POSTSCRIPT: A COUNTRY IN SEARCH OF A PAST
It is perfectly natural that researchers studying the state of Russia in the 1990s should use data from the later Soviet period as their starting point. The situation becomes ironic only when sociologists who have a pro-found knowledge of this past, from the studies they conducted at the time (when they were very critical of the system), now treat it as some kind of Eldorado, on account of the living standards and social benefits enjoyed by the population not so long ago, but which have deteriorated inexorably since the beginning of the 1990s.[5] The picture they present is highly instructive: decreasing numbers of people go to the theatre, concerts, the circus or libraries; the reading of literary works and subscriptions to newspapers are in sharp decline in town and countryside alike. The whole structure of leisure activity has been transformed because of increased workloads. Leisure is now much more passive (essentially ‘restorative’), whereas it was becoming culture-oriented in the late Soviet era with the growth in free time. The phenomenon is particularly striking in the case of specialists and managers. The need to increase household incomes compelled many Russians to rear more cattle and poultry on their mini-farms to improve their diet and earn a little more money, or simply in order to survive, with a corresponding reduction in their time for rest and cultural recreation.
The expansion of liberties and rights, as well as the emergence of expensive services, have benefited only the best off, the best qualified, and the most enterprising. A majority of people saw their access to national and international culture reduced. The sociologists we are referring to are highly critical of the quality of television programmes. Television has become the dominant leisure activity, with especially deleterious effects on children who, left to their own devices in the afternoon, sit glued to bovine broadcasts.
According to the authors, two processes are at work: an ever-deepening social stratification, and withdrawal by individuals into their own selves (fewer social and family contacts, lack of interest in culture and politics), which is less pronounced in the major urban centres of European Russia, but very marked in the provincial towns and the countryside. They do not deal with the decline in scientific research, education, and medical and social services, or the fall in demographic indicators, producing a catastrophic situation in which the country’s very survival is at stake.
To conceal this woeful state of affairs, the new power-holders – most of them from the old nomenklatura but now rebaptized ‘democrats’, ‘liberals’, or ‘reformers’ – embarked on a massive propaganda campaign against the old Soviet system, using all the devices previously employed in the West and even outbidding them: the system was nothing but a monstrosity run by monsters, from the original sin of October 1917 right up to the failed coup d’état by conservative party stalwarts against Gorbachev in August 1991. Thereafter, a miracle supposedly occurred, with the dawning of a new era of freedom under President Yeltsin. As a result of this kind of political discourse, contemporary Russia, already woefully diminished and still in a state of shock, also suffers from a kind of self-denigration of its historical identity. Not content with looting and squandering the nation’s wealth, the ‘reformers’ also mounted a frontal assault on its past, directed at its culture, identity and vitality. This was no critical approach to the past: it was sheer ignorance.
The mendacious and nihilistic campaign against the Soviet era was accompanied by a kind of frantic shopping around for alternative pasts to offer the nation for it to identify with. It began with a wholesale readoption of anything Tsarist and pre-revolutionary – a pathetic attempt to find a worthy predecessor in a decaying system. Then, when the rejection of anything Soviet became yet more intense, crystallizing in a hatred of Lenin, Leninism and Bolshevism as issuing from Hell, attempts were made to rehabilitate the Whites in the Civil War – the most reactionary right wing of the Tsarist political spectrum, which lost precisely because it had nothing to offer the country.
Identification with anything and everything detested by the Bolsheviks or the Soviet regime simply attested to intellectual feebleness. The first wave of ‘new elites’ who conquered the Kremlin and power were regarded by many Russians as something approaching a new ‘Tatar invasion’, attacking the country’s political and cultural interests. The nation’s best minds and moral authorities feared lest its only prospect was the nightmarish one of sinking to the level of a Third World country.
It takes time to recover from the ravages of obscurantism. But various cultural events offer positive signs that a slow recovery is under way. We should remember the historian Kliuchevsky’s reaction to those who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, claimed that ‘the past is in the past’. No, he said: with all the difficulties crowding in on us and the errors that have been committed, the past is all around us, enveloping reforms, distorting and almost swallowing them up.
As if taking up where Kliuchevsky had left off, the political philosopher Mezhuev, speaking at a conference in Moscow organized by Tatyana Zaslavskaya, forcefully argued that ‘a country cannot exist without its history’.[6] His highly stimulating thoughts are worth quoting at length:
Our reformers – whether communists, democrats, slavophiles, or people fascinated by the West – all make the crucial mistake of failing to identify a rationally and morally justified continuity between Russia’s past and its future, between what it has been and what (according to them) it should be. Some negate the past and others identify it as the only possible model. The result is that for some the future is merely a mixture of past themes, while for others it is the mechanical acceptance of the opposite – something without any analogy in Russian history. But the future must be conceived in the first instance in relation to the past – in particular to the past we have just left behind.
Mezhuev proceeds to criticize the liberal economist A. Illarionov, who regards the twentieth century as a wasted one for Russia: having lived under socialism, the country deviated from its liberal trajectory and that is why yesterday’s giant has become today’s midget. For Illarionov, the only salvation consists in a return to liberalism. According to Mezhuev, such nihilism is historically absurd. It is easier to be wise after the event than to analyse what happened and why. To rail against Russia for not having become liberal at the beginning of the century is to demonstrate a profound ignorance of Russian history and liberalism alike. The triumph of liberalism was the product of a protracted historical process: the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the revolutions that emancipated societies from absolutist monarchies (but not everywhere!). England itself, the mother of liberalism, took time to embark on the liberal road. Russia and many other countries did not develop a liberal market economy. Should they be blamed for this? That would be pointless. The important thing is to understand the past century and the role it will play in future developments.
For Mezhuev, the key to twentieth-century Russian history is to be found in three revolutions, not exclusively in the Bolshevik revolution. The first – in 1905 – was defeated. The second – in February 1917 – witnessed the victory of moderate revolutionary forces. The third – October – which saw the triumph of more radical revolutionaries, was only the last phase in this revolutionary process. That is how such processes always unfold. Once triggered, there is no one to blame; the process pursues its course to a conclusion. The philosopher Berdyaev had understood this welclass="underline" the Bolsheviks were not the revolution’s authors, but the instrument of its development. It is pointless adopting primarily moral criteria and denouncing the cruelties inflicted, for it is always thus in situations of civil war or struggles against oppression. A revolution is not a moral or legal action, but a deployment of coercive force. There are no ‘good’ revolutions; they are always bloody:
5
T. I. Zaslavskaya and Z. I. Kalugina, otvet. red.,
6
See V. P. Mezhuev, ‘Otnoshenie k proshlomu – kliuch k budushchemu’, in