Paul Goble
Staunton, July 20 – Predicting the future is never easy: there are too many unknowns and too many contingencies for anyone to be certain. But the failure of Western experts to predict at the end of the 1980s that the Soviet Union would disintegrate and at the start of the 2000s that it would return to the authoritarianism of the past certainly constitute major failures.
And these failures raise three serious questions: Why were Western analysts so overwhelmingly wrong in one or both of these cases? Are they any more likely to be right about Russia’s future now? And what might be done to improve their ability to make more accurate predictions?
The reasons behind the mistakes of 1990 and those behind the mistakes of 2000 have much in common – the investment of many involved in the continuation of conditions about which they were trained and an unwillingness on their part to imagine that the future could be fundamentally different than the past being perhaps the most important.
But there were others: group think both natural and promoted by peer-reviewed publications, an overreliance on easy-to-access English-speaking Russians who often told their Western interlocutors exactly what the latter wanted to hear, and the Western and especially American tendency to assume that everything will get better and better, to name but three.
However, there were important differences as well. In 1990, judgments about where the USSR was headed were being made almost exclusively by people who focused on Moscow and Russians rather than on the non-Russian half of the population. The number focusing on the latter were microscopically small compared to those considering the former.
And in 2000, those in the West who had invested in the changes of the 1990s assumed that Boris Yeltsin would continue them via his successor, given the failure to recognize that the first Russian president had begun to turn away from the positive changes earlier toward a dark authoritarianism by his attacks on the parliament and Chechnya, his falsification of elections, and his increasing willingness to ally himself with the authoritarians.
Many Western experts were unwilling to connect the dots, and so when Putin presented himself as a new man committed to continuing what the West thought was happening, the overwhelming majority of commentators and experts accepted him at face value and so they were shocked when he moved into a different direction.
Now, Western experts are engaged in predicting what will come after Putin with suggestions ranging from suggestions that Russia will become a beautiful democratic country and finally become part of the international community to arguments that what comes after Putin may be even worse, an even more repressive and aggressive fascist state than his.
This diversity of suggestions is in one sense welcome in that it makes the group think of 1990 and 2000 less likely to take hold. But it again rests on the fact that all too many of those now considering Russia and its future are like the blind men and the elephant, with each considering only one part and then drawing conclusions.
Often as in the past, the part of Russia being examined is the one that is easiest to do; but equally often, it is the part that Western institutions find the most promising given their own aspirations and goals. And now those with vested interests either in having access to Russia or relying on a restored Cold War to boost themselves are both playing key roles.
There are many things that could be done to improve the odds of accurate prediction. But perhaps the most important lie in two areas, the training of a new generation of experts and the provision of information across a broad range of issues. Changing the training of experts is key because there was a fundamental change in the 1980s that made predictions on Russia worse.
Those trained earlier were largely area specialists who were expected to know a great deal about a wide variety of things in the country or countries of their specialization. Those trained later were far narrower in their focus. They knew more about what they were focusing on but far, far less about the context in which it was embedded.
Their expertise on these more narrow subjects was welcome. How could it not be? But it created a situation in which many assumed that such expertise qualified those who had it to speak with the same ability to predict probable developments as those who had broader knowledge about the country as a whole.
A return to the earlier approach is probably impossible, but perhaps it is still possible to make the practitioners of the new one more aware of the limitations of the one they are part of. And that points to the importance of restoring some of the information available to all those working in the field.
Two generations ago, almost everyone who followed the USSR read on a regular basis the daily selections of translated articles from the Soviet media by the US Foreign Broadcast Information Service and the BBC. Now, those no longer exist; and so they can’t be read. But if something similar were created, it would broader the understanding of those making predictions.
This comment is offered not as a definitive statement but in the hopes that it will provoke discussion so that our current predictions about the future will be better than those we made in the past. As someone who has been “in the business” as it were for 50 years, I know I have fallen victim to some problems that I’ve mentioned here and would like help in overcoming them.
Clearly, recognizing our mistakes from the past, taking a broader view, looking beyond that strange country known as English-speaking Moscow to other Russians and to non-Russians as well, and recognizing that long-standing continuities are often more important than short-term changes and often subvert the latter will be part of this.
But it is time to start thinking about what we can do. If we don’t, we may suffer the third major defeat in predicting the future, a failure that will lead not only problems with scholarship and commentary but also to problems with policies that may end by making the future even worse than it would otherwise be.
That’s happened in the past in this case: it would be well if it did not happen yet again.
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