Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 26 – By the middle of
August, Boris Pastukhov says, “the Ukrainian conflict will have exhausted
itself as a mobilization tool” for the Kremlin, one that gives “the appearance
of national unity.” And consequently, “at that moment, new steps will be taken
by the Kremlin directed at maintaining” the current level of “mobilization activity.”
Those steps, the London-based
Russian analyst continues, may be further aggression in Ukraine, attacks on
other countries, or the launch of an expanded campaign against internal
enemies. Vladimir Putin has “a large choice,” but ginning up a new foreign
threat to which he can respond is “the most probable” (polit.ru/article/2014/06/25/mobilisation/).
Despite efforts to present Russia as
so different that normal social and political forces do not operate, Pastukhov
says, it “is not the only country which uses nationalism as a means of social
mobilization during difficult periods for thepolitical regime, and the
algorithms of this type of mobilization have been investigated quite well.”
Faced with rising anger among the
middle classes in 2011 and 2012, an anger directed “not so much toward ‘a legal
state’ as toward ‘truth’ (social justice in the broadest sense),” Putin
responded first with the Olympiad and then with Ukraine in order to prevent his
opponents from “mobilizing the inert part of the population” by mobilizing it
himself.
Sochi helped, but “only the
full-scale confrontation with Ukraine allowed the regime to finally break out
of the ‘corner’ into which the opposition had begun to push it,” Pastukhov
says. This war had the effect of winning popular support and thus depriving the
opposition of a broader social base.
But “the experience of other
countries shows,” the Russian scholar says, that this is typically a temporary
solution rather than a permanent one when there are deep-seated problems in the
first place. Indeed, in most cases, the sense of unity in the face of a common
enemy “in contemporary society lasts approximately six to eight months” and no
more.
Over time, people become insensitive
and lose interest and the regime, if it wants to use this method of maintaining
support, has to come up with something new in order to keep the patriotic “bubble”
inflated.
Otherwise, an authoritarian state is
likely at some point to face one of two kinds of a revolution: a Durkheimian
one in which the leader and the led are united in support of a common set of
ideals, gain power in a relatively bloodless fashion, and quickly form a
government after a brief period of time, or “a fragmentary revolution,” which
is entirely different.
For a Durkheimian revolution to take
place, Pastukhov says, the society has to be more organized, the government too
weak to respond to an initial challenge, and local and regional elites have to
be part of the anti-regime movement rather than separate and in pursuit of
their own goals.
When those conditions are not
present, he continues, then one can expect the second kind of revolutionary
change, a “fragmentary” one. In that
kind, political and ideological divisions among the opposition and population
are large, each group has its own goals, and in the absence of “a common enemy,”
they each go their own way.
That leaves the country “without a
single leadership,” and that in turn means that the economic and political
crisis which led to the possibility of revolutionary change only deepens,
albeit over a longer period of time. The
authority of those in power continues to decline, and the revolution extends
over a longer period.
Many in Russia in 2011-2012 hoped
for a Durkheimian revolution, but Putin’s actions in Ukraine are pushing the
country on the way to a deeper but slower “fragmentary” one. It is difficult to say when it will be
completed, Pastukhov says, but he does suggest one intriguing possibility: “more
than 80 percent of all revolutions and coups in authoritarian countries take
place on national holidays” when people are in the streets and when it is
harder to control them.
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