Russian philosopher, naturalist, and economist Nikolai Danilevsky. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
November 28 marks the 200th birthday of Russian thinker Nikolai Danilevsky. Relatively unknown in the West, Danilevsky is extraordinarily influential in modern Russia, and understanding his ideas is essential to grasping the essence of the current political conflict between Russia and the West.
In the early 1990s, two theories of humanity’s future competed for the attention of those interested in international affairs. The first was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which predicted that every country in the world was destined eventually to adopt the same social-economic and political system, namely Western-style liberalism. The second was Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which stated that rather than converging, the countries of the world were separating into distinct civilizational blocs.
To Russians, none of this was remotely new. For the Fukuyama-Huntington debate did little more than echo a long-standing argument that has been raging among Russian intellectuals since the infamous debate between the Westernizers and Slavophiles in the 1840s.
The Westernizers were Fukuyama-ists before Fukuyama. They had what academics like to call a “teleological” view of the world, considering that the iron laws of history dictated that all societies eventually converged on a common end (telos in Greek). For them, this end was synonymous with the West. As the mid-19th century liberal Russian thinker Konstantin Kavelin put it, “The difference [between the West and Russia] lies solely in the preceding historical facts; the aim, the task, the aspirations, the way forward are one and the same.”
The Slavophiles countered this argument by contending that Western civilization had peaked. Russia, by contrast, still had much to offer the world through its own unique, Orthodox, culture. Only by developing this uniqueness and avoiding assimilation into the West could Russia contribute to universal civilization.
Interestingly, this argument still viewed Russia and the West as connected. Russia, by protecting its Orthodox heritage, was seen as being able in due course to export it to the West and so save the latter from itself. Slavophilism did not reject the idea of a common future.
It is here that Danilevsky stepped in, making the decisive break with teleological thinking. A biologist by profession, he adopted an organic view of the world. Human civilizations, he maintained, were organic beings that were born, matured, and died. None could be said to constitute the “End of History.”
In his most famous work, entitled Russia and Europe, he outlined a theory that Russia and Western Europe were entirely distinct “cultural historical types.” Different cultural historical types, he said, developed in their own separate ways. In opposition to theories of cultural convergence, he compared the world to a town square from which different roads (i.e. different civilizations) moved out in different directions. Each cultural historical type was inherently distinct, and consequently it made no sense to try to force it to develop along the path of another.
Other Russians built on Danilevsky’s theory. Late nineteenth century philosopher Konstantin Leontyev, for instance, postulated that civilizational life cycles had three stages: primary simplicity, flowering complexity, and secondary simplicity (the period of decay). Flowering complexity represented the peak of development. On an international scale, this meant that one should avoid the alleged homogenization that would come with everybody adopting Western-style liberalism, and instead celebrate a multiplicity of different civilizational types. The “End of History” would quite literally be the end of human development, and was thus to be avoided.
Later, Eurasianist thinkers used geology, botany, linguistics, and other fields of study to try to provide a scientific basis for the idea that the space of the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union constituted a coherent entity distinct from those around it. Originally devised by Russian émigrés in the 1920s, Eurasianism crept into the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era, influencing among others the ethnographer Lev Gumilyov. Gumilyov argued that ethnic groups (etnoi) were a natural phenomenon and that what suited one group did not suit another, although those with certain complementarities could form a superetnos. The superetnos that was the Soviet people was entirely different from the superetnos of the West and as such should develop entirely in its own separate way.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, civilizational thinking has become de rigueur in Russia. A study by San Francisco State University professor Andrei Tsygankov showed that the most cited Russian authors in Russian academic articles on topics of international relations were Danilevsky and Leontyev. The idea that civilizational differences are real and can be objectively determined is now widely accepted outside the very narrow circle of Russia’s few remaining liberals.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was rather late in coming round to this point of view. In the early 2000s he was a traditional Westernizer, speaking of Russia’s eventual integration into Europe. More recently, however, his tone has changed. Speaking to the Valdai Club at the end of October, he used the words “civilization,” “civilizations,” and “civilizational” some 20 times, and commented that “real democracy in a multipolar world is primarily about the ability of any nation—I emphasize—any society or civilization to follow its own path.”
To rub in the point, Putin mentioned Danilevsky and cited his statement that progress lies in “walking the field that represents humanity’s historical activity, walking in all directions,” adding that “no civilization can take pride in being the height of development.” Putin followed this by calling for a “free development of countries and peoples,” in which “primitive simplification and prohibition can be replaced with the flourishing complexity of culture and tradition.” Though Putin didn’t say it, the language was pure Leontyev.
Some commentators argue that the “New Cold War” between Russia and the West differs from the original in that lacks an ideological component similar to the conflict between communism and capitalism. Others maintain that there is such a component and that it consists of the struggle between democracy and autocracy. Putin’s speech shows that both points of view are wrong.
For the speech reveals a very coherent philosophy well founded in a specific Russian intellectual tradition with origins in Danilevsky. However, this philosophy has nothing to do with autocracy and democracy. In fact, the very essence of civilizational theory is that no system is inherently the best. Putin is not making any claims about how states should organize their internal affairs, let alone promoting autocracy versus democracy. He is, however, making a claim about how the world as a whole should operate, and contrasting the vision of a world converging around Western values and institutions with that of a world consisting of distinct civilizations each advancing towards their own unique destinations. The New Cold War does, therefore, have an ideological component but it’s very different from what most people in the West imagine it to be.
Only time will tell which vision of the world turns out to be accurate. But for now, the terms of the intellectual debate have been set. Two hundred years on, it is very much Danilevsky’s moment.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.
There can be few leaders whose reputation at home differs so widely from his reputation abroad as the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, who died on Monday aged 91. Hailed as a hero in the West for ending the Cold War, liberating the people of Eastern Europe, and bringing democracy and freedom to the nations of the former Soviet Union, he is reviled in Russia as a man who inherited a superpower and then destroyed it, leaving it dismembered and impoverished.
Of peasant stock, Gorbachev grew up in the Stavropol region of Southern Russia and aged only 17 won the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for his success in harvesting grain with his father. A clever and hard working student, he won a place at Moscow State University where he studied law before taking up a career in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He then rose rapidly up the party’s ranks until in 1985 he assumed the position of General Secretary and as such become the Soviet Union’s de facto leader.
In all these ways, he was a typical party functionary. He differed, though, from the generation of leaders who had gone before him, all of whom had had direct experience of the revolutions of 1917 and of the Second World War. Gorbachev was one of those who were called “Children of the Twentieth Party Congress”—that is to say, communists whose view of the world was shaped by the party congress of 1956 at which Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing Stalin.
The Children of the Twentieth Party Congress believed in communism—in state control of the means of production, in central economic planning, in the social guarantees granted by the Soviet constitution, in the Soviet Union as a genuine ‘brotherhood of nations,’ and so on. But at the same time, they felt that the system was not living up to its promise. They believed that Stalinism had over-centralized and over-bureaucratized Soviet society, stifling initiative, breeding corruption, and creating a severe disconnect between the claims of Soviet propaganda and the realities on the ground. The solution, they felt, was to return to “Leninist norms,” whatever those might be, and thereby put the USSR back on track to a bright communist future.
On reaching the pinnacle of Soviet power, Gorbachev thus sought not to dismantle the system but to make it function more efficiently. As he told the 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1986, “Our goal is to realize the full potential of socialism. Those in the West who expect us to renounce socialism will be disappointed. We’re not going to give up on socialism. On the contrary, we need more socialism.”
Gorbachev’s problem was that he had very little idea how to do this as well as a faulty understanding of the underlying causes of the USSR’s social and economic difficulties.
In particular, Gorbachev’s grasp of economics was sketchy. He firmly believed in the communist economic model, writing in his 1987 book Perestroika that “Socialism and public ownership, on which it is based, hold out virtually unlimited possibilities for progressive economic processes.” He was therefore unwilling to touch the fundamentals of the Soviet system – state ownership and central planning. Instead, he tinkered with the economy by attempting to meld state planning with certain attributes of free markets in accordance with the ideas of what was called “market socialism.” In this, state ownership and the plan were retained, but enterprises gained more autonomy to determine production and were allowed to keep and reinvest some of their profits.
Market socialism proved a disaster. Instead of making enterprises more efficient, the introduction of market elements simply undermined the few advantages that planning provided. Given the failure of this policy, there were two options left: give up and go back, or press on and move towards a free market economy, or at least some sort of mixed market system. Gorbachev did neither. Going backwards would have been an admission of failure. Moving forward was ideologically beyond him. Instead, he dithered while the economy gradually collapsed around him.
As this happened, Gorbachev looked for someone to blame and his gaze fell upon conservative members of the CPSU, who he believed were deliberately sabotaging his reforms. In typical Russian fashion, his solution to this was to centralize authority in his own hands. This he did by stripping the CPSU of its power and concentrating it in a newly created executive position, that of President of the USSR, a position that Gorbachev then occupied.
Arguably, Gorbachev’s attacks on the party made things worse rather than better, for the party was the primary mechanism that kept the Soviet system functioning more or less smoothly. The more Gorbachev bypassed and undermined the party, the more authority it lost, the less people did as the plan demanded, and the more the system unraveled into anarchy.
In all this, Gorbachev revealed a considerable naivety. To accompany political and economic reform, which went by the name perestroika, he declared a need for more openness (glasnost). Censorship was relaxed and eventually abolished. It would appear that Gorbachev sincerely believed that if given their freedom, the Soviet people would use it in a constructive way, helpfully pointing out problems so that they could be addressed, but not challenging the authorities in the process. This is not what happened. Instead of constructive suggestions, the Soviet people used their new found freedom to publish revelations of the past crimes of the communist state, to attack the country’s leaders, and to demand ever more radical change. The more people learnt about their country’s past and about enormous social problems it was experiencing in the present, the more the system lost its legitimacy. Rather than strengthening the state, glasnost fatally weakened it.
Another failing was that Gorbachev totally misread the mood of many of the minority nationalities within the Soviet Union. In a 1987 speech marking the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, he declared the nationalities problem “solved.” Nothing was further from the truth. Soviet peoples used the freedom Gorbachev gave them to demand more national autonomy and in the case of the three Baltic states to demand independence. In other cases, minority nationalities sought to increase their own power and territory at the expense of other minorities. Visiting Armenia following a devastating earthquake in December 1988, Gorbachev was shocked to find that locals wanted to speak not about the earthquake but about the status of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh (under Azeri control, but claimed by the Armenians). By the time Gorbachev woke up to the seriousness of the Soviet Union’s ethno-national problems it was too late. As central authority collapsed, local elites decided that the best way of preserving their authority was to leap on the nationalist bandwagon. The rest, as they say, is history.
In the eyes of Westerners, Gorbachev’s greatest achievement was to bring an end to the Cold War. The Soviet leader believed that successful reform at home was impossible as long as the USSR was locked in an existential geopolitical struggle with the West. It was therefore necessary to make peace. To this end, he made it clear that the Soviet army would not intervene to prop up the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, each of which fell in turn in rapid succession in 1989. Beyond that, Gorbachev agreed to accept German reunification and to withdraw the Soviet army from Eastern Europe. With this, Soviet-Western relations quickly changed from mutual hostility to something akin to friendship.
More than anything else, this explains the adulation Gorbachev received in the West. Many Russians, though, view the matter very differently, asking themselves what Gorbachev got in exchange for surrendering the Soviet’s empire in Eastern Europe. Most importantly, they note that he failed to get a written guarantee that NATO would not expand eastwards. Historians disagree as to whether NATO leaders gave verbal promises in this regard, but it is certain that nothing was ever put on paper. Rarely has somebody given up so much and got so little in return. The sense of bitterness that resulted has soured Russian-Western relations ever since.
Here again, Gorbachev’s naivety reveals itself. Gorbachev spoke of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” and commented that “Europe is our common home.” But his vision was never that the Soviet Union, or later Russia, should be reduced to a subordinate status within a Europe dominated by NATO. Rather, he envisioned NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact disappearing and being replaced by a new security architecture in which the Soviet Union and Western states would be equal partners. Gorbachev seems to have imagined that if the Soviets dismantled their Cold War infrastructure, the West would do the same. But the West never had any intention of doing such a thing. In the eyes of Gorbachev’s Russian critics, he was, simply put, a dupe.
Mikhail Gorbachev meant well. An idealist, he believed in communism’s humanist potential. Realizing that communism’s practice fell short of its promise, he sought to do something about it. In the process, he unleashed hidden forces that destroyed the system he hoped to revive. For better or for worse, we are still living with the consequences today.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.
Sergei Kovalyov, who died this week, was a controversial figure. A Soviet dissident who became Russia’s first Presidential Human Rights Commissioner, Kovalyov provoked intense reactions. To his admirers he was a principled defender of human rights and democracy, a man of enormous courage who faced down first the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and then the post-Soviet government of Boris Yeltsin. To his detractors, he was a Westernizing zealot devoid of any patriotic feeling who betrayed his country and its soldiers by taking the side of Chechen terrorists. In a sense, Kovalyov embodied the triumphs and tribulations of Russian liberalism, and as such his life deserves a closer look.
Sergei Kovalyov
A high proportion of Soviet dissidents were scientists, and Kovalyov, a biologist by training, was no exception. Nikita Khrushchev put a great emphasis on science as the means by which Soviet society would catch up and overtake the West, and consequently scientists were given a fair amount of intellectual independence in order to pursue new discoveries. This provided fertile ground for the growth of dissident thinking.
The scientific mindset helped shape the dissident movement. It brought with it Enlightenment humanism (influenced to some degree by the more humanistic elements of Marxist thought) and a form of scientific positivism that saw human society as being driven by the same sort of laws that determined chemistry and physics. This produced a historical determinism that saw society as inevitably heading towards a given goal, which for those imbued with Marxism-Leninism was communism, but which for some others, such as Kovalyov, was Western-style liberal democracy. One might say that just a Marx flipped Hegel on his head, Soviet liberals flipped Marx on his head to discover a new “End of History”, personified by the West. This gave them the sense of confidence they needed to oppose the Soviet regime, and, in some cases, a certain dogmatism that led them to believe that the ends justified the means in the pursuit of the inevitable liberal and democratic future.
Kovalyov fitted well within this paradigm. As his biographer Emma Gilligan writes, his “morality was founded on a rational philosophy that stemmed from a scientific worldview and he shared the enlightenment practice of questioning authority.” His views were “rationalistic humanism … with their emphasis on positive law.” Kovalyov’s “scientific worldview” and “rationalistic humanism” rendered him a cosmopolitan who valued individual humans more than social constructs such as nations. He described himself as an “anti-patriot”. As we shall see, this proved to be his eventual undoing.
After losing his job at Moscow State University, he worked at an experimental fish hatchery in Kalinin (Tver) before being arrested and imprisoned in 1974. His arrest owed itself to the two years he spent editing The Chronicle of Current Events, an underground publication that surveyed abuses of human rights in the Soviet Union, including the Soviet practice of locking dissidents up in psychiatric hospitals on the spurious grounds that they were insane. It was this work that would rightly entrench Kovalyov’s reputation as a courageous defender of human rights and individual liberty.
Kovalyov in prison
After seven years in a strict-regime prison camp, and three years of internal exile, Kovalyov was freed in 1984, just in time for the start of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika one year later. His attitude to perestroika put him at the more moderate end of the dissident spectrum. This had been true even when editing The Chronicle, when as Gilligan says, “Kovalyov argued against … a simple line between ‘us and them’.”
In my last post, I discussed how some Russian liberals tend to blame the country’s problems on a small band of crooks who have usurped the state, while others blame the Russian people as a whole. Kovalyov belonged the second group. He wrote: “Totalitarianism is not only government pressure over society. It consists also of a society that displays a readiness to submit itself to that violence and even to assist in state terror.” Given this belief, he felt that simply opposing the Soviet regime and seeking to topple it was pointless. Regime and people were equally responsible for the fate of the country and needed to work together to improve it.
Kovalyov’s position was controversial in dissident groups. Fellow dissident Alexander Podrabinek, for instance, complained to him that: “You cannot attempt to place moral responsibility for the crimes of the regime on everyone. … This government was never ours. … The majority of the people in our country cannot and must not be held responsible for the crimes of the regime.” Kovalyov, however, argued that, “not all compromises are dishonest. If I agree with something I am ready for conscientious cooperation.” To this end, in 1987 he created the group Press Klub Glasnost which, against opposition from dissidents such as Podrabinek and Valeriia Novodvorskaia, passed a resolution saying that, “We consider it essential to continue persistent attempts to establish a dialogue between the human rights movement in the USSR and the authorities … we from our side are prepared in all good faith to establish cooperation with the authorities at all levels.”
This is, I think, something that Kovalyov’s conservative detractors miss: Kovalyov showed a willingness to work with the authorities, not to seek their destruction.
This applied equally to the post-Soviet government of Boris Yeltsin. Indeed, one might say that Kovalyov, like so many Russian liberals, took his support for Yeltsin too far. The passionate commitment to democracy and human rights led him and many others to tolerate, even encourage, the creation of an authoritarian order in the early 1990s, a move he would later regret.
So it was that following the failed August 1991 coup against Gorbachev, Kovalyov supported banning of the Communist Party, providing expert testimony to the Constitutional Court that the party and the KGB were one and the same. Later, he supported Yeltsin when he sent tanks to attack the Russian parliament in October 1993. He said:
“There is no doubt that the victory of [parliament’s leader Ruslan] Khasbulatov and his supporters … would have meant the end of democracy, the end of parliamentarism, and the final result, the end of freedom in Russia … For my entire life I have tried to fight against the arbitrariness of power. But I am firmly prepared to defend these rights from a crowd of pogromshchiki, from a possessed crowd whose leaders have passed guns to them.”
Yeltsin had acted on the will of the people when he dissolved parliament, said Kovalyov, adding that, “The President by definition must be the guarantor of constitutionalism. But what is constitutionalism – following the letter of a bad law or the fundamental principles of constitutionalism?”
The contradiction between this and Kovalyov the defender of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, is of course striking. He was at least aware that there was a problem. “Haven’t we resorted to the principle of revolutionary expediency?” he asked, “I hope that the present precedent will not become [parliamentarism’s] tombstone.”
Before long, he would decide that indeed it had.
In June 1990, Kovalyov was appointed Chairman of the Human Rights Committee of the Russian Supreme Soviet (the same body whose physical destruction he would later celebrate). In September 1993, Yeltsin also appointed him head of the new Presidential Human Rights Commission. As such, he was responsible for examining the condition of human rights in the Russian Federation, receiving citizens’ complaints, and making suggestions for improvements.
Beyond this, Kovalyov also made a significant contribution to Russian law by drafting Section 2 “On the Rights and Liberties of Man and the Citizen” of the new Russian Constitution that came into effect in late 1993. Section 2 gives the Russian Constitution a distinctly liberal feel, guaranteeing Russian citizens a host of civil and political rights, and unlike the old Soviet constitution makes these rights unconditional, not dependent on citizens’ fulfilment of their obligations or on compatibility with the advancement of the cause of communism. This was perhaps Kovalyov’s greatest achievement. For this alone, he deserves his place in the pantheon of Russian statesmen.
Before long, however, his relationship with the Russian state collapsed into a condition of mutual acrimony.
There were multiple causes. One was the increasingly authoritarian methods used by Boris Yeltsin’s government. Kovalyov objected, for instance, to Yeltsin’s 1994 Decree “On Urgent Measures to Protect Citizens against Banditry and Organized Crime,” saying that it violated the constitution on several counts, such as its articles allowing for warrantless searches and prolonged detention without charge. It’s worth highlighting this case, as it indicates how the Yeltsin government started abusing the Russian constitution before its ink was barely dry. The idea that the 1990s were a liberal paradise that was then destroyed by Vladimir Putin is a little hard to sustain.
The second cause of Kovalyov’s break with the Yeltsin government was the First Chechen War, that started at the end of 1994. Kovalyov called this an “act of terrorism against the Chechen people.” After travelling to Grozny to observe events, he was shocked to see how Russian forces indiscriminate shelling was killing large numbers of civilians. He noted:
“The firing, perhaps, is directed at military targets, but the strikes are falling on people’s homes. I have seen the destruction of people’s homes with my own eyes. I have seen the corpses of peaceful citizens, clearly not combatants. … What is happening is clearly an enormous tragedy. … The Chechen nation, like any nation, can make mistakes in its choice of leader and ideals. But this does not give anyone the right to conduct a debate with them in the language of bombing and bombardment.”
Kovalyov demonstrating against the war in Chechnya
It was at this point that Kovalyov sealed his fate. It’s worth remembering that his job was to defend human rights, not to support government policy. And he took the job seriously. Seeing the massive human rights abuses taking place in Chechnya, he determined that a ceasefire was necessary. But a ceasefire inevitably favoured the Chechen rebels, as it would leave them in control of most of Chechnya. Because of this, many in Russia concluded that Kovalyov was actively supporting the Chechens against his own people.
Kovalyov deepened this impression by visiting the bunker of Chechen leader Dzhokar Dudayev, where he and others found themselves stuck after Russian forces launched an assault on Grozny. It was at this point that Kovalyov is said to done something that forever tarnished his reputation in Russia: supposedly he urged surrounded Russian troops to surrender to the Chechens, guaranteeing their safety if they did (something he was, of course, unable to do). From that moment on, in the eyes of many Russians, Kovalyov was little more than a traitor.
The result was a huge political storm when Kovalyov returned to Moscow. Deputies in the Russian parliament, the State Duma, lined up to condemn him. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, for instance, ranted:
“Who is he defending? The bandits, rapists and troublemakers…people who are fighting against our Constitution, our State, with weapons in their hands! And millions of citizens have suffered. Suffered from the disintegration of the USSR as a result of the activity of his political movement… Why wasn’t he monitoring human rights violations in our city? Why was he sitting in a basement in a city where a war is going on?”
It’s worth pointing out that the State Duma in 1994, though dominated by Communists and Zhirinovsky’s misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, had a much stronger liberal representation than it does today. Yet even then, a strong patriotic mood, and a tendency to denounce political opponents as traitors, were obvious. Once again, the idea that this mood is a creation of Putin is, in retrospect, a myth.
In response to the attacks, Kovalyov dug his grave further. “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” he said on TV, an idea he reiterated some years later, telling an interviewer, “I am an anti-patriot. I really do not like what is called patriotism and think it is a socially harmful idea.”
One can argue about whether Kovalyov is right. But politically speaking, his anti-patriotism was politically fatal. The State Duma voted to dismiss him from his position as parliamentary human rights commissioner. For a little while, though, he remained in his presidential post, a fact which led him to the final controversial incident of his career – the Budyonnovsk hospital siege.
In June 1995, Chechen terrorists, led by Shamil Basayev, seized a hospital in the town of Budyonnovsk in southern Russia, taking up to 2,000 people hostage. Kovalyov then negotiated their release. Under the terms of the agreement, Basayev let the hostages go, and in return was allowed to leave Budyonnovsk safely. To guarantee the agreement, 100 volunteers went with him as hostages. Kovalyov joined their number.
One has to admire Kovalyov’s courage, putting his own life on the line to ensure the release of other hostages. Even this, though, wasn’t enough to satisfy his opponents. Kovalyov’s deal allowed Basayev to get away with his act of terrorism. To some, it was proof once again that Kovalyov was on the side of the terrorists. The fact that Dudayev awarded Kovalyov a medal and that Dudayev’s wife described Kovalyov as her favorite politician didn’t help.
By January 1996, Kovalyov had had enough, and resigned as head of the Presidential Human Rights Commision. He wrote to Yeltsin:
“I can’t go on working with a president whom I believe to be neither a supporter of democracy nor a guarantee of the rights and liberties of my fellow citizens. … Life has always been cheap in Russia, especially under the Bolsheviks. But you introduced a new ‘democratic’ and ‘humanitarian’ strain into this shameful national tradition. For a whole year in Chechnya you have been restoring ‘constitutional order’ and ‘civil rights’ with bombs and missiles.”
Kovalyov called Yeltsin a “constitutional criminal.” He said:
“The real cause of the war in Chechnya is neither in Grozny nor in the entire Caucasus region; it is in Moscow. The war pushed aside that corner of the curtain that obscured the real power struggle for control of Russia. Unfortunately, it is not liberal, but the most hard-line forces – those from the military-industrial complex and the former KGB – who are celebrating that victory in the power struggle now … the goal of the war in Chechnya was to send a clear-cut message to the entire population: ‘The time for talking about democracy in Russia is up. It’s time to introduce some order into this country, and we’ll do it whatever the cost’.”
Kovalyov’s story tells us much about the fate of Russian liberalism. In its determination to extirpate the remnants of the communist system, it threw itself 100% behind Boris Yeltsin in his struggle against the then parliament, the Supreme Soviet, and celebrated his use of force to defeat his opponents. It was then shocked to discover that the new order it had created was not the liberal democratic order it had imagined. Committed to the rule of law, it turned a blind eye to it when it suited them, and then threw up its arms in horror when Yeltsin’s army revealed its utter unconcern for the rule of law during the war in Chechnya. While seeking to save lives and end the violence, Russian liberalism proved completely out of touch with the patriotic feelings of most Russians, who didn’t like the war in Chechnya but viewed the Chechen rebels as bandity, bandits or terrorists, and couldn’t tolerate any note of sympathy for them. Kovalyov proved unable to find some sort of language that would condemn the indiscriminate use of force by the government but also condemn the terrorism of the government’s enemies. In the process, he and other liberals inadvertently destroyed liberalism’s reputation by smearing it with the “anti-patriotic” label.
Of course, one may argue that any other approach would have been unprincipled. Indeed, Kovalyov’s career speaks to a man of enormous principle, willing to endure great sacrifices in order to build a better society. His contribution to human rights, especially to the 1993 Constitution, merits high praise. But his career speaks also to the fact that the “authoritarian” regime attributed to Vladimir Putin was firmly in place already by the early 1990s, to the fact that Russian liberals themselves helped construct this regime, and also to Russian liberalism’s fatal tendency to portray itself as anti-patriotic to the bone. It was Kovalyov’s tragedy that a life dedicated to the promotion of human rights ultimately led to his rejection by the people he sought to serve.
Back in autumn 2006, I attended a conference at the Chateau Laurier here in Ottawa at which a Canadian general waxed lyrical about the just completed Operation Medusa in the Panjwai District of Afghanistan. The Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were the best the country had every produced; the Taliban had been utterly crushed; it was now just a matter of some final mopping up. Victory was ours!
It was a glorious display of triumphalism, echoed in just about every other talk at the conference. It was also completely unjustified. The Taliban were far from defeated, and the Canadian army had to go backwards and forwards in Panjwai for several more years (“mowing the grass” as they called it) before packing up and going home.
Now, the tables are turned, with news emerging from Afghanistan that Panjwai has fallen fully under Taliban control. It’s estimated that Canada spent $18 billion in Afghanistan. 159 Canadian soldiers lost their lives – many more were injured. After the country paid such a price, you might imagine that our press would be interested in the news that the Taleban have captured Panjwai. But not a bit of it. On the CBC website, there’s not a word. In Canada’s premier newspaper, The Globe and Mail, not a word. In my local rag, The Ottawa Citizen, not a word. It’s as if it all didn’t happen.
To my mind, this is deeply problematic. If we are to learn any lessons from the fiasco of the Afghan operation, we first have to admit that there’s a problem. Instead, we seem intent on forgetting.
The military campaign in Afghanistan was a mistake from the very start. It’s tempting to believe that we could have got a different result if we’d committed more resources or tried different tactics. But political limitations meant that more resources were not available. Afghanistan simply didn’t matter enough for the government to be able to persuade the public to commit significantly more to the conflict. As for tactics, different commanders tried a whole succession of different methods; none worked. Failure wasn’t a product of military incompetence. The war was fundamentally unwinnable.
Against this, some might argue that winning was never the point. Canada, like many other NATO members, wasn’t there to defeat the Taliban but to be good allies to the United States. But this isn’t a very effective argument. The only point of showing oneself to be a good ally is so that you get something back in return. But Canada – like, I suspect, other US allies – appears to have got diddly squat. For instance, helping the Americans in Afghanistan didn’t stop Trump from tearing up the NAFTA treaty or stop Biden kicking Canada in the teeth by cancelling the Keystone and Line 5 pipelines (both of great importance to the Canadian economy). Besides, if the point of fighting is to be an ally, you achieve your strategic goal just by turning up. Consequently, what you do thereafter doesn’t matter. Military operations thus get entirely detached from strategy. The result is inevitably a mess. In other words, it’s a poor strategic objective. It’s not one we should have set ourselves.
There is a simple lesson to draw from all this: we shouldn’t have sent our army to Afghanistan. It didn’t help Afghanistan, and it didn’t help us. Let’s not repeat the same mistake somewhere else in the future.
It’s said that, when asked why he had escalated America’s military campaign in Vietnam, US president Lyndon Johnson pulled down his trousers, whipped out his male member, and said “That’s why!’
I have no idea if this is true, but it’s quite plausible. For LBJ, Vietnam was nothing if not a test of manhood. As he told his biographer Doris Kearns: “If I left that way and let the communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward … an unmanly man, a man without spine.”
It’s perhaps too harsh to say that 58,000 Americans died so that LBJ could feel like a man. But there’s something to it. And as I detailed in my 2006 book Military Honour and the Conduct of War, LBJ is hardly unique. Throughout the ages, war – like international politics generally – has been powerfully influenced by the search for honour, and perhaps even more by the desire to avoid dishonour.
One you realize this, a lot of international politics suddenly makes sense. Modern Westerners tend to be a bit uncomfortable with the language of honour. It sounds a bit archaic. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not relevant – just that we’re not very good at recognizing it in ourselves. A case in point is the incident last week when a British warship sailed through what Russia claims are its territorial waters off Crimea. But before we get onto that, we first need to take a little diversion into academic theory.
Honour, as Aristotle put it, is “the reward for virtue.” What virtue consists of is something we’ll come onto in a moment, but the key point is that honour comes from displaying virtue. Honour also comes in two forms – external and internal, otherwise expressed by words such as prestige, reputation, face, etc. in the first instance, or like conscience and integrity in the second. Seen this way, honour is, according to a well-known definition, the worth of a person in his/her own eyes as well as the worth of a person in the eyes of others. Either way, it’s a measurement of worth. But of the two forms (internal and external) the first is the most important – the reason one wants to be considered worthy in the eyes of others is because it makes you feel worthy in your own eyes. Ultimately, honour is all about feeling good about yourself.
Another way of looking at honour is to divide it into two other types. The first is absolute, and is often associated with female honour. This type you either have or you don’t – you’re pure, and so honourable, until you aren’t and you’re not. The second type is relative and competitive – or “agonistic” in the technical jargon. This type is traditionally associated with male virtues – strength, courage, prowess, and so on. Honour of this type has to be perpetually defended, lest one loses one’s relative position. It requires one both to challenge others and to defend oneself any time one is challenged.
This latter type of honour tends to flourish where governance is weak, and people or institutions feel that they need to exert themselves in order to survive. This gives it an instrumental purpose. But it also tends to get detached from this purpose. Strength, courage, prowess etc are considered important in the sense of being necessary to defend against threats. Because of that, societies tend to promote them as virtues, rewarding their display. The result is that people internalize them and feel a need to display these virtues even when it’s not appropriate. Because virtue and worth have become associated with strength, courage, prowess etc, showing strength, courage, prowess, etc becomes almost an end in itself – or at least, a psychological necessity to avoid the sense of shame that comes from failing to live up to the standard of virtue.
The result is a lot of utterly unnecessary conflict, as individuals, including state leaders, feel the need to challenge one another and respond forcibly to anything that is perceived to be a challenge.
Which brings us on to the shenanigans of the Royal Navy last week off the coast of Crimea.
In a recent post, I speculated as to what inspired this particular piece of foolish derring-do. Now we have an answer, courtesy of some waterlogged Ministry of Defence documents found abandoned behind a bus stop in Kent. In these, anonymous defence officials predicted that the Russian response to a British incursion into Crimean waters might be fairly forceful. But they also concluded that this was no reason not to direct the British warship HMS Defender to sail through the waters in question. Were that to happen, said the documents, people might get the impression of “the UK being scared/running away.”
At which point, I hope, the connection with what I said earlier becomes clear. One might imagine that the Russian-British spat was a matter of high principle or national interest. In reality, it’s about not wanting to look cowardly.
In effect, the Russian annexation of Crimea was a “challenge” to the West. As such, the logic of honour requires a response. Failing to face up to the challenge by sailing around Crimea would have meant ducking the challenge, and as such was unacceptable. The fact that the Russians might respond forcefully made meeting the challenge even more essential. If there was no chance of a forceful response, there wouldn’t be any cowardice in failing to meet it. It was precisely the possibility that things might turn violent that made the escapade necessary.
This seems strange, but the logic is entirely in keeping with the perverse incentives provided by the honour code. The possibility that an incident might escalate into war isn’t a reason to back off; it’s actually all the more reason to press on.
The thing about this, though, is that the challenge in question was purely imaginary. It existed in the minds of the Royal Navy, but not anywhere else. People weren’t actually going to think that the British were a bunch of cowards if they decided to sail from Odessa to Georgia by some other route. In fact, nobody would have noticed, let alone cared.
Thus, going back to what I said earlier, the internal aspect of honour is what matters here – it’s all about self-perception rather than the perception of others. What’s driving this is a feeling in the British establishment that their status in the world isn’t what it was. The sense of internal dishonour this provokes makes them feel bad about themselves. And so they incite a conflict in order to boost their self-esteem.
If you have a spare hour, I recommend Bill Moyer’s documentary LBJ’s Road to War. A lot of it consists of recordings of President Johnson’s phone calls with his advisors about Vietnam. What comes out of it is that all concerned knew that escalating the war was a bad idea and wouldn’t succeed. But more important from LBJ’s point of view was that he didn’t want to look weak. And the rest as they say, is history. The lesson is obvious, and its one that the Brits – and everybody else – would do well to learn.
Sunday’s edition of the New York Times had an interesting little piece by the newspaper’s token conservative op-ed writer Ross Douthat, entitled ‘The Strange Death of Liberal Russophobia’, a by-line echoing the title of George Dangerfield’s famous 1935 book The Strange Death of Liberal England. Douthat notes that between 2016 and 2020, when Donald Trump was president of the USA, among American liberals,
[Russian president Vladimir] Putin was a figure of extraordinary menace whose tentacles extended everywhere, from Brexit to the NRA. He had hacked American democracy, placed a Manchurian candidate in the White House, sowed the internet with misinformation, placed bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan, extended Russian power across the Middle East and threatened Eastern Europe with invasion or subversion. In this atmosphere ever rumor about Russian perfidy was pre-emptively believed, and the defense of liberal democracy required recognizing that we had been thrust into Cold War 2.0.
Douthat isn’t wrong about that. For a period of four years, Putin derangement syndrome, allied to an overarching Russophobia, became a centrepiece of the Democratic party’s identity. It was to be expected that once Joe Biden became president, US policy towards Russia would become even more hardline. But, Douthat notes, the opposite has happened:
Now comes Biden, making moves in Russia policy that are essentially conciliatory – freezing a military aid package to Ukraine, ending US sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking Germany to Russia, a return of ambassadors – and setting a summit that can reasonably be regarded as a modest propaganda coup for Putin.
And yet, all this – which if Trump had done it, would have led to screams of betrayal and have been seen as proof that Trump was working on behalf of the Kremlin – has passed by with nary of a squeak of protest from the same American liberals who just a short while ago were portraying Moscow as the source of all evil.
What gives?
Douthat argues that it’s a sign of ‘the wisdom of the Biden administration in recognizing that certain Trump-era hysterias within its party can be safely put to sleep.’ According to Douthat, the Russophobic lunacy was the purview of one particular part of the Democratic party – what George Packer calls ‘Smart America’ (‘which is basically meritocratic elites’). This group ‘wanted to blame all its own failures on Russian disinformation’, but it isn’t Biden’s core constituency. He therefore feels free to ignore it and to pursue an essentially Realist policy towards the Russian Federation.
There maybe something to this theory. But I suggest another – the ‘strange’ death of liberal Russophobia isn’t so ‘strange’ at all. Its rise and fall indicates that it was always a tactic more than anything else. Russia-bashing was a method chosen by elements in the Democratic party as a means of undermining Trump and so winning back power. It wasn’t in my view a very good method, and I don’t think that Biden’s victory owed much if anything to it, but it was always a method not an end in itself. That doesn’t mean that ‘Smart America’ didn’t come to believe its own Russophobic propaganda – I get a strong sense that its members repeated its claims so often that in due course they became true believers. But from Biden’s point of view, once Trump was gone, the method had served its purpose. There is no longer any reason to make a central point of Democratic rhetoric.
And so, having outlived its usefulness, it has been discarded. Or at least, one hopes it has. I’m not convinced that it’s exactly suffered a ‘death’, as Douthat put it. It’s still there, with a strong hold on parts of the liberal establishment in the USA. But it seems that at least for now, Biden is prepared to largely ignore it. In that sense, when Douthat speaks of the ‘wisdom of the Biden administration’, one has to agree.
I’m guessing that national newspapers have largely given up fact-checking their authors. It’s time consuming and costly, and it’s a competitive business and profit margins are slim. Who needs it? And so, our newspapers happily churn out story after story alleging Russian misinformation while themselves publishing blatant misinformation about the Russian Federation, its leaders, and its policies.
Take Canada’s own beloved National Post, excerpts from which are syndicated in local newspapers across the country, including our capital city’s Ottawa Citizen. The Post likes to publish the works of one Diane Francis, an American-born Canadian journalist whose political leanings can be surmised from the fact that she is said to be a ‘non-resident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC.’ No doubt she’s done some great work through the years, to justify her many awards. But when it comes to Russia she has some serious problems getting her facts right.
This is clear from her latest gem, which appeared today with the headline ‘Putin is playing chess with the West – and he’s winning.’ Francis begins:
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been very, very busy lately playing geopolitical chess, as America plays checkers.
Talk about cliché! Putin plays chess while we play checkers – how many times have I heard that one?! But I’m not interested in Francis’s lack of stylistic originality, so much as her tenuous grasp of reality. For this is what she has to say:
As the US election campaign dominated the headlines all summer and fall, millions more people were placed under the boot of Russia in Belarus and Nagorno-Karabakh … [In Belarus] Now Moscow controls its economy, media and police forces … [In Nagorno-Karabakh] Russian troops are nothing more than an occupying force executing a de facto takeover of territory.
Where does Francis get this stuff?? I’m damned if I know. How precisely does Russia now control the Belarusian economy?? Has Moscow bought out the Minsk Tractor Factory, the Belaruskali potash company, Belavia airlines, or anything else? If so, Diane Francis is apparently the only person in the world to know about it.
What about the other claims? Does Moscow now control the Belarusian media? A few weeks ago there was an allegation that after several hundred Belarusian TV workers walked off the job, a similar number of Russians were flown in to replace them. No solid evidence to back the allegation has ever been provided, and it seems somewhat improbable that Russian state TV has that many spare people lying around. As for Moscow controlling the Belarusian police, again that appears to be something entirely in Diane Francis’s imagination. Back in August, Russian president Vladimir Putin said that he could send police to Belarus if they were needed, but nothing ever came of it. The Belarusian police seem to be managing perfectly well on their own (as far as the authorities are concerned) and remain decidedly under the control of their own president, Alexander Lukashenko.
Which leaves us Nagorno-Karabakh. Russian peacekeepers there are ‘an occupying force executing a de facto takeover of territory’, Francis tells us, bringing ‘millions more under the boot of Russia’. I’m kind of wondering whose territory it is that she thinks Russia has taken over – Azerbaijan’s or Armenia’s?? I also wonder how she thinks that 1,960 soldiers, with no civilian administrators, can control a territory the size of Nagorno-Karabakh. The fact that they are there as a means of bringing peace to the region and preventing the inevitable bloodshed which would have resulted if the war had continued, passes Ms Francis by. So too does the fact that both the parties to the conflict – Azerbaijan and Armenia – consent to the Russians’ presence.
If that was all that this article got wrong, it would be bad enough, but sadly it isn’t. For Ms Francis tells us that,
Putin also expanded his presence in Syria, Libya and the Arctic, and will certainly do so in Afghanistan if Trump pulls American troops out.
I have to say that I’m not aware of a recent expansion of the Russian presence in Syria (the Arctic in question is in any case part of Russia – and as for Libya, it depends on whether you count the mercenaries of the Wagner Company). In reality, the Russian military footprint in Syria isn’t notably larger than it has been at any other point in the last five years. As for Russian troops storming into Afghanistan if the Americans leave, all I can say is that nothing is impossible but to say that this will ‘certainly’ happen is bizarre to say the least. One imagines that Russians have little appetite for a second Afghan war. Meanwhile, the Russian government has repeatedly made it clear that it would prefer if the Americans stayed in Afghanistan.
And then finally, Ms Francis comes out with this whopper of a falsehood. telling us that Russia’s ‘takeover’ of Nagorno-Karabakh
is similar to what the Kremlin did in Ukraine in 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea and killed tens of thousands of people.
Whoa, Whoa. Stop for a moment. Russia ‘killed tens of thousands of people’ in Crimea’??? Since when? The last time I looked into this, the death toll in the Russian annexation of Crimea was one person, not tens of thousands. But what’s the difference when there’s propaganda to be spread?
Methinks that Ms Francis is probably confusing the takeover of Crimea with the war in Donbass, but even if you accept that explanation for her curious statement, it is still far from the truth. So far about 13,000 people have been killed in Donbass. That’s bad, but it’s not ‘tens of thousands’. Ukrainian military deaths amount to 4,500. Rebel military deaths are somewhere in the same region, though possibly a bit higher. Of the 13,000 dead, it’s also reckoned that maybe around 3,500 are civilians, the vast mass of whom were on the rebel side of the frontline and so the victims of Ukrainian, not rebel or Russian, shelling. In other words, most of those killed in the war have been killed by the Ukrainian army. ‘Russia’ is not free of guilt, but ‘killed tens of thousands of people’ it most certainly has not.
Nor is Russia responsible, as Ms Francis claims late in her article, for the fact that ‘This fall, Ukraine’s anticorruption efforts came to a sudden halt’. Francis claims that this was ‘due to attacks by Russian-backed media outlets, politicians and oligarchs, as well as Russian-influenced judges.’ That would be Ukraine’s Constitutional Court. Where is the evidence that its judges are in the pay of the Kremlin?? Once again, I’m damned if I know. Ms Francis certainly isn’t telling.
Discussing such falsehoods before, I’ve noted that even though it’s one article it’s still worth pointing out its errors. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people read this junk. They take its claims as truth. But they’re not; they’re false, pure and simple. Publishing this stuff, without any effort to check its facts, is highly irresponsible, fanning fears and hatreds, and contributing to a worsening of international relations. Although it almost certainly won’t, the National Post, and other outlets like it, should consider this long and hard.
‘In recent weeks, Russia has stepped up its military and propaganda campaign around the world,’ Ms Francis tells us, warning also of the dangers of ‘Russian disinformation campaigns’. It strikes me that if she’s after propaganda and disinformation, she should start by looking a little closer to home.
Twenty five years ago or so, Grigory Yavlinsky, was a reasonably serious political actor. His Yabloko party won 7% of the vote, and 45 seats, in the 1995 elections to the Russia State Duma, and the following year Yavlinsky won a similar share of the vote in the Russian presidential election. As the foremost representative of Russian liberalism, Yabloko was never very popular, but it had enough support to get a place in the corridors of power. Those days are long gone. Nowadays, Yavlinsky and Yabloko get about 1% of the vote in presidential and parliamentary elections. ‘Why should we bother listening to them?’ you might ask.
I’m not sure that Yavlinsky’s new book The Putin System: An Opposing View (in fact a translation and updating of a 2015 Russian-language text) provides much of an answer. On the plus side, the book is a much more sophisticated critique of modern Russia than most of what you find in bookstores nowadays. But at at the end of day, it ends up in much the same place, warning readers of Russia’s rapid decline into totalitarianism. What you get, then, is more of the same, but with the hysterical language of popular authors replaced by dense academic prose.
For that reason, The Putin System is not going to be a best-seller. It’s kind of dull: highly theoretical, and lacking in specifics. I can’t see anybody who’s not a die-hard Russia watcher wanting to spend a lot of time drudging through it. However, as that’s my job, let me tell you more or less what it says.
Yavlinsky argues that the ‘Putin system’ is best described as ‘peripheral authoritarianism’, and he spends a lot of time explaining what he means by this. Russia is ‘peripheral’ because it stands outside the ‘core’ of global capitalism, its role being merely to be supply raw materials to the core. And it’s authoritarian because its system is non-competitive. Yavlinsky notes that the distinction between authoritarianism and democracy is a false one. What defines a system, according to Yavlinsky, is how the elite is chosen. So-called ‘democracies’ aren’t necessarily run by the ‘people’; while so-called ‘authoritarian’ states may be quite responsive to popular demands. It varies according to local conditions and to the nature of the particular elite. The real difference, he says, is between competitive and non-competitive systems. Russia is non-competitive, as the elites have ways of ensuring that they stay in power regardless of elections. It is Russia’s non-competitive system which makes it authoritarian, Yavlinsky says.
At this point, I found myself quite liking Yavlinsky and The Putin System. Again and again, analysts throw out words like ‘authoritarian’ to describe Russia without saying what they mean. Yavlinsky at least makes an effort to define his terms, which gives us something we can talk about, rather than just throw insults around. Definitions matter. What stood out for me from this definition was Yavlinsky’s elitist understanding of politics. I’ll return to this later.
The non-competitive nature of the Russian state, Yavlinsky argues, is a natural product of the system of property relations established in the 1990s. Here he sounds a bit like Tony Wood in his book Russia without Putin. Shock therapy in the 1990s redistributed property in a way that concentrated it in the hands of a few, and created an unhealthy mutual dependency between the state and the new rich. An independent middle class failed to develop. Meanwhile, Russia remained primarily a natural resource exporter, on the periphery of the international system. All this reduced the opportunities for self-enrichment, and made it easy for the elite to capture the few opportunities which remained, turning the state into nothing more than a system for distributing rents from the few profitable sectors of the economy into the hands of the select. This created strong incentives for the elite to inhibit competition which might threaten their dominance, gradually squeezing that competition until the state became something close to totalitarian. This process began under Yeltsin. There was no sharp break, therefore, between Yeltsin and Putin. The latter simply continued what the former had started. The basic theory is this:
Authoritarianism as a political system is essentially an unavoidable or nearly unavoidable result of the domination of a peripheral-type capitalism in the country. The reason for this is that, being peripheral, this type of capitalism relies on a narrow range of rather unsophisticated resources and, therefore, by its very nature, does not generate sufficient prerequisites for a full-fledged functioning of political competition.
Authoritarian systems can be responsive and modernizing, Yavlinsky says, but the Russian version of authoritarianism, he claims, is not like this. By suppressing competition it is bound to stifle initiative, prevent necessary reform, and in the long term produce economic stagnation. The only way out of this is to move away from the periphery towards the ‘core’, i.e. towards the West. Instead, the state is moving in the opposite direction, thus ensuring its ultimate failure. Consequently, says Yavlinsky, ‘I agree with those who believe that this regime is doomed.’
As I said, this is a more sophisticated analysis than the normal ‘Putin is evil’ explanation for Russia’s authoritarian turn, although it ends up in much the same place. There may even be something to it. But I have some doubts. In the 1990s, resources were also unequally redistributed in Ukraine, which is also a ‘peripheral’ state, and yet independent Ukraine has always had a very competitive political system. At the same time, the competitive nature of that system hasn’t done Ukraine any obvious good. This casts some doubt on Yavlinsky’s analysis of the causes of Russian authoritarianism as well as on the benefits of political competition.
An even more fundamental weakness of this book is that Yavlinsky doesn’t provide any answers about how to get out of the problem he identifies. In fact, he admits that it’s not at all that easy. Part of the solution would appear to be joining the ‘core’ – i.e. Western Europe. But is this anymore the ‘core’ of the world? Yavlinsky claims that authoritarianism is identified with being on the periphery of global capitalism, and competitive systems with being in the core. But isn’t China now very much part of the core of global capitalism? Yavlinsky’s periphery-core model of the world strikes me as rather out of date.
In any case, how can one make Russia more ‘competitive’ if the lack of competition is a reflection of the economic substructure? If you follow this sort of Marxist analysis, changing the ruler and a few ministers and issuing some decrees about human rights, fair elections, and so on, won’t change anything if the substructure remains unaltered. But how do you change that? Yavlinsky doesn’t tell us, beyond the following:
The duty of all healthy political forces in Russia is to make an effort to develop and put forward a realistic alternative, a truly practical plan to overcome the present crisis. If necessary, this plan may need to be imposed upon Russia’s fearful and disoriented political elite, which may have to be forced to fulfill its responsibilities toward the country and its people. [My emphasis]
What do we get from this? Politics for Yavlinsky appears to be a matter of the economic substructure and of the elites. There’s no talk here of democracy or what the Russian people want. Even more startling, it would seem that after 30 years in politics, Yavlinsky still doesn’t have a plan for how to reform Russia. But what he does know is that whenever this great plan does emerge it may have to be ‘imposed’ upon Russia for the greater good of all.
I found this a little off-putting. For a notional liberal democrat, it turns out that Grigory Yavlinsky is just a smidgen too Bolshevik for my liking.