Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 16 – Social networks
among Russians have grown and deepened over the last two years, according to a
poll conducted by the Russian Academy of Economics and State Service, thus
creating the basis for the rise of civil society and more protests by making
Russians less dependent on the state.
In a commentary on this 6,000-person
poll in “Vedomosti” yesterday, Ekaterina Schulmann of that academy says that
this, not the responses to explicitly political questions, is the survey’s most
important finding. (For the poll, see ranepa.ru/about-the-academy/consulting-services/evrobarometr.html;
for her analysis, vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2015/06/16/596463-lyudi-stanovyatsya-blizhe).
“The least valuable part of the
research,” she says, “is its political block.
Much more important is that portion devoted to how people assess their
own lives and what they would like to change.
And within that, the most significant concerns changes in “social
capital” with “the growth of so-called strong and weak social ties.”
Put in simplest terms, Schulmann
says, “’strong ties’” are defined by the researches as those which exist
between people who could ask each other for a loan or take a vacation together,
while “’weak’” ones are those in which the participants feel free to ask for a
recommendation for a job or for a child in school.
It is of course “difficult to say how realistically
citizens asses the strength of their ties and their extent and how closely
their ideas correspond to reality.” But “what
is important is something else: in comparison with the result of 2012,”
respondents say that now, “the number of their strong social links has doubled,
and the number of weak ones gone up by 1.5 times.”
“The importance
of this fact for social and economic self-assessment of people is enormous,”
Schulmann says. The study’s authors seek to link this trend with what they call
“’political optimism,’” but in fact, “there is nothing political in this
optimism” and it does not speak to public attitudes toward the leadership of
the country.
“People who
feel themselves part of a social network think that they can get by without the
state: their feeling of subjective well-being is growing not because they are
well led but because they have become more confident in themselves,” Schulmann
continues. And that is explained by “a different correlation.”
That is the one
“between the growth in the number of ties and the reduction of trust in
government institutions,” and consequently, the reason for such a rapid growth
in the number of social ties “is not state policy” which in fact has “destroyed
any chance for legal political and social activity.” Instead, it lies elsewhere.
Specifically,
it is a product of the joint impact of relative material well-being over the
last decade “and the corresponding growth of labor and residential mobility and
new information technologies” like mobile phones, Skype and online social networks,
according to the Moscow scholar.
“It is
difficult to overrate the importance of this trend,” she says, because it shows
that the social atomization of Soviet times is being overcome. “Post-Soviet
citizens like graduates of children’s homes and jails knew a lot which an individual
shouldn’t know,” but they lacked “the basic habits of social life which are
based not on a struggle of all against all … but on cooperation and the
exchange of services and trust.”
Such a growth
in horizontal ties provides “the substrate out of which grows civil society”
rather than as some imagine from “’correct values’ or democratic convictions.” Those are “secondary,” she says.
And here lies a
paradox, Schulmann argues, that “all political regimes of a semi-authoritarian
type encounter.” Such feelings of
community “make people at one and the same time braver and happier” and that
means they are pleased with much that is happening but are ready and able to
protest against what they don’t like.
Many Russians to this day accept the “vulgarized
Marxist myth” that “only ‘people driven to despair’ protest. In fact, for protest, one needs resources:
the starving do not take part in political life but rather look for food.” With
the growth of ties, Russians are acquiring some of the resources needed to protest.
But there is a
problem: “the political regime does not foresee any legal mechanisms of civic
activity: neither protest not expressions of loyalty. Therefore, it suppresses
the first and imitates the second even though it could incorporate both one and
the other if it were a little more open and democratic.”
How will the
Kremlin respond? Schulmann asks rhetorically, suggesting that “Each hybrid
seeks its own methods, but they reduce nonetheless to two [opposing] strategies:
resist and collapse or adapt and democratize.”
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