The Legacy of the Soviet Union

The Legacy of the Soviet Union Edited by

Wendy Slater and Andrew Wilson

The Legacy of the Soviet Union

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The Legacy of the Soviet Union Edited by

Wendy Slater Former Lecturer in Contemporary Russian History School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London, UK

and

Andrew Wilson Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK

Editorial Matter and Selection © Wendy Slater and Andrew Wilson 2004 Chapters 1–13 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1786–8 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The legacy of the Soviet Union / edited by Wendy Slater and Andrew Wilson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1786–8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Former Soviet republics. 2. Nationalism – Former Soviet republics. 3. Former Soviet republics – Ethnic relations. 4. Former Soviet republics – Politics and government. 5. Former Soviet republics – Economic conditions. I. Slater, Wendy, 1967– II. Wilson, Andrew. DK293.L444 2004 909⬘.09759180829—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents List of Contributors

vii

Preface and Acknowledgements

x

1 Introduction: Soviet Union in Retrospect – Ten Years After 1991 Sheila Fitzpatrick

1

Part I

National Identity

15

2 A Future Russia: A Nation-state or a Multi-national Federation? Vera Tolz

17

3 Rival Versions of the East Slavic Idea in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus Andrew Wilson

39

4

61

Separatist States and Post-Soviet Conflicts Dov Lynch

5 Management of Ethnic Relations in Kazakhstan: Stability without Success Bhavna Dave

Part II

The Economy

83

101

6 Transactions in the US–Russia Relationship: Representational Gymnastics, Shifting Agency and Russia’s Decline Janine R. Wedel

103

7 Blat Lessons: Networks, Institutions, Unwritten Rules Alena Ledeneva

122

8

144

Administrative Regions and the Economy Philip Hanson

Part III 9

Politics, Law and Foreign Policy

Law Reform and Civil Culture W. E. Butler

169 171

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10 Censorship and Restrictions on Freedom of Speech in Russia: 1986–1991–2001 Martin Dewhirst

186

11 Politics Beyond the Garden Ring: Rethinking the Post-Soviet Experience Vladimir Gel’man

208

12 Westernism, Eurasianism and Pragmatism: The Foreign Policies of the Post-Soviet States, 1991–2001 Peter J. S. Duncan

228

13

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Conclusions: Stalin’s Death 50 Years On Wendy Slater

Index

266

List of Contributors W. E. Butler is Professor of Comparative Law at the University of London; Director, the Vinogradoff Institute, UCL; M. M. Speranskii Professor of International and Comparative Law, Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences; Foreign Member, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Russian Academy of Legal Sciences. Bhavna Dave is Lecturer in Central Asian Studies, Department of Political Studies, SOAS. She has written widely on Kazakhstan, and is currently completing a book on post-Soviet Kazakhstan, to be published by Harwood Academic Press. Martin Dewhirst has been on the staff of Glasgow University since 1964. He lectures on Russian language, literature and the media, and has a special interest in samizdat and the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet systems of censorship. He co-edited The Soviet Censorship (1973) and Russian Writing Today (1977). His most recent publication is an article (with Alla Latynina), ‘Post-Soviet Russian Literature’ in The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature (2001). Peter J. S. Duncan is Senior Lecturer in Russian Politics and Society, SSEES, UCL. Among his books are The Soviet Union and India; The Road to Post-Communism: Independent Political Movements in the Soviet Union, 1985–1991 (with Geoffrey Hosking and Jonathan Aves, 1992); and Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (2000). Sheila Fitzpatrick is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Russian History, University of Chicago. Recent publications include Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivisation (1994); edited with Robert Gellately, Accusatory Practices. Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989 (1997); Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (2000); In the Shadow of Revolution. Life-Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (2000). Vladimir Gel’man is Lecturer in Russian politics at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, European University at St Petersburg. He has authored or co-authored more than eighty articles; and co-edited vii

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Elections in Russia, 1993–1996 (1999). His recent publications in Russian include Transformatsiia v Rossii: Politicheskii rezhim i demokraticheskaia oppozitsiia (1999) and Rossiia Regionov: Transformatsiia politicheskikh rezhimov (2000). Philip Hanson is Professor of the Political Economy of Russia and Eastern Europe at the University of Birmingham (retired), and formerly Director of that university’s Centre for Russian and East European Studies. He has published mainly on the Soviet and Russian economies. His most recent book, co-edited with Michael Bradshaw, is Regional Economic Change in Russia (2000). Earlier books included From Stagnation to Catastroika (1992); and Trade and Technology in Soviet–Western Relations (1981). Alena Ledeneva is Reader in Russian Politics and Society, SSEES, UCL. Her publications include Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (1998); Bribery and Blat in Russia (2000); Economic Crime in Russia (edited with S. Lovell and A. Rogatchevskii, 2000); and How Russia Really Works (edited with M. Kurkchiyan, 2001). Dov Lynch is Lecturer in War Studies, King’s College, London, and Director of a US Institute of Peace project on ‘Eurasian Security and de facto States’. Research Fellow at EU Institute of Security Studies in 2001. Recent publications include Russian Peacekeeping Strategies towards the CIS (2000); co-editor, Energy in the Caspian Region (2001). Wendy Slater is Lecturer in Contemporary Russian History, SSEES, UCL, 1999–2003; and deputy editor of The Annual Register. She has written widely on the ideology of Russian nationalism in the late- and postSoviet eras, and on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church. She is currently preparing a book to be called The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II, planned for publication by Routledge Curzon in 2005. Vera Tolz is Professor of Contemporary Russian History, Department of Politics and Contemporary History, University of Salford. Her books include The USSR’s Emerging Multiparty System (1990); Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionalism and Politics (1997); and Russia: Inventing the Nation (2001). Janine R. Wedel is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Winner of the 2001 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order for the ideas set forth in her latest book, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (1998, 2001). Publications also include The Private Poland: An Anthropologist’s Look at Everyday Life (1986); and The Unplanned

List of Contributors ix

Society: Poland Before and After Communism (1992). Wedel is a threetime Fulbright fellow, and recipient of awards from numerous other foundations. Andrew Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies, SSEES, UCL. His recent publications include The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (2000) and Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith (1997).

Preface and Acknowledgements The idea for this book came out of a conference held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College, London in November 2001, timed to mark the ten years that had then passed since the fall of the USSR. The aim of the conference was to provide some pointers as to how academic understanding has developed in the decade, both in terms of our knowledge of the 15 successor states and our reassessment of the USSR itself. A subsidiary theme involved the assumption of studying the post-Soviet space as a whole. Do the 15 states still have enough in common to justify a comparative perspective? Is ‘post-Soviet’ still a meaningful term, both in terms of a collective legacy and a decisive influence? If yes, what would have to change for this no longer to be the case? The papers included in this volume reflect these themes. They cover a variety of inter-disciplinary and geographical perspectives, although they cannot of course claim to cover every aspect that is worthy of study. Sheila Fitzpatrick sets the scene by examining how Soviet history is now subject to ‘reconfiguration’. ‘When the Soviet Union collapsed’, Fitzpatrick writes, ‘the Russian Revolution abruptly ceased to be a nation-founding event and became an episode. Soviet history stopped being an ongoing process and became finite, bounded not only by a beginning (1917) but also by an end’. The First World War (1914–17) became more important; different boundaries – 1945 rather than 1953 – suggested themselves. What was once ‘mature socialism’ became the ‘end-Soviet’ era; it became possible to choose to ‘see Brezhnevism (“high Sovietism”?) as the destination point of Soviet history’. Fitzpatrick ends by speculating about some of the directions (post) Soviet studies might take in the next decade. Part I looks at how – and if – the post-Soviet states are reconstructing their national identities. Vera Tolz argues that the Russians, the supposedly ‘imperial’ nation under the USSR, are in fact most troubled by postSoviet identity transformations, given that the Soviet era redeveloped in a different form the Tsarist habit of confusing Russian ‘nation’ and ‘state’ (and, without explicitly using the latter term, also conflating ‘state’ and ‘empire’). Andrew Wilson addresses the East Slavic idea as one possible solution for post-Soviet identity problems for the three core nations of the old USSR (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus), but one that is still profoundly influenced by the Soviet era; redefining as it does the x

Preface and Acknowledgements xi

Soviet family of nations at the same time as retaining key aspects of Soviet mythology. Dov Lynch looks at the legacy of Soviet ethnic micromanagement, arguing that ‘de facto states’ like Abkhazia and the Dnister Republic must now be considered as realities the international community has yet to deal with. Lynch challenges the myths that such conflicts have only persisted because of third-party interference and are somehow ‘frozen conflicts’ – in fact local situations have continued to develop since ‘cease fires’ in the early 1990s. Bhavna Dave looks at Kazakhstan as a prime example of a state that re-embodies the Soviet legacy in different forms by combining both the nation-building and multicultural approaches to rationality issues. The result has been ‘stability without success’. ‘Although Kazakhstan has managed to steer clear of conflict along ethnic lines’, Dave assets, ‘the top-down management of ethnic relations has exacerbated a deep sense of alienation of the citizenry from the state, bringing about a massive population flight and a steady deterioration of the quality of life and norms governing the public sphere’. Part II on The Economy considers some of the deep-rooted problems that may threaten the current trend towards tentative recovery in most of the former USSR. Janine Wedel looks at the moral hazards ignored by purveyors of Western assistance, and the missed opportunities for more constructive engagement. Alena Ledeneva mines the culture of blat (‘favour’) to see why informal practices and patronage networks still constrain the possibilities for long-term economic recovery. Philip Hanson addresses the proposition that Russia’s economic decline is due to fiscal federalism and the loss of central control over budgetary flows, but finds it wanting. A remodelled federation is no barrier to Russia building on its current recovery. Hanson also examines changing patterns of regional inequality since independence, and their interaction with political and ethnic factors, including ‘the intense debate in Russia about “donor” and “recipient” regions’. ‘Public finances, and their centre–region dimension in particular, remain problematic’, he concludes, but the Federation is more cohesive than some more alarmist reports might suggest. In Part III on Politics, Law and Foreign Policy, William Butler argues for the supreme importance of legal reform and a genuinely independent judiciary for Russia’s overall ‘transition’ prospects – and of course those of the other successor states. Although many elements of the Soviet legal system have ‘displayed surprisingly robust residual strength’, including the tendency to ‘over-legislate’, Butler argues, Russia does have alternative traditions to build on. ‘For Russian jurists of the present generation the “rule of law” and the “rule-of-law State” are a rediscovery rather than an invention.’ Properly interpreted, Butler argues, Russia also has a

xii Preface and Acknowledgements

tradition of civil society (obshchestvennost’). Martin Dewhirst, on the other hand, stresses the continuities in the culture and practice of censorship. If anything, in fact, Russian society ‘is less open in 2001 than it was a decade ago’. Vladimir Gel’man looks at regional politics outside of Moscow’s ‘Garden Ring’. He classifies the various approaches to ‘regionology’ that have developed since 1991, and examines how ‘the diversity of regional political processes in Russia helps to test different theories of political transformations and theories of institutional changes’. Peter Duncan looks at the foreign policies of all the successor states in comparative perspective, and examines whether the geopolitical pluralism that emerged after the USSR can be fitted into a tripartite typology of ‘Westernism, Eurasianism and Pragmatism’. Finally, Wendy Slater looks at another anniversary, the commemoration, condemnation and retrospective contemplation provoked in 2003 by the 50 years since Joseph Stalin’s death in March 1953. Only in the brief periods after the XXII CPSU congress in 1961 and in the years either side of 1991 was a partial reassessment of Stalin ever possible. Ambivalence is therefore characteristic of even mainstream assessments in the media and in history writing. Even the current fashion amongst younger politicians for dismissing Stalin as just ‘history’ is testament to the lack of real elucidation. Thanks are due to the organizers of the original conference. The committee was led by Geoffrey Hosking, who first raised the idea for such an event, and included the editors, Peter Duncan and Alena Ledeneva. Financial support for the conference was very generously provided by the British Academy and the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to whom the organizers once again extend their thanks. Thanks are also due to all the staff at SSEES, and to Amy Warner, who provided determined administrative support. Finally, the editors are grateful to Alison Howson and Guy Edwards at Palgrave, for helping to guide and smooth the final publication. Some of the material in Philip Hanson’s chapter was previously included in a paper entitled ‘Federalism with a Russian Face’ that was prepared for a Carnegie project to be published as The Dynamics of Russian Politics: Putin’s Reform of Federal–Regional Relations, Vol. 2, edited by Peter Reddaway and Robert W. Orttung (Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). The chapter by Vladimir Gel’man includes material that was published in Beyond the Garden Ring: Dimensions of Russian Regionalism (Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2002). ANDREW WILSON

1 Introduction: Soviet Union in Retrospect – Ten Years After 1991 Sheila Fitzpatrick

Soviet history looks different today than it looked ten years ago. That is a truism, of course. We would be surprised, regardless of the time or occasion, if scholars were dealing with their subject in exactly the same way as they had done a decade earlier. Scholarly fashions and emphases change. Answers to new questions are sought, preoccupations of the present projected back on the past. But the difference between how Soviet history looks now and how it looked before 1991 is a more profound one. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Soviet history – the thing, not the writing of it – came to an end. With that collapse, the Russian Revolution abruptly ceased to be a nation-founding event and became an episode. Soviet history stopped being an ongoing process and became finite, bounded not only by a beginning (1917) but also by an end. I take as my starting-point in this chapter the premise that Soviet history will necessarily be reconfigured in our minds in the aftermath and as a consequence of 1991. This is not a question of new data, though of course our greater access to information will also inevitably produce new insights and perspectives. What I have in mind is the reconfiguration brought about by a great change in the world. In 1991, ‘Soviet history’ suddenly became the period that came before Russia’s ‘post-Soviet’ history. That requires a change in historical thinking something like the mental shift required of European historians when, as a result of the Second World War, the ‘postwar’ period starting in 1918 became bounded, requiring reconceptualization as ‘interwar’. The subject of this chapter is the reconfiguration of the Soviet past in the light of the Russian present. That means reconfiguration by Western 1

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and Russian scholars, and to some extent also by ordinary Russians. First, I will discuss memory and how the Soviet period, particularly the Stalin period, is remembered in Russia in different contexts and by different people. Second, I will explore the question of reconfiguration: how the framework of our thinking about Soviet history has changed as a result of 1991. I will conclude with some reflections on the legacy of the Soviet Union.

Memory In the early 1990s, some Russians were talking about the 74 years of the Soviet period as a deviation from the proper path of Russian history, something better forgotten, an empty space. In Russia that attitude has largely vanished, but there are sharply divergent ways in which people remember Soviet times. In addition to individual personal memories, two dominant narratives of the Soviet past emerged in Russia in the 1990s. The first was the ‘repression and suffering’ narrative, associated mainly with the Stalin period: arrests, deportations, Gulag, the whole oppressive sistema. These stories have been systematically collected and published since perestroika by groups like Memorial. The second dominant narrative, less likely to be written down but a staple of conversational exchanges especially among the older generation, is about the ‘good old days’. This is the nostalgia story – order, low prices, the nation held in respect in the world. Memories are often tailored to fit into familiar narratives – reframed, corrected, smoothed over to eliminate things we would prefer to forget. Even worse, scientists tell us that after we have recalled and recounted a memory, the brain then stores it in the narrated form (like a computer with an edited version of a file) rather than the original. The problems of memory are compounded when people are remembering discredited periods of the national past (for example, Germans and Italians remembering the Fascist/Nazi periods after the Second World War), especially when they are being questioned about these memories by outsiders. In collecting oral autobiographies of Italian workers in the late 1970s, for example, Luisa Passerini was struck by the silence of her interviewees about fascism and the inapplicability to their attitudes of the categories ‘consent’ and ‘dissent’. She found that the more political of the respondents ‘would often skip the period between the wars’, while those with little interest in politics ‘ignore[d] certain phenomena and processes considered of great importance by historians’, including clandestine resistance.1 Interviewing German workers from the Ruhr in the 1980s, Ulrich Herbert was disconcerted to find that the prewar Nazi period

Soviet Union in Retrospect 3

figured in people’s memories as ‘good, normal times’ (in contrast to the times of economic depression and civil disorder that preceded them and the postwar hardship that followed).2 Yet for all the problems of reported memories, historians would scarcely want to do without them. One can only regret that since 1991 there have been no big oral history projects comparable with the Harvard Interview Project of the early 1950s or even with the Soviet Interview Project of the 1980s.3 Nevertheless, there have been a number of small-scale interview and memoir projects conducted by individual scholars or small groups, which provide us with fascinating (if sometimes apparently contradictory) insights. Suffering and stoical victimhood on ‘the road to Calvary’ are key tropes in most of the repression and Gulag memoirs published in the 1990s.4 In an oral history of childbearing conducted in the early 1990s, David Ransel found that peasant women of the older generation (born before 1912) were often eager to relate stories of dekulakization and other miseries, despite the fact that they were not directly asked about such experiences.5 Catherine Merridale, investigating attitudes to death a few years later, expected and elicited a strong ‘repression’ narrative from her respondents, whilst noting that her respondents were unwilling simply to ‘relate their lives as tales of suffering’, preferring to talk about survival.6 The survival theme was also prominent in the stories of elderly women collected by Barbara Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck in the 1990s; in this case, the editors’ Western feminist perspective, which entailed a belief that the equality and opportunity officially claimed for Soviet women was a fraud, ‘encountered incomprehension and outright resistance’ from respondents.7 Despite the remarkably high representation in this small sample of women stigmatized in the 1920s and 1930s for bad social origins, most of the women embraced at least one major tenet of Soviet ideology, namely ‘that contributing to production and working for the public good were of utmost importance’, and they ‘apparently derived genuine satisfaction from their participation in public life’.8 Positive attitudes were even more marked in the responses of elderly men and women interviewed by a Leningrad team in the late 1990s, who generally remembered their working and everyday lives in Leningrad in the 1930s with pleasure and even nostalgia. Although most were recent arrivals from the countryside, they tended to deal briefly and matter-of-factly with dekulakization and claimed to have had no or little personal contact with other aspects of terror.9 Clearly many of those who remember the 1930s positively do so because – like their German counterparts interviewed about the Nazi

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period, and the Italians interviewed by Passerini10 – this was the time of their youth, and youth was the time of greatest happiness. All the same, as a coherent discourse starts to emerge in post-Soviet Russia about the ‘good old times’ (variously under Brezhnev, Khrushchev, or Stalin, or generally Soviet), certain themes emerge which, taken together, offer a retrospective interpretation of the meaning of ‘Sovietness’: welfare provisions, guaranteed employment, order on the streets, respect for authority (comparative) egalitarianism, a sense of national purpose and national pride, a spirit of community (including at the workplace – a valued site of friendship and support), respect and financial support for culture and science, and ‘friendship of nations’ rather than hostility between ethnic groups. Needless to say, this is not how Western observers of the late Soviet period tended to describe Soviet society. It is probably not how the same Russians would have described their society 20 years ago. Is this, then, what ‘Sovietness’ really meant, or is it simply a nostalgic recasting of the past? Such questions are unanswerable, since the concept has no absolute meaning that can be divorced from perception. The characterization cited above is essentially a list of ‘what we lost’ in the passage from Soviet to post-Soviet life – and no doubt it was partly the losing of these things that made them recognizable, retrospectively, as once possessed.

Reconfigurations With respect to historiography, the ‘repression’ theme – always popular with Western historians – has flourished both in Russia and the West since 1991; this is where the opening of Soviet archives has produced the most abundant new data, since by definition the relevant files were previously secret and inaccessible. The ‘good old days’ theme has been less well represented historiographically, although there are signs that this may change as the Soviet welfare state becomes a focus of historical investigation; and one might also interpret the recent success of ‘Soviet subjectivity’ studies11 as to some extent nostalgia-driven. However, it is not my purpose to give a detailed review of recent historiography. I want to address a broader issue, namely the way in which 1991 has reconfigured the shape of Soviet history. I began with the statement that we see Soviet history differently now from the way we saw it before 1991. This is not just a matter of seeing it more clearly and fully (although that may well be true). What I have in mind is that our sense of the meaning of the journey is almost inevitably changed by the fact that, as far as the Soviet period of Russian history is concerned, the train has now arrived at the terminus. Much historical

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writing has always had an implicit teleology or sense of destination: think of Leonard Schapiro’s Origin of the Communist Autocracy and E. H. Carr’s Foundations of a Planned Economy,12 for example. But when real life provides us, dramatically, with a destination, as, say, in the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War or the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, even the least teleologically-inclined historian is likely to react. The existence of an end-date necessarily affects our sense of periodization. Our sense of relevance is likely to change, too, bringing adjustments to the relative importance we attach to different historical events and phenomena. Two particularly striking reconfigurations have occurred since 1991. The first is a historiographical recovery of the First World War, coupled with sharply reduced interest in the Bolshevik Revolution. The second is the repositioning of the Second World War in Russian/Soviet history, which has important implications for the conceptualization of Stalinism. First World War and Revolution For more than 70 years, the Bolshevik (October) Revolution of 1917 had a special status. In the Soviet Union and for sympathizers throughout the world, it was the glorious event that founded the first socialist state. For other socialists, it was the glorious event that should have founded the first socialist state, but went wrong. For anti-Communists, October 1917 was the fatal Russian misstep that made the whole world vulnerable to revolution and/or Communist takeover. Now, in the wake of 1991, the Revolution’s place in history has not been lost – 1789 is still around as a milestone, after all, despite the Bourbon restoration in France in 1815 – but it has been, at least temporarily, significantly diminished. It is no longer a state-founding event, no longer a focus of national pride (or international suspicion). The old debates about whether or not the Revolution had popular support arouse much less passion once there is no powerful state in the picture whose legitimacy is tied to them. Two reconfigurations follow from the downgrading of the Revolution. The first, perhaps only of minor historiographical interest, is the notion of a ‘pre-revolutionary’ period. The term ‘pre-revolution’, associated primarily with Leopold Haimson and his school at Columbia in the 1970s, was used to denote the late imperial period, viewed teleologically as precursor to 1917. Now, if anything, the teleology is going the other way. Historians (especially Russians) are inclined to study the late imperial period in terms of trends pointing not towards revolution, but anywhere

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else. Historiographically, the Romanovs are back in fashion and so (under the label ‘civil society’) are Russian liberals. The second major reconfiguration is the return of the First World War. Looking back, it is remarkable how effectively hidden the First World War was in pre-1991 historiography. The Revolution and Civil War totally overshadowed it. Soviet historians almost ignored it; Western historians followed suit. A huge First World War scholarship blossomed in virtually all other national historiographies (British, French, German, US), but Russianists paid little attention. Memory was prominent in that Western historiography, so perhaps Russianists’ lack of involvement was understandable: we had, almost literally, forgotten about the First World War. If we dealt, say, with the experience of war as it affected Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s, it was the Civil War that was under discussion. Now all that is in the process of changing,13 which is all to the good since the subsuming of the First World War in Revolution and Civil War obviously produced significant distortion of individual and, indeed, collective experience. We should not, however, expect this distortion wholly to disappear, as it is by now embedded in the memoir as well as the historical literature. Generations of Russians in the Soviet Union learned to tell their life-stories with the Revolution and Civil War, not the First World War, as a key milestone; émigrés publishing in Europe and America, though for different (commercial) reasons, also tended to focus on revolutionary rather than First World War experiences and atrocities. Thus, the partial obscuring of the First World War in Russian historical memory has become an artefact not just of secondary but also of primary sources.

The Second World War and the concept of Stalinism For more than 40 years, the Second World War held a position of great importance in Soviet understanding of Soviet history, but not in Western understanding. For Soviet historians, along with the rest of the Soviet population, the Second World War was ‘the Great Patriotic War’, the definitive test of the nation’s strength, a demonstration of popular heroism and resilience and, finally, a great though costly victory that vindicated Soviet power in the eyes of the world. In the postwar West, by contrast, historians of the Soviet period tended to neglect the Second World War as an object of study.14 There were various reasons for this. In the first place, the War and the Great Purges, existing in close chronological proximity but belonging to different historical narratives, were to some extent competitors for historians’ attention. The Great Purges

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were the key episode in what might be called the negative (‘crimes of Lenin and Stalin’) story of Soviet history, whilst the Second World War was associated with a more positive ‘Soviet achievements’ narrative that, with the onset of the Cold War, quickly became suspect in the West. In the second place, Western historians did not see the Second World War as a major formative experience because in their big picture of Soviet history it did not change anything important. The ‘totalitarian’ (or, for other scholars, ‘Stalinist’)15 regime established before the war continued essentially unaltered afterwards. The war, lacking any system-changing significance, was simply an episode. The idea of Stalinism as a central template for Soviet history (recently presented under a new guise by Stephan Kotkin)16 is deeply entrenched in Soviet studies. For scholars working with the totalitarian model in the postwar period, Stalinism was ‘totalitarianism full-blown’, as opposed to the half-blown or embryonic versions that preceded it. To be sure, the émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff proposed a different interpretation of the relationship of Stalinism to the Bolshevik Revolution in The Great Retreat,17 and revisionists like Stephen Cohen similarly rejected the notion of essential continuity between original Bolshevism and Stalinism.18 But there were many other revisionists of the 1970s and 1980s (for example, Arch Getty, Roberta Manning, Lynne Viola, Hiroaki Kuromiya and myself) who shared with the totalitarian school the assumption that Stalinism was the central problem of Soviet history. Most Western Soviet historians, whatever their position in our Historikerstreit of those years, understood the course of Soviet history as, first, movement towards high Stalinism, and then, after Stalin’s death, movement away from it. While some scholars’ notions of Stalinism emerge primarily from the 1930s and others from the postwar years, few if any scholars suggested that there were essential differences between the two periods. Those whose research expertise was in the postwar period tended to assume that the same general patterns applied to the 1930s, whilst those with 1930s expertise made a similar assumption about the postwar years. The paucity of published data on most aspects of the postwar period, together with the total inaccessibility of postwar archives to Western scholars, made it extremely difficult to make reliable judgements about change. I was one of many historians working on the prewar period who assumed that the postwar period was essentially ‘more of the same’,19 so it came as quite a surprise when the opening of Soviet archives revealed all sorts of substantive differences. I remember vividly that as I read my first set of postwar Central Committee files I felt I had landed in another world than the one I knew from the 1930s archives.

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Sheila Fitzpatrick

If the postwar era was another world, that implied that some really important changes had occurred since the prewar era – in other words, that the Second World War had had a transformative impact. Looking back, this may seem almost self-evident: not only would commonsense suggest it, but virtually all other national historiographies treat the war in this way. In the Soviet case, however, in addition to the blind spot associated with the concept of an unchanging Stalinist (totalitarian) system, there was also the structural difficulty of accommodating two apparent watersheds – the war and the end of Stalin’s rule – in such close proximity. Just as in the past the old consensus on a 1953 watershed threw 1945 into the shade, so in the future we might expect that a new consensus on the watershed status of the Second World War will diminish the significance of 1953 in historians’ eyes. That new consensus, most passionately proposed in Amir Weiner’s Making Sense of War,20 already seems to have become established among historians, particularly the younger generation. For the sizeable cohort of young scholars in the US currently working on postwar topics, the War is the conventional starting-point, sometimes with just a nod or two to origins in the 1930s. So where does that leave Stalinism? My guess is that the next ten years will see at least a partial deconstruction of the concept. In the first place, as historians find more and more divergences between the prewar and postwar periods, ‘Stalinism’ in its current static, reified form will lose utility. In the second place, the outer edges of the Stalinist period are likely to blur as historians start discovering (as is already happening) that reform projects and new processes previously thought to start after 1953 in fact predate Stalin’s death. There may be more radical reconfigurations to come that will perhaps push Stalinism off center stage altogether. I had an intimation of this recently when a graduate student discussing possible research topics in Soviet history expressed a preference for working, not on the messy period of turmoil and upheaval at the beginning, but on ‘how it all turned out’. Ten years ago, that would have meant the 1930s, then usually understood as the outcome of the Revolution, but this student meant something different: for her, the outcome – when a stable Soviet order emerged – was the 1960s and 1970s. This is, in fact, a perfectly reasonable way of understanding the story of Soviet history. Historiographically, however, it would mark a major departure – perhaps even a new teleology with Brezhnevism (‘high Sovietism?’) as the destination point of Soviet history. To return briefly to the Second World War, there is some irony in the fact that its discovery by Western historians as a key myth of Russia’s

Soviet Union in Retrospect 9

twentieth century has occurred simultaneously with the waning of that myth among Russians. Victory Day is still celebrated in post-Soviet Russia; veterans still turn out (if in ever-declining numbers) with their medals on their chests. All the same, most observers agree that the ‘Great Patriotic War’ is finally retreating from the centre of Russian popular consciousness, especially the consciousness of the young. This is, of course, understandable, both for generational reasons and because the War was the great vindication of the Soviet nation, the beginning of Soviet superpower status. Now, that nation has ceased to exist and that status has been lost. The War, consequently, loses significance in popular memory. In addition, it should be noted that for many years the Second World War also fulfilled another function, that of instantiating the familiar Russian story of suffering and survival. Since perestroika, however, the most popular versions of that story have been set in the frame of Stalinist repression. How the Second World War will be configured in the new national history is a question yet to be answered. Or rather, it is a set of questions, since Russia is not the Soviet Union’s only successor state, and the new national history to be written includes histories of the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the rest, as well as the history of Russia. Indeed, it is in the non-Russian successor states that new national histories are sprouting most vigorously in response to an urgent nation-building need. One of the interesting things to watch about those national histories is whether they retain the old periodization of Soviet history or generate new, non-uniform periodizations. If the successor states do undertake such acts of historiographical de-Sovietization, it seems likely that one of the ways in which they will differ from each other and the old Soviet model will be in regard to the Second World War. The new Ukrainian nation will surely see the Second World War as a milestone in the national history of suffering and heroism. But in the new Kazakh national history will the War necessarily feature as a heroic or even a significant episode? This is not just an issue for national historians in the successor states, but for historians in general, for there are substantive questions here as well as symbolic ones. If the Second World War was a watershed in the history of twentieth-century Russia and the Ukraine, was this equally true for Armenia and Uzbekistan? Or, for that matter, for Buriatiia and the Russian Far East? As the study of regional history develops, we may learn some surprising things about Russia’s different wars, as experienced, say, in Kuibyshev (the temporary seat of government), Siberia and occupied Rostov-on-Don, as well as Moscow and Leningrad.

10 Sheila Fitzpatrick

Legacy It’s very hard for me as an old person, you know, to refashion myself [ perestroit’sia], to adapt to the new situation, very hard. It’s hard to give up your former convictions, your former way of thinking … (interview with Vera Fleisher, Moscow)21 In the 1930s, celebrating the defeat of the classes hostile to the Revolution, Stalin noted with regret that there was only one drawback: while the classes were defeated and annihilated, unfortunately many members of those former classes remained, with all their old habits of thoughts, prejudices and resentments.22 The same can be said this time around. The world has been turned upside down, the structural bases of Soviet socialism (most of them, at least) have been abolished – and yet people remain, people who were formerly Soviet citizens, schooled in Soviet schools, thinking like Homo sovieticus. This is not to deny that Russians, former Soviet citizens, have made remarkable efforts to reforge themselves as post-Soviets, or to suggest that this endeavour will not ultimately succeed. It is a struggle, nevertheless, just as it was in the 1920s, when people had to achieve the opposite transformation, that is, turn themselves into Soviets. The huge amount of new information and behavioural patterns that have to be mastered can be gauged by reading the Russian press of the 1990s, full of new words, foreign borrowings, and ‘how to …’ advice about unfamiliar processes. The sense of confusion and alienation, that everyone is playing a role in the ‘made for television’ play that is the substitute for real life – is vividly conveyed in a recent Russian bestseller, Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’.23 How does ‘your former way of thinking’ impinge on the present? What Vera Fleisher probably had in mind were Soviet norms and values that no longer seem appropriate to the post-Soviet era: for example, a negative view of profit-taking (‘speculation’) and large income differentials; deference to the opinion of the collective; the assumption that the state should provide work, cheap housing and welfare services and maintain low prices on basic consumer goods; acceptance of the state’s tutelary responsibilities vis-à-vis the citizen, including protection from deviant thoughts and images; a desire for strong leadership and distaste for party (factional) politics; belief (on the part of Russians) in the Soviet civilizing mission towards backward ethnic groups and the Soviet Union’s brotherly guidance of Eastern Europe. There are also aspects of the Soviet legacy that relate not so much to Soviet values as to the mentalités and practices developed in the Soviet era.

Soviet Union in Retrospect 11

Among these were fatalism, the habit of dwelling on suffering and negative thinking. Nancy Ries relates that ‘when a Russian translation of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking began appearing in kiosks around Moscow, people clamored to buy it and read it’. Although her informants were impressed by the book, ‘with their jokes and sighs they let it be known that they thought [their own] negative thinking was powerful enough to encompass and absorb any instruction in positive thinking that could be offered’.24 Several anthropological studies of Russians in the transition period of the early 1990s emphasize their informants’ sense of collective victimhood.25 This links up with themes explored by historians of everyday life and popular opinion in the Stalin period,26 as well as with the stories of suffering recounted in the Gulag memoirs and oral histories discussed earlier in this chapter.27 So strong is the sense that the gulf between the powerless ‘we’ and the omnipotent ‘they’ is unbridgeable and that the Russian people have been collectively victimized that there has been, remarkably, no real discussion about complicity or responsibility for Stalin-era repression. Russia has no counterpart to the German agonies about national responsibility for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. All of the Russian ‘we’ are victims and only ‘they’ (nameless but for Stalin and a few henchmen) are perpetrators.28 As for the legacy of unofficial Soviet practices, the most notable are those involving networks, personalistic connections, patronage and blat relationships – in short, the phenomena on which Alena Ledeneva has written so well.29 There is a paradox here, for many of these were regarded in Soviet times as perezhitki proshlogo – undesirable survivals from the past undermining the planned economy and corrupting the state bureaucracy. Now they are perezhitki once again, this time from a Soviet past, undesirable because they impede the advance of the money economy, the rule of law, and impersonal contractual relations in business. One could argue, of course, that these informal practices should be regarded not as Soviet at all but rather as traditional Russian. That argument certainly applies to patronage. But blat – the horizontal network of connections used to obtain goods and services, conceptualized as friendship-based – was definitely a phenomenon of the Soviet period, generated and shaped by Soviet institutional structures as well as by endemic Soviet shortages; and in general the whole complex of informal practices of the Soviet era was so interwoven with official Soviet structures (not least the centrally planned economy) that it should surely be allowed full Soviet citizenship. The legacy of informal practices is often spoken of in negative terms, but I would suggest that its contribution in the 1990s might also be

12 Sheila Fitzpatrick

assessed in a positive light. The 15 years starting with Gorbachev’s perestroika was an era of initiatives from above, aimed at systemic reform, mainly unsuccessful. As each centrally generated reform effort foundered and the old institutional structures unravelled, Russians and Westerners alike announced Russia’s descent into primal chaos. Yet chaos (in the colloquial sense of total confusion, lack of any order or pattern) is not what exists in Russia today. The society turned out to have its own self-organizing capacities (although it lacked a language to describe and conceptualize them), and the organizational forms that have emerged are clearly derived from pre-existing informal practices, the old ‘second economy’ that has now become the first.30 If I were to suggest a research agenda for post-Soviet studies, it would focus above all on what I have called self-organization:31 the sum of millions of instinctive, unarticulated adjustments and re-connections, based partly on principles and habits learned in Soviet times. Far more effectively than any orders from above, these multiple adjustments have produced a new kind of social, economic and political order. The process of self-organization is harder to study than policy or discourse because of the irrelevance of official pronouncements and the absence of texts. It may be particularly hard to study in the Russian case because of local discursive conventions that routinely deny agency (‘we’ are powerless, ‘they’ alone are in control). The research agenda I am recommending makes the opposite assumption about agency. Throughout the transition period, millions of people all over Russia have been making independent individual (and family) decisions that determine not only their place in the new order, but also the nature of the new order itself. Our job now is to understand how they did it and what kind of new order has emerged.

Notes and references 1. Luisa Passerini, ‘Oral memory of fascism’, in David Forgacs (ed.), Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture, London, 1986, p. 185. 2. Ulrich Herbert, ‘Die guten and die schlechten Zeiten’, in Lutz Niethammer (ed.), ‘Die Jahre weiss man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll’. Faschismus–Erfahrungen im Ruhr-Gebiet, Berlin and Bonn, 1986, pp. 233–66 (hereafter ‘Die Jahre’), and idem, ‘Good times, bad times: memories of the Third Reich’, in Richard Bessel (ed.), Life in the Third Reich, Oxford and New York, 1987, pp. 97–110. 3. Valuable Russian efforts to record and collect individual memories, notably those of Tsentr Dokumentatsii ‘Narodnyi arkhiv’, in Moscow, have been hindered by lack of funding. 4. See, for example, Simeon Vilensky (ed.), Till My Tale is Told. Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag, Bloomington, IN, 1999, p. 169 (‘road to Calvary’) and

Soviet Union in Retrospect 13

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

passim; Inna Shikheeva-Gaister, Semeinaia khronika vremen kul’ta lichnosti 1925–1953, Moscow, 1998. David L. Ransel, Village Mothers. Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria, Bloomington, IN, 2000, p. 5. Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone. Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia, Harmondsworth, 2001, p. 18. Merridale’s respondents, many of whom were contacted via Memorial and similar organizations, were familiar with the conventions of the Soviet repression narrative and tended to balk at her efforts to provoke more concrete, physical discussion of the deaths resulting from repression: ‘We thought you wanted to talk about repression, but all your questions were about death’, one interviewee objected (p. 209). Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck (eds), A Revolution of Their Own. Voices of Women in Soviet History, Boulder, CO, 1998, p. 220. Ibid. M. Vitukhnovskaia (ed.), Na korme vremeni. Interv’iu s leningradtsami 1930kh godov, St Petersburg, 2000. The focus of the interviewers’ interest in this oral history project was migration from village to town and subsequent adjustment to urban life. On repression, the editors write that although it was not their specific purpose to investigate this topic, neverthless ‘questions about arrests, exiles, and purges were given to almost every informant’ and ‘the answers convince us that the theme of repression was much closer to the intelligentsia and party and economic élite than to workers’ (p. 14). See, for example, Niethammer (ed.), ‘Die Jahre’; Alison Owings, Frauen. German Women Recall the Third Reich, New Brunswick, NJ, 1993; see also Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory. The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, trans. Robert Lumley and Jude Bloomfield, Cambridge, 1987. For example, Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist soul: the diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–9’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions, London and New York, 2000, pp. 77–116 and Anna Krylova, ‘ “Healers of Wounded Souls”: the crisis of private life in Soviet literature, 1944–1946’, The Journal of Modern History, 73(2), 2001, pp. 307–31. Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy. Political Opposition in the Soviet State: First Phase, 1917–1922, Cambridge, MA, 1955; E. H. Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy 1926–1929, 2 vols, London, 1969–71. Vol. 1 is co-authored with R. W. Davies. See, for example, Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I, Ithaca, NY, 1995; Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I, Bloomington, IN, 1999; Joshua Sanborn, ‘Drafting the Russian nation: military conscription and the formation of a modern polity in Tsarist and Soviet Russia, 1905–1925’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1998; Eric Lohr, ‘Enemy alien politics within the Russian Empire during World War I’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1999. Military and diplomatic historians, comparatively isolated from the mainstream of Soviet historiography, are the exception to this generalization. The concept of ‘Stalinism’, introduced into historiographical debate by Robert C. Tucker in the 1970s, was intended to avoid the built-in value judgements and pejorative Nazi–Soviet comparison associated with the totalitarian model. In this context, however, the two terms were functional equivalents.

14 Sheila Fitzpatrick 16. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA and London, 1995. 17. Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat. The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia, New York, 1946. 18. See his article ‘Bolshevism and Stalinism’, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism. Essays in Historical Interpretation, New York, 1977. Revisionist historians of 1917 like William Rosenberg, Ronald Suny and Alexander Rabinowitch were also sympathetic to this view. 19. See, for example, my article ‘Postwar Soviet society: the “Return to Normalcy”, 1945–1953’, in Susan J. Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, Totowa, NJ, 1985, pp. 129–56. 20. Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War. The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2001. 21. Engel and Posadskaya-Vanderbeck (eds), A Revolution of their Own, pp. 87–8. 22. Sovetskaia iustitsiia, 1934, 9, p. 2. 23. Viktor Pelevin, Generation ‘P’, Moscow, 2000. 24. Nancy Ries, Russian Talk. Culture and Conversation during Perestroika, Ithaca, NY, 1997, pp. 118–19. 25. Ries, Russian Talk; Dale Pesman, Russia and Soul, Ithaca, NY, 2000. 26. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, Oxford and New York, 2000, especially pp. 218–27. On the ‘we/they’ dichotomy, see Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, Cambridge and New York, 1997, pp. 124–46. 27. See above, pp. 2–4. 28. For an illustration of the difficulty of finding perpetrators or getting away from the universal ‘victim’ story, see Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost. Russians Remember Stalin, New York and London, 1994. Note also that one of the most memorable statements on Russia’s historic victimhood came from none other than Stalin in his much-quoted speech of 4 February 1931 in which he described Russian history as characterized ‘by the tremendous beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by British and French capitalists. She was beaten by Japanese barons. Everyone beat her …’ I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 vols, Moscow, 1949–51, xiii, p. 38. 29. Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours. Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange, Cambridge and New York, 1998; on blat in the 1990s, see also Pesman, Russia and Soul, pp. 126–45. 30. For a valuable discussion of the organizational contribution of informal practices in post-Soviet Russia, see Alena Ledeneva, Unwritten Rules: How Russia Really Works, London, 2001. 31. The term comes from physics. I owe its application to post-Soviet circumstances to Michael Danos.

Part I National Identity

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2 A Future Russia: A Nation-state or a Multi-national Federation? Vera Tolz

There is a tendency among scholars to understand political developments in post-communist states within the framework of nation-state building. Thus, as far as Russia is concerned, the dominant approach among Western scholars as well as many Russians is to see the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the emergence of the independent Russian Federation as a new chance for the Russians to build a nation-state. Some Russians imagine their new state in rather exclusive ethnic terms, others advocate a civic (rossiiskaia) nation-state of fellow citizens regardless of their ethnicity. There is also a tendency both among scholars and political élites to view the majority of modern states as nation-states, even if they unite peoples speaking different languages and belonging to different cultures. Thus, Switzerland, Belgium and Canada, to cite just a few examples, are usually classified as nation-states. From this perspective, the Russian Federation is a nation-state in the making. Moreover, some observers argue that it is ‘more culturally homogenous’ than most other states.1 Indeed, 81 per cent of the Russian Federation population are ethnic Russians, and scholars argue that a state where a dominant ethnic group constitutes over 80 per cent of the population is usually stable. Representatives of ethnic minorities in Russia are well versed in the Russian language. Historically, Russians have been open to foreigners as members of their community, if the latter are versed in the Russian language; and have acknowledged these foreigners’ contributions to the development of Russian culture. Despite the proliferation of xenophobic, extreme ethnic nationalist groups in post-communist Russia, this feature of Russian identity allows some Russian and Western scholars to see the creation of a civic rossiiskaia nation-state, where Russian culture will be the unifying force, as a realistic goal for which the country should strive.2 17

18 Vera Tolz

This chapter questions the applicability of the concept of the nationstate to a country uniting more than one ‘more or less institutionally complete’ historical community, where each community occupies a given territory and has a distinct language and culture. A country which unites several such communities cannot be a nation-state (even if one community is overwhelmingly dominant), but is a multi-national state.3 According to Will Kymlicka, multi-national states are created ‘either because they incorporated indigenous populations or because they were formed by a more or less voluntary federation’.4 (A multi-national state is to be distinguished from a polyethnic nation-state, where the source of cultural pluralism is immigration.) On this basis, the chapter argues that the Russian Federation is a multi-national state. It has national (rather than ethnic) minorities, whose élites are determined to preserve political self-government – a goal which seems to be supported by many ordinary people in the ethnic republics. Second, this chapter argues that ‘nationalizing’ policies, similar to the ones pursued by the majority of post-Soviet governments in the newly independent states, are likely to lead to the disintegration of the Russian Federation. Political élites in post-communist countries regard nationbuilding as one of their main goals. The term ‘nationalizing’ is used by Western scholars to describe government policies aimed at achieving cultural and linguistic homogeneity as well as fostering the political loyalty of citizens in their states.5 Some scholars, however, argue that the word ‘nationalizing’ should not be applied only to post-communist regimes.6 In the nineteenth century in particular, West European countries, which are regarded as civic nation-states, also pursued policies aimed at assimilating people into a dominant language and culture. Indeed, virtually all the civic nations have a cultural component to their national identities. ‘What distinguishes “civic” nations from “ethnic” nations is not the absence of any cultural component to national identity, but rather the fact that anyone can integrate into the common culture of the former, regardless of race or colour’.7 In most post-communist countries, especially those which granted citizenship to all those permanently residing on their territories at the time of the collapse of the communist regime, the civic idea of a nation therefore prevails. Yet the existence of clear parallels should not make us overlook some significant differences between nation-building processes in postcommunist countries and those in West European civic nation-states. First, the political discourse in post-communist states is often somewhat ambiguous about the status of people with an ethnic origin different from that of the eponymous nationality. More importantly, in Western

A Future Russia 19

Europe, through the creation of the universal state-sponsored education and armed service, the ruling élites ‘nationalized’ pre-national, often illiterate groups. In contrast, post-communist states are trying to ‘nationalize’ minorities whose identity is connected with literary language and high culture. The problem with Russian-speaking minorities, for instance, is exacerbated by their perception that this culture is superior to those of ‘nationalizing’ regimes. Since in the modern world nationalism provides an answer to questions about people’s dignity and self-worth, it is much more difficult today to assimilate people with some sense of national identity than it was in the nineteenth century, when élites in Western Europe carried out their ‘nationalizing projects’ in societies where people’s self-worth was defined by their position in a hierarchical society, not by their belonging to a national community.8 It remains to be seen how successful the regimes in the non-Russian newly independent states will be in integrating Russian-speaking minorities into the emerging nationstates by applying ‘nationalizing’ policies. For the Russian Federation to pursue ‘nationalizing’ policies similar to those of the governments of the non-Russian newly independent states is not an option. To argue that, since ethnic Russians constitute 81 per cent of the population and the majority of non-Russians are well versed in the Russian language, the Russian Federation can easily become a fairly culturally homogenous nation-state is to overlook major historically reinforced peculiarities of the country. In fact, despite the high degree of Russification of the non-Russians, obstacles on the path to Russia becoming a nation-state within the current borders of the Russian Federation are greater than in the case of the majority of the non-Russian newly independent states. In the Russian Federation some non-Russian ethnic groups enjoy political autonomy within self-governing units. There is little chance that the élites as well as ordinary people in the autonomies will agree to relinquish peacefully the rights which the existence of these autonomies allots to them. If anything, the late perestroika and post-communist periods have witnessed a broad expansion in the political powers of these autonomies, whose leaders are busy strengthening what they view as the ‘national’ identities of residents of these autonomies, which are separate from and not necessarily subordinate to the panRussian (rossiiskaia) identity. In another newly independent state, where similar ethnic autonomies were created in the Soviet period – Georgia – ‘nationalizing’ policies resulted in a civil war. In sum, the aim of the federal government in Russia should be to manage a multi-national state, rather than to build a nation-state. On the one hand, Russians have a rich historical experience of dealing with

20 Vera Tolz

ethnic and national diversity. Historically, not all Russian policies towards non-Russian nationalities can be regarded as imperial. Both tsarist and Soviet governments never managed or even attempted to Russify non-Russians consistently. At different times, different policies were pursued which not only tolerated, but even fostered ethnic and national diversity in the country.9 But what both tsarist and Soviet regimes failed to do was to foster a binding patriotism which would convince all different ethnic groups and nationalities that they should live together in one state. Arguing that it is difficult to maintain unity in a multi-national society, Kymlicka has stressed that possible sources of such unity are common political values, common mythical history and shared identity.10 Through analysing intellectuals’ discourse about identity and various policies of federal and republican élites in the Russian Federation, this chapter will assess to what extent they contribute to promoting the ingredients necessary to keep a multi-national Russia together. In conclusion the chapter will analyse possible outcomes of these often conflicting policies. It will also explain why the tendency on the part of Russian intellectual élites and the federal government to conceptualize the Russian Federation as a nation-state rather than as a multi-national state is not simply a matter of terminology, but a phenomenon which might have a negative impact on the stability and even territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.

The Russian project: views of the federal élites This section will analyse debates among ethnic Russians on the question of national identity and the relevant policies of the federal government. Scholarly literature on nationalism and identity formation emphasizes the role of élites in determining the membership and other parameters of a national community. Both Russian intellectuals and politicians are clearly conscious of their role in the formation of a compound identity in post-communist Russia. Conflicting visions of Russia The question of Russian national identity was at the top of the agenda of many intellectuals and politicians in the 1990s. In the early 1990s, some participants in the debate on Russian identity stuck to the idea of ‘Russia’ as inseparable from the empire, imagined the just borders of Russia as roughly coinciding with those of the USSR and argued that all Soviet citizens belonged to a single ‘unique civilization’. However, by

A Future Russia 21

late 1992 or early 1993, traditional imperialism began to decline. Instead, various new conceptions of ‘Russia’ with different memberships and different ‘just’ state borders were articulated. One can adopt different approaches to classifying these concepts. But for the purpose of this chapter, I will divide these concepts according to whether they focus on the ethnic Russian component or emphasize the multi-cultural nature of Russia. The emphasis on the ethnic Russian component predominates in the visions of Russia as the East Slavic union, a state of Russian speakers and in various racial concepts of Russianness. The multi-cultural nature of the new Russia is emphasized in the concept of a civic rossiiskaia nation and in non-imperial Eurasianism. The visions of Russia as the East Slavic Union and as a state of Russian speakers focus on ‘ethnic’ elements of statehood – the cultural similarity and alleged common historical origins of East Slavs in the medieval state of Kiev Rus´ in the case of the former and language as the main marker of identity in the case of the latter. In both cases, Orthodox Christianity is also seen as a unifying force in the community. There are major problems with both concepts. First, they are irredentist, as their proponents make territorial claims on Ukraine, Belarus and those newly independent states which have sizeable Russian-speaking minorities. The most extreme representatives of these views deny that Ukrainians and Belarusians have an identity separate from the Russians. Second, by focusing on ‘ethnic’ Russian ingredients of nationhood – the Russian language, Slavic descent and the Russian Orthodox Church – they ignore the presence of non-Slavic, non-Christian peoples in the Russian Federation. The majority of those who claim Ukraine and Belarus and parts of other newly independent states do not necessarily seek independence for nonRussian ethnic autonomies of the Federation and do not advocate discriminatory measures against non-Slavs and non-Christians. However, some people do. These are representatives of extremist organizations of Russian nationalists which began to proliferate in the late 1980s. Such groups as Nikolai Barkashov’s Russian National Unity, Nikolai Bondarik’s Russian Party, Nikolai Lysenko’s National Republican Party to name just the best known groups portray non-Russians, particularly people from the Caucasus (as well as the Jews) as traditional enemies of the Russian nation, which is defined in purely exclusive terms by descent. Consistent with his views, Lysenko has argued that the new Russia should let non-Russian ethnic autonomies of the Russian Federation become independent. All these organizations propose discriminatory laws against non-Slavs if they remain in Russia, and a ban on mixed marriages.

22 Vera Tolz

Similarly, there is no unity among those intellectuals who treat seriously Russia’s multi-ethnic nature. In the late 1980s, leading ethnographer Valerii Tishkov began to promote the idea of a civic nation as a community of citizens regardless of their ethnic origins and united by loyalty to political institutions and the Russian constitution. Tishkov’s concept of Rossiia is often quoted as the most viable path for Russia.11 Tishkov believes that this community can be forged by the efforts of politicians and intellectuals. He has identified the élites of Russia’s ethnic autonomies as creating the main obstacles to the emergence of a civic community within the borders of the state, as their policies and propaganda reinforce the traditional Soviet view of a nation as a primordial ethnic community with an exclusive right to a particular territory. Tishkov therefore supports the introduction of extra-territorial ethnocultural autonomy as a framework to protect cultural diversity in the Russian Federation.12 In his analysis of nation-building, Tishkov adopts a post-modernist approach in its extreme form. He denies links between ethnic groups and communities which are defined as modern nations. He views ‘nations’ as ‘exclusivist’ projects driven by the élites or ‘armed sects’, who aim to ‘usurp the state’ (its power and resources), while pretending ‘to speak on behalf of their people’.13 For Tishkov, there is little reality and stability behind cultural and linguistic bonds between ordinary people, as people’s identities are always ‘multiple, situational and fluid’.14 Thus, ‘[t]here are no other arguments for a nation but a chosen project and its followers’.15 As there are no real nations in the world, the maintenance of the territorial integrity of existing states is usually in the best interest of the majority of people. It can be questioned to what extent Tishkov’s model allows one to estimate realistically the strength and weakness of exclusive ethnic nationalism among non-Russians in the Russian Federation. Tishkov’s model denies the importance of a sense among ethnic (national) minorities of being different from others, for instance, from the dominant nationality. However, the strength of ethnic nationalism in postcommunist Eastern and Central Europe has made some scholars stress the limitations of a post-modernist approach to nationalism. In the words of Kymlicka: [R]ecent history suggests that to some extent national identities must be taken as givens. The character of a national identity can change dramatically … But the identity itself – the sense of being a distinct national culture – is much more stable […] If anything, attempts to subordinate these separate identities to a common identity have

A Future Russia 23

backfired, since they are perceived by minorities as threats to their very existence.16 A final approach, which takes into account Russia’s multi-ethnic/ multi-national nature is Eurasianism. It is not always acknowledged by students of Russia that the term has at least three different meanings in contemporary political and intellectual discourse.17 These three different versions can be called messianic Eurasianism, Eurasianism as a foreign policy orientation and Eurasianism as an approach to managing interethnic relations in the Russian Federation. The original term Eurasianism was coined by the intellectual movement of the 1920s whose members viewed the territory of the Russian Empire as a unique civilization where a new national community of Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian, Finno-Ugric and Mongol peoples with a common culture had been formed. The version of Eurasianism that became fashionable among intellectuals in the late 1980s reiterated some of the views of the original Eurasians with the initial aim of defending the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and later of justifying the support for its revival. This Eurasianism was imperialist and its adherents did not regard the Russian Federation as a legitimate political entity. Today, this version of Eurasianism continues to be propagated by the Moscow-based movement Eurasia, headed by Aleksandr Dugin. He and his followers argue that Eurasia (within the borders of, at least, the former USSR) is a separate and self-contained civilization under ‘the wing of the Russian nation’. For Dugin, Eurasia ‘stands irreconcilably in opposition to the Atlantic world’, that is, particularly the USA. In an article in Krasnaia zvezda on 29 May 2001, Dugin claimed that Eurasianism was on the way to becoming a common ideology of the entire political leadership in the country. If Eurasianism in Dugin’s aggressively imperialist and anti-Western version were indeed to become an official ideology of the Russian political establishment, this would be a very worrying development. However, this does not seem to be the case, despite the fact that Dugin clearly has some links with representatives of security services and other federal institutions.18 More often, the term Eurasianism is used by Russian intellectuals and politicians in meanings which are much less messianic and which are markedly different from the original vision of the conservative Eurasianists of the 1920s. It was already in the early 1990s that President El’tsin’s foreign policy advisor Sergei Stankevich started to use the word Eurasianism to describe Russia’s particular foreign policy orientation. Arguing against what he viewed as the then foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev’s sole focus on

24 Vera Tolz

improving Russia’s relations with the USA, Stankevich stressed that Russia’s national interests were also connected with Asia. Rather than talking about Russia’s special civilising mission, Stankevich presented his position as purely pragmatic. The use of the term Eurasianism to define Russia’s foreign policy orientation has become particularly popular in the late 1990s. According to this view, as the countries of the Asian-Pacific rim increasingly play a key role in the world economy, it makes sense for Russia to use its geographical location to its own advantage.19 Similarly the term Eurasianism is often used in Russian intellectual discourse to describe the political, religious and social interaction of ethnic Russians and non-Russians in the Russian Federation.20 As will be shown later, it is in the latter meaning that the word Eurasianism has been used by the majority of Russian and non-Russian politicians since the late 1990s.

The federal government and identity formation A similar disagreement in the thinking about Russian or rossiiskaia identity exists at the level of federal and regional Russian governments with inevitable policy implications. First, particularly until 1999, there were major differences over the question of what is Russia between representatives of the executive and legislative branches of government. In addition, policies related to identity formation pursued by politicians from the executive branch, including the presidents, have been highly inconsistent. Between the autumn of 1991 and late 1992, Boris El’tsin’s government demonstrated unequivocally its commitment to de-ethnicized statebuilding and to strengthening the civic identity of all citizens of the Russian Federation regardless of their ethnicity. The Russian citizenship law of November 1991 did not refer to ethnic attributes. Thus only residence within the borders of the Russian Federation and, initially, USSR citizenship, determined whether a person could obtain citizenship of the Russian Federation. The law did not require knowledge of the Russian language as a condition for citizenship. All other newly independent states of the former USSR incorporated language requirements into their citizenship laws. The 1993 Russian constitution described the federation as the community of all citizens regardless of their ethnicity. Yet, since 1992, some traditional views on what Russia was and who the Russians were began to influence government rhetoric and policies. Thus the position that Russia should defend all Russian speakers in the territory of the defunct USSR reflected the view that Russian identity was primarily characterized by language. This approach strongly influenced

A Future Russia 25

government policies from late 1992 to 1995. The idea that Russians are an inseparable part of the East Slavic community reinforced the decision of the Russian government to enter into a Union with Belarus, despite the negative economic implications of this move. This approach also delayed the signing of a bi-lateral treaty on friendship and co-operation with Ukraine until May 1997. The Russian government’s insistence throughout the 1990s that Russia was entitled to play a special role on the territory of the USSR, which constituted its natural sphere of interest, reflected the view that Russian identity was inseparable from Union identity.21 As for the Russian State Duma, until 1999 it was dominated by opposition forces – the communists and the Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovskii. Both groups argued that Russian identity was closely connected with the Union, whose recreation they desired. As their programme minimum, the communists and the nationalists viewed the incorporation of the areas populated by the Russian speakers in the ‘near abroad’ into greater Russia and the recreation of an East Slavic Union, hence the Duma’s resolutions declaring the Belovezh’e accord (which created the CIS) null and void (1996) and a series of resolutions questioning the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Neither the communists nor Zhirinovskii’s followers supported the idea of a civic community within the borders of the Russian Federation. At the same time, El’tsin’s government never abandoned its attempts to pursue consolidation within the borders of the Russian Federation by forging a compound identity among all its citizens. But these attempts were contradictory and inconsistent. This can be demonstrated by looking at the officially sanctioned search for a new ‘Russian idea’ and at El’tsin’s 1996 decree on nationalities’ policies. It was in the aftermath of El’tsin’s victory in the 1996 presidential elections that, in July 1996 in his address to the people, El’tsin urged society to search for a new ‘Russian national idea’. This call came in response to the criticism of his government on the part of people like Tishkov for not doing enough to unite society within the borders of the Russian Federation by promoting common symbols and values with which all citizens of the country could identify. (Although Tishkov lost his post as head of the State Committee on Nationalities in October 1992, he continued to advise El’tsin’s government.) Rossiiskaia gazeta was chosen to publicize the results of the search.22 The newspaper described the endeavour as a contest for an idea for pan-national unification. Yet, maybe unconsciously, the appeal was formulated in such a way that it found a resonance primarily, if not exclusively, among ethnic Russians. First, by calling the idea russkaia rather than rossiiskaia, the organizers of the contest introduced an ethnic

26 Vera Tolz

Russian element. Second, the announcement of the contest was illustrated by quotes exclusively from Russian intellectuals, some actually Russian ethnic nationalists as well as by the picture of Russian nationalist painter Il’ya Glazunov, ‘Eternal Russia’. The symbolism of this picture has meaning only for ethnic Russians. Subsequent material, published in Rossiiskaia gazeta, also tended to represent the ethnic Russian point of view. In line with nineteenth-century historiography, Russia was presented as ‘the shield protecting Europe from Asia’. A letter by Gurii Sudakov, which was awarded a prize, was strongly influenced by the ideas of the nineteenthcentury Slavophiles. It discussed Russia’s uniqueness in comparison with Europe and presented Orthodoxy as a symbol of Russianness.23 The latter, in fact is in line with the government policies, which since the second half of the 1990s have been increasingly supportive of the Moscow Patriarchate in its attempts to attain a privileged position compared to other religious denominations.24 The contest for a new national idea provoked considerable criticism among Russian liberals, who saw in it an attempt to introduce a new state ideology. Yet the critics overlooked arguably a more seriously negative aspect of the endeavour. By promoting ethnic Russian symbols, this contest not only did not draw in, but also could only alienate nonSlavs and non-Orthodox citizens of the country. Indeed, residents in the Muslim republics of the Russian Federation, for instance, complained about the ‘Orthodoxization’ (pravoslavizatsiia) of the Russian media at the federal level.25 More sensitive to the presence of non-Russian minorities was El’tsin’s decree of 16 June 1996 which promoted the state’s new nationalities’ concept. Using the word Eurasianism to indicate the peaceful coexistence of equal nationalities within the borders of the Russian Federation, the decree defined as a key goal of the state’s nationalities policy ‘the maintenance and further development of national distinctiveness and the traditions of interaction between the Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian, Finno-Ugric, Mongol and other peoples of Russia in the framework of the Eurasian national-cultural space’. Thus the decree promoted the idea of co-operation between all nationalities of the Russian Federation towards coexistence in one country. Eurasianism as the basis of Russia’s nationalities policies is also promoted by some leaders of ethnic republics.26 In order to strengthen the unity of the Russian Federation, the decree tried to diversify federal arrangements by recognizing ‘multiple forms of national self-determination’. National cultural autonomy not tied to territorial autonomy was to be promoted, thereby offering a possibility for cultural self-determination to those ethnic minorities ‘who either

A Future Russia 27

do not possess their own administrative homeland or live outside the ethnorepublic claimed by their titular co-nationals’.27 Instead of having their ethnicity registered under the rubric of nationality, as was the case in Soviet passports, ‘each citizen of the Russian Federation would declare his or her national affiliation in an electoral register, and national groups would then be represented in a second chamber of parliament that should take responsibility for matters such as language education in schools’.28 Thus, the decree was informed by the fact that in essence the Russian Federation was multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. It also looked for ways of representing the interests of all major nationalities at the state level, while downplaying the role of ethnic territorial autonomy (something which many observers regard as potentially threatening to a country’s territorial integrity) as the only avenue for dealing with nationalities’ demands for representation. Yet this decree had its weaknesses as well. First, it did not have binding force, and after the adoption of the decree Moscow’s nationalities’ policies continued to be formulated on an ad hoc basis against the background of an increasingly weakened federal center. Moreover, the decree was ambiguous about the status of ethnic Russians in the Federation. On the one hand, the decree proclaimed the equality of all nationalities. At the same time, it claimed that ‘thanks to the unifying role of the Russian (russkie) people’ the unity of the Russian Federation had been maintained. Second, as Graham Smith rightly noted, ‘Eurasianism leaves fluid the sovereign boundedness of Russia, which might again include the full extent of the Russian historical community, including Ukraine, Northern Kazakhstan and North-east Estonia’.29 Indeed, while ostensibly dealing only with the nationalities policies of the Russian Federation, the decree nevertheless linked these domestic policies with Russia’s foreign policy. It claimed that Russia should defend the rights and interests of citizens outside the federation and provide help for compatriots in preserving and developing the language, culture, traditions and links with Russia. Not surprisingly, the disarray in the thinking and policies of the El’tsin era was reflected in the political symbolism of the state. The introduction of old Russian imperial symbols – the two-headed eagle as the national herald, the white-blue-red flag and the music from Mikhail Glinka’s first Russian national opera, ‘A Life for the Tsar’ – by presidential decrees in the early 1990s was opposed by a State Duma dominated by the opposition. (In January 1998, deputies overwhelmingly voted against the national anthem and the flag proposed by El’tsin.) In particular the communists in the Duma were in favour of returning to the Soviet national

28 Vera Tolz

anthem and the red flag. At the same time, even the communists were in favour of seeing the Orthodox Church as a symbol of Russianness. State awards also reflect the conflict between pre-revolutionary Russian and Soviet symbolism. The order of the Apostle Andrew the First Called, introduced by Peter the Great in 1699, coexisted with the title of the Hero of Russia (formerly the Hero of the USSR). The new/old symbolism was not only transitional and contradictory. It was also insensitive towards non-Russian nationalities. Imperial or ethnic Russian symbols could hardly have a resonance for them. Thus at a round-table discussion on the new ideology for the Russian Federation, organized by Svobodnaia mysl’ in 1999, a journalist from Tatarstan, T. S. Saidbaev, complained about the insensitivity of the federal government in its choice of symbols. He noted that [Muslim] Dagestanis who fought on the Russian side against the Chechens were awarded medals decorated with Russian Orthodox crosses.30 With the accession of Vladimir Putin to power, the leadership has continued to address the questions of forging a compound identity and of the consolidation of society. It is possible to argue that Putin’s approach to this issue has been more consistent, if not less controversial, than El’tsin’s. As Putin is not held responsible by the population for the demise of the USSR, he does not feel under pressure to promote CIS integration or the East Slavic union to the same extent as El’tsin. Putin’s focus is thus clearly on the consolidation of the community within the borders of the Russian Federation. Soon after his election as president, Putin published a programmatic article entitled ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millenium’, in which he warned that, as had been the case after October 1917, so in the 1990s Russian society was in a state of schism (raskol). It was essential to overcome this raskol by making people united around one common rossiiskaia [sic] idea.31 There are three main areas in which Putin’s policies will have a particular impact on the formation of national identities of the peoples of Russia. These are the adoption of the new state symbols and of a new citizenship law as well as the president’s regional reforms. In the first area, Putin seems to have achieved an important breakthrough by offering a fairly sophisticated compromise between Russia’s two different pasts (pre-revolutionary and Soviet) and the present. On the one hand, a major concession was made to those who wanted to see the rehabilitation of some important symbols of the Soviet era. Sergei Mikhalkov, the author of the text of the Soviet anthem, was asked to write new words, while the Soviet music was restored. Putin also suggested that the Soviet red flag become the official flag of the Russian Armed Forces. Although

A Future Russia 29

the return to Soviet music in the anthem provoked a wave of criticism among liberal intellectuals, arguably the Soviet period can offer more examples of a ‘usable past’ necessary for the consolidation of a common identity from the point of view of non-Russian minorities than can prerevolutionary, imperial history. The latter is much more unequivocally rejected by the élites in non-Russian autonomies than many parts of Soviet history. On the other hand, Putin made a gesture towards those who wanted to stress ties between contemporary and pre-revolutionary Russia. The tricolour was finally accepted as Russia’s state flag as was the double-headed eagle as the new national emblem. The Russian parliament accepted the new state symbols in December 2000, thus marking an important stage in the legitimisation of the new Russian state. Another important development in the sphere of nation-building within the borders of the Russian Federation is a new citizenship law, which was endorsed by Putin and approved by the Duma in April 2002. The law does not give any privileges to former Soviet citizens outside Russia in obtaining Russian citizenship, as had been the case in the 1991 law. Commenting on the new law, Oleg Kutafin, the chairman of the Presidential Commission on Citizenship, argued that the new legislation was aimed at ‘finally stabilizing the situation inside the country’. He stressed that the hitherto loosely used word compatriot (sootechestvennik) should not be applied to any Russian speaker in the ‘near abroad’ but only to the citizens of Russia who live outside its borders.32 The new law is thus aimed against the influential perception of the Russian nation as a community of Russian speakers, regardless of their current citizenship. A drive for consolidation also informed one of Putin’s most significant reforms – the restructuring of the relationship between the centre and the periphery. The creation of seven federal districts overarching the ethnic divisions in the federation, with appointed plenipotentiaries instructed to ensure the conformity of regional and republican laws to the federal constitution, was aimed at reversing a growing trend towards autarchy in the Russian republics and regions.33 In June 2000, the federal Constitutional Court issued a ruling on the violation of the federal law by the constitutions of six republics. Most of the violations were in areas relating to the question of identity formation. For instance, some constitutions stipulated the republics’ right to award citizenship outside the framework established by federal legislation and included provisions for secession from the Russian Federation, which the federal constitution does not allow. By the end of 2000, Putin’s government also reached a compromise with the republican élites over the introduction of a new all-Russian

30 Vera Tolz

(rossiiskii) passport. Overcoming the resistance of the leadership of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan who had lobbied for the introduction of special republican passports, the federal and republican authorities agreed that residents of all republics would receive all-Russian passports, together with an insert page in the language of a republic’s titular nationality. In another compromise, entry no. 5 on ethnicity was abolished in the passports but retained in birth certificates. If the unity of the Russian Federation is to be maintained there is a clear need to bring republican constitutions in line with federal law and to eliminate from them provisions which are appropriate for independent states rather than administrative units of the federation. At the same time, while demanding the revision of republican legislation, Putin has not unleashed a similar ‘war’ against policies of regional governors which, in violation of federal laws, promote inter-ethnic strife in the provinces. Particularly after the beginning of the war in Chechnia in 1994, a number of governors have been pursuing policies which openly discriminate against people from the Caucasus, even if they are citizens of the Russian Federation.34 If anything, the anti-Caucasian, and by implication anti-Muslim, rhetoric among federal and regional officials as well as in the federal media increased further with Putin’s accession to power and with the renewal of military operations in Chechnia. Putin himself has portrayed Islam as a force threatening Russia and indeed the entire world.35

Non-Russian project: the position of the élites in ethnic autonomies The upsurge of ethnic nationalism in Russia’s ethnic autonomies in the late 1980s and the early 1990s brought about speculation that the Russian Federation could, like the USSR, disintegrate along ethnic lines. In this period, movements advocating the separation of the republics from Russia were proliferating. More importantly, the republican élites considerably broadened their political and economic rights, facilitated the adoption of constitutions describing republics as sovereign states and introduced laws aimed at fostering the language and culture of titular nationalities. Newly introduced state symbols of the republics were usually meaningful only to titular nationalities, and, at times, pointed to the latter’s struggle against the Russian rule. By the mid-1990s the fears of disintegration subsided, with analysts emphasizing the structural differences rather than similarities between the USSR and the Russian Federation. Indeed, at present, politically significant separatist movements exist only in Chechnia and Dagestan.36 In other

A Future Russia 31

republics, there are either no sizeable ethnic secessionist movements or, even if they do exist as in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, they are not represented in republican legislative and executive institutions. Top political leaders in these republics began to state their commitment to keeping their units in the Russian Federation. But in the later part of the 1990s, particularly after the collapse of the ruble in 1998, a new wave of concern over the unity of the Federation resurfaced. Thus, after assuming the post of prime minister Evgenii Primakov stated in September 1998: ‘This issue [of Russia’s territorial unity] is far from theoretical at the moment, and far from hypothetical […] We are facing a most serious danger, the most serious danger that our country will split into separate parts.’37 This was a reaction to the increasing weakness of the central government, accompanied by the increasing independence of regional and republican élites, often acting in outright defiance of the Russian constitution. It has been widely believed by scholars that the achievement of greater economic powers, particularly greater control over economic resources, has been the main goal of the republican élites since the late 1980s. And it is precisely in the economic and legal spheres that Putin has attempted to reintroduce central control. According to this reading, politicians in the ethnic autonomies opportunistically employ nationalist rhetoric and use the threat of separatism in their dealings with Moscow simply as a tool to achieve greater economic powers at the expense of the central government. However, a closer analysis of the rhetoric employed by the élites in the ethnic autonomies in justifying their policies to the population of the republics reveals a different picture. In contrast to the leaders of the non-Russian newly independent states, who justified laws stimulating cultural and ethnic revival of titular nationalities on the grounds that these nationalities’ very existence was threatened in the Soviet period, the leaders of Russia’s ethnic autonomies justified similar laws by reference to the economic advantages of political sovereignty and decentralization. Both political leaders of the newly independent states as well as leaders of Russia’s ethnic autonomies have been influenced by the Soviet concept of a nation as an ethnically defined primordial, unchangeable community, to whom the territory of the state/autonomy exclusively belongs. At the same time, the élites of the ethnic autonomies did not want to alienate the Russians, who in 15 out of 21 of the autonomies constituted the majority of the population, hence their reference to non-ethnic benefits of decentralization.38 On the one hand, the importance of the very way in which the discourse related to the questions of nationalism and identity is structured should not be underestimated. Graham Smith rightly observed that the

32 Vera Tolz

fact that the élites in the ethnic autonomies preferred to frame political struggles as centre–periphery rivalries rather than inter-ethnic ones indicated that federalism ‘can act as a counterweight to primordial nationalism’.39 In theory, such rhetoric does not promote exclusive ethnic identities, but reinforces a civic identity of titular and non-titular nationalities, at least within the borders of the ethnic autonomies, as all residents are expected to benefit economically from decentralization. At the same time, the focus on economic issues seems to have made Moscow overlook the significance of some policies aimed at ethnic revival adopted in a number of the republics. This is particularly true in the sphere of education, the control over which Moscow has loosened, being happy about the republics’ and regions’ willingness to take over a significant part of the financial burden in this area. Thus, in 1997, ‘because of the lack of funds in the federal budget for textbook publishing’, the Russian Ministry of General and Professional Education offered the subjects of the federation ‘the right to determine themselves the way in which their localities will be supplied with textbooks’.40 This move increased the number of textbooks produced at the republican and regional levels, thus allowing local élites to strengthen their control over one of the key spheres of identity formation. The 1990s witnessed the proliferation of history textbooks and in the late 1990s, particularly, many such books were published outside Moscow. Overall, post-communist history textbooks in Russia are even more Russocentric than their Soviet predecessors. Post-communist textbooks often depict the history of Russia focusing entirely on the activities of ethnic Russians, whereas Soviet books included obligatory, even if perfunctory, chapters on the activities of non-Russians in the Russian Empire/USSR.41 Not surprisingly, there is a counter-trend in the nonRussian ethnic republics, as some of the textbooks published there go to the other extreme of completely separating local histories from the history of the Russian state.42

Public opinion As far as ethnic Russians are concerned, the dominant identity is a civic identification with the Russian Federation as a multi-ethnic society. According to a study, conducted by the Independent Institute of Social and Nationalities Problems and published in February 1996, 74 per cent of those polled perceived Russia as a ‘common home’ of all nationalities of the federation. In turn, in a poll conducted in July 1996 by the AllRussian Central Institute of Public Opinion (VTsIOM), 54.6 per cent of

A Future Russia 33

the respondents agreed that ‘Russians are all those who live in Russia and regard themselves as Russians’. Only 11.8 per cent thought that Russians are only those who are defined as such in the nationalities entry in internal passports.43 At the same time, there are some attitudes among Russians which can complicate the stability of Russia as a multi-national community within the current borders of the Russian Federation. First, the overwhelming majority of Russians still believe that Russia, Ukraine and Belarus should constitute one (union) state. Few, however, believe that force should be employed to achieve this result.44 An even greater implication potentially is a relatively high level of intolerance among Russians towards some ethnic minorities, and the growing negative attitude towards Islam. On the one hand, extremist groups which promote racial intolerance consistently fail to receive the support of the electorate. In the 1999 elections, the vote for the only extremist group represented in the Duma, the LDPR, fell to 5.98 per cent, as compared to 22.9 per cent in the 1993 elections and 11.8 per cent in the 1995 elections. Yet an opinion poll conducted by Moscow University’s Centre for the Study of Public Opinion in 1992 revealed that 40 per cent of the respondents had a negative attitude towards the Chechens.45 At the same time, 17 per cent thought that Islam ‘was a bad thing’. By the end of the decade, the level of intolerance increased dramatically. In 1996, 70–80 per cent of St Petersburg residents endorsed the view that ‘the fewer people from the Caucasus come to the city, the more safe it will be’;46 in 2000, 80 per cent subscribed to the negative view of Islam.47 Anti-Islamic protests, particularly against the construction of mosques in predominantly Russian regions of the Russian Federation, are also on the increase.48 The question of the popular perception of identity among nonRussians in the Russian Federation is even more complex. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of non-Russians who live outside their ethnic autonomies primarily view themselves as rossiiane and feel supreme loyalty to the Russian Federation, even though the majority do not deny their own cultural identities.49 (67 per cent of non-Russians do not live in their ethnic autonomies.) But, according to Dmitry Gorenburg, in six out of 21 republics, 50 per cent or above of the titular nationalities identify exclusively or primarily with their republic (in Dagestan 50 per cent, in Tatarstan – 52 per cent, in Buriatiia – 53 per cent, in Sakha-Iakutiia – 59 per cent, in Tuva – 64 per cent and in Chechnia – 87 per cent).50 In a further manifestation of exclusive ethnic nationalism, in Chechnia, Kalmykiia, Sakha-Iakutiia and Tuva, the majority of the representatives of the titular nationality support the proposal of making the

34 Vera Tolz

language of the titular nationality the only state language of the republic. (At the moment, these republics also have Russian as the second state language.) In turn, the majority of the representatives of the titular ethnic groups in Chechnia, Ingushetiia, Sakha-Iakutiia and Tuva support the inclusion of the right of secession in the republican constitutions.51

Conclusions The need to forge a shared identity which would hold Russia together has been acknowledged by Russian intellectuals and politicians. Despite the fact that members of the Russian ruling élite, particularly the opposition, have articulated various irredentist projects, the aim of keeping the Russian Federation together by fostering a shared identity among all its citizens has been a priority for both the El’tsin and the Putin governments. To this end, the federal government has been trying to come up with a unifying ‘Russian idea’ and to define values which different members of society can share. The government also attempted to propagate various historical achievements of which all citizens of the federation could feel proud, and this goal made both El’tsin and Putin rehabilitate parts of the Soviet heritage which were denigrated in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Putin has also launched reforms aimed at overcoming the increasing autarchy of constituent units of the federation in the legal and economic spheres, albeit with controversial means, to strengthen the federal centre and to command the respect of citizens. Yet, as this chapter has shown, the policies of the federal government have been inconsistent. In particular, even those politicians who claim commitment towards fostering a unifying civic identity among all citizens of the Russian Federation have, on occasion, shown a lack of sensitivity and respect towards non-Russian minorities, especially by promoting the idea that Russia is an exclusively Christian Orthodox country and by anti-Islamic and anti-Caucasian propaganda. It is also possible to argue that this insensitivity towards the aspirations of non-Russians is reinforced by the overwhelming conceptualization of post-communist Russia as a nation-state, with the inevitable domination of the culture of the national majority, rather than as a multi-national state. It is precisely this conceptualization that makes Russian élites not question the legitimacy of the Russian Orthodox Church campaign for the status of the state Church and to utilize widely ethnic Russian or imperial symbolism. Moreover, even Tishkov’s vision of Russia as a civic nation-state rather than a multi-national state is prone to the danger of underestimating the fact that ‘whenever and however a national identity is forged, once

A Future Russia 35

established, it becomes immensely difficult, if not impossible (short of genocide) to eradicate’.52 This is particularly true for the Russian Federation, where politically institutionalized ethnicity is inherited from the Soviet period. By conceptualizing the Russian Federation today as a nation-state, Russian élites may well be repeating the mistake of their pre-revolutionary and Soviet predecessors who imagined the tsarist empire and the USSR as a Russian nation-state. While failing to promote consistently symbols and values that appeal to all citizens of the Russian Federation regardless of their ethnicity, the federal government has, to some extent, relinquished control over educational policy in the federal units. This allows some republican élites to promote identities among local residents, in which there is no place for identification with the Russian Federation as a whole. In turn, many textbooks written by ethnic Russian authors offer interpretations of Russian history which are insensitive and even, at times, offensive towards the cultures and traditions of Russia’s non-Russian nationalities. Kymlicka has pointed out that one of the key unifying forces in a diverse society is the value attached by its members to the preservation of this diversity. Citizens must value ‘deep diversity’ in general and also ‘the particular ethnic groups and national cultures with whom they currently share the country’.53 This feeling has been present in Russia historically and this continues to be the case today, as opinion polls indicate. But the feeling of value of some ethnic groups and national cultures represented within the borders of the federation, particularly of peoples from the Caucasus and Muslims in general, is diminishing among Russians in the post-communist period.54 As for the non-Russians in the Russian Federation, the ‘national revival’ of the 1990s was undeniably accompanied by some growth of resentment towards the Russians. At the moment, the disintegration of the Russian Federation is not an immediate danger. The factors that make the federation less susceptible to ethnic fragmentation are still at work: the majority of ethnic republics lack external borders, Russians predominate in the majority of republics and economically many provinces are heavily reliant on investment from Moscow. However, the provinces’ response to the 1998 economic crisis and the increasing weakness of the federal centre in the form of greater political and economic autarchy is a warning that a further deterioration of the economic situation and weakening of the state at the central level could well lead to the disintegration of the Russian Federation. Evidently, a shared identity and patriotism are not properly forged and, more importantly, no clear vision exists of how this can be achieved.

36 Vera Tolz

Notes and references 1. V. A. Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union. The Mind Aflame, London, 1997, p. 261. 2. Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, London, 1996, p. 203; Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict, p. 260. 3. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship. A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford, 1995, pp. 12–13. 4. Ibid, p. 13. 5. The term was introduced by Rogers Brubaker, see Brubaker, ‘National minorities, nationalizing states, and external homelands in the new Europe’, Daedalus, 124(2), 1995, pp. 107–32. 6. See, for instance Taras Kuzio, ‘ “Nationalising States” or nation-building? A critical review of the theoretical literature and empirical evidence’, Nations and Nationalism, 7(2), 2001, pp. 135–54 (p. 143). 7. Kymlicka, Multicultural citizenship, p. 24. 8. Charles Taylor, ‘Nationalism and modernity’, in John A. Hall, The State of the Nation, Cambridge, 2000, p. 207. 9. Theodore Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. Nationalism and Russification in the Western Frontier, 1863–1914, DeKalb, IL, 1996; and Ronald G. Suny, The Revenge of the Past. Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Stanford, 1993. 10. Kymlicka, Multicultural citizenship, pp. 184–91. 11. Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, p. 261. 12. V. A. Tishkov, ‘Natsionalizm i national’naia identichnost’,’ Novoe vremia, 7, 1991; and his Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict, pp. ix–x. 13. Valery A. Tishkov, ‘Forget the “nation”: post-nationalist understanding of nationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(4), 2000, pp. 625–50 (pp. 631 and 636). 14. Ibid, p. 630. 15. Ibid, p. 647. 16. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 184–5. 17. See for instance, the interesting article by Graham Smith, ‘Russia, multiculturalism and federal justice’, Europe–Asia Studies, 50(8), 1998, pp. 1393–411 (p. 1401), which, however, does not clearly indicate that El’tsin’s 1996 decree on nationalities’ policy in the Russian Federation uses the term Eurasianism in a sense markedly different from how it was originally used by members of the 1920s movement. 18. Conferences, which discuss the concept of Eurasianism and in whose organization Dugin often plays a prominent role, are attended by representatives of the security forces as well as politicians (Vremia MN, 29 June 2001, reporting the conference ‘Islamskaia ugroza ili ugroza Islama’, www.vremyamn.ru). 19. Viktor Zotov, ‘I zapad i vostok’, Svobodnaia mysl’, 6, 1998, pp. 67–73 and D. V. Dragunskii, ‘Etnopoliticheskie protsessy na postsovetskom prostranstve i rekonstruktsiia severnoi Evrazii’, Polis, 3, 1995, pp. 41–5. 20. L. Vorontsova and Sergei Filatov, ‘Tatarskoe evraziistvo; evroislam plius evropravoslavie’, Druzhba narodov, 8, 1998, pp. 131–5. 21. Vera Tolz, ‘Forging the nation: national identity and nation-building in postcommunist Russia’, Europe–Asia Studies, 50(6), 1998, pp. 993–1022.

A Future Russia 37 22. Rossiiskaia gazeta, 19 July 1996, p. 1. 23. Rossiiskaia gazeta, 17 September 1996, p. 4. 24. S.B. Filatov, ‘Novoe rozhdeniie staroi idei: pravoslavie kak natsional’nyi simvol’, Polis, 3, 1999, pp. 142–9. 25. R. Ryvkina, ‘Mezhdu etnokratiei i grazhdanskim obshchestvom’, Svobodnaia mysl’, 4, 1997, p. 88. 26. Elena Chinyaeva, ‘A Eurasianist model of interethnic relations could help Russia find harmony’, Transition, 2(22), 1 November 1996, p. 30. 27. Smith, ‘Russia, multiculturalism and federal justice’, p. 1402. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid, p. 1401. 30. Svobodnaia mysl’, 12, 1999, p. 31. 31. Putin, ‘Rossiia na rubezhe tysiacheletii’, in the section ‘Putin za i protiv’, http://www.panorama.ru; as well as Putin’s interview with India Today in September 2000, quoted in Astrid Tuminez, ‘Russian nationalism and Vladimir Putin’s Russia’, Programme on New Approaches to Russian Security Policy Memo Series (memo no. 151) at www.fas.harvard.edu/~ponars/ policy%20memos/. 32. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 20 November 2001, pp. 7, 8 and Rossiiskaia gazeta, 20 April 2002. 33. For the analysis of Putin’s regional reforms, see Jeff Kahn, ‘What is the new Russian federalism?’ in Archie Brown (ed.), Contemporary Russian Politics. A Reader, Oxford, 381–3. 34. Aleksandr Verkhovskii, Ekaterina Mikhailovskaia and Vladimir Pribylovskii, Politicheskaya ksenofobiya. Radikal’nye gruppy, predstavleniia liderov, rol’ tserkvi, Moscow, p. 54. 35. Putin’s interviews with the London Times, 21 March 2000 and in Brussels in November 2002 as quoted in Kommersant, 12 November 2002, pp. 1, 3. 36. ‘Etnicheskii separatism na sovremennom etape’, http://www.panorama.ru. 37. Quoted in Gail W. Lapidus, ‘State building and state breakdown in Russia’, in Brown (ed.), Contemporary Russian Politics. A Reader, p. 350. 38. Dmitry Gorenburg, ‘Regional separatism in Russia: ethnic mobilisation or power grab?’ Europe–Asia Studies, 51(2), 1999, pp. 245–74. 39. Smith, ‘Russia, multiculturalism and federal justice’, pp. 1407–8. 40. Osnovnye napravleniia i itogi deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Obshchego I Professional’nogo Obrazovaniia Rossiiskoi Federatsii v 1997 g. i pervoocherednye zadachi na 1998 g., vyp. II, Saransk, 1998, pp. 98–9. 41. L.I. Semennikova, Rossiia v mirovom soobshchestve tsivilizatsii, Briansk, 1996, pp. 488–9. 42. Katherine E. Graney, ‘Education reform in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan: sovereignty project in post-Soviet Russia’, Europe–Asia Studies, 51(4), 1999, pp. 611–32. 43. Stephen White, Alex Pravda and Zvi Gitelman, Developments in Russian Politics, Basingstoke, 5th edn, 2001, p. 281, table 14.2. 44. Tolz, ‘Forging the Nation’, p. 292. 45. Moskovskii komsomolets, 12 March 1992, quoted in Aleksandr Verkhovskii, Ekaterina Mikhailovskaya and Vladimir Pribylovskii, Politicheskii extremizm v Rossii, Moscow, 1996–99, the section ‘Uroven’ ksenofobii i uroven’ revoliutsionnosti’ (see http://www.panorama.ru).

38 Vera Tolz 46. Z.Sikevich, Raskolotoe soznanie, St Petersburg, 1996, pp. 75–85. 47. Paul Goble, ‘Idel-Ural and the future of Russia’, RFE/RL NewsLine, 17 May 2000. 48. Aleksei Malashenko, ‘Islam v Rossii’, Svobodnaia mysl’, 10, 1995, pp. 48–9. 49. Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict, p. 266. 50. Quoted in ibid, p. 262 on the basis of the results of a survey conducted in November and December 1993 under the supervision of Timothy Colton and Jerry Hough. 51. Quoted in Dmitry Gorenburg, ‘Nationalism for the masses: popular support for nationalism in Russia’s ethnic republics’, Europe–Asia Studies, 53(1), 2001, pp. 73–104 (pp. 79 and 81). 52. A. Smith, ‘A Europe of nations – or the nation of Europe?’ Journal of Peace Research, 30(2), 1993, pp. 129–35 (p. 131). 53. Kymlicka, Multicultural citizenship, p. 191. 54. These tendencies are not entirely new. The idea that peoples of the Caucasus and Muslims were Russia’s main others and even ‘traditional enemies’ of the Russian people started to be articulated by Russian nationalists in the late 1960s.

3 Rival Versions of the East Slavic Idea in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus Andrew Wilson

In May 2000, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, under the approving eye of Moscow Patriarch Aleksii II, met near Kursk in a ceremony to mark the fifty-fifth anniversary of Soviet war victory, near the site of the great tank battle of 1943.1 The four celebrated the opening of a ‘Chapel of Unity’ of the East Slavic peoples in the church of SS. Peter and Paul. A ‘Unity Bell’ was hung in the chapel, decorated with images of St Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, (d. 1015), St Euphrosyne of Polatsk (c.1102–73), and St Sergii of Radonezh (b. 1314). Vladimir was for Ukraine, Euphrosyne for Belarus and St Sergii for Russia; but the trio did not necessarily represent an equal Trinity. Vladimir (Russian spelling) is also Volodymyr (Ukrainian spelling), seen by many Ukrainians as the founder of Ukraine-Rus´ – a theory first popularized by the historian Mykhailo Hrushevs´kyi (1866–1934). But as Vladimir he would still tend to be appropriated by many Russians as one of their own, the founder of the East Slav condominium as a whole and therefore the spiritual father of the other elements in the Trinity. Euphrosyne might again suit the Russian world view – not a ruler of a state as such, but a nun, the lost princess of the would-be local dynasty of north-western Rus´. St Sergii on the other hand is strongly associated with myths of the origins of Russian statehood. First and foremost a hesychastic aesthetic and founder of the Trinity Monastery, legend also has it that he inspired Dmitrii Donskoi to victory at the Battle of Kulikovo Field (1380) – and possibly also spurred on Metropolitan Kiprian in his attempt to reunite the two sees of Moscow and Lithuania in 1381–82 (i.e. the embryonic ‘Russian’ north and the ‘Ukrainian’ or ‘Ruthenian’ south). 39

40 Andrew Wilson

At a second ceremony in June 2001 at a ‘friendship monument’ in the village of Veselovka symbolically situated on the triangular border of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, the cast was less impressive. Only the Belarusian President Lukashenka and Aleksii were present.2 Kuchma was busy meeting the Pope back in Ukraine, and Putin was presumably wary of giving too obvious support to Lukashenka in a re-election year. Instead of the grand designs symbolized by the full house at Kursk, this seemed a more parochial affair – and unilateral initiatives by Lukashenka would of course have much less chance of success. Finally, there are seemingly eccentric versions of the East Slavic project. Ukraine’s most consistently newsworthy nationalist group, the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA) and its paramilitary wing the Ukrainian SelfDefence Union (UNSO), have twice hosted congresses for their seeming Russian equivalents in Kiev in 1993 and 1996. Their Russian guests, pleased by their enthusiasm for ‘a new Slavic Empire’, were somewhat surprised by the suggestion that its capital should be in Kiev. However, if the three peoples are truly free and equal, all roads need not lead to Moscow. Rather than a single common version of the East Slavic idea in the post-Soviet space that might serve as a post-imperial identity, there are in fact many competing visions, all capable of throwing up unexpected options. It is the aim of this essay to suggest that the East Slavic idea is indeed still popular amongst all three nations, but that it is both differentiated and diffuse. The essay begins with a short historical overview, then looks in turn at Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian versions of the idea, before ending with a brief examination of how different visions have been embodied in public symbolism since 1991.

Historical roots It is difficult to date the origins of the concept of East Slavic unity. Some historians might claim to find it already at the time of Rus´, but it makes little sense to search before the time when its three would-be constituent parts were distinctly formed but politically disunited. In other words, identity-building in Rus´ – the contemporary idea that all the Rus´ shared a common identity when they shared a common polity – is not here the subject of analysis. Some might, however, go as far back as the reign of Ivan III (1462–1505) and Metropolitan Spiridon’s Tale of the Princes of Vladimir (c.1505) when the princes of Muscovy first claimed the lineage of all of Rus´.3 Others might start with the great Ruthenian writers of the seventeenth century,4 churchmen such as Zakhariia Kopystens´kyi, archimandrite of

Rival Versions of the East Slavic Idea 41

the Kiev-Pechers´ka Caves, 1624–27. His most famous work Palinodiia, or a Book in Defence of the Eastern Church (1621–22) provided a tentative ideological programme to underpin political moves, such as Metropolitan Iov Borets´kyi’s appeal to Moscow to support the local Orthodox in 1625. One of his successor scribes, the Ruthenian–German Innokentii Gizel (c.1600–83), most probable author of the Sinopsis (1674), first properly articulated the idea of a collective East Slavic ‘Slaveno-Rus´-ian’ nation and its partner image of a pravoslavnii Rossiiskii narod – the spelling of Rossiia then first becoming fashionable as a Hellenicized version of ‘All Rus´’. The Ruthenians of course assumed that Moscow and Kiev would be equal partners in such an enterprise; in fact, the whole project was arguably designed to tame a potentially imperial relationship by subsuming it under a protective common identity. The idea that Kiev was the ‘New Jerusalem’, ‘the mother of all Rus´-ian cities’, potentially placed it first in importance,5 either as an equal partner to Moscow or its older superior. Gizel’s treatise was in fact the only history of Romanov Rossiia until the 1770s. Its schema was therefore hugely influential in the nineteenth century Russian nation-building project. This had many layers and many variations, and was arguably least successful when most narrowly conceived. The more inclusive East Slavic idea of a bol´shaia russkaia natsiia, assumed to be an ethnic commonality distinct from periphery inorodtsy at the empire’s geographical or social margins,6 had potentially broad appeal, but only when built on true principles of cultural synthesis and fraternal equality. This was rarely the case after the 1860s. ‘AllRussian’ nationalism was therefore not the force it could have been. Whereas the Ukrainian and (smaller) Belarusian intelligentsias accepted the idea of dual identities in the first half of the nineteenth century, this assumption was increasingly challenged in the second half. The building of a Soviet identity also went through many twists and turns, although there was something of a reversion to a type of East Slavic ‘neo-rossiiskii patriotism’ in 1941–44.7 However, the ‘National Bolshevism’ of the time wavered in its definition of the nation. The myth of joint East Slavic struggle against the common German enemy was potentially extremely powerful; but David Brandenberger describes how a seemingly innocuous Ukrainian attempt in 1943 to catalogue its precedents, going back to Danylo of Halych fighting alongside Aleksandr Nevskii, was criticized for assuming equal partnership rather than Russian leadership.8 Wartime rhetoric was in any case quickly undermined by Stalin’s notorious Kremlin victory toast to the Russian people as ‘the guiding force […] the outstanding nation’ in the Union in 1945.9

42 Andrew Wilson

The ‘Soviet Slavic’ project was fleetingly revived in 1953 when Beria tried to build alliances with republican élites during his abortive leadership bid;10 but largely remained an undercurrent in the postwar era,11 when rather more attention was paid to building up the myth of a general sovetskii narod – an amalgam of state-centred great power patriotism and welfare civics. The element of East Slavic predominance – and of Russian leadership – in the union of fraternal peoples was less pronounced than it might perhaps have been, and the relationship between the first two elements awkwardly undefined. Hence, the relationship of the East Slavic idea to other possible identity projects in the post-Soviet era – Soviet or Eurasian, Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian ethnonationalist – also remains underdeveloped. The first East Slavic project – in the two centuries either side of Gizel’s 1673 Sinopsis – had most chance of success, because it was genuinely synthetic. In fact Ruthenians (Ukrainians) largely defined its terms. Subsequent version of the project – the nineteenth century Romanov version and its ‘Soviet Slavic’ successor – still had prospects, but would clearly have been more successful if less unilateral. Will the same lessons be learnt today? Would the East Slavic idea be more powerful if it were not mainly in Russian hands?

The view from the centre: family metaphors and composite nouns How important is the East Slavic identity today? For post-Soviet Russians, some commentators, such as Vera Tolz in this volume, have presented it as only one of many identity options.12 Mikhail Molchanov has argued that it is now their most logical identity choice, especially given the problems with the alternatives.13 Significantly, pace Molchanov, it would he hard to describe any Russian political party as programmatically East Slavic; even most nationalist parties segue between different versions of the national idea.14 It is therefore easier to look for East Slavic sentiment expressed in more general terms. The ‘indissoluble union of fraternal peoples’ is no longer with us. Many Russians still express their nostalgia for the Union, or even the Empire of old, in all-Soviet terms, particularly if making reference to its collective might in the lost bi-polar superpower world. For others, however, the first step back towards the East Slavic idea is the tendency to discard or disregard periphery nations now admitted to be culturally or historically ‘alien’ (the Baltic States, probably most of Central Asia and the South Caucasus),15 or regarded as having held back the core (Central

Rival Versions of the East Slavic Idea 43

Asia). For those who have gone this far, Molchanov argues, the alternatives to an East Slavic identity hold little attraction: ‘extracting a separate Russian ethno-nation from a rather amorphous “all-Russian” mixture is hardly possible at the moment because of the blurred national identity of the Russians themselves’ and their past history of assimilation; while Eurasianism fails ‘to anchor the Russian national identity in the [the] pre-Mongol Kievan past that Russians share with Ukrainians’ and Belarusians.16 However, when embracing the idea of a triune identity, Russians all too often make one of three mistakes. They exaggerate the degree of family intimacy, assume unity instead of unity-in-diversity, and/or repeat unhelpful assertions of Russian primacy. The first tendency can be demonstrated by examining the family metaphors that Russians now use when groping around for a post-Soviet identity. One perceptive Ukrainian commentator has argued that the tendency to ‘over-intimatise’ relations in all such metaphors reflects an archetypal nostalgia for a virtual USSR or bol´shaia Rossiia, one much better than the real versions or their vestiges.17 Most imply some sort of trajectory towards the East Slavic idea. In presumed order of intimacy, they include: Siamese twins (or triplets). The idea that the post-Soviet peoples cannot exist without the other; and/or that separation has proved or is proving fatal, can accommodate twins of conceivably triplets, but not the whole 15 former Soviet states. The intense and emotional metaphor is therefore most often applied to Russia and Ukraine (Russia and Belarus being siblings of very different sizes),18 but hardly ever to historically less ‘intimate’ relations. The metaphor of course falls down if it is implied that the separation process can be reversed. Painful divorce. Again this carries perhaps unwanted overtones of finality – remarriage not being that common in the former USSR. Family quarrel. In a speech devoted to the 1997 Russian–Ukrainian ‘Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership’, President Boris El’tsin recalled Gogol’s short story ‘The Two Ivans’ (1835): ‘remember how Ivan Ivanovich quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich and how easily they destroyed their friendship over a trifle’.19 This time, the metaphor works in the sense that reconciliation is as normal a part of fraternal relations as periodic breakdown – although not, as El’tsin seemed to forget, in the case of the ‘Two Ivans’, who went to their graves still cursing one another. The Communal flat. In the same 1997 speech, El’tsin reminisced how ‘Russians and Ukrainians lived in a communal flat, so to speak. Our separation was painful. We had to divide the indivisible and test the resistance

44 Andrew Wilson

of normal human, even family, links.’ This is the least powerful image, as the metaphor is also so often used to bemoan the crowded coexistence of all the former peoples of the USSR,20 with the obvious connotations of relationships spoiled by enforced intimacy. Brotherhood. Finally, the most common default option asserts fraternity or brotherhood (almost never sisterhood), a middle range option as it were. Once reduced to this level, the metaphor is acceptable to most Ukrainians and Belarusians; but then it has fewer direct political implications, if any. Adult siblings, of course, do not have to live together. Of a different order still is the assertion that the Eastern Slavs have a common identity as a single whole. There is no clear dividing line in practice with ‘fraternity’ rhetoric, but certainly conceptually a much closer connection is assumed when the Eastern Slavs are referred to as some kind of collective whole. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, clearly assumed such a unity when he bemoaned in an interview in 2000, ‘the way I feel about the division between Russia and Ukraine is the same sort of pain as was felt over the division of the German people’ in 1949–89.21 In a similar vein, according to Metropolitan Cyril, ‘the borders which were artificially traced through [the middle of] the Slavic peoples remind me of the Berlin Wall, which divided the Germans’.22 After 1991 most Russian nationalists have returned to pre-revolutionary formulae as a means of expressing this myth of unity-in-diversity, of a collective East Slavic whole.23 The family of such expressions is centred around the trinitarian myth of a ‘Three-in-One Rus´ Nation’ or triedinaia russkaia natsiia (or triedinii russkii narod – more rarely ruskii with one ‘s’), with its useful undertones of ‘Holy Rus´’, and includes phrasing such as triedinaia pravoslavnaia russkaia narodnost´ or (Solzhenitsyn’s term) edinii treslavianskii narod.24 This reversion is typified in a text by the Russian Communist leader Gennadii Ziuganov. First, he recycles the myth of indissoluble popular affection (see below): ‘the basic mass of the fraternal Ukrainian people well understand that together with the Great Russians and Belarusians they belong to one Orthodox all-Russian (obshcherusskoi) culture.’ Then in his discussion of the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty he makes the key verbal move himself, arguing that, ‘this union of two fraternal peoples [Soviet version] – more exactly, of two parts of the same people [old and new version] – became a great stimulus to the development of the state’ allowing it finally ‘successfully to resolve its [longstanding] external political tasks’.25 The third problem – the unhelpful assertion of pre-eminence and/or primogeniture – is also easily illustrated. Modern equivalents of Stalin’s 1945

Rival Versions of the East Slavic Idea 45

victory toast are common enough. Aleksandr Rutskoi for example claimed in 1995 that every group needs a leader and ‘throughout the whole millennial history of Rus´, this leader has been the Russian people’.26 These three problems can crucially affect the broader nature of East Slavic mythology. There are several myths that are powerful enough to challenge alternative national narratives, but only if they are presented as something that all three nations can indeed share. First, it is interesting that the new version of the East Slavic idea is only partially de-Sovietized. In particular, it plays a variation on the old Soviet friendship myth. In the words of a Communist activist, ‘in the last decade, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union’ and so much ‘interethnic conflict […] only the Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians have preserved fraternal and friendly relations between themselves’.27 The claim that the three peoples still maintain their affections whatever projects politicians pursue is extremely common. According to Ziuganov for example, ‘beyond the ruling circles of Ukraine, people are demonstrably fed up with anti-Russian forces’, ‘the sympathies of the basic mass of the fraternal Ukrainian people are on the side of Russia’;28 – and there is much sociological evidence to back up this assertion.29 The contrast with civil strife elsewhere in the former Union, or at least the yearning for civic peace in the heartland, is also real enough. Second is a persistent myth of common endeavour – again adapted from earlier Soviet versions. The paper Brother Slavs, printed in eastern Ukraine with alleged Russian support, recounts a thousand years of joint struggle in its standard advertising appeal. The three peoples ‘together with count Vladimir were baptised in the Orthodox Faith; together with count Sviatoslav destroyed and crushed the Khazar Kaganate and together with Dmitrii Donskoi won the battle over the Tatars at Kulikovo Field; together with Minin and Pozharskii beat off the Poles, and together with Peter the Great – the Swedes; together with Suvorov and Ushakov crushed the Turks, and with Kutuzov – the French; and together with Georgii Zhukov your grandfathers, fathers or you yourself won the victory over Germany’.30 Hence the potentially powerful symbolism of the 2000 Kursk meeting mentioned at the start of this piece. Significantly, this appeal appears under Viktor Vasnetsov’s famous painting The Bogatyrs (1898), with the three legendary defenders of Rus´ – Ilia of Murom, Dobrinia Nikitich and Aliosha Popovich, giants on horseback side by side awaiting the call to arms – here also standing for the three component nations of modern Rus´. Then there are myths of cultural synthesis, the idea that ‘the term “rosiis´ka [the Ukrainian spelling of all-Russian] culture” does not mean

46 Andrew Wilson

Russian ethnic culture nor even the culture of the all-Russian [again rosiis´ka] people, but the state culture of Russia, which has formed over the ages’.31 It is sometimes also argued that this cultural synthesis has resulted in a common East Slavic civilizational ‘space’. East Slavic ideologues may even place the ‘civilisational divide’ in the same place as Samuel Huntington, between the diaposonic ‘symphony’ of the Orthodox East and the Catholic West, so as to exclude the west Ukrainian (less often west Belarusian) Greek Catholics, who (as with Huntington) are rather crudely lumped together with the Roman Catholics.32 At least in terms of western boundaries, therefore, East Slavism echoes the geopolitics of both Eurasianism and the High Soviet era. The one great institutional expression of the myth of cultural unity to be found in all three states is of course the Orthodox Church. The official title of Aleksii II is after all still Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus´ – not Patriarch of Russia.33 On the one hand, the Church still likes to have it both ways. It still refers to Moldova and Estonia as its ‘canonical territory’.34 But a special place is clearly reserved for the core territories of Rus´. According to one Church source, ‘only a United Rus´ can serve as a self-sufficient and full-bodied culture, historical and political unit’ for the Eastern Slavs.35 Significantly, this is the view of a certain Father Tikhon of the Ukrainian branch of the Church in Luhans´k (the Moscow Patriarchate is still the largest Church in Ukraine in parish terms). Between the Church’s ugly Ukrainophobes and the official position of Patriarch Volodymyr, who supports autonomy so long as it is achieved by an evolutionary and ‘canonical’ process, this is actually the mainstream view – the Church is only Ukraine’s largest because it includes so many Ukrainians as well as Russians. The Orthodox Church has not only resisted the consolidating logic of post-1991 political boundaries. Given the profound weakness of other elements in would-be civil society (political parties, voluntary organizations, trade unions) it is often the only force underpinning any kind of collective identity and/or collective action in East Slavic society.36 A glance at Russian nationalist websites in all three countries confirms the linkage.37 Putin recognized this fact when, at a joint ceremony with Ukraine’s President Kuchma to mark the reopening of the cathedral on the supposed site of Vladimir/Volodymyr the Great’s baptism in Crimea in July 2001 – an event of potent symbolic importance in itself so close to Ukraine’s tenth anniversary celebrations the following August – he remarked that people too often ‘use clichés referring to fraternity and brotherhood without people really thinking about what they meant. Spiritual values constitute[d] the foundation of unity between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.’38

Rival Versions of the East Slavic Idea 47

Periphery versions: Ukraine Fraternity does not necessarily require equality, even if the French Revolution bracketed the two together. Too often, Russian claims of preeminence amongst the Eastern Slavs disrupt calls for ever closer reunion. Things tend to look different in Ukraine and even Belarus, however, where even enthusiastic advocates of the East Slavic idea are likely to put more stress on the principle of an interaction of equals, and prefer relatively pluralistic formulae of the friendship of ‘fraternal peoples’ to the risks of subsuming their identity in any collective whole, however amorphous. Stephen Shulman has argued that the idea of an ‘East Slavic nation’ competes for loyalties in Ukraine with the rival ‘civic nation’ and ‘ethnic Ukrainian nation’;39 but it is important to consider what type of ‘East Slavic nation’ is under consideration, just as it is crucial to examine what is in the ‘civic’ box.40 The current mainstream Ukrainian version of the East Slavic idea is based in the vision developed by Ukrainian thinkers in the Romanov Empire in the nineteenth century – even amongst leading Ukrainian Communists like Borys Oliinyk. Oliinyk served as an adviser to Gorbachev and chair of the Moscow Supreme Soviet’s Council of Nationalities in the perestroika era: in his more normal life as a poet he has penned eulogies to ‘our house’ (nasha khata), the joint homestead of the Eastern Slavs.41 At the June 2001 Moscow ‘Sobor of the Slavic Peoples of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine’, however, he denounced ‘political pyrotechnics of the type “three-in-one nation”, “Great-Russian, Little Russian” which then, you see, develop into “all more or less Russian (rossy)”. We must set out not from the romantics of abstract theoretical (kabinetnykh) deductions, but from the real fact of life of three equal and equally great peoples – Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian.’ Moreover, he continued, ‘with all respect to Moscow, we must explain to [our] disoriented citizenry that the idea of Slavic unity began with Kievan Rus´ and was [first] formulated conceptually not on the Volga, but more than a century and a half ago on the banks of the Dnipro, where the Cyrylo-Methodian Society was born, in whose constitution a model was laid out for uniting all free (read – sovereign) Slavic peoples’.42 The main ideologue of the Cyrylo-Methodian Society (1845–47) mentioned by Oliinyk was the historian Mykola Kostomarov (1817–85). Kostomarov worked within the nineteenth century paradigm of a bol´shaia russkaia natsiia, but subtly undermined its Russocentric assumptions by arguing in his main work Two Rus´ Nationalities (1861) that the Ukrainians and Russians were kindred peoples distinguished by

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contrasting political cultures (he can be forgiven for ignoring the Belarusians, whose national movement was practically non-existent in 1861). The Ukrainians, he argued, were natural democrats – even if overinclined towards license over liberty and anarchy over order – in contrast to the patriarchal and statist Russians and aristocratic Poles.43 With Kostomarov’s mythology as an assumed background therefore, modern Ukrainian politicians find it surprisingly easy to sidestep awkward questions of ethnicity and language and combine East Slavic fraternity rhetoric with a steadfast defence of Ukrainian independence. The former can be confusingly prevalent, and was in fact almost universal amongst ‘centre’ and ‘left’ politicians in the 1999 presidential election, disguising the fact that only two political forces were campaigning for real change. The first were the fringe ‘Slavic’ parties: including such groups as the Party of Rus´–Ukrainian Union (RUS´), the Party of One Rus´, the Party of One Kievan Rus´, and the longstanding Party of Slavonic Unity of Ukraine, formed in April 1992. None received significant support in 1999; Aleksandr Bazyliuk, of the Slavonic Party (but actually a Ukrainophobe), won a derisory 0.14 per cent. Most such groupuscles backed the then chairman of parliament Oleksandr Tkachenko in return for his playing the east Slavic card quite heavily. Tkachenko was running at a respectable 2–3 per cent in the polls before making a late withdrawal in favour of Communist leader Petro Symonenko (and formally joined the Communist Party in 2001). Nor have Ukraine’s specifically ‘Slavic’ parties enjoyed much success at parliamentary elections. In 1998, there were three rival parties aiming rather too narrowly at Russian ethno-nationalism. The Social–Liberal Union or SLOn suffered from targeting the Russian intelligentsia, and won only 0.91 per cent; a Crimea based party of Soviet nostalgia, ‘Union’, won 0.7 per cent; the Party of Regional Revival, discretely backed by the Moscow Patriarchate only 0.9 per cent. In 2002 the ‘Russian (Rus’kyi ) Block’ could only manage 0.7 per cent. The more explicitly East Slavic ‘Party For the Union of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia’ also fared poorly, with a mere 0.4 per cent. The one party which does enjoy electoral success are the Communists, who won 20 per cent at the 2002 elections, down from 24.6 per cent in 1998 and Symonenko’s 22.2 per cent in 1999. It has taken the party almost a decade to begin gradually mutating from a party of ‘Leninist’ Soviet patriotism to one making a specifically East Slavic appeal, including campaigning in support of ‘canonical’ Orthodoxy.44 Nevertheless, since the Kosovo campaign in 1999 and the Papal visit to Ukraine in

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2001, the Ukrainian Communists have quite markedly begun to ape ‘Ziuganovism’ and move into a position of open support for the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine.45 The Communist Party of Ukraine remains the one significant force that directly advocates East Slavic political reunion (although often only as a step to full Soviet restoration); usually with no reservations, although Oliinyk has accepted that ‘with Ukraine, the Belarusian model will not succeed’.46

Periphery versions: Belarus In Belarus, on the other hand, the main East Slavic voice is of course President Lukashenka himself; but he is supported by most significant opposition groups, excluding the Popular Front but definitely including the Communist Party of Belarus,47 and is powerfully echoed by the ‘Belorussian Exarchate’ of the Russian Orthodox Church.48 Political parties are less important under Lukashenka’s regime, although the ‘Slavic Council of Belarus’ (Slavianskii Sobor – ‘Belaia Rus´’) led by Yurii Azarenok has been granted covert license by Lukashenka to act as a sounding board for his own ideas. The local version of the East Slavic idea does not refer back to the kind of ‘middle ground’ doctrine typified in Ukraine by Kostomarov that can act as a counterweight to Russian discourse. It is naturally enthusiastic about all projects for political reunion. Nevertheless, it has own distinguishing dynamic. First, Lukashenka still relies to a great degree on Soviet symbolism and on a version of Belarusian identity formed almost entirely by the experiences of war and postwar reconstruction, rather the distant tribal past.49 His version of national history begins in the 1940s when a Soviet Belorussian nation was created almost ex nihilo, apart from the common fundament of Orthodox folk culture. Belarusian nationalists (traditionally the oppositional ‘National Front’), on the other hand, tend to begin their story with Polats´ka-Rus´ or the supposedly Slavic Grand Duchy of Lithuania/Litva. Their Belarus is therefore a central European and historically Greek Catholic nation emerging from two hundred years (1795–1991) of Russo-Soviet repression. However, most of that history is now lost. The trouble faced by Belarusian nationalists since 1991 is not that their version of national identity is implausible, but that it has little to say to the life experiences of the vast majority of the population, dominated by the twin myths of wartime suffering and postwar reconstruction. There are therefore two versions of the ‘Belarusian’ idea, one of which is still happy to spell itself ‘Belorussian’. Furthermore, Lukashenka’s

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version of national identity is also necessarily a nested one. In fact his preferences require that which is adjectival in the ‘Soviet Belorussian’ identity also to be some part of the overarching East Slavic identity. The ‘official ideology’ of the Lukashenka era, as propagated by papers like Slavianski nabat and the printing house ‘Art and Literature’, is therefore the superficially curious hybrid idea of a ‘Slavic-Soviet civilization’. He therefore favours ‘Slavic’ ideas that match the ideology of the late Soviet era; such as civilizational opposition to the West and Russian as ‘the language of inter-ethnic communication’. Significantly, as a self-styled ‘Orthodox atheist’, Lukashenka has been unable to play the religious card as much as he might; and the Belorussian Exarchate does not have the self-sustaining mythology of any branch of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine – being institutionally part of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Nevertheless, Lukashenka likes to bracket together the local (Greek) Catholic tradition and Belarusian nationalism as equally ‘alien’ (the 2002 Law on Religion discriminates against faiths that have not been active in Belarus for ‘at least twenty years’). Even Lukashenka, however, does not really speak of a collective (i.e. Russian–Belarusian) ‘we’. In his address to the Russian Duma in October 1999 he stressed that ‘we are not “fragments” of the great Soviet people, we are Belarusians and Russians – proud, free, strong peoples. And nobody is allowed to put us down’. At the same time, of course, the two share a community of fate. Much of Lukashenka’s speech was devoted to the Second World War, when together, to what his website claims was sustained applause, ‘we saved the world’.50 Moreover, since the arrival of Putin in the Kremlin, his obvious disdain for ‘virtual’ integration, and his harder definition of the choices facing Belarus, Lukashenka has been forced to pay more attention to this singularity. In speeches made in 2002 and 2003 he has stressed that, although ‘the ideas of Belarusian statehood are inseparably linked to the idea of Slavonic unity, brotherhood and co-operation of peoples … the absorption of a small state by a great state is a historical anachronism … the sovereignty, the state independence of Belarus (Russia as well) will remain unshakeable’.51 As Olexii Haran´ and Serhii Tolstov have correctly argued therefore, the differential appeal of the East Slavic idea cannot be explained ‘by simple references to history and culture (the “clash of civilizations” approach) or even by economic dependence on Russia. It is the result of the correlation of political forces and the position of the elite.’ In Ukraine, it is important ‘to explain why the slogans of [east] Slavic unity have not been translated into practical steps’.52 In Belarus they have – to an extent. Ukrainian and Belarusian élites have made different choices.

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Imperial Kiev A further difference between Russia and Ukraine and Belarus is the existence in the latter of radically different versions of the East Slavic idea – even if only at the margins of political thought. The mainstream Ukrainian and/or Belarusian nationalist position is that the extremely loose bonds of common East Slavic origin can exercise but little restraint on the separate trajectories of what are now three very distinct nations. One Ukrainian nationalist group, the Ukrainian National Assembly– Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNA–UNSO), however, advocates an interestingly inverted version of East Slavic identity. Its ‘Slavic Doctrine’ is based on the idea of ‘a united Slavic state with its centre in Kiev’ and the birth of an ‘Ukrainian empire as a factor in nourishing Slavic civilisation’.53 In answer to its own rhetorical question ‘which of the existing Slavic states on the territory of the former USSR can lead the process of restoring its former might?’, the UNA–UNSO has argued that this ‘mission of [re]uniting Rus´ lands’ cannot be entrusted to Moscow, because ‘in Russia the Slavic peoples are far from dominant in all regions’, and the ‘cosmopolitan ruling elite’ and ‘denationalised and weak central government’ is ‘incapable of establishing ethnocontrol’ over potentially separatist peripheries. Nor can Belarus lift the flag of unity for the Slavic peoples on account of its smallness of number[s]. It is settled by history itself and by God that the [true] successor of Kievan Rus´ – Ukraine must take up the mission of uniting Rus´ lands. First, because Ukraine is a unitary Slav state, 98% of whose [no longer] 52 million population is Slav. Second, because it has the only national army which is practically 100% Slav. Third, because Ukraine has a [proper] national government [sic], capable not just of representing the interest of the nation, but of becoming the consolidating principal for the Slavic world. Moreover, Ukraine was and remains the religious centre of Orthodoxy, which it took over from Byzantium. Fourth, it has a powerful diaspora on all the territory of the former USSR [sic], which can establish ethnocontrol on the territories it occupies. The UNA–UNSO has defined its ultimate aims as follows: as a ‘first step the creation of a confederation of Slavic states, and later a powerful unitary empire in the borders of the former USSR under the protection of Ukraine with its capital in Kiev’.54 The position is extreme: nevertheless

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it informs much of the ‘nativist’ thinking of a significant part of the governing élite in Kiev, helping to square the circle of their own neoSoviet identity and neo-Belorussian authoritarian autarkism.55

We are not all Slavs If the UNA–UNSO would like to invert the recent historical pattern of East Slavic interaction and take the Russians under their wing, radical versions of both Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism have more often made the opposite argument – that the Russians are not really Slavs at all. This myth of Russian miscegenation arose in the nineteenth century among writers like Max Müller (1823–1900) and Franciszek Duchin´ski (1816–93), and was then popularized by Ukrainians like Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), Yurii Lypa (1900–44) and Yevhen Malaniuk (1897–1968).56 According to Lypa, in his 1941 book that enthusiastically predicted the eventual Division of Russia, ‘the Muscovites are not a pure people […] they have strong Finnish admixtures’, the Russian language is full of ‘Finnish words’. This was not a mere original encounter, the Russian culture was built over the Finnish, and ‘the digestion of the Finnish ethnos took six–seven centuries’ (until the end of the eighteenth century in some backwaters). Moreover, in general, Lypa argued, ‘the development and formation of the Muscovite people was a very unsteady process. An unnatural external force uprooted this people from their incubation stage in the remote (hlukhykh) forests of the Volga. The stimulus to uniting the as yet immature Muscovy was the animal energy of the Mongols.’ Even now (as he wrote in 1941) the apparent ‘ethnic unity of the Muscovites – is only an outer skin, the result of the strident centralisation of their government and their difficult living conditions’. Russia’s tendency towards aggressive expansion was only a hyperbolic inversion of the more natural tendency to collapse back into what would eventually turn out to be a small mini-state on the Volga.57 The Belarusian version of this myth is that their national name (the White Rus´) derives from their unique East Slavic purity. The historian Usevalad Ihnato˘ uski in his Short Outline of a History of Belarus (1919) argued that ‘the Belarusian tribe throughout all its glorious past has never mixed with peoples of other races’. In particular they were spared by geography (the protection of forests and marshes) from the effects of the ‘Turkic–Mongol avalanche’, while ‘things were different with the Great Russians and Ukrainians: they lived under such difficult conditions that it was impossible to preserve their ancient ethnic type’.58 In other words, the original proto-Russians may indeed have been the most

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easterly of the East Slavic tribes, but their ‘blood’ now forms but a tiny percentage of the Russian whole. The most high-profile modern proponent of such views is Zianon Pazniak, exile leader of the Belarusian Popular Front.59 Critics might claim that they made it easier to force him into exile. Sometimes, on the other hand, Belarusian nationalists have, again, argued more or less the opposite. Not only was intermingling between local East Slavic and Baltic tribes the original basis of Belarusian ethnogenesis, the modern historian Mikola Ermalovich has claimed, we are ‘more like Slavicised Balts than Balticised Slavs’.60 This myth may be radically different to Ihnato˘ uski’s. Nevertheless, it still serves the same function of establishing imagined divides in the East Slavic whole and distinguishing the Belarusians from the Russians. It might be pointed out that echoes of these arguments are occasionally to be found in Russia, though they are far from mainstream. Lev Gumilev, for example, in From Rus´ to Russia (1992) agreed that the Russians were only partially East Slavic, their ‘ethnogenesis’ largely dating to the period after the fall of Rus´, through ‘positive complementarity’ with first FinnoUgric and then Tatar-Turkic elements.61 The limited audience for such views demonstrates how difficult it will be to disentangle the myths of Russian national and general East Slavic origin. Much more common in Russian nationalist circles therefore are rival theories of the bastardized origin (Turkic, Polish) of the Ukrainians and less often Belarusians, or, more likely, of the Galicians in particular. According to the (Ukrainian) paper Brother Slavs, in Kiev, the ‘mother of Russian cities, they have closed almost all Russian schools (sic)’ and ‘dance the “hopak” in Turkish clothing – “sharovars” [baggy trousers] (even the word is Turkish!). So who are the “yanichary” (“Turkish occupants”) here?’62

Signing symbols East Slavic mythology exists in a variety of guises. One way of looking at this practical diversity is to examine the semiotics of public symbols and public space. Since independence, both Russia (in 1993) and Ukraine (1997) have put up new statues to Yaroslav the Wise, ruler of Rus´ from 1019 to 1054. Russia chose the city of Iaroslavl´, the monarch’s namecity, as he supposedly personally founded it in 1010. In his book on the post-Soviet city, Blair Ruble mentions the controversy over giving the statue a more ‘Russian’ image, specifically as to whether it should be placed above the river or in the centre of the city square in the ‘Western’ style.63 Moreover, unlike Ukraine in particular, most of Russia’s other

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new symbols and monuments have not really been constructed with the East Slavic ‘question’ in mind. Moscow’s new statue of Peter the Great and the Cathedral of the Christ the Saviour all refer to the Imperial era (in the latter case to the victory over Napoleon). The new national anthem skilfully avoids direct mention of the East Slavic idea, referring to ‘an age-old union of fraternal peoples’ without specifying which.64 It is therefore worth looking in more detail at the way in which Ukraine, in contrast, has tried to have it both ways on this issue, particularly because the Ukrainian case involves many more layers of nuance. The authorities in Kiev are well aware that East Slavic symbols are popular with the considerable numbers of Ukrainians and local Russians who have varying degrees of nostalgia for the old Empire and/or Union. Suitably branded, however, the very same symbols can also representing the mythology of Ukraine-Rus´. Ukraine’s version of Yaroslav stands next to Kiev’s Golden Gates, providing on the surface a very catholic image. Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin (since Spring 2001 ambassador to Kiev) indicated his approval on a visit in 1997 by declining an invitation to lay flowers at the Shevchenko monument and visiting Yaroslav instead. However, on closer inspection the monument is branded as more specifically Ukrainian. First, by what might be called a fast-forwarding technique, that is linking the Rus´ era to later, more identifiably ‘Ukrainian’ periods. Yaroslav is given a mustache and depicted without a beard – in short made to look like a seventeenth century Cossack rather than an eleventh century monarch (the same technique is used on Ukraine’s new currency – for Yaroslav on the two hryvna note and Volodymyr on the one). Second, there is an element of ‘rewind’. Yaroslav is depicted in the style of Constantine holding the plans to his city, with the implication that he is building more than just the nearby church (St Sofiia’s), but a whole (Ukrainian) nation. Third, the Ukrainians had no worries about placing the statue right in the centre of the square. Fourth, the statue is linked by geographical proximity and symbolism to a new statue to Hrushevs´kyi unveiled by President Kuchma with great fanfare in 1998. On the one hand it is placed near the building where Hrushevs´kyi served as president of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1917. This was probably what persuaded even the leaders of the Communist Party to come to the ceremony. On the other hand, the statue is opposite the Academy of Sciences (emphasizing his function as a historian), and at the beginning of Volodymyrs´ka Street, thereby implicitly endorsing Hrushevs´kyi’s version of the history of Ukraine-Rus´ and giving a subtle sign to the other important symbols on

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the thoroughfare (which runs to the statue of Yaroslav, on to St Sofiia’s and finishes at St Michael’s – see below). Other examples of the ‘rewind’ technique can be seen in the two statues to Andrew the Apostle that now stand in Kiev. Myth has long had it that Andrew ‘the first-called’ visited Kiev in 55 AD – this myth being central to Russian as well as to Ukrainian nationalism. But the mythology of Andrew is being significantly reworked by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kievan Patriarchate). First, because it can be claimed that, in the words of Patriarch Volodymyr in 1993, Andrew’s blessing was conferred not on any future Russia, or even collective Rus´, but on the specific spot where he stood and placed his cross. This can therefore be represented as ‘the land of Rus´-Ukraine, blessed by Andrew the Apostle’ – Andrew supposedly never having made it any further north.65 Second, the modern version of the Andrew myth helps to bolster another myth – that the Ukrainian Church was an ‘original apostolic’ creation and a completely different entity to the Russian Church. To emphasize the point, one of the new statues to Andrew has been placed on the hill overlooking the river Dnipro where he supposedly originally placed his cross. Also typical of modern rebranding techniques is the Monastery of St Michael of the Golden Domes, the key symbol of the new Ukraine, rebuilt at great expense in time to be used as the centrepiece in President Kuchma’s television adverts for his 1999 re-election campaign. St Michael’s is an interesting choice. It is obviously intended to be Kiev’s rival to the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. As such, the monastery was undoubtedly one of the greatest examples of the Ukrainian or Cossack Baroque style of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, before it was demolished by the Soviets in 1935–36. However, Ukraine could just as well have rebuilt the grandest church from the period, the St Nicholas, built in 1690–93 and famous for its fifty-foot seven-tier iconostasis before its destruction in 1934. So why not? One reason is that the St Nicholas was also famous as ‘Mazepa’s church’. The Hetman who built it is still perceived as too ‘antiRussian’ a figure, given that he sided against Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. A more interesting reason, however, is the mythological function of the new rebuilding. The St Nicholas was a ‘pure’ Baroque church. The St Michael monastery is a mixture, which better serves the function of linkage. The fact that it was originally built in 1108–13 and the exterior remodelled in the Baroque era helps to signal a more Ukrainian version of Rus´ (in contrast, not just in rivalry, to Moscow’s Christ the Saviour) – by linking one era, that of Rus´, to another, the

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Ukrainian Baroque, serving to strengthen myths of continuity and to brand Rus´ more as Ukraine-Rus´.

Conclusions Why is any of this important? President Putin needs some ideological cover for his reassertion of Bolshoe Prostranstvo. An identity of sorts is also available for Ukraine and Belarus if European and/or Euroatlantic integration projects turn sour. The current Ukrainian approach to Rus´ symbolism could embrace traditional Ukrainian nationalism, the East Slavic idea and a new ‘nativism’, or any combination of the three. More broadly, Mikhail Molchanov has argued that East Slavism is the most viable alternative identity for all three nations.66 Russian versions of the East Slavic idea, however, cannot be assumed to coincide with versions popular in Ukraine or Belarus; just as the political projects sketched above do not necessarily coincide. Clearly, moreover, the East Slavic ‘idea’ does not provide a fully national identity, on most any definition of the latter term. According to Anthony Smith, for example, a nation ‘can be defined as a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members’.67 The latter two features (which arguably make the definition overly state-dependent) and are only vestigial in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. As outlined above, East Slavic ideologues are much stronger on ‘common myths and historical memories’. As regards the ‘common name’, there is no real consensus and the adjective is too often dropped. Papers like ‘Brother Slavs’ are also full of pan-Slavic politics, thereby diluting their message. Moreover, as with ‘British’, or even worse, ‘UK’, ‘East Slav’ does not easily provide a full range of cognate vocabulary, of commonly used identity pronouns and adjectives. The historical territory of Rus´ is of course not the same as the current joint territory of the three East Slavic states. Much may ultimately depend on the middle factor: the extent to which three national systems of cultural reproduction maintain elements of an East Slavic message and/or pan-national cultural institutions (above all, Russian press and television and their local conduits) retain their importance, but that is a topic beyond the scope of the current essay. Short of mobilizing a true ‘nation’, however, most East Slavic rhetoric and ideology is necessarily vague. In Russia, the East Slavic idea is a version (one version) of being Russian. In Belarus, it is a means of sidestepping the National Front’s version of Belarusian identity. In Ukraine only

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a relatively small minority see East Slavism as their primary identity; otherwise it is a means of nesting Ukrainian identity (identities) in a safely broader whole. Nevertheless, it is remarkable just how much of mainstream politics in all three countries is still conducted within the framework of fraternity discourse. This is the largest and loosest of the concentric circles outlined above and certainly does not imply any specific foreign policy project. It does, however, narrow the range of other possible ‘vectors’ or ‘trajectories’, at the same time as leaving the broad mass of the population uncertain as to how close their future relations will actually be.

Notes and references 1. Liudmila Romanova, ‘Stil´ politicheskogo simbolizma’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 4 May 2000. My acknowledgments to Serhii Plokhy, who has also used the Kursk meeting to begin an article on religious trends. 2. ‘Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Belarusian President urge Slavic unity’, The Russia Journal, 28 June 2001. 3. For a critique of traditional Russian historiography of the era, see Edward Keenan, Rosiis´ki istorychni mify, Kiev, 2001. 4. For a modern commentary, see Nataliia Yakovenko, Paralel’nyi svit: Doslidzhennia z istoriï uiavlen’ ta idei v Ukraïni XVI–XVII st., Kiev, 2002, part three. 5. See the section ‘Kyïv – druhyi Yerusalem’ in Yakovenko, Paralel’nyi svit, pp. 324–30. 6. Alexii Miller, ‘Ukrainskii vopros’ v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina XIX v.), St Petersburg, 2000, pp. 31 and 37. 7. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation, London, 2001, p. 522; Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, New Haven and London, 2000, p. 143. 8. David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism. Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956, Cambridge, MA, 2002, pp. 158–9. 9. The speech is reproduced in Bohdan Nahaylo and Viktor Swoboda, Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR, London, 1990, p. 95. 10. Dmytro Vedienieiev and Yurii Shapoval, ‘Chy buv Lavrentii Beriia ukraïns´kym natsionalistom?’, Dzerkalo tyzhnia, 7 July 2001. 11. Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991, Cambridge, MA, 1998, p. 43. 12. See also, inter alia, Vera Tolz, Russia. Inventing the Nation, London, 2001, chapter eight. 13. Mikhail A. Molchanov, Political Culture and National Identity in Russian– Ukrainian Relations, College Station, Texas, 2002. 14. See, for example, the sites at www.eurasia.com.ru and www.rne.org and the Pamiat’ site at http://abbc.com/pamvat 15. This is the main theme of Solzhenitsyn’s essay The Russia Question at the End of the Twentieth Century, London, 1995.

58 Andrew Wilson 16. Molchanov, Political Culture and National Identity in Russian–Ukrainian Relations, pp. 111 and 102. 17. Ihor Losev, ‘Ukraïns´ki kompleksy rosiis´koï svidomosti’, Heneza , 1999, pp. 48–54. 18. See for example Fakty i kommentarii, 11 November 1999, and ‘V provintsii russkoiazychnoi’, www.slavonic.iptelcom.net.ua/vybor/province.htm, the site of the ‘Slavonic Party’. 19. Radio Russia, BBC SWB, SU 3083, 22 November 1997, pp. 14–15. 20. Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a communal apartment, or how a socialist state promoted ethnic particularism’, Slavic Review, 53(2), 1994, pp. 414–52. 21. From Solzhenitsyn’s interview in the Guardian (as translated from Der Spiegel), 18 March 2000. 22. Quoted in Oleh Hryniv, Spokuta malorosiï: derzhavotvorennia bez paradoksiv, L’viv, 2001, p. 77. 23. Tolz, Russia: Inventing the Nation, p. 241. 24. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rossiia v obvale, Moscow, 1998, p. 82. 25. Gennadii Ziuganov, Geografiia pobedy: osnovy Rossiiskoi geopolitiki, Moscow, 1998, pp. 256 and 252. 26. Aleksandr Rutskoi, Obretenie Very, Moscow, 1995, p. 34. 27. Serhii Syrovats´kyi, ‘Dukhovnoe edinstvo Sviatoi Rusi’, Komunist Ukraïny, 3, 2001, pp. 55–7 (p. 55). 28. Ziuganov, Geografiia pobedy, p. 256. 29. The current sociology of the relationship is beyond the scope of this work; but see for example A. V. Razumkov, ‘Mezhetnicheskoe soglasie kak factor natsional’noi bezopsatnosti Ukrainy’, in N. A. Shul’ha et al. (eds), Dialog ukrainskoi i russkoi kul’tur v Ukraine, Kiev, 1999, pp. 18–22. At p. 21, quoting both Ukrainian and Russian research undertaken in 1997, Razumkov reports that 61 per cent of Ukrainians had a ‘more or less positive’ attitude to Russians, only 6 per cent ‘more or less negative’. The figures for Russians’ attitudes to Ukrainians were, respectively, 53 per cent and 14 per cent. 30. See the paper’s website at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Embassy/ 2561/about-e.html 31. Oleksandr Maiboroda, Rosiis’kyi natsionalizm v Ukraïni (1991–1998 r.r.) (Kiev: University of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, 1999), p. 22; quoting from the programme of the party Soiuz (‘Union’), in Hryhorii Andrushchak (ed.), Politychni partiï Ukraïny, Kiev, 1998, pp. 376–7. Retranslated from the original. 32. Petro Symonenko, ‘Komunisty pro tserkvu ta ïï rol’ u zhytti suchasnoï Ukraïny’, Holos Ukraïny, 26 May 1999; Oleksandr Hosh, ‘Sotsialistychnyi shliakh – shliakh vidrodzhennia kraïny’, and Vladyslav Suiarko, ‘Relihiinyi i politychnyi klerykalizm’, Komunist Ukraïny, 2, 1999, pp. 17–24 and 41–8. 33. The official title of Filaret, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kievan Patriarchate) is ‘Patriarch of all Rus⬘-Ukraine’; caricatured in one ROC source as the ‘Metropolitan of Galicia and all Ukraine’, Father Tikhon (Zhiliakov), ‘Avtokefaliia na Ukraine: eto zlo’, Rus´ Pravoslavnaia, 9, 2000, p. 3. 34. From Patriarch Aleksii’s speech to the August 2000 Sobor, ‘Imet’ derznovenie i ne postydit’sia …’, Rus´ Pravoslavnaia, 9, 2000, p. 1. 35. Tikhon, ‘Avtokefaliia na Ukraine’. 36. Anatol Lieven, ‘Russia’s passive fury. The weakness of Russian nationalism’, Survival, 41(2), 1999, pp. 53–70.

Rival Versions of the East Slavic Idea 59 37. See for example the web site of ‘Russian rebirth’, one of many ROC sites with good links, at www.zaistinu.ru and especially www.zaistinu.ru/ukraine. See also the networks Edinaia Rus’, at www.mrazha.ru and www.russ.ru 38. BBC SWB, 28 July 2001. 39. Stephen Shulman, ‘The Internal–External nexus in the formation of Ukrainian national identity: The case for Slavic integration’, in Taras Kuzio and Paul D’Anieri (eds), Dilemmas of State-Led Nation Building in Ukraine, Westport, 2002, pp. 103–30 argues that the ‘East Slavic nation’ would potentially have more popular support. 40. Stephen Shulman, ‘Sources of civic and ethnic nationalism in Ukraine’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 18(4), December 2002, pp. 1–30. 41. Borys Oliinyk, ‘Khto zh tse nashu khatu rozvalyv?’, Tovarysh, 30, 2000. See also his poetry collection, Taiemna vechera. Poeziï 1989–2000, Kiev, 2000. 42. Borys Oliinyk, ‘Gei, brat´ia slaviane! U nas put´ i sud’ba ediny’ (his speech at the Sobor), Komunist, 24, 2001. Oliinyk was one of three leaders of the group ZUBR (‘For the Union of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia’), along with Gennadii Seleznev, Chairman of the Russian Duma since 1999, and Leonid Kozik, then Deputy Prime Minister and representative of the President of Belarus in Russia. In 2001 the group could count on the support of 65 out of 110 deputies in the Belarusian ‘Palace of Representatives’ and 19 out of 450 in the Ukrainian Rada; Pavel Baulin, ‘Zelenoglazaia sestra Belarus’’, Komunist, 21, 2001. 43. N. I. Kostomarov, ‘Dve russkie narodnosti’, Osnova, 3, 1861 (reprinted in Kiev by Maidan, 1991); ‘Mysli o federativnom nachale drevnei Rusi’, Osnova, 1, 1861 and Thomas M. Prymak, Mykola Kostomarov: A Biography, Toronto, 1996, pp. 104–8 and 110–11. 44. See Andrew Wilson, ‘The Communist Party of Ukraine: From Soviet man to east Slavic brotherhood’, in Joan Barth Urban and Jane Leftwich Curry (eds), The Left Transformed in Post-Communist Societies: The Cases of East-Central Europe, Russia and Ukraine, Lanham, 2003, pp. 209–43. For some typical Communist views, see Petro Symonenko, ‘Komunisty pro tserkvu ta ïï rol´ u zhytti suchasnoï Ukraïny’, Holos Ukraïny, 26 May 1999, pp. 6–7; and Serhii Syrovats’kyi, ‘Dukhovnoe edinstvo Sviatoi Rusi’, Komunist Ukraïny, 3, 2001, pp. 55–7. 45. Petro Symonenko, ‘Krestovyi pokhod protiv Ukrainy’, at www.kpu.kiev.ua/ Arhiv/si011205.htm dated 5 December 2001. 46. Quoted in Olexiy Haran’ and Serhiy Tolstov, ‘The Slavic triangle. Ukraine’s relations with Russia and Belarus: A Ukrainian view’, in Arkady Moshes and Bertil Nygren (eds), A Slavic Triangle? Present and Future Relations Between Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, Stockholm: Swedish National Defence College, 2002, pp. 75–94, at p. 91, note 47. 47. Joan Barth Urban, ‘Kommunisticheskie partii Rossii, Ukrainy i Belorussii (bezuspeshnyi poisk edinstva v raznobrazii)’, in Dmitrii Furman (ed.), Belorussiia i Rossiia: obshchestvo i gosudartsvo, Moscow, 1998, pp. 393–415. 48. Its website is at www.belarus.net/church/gener_1.htm 49. ‘Vystuplenie Prezidenta Respubliki Belarus’. A. G. Lukashenko v Gosdume Rossii 27 oktiabria 1999 g’., www.president.gov.by/rus/president/Speech/ duma99.shtml

60 Andrew Wilson 50. ‘Vystuplenie Prezidenta Respubliki Belarus’. 51. From speeches given on Independence Day in July 2002 and in April 2003; www.president.gov.by/eng/president/speech/2002/02den.html and www. president.gov.by/eng/president/speech/2003/message. The author is grateful to David Frick for pointing out that the president’s website (by the time of access on 9 June 2003) contained a much more eclectic section on Belarusian history. See www.president.gov.by/eng/map/ist1.shtml 52. Haran’ and Tolstov, The Slavic Triangle, p. 76. 53. Valentin Yakushyk (ed.), Politychni partiï Ukraïny, Kiev, 1996, p. 120. Andrii Shkil´, Viter imperiï. Zbirnyk stattei z heopolitiki, L´viv, 1999. 54. ‘Ukraïns´ka imperiia, yak factor vyzhyvannia Slov´´ians´koï tsyvilizatsiï’, http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/5331/ukrimp.html. See also www. una-unso.org 55. See Ola Hnatiuk, Pozegnanie ˙ z imperium: Ukrai´nskie dyskusje o tozsamos ˙ ´ci, Lublin, 2003, part VI. 56. Markus Osterrieder, ‘Die Kultur des slavischen Ostens und der Schatten von Turan,’ Das Goetheanum, 79, 2000, pp. 28–31. 57. Yurii Lypa, Rozpodil Rosiï, L´viv, 1995 (reprint of the 1941 edition), pp. 57 and 54. 58. Usevalad Ihnato˘ uski, Karotki narys historyi Belarusi, Minsk, 5th edn, 1991, pp. 25–6. 59. David Marples in his article ‘National awakening and national consciousness in Belarus’, Nationalities Papers, 27(4), 1999, pp. 565–70, recommends Pazniak, ‘O russkom imperializme i ego opasnosti’, Narodnaia hazeta, 15– 17 January 1994 as a guide to his views on this question. 60. Rainer Lindner, ‘Beseiged past: National and court historians in Lukashenka’s Belarus’, Nationalities Papers, 27(4), 1999, pp. 631–47 (p. 633), quoting Ermalovich; ‘Tsi by˘ u starzhytnaruski narod?’, in Z´mister San´ko, 100 pytannia˘ u i adkaza˘ u z historyi Belarusi, Minsk, 1993, p. 5. See also Lindner, Historiker und Herrschaft : Nationsbildung und Geschichtspolitik in Weissrussland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1999. 61. Lev Gumilev, Ot Rusi k Rossii. Ocherki etnicheskoi istorii, Moscow, 1992. 62. Brat´ia slaviane, 18, 2001. See also http://slavica.maillist.ru/abakumov 63. Blair Ruble, Money Sings: The Changing Politics of Urban Space in post-Soviet Yaroslavl, Washington, DC, 1995, pp. 127–9. 64. For the text, see Nezavisimaia gazeta, 30 December 2000. 65. Patriarch Volodymyr, then head of the UOC(KP), Pravoslavnyi visnyk, 1993, pp. 10–11. 66. Molchanov, Political Culture and National Identity in Russian–Ukrainian Relations. 67. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity, London, 1991, p. 14.

4 Separatist States and Post-Soviet Conflicts Dov Lynch

Introduction Even the most casual glance at a map of the world provides the onlooker with a satisfying sense of completion: the globe has been divided up into legally equal sovereign states, and all territories and peoples fall under the jurisdiction of one or another of these units. The world is a complete matrix of colours and lines that leaves nothing to chance. The blank spots have been filled in. The map of the former Soviet Union conjures a similar satisfaction. Fifteen new states emerged from the Soviet collapse. All of the territory has been divided up. Formal jurisdiction has been claimed across all of the post-Soviet space. At least, so it seems. In late November 2000, the city of Tiraspol, formally under the jurisdiction of the Republic of Moldova, held an unusual summit.1 The summit brought together the Foreign Ministers of the four separatist regions that have declared independent statehood in the former Soviet Union: the Pridnestrovyan Moldovan Republic (PMR) inside Moldovan borders, the Republic of South Ossetia and the Republic of Abkhazia within Georgian borders, and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic inside Azerbaijan.2 The separatist foreign ministers agreed to create a permanent forum called the ‘Conference of Foreign Ministers’ to coordinate their activities. There had been similar meetings between the separatists in the early 1990s, none of which had much impact on the conflicts. This summit also is unlikely to have dramatic effect. However, it performed an important service in highlighting an enduring and forgotten reality of security in the post-Soviet space ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition to the 15 successor states that emerged in 1992, four other states exist that are unrecognized. These separatist states are not found on any map of the former Soviet Union. 61

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They are completely isolated in international relations, and they all face deep internal problems and existential external threats. If ever they are discussed, the separatist areas are often dismissed as criminal strips of no-man’s-land, or as the ‘puppets’ of external states. There has been much analysis devoted to individual cases of conflict in the former Soviet Union. However, there has been no comparative study of the separatist states.3 A critical gap has emerged in our understanding of security developments in the former Soviet Union. Without a clear grasp of the nature of these separatist states, attempts to resolve the conflicts in Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan have been reactive and largely ineffective. Ceasefire agreements have been reached in all of the separatist areas. Internationally led negotiations have been underway in all of them since the early 1990s. However, there has been no progress towards conflict settlement. From these circumstances, four de facto states have emerged.4 These de facto states are the main reason for the absence of progress towards settlement. This chapter will examine the role played by the de facto states in blocking conflict settlement. The argument is divided into three parts. As a foil to the argument, the chapter will start with a brief discussion of the reasons for progress towards the settlement of the Tajik civil war. This is a unique case of conflict settlement, which throws revealing light on the peculiar nature of the conflicts in Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The second part will seek to define briefly the de facto state. The third part of the chapter will examine the forces that have driven the de facto states. The discussion will focus on the logic that underpins the separatist states at the internal and external levels.

The Tajik foil: why has the civil war ended? The Tajik civil war provoked many statements about the threat it posed to regional stability.5 The civil war did have devastating results, with an estimated 20 000 to 40 000 victims, 600 000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), and at least 100 000 refugees.6 However, there has not been a wave of Islamic fundamentalism sweeping through to Tatarstan in the Russian Federation. Tajikistan’s Central Asian neighbours have not collapsed in the flames of conflict spillover. A peace process has advanced following the General Agreement of June 1997 and the creation of the Commission for National Reconciliation. IDPs, as well as some 50 000 refugees in northern Afghanistan, have resettled in Tajikistan with the support of the United Nations (UN) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Though flawed, new presidential and parliamentary

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elections occurred in November 1999 and February 2000. Islamic figures of the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) were appointed to high-level posts in the government leading to formal power-sharing with the conservative regime under President Immomali Rakhmonov. The progress towards conflict settlement in Tajikistan is unique. The reasons for this success merit close attention as they provide a foil for understanding the obstacles to settlement in Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Concepts of state weakness are helpful for understanding the reasons for progress in Tajikistan. A brief detour into political theory is revealing for the study of all post-Soviet conflicts. The literature on state weakness falls broadly into two categories. A first approach to state weakness focuses upon the institutions and individuals that make up the state, as well as the capacities of state agencies.7 According to Joel S. Migdal, state strength is weighed in terms of a state’s capacity to ‘penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract resources and appropriate or use resources in determined ways’.8 In this view, weakness is a syndrome, which is characterized by corruption, the collapse of a state’s coercive power, the rise of ‘strongmen’ and the segmentation of the political community into several ‘publics’. The socioeconomic pressures on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic had risen since the 1970s, with demographic changes placing increasing demands on limited resources. These were exacerbated in the uncertain political situation of the late 1980s in the Soviet Union. This institutional perspective on state weakness is helpful for understanding the causes behind the Tajik civil war. However, it is not fully satisfactory. The Tajik state and its institutions have remained desperately weak. Why has settlement been possible? A second approach has interpreted state strength in more than politicalinstitutional terms. Barry Buzan stressed the importance of the ‘idea’ of the state in terms of people’s perceptions of its nature and legitimacy.9 If it is widely held, this ‘idea’ may act as an organic binder that links the state and its parts with coherence, as well as mechanisms to allow for popular subordination to its authority. However, without such an ‘idea’, and in circumstances of institutional weakness, Buzan saw the possibility of the ‘disintegration of the state as a political unit’.10 With weak institutional structures, the civil war was a contest over power in the new state. By 1996, the fundamental dispute over the ‘idea’ of Tajikistan had receded. The Tajik opposition sought a share of power in Dushanbe, and a weakened President Rakhmonov recognized the need to compromise. The absence of conflict over the fundamental ‘idea’ of Tajikistan, its territory, Tajik boundaries and citizens, created

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enough common ground between the parties for progress in the peace process. This conflict also lacked the ethno-political dimension that has been fundamental to the conflicts in Russia, Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan.11 In contrast, the conflicts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transdniestria, Chechnia and Nagorno-Karabakh reflect conflicts over the domain and scope of the territory of the new states of Georgia, Moldova, Russia and Azerbaijan (otherwise referred to as the metropolitan states). The aim of the separatist groups is not to capture power in the capitals of the metropolitan states, or to renegotiate the division of state powers within a given territory. Their objective is to exit the metropolitan state. At the least, the aim is to build new relations with it on an inter-state level as equal units. The linkage of ethnicity with territory has made the objectives of these separatist areas state-orientated – nothing less than state sovereignty will suffice for their authorities. This absolute disagreement about the ‘idea’ behind the new states of Russia, Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan has made conflict resolution unattainable on the lines set by settlement of the Tajik civil war. In this light, it may be worth viewing these not as civil wars but inter-state wars.

Defining the de facto state Before proceeding, it is worth defining the notion of a de facto state. In his theoretical examination of this phenomenon, Scott Pegg defined them as follows: A de facto state exists where there is an organized political leadership, which has risen to power through some degree of indigenous capacity; receives popular support; and has achieved sufficient capacity to provide governmental services to a given population in a specific territorial area, over which effective control is maintained for a significant period of time. The de facto state views itself as capable of entering into relations with other states and it seeks full constitutional independence and widespread international recognition as a sovereign state.12 In order to understand the de facto state, several points must be made. First, Pegg’s definition is based on a distinction between empirical and judicial notions of statehood. The de facto state is not recognized by other states or the international community. As a result, it has no judicial status in the international arena.

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However, it may have an empirically defined claim to statehood. The classical definition of an entity that may be regarded as a sovereign state was set forth in the Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States, 1933. The Montevideo criteria are that an entity have: (1) a permanent population; (2) a defined territory; (3) a government; and (4) the capacity to enter into relations with other states. The de facto states fulfill the first three of these criteria, and claim to be able to pursue the fourth. However, the empirical qualifications of the de facto state cannot make it legal or legitimate in international society. As Pegg argued, it is ‘illegitimate no matter how effective it is’.13 Second, it is necessary to distinguish between internal and external sovereignty. Internal sovereignty refers to the supreme authority of a body within a given territory.14 External sovereignty, on the other hand, may be defined as ‘being constitutionally apart, of not being contained, however loosely, within a wider constitutional scheme’.15 The de facto state claims both of these; that is, to be sovereign over its self-defined territory and people, and to be constitutionally independent of any other state. The key difference for the de facto state resides in its nonrecognition. This status prevents it from enjoying membership of the exclusive and all-encompassing club of states – the de facto state does not have recognized external sovereignty.

The logic driving Eurasian de facto states There are two pieces of conventional wisdom that require rethinking. First, most discussions focus on external factors as key obstacles to settlement. On the ground, the parties themselves are the first to blame external forces for everything – from creating the conflict to holding off its resolution. Vasily Sturza, the Moldovan Presidential Envoy to the negotiations with the PMR, made the point bluntly in July 2000: ‘The resolution of the conflict depends exclusively on the Russian Federation.’16 Clearly, Russian forces did play a role in the initial phases of these conflicts, and ambiguity in Russian policy has done nothing to help resolve them since. External factors have been, and continue to be, critically important inhibitors. However, the balance of analysis needs to be redressed. This chapter will concentrate first on the internal forces that inhibit conflict settlement. The political, military and economic dimensions are more essential obstacles to settlement. These internal drivers combine with external forces to create a sustained status quo. The second piece of conventional wisdom concerns the oft-repeated view that these are frozen conflicts. They are not frozen. On the contrary,

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events have developed dynamically in the separatist states and in the conflict zones. The situation on the ground in 2002 is very different from the context that gave rise to these conflicts in the late 1980s. The following analysis will examine the main dimensions of the new reality that has emerged. An understanding of the current situation, and the logic sustaining it, is fundamental for thinking about ways to move beyond the current impasse. Any settlement will have to be based on the reality of 2002, and not on that of 1992. Internal drivers There are three internal factors driving the continuing existence of the de facto states. Absolute sovereignty The first factor resides in the insistence by the authorities of the de facto states on absolute sovereignty. The amalgam of territory, population and government in these areas has produced something that is greater than the sum of these parts – a deeply felt belief in sovereignty. Vladimir Bodnar, the Chair of the Security Committee of the Parliament of PMR, stated: ‘What defines a state? First, institutions. Second, a territory. Third, a population. Fourth, an economy and a financial system. We have all of these!’17 The de facto states draw on two legal sources of legitimacy to justify their claim to statehood and two historical/moral sources. First, the authorities adhere to an empirical definition of sovereignty on the lines of the 1933 Montevideo Convention. They maintain that they fulfil all the conditions for being considered to have positive sovereignty. Drawing on Pegg’s definition, all of the de facto states have a system of organized political leadership, which has received popular support, provides basic governmental services to a given population over a specific territory, over which effective control is maintained for a significant period of time. There are similarities between them at this level. They all maintain presidential systems and have very poorly developed party structures. In all of them, while there may be significant political differences, politics is far from pluralistic. In general, politics is deeply personalized, and the mechanics of the decision-making process are opaque and highly controlled. The post-Soviet cases also show significant variation. The level of governmental service is vastly different from one to another. At an extreme, the Abkhaz government maintains the daily running of legislative, executive and judicial institutions, but performs very few services for its

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population. The UN and international non-governmental organizations, such as Accion Contra la Hambre, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and Médecins Sans Frontieres, have become the pillars of social security in Abkhazia. Moreover, the state is unable to provide for law and order across its claimed territory. The war between Abkhazia and Georgia in 1992–94 occurred solely on Abkhaz territory, and it left the area devastated, its infrastructure destroyed and now crumbling, and its population marked by a vicious war of looting and plunder. By contrast, the PMR and Nagorno-Karabakh are much stronger. In both of them, a sense of state presence in people’s lives is palpable. The degree of state control over territory is also variable. Abkhazia maintains very weak control over its territory. The PMR and Nagorno-Karabakh are much stronger in this respect, with clear armed force structures, police agencies, border troops and customs. Moreover, the separatist leaders adhere to the declaratory approach for understanding the recognition of an entity as a state by other states.18 These governments maintain that recognition does not create a state, but reflects an existing reality. In the declaratory approach, the attribution of statehood arises from the empirical existence of sovereignty, and not juridical recognition of its creation by other states. As a result, formal recognition is seen as secondary for these governments. The second source of legitimacy claimed by the de facto states draws on the right of self-determination. On 25 July 2000, Sokrat Jinjolia, the Chairman of the Abkhaz Parliament stated: ‘We are independent. We have passed an act of independence. Non-recognition does not matter.’19 All of the de facto states have cloaked their claims to independence on the basis of popular elections/referendums and legislative acts to this effect. The de facto states also have approved new constitutions which enshrine legally what are seen as popular/democratic resolutions on independence and sovereignty. For example, the Abkhaz Constitution, approved in a referendum in November 1994, states that the Republic of Abkhazia is a ‘sovereign democratic state based on law, which historically has become established by the rights of nations to self-determination’. Popular will is held up as a key pillar of legitimacy. Third, the state-building projects in the separatist areas are based on the position that the current states represent but the latest phase in a long historical tradition. The Abkhaz Foreign Minister, Sergei Shamba, placed great stress on this: ‘Abkhazia has a thousand year history of statehood since the formation in the 8th century of the Kingdom of Abkhazia. Even within the framework of empires, Abkhazia kept this history of stateness. No matter the form, Abkhaz statehood remained intact.’20

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Sovereignty here is seen as an idea that does not need necessarily an institutional form. The primordialist rhetoric of the de facto states strengthens their claims to absolute sovereignty: any compromise would be seen an injustice in the present and a violation of the very movement of history. Finally, as stated by Grigory Maracutsa, ‘Pridnestrovye (PMR) is a sovereign and independent state because the Republic of Moldova attempted to resolve the conflict through the use of force. Seven hundred were killed and three thousand wounded from this act of aggression.’21 All of the separatist authorities insist on an inherent moral entitlement to self-determination when faced with ‘alien’ and ‘imposed’ rule. The insistence on absolute sovereignty by the de facto states has several effects. First, it means that conflict settlement will be difficult to reach through federal power-sharing. It is often assumed in Chis¸inau ˘, Tbilisi, Baku, as well as European capitals, that the ‘statehood’ of these entities is a resource that they will be willing to bargain away once the circumstances are propitious. Many peace proposals put forward over the last decade have been based on notions of federal power-sharing. The assumption underlying many of these proposals is that sovereignty is the maximal, and thus negotiable, aim of the break-away areas, and that their minimal and non-negotiable objective resides at some lower form of autonomy. In fact, sovereignty is non-negotiable for the de facto states. They may be willing to negotiate a new relationship with the metropolitan states, but not one based on a federation. At most, the selfdeclared states will accept confederal ties with the metropolitan state. A confederation has elements of power-sharing, but these do not infringe on the internal sovereignty of its constituent subjects. All of these de facto states insist on developing voluntary and equal ties with their former rulers. In their view, co-operation could be deep in certain areas, such as trade, customs and communications, but it would not infringe on their basic sovereignty, whose destiny will remain integral. In the negotiations that have occurred in all of these conflicts, the separatist areas have supported the proposals put forward for ‘common statehood’ with the metropolitan state that draw on confederal elements. However, Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan have rejected confederal proposals as threats to their own sovereignty. Moreover, the metropolitan capitals are reluctant to abandon one of their strongest weapons with regard to their separatist regions: that is, withholding formal recognition of their existence. Non-recognition relegates the self-declared states to continued pariah status in international relations. It also ensures that the metropolitan state may consider using all means at its disposal, including force,

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to restore its territorial integrity at some point in the future. The Russian use of force against Chechnia despite the peace agreement struck in 1997 is a case in point. The second effect stemming from the insistence on absolute sovereignty concerns IDPs and refugees in the conflicts in Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Absolute internal sovereignty means that the de facto states will not welcome back the IDPs who fled during the wars. Demography resides at the heart of the conflicts. Before the war, the Georgian population represented the overwhelming majority of inhabitants of the Abkhaz region. At the last census of 1989, the Abkhaz represented 17.8 per cent of the population of Abkhazia (the total was 525 000) with 95 840 registered, with the Georgian population measured at 230 523. The Georgian population in Abkhazia did not flee their homes as an indirect consequence of the war. This population was a target of the conflict. One of the driving forces behind the Abkhaz was a fear of the extinction of Abkhaz culture, and eventually the Abkhaz people. ‘Citizenship’ of the self-declared Abkhaz state cannot be allowed to include the displaced Georgian population, as this would leave the Abkhaz as a small minority once again in their own region. The tight link between ethnicity and land in these conflicts makes the return of refugees and IDPs difficult to consider for the de facto state. Nagorno-Karabakh is different. Over 80 per cent of the 600 000 Azerbaijani IDPs lived in the seven districts of Azerbaijani territory that are occupied by Karabakh forces but are not inside Nagorno-Karabakh itself. These lands were occupied in 1993–94 to provide a security buffer, and as bargaining chips in the peace process. The separatist Armenian state could countenance the return of Azerbaijani IDPs to at least six of these districts (not Lachin, which is the main link to Armenia). However, the repatriation of the Azerbaijani population to towns and areas inside Karabakh itself, such as the town of Shusha that towers above Stepanakert, is considered impossible by the Armenian authorities. The blanket right to return of all IDPs and refugees to their previous homes is unlikely to be a part of a settlement package in these cases, although partial returns may be. Fear: source and resource Insecurity represents another internal force driving these states. Behind all the rhetoric of sovereignty, self-determination and justice, there reside calculations of power that have led the separatist authorities to seek security based on force alone. Fear was the factor that gave rise to the conflicts at the outset. In late March 1992, the first Moldovan President Mircea Snegur declared a state

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of emergency, which set Moldova and the PMR on the path towards larger-scale clashes than any since late 1990. The new Moldova, as it was then emerging, seemed to be a Romanianizing state, in which the traditionally more Slavic and more Russophone elites on the left bank would be sidelined. Fear was also a driving force behind the conflicts in Georgia and Azerbaijan. In August 1992, Georgian guardsmen seized the Abkhaz capital. Similarly, in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian population lived in a vulnerable enclave embedded in Azerbaijan. Insecurity has remained a defining condition of life since the end of the wars in each de facto state. The cease-fires reached in Moldova (1992), Georgia (South Ossetia in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1994) and Azerbaijan (1994) have frozen a status quo reached on the battlefield. Historically, these peoples have rarely, if ever, won wars. Victory has left them bewildered. On the one hand, victory is a source of strength. Naira Melkoumian, the Nagorno-Karabakh Foreign Minister, stated: ‘After a history of tragedy, we have won a war at last!’22 As a result, the authorities are determined at all cost to retain the fruits of victory. During the armed phases of the conflicts, the strategies of the de facto states remain total, because in their view, the threat posed by the metropolitan states is itself total. Naira Melkoumian argued: ‘History gave Armenia so little territory. We cannot make any concessions that would threaten Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.’23 At the same time, the separatist authorities profoundly distrust victory. They are all aware that they have won a battle and not the war. The example of renewed armed conflict in Chechnia has been edifying in this respect. The distrust of victory has led them to elevate self-defense over all other policy areas. None of the de facto states are military states. However, all of them are devoted to the military. Fear is an instrument also, that is wielded by the separatist authorities in state-building. Since the early 1990s, the metropolitan states have started to move away from exclusive state-building projects and more moderate politicians have led the movement towards state consolidation. By contrast, in the de facto states there has been very little shift away from the type of political discourse that was prevalent in the early 1990s. Public rhetoric has remained largely defined by dichotomies of ‘us/them’. The ‘other’ – the former central authorities – is used to justify the very existence of the de facto state. The existential challenge posed by the former central power, whether it is accurate or not, is a powerful glue binding the residual populations of these areas together into some kind of cohesive whole. The discourse of insecurity also makes powersharing very difficult to accept, as it has totalized the conflicts.24

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Two conclusions flow from the condition and exploitation of insecurity. First, these are racketeer states. As defined by Charles Tilly, ‘some-one who produces the danger and, at a price the shield against it, is a racketeer’.25 This is not to say that the metropolitan states do not pose a real threat. However, the emphasis placed on the metropolitan threat goes beyond a rational assessment of needs and requirements. The PMR is a case in point. Any objective assessment of the threat posed by Moldova to the PMR would conclude that it is almost nil, in terms of capabilities and intentions. However, the PMR Minister of Security runs a number of social organizations and newspapers that inflate the Moldovan threat. As a result, the extensive role played by the Security Ministry in all aspects of political and economic life in the PMR may appear justified. This logic affects more than the Ministry of Security. The PMR itself depends on the threat posed by Moldova and the West, against which the self-declared state proposes to defend the population on the left bank of the Dnestr River. An existential threat, which does not exist, has become a fundamental pillar justifying the existence of the de facto state – in essence, this is racketeering. The racketeering dimension also affects civil–military relations. In Nagorno-Karabakh, the racketeering tendency made the former Defense Minister, Samvel Babayan, the most powerful economic and political actor until March 2000 when he was arrested for the attempted assassination of the Nagorno-Karabakh president. The president and government have sought since then to reduce the weight of the military in Karabakh politics. In an interview in August 2000, Prime Minister A. Danielyan stated: ‘The armed forces should not be distinct or separated from the government – not a force of its own […] All must obey the law. The armed forces hold the line. That is all.’26 At the least, in Abkhazia and the PMR, the military and security agencies dominate security policymaking. At the most, in Nagorno-Karabakh, the military is dominant in politics. The second conclusion is that the self-declared states have no faith in the rule of law as a means to guarantee their security. Military power is seen as the only means by which to deter the metropolitan state. The distrust of law is a legacy of the Soviet Union where politics were founded on the rule by law and not of law. In the early 1990s the separatist regions experienced how new laws enacted in the metropolitan capitals (constitutions, declarations, resolutions, and so on) were used as weapons against them. As noted by Svante Cornell, ‘there is no confidence (in these separatist areas) in the implementation of the basic principle of international law, Pacta sund servanda’.27

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This distrust has implications on the nature of any agreed future relationship between the de facto and metropolitan state. Again, it is difficult to imagine that the self-declared authorities will agree to federation relations, where, by definition, ties between federal subjects and the federal centre are based on the transformation of fundamental political questions into legal questions.28 Any settlement of these conflicts must consider at its heart the requirements of hard deterrence and security in order for the de facto states to be willing to compromise on the victories they have already achieved on the battlefields. Subsistence syndromes The de facto states are failing. They have the institutional fixtures of statehood, but they are not able to provide for its substance. The wars of the early 1990s devastated their economies and exacerbated the difficulties that resulted from the Soviet collapse. Since the cease-fires, little progress has occurred towards economic reform. The enduring threat of war has combined with economic mismanagement to result in hyperinflation, demonetized economies, the collapse of the social services, and the extensive criminalization of economic activities. These problems have been exacerbated by the legal limbo in which all of these de facto states exist. In the cases of Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, economic blockades by Azerbaijan and Georgia are a means of coercion against the separatist areas with two aims: first, to compel them to compromise in the negotiations; and second, to ensure that the de facto state does not prosper while the negotiations are underway. The economic lever has also been raised as a potentially positive tool by the international community to encourage the de facto states to compromise through the promise of eventual assistance for reconstruction. On both accounts, the economic tool plays a far less important role than is assumed. The de facto states are driven first and foremost by political and not economic imperatives. The severe economic difficulties that are common to all of them have not compelled them to compromise. On the contrary, economic isolation has only strengthened subsistence syndromes in which the authorities are determined to survive at all costs, and have developed structures which are appropriate for this purpose. The subsistence syndromes, which are based on a combination of firm political determination, deep economic weakness and extensive criminalization, are a key part of the internal logic sustaining the de facto states. All of these states have dwindling and aging populations. Many of those who could do so have fled, mainly to Russia. Much of the remaining

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populations represent the weak and the vulnerable, and those who have nowhere else to go. The residual populations have become deeply impoverished. However, it is no accident that the separatist states are not situated near the Arctic Circle – sunny and favourable climates, beneficial geographical positions with access to the Black Sea and important rivers, and fertile lands have been key to their continuing survival, allowing people to retreat into difficult but sustainable subsistence strategies. Inside the de facto states, political stability is founded on corrupt corporatism. The authorities have sought to neutralize potential internal threats by co-opting them. In these economies, shadowy figures often play government-supported monopolistic roles. In the PMR, the financial– industrial group ‘Sheriff’ runs important sectors of the separatist economy, including several cable television stations, the only telephone communications company in the region (InterDnestrCom – which follows the U.S. Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standard as opposed to Moldova’s use of the European Groupe Systemes Mobiles (GSM) standard), a weekly newspaper called Delo, a Western-standard supermarket chain, and a series of petrol stations. In exchange, the Sheriff Group has performed social functions for the separatist state, including the construction of a new cathedral called ‘Christ’s Rebirth’ in Tiraspol. The mingling of criminal and official structures is dramatic in the PMR, where a ruthless form of monopolistic state capitalism has been created in a land where statues of Lenin remain standing in the streets and parks.29 The armed forces are always very well protected in the separatist states. In Nagorno-Karabakh, the military became the most prominent political/economic actor under the former Defence Minister Samvel Babayan. Babayan was able to benefit from his position to secure a monopoly over the cigarette and petrol trade. Babayan was also deeply involved in reconstruction of the Karabakh infrastructure. A most famous case of abuse is known mockingly as the ‘Babayan Underpass’ in Stepanakert. This was a major underpass that took years to build by military-related contractors in a state where there are very few cars, and traffic is not a problem. Many groups inside and outside the de facto states profit from the status quo. Crime and illegal economic activities have come to reside at the heart of these conflicts. These activities include large-scale cigarette and alcohol smuggling from the PMR to Moldova to avoid sales taxes. For Moldova, such smuggling has become a ‘major, major problem’, with millions of dollars lost in state revenue.30 Clearly, important forces in

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Moldova profit from this situation. For example, the PMR steelworks at Rybnitsa, which is one of the mainstays of PMR independence, is not a full cycle factory: 50 per cent of its scrap metals are provided by Moldova. The factory exports steel to world markets, mainly the United States, with Moldovan customs stamps, provided to the PMR by Chis¸inau ˘ in February 1996. A number of figures in the Moldovan government profit greatly from this very lucrative trade. Russian groups have also invested in the PMR. Most notably, the Russian-owned Itera gas provider is the majority owner of the Rybnitsa steelworks. Similarly, South Ossetia has become a major channel for smuggled goods to and from Georgia and Russia (including most of the flour and grain sold in Georgia). Crime mingles with geopolitics in these conflicts in an unsettling manner. Russian peacekeeping troops have become involved in smuggling activities across the front lines in Georgia and Moldova. In the Gali District of Abkhazia, crime and smuggling have become a way of life for the vulnerable Georgians who have returned, the Georgian paramilitary groups that are active there, and the peacekeeping troops. The trade in hazelnuts and citrus fruits, and also petrol from the Russian Federation, has blurred the lines between ethnic groups in the conflict, uniting them all in the search for profit. It is clear that enough people, inside and outside the de facto states, profit enough from their existence to make the status quo durable. A perverted and weak, but workable, incentive structure has emerged over the last decade that sustains the separatist areas. External drivers These internal forces combine with three groups of external forces to sustain the de facto states. The role of the metropolitan states Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan themselves play important roles in sustaining the status quo. This is not to blame them for the impasse, but it is important to recognize their part more clearly. Their role is both indirect and direct. At the indirect level, Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan have not become magnets, which might be sufficiently attractive to compel the separatist areas to compromise in order to benefit from the restoration of political and economic relations. At the economic level, the authorities of the de facto states believe that the economic situation in Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan is just as bad as theirs, if not worse.

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More fundamentally, the nature of politics in the former centres has reinforced the de facto states’ determination. Radical nationalist parties continue to exist, providing ammunition for the separatist authorities to justify the possibility of renewed war. Since the war, the Georgian government has subsidized structures of government for ‘Abkhazia in exile’. Tbilisi supports an Executive Council of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, which has 25 delegates and a supreme presidium. The ethnically Georgian government in exile maintains 11 ministries, 13 state committees, nine general offices and five inspectorates. This ponderous and expensive government in exile performs an important service for President Eduard Shevardnadze in channeling the political force of the 250 000 strong IDP population. After all, Shevardnadze has survived two very close assassination attempts, and new attempts cannot be ruled out. Government support to these structures is a control valve in domestic politics. However, the existence of Abkhazia-in-exile reinforces the separatist view that Tbilisi has not recognized their position as having any legitimacy, and still sees them as a ‘fifth column’ for the return of the Russian empire. In addition, the activities of Georgian ‘partisan’ groups inside Abkhazia has strengthened Abkhaz views that Tbilisi seeks to undermine Abkhazia by force. The protection of human rights has remained problematic in the metropolitan states. In Azerbaijan, in particular, the treatment of national minorities and ordinary citizens has been blemished by strong-arm tactics of the police and security forces. At the indirect level, therefore, not enough change has occurred in the politics and economics in the metropolitan states to convince the separatist authorities to seek renewed ties through compromise. In the striking words of Paata Zakareishvili, a moderate Georgian political commentator: ‘What has Georgia done to make Georgia more attractive to Abkhazia? Georgia is hardly attractive to Georgians.’31 Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan also play a direct role in sustaining the status quo. On the economic level, the metropolitan states face a dilemma. A first option they face is to develop economic ties with the separatist area, as Moldova has done. But, while certain groups in Moldova have profited from this co-operation, it has done nothing to decrease the number of PMR customs and border posts illegally deployed in the Security Zone along the Dnestr River. Nor has it increased the degree of trust between the two parties. Quite the contrary, co-operation has been exploited by the separatist authorities to strengthen their independence. The other option available is to blockade the separatist area, as

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has been done by Georgia and Azerbaijan. These blockades have affected deeply the economic development of the separatist states. However, every official and academic analysis of these blockades has highlighted a counter-productive effect. They have served only to entrench the intractability of the de facto authorities, and pushed them to develop subsistence economies. In their economic policies, both paths adopted by the metropolitan states have worked to strengthen the de facto states. At the direct level, the existence of de facto states inside the metropolitan borders is not entirely undesirable – the situation could be worse for Chis¸inau ˘, Tbilisi and Baku if these states were recognized by the international community. The metropolitan states are not compelled to recognize the defeat they suffered in the wars of the early 1990s. The open recognition of defeat, and the loss of territory, would challenge political stability and threaten the current leadership. Particularly in Georgia and Azerbaijan, there exist strong opposition forces, which would readily seize such an opportunity to attack compromise as ‘defeatist’. Put bluntly, the status quo allows the Georgian and Azerbaijani authorities to avoid grasping the nettle of defeat. Moreover, the status quo has allowed Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan to focus on domestic areas that are perceived to be more vital for their future; that is, attracting foreign direct investment, developing strategic areas of their economies, and pursuing economic reform. The metropolitan states accepted the ceasefires in the early 1990s to gain time. The status quo is seen as a window of opportunity in which to gain external sources of support, while the separatist area is blockaded and undermined. The Russian role As the former imperial centre, Russia has played a key role in these conflicts. Russian intervention was important in the outbreak and then freezing of the conflicts in Moldova and Georgia. Russian peacekeeping forces are now deployed on what have become de facto borders inside these states. Since the end of the wars, Russian policy towards these conflicts has retained enough ambiguity to reinforce the status quo. The first level of Russian engagement lays with peacekeeping operations. The deployment of Russian forces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and in the PMR between June 1992 and May 1994 reflected Russia’s re-engagement throughout the former Soviet Union after an initial period of neglect.32 At this point, Russian operations were deployed to re-establish Russian hegemony over these states. In Moldova and Georgia, Russia sought to compel Chis¸inau ˘ and Tbilisi to accede to Russian security demands in the shape of forward basing rights, military co-operation,

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and border co-operation. Support to the separatist movements played a critical role in the Russian strategy. Russian policies changed after 1996. After the appointment of Evgenii Primakov as Foreign Minister in 1996, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs re-emerged as the leading decision-making agency towards these conflicts. The relative downscaling of the Ministry of Defense at that point allowed room to the Foreign Ministry to seek a balance between the military and political aspects of Russian policy. The exacerbation of Russia’s economic and financial situation, particularly after August 1998, reinforced a retrenchment of Russian peacekeeping positions. Despite the change, Russian operations continue to sustain the status quo in these conflicts. The fact that Russian peacekeeping forces played a role in the conflicts, supporting either one or the other side, remains at the forefront of the security calculations of the conflicting parties. As a result, the operations have not promoted trust between the parties, but only reinforced a prevailing sense of distrust. The Moldovan government’s confidence in the security guarantee provided by the peacekeeping forces has been undermined by Russia’s permissive attitude towards the PMR construction of border posts in violation of the peacekeeping agreement. In Georgia, any trust that Tbilisi might have had in the peacekeeping operation has been destroyed by its passive approach to providing security to the returning IDPs in Gali. Put bluntly, Russian peacekeeping troops guard the borders separating the parties, thereby entrenching the separatist state. Russia’s position has reinforced the metropolitan state’s propensity to disregard the legitimacy of the separatists – they are seen as the ‘fifth column’ of an aggressive external power. In October 1999, at the OSCE summit in Istanbul, Russian President Putin agreed to withdraw Russian bases from Moldova and Georgia. Under Putin, Moscow has far from abandoned its strategic interests in the former Soviet Union. Despite the OSCE agreement, Russia is intent on maintaining a small military presence in Moldova and Georgia. All of the conflicting parties have adopted positions to place themselves so as to benefit most from a coincidence of their own interests with Russian strategy. Russian peacekeeping operations, therefore, have only increased the distrust between the parties in Moldova and Georgia and entrenched the status quo through their protection of the de facto state. In the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, where no peacekeeping forces were deployed, extensive Russian military support to its strategic ally, Armenia, has had similar effects. Russian engagement has also been political and economic. At the political level, radical nationalist forces in the Duma have pledged support

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to the de facto states on numerous occasions, through resolutions and public debates. The Duma has little impact on the course of Russian foreign policy. However, its activities are followed closely in the capitals of the de facto states, and actively drawn upon in their own rhetoric as sources of support. This is not a negligible factor strengthening their determination, as they hold out for an eventual victory of radical forces in Russian politics. At the economic level, the Russian government has been liberal in allowing various forms of economic co-operation with the de facto states. In the PMR, the Russian Central Bank played a direct role in supporting the separatist budget in 1992. Since then, this support has stopped. Nonetheless, Moscow has not prevented the numerous economic and trade agreements that have been struck between the de facto states and subjects of the Russian Federation. In December 2000, Russia established a visa regime on the Russian–Georgian border, which made the crossing prohibitive for Georgians. Much to Tbilisi’s dismay, the regime was not applied to Russian borders with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are legally Georgian. Abkhazia exists thanks to its position on the Black Sea, and mainly because of its border with Russia. There is furious trade across the border. Abkhazia also remains a part of the ruble zone. Russian support, while far less than is assumed in Tbilisi, is just enough to sustain the existence of Abkhazia. Other sources: state, sub-state and supra-state actors The separatist areas depend on other sources of external support for their existence. In Karabakh, independence is really a sleight of hand, which barely covers the reality that it is a region of Armenia. Karabakh’s independence allows the new Armenian state to avoid the stigma of aggression, despite the fact that Armenian troops fought in the war between 1991 and 1994 and continue to man the Line of Contact between Karabakh and Azerbaijan. Moreover, every year, Armenia provides an ‘inter-state loan’ to Karabakh that covers 75–80 per cent of its needs. The Karabakh de facto state is very different from Abkhazia and PMR, which do not have such a reliable and dedicated patron. Kinship groups are another source of external support. NagornoKarabakh presents a unique case again. Nagorno-Karabakh has pride of place in the minds and hearts of the Armenian diaspora, and has been the focus of intensive assistance. As a separatist area, Karabakh has been terra incognita for most international organizations. Thus, diaspora support was crucial in the early 1990s in allowing Karabakh to survive the difficulties of the war. It is difficult to overestimate the role this support

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has played in creating Karabakh in material terms, as well as a pressure valve displacing any urgency for compromise with Azerbaijan. In the PMR, Cossack groups from the Don and Kuban played an important role in the clashes that occurred in 1992. The Cossacks remain a pillar of support for the separatist regime. In general, the PMR has benefited from a degree of support from a range of Slavic groups, including radical forces in Russia, and also ordinary Russians seeking a retirement place. The Slavic heart of the PMR is personified in its president, Igor Smirnov. Smirnov retains a Russian passport and votes in all Russian elections. In Abkhazia, support from ethnically related peoples in the North Caucasus was crucial in the war. The support of Basaev and his Chechen group to the Abkhaz is well known. Also, it is estimated that a few hundred Turkish-Abkhaz returned to Abkhazia and play a part in trade with Turkey. However, support has not been provided on any scale similar to Nagorno-Karabakh. Finally, international humanitarian organizations also strengthen the status quo. Particularly in the case of Abkhazia, such organizations are pillars of the separatist state. A Needs Assessment study conducted by the UN Development Programme in Abkhazia in February 1998 concluded: ‘A large proportion of the population receives assistance either directly or indirectly at a cost of almost 17.5 million U.S. dollars in 1997.’ Since 1997, the levels of international support have remained at a comparable level, and the proportion of Abkhaz dependent on international humanitarian aid has if anything increased. International aid is several times larger than the budget of the break away state. With regard to Nagorno-Karabakh, the levels of international humanitarian support are also not negligible. The aid provided by the US government through Save the Children has averaged around 15 million US dollars a year. The assistance policies of other international organizations, such as the European Union, also work to entrench the current situation. For example, the EU has committed 5 million European Community Currency (ECU) to the rehabilitation of the Inguri Dam, which is the primary source of electricity generation for Abkhazia and western Georgia.

Conclusions The de facto states have survived since the Soviet collapse, and they seem entrenched to last another ten years. Their claim to statehood carries a logic that is difficult to overcome now that it has been launched. As the anthropologist Ann Maria Alonso noted: ‘Baptized with a name,

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space becomes national property, a sovereign patrimony fusing place, property and heritage, whose perpetuation is secured by the state.’33 In their own view, the de facto states have been playing already in the game of states for ten years. The attributes of statehood, internal sovereignty and empirical statehood, are no longer negotiable in practice. These states will hold out as long as they possibly can. In their perspective, the status quo plays in their favour. Non-recognition and isolation are prices that they are willing to pay. The Abkhaz Defense Minister told me in July 2000: ‘How long will we have to wait? [for recognition] Ten, 20, 30 years? Let it be, we will wait.’34 On similar lines, the Prime Minister of Nagorno-Karabakh, Anushavan Danielyan, stated: ‘Non-recognition does not affect Nagorno-Karabakh’s existence, or its status as an independent state […] Nagorno-Karabakh is the same as Azerbaijan, but it is just not recognized!’35 The de facto states are playing the long game, in which not losing means winning. Any settlement will have to be based on the reality of the self-declared states. These conflicts are fundamentally different to the Tajik civil war. The absence of a sense of shared destiny, and common state ‘idea’, makes power-sharing inappropriate. The initial causes for the conflicts are less important now than this fundamental reality. The de facto states are driven by interweaving internal and external forces that have sustained them for over a decade. Since the early 1990s, the international community, the metropolitan state and international organizations have applied a number of policies, ranging from outright hostility to limited engagement of the de facto states. The result has been a mixed and contradictory bag of approaches with little coherence and no strategy. In order to move towards conflict settlement the international community faces the task of creating a new logic on the ground that addresses the logic driving the self-declared states.36 The conflicts will not resolve themselves, and the de facto states will not disappear of their own volition. Ten years after the Soviet collapse, the separatist states have become deeply embedded, and they are likely to remain a feature of the post-Soviet space.

Notes and references 1. Reported in Jamestown Monitor, 6(224), 1 December 2000. 2. Henceforth, these will be referred to as PMR, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. 3. An exception is Edward Walker, ‘No Peace, No War in the Caucasus: Secessionist Conflicts in Chechnya, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh’, Center for Science and International Affairs (CSIA), Occasional Paper, SDI: Harvard University, February 1998.

Separatist States and Post-Soviet Conflicts 81 4. On the notion of a de facto state, see the theoretical work of Scott Pegg, International Society and the De Facto State, Aldershot, 1998. 5. This section draws on the author’s chapter, ‘The Tajik Civil War and the Peace Process’, Civil Wars, Special Edition on post-Soviet conflicts, 4(4) Winter 2001. 6. See Human Rights Questions: HR Situations and Reports of the Special Rapporteurs and Representatives, United Nations A/51/483/Add 1, 24 October, 1996, prepared by Francis Deng for 51st Session of the GA. 7. See discussion by author in ‘Euro-Asian Conflicts and Peacekeeping Dilemmas’, in Y. Kalyuzhnova and D. Lynch (eds), The Euro-Asian World: A Period of Transition, London, 2000. 8. See, for example, Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States, State–Society Relations and States Capacities in the Third World, Princeton, 1988; Mohammed Ayoob, ‘State-making and third world security’, in J. Singh and T. Berhauer, The Security of Third World Countries, Dartmouth, 1993; and William Zartman (ed.), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority, London, 1995. 9. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, Hemel Hempstead, 1991. 10. Ibid., p. 82. 11. Shirin Akiner noted the stress placed on the Tajik identity in her recent work on Tajikistan, Tajikistan: Disintegration or Reconciliation?, London, 2001. 12. Scott Pegg, International Society and the De Facto State, Aldershot, 1998, p. 26. 13. Ibid., p. 5. 14. Gunnar Agathon Stolsvik, The Status of the Hutt River Province (Western Australia), A Case Study in International Law, Bergen, 2000, p. 29. 15. Alan James, ‘Sovereignty – a ground rule or gibberish?’, Review of International Studies, 10, 1984, p. 11. 16. Interview with the author, Chis¸inau ˘, Moldova, 13 July 2000. 17. Interview with the author, PMR, 11 July 2000. 18. On the difference between the declaratory and the constitutive approach, see discussion in Michael Ross Fowler and Julie Marie Bunce, ‘What constitutes the sovereign state?’, Review of International Studies, 22, 1996, pp. 400–2. 19. Interview with the author, Abkhazia, 25 July 2000. 20. Interview with the author, Abkhazia, 20 July 2000. 21. Interview with the author, PMR, 14 July 2000. 22. Interview with the author, NKR, 24 August 2000. 23. Interview with Melkoumian, NKR, 17 August 2000. 24. On this notion, see Graham Smith, V. Law, A. Wilson, A. Bohr, and E. Allworth, Nation Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 13–19. 25. From ‘War-making and state-making as organized crime’, in Peter Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In, New York, 1985, cited in an interesting article by Hugh Griffiths, ‘A political economy of ethnic conflict: Ethno-nationalism and organized crime’, Civil Wars, 2, 2, Summer 1999, pp. 56–73. 26. Interview with the author, NKR, 15 August 2000. 27. Svante E. Cornell, 2001, p. 47. 28. This point emerged from a discussion between the author and Bruno Coppietiers in November 2000.

82 Dov Lynch 29. See the comments by Boris Pastukhov, 18 April Moldovan information service, Infotag. 30. Interview with the author, Chis¸inau ˘, Moldova, 13 July 2000. 31. Paata Zakareishvili, ‘Political responsibility and perspectives for conflict resolution in Georgia–Abkhazia’, in Natella Akaba (ed.), Abkhazia–Georgia: Obstacles on the Path to Peace, Sukhum, Abkhazia, 2000, pp. 9 and 24–9. 32. For an examination of Russian peacekeeping, see the author’s Russian Peacekeeping Strategies towards the CIS, London, 1999. 33. Ann Maria Alonso, ‘The politics of space, time and substance: State formation, nationalism and ethnicity’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 23, 1994, pp. 379–405. 34. Interview with the author, Abkhazia, 31 July 2000. 35. Interview with the author, Nagorno-Karabakh, 15 August 2000. 36. For a discussion of ways to move towards settlement of these conflicts, see the author’s Managing Separatist States, EU Institute of Security Studies Paper, 2001.

5 Management of Ethnic Relations in Kazakhstan: Stability without Success Bhavna Dave

Introduction The resilience and survival of multinational states, in the long run, are contingent upon the ability of the institutional mechanisms of the state to accommodate ethnic and cultural diversity and create a shared public culture.1 The availability of legal and institutional safeguards for both individual and group-based rights and the presence of civil society are indispensable in maintaining the effective functioning of multiethnic states and crediting them with legitimacy. Obviously, the liberal theory of minority rights and cultures has found little grounding in post-Soviet states in which participatory norms are extremely weak and the status and legal rights of minorities depend largely on the personal preferences of the ruling élites. These states exhibit an enduring dominance of Soviet era categories ‘nationalities’ and ‘peoples’ (narody), in which an ethnic group is conceived as an objective category in possession of its distinct homeland, language and psychological make-up. Embedded in the use of these categories is a clear distinction between the titular and non-titular groups, in which the former is endowed with a special status whereas the latter collectively referred to as ‘nationalities’, whose ethnic homeland is located elsewhere. Inherent in the continuing characterisation of ethnic groups as ‘nationalities’ is the psychological and institutional resistance to recognizing them as ‘minorities’, entitled to equal, though differentiated, civil and political rights. ‘Nationalities’ often lack the institutional avenues for integration into the state structure which is closely identified with the titular nation, and also lack the institutional means for preservation and regeneration of their ethnonational heritage. 83

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The presence of a large Russian population along its nearly 5000 km border with Russia appeared to imperil Kazakhstan’s territorial integrity in the aftermath of independence in 1991. With Slavs forming either an absolute majority or plurality in the north-eastern oblasts, Kazakhstan contained several necessary preconditions for ethnic mobilisation along the triangular pattern of conflict delineated by Brubaker.2 Notwithstanding earlier warnings of a potential ethnic cauldron3 or challenges to the nationalizing agenda stemming from the deep historical rootedness in the host state, there has been little public display of ethnic unrest, either in Kazakhstan or elsewhere in Central Asia. Instead, the course of nationalisation has been remarkably smooth and swift and no effective resistance has ensued from non-titular groups.4 In the Central Asian states in particular, the Slavs and the European groups have either opted to return to their purported kin state, or emigrated to Russia. Their decision to leave is not simply a consequence of the growing ethnocratic nature of the state, but is influenced by a pervasive assumption of the ‘civilizational’ superiority of the ‘European’ groups over the Muslim populations and the ensuing psychological resistance to their reduced status as ‘non-titular’ group. Those who have opted to remain in the host state have sought a tactical accommodation with its nationalizing framework in light of the lack of options to exit or mobilize for their rights. Another important factor that deters ethnic mobilization is the fear of reprisal by the state against their actual or perceived disloyalty.5 A high degree of coercion employed by the state and the extensive state surveillance of the public or ‘ethnic’ sphere have so far been instrumental in deterring minority ethnic mobilization in several post-Soviet states. This chapter will shed light on the absence of an ethnic mobilization in Kazakhstan and the apparent success of the state in preventing overt conflict along ethnonational markers. The argument is laid out in two sections. In the first section I show how the demotion of the status of Russian-speakers through the law making Kazakh the sole state language (denying Russian an equal status) established a clear rank ordering of ethnic groups: the new ethnic hierarchy eliminated the potential ground for conflict over language, the single most contested issue, thus legitimating the nationalizing course. The second part describes the erection of a surrogate institutional infrastructure for symbolic representation and co-optation of various ethnic representatives or ‘leaders’ in a hierarchical or ranked ethnic system. Here I highlight the role of presidential patronage as a leading force behind the institutional structure of ethnic representation, established to solicit domestic and international

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recognition of its ‘peaceful’ ethnic situation. The chapter ends with an assessment of the long-term implications of the top-down coercive ethnic strategy for Kazakhstan’s state identity and the quality of interethnic relations.

Language status reversal and new ethnic hierarchy The elevation of Kazakh and demotion of Russians and Russian-speakers Kazakhstan witnessed one of the most acrimonious debates in the postSoviet sphere on the language issue in the aftermath of independence.6 The trend in all the post-Soviet states was to ‘restore’ the status of the titular language. Such a choice was not straightforward in Kazakhstan, where Kazakhs did not constitute a majority and did not uniformly favour the choice of their purported mother tongue as the state language. The key question at the early stage of language debate was whether Kazakhstan would constitute an exception, given its multiethnic composition and the fact that Kazakhs did not form a majority. Titular language proficiency among the non-titular population was the lowest in Kazakhstan among all post-Soviet republics: only one in 100 non-Kazakhs could claim proficiency in Kazakh. The underlying concern for the post-independent Kazakhstani leadership in Kazakhstan was not whether Kazakh could become the primary language of intraethnic communication or the effective language of state business, but how legal status of the sole state language could be conferred upon Kazakh when Russian had been deeply entrenched as the de facto language of inter-ethnic communication.7 Kazakh’s status as the sole state language was justified on the dual grounds of a primordialist linkage of nationality and language and affirmative action. These can be summarized in views such as: ‘Where else can Kazakh be spoken, if not on its own homeland? Kazakh needs protection as the state language precisely because it is a weak language, unable to withstand a natural competition with Russian.’ The overall agreement was that Kazakh would not survive if bilingualism, that is, the existing status quo, were to prevail and needed extensive state support in order to revive and flourish in its own homeland. The primary conflict in the language issue was not between Kazakhs and Russians or Russian speakers (Slavs, Germans, Tatars and Koreans, as well a sizeable stratum of urban Kazakhs who practically use Russian as their native language), but between the Kazakh ‘nationalists’ championing the rights of rural, mainly Kazakhophone, Kazakhs advocating an ethnic vision

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of the state, and urban Russophone Kazakhs, more at home in an ‘internationalist’ milieu and ill-at ease with a nationalist conception of the state. The subsequent passing of the ‘Law on Languages’ in 1997, which made Russian the ‘official’ language, to function on a par with Kazakh, served to appease the majority of Kazakhs more at ease with using Russian. The status of the sole state language granted to Kazakh was the single most crucial act that codified the primacy of the titular group and sealed the controversy over language and ethnic issues. The salient subtext of the law was the denial of the state language status to Russian. A decisive impact of the language legislation was to produce what Horowitz describes as a ‘ranked’ system in which social class and ethnic origins are seen as broadly coinciding and groups are hierarchically ordered within a single system.8 Mobility opportunities in a ranked system are restricted by group identity. The language law, in an unranked setting, would portend a cultural and political marginalization of Russophone Kazakhs, and not just of Russian-speakers. The inextricable linkage posited between one’s nationality and language and the absence of any formal reliable means of testing state language proficiency, make it easy and natural for a Kazakh to claim proficiency in Kazakh.9 A similar claim on the part of a non-titular Russophone, however, would be incredible and subject to greater scrutiny as hardly one out of 100 had any facility in Kazakh according to the 1989 census. The state symbolism granted to Kazakh has certainly appeased a vast majority of representatives from rural parts of southern and western regions of Kazakhstan who hold sway within the state apparatus. Although a visible stratum of urban Russophone Kazakhs, referred to as the technocrats or ‘Young Turks’, occupy crucial positions within the state apparatus, they appear to lack the clientelistic networks possessed by Kazakhs of more rural origins and remain dependent on presidential patronage. Russian-speakers are further marginalized as a result of Kazakhisation policies. The ten-year state programme on language policy introduced in early 1999 emphasizes ‘increasing the demand for the use of the state language’ and ‘creating conditions for learning it’. It lays down how these objectives are to be realized through administrative and bureaucratic measures, steering clear of any discussion of ‘political’ or ‘ethnic’ issues. Erbol Shaimerdenov, the head of the Committee on Implementation of the State Language, pointed at the increasing volume of official documentation in the state language (that is, translations of existing Russian texts into Kazakh) as evidence of the ‘success’ of the language policy.10 The state language programme is geared towards demonstrating success in

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meeting targets rather than in attaining a qualitative improvement and widening of the linguistic domain. The 1997 language law asserts that it is the duty of every Kazakhstani to learn the state language. Lacking political will, administrative capacity or resources to execute the language programme, the state officials have opted to achieve the targets through statistical means. The 1999 census data demonstrating that 99.4 per cent of Kazakhs know the state language runs counter to the prevalent sociolinguistic scenario in the country.11 Almost 97 per cent of Kazakhs indicated Russian as the ‘other’ language in which they are fluent. The near universal proficiency in the state language (and their ‘mother tongue’) claimed by Kazakhs has for the time being put a lid on concerns mobilized by Kazakh nationalists over the fate of the Kazakh language and the ensuing cultural loss. It has also made it easy for the Russophone Kazakhs to claim native language proficiency without actually having to prove it.12 It was in reference to this ‘success’ that Nazarbaev declared the language issue resolved politically, emphasizing that it was now the responsibility of the people, the intelligentsia in particular, to co-operate by speaking in Kazakh with their children.13 The supposed ‘solution’ of the language question is a decisive step towards consolidating the idea of Kazakhstan as a Kazakh state. The denial of the state language status to Russian is seen by Slavs as an affirmation of their ‘second class’ status. The Kyrgyz experience is quite similar in that although the Kyrgyz parliament debated the proposals of making Russian the second state language, including holding a referendum on changing its status, it only voted to grant Russian the status of an ‘official’ language in October 2001. Notwithstanding international pressures, such as the recommendations by the OSCE High Commission on National Minorities, to embrace the model of ‘civic’ statehood, the historical and institutional legacy of the Soviet state push the new states to engage first in the process of ethnic state building. The study of inter-ethnic relations, demography and migration has increasingly turned into a politicized enterprise since Nazarbaev enshrined the notion of constructing Kazakhstani statehood on the ‘ancestral land of the Kazakhs’ in the Preamble of the Constitution.14 While non-titular emigration needs to be framed in the context of post-imperial migration trends,15 the growing Kazakhization and anxiety over a decline in status following the adoption of the language law are among the key factors that have triggered an exodus of the Russianspeaking population from Kazakhstan since 1991.16 Altogether, about two million Russian speakers (including 750 000 ethnic Germans, out of about a million living in Kazakhstan) have left Kazakhstan between 1989–99, with the combined European share in the population dropping

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to under 40 per cent from almost half in 1989. The drop in the population over the past decade amounts to almost 8 per cent of the total. In the typology of Albert Hirschman,17 ‘exit’ has been the dominant response by culturally and politically disgruntled Russians who perceive the nationalizing course as irreversible and see little future for their children in the ethnically reconfigured landscapes of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Whereas in 1993 Nazarbaev objected to the questions about the plight of the ‘Russian-speaking population’ of Kazakhstan posed by Russian journalists by asserting that ‘all Kazakhstani are Russian-speakers’ and therefore no separate problem of ‘Russian-speakers’ exists, seven years later he described Kazakhstan as a Turkophone state.18

Conflicting visions of multiethnicity and national homogeneity Simultaneously pursuing a nationalizing strategy geared towards establishing the primacy of the Kazakh language and titular claims, the Nazarbaev leadership has continued to characterize Kazakhstan as a ‘multinational’ state, consisting of ‘over a hundred nationalities’, ‘living harmoniously side by side’. Kazakhstan is a unitary, centralized state, which neither offers legal–constitutional provision for territorial rights and cultural autonomy for nationalities, nor any formal institutions providing for proportional representation of minorities. The continuing distinction between the ‘titular’ and ‘other’ nationalities, and the covert attempts to cast the titular nation in the role of a state-forming group contradict the rhetorical commitment to ‘integration’. In a comparative study of state-building policies of Kazakhstan and Latvia, Kolstø offers diverse explanations of the absence of ethnic conflict in both countries. Describing both as ‘culturally bipolar societies’, Kolstø explains that Latvia has escaped violent ethnic conflict by steering nationalist sentiments into legal channels and evolving in the direction of an ‘ethnic democracy’ in which general democratic principles prevail alongside with ethnic favouritism.19 In contrast, Kazakhstan has managed to avoid ethnic conflict through a simultaneous pursuit of the incompatible goals of ethnic and civic nation-building, intended to appease both Kazakh nationalists as well as non-titular élites.20 I have argued so far that the Kazakhstani state has pursued an exclusive nationalizing strategy since the adoption of the language law in 1997, while undertaking formal symbolic measures to portray a civic or multiethnic profile. The projection of Kazakhs as the principal ‘state-forming’ nation, implemented by the state by employing juridical means, such as the elevation of Kazakh language as the symbol of the state, as well as

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informal titular preferences are examples of exclusive ethnic strategies intended to manipulate the multi-ethnic climate in favour of the titular nationality. The Kazakh language is an exclusive national symbol and not a shared language of the groups inhabiting Kazakhstan. The pursuit of exclusive ethnic strategy to the detriment of democratic participation has aided the evolution of Kazakhstan into a personalistic authoritarian system in which wealth and political power are concentrated in the presidential family and close allies, and mobility within the state administration is governed by a network of patron–client relations. The fact that the Slavs formed the majority of the electorate who actively participated in the previous parliamentary and local elections was a significant factor in clamping down on the initial democratization policies.21 While pursuing an exclusive ethnic agenda, the Kazakhstani élites have sought to portray the country as a homeland of Kazakhs as well as a multiethnic republic in which various nationalities peacefully cohabit. Although Kazakhstan is no longer required to maintain an ‘international’ profile by accommodating waves of settlers and speaking Russian, as in the Soviet period, a significant Slavic presence is nonetheless regarded by the ruling élites as a strategic necessity for maintaining a ‘Eurasian’ image and projecting Kazakhstan as an aspiring civic state, committed to preserving its multi-ethnic make-up and maintaining ‘inter-ethnic harmony’. This emphasis on multi-ethnicity and ‘internationalism’ remains ontologically and ideologically continuous with Soviet-era practices. If in the Soviet era under the ideology of ‘Soviet community’ internationalism had a distinctly Russian face, post-Soviet Kazakhstani internationalism, shaped by many of the discursive and institutional legacies of its Sovietera predecessor, displays a distinctively ‘Kazakh face’.22 The draft of the present constitution (adopted in 1995) described Kazakhstan as a state founded on the principle of the ‘self-determination of the Kazakh people’. The clause was subsequently deleted in the final version but a distinction between ‘Kazakh’ and ‘other’ people of Kazakhstan has continued to prevail in semi-official, academic, journalistic and popular references.23 The Preamble to the Constitution refers to Kazakhstan as the ‘indigenous homeland of the Kazakhs’, inhabited by ‘Kazakhs and other nationalities’. The present constitution also introduced the notion of ‘the people of Kazakhstan [narod Kazakhstana]’, reminiscent of its ideological precursor, ‘the Soviet people’. Notwithstanding Nazarbaev’s rhetorical support to the notion of a Kazakhstani narod, there is no recognizable policy of erecting institutions to promote a supra-ethnic ‘Kazakhstani’ identity. Instead, the mandatory stamping of ‘nationality’ in passport and identity documents, introduced in the

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1930s, has served as a most influential mechanism of institutionalizing a biologically governed, ‘backward-looking’ conception of a languagebased identity in which a departure from one’s ascribed nationality or native language is an instance of (forced) assimilation.24 Article 10 of Kazakhstan’s Constitution allows a citizen to ‘indicate or not indicate his/her national, party, or religious affiliation’.25 However, the state has done little to make the citizens aware of the right not to indicate their nationality and there is a near universal tendency to fill the nationality column as if it were required. Kyrgyzstan was the only Central Asian state to generate some debate on the infamous ‘fifth column’ and propose its deletion. In early 1996, keen to obtain international approval by embracing a civic model of statehood, and particularly eager to impress the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) High Commissioner on National Minorities, Kyrgyzstan proposed to eliminate the column ‘nationality’ and replace it with ‘citizenship’ on its new passports, to be issued later that year.26 The decision was subsequently revoked in the face of the realisation that the nationality stamp on passport is not merely a form of ethnic categorization but also a crucial criterion in determining the distribution of privileges and positions among the titular and non-titular nationalities.27

Territorial and administrative reorganization Kazakhstan’s transformation from a multi-ethnic Soviet republic to a nationalizing Kazakh state is neither an outcome of a self-conscious manifestation of a collectively shared sense of nationalism, as in the Baltic states, nor a result of any pre-existing sense of cultural distance between the two dominant ethnic communities. Having proposed a ‘solution’ to the language question, the Nazarbaev leadership turned to administrative measures, such as territorial gerrymandering, to produce Kazakh majorities in the newly constituted regions and thus undermine any potential irredentist threat. The changes, affecting all Russiandominated border regions (except Pavlodar), enlarged the size of these oblasts and turned Kazakhs into majorities in the reconstituted units. These changes were presumably guided by the calculations that the large size of these oblasts with titular majority would undermine the basis for a potential secessionist claim. If in the early 1990s the Kazakh demographers and linguists were united in affirming that ‘[the changing] demography will bring about a shift to Kazakh’, by the end of the decade we see that the ethnic and linguistic policies of the state accelerated

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the desired demographic effects, culminating in the recognition of Kazakhs as the majority group in the 1999 census and as the majority nationality in all the reconstituted units along the border with Russia. The administrative mergers, the implantation of Kazakh officials from the southern regions into the city and oblast offices of the reconstituted units in the north-eastern regions, and above all, an extensive surveillance by interior affairs ministry and Kazakh national security officials over public and private life have weakened the mobilizational potential of Russians. However, the integration of northern and eastern regions into the central structure is far from a fait accompli. Russian claims over entire northeastern regions of Kazakhstan, as articulated by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, are grounded in nationalist thinking rather than a differentiated knowledge of historical facts, and have found little political support from within Russia or an unequivocal endorsement by Russians within Kazakhstan. However, as a Kazakhstani historian Irina Erofeeva notes, ‘an undisputed belief in their civilisational superiority and deep-seated historical claims over the region’ among local Russians manifests itself as ‘profound introversion and apprehension of all outsiders – whether from other oblasts of Kazakhstan or from Russia’.28 Erofeeva also points out that the northwestern parts of the East Kazakhstan oblast, along the right bank of river Irtysh, including the city Ust-Kamenogorsk, belong to the Siberian ecological landscape (not the Kazakh nomadic pastures) and were under the West Siberian governorate all through the tsarist period until their inclusion into Soviet republic of Kazakhstan in the 1920s.29 These points undermine the validity of Kazakh ‘historical’ claims over the region. Kazakhstan’s law on public assembly, in force since 1998, requires prior permission of the authorities for holding a public rally. Participation in an ‘unsanctioned’ rally or meeting can lead to arrest, fines and ultimately a disqualification from contesting any public position. Furthermore, Article 337 of the Criminal Code also provides stiff penalties for participation in an ‘unregistered’ public association. A rigid surveillance by the interior ministry forces, legal restrictions and harsh penalties make it extremely difficult to engage in any spontaneous public action. Accusation of inciting ethnic discord or displaying nationalism is one of the most dangerous charges a person can face. Piotr Svoik, a leading Russian opposition activist in 1998, was accused of insulting the dignity of the Kazakh nation by publishing an article in a popular Russian language newspaper.30 The intimidation by authorities (Svoik was beaten up in December 1997 by ‘unidentified assailants’) appears to have been instrumental in ending his association with the opposition and securing co-optation into the regime.

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The arrest of a group of some 13 Russians in Ust-Kamenogorsk by Ministry of Interior officials in November 1999 for allegedly plotting an ‘armed insurrection’ to overthrow the regional administration in the East Kazakhstan oblast and proclaiming an Autonomous Republic of Altai is similarly reflective of the paranoia of the regime rather than any mobilizational potential of Russians. Independent observers and human rights advocates have pointed out that the amount of explosives seized was too small to be called an insurgency and the confiscated materials may have been planted by the authorities themselves.31

New institutions of ethnic patronage National-cultural centres and the assembly of people An important feature of Nazarbaev’s ethnic strategy is the use of presidential patronage to erect institutions of ethnic representation. Formally speaking, each ethnic group is given the constitutional right to form an official national cultural centre committed to developing the cultural heritage of its national community as a whole. At the same time, the constitution prohibits the formation of a public association or political party propounding an ethnic, religious or nationalist ideology. In the official conception, each ethnic group is a homogeneous, bounded entity which can be represented by a single official national-cultural centre. The national centres are also encouraged, and expected, to solicit help from the ‘kin’ state for the cultural and material advancement of their group. Indeed the German and Korean centres have vastly benefited from material support from their kin-states, as well as from their individual ethnic sponsors, but most other centres remain largely dependent on modest (Kazakhstani) state support.32 The lack of ethnic cohesiveness among Russians, their territorial dispersion and varying degrees of rootedness make it impossible for any single national-cultural centre to represent these multitudes of claims and interests. The single largest group representing Slavs, Lad, is ineligible for the status of a ‘national-cultural’ centre as it is founded on the notion of Slavic unity. The national-cultural centres serve to promote and legitimate the official policies, rather than attempt to channel group or societal aspirations to the state institutions. They are socialized into denying the appropriateness of the idea of self-determination and instead acquiesce to their ‘diaspora’ status through an orientation towards the kin state. Alexander Dederer, the leader of Kazakhstan’s Germans admitted that ‘no group will voluntarily seek to limit their rights’, if the principle of national-cultural autonomy were to be endorsed.33

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The most visible institution wielding ethnic patronage is the Assembly of Peoples of Kazakhstan (Assembleia narodov Kazakhstana), established in 1995 by President Nazarbaev. The President also serves as its chairman and is looked upon as the Guardian-Protector of small minorities. Both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan set up these structures of ethnic representation ostensibly in compliance with the recommendations of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. The assembly at the centre consists of over 300 representatives of various ethnic groups and has branches at the oblast levels. The various national-cultural centres nominate delegates to the assembly. The President nominates other members, who include academics, artists, writers and social activists of various nationalities, after a formal consultation with the national-cultural centres. Membership of the assembly is viewed as an honour personally bestowed by the President that the recipient cannot refuse. The national-cultural centres and the Assembly of Peoples are nonpolitical associations whose activities are focused on ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnographic’ issues, such as organizing language lessons, concerts, plays, national festivals, ‘days of culture’, anniversaries of major literary and historical figures and so on. A crucial obligation of the Assembly of Peoples is to refrain from political activity or any form of ethnic entrepreneurship. The law mandating that these centres be registered with the ministry of justice serves as an important screening mechanism. Groups such as Russkaia obshchina and the various Cossack formations have encountered a series of bureaucratic obstacles at the central and oblast levels in securing long-term legal status and have remained on the fringes of the official framework. The ban on the various oblast branches of Russkaia obshchina and Lad was lifted in August 1999 on the eve of the parliamentary elections. At the same time, the state élites acclaim the ‘conflict resolution’ role of the Assembly, citing an agreement, supposedly brokered by the Assembly, between the Union of Cossacks of Semirech’e and the law and order authorities of Almaty.34 The Union of Cossacks of Semirech’e was denied registration because of its members’ insistence on wearing military uniforms and bearing arms. Max van der Stoel, the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, facilitated negotiations between Cossack representatives and government officials, urging that Cossack participants be invited to national and international conferences on ethnic issues. Two Cossack representatives were nominated by the Kazakhstani government to attend a conference in Locarno in Switzerland in 1996 amidst allegations that they had been ‘bought off’.35 Subsequently, state officials have successfully exploited the divisions between two rival

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Cossack organizations, the Semirech’e Cossack group headed by Gennadii Belykov, which is closely associated with the Russkaia obshchina, and the Union of Semirech’e Cossacks headed by Viktor Ovsiannikov, which enjoys the tactical support of the authorities. The state policy of enshrining the country’s multi-ethnic legacy is oriented towards celebrating the cultures and national heritage of numerous small ethnic groups while fomenting factions and divisions within larger groups (Russians). The state has entrusted the Assembly with the task of apportioning the 10 per cent quota in universities for the ‘small’ ethnic groups – a provision that excludes Russians. While Russians are psychologically resistant to being reduced to the status of a ‘minority’, spokespersons for other ethnic groups, notably ethnic Germans, Koreans and Uighurs have made steady demands for the recognition and institutionalization of their minority status. For example, the German Council of Kazakhstan, enjoying the sponsorship of Germany, obtained membership of the Federal Union of European Minorities. Minority leaders have used more informal and personalistic connections to secure certain political concessions for their groups. The Koreans have been able to work out an informal arrangement, which allows them to nominate their own akim (head of the region or oblast) in the city of Ushtobe in the Taldy Korgan oblast, which has a sizeable Korean population.36 This arrangement is an ad hoc one, a personal favour granted by Nazarbaev arising from informal negotiations and has no legal status or wider ramifications for other ethnic groups.

Ethnic frontmen and co-optation One problem particularly afflicting Russians, and to a large extent all other ethnic groups, is the absence or weakness of ethnic leaders capable of creating a support base within their ethnic communities. Horowitz also points to the absence of a legitimately recognized élite in a certain ethnic group as a characteristic of the ranked nature of the system.37 While the legitimacy of the Kazakh élite is under question,38 a nontitular élite is simply absent in the system, attesting to the ‘lack of group autonomy in leadership selection’, which Horowitz describes as ‘a sure sign of ethnic subordination’.39 The ethnic faces in the official apparatus are invariably appointees from the top, either unknown to their ethnic constituencies or unpopular among them. Examples of these are Sergei Tereshchenko, a former Prime Minister (1991–93), native of Shymkent and fluent in Kazakh; Aleksandr Pavlov, a former Finance Minister from North Kazakhstan; and Viktor

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Khrapunov, current Mayor of Almaty who has made public gestures of speaking rudimentary Kazakh and accompanying his Kazakh wife to mosque. Indeed, the few Kazakh-speaking Slavs serving in the high political echelons are extensively plugged into the ‘internal’ clan and zhuz politics (which critics dub a mainly ‘Kazakh’ phenomenon) and pejoratively referred to as the ‘fourth zhuz’.40 Integration through co-optation is the only means of attaining mobility available to the Russian-speakers within the nationalizing apparatus. Co-optation brings in security of tenure as a reward for loyalty and support. The rewards for compliance are generous, just as the penalties for undertaking autonomous political action or disloyalty are severe. Scorned as Kazakhicized (‘okazacheny’), Russians occupying major positions in the state apparatus tend to enjoy little support or credibility among their ethnic kin and are ill-suited to provide leadership to their ethnic communities. The state has also sought to exploit anti-Russification sentiments among other Slavic groups (mainly Ukrainians) by emphasizing their ethnic distinctiveness and ‘suffering’ under the Soviet rule. The common plight of Kazakhs and Ukrainians is highlighted in references to the losses both ethnic groups suffered under collectivization of the late 1920s. An overwhelming majority of Ukrainians of Kazakhstan are linguistically and culturally Russified. Indeed the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Almaty, Astana and a few other oblasts may be the only places in Kazakhstan where Ukrainian is spoken. Led by Aleksandr Garkavets, a linguist and Turcologist, the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Almaty has enjoyed the sustained ideological support and patronage of President Nazarbaev. Although the Ukrainian state has little financial means to help its diaspora and sustain the national-cultural centre, the independence of Ukraine and the adoption of Ukrainian as the sole state language have injected a certain degree of ethnic differentiation from Russians and desire to learn Ukrainian. As a doctoral student working on the Ukrainian diaspora in Kazakhstan at the Almaty State University noted, numerous Ukrainian cultural centres all over the country have become the domain of a small group mainly of Western Ukrainian extraction who came to Kazakhstan after the Second World War and do not have intimate ties with the historical Ukrainian diaspora.41 While the personal background of the activists of the Ukrainian Centre and the patronage-based ethnic segregationist policy of Kazakhstani state may have facilitated the exit of the Ukrainian cultural centre from the Slavic movement Lad in the early 1990s, such a separation is also reinforced by the efforts of independent Ukraine to build a ‘European’ image through a cultural disassociation with Russia.

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Members of the Assembly representing the relevant ‘kin’ states are encouraged to cultivate close contacts with their kin states and obtain the necessary funding for cultural regeneration. They are often included in the presidential or governmental delegations to that country and also assigned a visible role during visits by foreign dignitaries of their kin state. For instance, Pavel Atrushkevich, the President of the Assembly and a Belarusian by nationality, accompanied President Nazarbaev on a visit to Belarus; Oleg Dymov was a prominent face in the President’s visit to Bulgaria and Aleksandr Garkavets has been a consistent presence in the various meetings with Ukrainian governmental delegations. On the other hand, none of the representatives of Lad, Russkaia obshchina or Cossack groups have been invited to partake in similar dealings with Russian delegations. As the above examples show, the absence of an autonomous ethnic élite or institutionalized power-sharing arrangements enables the state to co-opt individual ethnic members and use them as ethnic figureheads. Their symbolic representation allows the state to affirm its ‘multi-ethnic and international’ image and deter the emergence of a counter-élite outside the official organs of power. As Piotr Svoik noted in 1997, ‘as individuals, these are respectable and intelligent people, but together they demonstrate an incredulous callousness and willingness to rubber-stamp almost anything’.42 Svoik himself is a typical example of an individual who has been co-opted into the state apparatus after periodically dabbling in opposition activism and attacking the ethnic policies of the state.

Implications of Kazakhstan’s ethnic strategy The Kazakhstani case shows how a rank ordering of ethnic groups and state support to the titular ethnic group have served to deter direct ethnic competition. The framing of the language issue in terms of status and survival of the titular group allowed the state élites to justify nationalization measures as motivated by affirmative action, thus representing Russians as an advantaged group and Kazakhs as the victims. Lacking an autonomous ethnic élite or effective leadership, and further constrained by the unavailability of an institutional framework, most Russian-speakers have exercised the exit option. Symbolic appeasement, as attempted by Kazakhstan with respect to smaller groups (such as Koreans, Germans, Tatars), including the use of patronage, have had some success when the group concerned does not claim an indigenous status and accepts its diasporic or non-territorial status in the host country. Furthermore, the covert discrimination against Russians has not evoked resistance

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primarily because Russians as a group remain deeply acculturated into seeing themselves as civilizationally superior and do not covet inclusion in the ethnic hierarchy. The emigration of Russian-speakers as well as the political disempowerment of non-titular groups have accelerated the transformation of Kazakhstan into a Kazakh national state. Ethnic ‘stability’ has come at a high cost to the principle of ethnic equality and pluralism. Although Kazakhstan has managed to steer clear of conflict along ethnic lines, the top-down management of ethnic relations has exacerbated a deep sense of alienation of the citizenry from the state, bringing about a massive population flight and a steady deterioration of the quality of life and norms governing the public sphere. The 1999 census states the population to be 14.9 million, down from 16.7 million in 1989, and declining further. Kazakhstan has lost about 8 per cent of the total population due to non-titular emigration over the past decade. Such a high drop in population is especially alarming for a country that has not been subject to any ethnic turmoil or civil strife and has taken pride in preserving ethnic ‘stability’. The population decline is compounded by the absence of the projected increase in the Kazakh birth rate. Despite the government’s efforts to boost the birth rate through economic incentives, the birth rate attained an all-time low of 1.6 per cent in 1999 and has declined further.43 As the conflict avoidance strategy of the state has generated preferential conditions for the mobility of Kazakhs, particularly those proficient in the Kazakh language, it has deepened the social and cultural tensions between Russified urban élites and a rural, newly urbanizing group of Kazakhs. With the growing marginalization of Russians and non-titular groups in the political arena, intra-ethnic competition and rivalries are more likely to come to the fore, thus dampening the vision of a nation-state founded on the principles of ethnic harmony and cultural homogeneity.

Notes and references 1. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford, 1995. 2. Rogers Brubaker, ‘National minorities, nationalizing states, and external national homelands in the new Europe’, Daedalus, 124(2), 1995, pp. 107–32. According to Brubaker, ethnic conflict in the post-Soviet states is likely to be manifested along a triadic nexus of the titular nationality, the largest nontitular group and its external homeland. 3. Anatoly Khazanov, After the USSR: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Madison, WI, 1995.

98 Bhavna Dave 4. Strong secessionist attitudes are present in the regions bordering Russia in East and North Kazakhstan (most notably in Ust-Kamenogorsk and Petropavlovsk). Although the paper makes some references to these regions, this issue merits a separate study. 5. Fear of reprisal has similarly been a most crucial factor that explains the lack of ethnic activism on the part of other major non-titular groups in Central Asia – notably Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, concentrated heavily in the Osh oblast in Southern Kyrgyzstan, and Tajiks in Uzbekistan living in Samarkand and Bukhara. Barring a few local organizations or movements generally devoted to cultural or other symbolic ethnic issues, the non-titular groups (‘minorities’) lack a cohesive leadership or close ties with the ‘kin’ state. 6. For a detailed account, see Bhavna Dave, ‘The politics of language revival in Kazakhstan: National identity and state-building in Kazakhstan’, unpublished PhD. Dissertation, Syracuse University, 1996. 7. About 64 per cent of Kazakhs claimed fluency in Russian in 1989 and almost 98 per cent have a basic proficiency in the language. Estimates of native language proficiency among Kazakhs remain varied. My own ethnographic observations during the period 1992–95 suggest that almost two thirds to three fourths of Kazakhs living in urban settings almost exclusively spoke Russian though many of them claimed to understand Kazakh and be able to speak it if the situation warranted. 8. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Berkeley, CA, 1985, p. 22. 9. According to the 1999 Kazakhstan census, 99.4 per cent of Kazakhs claimed proficiency in the state language. The ‘proficiency’ in question was determined solely on the basis of subjective assessment and did not differentiate between distinct domains, such as speaking, reading and writing. For details, see Bhavna Dave, ‘The Entitlement through numbers: nationality and language categories in the first post-Soviet census of Kazakhstan’, Nations and Nationalism, 2004. 10. Interview with Erbol Shaimerdenov, Astana, 9 September 1999. 11. It also showed that 15 per cent among the ethnic Russians claim to know the ‘state language’, a remarkable improvement from 1989 when less than 1 per cent claimed any facility in Kazakh. It should be noted that the 1999 census questionnaire did not contain the more emotionally charged category ‘mother tongue’ and only required respondents to list knowledge of the ‘state language’ and ‘any other language they know fluently’. 12. For a comprehensive discussion on how the 1999 census has facilitated the attainment of state’s language and ethnic policies, see Dave, ‘Entitlement through numbers’. 13. Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 15 December 2000. 14. See Nurbulat Masanov, ‘Migratsionnye metamorfozy Kazakhstana’ in S. A. Panarin, A. N. Vyatkin and N. Kosmarskaya (eds), V dvizhenii dobrovol’nom i prinuzhdennom: postsovetsie migratsii v Evrazii, Moscow, Natalis, 1999, pp. 127–53 (p. 143); Alexander N. Alekseenko, ‘Perepis’ naseleniia 1999 goda v Respublike Kazakhstana’, http://www.zatulin.ru/institute/sbornik/001/03.shtml 15. Rogers Brubaker, ‘Aftermaths of empire and unmixing of peoples: Historical and comparative perspectives’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 18(2), 1995, pp. 189–218.

Management of Ethnic Relations in Kazakhstan 99 16. David Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Population in the Near-Abroad, Ithaca, NY, 1998. 17. Albert O. Hirshman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations and States, Cambridge, MA, 1970. 18. Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 15 December 2000. 19. Aina Antane and Boris Tsilevich, ‘Nation-building and ethnic integration in Latvia’ in Pål Kolstø (ed.) Nation-Building and Ethnic Integration in PostSoviet Societies: An Investigation of Latvia and Kazakhstan, Boulder, CO, 1999, pp. 63–152. 20. Jørn Holm-Hansen, ‘Political integration in Kazakhstan’ in Kolstø (ed.), ibid., pp. 153–226. 21. The Slavs form about two thirds among the group of pensioners, who are the most politically-engaged social group. 22. Edward Schatz, ‘ “Tribes” and “clans” in modern power: The state-led production of subethnic politics in Kazakhstan’, unpublished PhD. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2000, pp. 129–30. 23. A similar distinction between ‘Ukrainian and other people’ has been retained in Ukraine although the Ukrainian state professes to be a ‘civic’ state. It has put forth the notion ‘people of Ukraine’ (narod Ukrainy) as an inclusive category. Ukrainian deputies voted to capitalize the first letter to refer to the civic category, whereas the ethnonym is to be written without capitalization. See Dominique Arel, ‘Interpreting “Nationality” and “Language” in the 2001 Ukrainian census’, post-Soviet Affairs, 18(3), 2002, pp. 213–99. Russia has distinguished between the ethnic (russkii) and civic (rossiskii). 24. Dominique Arel, ‘Language categories in censuses: Backward-or forwardlooking?’ in David Kertzer and Dominique Arel (eds), Categorizing Citizens: The Use of Race, Ethnicity and Language in National Censuses, Cambridge, 2000, p. 168. 25. Konstitutsiia Respubliki Kazakhstana, Almaty, 1996, p. 9. 26. Radio Free Europe /Radio Liberty Newsline, 15 March 1996. 27. Valery Tishkov, ‘The Osh riots’ in Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and After the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame, London, 1997. 28. Interview with Irina Erofeeva, Almaty, 19 September 1999. 29. Ibid. 30. Karavan, 20 March 1998, p. 37. 31. www.eurasia.org.ru/arkhiv/december1999 32. Germany has offered extensive help to enable the shrinking German community to remain within Kazakhstan. The Deutsches Haus in Kazakhstan distributes free medicine, produce and fuel for winter and runs free German language classes. Similarly, South Korea has offered a large renovated building for housing the Korean Cultural Centre and the Korean theatre. It also offers facilities for learning Korean, training in English, as well as other subjects related to the growth of market economy and marketing skills in Korean institutions. Samsung and Daewoo, huge investors in Kazakhstan, use local Koreans for promoting business ties. 33. Panorama, 13 August 1999, p. 6. 34. Pavel Atrushkevich, ‘Politikov s chervotochinoi pugaet edinstva naroda’, Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 8 October 1998, p. 2.

100 Bhavna Dave 35. Author’s conversations with some Cossack leaders in Ust Kamenogorsk, July 1997. 36. Author’s interview with Gennadii Mikhailovich Ni, President of the Koreans’ Association of Kazakhstan, Almaty, August 1999. 37. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, p. 25. 38. Among the works by Kazakhstani scholars detailing the domination of regional and clientelistic networks among the ruling Kazakh élite, see Nurbulat Masanov, ‘Kazakhskaia politicheskaia i intellektual’naia elita: klanovaia prinadlezhnost’ i vnutrietnicheskoe sopernichestvo’ (hereafter, ‘Kazakhskaia elita’), Vestnik Evrazii, 1, 1996, 2, pp. 46–61 and Vitalii Khliupin, Bol’shaia sem’ia Nursultana Nazarbaeva: politicheskaia elita sovremennogo Kazakhstana, Moscow, 1998. 39. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, p. 25. 40. Masanov, ‘Kazakhskaia elita’, p. 56. 41. Author’s interview (name withheld), Almaty, August 1999. 42. Delovaia nedelia, 27 June 1997, p. 7. 43. On the ethnonational roots of the impending demographic crisis in Kazakhstan, see Aleksandr N. Alekseenko, ‘Demograficheskaia katastrofa v Respublike Kazakhstana’, 2001, http://www.zatulin.ru/institute/sbornik/001/ 03.shtml

Part II The Economy

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6 Transactions in the US–Russia Relationship: Representational Gymnastics, Shifting Agency and Russia’s Decline Janine R. Wedel

When the Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989, it seemed that the West, particularly the United States, finally had what it had always wanted: the chance to remake former enemies into its own image as capitalist democracies. Friendly, co-operative relations could be built, and Western aid would help the region construct democratic, free-market states. Rather than continuing to confront the East, the West would buy security. Ten years later, that view appears naïve. To be sure, some effective aid projects were developed following the early years of aid misadventure. Some assistance provided by the European Union (EU) to the Central European nations in recent years has been helpful, as those nations enter into pre-accession negotiations with the EU. However, in other cases, foreign aid has failed, and may even have been counterproductive. Assistance to Russia is a case in point. Debates on foreign aid typically turn on how much to spend and what to spend it on. Western policymakers also ask ‘What’s in our national interest?’ so they can sell the programme at home. But as an anthropologist who has studied relationships among people and societies, I ask who gets the aid on both sides – on the donor side who gets the contracts, and how the contracts are set up; on the recipient side whether the aid will have any effect, and if so, how it will rearrange the local political, social and economic structure. So a major theme of my work on foreign aid (and my book, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe) is that it is relationships – between Easterners and Westerners, among Easterners, 103

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and among Westerners – that shaped the outcome of nearly all grant aid to the region: This is true whether it is technical assistance through person-to-person contact; grants to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the recipient nations, or assistance for economic reform to a single political-economic group. Although these strategies differed significantly, in all of them it was crucially important exactly who participated and how these participants connected to their counterparts and compatriots. Aid policies, like any policies, do not exist in a vacuum. They are only as successful as their implementation by individuals and institutions: individuals, with their own interests and cultural backgrounds; institutions, grounded in culture and politics. Foreign aid to Eastern Europe came at a crucial moment, but the lack of attention paid to the agendas of the people involved in foreign aid on both sides has played a major role in its failures. First, a few words about the focus and methods for this study. My focus is primarily on priority projects in priority countries, as seen by the donors. Since the main objective of the donors was to build market economies – often, to privatize what they considered to be inefficient state owned enterprises – I concentrate on economic projects. With regard to priority countries, my empirical research begins in the Central European countries of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which were viewed as the most likely to succeed among the transitional countries, and which were the first to receive aid, at least initially. When the aid story moved to east to Russia, and then Ukraine, both considered crucial to strategic and political interests, so did I. My method of research is what anthropologists call ‘studying through’. Traditional anthropology studies ‘bounded’ groups, sometimes isolated, sometimes as part of complex societies and world systems, and frequently disenfranchised. But this study required examining both sides of the aid chain and how the sides link together. To capture the aid story, aid issues were followed through actors and processes on both donor and recipient sides, with aid as the common thread. The connections explored (for example, among a Russian ‘clan’, representatives of a Harvard University institute and US officials) required me to develop access to and trust among a variety of informants familiar with the same project or set of projects. Following issues that involve actors in multiple settings required the tracking of policy in different settings. I moved back and forth between donor and recipient societies, a rather messy process that required a lot of tracking events and players and cross-checking on all sides. It also

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helps to have verification from other scholars and independent investigators. In the course of the study, I found common ground not only with fellow anthropologists but also with political scientists, economists, public administration specialists, and investigators working on pieces of the same issues. Perhaps this is an indication that crossfertilization of methods may increasingly be called for in studies of global issues and interactions. My research on Western assistance began in 1989 immediately after the Communist East Bloc fell apart. At the time I had spent about six years in Poland. I had described the inner workings of a complex, ingenious society – a society in which an elaborate system of informal distribution of goods and services paralleled and often overshadowed the official economy; a society in which the state and its rules were treated less as opponents to be destroyed than as inconveniences to be overcome; a society rearranged by its informal practices in profoundly un-Communist directions. So when visitors from the West came to Poland in 1989–90 to look at the ‘miracle’ of the end of the Cold War, I suddenly found myself in the role of informal broker between local people and their would-be Western partners. I witnessed the many misconceptions and unrealistic expectations on both sides.

Triumphalism The years 1989 and 1990 launched an era of excitement, of high hopes and great expectations in Central and Eastern Europe. People hoped the ‘transition’ would be simple and swift. As ‘transition to democracy’ came into vogue in the West, carpetbaggers, political tourists, business scouts, bargain hunters and hundreds of instant experts came to the East. The environment of adventure and newfound opportunity attracted joint venture seekers, dealmakers, and often, people who could ‘play on any team’ – Communist, capitalist or mafia. Although some steadfast and persistent advisers made contributions in the region, the jet-setting ‘econolobbyists’ were more about public relations and their own publicity than they were about serious policy advice. Although not necessarily funded by government aid programmes (Western foundations were frequent supporters), the econolobbyists, through their promises and illusive relationships with their hosts, created an image that persisted throughout the aid saga. In the West, the econolobbyists wrote op-ed pieces, delivered speeches calling for aid, and thereby helped define the ‘reform’ agenda. They were perceived as

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able to effect market reforms in the East. In the East, the econolobbyists’ value was seen in their ability to deliver Western money and access and to help policymakers ‘sell’ controversial reforms in the transition countries. Unregistered, unregulated and unrestrained, a few highly visible econolobbyists were an integral part of the phase of Triumphalism and even gave it definition. As attention shifted from one country to another, the econolobbyists moved in and received attention during the period of high expectations in whatever country they were helping to put ‘on track’. Yet they were scarcely to be found in the subsequent phase of Disillusionment. Both at home and abroad, the econolobbyists effectively leveraged their supposed access to and influence with policymakers and money sources. And, as public hype over one country undergoing ‘reform’ diminished, they typically abandoned it and moved on to another. This was a period I call Triumphalism, and it existed in both East and West. It was an era of big schemes; the post-war Marshall Plan was held up as a shining model of what could be. However, although the Marshall Plan served as a rhetorical and ideological reference in both East and West, aid to Central and Eastern Europe bore little resemblance to it. Whereas the Marshall Plan consisted largely of capital assistance, aid to Central and Eastern Europe was largely technical assistance. The Marshall Plan was funded and directed by the United States, whereas in the 1990s many donor nations (such as Germany, the United Kingdom, other individual Western European governments, and the EU) contributed aid to Central and Eastern Europe. If the Marshall Plan was high-level and focused, aid to Central and Eastern Europe was dispersed. Aid to the region also differed significantly from the ‘Third World’ model: it was thought that the countries of Central Europe could be brought up to ‘our [Western] standards’ within a few years – in part because of their high educational and literacy levels. And a higher priority was placed on the task of transforming the Second World: aid agencies were reorganized, with foreign ministries playing a large role in the new effort.

Technical assistance and disillusionment The major method that the bilateral donors (and the EU) employed in their aid-giving was ‘technical assistance’. This meant sending thousands of consultants and supposed experts on just about everything to the region. It did not take long, though, before local people had had

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enough of the fly-in fly-out consultants and the so-called ‘introductory visits’ of consultants who never returned. In the early days, this was common with aid-paid consultants, who would come to lecture on how to build democracy by giving a talk on, say, the Danish or the French constitutional system. The Poles soon coined a derisive term – the ‘Marriott Brigade’ – for the consultants who came and stayed in Warsaw’s only five-star hotel at the time – the Marriott – and then proceeded on to Budapest and Prague. This launched the second phase of East–West aid relations, which I call Disillusionment. A Polish aid official suggested that the main benefit of the Marriott Brigade was not their expertise, but the hard currency – the payments to hotels, restaurants, taxis and translators – that they contributed to the local economy. A Slovak aid official told me, ‘the Western consultants collect information, get the picture, then they go home. […] We are solving the West’s unemployment in this way.’ The Disillusionment experienced in Central and Eastern Europe was duplicated a few years later as the focus of Western aid – and many of the same programmes and consultants – moved East. The same despairing language that officials used in Central Europe was repeated almost verbatim further east in Russia and Ukraine, despite considerable cultural differences. In other words, the same dynamic of East–West contact and of Disillusionment was repeated in each country. Within a year or so of its arrival, the Marriott Brigade had alienated many of the people it was trying to help.

Adjustment After a period of frustration and resentment on both sides, however, some adjustment took place. In Central Europe, this could be seen around 1994. This phase, which I call Adjustment, occurred as donors and recipients began to work out how they could use each other to mutual advantage. During this period there began to be some effective technical assistance, which was characterized by two conditions. First, effective technical assistance consisted of long-term resident advisers who were requested by and integrated into the host institutions that had invited them. One example of such assistance was a US Department of Treasury program, in which consultants worked closely with their hosts on issues such as debt relief, and lived for long periods in the recipient countries. The second characteristic of effective technical assistance is that it does not advantage one political group over another: in other words, it

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is neutral. Aid must be perceived as impartial and as working on behalf of the recipient country generally, not as propping up a particular group within the country. One program sponsored by the US Congressional Research Service provided support to the new parliaments of the region, so that they could develop impartial systems of information that all parliamentarians, regardless of political affiliation, could use. This program was successful and perceived as such because it was politically neutral. Aid can encourage the development of a more comprehensive market system or inadvertently promote opposition to it. Aid can foster friendly relations with the donor nation, or animosity towards it. The phase I call Adjustment took place in some countries after a period of learning.

Aid to Russia In other countries, however, there has rather been anti-Adjustment. In Russia, Western aid has contributed to economic decline, and a backlash effect against the United States, since many Russians know that American dollars were behind many of the so-called ‘reforms’ that have made many of their lives harder. How did the United States, by far the dominant partner in the relationship, allow one of the most promising rapprochements of the last century to founder? Rather than proceeding on the basis of common sense and well-established modes of representation between states, it acted upon an ideology implemented through a most dubious mode of conducting relations between nations. The ideology – that of radical privatization and marketization, applied in this instance in a cold-turkey manner to a society with no recent experience of either – is well known. The way in which advice and aid were given is much less familiar, but it is a vital part of the story. It is necessary to give this distinctive way of conducting business a name, and, drawing on my experience as an anthropologist, I call it ‘transactorship’. By ‘transactors’, I mean players in a small, informal group who work together for mutual gain, while formally representing different parties. Even though transactors may genuinely share the stated goals of the parties they represent, they have additional goals and ways of operating of their own. These may, advertently or inadvertently, subvert or subordinate the aims of those for whom they ostensibly act. The behaviour of members of such groups is marked by extreme flexibility and a readiness to exchange roles, even to the extent of representing parties other than the ones to which they are formally attached.

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During the 1990s, the cosy manner in which American advisers and Russian representatives – that is, the transactors – interacted and the outcomes of their activities ran directly counter to the stated aims of the US aid program in Russia. As a new century begins, key transactors in this program are being sued by the US government for ‘using their positions, inside information and influence, as well as USAID-funded resources, to advance their own personal business interests and investments and those of their wives and friends’. Transactorship, as it applies in the US–Russia relationship over the last decade, involves individuals, institutions and groups whose official status is difficult to establish. Indeed, nearly everything about transactors is ambiguous. Their sphere of activity is neither fixedly public nor private, neither firmly political nor economic; their activities are neither fully open nor completely hidden and conspiratorial; and the transactors are not exclusively committed to one side or the other. Their enormous flexibility enhances their influence on all sides.

The emergence of transactorship How in the case of Russia and the United States did the transactors come together? As the vast Soviet state was collapsing in late 1991, Harvard professors Jeffrey Sachs, Andrei Shleifer and others participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow. There, young would-be Russian ‘reformers’ were in the process of devising a blueprint for economic and political change. The key Russians present at the dacha were the economists Egor Gaidar and Anatolii Chubais. These meetings occurred at the time when Boris El’tsin, then president of what was still Soviet Russia, was putting together his team of economic advisers. Gaidar would become the first ‘architect’ of economic ‘reform’ in post-Communist Russia. A long-standing group of associates from St Petersburg, centred around Chubais, was to figure prominently in El’tsin’s team. Indeed, Chubais would go on to replace Gaidar, and to become an indispensable aide to El’tsin. While at the dacha, Sachs and several other Westerners offered their services to the Russians, including that of facilitating access to Western money – an offer the Russians accepted. In the ensuing months and years the members of the Harvard and Chubais teams saw to it that they became the designated representatives for their respective sides – and transactors in the sense I have described. On the American side, representatives from the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) would provide the theory and advice to reinvent the Russian economy.

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Maintaining that Russian economic reform was so important, and the ‘window of opportunity’ to effect change so narrow, US policymakers granted the Harvard Institute special treatment. Between 1992 and 1997, the Institute received US$40.4 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in non-competitive grants, and – until USAID suspended its funding in May 1997 – had been slated to receive another US$17.4 million. Harvard-connected officials in the Clinton administration, citing ‘foreign policy’ considerations, largely bypassed the normal public bidding process required for foreign aid contracts. The waivers to competition were backed by friends of the Harvard Institute group, especially in the US Treasury. Approving such a large sum of money mostly as non-competitive amendments to a much smaller award (the Harvard Institute’s original award was US$2.1 million) was highly unusual, according to US government procurement officers and US General Accounting Office (GAO) officials, including Louis H. Zanardi, who later spearheaded GAO’s investigation of HIID activities in Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, the US government delegated virtually its entire Russian economic aid portfolio – more than US$350 million – for management by the Harvard Institute. The Institute was also provided the legal authority to manage other contractors (some of whom were its competitors), leaving it in the unique position of recommending US aid policies while being itself a chief recipient of that aid. In 1996 the GAO found that the Harvard Institute had ‘substantial control of the US assistance program’. According to US government procurement officers and GAO officials, delegating so much aid to a private entity was unprecedented. In Russia, the Harvard representatives worked exclusively with Anatolii Chubais and the circle around him, which came to be known as the Chubais Clan. The interests of the Harvard Institute group and those of the Chubais Clan soon became one and the same. Their members became known for their loyalty to each other and for the unified front they projected to the outside world. By mid-1993, the Harvard–Chubais players had formed an informal and extremely influential transactor group that was shaping the direction and consequences of US economic aid and much Western economic policy towards Russia. Providing pivotal support to the Harvard–Chubais transactors was Lawrence Summers, earlier a member of the Harvard faculty and at this time chief economist at the World Bank. Summers had strong ties to the Harvard team, including Shleifer, the economist who served as project director of the Harvard Institute’s program in Russia. Soon, Summers would play a principal role in designing US and international economic

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policies at the US Treasury, where he would occupy the posts of undersecretary, then deputy secretary and, finally, secretary. The Chubais transactors were advertised by their promoters as the ‘Young Reformers’. The Western media promoted their mystique and overlooked other reform-minded groups in Russia. Western donors tended to identify Russians as reformers not on the basis of their commitment to the free market but because they possessed personal attributes to which the Westerners responded favorably: proficiency in the English language; a Western look; an ability to parrot the slogans of ‘markets’, ‘reform’ and ‘democracy’; and name recognition by wellcredentialed fellow Westerners. Members of the Chubais team possessed all of these qualities. By their sponsors in the West, they were depicted as enlightened and uniquely qualified to represent Russia and usher it down the road to capitalism and prosperity. Summers dubbed them a ‘dream team’, which, given his position and status, was a particularly valuable endorsement. In Russia, however, the Chubais transactors’ primary source of clout was neither ideology nor even reform strategy, but precisely their standing with and their ability to get resources from the West. As the Russian sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaia explained it, ‘Chubais has what no other élite group has, which is the support of the top political quarters in the West, above all the USA, the World Bank and the IMF, and consequently, control over the money flow from the West to Russia. In this way, a small group of young educated reformers led by Anatolii Chubais transformed itself into the most powerful élite clan of Russia in the past five years.’ US support proved decisive in this transformation. The administration’s ‘dream team’ seal of approval bolstered the Clan’s standing as Russia’s chief brokers with the West and the international financial institutions, and as the legitimate representative of Russia. It also enabled the Harvard–Chubais transactors to exact hundreds of millions of dollars in Western loans and American aid.

The modus operandi The transactors employed five basic operating principles. Democracy by decree. The transactors’ preferred way of proceeding in the Russian context was by means of top-down presidential decree. US officials explicitly encouraged this practice as an efficient means of achieving market reform. Rule by decree also allowed the transactors to bypass the democratically elected Supreme Soviet and the Duma. The Harvard

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Institute’s Russia director, Jonathan Hay, and his associates went so far as to draft some of the Kremlin decrees themselves. Needless to say, this did nothing to advance Russia’s evolution towards a democratic system, nor was it consistent with the declared American aim of encouraging that evolution. Flex organizations. A similar anti-democratic ethos pervaded the network of Harvard–Chubais transactor-run organizations. The transactors established and oversaw a network of aid-funded, aid-created ‘private’ organizations whose ostensible purpose was to conduct economic reform, but which were often used to promote the transactors’ parochial agendas. These organizations supplanted or circumvented state institutions. They routinely performed functions that, in modern states, are typically the province of governmental bureaucracies. They bypassed the elected Duma and other relevant actors, whose support was in the long term crucial to the successful implementation of economic reforms in Russia. Further, the aid-created organizations served as a critical resource for the transactors, a vehicle by which to exploit financial and political opportunities for their own ends. I call these bodies ‘flex organizations’ in recognition of their impressively adaptable, chameleon-like, multipurpose character. The donors’ flagship organization was the Russian Privatization Centre, which had close ties to Harvard University. Its founding documents state that Harvard University is both a ‘founder’ and ‘Full Member of the [Russian Privatization] Centre.’ The Centre received funds from all major and some minor Western donors and lenders: the United States, the IMF, the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the EU, Germany and Japan. The Centre’s chief executive officer, a Russian from the Chubais Clan, has written that while head of the Centre he managed some US$4 billion in Western funds. The Chamber of Accounts, Russia’s rough equivalent of the US General Accounting Office, investigated how that money was spent. An auditor from the Chamber concluded that the ‘money was not spent as designated. Donors paid […] for something you can’t determine’. The Centre was an archetypal ‘flex organization’, one that switched its identity and status situationally. Formally and legally, it was non-profit and non-governmental. But it was established by Russian presidential decree and received aid because it was run by the Chubais transactors, who also played key roles in the Russian government. In practice, the Centre played the role of government agency. It negotiated loans from international financial institutions – which typically lend to governments, not private entities – and did so on behalf of the Russian state.

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According to documents from Russia’s Chamber of Accounts, the Centre wielded more control over certain privatization documents and directives than did the Russian government agency formally responsible for privatization. Two Centre officials, its CEO from the Chubais Clan and Harvard’s Moscow representative, Hay, were in fact authorized to sign privatization decisions on Russia’s behalf. Thus did a Russian and an American, both of them affiliated with a private entity, end up acting as representatives of the Russian Federation. Transidentities. It was not only organizations that could change guises. The flex organization had its individual equivalent in the phenomenon of ‘transidentity’, which refers to the ability of a transactor to change his identity at will, regardless of which side originally designated him as its representative. Key Harvard–Chubais transactors were quintessential chameleons. To suit the transactors’ purposes, the same individual could represent the United States in one meeting and Russia in the next – and perhaps himself at a third – regardless of national origin. Jonathan Hay, who alternatively acted as an American and a Russian, provides a telling example of this phenomenon. In addition to being Harvard’s chief representative in Russia, with formal management authority over some other US contractors, Hay was appointed by members of the Chubais Clan to be a Russian. As such, he was empowered to approve or veto high-level privatization decisions of the Russian government. According to a US official investigating Harvard’s activities, Hay ‘played more Russian than American’. The financial arena yields many such examples of transidentity, in which Chubais transactors appointed Americans to act as Russians. It was (and is) difficult to glean exactly who, at any given time, prominent consultants on the international circuit represented, for whom they actually worked, all sources of funds, and where their loyalties and ambitions lay. Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, who served as director of the Harvard Institute from 1995 to 1999, and conducted advisory projects in the region (in the early 1990s sometimes under the umbrella of Jeffrey D. Sachs and Associates, Inc.), provides a case in point. According to journalist John Helmer, Sachs and his associates (including David Lipton, vice president of Sachs’ consulting firm who later went to Treasury to work for Summers) played both the Russian and the IMF sides of the street. During negotiations in 1992 between the IMF and the Russian government, for example, Sachs and his associates appeared as advisers to the Russian side. However, Helmer writes that ‘they played both sides, writing secret memoranda advising the IMF negotiators as well’. Compounding this ambiguity is the question of whether Sachs was an official adviser to the Russian government. Although he maintains that

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he was, key Russian economists as well as international officials cast doubts on his claim. Jean Foglizzo, the IMF’s first Moscow resident representative, was also taken aback by Sachs’s practice of introducing himself as an adviser to the Russian government. As Foglizzo put it, ‘[When] the Prime Minister [Viktor Chernomyrdin], who is the head of government, says “I never requested Mr. Sachs to advise me” – it triggers an unpleasant feeling, meaning, who is he?’ Sachs presented himself to leading Russians as a powerbroker who could deliver Western aid, according to Andrei Vernikov, a Russian representative to the IMF, and other sources. In 1992, when Egor Gaidar (with whom Sachs had been working) was under attack and his future looked precarious, Sachs offered his services to Gaidar’s parliamentary opposition. In November 1992 Sachs wrote a memorandum to the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov (whose reputation in the West was that of a retrograde Communist), offering advice, Western aid and contacts with the US Congress. Khasbulatov declined Sachs’s help after circulating the memo. Sachs also proved adept at lobbying American policymakers. The proponent of ‘shock therapy’, he has now emerged as a champion of AIDS assistance and other humanitarian causes. The most effective and influential transactors are extremely adept at working their multiple roles. One such ubiquitous transactor was Anders Åslund, a former Swedish envoy to Russia who worked with Sachs and Gaidar. Åslund seemed at once to represent and speak on behalf of American, Russian and Swedish governments and authorities. Accordingly, he was understood by some Russian officials in Washington to be Chubais’ personal envoy. Though a ‘private’ citizen of Sweden who played a leading role in Swedish policy and aid towards Russia, he nonetheless participated in high-level meetings at the US Treasury and State Departments about US and IMF policies. Åslund was also allegedly involved in business activities in Russia. According to the Russian Interior Ministry’s Department of Organized Crime, he had ‘significant’ investments in the Russian Federation. In addition to his work for governments, the Harvard– Chubais transactors and the private sector, Åslund was engaged in public relations activities. His assignment in Ukraine, where he was funded by George Soros, explicitly included public relations on behalf of that country, according to other Soros-funded consultants who worked with Åslund there. His effectiveness in this role was no doubt enhanced by his affiliation with Washington think tanks, his frequent contributions to publications such as the Washington Post and the London Financial Times, and the fact that he presented himself on these occasions as an objective analyst, despite his many promotional roles.

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Interchangeability. Groups also had transidentity capabilities. The Harvard Institute group, though formally representing the United States, also represented the Chubais group. Thus, some US officials and investigators requesting meetings with Russians were instead directed to Americans. In lobbying for aid contracts, the Harvard Institute group continually cited its access to Russian ‘reformers’ as its primary advantage; this was in fact a key component of its public relations effort. In turn, Harvard acted as the Chubais Clan’s entrée to the eyes and ears of US policymakers and to American funds. In the United States, the Harvard transactors touted Chubais as the voice of Russia, and he became the quintessential enlightened Russian in the eyes of many US officials and commentators. Not surprisingly, then, in times of crisis for the Harvard–Chubais nexus – such as the ruble crisis of August 1998 and the Bank of New York money laundering scandals – the transactors and their associates have sought to bolster their colleagues’ continued clout and standing in both Russia and the United States. Summers has frequently rushed to the defense of Chubais and other key transactors. In testimony before the US House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations, for example, Summers stoutly defended Chubais and asked that Chubais’ prepared statement (‘I Didn’t Lie’) be placed in the congressional record. Similarly, Åslund serves as a staunch defender of and advocate for Chubais. Of late, he also has been arguing Vladimir Putin’s cause. Lack of accountability and self-perpetuation. Transactors are largely above formal accountability, at least in the short run. The group places its members in various positions to serve its agendas, which may or may not conflict with those of the government or public interest they supposedly serve. The result is a game of musical chairs. For example, a key agency in Russian ‘reform’, the State Property Committee, was headed by a succession of Chubais transactors, among them Chubais himself, Maxim Boycko and Alfred Kokh. Kokh was named chairman of the Committee after Boycko was fired by El’tsin for accepting a thinly veiled US$90 000 bribe from a company that had received preferential treatment in the privatization process. Kokh himself was later removed for accepting a US$100 000 payment from the same company. Chubais, Boycko and Kokh also held a variety of key positions in the Harvard–Chubais transactor-run, aid-funded Russian Privatization Centre. The Chubais transactors are unlikely to disappear in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In fact, Putin has long been intertwined with them. An operative in the KGB and briefly head of its successor agency, Putin, like most members of the Chubais Clan, hails from St Petersburg and was

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intimately involved in the ‘reforms’ there. After moving to Moscow to work with Chubais, Putin helped to suppress criminal investigations that implicated El’tsin and members of his family – as well as Chubais himself. Chubais, in addition to running the country’s electricity conglomerate, helped to run Putin’s presidential campaign.

Consequences of transactorship What, it might be asked, is wrong with the transactorship mode of organizing relations? Many US officials have argued that it was the most effective method by which to implement market reform in Russia – through a committed group with intimate access to both sides (and to many activities in both countries). In fact, there are several reasons for which this argument is seriously flawed. Transactorship has served to undermine democratic processes and the development of transparent, accountable institutions. Operating by decree is clearly anti-democratic and contrary to the aid community’s stated goal of building democracy in Russia. It has weakened the message to the Russians that the United States stands for democracy. Further, the aidcreated flex organizations have supplanted the state and often carried out functions that ought to have been the province of governmental bureaucracies. As well, the flex organizations have likely facilitated the development of what I have called elsewhere the ‘clan-state’, a state captured by unauthorized groups and characterized by pervasive corruption. In such a state, individual clans, each of which controls property and resources, are so closely identified with particular ministries or institutional segments of government that the respective agendas of the state and the clan become indistinguishable. Thus, while the Chubais transactors were closely identified with segments of government concerned with privatization and the economy, competing clans had equivalent ties with other government organizations, such as the ministries of defense and internal affairs and the security services. Generally, where judicial processes are politically motivated, a clan’s influence can be checked or constrained only by a rival clan. By systematically bypassing the democratically elected parliament, US aid flouted a crucial feature of democratic governance: namely, parliamentarianism. Transactorship has frustrated true market reform. Without public support or understanding, decrees constitute a weak foundation on which to build a market economy. Some reforms, such as lifting price controls,

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may be achieved by decree. But many others depend on changes in law, public administration or mindsets, and require co-operation among a full spectrum of legislative and market participants, not just a clan. Although transactors may share the overall goals of the sides they represent, they may advertently or inadvertently subvert those goals in pursuit of their own private agendas. The Chubais–Harvard transactors were known to block reform efforts on occasion. In particular, they were inclined to obstruct reform initiatives when they originated outside their own group or were perceived to conflict with their own agendas. For example, when a USAID-funded organization run by the Chubais– Harvard transactors failed to receive the additional USAID funds it had expected, its leaders promptly obstructed legal reform activities in the areas of title registration and mortgages – programs that were launched by agencies of the Russian government. Lack of transparency characterized the transactors’ operations. Secrecy shrouded the privatization process, with numerous, unfortunate consequences for the Russian people. Privatization, largely shaped by the Chubais–Harvard transactors, was intended to spread the fruits of the free market. Instead, it helped to create a system of ‘tycoon capitalism’ acting in the service of corrupt oligarchs. The ‘reforms’ were more about wealth confiscation than wealth creation; and the incentive system encouraged looting, asset stripping and capital flight. Transactorship has encouraged the maximization of opportunities for personal gain. The prestige and access of the Harvard–Chubais transactors facilitated their involvement in other areas, including allegedly the Russian securities market, both in Russia and internationally. Providing a small group of powerbrokers with a blank cheque inevitably encouraged corruption, precisely at a time when the international community should have been demanding safeguards in Russia such as the development of a legal and regulatory framework, property rights and the sanctity of contracts. Over the years there have been many substantiated reports of the Chubais transactors using public monies for personal enrichment. Today some of these same persons are under investigation for alleged involvement in laundering billions of dollars through the Bank of New York and other banks. The Harvard Institute has also had its difficulties. In 1996 the GAO found that USAID’s management over Harvard was ‘lax’. In 1997 the government cancelled most of the last US$14 million earmarked for the Institute, citing evidence that the project’s two managers – Hay and Shleifer – had used their positions and inside knowledge to profit from investments in the Russian securities markets and other private

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enterprises. The two, together with their wives and Harvard University, are now being sued by the US government for US$120 million following an investigation by the US Department of Justice. In January 2000 a Harvard task force issued a report alluding to that scandal and recommending that the Harvard Institute for International Development be closed. It was shut down. Because the transactors’ success is grounded in mutual loyalty and trust, and because of their shared record of activities, some of which have left them vulnerable to allegations of corruption, the transactors have ample incentive to stick together. Any desertions must be well considered, as they could have serious consequences for all involved. Transactorship has encouraged not only corruption but also the ability to deny it. Transactorship affords maximum flexibility and influence to the transactors, and minimal accountability to the sides the transactors presumably represent. If the Harvard Institute’s manager in Russia was asked by US authorities to account for privatization decisions and monies, he could respond by claiming that he made those decisions as a Russian, not as an American. If USAID came under fire for funding the Russian state, it could claim that it was funding private organizations. When the issue of ‘Russian’ corruption captured American headlines in 1999, Treasury Secretary Summers began insisting that the Russian government make amends. ‘This has been a US demand for years’, he claims, as if he had not himself addressed letters to ‘Dear Anatolii’ and met with Chubais as recently as the summer of 1999. This only months after Chubais admitted that he had ‘conned’ from the IMF a US$4.8 billion installment in July 1998, the details of that deal having been worked out in Summers’ home over brunch – a meeting that the New York Times deemed crucial to obtaining release of the funds. Transactorship has proved particularly harmful in a setting in which Communism until recently prevailed. The transactorship mode of organizing relations is reminiscent of precisely those features of Communism that the international community should be concerned not to reinforce. The informal, but influential, parallel executive established by the Harvard–Chubais transactors recalls the powerful patronage networks that virtually ran the Soviet Union. Political aid disguised as economic aid is only too familiar to Russians raised under a system of political control over economic decisions. As Shleifer acknowledged in a 1995 book funded by Harvard, ‘Aid helps reform not because it directly helps the economy – it is simply too small for that – but because it helps the reformers in their political battles.’ And yet US officials have defended this approach. In a 1997 interview, Ambassador Richard L. Morningstar, US aid coordinator to the former

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Soviet Union, said, ‘When you’re talking about a few hundred million dollars, you’re not going to change the country, but you can provide targeted assistance to help Chubais’ – an admission of direct interference in Russia’s political life. US assistance to Chubais continued even after he was dismissed by El’tsin as first deputy prime minister in January 1996: he was placed on the Harvard payroll, a demonstration of solidarity for which senior US officials declared their support.

Conclusion The US–Russian experience of transactorship is interesting and disturbing not only in its own right, but because this mode of operating may grow more common in the twenty-first century. With the ongoing processes of globalization, the nationality of actors is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Already global élites, with ever closer connections to one another and fewer to the nation-state, see themselves not so much as American, Russian or Brazilian, but as members of an exclusive and highly mobile multinational club, whose rules and regulations have yet to be written. Many met as students at prestigious universities. And many are members of what sociologist Peter Berger has identified as the overlapping ‘Davos’ and ‘Faculty Club’ cultures, which have much more in common with each other than they have with their fellow nationals. As Berger observes, ‘it may be that commonalties in taste make it easier to find common ground politically’ – and, of course, economically. While all this is true, global élites will continue to operate in a world organized into nation-states. In such a world, assumptions about representation, grounded in national and international law, are based on the idea that an individual can formally represent either one state or another, but not both. The transactor mode of behaviour may seem to offer a means of having it both ways, of squaring the circle. But it also raises crucial public policy questions. What are the implications of a state of affairs in which the ‘choice’ of who represents one side is shaped to a significant degree by self-selected representatives of the other? What are the consequences when the same player represents multiple sides? Wherein lies the accountability to electorates and parliaments in a world of growing cosiness and joint decision-making among governing élites? Where, if at all, do representation and democracy enter the picture? The US–Russian case in the last decade provides a cautionary lesson in all these respects. Why did transactorship emerge in Russia, but not in Central Europe? The answer lies both in the choices made by donors about who they trusted as brokers and representatives of both donor and recipient sides,

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and in the political, societal, institutional and legal frameworks of the recipient countries. Significant differences characterized the structures within which aid was distributed in Central Europe, as compared with Russia. Although reform-oriented groups in Central Europe garnered much of the aid, they did not have a monopoly on it, in contrast to the Russian Chubais Clan. Moreover, very different frameworks developed in the 1990s in Russia as compared, for example, with Poland, where there is little evidence of criminal mafia infiltration in the political establishment, as there is in Russia. Polish recipients generally operated in a more transparent and accountable way, and their primary motivation was largely to build a political base, not self-enrichment, in contrast to some Russian recipients. What is the ultimate outcome of the aid over ten years to the region? As I indicated earlier, some regions of Central Europe are muddling through relatively well. Some countries are entering into negotiations to join the EU. Some of the aid, which after all created traffic between East and West and promoted relationships, no doubt served this process. But Russia’s problems are deeper and complex and Western aid has exacerbated them. Many Russians now believe that the United States deliberately set out to destroy their economy. As with anything, if relations among nations are allowed to deteriorate for a long time they become more difficult to repair. If my work on assistance to Central and Eastern Europe accomplishes anything, I hope it will urge an examination of how we implement foreign aid and what outcomes it produces. In particular, I hope to draw attention to the importance of relationships: how they are set up; who wins, who loses; and how the choice of representatives influences social and political organization on the recipient side. The structure of relationships among individuals crucially shapes the effectiveness of billions of dollars of foreign aid and the relationships of nations.

Sources Janine R. Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, New York, 2001. Janine R. Wedel, Clans, Cliques, and Captured States: How We Misunderstand ‘Transition’ in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Working Paper prepared for the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research and the National Institute of Justice, Fall 2000. Janine R. Wedel, ‘Clique-run organizations and US economic aid: An institutional analysis’, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, 4(4), Fall 1996, pp. 571–602.

Transactions in the US–Russia Relationship 121 Janine R. Wedel, ‘Tainted Transactions: Harvard, the Chubais Clan and Russia’s Ruin’, The National Interest, 59, Spring 2000, pp. 23–34. United States District Court, District of Massachusetts, Civil Action no. 00CV11977DPW, United States of America, Plaintiff, v. The President and Fellows of Harvard College, Andrei Shleifer, Jonathan Hay, Nancy Zimmerman, and Elizabeth Hebert, Defendants.

7 Blat Lessons: Networks, Institutions, Unwritten Rules Alena Ledeneva

In their conclusion to a volume of early post-1991 reflections on the collapse of world communism Frederic Fleron and Erik Hoffman admit: We have been unable to understand scarcity and bargaining. We have found it difficult to comprehend the politics of survival in economies that are dominated by nonmarket forces and that reward blat, stability, conformity, and material equality rather than work, risk, creativity, and personal achievements. Because we live in consumer-oriented societies where virtually all goods and services are available to those who have the money to pay for them (i.e. societies with no nomenclatura elites), we have brought too many Western economic, social, and psychological assumptions to our analyses of Communist systems.1 A few years later John Barber made an even more radical statement. ‘If we had not underestimated blat’, he said, ‘we would have been able to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union’.2 In fact, this could be said of all the other informal practices hiding behind the six paradoxes of socialism as they appear in a popular anecdote: No unemployment but nobody works. [Absenteeism] Nobody works but productivity increases. [False reporting] Productivity increases but shops are empty. [Shortages] Shops are empty but fridges are full. [Blat] Fridges are full but nobody is satisfied. [Privileges] Nobody is satisfied but all vote unanimously in favour. [Cynicism]3 Blat is the use of personal networks and informal contacts to obtain goods and services in short supply and to circumvent formal procedures. 122

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The word is virtually impossible to translate directly into English. As Joseph Berliner, one of the earliest observers of blat, has remarked, ‘the term blat […] is one of those many flavoured words which are so intimate a part of a particular culture that they can be only awkwardly rendered in the language of another’.4 The ubiquity of blat was obvious to every citizen of the ex-Soviet Union5 and was also reported by Western researchers, who first described the phenomenon in the 1950s.6 Edward Crankshaw referred to it as ‘an extremely elaborate and all-pervading “old-boy” network. Everyone, including the most ardent Party members, deals in it’.7 Yet although blat has long been recognized, there have been no attempts to assess its role and to conceptualize its function for the workings of the Soviet system. As Sheila Fitzpatrick suggests: Very little attention has so far been paid to sociability in the Stalin era, or for that matter in the Soviet period as a whole. Perhaps thinking about blat as a form of sociability, as well as a form of economic exchange, will provide an entrée into this wider field of enquiry. The importance of friendship and small-group loyalties in Soviet (especially late Soviet) life was something well-known, at an impressionistic and personal level, to several generations of western Soviet scholars; yet for some reason this impressionistic knowledge was usually compartmentalized as ‘field lore’, not applicable to our theoretical understanding of how Soviet society worked.8 The 1990s have provided a window of opportunity for research on blat. People were no longer inhibited from discussing sensitive issues, yet their memory of the Soviet past was still fresh. Before perestroika people were unwilling to talk for fear of the consequences or because they were fundamentally unused to speaking openly. The political and economic reforms of the 1990s resulted in dramatic social changes which made Soviet realities a thing of the past. With these changes, people lost their inhibitions and even began to talk about the old ways with nostalgia. Although they still remembered how Soviet society functioned, people had already had some time to reflect on how this had changed in post-Soviet conditions. This has made it possible to collect data on Soviet blat that would otherwise have been inaccessible to researchers. The research that I conducted in 1994–95 resulted in the following definition of blat.9 ●

Blat is the use of personal networks (kin, friends and acquaintances) to obtain goods and services in the economy of shortage [form of sociability];

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●

Blat is also the informal exchange of ‘favours of access’ given at the expense of institutional resources [parallel currency]; Blat is instrumental both to people (to satisfy the needs of personal consumption) and to the state (to cope with the extreme centralisation of the Soviet system), and it illustrates one of the unwritten rules necessary to operate a system which cannot work according to its own proclaimed principles.

The theoretical account of blat offered in my Russia’s Economy of Favours is concerned with the institutional characteristics of Soviet society which necessitated a gradual expansion of blat networks; with the ways in which these networks were interwoven with other forms of power (despite the fact that not much has been written on political power or vertical patron–client relationships);10 and with the ways in which actors have used these networks to pursue their own aims and interests. A central argument of the book is that blat should be considered as the ‘reverse side’ of an overcontrolling centre, a reaction by ordinary people to the structural constraints of the socialist system of distribution – an indispensable set of practices which enabled the Soviet system to function, made it tolerable, but also subverted it. The research into blat has prompted three further areas of investigation. First, blat is a network phenomenon, which raised my interest in the nature of networks used for getting things done in Russia. Second, blat is both functional and subversive, which required a conceptualization of the relationship between formal institutions and informal networks. Third, blat was a form of ‘know-how’ in the Soviet system. Understanding blat was the key to understanding how the Soviet system really worked and posed questions about the whole system of unwritten rules and their role in non-transparent economies. These three themes are much wider than blat and, I think, much more interesting, particularly when explored in a post-Soviet context. Revealing the nature of networks, explaining the relationship between the formal and the informal, and providing insight into the unwritten rules are all essential to understanding the informal order in Russia.

The nature of networks that serve the economy of favours Blat is an important part of the Soviet legacy and blat networks are still instrumental in getting things done in post-Soviet Russia.11 The relevance of the Soviet term blat, which is associated mainly with the economy of shortage and access to items of everyday consumption, however,

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becomes questionable in the post-Soviet context. The term ‘economy of favours’ is better suited as a generic term for blat, both in post-Soviet studies and for comparative research. The fact that the economy of favours makes use both of personal/ informal networks (the terms are used interchangeably) and institutional resources has considerable bearing on the nature of personal networks and institutions. Not only do personal relationships become ‘colonized’ and used for matters going far beyond sociability, but formal contacts also tend to become ‘informalized’, which results in ‘privatising’ the state, as Vladimir Shlapentokh puts it.12 Thus formal institutions can also be seen as ‘colonized’ by personal networks and involved with the economy of favours. Richard Rose associates this impact with the ‘antimodern’ nature of formal institutions in Russia.13 The literature on the sociology of organizations has examined the impact of personal networks on organizations. But what kind of impact does the economy of favours have on personal networks themselves? We know that not all personal relationships and not all formal institutions become ‘colonized’, as not all rules can be broken and those which do tend to get broken are still considered to be rules. Is it possible then to distinguish those personal/informal networks that serve the economy of favours from a wider class of social networks? Analytically, the networks that serve the economy of favours are, quite literally, ‘in-formal’; that is, they penetrate the formal institutions and reside in them (say, when a friend becomes a colleague at work). In framing the phenomenon, I follow the logic of Endre Sik and Istvan Janos Toth’s concept of the ‘hidden economy’ and Eurostat classifications, which do not take account of housework, do-it-yourself activities, social work, the exchange of produce between households, crime and activities which count as productive but which are not legal (for example, the production of and trade in drugs). Under this category, Endre Sik and Toth do list the unreported activities of registered enterprises and the activities of enterprises which, although not registered, conduct otherwise legal activities.14 Following this logic, networks that serve the economy of favours include not all informal contacts but only those used to access or penetrate formal structures. Favours exchanged within those networks informally are given not at one’s own expense (do-it-yourself activities or exchange of produce between households), but rather at the expense of institutions. They are so-called ‘favours of access’ that serve to channel institutional resources into private pockets, thus constituting a parallel currency exchanged within circles of ‘svoi’ people (people belonging to the circle).

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Now that we have narrowed down the range of informal networks under consideration, the nature of these networks can be clarified. Generally, the term ‘network’ refers to a large number of people, groups and institutions that have a connection with each other and work together as a system.15 It is used to describe anything from a public telephone or television network to the supportive network of the extended family and global production networks.16 Technically speaking, it is a system of nodes and ties representing a ‘web’ principle of organization applicable to a wide range of nodes. Thus, Manuel Castells promotes the idea of a network society based on new technologies and communicational networks characteristic of the information age,17 while Dirk Messner in his The Network Society18 focuses on social networks and excludes electronic networks, media networks, intra-firm networks or even production networks.19 In conventional sociological discourse the term ‘network’ is used to designate social ties between people and to cover ‘sociability’ – that is, relationships with friends, leisure associates and professional contacts. In this context, networking can be defined as connecting nodes and building up networks. In the context of the command economy and economy of shortage, as I argued in Russia’s Economy of Favours, friendship and the use of friendship become blurred. Friends (and acquaintances) are supposed to provide each other with access to goods and services in short supply and help out in other ways too. Networking acquires a connotation of the pragmatic, or sometimes strategic, use of networks, and the term ‘network’, therefore, ceases to be a neutral concept. Apart from sociability, personal networks also provide access to institutional resources, and thereby form historically and economically shaped patterns of mediation between state and society. There is no Soviet word to denote ‘personal network’ or ‘networking’ (although post-Soviet academic discourse uses the term ‘seti’), while the most related idioms, such as ‘blat’, ‘people of the circle’ (svoi liudi), ‘one of us’ (svoi), and ‘circles of mutual dependency’ (krugovaia poruka) carry a connotation pointing to the exclusive nature of networks and their calculated use. This prompts one to look into the nature of ties constituting networks in addition to the analysis of their functional or dysfunctional significance for the economy. In fact, it is possible to argue that it is the latter – the role networks play in the economy – that makes the difference for the former – the nature of ties within a network. The more dependent the formal economy is on economy of favours, the more instrumental the ties within informal networks20 and the less developed the impersonal systems of trust. In such economies, the fact of belonging almost automatically provides a member

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of an informal network with access to a whole variety of institutional resources available ‘for people of the circle only’, while a wider social fabric is rather unwelcoming and even hostile. Needless to say, the predominance of such informal networks impedes the emergence of impersonal systems of trust and the development of a fully fledged market economy in the post-Soviet period. To summarize, networks do not only organize and facilitate, they also divert and misappropriate the structures organizing the economy’s dominant functions and processes. For example, networks that have been used as a resource, say, in starting up businesses (studies of social capital emphasize this aspect of networks), can later become a serious obstacle for the further development of the business environment (competition, transparency, market incentives). Let me outline the features of informal networks that serve the economy of favours, relying on my own research,21 and the features of networks in the network society as suggested by Castells,22 which can be used as ideal types in analysis of existing networks and their transformation (see Table 7.1).

Table 7.1 Networks in the economy of favours and in the network society Networks in the economy of favours

Networks in the network society

Existing structures grounded in the past Networks account for anti-modern nature of institutions

Emerging structures permeating all societies Networks are the institutions of the information age, enabling and innovative Socio-political basis: global capitalism Networks transcend all states

Socio-political basis: statism Networks are exploitative of the state, parasitic on state property Networks are personalized, based on a priori existing social contacts Networks of ‘svoi liudi’ bound by mutual obligations and closed to outsiders Discipline imposed by ethics, etiquette and unwritten rules Unwritten rules are followed more than laws

Networks (both technological and social) are of an impersonal nature Networks imply openness, dynamism and flexibility for individuals, firms and countries Discipline imposed by global financial markets, military technology, control of knowledge The only rule is that there are no rules – laws are enforced with difficulty by global and national institutions

128 Alena Ledeneva Table 7.1 (continued) Networks in the economy of favours

Networks in the network society

Ambivalent relationship between networks and the socio-economic order: networks are both functional and subversive Fragmentation of the state, with state institutions being ‘colonized’ by antagonistic networks

Networks generate a new order (assumes decline of the state)

Indicators of economy of favours: diversion in workings of formal institutions (ineffectiveness of the rule of law, oversized informal economy, spread of corruption and customary practices)

The new state will be a decentralized network state (devolution of power and resources to regions, local governments and NGOs, initiated by the state) Indicators of network society: number of communication devices (telephone lines, TV, PCs, Internet hosts etc.)

It follows from the evidence provided by Castells and Kiselyova23 that some features of the network society model are already visible in Russia. My own views on the possibility of Russia’s smooth transition to a network society are rather pessimistic. There is evidence that even emerging networks of a ‘network society’ type still have the features of Soviet informal networks. For a fully fledged market economy to emerge, networks will have to cease being ‘circles of friends’ that are exploitative of institutional resources – features that have been described as inherent to the Russian character.24 This raises the issue of the dynamics of the relationship between the formal and the informal constituents of the economy.

The relationship between formal institutions and informal networks Many works published in the 1990s contributed towards the conceptualization of the relationship between the formal and the informal. Some of them derived from the debates on the self-subversive nature of the Soviet system among social historians seeking to transcend the totalitarian concept of that system,25 and some of them from the analysis of Soviet institutions.26 The formal/informal relationship has also been explored in studies of the informal economy in the later period of Soviet history. In the massive literature on the ‘second economy’, many of the informal practices

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pervading the Soviet command system were identified and thoroughly examined.27 The characterization of these practices as ‘informal’ testified to the Soviet regime’s ability to ensure that, for the most part, they contributed to rather than subverted the formal goals and activities of society. The informal economy took care of many needs that were not met by the command economy, and thus contributed to the functioning of the Soviet system. According to Ken Jowitt, however, at some stage informal practices subverted more than contributed to the party’s formal goals and general interests.28 The role of informal practices in subverting the Soviet system can be summed up as follows. First, the so-called ‘socialist’ economy should be viewed as selfcontradictory and self-subversive, as it could not have worked according to its proclaimed principles. The planned economy would not have worked had it not been for tolkachi (from tolkat’ – to push, to jostle), who ‘pushed’ for the interests of their enterprise in such matters as the procurement of supplies or the reduction of plan targets. Their ‘professional’ role was to support the Soviet ‘command’ economy and to enable it to work which, paradoxically, could only be done by violation of its declared principles of planned allocation. Second, all institutional positions, including the party apparatus, were subject to informal influences. Classically defined as rational and impersonal and known to be particularly oppressive and inflexible under the Soviet regime, the bureaucratic system, in fact, was personalized and penetrated by informal networks which often made use of the ‘party line’ for their own interests. Third, indicative of the legal system and political regime, informal networks had to be used to secure civil rights. Historical evidence from 1940 suggests that to have blat meant a ‘close connection with a swindler, speculator, fiddler, thief, flatterer and the like. Though to have no blat is equal to having no civil rights, for it means that everywhere you are deprived of everything. You can obtain nothing in the shops. In response to your legitimate demands, you will get a simple and clear answer “no”. If you appeal, they are all numb, deaf and mute.’29 Finally, blat networks cushioned the discrepancies between the institutional and the personal in the authoritarian state: between shortages and (even if repressed) consumerism; between a rigid ideological framework and human needs. Many scholars, ranging from Merle Fainsod to J. Arch Getty, viewed informal networks primarily as a hindrance to efficient governance. Others, building on the work of T. H. Rigby and Graeme Gill, viewed personal networks as central to the workings of the system. It seems

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essential to reveal both the functional and the subversive roles of informal networks for the formal economy. On the one hand, personal networks became embedded in the institutional order to such an extent that agents stopped reflecting upon them, which made them an integral to the functioning of the system. On the other hand, they also subverted the formal system, especially its ideological and moral foundations. The highly exploitative nature of the Soviet state has resulted in an extreme parasitism inherent in the popular attitudes towards the state itself,30 which had to accommodate such attitudes in exchange for its own legitimacy. The concept of ‘economy of favours’ grasps such a mutually exploitative dependence between the formal institutions and the informal networks within the system. Informal networks permeate formal institutions, thus transforming the way they operate; while the functioning of formal institutions in turn becomes dependent on channels and influences supplied by the informal networks. This phenomenon has been emphasized by Saskia Sassen in her definition of the informal economy: We can only obtain an operational definition of the informal economy against the backdrop of an institutional framework for economic activity in which the state intervenes explicitly to regulate the processes and products of income generating activities according to a set of enforced legal rules. Nevertheless, the informal economy does not include every transaction that happens to evade regulation. What makes informalization a distinct process today are not these small cracks in the institutional framework, but rather the informalization of activities generally taking place in the formal economy.31 Watching the dynamics of the formal/informal relationship during the radical political and economic change in Russia in the 1990s has been eye-opening in many ways. The informal networks shaped by the Soviet system were well adjusted to it. The Soviet regime not only enabled, but also restricted, the ‘colonizing’ effects of the economy of favours. Once the Soviet system collapsed, the transformation of the informal order was inevitable. The key feature of the Soviet economy of favours – parasitism on the state – was bound to change in market conditions. First, the reforms aimed at liberalization, privatization and financial deregulation undermined ‘socialist’ doctrine. The process of privatization in combination with the severe economic trends of the 1990s, such as the decline of industrial production, the investment crisis and the crisis of mutual

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arrears, meant that the system of socialist guarantees ceased to operate. This ruled out previously dominant forms of solidarity and mutual help between industrial enterprises, and destroyed a social security system centred on care for collectives in organizations; people were thereby provided with a justification (‘they betrayed us’) and a free hand to help themselves to whatever they could in the new system. Second, a fundamental change in property rights in the post-Soviet order has radically transformed the nature and scale of ‘helping oneself’. The omnipresence of state ownership in the Soviet era produced an idiosyncratic attitude towards state property. Public resources were widely interpreted as quasi-private, as grasped in the saying ‘public means that part of it is mine’. Practices of ‘petty privatization’ of the state, that is, the trickle-down of state property through ‘carrying out’ (vynos), minor theft and siphoning resources from the official economy into informal networks, have been replaced by strategies of privatizing state property. Privatization has engendered a whole new set of problems, as entrenched attitudes of entitlement towards socialist property impede the transition to notions of ‘private property’, ‘corporate governance’, ‘minority shareholders’ rights’ and the like. Third, parasitism on the state transmuted into parasitism on business. To illustrate this tendency, let us return to an example of blat: the mass practice of informal exchange of so-called ‘favours of access’ (access to state property and its distribution systems). Favours of access were given or exchanged by official ‘gatekeepers’ on two conditions: the ‘gate’ itself was never alienable, and gatekeepers remained in charge of re-distribution. This enabled gatekeepers to receive and accumulate, with time, various forms of non-monetary returns – loyalties, obligations and potential favours of access to various distribution systems. Today, most ‘favours of access’ demanded from officials by the protagonists of business are about privatizing resources or facilitating this by means of licences, permissions, tax privileges and so on. For officials, providing such favours effectively means cutting off the branch on which they are sitting – that is, losing their ‘gate’. It is not surprising therefore that representatives of the state and market sectors join forces, thus shaping the phenomenon of ‘nomenklatura business’. Lump-sum corruption has given way to more sophisticated arrangements by which, in exchange for ‘alienating access’ to state property, state officials receive ‘inalienable access’ to private resources. Commissions, percentages, securities and shares in businesses are now common forms of favour repayment. Thus, parasitism towards the state merges with parasitism on the private sector (see the change in the use of blat networks in Table 7.2).32

132 Alena Ledeneva Table 7.2 Role of networking in a command economy and in a market economy Sector Role of networking in a command economy

Role of networking in a ‘market’ economy47

State

Similar role plus the following tendencies: ● Change of items in short supply and corresponding change in needs and favours; ● Monetarization of blat exchanges (favours become measurable as money becomes ‘real’); ● Long-term reciprocity gives place to short-term (as a result of changes in patterns of trust); ● Restructuring of blat networks (as a result of polarization of society, collapse of the socialist social security system); ● Changes resulted from the privatization of state property (see below).

●

●

●

●

●

To obtain goods and services in short supply; To serve the needs of personal consumption and to ‘humanize’ the official distribution of material welfare; To exchange ‘favours of access’ to the centralized distribution system of resources and privileges (parallel market); To build ‘social capital’ and to accumulate parallel currency in a society where money played little role; To sustain friendships and acquaintances.

Private Personal contacts are used: To earn money or to arrange a ‘good’ job;48 ● To reduce risk of keeping deposits in a bank – good contacts can ensure their safety; ● To invest in and to run business and trade (in business, networks are instrumental in giving access to bureaucratic decision-making and information, especially where bribery is impossible); ● To access means of making money, such as budget resources, export licenses, privileged loans or business information (institutions where personal contacts have become most important are thus those of tax, customs, banking and regional/local administration); ● To protect one’s capital, business or interests. ●

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The wider implications of the economy of favours for the Russian ‘market’ of the 1990s can be summarized as follows. Market institutions do not operate according to ‘market’ incentives. The economy of favours is likely to account for the super-profits made on the Russian market, for the 1995 loans-for-shares auctions, as well as for large-scale corruption33 and the intermingling of political and criminal networks. It might also help explain a paradox of the post-Soviet economy – that with the development of the market, a growing proportion of ‘market’ transactions is being conducted in various money substitutes.34 The use of barter for serving the shadow economy, for shifting debts and creating the anti-bankruptcy alliances between industrial firms and local authorities, the establishment of so-called ‘authorized’ business structures and so on all indicate the impact of the economy of favours on the post-Soviet economy. State institutions are corrupt and their legitimacy is eroded. The situation is best described as the fragmentation of the state monopoly on legitimate violence, taxation and law enforcement, which prompted the emergence of alternative state-related and independent agents. The organized groups that command the means of violence and take over the function of enforcing laws and contract relations in the private sector of the economy use a ramified network of informal control and protection business.35 They also offer, among other things, their services in ‘solving problems’ in local and regional authorities, tax inspection offices and the state’s coercive institutions. The institutions of civil society have been also influenced by the economy of favours. The networks of mutual help and informal exchange developed under the Soviet regime could hardly be considered embryos of ‘civil society’ due to their state-dependency and exploitative use of the state.36 These networks still dominate the niche of civil society, undermining people’s loyalty to the state and order. Other implications of the state-dependency discussed above should be also viewed as distorting market institutions. Other institutional implications of the post-Soviet economy of favours are grasped in the notion of ‘bargaining’,37 which is applicable to both market and bureaucratic orders. For example, Gerald Easter describes methods of revenue extraction in terms of elite bargaining which entails using informal personal relations in place of formal bureaucratic mechanisms for revenue extraction.38 In this approach, revenue was not so much extracted by the state, as obtained by negotiations between agents of the central government and a new financial elite. Easter rightly emphasizes that although revenue collection is a

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post-Soviet concern, the state’s inability to administer tax collection is also rooted in the Soviet system of infrastructural, or administrative, power. He argues that the Soviet infrastructural power was based on ‘patrimonial’ rather than ‘bureaucratic’ principles. The emphasis on personal networks in the functioning of institutional structures is crucial – not only because they serve as a basis for the analysis of post-Communist institutional transformation by disclosing aspects of both continuity and change, but also because such a perspective captures the ambivalence of the relationship between personal networks and institutional structures.39 As Easter puts it, ‘while the patrimonial system enhanced the state’s administrative capabilities in the short term, over the long term it had the unintended consequence of weakening state capacity’.40 The effects of the Soviet legacy on the post-Soviet economy and society substantiate the idea of ‘path dependency’ suggested by David Stark.41 His view is based on the assumption that processes for selecting technologies and organizational forms are governed more by routine than by rational choice – the point illustrated by recent research in evolutionary economics and organizational ecology.42 It does not preclude the possibilities of dramatic change, but it departs emphatically from those ‘all too prevalent approaches that argue for rapid, radical, extensive (and even exhaustive) replacement of the current institutions, habits and routines of the former economies by an entirely new set of institutions and mentalities’. The strength of the concept of ‘path dependency’ is its analytic power to explain disappointing outcomes where strategic actors are deliberately searching for departures from long-established routines and are attempting to restructure the rules of the game. The economy of favours is a perfect example of a powerful set of routine practices that persistently impedes such restructuring. It follows that it is impossible to achieve real change by reforming only the formal framework. The informal order has to be addressed as well. The next section illustrates such a shift in perspective in detail.

Unwritten rules A reflection of the importance of the informal order in Russia can be found in popular wisdom: ‘Russia is a country of unread laws and unwritten rules.’ Or, as they say, ‘the imperfection of our laws is compensated for by their non-observance’ (nesovershenstvo nashikh zakonov kompensiruetsia ikh nevypolneniem). It is not that the requisite components of the rule of law are absent in Russia; rather, the ability of the rule of law to function coherently has been diverted by a powerful set of

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practices that has evolved organically in the post-Soviet milieu. Adopting a perspective of ‘unwritten rules’ and understanding how they work can help to make the rules of the game in Russia more transparent and therefore subject to positive change and reform. In other words, rather than looking only at what does not work in Russia and why, one should concentrate on what does work and how. An example will best illustrate such an approach. The ineffectiveness of the rule of law in Russia is one of the main obstacles to Russian economic and political development. Not only does the weak rule of law deter much-needed foreign investment in the Russian economy, it also undermines efforts to rein in acute problems such as capital flight, tax evasion and abuses of corporate governance. Following our alternative perspective, one should ask: ‘if the rule of law does not work in Russia, then what does?’43 Given the scale of the informal economy in post-Soviet Russia, there is no shortage of examples that illustrate how ‘unwritten rules’ operate. Tax evasion and tax bargaining alone provide an excellent ground for studying the informal order. In the corporate sector, the most damaging practices for the transparency of the new Russian economy are those based on the so-called ‘corporate identity split’ and false reporting. This means that firms insulate themselves by at least two front companies and create various shell-firms or scam-firms, which are organized in sophisticated financial networks. Specially established offshore companies conduct financial transactions in order to reserve profits for the insiders’ club of shareholders or managers. Unwritten rules also prevail in regulating non-monetary exchanges and help in fighting business and political wars. What are these unwritten rules? ●

Unwritten rules are the know-how needed to ‘navigate’ between formal and informal sets of constraints and to manipulate their enforcement to one’s own advantage. Without being articulated, they ‘prescribe’ which rules to follow in which context and ‘set’ the best approach for getting things done. Applying one formal rule rather than another, using restrictions (quotas, filters etc.) and small print, and enforcing some decisions but not others, are all examples of how constraints can be mediated. The focus of unwritten rules is not on constraints per se, as in the case of formal and informal codes, but on the enabling aspects of those constraints. To put it more bluntly, unwritten rules define the ways of circumventing constraints, both formal and informal, of manipulating their enforcement to one’s own advantage, and of avoiding penalties by combining the three elements of the rules of the game creatively.

136 Alena Ledeneva ●

●

If we distinguish between organizations as enforcing mainly formal constraints and social networks as enforcing mainly informal constraints, unwritten rules regulate the ways in which organizations and networks interact. In other words, they shape the interaction between organizational principles and ties of kinship and friendship. For example, the ways in which old-boy networks or nepotism permeate modern institutions are guided by unwritten rules. Soviet blat, as already mentioned, is a classic example of unwritten rules by which resources of the formal distribution system were siphoned into the informal networks of the ‘gatekeepers’. Blat was functional for the Soviet system as it helped in lubricating the rigid constraints of the formal economy. In present-day Russia, unwritten rules bridge the formal and informal sectors of the economy and prevail in areas vacated by the state but not yet filled by civil society – thus deforming both organizational and network principles. Unwritten rules exist in all societies, but predominate (and even become indispensable) in those where enforcement, formal and informal rules are not synchronized and do not constitute coherent rules of the game. Douglas North shows that when people perceive the structure of the rules of the system to be fair and just, transaction costs are low and enforcement costs are negligible, which helps the efficiency of the economy.44 When people perceive the system to be unjust, transaction costs rise. In other words, if one cannot follow both formal and informal sets of rules coherently, this will be reflected in their merger and certain patterns of rule-following or unwritten rules. It might be tempting to think that unwritten rules are generally disadvantageous for the system. This is only true, however, if the rules of the game – formal and informal constraints and their enforcement – are tied to the public interest and are beneficial to economic performance. As this has not always been the case in Russia, the impact of unwritten rules is rather ambivalent.

Reliance upon unwritten rules is an outcome of the loopholes in legislation plus the inefficiency of formal rules and their enforcement on the one hand, and people’s lack of respect for formal rules on the other. Traditionally, distant and sceptical attitudes to the law create a fundamental problem of public governance and limit the constituency for an effective institutional framework, essential for a market economy. Overcoming Russia’s dependency on unwritten rules means breaking free from the following chain reaction: ●

The ‘rules of the game’ in the economy are non-transparent and frequently change because the existing legal framework does not function

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●

●

●

coherently. Some key building blocks of a transparent market system, such as a land code, anti-corruption legislation and a fully functioning banking system, are not in place and basic market institutions, such as open competition, property rights and transparent corporate governance, do not work as they should. The incoherence of formal rules forces almost all Russians, willingly or unwillingly, to violate them and to play by rules introduced and negotiated outside formal institutions. Anybody can be framed and found guilty of some violation of the formal rules, as the economy operates in such a way that there is always something on which to be caught out. For example, everybody is forced to earn in the informal economy to survive – a practice that is punishable, or could be made so. Businesses are taxed at a rate that forces them to evade taxes in order to do well. Practices such as the embezzlement of state property or tax evasion become pervasive. Inside state institutions, a whole gamut of corrupt practices, such as bribe-taking and extortion in the granting of licenses and so on, has been prevalent. The ubiquitous character of such practices makes it impossible to punish everyone. Due to the pervasiveness of the offence, punishment is bound to occur selectively on the basis of criteria developed outside the legal domain. While everybody is under the threat of a punishment, the actual punishment is ‘suspended’, but can be enforced at any time. The principle of ‘suspended punishment’,45 by which a certain freedom and flexibility did exist but which could be restricted at any moment, worked well in the Soviet system. It brought about the routine practice whereby authorities switch to the written code only ‘where necessary’. A similar tendency is noticeable today and apparently for the same reasons: formal rules are insufficient to operate fully on their own and impossible to enforce as it is not feasible to catch everybody. Unwritten rules come into being to compensate for the defects in the rules of the game and to form the basis for selective punishment. Violation of unwritten rules can result in the enforcement of written ones which, paradoxically, makes it more important to observe the unwritten rules rather than the written ones. This, in turn, feeds back into the non-transparency of the ‘rules of the game’ in the Russian economy.

Unfortunately, these attributes of the system seem not to have changed much during Russia’s transition to a market economy. In the same way that the planned economy was not really a planned economy and was actually run with help of tolkachi (‘pushers’), blat and other informal

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arrangements operating according to unwritten rules, the market economy today is not really a market economy. This is due primarily to the key role that unwritten rules still play in the system. Western aid programs have funded ambitious macroeconomic reforms aimed at ‘shocking’ Russia into a functioning market economy, and foreign investors have attempted to introduce and apply Western business practices and norms within the Russian context. Despite these external efforts and the internal political will to change the foundations of the system, it turned out not to be an easy task. Unwritten rules have long been a powerful invisible hand within Russian political culture and their presence is unlikely to melt away. In the 1990s, unwritten rules surfaced in the opportunistic and manipulative use of formal constraints and the possibility of building corporate strategies on such a basis. In order to get routine business tasks accomplished companies, firms and enterprises are often compelled to secure a ‘roof’ (krysha), or to employ individuals and private security companies skilled at both navigating Russia’s complex financial and legal spheres and at mastering so-called ‘informal negotiation techniques’. The former implies professional expertise in the tax code, licensing requirements, insolvency law, accounting and banking procedures in combination with the necessary know-how to manipulate these codes to the firm’s advantage. The latter refers to sophisticated intelligence-gathering capacities and the informal use of blackmail files (kompromat), including copies of bank statements, currency transfers, business and real estate transactions and other official documents as well as general correspondence, personal information and unofficial transcripts of telephone conversations of a compromising nature. Rather than restricting their activities to ‘traditional’ tasks such as physical protection and information security, private security services in Russia have become the de facto administrative force of the present economy: their extra-legal activities enable Russia’s imperfect institutional framework to operate. Representatives of security agencies facilitate interactions with both state bodies and with other economic agents, including business competitors, organized criminal groups and protection agencies. The transaction costs incurred by private security services, pervasive corruption and a high-risk environment undermine the solvency of small firms in competitive markets and serve to maintain the unwritten rules which benefit those interested in keeping transaction costs high. Will Russia be able to break free from the dependency on unwritten rules? We should not necessarily be pessimistic. But in order to reduce

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the prevalence of unwritten rules in the economy and to make the economy more responsive to market stimuli, it is not enough simply to change the formal constraints. It is crucial to influence the system of informal constraints and to target the unwritten ways in which these informal constraints divert, redefine and enforce the formal ones. Otherwise it will be impossible to prevent an endless string of frustrations in the course of further reforms in Russia. The key question is: ‘how can we reduce the significance of unwritten rules if they are instrumental for the functioning of the economy?’ Following my approach some practical steps can be suggested,46 especially now that the stage of the ‘shock’ macroeconomic reforms is more or less over and more sophisticated targets, such as judicial reform and corporate governance are on the agenda. The fundamental assumption behind such steps is that awareness of the informal order and of the unwritten rules regulating it, followed by the focused efforts of policymakers to transform the informal as well as the formal, should become a necessary condition for reforms to work and for a fully fledged market economy to develop.

Conclusion In this chapter I have discussed the constituents of the informal order by considering three important dimensions of the economy of favours. First, I considered its impact on both formal institutions and on informal networks, with particular emphasis on the latter. I identified some ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the formal and the informal in the Soviet and post-Soviet economy. Finally, I revealed some of the unwritten rules that regulate this relationship and ensure that rules are broken only to the extent to which the informal order is not violated. In doing so I have also illustrated the ways in which unwritten rules impede reforms in Russia and have argued that targeting them is a necessary precondition to fundamental change in Russia. A great deal has been done in the field towards understanding the informal order operating both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time, there is much more that still has to be done. In this sense it might be useful to formulate not only what we have learnt in the past ten years, but also what needs to be done: (1) The informal field needs some rigour. So far, a variety of terms such as informal structures, sectors, economy, institutions, networks, practices, rules and constraints has been used interchangeably, which leaves too much uncertainty for the reader.

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(2) The same point can be made about networks. Until network analysis is adequately integrated with the field of post-Communist network studies, dominated by qualitative research, there will be very little consensus on methodology and even on definitions. The simple fact that ‘networks’ could be both exclusive and inclusive, and that there are both functional and subversive dimensions to networks, has often been overlooked in the keen attempts either to view postCommunist networks as corrupt or to interpret them as social capital for the sake of quantitative and comparative studies. (3) Learning from mistakes, it seems mandatory not to get biased in the other direction and to see everything in an informal light. This means studying the ‘in-formal’ in conjunction with its formal framework and trying to achieve a balanced view. It used to be the case that the existing order often went unnoticed behind the façade of ‘chaos’ theories. It is important to prevent the reverse from being the case. (4) Finally, the informal order has to be taken into account for policymaking however difficult it might be. Such concepts as anti-modern institutions, chaotic capitalism or economy of favours have been useful analytically, but can they be applied to policy-making? It is here that some innovative thinking still needs to be done.

Notes and references 1. Frederic J. Fleron and Erik P. Hoffman, Post-Communist Studies and Political Science: Methodology and Empirical Theory in Sovietology, Boulder, CA, Oxford, 1993. 2. Personal communication, 9 May 1996, PhD viva. 3. Peter Rutland suggested a seventh paradox: ‘Everybody voted in favour but the system collapsed’. 4. Joseph S. Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR, Cambridge, MA, 1957, p. 182. 5. According to Berliner, anecdotes such as ‘Blat is higher than Stalin’ and ‘You’ve got to have ZIS (znakomstvo i sviazi)’ were common currency. See J. Berliner, ‘Blat is higher than Stalin’, Problems of Communism, 3(1), 1954. 6. Edward Crankshaw, Russia Without Stalin. London, 1956; D. J. Dallin, The New Soviet Empire, London, 1951; J. Berliner, ‘Blat is higher than Stalin’. 7. Crankshaw, Russia Without Stalin, p. 74. 8. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Blat in Stalin’s time’, in S. Lovell, A. Ledeneva, and A. Rogatchevsii (eds), Bribery and Blat in Russia, London, 2000, pp. 166–82, p. 179. 9. Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange, Cambridge, 1998. 10. For analysis of patronage see Geoffrey Hosking, ‘Patronage and the Russian state’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 78(2), April 2000.

Blat Lessons 141 11. Richard Rose, ‘Getting by in the three economies: The resources of the official, unofficial and domestic economies’, Studies in Public Polity, 1983, p. 110. 12. Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People, New York, Oxford, 1989. 13. Richard Rose ‘Living in an anti-modern society’, East European Constitutional Review, 8(1/2), Winter–Spring 1999, pp. 68–75. 14. Endre Sik and Istvan Janos Toth, ‘Some elements of the hidden economy in Hungary today’ in Tamas Kolosi, Istvan Gyorgy Toth, Gyorgy Vukovich (eds), Social Report 1998, Budapest, 1999, p. 100. See also Endre Sik, ‘Network capital in capitalist, communist and post-Communist societies’, International Contributions to Labour Studies, 4, 1994, pp. 73–93. 15. Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary, London and Glasgow, 1987, p. 966. See also Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz, Social Structures: A Network Approach. Cambridge, 1988. 16. David Held and A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 259–82. 17. Manuel Castells, The Rise of Network Society (Vol. I of the trilogy: The Information Age. Economy, Society and Culture), Oxford, 1996, p. 165. 18. Dirk Messner, The Network Society: Economic Development and International Competitiveness as problems of Social Governance, London, 1997. 19. Martin Perkmann, ‘The two network societies’, Economy and Society, 28(4), 1999, pp. 615–28, p. 620. 20. The instrumental use of networks is usually ‘misrecognised’ by the members. The aspect of misrecognition is not considered in this chapter. For details see Ledeneva, 1998. 21. My research was prompted by the question ‘what kind of networks existed under the Soviet regime and do they continue to exist?’ (see Ledeneva, 1998). 22. Castells, The Rise of Network Society. 23. Manuel Castells and Emma Kizelyova, ‘Russia and the network society: an analytical exploration’, paper at the Conference on ‘Russia at the End of the 20th Century’, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University, 5–7 November, 1998 (www.stanford.edu). 24. Ksenia Kasianova, O Russkom Natsional’nom Kharaktere, Moskva, 1994. 25. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca, CA and London, 1992; and Everyday Stalinism, Oxford, 2000; S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley, CA, 1995; G.T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933–1953, Philadelphia, 1991. 26. Stephen L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions. Cambridge, MA, 1998. 27. Gregory Grossman, ‘The second economy of the USSR’, The Problems of Communism, 26(5), 1977, pp. 25–40; G. Grossman, ‘The second economy in the USSR and eastern Europe: A bibliography’, Berkeley-Duke Occasional Papers on the Second Economy in the USSR, Paper No. 21, July 1990. 28. Kenneth Jowitt, ‘Soviet neotraditionalism: The political corruption of a Leninist regime’, Soviet Studies, 35(3), 1983, pp. 275–97, p. 275. 29. The letter of a citizen of Novgorod found in the correspondence of Vyshinskii, the head of the People’s Deputies Soviet. The State Archive of

142 Alena Ledeneva

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

Russian Federation, f. 5446, op. 81a, file 24, p. 49. I am grateful to Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick for prompting me to see this document. The blat system of exchange was grounded in the possibility of extending favours at the expense of state property. The dubious nature of state property and the repressive nature of the Soviet state have contributed to the spread of all-pervasive practices of cheating and outwitting the state: blat and other forms of diversion of state property, smuggling out (vynos), false reporting (pripiski), stealing, and so on. Saskia Sassen, ‘The informal economy: between new development and old regulations’, in Saskia Sassen, Globalisation and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money, New York, 1998, pp. 153–74, p. 156. See also Alena Ledeneva, ‘Continuity and change of blat practices in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia’, in Lovell, Ledeneva and Rogatchevsii (eds), Bribery and Blat in Russia, pp. 183–205. See Heiko Pleines, ‘Large-scale corruption in the Russian banking sector’ and other articles in Alena Ledeneva and Marina Kurkchiyan (eds), Economic Crime in Russia, Kluwer Law International, 2000. See Alena Ledeneva and Paul Seabright ‘Barter in post-Soviet societies: what does it look like and why does it matter?’ in Paul Seabright (ed.) The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies, Cambridge, in press. See also website at www.kings.cam.ac.uk/histecon/ barter/ on barter economy and its multiple implications. See Vadim Volkov ‘Organized violence, market-building, and state formation in post-communist Russia’ in Alena Ledeneva and Marina Kurkchiyan (eds), Economic Crime in Russia. See Alena Ledeneva, ‘Neformal’ naia sfera i blat: grazhdanskoe obshchestvo ili (post)sovetskaia korporativnost’ ’ and other articles in a special issue of Pro et Contra on civil society, Fall, 1997. David Stark defines bargaining as a loose term denoting patterns in which price setting is strongly influenced by network connections that differ from purely market transactions or political considerations that differ from purely administrative criteria. Stark, 1994. Ibid., p. 69. Gerald M. Easter, ‘Institutional legacy of the old regime as a constraint to reform: the case of fiscal policy’ in S. Harter and G. Easter (eds) Shaping the Economic Space in Russia, Aldershot, 2000, p. 11. Gerald M. Easter, Reconstructing the State: Personal Networks and Elite Identity in Soviet Russia, New York and Cambridge, 2000. Translated into the networks discourse, one can say that ‘forged under conditions of soft-budget constraints, [the] cohesive networks of trust and friendship will promote dynamism in the short run, but when times get difficult, they will be used to defend perceptions of “interests” shaped by longterm habits and routines inimical to marketization’. David Stark, ‘From system identity to organisational diversity: analysing social change in eastern Europe’, Contemporary Sociology, 21(3), 1992, pp. 299–304, p. 302. David Stark, ‘Path dependence and privatisation strategies in East Central Europe’ in J. M. Kovacs (ed.) Transition to Capitalism?, Budapest, 1994, p. 66. See Michael T. Hannah and John H. Freeman, Organizational Ecology, Cambridge, MA, 1989 and others quoted by David Stark, ‘Path dependence

Blat Lessons 143

43. 44. 45. 46.

and privatisation strategies in East Central Europe’ in Kovacs (ed.) Transition to Capitalism?, p. 91, fn 3. See Alena Ledeneva, Unwritten Rules: How Russia Really Works, London, 2001. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge, 1990. For details see Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours. See Alena Ledeneva, Unwritten Rules: How Russia Really Works.

8 Administrative Regions and the Economy Philip Hanson

It is widely believed that a country as large and diverse as Russia needs devolved government. Yet Russia has for most of its history been a centralized state. In the 1990s, partly because the centre was weak, a process of federalization began. From early 2000 President Putin has been seeking to strengthen central control. This chapter will focus on the economics of Russia’s wavering federalization. That topic cannot be pursued without our stumbling, however awkwardly, into political issues. Still, the focus will be on the economy. President Putin’s re-assertion of central control in Russia has worried political analysts more than it has economists. The reason for this is simple. Regional leaders have typically had close links with business, have characteristically acted to impede the working of competition, and have dealt with their budgetary problems by encouraging the development of non-monetary settlements (arrears, barter, tax offsets, bills of exchange). It has been tempting for economic commentators to see the degree of regional autonomy in 1990s Russia and the incoherence of centre–region budgetary relations as a main source of the country’s economic difficulties. Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, writing before the recent economic recovery began, blamed the post-1995 stagnation of output on a failure ‘to construct a democratic, fiscally stable federal order on the basis of a ruined communist state’.1 David Woodruff attributed Russian economic difficulties above all to the central government’s ‘unsuccessful attempt to gain a monopoly over the definition of the generally accepted means of payment’.2 In contrast, other studies have treated sub-national government in Russia as merely part of Russia’s economic difficulties, not a prime source of them. The OECD, in its most recent survey of Russia, drew attention to the damaging consequences of the large unfunded mandates of 144

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regional authorities: that is, the loading on to them by the centre of spending commitments that they could not meet, and which prompted the growth of barter and other forms of non-monetary payments.3 The Birmingham group, trying to understand regional patterns of economic change in Russia, concluded, amongst other things, that by the late 1990s most of the cronyism and corruption that hampered the development of open and competitive markets in Russia involved regional and local governments, and that even regions with reformist reputations exhibited much of the same pathology.4 Such studies have also made it clear, however, that this is not the whole economic story of modern Russian regionalism. Some of the worries about regional devolution in Russia have been misplaced. There is evidence of market integration across regional boundaries in the 1990s. The case for Russian administrative regions having established trade barriers and different economic rules of the game, blocking such integration, is not proven.5 This chapter argues by contrast that the more far-reaching claims made for bungled federalization as the key economic problem of late 1990s Russia are overstated; that regional government is indeed weak and often damaging to the market, but that the impediments to growth in Russia are not chiefly the product of territorial–administrative structures, however messy those structures may be; and that the economic case for a resumption of federation-building in the long run is strong. However, it is also the case that a general lack of respect for formal institutions and due process, together with geographically very uneven development, make the creation of a decently operating federation in Russia difficult, and that there is, on balance, some economic benefit to be expected in the medium term from President Putin’s re-assertion of central control. The chapter is organized as follows. First, there is a brief summary of the economic arguments for devolved powers of taxing and spending – a core issue in Russia. In the second section, the evolving regional administrative structure of Russia is described, together with its main economic weaknesses. Then the ways in which the economic fortunes of Russian regions have diverged are assessed, together with the ways in which the central government has tried to cope with that divergence. The fourth section is an assessment of the possible role of devolved government in contributing both to great regional inequality and to poor overall economic performance.

The standard case for fiscal devolution Public finance theory provides arguments about the appropriate role of regional and local governments in taxing and spending.6 This topic

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of multilevel budgets is known in the trade as fiscal federalism. The issues, however, are not restricted to states with a formal federal structure: they arise in any state that has governments with budgets below the national level. In a market economy, government taxing and spending can serve three main purposes. It can help provide macroeconomic stability (that is, it can keep both inflation and unemployment low). It can rectify market failure where the balance of advantages may justify government intervention: this can include the provision of public goods, such as defence and law and order, that would be under-provided if left to the market. And it can reduce inequality of incomes, perhaps providing some minimum level of material provision for all. Of these three functions of government, the first, macroeconomic stability, is a national public good that can be provided (if at all) only by the central authorities: that is, the government and the central bank. The same goes for national public goods like national defence, but not for all public goods. Some are local, such as parks and fire brigades, and might be more efficiently provided by sub-national government. The third function, of providing a minimum real income for all, is probably best seen as a function of central government, since it is to do with inequality amongst all households in a nation. The grounds for thinking that at least some things (mainly local public goods and the local provision of some national public goods) would be better organized by local or regional governments are the following. First, these are matters on which a public administration that is closer to the local situation is likely to be better informed. Second, if that administration is elected, it has an incentive to respond to local wishes. Third, the mix of the population’s preferences between the cost of paying more tax and the benefit of having more public provision may vary across communities, and different levels of local taxing and spending can reflect this. Finally, people, including the owners of firms, can vote with their feet to leave one local tax jurisdiction for another if the mix elsewhere is more attractive to them. This option of exit reinforces that of voice – that is, voting. Both exit and voice at the local level help to discipline a regional or local government’s activity. The stress on people moving comes, naturally, from American economists, but such mobility is not a uniquely American phenomenon. People move for a better deal everywhere, even if in many countries they move less readily than Americans do. Russians also move, despite residence restrictions and an underdeveloped housing market. In 1993–96 the rate of inter-regional migration in Russia was about

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1 per cent of the population per annum, about the same as the rate of movement from southern to northern Italy in the 1970s and 1980s.7 This approach to allocating responsibilities between levels of government provides arguments for sub-national governments having their own, clearly identified tax bases and for their being as fiscally selfsupporting as possible. When they are largely fiscally self-sufficient and can set their own rates of tax on particular sets of transactions, they have strong incentives to collect ‘their’ taxes as cost-effectively as possible, and to exercise discipline over their own spending; they are not relying on hand-outs from above, derived from national tax collection in which their own input is small. It follows that the taxing of the more mobile tax bases (such as profits tax in a world of more-or-less footloose business) should generally be left to central government. At the other extreme, the taxation of particularly high-yielding, but immobile, natural resources (oil, gas, diamonds) located in only some regions of a country should also be a preserve of central government. Such resources otherwise make some localities fortuitously tax-rich. One final implication of the standard fiscal-federal analysis is that transfers from central to regional budgets should be kept to a minimum for the sake of sub-national fiscal autonomy, and should be to do mainly with ensuring that some national minimum of public-goods provision can be assured even in the poorest regions. Inter-budgetary transfers should not be aimed at reducing inequality; that should be something tackled directly by the central budget. Even a cursory acquaintance with some of Russia’s centre–region issues makes it obvious that Russian public finances do not conform to these prescriptions. Still, for the reasons given above, there is a prima facie economic case for federalism in Russia. The fact that devolution has so far been inconsistent does not alter that. When economists offer these prescriptions for a successful devolved fiscal system, they are not endorsing any sort of barrier between the regions of a country. Goods, labour and capital should be entirely free to move across regional borders. The economic rules of the game, from the laws on bankruptcy to competition policy, should be the same in each region, even though the taxes may be somewhat different. Russian regional politicians are sometimes alleged to have created inter-regional trade barriers, and even substantially different regional economic regimes. Whether or not such problems have been significant, the case for sub-national budgetary autonomy, with politically accountable regional governments, remains a strong one on the grounds of efficiency.

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Russia’s regions and their relations with the centre Russia has, counting Chechnia, 89 administrative regions. All the divisions are inherited from the Soviet Union. (Vladimir Putin’s introduction in 2000 of seven federal districts, each with its presidentially appointed representative (a polpred in the usual Russian abbreviation), is so far a monitoring, not an administrative, arrangement.) One peculiarity of the administrative inheritance is the existence of regions with non-Russianethnic labels. Many of these in fact contain more ethnic Russians than members of the so-called ‘titular nationality’. Nine of the 89 administrative regions are autonomous districts within larger regions. The regular economic data available for those larger regions are not uniformly available separately for these sub-divisions, so the account that follows will focus on 79 regions, covering the whole country except Chechnia: 20 nominally ethnic republics; two cities of federal status that are run as separate regions: Moscow and St Petersburg; 55 standard regions (oblasti and kraia), the Jewish Autonomous oblast’ (which is on the Chinese border and contains hardly any Jews) and Chukotka autonomous district (okrug).8 Below the regional level are municipal and rural–district administrations: 2958 of them altogether. These also are elected governments, with substantial responsibilities, including the disbursement of the largest single remaining state subsidy: the provision of housing maintenance and housing utilities (water, gas, electricity, sewerage and often, through centralized heat supply, space heating) at well below cost to almost the whole population. What they do, and how well they do it, matter, but are not the subject of this chapter. So far, their budgets are derived from the ‘consolidated budget’ (regional plus local) of their region. Rules governing the relations between regional and local budgets are still only in the process of being established. The 79 regions have an average population of 1.8 million but their sizes vary enormously around that average. At the beginning of 2000 Moscow had 8.6 million residents and Chukotka had 72 000.9 (Census figures for late 2002 showed Moscow with a population of over 10 million.) Their economic conditions, insofar as they are captured in official figures, also vary enormously. Per capita production (gross regional product [GRP] per head) in 1998 ranged from one-fifth of the Russian average in Ingushetia (next to Chechnia and badly affected by the war) to 3.8 times that average in the oil-and-gas-rich province of Tiumen’.10 These two regions are not outrageous extremes in an otherwise fairly homogeneous set of regions. A handy measure of dispersion, the

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coefficient of variation, is 0.61, or 61 percent, for these GRP data.11 Broadly speaking – and with some caution because of the rather poor quality of the Russian data – the unevenness of development levels amongst Russian regions probably exceeds that among level-two regions of the present European Union: regions with about the same average population size as those of Russia. In 1996 the coefficient of variation of per capita GDP among EU level-two regions was estimated at 26.9 per cent. The ratio between the per capita GDP of the richest region, Hamburg, and the poorest (excluding the French overseas region of Guadeloupe) – Epeirus in Greece – was 4.4: 1, far less than the range from Tiumen’ to Ingushetiia.12 In other words, from the poorest parts of Greece and Portugal, through the uneven development of Italy and Great Britain, to the most prosperous parts of Sweden or Germany, regional variability is apparently somewhat less than in Russia. And of course the Russian average is much lower (about one-fifth that of the EU, in terms of per capita GDP at purchasing power parity in 2000).13 There is a particularly striking contrast between Moscow and the rest of Russia. If Moscow were an independent city-state it would be a roaring post-communist success: huge tracts of Russia, however, more closely resemble the Middle Ages. In February 2001 the average money income in Moscow would buy 8.94 times the standard ‘subsistence’ basket of food items at local, that is, Moscow, prices. The average for the rest of the country (at average Russian prices) was 2.45.14 The Russian Communications Ministry reckoned in mid-2001 that there were 30 mobile phones per 100 Moscow residents, and 2 per 100 in the rest of the country.15 This huge and varied patchwork of regions acquired in the 1990s considerable independence from the centre. Presidents of the ethnic republics, in particular, had a great deal of leeway. But the governors of ordinary regions, even when they had been appointed by the president and could in principle be removed by him, typically depended more on the local business elite than on Moscow. Reformists despatched from Moscow in 1991 and 1992 to govern many regions soon either were replaced by people more acceptable to the directors of large local enterprises or adapted to the local scene. The unsuccessful Chubais–El’tsin effort to remove Evgenii Nazdratenko from the governorship of Primorskii krai in 1997 illustrates the importance of the local power base.16 The pattern of events tended to be that the local business and political elite, already closely interwoven, was able to seize control in most areas once the communist party chain of command from Moscow ceased to function. At the same time, the federal government passed

150 Philip Hanson

down to the regions and their constituent local governments much of the responsibility for social provision: benefits, health care and housing subsidies. The sub-national governments lacked the tax revenue to meet all their obligations. They also lacked the centre’s ability to print money. Regional political leaders had opportunities to serve the interests of close allies running large enterprises in the region, and to profit personally from doing this. But they also had real problems with the public finances of their regions, and in the early- and again in the late-1990s had to worry about re-election. This combination of circumstances played out differently in different regions, partly because of variations in their initial conditions. In Ul’ianovsk Governor Goriachev managed for a time to subsidize local retail food prices and retain price controls, restricting new business development and using subsidies informally provided by a network of large and initially profitable enterprises. This alliance, and the local price controls, broke down as the finances of the large enterprises deteriorated. In late 2001 Goriachev’s successor, Vladimir Shamanov, was still seeking to control local producers.17 In Kostroma, which was poor and had few large and influential producers, the regional government used what limited resources it had in trying to preserve the inherited production structure, which has simply crumbled.18 Moscow city was one – perhaps the only – region in which a dynamic and diverse economy delivered rising tax revenues throughout most of the 1990s. This left the mayor with resources to meet expenditure obligations and to maintain and even improve roads, buildings and transport. At the same time it allowed Mayor Luzhkov to waste resources propping up large enterprises that were failing. The small number of regions containing large, natural resource-based export capabilities (Tiumen’, Irkutsk, Krasnoiarsk, Perm’, Komi, Belgorod, Lipetsk, Vologda, Sakha) have fared better than most, but the struggle for control of dollar-earning assets has been intense.19 Two phenomena have been observed throughout Russia. First, close links between governors and the more powerful local enterprises (those with large export earnings or significant influence in Moscow) have been the norm. Governors have often been on the boards of such enterprises and, if not overtly linked, still very often act in the interests of those enterprises. Iuliia Latynina’s novels, which draw on her experience as a journalist, routinely portray local and regional politicians as being in the pockets of a local tycoon.20 The difficult, potentially damaging situation that results on the rare occasions when a

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governor acts against a local tycoon can be seen in the bitter struggle in Krasnoiarsk between Aleksandr Lebed’ and Anatolii Bykov.21 These links impede competition. It has been routine in Russian business to hamper business rivals by deploying against them local politicians and local judges, not better products or lower costs. Three examples of criminal cases in progress in September 2001 illustrate what vague terms like ‘cronyism’ and ‘corruption’ can mean. The Mayor of Vladivostok was under investigation for selling off state properties at far below market prices to allies, while excluding other bidders. He was himself an ally of the former governor, Evgenii Nazdratenko, and consequently an enemy of Nazdratenko’s successor, just as his own predecessor, Cherepkov, was a foe of Nazdratenko. In Kursk the former regional head of government was being tried for embezzlement. He and his family, it was reported, already controlled much of the region’s vodka production, oil products distribution, and many of the casinos, restaurants, and security firms. In Smolensk, in a case stemming from a murder investigation, the former Deputy Governor was charged with abuse of office for selling vodka factories illegally. Several officials of the regional administration, reportedly, were refusing to testify.22 Second, regional governments have unfunded mandates (legally binding spending commitments for which funds were lacking) that have led them to collude with local large enterprises to have taxes ‘paid’ in overvalued barter deliveries of goods or by offsetting tax, allowing the regional governments to pass on less in tax revenue to the centre. The sum of such unfunded mandates was estimated at 5 per cent of GDP in 1998 by the OECD; a recent Russian government projection for 2001 puts the sum, surprisingly, even higher at 8 per cent of GDP.23 This means, since the usual budget figures are given on a cash-flow basis, that the state of overall government finances is correspondingly worse than is shown in the usual figures. It also means that the inefficiencies associated with non-monetary settlements are perpetuated.

The diverging fortunes of Russia’s regions and the centre’s response The sharp divergence of regional economic fortunes in Russia has already been touched upon. How can this best be measured, given that people’s real incomes are the most important indicator? These can be approximated by taking reported per capita money income and dividing it by a measure of local costs of living. This deflation of money values is important because prices differ widely across Russia. A higher money

152 Philip Hanson

income in Magadan, for example, may buy less than a much lower money income in Ul’ianovsk. Local living costs are approximated by the various ‘food basket’ costings provided in the official data and by local ‘subsistence minima’. All these data are unquestionably poor. The pattern they reveal nonetheless roughly fits with other evidence, including that of one’s own eyes, though some adjustments may be needed for the assessment of some individual regions. Figure 8.1 is a scattergram of average regional per capita real incomes in February 2001 derived in this way, plotted against the population size of regions at the beginning of 2000. There is a relationship between a region’s size and its prosperity, indicated by the trend line in the chart. That relationship is strongly influenced by a few samples – notably, Moscow city, which is in the top right-hand corner – but it remains significant even if that extreme is removed (see below). There is also, and more predictably, a relationship between regional per capita real income levels and levels of per capita gross regional product (GRP): that is, regional production. However, the relationship is not

Population as % RF, 1/1/00

6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Per capita real income (Feb 2001) Figure 8.1 Russian regions: per capita real incomes and population-size, 2000–01 Note: Population-size is shown as a percentage of the Russian total. The real income measure is money income divided by the local (i.e. regional) cost of a 25-item food basket. This understates the real income of predominantly rural areas where subsistence food production plays a larger role. See the text. Sources: Goskomstat, Regiony Rossii 2000; Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii v fevral’e 2001. See notes 9 and 13.

Administrative Regions and the Economy 153

as close as might have been expected. See Figure 8.2 below. These relationships will be explored further in the penultimate section. Differences in regional prosperity, measured in this way, tended to increase from 1992, with a break after the 1998 financial crisis. Table 8.1 illustrates the development of regional divergence over a period of nine years from 1992 to 2001. The measurements in Table 8.1 are a little ragged, in ways discussed in the notes to the table. That is the result of gaps in the data available and some changes over time in the official series. Comparisons with the communist era are impossible. Shortages, not prices and money incomes, were then the main source of regional inequality, and there are no decent data on those shortages and how they varied across regions. What can be said is that regional inequality increased from 1992 through 1998, declined after the crisis of August 1998, and has apparently increased again since mid-1999. A plausible conjecture about this regional divergence and its (temporary?) reversal might run as follows. The post-communist Russian economy experienced a drastic fall in economic activity up to late 1998. Domestic final demand collapsed, whilst imports were allowed in more freely and competed with domestic production. Two kinds of regions coped less badly than most: those with strong natural resource-based

Per capita GRP 1998 (RF = 1)

4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Per capita real income 2/01 Figure 8.2 Russian regions: per capita real income 2/01 and per capita GRP 1998 Note: For definitions, see the text. Source: As Figure 8.1.

154 Philip Hanson Table 8.1 Russia: regional variation in real incomes, 1992–2001 1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

III Coefficient of variation (%) Number of regions Memorandum RF real y (I)* Ditto (II) Ditto (III)

1999

2001

6

2

30.6

26

32.2

39.5

42.3

49.8

55.7

39.9

48.0

74

74

77

77

76

77

77

77

79

2.54

3.79

2.38

2.3

3.2 2.3

1.7

1.5

2.2

2.8

Note: Data are annual averages except for 1997, where ‘III’ denotes third quarter, 1999 and 2001 (June and February, respectively). The coefficient of variation is the author’s calculation, discussed in the text. The number of regions changes slightly over the period, depending on data availability. * real y (I) is average money income divided by the local cost of a 19-item food basket, and is the basis for the calculations for 1992 through 1996. Real y (II) is average money income divided by the local cost of the ‘subsistence minimum’, and is the basis for the calculations for 1996 through 1999. Real y (III) is average money income divided by the cost of a 25-item food basket. The substantial difference between I and II is evident in the 1996 figures. III is roughly, though not exactly, comparable with I. Sources: 1992–97: Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, Table 3.5; 1998: derived from Goskomstat, Regiony Rossii 1999, 1999: derived from Goskomstat, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii v yiule 1999, 2001: as Figure 8.1.

export capabilities (the nine or so listed in the previous section), and a handful of regions that contained emerging commercial and financial hubs (Moscow above all, and to a lesser extent also St Petersburg, Samara, Nizhnii Novgorod and Sverdlovsk). Other regions, dependent, in varying proportions, on manufacturing and agriculture, had nothing much to sell to the outside world and were also unable to profit from the emerging businesses of consumer-goods importation and financial markets. This last, most numerous, category of regions suffered most. Hence the divergence of fortunes through 1998. The devaluation of the rouble from six to the dollar in July 1998 to 25 (1999 average), 28 (2000 average) and the level of around 30 in late December 2001 revived Russian manufacturing, especially engineering and food processing. Imported items became drastically more costly, the domestic production of import substitutes recovered. The previously most damaged regions began to revive, narrowing the gap between themselves and the fortunate minority of natural resource and commercial-hub regions, at least up to mid-1999 and perhaps for a while longer. Subsequently, real exchange-rate appreciation eroded the original competitive boost to domestic producers of import substitutes. That is to

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say, Russian domestic inflation outpaced the further depreciation of the rouble, lowering domestic competitiveness. Net exports therefore fell in 2001 over 2000.24 The new competitiveness of the ordinary, old bits of the Russian economy began to wane, and with them the comparative strength of the majority of regions that are dominated by ordinary, old Russian/Soviet production. However, overall growth continued, raising the national average level of real income. If that conjecture is on the right lines, regional inequality is likely to continue to increase in the medium term. High and growing inter-regional inequality can create two kinds of problems. First, it makes it difficult to combine an acceptable minimum public provision for all with genuinely devolved government. The poorest regions may simply lack an autonomous tax base from which to provide a nationally acceptable basic provision of health, education and local public goods. If they are to make such provision, their budgets have to be supplemented from the centre – in effect, from richer regions. The benefits of devolved taxing and spending powers are lessened as poorer regions remain heavily dependent on transfers from the centre. Second, pronounced regional inequality may be a source of social and even political fragmentation. The European Union’s structural funds to benefit poorer regions, for example, were established for the sake of ‘cohesion’. But one source of inter-regional tension may be the very fact that people in better-off regions perceive themselves as subsidizing the population of poor regions: northern Italy versus the Mezzogiorno, for example. The first of these difficulties arises in Russia and impedes the development of a properly functioning federation. The second has so far, despite much griping by so-called ‘donor’ regions, not really threatened the unity of the state. The Chechen push for independence has a long history that is not best described in economic terms. The other North Caucasus republics are also both poor and unstable, but the instability has much to do with ripples from Chechnia and from Abkhazia, across the border in Georgia. There are other very poor regions, such as Tula and Ivanovo in the Central Federal District, that are not the least bit restive. And the region most assertive of its autonomy, after Chechnia, is Tatarstan – one of the comparatively prosperous parts of Russia. Before coming back to the consequences of extreme economic differentiation for the development of a federation, let us try to put the present degree of inter-regional inequality in perspective. In international perspective, it was suggested in the previous section, Russia’s regional inequality seems to be roughly of the order of that

156 Philip Hanson

amongst similar-sized regions of the EU. It may in fact be somewhat less than this if we allow for regional differences in subsistence food production. This does not come into the available personal income data. If subsistence food production forms roughly half the real personal income of the rural population but only a fifth of the average real income of the entire Russian population, then an appropriate adjustment for heavily rural regions such as Krasnodar, Stavropol’, the North Caucasus republics, Tyva, the Altai Republic and a few more, would make the dispersion of real real incomes somewhat more compressed than has been estimated here. In this case, the dispersion of regional real incomes might not stand out as extreme for a large country – though it is certainly very great. Another way of putting inter-regional inequality in perspective is to compare it with Russia’s overall, or inter-household inequality. The differences amongst regions are the differences between the average real incomes in each region. If inter-regional inequality were the only form of inequality that existed, everyone in a given region would have the same per capita household income as the regional average. That would be a situation in which Russia’s inequality amongst households was purely regional. How much of total inequality stems from the fact that incomes are not equal within each region? How much, in other words, is accountable as intra-regional inequality? The answer for early 2001 is, as a rough order of magnitude, about three-fifths. In the first quarter of 2001, according to Goskomstat data, the richest 10 per cent of the Russian population accounted for 33.3 percent of all personal income, and the poorest 10 per cent for 2.4 per cent.25 The richest tenth had 13.9 times the income of the poorest tenth: a decile ratio, in other words, of 13.9. Using the regional data for February 2001 from which the figures in Table 8.1 and Figure 8.1 are derived, one can ask how the decile ratio would look if there were no intra-regional inequality. The answer is approximately 5.4. Briefly, this calculation involves adding up the populations of the richest regions downwards from the very richest, Moscow, until one has cumulated approximately 10 per cent of the Russian population; calculating the weighted average of the incomes of those regions, and comparing it with an equivalent calculation working upwards from the poorest regions. The four richest regions, starting with Moscow and Tiumen’, account for 9.57 per cent of total population. The poorest 14 regions, starting (at the bottom) with Ingushetiia and Chukotka, account for 9.80 per cent of the population. In each case, adding the next region takes one well above 10 per cent. The average for the richest

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four is 7.23 food baskets. The average for the poorest 14 is 1.35 food baskets. Hence the approximate decile ratio: 5.4. In purely arithmetical terms, then, inequalities across regions are not the bulk of the problem. They may however have become a slightly larger part of the problem in the last four or five years. A similar calculation for November 1996 produced a hypothetical decile ratio of 4.4 if there were no intra-regional inequality, against an actual decile ratio across all households of about 13.26 Provisionally, at least, it can be said that economic divergence across Russian regions may not in itself be threatening to the social cohesion of the country. It does however impede the development of a wellfunctioning federation. Even if the Russian leadership wanted to encourage devolved government – which Putin does not – it would be impossible to have a system in which all regional governments generated revenue from their own internal tax bases and provided broadly similar public provision across regions. The state as a whole – federal plus regional plus local – depends heavily for its resources on a few regions. In 1999 Moscow provided 32.7 percent of federal budget revenue, and the ten leading regions together provided 62.8 per cent.27 This is not surprising in a country where the six strongest regions (Moscow, Tiumen’, Moscow oblast’, St Petersburg, Sverdlovsk, Samara) in 1998, with 21.3 per cent of the population, produced 37.8 per cent of total gross regional product (GRP) and 51.5 per cent of Russia’s merchandise exports.28 The corollary is that around 30 poorer regions regularly depend on transfers from the federal budget for half or more of their own budgetary revenue. These regions contained about 30 per cent of the population in 1999.29 In that year one of the poorest regions, Tyva, relied for 81 per cent of its budgetary revenue on assistance from the centre.30 Hence the intense debate in Russia about ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ regions. The flows of resources from regions to centre and back to regions, through the budgetary system, are a complicated subject whose details have been mastered by few. Aleksei Lavrov, an economic geographer who has been working as an adviser to Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko, is the leading master of those details.31 Here only a broad summary will be attempted. The tax collection and tax police services are federal, with regional branches. Revenue collected in a region now flows into a regional branch of the Federal Treasury, with accounts held in federally approved banks. Even Tatarstan now (in 2001) does not control the tax revenues raised on its territory but has a Tatarstan branch of the Federal Treasury

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performing this function. Part of that revenue goes directly into the sub-national budget of the region where the revenue was raised. The balance goes to Moscow, into the federal budget. From the federal budget some funds are transferred back to the regions, partly through the Fund for Financial Support of the Regions (FFPR). Despite the great unevenness of production, incomes and tax capacity across regions, the flows from the centre back to the regions have until 2001 been modest in scale (see Table 8.2). In addition, the main revenueraising taxes (value-added tax or VAT and profits tax) have been split between national and regional levels. Excises on oil and gas and export and import duties accrue only to the centre. The system as it evolved during the 1990s has been subjected to a great deal of justified criticism. One line of criticism is that the sharing of the same tax base leads to over-taxing, just as common land tends to be overgrazed.32 The basis on which tax revenues were retained initially at sub-national levels was subject to a great deal of manipulation, chiefly by collusion between regional governments and local large enterprises for taxes to be paid in kind. The pattern of subsequent centre-to-region Table 8.2 Russia: budgets and transfers as per cent GDP, 1994–98 1994 Federal budget Revenue Expenditure O/w planned transfers to regions Actual transfersa Planned FFPR Actual FFPR Sum regional budgets Revenue Expenditure FFPR/reg. (revenue, per cent) Memorandum item: GDP, 1994 ⫽ 100 Number, donor regionsb

1995

1996

1997

1998

13.0 18.6

11.8 19.9

12.3 19.6

10.2 15.2

4.3 3.3 1.9 0.9

1.9 1.7 1.0 1.3

2.7 2.2 1.8 1.1

2.7 1.7 2.1 1.3

1.9

18.9

15.5 16.0 8.1

15.0 16.0 7.3

16.3 17.7 8.0

14.7 15.2

95.9 14

92.5 12

93.4 8

89.1 7

4.9 100 –

Notes: Details of primary sources and calculations are given in the source. Gaps indicate data not available when the original calculations were made (mid-1999). a derived from a source that gave actual as per cent planned; b in Russian parlance, donor regions are merely those that receive no FFPR transfers. As Aleksei Lavrov has shown from Ministry of Finance data, most Russian regions transmit more tax revenue (collected on their territory) to the federal budget than they receive back from it either in FFPR transfers to their budgets or in direct federal spending on their territories. Source: Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, Table 5.1.

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transfers was shown in some analyses to be driven by the need to buy off obstreperous regional leaders rather than by measures of regional need (although there was a fairly strong statistical association between regional poverty and per capita transfers). There was no doubt that incentives both to collect tax efficiently and to spend public funds wisely were, at the sub-national level, especially weak. 33 Table 8.2 brings together data on the relations between budgetary levels through 1998. The main point to be made about these numbers is that the centre was making only very modest transfers to regional budgets. The figures in row 6 do not, it is true, represent the whole of federal-to-regional budgetary flows. They do however constitute a large part of those flows, and they are the one part that is deliberately designed to help boost the undernourished budgets of poorer regions. Russia was providing less in the way of centre–region transfers, relative to resources available, than many established federations. Lavrov, citing a figure of 1.5 per cent of GDP for 1999, quotes significantly higher figures for Canada (4 per cent in 1995), Australia (6.5 per cent) and the US (3.0 per cent).34 Since 1998 a lot of effort has gone into trying to reform the budgetary system as a whole. One aim is to move towards separate tax bases for different levels of government. Another is to do away with unfunded mandates (see above). A third is to establish clear tax bases and revenue allocations for local, as distinct from regional, governments.35 The strong upturn in the economy has helped: as the tide rises, more regional boats can float. In particular, liquidity has increased, enabling more taxes to be paid in ‘live money’ (zhivye den’gi) rather than barter and tax offsets. This makes regional tax and spending flows more intelligible and impedes local capture of federal revenue. Putin’s drive to strengthen the centre’s control of regional activities, and at the same time to clarify the division of powers between levels of government, has also helped.36 Nonetheless, public finances, and their centre–region dimension in particular, remain problematic. The federal government is aiming in 2002 at initial disposition of 55 per cent of revenues, having in the recent past had 50 or slightly less. In a growing economy with growing tax revenues, this is less apt to generate conflict than it would if the economy were stagnant. But a fall in world oil prices could easily halt growth.37 Even in the current situation, regional leaders have been complaining about the pressure from the centre on their budgets.38 Meanwhile, substantial shared tax bases remain and federal transfers to the regions, though helping to reduce the most extreme differences in regional budgetary resources per head of population, are still modest.39

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At the same time, other measures emanating from Moscow tend to reduce sub-national control over resources. The plan to split the electricity monopoly, United Energy Systems (UES), between the distribution grid and the generating companies, and to sell off shares in the latter, should bring cost-reducing competition into the industry. It also threatens to remove from regional leaders the control they have exercized over local electricity tariffs, which they have predictably used to subsidize local producers in general and to favour close allies in particular. There has also been more overt pressure from central government on the debt and spending levels of regions. On 4 December 2001 a Deputy Finance Minister, Bella Zlatkis, threatened that central government would declare seven (unidentified) regions bankrupt and take over their finances. Press speculation suggested that there were in fact eight regions that were in trouble because (contrary to federal law) their outstanding debt exceeded their annual revenue. These eight constituted a sad list of very poor places: Tyva, North Ossetia, Buriatiia, Kabardino-Balkariia, Karachaevo-Cherkessiia, Kurgan and – rather less predictably – Nizhnii Novgorod and Omsk.40 Zlatkis’s statement was a bark, not a bite, but it may have helped to encourage the others. Putin’s drive to reduce the mass of licensing and regulation of business, and therefore to reduce the opportunities for corruption, also removes (if it is implemented) the economic power of regional politicians. It is mainly the regional and local authorities who operate these controls. At least some of the seven presidential representatives ( polpredy) are trying to promote this policy. In Ul’ianovsk, in former Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko’s Volga district, the inspector from the federal district was in spring 2001 requiring books to be printed in which enterprises would log the visits of officials in order to expose excessive, bribe-seeking inspections.41 To what extent the net effect of the polpredy is to reduce, rather than increase, bureaucracy, is not clear. But there is no doubt whose resource controls they are trying to weaken. All these policies tend both to improve the business environment and to weaken the regional leaders’ command over resources. For the time being, at least, the centre’s new assertiveness probably helps the economy.

Does territorial administrative division alter economic outcomes in Russia?42 Devolved government in Russia might have had adverse economic effects of two kinds: it might have accentuated inter-regional differences,

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and it might have damaged overall economic performance. In this section, these two questions will be explored in that order. The fact that Russia’s regions have diverged economically over the past decade does not by itself support the hypothesis that devolved government has contributed to Russia’s economic weakness. What distinguishes Russia, so far as regional developments are concerned, is the sheer scope that its geography offers for regional divergence. Even in the absence of internal administrative barriers great distances, and therefore transport costs, limit flows of goods and people. It may also be difficult to acquire in poorer regions the skills and training needed to work successfully in richer regions. For these reasons, regional disparities in real incomes are likely to be larger, other things being equal, in large than in small countries. In a well-functioning market economy one would expect some movement of capital from richer to poorer areas in order to take advantage of cheaper labour and land. This tends, along with labour movement from poorer to richer regions, to reduce regional income differences. At the same time, however, the effects of agglomeration favour further concentration of economic activity in areas where concentrations already exist.43 There is some evidence of a long-run tendency towards interregional income convergence within countries.44 But it is also obvious that agglomerations of economic activity persist over time. Post-communist economic change may be particularly favourable to very large cities. New firms can more easily grow, and old firms more easily be restructured, where a variety of skills, materials and capital goods is close at hand to be recombined in order to change the pattern of production. A large plant in a big city can more easily, for example, lease parts of its property to small shops and cafes than a large plant in a small town. Underemployed workers in that large plant can find alternative employment more easily in a big city. These differences in local adjustment will matter more in a very large country than in a small or medium-sized country. For the February 2001 data, almost three-fifths of the variance in average real incomes across 79 Russian regions can be accounted for by two factors: the region’s population and its per capita gross regional product (GRP). Y ⫽ 0.738 ⫹ 0.427 popn ⫹ 1.000 GRP adjusted R2 ⫽ 0.573 n ⫽ 79 (4.714) (5.479) (6.674) where Y ⫽ per capita real income of a region (money income divided by the 25-item food basket at local prices); popn ⫽ the region’s population in 2000 as a percentage of total Russian population; GRP ⫽ per capita

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gross regional product as a proportion of the Russian average (i.e. total Russian GRP per capita ⫽ 1); bracketed figures are t-statistics. Source: Based on Goskomstat data as in Figures 8.1 and 8.2. The two explanatory variables work reasonably well, in the sense that their influence is statistically significant when they are used together but also when used as single-factor explanations; the coefficients are reasonably stable in different specifications, and together they account for a fair amount of the variance. Adding further explanatory variables (dummies) for the presence of major natural-resource exports in a region and for the presence of a city of more than a million inhabitants slightly reduced the coefficient of determination, without either of the additional variables appearing significant at 5 per cent. The two explanatory variables here have a common sense rationale. One would expect a region with higher per capita (recorded) production to have higher per capita real incomes, other things being equal, unless there was massive inter-regional redistribution through taxes and benefits – which there is not. There are, nonetheless, intriguing differences between the GRP distribution and the real income distribution: for example, Tiumen’ tops the per capita GRP list and Moscow city – by far – the personal real income ranking. The location of recipients of oil and gas profits must play a part. Population-size roughly captures local market-size, in a country whose regions tend to have high concentrations of population in regional capitals and large distances between regional capitals. It is striking that most of the Russian business ratings of regions, such as those produced by Ekspert magazine, favour larger regions. The exceptions are instructive: Krasnodar, large and comparatively poor, is, unusually, an amalgam of two very different regions: the coastal strip of resorts and ports and a large, poor, rural hinterland. Still, more than two-fifths of the differences amongst regions in real income levels remain statistically unaccounted for. Have regional leaders’ policies contributed to these divergences? Previous research casts doubt on this.45 Two main possibilities come to mind: that some regions have enriched themselves at the expense of others by imposing barriers to the movement of goods (some sort of optimal tariff policy), or that some have adjusted less badly to economic change than others by adopting significantly different policies, creating different business environments. The first of these is implausible. Many governors have from time to time declared that controls would be placed on the movement of food

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products out of their regions. However, these appear since 1994 or so to have been empty declarations, not effectively implemented (quite apart from being contrary to federal law). Moreover, the regions most prone to such declarations have been the net food exporters, which are typically below average in prosperity. The second conjecture is also unconvincing. Evidence on inter-regional migration and on regional patterns of development of small private firms shows both the movement of people and the development of new firms apparently responding (across regions) in ‘normal’ ways to market stimuli. Higher unemployment pushed people out of some regions; higher real income pulled people into others. In the early-to-mid-1990s small firms developed better the lower the unemployment level and the larger the size of a region (proxies for demand), other things being equal, and the lower the wage-level (labour costs), other things being equal. All of this indicates rather normal patterns of behaviour, without a massively differentiated pattern of regional business environments.46 That some regional leaders adopted more market-friendly policies than others is beyond doubt. However, the case-study evidence suggests that corruption and political meddling have been the norm across all regions, and that initial conditions strongly influenced the sort of leadership elected and the policies adopted. If regions such as Nizhnii Novgorod and Samara have done comparatively well, this is at least partly to do with their size, the absence of large natural resource-based exports favouring status quo incumbents in local management positions, and the presence of a large number of highly educated people previously attached to defence production and research and urgently needing to find new employment. All in all, the case for regional leaders contributing significantly to regional economic divergence is not strong. The divergence arose out of differences in adaptation heavily determined by a region’s initial conditions – including its size. The centre did rather little – see above – to reduce inter-regional differences, but that is another matter. The consequences of regional leaders’ policies for overall economic performance are harder to assess. Two channels of influence seem potentially important. The first is regional leaders’ resistance to the immediate local consequences of macroeconomic stabilization. The eventual benefits of comparatively low and predictable inflation are a national public good. The immediate costs of attaining that public good are felt locally by particular people in particular places. Local politicians in any country tend to do what they can to protect ‘their’ workplaces. The problem in Russia has been that they could, and did, do a great deal

164 Philip Hanson

in the way of propping up local large enterprises that needed either to be closed or to be vigorously restructured. This propping-up has taken many forms, from direct subsidy through cross-subsidizing of electricity supplies to collusion in non-monetary settlements. These are not arrangements peculiar to the more old-style governors: they are general. The preservation of soft budget constraints for ‘important’ local enterprises could be observed in progressive Samara as well as in Retrograd (the Wall Street Journal’s name for Ul’ianovsk under Goriachev).47 The second channel, which merges with the first, is the whole fiscalfederal mess already described. Unfunded mandates and shared tax bases helped to foster non-monetary settlements, which in turn delayed economic restructuring. It is hard, however, to interpret all these impediments to reform as stemming from the administrative structure of Russian government. Subnational budgets have indeed been the immediate source of a great many distortions; and cronyism and micro-management by regional political bosses have been pervasive and have impeded structural change. It was however the central government that failed to control its own budgetary balance in 1995–98 and built up short-term debt it could not repay. After 1994 national macroeconomic stabilization was done with smoke and mirrors – control of the money supply and reduction in inflation without fiscal discipline – and was not sustainable. And it was the central government that enforced unfunded mandates on sub-national budgets.

Conclusions The most obvious reason for not treating the federal structure as the prime source of Russia’s economic difficulties is that output has since recovered, and has been growing for almost three years, without the fiscal-federal system being radically reformed. This view is reinforced by the similarity of economic fortunes across the CIS, including the fortunes of states without substantial devolution in government. Russia’s slow and troubled economic adjustment after the collapse of communism has root causes not related to its hesitant movements towards a real federation. Occam’s Razor dictates that explanations that will also work for other so-called ‘transition laggards’ are, other things being equal, to be preferred. Of the approximately 400 million people living in European ex-communist countries, at least 300 million live in countries whose economic recovery is at best only just beginning. Russia accounts for only 144 million of those people.

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An extreme difficulty in developing institutions and rules of the game appropriate to a well-functioning market is common to all these countries. There are many ways of characterizing, diagnosing and perhaps ultimately removing that difficulty. Richard Rose emphasizes the resistance of an ‘anti-modern society’ to such change: a society in which formal institutions are not expected to operate according to due process and formal procedure, but where everyone expects informal networks to prevail. Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaia draw attention to the revolutionary nature of post-communist change in the former Soviet Union (as distinct from Central Europe), place Russian experience in the context of earlier revolutions (English and French, particularly), and point out that it takes a long time for output to recover after a revolution.48 In short, it seems mistaken to put a great deal of weight on Russia’s administrative structure when one is trying to identify the determinants of Russia’s post-communist economic decline and the limits on its subsequent recovery. If, however, the development of market-friendly government institutions is far more problematic in Russia than in, say, Hungary or Estonia, the complicated arrangements needed for a federation to function well are going to be particularly difficult to establish. Moreover, the present large regional inequalities make it impossible for many regions to operate with any real fiscal autonomy. Putin’s re-centralization of government power, insofar as it really works, could well reduce corruption and micro-meddling in the economy and leave producers more equally at the mercy of competition, to the benefit of production and productivity levels. As an expedient for a few years, this may be beneficial. A real federation is desirable, but not just yet.

Notes and references 1. Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, Without a Map. Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia, Cambridge, MA, 2000 (hereafter Without a Map), p. 113. 2. David Woodruff, Money Unmade. Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism, Ithaca, NY, 1999 (hereafter Money Unmade), p. xii. 3. OECD, Economic Survey. The Russian Federation, Paris, 2000 (hereafter OECD Survey). 4. Philip Hanson and Michael Bradshaw (eds), Regional Economic Change in Russia, Cheltenham, 2000 (hereafter Regional Economic Change). 5. Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, chapter 3. 6. See W. Oates, Fiscal Federalism, New York, 1972; idem, Principles of Fiscal Federalism: A Survey of Recent Theoretical and Empirical Research, College Park, MD: University of Maryland, Center for Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector working paper no. 21, 1992.

166 Philip Hanson 7. Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, p. 85. 8. Chukotka is now separate from Magadan oblast’. Its 72 000 people are governed by a young oil tycoon, Roman Abramovich. He has given them more money than the federal government ever did: reportedly, some US$30– 40 million. For a fascinating account of his rule see Elena Dikun, ‘Abramovich’s Golden Hills in Chukotka’, Prism (Jamestown Foundation), 7(9), 2001, part 3. 9. Regiony Rossii 2000, Table 2.1, from http://www.info.gks.ru/scripts 10. Ibid., derived from Table 10.1. The Russian average here is derived from the total of all gross regional product, which was almost 12 per cent less than gross domestic product (GDP) since some economic activity is not regionally allocated. 11. Author’s calculation. The coefficient of variation shows an average of the deviations from the average as a proportion of the average itself (standard deviation over mean; the standard deviation is the square root of the mean of the squared deviations from the mean). 12. Derived from European Commission, Sixth Periodic Report on the Social and Economic Situation and Development of the Regions of the European Union, Brussels, 1999, pp. 20, 200, 201. The Commission’s figures show little difference, in fact, between the Guadeloupe and the Epeirus per capita GDP levels. In Table 3 (p. 201) the measure of variance cited is a standard deviation of 26.9. Since the mean is 100, that translates into a coefficient of variation of 26.9 per cent. 13. Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) estimates in EIU, World investment prospects, London, 2001, Table 8. 14. Derived from Goskomstat, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii v fevral’e 2001, from http://www.info.gks.ru 15. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (hereafter RFE/RL), RFE/RL Newsline, 24 July 2001. 16. On the political economy of Nazdratenko in Primor’e and Leonid Gorbenko in Kaliningrad, see Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, chapter 9. Both have lost gubernatorial office under Putin, although Nazdratenko had to be offered the national administration of the fisheries (a major source of illicit gain in Primor’e) to get him out. 17. East–West Institute, Russian Regional Report (hereafter RRR), 14 November 2001. 18. Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, Chapter 6. 19. I have included here regions containing the biggest steel producers, whose exports have been based partly on high-quality ore and partly on Western steel-making technology imported in the 1970s; Krasnoiarsk’s aluminiumsmelting is based on cheap hydropower. I have not included Sakhalin, although its large offshore oil and gas deposits are currently being developed, because it did not inherit significant exporting capabilities. 20. For example, Okhota na iziubriia, Moscow, 1999, about the struggle for control of steelworks. 21. Bykov’s conviction and imprisonment have not ended the power struggle. Andrew Yorke’s summer 2001 trip report from Krasnoyarsk tells of Bykov, in Lefortovo prison, arranging for the local TV station’s electricity bills to be paid, RRR, 6(30), 29 August 2001. 22. RRR, 6(32), 17 September 2001. 23. The 1998 estimate is from OECD, Survey; the projection for 2001 is from Nezavisimaya gazeta, 24 May 2001, as cited in RRR, 6(20), 30 May 2001.

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24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

The higher figure for 2001 is surprising because the post-1998 economic recovery has made public finances much healthier (and the GDP larger). It may be that the Ministry of Finance was scaremongering in support of its plans for the 2002 budget. Data in RECEP, Monthly Update, July 2001, www.recep.org and Ekonomicheskaia kon”iunktura v iune-iule, www.forecast.ru Cited in RFE/RL Newsline, 4 May 2001. Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, pp. 65–6. It should be added that the ‘approximate deciles’ in this calculation were close to 11 per cent of the total population – that was the way the particular regional populations stacked up. That would tend to lower the hypothetical, no-intra-regional-inequality decile ratio slightly. But the conclusion that the regional element has increased probably still holds. Inter-regional inequality increased between 1996 and 2001 (see Table 1) rather more than overall inequality. Alesksei Lavrov et al., Federal’nyi biudzhet i regiony. Struktura finansovykh potokov, 2001 (hereafter Lavrov Federal’nyi), Table 2.10. Ibid, Table 2.10. The share of Tiumen’ in total exports and GRP in current prices will have risen since then with the rise in world oil prices. The attribution of exports to regions of origin is by point of shipment of the gross value of exports rather than by value added. Ibid, Table 2.3. Lavrov, Federal’nyi, chart 3.8. He is also a major source of both analyses and of Ministry of Finance data used by others. In addition to the draft cited above, see Aleksei Lavrov et al., Federal’nyi biudzhet i regiony, New York, 1999. This argument is well developed in Shleifer and Treisman, Without a Map. Shared tax bases are nonetheless a feature of some established federations. These issues and the debates about them are reviewed in Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, Chapter 5. Lavrov, Federal’nyi, Chapter 3. Olga Kuznetsova, ‘Finance ministry seeks improved center–periphery budgetary relations by 2005’, RRR, 6(24), 27 June 2001. On 26 June 2001 Putin set up a presidential commission headed by Dmitrii Kozak to clarify the legislation on the powers of central, regional and local governments. The delimitation of powers has been fuzzy; the aim is to clarify it. This is in addition to the efforts of the seven presidential representatives in the seven presidential districts to eliminate conflicts between national and sub-national legislation. On the basis of values and quantities in the year 2000, Russian exports of oil, oil products and natural gas were equivalent to 25 per cent of GDP (when GDP is valued in US dollars at the average exchange rate). It follows that a fall of US$1 per barrel in the oil price would reduce GDP by 0.5 per cent. On the complaints of Perm’, Cheliabinsk and Kursk, see RRR, 6(31), 5 September 2001. The centre will continue to take just under a third of the profits tax after the rate is cut from 35 to 24 per cent. RRR, 6(29), 9 July 2001. Centrally decreed increases from 1 December 2001 in public officials’ pay, not covered by increased transfers to sub-national budgets, provoked complaints and criticism from (among others) the leaders of Voronezh, and Irkutsk (RRR, 17 October and 28 November 2001).

168 Philip Hanson 39. But the FFPR transfers have been increased, which is appropriate given the increased initial centralization of public revenue. They were 2.6 per cent of GDP in the first three quarters of 2001 – well above the earlier levels criticized by Lavrov (see above): www.eeg.ru/budget,html 40. BBC Global Newsline, FSU (Economic), 7 December 2001. 41. RRR, 6(17), 9 May 2001. 42. This section draws on my paper, ‘How is the Russian economy different? Size and regional diversity,’ presented at the ICSEES Congress, Tampere, in August 2000, and published in Russian as ‘Vliianie faktora regional’nogo raznoobraziia na ekonomicheskuiu transformatsiiu Rossii’, in Problemy prognozirovaniia, 3, 2001, pp. 78–88. 43. Agglomeration effects can be industry-specific, where the clustering together of producers in the same industry produces economies of scale for the industry as a whole, for example through specialist sub-contractors being enabled to operate on a scale that brings them internal (intra-firm) economies of scale, lowering the price of the inputs they supply. Agglomeration effects can also be of a more general kind, where producers in different lines of activity benefit from the local availability of a wide range of skills and capabilities. The latter sort of agglomeration effect, known as Jacobs externalities, seems especially relevant to post-communist change, when resources need to be drastically re-allocated and available inputs re-assembled in different combinations to produce a greatly changed assortment of final output. Hence, perhaps, the comparative vitality of the biggest cities in ex-communist countries. 44. See R.J. Barro and X. Sala-I-Martin, ‘Convergence across states and regions’, Brookings Papers in Economic Activity, 1, 1991, pp. 107–82. 45. See Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, particularly Chapter 3 and some of the other studies on market integration cited there, and the eight regional case-studies in Chapters 6 through 9. 46. Ibid, Chapters 3 and 4. Changes in the definitions of small firms make analysis over the whole of the 1990s problematic. 47. Examples for Samara are given in ibid., Chapter 7. 48. Richard Rose, ‘Getting things done in an anti-modern society: Social capital networks in Russia’, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde Studies in Social Policy, 1998. Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaia, The Challenge of Revolution. Contemporary Russia in Historical Perspective, Oxford, 2001. I have surveyed several accounts of constraints on Russian economic progress in ‘Barriers to long-run growth in Russia’, Economy and Society (February 2002).

Part III Politics, Law and Foreign Policy

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9 Law Reform and Civil Culture W. E. Butler

A decade after the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Western specialists in Russian affairs and policymakers are divided as to whether an opportunity has been missed by the West to materially propel the CIS countries towards a rule-of-law, social State, a market economy, and a civil society. This is the same discipline which, at a large assembly in Switzerland held in 1988, predicted that the Soviet Union would last another 15–20 years and ultimately would self-destruct in a violent counter-revolution. Those in the West who followed – and in due course participated in – the course of law reform during perestroika were on the whole more perceptive and less apocalyptic. To many of us, forces were at work in Soviet society and the Soviet legal system which suggested a Russian legal consciousness was in being, that it shared key common values with Western understandings of human rights and the rule of law, and that Russia was seeking the reformation of legal rules and institutions along lines more congenial with international standards.1 While the ultimate course and result of these forces was by no means assured, they proved in the end to be, in my perception, extremely powerful and influential – and remain so. In this article I seek to bring together, however necessarily superficially and briefly, several large strands of law reform in the first post-Soviet decade: (i) the place of law reform in the large social, economic and political reforms undertaken in Russia (and the CIS); (ii) the measure of accomplishment in law reform; and (iii) the putative legal and quasi-legal standards which Russian society (above all) and the legal system are striving, however unsatisfactorily, to address, to wit: the rule of law and the formation of a ‘civil society’.2

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The place and context of law reform If I state that in any transition from a Soviet-style socialist economic order to a market-oriented economy law reform is the primary, fundamental and central element against which any financial, institutional, social or economic changes pale in importance, this is not intended to be an expression of professional chauvinism or myopia. The Soviet system was a profoundly ‘law-based’ social system.3 It depended upon – thrived upon – the formalities of and a hierarchy of legal and administrative rules designed to preserve the status of the ruling elites, agencies and organizations, maintain order and rationality in the management of State ownership, discipline citizens and inculcate in them a loyalty to values which the regimes of the day wished to emphasize. Soviet Law was positivism run rampant. Just as any positivist system, it contained some rules purely self-serving to the system and others that contained, under the proper conditions and circumstances, the seeds of the system’s own destruction. Soviet positivism drew upon and reinforced attitudes towards law that profoundly affected post-Soviet attitudes towards and implementation of legal change in the post-Soviet era. Here lay the heart of the law-reform challenge: to dismantle the pernicious elements of the Soviet legal system (repeal); to preserve and reshape the desirable elements along lines supportive of a market economy, the rule of law and the formation of a civil society (amendment); and to introduce new components of the system necessary to these ends (new law). Leaving aside for a moment the quality and measure of achievement during the past ten years, a staggering amount has been done on all three core fronts. It is therefore bewildering to read two of the most thoughtful critiques4 of what has transpired in Russia during the past decade and find not a serious mention of law reform, never mind a penetrating evaluation of its successes and failures. Both studies invoke ‘tragedy’ as the leitmotif of their studies, a term chosen for its aptness, in the authors’ views, in describing the Russian situation and presumably the ‘failure’ of Western policymakers, statesmen and agencies to properly diagnose and support (above all, finance) measures of the proper kind and on the proper scale. The implication is that the tragedy might have been averted or at least reduced in scale. For better or for worse, law reform was not in fact as marginalized in the practice of international institutional and governmental assistance programmes as Cohen and Reddaway/Glinski implicitly suggest. The governments of the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Japan funded substantial law reform programmes, as has The World Bank,

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the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the International Monetary Fund and especially the European Union. Each of their projects had its merits and drawbacks; some were more successful than others; and the process continues. The intention of the best projects was to aim at the very heart of the pre-existing legal system, to eliminate, adjust or introduce legal rules that would further institutional change and the formation or reinforcement of democratic values. I would venture to suggest that on the scale of significance for potential value the monies, comparatively modest, spent on law reform projects of this kind gave better value than those in any other domain of foreign assistance. While the lawyers have concentrated on legislation and legal institutions, the other social sciences seem to have been preoccupied primarily, insofar as law is concerned, with crime and corruption. If it were possible to extinguish crime and corruption in any social system by studying it to death, Russia doubtless would be a crimeless society. Here the returns as measured by an enhanced understanding and corresponding reduction of criminality are nil, and the genuine insights into the Russian social order on this score only slightly higher. But how do we measure the course of law reform? Dismantling was the first order of the day under late perestroika and the early days of sovereignty and independence. Here surely the record is impressive, the more so for being accomplished without Western assistance and in the midst of deep-seated Western scepticism and even suspicion: the abolition of the monopoly role of the Communist Party and, eventually, of the Party itself; the introduction of constitutional supervision agencies and, in good time, constitutional courts; the fashioning not merely of separation of powers (which had existed under the USSR-era constitutions), but of checks and balances among those powers; the transition to strong presidential models in place of party or parliamentary models; the replacement of State arbitrazh by a system of economic courts and concomitant transition throughout the judiciary to a professional corpus of judges and, gradually at local levels, to justices of the peace; the embodiment of basic human rights and freedoms in the 1993 Constitution in a way which makes them exceptionally difficult to remove or abridge by amendment; and the partial abolition of structures of the Planned Economy so pernicious to an entrepreneurial market economy. Not all of these changes have commended themselves to everyone. The multi-party system lacks the elements of party responsibility, loyalty, accountability and solidity, which the Anglo-American world associates with such a system. Many are apprehensive of a strong President, even

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though the fragmentation of political alignments within parliament seriously obstructed the pace and direction of reform. Human rights and freedoms are indeed duly ensconsed, yet difficult to balance in a complex societal structure which for generations at least has placed stronger emphasis upon the collective over the individual. Federalism proves to be a shifting equation of centralism and devolution whose dynamics need to mature. Destatization and privatization have been accompanied by or perpetuated concentrations of economic wealth and power deemed by most to be unjustified or corrupt. The disappearance of certain power structures from the former USSR has led to the criminalization of others erected in their place, a process facilitated by inept and unconscionable foreign companies who passively or actively encourage or tolerate these structures within their own operations.

The course of law reform Against this background, virtually any legislative change amounts to law reform. The early decisions of the Independent States, following their declarations of sovereignty and/or independence, to apply on their territories only that legislation of the USSR which has not been repealed, or is not inconsistent with subsequent Independent State legislation, or which is not contrary to new or amended constitutions was an early ‘law reform’ of immense consequence. In fact this was a staggering measure, comparable in scale (but not in tone) to what the Bolsheviks undertook after 7 November 1917 – to escape instantaneously from the socioeconomic and political structures of the prior social system. A legal vacuum is always intolerable; not even the Bolsheviks tolerated one. And in the case of the Independent States, the peculiar form of ‘USSR federalism’, which did leave residual powers to the union republics or required that the union republics replicate and adapt all-union enactments to their own individual circumstances, provided a safety net – perhaps too resilient a safety mechanism – against legal nihilism under post-Soviet circumstances. The manner in which the former Soviet Union was dismantled contributed significantly to the setting. Few Western soothsayers predicted that the process would proceed without large-scale violence, not to mention in accordance with law. The relevant union republics simply exercized their rights as sovereign States to denounce and withdraw from a Treaty concluded some 69 years earlier. They resolved issues of State continuity and succession amicably and rapidly; property was divided, foreign indebtedness assumed or balanced, the treasury dispersed, and the

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foreign economic monopoly eliminated. With relatively minor difficulties, the resources of the armed forces were distributed and centralized command systems decentralized. All this in the context of a massive withdrawal from Central Europe with concomitant reductions in the size of forces and the social problems such reductions inevitably entail. State-disintegration and State-formation have occurred on a stupendous scale within the former USSR during the past decade before our very eyes. Excluding local conflicts principally in the Caucasus, it has done so with remarkably little bloodshed and instability. In part this must be attributed to the fact that Soviet legal structures lent themselves to change of this order once the political will and opportunity existed to take advantage. The late perestroika and early independence periods, viewed from the standpoint of law reform, thus amounted initially to stripping out certain Soviet institutions by way of abolition and by way of substitution. More awkward was the next step: determining what should replace them, and precisely where one should commence. Here was a challenge to comparative law so monumental that the comparative law community found itself paralysed in response. Comparative law as a discipline usually is preoccupied with incremental, passive legal change; rarely are comparativists called upon to apply their method, their insights, their lore to legal change on such an extraordinary scale or, more importantly, within a relatively brief time-span. All of the fundamentals were found wanting: the lack of a shared legal vocabulary to work with Russian law reform and, worse, the absence of consensus on how to approach such terminology; the want of legal practitioners suitably trained to work in the CIS; the apparent irrelevance of so much comparative legal ‘theory’ to local conditions; and the total vacuum in the CIS itself of any familiarity with the precepts of comparative law. To chart a new course for a legal future, it is desirable, if not essential, to know exactly what is being dismantled and why. Indeed, where to begin may be dictated by one’s comprehension of the pre-existing system rather than any convictions about in what direction to proceed. Law reform is not a ‘crusade’, and the failure to extract as much as one might have wished from the political processes of making law is not a ‘tragedy’. Civil Law was and is widely regarded as the central pillar of a market economy: it is that branch of law which regulates ownership, obligations, responsibility, inheritance, intellectual property and conflicts of law. To ‘manipulate’ those concepts and principles is to play with the very interstices of a market system; in some legal systems family law and land law would be assimilated to civil law. It is instructive to

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recall that in the early 1990s international financial institutions required legislation of a civil-law nature to be enacted – enterprises, bankruptcy and the like. Their concern was a proper, albeit rough and ready, reflection of how these legal institutions were the fulcrum point of legal transition from a planned to a market economy. A task force appointed by the European Commission to chart a strategy for law reform in the CIS, while acknowledging the central role of Civil Law, found it impossible to isolate any branch of law as decisive in comparison with others. Constitutional law, administrative law, budgetary law, natural resources, branches of transport, the family, civil and criminal procedure, court organization, social security and so on – all had their crucial parts to play in what had been in the Soviet Union and is, in its own way, as in other societies – a veritable seamless web of legal rules and institutions. To tamper with one produced ripple effects that required, in the end, all be addressed. There is perhaps no more compelling insight for those who doubted the importance of law in Soviet society; dismantling a legal system wedded to a particular socio-economic and political order is a gargantuan undertaking. Ten years on, the strong impulse in favour of law reform initially experienced met various forms of passive resistance. The social and psychological costs of drastic reform, proposed in 1992 as part of the Shatalin Plan, were rejected at the outset. Privatization was achieved in substantial part, but privatization legislation is in substance ‘procedural law’: it regulates how to move from ‘A’ to ‘B’.5 Mostly privatization law has served its purpose, accomplished its task. The intention to complete the transfer of State-owned property to non-State owners is proceeding more deliberately, sufficiently so as to frustrate, for example, the recodification of civil law along entirely market principles. Accordingly, we see retained in civil law such principles as unitary enterprises, operative management, economic jurisdiction, trust management and the like – all creations of the penultimate stage of the Soviet legal era which are counter-productive in a true transition to market relations. During the Putin era significant judicial reforms have already been achieved: a Tax Code, a long-awaited and deeply controversial Land Code, Part III of the Civil Code, the Code of Internal Water Transport, Labour Code, Code of Criminal Procedure, Code on Administrative Violations and Law on Environmental Protection, together with new codes of civil and arbitrazh procedure and perhaps a new housing code. Elements of what we attributed (perhaps wrongly) to Soviet legal experience have displayed surprisingly robust residual strength. Planned or market economy, Russia seems disposed to ‘over-legislate’. Whether they

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respect normative rules or not, Russians are evidently uncomfortable without some sort of normative act to guide them. The principle that ‘everything is permitted, unless prohibited’ rests uneasily in a people accustomed to having subordinate legislation play such an overwhelming role in their lives. Witness the recommended internal structures of Russian commercial organizations – a morass of internal statutes and regulations for company subdivisions, posts and positions that no Western corporate structure, however large and sophisticated, would tolerate. The ‘limited State’ has little meaning if there is a broad social expectation that the State should, and must, regulate so many details of economic and domestic being. Theory, or doctrine, continues to be important in Russian Law, and there is no theory as to precisely when and how the State should refrain from intruding into affairs where its presence is not required. It is not laws in the strict technical sense that are overproduced, that is, enactments of the Federal Assembly; it is the secondary layer of subordinate legislation that is so burdensome, yet regarded as so essential. To observe that other advanced societies may have an overabundance of regulation is no answer; the Russian situation is so very Russian as to defy meaningful analogy with Europe or North America. Yes, there do occur abuses by departments of their rights and powers. Many of these are caught by the system devised to reduce their incidence, notably the registration system of subordinate normative legal acts operated by the Ministry of Justice. But although the Ministry has the right to refuse to register departmental normative acts which in its expert opinion are contrary to law, it does not have the right to suggest that they are superfluous. It would be inappropriate to conclude observations on the course of law reform without remarking on what in my view is one of the most far-reaching achievements of law reform – the inclusion of Article 15 into the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation.6 Although each of the four subpoints is of importance in its own right, the achievement in point four is in a class of its own, for here the Russian fathers of the Constitution have incorporated another system of law to redress the imbalances of the Soviet legal heritage: ‘generally-recognised principles and norms of international law and international treaties of the Russian Federation shall be an integral part of its legal system’. The virtues of such a provision are several. First, it achieves an instantaneous symbiosis with the international legal order from which Russia was self-isolated for so much of the twentieth century. Second, given Russia’s stature in the international legal community, it imports rules to which the Russian Federation has assented and in the formation of which it has played a

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role. Third, it establishes a priority for international legal rules as against inconsistent Russian national legal rules. Fourth, international legal standards are automatically, in relevant instances, Russian legal standards. Fifth, the process of harmonization, approximation and unification of legal rules is greatly facilitated by way of treaty, where international market standards are likely to already have been articulated and agreed, and tampering by opposed parliamentary factions is likely to be minimized. Article 15 of the Russian Constitution remains one of the unsung achievements in the domain of law reform, whose operation in practice is real in individual cases. The collected decisions, rulings and decrees of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in only eight years already make absorbing reading on this score alone. Naturally, Article 15 has its detractors. The principal assault upon its application is to be found in the doctrinal assertions that the reference to ‘international treaties’ must have in view only those treaties ‘subject to ratification’. Such a qualification, not found in the formulation of Article 15 itself, would eliminate from the scope of Article 15 those treaties concluded at intergovernmental or interdepartmental levels, of which there are many. Towards a rule-of-law State Article 1(1) of the 1993 Russian Constitution committed the Russian Federation to being, inter alia, a ‘rule-of-law’ State. The expression came to prominence again during the late days of perestroika, although its roots in the Russian language date back to the nineteenth century as a borrowing either from English (Dicey) or German legal writings and the fundamental notions underlying the concept reach far back into Russian history, to the earliest days. It has been suggested that the Russian expression pravovoe gosudarstvo, which is the term used in the Russian Constitution, is ‘often mistranslated in English as “rule of law” or “State based on the rule of law” ’.7 On the contrary, this is the only translation which least obscures the heart of the issue in Russian law and society: law (jus, pravo) or law (lex, zakon). The question is not merely the relationship of law to the State, but which law? In the Russian language, as in most European languages but not English, there are two words for law: jus and lex (Latin); Recht and Gesetz (German); droit and loi (French); pravo and zakon (Russian), and similar distinctions in Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Dutch and many other languages. Depending upon the position developed or defended by the individual jurist concerned, the rule of ‘law’ may be jus or lex, or he may be contending that they are in substance the same. But unless the possibility

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of the distinction is preserved, those who advocate the broader and more fundamental concept of jus, that is, those who believe in a law that connotes right and justice, consistency with moral principles that prevail always and everywhere, that may not be transgressed by citizen or State, that may originate in community custom or other sources besides the State proper, can not plausibly argue their case or defend their position because there are no words left to describe it.8 How, for example, is one to understand such expressions as ‘pravovye zakony’, that is, laws (lex) which are in conformity with law (jus), or ‘antipravovye zakon’, that is, laws (lex) which are contrary to law (jus), unless the essential distinctions are drawn by a rigorous distinction in the terminology. For Russian jurists of the present generation the ‘rule of law’ and the ‘rule-of-law State’ are a rediscovery rather than an invention. German9 and English legal writings of the second half of the nineteenth century inspired Russian jurists to take up the question, although, as one noted Russian authority wrote: ‘the idea of a rule-of-law State has a significantly longer past in the history of European political thought than do its underlying plans and programmes for State transformation; to trace its roots is to review virtually the entire heritage of theoretical works explaining law ( jus) and State’.10 Outspoken proponents of the rule of law (jus) prior to the October 1917 Revolution were B. N. Chicherin, B. A. Kistiakovskii and P. I. Novgorodtsev, to name but a few. The attraction of the rule of law in its Anglo-American manifestation as a doctrine limiting State power by the force of law (jus) was considerable, for this principle held out the prospect of introducing genuine democracy into Russia at the expense of autocratic power claimed, albeit not actually possessed, by the Russian Imperial throne.11 Although the jurisprudential distinction between jus and lex is now well understood in Russian legal theory, and its implications (I would like to believe), there remains a profound reluctance, even amongst those who posit or accept the existence of Russian jus, to identify the source(s) of jus and/or legal principles of jus, or to develop the relationship between the 1993 Constitution and Russian jus. Most Russian jurists who accept the concept of jus would probably accept that the Articles of the 1993 Russian Constitution devoted to the rights and freedoms of man and citizen fall into the category of jus; the very nature of these rights as ‘human’ rights which inhere in individuals from birth (whenever that moment is deemed to occur) and by virtue of the human condition necessarily places them in the category of pravo.12 Even these, however, are being treated by some jurists, just as the Constitution, as ‘relative’: ‘Any constitution not only fixes the level of

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State and legal development achieved by society, but also determines its purposes, forms, and value ideals which must serve as an orientator in future development.’13 Commentators of this disposition accept the ‘natural law’ origins of human rights and freedoms; that is, these are ‘natural rights, inalienable’. The rule-of-law State guarantees this system of rights and freedoms ‘in accordance with modern standards of international law’ and deems them to be the highest value for the State. Thus is the extra-State origin of these rights acknowledged. The rule-of-law State further ensures the supremacy of jus and subordinates legislation, executive normative legal acts, and judicial activity of the State to rules of jus, it is argued. Yet human rights are the easy case for proponents of jus. Their naturallaw definition in the human rights covenants and incorporation into the 1993 Russian Constitution offer an inescapable and compelling conclusion for the Russian jurist of whatever persuasion. More difficult are rules of Russian jus which do not fall within the express text of the Constitution nor the law of human rights. Are there nonetheless rules of conduct not codified, or not fully codified, that constitute rules of Russian jus; if so, where do they originate and what is their relationship to Russian lex. An example might be the principle that obligations and duties must be performed in good faith, that this principle underlies all branches of Russian Law, and that the legislator is not at liberty to revoke or repeal this principle. The Civil Code of the Russian Federation, for example, prohibits abuse of right (Article 10), a principle which would seem to presume the good-faith fulfillment of obligations and duties generally. However, the Civil Code does not expressly make provision for the general principle of good-faith. One may argue that such a principle is subsumed within every general principle of civil law and is expressly mentioned, in addition, in several individual articles of the Code. Similarly, abuse of right has constitutional origins, but one may equally maintain that the 1993 Constitution does not necessarily set out exhaustively the content of abuse of right, nor do other branches of Russian Law to which this principle is relevant. Accordingly, one would affirm that Russian citizens and juridical persons (and the State?) fulfill their obligations and duties in good faith and may not abuse their rights in accordance with Russian pravo ( jus). One might advance a natural-law argument in support of such a proposition, but more persuasive would be the view that such principles inhere in the Russian concept of jus, override any legislation to the contrary, and, more importantly, do not require formal codification in order to be

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enforced by Russian State institutions and officials. The interpretation and application of jus is then the prerogative of Russian judicial institutions and the guiding explanations and case law which they develop. There are other principles of law of a non-human rights nature fundamental to a market economy and a rule-of-law State that might be mentioned in this connection, mostly suppressed under a planned economy. It is easier to identify those principles, however, than the sources of their binding effect. They do not inhere in the human condition, although they are incontestably an ingredient of a civil society. They assist in the balancing of rights among individuals, or between the individual and the State. They need not necessarily be relegated to the domain of constitutional rights, though they be higher than the Constitution and principles and rules to which the Constitution and laws must correspond. Here lies the challenge for Russian Law: to identify, articulate and enforce the body of Russian jus, including its source(s), as part of the foundation of the rule-of-jus State. A first step in this process is to reformulate the sources of Russian law (jus and lex), giving precedence of place to pravo.14 If there is occasion in the year 2011 to review what has happened in Russian Law during the previous decade, the course and outcome of the debate surrounding these issues should be a key benchmark to be evaluated. Towards a civil society ‘Civil society’ is not a legal term in the Russian language, so far as I can determine. It does not appear in the 1993 Russian Constitution; in particular, it does not appear in Article 1 of that document, where other features of a State are enumerated: ‘social’, ‘democratic’, ‘rule-of-law’. Since, indeed, it is describing ‘society’ as a whole, that is entirely appropriate. The word combination ‘grazhdanskoe obshchestvo’ first appeared in the Russian language at least by 1787,15 in translations of European writers. Its precise meaning has been nebulous throughout the centuries, however. In Russia the concept had an inherent appeal insofar as a civil society represented the antithesis of Tsarist autocracy. Karl Marx dismissed the idea of civil society as a world in which individualism ran rampant, subject to State intervention, in its pursuit of private gains at the heart of a capitalist system. While the doctrine has attracted its own adherents among historians of Russia,16 features of the civil society that attracted Russian liberals early in the twentieth century continue to do so early in the twenty-first century.17 It is not without relevance that the prominent role in various ways of obshchestvennost’ in Russian life gives the

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notion of civil society a particular cachet and attractiveness lacking in more individualistic European and North American societies. The reasons are not difficult to fathom. Just as the transition to a constitutional monarchy in 1905–06 marked an unprecedented empowerment, however imperfect, of the general public in the exercise of State rule, so too has the dismantling of the Soviet Union led to a new realization of the importance of both a limited State and a role for the individual which recognizes both his private and public responsibilities. The rule of law is recognized, universally it would seem, as an integral component of any civil society, although which ‘law’ remains to be resolved. The phrase ‘civil society’ is already viewed with opprobrium in some quarters. Stephen Cohen sees it as an expression associated with ‘transitology’, a phrase ‘inherently ideological’ contrasted with the ‘totalitarian’ approaches, now discredited, and promising the ‘near certainty’ of change based on a ‘singular idea of causal factors and outcomes’. The ‘civil society’ in this perception is contraposed to the totalitarian interpretation, yet seen to be the product of an ‘elliptical or blinkered approach, highly selective in what it chooses to study and emphasize and thus in what it ignores, obscures, or minimizes’.18 On an immediate policy level the concept of a ‘civil society’ is favoured in some quarters as a means of seeking support for Western ideals and policies directly within the Russian public, bypassing the political regime of the day and assisting Russian society and the Russian people at large. As a ‘policy’, it is viewed as being driven by directed Western funding and subsidies to those Russian individuals, media, political groupings, interest groups and philanthropic bodies who profess support for ideas that find favour with Western policymakers.19 Small wonder that insofar as this is the motive of Western assistance it meets with suspicion and hostility in Russian political circles. Taken on its concededly nebulous merits, however, to the extent that there is genuine movement towards achieving a ‘civil society’, there are plain implications for the principle of the rule of law and for law reform. Most proponents of a civil society regard the rule of law as an essential ingredient, a part of the larger whole. Proponents of the rule of law ( jus) could be justified in reversing the proposition, treating the civil society – that is, the proper balancing of a limited, liberal State with the public and private rights, freedoms, duties and responsibilities of the individual in his purely personal and in his collective capacities (as a member of nonState organized groups) – as an essential feature of the rule-of-law State and of the rule of law itself. The particular merit of the civil society, in my view, is that it requires us to face and to articulate the social dimension

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of the individual, his affiliation to sundry collectives (family, work, leisure) or statuses (gender, pensioner, minor, disabled, etc.). It draws our attention to the reality that the equation of individual -v- State is but one dimension; that collectives or groupings of individual -v- State are another, as are collectives of individuals vis-à-vis one another. All are entitled to the rule of law, and the rule-of-law State, limited and liberal, must intervene within its prescribed limitations to defend the rights of individual and collective participants inter se and with respect to the State. The proposition that the State should be subject to control and supervision by non-State groups is one that, given the Soviet legal heritage, will not be uncongenial to the Russian mentality. From Khrushchev onwards, the Communist Party experimented with sundry mechanisms to transfer State functions to non-State bodies (comrades’ courts, people’s guard), or to share State functions with non-State organizations (e.g., administration of the State pension and social security systems with massive trade union involvement), or to require lay participation in the dispensation of justice (people’s assessors elected by labour collectives or other social groupings). The notion that social organizations (NGOs being the functional equivalent) have a substantial and positive function to perform in the body politic would, conceptually, perhaps find fertile ground more easily in Russian society than most others.

Perspectives Theorists, social and legal, will disagree about what should come first: the civil society, or the rule-of-law State. How long the debate over a civil society will command the attention of the Russian philosophical and legal communities remains to be seen. One suspects it may be of considerable duration simply because the numbers of social organizations and other nongovernmental organizations are great and their role undefined, yet in most conceptions of a civil society such organizations are key players. That they have a role to play in Russia is undoubted, and the Russian tradition is to seek to formalize those roles. To jurists, however, the rule of law can be a matter of profound practical concern. Once the process of identifying rules of jus transcends the natural rights and freedoms of man and citizen and the preoccupation with constitutionalism to reach beyond to those rules of behaviour latent or dormant in the Russian community, expressive of standards, precepts, values and morality long accepted in Russian culture and society, the dialogue over the sources of jus and their relationship to the hierarchy of sources of law can commence properly. Although legal

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doctrine and theory have their role to play, it is to the Russian courts that one must look for guidance and assistance. The future of the ruleof-law State is more likely to depend upon the judiciary than on the other branches of State.

Notes and references 1. For the case that Russia has been following this course, and largely succeeding albeit at a different pace than in Europe and North America, for some three centuries or more, see B. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII–nachalo XX v.), 2nd edn, St Petersburg, 2000, 2 vols. Translated by Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917, Boulder, CO, 2000, 2 vols. It is not clear that the American translation is necessarily of the second Russian edition as published. 2. I omit here the aim of achieving a ‘social’ State, which is a subject of its own, not unrelated but beyond the scope and ambitions of this analysis. 3. I will comment below on the ‘rule-of-law’ State and do not use the term ‘lawbased’ here in that sense. 4. See Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of PostCommunist Russia, New York and London, 2000; P. Reddaway and D. Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy, Washington DC, 2001. 5. For a cogent jurisprudential analysis of privatization, its consequences and proposals for readjusting those consequences, see V. S. Nersesiants, The Civilism Manifesto: The National Idea of Russia in the Historical Quest for Equality, Freedom, and Justness, London, 2000. 6. Translated in W. E. Butler and J. E. Henderson, Russian Legal Texts: The Foundations of a Rule-of-Law State and a Market Economy, The Hague, London and Boston, 1998, p. 7. 7. See H. J. Berman, ‘The rule of law and the law-based state (Rechtsstaat) with special reference to the Soviet Union’, in D. D. Barry (ed.), Toward the ‘Rule of Law’ in Russia? Political and Legal Reform in the Transition Period, White Plains, NY, 1992, p. 43. W. G. Wagner has preferred a phrase to translate the words: ‘a state governed by law’, which in its stunning ambiguity leaves unclear whether the State is subordinate to law or whether the State is one in which law governs. See W. G. Wagner, ‘Law and the state in Boris Mironov’s Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii’, Slavic Review, 60(3), 2001, pp. 558–65 (p. 558). 8. I have addressed this issue on various occasions and draw upon those in preparing this Section of the article. See, in particular, W. E. Butler, ‘Towards the rule of law?’, in A. Brumberg (ed.), Chronicle of a Revolution: A Western-Soviet Inquiry into Perestroika, New York, 1990, pp. 72–89; ‘The rule of law and the legal system’, in S. White, A. Pravda and Z. Gitelman (eds), Developments in Soviet Politics, New York, 1990, pp. 104–05; Butler, ‘Perestroika and the rule of law’, in idem (ed.), Perestroika and the Rule of Law: Anglo-American and Soviet Perspectives, London, 1991, pp. 7–21; idem, Russian Law, Oxford, 1999, p. 79. 9. Berman, ‘The rule of law’, succinctly reviews the principal early German writings, suggesting that the term Rechtsstaat first appeared in 1829 in a work of Robert von Mohl, although the conceptual origins date back to Immanual

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10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

Kant. Some would date the concept back to the twelfth century as a naturallaw doctrine. Which periodization is accepted depends largely upon whether one speaks of jus or lex. S. A. Kotliarevskii, Pravovoe gosudarstvo i vneshniaia politika, Moscow, 1909, p. 338. Also see N. Khlebnikov, Pravo i gosudarstvo v ikh oboiudnykh otnosheniiakh, Moscow, 1874. On the role of the Russian legal profession in reforms which led ultimately to constitutional monarchy in Russia, see R. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, New York, 1976. The rule of law, for which a legal consciousness is a prerequisite, was amongst the jurisprudential contributions to the forces at work. The literature on the rule-of-law State in Russia has become substantial. For a good summary of the principal positions, see V. M. Boer et al., Pravovoe gosudarstvo: real ‘nost’, mechty, budushchee. 2nd edn, St Petersburg, 1999. See V. A. Chetvernin (ed.) Konstitutsii Rossiiskoi Federatsii: Problemnyi kommentarii, Moscow, 1997, p. 41. The reluctance of Russian jurists to face the issue squarely is well illustrated in the excellent study edited by I. I. Kal’naia (ed.) Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo: istoki i sovremennost’, St Petersburg, 2000. The authors, I. L. Chestnov and Iu. N. Volkov, lay down as a ‘cornerstone’ principle of the rule-of-law State the supremacy of jus, which, they say, includes two elements: (1) the formal aspect, supremacy of lex; and the substantive aspect, the conformity of lex to jus. After disposing of the first element, which comes down chiefly to compliance with the procedure for enacting lex, the second proves to be a damp squib: ‘the principle of the supremacy of jus is the requirement[s] for legislation, and above all, the procedure for working out normative legal acts’ (pp. 230, 234). See Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII veka, Leningrad, 1989, V, p. 214, citing Rassuzhdenie o nachale i osnovanii grazhdanskikh obshchezhitii, transl. from the French by A. F. Malinovskii, Moscow, 1787. The term also appeared in the Russian title of Adam Ferguson, Opyt istorii grazhdanskogo obshchestva, transl. I. Timkovskii, St Petersburg, 1817–18. 3 parts. See D. Wartenweiler, Civil Society and Academic Debate in Russia 1905–1914, Oxford, 1999, p. 5. Kal’naia, Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo. Cohen, Failed Crusade, p. 23. Cohen, Failed Crusade, p. 217.

10 Censorship and Restrictions on Freedom of Speech in Russia: 1986–1991–2001 Martin Dewhirst*

Only the censorship of school text-books can save our children. After all, even in the USA all text-books for schools are censored by the state. If this requires registration in law (zakonodatel’noe oformlenie), we are ready to take the initiative. Vladimir Pekhtin, leader of the Unity (Edinstvo) faction in the Duma, 20011 Several recent reports in the press state that, according to public opinion surveys carried out in the spring of 2001, some 57 or 58 per cent of the population of the Russian Federation would welcome the establishment of an official censorship organization in their country,2 despite the existence of a law on state secrets (since 1993), of a military censorship directorate within the Ministry of Defence,3 and of a wide range of unofficial types of censorship and self-censorship.4 According to an even more recent source,5 71.9 per cent of the population thinks that, ‘on the whole’, state control over the media should be introduced, with only 22.1 per cent opposed to this. It has been suggested that by the end of 1964 the ‘three-headed monster’ which enabled the Party and state authorities to keep Soviet society under their tight control had reached maturity.6 The ‘troika’ consisted of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the Committee on State Security (KGB) and Glavlit (as the official censorship agency was widely known). Much has been written about the first two of these organizations. By 2001 the CPSU had been replaced by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) (still, apparently, the largest and most popular political party) and, to some extent, by Edinstvo (Unity), 186

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an ‘establishment’ party that appeared out of nowhere in the autumn of 1999 and attracted almost a quarter of the votes in the Duma elections a few months later. Unity is now approaching other groups represented in parliament with a view to creating a broader alliance which might attract some current members and supporters of the KPRF. Now that the population is said to be building capitalism, the ideals of communism, as a supposedly unifying idea, are being replaced by something else – perhaps by the patriotic notion of the Russian Federation as a strong, independent, Eurasian state. The KGB and its successor organizations are, of course, very well represented by the Russian President himself and in the Presidential Administration, the government, the ‘strongarm’ ministries and other power structures. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Federal Government Communications and Information Agencies (FAPSI), General Staff’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), and so on may be more powerful and autonomous now than when they were under the control of the CPSU, and they have recruited a large number of desperadoes toughened (to put it mildly) by service in Afghanistan and/or Chechnia. To complete the vertical axis of power so greatly desired by Putin, and thereby ensure that society – especially the intelligentsia – is kept in its place, a reincarnation of Glavlit, with some explicit preliminary (e.g. pre-publication, predvaritel’nyi) and not merely subsequent (e.g. postpublication, posleduiushchii) control, if not censorship, over the media (and possibly over other areas of activity), may be wishful thinking, but it is evidently an attractive idea to a large section of the rossiiskie ‘masses’ and to at least some of their leaders. It should be remembered that, although censorship is banned by the Constitution and by the Law on the Press, the term ‘censorship’ is nowhere defined and that certain types of publications (e.g. calls for the forcible overthrow or change of the existing state and/or social system, the propagation of war, violence and cruelty and/or of racial, national and/or religious exclusivity and/or intolerance, pornography and/or materials leading to the commission of these and/or other criminally punishable actions), as in most other countries, are illegal. A further relevant point is that although the first, 1922, Statutes of Glavlit frequently feature the word tsenzura, as early as 1931, when the second edition of the Statutes came out, the Ts-word was usually replaced by the more politically correct (but much broader) term kontrol’. This convenient euphemism not only enabled Soviet spokespersons to claim that there was no censorship in the USSR, but could easily be used by the ‘post-Soviet’ authorities to insist that any pressures they might bring to bear (e.g. on the Media-Most holding)

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and restrictions they might impose (for instance, on reporting about and from Chechnia) are intended ‘merely’ to ‘control’ a situation which is verging on disorder and even chaos (after all, besporiadok can easily lead to besporiadki). This is a perfectly legitimate and not necessarily cynical way of ensuring that the supposed interests of the state (and, incidentally, of the old–new oligarchic establishment) take precedence over the supposed interests of society. So far there has been very little published Western research on the third of the ‘whales’ (kity) which provided the essential props on which the USSR depended for its existence. Glavlit as an institution could not be examined until after 1991 because very few of its employees left the Soviet Union and went public,7 and remarkably few samizdat documents dealt with the internal workings of this very small,8 but extremely important organization. It goes almost without saying that most of the relevant archival materials were completely off limits even to loyal Soviet scholars,9 and that periodically Glavlit incinerated or sent for reprocessing (e.g. into roofing material) many of its own files and records.10 The following pages are therefore devoted, with apologies for the abundance of quotations, to an examination of a few of the official censorship documents issued during the period of glasnost’. They should help us to assess the situation in this area in 1991. After a brief survey of some of the relevant developments in the 1990s, we may then be able to make a preliminary comparative and contrastive assessment of the state of affairs regarding freedom of speech in the Russia of 2001. It is a plausible hypothesis that since at least the mid-1960s the stringent restrictions placed on the circulation, exchange and discussion of information and ideas within the USSR (let alone between the USSR and the rest of the world) tended over the longer term to weaken rather than strengthen not only Soviet society but also the Soviet state. This may well have been the view of Mikhail Gorbachev, and after the serious mishandling of the Chernobyl’ disaster in April 1986 he apparently felt that the communist regime would benefit more than it would lose from the introduction of the policy of glasnost’ (‘sounding off’). In the present context it is important to note that this untranslatable Russian word, which is not a synonym of the term ‘freedom of speech’, means nothing more, but also nothing less, than ‘the relaxation of censorship’. And indeed, one of the first new tasks allocated, on 13 January 1987, by the CPSU CC to Glavlit, together with the USSR Ministry of Culture and the USSR State Committee for Publishing, was to declassify parts of the ‘special collections’ (spetskhrany) of large public libraries, making available

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to the general public numerous titles that had, in some cases for nearly 60 years, been at best unmentioned in the libraries’ catalogues and could be consulted only by special permission (most other copies of these items had of course been destroyed). ‘During the period from March 1987 up to October 1988, 7930 editions were returned to the general collections of the libraries, while 462 editions of a clearly anti-Soviet character, containing libel on V.I. Lenin, the CPSU, the Soviet state and the Soviet people, White Guardist, Zionist [and] nationalistic editions were left in the special collections.’11 In addition to returning the works of 28 named authors to the general stock, Glavlit proposed the same procedure for the Russian-language works of some 600 émigrés, ‘including a number of well-known writers such as I. Bunin, V. Nabokov, N. Gumilev (sic), E. Zamiatin, I. Brodskii, philosophers and publicists – N. Berdiaev, V. Khodasevich (sic), B. Zaitsev (sic) and others’. This suggestion was supported by A. Kapto, the Head of the Ideological Department of the CPSU CC, on 31 December 1988.12 However, an excellent example of how uncertain the prospects for genuine glasnost’ really were is provided by another document signed by Kapto a fortnight earlier, on 16 December 1988: The Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press attached to the USSR Council of Ministers (Comrade Boldyrev) reports that the CPSU CC Resolution No. 177/77gs of 7 March 1961 empowers the USSR Glavlit to implement secret control (neglasnyi kontrol’) over information transmitted abroad by foreign correspondents in order to receive essential information and for the timely organization of counter-propaganda. For these purposes, the special service of the USSR Glavlit is connected up in parallel to the lines of communication of a number of foreign correspondents. Of late, because an ever greater number of Western news agencies have been switching over to the transmission of materials with the assistance of high-speed computer technology and other contemporary means of communication (e.g. ‘telefax’), the work of the special section of the USSR Glavlit, equipped [as it is] with obsolete appliances (teletype machines) has been seriously impaired. Without the appropriate renewal of its technological base, in the near future this special service will not be able to carry out fully the functions that have been entrusted to it. In this connection it is proposed to task the USSR Ministry of Communications, together with the USSR Committee of State Security and the USSR Glavlit, with working on the question of the

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technological upgrading (obespechenie) of the special service of the USSR Glavlit. This question has [already] been agreed with the USSR KGB (Comrade F.D. Bobkov), the USSR Ministry of Communications (Comrade V.A. Shamshin) … .13 This is the only reference found so far to the ‘special service’ of Glavlit. One of the very few ex-employees of this organization to have gone public, Vladimir Solodin, does not mention it in his description of the structure of the head office on 1 August 1991, shortly before the end of its existence. Working under the Chief of the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press (V. Boldyrev) were four Directorates (Upravleniia) and five Departments (Otdely): the First Directorate, for the Control of Scientific and Technical Literature; the Second Directorate, for the Control of Foreign Literature; the Third Directorate, for the Coordination of the Work of the Local Organs of Glavlit; the Fifth (sic) Directorate, for the Drafting of Normative Documents; the First Department, for Secret Correspondence; the Second Department, for the Control of Foreign Periodicals; the Third Department, for the Control of the Mass Media; the Fourth Department, for the Control of Social, Political and Artistic Literature (political censorship); and the (unnumbered) Department for the Dispatch of Manuscripts Abroad.14 This breakdown is somewhat different from that provided, without reference to any source, by Paul W. Goldschmidt in his pioneering book on anti-pornography legislation in post-Soviet Russia.15 Goldschmidt mentions only the first three Directorates and allocates the preparation of ‘normative documents’ to a Sixth Department. He reallocates the function of the First Department to a Seventh Department, and adds a Fifth Department, for the Preparation of Agreements (copyright licenses, etc.) with Foreign Countries. Perhaps it should be explained at this point that the ‘normative documents’ (extracts from one of which will be provided later) are the innumerable orders, instructions, and so on, to all Glavlit employees throughout the USSR, informing them of what is not to be divulged to the public. It will be noted that political censorship (the Fourth Department) was still in good shape in what turned out to be the last years of the Soviet regime, when Glavlit was officially supposed to be concerned only with state (and not, as earlier, also military) secrets; a particularly good example of ideological censorship at the height of glasnost’ is the 1989 ‘Conclusion’ on the ‘inexpediency’ of the ‘propaganda and circulation’ of Sasha Sokolov’s novel Palisandriia in the USSR.16 The Department for the Dispatch of Manuscripts Abroad apparently handled articles and other typescripts written in the Soviet Union for publication in other countries. Whether the First Department’s

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speciality (‘Secret Correspondence’) meant that it had sole responsibility for the interception (the undetectable ‘perlustration’ of letters was one of the greatest achievements of pre-Revolutionary Russian censorship) of mail entering and leaving the Soviet Union is still unclear, as this important task might have been shared with the KGB. In 1991 Glavlit was operating in accordance with its new Provisional Statutes (Polozhenie) of 24 August 1990, issued a fortnight after the USSR Law on the Media of 12 June 1990 banning preliminary censorship came into force. (The previous Glavlit Statutes, of 19 November 1974, have apparently not yet been declassified.) The parts of the 1990 Statutes that have been published,17 include the following points (the translation attempts to convey the Soviet equivalent of Whitehallese): 1. The Chief Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press and Other Mass Media attached to the USSR Council of Ministers (GUOT SSSR) is a Union-Republican organ. On the basis of legislation currently in force and in accordance with the procedures set out in the present Provisional Statutes, the USSR GUOT implements the agreed state policy for the protection from unauthorised disclosure of information constituting a state secret in materials circulated within the country via the press and other mass media (book production, newspapers and periodicals, television and radio programmes, documentary films and other forms of the public circulation of information), and also in textual, audioand audio-visual materials intended for export abroad; … 4. In compliance with the tasks entrusted to it, the USSR GUOT performs the following functions: (a) draws up and issues, on the basis of constitutional norms and the legislation currently in force, an index [perechen’] of information barred from publication, orders and instructions which are binding on ministries, agencies, organizations, organs of the press and other branches of the mass media when preparing materials for public circulation and also for transmission abroad; when essential GUOT issues orders and instructions jointly and in coordination with other ministries and agencies; (b) scrutinizes the drafts of other agencies’ [vedomstvennye] indexes of information which is banned from publication [which have been] submitted for [GUOT’s] agreement [soglasovanie], and also [drafts] of other agencies’ indexes of information which have been passed for open transmission by radio. And gives its conclusions on them;

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(c) countermands, following the established procedures, outdated restrictions on the publication of information, provided that a decision of the organs of state power or the organs of state governance of the country is not required for this; (d) implements, on a contractual basis, the scrutiny of and advice [konsul’tirovanie] on materials circulating in the press and other forms of the mass media for the purposes of detecting in them information barred from publication; in the event of discovering such information, [GUOT] informs the management of the organs of the press and other branches of the mass media about this; (e) provides systematic informational support [metodicheskoe obespechenie] for the activities of those employees of the organs of the press and other branches of the mass media who are responsible for the protection of state secrets in materials intended for public circulation [and] implements for these purposes training, instructional and other measures; [GUOT] informs the editorial staff of the basic requirements of the normative documents on matters concerning the security of information subject to protection from disclosure in the press and other branches of the mass media; (f) scrutinizes, while observing the USSR’s constitutional norms and international obligations, textual, audio- and audiovisual materials which are being sent or taken [vyvozimye] abroad, including items mailed to other countries or intended to be communicated to foreign organizations or persons, with the purpose of detecting in the aforesaid materials information banned from publication; (g) carries out spot checks on materials in the press and other mass media after publication and informs the leading personnel of ministries and agencies, organizations, founders, publishers [and] editorial boards (editors) of organs of the press and other mass media of facts confirming [any] violations in the area of the protection of secrets, with the aim of closing [zakrytie] the sources of the circulation of such information; … (h) controls foreign publications, audio- and audiovisual materials entering the USSR through open (postal) channels [and] provides methodological [metodicheskaia] assistance to organizations and institutions whose collections [fondy] receive these publications and materials; … 5. The USSR GUOT has the right (a) to exempt [osvobozhdat’] individual materials entering the USSR by open (postal) channels from control, and likewise to re-impose such control;

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(b) to restrict the use of foreign publications and audio and audiovisual materials entering the country through open (postal) channels if they contain information banned from circulation by legislation currently in force; (c) to prevent the taking or sending abroad, including in items of mail addressed to foreign countries, of materials containing information banned from disclosure; (d) to set up, in case of need and following the established procedures, production-editorial organizations, operating on a selfsupporting basis and attached to the USSR GUOT and its local agencies, including the cities of Moscow and Leningrad; … 11. The financing of the USSR GUOT and its branches situated on the territory of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) is effected from the resources of the budget of the [Soviet] Union … There is probably little need to comment on the above document, which makes it clear that Glavlit was still heavily involved in postal censorship and in the work of the Soviet customs service. What is new is the proposed establishment of consultancy services which would earn fees from contracts with any parts of the information industry that would be willing to ask offshoots of Glavlit to vet their output and clear it for circulation. Other documents specify the rates to be charged for this task,18 the assumption being that clients would be prepared to pay to be censored and thus relieved of legal responsibility for revealing any official secrets or offending public taste. During the last few years Glavlit’s budget had been reduced and it had had to shed some employees. In an article published in March 2002 in the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics (vol. 18, no. 1) I wrote about the branch (upravlenie) of GUOT covering the city and oblast’ of Gor’kii (Nizhnii Novgorod), where by mid-1991 the number of Glavlit’s staff was down from a peak of over twenty full-time employees in the 1970s to a mere seven or eight.19 Among their tasks (for which they earned a special bonus) at the end of 1991 was to burn nearly all their office files, including every single copy of their main instruction manual, the famous secret Index (Perechen’ svedenii, zapreshchennykh k opublikovaniiu), commonly known as the Talmud (the fount of all learning and wisdom). Because no copies of any edition of the Index had apparently reached the West and as none was available in Nizhnii Novgorod, I have been unable until now to give a documented account of what the remaining censors (usually officially registered as ‘editors’) were actually censoring in 1991. Thanks to a colleague in Germany, I managed to obtain a copy of the last edition of the Soviet Perechen’, approved by Boldyrev, the last head (Nachal’nik) of

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Glavlit, on 17 April 1990, at the height of glasnost’. So far as I know, none of the many editions of the Perechen’ has so far been the subject of any detailed examination and analysis in any language, including Russian, so a brief description of the 1990 edition seems to be called for. The first surprise about the 96-page Index (presumably printed on Glavlit’s in-house press)20 is the print-run: 20 000, the same as that of previous editions.21 One can assume that many copies went to the headquarters of the separate military censorship, headed at this time by Major-General Sergei Filimonov and located at No. 19, Kropotkinskaia Street,22 especially as a large proportion of the areas of secrecy enumerated on the following pages do relate to military matters, and especially to secret military research, 49 areas of which are listed in Appendix No. 1 on pages 89–95. (As mentioned earlier, Glavlit was officially supposed to be handling state, but not military, secrets.) Some copies no doubt went to the KGB, which is mentioned before the Ministry of Defence as the first of the two other organizations with which the text of the previous issue of the Perechen’, that of 26 June 1987, had been agreed (soglasovannyi). It is interesting to note, however, that the KGB is mentioned only a handful of times in the 1990 edition. Other copies evidently went to the chief editors of periodicals, newspapers and publishing houses and to the numerous other ministries, committees and other bodies which are here given the right, on certain matters, to decide whether or not some sensitive information can be published. The 1990 Perechen’ is divided into 14 sections: General Provisions; The Armed Forces of the USSR and the Defence of the Country; Geodesy, Gravimetry, Cartography and Hydrography; Hydrometeorology; Science and Technology; Industry; Minerals; Transport; Communications; Agriculture; Finances; Foreign Policy and Foreign Economic Activities; Medical and Sanitary Questions; Sundry Information. All in all, some 355 areas of secret information are covered – far fewer, so far as one can tell, than in 1984, but considerably more than the 59 points listed in the mother of all Soviet Indexes, that of 14 December 1922,23 long before the information explosion of the second half of the twentieth century. To the layman, perhaps the most intriguing section of the 1990 edition is the last. Section 14.1 bans the publication, without the permission of the USSR KGB, of information about codes and ciphers and about research in the field of cryptography. 14.2 appears to be the main catch-all clause, banning any mention of work being carried out in conditions of secrecy (rezhim sekretnosti), of secret record-keeping or secret business correspondence (deloproizvodstvo), ‘of the disclosure of secret data, of the loss of secret documents and also of products, data

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concerning which are secret’. 14.4 covers such phenomena as secret ‘directorates, departments, groups, sections (bureaux), departments (bureaux) for secret technical documentation, secret libraries [and] secret archives in state committees, ministries, agencies, institutions, organizations and enterprises’. 14.5 requires the KGB’s permission before any reference is made, inter alia, to the ‘existence, real [and] cover (uslovnye) names and whereabouts (dislokatsiia) of subdivisions of the organs of state security and their training establishments’. 14.6 requires the permission of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs before any public mention can be made of, for instance, the operational and investigatory work of its organs, the ‘methods used by its fighting (auxiliary) sambo division’, and so on. 14.8 forbids any reference to the number of people sentenced to death in any town or larger area in the USSR, and to the number of inmates of ‘places of deprivation of liberty’, such as in any particular ‘corrective labour institution, investigation prison, district, town and upwards’. A closed trial cannot be mentioned unless the court chairperson agrees (14.9). 14.11 forbids the publication of aggregate data on the whereabouts (dislokatsiia – this is presumably a euphemism for ‘number’) of corrective labour institutions in the USSR as a whole and in a Union Republic. Without the consent of the USSR State Committee for Physical Culture and Sport, no information can be given to the public on the training methods used to prepare candidates for the USSR’s national teams (14.15). Among other subjects which are off limits in 1990 and 1991 we find, at 13.8, ‘technical devices (generators, emitters (izluchateli)) for influencing a person’s behavioural functions (creation of biorobots), apart from medical appliances, the possibility of controlling a person’s activities (behaviour) through the influence of psychics (ekstrasensy), [and] the influence of a person’s bioenergetic fields on technical objects (laser installations, computer systems)’. The section on Soviet foreign policy and foreign economic activities covers all intended publications on the period since 1950 (other sections classify information on their areas going back as far as 1946), and begins at 12.1 by banning information contained in Soviet ‘Directives’ (Direktivy) on questions of the USSR’s foreign, commercial, foreign economic, credit and currency policy with regard to foreign states. This section ends by barring information ‘on the activities of the Patrice Lumumba University of the Friendship of the Peoples, including the syllabuses [and] the number, surnames and photographs of foreign students and postgraduates who are studying or who have studied at the University – without the permission of the governing body (rukovoditeli) of the University’ (12.17), and, at 12.18, any

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mention ‘of the subordination of Amtorg, and of other companies abroad which have Soviet participating capital, to the USSR Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations’. It would be interesting to compare this edition of the Perechen’ with the ones drawn up in the 1990s, but this is still impossible, as the new Indexes are classified and writers themselves often do not know whether certain information is a state secret or not.24 El’tsin’s second Decree (Ukaz) on the subject after the formal dissolution of the USSR was signed as early as on 14 January 1992 and published in Rossiiskaia gazeta on 22 January. In the interests of safeguarding state secrets, people were ‘to be guided on his matter by normative acts that were adopted earlier’ – that is, in Soviet times. Special self-dependent (samostoiatel’nye) subdivisions or ‘specially appointed employees’ were to be organized in the appropriate institutions (strukturakh), and questions pertaining to the ‘coordination of activities for the organization of the protection of state secrets’ were to be handled by the (soon to be abolished) Russian Ministry of Security and Internal Affairs.25 This was obviously a makeshift arrangement, and until the Law on State Secrets was adopted in July 199326 such censorship as there was, appears to have been carried out by the Ministry of Security, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and, of course, the Ministry of Defence (this last had its representatives on the staff of most of the major newspapers.27 In due course, on 24 January 1998, El’tsin approved by decree a new list of state secrets, but as A. Rikhter and F. Kravchenko wrote that month, ‘No-one but the censorship knows what constitutes a state secret. But for revealing one a newspaper can be shut down.’28 According to a 1998 special feature on censorship in Russia and the West in Kommersant’’-vlast’,29 the publication of ‘information on the preparations for and conclusion, content and implementation of international treaties whose circulation could cause damage to the political or economic interests of Russia – a typically imprecise use of words – constitutes a breach of the law on state secrets. A major problem, according to an article on page 12, is that (in the absence of a single official censorship body) there is no longer, as in Soviet times, one aggregate or consolidated list of state secrets; now there are about forty. Some secrets are listed in the Law on State Secrets, some in the new presidential decree, and others in the 36 (another source gives 38) special indexes (perechni) drawn up in a wide variety of ministries and agencies.30 If in doubt, a writer is supposed to contact either the special interagency commission for the protection of state secrets, established by presidential decree on 30 March 1994,31 or the Federal Licensing Centre of the FSB, whose head, Vladimir Gladyshev,

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gave a rare interview for this issue of Kommersant’’-vlast’, which published it on page 12. Among the matters discussed were the following: Question:

According to the Constitution, the index of information that constitutes a state secret is ratified by a law. In fact it has been ratified by a presidential decree and by agency documents (vedomstvennye akty) which are not published. Is there not a contradiction here? Gladyshev: There is an index in the law ‘On State Secrets’, while the presidential decree supplements it to some extent (v kakoito chasti), but does not go beyond [its] guidelines … But to publish the complete lists of information regarded as a state secret – there wouldn’t be enough paper. It would be several thousand pages of text, and in addition it would be detrimental to the defence and security of the country [if it were published] … Question: Does it not seem to you that the decree on the index of information constituting a state secret contains excessively imprecise formulations? Gladyshev: In the decree it says that information can be classified. In reality this is done by [the appropriate] agency … Question: Should not a detailed index of state secrets be provided in the law? Gladyshev: No doubt that’s correct, but it would be awkward in practice. After all, the index changes constantly, and if this list was provided in the law, it [the law] would have to be constantly changed. It is against this background that we must try to assess how much change there has been in this area of Russian political and civic culture since 1986 and 1991. A useful working hypothesis might be that society has become much more open than it was in 1986 but is perhaps no more open in 2001 than it was in 1991. Similarly, the state may now be more secretive and closed, at least in some important respects, than it was ten years ago. Obviously, the results of post-Soviet as well as Soviet opinion surveys, like all statistics, have to be assessed with caution, and the 2001 returns mentioned at the beginning of this paper cannot be compared or contrasted with the results of polls held ten years earlier (if any were held) on whether or not Glavlit should be abolished. What can be asserted is that there is no need to set up a special organization devoted only to censoring or controlling the media if the state and/or society

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wishes to impose certain restrictions on what the public can readily access. One of the most ferocious periods of censorship in Soviet history, from late 1917 until 1921, ended before Glavlit was established. Another point on which all the (very few) students of censorship in the USSR are united is that Glavlit merely carried out the wishes and instructions of the CPSU, the GPU and its successors and, on occasion, the Soviet leader himself. One can speculate that had Gorbachev remained in power longer, or had the State Committee for the State of Emergency succeeded in its bid to prevent the further weakening of central authority, Glavlit would have taken on a new lease of life and grown stronger and larger. As it was, the Soviet regime, which came about by a tragic fluke, also ended by a tragic fluke – the second coup d’etat in August 1991 which brought El’tsin to power and, by subsequent dubious methods, kept him in power through the crises of 1993, 1996 and 1998. The population of the country as a whole had very little direct influence over all these political developments, and the greater part of Russian (rossiiskoe) society may not want to participate more actively in public life – we are, after all, talking about Eurasia, not Europe. Those who think that Russia is a country of extremes (the icon and the axe, etc.) could point to the sudden change from a largely closed and tightly controlled society, in which there was, for instance, remarkably little pornography, to a very open society, where suddenly, for a short time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, obscene and racialist publications were more widely and easily available than in most of Europe. Russians who had earlier complained of claustrophobia now found themselves victims of something like agoraphobia, making it difficult for them to cope with the new uncertainties, now that they were told that they were no longer constructing socialism but building capitalism. It is a truism to say that virtually noone anywhere expected the Soviet system to break down so soon, that very few people had thought hard about ‘what to do’ (chto delat’) after it collapsed, and that many of the people (including some foreigners) who played key roles in the immediate post-Soviet period were (and in some cases still are) among the most arrogant, ignorant and unscrupulous of those smart operators who are always and everywhere much more interested in their own quick profits than in the welfare of most of their fellow human beings. The resulting ‘democracy’ (der’mokratiia, shitocracy) and ‘privatization’ ( prikhvatizatsiia, piratization) naturally made many ex-Soviet citizens appreciate more fully the benefits of the ‘Russia they had lost’ and long for the return of some of the certainties and security of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. One could therefore suggest that Russian society did change somewhat between 1986 and 1990

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or 1991, but then changed back again, as people decided that they preferred order to chaos and found the burden of the responsibilities of a Western type of political, economic and personal freedom too heavy to bear. In this situation, an important role was and is played by the Orthodox Church (ecclesiastical censorship in pre-revolutionary Russia has a rich history),32 ever mindful of the nation’s moral standards and since about 1987–88 able to play a more prominent part in public life, nearly always supporting the current political establishment – for instance, by opposing the burial of Lenin in the foreseeable future. As early in the postSoviet era as 25 April 1992, an exceptionally well-educated and cultured Moscow priest, Mikhail Ardov, published an article in a newspaper for adults entitled ‘Do not Offend These Little Ones’ (Ne soblazniaite malykh sikh’ – St. Mark, chapter 9, verse 42).33 Like the recently expired CPSU, he treats the entire population of the country as though they were children in need of guidance from the authorities. After mentioning the ‘demonism and blasphemousness’ of rock music, Father Mikhail calls for ‘the introduction of censorship (tsenzura) and harsh punitive measures against those who distribute pornography. Of course, I have in mind moral and reasonable censorship, not the total and murderous Bolshevik sort.’ Writing about Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in a very eighteenth-century way, Ardov notes with pity that hardly anyone involved in this tragedy realises that ‘if this book had had, as in the good old times, a reasonable and enlightened censor, nothing like this could have happened’. He goes on, ‘I myself would not be averse to summoning up a wave of indignation on the part of Christians against, for instance, the highly talented novella by the late Venedikt Erofeev, Moskva-Petushki, where on almost every page there are blasphemies against our Lord Jesus Christ and His gospel.’ Six years later a publishing house decided not to issue a Russian translation of Rushdie’s novel after receiving threats to punish both the translator and the employees of the firm involved – an excellent example of shared values and mutual understanding between at least some currents in Islam and Russian Orthodoxy.34 It goes almost without saying that a television screening, even very late at night, of The Last Temptation of Christ came in for vociferous criticism.35 There has even been a case of a public auto-da-fe of books by insufficiently orthodox Orthodox theologians.36 One could easily get the impression from Ardov’s article that all censorship in Russia had already disappeared without trace, although the Nizhnii Novgorod directorate of Glavlit, for instance, did not finally close down until June 1992.37 Although some professional censors did

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vanish into thin air, many of them were able to find gainsome employment in its official successor organization, the RSFSR (later: RF) State Inspectorate for the Defence of Freedom of the Press and Media, established on 22 November 1991 by the RSFSR Ministry of the Press and Media ‘based on’ (na baze) the territorial directorates of Glavlit.38 This seamless transformation of Glavlit into an organization whose stated purpose was to defend media freedom was a useful stop-gap measure for the period until a new law on state secrets had been published and the first post-Soviet perechen’ of items and subjects banned from mention and discussion in the media had been drawn up. The Inspectorate was then, on 6 July 1994, abolished.39 It should not be thought, however, that this was a case of gamekeepers turning into poachers, trying to expand the limits of freedom. Thanks to another colleague in Germany, we can quote a document dated 14 January 1993 and addressed by I. V. Morozov, the head of the Voronezh regional inspectorate for the defence of press and media freedom, to the chief editors of local publications: Respected Dmitrii Stanislavovich! We are informing you that, as a result of numerous appeals from the RF Procuracy, the RF Ministry of the Press and Information proposes to apply to the mass media measures provided for by legislation in connection with the publication of subject matter which can be qualified as utilising the mass media for the purposes of committing criminally punishable acts. ‘The model index ( primernyi perechen’) is as follows: 1. Items calling for the forcible change of the constitutional order, for the commission of crimes against the state, including calls for acts of civil disobedience, for the organization of and participation in actions disturbing [public] order or entailing patent disobedience of the legitimate demands of the representatives of authority, for the disruption of public transport [and/or] state or public organizations – can entail criminal responsibility in compliance with articles 70, 70–1 and 190–2 of the RF Criminal Code /RF CC/. 2. Items containing propaganda of war – in compliance with article 71 of the RF CC. 3. Items calling for the violation of national and racial equality, demeaning the honour and dignity of any nation – in compliance with article 74 of the RF CC. 4. Items aimed at hampering the activities of the constitutional organs of power, calling for the non-observance of the Resolutions of the Councils of People’s Deputies of all levels, for the obstruction of their

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

normal activities [and] for the creation of unconstitutional organs of power – in compliance with article 79–1 of the RF CC. Items calling for the avoidance of the periodic call-up for military service – in compliance with article 80 of the RF CC. Items on the purchase and sale of freely convertible currency – in compliance with article 88 of the RF CC. Items advertising the performance of abortions [and] the treatment of venereal diseases – in compliance with articles 115, 115–1 and 116 of the RF CC. Items on the purchase and sale of USSR decorations [nagrady] – in compliance with article 194–1 of he RF CC. Items on the purchase and sale of work record-books [trudovye knizhki] – in compliance with articles 195 and 196 of the RF CC. Items on the provision of intimate services, on erotic massage, on the advertising of services for homosexuals, on the search for sexual partners, and so on – in compliance with articles 120, 121, 210 and 226 of the RF CC. Items concerning pornographic products, and also items propagating the cult of violence and cruelty – in accordance with articles 228 and 228–1 of the RF CC.

‘At the same time we draw to your attention [the fact] that the publication of advertising material concerning the firm “Siesta” falls under article 226 of the RSFSR CC (procuration). With respect, I. Morozov’ An interesting point here is that in his last paragraph Morozov refers to the RSFSR, not the RF, criminal code, suggesting that the RSFSR Code was still operational in areas not covered by the RF Code. (The RSFSR Criminal Procedural Code (CPC) was still being applied in 2001, as the RF CPC was not yet ready.) Much of this document is unexceptionable, although it does relate to a number of borderline cases, such as the right of conscientious objection to compulsory military service and the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults. The inspectorate’s activities no doubt helped to reduce the amount of pornographic materials in circulation, although it should be pointed out that in documents on this subject – for instance, the 12 April 1991 Resolution (Postanovlenie) of the USSR Supreme Soviet on pornography and ‘the cult of violence and cruelty’40 – no distinction whatsoever is made between pornograficheskii and eroticheskii. It would be interesting

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to learn whether the Inspectorate ever argued with the ‘numerous appeals’ for help that it received from the procuracy. It has to be admitted that the dividing line between what is erotic and what is pornographic is difficult to define. Another very interesting area where it has proved hard in post-Soviet Russia to draw a clear dividing line between what is legal and what is not, and where the Constitution and the laws themselves appear to be at variance, covers the numerous ecological problems endangering the health and even the lives of Russian citizens. The Constitution states quite clearly that information on environmental hazards cannot be regarded as classified, but the Law on State Secrets and other documents from 1993 onwards make it an offence to publish information, especially of a military nature, which could endanger the security of the state.41 The steady trickle of pressure on and trials of people who have supposedly contravened the regulations on the disclosure of classified information, from Mirzaianov and Fedorov (1992–95)42 through Nikitin (1996–2000)43 to Pas’ko (1997–2001 and possibly beyond),44 suggests that not all the lessons of Chernobyl’ have been and are being taken seriously. What is also important in the context of this paper is that these trials have presumably deterred more than a few Russians from going public about other lifethreatening dangers which the increasingly powerful and now virtually autonomous FSB, in particular, may prefer not to be disclosed. This form of intimidation, inducing an almost Soviet degree of selfcensorship on what people publish, is one of the six forms of censorship listed in an article published in 1996 by Aleksei Simonov,45 the head of the Glasnost’ Defence Foundation, established in June 1991 and finding that it has even more work to do ten years later (its slogan is ‘Glasnost’ is a tortoise crawling towards freedom of the word’). The five other types of censorship in Russia in the 1990s are listed as administrative censorship; economic censorship; censorship resulting from actions or threats from criminals; censorship resulting from editorial policy; and censorship resulting from editorial taste. I have explained and discussed these types of control (found, of course, in many other countries) elsewhere, so it might be more interesting here to quote a few of the numerous newspaper headlines from the mid-1990s which make it clear that some Russians knew, or at least thought, that they were being censored, either directly or by having their privacy invaded: ‘Glavlit umer. Da zdravstvuet Glavlit?’ (‘Glavlit is dead. Long Live Glavlit?’), Rossiiskie vesti, 3 March 1994, p. 4. El’tsin has given the

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right to decide what constitutes a state secret to the leading personnel of 38 ministries and agencies. ‘Terror kak forma tsenzury’ (‘Terror as a form of censorship’), Novoe vremia, No. 43, October 1994, pp. 6–7. The murder of the journalist Dmitrii Kholodov (still unsolved seven years later) as a warning to others. ‘Govorite gromche, vas proslushivaiut’ (‘Speak up, they’re listening to you’), Novaia ezhednevnaia gazeta, 15 November 1994, p. 2. The lawyer of some human rights activists discovered a bug in her telephone at home. ‘Chinovniki ne mogut oboitis’ bez tsenzury’ (‘The bureaucrats can’t do without censorship’), Izvestiia, 17 December 1994, p. 1. On the tightening of censorship at the beginning of the war in Chechnia. ‘Sozdaetsia tsenzurnyi komitet … ’ (‘A censorship committee is being established … ’), Rossiiskaia gazeta, 26 April 1995, pp. 1–2. On plans to increase official control of the media by setting up a state information agency (Gosinform). ‘ “Komsomolku” ne tol’ko chitaiut, no i podslushivaiut’ (‘They don’t just read Komsomolka, they bug it too’), Komsomol’skaia pravda, 23 August 1995, pp. 1–2. The Volgograd militia has been bugging the local office of this newspaper in an attempt to blackmail its investigative journalists and thus persuade them to stop writing about crimes committed by or involving some of the regional authorities. Looking at the problem of eavesdropping, bugging, clandestinely opening envelopes on the way to their addressees and intercepting email communications (this last type of interference and the various attempts by the authorities to control the Internet have been much written about in the last two years, and not only in Russia in the Autumn of 2001,46 we can say that, if only as a result of the increasing danger of terrorism, history has not come to an end and the positive, even essential, role of some forms of censorship is undeniable. One of the problems of the new millennium everywhere is to decide how intrusive and pervasive the controls over our private lives and activities should be. The tendency of the ambiguous and hypocritical authorities in Russia at present is to clamp down rather than to let go (the traditional tashchit’ i ne pushchat’), and as Russian society as a whole now seems to be prepared to accept this we can hypothesize that it is less open in 2001 than it was a decade ago.47

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Postscriptum This article was written just before the melodramatic attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001. Since then the highly selective ‘war on terrorism’ has, among many other consequences, made it easier for President Putin to continue to crush Chechnia and to tame the Russian media without provoking any coherent or effective high-level protests abroad. Despite some hopes raised in the autumn of 2001,48 it was clear by the end of March 2002 that the supposed security of the state would continue to take precedence over the wellbeing of society and that the persecution of people like Pas’ko, Igor’ Sutiagin, Valentin Danilov and Valentin Moiseev would continue, if only as a warning to others.49 TV-6, Russia’s last remaining national independent television channel, was temporarily closed down in January 2002 and what was left of the original NTV team of journalists will in future have to work under the friendly guidance of two pillars of the old Soviet establishment (E. Primakov and A. Vol’skii), perceived by some as even more odious than the new, post-Soviet oligarchs V. Gusinskii and B. Berezovskii, the former owners of NTV and TV-6.50 The future of the Ekho Moskvy radio-station and its team looked uncertain, and pin-pricks continued against some of the few national liberal newspapers (Novaia gazeta, Nezavisimaia gazeta and even Izvestiia). Ongoing attempts to control the Russian internet provoked outbursts like that of Vsevolod Sakharov in Russkaia mysl’.51 After the liquidation of the Judicial Chamber for Information Disputes shortly after the inauguration of President Putin,52 and the endorsement in September 2000 by Putin of a new 46-page Doctrine on Information Security,53 the prospects for greater freedom for the media and for the expansion of the ‘information space’ in Russia appeared to be rather gloomy.

Notes and references * I would like to thank the British Academy for the grant I was awarded in 1999 to conduct research on this subject in Russia. 1. ‘Spasti detei mozhet tol’ko tsenzura uchebnikov’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 7 September 2001, p. 2. 2. See, for instance, the interview with Igor’ Iakovenko, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 19 April 2001, p. 8; A. Minkin, ‘Tsenzura ili smert’ ’, Moskovskii komsomolets, 8 June 2001, p. 3; and M. Zheleznova, ‘Chtob tebia tsenzor obkornal’, Novaia gazeta, on-line (ed.) no. 21, 26 March 2001. According to Zheleznova, the corresponding figures for five and nine months earlier were, respectively, 49 per cent and 15 per cent. 3. See the interview with Colonel Aleksandr Manichev, head of the Defence Ministry’s Department for the Protection of Secrets in the Press and Other

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Mass Media, ‘Tsenzury net. No tainy ostaiutsia’, Krasnaia zvezda, 11 July 1996, p. 2, and the article referred to in note 26. See A. Simonov, ‘Shest’ vidov tsenzury’, Vecherniaia Moskva, 6 April 1996, p. 2. Profil’, 27 August 2001. Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury: Dokumenty i kommentarii, comp. T. M. Goriaeva, Moscow, 1997 (henceforth: ISPTs), pp. 14 and 21. A notable exception is Leopol’d Avzeger. See his Chernyi komitet: Zapiski tainogo tsenzora MGB, Tel-Aviv, 1987. A senior censor, Vladimir Solodin, puts the total number of Glavlit employees (he probably means just the professional full-time censors) at less than 1500 (Iskliuchit’ vsiakie upominaniia: Ocherki istorii sovetskoi tsenzury, comp. T. M. Goriaeva, Minsk and Moscow, 1995 (henceforth: Iskliuchit’), p. 317). Goriaeva herself (ibid, p. 39) suggests that in 1947 Glavlit had over 6000 employees, including part-timers (tsenzory-sovmestiteli). The doyen of specialists on the Soviet censorship system is Arlen Blium. See, inter alia, his monographs Za kulisami ‘Ministerstva pravdy’: Tainaia istoriia sovetskoi tsenzury 1917–1929, St Petersburg, 1994; Evreiskii vopros pod sovetskoi tsenzuroi 1917–1991, St Petersburg, 1996; and Sovetskaia tsenzura v epokhu total’nogio terrora 1929–1953, St. Petersburg, 2000. During the Soviet period Blium published many articles on Russian censorship before 1917. For a brief history of the Soviet censorship system in English, see the entry on censorship in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the former Soviet Union, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 485–7. The main books in English on this subject are The Soviet Censorship, ed. Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell, Metuchen, NJ, 1973; The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR, ed. Marianna Tax Choldin and Maurice Friedberg, Boston, MA, 1989; and Herman Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917–1991, Lanham, MD, 1997. On this see Solodin, Iskliuchit’, p. 327. The State Archives in Nizhnii Novgorod (henceforth: GANO) hold the documents (akty) listing the titles of 434 items that were burnt at the end of 1991 at f. 4254, op. vr. khr., d. 12, ll. 1–41. See Zensur in der UdSSR: Archivdokumente 1917–1991, ed. Arlen V. Bljum, Bochum, 1999 (henceforth: Zensur), p. 542. (Despite the title, this volume is entirely in Russian.) See Zensur, p. 543. Gumilev was not an émigré, and Khodasevich and Zaitsev were neither philosophers nor publicists. It should be added that many items in the spetskhrany of at least some of the major provincial libraries were still unavailable to the general public a full decade later. In 1999 I had the privilege of looking at the approximately 40 000 volumes from the Gor’kii spetskhran which for many years had been literally imprisoned in a former jail (Staryi Ostrog) on Freedom Square (Ploshchad’ Svobody) in what is now Nizhnii Novgorod. Two devoted librarians had only recently begun to reclassify and recatalogue these items for their eventual return to the general stock of the library. See Iskliuchit’, pp. 58–9. See Sovershenno sekretno, No. 1, 1992, pp. 12–13. See Pornography and Democratization: Legislating Obscenity in Post-Communist Russia, Boulder, CO, 1999, p. 247. See Zensur, pp. 544–6. See ISPTs, pp. 230–2. See Zensur, p. 550.

206 Martin Dewhirst 19. Compare, in GANO, f. 4254, op. 3, d. 81, l. 9 with op. 5, d. 101, l. 62. 20. See Goldschmidt, p. 247. 21. See Zensur, pp. 415–16. According to this source, the previous edition, which came out in November 1987, had only 40 pages (ibid, p. 538). The index of banned subject matter was almost ten times shorter in the 1987 issue than in the 1984 edition (Iskliuchit’, p. 56). 22. On Filimonov and his attempt to ban Sergei Kaledin’s novella Stroibat (The Construction Battalion), see Dos’e na tsenzuru, 1, 1997, pp. 81–89. 23. This perechen’ was finally published in Otechestvennye arkhivy, No. 6, 1993, pp. 80–6. 24. See, for instance, E. Coron, ‘Passport Denied: the New “Refuseniks” ’, The Christian Science Monitor, 6–12 October 1995, p. 12: ‘Since the criteria for what falls under which degree of secrecy are themselves a secret, the applicant /for a passport to go abroad/ finds himself in a Catch-22 situation. “He can only find out where he stands by having access to the list – but by doing so, he becomes the bearer of a secret’, says Boris Altshuler of the organization Movement Without Borders. A written request by The Christian Science Monitor to the FSB for a definition of what is now considered a state secret in Russia was refused.” 25. See N. Gevorkian, ‘ “Gossekretnyi” ukaz’, Moskovskie novosti, 5 (February), 1992. 26. The Law on State Secrets was published in Rossiiskaia gazeta on 21 September 1993, and in Zakonodatel’stvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii o sredstvakh massovoi informatsii, with a commentary by M. A. Fedotov, Moscow, 1996, pp. 68–90. See the interview on state secrets with General Iu. A. Iashin, the chairman of the State Technical Commission attached to the President of the Russian Federation, Krasnaia zvezda, 12 August 1995, p. 4. 27. For allegations of the infiltration of newspapers by the military and by ‘former’ KGB officers, see A. Kravtsov, ‘Kazachki-to zaslannye: armeiskie razvedchiki v bastionakh glasnosti’, Moskovskii komsomolets, 31 July 1992, p. 2, and M. Deich, ‘KGB vPRESSovyvaetsia, a pressa oKGBeshivaetsia’, Golos, 42–43, October 1992. 28. See A. Rikhter and F. Kravchenko, ‘Nikto, krome tsenzury, ne znaet, chto iavliaetsia gostainoi. No za ee razglashenie gazetu mozhno zakryt’ ’, Zhurnalist, 1, 1998, pp. 50–1. 29. Kommersant’’-vlast’, 9(261), 17 March 1998, pp. 8–21. 30. See, for instance, V. Rudnev and S. Tarasov, ‘Prezident nadeliaet rossiiskuiu biurokratiiu pravom na grif “sov. sekretno” ’, Izvestiia, 26 February 1994, pp. 1, 4. 31. On this rather shadowy body, initially functioning as the State Technical Commission attached to the President of the Russian Federation, see the interview mentioned in note 23; Rossiiskaia gazeta, 14 September 1995, p. 3; and, for further details, the Biulleten’ Gosudarstvennogo komiteta Rossiiskoi Federatsii po vysshemu obrazovaniiu, 11, 1995, pp. 14–25. 32. See the bibliography provided on p. 161 of The Soviet Censorship (fn 8). 33. See Nezavisimaia gazeta, 25 April 1992, p. 8. 34. See the section devoted to this terrorist threat in Dos’e na tsenzuru, 2, 1998, pp. 127–43. 35. See, for instance, N. Babasian, ‘Tserkov’ i sredstva massovoi informatsii: razvitie konflikta’, Russkaia mysl’, 8–14 January 1998, p. 18.

Censorship and Freedom of Speech Restrictions 207 36. On this incident see the coverage in Russkaia mysl’, 3–9 September 1998, pp. 20–1. 37. See GANO, f. 4254, op. 5, d. 101, l. 79. 38. See Zensur, p. 556. 39. See Rossiiskaia gazeta, 21 July 1994, p. 4. 40. See ISPTs, pp. 234–5. 41. For a good, brief article on this clash of concepts, see S. Abrashkin and K. Nikolaev, ‘Realizatsiia ukaza o gostaine mozhet nanesti ushcherb bezopasnosti Rossii’, Kommersant’’-daily, 29 January 1998, p. 1. 42. This first long-lasting post-Soviet attempt to silence those genuinely concerned about the environment got underway after their article ‘Otravlennaia politika’ was published in Moskovskie novosti, 20 September 1992, p. 16. On the background to the Mirzaianov case, see D. Clarke, ‘Chemical weapons in Russia’, RFE/RL Research Report, 2(2), 8 January 1993, pp. 47–53. 43. On the background to the Nikitin case, see, for instance, B. Whitmore, ‘The reluctant dissident’, Transitions, 5(5), May 1998, pp. 68–73. 44. On the background to the Pas’ko case see, for example, B. McLaren, ‘High seas treason’, Transitions, 5(7), July 1998, pp. 79–81. 45. See the reference in fn. 3. 46. See, for example, Frank Ellis, From Glasnost’ to the Internet: Russia’s New Infosphere, Basingstoke, 1999, especially the ‘Concluding Remarks’. 47. See, for instance, the interview, ‘Avtoritarizm neizbezhen, no diktatury mozhno izbezhat’ ’ with S. Karaganov, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, in Segodnia, 21 June 2000. 48. See ‘Perechen’ sekretov Minoborony perestal byt’ sekretnym’, Russkaia mysl’, 20–26 September 2001, p. 7. 49. See Issue 81 of the Daidzhest Fonda Zashchity Glasnosti, http://www.gdf.ru/digest/ 50. See Moskovskie novosti, 1–2, 2002: 8–21 January 2002, pp. 2–3. 51. Russkaia mysl’, 4–10 April 2002, p. 4. 52. See (the now defunct) Segodnia, 7 June 2000. 53. See G. Herd’s article in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 13(4), December 2000.

11 Politics Beyond the Garden Ring: Rethinking the Post-Soviet Experience Vladimir Gel’man

Introduction: regional political studies vs. ‘regionology’ It was not until the 1990s that regional aspects of Russian politics first came to the attention of Russian and foreign scholars. In Russia, however, this delay was for different reasons than in the West. In Russia political science as a discipline was officially acknowledged only in 1989, and the first empirical political research dated back to that time. The events of the next few years, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, processes of federalization and regionalization in Russia, as well as elections to all levels of government encouraged both academic and practical interest in this research area and formed a new niche for regional political studies. Western Sovietology, which thrived during the Cold War period, did not as a rule pay much attention to regional matters.1 In the post-Soviet period, however, the number of publications devoted to regional politics has grown dramatically.2 During the post-Soviet decade research on the regional aspects of politics became a central theme of Russian studies. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles were written, PhD dissertations were defended, conferences and seminars were held, lecture courses were read and the first textbooks were published. Thus the institutionalization of Russia’s regional political studies may be considered complete. The end of this period of development was symbolically marked by the publication of an actual memoir of the period.3 The institutional history of Russia’s regional political studies has been described in considerable detail.4 The goal of this essay is to discuss the content of these works without claiming at a comprehensive 208

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bibliographical analysis of the research field. I would rather try to answer the following questions: How do these studies add to our understanding of the ways in which politics works in Russia’s regions and in the country in general, as well as in the world at large? What are the theoretical and methodological principles of this new sub-discipline? How do they relate to general trends in political science and particularly to the study of Russian politics? What tendencies and specific patterns has the new discipline managed to identify, if any? And, finally, are regional political studies in Russia a coherent field of research with its own specific subject matter, or are they, rather, a conglomeration of separate studies with a common geographical area of scholarly interests? To answer these questions, this chapter will begin with a review of a number of general approaches by both Russian and Western authors. Then it will summarize the results of existing scholarly works according to two major topics: (1) Russia’s federalism and centre–regional relations in Russia; (2) regional political institutions and political processes in Russia. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the achievements and failures of regional studies in Russia, as well as their findings and prospects. First of all it is necessary to clarify some definitions. The term ‘regional political studies’ is used here to define the studies of regional and local politics (such as political regimes, political participation and behaviour, etc.) as well as those specific aspects of regional and local government, which are connected with national politics.5 Thus Russia’s regional political studies are a sub-discipline of studies in Russian politics in the same way as, say, studies of state and local government are a sub-discipline of studies in American politics. At the same time a number of Russian and Western authors use the term ‘regionology’, which relates to the interdisciplinary field known as regional science.6 In other words, in regional political studies the ‘regions’ are the object of research, but the subject matter of their analysis is defined by the framework of political science; as was done, for example, in the classic works on community power in the USA7 and on regional government performance in Italy.8 ‘Regionology’, however, does not distinguish between the subject matter and the object of research. Thus research on the regional aspects of Russia’s politics reproduces de facto the traditional dichotomy of Russian studies: comparative politics versus area studies, the two scientific discourses being, if not completely independent, at least very loosely related to each other. Moreover, while the majority of Western scholars adhere to the discipline of regional political studies, most of their Russian colleagues are either spontaneous or conscious ‘regionologists’.

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The two sub-disciplinary views also differ in the ways their research processes develop. As will be shown below, the ‘research cycle’9 of regional political studies begins from the illustrative notes on single cases, and proceeds through the interpretative stage of ‘thick descriptions’ and deviant case analyses towards comparative political studies (including quantitative research).10 ‘Regionology’, in its turn, builds on the focus of ‘region’ while seeking to use the whole complex of diverse ideas borrowed from political science, sociology, economics, ethnology, history, cultural studies, geography, law and so on. This approach is most explicitly expressed by Kimitaka Matsuzato, who described ‘regionology’ as ‘an attempt to break down the barriers between traditional academic disciplines by exploring the key concept of “space” ’.11 Both research schools confront certain methodological problems, the nature of their difficulties, however, being different. Regional political studies often suffer from the problem of ‘conceptual stretching’, due to the inappropriate use of the existing theories and the neglect of the real context of the phenomenon in question.12 Besides, a certain normative bias, which is widespread for regional political studies as well as for studies of Russian politics in general, impedes the understanding of some political patterns and realities. Scholars are often trapped by their inclination to gauge political processes in Russia by the normative ideals of democracy, market economy and the rule of law. As a result, scholars are appalled by how far the Russian realities are from those ideals, and start to blame the causes of this state of affairs. And sometimes this is the very end of the analysis: the academic value of such research is thus negligible. Given that one of the typical features of ‘regionology’ is its eclectic nature, the best it can ever do is to give an ad hoc explanation to the phenomena observed. At worst, the research question ‘Why?’ is never asked at all. The majority of Western and Russian scholars tend to use concepts from their ‘native’ disciplines.13 In this way legal scholars seek to explain the problems of federalism and centre–regional relations by the contradictions of legal regulations and inappropriate law enforcement mechanisms. Economists speak about them in terms of redistribution of taxes between the national and regional governments, while ethnologists refer to ethnic issues in some of Russia’s republics, and so on. Unfortunately, no inter-disciplinary perspective on the whole complex of these (and other) problems has been gained as yet. It is hard to tell whether the above mentioned problems are a type of ‘growing pains’ or if they reflect several ‘path-dependent’ trends in Russia’s regional political studies. At the same time, there is no doubt

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that during the post-Soviet decade both Russian and Western scholars have succeeded in gaining substantial experience in regional political analysis in Russia and have done so nearly ‘from scratch’. If we keep in mind the vast complexity of all the institutional changes that have occurred in Russian politics and its regional aspects during the last decade, we can imagine how difficult it is to explain all these processes hot on the trail. How successful have scholars been in meeting the challenges of Russia’s regional politics?

Federalism, Russian style: the swing of the pendulum The abrupt disintegration of the USSR and the threat of the further disintegration of Russia in the early 1990s triggered both practical and scholarly interest in Russian federal relations. It is true that the growth of separatism and the escalation of ethnic conflicts endangering Russia’s territorial integrity called for an in-depth analysis of the problems of Russia’s federalism. It is also true that the negative legacy of Soviet federalism with the rigid hierarchy of its territorial and ethnic federal structure, with its territorial claims and the potential for ethnic conflicts14 gave grounds for such speculation. That is why, when a number of Russia’s ethnic republics proclaimed their sovereignty, it was initially assumed to be a decisive step towards separatism and the beginning of secession.15 But in fact these predictions have never been realized. As the price the republics had to pay for their independence grew, the stimuli to leave Russian Federation diminished, and the incentives to look for compromise with the centre increased. This is well illustrated by the two contrasting cases of Tatarstan, which made effective use of its ‘blackmail potential’ to gain utmost advantage in its long bargaining with the centre;16 and Chechnia, which plunged into a series of bloody wars.17 When in 1992 all regions of Russia except Tatarstan and Chechnia signed the Federal Treaty, it showed the limits beyond which the separatism of ethnic republics would not go; and made other regions, composed on non-ethnic principles, fully fledged subject units of the federation.18 However, as a side effect of this arrangement, different regions in Russia gained different statuses, which led to a series of new conflicts, the most notorious being that around the so-called ‘Urals Republic’ in Sverdlovsk oblast’. Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s the threat that separatist movements and ethnic conflicts would result in the country’s disintegration had considerably diminished.19 In fact, the claims for sovereignty and greater control over the economic resources on their territories were simply the attempts of

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the ethnic (republican), and later the non-ethnic (regional), élites to gain from the centre’s loss of some of its state capacity.20 Similarly, the possible ethnic mobilization of the masses was an argument the republics used in their efforts to strike a better bargain with the centre.21 At the same time, by asserting their position towards the weak centre the ruling republican and regional élites were able to confirm their political power within their territories. This connection was most precisely expressed by Mikhail Afanas’ev, who said: ‘the exact Russian translation of the concept “sovereignty” is “autocracy” ’.22 These tendencies were most prominent in the most ‘sovereign’ of Russian republics.23 These type of strategies pursued by the regions towards the centre were further encouraged by conflicts in national politics – first, between the Soviet and Russian leaderships (1990–91), and later between Russia’s President and the Supreme Soviet (1992–93). The feeble attempts by the federal government to re-centralize the country after the coup of 1991 by appointing regional governors and presidential representatives were rather inconsistent and did not apply to ethnic republics.24 On the contrary, in making their bids for regional support the participants in federal conflicts had to outdo each other to satisfy the demands of regional élites. The latter, quite naturally, were inclined to maintain the stalemate and keep these conflicts unresolved as a zero-sum game.25 After the October events of 1993 and the adoption of Russia’s Constitution in December 1993, the uncontrolled decentralization of Russia seemed to have been restrained for a while,26 and the existing legal and political asymmetry of the federation was eliminated to some extent.27 This situation, however, only lasted until February 1994, when a campaign was started to sign bilateral agreements on power redistribution between the centre and the regions (and, first of all, between the centre and the ethnic republics). In this way, federal asymmetry and the tensions between republics and non-ethnic regions increased again. Referring to this situation, Steven Solnick insisted that in 1994–95 a coalition of republics against the centre was forming in Russia.28 The goal of the coalition was to secure unilateral privileges for its members, which presented a considerable threat to federal integrity. To balance the situation early in 1996, other regions were invited to sign bilateral agreements with the centre but, instead of alleviating the problem, this rather deepened the existing asymmetry and legal anarchy. In a large number of cases these bilateral agreements became the means of providing regions with exclusive privileges that had neither economic29 nor legal grounds.30 Towards the beginning of the presidential election campaign of 1996 this ‘bilateral agreement

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campaign’ skyrocketed, and by 1999 as many as 46 regions had concluded their ‘private’ deals with the centre. Most of these agreements have never been fulfilled, but it did not stop analysts from regarding them as a threat to Russia’s development. In a sense, those treaties put on paper and legalized existing informal relations between federal and regional leaders, which could be described as ‘loyalty in exchange for non-interference’.31 The relations built according to this principle, especially in the cases of economically influential ethnic republics, were considered to encourage anti-constitutional trends.32 The majority of observers blamed the centre for making unreasonable concessions to local élites. There being no effective political mechanisms of federal integration and law enforcement, these compromises seemed to lead towards further federal asymmetry and to the substitution of the legal system by informal bargaining practice.33 Whether consciously or not, this critique of Russian federalism was based on the assumption that the ideal standard of federalism was its US model34 although, according to some comparativists, the universality of this model is rather questionable.35 Daniel Treisman suggested an alternative model for Russia’s federal development in the first half of the 1990s.36 Using rational choice theory, he built his analysis around the following central question: Why did the Russian Federation remain intact while all other ex-socialist federations (like the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) fell apart after the collapse of their Communist regimes? Treisman believes that the answer to this question lies in the political course of the federal centre. Unlike Solnick he thinks that the centre had enough means (particularly financial) to exercise control over the regions. According to Treisman, the centre used the strategy of selective appeasement and managed to soften the most separatist claims and to secure favourable results during the federal elections in these regions. In other words, the federal government was able to buy the loyalty of the masses and élites in the regions by sending them enough money. Treisman proves his thesis by a careful quantitative analysis of budgetary and electoral statistics. It is difficult to tell how grounded this approach is, since it is based exclusively on analysis of the federal budget and does not take into account extra-budget funds, barter, ownership redistribution and last but not least, to what extent this budget was observed. For these reasons Treisman’s conclusions were severely criticized. Using a wider empirical base, Vladimir Popov, for example, after a detailed analysis of budget transfers distributed by the centre in the late 1990s, came to completely the opposite conclusion.37 According to Popov, the centre encouraged

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the most loyal regions (in terms of electoral results) while punishing the rebellious ones. Undermining Treisman’s model, Popov’s research also demonstrates that the centre sacrificed its regional economic policy for political interests, although for different reasons. Even if we agree with Treisman’s conclusions, we must admit that Russia had to pay a high price for maintaining the federation and preventing separatism and secession (with the exception of Chechnia). The major feature of federal relations in Russia in the late 1990s, as presented by Leonid Polishchuk, was regional lobbying.38 As a result Russia developed a model of ‘bargaining federalism’, characterized by the predominance of informal institutions, which not only undermined constitutional order in Russia and its regions, but also impeded consistent economic policy.39 Under these circumstances, the spontaneous and inconsequent policy adopted by the federal government created precedents whereby the political authority was de facto passed to the regions.40 It would be wrong to say that the federal government had no political will whatsoever and did not try to change the situation. For example, the centre tried to link its financial support to the regions’ willingness to adopt a more open economic policy and market reforms.41 But these attempts did not amount to any sort of consistent plan and most of the time did not lead to any significant results. No wonder, then, that different scholars referred to Russian federalism as ‘defective’,42 ‘market-distorting’,43 and the like. The definitions above emphasize the problems of institution-building in Russia, which were closely connected to the decline of state capacity. The political weakness of the centre and its loss of enforcement mechanisms further intensified these difficulties.44 At the same time, political parties45 and the Federation Council,46 which could have been the major political institutions of centre–regional relations, played no significant part in the decision-making process, the latter increasingly slipping out of federal control. Irrespective of bilateral agreements, both federal legislation47 and civic and political rights48 in the regions were regularly violated. In other words, the very label ‘federalism’ was used to mask the most archaic and/or authoritarian forms of government.49 After the economic crisis of 1998 and before the election cycle of 1999–2000, it was suggested that if these trends continued they would lead to the complete disappearance of the federal centre, that is, to Russia’s political disintegration.50 But, as with previous alarmist predictions, these prophecies were never to come true. In May 2000 when Vladimir Putin promulgated his plan to recentralize power, the situation around federal relations seemed to

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change dramatically. The plan included the establishment of federal districts, the consolidation of all financial resources in the centre, and changes in the way the Federation Council was formed. Despite the fact that observers had unanimously acknowledged the pressing need for federal reforms, their estimates of Putin’s plan and its consequences were controversial. In the beginning it was even feared that ‘Russia […] can once again become a unitary state with some regional and ethnic features’.51 Both the very content of the reforms and the way in which they were implemented were criticized. It was stated, for example, that the Federation Council, which in 1996–2000 included ex officio the heads of the regional executive bodies and the chairpersons of regional legislatures, had failed to become an effective tool for representing regional interests.52 But the new mechanism, according to which members of the upper chamber were appointed by regional authorities, conformed even less to the principles of democracy and federalism or to regional interests. Generally speaking, this reinforcement of the ‘executive power vertical’ had the very pragmatic aim of strengthening the President’s influence by weakening the position of regional élites in a zero-sum centre–region struggle.53 Thus the problem of state weakness was resolved by increasing the state capacity of the centre, while the need for the rule of law was the lowest priority.54 The so-called ‘dictatorship of law’ meant that legal mechanisms became nothing but tools for strengthening the centre. The campaign to bring regional laws into conformity with federal legal norms, for example, resulted in the deterioration of the situation regarding human rights in a number of regions.55 In general, however, the possible negative consequences of the centre’s arbitrary rule towards the regions were neutralized by the lack of implementation mechanisms, since even presidential envoys in federal districts did not have tools to carry through this course.56 Already by the beginning of 2001 it had become obvious that the policy towards federal re-centralization had its limits. As Leonid Smirniagin noted,57 the combination of several negative tendencies had, paradoxically, brought about favourable changes, and in respect to state building the general effect of federal reform was rather positive. The rationalization of the budget federalism model, for example, allowed financial transfer mechanisms to be aligned with the real economic potential of Russia’s regions.58 Nikolai Petrov has very appropriately compared the development of federal relations in Russia to a pendulum.59 Using this metaphor we may say that, following a number of swings in the 1990s, the pendulum

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reached the peak of decentralization after the economic crises of 1998. At this point there existed a very real threat that the centre would lose its position as an important actor in federal relations. Immediately after that, the pendulum made an abrupt swing in the opposite direction, without slowing down at the point of balance, and moved on to the extreme point of unreasonable centralization. A good illustration of this situation is the energy crisis of 2001 in Primorskii krai, when the federal government had not only to pay the damage costs but also to take on the political responsibility for the crisis as such. The pendulum has stopped swinging, but its position today is far from being balanced. The crucial difference between the current state of affairs and the situation in the 1990s is that further development of federal reforms today is associated primarily with the political processes in the centre and, as time goes on, with the processes of internationalization and globalization.60

The politics of Russia’s regions: 89 puzzles The development of regional political studies in Russia followed the logic of the above mentioned ‘research cycle’, although some of its stages overlapped in time. It is commonly believed that the cycle was started by the publication of the first contemporary Russian book on regional politics, describing the 1989 elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies.61 Alongside essays about the election campaign in five regions, the book included some elements of comparative politicalgeographical analysis. Soon after this, Russia’s regional politics began to attract the attention of foreign scholars. At that very time the restrictions limiting foreigners’ trips to Russia were lifted and hundreds of Western Sovietologists flooded the country to conduct field research in the regions. Both Russian and Western scholars were inspired by the democratization going on in the regions. The main foci of their attention at that time were the development of the democratic movement,62 elections to regional Soviets,63 the first steps of the new legislatures64 and mass political attitudes.65 There being no comprehensive theoretical models for studying Russia’s regional politics, it was only natural to borrow the teleological model of ‘transition to democracy’. Under the fast changing conditions of the 1990s, however, it became clear that some of the statements and judgments made under this approach would not stand the test of time. For this reason, some authors tried to avoid any sort of theoretical conceptualizing and concentrated on gathering empirical material. As a result, several projects aimed at monitoring regional political development were started, and a number of

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monographs on regions were published. These works often rejected any theoretical framework, compensating for this defect by scrupulous detail. The most impressive of these works are Political Almanac of Russia published by the Moscow Carnegie Centre,66 and the multi-volume series Regions of Russia. Chronicle of Events and Leaders,67 which is being published by the Slavic Research Centre at Hokkaido University in Sapporo. These works belong to the genre of ‘thick descriptions’, thick by their informative value and by their physical weight. The weaknesses of this sort of ‘atheoretical’ approach, however, soon became apparent. Towards the middle of the 1990s most of the scholars grew dissatisfied with mere descriptions. Their knowledge of the developmental patterns of Russia’s federal and/or regional politics, however, was too limited to be used as the foundation for any consistent theories so, for a while, case studies became the major research method. As a rule the topics of these studies were political issues, such as State Duma elections,68 conflicts and compromises of regional élites,69 and so on. Practically every one of Russia’s 89 regions represented a unique ‘puzzle’, with different patterns and rules to be investigated. And it was only in the second half of the 1990s that these case studies were built into a comparative perspective (meaning both that the cases were compared, and that the empirical data were incorporated into theories within the framework of comparative politics). Research in this field was further promoted by political developments in the 1990s. Federal and regional elections required more knowledge of the possible directions the political situation could take, and businesses needed to minimize the political risks of their regional investments. The pivotal point for regional political process was a sequence of gubernatorial elections in the autumn and winter of 1996. As a result of these elections, in the majority of Russia’s regions political regimes were established which enjoyed different degrees of autonomy from the centre.70 The elections also became an important source of information about regional electoral politics. This information was used to test existing theories of electoral behaviour.71 In other words, scholars took a crucial step from describing regional politics in Russia towards explaining it. It is worth mentioning that with the development of regional political studies, scholars grew more critical towards the object of their research. The turning point here was the October events of 1993 when the dissolution of the Soviets was followed by the ‘reassertion of executive power’.72 In the majority of regions the new institutional design73 became a fertile ground for the demolition of democratic institutions. In a situation where powers were separated, the predominance of the

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executive authorities allowed governors and republic leaders to gain full control over their territories.74 In several cases the established political regimes were labeled as ‘regional authoritarianism’.75 The notion of ‘delegative democracy’ was another popular concept used for the description of regional regimes.76 Many observers mentioned the insignificant role of local legislatures,77 the weakness of political parties,78 corporatist trends in the relations of the state towards the ‘third sector’ NGOs,79 direct or indirect state control over the mass media,80 state suppression of economic interest groups (or vice versa),81 and the general spread of patronage and clientelism.82 The political monopoly of the ruling groups was not limited to the informal practices of decision-making but had a tendency to institutionalize itself. This often happened either through regional electoral systems,83 or through systems of local government,84 which impeded the development of political parties, municipal autonomy and regional political contestation in general. At the same time it should be noted that political processes in Russia’s regions are highly diverse.85 According to Gail Lapidus, the regions ‘make the Russian Federation a virtual laboratory for testing different developmental models’.86 Discovering and classifying these models of political development and/or regional political regimes were the first results of comparative regional studies. Thus Mary McAuley distinguished the following types of political regimes: conservative (similar to the late-Soviet), consensus, pluralist and patronage (personal rule).87 Nataliia Lapina recognizes four models of political and economic élites’ interactions: patronage, partnership, suppression (‘wars of all against all’) and ‘privatization of power’.88 In our comparative study of six Russian regions we managed to identify the following types of political regimes: monopolistic (‘winner takes all’), cartel (‘élite settlement’) and oligopoly (‘struggle according to the rules’).89 The typologies mentioned above (and some others)90 were more or less explicitly built around different configurations of actors and political institutions.91 While creating empirical typologies of political processes, scholars had to explain regional similarities and differences from the cross-regional comparative perspective. This was done in several different ways. First to evolve was the ‘transformation of nomenklatura’ model, which linked the direction of post-Soviet regional political development to the reproduction or replacement of old political élites.92 Since in the middle of the 1990s the reproduction of the old regional élites reached up to 85 per cent,93 this model gave a simple and feasible explanation of why regional democratic institutions had failed. At the same time, it did not

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help to understand the differences in the reproduction of political and economic élites,94 and gave only occasional explanations of intra-élite conflicts.95 Besides, the connection between regional political regimes and the reproduction level of the old nomenklatura was not too obvious.96 Economic explanations of regional political diversity were based on the assumption that the economic resource bases of the regions predetermined their political development. Thus Mikhail Afanas’ev linked ‘depressive’ regional political regimes to the undeveloped economy, and ‘closed’ regimes to a local economy with a high share of agrarian and/or military-industrial complex, while the ‘open’ type was connected with a well developed, diversified economy and/or significant international economic involvement.97 Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, on the contrary, believes that the high concentration of economic resources promotes consensus among political and economic élites and contributes to effective control and management much better than the diversified economy.98 In practice, however, the connection between political development and social and economic development is not obvious even from the cross-national perspective. As to political regimes in Russia’s regions, it is clear that the situation in pre-industrial Kalmykia99 did not differ much from that of post-industrial Moscow.100 While Nizhnii Novgorod oblast’101 and Sverdlovsk oblast’102 have very similar economic potentials, their political regimes differ significantly. The culturalist approach is primarily used to explain the peculiarities of political development in ethnic republics. Many of these republics enjoy extremely antidemocratic reputations which need to be explained. Dmitrii Badovskii, for example, believes that the traditional type of political legitimization prevalent in the republics makes their political development very different from non-ethnic regions.103 In some of them, like, for example, in Bashkortostan,104 there are certain trends towards ‘ethnocratization’, whereby the representatives of nontitular ethnic groups are displaced from the élites. It is not uncommon to explain this phenomenon by ideas from ‘popular anthropology’. The latter assumes that the Turkish people and the Muslims are more inclined towards authoritarianism than other ethnic groups. But as Kimitaka Matsuzato states, these arguments fail when those republics are compared to other republics and to non-ethnic regions.105 It seems that here the culturalist perspective gives way to common sense, which suggests that the ethnic status of the republics is used by their élites not only for bargaining with the centre, but inside the republics as well. This usually leads to the confirmation of the ruling élite monopoly

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(as in Tatarstan), or to the struggle between different ethnic élites. The latter, in its turn, results in open ethnic conflicts (as in KarachaevoCherkessiia), or in the coexistence of different groups on the grounds of consociationalism (as in Dagestan).106 Some authors try to link different patterns of regional political development with certain types of local political subcultures.107 Thus the political culture of small towns and rural areas is described as ‘parochial’, that of middle-sized cities as ‘subject’, and the culture of big cities and megalopolises as ‘participant’.108 These approaches, however, are not based on comparative studies and their validity seems rather questionable. The élitist model concentrates on the internal relations among regional élites. According to the transitological approach, one of the most important conditions for democratization is a compromise between élites. In Russia’s regions, however, it is not always true, and although in some cases the consensus between élites is observed to lead to effective regional governance,109 these sorts of compromises rather impede the development of political contestation.110 The opposite was found to be true in the ‘deviant case analysis’ of Sverdlovsk oblast’, which is known to possess a relatively developed party system.111 The scholars came to the conclusion that unsolvable conflicts between regional élites may create favourable conditions for the establishment of political parties (and political competition in general). In his quantitative analysis of the elections to regional legislatures, Grigorii Golosov demonstrated that the split between élites had led to the success of party candidates over independent politicians and had promoted the development of political parties in the regions.112 One might say that in a broader sense irresolvable conflicts between regional élites encourage the installation of democratic rules of the game in Russia and its regions.113 The reasons for the split between élites is often related to the regional resource bases, which were formed in Soviet times and then underwent certain changes during the reform period. As yet, though, it is hard to say whether a synthesis between élitist and economic approaches is possible, and whether this synthesis can lay the grounds for complex neo-institutional politico-economic models of regional transformations. As a logical consequence of the research trends mentioned above, the next stage in the development of regional political studies is closely connected with the quantitative comparative analysis, its primary focus being regional elections.114 Other aspects of regional politics are more difficult to quantify, not only because fewer data are available, but also because they are less developed theoretically and methodologically. For this reason the first attempts to create comprehensive ratings of political

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development in Russia’s regions, similar to the Freedom House indicators used in national states, encountered substantial difficulties.115 The time for such estimates has probably not yet come. One may ask whether such trends are inevitable temporary hardships of the ‘transition to democracy’, or whether they have long-term consequences. Michael Brie compares the ‘political machines’ in Moscow under the current mayor Luzhkov with the similar practices of patronage politics in American cities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and in Southern Italy after the Second World War.116 Brie shows that economic growth and social development in those countries gradually undermined the ‘political machines’ which had prevailed in the early stages of democracy. However, the transition from oligarchy to pluralism that occurred in a number of American cities117 is not the only possible outcome of political transformation. Even if such a transition were to occur in Russian local politics, it could be expected to take a long time. Besides, it is obvious that political development at a national level in Italy and the USA followed a democratic course, which created favorable conditions for regional and local political democratization. In Russia the situation is reversed, and the lack of political contestation and the lack of the rule of law at the federal level impede democratic processes in the regions. Thus the standard of democracy set by the centre defines the future of regional politics. Currently, this standard is not too high. If it does not go up, and more so if it continues to drop, regional political development will be endangered.

Conclusion: problems and prospects During the decade of its existence, regional political studies in Russia have gone a long way from simple observations and ‘wishful thinking’ to serious comparative studies and theoretical analyses. While presenting a lot of challenges for the authorities at all levels, the complexity and diversity of Russia’s regional politics create a fertile ground for various kinds of research. Viewing Russian federalism through the prism of theories of a ‘weak state’ has helped broaden our knowledge of how centre–regional relations are developing in the country. The diversity of regional political processes in Russia helps to test different theories of political transformations and theories of institutional changes. It is worth noting that here we should rather speak about the crossfertilization of comparative politics and Russian studies. The further development of regional political studies in Russia depends not only on the results of current research projects, but also on

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how much academic and practical interest towards this field promotes new horizons of analysis. This will require considerable joint efforts by Russian and Western scholars as well as the development of new research programs. How fruitful will these efforts be in bearing new knowledge? One might suspect that ‘regionology’ would continue to occupy its rather narrow niche with an extremely limited focus of interests shared by a narrow community of students of local lore and area development specialists. Regional political studies, in its turn, if it ever seeks to break through its isolation and join mainstream political studies, will have to start comprehensive cross-regional and cross-national comparative research projects, to develop new theories and to define more precisely the limits of the old ones. One might say that owing to the efforts of numerous specialists, Russia’s regions have been charted on the political map of Russia and the world. The map is still incomplete and has many blank spots. We still have to add more detail and to try to see the whole pattern more clearly. Until now Russia’s regional political studies have answered the ‘What?’ and the ‘How?’ questions. We still have no answer to the question ‘Why?’ and we are not able to make any forecasts. Further developments will show whether the new generations of Russian and Western scholars will be able to cope with this task.

Notes and references 1. For one of the few exceptions, see Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial Decision-Making, Cambridge, MA, 1969. 2. See John Lowenhardt and Stephen White, Beyond the Garden Ring: A Bibliography, Mimeo, University of Glasgow, 1999; Neil Melvin and Rosalia Puglisi, Bibliography of Sources on Russia’s Regions (www.leeds.ac.uk/lucreces/ biblio.html). 3. Nikolai Petrov, ‘Tsentr politiko-geograficheskikh issledovanii: ot “Vesny 89” do “Almanakha 2001” ’, in Nikolai Petrov (ed.), Regiony Rossii v 1999 godu, Moscow, 2001, pp. 295–316. 4. See Michael Bradshaw and Philip Hanson, ‘Understanding regional patterns of economic change in Russia: An introduction’, Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, 10(3), 1998, pp. 285–304; Vladimir Gel’man and Sergei Ryzhenkov, ‘Politicheskaia regionalistika Rossii: istoriya i sovremennoe razvitie’, in Yurii Pivovarov (ed.), Politicheskaya nauka sovremennoi Rossii: tendentsii razvitiya, Moscow, 1999, pp. 173–255. 5. Gel’man and Ryzhenkov, ‘Politicheskaia regionalistika’, p. 173. 6. Andrei Makarychev, ‘Vliyanie zarubezhnykh kontseptsii na razvitie rossiiskogo regionalizma: vozmozhnosti i predely zaimstvovaniya’, in Andrei Makarychev (ed.), Sravnitel’nyi regionalizm: Rossiya – SNG – Zapad, Nizhnii Novgorod, 1997, pp. 97–129.

Politics Beyond the Garden Ring 223 7. Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City, New Haven, CT and London, 1961. 8. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ, 1993. 9. Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, ‘The use of comparative history in macrosocial inquiry’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22(2), 1980, pp. 174–97. 10. Grigorii Golosov, ‘Sravnitel’noe izuchenie regionov Rossii: problemy metodologii’, in Vladimir Gel’man et al. (eds), Organy gosudarstvennoi vlasti sub’’ektov Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow, 1998, pp. 130–8 (pp. 137–8). 11. Kimitaka Matsuzato, ‘Preface’, in Kimitaka Matsuzato (ed.) Regions: A Prism to View the Slavic-Eurasian World: Towards a Discipline of ‘Regionology’, Sapporo, 2000, pp. ix–xii (p. ix). 12. Giovanni Sartori, ‘Concept misformation in comparative politics’, American Political Science Review, 64(4), 1970, pp. 1033–53. 13. Gel’man and Ryzhenkov, ‘Politicheskaia regionalistika’, pp. 174–83; Michael Bradshaw and Andrey Treyvish, ‘Russia’s regions in a “Triple Transition” ’, in Philip Hanson and Michael Bradshaw (eds), Regional Economic Change in Russia, Cheltenham, 2000, pp. 17–42. 14. Gail W. Lapidus and Edward Walker, ‘Nationalism, regionalism and federalism: centre–periphery relations in post-communist Russia’, in Gail Lapidus (ed.) The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, Boulder, CO, 1995, pp. 79–113; Alfred Stepan, Russian federalism in comparative perspective, Post-Soviet Affairs, 16(2), 2000, pp. 133–76. 15. Daniel Treisman, ‘Russia’s “Ethnic Revival”: The separatist activism of regional leaders in a postcommunist order’, World Politics, 49(2), 1997, pp. 212–49; Jeff Kahn, ‘The parade of sovereignties: Establishing the vocabulary of the new Russian federalism’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 16(1), 2000, pp. 58–88. 16. Pauline Jones Luong, ‘Tatarstan: Elite bargaining and ethnic separatism’, in Timothy J. Colton and Jerry F. Hough (eds), Growing Pains: Russian Democracy and the Election of 1993, Washington, DC, 1998, pp. 637–68; Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, ‘Chechnya versus Tatarstan: Understanding ethnopolitics in post-communist Russia’, Problems of Post-Communism, 47(2) 2000, pp. 13–22. 17. The analysis of the developments in Chechnia is beyond the scope of this chapter. 18. Vladimir Lysenko, Razvitie federativnykh otnoshenii v sovremennoi Rossii, Moscow, 1995. 19. Nikolai Petrov and Andrey Treyvish, ‘Risk assessment of Russia’s regional disintegration’, in Klaus Segbers and Stephan De Spiegeleire (eds), Post-Soviet Puzzles. Mapping the Political Economy in the Former Soviet Union, vol. 2, BadenBaden, 1995, pp. 145–76. 20. Leonid Polishchuk, ‘Rossiiskaia model’ ‘peregovornogo federalizma’: politiko-ekonomicheskii analiz’, in Vladimir Klimanov and Natal’ya Zubarevich (eds), Politika i ekonomika v regional’nom izmerenii, Moscow and St Petersburg, 2000, pp. 88–108. 21. Dmirty Gorenburg, ‘Regional separatism in Russia: Ethnic mobilisation or power grab?’ Europe–Asia Studies, 51(2), 1999, pp. 245–74. 22. Mikhail Afanas’ev, Ot vol’nykh ord do khanskoi stavki. Pro et Contra, 3(3), 1998, pp. 5–20 (p. 6).

224 Vladimir Gel’man 23. Gorenburg, ‘Regional separatism’; Kahn, ‘The parade of sovereignties’. 24. Vladimir Gel’man, ‘Regional’naya vlast’ v sovremennoi Rossii: instituty, rezhimy i praktiki’, Polis, 1, 1998, pp. 87–105. 25. Olga Senatova and Aleksandr Kasimov, ‘Federatsiya ili novyi unitarizm? Povtorenie proidennogo’, in Vladimir Gel’man (ed.), Ocherki rossiiskoi politiki, Moscow, 1994, pp. 42–52. 26. Lapidus and Walker, ‘Nationalism, regionalism and federalism’. 27. Lysenko, ‘Razvitie federativnykh otnoshenii’; Irina Umnova, Konstitutsionnye osnovy sovremennogo rossiiskogo federalizma, Moscow, 1998. 28. Steven Solnick, ‘Federal bargaining in Russia’, East European Constitutional Review, 4(4), 1995, pp. 52–8. 29. Polishchuk, ‘Rossiiskaia model’. 30. Lysenko, Razvitie federativnykh otnoshenii; Mikhail Guboglo (ed.), Federalizm vlasti i vlast’ federalizma, Moscow, 1997; Umnova, ‘Konstitutsionnye osnovy’. 31. Vladimir Gel’man, Sergei Ryzhenkov and Michael Brie (eds), Rossiya regionov: transformatsiya politicheskikh rezhimov, Moscow, 2000, p. 58. 32. Guboglo, Federalizm vlasti; Sergei Mitrokhin, ‘Defektivnyi federalizm: simptomy, diagnoz, retsepty vyzdorovleniia’, Federalizm, 2, 1999, pp. 61–74; Polishchuk, ‘Rossiiskaia model’; Steven Solnick, ‘Is the centre too weak or too strong in the Russian federation?’ in Valerie Sperling (ed.), Building the Russian State: Institutional Crisis and the Quest for Democratic Governance, Boulder, CO, 2000, pp. 137–56. 33. Peter Ordeshook, ‘Russia’s party system: Is Russian federalism viable?’ PostSoviet Affairs, 12(3), 1996, pp. 195–217; Solnick, ‘Is the centre’. 34. William H. Riker, ‘Federalism’, in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (eds), Handbook of Political Science, vol. 5, Reading, MA, 1975, pp. 93–172. 35. Alfred Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, Oxford, 2001, pp. 315–61. 36. Daniel Treisman, After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia, Ann Arbor, MI, 1999. 37. Vladimir Popov, Fiscal Federalism in Russia: Rules versus Electoral Politics, program on new approaches to Russian security, Nizhnii Novgorod Academic Conference Paper, 2001. 38. Polishchuk, ‘Rossiiskaia model’.’ 39. Darrell Slider, ‘Russia’s market-distorting federalism’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 38(8), 1997, pp. 445–60. 40. Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, ‘Central weakness and provincial autonomy: Observations of the devolution process in Russia’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 15(1), 1999, pp. 87–106. 41. Segei Pavlenko, ‘Novyi federalizm: intriga i kontrintriga’, Pro et Contra, 2(2), 1997, pp. 34–46. 42. Mitrokhin, ‘Defektivnyi federalizm’. 43. Slider, ‘Russia’s market-distorting federalism’. 44. Stoner-Weiss, ‘Observations’; Solnick, ‘Is the centre’. 45. Ordeshook, ‘Russia’s party system’. 46. Nikolai Petrov, ‘Sovet Federatsii i predstavitel’stvo interesov regionov v Tsentre’, in Nikolai Petrov (ed.), Regiony Rossii v 1998 godu, Moscow, 1999, pp. 180–222. 47. Lysenko, Razvitie federativnykh otnoshenii; Guboglo, Federalizm vlasti; Jeff Kahn, Dictators in Law? The Uses and Abuses of Constitutionalism in Russia’s

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48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

Republics, Paper presented at the conference ‘Ten years of post-communist Russia’, European University at St Petersburg, 2001. Mitrokhin, ‘Defektivnyi federalizm’; Kahn, Dictators in Law? Nikolai Petrov, ‘Federalizm po-rossiiski’, Pro et Contra, 5(1), 2000, pp. 7–33. Nikolai Petrov, ‘Regiony Rossii ili Rossiia regionov: perspektivy territorial’nogosudarstvennogo pereustroistva strany’, Moscow Carnegie Centre Briefing, 1(3), 1999, pp. 1–4. Petrov, ‘Federalizm po-rossiiski’, p. 33. Petrov, ‘Sovet Federatsii’. Steven Solnick, ‘The new federal structure: More centralised, or more the same?’, PONARS Policy Memo, 2000, 161 (www.csis.org/rusera/ponars/ policymemos/pm_0161.pdf); Matthew Hyde, ‘Putin’s federal reforms and their implications for presidential power in Russia’, Europe–Asia Studies, 53(5), 2001, pp. 719–42; Leonid Smirnyagin, ‘Federalizm po Putinu ili Putin po federalizmu (zheleznoi pyatoi)?’ Moscow Carnegie Centre Briefing, 3(3) 1999, pp. 1–4. Vladimir Gel’man, ‘The dictatorship of Law in Russia: neither dictatorship nor rule of Law’, PONARS Policy Memo, 2000, 146 (www.csis.org/rusera/ ponars/policymemos/pm_0146.pdf). Kahn, Dictators in Law? Solnick, ‘The new federal structure’. Smirnyagin, ‘Federalizm po Putinu’. Popov, ‘Fiscal federalism in Russia’. Petrov, ‘Federalizm po-rossiiski’. The analysis of international influence on Russia’s centre–regional relations and regional development is beyond the scope of this chapter. Vladimir Kolosov, Nikolai Petrov, and Leonid Smirnyagin (eds) Vesna-89: Geografiya i anatomiya parlamentskikh vyborov, Moscow, 1990. Robert Orttung, From Leningrad to St Petersburg: Democratisation in a Russian City, New York, 1995. Timothy J. Colton, ‘The politics of democratisation: The Moscow election of 1990’, Soviet Economy, 6(4), 1990, pp. 285–344. Jeffrey W. Hahn, ‘Local politics and political power in Russia: The case of Yaroslavl’’, Soviet Economy, 7(4), 1991, pp. 322–41. Jeffrey W. Hahn, ‘Continuity and change in Russian political culture’, British Journal of Political Science, 21(4), 1991, pp. 393–421. Michael McFaul and Nikolai Petrov, Politicheskii Al’manakh Rossii, 2 vols. Moscow, 1998. Kimitaka Matsuzato, Regiony Rossii: khronika i rukovoditeli, 7 vols. Sapporo, 1997–2000. Colton and Hough, ‘Growing pains’, pp. 311–668. Neil Melvin, ‘The consolidation of a new regional elite: The case of omsk (1987–1995)’, Europe–Asia Studies, 50(4), 1998, pp. 619–50; Petra Stykow, ‘Elite transformation in the Saratov region’, in Vladimir Shlapentokh, Christopher Vanderpool and Boris Doktorov (eds) The New Elite in PostCommunist Eastern Europe, College Station, TX, pp. 201–22. Vladimir Gel’man, ‘Regional’nye rezhimy: zavershenie transformatsii?’ Svobodnaya mysl’, 9, 1996, pp. 13–22. Grigorii Golosov, ‘Povedenie izbiratelei v Rossii: teoreticheskie perspektivy i rezul’taty regional’nykh vyborov’, Polis, 4, 1997, pp. 44–56; Steven Solnick,

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72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

77. 78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95.

‘Gubernatorial elections in Russia, 1996–1997’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 14(1), 1998, pp. 48–80. Mary McAuley, Russia’s Politics of Uncertainty, Cambridge, 1997, p. 232. Gel’man, ‘Regional’naia vlast’ v sovremennoi Rossii’, pp. 96–7. Afanas’ev, ‘Ot vol’nykh ord’; Marie Mendras, ‘How regional elites preserve their power’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 15(4), 1999, pp. 295–312. Olga Senatova, ‘Regional’nyi avtoritarizm na stadii ego stanovleniya’, in Tat’iana Zaslavskaya (ed.) Kuda idet Rossiya? Transformatsiya postsovetskogo prostranstva, Moscow, 1996, pp. 146–51. Gel’man, ‘Regional’nye rezhimy’; Andrei Tsygankov, ‘Manifestations of delegative democracy in Russian local politics: What does it mean for the future of Russia?’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 31(4), 1998, pp. 329–44. Afanas’ev, ‘Ot vol’nykh ord’; Grigorii Golosov, ‘Izmereniia rossiiskikh regional’nykh izbiratel’nykh sistem’, Polis, 4, 2001, pp. 71–85. Ordeshook, ‘Russia’s party system’; Grigorii Golosov, ‘Gubernatory i partiinaya politika’, Pro et Contra, 5(1), 2000, pp. 96–108. Elena Belokurova, ‘Gosudarstvo i blagotvoritel’nye organisatsii: transformatsiia modelei vzaimodeistviia’, Unpublished PhD dissertation, European University at St Petersburg, 2000. Laura Belin, ‘Political bias and self-censorship in the Russian media’, in Archie Brown (ed.) Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader, Oxford, 2001, pp. 323–42 (pp. 340–1). Sergei Peregudov, Natal’ya Lapina and Irina Semenenko, Gruppy interesov i rossiiskoe gosudarstvo, Moscow, 1999, pp. 195–210. Mikhail Afanas’ev, Klientelizm i rossiiskaya gosudarstvennost’, 2nd edition, Moscow, 2000. Golosov, ‘Izmereniya rossiiskikh regional’nykh izbiratel’nykh sistem’. Sergei Ryzhenkov and Nikolai Vinnik (eds) Reforma mestnogo samoupravleniia v regional’nom izmerenii, Moscow, 1999. Gel’man, ‘Regional’naya vlast’ v sovremennoi Rossii’; Petrov, ‘Federalizm porossiiski’, pp. 20–1. Gail W. Lapidus, ‘State building and state breakdown in Russia’, in Archie Brown (ed.) Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader, Oxford, 2001, pp. 348–54 (p. 354). McAuley, Russia’s Politics of Uncertainty. Peregudov, Lapina and Semenenko, Gruppy interesov, pp. 195–210. Gel’man, Ryzhenkov and Brie, Rossiia regionov. Afanas’ev, ‘Ot vol’nykh ord’, pp. 11–13. Gel’man, Ryzhenkov and Brie, Rossiia regionov, pp. 19–20. Mary McAuley, ‘Politics, economics, and elite realignment in Russia: A regional perspective’, Soviet Economy, 8(1), 1992, pp. 46–88. Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, ‘From Soviet nomenklatura to Russian elite’, Europe–Asia Studies, 48(5), 1996, pp. 711–33. James Hughes, ‘Sub-national elites and post-communist transformation in Russia: A reply to Kryshtanovskaya and White’, Europe–Asia Studies, 49(6), 1997, pp. 1017–36. Kimitaka Matsuzato, ‘The split and reconfiguration of ex-communist party faction in the Russian oblasts: Chelyabinsk, Samara, Ulyanovsk, Tambov, and Tver (1991–1995)’, Demokratisatsiya, 5(1), 1997, pp. 53–88.

Politics Beyond the Garden Ring 227 96. McAuley, Russia’s Politics of Uncertainty; Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance, Princeton, NJ, 1997. 97. Afanas’ev, ‘Ot vol’nykh ord’, pp. 11–13. 98. Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes. 99. Senatova, ‘Regional’nyi avtoritarizm’. 100. Michael Brie, ‘The political regime of Moscow – creation of a new urban machine?’ Wissenschafszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung Working Papers, 1997, P97-002. 101. Gel’man, Ryzhenkov and Brie, Rossiia regionov, pp. 146–80. 102. Vladimir Gel’man and Grigorii Golosov, ‘Regional party system formation in Russia: The deviant case of Sverdlovsk oblast’’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 14(1/2), 1998, pp. 31–53. 103. Dmitrii Badovskii, ‘Transformatsiia politicheskoi elity Rossii: ot “organisatsii professional’nykh revoilyutsionerov” – k “partii vlasti’’, Polis, 6, 1994, pp. 42–58. 104. Rushan Gallyamov, ‘Politicheskie elity rossiiskikh respublik: osobennosti transformatsii v perekhodnyi period’, Polis, 2, 1998, pp. 108–15. 105. Kimitaka Matsuzato, ‘Vvedenie. Nekotorye kriterii dlya sravneniia politicheskikh rezhimov Tatarstana, Udmurtii i Mordovii’, in Kimitaka Matsuzato (ed.), Regiony Rossii: khronika i rukovoditeli, vol. 7, Sapporo, 2000, pp. 3–14 (pp. 6–7). 106. Robert Bruce Ware and Enver Kisriev, ‘Ethnic parity and democratic pluralism in Dagestan: A consociational approach’, Europe–Asia Studies, 53(1), 2001, pp. 105–31. 107. Vladimir Kolosov and Aleksei Krindach, ‘Tendentsii postsovetskogo razvitiia massovogo soznaniia i politicheskaia kul’tura iuga Rossii’, Polis, 6, 1994, pp. 120–33. 108. Segei Biryukov, ‘Legitimatsiia statusa regional’noi politicheskoi vlasti’, Vestnik MGU, series 18(4) 1997, pp. 77–95 (pp. 81–2). 109. Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes. 110. Melvin, ‘The consolidation of a new regional elite’. 111. Gel’man and Golosov, ‘Regional party system formation’. 112. Grigorii Golosov, ‘From Adygeya to Yaroslavl’: Factors of party development in Russia’s regions’, Europe–Asia Studies, 51(8), 1999, pp. 1333–65. 113. Gel’man, Ryzhenkov and Brie, Rossiia regionov, pp. 343–6. 114. Golosov, ‘Povedenie izbiratelei v Rossii’; Golosov, ‘From Adygeya to Yaroslavl’. 115. Nikolai Petrov, Russia’s Regions: Post-Soviet Transit, 1991–2001, Program on new approaches to Russian security, Nizhnii Novgorod Academic Conference Paper, 2001. 116. Brie, ‘The Political regime of Moscow’, pp. 13–21. 117. Dahl, Who Governs?, pp. 11–86.

12 Westernism, Eurasianism and Pragmatism: The Foreign Policies of the Post-Soviet States, 1991–2001 Peter J. S. Duncan

This chapter will ask what we have learned about how, and to what extent, the 15 former Soviet republics, after the sudden collapse of the USSR, broke from the imperial nexus and the Soviet legacy in the field of foreign policy. How did they succeed in creating functioning and professional ministries of foreign affairs and diplomatic services, and begin to define their own national interests and concepts of foreign policy? What orientations and divisions did they have, and how successful were they in achieving them in the first ten years, from 1991 to 2001? How did their policies change, as a result of political struggles at home and developments in the international environment?1 Probably the most comprehensive attempt to answer these questions to date is that of Mark Webber, whose valuable comparative monograph covers events up to 1994.2 A useful collection of country studies covering nearly all the states of the former Soviet Union (FSU) was edited by Adeed and Karen Dawisha, also dealing with the early years.3 Taras Kuzio has produced a more recent comparative analysis of the foreign policies of all fifteen states.4 There is no implication in these works, or in the present essay, that because these states all belonged to the Russian Empire and then the USSR, they are historically destined ultimately to share the same fate, part of a single security complex. On the contrary, not only the Baltic States but also the other 12 former republics, which have all joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), have discovered their own interests which sometimes converge with and sometimes diverge from those of Russia. At the same time, Russia has continued to dominate the CIS area and also to play a major role in the security thinking of the Baltic States. 228

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The environment in which the new foreign policies developed was one of perhaps unprecedented change. Internationally, the biggest change in world politics was the disappearance of the Soviet Union itself. No longer balanced by its former rival, the United States acted with increasing confidence as the sole superpower in a uni-polar international system. The collapse of Communism also gave renewed impetus to the processes of globalization, the penetration of international capital, the spread of new information and communications technologies and pressure from the international community to promote democratization and the observance of human rights. The new states were simultaneously faced with the growing international problems of organized crime, drug trafficking, ethnic conflict, illegal arms trading, uncontrolled migration flows and terrorism. Internally, the USSR had already begun, hesitatingly, on the path of economic reform. The new states showed great variations in the pace at which they continued this; typically the process of privatization reflected Russian and Soviet traditions of corruption, and indeed reinforced them, benefiting only a small number of people close to the state. With the level of economic activity continuing the fall which had begun in the last years of Soviet power, the bulk of the population saw their living standards tumble and many fell into poverty.

Foreign policy and national identity For these newly emerging or newly re-emerging states, foreign policy is closely linked with national identity. In the well-established states of the West, foreign policy is about the pursuit of the interests of the states or of groups within them, and the promotion of their own values. The states seeking to overcome the consequences of Communism have had to define their own post-Communist values, their place in the world, and the categories of states they wish to align themselves with. This has been difficult enough for states such as Poland and Romania, which formally maintained their independence; the post-Soviet states have additionally had to create foreign policies which promote the internal legitimacy of these new polities while serving the broader interests of the new élites. What type of national identity did these new states seek to build? All of them, with the exception of the Russian Federation, have emphasized to a greater or lesser extent the special link between the state and the ethnic group after which it was named. The Russian Federation, on the other hand, like its predecessor, the Russian Soviet Federative Soviet

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Republic (RSFSR), has normally promoted a geographical (rossiiskaia) rather than ethnic (russkaia) Russian identity; it was not the whole homeland of the Russian people but rather the residual of Soviet territory after the non-Russian union republics were subtracted. The rehabilitation of ethnic and, in the Russian case, imperial identities and the ending of state-sponsored atheism gave new possibilities for the external orientation of national identities and the type of state with which the 15 might ally. Among these possible trajectories were liberal-Westernizing or European, Communist, nationalist, Central Asian, Eurasian, pan-Orthodox, pan-Slav, pan-Turkic, pan-Islamic, panRomanian, Nordic, pan-Persian and imperial Russian conceptions (not all being mutually exclusive). Samuel P. Huntington’s theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’ predicts that the essential conflicts in world politics will be between the great religio-cultural blocs of the world, such as the Western (Catholic and Protestant), the Orthodox-Slav and the Islamic.5 Adherents of this theory might predict that the Central Asian states and Azerbaijan should join the Islamic world, Russia, Moldova and Georgia should emphasize their Orthodoxy, the Baltic States should join the West and Ukraine and Belarus should split up on religious lines. Certainly such culturally orientated movements exist in all these states, hoping to push the regimes in the desired direction. Nevertheless the states themselves, have all tended towards, or moved between, policies of Westernism, Eurasianism and pragmatism.

Classifying foreign policies Earlier attempts at classification of the foreign policies of the post-Soviet states have focussed on the relationship with Russia and the CIS. Hendrik Spruyt divided the states, other than Russia itself, into those with a ‘cooperation–acquiescence’ or a ‘disengagement–resistance’ attitude to CIS integration in the early years. His classification has the merit of allowing for policy change; for Spruyt, Georgia, Moldova and Azerbaijan moved from being in the latter category in 1992 to the former in 1994.6 Kuzio in 2000 divided the fifteen states into ‘Westernizers’ and ‘Russophiles/Slavophiles’, and further divided both these groups into ‘radicals’ and ‘pragmatists’. The radical Westernizers were, not surprisingly, the Baltic States while the pragmatic Westernizers were the member states of GUUAM (see later), that is, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova, and also Turkmenistan. Belarus was the only radical in the Russophile group, the pragmatic members of which were Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Armenia.7 These

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six Russophiles were the remaining members of the CIS Collective Security Treaty, or Tashkent Treaty, signed in May 1992. One weakness of Kuzio’s approach is that it presents the GUUAM states as more uniformly consistent in their opposition to Russia’s policies than they really are. Another is that it obscures the Westernizing tendencies that are present among all the pragmatic ‘Russophiles’, above all in Russia itself. Indeed in the early 1990s Russia was more Westernizing than Russophile in its foreign policy. The term ‘Russophile–Slavophile’ hides the extent to which the Central Asian states, including Uzbekistan, have been aiming not only at maintaining Russia’s interest in the region but have also sought to increase co-operation among themselves. For this reason the term ‘Eurasianism’ is preferable to Russophilism or Slavophilism. Eurasianism (evraziistvo) emerged as a trend among Russian émigré thinkers in the 1920s. They argued that the peoples of the Soviet Union, be they Slav and Orthodox or Turkic and Muslim, had melded together over the centuries of Russian rule and now shared particular characteristics which laid the basis for political unity.8 In the post-Soviet context, ‘Eurasianist’ refers to policies which give priority towards promoting the co-operation and unity of the post-Soviet states. In general, Eurasianists tend towards co-operation with China and certain Middle Eastern states such as Iran, rather than with the West; and give low priority to human rights questions in international affairs. Westernism, on the other hand, refers to policies aimed at co-operating with the United States, the European Union, NATO, and the plethora of international organizations dominated by Western states which promote market economies and democracy, and from which the USSR was excluded. Not all those who favoured a Westernist foreign policy were also attracted to liberal democracy and market reform; Leonid Kravchuk, for example, President of Ukraine from December 1991 to July 1994, pursued an anti-Russian and pro-Western foreign policy while failing to implement muchneeded domestic economic reform. On the other hand those implementing policies of democratization, human rights and economic reform nearly always favoured a Westernist policy, or failing that a pragmatist position. ‘Pragmatism’ is here taken to mean a policy which avoided ideological commitment to Westernism or Eurasianism, and in practice took elements from both, showing flexibility in the pursuit of state, institutional or personal interest. Those regimes whose domestic ideology was based on nationalism tended towards a Westernist foreign policy. This applied to the Baltic States, to Georgia under Zviad Gamsakhurdia, President from April 1991 to January 1992, and to

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Azerbaijan under the pan-Turkist Abulfaz Elchibei, President from June 1992 to June 1993. No regimes based on political Islam or any other religion-based ideology came to power in the 15 states; all pursued policies of Westernism, Eurasianism or pragmatism.

Making foreign ministries The new states did not have to build their foreign ministries out of nothing. In 1944 Stalin had ordered the creation of People’s Commissariats of Foreign Affairs in all the Union Republics, with the aim of them all entering the new United Nations as full members, with the right to vote in the General Assembly. The West refused to agree to a situation in which Stalin would have a bloc of 16 votes automatically in support of his policies, and allowed only the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics, which had suffered particularly from the Nazi occupation, and the USSR itself, to take their seats in the UN. Consequently Ukraine and Belarus, while undeviatingly loyal to the Soviet line, developed a significant diplomatic cadre, experienced in the work of the UN and associated international organizations. The foreign ministries of the other republics, however, were small and insignificant bodies, with no foreign representation, and concerned with matters such as the visits of foreign dignitaries to the republic. This inactivity continued until the elections to the republican Supreme Soviets in 1990, when in some republics the victorious opposition forces sought to put content into their foreign ministries as part of their struggle for sovereignty or independence against the central institutions of the USSR. In the RSFSR, following the election of Boris El’tsin as Chair of the Supreme Soviet and the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the RSFSR, in May and June 1990 respectively, a search began for a new foreign minister. While the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) wanted to foist on El’tsin someone who would be loyal to them, Vladimir Lukin, Chairperson of the Committee on International Affairs of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, recommended the appointment of Andrei Kozyrev.9 Born in Brussels in 1951, Kozyrev was a radical supporter of Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy, which promoted international co-operation and interdependence instead of confrontation with capitalism. Kozyrev had risen to be head of the Department of International Organizations within the Soviet MFA. When appointed head of the Russian MFA in October 1990, Kozyrev inherited a staff of 70, while the USSR ministry had 3500 employees at the headquarters in

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Smolensk Square and ‘thousands’ more abroad.10 Between then and December 1991, the Russian MFA grew rapidly, recruiting among Soviet diplomats who were disillusioned with Gorbachev’s vacillations and compromises with the conservative wing of Soviet politics. It was the Soviet MFA, however, which continued to be internationally recognized. Following the formation of the CIS, El’tsin decreed on 16 December 1991 that the Russian MFA would take over Soviet embassies and property abroad and decide on the future of Soviet diplomatic cadres.11 Kozyrev returned to Smolensk Square and his ministry absorbed the bulk of the Soviet MFA. While Russia was thus incomparably better off in the construction of its foreign ministry than any of the other postSoviet states, it still suffered problems. Some of its older employees retained the mindset of the Cold War era, remaining suspicious of the United States and of the new Russian leadership. The attempt at ‘shock therapy’ to reform the Russian economy in January 1992 led to a crisis in tax collection and a drastic reduction in the funds available to the MFA. This led to cuts in the real value of salaries and the defection of many of the younger generation of diplomats to careers in business. Foreign travel was no longer the privilege of a few but available to all who could afford it, subject to visas from the receiving country. Graduates from the traditional sources of recruitment, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and the Diplomatic Academy, both within the MFA, preferred to go straight into business careers. Nevertheless, by mid-1998 the ministry still had 3170 people working in the central apparatus and 8227 abroad.12 At the other extreme from Russia, Estonia started from scratch. In 1990 the new Estonian Supreme Soviet, with a pro-independence majority, appointed Lennart Meri as Foreign Minister. Born in 1929, he had been deported with his family to Siberia in 1941 after the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States, and later made a career as a film-maker in Estonia. Having been founder of the Estonian Congress, on the radical wing of the nationalist movement, he began his work as Foreign Minister by liquidating the old ministry and sacking all the employees. They were replaced by supporters of Estonian independence and Estonians returning from exile.13 Meri’s successor as Foreign Minister had been in Sweden, managing the pop group Abba. From 1997 to 2002 the Foreign Minister was an Estonian-American, a former analyst at Radio Free Europe, Toomas Hendrik Ilves. One characteristic of the Estonian ministry in particular, although also apparent in the other Baltic States and to a lesser extent elsewhere, was the extreme youth of

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top officials; Juri Luik was only 26 when he became Minister without portfolio with responsibility for dealing with Russia, while the Political Director of the ministry was only 22. Although Lithuania was more radical than Estonia in its approach to independence in 1990, the Landsbergis leadership was less radical in relation to the foreign ministry. The Supreme Soviet, its Foreign Relations Committee, and its Presidium under Vytautas Landsbergis became the central focus of foreign policy-making. Algirdas Saudargas, an MP from the victorious nationalist movement Sajudis, was appointed Foreign Minister. Only one of the deputy foreign ministers was sacked, and at least half of the fifteen-strong staff were retained. This reflected the extent to which the desire for independence had penetrated the Lithuanian élite. There followed a big expansion to around 50 or a 100 within a year, and now to around 300. The emigration was a source providing five or six ambassadors, nearly all from the USA. Given the low salaries, the limited opportunities to travel and the perilous state of the government, which was subject to a trade blockade by Moscow in retaliation for its declaration of independence, those who joined the Lithuanian foreign ministry in 1990–91 were probably motivated more by a sense of civic duty and patriotism than by careerism.14 At the top level of the ministry, politicization seems now to be giving way to professionalism. Changes in government have not necessarily led to the sacking of deputy foreign ministers; and Saudargas has been Foreign Minister for most of the independence period, serving two and a half years after his first appointment in 1990 and returning to office in 1997, where he remained despite the return of the Left in the 2001 elections. The diaspora has played a greater role in Armenia. The American-born Raffi Hovannisian was the first Foreign Minister of independent Armenia, but resigned in October 1992 in protest at what he considered President Levon Ter-Petrosian’s conciliatory attitude in relation to Nagorno-Karabakh (see below). This reflected a clear trend for the diaspora to take a harder line than Ter-Petrosian, who remained President until February 1998, not only on Nagorno-Karabakh but also in relation to Turkey over the demand for recognition of the genocide of Armenians during the First World War. In 1994 the government banned the anti-Turkish Armenian Revolutionary Federation (the Dashnaks), which was supported by the diaspora, calling it a foreign organization, and the 1995 Constitution banned dual citizenship, in an attempt to prevent diaspora Armenians from participating in Armenian politics. The other eight post-Soviet states reacted less radically to the need to enhance their foreign ministries. In Ukraine, Anatoliy Zlenko, a career

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diplomat in the Ukrainian service, born in 1938, had been promoted from First Deputy Foreign Minister to Minister in July 1990. He remained at his post after independence. Similarly Belarus retained Pyotr Krauchanka; he had served in Party posts until being appointed Foreign Minister, also in July 1990. Other states sought the return of compatriots who had been serving in Soviet diplomacy. Thus Kyrgyzstan called back Roza Otunbayeva, who had been Kyrgyz Foreign Minister from 1986 to 1989 but since then had been working in Moscow on the Soviet Commission for UNESCO and had been named as Soviet Ambassador to Malaysia and Brunei. When the Russian Ministry took over the Soviet Ministry, this appointment was confirmed, but she returned to Bishkek to resume as Foreign Minister in January 1992.15 While all of the post-Soviet states succeeded in creating and maintaining independent foreign ministries, problems persisted for some time in finding premises for embassies. Here the Baltic States were at an advantage because the West had not recognized the Soviet occupation, and in most cases preserved the pre-war embassy buildings for their former owners. By the end of the 1990s, most states had embassies in New York, Geneva and at least the major Western capitals. Russia had 140 embassies, while Lithuania had 30. An exception was Moldova, which appears to be the poorest country in Europe and lacks funds for staff and premises.

Implementing foreign policies Russia Whether Russia is, or should be, part of the West, or whether it is a fundamentally different sort of society with its own role was at the core of Russian foreign policy debate in the first decade after 1991. This timehonoured discourse on Russian national identity was now complicated by divisions over how Russia should be defined: was it just the Russian Federation, or was it the whole of the FSU, or the CIS? Russians had always identified with the USSR as a whole, so if the borders of the state were now to be restricted to the RSFSR, then surely Russia should still have some special role within the former Soviet borders? On the formation of the CIS in December 1991, it was agreed that Russia would be the successor state to the USSR, inheriting its rights and obligations, including its permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Russian foreign policy was initially linked with the adoption of an IMF programme of economic reform in January 1992 and the desire of El’tsin and Kozyrev

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for Russia to become a ‘normal’ country and to join the ‘civilized’ West. Indeed, this early period was the most Westernist of Russian policy. Kozyrev hoped to join organizations such as the IMF, GATT, to make the G7 the G8, and to win from the West large amounts of aid, investment and market access. The original plans for CIS strategic co-operation failed, partly due to Ukrainian opposition, and Russia created its own Ministry of Defence under General Pavel Grachev in May 1992. Western concerns about nuclear proliferation led ultimately to Russia taking over the missiles sited in other CIS states, or their being destroyed. As far as the defence of borders was concerned, Moscow considered that it was cheaper, where possible, to defend the old Soviet borders, in co-operation with local forces, rather than to create a new border around the Russian Federation. Russia asserted its control over units of the former Soviet Army deployed outside the Russian Federation, except where they had been taken over by the host state, as in Ukraine. This meant that Russia necessarily found itself involved in ethnic and political conflicts outside its territory, which had emerged under perestroika and contributed to the weakening of the Soviet regime. The Transdnestrian Republic had been proclaimed in the eastern part of Moldova by the local Russian-speaking nomenklatura, capitalizing on the fears of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians about their future if Moldova should unite with Romania. In June 1992, the Russian 14th Army intervened to prevent the Moldovan forces from moving against Transdnestria.16 In Tajikistan, the 201st Motorized Rifle Division found itself in the middle of a Civil War in 1992. Although supposedly neutral, from late 1992 to mid-1993 the Russian forces consolidated the defeat of the Islamist forces and the return to power of a coalition led by ex-Communists, headed by Immomali Rakhmonov, with the Russian Federal Border Service keeping out Islamists based in Afghanistan.17 In Georgia, Russian forces were caught up in the struggles for autonomy being waged by South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It was not the Foreign Ministry but the Ministry of Defence, however, which was taking the lead in issues relating to the FSU. Kozyrev came under repeated attack for neglecting Russia’s interests in the ‘near abroad’ while concentrating on building relations with the West. In particular, the Vice-President, General Aleksandr Rutskoi, and leaders of the Russian Supreme Soviet criticized the Foreign Ministry for abandoning the Russian-speaking population in the former republics. In May 1992 the Supreme Soviet declared the transfer of the Crimea, where two thirds of the population were ethnic Russians, from the RSFSR to Ukraine in

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1954 invalid; this was tantamount to a claim on Ukrainian territory and embarrassed El’tsin and the government. In July 1993 the Supreme Soviet declared the principal naval port of the Crimea, Sevastopol, a ‘Russian city’. Ukraine took the matter to the UN Security Council, and the Russian delegate found himself in the awkward position of having to vote for a resolution condemning his own parliament. Opposition between executive and legislature was compounded by disarray between the Foreign and Defence Ministries. With ethnic conflict continuing in various parts of the CIS, El’tsin proposed in February 1993 that the United Nations or the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe should give Russia a ‘security mandate’ to maintain order throughout the FSU. Russia feared that its own security could be threatened by spill-over effects, such as arms smuggling and uncontrolled flows of refugees. While El’tsin’s proposal was accepted neither by the international community nor by the CIS states, the military assumed the duty of acting as ‘peace-keeping forces’ (literally ‘peace-making forces’, mirotvorcheskie sily) in Moldova, Tajikistan and Georgia, in the latter cases with a CIS mandate.18 The way this was carried out, however, was often against the policies of the Foreign Ministry, prompting Kozyrev to object that ‘the armed forces have a foreign policy of their own’ in the FSU.19 El’tsin succeeded in winning Western support for the violent dissolution of the Supreme Soviet in October 1993. The victory of the Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovskii, whose Liberal Democratic Party of Russia won the party-list section of the seats in the December 1993 election to the new State Duma, was not a major factor in Russia pursuing a more assertive foreign policy in the ensuing period. Rather, the euphoria at the ending of the Communist system and at Russia’s independence from Soviet rule had disappeared among much of the population and the élite, and been replaced by nostalgia for the superpower era. It was the feeling among the policy-makers that while Russia had co-operated with the West over sanctions on former friends of the USSR, and given in to American pressure over the supply of cryogenic rocket engines to India, the IMF reform plan had failed miserably and the West was not giving Russia the expected aid. While Russia joined the International Contact Group on the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina set up in April 1994, its opinion was ignored when NATO proceeded to launch air strikes on the Bosnian Serbs.20 Russian public opinion was supportive of the Serbs, and Russian nationalist politicians made much of the similarity between the positions of the Serbs and the Russians, as Orthodox peoples who after the break-up of a federation had found themselves as

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minorities in the new states. Kozyrev, however, pointed out that Russia itself had a partly Muslim population, and should follow a policy dictated by international law and the support of human rights. Most importantly, the whole of the Russian political spectrum felt betrayed by plans for NATO enlargement. Russia saw NATO as a relic of the Cold War, and argued that the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which included all the FSU states, should have increased powers and be the main forum for European security issues. Already in August 1993, when El’tsin in an unguarded statement in Warsaw said that Russia would not object to Poland joining NATO, the Foreign Ministry had been swift to clarify that the opposite was the case. Despite much opposition in Russia, Kozyrev was able to sign up for NATO’s Partnership for Peace in June 1994,21 but in December El’tsin forced him to postpone signing Russia’s partnership agreement, in protest at the Clinton Administration’s renewed support for NATO enlargement. Russia’s potential was also weakened by the completion of its military withdrawal from Germany and the Baltic States in August 1994. Among Kozyrev’s critics were not only Zhirinovskii and the Communists, led by Gennadii Ziuganov, but members of the security structures. In November 1993 Evgenii Primakov, leader since 1991 of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), issued a report on the dangers of NATO enlargement.22 A counter to this was to strengthen integration in the CIS, which Primakov advocated in another report in September 1994.23 Until then the Russian Westernist reformers had favoured reorienting Russia away from the CIS, and had effectively ended the rouble zone to avoid Russia having to pay for the budget deficits of the former republics. El’tsin, however, was tending more to a pragmatic Eurasianist view that favoured CIS integration, but on terms which were favourable to Russia; this was put forward in his presidential decree of September 1995, ‘Russia’s Strategic Course with the Member-States of the Commonwealth of Independent States.’24 Russia’s position with both the West and the CIS was weakened, however, by the moves to crush Chechen independence. The indiscriminate bombing of Chechnia, beginning in December 1994, and the cruel treatment of Chechen civilians led to protests in the West, culminating in the suspension of the Partnership and Co-operation Agreement with the EU. Russia’s neighbours were not only horrified by the preference for force and repression rather than negotiation but also concerned by the poor performance of the Russian Army. In particular the Central Asian states began to question whether they could rely on Russia to guarantee

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their security.25 Kozyrev publicly supported Russia’s actions in Chechnia and in April 1995 even went so far as to warn that Russia might have to use force to protect the rights of ethnic Russians in the former Soviet republics.26 Under attack from both Eurasianists and Westernists, Kozyrev was further undermined by El’tsin’s open declaration that he would sack him. In fact, when Kozyrev finally resigned as Foreign Minister after being re-elected to the State Duma in the December 1995 elections, he was the only member of the 1991 Gaidar government still in office. The Communists emerged as the largest party after the elections, forcing El’tsin to adopt a new strategy to ensure his re-election as President in July 1996. He promoted Primakov to be Foreign Minister, aware of the wide following that the experienced politician had in Russia. As Foreign Minister, Primakov devoted much of his attention to relations with CIS states. Little progress was made in improving the functioning of the CIS as a whole, which continued to produce a mass of decisions that remained largely unimplemented.27 Primakov pragmatically focussed on those states which were more susceptible to closer links with Russia. When in March 1996 the Communist-dominated Duma passed a resolution denouncing the dissolution of the Soviet Union, CIS and Baltic States leaders condemned the move. Primakov responded by pointing to the unreality of the Communists’ rhetoric, but at the same time appealed to the popular nostalgia for the Soviet superpower by creating, together with Belarus, a ‘Community of Sovereign Republics’ (SSR in Russian). This was not a USSR (SSSR in Russian) but evidence for the voters that El’tsin’s Russia was beginning to gather the lands together again. El’tsin defeated Ziuganov in the July presidential elections, but had already disappeared from public view because of the heart ailments that were to dog his presidency to the end. NATO, which had soft-pedalled the enlargement issue in order to ensure a Communist defeat, now made clear its intention to expand. Primakov countered by moving closer to China, which was now a major customer of the Russian arms industry, and persuaded it to join Russia in declarations of opposition to NATO’s plans. The CIS states, on the other hand, were unwilling to incur American displeasure; only Belarus openly supported Russia, and in April 1997 was rewarded with a ‘Treaty of Union’. Liberals in the Russian government were wary of integration with Belarus, because of the economic cost to Russia and the authoritarian behaviour of President Aliaksandr Lukashenka. Despite Primakov’s vocal opposition, NATO made clear that Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary would be

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admitted to NATO, taking the alliance up to the Polish border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Nevertheless Primakov negotiated the NATO–Russia Founding Act, which was signed in May 1997, creating a Permanent Joint Council of the 16 NATO members plus Russia, giving Russia a consultative voice in the alliance. Almost at once Russia also signed a long-awaited friendship treaty with Ukraine, having reached agreement over the status of Sevastopol. This did not prevent Ukraine together with Georgia, Azerbaijan and Moldova from forming GUAM, which appeared to be an anti-Russian grouping within the CIS, in October 1997. A further setback to Russia’s world role was the default on government debt and the crash of the rouble in August 1998. Because of this crisis, Primakov was promoted to Prime Minister, at the insistence of the State Duma, and his deputy Igor’ Ivanov replaced him as Foreign Minister. Relations with the West worsened, as Russia became more concerned about America’s international behaviour. In late 1998 Primakov, an Arabist, condemned the AngloAmerican bombing of Iraq. He raised the rhetoric still further after NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in March 1999, without the approval of the UN Security Council, in an effort to prevent President Slobodan Milosˇevic´ from driving out the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo. In protest against the bombing, Primakov, en route to the IMF in Washington, turned his plane around in mid-air and flew back to Russia. Against the background of the Kosovo War, the April 1999 Washington summit of NATO marked the organization’s 50th anniversary by adopting a new ‘Strategic Concept’. This changed the nature of NATO from being a defensive alliance to one claiming responsibility for security throughout Europe. It admitted the three new members and promised that its doors were open to future enlargement.28 Russia was further humiliated by the announcement in Washington that Uzbekistan would join GUAM, which then became GUUAM. The Kosovo War seems to have begun another period in Russia’s foreign policy. Despite opposition to the NATO bombing, Russia remained a part of the Western-led negotiating process, and agreed to contribute forces to the UN force in Kosovo, K-FOR. Before NATO forces were able to move in, a Russian unit from the UN force in Bosnia moved through Serbia to take control of the main airport in Kosovo, near Prisˇtina. This was deeply embarrassing to Igor’ Ivanov, but clearly won El’tsin’s approval. At the same time, NATO found that it needed Russia to persuade Milosˇevic´ to accept a settlement. Russia’s apparent success in the Second Chechen War, at least in late 1999 to early 2000, the resignation of the infirm El’tsin and the election of the young and active Vladimir

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Putin as President in March 2000 all gave Russia a new image in the world.29 Putin embarked on an extensive programme of foreign travel, visiting CIS countries, Europe, China, India and America, and including states such as Mongolia, North Korea and Cuba that had been friends of the USSR but which had been neglected for the previous decade. He succeeded in pushing through the State Duma the START-2 treaty, agreed between Kozyrev and the USA in January 1993 and significantly cutting Russia’s nuclear arms burden, which El’tsin had never been able to get ratified. The June 2000 foreign policy concept expressed goodwill to nearly all humanity; it expressed hopes for good relations even with Estonia and Latvia. Only the United States was mentioned in a negative context. It criticized the latter’s ‘economic and power domination’ and the consequent weakening of the role of the UN Security Council, but emphasized the need for Russian–American co-operation.30 Putin sought to build a coalition against American proposals to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty and build a missile defence system, gaining the support of the EU in October 2000. Seeking support for Russian action in Chechnia, which was now described as an anti-terrorist operation, Putin linked the Chechen rebels, who were increasingly stressing their Islamic identity, to terrorism in Central Asia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kashmir, the Arab world and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Following terrorist incursions of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) into Batken, Kyrgyzstan, in the summer of 2000, CIS interior ministers agreed in September to establish an anti-terrorist centre in Bishkek. Putin’s dynamism, together with a Russian economic recovery, strengthened Russia’s position among all the CIS states. Russia continued to blame the West for allowing the activity of ethnic Albanian armed groups, which it linked with international terrorism, in Kosovo and Macedonia. Following the attacks on New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001, Putin overcame Russian military resistance to enforce co-operation with US security organizations in the fight against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. While Putin was initially seen as a Russian nationalist, the tactical flexibility he demonstrated when he was given the opportunity of a coalition with the West places him firmly in the pragmatist category. Talk of closer relations with the EU and even NATO was accompanied by the pursuit of integration with Belarus, now accepted by nearly all shades of Russian opinion, and by a closer involvement with the security of the CIS states.

242 Peter J. S. Duncan

The Baltic States Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania began to run their own foreign policy not in December 1991 but in March 1990. The aim was to win foreign support in their struggle for independence from the USSR. With the collapse of the August 1991 coup, independence and recognition were achieved by early September. There was no question, for the indigenous populations, of the countries joining the CIS; rather, they wished to join the Euro-Atlantic institutions as quickly as possible. The immediate need, however, was to secure the withdrawal of the Soviet, and then Russian troops. El’tsin and the Russian democrats had developed working relations with the Baltic nationalists from at least May 1989, in the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and these had developed further after the republican elections in March 1990, when all began to work together against Gorbachev’s centre. El’tsin was committed to withdrawing troops. The Russian leadership, however, was deeply disillusioned by the citizenship and language laws passed in Estonia and Latvia. These governments feared that if all the Russians and other minorities were given citizenship, they might form an important political block in favour of continued links with Russia. Lithuania, which gave all its residents the opportunity of citizenship, caused some suspicion in Estonia and Latvia by agreeing to a deal for the withdrawal of Russian forces by August 1993, a full year before the withdrawal from the others. Russia needed to retain transit rights across Lithuania to Kaliningrad oblast’, and this may perhaps also have made it more amenable to the Lithuanians. The parliamentary victory of the ex-Communists in 1992 and the election of Algirdas Brazauskas, their leader and former First Secretary of the Communist Party of Lithuania, as President in 1993 led to a softening in attitudes towards Moscow, although the orientation was still towards the West. Brazauskas succeeded in resolving the differences over transit, and persuading Moscow not to take seriously the occasional claim by Lithuanian nationalists on the territory of Kaliningrad.31 As far as Estonia and Latvia were concerned, however, Russia more than once threatened to interrupt its troop withdrawal because of the treatment of the Russian minority. The main issue, however, was military pensioners’ rights rather than those of the Russians in general. Kozyrev’s policy of internationalizing human rights issues led to Russia criticizing Estonia and Latvia at the OSCE. Indeed an important activity for Estonia and Latvia in the 1990s was the rebuttal in European fora of Russian accusations about the ill-treatment of minorities, and making

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counter-accusations against Russia over Chechnia. Estonia was admitted to the Council of Europe in 1993 and Latvia in 1995 after some amendments to its citizenship rules. These decisions led to accusations of double standards from Russia, which was not admitted until 1996. The OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities continued to monitor the situation in Estonia and Latvia until December 2001. Estonia has dropped territorial claims on Russia, but both countries are offended by Russia’s continued refusal to recognize that they were forced into joining the USSR in 1940. The Baltic States retain close co-operation among themselves and with the Nordic States. All belong to the Council of Baltic Sea States, which includes Russia, Germany and Poland. Like all the post-Soviet states, the Baltic States joined Partnership for Peace, and all three are vigorously asserting their claims to NATO membership. NATO has encouraged the formation of BALTBAT, the Baltic Peacekeeping Battalion, and Poland is helping Lithuania develop its defence capability.32 Although Putin has toned down the rhetoric, Russia remains as opposed to their membership of NATO as to that of the CIS countries. The Baltic States are the only post-Soviet states to become associate members of the Western European Union, which Russia sees as less threatening than NATO. Moreover, the Europe Agreements signed with the EU in 1995 gave them a higher status than the CIS states. Estonia had the advantage of its close relationship with Finland, which promoted its claims within the EU. Tallinn opened membership negotiations in March 1998, with Riga and Vilnius following in February 2000. Undoubtedly the Baltic States are the most Westernist of the post-Soviet states, with considerable success in relations with Western institutions. In 2002 they were invited to join NATO and the EU.

Belarus At the other extreme is Belarus. With the Belarusian Communists discredited after the August coup, supporters of sovereignty came to the fore and Stanislau Shushkevich, Chairperson of the Supreme Soviet, was one of the founders of the CIS. But Belarusian identity has rarely manifested itself in opposition to Russian identity. It can be compared more with Siberian identity, in the sense that people in Belarus usually considered themselves part of the wider Russian identity. The more Polonized, Catholic population in the West was not as influential in Belarus as Western Ukrainians were in Ukrainian politics. Moreover, the

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Belarusian economic élites, unwilling to embrace reform, sought support from Russia as preferable to independence. In April 1993, the Supreme Soviet approved the CIS Collective Security Treaty, but Shushkevich refused to sign it, relenting only in January 1994. By the 1994 presidential elections, both leading candidates, Prime Minister Viacheslav Kebich and the former collective farm chairperson, Lukashenka, agreed on the need for closer relations with Russia. Since his victory, Lukashenka has been a fervent advocate of union with Russia. Belarus was a founder member of the Customs Union with Russia and Kazakhstan formed in January 1995, joined later by Kyrgyzstan in March 1996 and Tajikistan in February 1999, and re-designated as the Eurasian Economic Community in October 2000.33 The development of the ‘Union State’ with Russia has proceeded under Putin. The geographical position of Belarus, with Minsk on the main route from Moscow via Smolensk to Warsaw and Berlin, makes the country a bridge to (or shield against) Europe, and for Westernists the Union State brings Russia closer to Europe. For Eurasianists, reunion with Belarus is important for its strategic value and as a model for all the CIS countries, especially Ukraine.34 Lukashenka has dealt harshly with his opponents, several of whom have disappeared, believed murdered. The OSCE and EU criticized his dissolution of the Supreme Soviet and the November 1996 referendum extending his term of office. Lukashenka is outspoken in his denunciation of the West and his opposition to NATO enlargement is more virulent that Russia’s.35 Moscow and the CIS states, however, support Lukashenka despite his dictatorial regime and have criticized the OSCE for meddling in Belarusian affairs. When Lukashenka was reelected President in September 2001, Putin congratulated him on his ‘convincing victory’.36

Ukraine On 1 December 1991 the voters of Ukraine not only opted for independence by referendum with 90 per cent in favour, but also elected the former ideology secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, as President. Riding on a nationalist tide, Kravchuk’s aim was to preserve the power of the old nomenklatura. The independence referendum was the event which triggered the formation of the CIS. Whereas the Russians hoped that the CIS would be a viable organization, Kravchuk soon made it clear that he shared the views of the leader of the nationalist movement Rukh, that it was ‘a civilized form for [managing]

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the collapse of the Union’.37 His aim was to lead the ‘return to Europe’ from which Ukraine had supposedly been excluded by Russian imperialism. He was hampered by the image which Ukraine soon attracted in the West, of corruption worse even than in Russia, hyperinflation and potential nuclear disaster arising from the plant at Chernobyl. Faced with unofficial Russian claims on the Crimea, some nationalists argued for Ukraine to retain its nuclear weapons, provoking Western pressure and an American-mediated solution to persuade Ukraine to implement unilateral nuclear disarmament. While Rukh called for leaving the CIS, the pragmatic Kravchuk maintained Ukraine’s membership, while frustrating attempts by Russia and others at promoting integration. By 1994 it was clear that Ukraine was geographically split, with the ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East favouring a Eurasianist restoration of economic links with Russia and the CIS while Ukrainian-speakers in the West favoured closer ties to the Euro-Atlantic community. Leonid Kuchma defeated Kravchuk in the presidential elections of June–July by appealing to the Easterners, and promising to restore Russian as an official language. In office Kuchma failed to do the latter, and was consequently criticized by the Russian Foreign Ministry, but restored more balance in Ukrainian foreign policy between a Westernist and Eurasianist position. Ukraine officially pursues a ‘multivectored’ foreign policy. The country was dependent for its energy on Russia, and despite becoming the third largest recipient of US aid (after Israel and Egypt), because of its economic crisis it built up billions of dollars of debts to Russia for oil and gas deliveries. In May 1997 the dispute over the division and location of the Black Sea Fleet, unsolved since 1991, was settled by Ukraine agreeing to lease to Russia for 20 years the principal bays of Sevastopol, in exchange for debt forgiveness amounting to 2.5 billion US dollars.38 As noted above, the subsequent Russo-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty did not prevent Ukraine from becoming a major force in GUAM. These countries all had the perception of Russia having exploited ethnic conflict on their territory for political gain; and they sought to reduce their dependence on Russia for energy supply or transit, by promoting the Transport Corridor Europe–Caucasus–Asia (TRACECA). Ukraine actively participated in Partnership for Peace, and in March 2000 the North Atlantic Council met outside a NATO state for the first time, in Ukraine. The West failed, however, to meet Ukraine’s economic expectations; the EU did not see Ukraine as a candidate for membership. Soon after his election as President, Putin put pressure on Ukraine for a reorientation. Ukraine joined the CIS Anti-Terrorist Centre in

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June 2000, and took part in a CIS air defence exercise in August. In September 2000 Kuchma dismissed the Foreign Minister, Borys Tarasiuk, seen as the most pro-Western member of the government. He brought back Anatoliy Zlenko, and made clear that Russia was henceforth to be treated more favourably.39 Foreign policy in Ukraine has become more presidential, with the National Security and Defence Council playing an important role alongside the Foreign Ministry.40 The scandal around the headless body of a journalist, Grigorii Gongadze, apparently murdered on Kuchma’s orders, and discovered in November 2000, further isolated Kuchma in the West. Putin chose the moment to offer political support and economic co-operation.41 Moldova Independent Moldova did not join Romania. It did not want to lose Transdnestria, which would refuse to join, and moreover the Chis¸inau ˘ élite did not want to give up the independence it had tasted. By 1994, after Russian pressure which included interrupting the supply of energy,42 Moldova had a Constitution which described its language as Moldovan, not Romanian (contrary to the claims of the panRomanians) and had ratified CIS membership. The focus of Moldovan foreign policy has been, with the help of the OSCE and together with Russia, Ukraine and Romania, to regain control over Transdnestria and the withdrawal of Russian forces; and to secure trade, investment and aid from the EU. An agreement of 1994 for Russian withdrawal has been implemented only very slowly, and the enclave remains out of Moldova’s control. Moldova’s participation in GUUAM is directly related to what appears to be a continued Russian occupation. The victory of the Communists, who had talked of joining the Russia–Belarus Union, in the March 2001 Moldovan parliamentary elections led to hopes of an improvement in relations with Russia and a settlement with the rebel region. Transcaucasia It was expected in 1991 that Transcaucasia and Central Asia might become regions where Russia would be strongly challenged by Turkey and Iran for influence, but ten years on Russia still remains more important. Foreign policy in Transcaucasia remains dominated by ethnic conflicts, which helped to undermine the Soviet Union and which are now ‘frozen’ behind cease-fire lines but still unresolved. After Shevardnadze was restored to power in Georgia in 1992, he was unable to regain

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control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.43 Ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought a war in and around the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, between 1991 and 1994. While Armenia denied official involvement, ethnic Armenians gained control of Karabakh and the Lachin Corridor linking it to Armenia, establishing a Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. The poor performance of the Azerbaijani troops contributed to the return to power of the former Communist First Secretary, Heydar Aliev in 1993. Both Shevardnadze and Aliev succumbed during 1993 to Russian pressure to join the CIS, in the hope that this would help them to regain full control over their republics. Russia brokered a cease-fire in Karabakh in 1994, which has held, but the subsequent negotiations led by the OSCE Minsk Group have foundered over the phasing of moves to implement self-determination for the region. Ter-Petrosian was forced to resign as President of Armenia in February 1998 because of his attempts to conciliate Azerbaijan, and was replaced by the Karabakh leader, the more bellicose Robert Kocharian.44 Losing hope in Russia, and seeking Western support, including perhaps even NATO membership, Georgia and Azerbaijan helped to found GUAM in 1997. The Clinton Administration was supportive of their efforts to encourage Western oil companies to build new pipeline systems to avoid Russia, such as one from Baku through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean. The oil companies have been reluctant to pay the costs, particularly if there are existing alternatives through Russia. While Azerbaijan has excluded all Russian forces, Georgia has been in dispute with Russia, demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from its remaining bases, and criticizing the Russian peace-keepers for not allowing Georgian refugees to return to Abkhazia. Both Azerbaijan and Georgia have developed relations with Turkey. Georgia and Azerbaijan have also come under pressure from Russia over suspicions that Chechen fighters have been taking refuge on their territory,45 and Georgia responded by coming closer to the USA. Armenia, on the other hand, perceiving hostility from Azerbaijan and Turkey, has developed a close defence relationship with Russia, giving it basing rights for 25 years. Armenia also has good ties with Iran, which itself became an ally of Russia in Caspian affairs.

Central Asia The five countries of Central Asia – Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – are located between three great entities: Russia, the former imperial power; China, with its dynamic

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economy and vast population; and the Islamic world, represented by Iran and Afghanistan as immediate neighbours, and to which the region traditionally belongs. Central Asian foreign policies derive from the need to prevent domination by any one of these three; the need to attract foreign investment to develop raw materials and mineral extraction and help them break out of their geographical isolation; and the desire to preserve their authoritarian, largely ex-Communist nomenklatura regimes from the threat of popular unrest and political Islam. Turkmenistan, with its gas wealth, proclaimed a policy of neutrality. It avoided participation in the CIS Customs Union, the Collective Security Treaty, and the Central Asian Economic Union (CAEU). Its security is bolstered by bilateral military relations with Russia, and good relations with Iran.46 After the capture of Kabul by the Taliban in 1996, Turkmenistan developed a working relationship with the unrecognized regime in Afghanistan.47 Kazakhstan, with its substantial Slav population, and possibly fearing Russian claims on the ethnically Russian northern and eastern parts of the republic, has been a firm advocate of CIS integration. Nazarbaev’s idea of a Eurasian Union has been regarded unenthusiastically by Russia, however, possibly because it moves too far towards supra-nationality. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have all joined the Collective Security Treaty and the Eurasian Economic Community. These states may also fear the aspirations of Uzbekistan for regional leadership, revealed in its involvement in the factional struggles within Tajikistan.48 Cutting across these, however, has been the CAEU, formed in August 1994 by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, with both economic and defence dimensions. With NATO’s encouragement, this led to the formation of the Central Asian Battalion (CENTRASBAT), analogous to BALTBAT. Tajikistan joined the CAEU in July 1998 and it was renamed the Central Asian Economic Community. All five Central Asian states joined the Economic Co-operation Organization, with the regional Muslim states of Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey.49 Kyrgyzstan has been the only CIS state to be accepted into the World Trade Organization, joining in 1998. Since the Tajik civil war, the states have been concerned at the threat of Islamic rebellion emanating from Afghanistan. Uzbekistan and Russia gave support to the Northern Alliance of ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks fighting the Taliban. In 1998, following Taliban victories, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan established a coalition to fight ‘religious extremism’.50 This did not prevent Uzbekistan leaving the CIS Collective Security Treaty and joining GUAM in 1999. Uzbekistan has generally called on

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the Central Asians to rely only on themselves for their security, while the others have been keener to involve Russia. The incursions by the IMU, which has been linked by the US State Department to bin Laden, into southern Kyrgyzstan in summer 1999, and again in summer 2000 to Batken and Uzbekistan, gave impetus to security co-operation between Russia and Central Asia, as noted above.51 The Central Asians have sought the intervention of the OSCE, accusing it of concentrating on human rights at the expense of security issues. Additionally, China, with its own concerns about nationalists in Xinjiang, has become involved. The Shanghai Forum was originally established by China and the CIS countries bordering it, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, to discuss border issues and economic co-operation. In June 2001 Uzbekistan joined, and it was transformed into the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, agreeing to establish its own anti-terrorism centre (like the CIS centre, in Bishkek). The multitude of organizations that the Central Asians have established or joined reflects their desire to seek help from all possible quarters and their pragmatic orientation, even though Uzbekistan has pursued a much more pro-Western policy than the other states. In these circumstances it is not surprising that Uzbekistan agreed to host US forces involved in the fight against the Taliban in October 2001, nor that the other states together with Russia should co-operate with the American action. Tajikistan joined Partnership for Peace in February 2002, the last post-Soviet state to do so, at a time when longer-term American military involvement in the region was looking more likely.

Conclusion The decade has generally seen a shift towards pragmatism in foreign policy among the post-Soviet states. The nationalist regimes of Gamsakhurdia, Elchibei and the Moldovan Popular Front have fallen, replaced by governments which would deal with Russia within the framework of the CIS. The leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, in different ways, have lost their illusions in the West, and seen the need to forge new links in Eurasia, while taking advantage of opportunities in the West as well. Allen Lynch’s attribution of ‘realism’ to Russian foreign policy, which he rightly says appeared already under Kozyrev,52 could be extended to most of the other post-Soviet states. From Lithuania to Azerbaijan, former Communist leaders have returned to power, or in most of Central Asia never lost it. These élites are normally a source

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of stability in foreign policy. Armenia is an exception, where policy on Karabakh has if anything become more intransigent; while the Baltic States have held to a stable Westernist course. Prior to 11 September 2001, the CIS states were divided into a Eurasianist group of six states adhering to the Collective Security Treaty and the Westernist GUUAM group, with Turkmenistan avoiding affiliation to either. The most important set of factors influencing whether a state has tended to take a Westernist or a Eurasianist position are those linked with ethnicity and conflict. Where states perceive that Russia has gained from such conflict on their territories, as in Karabakh, Georgia, Transdnestria and the Crimea, they have turned to the West. Where there is already an interest from outside powers, such as the Nordic countries have in the Baltic States or Western countries have in Caspian energy resources, this can be an important factor in reducing Russia’s influence. Less important, but still a factor, is the degree of economic reform, with the more reformed states being more open to the West as a partner. Of little relevance is the nature of the political regime. Uzbekistan, for example, has been consistently more authoritarian than Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, but nonetheless less oriented towards Russia. Neither is religion a factor; both the Collective Security Treaty and GUUAM contain a mix of predominantly Christian and predominantly Muslim states, thereby tending to refute Huntington’s thesis. Undoubtedly Putin has made a difference in strengthening Russia’s position in the region as a whole, highlighting the importance of contingency in foreign policy. Equally, however, if America opts to take a long-term military interest in Central Asia and the Caucasus, the political shape of the whole FSU, and indeed the world, could change dramatically.

Notes and references 1. I gratefully acknowledge information and ideas from the SSEES Post-Soviet Press Study Group, and particularly from Martin Dewhirst, John Moukas, Rebecca Carey and Johannes Toepfer. 2. Mark Webber, The International Politics of Russia and the Successor States, Manchester and New York, 1996. 3. Adeed Dawisha and Karen Dawisha (eds), The Making of Foreign Policy in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, Armonk, NY and London, 1995. 4. Taras Kuzio, ‘Geopolitical pluralism in the CIS: The emergence of GUUAM’, European Security, 9(2), 2000, pp. 81–114, and idem, ‘Promoting geopolitical pluralism in the CIS: GUUAM and Western foreign policy’, Problems of PostCommunism, 47(3), 2000, pp. 25–35.

Westernism, Eurasianism and Pragmatism 251 5. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations’, Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 1993, pp. 22–49. 6. Hendrik Spruyt, ‘The prospects for neo-imperial and nonimperial outcomes in the former Soviet space’, in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott (eds), The End of Empire: The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective, Armonk, NY and London, 1997, pp. 315–37 (p. 323). 7. Kuzio, ‘Geopolitical pluralism in the CIS’, p. 82. 8. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, ‘The emergence of eurasianism’, California Slavic Studies, 4, 1967, pp. 39–72. 9. Andrei Kozyrev, Preobrazhenie, Moscow, 1995, pp. 277–9. 10. Ivan G. Tiouline, ‘Russia. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Through decline towards renewal’, in Brian Hocking (ed.) Foreign Ministries: Change and Adaptation, Basingstoke, 1999, pp. 170–87 (p. 171). 11. Ibid, pp. 170–1. 12. A. V. Torkunov et al., Vneshniaia politika Rossiiskoi Federatsii 1992–1999, Moscow, 1999, p. 19. 13. Interview with Raul Mälk, Ambassador of Estonia in London, and formerly Minister of Foreign Affairs, London, 6 August 2001. 14. Interview with Justas Paleckis, Ambassador of Lithuania in London, London, 22 August 2001. Paleckis was formerly Vice-Chairperson of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet and later adviser to President Algirdas Brazauskas. 15. Interview with Roza Otunbayeva, Ambassador of the Kyrgyz Republic in London, London, 28 August 2001. 16. Dov Lynch, Russian Peacekeeping Strategies in the CIS: The Cases of Moldova, Georgia and Tajikistan, Basingstoke, 2000, pp. 111–18. 17. Lena Jonson, The Tajik War: A Challenge to Russian Policy, London, 1998, pp. 8–9. 18. Lynch, Russian Peacekeeping Strategies. 19. Roy Allison, ‘Military factors in foreign policy’, in Neil Malcolm, Alex Pravda, Roy Allison and Margot Light, Internal Factors in Russian Foreign Policy, Oxford, 1996, pp. 230–85 (p. 264). 20. Michael Anderson, ‘Russia and the former Yugoslavia’, in Mark Webber (ed.) Russia and Europe: Conflict or Cooperation?, Basingstoke and New York, 2000, pp. 179–209 (pp. 188–91). 21. Andrei Kozyrev, ‘Russia and NATO: A partnership for a united and peaceful Europe’, NATO Review, 42(4), 1994, pp. 3–6. 22. Neil Malcolm, ‘Foreign policy making’, in Malcolm et al., Internal Factors, pp. 101–68 (p. 145). 23. ‘Russia and the CIS: Does the West’s position need adjustment?’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 22 September 1994, in Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, 56(38), 1994, pp. 1–5. 24. Mark Webber, CIS Integration Trends: Russia and the Former Soviet South, London, 1997, pp. 14–16. 25. Roy Allison, ‘The Chechenia conflict: Military and security policy implications’, in Roy Allison and Christoph Bluth (eds), Security Dilemmas in Russia and Eurasia, London and Washington, DC, 1998, pp. 241–80 (pp. 264–67). 26. Michael Binyon, ‘Kozyrev threatens force to protect ethnic Russians’, The Times, 19 April 1995.

252 Peter J. S. Duncan 27. Richard Sakwa and Mark Webber, ‘The Commonwealth of Independent States, 1991–1998: Stagnation and survival’, Europe–Asia Studies, 51(3), 1999, pp. 379–415; Martha Brill Olcott, Anders Åslund and Sherman W. Garnett, Getting it Wrong: Regional Cooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent States, Washington, DC, 1999, esp. pp. 1–36. 28. NATO Review, Summit edition, 47(2), 1999. 29. For a liberal Russian view of Russia’s international situation, see Vladimir Baranovsky, ‘Russia: A part of Europe or apart from Europe?’, International Affairs (London), 76(3), 2000, pp. 443–58. 30. ‘Kontseptsiia vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 11 July 2000. 31. Mette Skak, From Empire to Anarchy: Postcommunist Foreign Policy and International Relations, London, 1996, pp. 192–222. 32. Atis Lejinsˇ, ‘Joining the EU and NATO’, in Atis Lejinsˇ (ed.), Baltic Security Prospects at the Turn of the 21st Century, Helsinki, 1999, pp. 9–50. 33. Vladimir Mikhailov and Konstantin Drachevskii, ‘Po puti vzaimodeistviia i sotrudnichestva’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 4 November 2000. 34. Clelia Rontoyanni, ‘Building the wider Europe: Ambitions and constraints in Russia’s policies towards Belarus and Ukraine’, Glasgow Papers, No. 3, 2000, pp. 4–9. 35. Anatoly Rozanov, ‘Belarus: Foreign policy priorities’, in Sherman W. Garnett and Robert Legvold (eds), Belarus at the Crossroads, Washington DC, 1999, p. 25. 36. Alice Lagnado, ‘Belarussian election landslide “Undemocratic” ’, The Times, 11 September 2001. 37. Viacheslav Chornovil, quoted in Andrew Wilson, Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith, Cambridge and New York, 1997, p. 176. 38. James Sherr, ‘Russia–Ukraine rapprochement?: The Black Sea fleet accords’, Survival, 39(3), 1997, pp. 33–50 (p. 43). 39. James Sherr, ‘The dismissal of Borys Tarasyuk’, Conflict Studies Research Centre Occasional Brief, 79, 6 October 2000. 40. Paul D’Anieri, Robert Kravchuk and Taras Kuzio, Politics and Society in Ukraine, Boulder, CO and Oxford, 1999, p. 227. 41. Tat’iana Silina, ‘O chem sheptalis’ prezidenty?’, Zerkalo nedeli, 17 February 2001. 42. Michael W. Miller, ‘Moldova: A state nation. Identity under postcommunism’, Slovo, 7(1), 1994, pp. 56–71 (p. 70). 43. Jonathan Aves, Georgia: From Chaos to Stability?, London, 1993, pp. 26–37. 44. On Karabakh, see Edmund Herzig, The New Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, London, 1999, pp. 65–73. 45. Nodar Broladze, ‘Gruziia vozvrashchaetsia v sferu vliianiia Rossii?’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 27 September 2001. 46. R. Freitag Wirminghaus, ‘Turkmenistan’s place in Central Asia and the world’, in Mehdi Mozaffari (ed.), Security Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States: The Southern Belt, Basingstoke and New York, 1997, pp. 66–84. 47. John Anderson, The International Politics of Central Asia, Manchester, 1997, p. 200. 48. Annette Bohr, Uzbekistan: Politics and Foreign Policy, London, 1998, pp. 49–56.

Westernism, Eurasianism and Pragmatism 253 49. Rafis Abazov, The Formation of Post-Soviet International Politics in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Seattle, WA 1999, pp. 42–9. 50. Lena Jonson, ‘Russia and Central Asia’, in Roy Allison and Lena Jonson (eds), Central Asian Security: The New International Context, London and Washington, DC, 2001, pp. 95–126 (p. 100). 51. Roy Allison, ‘Structures and frameworks for security policy cooperation in Central Asia’, in ibid., pp. 219–46 (pp. 220–3). 52. Allen C. Lynch, ‘The realism of Russia’s foreign policy’, Europe–Asia Studies, 53(1), 2001, pp. 7–31.

13 Conclusion: Stalin’s Death 50 Years On Wendy Slater

Our past hasn’t become past yet – the main problem of this country is that we don’t know when it will become past.1 The chapters in this book were prompted by an anniversary – the passing of a decade since the demise of the Soviet Union. Contributors to the conference from which this book developed were asked to reflect upon what those ten years had taught them about their various fields of study. Between holding the conference and publishing the volume, there was another significant anniversary in the former Soviet Union – 50 years since the death of Stalin in March 1953. Despite the artificiality of ‘round number’ anniversaries as historical markers, there is still an argument for using them to prompt timely analysis. In this case, I want to ask how the half-century anniversary of Stalin’s death was marked in Russia, and what this reveals about perceptions of Russian history.

Commemorating Stalin VTsIOM (the All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion) conducted a poll of 1600 adults to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Stalin’s death. As a snapshot of public opinion, the poll left VTsIOM director Yurii Levada ‘perplexed’. The most significant finding was that over half the respondents (53 per cent) believed that Stalin had played a positive role in the history of the country, while only 33 per cent believed his role to have been negative. The remaining 14 per cent were unable to answer. As reported by Interfax,2 the poll also gave the following results (respondents were allowed to agree with more 254

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than one statement – the total thus exceeds 100 per cent). ●

●

● ●

●

●

●

36 per cent answered that the most important thing about Stalin was that Russia won the Great Patriotic War under his leadership, whatever mistakes he had made; 27 per cent agreed with the statement that Stalin was ‘a cruel, inhumane tyrant, guilty of killing millions of people’; 27 per cent believed that the truth about Stalin was not yet known; 20 per cent agreed that Stalin was ‘a wise leader who made the USSR a powerful and prosperous country’; 20 per cent believed that only a tough ruler could have maintained order in the circumstances of ‘class struggle and external threat’; 18 per cent agreed that Stalin left the USSR unprepared for war in 1941; 16 per cent believed that ‘Russia needs leaders like Stalin’ and expected such a leader to emerge.

For all the crudity and possible room for error or manipulation in opinion polling (although VTsIOM is universally recognized as the most experienced and ‘scientific’ of Russian polling organizations), the evidence does seem to point to a fairly widespread acceptance of Stalin and Stalinism. This, in fact, is a trend that began in the late 1990s, reversing the total rejection of Stalinism that was seen under perestroika, and it can be seen in parallel with the growing attitude of ‘neo-traditionalism’, or nostalgia for Russian greatness and negative feelings towards the West.3 The figure of Stalin seemed to evoke positive responses when associated with concepts like ‘law and order’; prosperity (for the country, rather than the individual); and military victory. This is unsurprising, given the general dearth of such things in Russia since the demise of the Soviet Union. The increase in lawlessness, particularly violent crime, has been shocking with three million criminal acts committed in 2001 – half of them serious. Putin rebuked senior law enforcement officers in February 2002 because, he said, ‘murder, kidnapping, robbery, and burglaries have become a fact of life’. Another negative phenomenon since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been the impoverishment of large swathes of the population – 30.9 million people in the fourth quarter of 2002 received an average monthly income below the subsistence minimum (set at 1893 roubles), according to State Statistics Committee figures. This is more shocking when coupled with the enrichment of the few. The same figures suggested that the richest 10 per cent of the population received nearly one-third (29.3 per cent) of national income during

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2002; whilst at the pinnacle of national wealth the number of billionaires in Russia (measured by Forbes magazine) reached 17 in 2003: there had been none in 2000.4 Finally, Russian foreign policy since the end of the Soviet Union has been prickly, but largely impotent, faced with the overweening might of the USA. Nevertheless, issues of national pride have dictated some foreign policy departures from a generally pro-Western trajectory, particularly since the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.5 Thus, a more favourable attitude towards Stalin is generated by his positive associations with the order, stability and prosperity that so many in Russia lack. There is also a need to reclaim the episodes in Soviet history that Russia can best appropriate – most obviously, of course, the Great Patriotic War. Pro-Stalin sentiment in Russia should not surprise us, however, when we remember that Stalin’s name was only completely blackened for two relatively short periods in the last half-century. The first of these coincided with the removal of his body from the Mausoleum in 1961 following the 22nd Party Congress; the second, at the height of perestroika in the late 1980s, saw the figure of Stalin and the ‘Stalinshchina’ (time of Stalin) come to embody all that was negative in the Soviet system.6 Neither occasion lasted more than a few years; neither was successful in producing a more measured evaluation of Stalin; both were largely determined by contemporary political needs. Now, the figure of Stalin seems to have its uses for the ‘managed democracy’ of the Putin era. Boris Dubin, who analysed the VTsIOM survey, claimed that there was a covert policy of rehabilitating Stalin: ‘the symbolic attempts to restore the name and person of Stalin to the official pantheon of Russia’s heroes have become more frequent and the level at which these attempts are made more elevated’.7 More direct claims came from State Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalev, at one time a political prisoner in the post-Stalinist system, who suggested on 5 March 2003, that the current Russian presidency should bear responsibility for Stalin’s rising popularity, for it continued to back the concept of a strong hand to govern Russia. Kovalev, admittedly making a political point, implicated Putin’s background in the Soviet security system in the Stalin revival: the President, said Kovalev, had held a small private party to celebrate Stalin’s birthday in 1999.8 The Russian media marked the 50th anniversary of Stalin’s death in various ways, but the main characteristic of the commemoration was its ambivalence. Take, for example, the commentary on 5 March from TV-Tsentr: Stalin exterminated so many independent-minded people from all social strata that many survivors were happy that they survived and,

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at the same time, had no idea how to live without him, the all-seeing man who always knew what was right and what was wrong. Hitler lost everything and ended his days in a locked bunker. Stalin could act consistently and step by step; he knew when to hide in the shade. He won over Lenin, Trotskii and Bukharin. Then he won over Hitler – at what price is a different story – and conquered half the world. He was defeated only by death. He lost no battles in his life. What all of us gained from his rule and whether we gained anything at all, is still a subject for argument.9 The glossy popular history magazine, Rodina, devoted much of its February 2003 edition to a collection of articles entitled ‘Fifty Years without Stalin’, to which the editors penned a similarly ambivalent introduction: Under [Stalin] Russia, having lived through the most terrible cataclysms – war, destruction, famine – achieved the status of a global superpower. Not considering the losses, Stalin directed all his energy and will towards creating a powerful, centralized state. This state seemed so strong that no-one could even conceive of its swift demise in the twentieth century. However, the immense human losses, the colossal popular efforts, the imbalanced economy all meant that the burden of global leadership was unbearable. The Stalinist world collapsed surprisingly quickly, without war and even with the help of the CPSU itself. The system, envisaged to endure for centuries, passed into history, but its heritage remained. Its birthmarks are visible in politics, economy, science and literature. On the cusp of the millennium, Russia is again in search of its path and its history. So what role has been prepared for Stalin? Do we reject his heritage?10 The anniversary also saw more polarized positions emerge, reflecting the contemporary political situation. Human rights activists railed against the tenor of the commemoration, which they saw as overly positive and having succumbed to a kind of national myth-making. In an interview with Interfax on 5 March, Aleksandr Iakovlev – the ‘godfather of perestroika’ and Chairman of the Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Oppression – expressed outrage at the attention being paid to the anniversary of Stalin’s death. The Russian mass media have been dancing around this figure for nearly five days. It’s amazing. What this petty occasion deserves is

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just a line reading that the tyrant died 50 years ago. The worst thing is that Stalin is being pictured as a martyr who was probably poisoned, or probably strangled.11 Now it turns out he was a good guy who smiled at kids and gave them sweets. It’s shameful! This man signed a decree which said that children can be executed from the age of twelve. He eliminated all of his relatives and all of his comrades-inarms who were unfortunate enough to learn what they shouldn’t have. This man destroyed the peasantry, and nobility and Russian culture as a whole. Are we as Russians so oblivious? Iakovlev concluded his tirade with a significant, if somewhat obvious, point. ‘If the same hullabaloo had been staged in Germany over Hitler, a countless number of court actions would have followed.’ Similarly, state Duma deputy Sergei Yushchenkov – himself shortly to become a victim of Russia’s crime wave or political intrigue (he was murdered on 17 April) – likened Stalinism to Fascism, both of which, he said ‘appear only in countries where the majority of people are pauperized and turned into a crowd of slaves longing for a heavy hand. This crowd masochistically takes for the impulses of willpower the sadistic measures implemented by the authorities.’12 The German prohibition on Nazi propaganda, facilitated by the defeat and post-war occupation of Nazi Germany, was not mirrored in post-Stalinist Soviet Russia for obvious reasons – the system had been vindicated by military victory and was only ever modified, rather than eradicated. But the question of why it might be acceptable (albeit in a qualified manner) to praise Stalin, but not Hitler, has also exercised most recently and controversially British author Martin Amis who, in Koba the Dread (and citing Solzhenitsyn), expresses it far more vividly as the ‘Little Moustache versus the Big Moustache’.13 Unsurprisingly, Stalin’s death was commemorated by the largely elderly adherents of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), who laid flowers at his tomb on 5 March. Their leader, Gennadii Ziuganov, seems now to have overcome the embarrassment that used to characterize his excursions into Soviet history when forced to evaluate Stalin. After all, Ziuganov was a man who managed to write on the entire Soviet period without mentioning Stalin’s name once.14 His current position is that ‘Stalin was a great statesman who had a strong fighting character and a strong will’; and that the ‘repressions’ (the Terror) were ‘mistakes which the party evaluated in due course and did its best to avoid’.15

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Stalin in Russian history Stalin is evidently still a live political issue in Russia. For this reason, and because Stalinism is inextricably woven into the fabric of the individual histories of so many living Russians, it continues to be a past that has not yet passed. According to archivist and historian Oleg Khlevniuk In Russia, Stalinism continues to be perceived (justly or not) as a past that has not yet been overcome. Portraits of Stalin in the street demonstrations of ultra-leftists are a reflection of attitudes that are widespread throughout society, in the government bureaucracy, and also among a certain segment of historians. On the opposite end of the spectrum there are anti-Stalinists who view any kind of scholarly objectivity according to the maxim ‘to explain is to excuse’.16 The Stalinist past remains tangibly evident in the infrastructure of the the country (the layout of Moscow, the steel (stal’) plant of Magnitogorsk);17 it is also embedded in the personal memories of numerous individuals. The recovery and recording of these recollections has been a major feature of the last 15 years or so, managed by civic organizations like Memorial.18 Irina Paperno describes this ‘motley (and evolving) corpus of texts: memoirs, memoir-novels (written by professional writers and by amateurs), memoiristic essays, diaries, notebooks, scattered notes, and at least two address (or telephone) books’ as a ‘virtual community’. Whether polished memoirs or personal papers deposited in the ‘people’s archives’ organized by groups like Memorial, and whether written contemporaneously or much later, this corpus of material signifies a movement for self-realization that coincided with the end of the Soviet Union. ‘Something happened’ writes Paperno, ‘people’s accounts of life under the Soviet regime have become a matter of public record, marking the end of the Soviet regime and the end of the twentieth century’.19 In many of these accounts, the Stalin era occupied a central place as the definitive Soviet experience and the framework for crucial experiences in people’s lives. Whether victims or beneficiaries of the Soviet 1930s (and one could argue that all were victims), such people were shaped by the Stalinist project. This was not accidental: indeed, it was a conscious policy of Stalinism to mould the ‘new Soviet man’ (and woman), and one mechanism for doing this was to encourage a stylized autobiographical narrative of the process.20 Translating this mechanism into private diary form, however, could

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produce intense psychological conflict for those who wanted, but felt in some ways unable, to become part of the Soviet project, as Jochen Hellbeck demonstrates in his analysis of the diary of Stepan Podlubny, a young man from Ukraine trying to reforge himself into the approved vision of a new Soviet man in Moscow.21 Thus, the vast corpus of autobiographical narratives that emerged at the end of the Soviet period had antecedents in the Stalin era. However, the demise of the Soviet Union gave this phenomenon new meaning. Paperno suggests that this context of the end of the Soviet Union, and the climax of the twentieth century, created a space where the [Russian] individual could gain a sense of self through his interaction with history. ‘Soviet people use history, catastrophic history, as a justification of authorship and a source of personal significance – an instrument of subjectivization. In the end, the self and history are inextricably linked’. Paperno also suggests that, for those who lived through Soviet times when private space was taboo, the new publishing phenomenon has provided ‘access to the inner recesses of each other’s lives’, and created ‘a virtual communal apartment’.22 This metaphor for post-Soviet society – an inescapable one for anyone writing about Soviet culture – suggests that the retelling of life stories has become a substitute for the absence of the regime, whose disappearance has left both its supporters and its opponents (the Intelligentsia) inhabiting a void. ‘The individual in everyday life experiences the memories of the past horrors, the vacuity of the present, and the uncertainties of the future in apocalyptic perspective.’23 It may be that in the telling and reading of life stories, we see another of those small connections that Sheila Fitzpatrick writes about in her Introduction to this volume as the next object of investigation for students of Russian society. Meanwhile, the teaching of history – that is, history as practised institutionally, particularly in schools – having lost its ideological carapace, remains mono-dimensional, lacking the immediacy of the personal accounts discussed by Paperno. Institutional history also remains shackled by the need for an ‘agreed version’ of Soviet history. This, too, can be seen as a legacy of the Soviet regime. It was not only the mendacity of the Stalinist ‘Short Course’ that was damaging: it was also the insistence that there was only one correct version of history, an attitude that persisted even when that (Stalinist) version was finally consigned to the ‘trash-heap’. In the late 1980s, Stephen Cohen’s interview with one of ‘Gorbachev’s Reformers’, historian Yurii Afanas’ev, revealed their conceptually polarized attitudes towards ‘truth’ in history, with Cohen suggesting that there might be competing ‘truths’, and Afanas’ev seemingly

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unable to overcome his positivistic training.24 That mentality persists: the policy was announced in 2001 of commissioning a single history textbook for use in schools, although none has yet been created. Meanwhile, the history school curriculum ‘gallops through the entire past, from the Stone Age […] to the Chechen crisis, in five years’.25 The twentieth century is covered at age 15 and again at 17 but, when questioned, the children in one Moscow school ‘agreed that there were too many “facts”, that modern history was “grey”, and that they preferred the stories that they read at home’. Students and school children, moreover, saw no connection between the stories they heard from their parents and grandparents (about the war, in particular) and the history they learned in school. As Merridale points out, ‘Memory and school history have come adrift from one another, the one remaining painful and divisive while the other is now safe but bland.’26 The historical profession in Russia, meanwhile, has produced very few young historians in the field of Soviet history since the end of the Soviet Union. According to Khlevniuk this is in part because the political changes of 1991 were played out in sharp conflicts between old and new historiography, and old and new historians. Stalinism, as we have seen, is still very much a live issue within Russia. Professional historians in Russia over the last decade have instead focused more on producing collections of archival materials and reference works than on monographs about Stalinism, although there are examples of highly innovative and productive collaborations with Western colleagues, and a few notable individual works by Osokina and Zubkova, for example.27

Stalin and history in the West Stalinism is not only a divisive issue for Russia. Some of the most poisonous disagreements between historians in the West have been over their interpretations of the Stalinist period. The trajectory of the historiography is well known and there is no need to restate it here. But it is profoundly troubling that, at a time when many historians are producing exciting and innovative research in the field of Stalinism, the old arguments between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘revisionists’ continue to be played out before the wider reading public. Martin Amis, for example, mocks the revisionist stance: ‘If Getty goes on revising at his current rate, he will eventually be telling us that only two people died in the Great Terror, and that one very rich peasant was slightly hurt during Collectivization.’ This jibe cheapens Amis’s meditation upon why intellectuals, including his father and his closest friend, chose to be on the

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Left, despite the horrors of Stalinism. Koba the Dread, nevertheless, is not really history, it is a personal memoir about what Stalinism has meant to Amis and, of course, wonderfully executed even if the history is somewhat skewed.28 The debate over revisionist views of Stalinism has, at times, soured into the sort of intemperate attacks upon colleagues that would not have been out of place in the Cold War era. This is a pity, because so much new history-writing on Stalinism has been vibrant, engaging, and courageous, and should be more widely read. Thus, rather than leaving the newspaper columns to the ‘unproductive and intellectually vapid name calling’ of many recent post-Cold War critiques of revisionist history, especially that of Stalinism,29 it would be more productive if ‘those laboring in the field’s trenches [would] pause to convey its current debates and achievements to comparativists, Europeanists, non-historians, and the wider public’.30 The last decade has seen both archival and conceptual revolutions in the study of Stalinism. There has been a serendipitous, and hugely productive, confluence between the greater availability of archival sources since the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new cultural history (encompassing the ‘linguistic turn’). Historians have attempted to recreate the separate cultural universe of Stalinism – ‘Stalinism as a Civilisation’ as one of the first such studies, Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain, was subtitled. Historians working on Stalinism have also looked for new ways to conceptualize it, and have viewed it (as with Fascism) both as a form of ‘neo-traditionalism’ and as an ‘alternative modernity’.31 In the future, it is likely that the chronological parameters of research into Stalinism will be expanded beyond the ‘long decade’ of the 1930s (1928–39) in order to look back into the 1920s and forward to wartime and post-War Stalinist society. This is already beginning to happen: Stalinism can be investigated in terms of its cultural origins after the Civil War and during the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), and in its mutation in the post-war era that gave rise to the later transformation of the Soviet system.32

Prospects for Stalin The anniversary of Stalin’s death did suggest a way to resolve the fraught questions of how Stalinism can be remembered and historicized in Russia. It is clear that divisions about Stalin and Stalinism are becoming far less relevant with the passage of time. When the newspaper Tribuna asked politicians to comment on Stalin, Boris Nemtsov, leader of the

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centrist, but opposition, Union of Rightist Forces (SPS), positioned himself as representative of the young generation for whom Stalin was an irrelevance, or, put less crudely, mere ‘history’. (Nemtsov, born in 1959, has carefully constructed his image – including a personal Internet homepage – as representative of the post-Soviet generation, untainted by association with the Soviet regime.)33 I knew neither Lenin nor Stalin, and during the time of Khrushchev I was a child. I was a young man during the Brezhnev era, and not personally acquainted with him. Therefore, I can say nothing either good or bad about these people. Let the old Communists decide what to think about them.34 Similarly, an attitude of indifference prevailed among 15 per cent of respondents to one reported opinion poll, who said that the name of Stalin triggered no associations beyond that of ‘a pipe-smoking boss with a moustache’.35 It was unclear whether this was a feature of generational change, but Nemtsov’s position was clear: debates about Stalin belong to history and have no place in contemporary politics. The Soviet past is now largely a matter of irrelevance to younger Russians. It serves as a source of kitsch fashion – for example, the practice of bringing out the Soviet school uniform of bows and pinafores on the last day of the final year at school, ‘when teenage schoolgirls accessorize them with fishnet stockings, garters, and platform boots’, or as material for advertising campaigns.36 In terms of everyday life, Stalinism is less of an issue than, say, unemployment. It is no longer ‘more interesting to read than to live’ as it was under perestroika.37 The enormity and atrocity of Stalinism remain, but perhaps it is at last becoming a past that has passed.

Notes and references 1. Aleksander Sokurov, director of Russian Ark, quoted in ‘90 Minutes that Shook the World’, The Guardian Friday Review, 28 March 2003, p. 2. 2. Interfax, 4 March 2003. At the time of writing, the second part of the article that contextualized and analysed these statistics had not yet been published. Part 1 was to be found in: Boris Dubin, ‘Stalin i drugie. Figury vysshei vlasti v obshchestvennom mnenii sovremennoi Rossii’, Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniia, 1 (63), January–February 2003, pp. 13–25. 3. Boris Dubin, ‘Stalin i drugie’. 4. Kommersant-Daily, 28 February 2003, reporting the list of the world’s 476 billionaires in Forbes magazine’s March 2003 issue.

264 Wendy Slater 5. On foreign policy see Peter Duncan’s contribution to this volume. 6. For a brief, but comprehensive, summary of this see Maria Ferretti, ‘Rasstroistvo pamiati: Rossiia i Stalinizm’, Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniia, 5 (2002), pp. 40–54. 7. Boris Dubin, ‘Stalin i drugie’, p. 13. 8. Kovalev’s statement was reported by RFE/RL Newsline, 6 March 2003. 9. Centre TV, Moscow, 0800 gmt 5 Mar 03, BBC monitoring. 10. ‘50 let bez Stalina’, Rodina, 2 (2003), p. 1. 11. Iakovlev was referring to two documentaries about Stalin’s death, broadcast on 2 March by ORT and NTV. 12. Yushchenkov’s speech in State Duma, reported on TVS, 5 March (BBC monitoring). 13. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (London, 2002), pp. 81–2. 14. In his book Derzhava, ed. N. A. Vasetskii, Moscow, 1995. 15. Reported by RIA news agency, 5 March 2003; see also Ziuganov’s lengthy comment for Rodina, 2 (2003), pp. 32–3. 16. Oleg Khlevniuk, Kritika, 2(2), Spring 2001, pp. 319–27, p. 327. 17. Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era, Berkeley, 1996, p. 240. 18. Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory During the Yeltsin Era, Ithaca, 2002; Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, London, 2000. 19. Irina Paperno, ‘Personal accounts of the Soviet experience’, Kritika, 3(4), Fall 2002, pp. 577–610, p. 581. 20. In his Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation, Stephen Kotkin used these narratives, collected for an official history of Magnitogorsk that was never written, as source material. 21. Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist soul: The diary of Stepan Podlubny, 1931–1939’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 44, 1996, pp. 344–73. 22. Paperno, ‘Personal accounts of the Soviet experience’, pp. 584, 600. 23. Ibid, p. 609. 24. Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina van den Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers, New York, 1989. 25. Catherine Merridale, ‘Redesigning history in contemporary Russia’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38, 2003, pp. 13–28, p. 26. 26. Ibid. 27. Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘Stalinism and the Stalin period after the “Archival Revolution” ’, Kritika, 2(2), Spring 2001, pp. 319–27. Khlevniuk provides a succinct synthesis of the new research on Stalinism. His observations about Russian historians are supported by Yuri Afanasyev, ‘Reclaiming Russian history’, Perspective, 7(1), 1996. 28. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread. The jibe at Getty is a footnote on p. 160. For a response to the book by one of Amis’s two interlocutors, see Christopher Hitchens, ‘Lightness at midnight: Stalinism without irony’, The Atlantic Monthly, September 2002. 29. Lynne Viola, ‘The Cold War in American Soviet historiography and the end of the Soviet Union’, Russian Review, 61, 2002, pp. 25–34, p. 33. See also other

Stalin’s Death 50 Years On 265

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

articles in this issue ‘Historiography of the Soviet period in post-Soviet perspective’, pp. 1–51. Kritika, 2(4), Fall 2001, pp. 707–11, p. 711. For example, Stephen Kotkin, ‘Modern times: The Soviet Union and the interwar conjuncture’, Kritika, 2(1), Winter 2001, pp. 111–64; articles in David Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis (eds), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, 2000. ‘ “1930s studies” ’, Kritika, 4(1) Winter 2003, pp. 1–4. http:www.nemtsov.ru Tribuna, 5 March 2003. Public Opinion Fund poll, reported by ITAR-TASS on 4 March 2003. Merridale, ‘Redesigning history’, p. 25. On kitsch see also chapters by Svetlana Boym and Theresa Sabonis-Chafee in Adele Marie Barker, Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, Durham and London, 1999. Quoted by Ferretti ‘Rasstvoistvo pamiati’, p. 41.

Index Abkhazia, Abkhaz xi, 61–82 passim, 155, 236, 247 Afanas’ev, Mikhail 212, 219, 260 Afghanistan 62, 187, 236, 241, 248 Aid 79, 103–21 passim, 236 Albania, Albanians 240, 241 Aleksii II, Patriarch 39, 40, 46 Aliev, Heydar 247 Almaty 93, 94, 95 Alonso, Ann Maria 79 Altai, Autonomous Republic 92, 156 America, Americans 23, 24, 79, 106, 108–21 passim, 159, 172, 209, 213, 221, 229, 231, 239, 241, 245, 255 Amis, Martin 258, 261–2, 264 n 28 Andrew the Apostle, Order of Andrew 28, 55 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) 241 Anthropology 11, 104 Ardov, Mikhail 199 Armed forces, army 51, 71, 73, 186 Armenia, Armenians 9, 61–82 passim, 230, 234, 240, 247 Åslund, Anders 114, 115 Assembly of the Peoples of Kazakhstan 93–4 Astrushevich, Pavel 96 Australia 159 Azarenok, Yurii 49 Azerbaijan, Azeris 61–82 passim, 230, 232, 240, 247 Babayan, Samvel 71, 73 Badovskii, Dmitrii 219 Baku 68, 76, 247 Baltic states, Balts 42, 53, 228, 230, 231, 233–4, 242–3, 250 Bank of New York 115 Barber, John 122 Barkashov, Nikolai 21 Baroque 55

Basaev, Shamir 79 Bashkortostan 30, 219 Bazyliuk, Aleksandr 48 Belarus, Belarusians x, 21, 25, 33, 39–40, 41, 43, 46, 49–50, 51, 52–3, 56–7, 95, 230, 232, 235, 239, 243–4 Belarusian Popular Front 53 Belgium 17 Belorussian Exarchate 49 Belovezh’e Accord 25 Belykov, Gennadii 94 Berger, Peter 119 Beria, Lavrentii 42 Berezovskii, Boris 204 Berliner, Joseph 123 bin Laden, Osama 241, 249 Black Sea Fleet 245 Blat xi, 11, 122–43 Blium, Arlen 205 n 9 Bodnar, Vladimir 66 Bolsheviks, Bolshevism 7, 174 Bondarik, Nikolai 21 Borets’kyi, Iov, Metropolitan 41 Bosnia, Bosnia-Herzegovina 237, 240 Boycko, Maxim 115 Brandenberger, David 41 Brazauskas, Algirdas 242 Brezhnev, Leonid x, 4, 8, 263 Brie, Michael 221 Britain, British 56, 106, 149, 165, 172, 178 Brubaker, Rogers 84, 97 n 2 Bukharin 257 Bulgaria, Bulgarians 96 Buriatiia 9, 33, 160 Buzan, Barry 63 Bykov, Anatolii 151, 166 n 21 Byzantium 51 Canada 17, 159 Carnegie Centre, Moscow Carr, E.H. 5

266

217

Index 267 Castells, Manuel 126, 127–8 Caucasus, Caucasians 21, 23, 26, 30, 33, 34, 35, 38 n 54, 42, 79, 88, 155, 156, 246–7 Catholic Church, Roman Catholics 46, 230, 243 Censorship xii, 186–207 passim Central Committee (of CPSU) 7, 188, 232 Central Asia 42–3, 62, 84, 88, 230, 231, 238, 241, 246–9 Central Asian Battalion 248 Central Asian Economic Union (CAEU) 248 Central Europe 22, 103, 106, 107, 120, 165, 175 Ceyhan 247 Chechnia, Chechens 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 70, 79, 148, 155, 187, 188, 204, 211, 238–41 passim, 243, 261 Chernobyl’ 188, 202, 245 Chernomydrin, Viktor 54, 113 Chicherin, A.V. 179 China 231, 239, 241, 247, 249 Chis¸inau ˘ 68, 74, 76, 246 Christ the Saviour Cathedral, Moscow 55 Christianity, Christians 21, 34, 199, 250 Chubais, Anatolii, ‘Chubais Clan’ 109–20 passim, 149 Chukotka 148, 156 Citizens, citizenship, citizenship laws 10, 11, 17, 24, 27, 28–9, 34, 35, 90, 183, 202, 242 Civic identity, civic states 17, 18, 21, 24, 25, 32, 34, 47, 87, 90 Civil Code (of the Russian Federation) 180 Civil society xii, 6, 127–8, 171–85, 197 Civil War, the Russian 6 Civilizations (clash of) 23, 46, 50, 91, 230 Civilising mission (Russia’s) 10, 24, 91 Class, class struggle 10 Clinton, Bill, Clinton Administration 238, 247 Cohen, Stephen 7, 172, 182, 260

Cold War 7, 105, 208, 233, 238, 262 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) 25, 28, 164, 171, 175, 176, 228, 230, 231, 235–50 passim Communism, Communist project 5, 122 Communist Party of Belarus 49 Communist Party of Lithuania 242 Communist Party of the Russian Federation 44, 186, 187, 258 Communist Party of Ukraine 48–9, 54, 244 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) 186, 199, 257 Confederation 68 Constitutions 24, 34, 65, 67, 87, 89, 90, 173, 176, 178–80, 187, 202, 212 Constitutional Courts 29 Cornell, Svante 71 Corruption 73–4, 145, 229 Cossacks 79, 93–4, 96 Council of Europe 243 Crankshaw, Edward 123 Crime, criminal groups 72–4, 145, 173, 202, 255 Crimea 46, 48, 236–7, 245, 250 Cuba 241 Cyrylo-Methodian Society 47 Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic 104, 213, 239 Dagestan, Dagestanis 28, 30, 31, 33, 220 Danielyan, Anushavan 71, 80 Danylo of Halych 41 Dashnaks 234 Dawisha, Adeed 228 Dawisha, Karen 228 Dederer, Aleksandr 92 De facto states xi, 61–80 passim De-kulakization 3 Democracy, democratisation 111–12, 116–17, 198, 216, 221 De-Sovietization 9 Devaluation (see August 1998 crisis) Dicey, A.V. 178

268 Index Dnester Republic xi, 61–82 passim, 236, 246, 250 Donskoi, Dmitrii 39, 45 Dontsov, Dmytro 52 Dubin, Boris 256 Duchin´ski, Franciszek 52 Dugin, Aleksandr 23 Duma 25, 27–9 passim, 50, 77, 111–12, 187, 217, 237, 239, 241 Dushanbe 63 Dykov, Oleg 96 Easter, Gerald 133, 134 Eastern Europe 10, 22, 103, 105, 107 East Kazakhstan 91, 92 East Slavs, East Slavic idea x–xi, 21, 25, 28, 33, 39–60 passim Economy, economics xi, 11, 32, 72, 103–68 passim, 213–14, 255–6 Education, education policy 32 Elchibei, Abulfaz 232, 249 Elites 18, 20, 22, 31, 35, 50, 83, 88, 89, 93, 100 n 38, 119, 217–18, 220, 244, 249 El’tsin, Boris 23, 24, 28, 34, 43, 109, 115, 119, 149, 196, 198, 202, 232, 235, 237–9, 241 Engel, Barbara 3 England, English (see Britain) Ermalovich, Mikola 53 Erofeev, Vendikt 199 Erofeeva, Irina 91 Estonia, Estonians 27, 46, 165, 233–4, 241, 242–3 ‘Ethnic democracy’ 88 Ethnic minorities 19, 26, 31, 33, 34, 83, 94, 211, 242 Ethnic states 18, 85–6 Ethnicity 4, 17, 22, 30, 47, 64, 83 Euphrosyne of Polatsk 39 Eurasia, Eurasianism xii, 21, 23–4, 26–7, 36 n 17 and 18, 43, 89, 198, 230, 231, 232, 244, 249, 250 Eurasian Economic Community 244, 248 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) 112, 173

European Union (EU) 79, 103, 106, 112, 149, 156, 173, 231, 238, 241, 243–6 passim Fainsod, Merle 129 Fascism 2, 4, 258 Far East 9 Federal Governments’ Communication and Information Agency (FAPSI) 187 Federal Security Service (FSB) 187, 196–7, 202 Federalism xi, 27–9, 144–68 passim, 174, 211–16, 237–8 Federation Council 214–15 Feminism 3 Filaret, Patriarch 58 n 33 Filimonov, Sergei 194 Finland, Finns, Finno-Ugric 23, 26, 52, 53, 243 First World War x, 5–6, 234 Fitzpatrick, Sheila 123, 141 n 29, 260 Fleischer, Vera 10 Fleron, Frederic 122 Flex organizations 112–13 Foglizzo, John 114 Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) 187, 238 Foreign policy xii, 23–4, 27, 76–8, 195, 228–53, 256 France, French, French Revolution 5, 45, 107, 149, 165, 178 Freedom House 221 Frick, David 60 n 51 Gaidar, Yegor 109, 114, 239 Galicia, Galicians 53 Gamsakhurdia, Zviad 231, 249 Garkavets, Aleksandr 95, 96 General Accounting Office (GAO), USA 110, 112 Getty, J. Arch 7, 129, 261 Georgia, Georgians 19, 61–82 passim, 155, 230, 231, 236–7, 240, 246–7, 250 Germany, Germans 2, 3–4, 5, 11, 41, 45, 85, 87, 92, 94, 96, 99 n 32, 106, 112, 149, 172, 178, 184–5 n 9, 193, 258

Index 269 Gill, Graeme 129 Gizel, Innokentii 41–2 Gladyshev, Vladimir 197–8 glasnost’ 188, 190, 202 Glasnost’ Defence Foundation 202 Glavlit 186–95 passim, 197–200, 202 Glazunov, Il’ya 26 Glinka, Mikhail 27 Glinski, Dmitrii 172 Gogol, Nikolai 43 Goldschmidt, Paul W. 190 Golosov, Grigorii 220 Gongadze, Grigorii 246 Gorbachev, Mikhail 12, 47, 164, 188, 198, 232, 242, 260 Gorbenko, Leonid 166 n 16 Gorenburg, Dmitry 33 Grachev, Pavel 236 Great Patriotic War 6, 9, 156, 255 Greek Catholic Church 49 GRU (see Main Intelligence Directorate) GUAM (see GUUAM) Gulag 2, 3, 11 Gumilev, Lev 53 Gumilev, Nikolai 189, 205 n 12 Gusinskii, Vladimir 204 GUUAM 230, 231, 240, 245–8, 250

Homo sovieticus (see Soviet identity) Hokkaido University 217 Horowitz, Donald 94 Hovannisian, Raffi 234 Hrushevs’kyi, Mykhailo 39, 54 Human rights 75, 238 Hungary 104, 107, 165, 239 Huntington, Samuel P. 46, 230, 250

Haimson, Leopold 5 Haran’, Olexii 50 Harvard 109–20 passim Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) 109–10, 111–12, 114–20 passim Harvard Interview Project 3 Hay, Jonathan 112, 113, 117–18 Hellbeck, Jochen 260 Helmer, John 113 Hendrik, Toomas 233 Hero of Russia/the Soviet Union 28 Hirschman, Albert 88 Historikerstreit 7, 11 History, historiography x, 1–12 passim, 13 n 14, 26, 32, 41, 67–8, 91, 254–65 passim Hitchens, Christopher 264 Hitler 257–8 Hoffman, Erik 122

Japan 112, 172 Jews 21, 148 Jinjolia, Sokrat 67 Jowitt, Ken 129

Iakovlev, Aleksandr 257–8 Iaroslavl’ 53 Ihnatou ˘ ski, Usevalad 52, 53 IMF 111–21 passim, 173 Imperialism 20–21, 34, 76, 247 Incomes, real incomes 152–8 Informal practices (see blat) Ingushetia 34, 148 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) 62, 69, 77 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 67 Internet 203 Iran 246–8 passim Iraq 240 Islam, anti-Islamic views 30, 33, 34, 38 n 54, 62, 199, 232, 236, 241 Italy, Italians 149, 155, 178, 221 Ivanov, Igor’ 240

Kabardino-Balkariia 160 Kabul 248 Kaliningrad 240, 242 Kalmykia 33, 219 Kapto, A 189 Karachaevo-Cherkassiia 160, 220 Kazakh language 85–90 passim, 98 n 9 Kazakhstan, Kazakhs xi, 9, 27, 83–100, 230, 247–9, 250 Kebich, Viacheslav 244 KGB 187, 194, 195, 206 n 27 Khasbulatov, Ruslan 114 Khazar Kaganate, Khazars 45 Khlevniuk, Oleg 259, 261, 264 n 27

270 Index Khodasevich, Vladislav 189, 205 n 12 Kholodov, Dmitrii 203 Khrapunov, Viktor 94–5 Khristenko, Viktor 157 Khrushchev, Nikita 4, 183, 263 Kiev 40, 41, 43, 50–1, 53–6 Kiev Rus’, Kievan Rus’ (see Rus’) Kiprian, Metropolitan 39 Kirienko, Sergei 160 Kiselyova, Emma 128 Kistiakovskii, B.A. 179 Kocharian, Robert 247 Kokh, Alfred 115 Kolstø, Pål 88 kompromat 138 Kopystens’kyi, Zakhariia 40–1 Korea, Koreans 85, 92, 94, 96, 99 n 32, 241 Kosovo 48, 240, 241 Kostomarov, Mykola 47, 48, 49 Kotkin, Stephen 7, 262, 264 n 20 Kovalev, Sergei 256 Kozak, Dmitrii 167 n 36 Kozyrev, Andrei 23, 232–3, 235–9 passim, 241, 249 Krasnodar 156 Krasnoiarsk 151, 166 n 19 Krauchanka, Pyotr 235 Kravchuk, Leonid 231, 244–5 Kryshtanovskaia, Olga 111 Kuchma, Leonid 40, 46, 54, 245, 246 Kuibyshev 9 Kulikovo Field, Battle of (1380) 39, 43 Kurgan 160 Kuromiya, Hiroaki 7 Kursk 39, 45, 151, 167 n 38 Kutafin, Oleg 29 Kutuzov 45 Kuzio, Taras 36 n 6, 228, 230, 231 Kymlicka, Will 18, 20, 22, 35 Kyrgyzstan, Kyrgyz 87, 90, 93, 98 n 5, 230, 235, 241, 244, 247–9, 250 Lachin corridor 247 Lad 92, 93, 95 Landsbergis, Vytautas 234 Lapidus, Gail 218 Lapina, Nataliia 218

Latvia, Latvians 88, 241, 242–3 Latynina, Iuliia 150 Lavrov, Aleksei 157, 159 Law xi, 134, 171–85, 187, 199–201, 210 Lebed’, Aleksandr 151 Ledeneva, Alena 11 Lenin 7, 73, 189, 257, 263 Leningrad 3, 9, 193 Levada, Yurii 254 Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) 33 Liberalism, liberals 6, 83, 105–6, 181, 230, 239 Lipton, David 112 Lithuania, Lithuanians 39, 49, 234, 235, 242–3, 249 Luhans’k 46 Lukashenka, Aliaksandr 40, 49–50, 239, 244 Luik, Juri 234 Lukin, Vladimir 232 Luzhkov, Yurii 150, 221 Lypa, Yurii 52 Lynch, Allen 249 Lysenko, Nikolai 21 Macedonia 241 Magadan 152 Magnitogorsk 259, 264 n 20 Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 187 Malaniuk, Yevhen 52 Manning, Robert 7 Maracusta, Grigoriy 68 ‘Marriott Brigade’ 107 Marshall Plan 106 Marx, Karl 181 Matsuzato, Kimitaka 210, 219 Mau, Vladimir 165 Mazepa, Ivan 55 McAuley, Mary 217 Melkoumian, Naira 70 Memorial Society 2, 259 Memory 2–4, 260–1 Meri, Lennart 233 Merridale, Catherine 3, 13 n 6, 261 Messianism 23 Messner, Dirk 126

Index 271 Middle East 231 Migdal, Joel S. 63 Mikhailov, Sergei 28 Milosˇevic´, Slobodan 240 Minin 45 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia (MFA) 232–3, 237 Minsk 244 Molchanov, Mikhail 42–3, 56 Moldova, Moldovans 46, 61–82 passim, 230, 235, 237, 246, 249 Mongolia, Mongols 23, 26, 43, 52, 241 Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States (1933) 65, 66 Morningstar, Richard L. 118–19 Moscow, Muscovy 9, 10, 11, 23, 32, 35, 39, 40, 51, 52, 55, 109, 148, 149, 150, 152, 157, 193, 219, 236, 242, 259, 260 Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) 233 Müller, Max 52 Multiculturalism 27 Multi-national states 18, 34, 83, 88 Muslims 26, 28, 30, 34–5, 38 n 54, 84, 219, 231, 238, 250 Myths, mythology 19, 35, 42–3, 44–6, 53–5, 67–8 Nagorno-Karabakh, NagornoKarabakh Republic 61–82 passim, 234, 247, 250 Nations, national identity, nationalism x, 17, 19, 20, 22, 31, 34–5, 56, 70, 83–4, 88–9, 229–30 National Republican Party 21 Nation-states, nation-state building 17–19, 22 National Bolshevism 41 Nationalizing policy, nationalizing states 18, 19, 36 n 5, 84 Nativism 56 NATO 231, 237–41 passim, 243–5, 247–8, 255

Nazarbaev, Nursultan 87–9 passim, 92–5 passim, 248 Nazis, Nazism 2, 3, 5, 11, 258 Nazdratenko, Evgenii 149, 151, 166 n 16 Nemtsov, Boris 262–3 NEP (New Economic Policy) 262 Networks 126–7, 142 n 40 Nevskii, Aleksandr 41 Nizhnii-Novgorod (aka Gor’kii) 154, 160, 163, 193, 199, 205 n 12, 219 NGOs (nongovernmental organisations) 104, 128, 183, 218 ‘Non-Russian nationalities’ 20, 21, 28, 31–5 passim North Atlantic Council 245 North Ossetia 160 Nostalgia 2, 42, 43, 123 Novgorodtsev, P.I. 179 Oliinyk, Borys 47, 49 Omsk 160 Oral history 3, 13 n 9 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 144, 151 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 62, 77, 87, 90, 93, 237, 238, 242, 244, 246, 249 Orthodoxy, Orthodox religion 26, 34, 41–3, 44, 45, 46, 48, 51, 199, 230, 231, 237–8 Otunbayeva, Roza 235 Ovsiannikov, Viktor 94 Paperno, Irina 259, 260 Parasitism 130–1 Party for the Union of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia 48 Party of One Kievan Rus’ 48 Party of One Rus’ 48 Party of Slavonic Unity of Ukraine 48 Party of Rus’-Ukrainian Union 48 Passerini, Luisa 4 Passports 27, 30, 33, 90

272 Index Patronage 11, 100 n 38, 122–43 passim, 218 Pavlodar 90 Pavlov, Aleksandr 94 Pazniak, Zenon 53 Pegg, Scott 64, 66 Pekhtin, Vladimir 186 Pelevin, Viktor 10 Pereiaslav, Treaty of (1654) 44 perestroika 2, 9, 12, 19, 47, 123, 171, 256, 257, 263 Peter the Great 28, 45, 55 Petrov, Nikolai 215 PMR – Pridnestrovyan Moldovan Republic (see Dnester Republic) Podlubny, Stepan 260 Poland, Poles 45, 48, 104, 105, 107, 229, 238, 239, 243 Polats’ka-Rus’ 49 Poltava, Battle of (1709) 55 Pope 40, 48 Popular opinion, public opinion 11, 32–4, 35, 197, 216, 254–5 Posadskaya-Vanderback, Anastasia 3 Post-Soviet x, 1, 42, 43, 66, 130–4, 208, 260 Post-Communist, Post-Communism 17, 19, 109, 134, 140 Post-modernism 22 Post-war, post-war era 1, 8 Popov, Vladimir 213 Pozharskii 45 Primakov, Yevgenii 31, 77, 204, 238–40 Primordial, primordialism 22, 32, 68 Primorskii krai 216 Pris˘tina 240 Purges, Great Purges 6–7, 258, 261 Putin, Vladimir 28–9, 34, 46, 56, 77, 115–16, 144, 145, 148, 157, 165, 187, 204, 214, 215, 240–1, 243–6 passim, 250, 255, 256 Rakhmonov, Immomali 63, 236 Ransel, David 3 Reddaway, Peter 171 Regions, ‘regionology’ xii, 37 n 33, 144–68, 208–27

Revolution, the Russian (1917) 1, 5–6, 7, 10, 179 Rigby, T.H. 129 Ries, Nancy 11 Romania, Romanians 229, 246 Romanovs 6 Rose, Richard 164 Rostov-on-Don 9 Rossiiskii or rosiiskii, pan-Russian identity 17, 19, 21, 22, 28, 40–2, 43, 46, 230 Ruble, Blair 53 Rukh 244–5 Rule of law xi, 134, 171–85 passim Rus’ 21, 39–40, 44, 46, 47, 55 Rushdie, Salman 199 Rus’-Ukraine (Ukraine- Rus’) 39, 55 Russia, Russians, Russian identity x, 4, 6, 9, 10, 17–38 passim, 39–57 passim, 83–100 passim, 105, 107, 128, 230, 235 Russian Block (Ukraine) 48 Russian Federation 17–27 passim, 30–35, 62, 63, 177 Russian culture 10, 17, 183 Russian Empire 23, 32 Russian language 10, 17, 19, 21, 24, 27, 34, 85–7, 98 n 5, 181, 245 ‘Russian idea’ 25, 34 Russian national symbols 27–9, 34–5 Russian National Unity 21 Russian Orthodox Church 21, 28, 34, 46–50 passim, 55 Russian Party 21 Russian peacekeepers 77 Russian Privatization Centre 112, 115 Russians abroad, Russian minorities 19, 21, 29, 84–8, 91–7 passim, 230, 238, 242–3, 245 Russification 19, 95 Russkaia obshchina (Kazakhstan) 93–4, 96 Russkii, ethnic Russian identity 25, 230 Russophones, Russian-speakers 19, 21, 29, 84–8, 245 Ruthenia, Ruthenian identity 39, 40–1

Index 273 Rutskoi, Aleksandr 45, 236 Rybnitsa (steel factory) 74 Sachs, Jeffrey 109, 113, 114 St. Michael’s Monastery of the Golden Domes 55 St. Nicholas Church 55 St. Petersburg 33, 109, 115–16, 148, 154, 157 St. Sofiia 54 Sajudis 234 Sakha-Iakutiia 33, 34 Sakhalin 166 n 19 Samara 156, 157, 163, 164 Saudargas, Algirdas 234 Save The Children 79 Schapiro, Leonid 5 Secessionism, separatism 31, 34, 61–82 passim, 90, 98 n 4 Second World War 1, 5, 8–9, 39, 41, 50, 95, 106, 221 Serbia, Serbs 237, 240 Sergei of Radonezh 39 Sevastopol 237, 240, 245 Shamba, Sergei 67 Shatalin plan 176 Sheriff Group, (Dnister Republic) 73 Shevardnadze, Eduard 75, 246–7 Shevchenko, Taras 54 Shlapentokh, Vladimir 125 Shleifer, Andrei 109, 110, 117, 118, 144 Shulman, Stephen 47 Shushkevich, Stanislau 243–4 Siberia 9, 91, 233, 243 Sik, Endre 125 Slavophiles 26, 231 Slavic Council of Belarus 49 Slavs 21, 23, 26, 47, 50, 51–3, 56, 79, 85, 89, 92, 231 Slovakia, Slovaks 107 Smirniagin, Leonid 215 Smirnov, Igor 79 Smith, Anthony D 56 Smith, Graham 27, 31–2 Smolensk 151, 244 Snegur, Mircea 69 Social-Liberal Union (SLOn) 48 Sokolov, Sasha 190

Solnick, Steven 212–13 Solodin, Vladimir 190 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 44, 91, 258 Soros, George 114 Sovereignty 65–9 South Ossetia 61–82 passim, 236, 247 Soviet ideology, mythology x, 3, 8–9, 22, 41–2, 45, 49 Soviet identity x, 4, 8–9, 10, 19, 23, 28, 34, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 89, 259–60 Soviet Interview Project 3 Soviet Slavic project 41–2 Soviet society 1–12, 123–4, 127–8, 176, 186 Spiridon, Metropolitan 40 Spruyt, Hendrik 230 Stalin, Stalinism xii, 2, 4, 5, 6–9, 10, 11, 13 n 15, 41, 44, 123, 232, 254–65 passim Stankevich, Sergei 23–4 Stark, David 134 Starodubrovskaia, Irina 165 START-2 Treaty 241 State-building 70–1, 175 Stavropol 156 Stepanakert 69, 73 Stoner-Weiss, Kathryn 219 Sturza, Vasiliy 65 Sudakov, Guril 26 Susha 69 Summers, Lawrence 110, 118 Suvorov 45 Sviatoslav, Count 45 Sverdlovsk 154, 157, 211, 218, 220 Svoik, Piotr 91, 95 Sweden, Swedes 45, 114, 149 Switzerland, Swiss 17, 93, 171 Symonenko, Petro 48 Tajikistan, Tajiks 62–4, 98 n 5, 230, 236–7, 244, 247–9 Tallinn 243 Tarasiuk, Borys 246 Tashkent Treaty (1992, aka Collective Security Treaty) 231, 244, 248, 250 Taliban 241, 248, 249

274 Index Tatars 45, 53, 85, 96 Tatarstan 28, 30, 33, 62, 155–8, 211, 220 Tbilisi 68, 75, 76, 77 Television, Russian 204 Tereshchenko, Sergei 94 Ter-Petrosian, Levon 234, 247 Terror, the (see Purges) Terrorism 206 n 34, 229, 241, 245, 249 Three Bogatyrs 45 Tikhon, Father 46 Timasheff, Nicholas 7 Tiraspol 61, 73 Tishkov, Valerii 22, 25, 34 Tiumen 148, 150, 156, 167 n 28 Tkachenko, Oleksandr 48 Tolstov, Serhii 50 Tolz, Vera 42 Totalitarianism 7, 8, 182 Toth, Istvan Janos 125 Transactorship 109–12, 114–20 passim Transdnistria (see Dnister Republic) Transport Corridor Europe-CaucasusAsia (TRACECA) 245 Treisman, Daniel 144, 213 Trotskii 257 Tsars, Tsarist era 20, 28, 91, 181, 182 Tucker, Robert C 13 n 15 Turkey, Turks, Turkic identity 23, 26, 45, 52, 53, 88, 219, 230, 231, 232, 246 Turkmenistan 230, 247–9 Tula 155 Tuva 33, 34 Uighurs 94 Ukraine, Ukrainians x, 9, 21, 25, 27, 33, 39–57 passim, 95, 96, 99 n 23, 104, 107, 110, 114, 230, 232, 234–5, 236–7, 240, 243, 244–6, 249, 260 Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA) – Ukrainian Self-Defence Union (UNSO) 40, 51–2 Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kievan Patriarchate) 55, 58 n 33 Ukrainian People’s Republic 54

Ulrich, Herbert 2–3 Ul’ianovsk 150, 152, 160, 164 UNESCO 235 Union (party) 48 Union of Cossacks of Semirech’e 93–4 Union of Right Forces 263 United Energy Systems (UES) 160 United Kingdom (see Britain) United Nations (UN) 62, 67, 79, 232, 235, 237 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 110, 117, 118 United Tajik Opposition (UTO) 63 Unity (Edinstvo ) 186 ‘Urals Republic’ 211 USA (see America) Ushakov 45 Ushtobe 94 Ust-Kamenogorsk 91, 92 Uzbekistan, Uzbeks 9, 98 n 5, 230, 231, 240, 247–9, 250 van der Stoel, Max 93 Vasnetsov, Viktor 45 Veselovka 40 Victims, victimhood 11, 14 n 28 Victory Day 9 Vilnius 243 Vincent, Norman 11 Viola, Lynne 7 Vladimir, Prince (see Volodymyr, Prince) Vladivostock 151 Volga, Volgograd 52, 160, 203 Volodymyr, Patriarch 46, 55 Volodymyr, Prince of Kiev 39, 45, 46, 54 Webber, Mark 228 Weiner, Amir 8 Welfare 10 West, Western scholars xi, 1, 3, 6–7, 8–9, 17, 103–21 passim, 171, 172, 174, 182, 208, 210–11, 216, 222, 230, 238, 246, 255, 261 Western Europe 18–19 Woodruff, David 144

Index 275 World Bank 110, 111, 172 World Trade Organization (WTO) 248 Xinjiang

249

Yaroslav the Wise 53–5 Yugoslavia 213, 240, 255 Yushchenkov, Sergei 258

Zaitsev, Boris 189, 205 n 12 Zakareishvili, Paata 75 Zanardi, Louis H. 110 Zhirinovskii, Vladimir 25, 237, 238 Zhukov, Georgii 45 Ziugnaov, Gennadii 44, 45, 49, 238, 239, 258 Zlatkis, Bella 160 Zlenko, Anatoliy 234–5, 246