Sunday, November 9, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Russians’ Preference for Archaic Forms Leads Them ‘from One Catastrophe to Another,’ Akhizer Says


Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, November 9 – “Russian remains in a pre-state situation,” a reflection of the preference among the Russian people for “archaic forms” and the myths that justify them, according to the late Aleksandr Akhizer. That tendency toward “archaization,” a term he popularized, led to the destruction of the USSR and will lead to the breakup of Russia.

 

            In a new article on the Tolkovatel portal, Pavel Pryanikov discusses Akhizer’s ideas, ideas which he says have had a broad impact on Russian discussions now even though the author, who died in 2007, has been “undeservedly forgotten” by all but the narrowest circle of experts (ttolk.ru/?p=22012).

 

            During Soviet times, Akhizer was a recognized specialist on urbanization and urban planning, but over the course of three decades, he wrote “for the draw” his main work: “Russia: A Critique of a Historical Case.” The KGB confiscated that in the 1980s, and he had to start over, publishing his three-volume work first in 1991 and then in a new edition in 1997-98.

 

            According to Akhizer, “a society or an individual can respond to a crisis or danger either by developing an innovative idea which opens new creative possibilities or by returning to old ideas which proved themselves during earlier crises.” Most Western societies and dominated by the former, while Russia remains dominated by the latter.

 

            That means, Akhizer argued, that as problems become more complex, Russian society and its individual members do not respond in ways that are either creative or adequate but rather assume that they can use old methods, even though those are increasingly incapable of addressing new situations.

 

            That leads to what he called “archaization,” the result of following cultural programs “which took shape under simpler conditions and which do not today meet the complexities of the world or the character and size of the dangers.”  It represents “a form of regression in which people behave in much the same way as they did in “a pre-government society.”

 

            That is, he suggested, they are governed “by purely local myths, where relations are based on the emotions of people whose field of view is limited to the members of the local community with which they are personally acquainted and who do not see development as something of cultural value.”

 

            Archaization occurs in a large society or state “as an effort to fully or partially return to pre-state forms of culture and activity.”  In Russia today, that is what is happening, with the society being “infected by the archaic” and moving in the direction of “re-feudalization” rather than modernization.

 

            If in the past, this tendency toward the archaic reflected the peasant culture out of which most Russians sprang and from which they were only recently separated, today, it is product not so much of this history as of the day to day behavior of Russians in small family or social groups, behavior that Russians project on the entire society and polity.

 

            One consequence is a continuing return to the past, and another related one is that many things which appear modern on the outside in fact reflect older patterns and thus are in many cases subverted by them.  That is the case with monopoly capitalism in Russia  now which has more in common with late imperial capitalism than it does with capitalism in the West.

 

            Another, Akhizer argued, is that there is a recurring cycle in which first the ruling elite is greeted by society almost in an ecstatic manner and then is viewed with hatred when it cannot solve current problems or faces any defeat.  And that is not something Russian elites have figured out how to escape.

 

            The widespread acceptance among Russians of “the myth of the restoration and broadening of the empire and the continuation of endless colonization,” justified in the name of giving assistance to “brothers of the faith or blood or class” only “temporarily” stabilizes the situation but does not solve the country’s problems.

 

            This may be hidden for a time because “society continues to live with comfortable myths despite catastrophic experiences.” But as a result, Akhizer concluded, Russia has not found a way out of the dilemma Nicholas Berdyaev described as the task of somehow forming a relatively modern state in a land with “a low level of state consciousness.”

 

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