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CIAO DATE: 4/01
Social Sciences
Problem of the Self-determination of Russia: Historical Dimension
Igor Pantin
*
The Russian society today is at the turning point of its development. On the one hand, it has, whether it wants it or not, as if to return to the starting point, to create, using K. Marx’s expression, situations, relations, conditions under which the modernization can only take serious character; on the other hand, one has to critically comprehend the experience of the first stage of the transformations including that what seemed to have been accomplished, reached.
Every nation chooses its way, taking into account the character and trajectory of the past and future development, taking into consideration new conditions in the world, the way gone by the country and in our case–the attempt of its correction in the 90s of our century. "Russian idea", "Russian project", "Russian self-determination", "Russian way", etc.–there is one thing in all these word combinations–the desire of different social forces to make out for themselves the main vector of the historical development of the country today and in the nearest future.
It is always difficult to determine the direction of the movement of society. And the matter is not only in that during the times of change (and it is these times that Russia experiences now) the determination by the past sets only a possible spectrum of changes. The main point is quite different–this very vector is being determined in historical movement and does not reveal itself at once. Its determinateness is the result and not the beginning of the long historical process and its cognition. It is being created and, to be more correct, sprouts from the activities of people guided by different sort of interests, illusions, passions; from the experience, both successful and unsuccessful, from the great number of reactions of adaptation to heterogeneous situations and situations of different order, both external and internal, reactions which do not coincide at once and are summed up in a certain grand total.
At first it may seem that the polemics around the future of the country repeats at a new historical turn the good old discussions of the Russian intelligentsia about what Russia is and, above all, what it should be. However in spite of all the similarity with the past the problem of the historical way of Russia being under discussion today seems to have one decisive difference: it is intertwined directly with the canvas of political life.
The crisis of the liberal democratic model of the period of the destruction of Communism, the failure of the first attempts of domestic liberals to transform the national economy on a new basis put on the agenda the questions of what our post-Communist development represents and may represent, what general historical parameters and conditions it has to reckon with. In other words, the question is about the self-determination of the country under specific historical conditions, about the ways of its modernization taking into account the gained experience, the comprehension of the character of tasks facing it in connection with the search of the way in the changed and, above all, changing historical universum. One cannot avoid this self-determination. If we refuse this work, then as S. Chernyshev put it correctly, "the circumstances will determine us by themselves from outside in such a way that we may lose our identity, or disappear". On the contrary, in the event of success the self-determination creates "the basis, the ground on which we and our descendants will stand in the further process of self-determination" 1 .
Every nation chooses it freedom, finds its measure of correlation and limitation of different freedoms. The imitation of somebody else’s experience, somebody else’s methods of the renewal of social life and economy leads, as the practice of the 90s showed, to traumatic consequences. But independence in the cause of self-determination is not given at once: it presupposes the political experience of the people, the elite and the ability of society for critical reflection.
Among many reasons of the failure of the first attempt of our radical reformers to break with the past and "jump into the contemporaneity" one thing for some reason attracts attention least of all–and that is the spiritual and theoretical unpreparedness of society to the new, genuinely revolutionary transformations. One should be aware of the fact that unlike a number of major social turnovers of the past the reforms of the 90s which meant the break with the historical experience accumulated by the Russians were not preceded by the revolution in minds, revolution in thinking. Certainly, the 60s, the dissidents’ movement of the 70s–the beginning of the 80s and, finally, Gorbachev’s perestroika introduced some new ideas and values into intellectuals’ (but not mass!) consciousness, but by and large the sphere of presentations about the highest goals, the historically possible (and, above all, the due) remained the same as it was before. In any case Russia in contrast to, let us say, France of the 18th century, started the profound transformations still without having a developed adequate world outlook, a system of new ideological orientation points which would make the new socio-political changes clear for the elite and, above all, for wide sections of the population, would correlate them with the imperatives of the present, with the course of the preceding development of the country, with the fate of a "common man", and finally would blaze the trail to the new system of values.
And meanwhile after the collapse of the Communist regime and disintegration of the USSR the Russian reformers faced the reality the account of which in programs, ideology, political practice demanded a decisive review of the traditional liberal democratic paradigm, the introduction of important historical components into democratic outlook. It turned out that there is no "natural", unbreakable connection between private property and the formation of market economy, democratic freedoms and the formation of a new state system. The market based on the privatization of the part of the state means of production for some reason is being formed with great difficulty and all the more is not yet becoming the factor of the renewal of the country. And what is more market reforms caused the economic chaos, the criminalization of society, separatism, the outburst of archaism, centrifugal tendencies in governing the country.
As it became clear it is impossible to overcome oneself with a jump at once. We, Russians, have had a long history full of events, which formed our character, the attitude towards freedom and law, our presentations about the destination of the state, people’s power and many other things. One cannot get rid of one’s mentality by means of the overthrow of Communist totalitarianism and its institutions: one requires long and persistent work to get rid of customs, morals, psychology which have been formed for ages. In short, it turned out again that each nation, according to M. Gefter, starts not from the zero but from the beginning, the latter is being imposed upon it by the previous experience, by history 2 . But it is just the expansion of the problem of modernization to the limits of history, past and present, that is particularly difficult for us (I mean the researchers).
There is no doubt that the history of Russia has tragic character. But, to my mind, a thoughtful researcher should correlate these tragedies, including totalitarianism, not just with spontaneous social cataclysms (naturally, with them as well) but with tormenting search and preparation of the answers by the huge country–answers which are always different since situations are different–to the challenges and problems of the Contemporaneity in the form they have been represented historically. And then we pass from the mere exposure of the evil deeds of Communist totalitarianism and the curses at its address to the study of the causes of its appearance, possible alternatives to the Bolshevist revolution and, finally, the analysis of the historical results of the seventy-year-old Communist rule which, as it becomes evident now, are far from being simple.
In short, there is a great difference in what context we should discuss the opposition "Russia–the West". Either we explain it by "distortion" of the trajectory of Russia’s historical development under the influence of the factor of space and the Tartar-Mongolian conquest and in the 20th century of the Communist regime, and accordingly perceive the road to the Contemporaneity in the return to Europe (modernization as Westernization). Or we interpret this opposition as a specific manifestation of common challenges and problems of the Contemporaneity and accordingly determine the theoretical and political reaction to them.
There is one more thing. The approach from the point of view of the Contemporaneity considerably changes the nature of the discourse "Russia–the West" since it inserts it into another philosophical and historical context. When denying the existence of a somewhat world vertical alongside which the levels of social reality are placed in this or that order (the West–Russia, capitalism–Communism, etc.), a researcher has to consider quite a new picture of the world historical movement which is "not covered" by the customary terms of progress.
To be sure, the general direction of economic, political and cultural development remains by and large the same for the given epoch. Today the role of, let us say, the information component of the technological progress despite all the differences in terms of advancement is great in France, the USA, Russia and India as well. The economy of each individual country cannot develop any longer without the world market of technologies, goods and services, without a risk of deadlocks and stagnation. The growth of the cultural level and material well-being of population stipulates the necessity of the provision of the rights of an individual, democratic elections, to put it in wider sense, the participation of the population in the political life of the country. In this respect the development of countries and peoples is neither spontaneous nor groundless: the nature and form of their development "are tied" to the world tendencies. And what is more, the countries having taken the lead at a given stage of the world development already due to the existence of the global information space influence the course of processes taking place in a society, the system, culture, economy of which do not correspond to the present epoch and where modernization is on the agenda.
Everything would seem extremely clear: the experience of the countries being in the vanguard at a given epoch forms eventually the civilizational face of the nations dragging behind in their social development. The sooner the latter nations take up the road of the vanguard of mankind (and today these are the countries of Europe, of the West), the more successfully they will overcome their historical lag. However, the scheme of progress of such a type does not correspond the modern philosophy of history. Surely, the processing of the experience of the advanced countries and nations having gone ahead takes place nowadays as it has never been in the past. But it is being carried out first of all in accordance with the requirements, internal conditions, social, ethnic and national and, finally, historical peculiarities of those who are mastering this experience. Moreover, the mastering takes place under the conditions of sharp social and political struggle capable of influencing not only the form of historical movement of a given country but, if you wish, the very type of it, the omission, the reduction of some and the appearance of a number of other stages and phases which were absent in the Western Europe and North America.
_In short, it is not the realization of what has been predestined by history, not the progress in one direction but a resultant force of political struggle, a conflict of interests and wills not only within the country but also on the international arena, an inevitable change of the form and order of development, a different proportion of progress and regress, "Western" and "national" that make the picture of the movement of mankind which is displayed in the mind of today's researcher.
Social development within this philosophical and historical paradigm loses its unambiguousness, predetermination, it cannot already be measured by approaching the neo-European civilization or, on the contrary, by moving off from it. In the context of the interaction between the countries, regions, civilizations the movement aroused by this interaction, dislodged from habitual niches, mastering progress and rejecting it, searching for its own ways, turns out to be, in world historical terms, no less ponderable than the adaptation to the material progress of the West, the Westernization of a given society. We will not understand the character of the most important events of the 20th century without recognizing the principled character of the different vectors of human evolution, of historical development as a spectrum ("a bunch") of opportunities, alternatives, which are differently realized in different situations.
As it was said above, it is impossible to understand the Contemporaneity without the foregone–history. However, and this should be specially stressed, the new, the specific being fixed in the notion of the Contemporaneity is not a simple result of the development of the structures of the past. In epistemological aspect we deal with quite another type of determination in principle than the determination by the past (the past determines the present by itself) which is often met in the historical science, and that is the determination by the Contemporaneity.
I will formulate one methodological provision that is, in my opinion, important for understanding history from the point of view of the determination by the Contemporaneity. Each major historical event is undoubtedly something integral, organically growing from the whole totality of the facts of the past and the present and, of course, of the tendencies of the future. However, each event includes a great number of the elements of purposeful action first of all connected with the meanings and cultural senses of a given society. These actions do not simply modify the general law, they possess new range, new opportunities opening a whole scale of variants of the future. Thus, historical reality in its future possesses not simply a higher range of complexity, which can be taken into consideration and forecast by drawing a greater number of "coordinates" through each "point". The peculiarity of the development of a society, especially in critical periods, is different: some "coordinates" cannot be determined in advance, "objectively", on the basis of the established sociological or economic relations, such as the relations "basis–superstructure", "the world–an individual country", "necessity–freedom", etc. That is why the predictions of social science, strictly speaking, are related not to the "real", strictly determined course of events but only to the objectively possible, alternative, probabilistic one. It is not the regularity (the general) plus individual deviations caused by history and human activity (the specific) but the regularity as a conflict and a resultant force of the opposing tendencies including the possibility of different movement that becomes today the cornerstone of the understanding of the course of history.
Thus, the question is not about outlining the way of transition to the future by orienting oneself on an economic determinant and other constant factors but rather about revealing, taking into consideration, bringing together all history forming potentials of reality, inner sources of its change including into these sources both political life and the sphere of consciousness of people transforming their lives.
The said means that in historical, in a wider sense, social science the time of historical theories which in their constructions do not take into consideration the whole totality of the cultural, political and other dimensions of social development is passing away.
Once the abstraction from culture, i.e. from everything that man does of his own free will, meaningfully, was a prerequisite of the formation of social theory. Only in such a way one could construct a certain comprehensible determinist world where man, not free by definition, acts under the compulsion of necessity. Even in Marx's understanding of the development of society which, generally speaking, included the embryos of higher outlook (let us recall Theses on Feuerbach), people appear as an acting factor of historical process only to the extent of their integration in the mechanism of public production and their realization of its demand. All the rest–culture, morals, value directions, etc.–is derived and secondary, in many respects stipulated by the change of production relations. In any case the decisive reason of inner changes in man, according to Marxism, as C. Rosselli paid attention to that, is not in him proper but in the contradictions of economic life external to him.
It would be a mistake to think that Marx with his encyclopedic horizon did not know about the other, non-economic links of the determinist chain of development. Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte convincingly denies this point of view. But the problem is that it is the factor of material production forces and production relations that he formalizes when substantiating his understanding of history. And though Marx was against the reduction of the world of culture, morals to economic relations (his point of view in Capital is that of "deduction" but not "reduction"), the independent role of man in historical process and models corresponding to it remained on the second place in his works.
The 20th century has radically changed the character of social theory.
First of all, this change was connected with the huge expansion of the subject of social sciences and, accordingly, the source-studying base. The concrete research let scientists to penetrate deeper into the nature of social phenomena, the forms of economic, political and spiritual development of peoples in different epochs and on different continents. The quantity and character of researchers' material, the ever-increasing difficulties of mastering it created the necessity of a new theoretical synthesis of knowledge about society.
The new reality which was opened to people could not be grasped with the help of allegedly universal (and in fact eurocentric) point of view on human evolution, the opinion which was only proved and concretized by concrete research: the "uncomfortable" exceptions to the rule, the "anomalous" historical formations demanded the enrichment of the methods of explanation of social changes, the new, non-economocentric outlook on the processes of development.
The new science demands the utmost complete and precise description of a context. The "price" of the particular, the individual, the unique grows dramatically since it is already interpreted not as a simple "manifestation" of a general tendency but as a start of a historical law which is carving out its way in life.
But not only the development of knowledge leads to the necessity of the renewal of social theory. The great expansion of the borders of historical action, both geographical and social, connected with the inclusion into the progressive development of history of many dozens (if not hundreds) of peoples, sharp overfalls in the forms and rhythms of the development of countries, civilizations which turned out to be far more significant than one could assume before, finally, the great, and in the period of the turning-point, the decisive role of the factor of political will in historical process–all this makes reconsider the former presentations about the nature of historical necessity, the correlation between economy and science, the ways of transformation of society.
And this is already another representation about science, another ideal of scientism. When it is necessary to analyze not just the objective direction of the development of a given society but to research, to understand the mechanism of its change under concrete conditions, then the object-subject (economic) dependence cannot be already regarded as reasons determining the position and actions of people. The cultural senses and meanings, political activities of parties and classes creating new balance of forces, new balance of social factors are coming to the forefront. "Necessity" is now understood not in the former scientistically ontological sense ("it will be necessary in such a way") and all the more not in the moralistic but in the concrete political sense. Orienting itself on the will of a certain force but also taking into consideration the will of other forces.
Here is the starting point of a new line in the comprehension of the laws of historical development, of the connections of another type of the concepts of the future with the present state of affairs. Social science ("the philosophy of history") ceases to be a theory concentrated almost exclusively on the revealing of constantly acting factors and laws but focuses its attention on the elements of historical process which yield to the influence of these or those forces, on the cultural senses and meanings prevailing in a given society (in many respects they determine the policy), on the position occupied by the country as regards other countries, etc. But the explanation of this reality requires another categories and another scientific machinery.
However, let us go back to the problems of the books being under review and, to be more exact, to their authors’ opinions about the problem of predetermination of the historical development of Russia.
The fact that the predetermination in history does not exist is recognized today by the majority of thinking researchers. But the problem is set far more complex, the agreement of researchers is minimized when one passes from a general theoretic statement to the consideration of the history of a given country in the prospects of its development, evaluation of the past including the recent one, and also to the determination of possible and more often desirable (for whom?) ways of its movement.
Once in the 90s of the 19th century V. Lenin (and G. Plekhanov before him) answered the narodniks’ (Russian populist) question "Where should Russia go?" with the indication to where it was really going, that is with the reference to the fact of the started capitalist development of the country. Within the limits of the then Marxist doctrine (historical determinism) such answer to the populists was rightful to a certain extent: it was necessary to find out on what economic basis the social evolution of the country was being carried out, what range of social forces the bourgeois development engendered. But after that (at the beginning of the 20th century) the ways of Lenin and Plekhanov drifted apart forever. Both vow fidelity to Marxism and historical determinism but are opposed to each other in politics. The question "Where should Russia go?" firstly put in the populist theory and refuted from the point of view of "scientific socialism", the content and spirit of the Marxist historical theory, became the reason of the decisive delimitation among national social democrats. The discussion was about who and how would solve the strategic tasks of the country. The failure of reformation attempts of the governmental party (Witte, Stolypin) to create the conditions for the free development of capitalism, World War I eventually led to the proletarian and plebeian revolution in Russia with clearly expressed social orientation.
No, the author of the article is not going to characterize the October and post-October periods of the development of our country. Firstly, I have already had to write on the peripeteia of these periods 3 . Secondly, the logic of this article has something more important: why today, a century after, we are again setting ourselves the question "Where should Russia go?", or in Marx’s terms, why our motherland cannot in any way find "the tracks of its natural development"?
The diversity of answers to this question is surprising. For some people Russia as a developing country (alongside with such countries as Brasilia, India, Egypt, etc.) unlike the developed countries is doomed to commotion and cataclysms. For others–the bourgeois policy of the liberal reformers put it on the verge of disaster. For the third ones–the "natural" development of the country was interrupted by Communism the survivals of which will affect for a long time the economy, politics and culture. For the fourth ones–the "genuine" and wholesome content of the reforms could not manifest itself due to the sluggishness, inertia of the undeveloped nation and the resistance of the "reactionary" forces. For the fifth ones... However, that will do. There is a grain of truth in every answer while the only trouble is that it is hardly possible to work any concept out of them.
What is the "problem of Russia" in the end of the 20th century outlining, as it seems to me, the general direction (and only direction!) of the development of the country? This is the problem of the necessity of the going out of the Russian, and yet earlier–of the Soviet society beyond the limits of industrialism as a type and the stage of the development of productive forces and mainly as a specific civilization model with the type of an individual inherent in it. It is difficult, if possible at all, to say now whether this going out will become an alternative to the North Atlantic, Western civilization or, on the contrary, Russia will follow the Western Europe. One thing is clear: from the point of view of development at the Contemporaneity the going out of such a type should become an alternative first of all to "original non-civilization". As a matter of fact, it is in the comprehension of this imperative that the rightful factor of "Westernizers’" theories, including the concept of the author of the book There Is a European Power, is. The only thing which should be added to their views is that the self-discipline of an individual, openness to the world, the richness and dynamism of its requirements, the comprehension of its own Ego capable of distinguishing freedom and tyranny, the democratic way of solving general problems instead of paternalism "in the interests" of masses and "social progress", etc., cannot be achieved by the only one way even if it was tested in its time by the advanced countries: the difference of meanings and cultural senses, the feed-back of the phenomenon of the Russian "backwardness" with the neo-European movement, etc. should be also taken into consideration.
As a person studying the political history of Russia, I know that our country has been developing throughout the centuries in the field of force of the political relations of Europe, actively participating in the "concert of the European powers" (K. Marx). Moreover, one can speak of a certain, though asymmetric, correlation of the development of Europe and Russia. But the problem of interrelations of Russia with the European world can hardly be limited in spite of, let us say, W. Weidle’s statement that Russia should "reunite with the West", "to find its place in Europe and thus find itself" 4 .
There is no doubt that the political relations with Europe, economic ties (trade, loans), the borrowing of advanced technology, cultural values in the West made in their totality an important, though not a simple, factor of the historical development of Russia. Let us recall at least that the unsuccessful war with Sweden in the end of the 17th century, the defeat in the Crimean war in the middle of the 19th century stimulated the changes in the state (Peter the Great) and social (Alexander II) system of the country. To say nothing of the influence of the European socialism upon the appearance of the Russian social democracy, including Bolshevism, and also the historical role of the World War I, which prepared the conditions for the October revolution. Unfortunately, the factor of inverse effect of the culture of Russia on the civilization of the West, for example, the contribution of Russia into the defeat of Napoleon and Hitler, the development of high culture, the role of the literary heritage of Russia (Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky), has been far less analyzed...
Besides, the influence from outside is of contradictory character. In some cases it is able to catalyze the decomposition of the old organization of society in such a way that the process of disintegration of the old forms forestalls now and then the conception and victory of the new ones, often for a long time: in other cases it can for some period strengthen the supremacy of the old regimes and forces, give them space for maneuver. All this creates great difficulties for the determination of the socioeconomic and civilization dominant of a society, for example, of today’s Russian society.
In other words, the author of this article, as the reader might have already seemed to guess, denies the programmed character, the predetermination of the historical development of Russia–whether it be a "European", "Eurasian", "Chinese" or "Brazilian" vector. Like every living being Russia will have in different forms and ways to take and process the experience, the achievements of the countries of the West and the East which have gone ahead, to take and process in accordance with its own requirements and internal conditions, the historical peculiarities of development and, finally, the mentality of the people.
I am ready to call this variant of development an original one, if it were not for the circumstance that the ways of Italy, Japan, China, Brasilia, India and other countries are as much "original". It may be qualified as Western with the correction that the notion of the "West" includes also a number of Eastern countries. But I think the way Kapustin calls it is a more exact one–the movement within the Contemporaneity. The modern world socium with its universal political, economic and cultural ties among the countries, with its necessity–for the sake of one’s own originality!–to quickly adopt the experience and achievements of other peoples, not only "Western" but also "Eastern", with its radically changed nature of diversity, with its ever speeding up transformation of the derivative, the ideal into the primary, the material, etc.–here is what surpasses, leaves behind the former opposition "Westernism–originality". Certainly, the political and social struggle, the conflict of concrete interests are still able to reproduce this opposition in individual local fields of knowledge and politics but as a general philosophical position (whatever the form–"europeism" or "originality") it belongs to the past. The modern development characterized by that every individual country or a group of countries appear as a nationally specific and at the same time integral part of the world historical whole turns the differences stipulated by the place (geographical factors) and the historical past (isolation of ethnic groups and cultures) into a sort of relics compared with another type of diversity engendered by the Contemporaneity–whether it be its European, Russian, North American, Chinese, etc. versions.
The said lies more or less on the surface and its understanding does not need special efforts of thought. The problem of the consideration by the country being under modernization (in our case this is Russia) of the peculiarities of its historical development and, accordingly, the character of social tasks being put on the agenda of modernization is more difficult.
Every significant historical turning point has its own aspect, to be more correct, prehistory which is most often hidden not only from the stranger’s view but, what is worse, from the participants of transformations themselves. With the Russian reformers these are learned by heart liberal and market commandments, an arrogant patronizing attitude in the spirit of Enlightenment towards to the plan of social structure through which the huge country would be able to self-determine in modern world anew. The political and social component of the turning point was supposed to be given in the practice of the Western democratic states. Nobody thought seriously (the warnings of intellectuals did not count) about the radical character of the "gap" between Europe and Russia, about the difference of the starting conditions of democratization in the West and in our country. The foundations of civil society in the countries of the Western Europe in the 17th-18th centuries were already established, and the struggle for freedom was called upon to take away political and legal barriers from the way of this society. It was not the case in Russia. Here the reformation of political and the renewal of social life, between which there was a peculiar, sometimes tragic, correlation in the history of Russia, were the historical task of democratization.
I realize that the character of peoples, nations, or, as it is customary to say nowadays, their mentality is an issue difficult for discussion, many spontaneous and far-fetched things are added to it. But nevertheless the character itself is quite a real thing. It sums up very many issues: natural conditions, the size of territory, the historical fate of the people, the structure of its speech, everyday life, traditions, etc. But, perhaps, the most important thing is the accustomed way of communication of one person with another.
The Russian problem throughout the whole history is mainly the problem of overcoming the arbitrariness in the relations among the people. Without overcoming the arbitrariness there could be no legitimacy, spiritual independence, freedoms and human rights, to say nothing of the liberation of an individual. The majority of Russians due to poverty, the self-will of the state, the absence of rights in civil terms have lacked for centuries (and lack now) the deep feeling of their independence and responsibility. The understanding of freedom as a moral duty (and not just "will"), the comprehension of their rights and the rights of others–all this has been staying in a rudimentary state for too long. That is why throughout the centuries the man of mass hesitated between the slave habit of obedience and the anarchic rebellion, absurd and ruthless. And it is not incidental that the struggle for freedom in Russia, when it started, was the cause of the minority but not of the people’s impulse (with, perhaps, the exception of 1905). Unfortunately, the interference of the state, whether it be a tsar, leader or president, quite often corresponds to the psychological requirement of Russians. Hence there is a common person’s longing for "strong power", strong not by its authority, observance of law, understanding of social problems but by the interference into all spheres of human life, patronage over all sections of the population.
Here is an interesting opinion of N. Chernyshevsky about Russians expressed in his work Apology of a Madman (1861) that was not published in the author’s lifetime: "Our main idea, our most stubborn tradition is that we add the idea of arbitrariness to everything. Legal forms and personal efforts seem powerless and even ridiculous to us; we do not rely upon conscious action, spontaneous readiness and ability of others, we do not want to deal in such a way: the first prerequisite of success even in just and good intentions for each of us is that the others should unquestionably and blindly obey us. Each of us is a small Napoleon or rather Batu Khan. But if each of us is Batu Khan what will become of a society which consists of Batu Khans?.. For us to get rid of this very habit which has been created for centuries is likely more difficult than for the Western peoples to get rid of all their habits and ideas". 5
One should say that the bitter confession which escaped the lips of Chernyshevsky, a man not disposed to emotions in politics, had a solid basis not only in autocratic but in Communist Russia as well. Even Bolsheviks were far from being revolutionaries from the point of view of the formation of statehood, they, strange as it may seem at first glance, followed the line of the least resistance. In any case from the point of view of a state system their regime despite the semblance presented the most passive result of the Russian history. It corresponded not to the reason but rather to the prejudice of the Russians. Even the difference between Stalin’s (autonomist) and Lenin’s (federative) projects of the state rule of the multinational country was not so radical as it seems to somebody. J. Stalin with his autonomization and the only one vertical type of state administrative structures just a little bit forestalled the events not taking into consideration the fact which was evident to V. Lenin, as an experienced politician, that is the necessity of multi-dimensional and diverse forms of control over the republics of the Caucasus, the Ukraine, Siberia, etc., under those concrete conditions. 6
The way of thinking of the liberal reformers of the beginning of the 90s was quite a Bolshevist one, when they tried to cut the Russian society from its whole past, both autocratic and Communist, at one stroke, with a swift gesture (let us recall "the land-slide privatization"). Certainly, these hopes turned out to be an illusion. Life showed that to break the state in Russia (I think not only in it) means only one thing–to spread discord. Society deprived of the state component is left alone with its own pathologies–corruption, crime, arbitrariness, and irresponsibility.
I am far from thinking of exposing the mistakes and weak points of the reformers of the beginning of the 90s. The point of view of legal evaluation gives little to understand the essence of historical processes. The problem is quite different–it is in the realization of the colossal complexity of the reformers’ tasks in Russia. They will have not just to break but to treat the Russian state, step by step turning it into a modern democratic institution, to struggle against superfluous centralization, at the same time not allowing the self-will of regional elites; to overcome step by step the bureaucratic and clientele type of governing the country and economy, to form the market not allowing at the same time the raging of market element.
The process of democratization in Russia should outstrip economic modernization, otherwise the Russian society will not have the spiritual and political potential which is necessary for the surpassing of gigantic difficulties on the way of the formation of market economy. But democratization, and this is very important, cannot be limited to the simple transfer of Western democratic institutions to the Russian soil. It will either occupy all levels, "the floors" of social life, will be turned into the mass creative work of the "masses", the invention, if you wish, of new political institutions, both new, modern ones and also connected with the traditions and morals of the Russian population, or will be turned into a permanent process of crises, the strolling of the "upper crust" in the dark, the erosion of democratic values in masses.
Here is one example to illustrate the said. It is absurd, for instance, to doubt the democratic character of the overturn in Russia in August 1991. But one should not forget the important circumstance that the democratic movements which played the key role in the victory of the new regime could not institutionalize their political influence and were driven away from decision-making centers by other forces. Some leaders of these movements were dissolved in the "party of power", others left politics. A strange alliance of forces uniting the factions of the former nomenclature ripe for change and the representatives of criminal circles and nouveaux riches. The influence of the "lower classes" on the policy of the ruling elites turned out to be rather ineffective. Besides, the economic policy of the new regime pushed "common people" still far away from the democratic methods of exerting pressure on the ruling elites. As a result we got a typically Russian situation: "We wanted to do our best but it turned out as usual".
I guess the reader has understood where and within what limits the author of this article disagrees with the most honest "Westernizers". On the eve of the new century we, the Russians, have to solve the problem of the creation of modern society not the way it was solved by the Europeans in its time but taking into consideration our past including the recent times and the imperatives of the Contemporaneity.
Certainly, the question is not about some falling out of Russia from the world (and European) logic of sociocultural development: simply the "set" of conditions necessary for the construction of modern democratic society and modern market economy in it, just like in any other country, is its own, specific, unique. The sooner this understanding comes the more effectively our country will overcome today’s crisis. Every people is the hostage of its historical origins. Not in the sense that it is unable to change itself and the conditions of existence in the spirit of the Contemporaneity but in the sense that the overcoming of the inertia of the established political traditions requires its will, efforts and ability to independent historical creative work.
Finally, there is another problem difficult for the understanding of the self-determination of our country. It is connected with the evaluation of the significance of the Communist regime in Russia from the point of view of the Contemporaneity. No matter how one interprets the genesis of the Russian Communism (the impossibility to solve the problems of Russia by the growth of capitalism, the victory of the "function" of capitalism over its "substance", the necessity of "reformation", etc.) one cannot doubt the fact that Communism succeeded, though for some time, in unleashing the creative energy of the social Utopia engendered by the challenges of the Contemporaneity and in putting the country on the way of industrialism.
The contemporaries saw in the rebelled in 1917 plebeian, proletarian and loutish Russia not the revolution broken out in the peripheral Middle Ages but the outline of the new world drawn in their minds at those times, the destinies of waking up Asia. The Present in its Western, European version got in a paradoxical way for some time under the dependence of the social Utopia revived on an unprecedented scale. The content of this vector of modern history seemed to be exhausted only after World War II, in the 60s-70s when the colonial system of capitalism collapsed and the developed world due to its economic achievements separated itself from the developing one. That was the death-hour of the Communist regime. It collapsed almost at once and not so much as a result of insoluble economic problems and constraints, not due to the powerful political pressure of the hostile to it democratic forces in society and people but rather "gave way" under the burden of its inability to deal with the problems of the Contemporaneity which the country faced in the end of the 20th century.
This is the range of Kapustin’s thought. For him totalitarianism is not a unique and unprecedented form of a political regime. It rather leads the authoritarian rule to the end, to its logical limit. True, totalitarianism is something qualitatively new. But its novelty appears only due to that it is the "counter-course" of revolutions, really unique in their radical character, their negation and exploitation at the same time.
If one tries to decode the issue of Stalinism as a "counter-course" of October from the point of view of history, then one should admit that the Communist (Stalinist) totalitarianism is the continuation and at the same time the negation of the results of the October Revolution. The continuation because it made the Bolshevist terror of the period of the Civil war a principle, created a new "socialist" state system distinguished by the one-party dictatorship, destroyed any and all political inhibitions and counterbalances with which society could have corrected the actions of power. But still Stalin first of all expressed the "counter-course" to October. Having been unnecessary during the October uprising and generally in the period of "Sturm und Drang" he managed to make himself necessary in the activities of this, in fact, Jacobinic party which knew no limits of revolutionary expansion, the functioning of this dictatorial state emerged out of the Civil War. He and his totalitarian regime liquidated the New Economic Policy, historically rightful result, unlike the policy of "military communism" of the October overturn, and ruined a peasant as an independent master on his land with the help of collective farms. And the conditions of the development of peasantry in those times were the general conditions of the social progress of the country. Even the imposition of big industry, or as they used to say, the industrialization of the country the necessity of which justified the great sacrifices of the people was followed by the fall of the general cultural level of the working class and peasantry, the loss of the political dimension of the existence of the people, the dehumanization of society (the appearance of the phenomenon of "crowd"), the leveling of national cultures for the sake of "internationalism", the barbarization of power.
In short, the huge possibilities of the bureaucratic and despotic state connected with the Asian ignorance of human rights gave Stalin and his satraps the monstrous, not typical of the 19th century force of construction and destruction. In this sense Stalin is the representative of a special epoch radically different from that of the Bolshevist, October one. True, its mission was already not socialism, even in that primitive way in which it was presented in 1917, but a power, to be more exact, "a superpower"–after the defeat of fascism and the appearance of an atom bomb.
Why do I insist on that Communist totalitarianism is just the procreation of the 20th century, its logic, its conditions and crises but not simply the "reaction of the traditional society on technogeneous civilization" "for the revival of the past"? Well, just because without taking into consideration the qualitative changes in our society in the 20th century, without taking into consideration the algorithms of its functioning and development we are not able to comprehend the task of redefinition of democracy which, to my mind, is one of the main prerequisites of the solution of the problems of the Contemporaneity by our country. The origins of Communist totalitarianism are not only in the stereotypes of the history of Russia. They are rooted in the expansion of progress to ever new territories, to the whole space on the Earth, in the crisis of bourgeois civilization which especially painfully manifested itself in the first half of the 20th century. The totalitarianism, especially Soviet and German ones, became the answer (a quasi-answer) of these countries, different by genesis but in something similar by type, to the breaks and shocks of the civilizational development in the 20th century, an attempt to solve internal antagonisms by means of forced leveling of social, ideological, political, national and confessional and other differences within one country, and then, such is the logic of totalitarianism, throughout the world.
History rejected, left totalitarianism both Communist and fascist in the past. But the problem of modernization of individual countries, whole regions under the conditions of the colossal difference of development levels is still on the agenda. It is still on the agenda in a double sense. On the one hand, the new foundations in international life, the new world order based on the resuscitating force of differences have not only been formed but in general are questioned by the striving of the developed countries for hegemony. The NATO way of solving an ethnic conflict is a vivid example of this. The new world leader (by all means a "liberal", "democratic one"!) is trying today to submit countries and peoples to his control, to impose by force "the only civilized", "progressive" ways of solving the most difficult age-long problems, thus turning any conflict into a precatastrophe capable of detonating the world, putting mankind on the verge of self-destruction. On the other hand, on the eve of the millennium it becomes clear as never before that people cannot live everywhere in one manner, even if this "manner" is backed by the achievements of a number of regions. The existence of mankind, not only what it was but also what it will be, is a world full of peculiarities, specificity, differences which are neither leveled by other, even "advanced" states and regions, nor opposed to universalism. Every country can have only its own answer to the question "what to do?" But for this answer to be today’s but not yesterday’s or the day before yesterday’s it should take into account the problem of Tomorrow, i.e. be up-to-date.
Endnotes:
*: K. Kedrov, a noted poet and critic, literary columnist for the Novye Izvestiya daily. This article was published in Russian in Novye Izvestiya, 13 November 1999. Back.
Note 1: S. Chernyshev. Russian Self-Determination–National Security: in Search of Priorities. The Materials of the Meetings of analytical group of the Council of Defense of the Russian Federation. Moscow, 1998. p. 446 (in Russian). Back.
Note 2: M. Gefter. "Pages from the History of Marxism of the Beginning of the 20th Century". Historical Science and Some Problems of Contemporaneity. Moscow, 1969. p. 35 (in Russian). Back.
Note 3: I. Pantin. "October: Movement to the Unpreindicated". POLIS (Politicheskiye issledovaniya). 1997. No. 5. Back.
Note 4: W. Weidle. Tasks of Russia. New York, 1956, p. 62 (in Russian). Back.
Note 5: N. Chernyshevsky. The Complete Works. Moscow, 1950, vol. 7, p. 616 (in Russian). Back.
Note 6: Yu. Pivovarov, A. Fursov. "The Russian System". Rubezhi. 1995. No. 5, p. 42. Back.