Russian People Understand What Russian Liberals Won’t: Putin’s System is Totalitarian, Lev Gudkov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, October 9 – “Mass consciousness more precisely and soberly evaluates the nature of the existing regime than do political analysts, ‘sociologists’ and publicists,” Lev Gudkov of the Levada Center says. “It views the regime as a totalitarian system which cannot be changed but to which one can and must adapt because other possibilities are impossible.”

            The majority of the population “doesn’t know the words ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘authoritarianism,’ but it clearly understands the character and resources of the regime,” he continues. The failure of liberals to do the same is a tragedy of their own making and their unwillingness to ask questions they don’t like the answers to (republic.ru/posts/94886).

            Because of their “blind spots,” Gudkov says, including a lack of knowledge both about social reality and the nature of the regime and its resources, the liberals, whom he in this context speaks of as Russian “society” cannot answer “the fundamental question: Why didn’t democracy occur in Russia?”

            Not only has there not been an adequate answer to that question; there has been instead a lack of attempts to think about why this is so.  Russian liberals are clearly aware that repression is getting worse in Russia, but they aren’t prepared to ask why there has not been mass resistance to this development.

            Without at least trying to answer “what causes have led to the restoration of a repressive state which has destroyed the basic principles of the 1993 Constitution and why the population is prepared to make its peace with a corrupt regime despite falling incomes, the degradation of  the social sphere, emigration, and unending local wars,  our ‘educated’ community is condemned.”

            “On the one hand, it is condemned to the role of servility towards the powers that be, an approach without principles; and on the other, it is doomed to self-celebration – we are ‘the creative class’ – which hides or drives out of its consciousness an awareness of the harm it is doing.”

            Social research in Russia has failed to answer these questions because in almost all cases, it has refused to ask them, Gudkov says.  And thus Russian liberals are operating in a world that since the 1980s they have not understood and thus tragically remain in a situation they don’t know how to respond to.

            According to Gudkov, “the social force which achieved changes at the end of the 1980s was the middle levels of the bureaucracy,” which felt it was not able to achieve what it hoped for but “in contrast to most of the rest of the population, did not expect anything from the authorities.”

            Russian liberals – “the democratically inclined part of this bureaucracy” – proved incapable of “preserving the support of society at the moment of greatest protest against the old system and quite quickly gave way to the remnants of the old nomenklatura and the new generation of the ruling elite which operated on the siloviki.”

            They failed to recognize that “in 1991-1993 were destroyed only certain most important institutions of Soviet totalitarianism” – the party’s monopoly on power and the planned and statist economy – and were declared a ban on a single state ideology and support for free speech and the priority of human rights.”

            “But,” Gudkov argues, “the basic institutions – the system of vertically organized power not subordinate to the population and the cooptation of cadres in correspondence with its interests, a mobilized army, a political police, the judicial system, mass education and control over the media – all these institutions were preserved or restored.”

            Moreover, the Soviet population’s basic desire to have its material needs met was achieved during the consumer “boom” of 2002-2008, a development that allowed “not simply a conservative stabilization but the acceptance and approval of the new authoritarian rule, which gained strength and led to the restoration of soviet practices.”

            But despite this, Russian liberals largely retained the ideas from the ideology of transitology and expected that the population would protest against the regime’s repressive behavior. Indeed, Gudkov says, counting on this has been at the center of liberal thought and expectations” with each small protest being viewed as opening the way to radical change.

            The Russian liberals have failed to recognize that while they have been hoping  for this, the population is simultaneously increasingly “alienated from politics, rejects taking any responsibility for the situation, and displays both total conformism and complete indifference to the declarations of the opposition and activities of the organizations of civil society.”

            This has left Russian liberals talking to themselves and taking actions that may in one way or another benefit them but that are irrelevant as far as the Russian population at large is concerned, the sociologist says. They need to recognize as the Russian people have that the world is dealing “not with an authoritarian regime,” but with a totalitarian one.

            Such recognition in turn requires the adoption of different expectations and different strategies than the ones Russian liberals now display, Gudkov argues. The place to start is to recognize that what happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s was not a wholesale change but a partial one that did not touch the “main institutions” that had formed Soviet society.

             Unless that happens, he suggests, no change in the system is in prospect anytime soon. “Hopes for a rapid shift from Putinism to ‘normal’ democracy are just as much an illusion as hopes that Moscow architecture of the suburbs of the Russian capital will suddenly be transformed into the architecture of Paris, London or Rome.”