Communism as a lived system of ideas in contemporary Russia

East European Politics and Societies

Volumn 19, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 463-493

  Dawisha, Karen ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Authoritarianism; Communism; Dictatorship of laws; Political culture; Public opinion polls; Putin; Russia; Socialism; USSR; Yeltsin

Indexed keywords

EID: 23944446112     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325405278105     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. The main contemporary proponents of this view are François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
2. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994);
3. and Stéphane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczlowski, Karel Bartošek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999),
4. who very specifically write not of the crimes of various regimes but of "the crimes of communism." These works build on and continue the tradition of Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968);
5. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
6. and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951).
7. Stephen White, Gorbachev in Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
8. Robert V. Daniels, Is Russia Reformable? Change and Resistance from Stalin to Gorbachev (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1989);
9. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
10. and Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1997). Criticism of this school and its inability and unwillingness to foresee the collapse of the USSR, due to the ideological pre-disposition of its authors, is the subject of an interesting special issue of The National Interest in spring 1993, which features articles by Francis Fukuyama, Richard Pipes, and others, as well as a fascinating article by Saul Bellow on the evolution of his own ideas about Marxism and Leninism.
11. Lilia Shevtsova, Putin's Russia (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003);
12. see her chapter "Russia Tranquilized," 163-86.
13. Of course, many books and articles have been written by individual leaders of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin period, analyzing the transition and justifying their positions. Among the best are Leonid Mlechun, Evgeniy Primakov, Istoriya odnoy kareery (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraph, 1999);
14. Yegor Gaidar, Dolgoye vremya: Rossiya v mire, ocherki ekonomicheskoy istorii (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Delo, 2005);
15. and Alexander M. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002).
16. Including Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, Russia and the New States of Eurasia: The Politics of Upheaval (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
17. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., Democratic Changes and Authoritarian Reactions in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
18. David Stark and László Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
19. Valerie Bunce, "Should Transitologists Be Grounded?" Slavic Review 54:1(1995): 111-27;
20. Terry Karl and Philippe C. Schmitter, "From an Iron Curtain of Coercion to a Paper Curtain of Concepts: Grounding Transitologists or Confining Students of Postcommunism?" Slavic Review 54:4(1995): 965-78;
21. and Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
22. Nina Andreeva, "I Cannot Forgo Principles," Sovetskaya Rossiya, 23 March 1988,
23. as reprinted in Richard Sakwa, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 440-46.
24. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Clarendon, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977), 155.
25. Michael Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4.
26. Williams, Marxism and Literature.
27. This is the method also adopted in Michael D. Kennedy, Cultural Formations in Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
28. Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds., "Introduction," in Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 4.
29. A term used at the beginning of his first term in 2000, whose elusive meaning was widely discussed at the time. See, for example, Michael Wines, "Putin Retains Soviet Discipline while Steering toward Reform," New York Times, 20 February 2000.
30. Most notably, Stark and Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways;
31. and Jon Elster, Claus Offe, and Ulrich Preuss, Institutional Design in Postcommunist Countries: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
32. The need to consider the agency of ordinary people as a group to effect change in post-communism is ably considered in Kennedy's Cultural Formations.
33. Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 70-71.
34. Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope Abandoned (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 249.
35. Saul Bellow, "Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence," National Review, 31 (Spring 1993): 130.
36. Brown, in Who Owns Native Culture?, asks similar questions about how intellectual property law might apply to ownership of cultural tradition by indigenous peoples.
37. This point is made especially by Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
38. For example, Jürgen Habermas, "What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need for New Thinking on the Left," New Left Review 183 (1990): 3-21;
39. Michael Burowoy and Janos Lukács, The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
40. This nostalgia is the subject of many studies, most notably, Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001);
41. and Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
42. But in addition, an increasing number of sociological studies have explored the specific reasons why individual groups may have good reason to favor life under socialism. See, for example, Lynne Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),
43. who explores how women welfare recipients missed a system that linked entitlements to social contribution rather than need; and Slawomira Zbierski-Salameh, "Polish Peasants in the 'Valley of Transition,' Responses to Postsocialist Reforms," in Burawoy and Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition, 189-223, who writes on how the transition reduced Polish farmers' capability to profit financially, forcing them to live at a subsistence level and fight for a reinstatement of their socialist-era status.
44. Vladimir Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda, trans. Andrew Bromfield (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 259-60.
45. As in "Lenin vsegda s toboi" ("Lenin is with you always"), Lyrics by Lev Oshanin, music by Serafim Tulikov. These and other songs reminiscent of the Soviet era are part of the screen-play Good Morning, Moscow! by Marina Kostalevsky (Bard Music Festival, 2004, unpublished).
46. As with Gleb Cherkasov, "The Kremlin's Not Complete without a Gray Cardinal," Mosnews.com/gazeta.ru (accessed 13 April 2005).
47. See Andrei Sergeev, "Big Children and Golden Cages," Russkii Kurier, 17 March 2005, in which the promotions of the sons (all in their twenties) of Viktor Chernomyrdin, Sergei Ivanov, Mintimer Shaimiyev, and Mikhail Fradkov and others are detailed.
48. A reference to Putin's biography, ghostwritten by Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalia Timakova, A. V. Kolesnikov, and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, First Person (New York: Public Affairs, 2000).
49. Prokhanov is the editor-in-chief of the extreme right-wing paper Zavtra, which regularly publishes works by other members of the "patriotic right." Also see Eduard Limonov, U nas byla velikaia epokha (Moskva: Konets veka, 1994);
50. Grigoriy Bondarenko, Lev Gumilev (Moskva: Paleia, 1992);
51. Vladimir Bondarenko, Aleksandr Prokhanov (Moskva: Paleia, 1992);
52. and Oleg Platonov, Russkaia tsivilizatsiia (Moskva: Kulturno-Proizvodstvennyi Tsentr 'Rada', 1992).
53. See the poll results in Vremya Novosti, 17 January 2005;
54. and RIA Novosti, 9 February 2005.
55. For a general discussion of civil society and its limits in post-communist states, see Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Postcommunist Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
56. and Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds., Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2000).
57. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
58. Vladimir Voinovich, The Ivankiad or the Tale of the Writer Voinovich's Installation in His New Apartment (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977).
59. Joseph Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957);
60. and Janine Wedel, The Private Poland: An Anthropologist's Look at Everyday Life (New York: Facts on File, 1986).
61. This distinction between vertical and horizontal networks is also made in Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism? What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), especially chap. 8.
62. Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
63. Stephen Lovell, Alena V. Ledeneva, and Andrei Rogachevskii, eds., Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s (New York: St. Martin's, 2000);
64. Janine R. Wedel, "Dirty Togetherness: Institutional Nomads, Networks, and the State-Private Interface in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union," Polish Sociological Review 2:142(2003): 139-59;
65. Katherine Verdery wrote about the emergence of "unruly coalitions" in What Was Socialism?, 193;
66. and David Woodruff, Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Woodruff argues that the use of barter was not a carryover from the Soviet past but a response to managers' efforts to protect industry from price increases. Yet without the experience of having lived in a barter economy under socialism, and still able to rely on extant networks, it is unlikely that managers would have had the knowledge or courage to eliminate money.
67. One of the first writers from inside Russia to write about this in a systematic fashion was Konstantin Simis, USSR: Corrupt Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
68. See Roy Medvedev, The Samizdat Register (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977);
69. and H. Gordon Skillings, Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1989).
70. Maryjane Osa, Solidarity and Contention: Networks of Polish Opposition (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2003);
71. Michael Kennedy, Professionals, Power and Solidarity in Poland: A Critical Sociology of Soviet-Type Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
72. For more information, see Michael Bourdeaux, ed., The Politics of Religion in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995).
73. See especially Marshall I. Goldman, Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry (New York: Routledge, 2003);
74. Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002);
75. Mitchell Orenstein, Out of the Red: Building Capitalism and Democracy in Postcommunist Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001);
76. and Hillary Appel, A New Capitalist Order: Privatization and Ideology in Russia and Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
77. It should also be pointed out that privatization proceeded quickly not just because of the existence of extant informal networks but also because the process at the outset was regarded as both legitimate and just. See Hilary Appel, "Justice and the Reformulation of Property Rights in the Czech Republic," East European Politics and Society 9 (1995): 22-40.
78. C. M. Hann, ed., "Introduction," in Postsocialism: Ideas, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia (New York: Routledge, 2001), 10.
79. There are hundreds of books and articles on this topic. Among those that deal with different aspects of the popular reaction to the collapse of communism and its continuing legacy on contemporary politics are Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Postcommunist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998);
80. and Anna Maria Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Parties in East Central Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
81. The importance of the construction of the past as a basis for a positive evaluation of the present in revolutionary situations is one of the themes of C. M. Hann, ed., When History Accelerates: Essays on Rapid Social Change, Complexity and Creativity (London: Athlone Press, 1994).
82. The different sense of time under socialism is the subject of Verdery, What Was Socialism?, in her chapter titled "The 'Etatization' of Time in Ceausescu's Romania," 39-59;
83. and Costica Bradatan, "A Time of Crisis - A Crisis of (the Sense of) Time: The Political Production of Time in Communism and Its Relevance for the Postcommunist Debates," East European Politics and Societies 19:2(2005): 260-90.
84. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, especially the excellent chapters on St. Petersburg and Moscow.
85. The ability of Russian voters to check a box labeled "against all" on their ballots, with the result that in many elections, "against all" has received upward of 5 percent of the votes, and more votes than several of the liberal parties, is discussed in Christopher Marsh, Russia at the Polls: Voters, Elections, and Democratization (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002).
86. According to public opinion polls carried out by the Public Opinion Fund (according to RIA Novosti, Moscow, 22 April 2005), 52 percent of Russia's population believes serious problems exist in Russia that may eventually lead to its collapse. And 58 percent believe that certain forces are working to bring this about, including internal forces (oligarchs, elites, nationalists, criminal elements) and external forces (United States, Japan, China, Ukraine, Georgia, and the "Islamic countries").
87. For more on the role of film in shaping national myths in post-communist states, including Russia, see Birgit Beumers, Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999);
88. Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003);
89. and Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
90. Milan Kundera, "Sixty-Three Words," trans. Linda Asher, in The Art of the Novel (New York: Harper Collins, 1988), 128.
91. Vladimir Lukin (then a member of the Soviet Foreign Ministry's Planning and Assessments Department, later the head of Gorbachev's own planning staff, and after 1991, a cofounder of the liberal democratic political party Yabloko), in Moscow News, No. 38, 25 September-2 October 1988,
92. as quoted in Karen Dawisha, East Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform: The Great Challenge, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 22.
93. RTR Russia TV, Moscow, BBC Monitoring, "Putin Focuses on Domestic Policy in State-of-Nation Address to Russian Parliament," 25 April 2005.
94. RIA Novosti press conference with the president of the Effective Policy Foundation Gleb Pavlovsky, 3 December 2004.
95. See, for example, Vitali Silitski, "Has the Age of Revolutions Ended?" Transitions Online, 13 January 2005, in which Silitski considers the negative reactions amongst the Kremlin insiders, such as Pavlovsky, Vyacheslav Nikonov, and others to the events in Ukraine and what this means for the future of similar democratic revolutionary upheaval in Russia.
96. ROMIR survey in February 2005 of fifteen hundred people in more than one hundred cities, towns, and villages, as reported by Interfax, Moscow, 17 March 2005.
97. I b i d.
98. The similar phenomenon in Slovakia is ably explored by Shari J. Cohen, Politics without a Past: The Absence of History in Postcommunist Nationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
99. Zhili-byli are the Russian words that start fairy tales, equivalent to "Once upon a time."
100. RTR Russia TV, Moscow, BBC Monitoring, "Putin Focuses on Domestic Policy."
101. Voinovich, Monumental Propaganda, 364-65.