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Subjectivity, Politics and Order in Russian Political Evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Richard Sakwa
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Slavic Review , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , Winter 1995 , pp. 943 - 964
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1995

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References

The support of the Nuffield Foundation in the preparation of this study is gratefully acknowledged. Comments and criticisms on earlier versions of the paper by Linda Lubrano, Mary McAuley, David McLellan, Stefan Rossbach, Michael Urban and, above all, Arpad Szakolczai helped bring some sort of order out of chaos, and their assistance is much appreciated. They are, of course, absolved from all responsibility for the views presented here.

1. Tolstoy, Leo, “How Literature Teaches Us about Moral and Psychological Life,” in Gibian, George, ed., The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 530-31Google Scholar.

2. The classic study in this respect is Alexis de Tocqueville's, Democracy in America (New York: Random House, 1981), where he noted the importance of mores, customs and “habits of the heart” (179) in the development of the American polity.

3. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness,” (“Preface to The Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968], 182).

4. For recent and very different treatments of the problem, see Touraine, Alain, Critique of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)Google Scholar; and Klempner, Geoffrey V., Naive Metaphysics: A Theory of Subjective and Objective Worlds (London: Avebury, 1995).Google Scholar

5. Walicki, Andrzej, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 228-29.Google Scholar

6. Luxemburg, Rosa, Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Lenin's only philosophical work, Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909) devoted much effort to attacking “subjectivism.“

8. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976).Google Scholar

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10. See in particular Bellah, Robert N. et al, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Bellah, Robert N. et al., eds., Individualism and Commitment in American Life: Readings on the Theme of Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).Google Scholar The fear that excessive individualism might threaten freedom and the viability of society itself has led to a renewed interest in communitarianism, see for example, Selznick, Philip, The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Etzioni, Amitai, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993).Google Scholar

11. For a sophisticated version of this argument, see Biryukov, N. and Sergeyev, V., Russia's Road to Democracy: Parliament, Communism and Traditional Culture (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993).Google Scholar

12. Cf. Murrell, Peter, “Conservative Political Philosophy and the Strategy of Economic Transition,” in Moore, John H., ed., Legacies of the Collapse of Marxism (Fairfax: George Mason University Press, 1994), 165-79Google Scholar, which draws on Edmund Burke, Karl Popper and Michael Oakeshott to counter ideas of “liberal Utopian” social reconstruction. Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1962) is particularly useful in this respect.

13. On Frank, see Boobbyer, P.C., Frank, S. L.: The Life and Work of a Russian Philosopher, 1877-1950 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; for Christian Democratic thinking on the question, see e.g. Mounier, Emmanuel, Personalism (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1950).Google Scholar

14. See Sakwa, Richard “Christian Democracy in Russia,” Religion, State and Society 20, no. 2 (1992): 135-68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Christian Democracy and Civil Society in Russia,” Religion, State and Society 22, no. 3 (1994): 273-303.

15. Vainshtein, Cf. Grigory, “Totalitarian Public Consciousness in a Post-Totalitarian Society,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 27, no. 3 (1994): 247-59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. See Havel, Vaclav, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Havel, Vaclav et al., The Power of the Powerless (Chicago: Hutchinson, 1985).Google Scholar

17. Studies on the interaction of objective and subjective factors in communist and postcommunist societies include Jadwiga Staniszkis, The Dynamics of Breakthrough in Eastern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), esp. afterword; and Elemer Hankiss, East European Alternatives (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), esp. chaps. 2-3.

18. This appears to be the prevalent view in central Europe. See, for example, Jadwiga Staniszkis, “The Worrying Power Shift in the Kremlin,” European Brief'2, no. 4 (1994): 73-74.

19. Vainshtein, 248.

20. See, in particular, “Bourgeois Democracy in Russia,” in Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions, trans, and eds. Gordon C. Wells and Peter Baehr (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995).

21. Tocqueville, 170.

22. Almond, Cf. G. and Verba, S., eds., The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The Civic Culture Revisited (Newbury Park: Sage, 1989).

23. The word “order” here is not used in the same way as in Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). While many of Huntington's points about conditions for order remain valid, in the postcommunist world the stress inevitably falls less on order as an absolute good than on ways of reconstituting politics to achieve social integration and political responsibility within the overall context of remodernization.

24. Holmes, Cf. Leslie, “Normalisation and Legitimation in Postcommunist Russia,” in White, Stephen et al., eds., Developments in Russian and Post-Soviet Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 309-30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. It should be stressed, however, that while postcommunist Russia has retreated from the bolshevik regime's stress on mass participation, the electoral process in principle allows for greater effectiveness of the limited participation that remains.

26. The classic text for the minimalist definition of politics is Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1943). The restructuring of gender relations, for example, is very much at the heart of the new minimalism, one of those “hidden” processes that are redefining subjectivity. See, for example, Funk, Nanette and Mueller, Magda, eds., Gender Politics and Post-Communism (London: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar; and Watson, Peggy, “Eastern Europe's Silent Revolution: Gender,” Sociology 27, no. 3 (August 1993): 471-87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. The fear of okhlocracy, the power of the mob, is typical of the anti-communist revolutions. There was more than a hint of this, of course, in the American post-revolutionary settlement, with its anti-majoritarian bias and elaborate checks and balances to control the feared rage of the demos.

28. Bernard, Cf. F.M., Pluralism, Socialism and Political Legitimacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 138.Google Scholar

29. Meszaros, I., Lukacs’ Concept of Dialectic (St. George: Merlin Press, 1972), 43.Google Scholar

30. Kolakowski, Leszek, Towards a Marxist Humanism (New York: Grove, 1968), 97.Google Scholar

31. In a very different context, Gertrude Himmelfarb has made a similar point in relation to the western welfare systems (The Demoralization of Society [London, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1995]).

32. See, for example, Caton, Hiram, The Origin of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Navickas, Joseph L., Consciousness and Reality: Hegel's Philosophy of Subjectivity (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murphy, Richard Timothy, Hume and Husserl: Towards Radical Subjectivism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosaldo, Renato, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (London: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar; Ferry, Luc, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Faubion, James D., ed., Rethinking the Subject: An Anthology of Contemporary European Thought (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994).Google Scholar

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34. “What We Are Fighting For?” in Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 241.

35. Popovskii, Mark, DeU akademika Vavilova (Moscow: Kniga, 1991).Google Scholar

36. See Weiner, Douglas R., Models of Nature: Conservation and Community Ecology in the Soviet Union, 1917-1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

37. As early as 1972 Roger Poole wrote: “In Russia itself, the subjective refusal of the objectivity which was responsible for the invasion of Czechoslovakia has been led, not by students, but by scientists and artists of the highest distinction. The more rigorous a political orthodoxy is, the higher have its critics to be in the scientific or social scale to challenge it effectively. Indeed it would seem that it is at the level of the Nobel Prize that Russian subjectivity first gets an opportunity to wage its batde, at that moment when the criteria of the outside world have forced objectivity to take account of its critic.” (Towards Deep Subjectivity [New York: Allen Lane, 1972], 29).

38. “The Smatterers,” in A. Solzhenitsyn et al, From under the Rubble (London: Fontana/ Collins, 1976), 274.

39. This account draws on the illuminating discussion of the problem of interiorization by Arpad Szakolczai in “Types of Mayors, Types of Subjectivity: Continuities and Discontinuities in the East-Central European Transitions.” (Firenze: European University Institute Working Paper SPS No. 93/5, 1993), 14-15. A useful collection of Foucault's essays and analysis can be found in Colin Gordon, ed., Michel Foucault: Power/ Knowledge (London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1980); and in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991).

40. In his last years Foucault developed the notion of “care of the self,” which suggested that human autonomy is possible widiin discursive political formations. He sought to shift the focus from the tradition of “knowledge of the self (the thinking subject)” dating from Descartes through to Husserl (“know yourself“), and to retrieve instead the Greek precept “to be concerned with oneself,” which, according to Foucault, was “one of the main principles of cities, one of the main rules for social and personal conduct and for the art of life.” See Martin, Luther H., Gutman, Huck and Hutton, Patrick H., eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Kennebunkport: Tavistock, 1988), 19–20 Google Scholar. See also the interview “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” in James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 1-20; and Foucault, Michel, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,” Political Theory 21, no. 2 (May 1993): 198–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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42. In his The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918) Karl Kautsky with remarkable prescience outlined some of these consequences, noting that all attempts to socialize production without democracy (like the Jesuit state of Paraguay) had given rise to premodern forms of patriarchal despotism.

43. The ambivalence of this dualism in the Russian intelligentsia, both holding the regime in contempt yet willing to serve it, is explored by O. Altaev in “The Dual Consciousness of the Intelligentsia and Pseudo-Culture,” in Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin, eds., The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian Samizdat (Belmont: Wordland, 1977), 116-47.

44. Modernity, of course, was characterized by the displacement of responsibility, above all to bureaucratic agencies (see Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989]Google Scholar). This was not, however, directly at the level of subjectivity but part of the formal organization of society. The Soviet system also achieved the abnegation of responsibility through bureaucratization and by processes of ideological displacement that minimized subjective responsibility for one's actions.

45. Kolakowski, Leszek, “The Myth of Human Self-Identity: Unity of Civil and Political Society in Socialist Thought,” in Kukathas, C. et al., eds., The Transition from Socialism: State and Civil Society in the USSR (Melbourne: Longman Chesire, 1991), 41–58.Google Scholar

46. This is very much Marx's own view of the subject. See Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom, chap. 1.

47. The Sane Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), cited in Gordon Bowker, ed., Freedom: Reason or Revolution? (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 32.

48. G.M. Tamás, “The Legacy of Dissent,” Uncaptive Minds 7, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 27.Google Scholar

49. A great mass of writing during perestroika tended to take this approach, for example, Hosking, Geoffrey, The Awakening of the Soviet Union (London: Heinemann, 1991).Google Scholar

50. See, for example, Dimov, Alexandre, Les Hommes Double: La Vie Quotidienne en Union Sovietique (Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1980)Google Scholar.

51. Siklova, Jirina, “The Solidarity of the Culpable,” Social Research 58, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 767.Google Scholar

52. Zinoviev, Alexander, The Yawning Heights (London: Penguin, 1981)Google Scholar; The Reality of Communism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1984), Homo Sovieticus (London: Paladin Books, 1985).

53. Lev Timofeev, Zachem prikhodil Gorbachev: 0 lenevykh vliianiiakh v bol'shoi politike, with an afterword by Anton Koziov, Metakorruptsiia: Ugolovnye istoki parlii bol'shevikov (Moscow: 1992).

54. See his views on the communist regime's inculcation of a spirit of kommunal'nost’ into the Soviet population (Pravda [6 June 1990]: 8).

55. For an eloquent exposition of this view, see Sergei Kurginyan, Sed'moi stsenarii, 3 vols. (Moscow: Eksperimental'nyi tvorcheskii tsentr, 1992). See also Buzgalin, A. and Kolganov, A., Tragediia sotsializma (Moscow: Ekonomicheskaia demokratiia, 1992).Google Scholar

56. Millar, Cf. James R., ed., Politics, Work and Daily Life in the USSR (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reporting the findings of the Soviet Interview Project, which noted the points of dissonance as well, especially among the “brightest and the best.“

57. Leonid Gozman and Alexander Etkind, The Psychology of Post-Totalitarianism in Russia (London: Centre for Research into Communist Economies, 1992), 76.

58. Dahrendorf, Ralf, Society and Democracy in Germany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 342.Google Scholar

59. For an analysis of the election results, see Sakwa, Richard, “The Russian Elections of December 1993,” Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 2 (1995): 195–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60. A classic presentation of the issues is by Robert C. Tucker, “Culture, Political Culture and Communist Society,” Political Science Quarterly 88, no. 2 (June 1973): 173- 90; the locus classicus of the political cultural comparison of the past and the present is Archie Brown and Jack Gray, eds., Political Culture and Change in Communist Systems (New York: Macmillan, 1977). See also Brown, Archie, ed., Political Culture and Communist Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and White, Stephen, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a discussion of the use of the concept of political culture, see Welch, Stephen, “Issues in the Study of Political Culture: The Example of Communist Party States,” British Journal of Political Science 17, no. 4 (October 1987): 479-50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Political Culture and Communism: Definition and Use,” Journal of Communist Studies 5, no. 1 (March 1989): 91-98.

61. Robert C. Tucker, “Kakoe vremia pokazyvaiut seichas chasy rossiiskoi istorii?” Problemy Voslochnoi Evropy, nos. 31-32 (Washington, 1991): 58-78.

62. Biryukov and Sergeyev, Russia's Road to Democracy, op cit; see also N. Biryukov, J. Gleisner and V. Sergeyev, “The Crisis of Sobornost': Parliamentary Discourse in Present- Day Russia,” Discourse and Society 6, no. 2 (April 1995): 149-77.

63. Nicolai N. Petro, letter to the author, 18 November 1992; his arguments are developed in The Rebirth of Russian Democracy: An Interpretation of Political Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

64. Aksiuchits, Victor, in Khristianskaia Demokratiia: Bulletin of the Christian Democratic International on Eastern Europe, no. 13 (May-June 1991): 17–28, at 19-20.Google Scholar For an analysis of the thinking of Abbot Joseph of Volok and the controversy with Nil of the Sorka (as he names them), see Utechkin, S.V., Russian Political Thought: A Concise and Comprehensive History (London: J.M. Dent, 1964), 22–26.Google Scholar

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67. Cf. Husserl's view in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, op cit.

68. Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (London: Gollancz, 1945).Google Scholar

69. Welch, Stephen, The Concept of Political Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

70. From Krishan Kumar, ed., “Introduction,” Revolution: The Theory and Practice of a European Idea (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 2.Google Scholar

71. Korsch, Karl, Marxism and Philosophy (1923), trans. Halliday, Fred (London: New Left Books, 1970).Google Scholar

72. “State and Civil Society” in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 206-78.

73. Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 295.

74. The question is also posed in a different context by Tomaz Mastnak, “Civil Society in Slovenia: From Opposition to Power,” Studies in Comparative Communism 23, nos. 3/4 (1990): 305-17.

75. Compare the role of the state in shaping the informal social movements of perestroika. See, e.g. Stephen Fish, M., Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and the Regivie in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

76. Kagarlitsky, Cf. Boris (Restoration in Russia: Why Capitalism Failed, trans. Clarke, Renfrey [London: Verso, 1995])Google Scholar, who condemns the doctrinaire way that Yeltsin's reforms were pursued and argues that without a modern bourgeoisie capitalist superstructures are left hanging in the air.

77. Calhoun, Cf. Craig, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).Google Scholar

78. This is the argument of G.M. Tamas, “A Disquisition on Civil Society,” Social Research 61, no. 2 (1994): 205-22.

79. For an analysis of the philosophical tradition from Kant to existentialism focusing on the drama of individual autonomy and the “antihumanist” (or “postmodern“) challenge to it (e.g. Derrida), see Richard White, “Autonomy as Foundational,” in Hugh J. Silverman, ed., Questioning Foundations: Truth/Subjectivity/Culture (London: Roudedge, 1993).Google Scholar

80. A phenomenon which Erich Froram identified as one of the key features of the twentieth century (Fear of Freedom [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1942]).

81. Gozman and Etkind, The Psychology of Post-Totalitarianism in Russia, 50.

82. This is analyzed by Michael Burawoy and Pavel Krotov in “The Economic Basis of Russia's Political Crisis,” New Left Review, no. 198 (March-April 1993): 49-69.