Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 5 – Russia currently
is confronted by five socio-cultural crises at one and the same time, and any
effort to solve them quickly by force will lead to the disintegration of
society and the state, much as such efforts have done elsewhere, according to Moscow
commentator Yevgeny Ikhlov.
Indeed, he suggests in an article posted
on Vestnikcivitas.ru yesterday, the only good if not easy way forward is the
implementation of reforms in such a way that “all the conflicts will be resolved
in an evolutionary” rather than a revolutionary one and thus lead all social
groups to conclude that their interests will be satisfied at some point (vestnikcivitas.ru/pbls/3441).
Whether that is
possible, of course, depends on many things including the leadership of the
country. But no one can deny the
challenges which the five underlying socio-cultural crises pose not only to the
Kremlin but to the Russian people as a whole.
The first crisis, Ikhlov says,
involves the superficial and unequal Europeanization of Russia, where for “already
200 years,” urban residents have “belonged to European civilization” but where
over the same period, much of the rest of the population continues to conform
to “a Byzantine cultural” matrix.
Such divides have existed elsewhere,
he points out, and where they have, that division has led to conflicts between
those who support the institutionalization of Europeanization and those who
support “a special path” that does not lead in that direction. That is exactly
what is taking place in Russia now.
The second crisis arises from the
first and involves a conflict between “European understandings of law and
rights” and “’Byzantine’” or “if you like, ‘Asiatic’” attitudes about “the
relationship of the state to these rights and the imitative character of legal
and democratic institutions.”
This may be called, Ikhlov says, “the
second crisis of Westernization.” The
first involved the resistance of the population to the imposition by elites of
standards from the West. Among examples of that are Bolshevism, Maoism, Hitler’s
National Socialism, and Khomeini’s
Islamic revolution.
The third crisis involves the “bourgeoisification”
of what remains a largely “feudal” social and ideological structure of
society. The nomenklatura system,
paternalism, and ritualism of the bourgeois society and feudal society is “a
typical manifestation of ‘mature fedeudalism,’” Ikhlov argues.
The historical record suggests that
such societies first more toward absolutism and only then to a bourgeois
revolution, and in the process there is “an autonomization of the personality and
a profanation of the state ideology.” The result in almost every case is “the
collapse of statehood,” and the state results by bans and other prohibitions.
The fourth crisis involves the
inclusion of people from a patriarchal peasant culture into the larger, urban
society, something that is not comfortable for either the one or the
other. “For the last ten years,” he
says, “higher educational institutions have practically completely replaced the
army as the instrument for the socialization of youth.”
And the fifth crisis arises from Russia’s view of
itself as an empire and a civilization, a perspective that points to the
ultimate division of the country “into ethnic states and historic regions (the
Russian Caucasus, the Urals, Siberia).”
The Bolsheviks delayed that by coing up with “a pseudo-religious
super-national ideology on the model of the Khalifate.”
“Yeltsin,” Ikhlov says, “attempted to introduce the
American model of a civic nation which did not arise because of the absence of
a civil society,” or more precisely arose in a fragmented way given the
fragmented quality of civil society in Russia.
Now Putin is using “’tsarist methods,’” but those, like the ones at the
end of Soviet times, “will end with the disintegration of the empire.”
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