The ravages of "market bolshevism"

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 10, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 19-34

  Glinski, Dmitri ^a   Reddaway, Peter ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033468911     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (8)

1. Thus for example, a poll conducted in 1988 by Moscow's Perestroika Club among its audience found that 70 percent of respondents saw social justice as a paramount value. Alexander Lukin, The Political Culture of Russian Democrats (1985-1991) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 1999), 204-5. These broad aspirations were also supported at the mass level. A late 1989 survey conducted by VTsIOM showed support for political reform, but not for the "abandonment of socialist principles." This evidence led Western sociologists to conclude that the failure of the CPSU as an institution was not equivalent to the rejection of the norm of social justice and, in fact, "may have been due . . . to its unwillingness or inability to service the norm." Ada W. Finifter and Ellen Mickiewicz, "Redefining the Political System of the USSR: Mass Support for Political Change," American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992): 860-61. In a sign of remarkable continuity in Soviet attitudes to their system, Soviet emigré participants in the Harvard Project in the 1950s had also expressed their discontent with the privileges of the communist elite, along with support for some basic elements of the Soviet economic system, such as government ownership of heavy industry.
2. Thus for example, a poll conducted in 1988 by Moscow's Perestroika Club among its audience found that 70 percent of respondents saw social justice as a paramount value. Alexander Lukin, The Political Culture of Russian Democrats (1985-1991) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 1999), 204-5. These broad aspirations were also supported at the mass level. A late 1989 survey conducted by VTsIOM showed support for political reform, but not for the "abandonment of socialist principles." This evidence led Western sociologists to conclude that the failure of the CPSU as an institution was not equivalent to the rejection of the norm of social justice and, in fact, "may have been due . . . to its unwillingness or inability to service the norm." Ada W. Finifter and Ellen Mickiewicz, "Redefining the Political System of the USSR: Mass Support for Political Change," American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992): 860-61. In a sign of remarkable continuity in Soviet attitudes to their system, Soviet emigré participants in the Harvard Project in the 1950s had also expressed their discontent with the privileges of the communist elite, along with support for some basic elements of the Soviet economic system, such as government ownership of heavy industry.
3. It was only very late, in October 1990, that the better-structured part of the movement, Democratic Russia, became institutionalized as a single political organization. It did not represent the full spectrum of the original movement, however, and by January 1992 it had already split over the disintegration of the Union and shock therapy.
4. Cf. Maksimilian Voloshin's famous poetic line: "Peter the Great was the first Bolshevik."
5. See an article by Viktor Luchin, member of Russia's Constitutional Court, "Decretal Law," Yuridicheskaya gazeta (Moscow) No. 17, 1997.
6. In trying to counteract these revelations, prominent Russian "reformers" used American aid money for Russia to pay U.S. public relations companies, notably Burson Marsteller in New York.
7. Petr Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 326.
8. Maksimilian Voloshin, Stikhi, stat'i, vospominaniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1991), 137.