Paul Goble
Staunton, February 3 – The state of liberal thought in Russia today “in no way can be called satisfactory,” Levada Center head Lev Gudkov says. Indeed, the situation is so dire that it is hardly worth speaking of “a crisis of liberalism” because the liberals are now “suppressed and disoriented but do not want to admit their defeat.”
In a 7500-word essay, he argues that Russian liberals suffer from numerous “blind spots” which keep them from having an adequate understanding of what it happening in Russia or coming up with proposals that will advance their interests rather than continue to marginalize them relative to their authoritarian opponents (liberal.ru/defense-of-democracy/kak-my-dumaem).
“In spite of everything,” Gudkov continues, “the liberally inclined public continues to believe and hope that mass protests and a decline in support for the powers that be will intensify and lead in the near term (or sometime) to the collapse of the Putin regime or, at least, call forth those changes that they have waited for so long.”
Despite some good analytic work, most Russian liberals continue to hope for “black swan” events that will in an unpredictable but hopeful way change everything. As for himself, Gudkov says, he has no such certainty that what they think will bring change has any chance of doing so.
“Growing doubts about the successfulness of the transition to a democratic Russia, which arose with us for the first time in the mid-1990s, have only intensified in the course of our numerous sociological investigations of mass consciousness,” the Levada Center sociologist continues.
Many Russian liberals assume that a democratic transition in their country is inevitable because of the success East European countries have had in carrying through such changes, but they forget, Gudkov says, that Russia lacked many of the popular impulses, including not least of all the desire to throw off the Russian yoke once and for all that Russia does not.
Perhaps even more limiting for the development of liberal thought in Russia is the fact that Russian liberals do not yet understand who carried out perestroika and the destruction of the USSR. They assume they did, but in fact, Gudkov says, “the active force” was the mid-level Soviet bureaucracy which wanted to increase its opportunities to rise.
As soon as the old nomenklatura was pushed out of the way, that is exactly what they did; and once they had achieved their goal, they set up making sure no one would ever be able to displace them as they had displaced the last Soviet leadership generation. As a result, Gudkov says, “we are dealing with a very different situation in principle” than was the case in Eastern Europe.
What has been going on in Russia are a new phenomenon political science has not described, “the regeneration of totalitarian institutes and corresponding portions of Soviet ideology” and the formation of a neo-totalitarian system many are inclined to call fascism of the Mussolini “corporate state” variety.
The focus of Russian liberals almost exclusively on the organized structures of power means that they do not see the aspirations and values that are animating the bureaucracy but instead focus on the supreme leader and thus assume that he can be moved by mass protests without any thought being given how to change the values of the bureaucracy.
A similar “blind spot” among Russian liberals, Gudkov argues, involves elections. They make elections far more important than they are for ordinary Russians who assume these actions are manipulated and do not open the way for rotation in office and other changes. Rather than addressing those attitudes, Russian liberals focus almost exclusively on electoral procedures.
Yet a third “blind spot” concerns the assumptions of Russian liberals about the role young people will play. They do not recognize that young people aren’t nearly as numerous in the aging Russian population as they imagine or as liberal in their attitudes as liberals imagine. That causes Russian liberals to focus on the wrong groups.
These shortcomings among Russian liberals have existed for 25 years, Gudkov says; and they have caused liberals to focus on institutions when what they should have been dealing with are issues involving mass consciousness and culture. Changing those is hard and slow work, but unless they change, none of the things liberals want will ever happen.
“Our mass man does not see a cause-and-effect relationship between approving Putin and his own daily live because his experience says that real or effective relationships exist only among those who immediately surround him.” And Russian liberals refuse to recognize that reality either.
According to Gudkov, “considering the nature of the Putin regime, one must recognize that we are dealing not with a deviation from a normative model of democratic transition but with a new in principle political phenomenon, the regeneration of a totalitarian institutional system after a lengthy period of decade and with the recombination of these institutions.”
For the time being, “liberal thought and democracy will remain trends of a marginal minority.” That has to be recognized and then steps need to be taken to change things, with a complete understanding that the process will involve hard work and many years but one worth proceeding to “broaden the zone of freedom.”
To put things more bluntly, the sociologist argues, “the prospects for the development of Russian society are connected not with mass protests against the existing regime … but with processes inside the bureaucracy” at its mid- and lower-levels. “In a super-centralized society, any actions reflecting dissatisfaction and protest will remain local, isolated phenomenon, if they do not provoke changes within the bureaucracy itself.”
Overcoming that “blind spot” is likely the greatest challenge now facing Russian liberals.
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