The Future of Russia in Historical Perspective

Russian Choices: The Historical Determinants

Russia's situation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union is in some respects unprecedented, at least since the 17th century. But in the broadest sense it is simply an example of an often repeated pattern in the Russian history. Success in asserting state power is followed by failure or relative decline. This pattern has repeatedly sparked drastic internal efforts to strengthen the power of the state and establish or regain Russia's international position.

Internal and international developments have been, and are, very closely linked. The most dramatic change has been international, the collapse of the Russian/Soviet empire. Internally, a most disturbing recent development has been the apparent breakdown of law and order and the influence of criminal elements in the expanding private economy. Closely related to the issue of legality and respect for law is the whole question of private property, particularly property in land, which has yet to be clearly resolved. The results of the December 1993 elections suggested that right-wing nationalism is a growing force. Finally there is, of course, the fundamental issue of the basic political order. What historical basis is there for developing democratic political institutions in Russia?

Russia: The Expansion and Collapse of Empire

Russia now has, roughly speaking, the frontiers that existed prior to the crucial events of the mid-17th century when, in 1654, the Ukrainian Cossack leader, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, turned to Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich of Moscow for support against the King of Poland, and in exchange for Muscovite aid accepted some sort of union with Moscow. Exactly what was agreed on has been a matter of bitter dispute between Ukrainians and Russians ever since. The ensuing war with Poland which Moscow ultimately won, tilted the balance of power in Eastern Europe in Russia's favor and paved the way for Russian emergence as a great power on the European scene following Peter the Great's defeat of Charles XII of Sweden at Poltava in 1709.

Now disintegration of the Soviet Union, and most significantly, the establishment of an independent Ukraine has moved the clock back, so to speak, not 50 or even 100 years, but over 300 years. The Soviet Union, heir to the Russian empire was the last of the great multi-national empires, like the Austrian and Ottoman, which grew on the basis of either conquest or dynastic bargaining. Like them, Imperial Russia had a dominant ethnic group, and was territorially contiguous. But Russia also shared some of the features of the great overseas empires of England, France, and Holland even though its expansion was overland. Central Asia and the Russian Far East were as remote and culturally distinct, from the center of political life as any of the overseas possessions of the Western European powers.

At first glance at least, the Russian/Soviet empire seems to be following the pattern of disintegration of those other great empires. The Ottoman and Hapsburg empires broke up into more or less ethnically homogeneous national units. The overseas possessions of the Western powers have been established, with varying degrees of success, as independent entities. That seems to be what happened very quickly in the Russian/Soviet case. There is, however, one factor that is different in scale and more potentially disturbing in the current scene than in the earlier examples. That is, of course, the presence of really large numbers of Russians living, and in some cases, long-established in the newly independent states. The issue is not unique to Russia. In the breakup of British and French empires the places where there was most trouble were those where substantial numbers of Europeans had settled themselves, but were outnumbered by indigenous inhabitants. The examples of Algeria, Rhodesia, and South Africa come immediately into mind. In the Americas and Australia the native people were simply overwhelmed by the European settlers. Parts of Siberia and northern European Russia have had a similar experience.

But in various parts of the former Russian Soviet empire the "settler problem" is more acute than any of the Western cases. Ukraine, overall, is about 20% Russian and in parts Russians are a substantial majority. Kazakhstan is 37% Russian and in much of the northern part of the republic, Russians far outnumber Kazakhs. The situation varies in the smaller republics, but those two are by far the most important in terms of their size and resources. In some areas the Russian settlers are relatively recent arrivals, but in other regions they have been there for generations.

In other major empires, once the empire collapsed or was dismantled, the "core state" remaining was relatively homogeneous, as are modern Turkey, Austria, France and Holland, and even Britain,(despite the Welsh and Scottish issues). Today, the new Russia possesses borders from the mid-17th century. But it is still a multi-national entity with about 20% of its population being non-Russian. This is because Muscovite Russia expanded from its earliest history into areas inhabited by non-Russians. Northwest and Northeast of Moscow were various peoples speaking languages related to Finnish. Some remnants of these groups still maintain a precarious separate identity; others have been completely assimilated in the centuries since the Slavic people moved north, beginning as far back as the 12th century.

The most dramatic early phase of Muscovite expansion was in the mid-16th century when Ivan IV (The Terrible) successfully conquered the Tatar Khanate of Kazan directly to the East of Moscow, eliminating the only major organized political entity between Moscow and the Pacific Ocean. More important than Siberia for the stability of present-day Russia is the situation in the area to the East and Southeast of Moscow in European Russia which was conquered in the 16th and ensuing centuries. Russian military pressure, followed by agricultural settlement, gradually pushed back the pastoral non-Russian peoples, but to this day there is a large, but not a majority population of Tatars and Bashkirs, people speaking Turkish languages and mainly Muslim in religious tradition. These are people who have far more in common with the Turkish/Muslim peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus than they do with the Russians who slightly outnumber them in their own home territories. Indeed it was among the Tatars of what had once been the Khanate of Kazan that modern Turkic nationalism began to develop in the late 19th century and eventually spread, to the more culturally traditional Turkic peoples of central Asia who had only been incorporated in the empire in the mid-19th century.

In the Caucasus region the three largest groups, Georgians, Armenians, and Azeri Turks enjoy a precarious independence, but as the current problems in Chechnya illustrate, the highly diverse, largely Muslim, and traditionally independent-minded populations of the mountainous areas remain a potential problem of great difficulty for any Russian regime, just as they were in the 19th century.

The techniques used by the Tsarist state of controlling non-Russian territories are significant in understanding the relationship of the newly independent states to present-day Russia. Despite the use of military power and police power, except perhaps in Central Asia and parts of the Caucasus, coercion was much less important than one might have expected. The most important and successful method used was the co-optation and, in some places, the virtually complete assimilation of the local elites. There are at least three important examples: the Baltic Provinces, Georgia, and Ukraine.

In the Baltic area taken from Sweden by Peter the Great in the early 18th century (present day Estonia and Latvia), the ruling class was a German landowning nobility descended from the crusading knights who had conquered the area in the 13th century. The Tsarist government recognized their existing privileges, rights to land and serfs and control of local government. In return these "Baltic Barons" loyally served the Russian state down to the end of the old regime, while preserving their German identity and the Lutheran religion. Only in the late 19th century did some problems begin to develop with the rise of both Russian nationalism and national feeling among the indigenous Latvian and Estonian population. Most of the German elite emigrated in the inter-war period after the establishment of independent states of Latvia and Estonia, and the remainder fled in 1945.

The Georgian nobility is similar to the Baltic Germans, although their integration into the Russian elite proceeded less smoothly. Georgia, faced by long-standing threats of domination by the Ottoman Empire and Persia, accepted Russian suzerainty at the very beginning on the nineteenth century. Russia promised to recognize the privileges of the Georgian nobility. Initially, however, the Georgian elite resisted because of substantial cultural differences, and because the Russian government tried to administer Georgia like other provinces in the empire. It did not want to leave the existing Georgian administrative system intact. However by mid-century, bowing to the inevitable, and helped by the sympathetic administration of Count Vorontsov, the vast majority of the Georgian nobility accepted Russian rule and became loyal members of the Empire's governing elite.

By far the most important example of elite co-optation, indeed assimilation, is found in Ukraine. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians, just like the Russians, and they speak a distinct language, but one very closely related to Russian. Up to the mid 17th century, all of Ukraine was part of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. In a broad belt of frontier territory bordering the territory of the Crimean Tatars on the south, and Muscovite Russia on the east, control by the King of Poland and the local nobility was tenuous or non-existent. In that area a large body of autonomous frontiersman, largely peasants, who had fled the exactionís of their predominantly Polish landlords, established themselves and developed a very substantial military capability, raiding the Crimeans and the Ottoman Turks, and fending off attempts by the King of Poland to govern them. To simplify a very complex story, these frontiersman, called Cossacks, led increasingly violent uprisings of peasants against the King of Poland and finally, when faced with defeat in the mid-17th century their leader, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, turned to Moscow for help. This resulted in a long war between Moscow and Poland which Moscow finally won.

There was continued tension between the undisciplined, traditionally self-governing Cossacks and the centralized autocracy of the Muscovite Tsars, but in the course of the ensuing century the leaders of the Cossack bands, originally the popularly selected leaders of the autonomous frontiersmen, were assimilated into the Russian nobility, rewarded with grants of land, and, most significantly, given property rights over the descendants of the men who had once selected their ancestors to be their leaders. By the mid-nineteenth century the Ukrainian landed nobility was virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the serf-holding Russian nobility. Their language was Russian and their orientation, like that of other Russian nobles, was to St. Petersburg and state service, not to local interests and concerns.

Only in the mid and later nineteenth century, with the emergence of a small Ukrainian middle class in the growing cities and the attraction of a few nobles to ideas of romanticism, did modern nationalism begin to develop in Ukraine. But compared to other national movements in central and Eastern Europe, it was very weak and poorly developed by 1917. In the part of Ukraine that remained under Polish control and later became Austrian with the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, a very similar development took place, except that there the Ukrainian Orthodox elite was assimilated to Polish language and culture and abandoned Orthodoxy for Catholicism.

Much the same pattern is visible in the Soviet period. In non-Russian areas the leadership of the local Communist party always included significant numbers of men drawn from the local national group. In many of the newly independent states, these men remain in leadership positions, having made a rapid switch from loyalty to Moscow to leadership of a nationally based state. Kuchma and his predecessor, Kravchuk in the Ukraine, Nazarbaev in Kazakhstan, and Dudaev in Chechnya are only a few of the many examples that could be mentioned.

Ukraine is by far the most important of the newly independent states. Its population is about equal to that of France, and despite its current economic problems, it is potentially a very rich country with great agricultural and industrial resources and a well-educated population. Reunification with Russia would very largely recreate the old USSR. The permanent emergence of a truly independent and strong Ukraine would create a major realignment of the balance of power in Eastern Europe, if not the world. It is impossible to make firm predictions, but there are clearly forces pushing in both directions. Not only are there 20% or so ethnic Russians concentrated in the cities of Eastern Ukraine, but there are many Ukrainians, especially in the industrialized East who are substantially russianized. They might accept, or even prefer, re-union with Russia. But national sentiment is strong among a substantial group of the population in Central Ukraine and particularly in Western Ukraine. The regional division immediately brings to mind the possibility of partition with all the complications that might ensue.

The Pattern of Catch-Up

There has always been a close relationship between internal developments and external pressures. A recurring pattern in Russia's relations with the rest of the world has been the effort to "catch up" and more or less successfully play a major role in the world, followed by periods of relative decline. The most famous of the "catch up" periods, is of course, the reign of Peter I (The Great) in the first quarter of the 18th century during which Russia defeated Sweden, then a European great power, and emerged on the European scene a major player from that time forward. This was done, in part by introducing new Western techniques of military organization, or more accurately put, accelerating their introduction which had begun in the previous century, and by culturally reeducating the traditionally Russian service-oriented nobility so that it could deal more effectively with the elites of contemporary Western Europe. In the course of the eighteenth century the Russian elite ceased to be regarded as exotic barbarians by Western observers and became an accepted participant in the eighteenth century elite culture. The most dramatic proof of this new acceptance is the fact that from Peter's time forward, all marriages in the Russian royal house were with foreign royalty, while prior to Peter there had been virtually none since the Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century.

However, and this is very important to remember, Peter did much of what he accomplished by using more intensely the traditional Muscovite state system which was far more centralized and powerful than that possessed by contemporary Western sovereigns. Russian noble landowners had total authority over their peasant serfs, but in turn the Tsar had complete, unchallenged, authority over them. In Russian political development there had never been anything like the contractual tie that characterized the relationship of many Western monarchs and their vassal lords in the medieval times. The most famous example of this tradition is, of course, the Magna Carta, negotiated between King John and the Barons of England. Nothing like it ever existed in Russia.

Throughout the eighteenth century, following Peter's death in 1725, Russia continued to enjoy virtually unbroken military success which culminated in the early 19th century with the defeat of the Napoleonic invasion in 1812-13 when Russia emerged on the European stage as the dominant continental military power. Russia's large standing army, composed of unpaid peasants conscripted for life, could compete very successfully with expensive European mercenary forces in a century of largely static technology.

The essentially internal-political factors which had enabled Imperial Russia to achieve such remarkable success in the eighteenth century became markedly less significant in the 19th century as Western European nations developed their economies far more rapidly than Russia, and introduced general conscription and short-term military service.

In 1854, largely as a result of diplomatic failures on both sides, Russia became involved in a war with Britain, France and the Ottoman empire that was fought on the Crimean peninsula. It was a small-scale affair and had little physical impact on Russia, but the strain was too much for the shaky economy. Although Alexander II wanted to fight on despite setbacks in the Crimea, he was eventually persuaded that funds were not available either from taxation or foreign loans and that Russia had no choice but to accept a humiliating peace settlement. For a power that had regarded itself as the arbiter of affairs on the European continent, the defeat was a profound shock to the ruling elite, composed of nobles with a strong military tradition.

The remaining years of the old regime, down to 1917 were a second "catch up" period in which the government embarked first, in the 1860's, on a series of major reforms that included the abolition of serfdom, the introduction of a modern legal system, rural local government (the zemstvo), general military conscription, and other very significant measures. Indeed, with one crucial exception, every major aspect of Russian life was affected by this series of decrees, aptly called "the Great Reforms". The exception was ultimately to prove fatal to the old regime, the principle of autocracy was left intact, and no step of any kind was taken to begin to involve any segment of the population in the formation of policy by the central government.

The Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, although it ended in a Russian victory, proved to be far more difficult than expected, and even worse, when the Great Powers of Europe combined at the Congress of Berlin (1878) to force Russia to give up many of the fruits of its hard won victory, Russia was in no position to resist them. This second humiliation, coming so soon after the defeat of the Crimean War and the Great Reforms, convinced many leading Russian officials that a major effort to modernize the Russian economy was necessary. The earlier Great Reforms had not been directed primarily at economic development, although many of their provisions can be regarded as preconditions for economic growth.

Under the leadership of finance ministers, Ivan Vyshnegradsky and particularly Sergei Witte, Russia did achieve a very rapid expansion of heavy industry in the late 1880's and 1890's. The expansion was based very largely on foreign capital. To convince foreign investors to put their funds into Russian projects, it was necessary to maintain a positive balance of payments and that was possible only by exporting grain in large quantities at low prices, to the detriment of the agricultural sector.The rapid industrial growth, concentrated in a few major centers, was a major step forward, but by 1914 it had not created sufficient wealth to meet the needs of both the state and the population. Indeed, the development of large concentrations of industrial workers in a few major cities created, for the first time, the potential for an urban-based revolutionary movement, which indeed materialized in 1917.Thus when the First World War began in 1914, Russia was still in the midst of a "catch-up" effort that was showing major progress but was far from complete.

After defeat in World War I, the revolution, and civil war, Russia in the 1920's was in an even weaker position relative to the rest of the world, than it had been at the end of the Crimean war some 65 years earlier. However, the new Soviet state successfully asserted its control over the territory of Imperial Russia, most significantly over Ukraine where the national movement had failed in its attempt to establish an independent state.

What followed in the 1930's was the most dramatic and costly "catch-up" effort in all Russian history, one that irrevocably transformed Russia from a predominantly agrarian society to an industrialized urban one. Although superficially similar in some respects to the efforts of Vyshnegradsky and Witte in the late 19th century, Stalin's collectivization of agriculture and the series of five-year plans were far more drastic, causing the death of millions of people and a catastrophic decline in the standard of living that was not made up until long after the Second World War.Virtually no foreign investment was involved, and the rapid growth of heavy industry that was the hallmark of the Stalin years was achieved by maintaining high rates of domestic investment that were made possible by keeping the standard of living very low for virtually everyone except a small cadre of Communist Party members in leadership positions.

The enormous sacrifices of the Soviet population in a sense "paid-off" for the state because the USSR emerged in the post World War II years as one of the two world superpowers. At a staggering human cost, Russia finally seemed to have regained the kind of position it had held at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Again Russia dominated much of continental Europe and exerted considerable influence throughout the world. However, just as they had during the reign of Nicholas I in the second quarter of the 19th century, complacency and stagnation took their toll. The relative importance of the basic industries that were the pride of the great industrialization drive of the early Five-Year Plans declined as the increasingly sophisticated technology of the computer-age developed in the West.

Russia today is again is in a "post-Crimean" situation where the primary aim is presumably to restore its position in the world to something like what it was in the recent past. The loss of major parts of the old Russian/Soviet empire means that this will be a far more difficult and demanding effort than any of the preceding ones.The crucial question is what means Russia will choose in this effort: crude military and political, and economic pressure on the former Soviet republics, particularly Ukraine, and the non-Russian areas within Russia (like Chechnya), or a more long-term attempt to develop a vigorous market economy and stable democratic political system that would permit Russia to again play its appropriate role in world affairs.

The Linkage Between Patterns

There has always been a close relationship between Russia's external situation and internal developments, particularly those sparked by state policies, but we don't know in what direction external pressure will push state policy. In the mid-19th century, defeat in the Crimean War induced the regime to undertake major reforms of a generally liberal nature (although none of them modified the basic position of the autocracy). The Stalinist solution to Russia's weakness was to inaugurate the most severe oppression ever suffered by the Russian people. There seems to be no single lesson to be drawn from the past in this respect.

Russia is clearly undergoing a major internal crisis at the moment, and the outcome is far from obvious. There have been a few, but not many such periods in the past. The most dramatic was probably the "time of troubles" in the first decade of the 17th century when Russia's central political authority collapsed, a Polish army occupied Moscow, Sweden seized much of the Northwestern part of Muscovy, and the country appeared to be falling into state of total anarchy. Similarly in the period immediately following the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, there were years of civil war, Ukraine declared its independence, and it seemed likely that no government at the center could remain in control. Yet in both of these instances central political power was restored in short order. In 1613 the new Romanov dynasty was established which lasted until 1917, and in the very early 1920's the Bolsheviks defeated their opponents one by one and reasserted the power of the centralized government, albeit with a new legitimizing ideology. After 1613 the nature of the political regime was essentially the same as the one that collapsed at the end of the 16th century. The new Bolshevik government under Lenin and then Stalin quickly restored an even more effective form of centralized autocracy.

The Persistent Distance Between Regime & People

Although the power and importance of the state were great, it is a paradox that the Imperial autocracy did not exercise extensive, detailed control over the countryside. It was too vast and thinly inhabited.One scholar has aptly called Russia's Imperial government a "tribute collecting hierarchy", and it was only in the 19th century that it began to perform some of the functions that we associate with modern government. Most Russian peasants had virtually no contact with officials. The village elder dealt with the landlord or his representative who in turn paid the taxes and every few years turned over a few unfortunate recruits for lifetime service in the army who were usually never to be seen again. Thus for most Russians, government was remote and largely irrelevant to their lives. For most peasant masses there was no legal system, but simply vaguely defined traditions exercised by the arbitrary authority of the landlord and the more powerful people in the village itself.

In 1864 the legal reforms which created a modern, European style-style legal system, specifically excluded the peasant population from the jurisdiction of the new institutions. A romantic Slavophile-based attitude had come to be fairly common among moderately conservative but reformist officials. They simply assumed that "traditional peasant law" existed and that it would be employed effectively in settling disputes among the peasant population, and it was therefore unnecessary, and indeed unfair, to extend the new European-style legal system into the peasant villages. In fact, as it turned out, there was no such thing as a well-established "customary peasant law". In effect, the arbitrary authority of the more powerful elements in the village society was perpetuated. Today most urban Russians are only a generation or two removed from their peasant origin (massive urbanization dates from the 1930's and particularly the immediate post-World War II decades) so the tradition of accepting arbitrary authority, be it the village elder, landlord, or Communist party official is a quite natural one.

The romantic Slavophile view of the peasantry mentioned in connection with the legal reforms of 1864 is merely one example of the dichotomy familiar to all students of Russian history--that between the Westerners and Slavophiles. These specific labels date from the first half of the nineteenth century, but the tension between those who wanted to borrow and adapt a great deal from the West and those who emphasized the superiority of Russian tradition, real or imagined, goes far back in Russian history. It becomes very marked and dramatic in the 17th century in the aftermath of the "time of troubles" when one school of thought argued that the way for Muscovy to regain its position was to adopt western ways, and the other saw salvation in the purification of Russia of corrupting Western influences that had already crept in. The theme can be traced throughout Russian history since then and was recently manifest in the differing approach of the two leading dissidents, the late Andrei Sakharov, the liberal westernizer, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the romantic nationalist whose profound criticism of the Communist regime does not mean that he favors western style parliamentary democracy. Most Russian political figures and thinkers exhibit varying proportions of both traditions: few are total Westernizers or total Slavophiles.

The Failure of Private Property

The recent peasant roots of much of the Russian population may help explain the strong resistance that has arisen to establishing a clear legal basis for private property in land. Peasants in Russian speaking areas traditionally practiced repartitional tenure, a system under which the land of the village was periodically reapportioned among the households of the village in proportion to the labor power of each household. The system facilitated the collection of taxes and rents by assuring each household the means (land) to support itself and produce a small surplus. It was not an ancient Slavic tradition as some romantic nationalists thought in the nineteenth century, but a practical reaction to the tax system introduced by Peter the Great in the early 18th century. It became deeply rooted in most of Russia in the following 200 years. Peasant extended families cultivated their individual allotments on their own. There was no collective group working on the land. However the system discouraged initiative, the use of new techniques or crops, and the accumulation of individual wealth because the allotment was not permanently in the hands of the family. If family members died or set up their own households, the allotment would be reduced at the next redistribution. What the family "owned" was not a specific piece of land but a claim to use its share of the village's land in proportion to the number of workers in the family at a given time.

In the last decade of the old regime the state was vigorously trying to end this system under the Stolypin land reform program, but it had not had time to progress very far by the time of the 1917 Revolution. In the 1920's peasants continued to practice the old system and in many instances forced peasants who had established separate hereditary holdings under the provisions of the Stolypin program to rejoin the village and accept whatever allotment the village as a whole felt that they were entitled to.

The collectivization of agriculture in the 1930's went even further and, except for a small garden plot, peasants no longer had individual family land allotments, and the working of the land was organized collectively. Thus the mass of the Russian people have never had a well-developed tradition that land is something that should be held individually and passed on from generation to generation in a family, an attitude so characteristic of peasant societies in Western Europe.

Even for non-peasant Russians the notion of absolute private property in the land is a relatively new one. In old Muscovy the Tsar, in theory, owned all the land and those who served him, mainly as soldiers, had only "use-rights" to the land and the peasants on it. The absolute ownership of land in a Roman law sense was not formally recognized by the state until the charter of the nobility issued by Catherine the Great in 1785. So both among the masses and the elites the idea of private property in land is not deeply embedded.

The Weakness of New Political Institutions

The most novel aspect of the current situation in Russia is the emergence, however tentative and shaky, of democratic political institutions: contested elections, a parliament that has some real power, open political debate, and a free press. It is easy to say that there is no precedent for these developments, that they have no foundation in Russian tradition and that therefore they will perish because they are "exotic foreign transplants" doomed to wither in the harsh Russian environment.

It is certainly true that Russia has had only the briefest experience with meaningful parliamentary institutions. The last Tsar, Nicholas II, very reluctantly agreed to the creation of an elected parliament, the State Duma, when the regime was faced with a partially successful revolution in 1905. The Duma was given limited powers, but the Tsar and most of his senior advisors never really wanted to cooperate with it and regarded it with suspicion and hostility. It was also true that significant numbers of the elected members of the Duma on the extreme left and the extreme right did not believe in parliamentary democracy and were only in the Duma for tactical reasons.Thus the seemingly hopeful parliamentary experiment of 1906-1917 failed to establish a firm foundation of confidence in democratic institutions.

One must look more broadly to find the basis for hope that democracy may yet prosper in Russia. Change in Russia, whether it is called "reform", "economic development", or something else, has traditionally been initiated from the top, by the Tsar and his close advisors, or by the Party Secretary and Politburo. The consequences of these top-down measures however had frequently far exceeded the expectations of those who initiated them. Peter the Great wanted his noble servitors to be able to deal effectively with foreigners and be competent military officers. To that end they were required to shave their beards, wear Western style clothing, and learn to read and write, at least in Russian, and hopefully in German or French as well. In Peter's own day the results were frequently rather comical in Western eyes, but by the end of the 18th century the upper level of Russian society was socially acceptable to the elites of the rest of Europe and provided a sufficient number of competent military officers.

What Peter and his successors had not realized was that literacy and familiarity with wider world would introduce new, and frequently subversive ideas into Russia. Education was further expanded in the 19th century for the purpose of providing the state with more and better civil officials, but with the unanticipated and unwanted byproduct of creating a new category of people--the intelligentsia, educated citizens who found the existing social and political order unacceptable. From that group came the opposition, moderate and extreme, to the old regime.

The rapid, state sponsored, economic development of the late 19th century greatly increased the size of some Russian cities and brought into being, for the first time, an urban working class of substantial size which ultimately made the 1917 Revolution possible, but it also created an urban middle class that began to take on the characteristics of similar groups elsewhere. They established networks of voluntary organizations which had been virtually unknown in the past. One can make a strong argument that on the eve of the 1917 revolution Russia was rapidly developing the kind of "civil society" that characterized most western nations.

That progress was, of course, brought to an end if not in 1917, then certainly in the early 1930's with the advent of Stalinist terror and the closing down of virtually every organization except those few that were officially sponsored. Nevertheless Stalin's policies and those of his successors had the same kind of unanticipated results as had those of Peter the Great in the 18th century and those of Count Witte in the late 19th. Beginning in the 1930's, but progressing particularly rapidly in the years after World War II and down to the start of the Brezhnev era, Russian society underwent a profound transformation. A predominantly rural, agricultural, and very substantially illiterate society, became a largely urban, industrial, and highly educated society.

The crude, brutal techniques of allocating human resources that worked in creating heavy industry in the 1930's and in restoring it after the Second World War became less and less effective as time went on. The technological complexity of modern industry required increased contact with the rest of the developed world. In the thirties a relative handful of technical experts, some foreign, some pre-Revolutionary holdovers, and some newly trained "red experts", could create basic new industries. By the 1980's a mainly new and very large class of sophisticated scientists and engineers had been brought into being. Just as Peter I had started the process that created the intelligentsia, so Stalin and Khrushchev created the group that ultimately made the continuation of the old system impossible.

In the last years of the Brezhnev era, voluntary organizations began to reemerge despite official opposition. The first and the most famous were associated with environmental issues: the preservation of Lake Baikal and the pollution created by the Chernobyl disaster. They were partly the product of the new social reality of the late 20th century Russia but they also had behind them the traditions of the old intelligentsia, the tradition of small circles, the idea that it is the obligation of the educated person to be critical of the society in which he lives.

Russia: The Current Situation

Russia is currently in a state of severe crisis. It has lost most of the empire that took hundreds of years to build up, the military forces are in disarray, production of goods has declined radically, the political institutions do not seem to be functioning effectively, and, perhaps worst of all, law and order seems to be on the brink of breaking down. Only a rash observer would venture firm predictions about what is likely to emerge in the next few years. No one in 1985 imagined that Russia would be in the present condition a mere ten years in the future.

All of the circumstances mentioned above are interrelated. The functioning of the economy depends on the existence of reliable legal norms. A stable political system facilitates economic development and is supported by economic prosperity. Russia certainly possesses many of the prerequisites for a very successful and dynamic economy. Endowed with ample natural resources, it also has a large and well-educated labor force. At the upper skill levels it has a large number of excellent scientists, engineers, and technicians. At the lower levels the workers have good basic education. The main problem is that attitudes toward work, labor discipline, at all levels, leave much to be desired. The "full-employment", or better said, "full-underemployment", of the Soviet period has generated a negative attitude toward work, expressed well in the old Soviet joke, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". The discipline of real unemployment may well instill a new and more positive ethos. The proliferation of small scale entrepreneurial activity, most visibly represented by simply selling things on the street, suggests that Russians faced by economic necessity are perfectly able to seize opportunities open to them, despite the widespread criticism expressed toward such activity as "speculation".

On a slightly larger, but less obvious scale, there are many small enterprises generally run by enterprising, young, well-educated, people in service activities of various kinds, travel agencies, computer operations, and the like.The factors that limit their success and threaten their future are twofold: bureaucracy and corruption. The bureaucracy is omnipresent but is not Weberian, in that it is not regulated by established, clearly defined rules. That leads, of course to corruption of all sorts. Perhaps even worse than the official corruption is the growth of criminal extortion, using threats of violence to exact protection payments from entrepreneurs.

The development of the economy is not primarily an economic problem, but a political one. Unquestionably the success of the Russian economy depends on currency stabilization and the establishment of the rule of law to make contracts enforceable, to make it possible to plan ahead. There are some encouraging signs of progress here. A new civil code has recently been promulgated and the constitutional court, suspended in 1993, has been reestablished.The stability of the ruble depends on budgetary discipline which is linked directly to the political stability of the government.

Prospects for political stability are uncertain. The election of December 1993 was marked by a strong showing by the extreme nationalist forces led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, but perhaps even more significantly by massive voter indifference to the whole process. Only four years following the abortive coup of August 1991 the population has become largely disillusioned with the electoral process.This disenchantment is perhaps understandable, given the economic difficulties that most Russians have come to face. They have been suddenly shifted from a seemingly stable, predictable system which provided for basic needs badly but reliably, to a volatile system which rewards a prosperous minority (a fairly large one), but which makes life very hard for most others.

No present political leader seems to enjoy widespread popular support, not Yeltsin, not Zhirinovsky. The situation is ripe for the emergence of "a man on a white horse", but none has yet appeared. Russians talk about the "Pinochet" option but there is no Pinochet in sight, but one may appear.Yeltsin has assumed extensive powers and delegated them to his appointees in the provinces, by bypassing elected bodies so the stage seems to be set for someone to assert dictatorial power.

The forcible restoration of the Russian empire does not seem likely in the near future, given the sad state of the Russian armed forces as demonstrated in Chechnya. That could change quite rapidly if the political situation stabilized under an authoritarian figure. Over the long term it seems virtually inevitable that Russian influence, if not domination or annexation, will be substantial in most "near abroad" countries as the former Soviet republics are often called.The most likely candidate for reabsorption is certainly Belarus where the national movement has never been well-developed. But one might expect that the longer it remains independent the more various members of the leadership will develop a taste for, and a vested interest in, independence. The crucial areas are, of course, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In both, the distribution of the Russian minority suggests the possibility of partition and the reannexation of Russian-dominated parts to Russia. This is a course of action that would be strongly opposed by nationalistic Ukrainians and the Kazakhs and hardly likely to occur without very strong military pressure from Russia, something that is not likely in the near future.

Ukraine is a large country, comparable to Germany in area and France in population with the same kind of human resources as Russia, and although it lacks oil, it has the best agricultural land in what was the USSR and a large, though outmoded, heavy industrial sector. Just as in Russia, the crucial factor determining its future development is political stability to permit economic growth.

Kazakhstan has great mineral wealth, particularly oil, which should permit it to become quite prosperous. The Kazakhs suffered terribly under Stalin and would certainly not relinquish their independence easily despite the considerable degree of Russianization among the upper levels of Kazakh society.

The prospects for economic development of the rest of Central Asia are less favorable. Environmental damage due to unwise irrigation practices designed to support cotton monoculture has damaged much land in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The population is growing rapidly, as is unemployment. The political regimes in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have hardly changed since 1991, and economic liberalization has scarcely begun. Russians, many holding technical and professional jobs, are leaving because they feel that there is no future for them in the newly independent states.

Of course, as already mentioned, Russia itself is 20% non-Russian. There have been demands for "independence" or "sovereignty" from various groups, most notably the Tatars and Bashkirs of the lower Volga area, despite a majority of Russians in their territory. In the light of Russia's savage attack on Chechnya it seems unlikely that any of these groups will press their claims to the point of out and out independence.

Implications for U.S. Policy

Throughout Russian history the state has played a central role in charting the economic and international course for the nation. The tradition of initiating things from the top, whether they be social reforms or economic development policies, is a very strong one. The central political authority has quickly reconstituted itself after an apparent collapse.

In the past, Russia's reanimation (under Peter the Great, after the Crimean War, and after the 1917 Revolution) has usually taken place in reaction and in opposition to the policies of the European Great Powers. Because of the external challenge, the Russian state strengthened itself against a possibly hostile outside world.

In the 21st century, the major problem confronting both the European Union and the United States is how to co-opt Russian development and state strengthening and to channel it in a peaceful direction. President Clinton has already sought to do this in his policy toward Russian heavy-handedness in Chechnya.Too much use of force, an expansion of Russian military authoritarianism toward the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, will certainly lead to a cutoff of US economic assistance and a halt in further arms control efforts. Not only will Russia not get into NATO; it will be rebuffed by the European Union and the Group of Seven. On the other hand, if Russia adopts a more forthcoming and cooperative policy toward the "near abroad" nations--one that relies on common economic interests instead of military domination--it will elicit more favorable responses from Europe and the United States.

Since Russian policy is, in balance, hovering between a narrow non-democratic nationalism and a more liberal, market-oriented system, the United States should use a carrot and stick policy--rewarding cooperation and sanctioning Great Russian nationalism. If NATO proceeds to admit the Visegrad countries (Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, with perhaps a later admission of Slovakia), the United States should consider a "Reinsurance Treaty" with Moscow, designed to end Russia's political and military isolation and cement a greater Western orientation. Russian history does not give a single answer to the final evolution of Moscow's attitude. In the years ahead that evolution can be affected by European and American policy.

Note *: Walter Pinteris a Russian Economic Historian at Cornell University Back.

Working Paper #9 for: