a naturalistic unit rather than a social institution." 5 Thus, the family became viewed as, at best, a residue from the past remaining in communist society because of natural or biological factors, and at worst as a regressive brake on the freedom of the new individual to be developed in communist society. Those in the Bolshevik leadership such as Alexandra Kollontai, who focused on the latter of these two interpretations, became the motive force behind efforts of the new regime to aid individuals in their liberation from the old bourgeois family constraints. These efforts culminated in programs to raise children institutionally, the easing of divorce and marriage laws, and the liberalization of abortion.
The fact that early on no member of the Bolshevik party appears to have considered the family an important social institution for aiding the regime's stability or an ally which the regime could cultivate is hardly surprising. In addition to the specific remarks made by Marx and Engels on the family, we must consider the overall eschatological nature of Marxism. It postulates an end that legitimizes itself by the contrast between this future state of existence and the current. In addition, this end, the state of communism, is described in terms of the negation of current society. This reliance on social criticism of current society in order to explain what the future holds explains why Marxism contains in-depth analysis of current society while lacking any substantial description of the institutions of the future state of communism. 6 In its most utopian interpretations the future state of communism is communism because there is a lack of any institutions. Thus, during the early period of the Soviet regime, a period in which the Weberian archetype of authority grounded in the realm of the ideal was employed to an extreme, we can see why the family, an institution whose existence extends far back into history, could not be seen as a useful institution for the Bolshevik government as it set about to build the new society of communism.
However, hostility toward the family gave way to a new family policy in 1944. Though the hostility to family had gradually eased over the years, the sudden official about face in Soviet policy towards the family is the other polar extreme we find in the history of the Soviet regime's treatment of the family. According to Hazard, the sudden elevation of the family in propaganda to an ideal to be emulated caught much of the population off guard. 7 Further, Hazard states that the sudden official shift was immediately felt in cases where divorce began to be denied on grounds that were considered adequate immediately before the policy change. The new policy also stated that only formally registered marriages would henceforth be considered legally valid. Explanations for this turnabout in the regime's treatment of the family usually concentrate on material, population-demographic concerns. A representative account is found in Geiger's work, in which he describes the social ills that became associated with the more radical parts of the old policy such as institutional rearing of children and the material constraints that prevented the regime from being able to allocate enough resources to such programs to provide the population with a viable alternative to the conventional family. 8 However, Geiger then goes beyond just a material explanation and also argues that other factors influenced the new policy, such as Stalin's desire to try and gain more support from a population who favored a more conservative policy, while at the same time improving social control. 9
This latter factor is important in evaluating Feher, Heller, and Markus's hypothesis. They argue that at this point the collapse of the Weberian rational-ideal archetype as a method of legitimizing the regime was complete. Instead of pure ideology underpinning the regime, a regression into the Weberian archetype of charisma occured at this point. This retreat from ideology as a means of securing legitimacy and the transformation to a charismatic framework with Stalin as the chosen figure is interpreted by Feher, Heller, and Markus as an inevitable step since the earlier form of legitimacy relied on an ideology that did not provide a rational structure of means to obtain the ends it sought. 10 The one attempt to bring Marxism into a practical institutional formula used various interpretations of Marx's vague mentioning of "the dictatorship of the proletariat" as a transitional structure until true communism could be attained. But Feher, Heller, and Markus argue that such a flimsy reinterpretation of the ideology could not salvage it as a basis for legitimacy.
Given the collapse of the earlier attempt at legitimization through a rational ideology, the idea of a reevaluation of the family and new policies toward the family, accompanying the rise of the charisma archetype, fits neatly into Weber's framework. Weber's analysis of the methods of establishing legitimacy holds that the archetypes of charisma and tradition make use of more traditional social institutions such as the family. The non-material factors behind the change towards the family pointed out by Geiger, as well as the sudden catapulting to fame of Makarenko under Stalin which Geiger describes, is an indication that the new charismatic regime began to see the family as another important means of social control as Weber's framework would predict. 11 Makarenko's criticism of the previous attempts at institutional rearing of children served to discredit the earlier assault on the family, and his reported successes through strict discipline, with himself as patriarch, appear at this time with the endorsement of Stalin.
Thus, Makarenko's criticism and discrediting of earlier family policies was a useful tool for the regime under Stalin as it began to strengthen the family as a social institution. In addition to the new, tougher laws concerning marriage and divorce described by Hazard, the regime also began to assign duties to the family in raising future Soviet citizens, and these duties become codified into law. They included the inculcation in children of, among others, the values of "patriotism, proletarian internationalism" and "communist attitudes toward work," reflecting the recognition by the new charismatic regime in 1944. This followed the general conservative turn of "the Great Retreat" of the 1930's, which presented the family as a social institution capable of enhancing the legitimacy of the regime through the process of political socialization. 12
After the death of Stalin, Feher, Heller, and Markus argue, the method of estab-lishing legitimacy in the USSR changed again, since the powerful leader of the Weberian charismatic archetype was gone. Now the regime drifted into traditionalism, and Weber's description of this archetype seems highly applicable to the behavior of the nomenklatura of this period. Referring to the traditionalist archetype,Weber states: "the organized group exercising authority is, in the simplest case, primarily based on relations of personal loyalty cultivated through a common process of education." 13 Evidence for classifying the regime under Weber's category of traditionalism is found in the vast reporting of the importance of personal relations, connections, and blat (use of influence) among the party elite. Also, in the post-Stalin we begin to see the increasing ritualization of the regime in the public sphere, so often encapsulated in the jokes and personal histories of the period -- which were especially notorious later under Brezhnev's tenure.
However, more substantive evidence of this shift to traditionalism can, as in the case of the shift toward the charismatic archetype, be seen in Soviet family policy. An example is the 1968 law, "On Ratification of the USSR and the Union Republics on Marriage and Family." This law codifies and discuses the strengthening of the "Soviet family." 14 This concept of a Soviet family, an invention of the charismatic period of the Soviet regime under Stalin, referred to as a given in the law of 1968 without reference to past ideological debates, is what Weber's archetype for legitimacy on traditional grounds would predict. The status of social institutions becomes defined in this traditionalistic period through their relationship to the high point of legitimization for the Soviet regime, the charismatic period of Stalin and the victory attributed to the regime in the Great Patriotic War. The basis for legitimacy in Weber's archetype of traditionalism is a narrowly defined history which we find at work in this period of the regime's history. Thus, the new law on the family in 1968 avoids breaking continuity with the past and merely continues the policies of strengthening the family that were initiated by Stalin in 1936. 15 The traditionalist period following Stalin's death would eventually shift its emphasis from Stalin the charismatic leader, to a constructed body of teachings and examples handed down from the Great Patriotic War and avoiding reference to the person of Stalin following his fall from credibility during de-Stalinization. Yet, the fact remains that the policies handed down through the traditionalist period of the regime from the high point of the Soviet state's legitimacy in World War II still bore the stamp of Stalin's influence. The great change is that under traditionalism, authority is derived from a presumed body of wisdom, where changes are interpreted as new understandings in an already existing body of historical ideas rather than stemming from the will of the charismatic leader.
From this discussion we can conclude that Feher, Heller, and Markus's argument that different periods of Soviet history saw transformations in the regime's methods of establishing legitimacy is supported by the coinciding changes in Soviet policy toward the family. These changes were necessary as the shift between the archetypes of authority and legitimacy required the use of social institutions such as the family for support of the regime, following the abandonment of the pursuit of legitimacy on purely rational grounds (again "rational" in terms of an ideology). This fact also indicates that although many studies such as Geiger's seminal work, The Family in Soviet Russia, or the Maces' The Soviet Family concentrate on the family's resistance to the regime, the Soviet regime itself came to evaluate the family as a social institution useful to the regime in the areas of social control, general socialization, and political socialization. Even though Geiger himself provides some evidence of this fact in his discussion of Makarenko's support from Stalin and Stalin's desire for increased social control, discussion of the link between family and support for the regime's pursuit of legitimacy is discarded in favor of discussing the extent of the family's ability to resist the regime.
We now derive two important questions. The first concerns how effective the regime was at exploiting social institutions such as the family and, in turn, how effective the regime was in establishing its legitimacy during the two periods that Feher, Heller, and Markus define, following the collapse of legitimacy within Weber's rational archetype. Secondly, given an answer regarding how well this worked in terms of Soviet legitimacy, what does this mean for today's Russian Federation? We have pointed out above that the Soviet Union in terms of legitimacy has followed a path opposite to the assumed progression of Weber's archetypes. Currently we have the case of a new regime attempting to establish its authority. We must then ask whether the development of authority and legitimacy in Russia today can follow a path toward Weber's rational archetype, or whether we are witnessing a repetition of the past. Do we see an attempt to base legitimacy of the regime on rational grounds but instead sliding toward the traditional or the charismatic archetype?
Signs of Effectiveness
One sign of the effectiveness of this attempt by the regime to legitimize itself is in the creation during the later Soviet period of a stable middle and upper class. The intelligentsia, with the important exceptions of a few dissidents, by and large provided a reliable ruling class for the Soviet system. The production of a steady supply of officials for the large number of positions to be filled in the vast state bureaucracies of the Soviet Union fulfills one of the critical tests of establishing legitimacy.
But what of this vast bureaucracy? Weber does define his rational-legal archetype as possessing a well-established bureaucracy. However, in the Soviet case the bureaucracy is arguably not the meritocratic machine that Weber describes. Instead, it seems to conform more to the weak bureaucracies envisioned in the traditional rather than the rational archetype. One observer, Kenneth Farmer, has characterized the Soviet bureaucracy as an "artificial elite," selected not "through competition but sponsorship." 16 We find an abundance of examples from the history of the Soviet period of the importance of family connections, favors owed, and the helping hands of friends, as well as the cases of corruption, and, in some extreme cases under Brezhnev's tenure, the buying and selling of offices. Thus, the Soviet bureaucracy -- because of its shortcomings -- provides more evidence of a legitimacy framework that appro aches the traditional.
In terms of the penetration of the social institution of the family by the state, the middle class provides us with much evidence for this fact in terms of continuity. The children of this class usually remained in this class through their access to education, access often obtained by the connections of their parents. 17 As Weber's traditionalist archetype would predict, we find a stable ruling class replicating itself in a largely closed social circle which staffs the nomenklatura. More often than not we find the children of the apparatchiki following in their parents' footsteps. However, there is also evidence that the higher elite in the USSR which occupied national political positions, channeled their children into other elite positions outside of political positions in order to avoid charges of nepotism. 18
This same well-established class shows its hand even more clearly when we examine in greater depth the character of Soviet institutions including higher education and the armed forces. Here we often find marriages between the families of this ruling class and, in the educational establishment, the children of party and state officials. We find a class which marries among others of similar status. Thus, as Weber's traditional model emphasizes, "The organized group exercising authority is, in the simplest case, primarily based on relations of personal loyalty, cultivated through a common process of education." 19
Such family ties are highly characteristic of the Weberian traditionalist norm. However, we should point out that this picture becomes much more complicated if one begins to look at areas of the former USSR outside of the Russian Federation or even within some regions lying inside the Russian Federation's borders. For example, family ties were probably even more significant in Georgia and much of Central Asia. Within Chechnya as well, which technically lies inside the Russian Federation, family ties and organization are known to be exceptionally strong. These sorts of family ties illustrate the success that Soviet attempts at legitimacy had in harnessing these traditionalist behaviors to a ruling class supportive of the regime. This is certainly not always the case with the other nationalities, where the familial ties of elites there were often directed against the center or provided an alternative legitimating norm to the regime's. But within these national governments in the various republics, we can largely expect to find a replication of the Russian situation; i.e., family ties and connections being the important factor in one's relation to government service. Within Russia, this fact indicates a degree of success in the Soviet regime's attempt to use the social institution of the family in order to legitimize itself.
However, the astute reader will question the course of this discussion by pointing out that the tradition of the Russian family is one of being a closed circle within which people maintain their private lives separate from the state. This sort of social behavior appears to point to the regime's failures in its attempts to gain legitimacy. However, we must also question the extent of failure here. For we know now that the dissident movements within the Soviet Union were never that large or that influential, with the exception of a few towering figures who later come to the fore, like Sakharov. We must ask how much of the complaining and criticism that was done around the kitchen table was actually directed against the regime and how much was instead aimed at grievances along the lines of consumerist standard of living demands.
Another factor which points to weaknesses in the regime's attempts is the corruption of the Soviet period and the pervasiveness of the second economy. Although this does show a weakness, at the same time it appears to fit within Weber's traditionalist archetype. And we must remember that even in the most supposedly stable of the rational, democratic regimes that the transitology literature would have us believe that the Russian Federation is evolving to, corruption is a problem that occasionally surfaces. Thus, a wider scale of corruption in a regime which is traditionalist in its form of authority should not surprise us.
After the Soviet Regime
The collapse of the Soviet regime in this perspective raises some interesting points. Usually, it is viewed as the fall of a totalitarian system. However, if we view the collapse instead as one of a traditionalist sort of regime, then the study of the political transition becomes more complex and may provide a more accurate description. For example, the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) may be more accurately viewed as a group of traditionalist reactionaries rather than as an ideologically primed group commit-ted to a totalitarian system. But at the same time, while providing greater accuracy regarding the description and motivation of the GKChP, the perspective of the traditional archetype also clouds the description and identification of Yeltsin's motivation -- for once we remove the characterization of the GKChP as the defenders of a totalitarian system and devotees of a discredited ideology, the characterization of Yeltsin as the new democrat also becomes difficult to maintain. It is interesting to note within this context that support for granting Yeltsin the broad emergency powers he has wielded ever since the failure of the putsch came from an alliance Yeltsin formed at the time, between himself and a faction in the Congress of Peoples' Deputies of the former USSR -- government and economic officials that Roeder has labeled the "bureaucratic faction." 20 Thus, the de-mystified clash between Yeltsin and the defenders of the old order can also be understood more realistically as the political competition of elites within a traditionalist type of political system.
The weakness of the system prior to the GKChP's last desperate attempt to maintain the status quo can of course be related to the policies of glasnost'. By allowing for more freedom of opinion, Gorbachev's policy revealed the corruption of the regime and the crimes of the past. The greatest threat to the old regime seems to have been the revelations of history, especially of the Stalinist past. 21 As we would expect from a traditionally grounded regime, discrediting the past strikes at the heart of the legitimacy of the regime.
This fact comes across to us today when viewing the actions and rhetoric of the now oppositionist Communist party. Zyuganov and his supporters frame their criticism of the Yeltsin regime in the context of the past and the use of its symbols. The appeal attempts to salvage the mobilizing aspects of a largely discredited past, which lies behind the Communist Party's appeal today. We must understand their popularity with some segments of the population in these terms, as the perceived inheritors of old traditional norms of legitimacy, rather than as striking a chord in voters for a return of a totalitarian system which western observers so often interpreted as having only control over,rather than legitimacy with, the population.
A more interesting question is whether the Yeltsin regime should be viewed within this traditionalist framework, or whether it may mark one of the critical transitions to a new type of legitimacy which Feher, Heller and Markus felt were identifiable at other points in Soviet history. Perhaps the first thought of the observer, now reminded of Weber's old categories, is that the Yeltsin regime might qualify as a charismatic regime. But one should remember that within Weber's archetypes the charismatic is a transitional type of regime, which creates new symbols and breaks decisively with past institutions. It is not an archetype associated with economic concerns, nor with attempts to define itself within or in regard to the past regime. 22
But the Yeltsin regime also seems devoted to the past. The double eagle of the Tsarist past has replaced the red star, the pre-revolutionary flag has replaced the Soviet, and the Orthodox Church has been revived as a state supporter. The president of the new Russia sought to be closely associated with the 50th anniversary celebrations of the victory in the Great Patriotic War, long one of the most important sources of the old regime's legitimacy. The continuity between the Yeltsin regime and the old, with regard to the elites in the federal government, also makes problematic an attempt to place Yeltsin's regime in the charismatic archetype.
The New Constitution
We should also consider here the new constitution of the Russian Federation. At first glance, the adoption of a new constitution would seem to indicate an attempt by the regime to move from tradition toward the rational-legal archetype we find in Weber's arrangement. Also, given the teleological arrangement of Weber's archetypes, a move toward constitutionalism seems a logical, forward moving historical development, fitting in well with the usual assumptions of the literature and its analysis of "transitions."
However, the assumption of the new constitution of the Russian Federation as a step towards a new type of legitimacy is undermined by two factors. First, the constitution was handed down from above by a president who sought and obtained powers in it which seemed designed for the past conflicts he faced. For example, the restrictions placed on the new legislature following Yeltsin's conflict with the Supreme Soviet in 1993 now include the president's ability to dissolve the legislature, the further legalization of broad powers to rule by decree (which were originally established and intended as "emergency powers"), and the elimination of the office of the vice president to prevent another rival similar to Rutskoi in 1993. In addition, the questionable referendum through which the constitution was adopted now appears to be potentially invalid due to a turnout of less than 50 percent. There is also the unusual linkage of the referendum vote to elections held at the same time, valid only if the constitution passed. 23
Secondly, there is a more serious question regarding the constitution's effectiveness as a move towards a new regime and a new means of legitimacy. The first problems could become theoretically unimportant if the top-down constitution still became the basis of a new order. But, as Robert Sharlet points out, constitutions even before Gorbachev's resignation are now viewed as a Grundnorm. 24 That is, politics even under Gorbachev often became formulated in the language of constitutional wrangling. Sharlet argues that this was a logical strategy as reformers sought to transfer power from the party back to the state. 25 This has meant that "legitimate political action must depart from, operate within, or refer back to the Constitution." 26 Thus, the constitution in Russia matters in the sense that it has become a focal point in politics, an important legitimizing agent.
One may ask then whether this is not exactly what Weber was talking about when formulating the rational-legal archetype of legitimacy. However, this author argues it is not. Instead, appeals to constitution in the case of Russia can be viewed as the continuation of a long-standing tradition in the Soviet Union of periodically adopting new constitutions from above to adjust for the weaknesses of the traditionalist archetype. Ideology could be appealed to and new interpretations found for long periods of time, followed then by readjustments to make the regime's policies mesh with the received framework of the past.
This pattern can be found in the history of the USSR and now the Russian Federation, with constitutional changes under Stalin's charismatic regime as it became more tradition-alist. Khrushchev's regime stopped short of constitutional change, but Brezhnev's did not, and Gorbachev also had to alter the makeup of Soviet institutions even if an entirely new constitution was not drawn up. The Union treaty, an attempt to recognize the de facto relationships of the republic, was sought by Gorbachev and was about to be signed when the putsch occurred in 1991, and now Yeltsin's regime has promulgated a new constitution.
The use of constitutions in this manner demonstrates that the new constitution of the Russian Federation is at this time less of a decisive break with the past and instead more of a continuation of a legacy with regard to the means of establishing legitimacy. The best illustration of this lies in the events up to October 1993. While debate over the new constitution dragged on, the Congress of Peoples Deputies and its smaller subset, the Supreme Soviet, pushed amendments to the then-still functioning Brezhnev constitution of 1978. These amendments soon totaled 320 and were to take on a contradictory character to the many presidential decrees issued by Yeltsin during this period due to his emergency powers. Soon this situation began to bog the country down in a "war of laws" finally culminating in the "October events" of 1993. The use of the constitution in this manner, as a legitimizing tool for various competing political interests, is not the rational-legal type of archetype that Weber described. Instead, as observers such as Oleg Rumyantsev have pointed out, the instrumental use of the constitution in these political struggles has led to a weakening of constitutional legitimacy in Russia. 27
Could this use of constitution-mongering for more immediate and less fundamental political conflicts be viewed as a transitional step toward Weber's rational-legal archetype? This thought once again contains the assumption that we know the direction of the changes in Russia, that there is a movement from some lower stage to the next in political developments there. And indeed there have been elections in the Russian Federation and other indications of what may be interpreted as a developing rational-legal model.
Sticking with Tradition
In spite of these indications, many shortcomings remain which point towards the past and the traditionalist framework of legitimacy. For example, the continuing wide scale degree of corruption and lawlessness seem to be conditions of a weakened traditionalist regime rather than of an, emerging legal state. Both government and opposition appeal to the past in attempting to woo voters, and much of the politics of the present seems to revolve around the issues of the past.
In terms of family policy, which was used in the beginning of this essay to illustrate past changes the regime legitimation, the Russian Federation has yet to demonstrate any definitive policy towards the family. Despite warnings from many researchers about the need for a new family policy to halt disturbing demographic trends since 1991, the Yeltsin regime has yet to address this problem. 28 In terms of the creation of a ruling class, the continuity of elites between the Yeltsin regime and the past is very strong.
The most striking of the links of the newly-emerging Russian regime with the past revolve around the dominance of the figure at the top. The president remains a primary figure in a new constitutional order that limits the powers of the other branches of government and has created a security council of advisers which seems unflatteringly reminiscent of the politburo. In addition, the new regime has at times maintained a tight control over the media, especially at strategic moments such as the referendum on the new constitution. Also, if the situation before Yeltsin was a blur between party and state, due to a failure to delimit the state while focusing on the party, one may ask whether the Yeltsin regime is not the flip side of this situation -- with a state occupied by an amorphous group that has not established itself as a party, the usual norm expected of regimes in the West and which conforms to Weber's rational-legal archetype.
One may also question the development of the "transition" with regard to economics as well. Although enough change has occurred to cause one well informed observer, Anders Aslund, 29 to argue that the Russian economy is now indeed a market economy, anyone familiar with the situation in Russia today cannot fail to notice that economic reform has often concerned legalizing an already existent second economy and changing the formal status of several managers and directors who now run private as opposed to state industries. Though this feature may certainly have important economic ramifications, in terms of the legitimacy of the regime, it stresses a large degree of continuity with the past as opposed to the radical breaks that transitology often assumes.
However, rather than turn further afield in our discussion, we may close with a transitology argument questioning the relevance of theoretical observations regarding the legitimacy of the new regime, which may seem secondary to those of economic reform, the conducting of elections, and other more measurable, quantifiable phenomena.
The reply to the criticism of relevance is that all of the above concerns operate within the sphere of the new regime's legitimacy. The maintenance of or lack of legitimacy for the government in Russia today is a constraint within which politics occurs. Failure to recog-nize the continuity of the current regime with the past can blind us to a great source of explanatory power. Although some observers have recognized so-called path dependency in specific areas, the observation presented here is of broader concern. For when we dis-cuss transitions, we imply that there is a movement from one recognizable stage to another. But the idea that I have attempted to put forward in this essay is that instead of attempting to explain the Yeltsin regime as a clearly recognizable break with a previous type of regime, whether labeled totalitarian or some other term, a better framework for understanding Russia today may be through approaching the current regime, as well as the later Soviet regime, as a variety of what Weber would have filed under a traditionalist archetype.
Also, for Weber the analysis of legitimacy was not merely a concern of theoretical justice or an attempt to unmask ideologies. As he states when introducing his concepts, "The legitimacy of a system of authority has far more than merely an ideal significance, if only because it has very definite relations to the legitimacy of property." 30 The contention here, however, has been that the significance does extend beyond this baseline of property relations. And Weber in fact argues that the method by which a regime legitimates itself has profound implications for the structuring of institutions. In terms of political and eco-nomic performance, the rational-legal archetype with a well functioning bureaucracy acquiring an end result maintains high status in his archetypes due to its efficiency as opposed to the other possible types.
A final concern is to avoid the mistaken assumption that this essay attempts to replace one set of terminology for another. Weber maintained that the archetypes were "ideal" categories and that the "real" being examined would differ. Therefore, we are not attempting to substitute other labels for those of the transition literature. Rather, we are arguing that the assumption of a transition from one type of regime to another is in this specific case premature and a method which may lock us into a preconceived view of actual events. What we find in Russia today is not a radically different regime from the late Soviet period, but instead a regime still relying on a traditionalist sort of legitimacy which continues to function as a constraint on the politics of Russia today. From this perspective, we should not continue to lament that the transition, a creation of transitology which assumes a particular path of development, has somehow failed. Instead, we should focus on the here and now of the situation in the Russian Federation, keeping in mind that "progress" is an assumption we bring to history as we wait for events to arrive at the destination we prefer.
Footnotes
Note 1: Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 328. Back.
Note 2: Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Markus, Dictatorship over Needs (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 142-43. Back.
Note 3: Kenneth Prewitt, Richard E. Dawson, and Karen S. Dawson, Political Socialization (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 114-36. Back.
Note 4: Kent H. Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 23; David and Vera Mace, The Soviet Family (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964). Back.
Note 6: For further discussion of the limitations of Marxism as a theory for the construction of institutions, see Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). Back.
Note 7: John N. Hazard, Law and Social Change in the U.S.S.R. (London: Stevens and Sons, 1953), 266. Back.
Note 10: Feher, Heller, and Markus, 145. Back.
Note 12: Albert Hughes, Political Socialization of Soviet Youth (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd. 1992), 10. Back.
Note 14: Liegle, The Family's Role in Soviet Education (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1975), 15. Back.
Note 16: Kenneth C. Farmer, The Soviet Administrative Elite (New York: Praeger, 1992), 274. Back.
Note 18: Ibid., 66 and 176. Back.
Note 20: Philip G. Roeder, "Varieties of Post-Soviet Authoritarian Regimes," Post-Soviet Affairs 10, no. 1 (1994), 90. Back.
Note 21: A thesis argued at some length with many examples by David Remnick in Lenin's Tomb (New York: Random House, 1993). Back.
Note 23: Stephen Holmes, "Superpresidentialism and Its Problems," The East European Constitutional Review, 2 (Fall 1993), 125. Back.
Note 24: Robert Sharlet, "The Prospects for Federalism in Russian Constitutional Politics," Publius, no. 24 (Spring 1994), 117. Back.
Note 25: Sharlet, Soviet Constitutional Crisis (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 86. Back.
Note 26: Sharlet, "Federalism in Russian Constitutional Politics," 117. Back.
Note 27: Oleg Rumyantsev, "Russian Constitutional Order," Harriman Review 8, no. 2 (July 1995), 21. Back.
Note 28: See for example Gennadi Zhuravlev, et al., "The Social-Demographic Situation," in Christopher Williams, Vladimir Chuprov, and Vladimir Staroverov, eds., Russian Society in Transition (Brookfield, VT: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1996). Back.
Note 29: See Anders Aslund's How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, Brookings Institution, 1995). Back.
Email this citation