Russia Goes from Revolution to Revolution as a Result of Uncontrolled Bureaucratization, Milin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 9 – “The problem of the Russian Empire/USSR/Russian Federation,” Dmitry Milin says, “lies in the periodic dominance of an uncontrolled bureaucracy which lives according to Parkinson’s law” and thus leads the country into one dead end after another which it can escape only by revolutions.

            While European countries have learned to control the bureaucracy by the regular change in those in power, the Russian blogger says, and thus have prevented the bureaucracy from leading to the collapse of their economies and societies, “Russia has not yet learned how to do that” (blog.newsru.com/article/09oct2019/rus_history).

            “In Russia,” Milin writes, “development proceeds cyclically from revolution to revolution. The tsarist bureaucracy having strangled the development of the country was replaced by the revolution of 1917. The Soviet bureaucracy having strangled the development of the USSR was removed from the scene by the revolution of 1991.”

            To be sure, Joseph Stalin “tried to organize the regular renewal of the bureaucracy by bloody repressions, but the costs of this method clearly exceeded the benefits and as a whole did not give the result” he hoped for. Moreover, World War II forced the bureaucracy to retreat, only to see it reemerge and dominate under Leonid Brezhnev.

            According to Milin, this “Russian cycle” goes through seven stages:  In the first, the revolution frees the country from bureaucratic oppression. In the second, the country initially experiences rapid growth. In the third, the new and inexperienced bureaucracy tries to interfere but cannot suppress everything.

            Then, in the fourth, the bureaucracy gains strength and the country is blocked from serious development. In the fifth, the situation becomes stagnant and is labelled either “’stagnation’” or “’stability.’” And in the sixth, the situation becomes so dire that the bureaucracy tries to reform itself in order to survive.

            And in the seventh, the bureaucracy having failed but opened the door to revolution is overthrown again with the process repeating itself through steps one through seven again and again because the problem of controlling the bureaucracy through the regular circulation of elites is never seriously addressed.

            According to Milin, Russia today is somewhere between stage five and stage six.  That suggests the next will be a revolution, something that won’t lead to a breakthrough unless and until Russians learn how to control their bureaucracy the way European democracies have but only restart the cycle once again.