Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 3 – Because of
longstanding Russian cultural and political traditions, the difficulties
Russians faced in the decade after 1991, and the efforts of Vladimir Putin to
denigrate his immediate predecessor and boost his own brand of
authoritarianism, many Soviet-era values re-intensified over the last decade,
according to Boris Dubin.
But despite that pattern, the
director of the independent Levada Center says in a 3800-word interview in the
current issue of “Vestnik Evropy,” there are reasons to believe that an
increasing number of Russians are escaping them and that what he calls
“non-Soviet” Russians are likely to play a bigger role in the future (magazines.russ.ru/vestnik/2012/33/d11.html).
Among these values which were in
eclipse in 1989-1991, Dubin says, are a belief that the country should have a
single paramount leader who will protect the population from the bureaucracy, a
lack of faith in any but ad hoc institutions broader than immediate personal
ties, and a willingness to think one thing while doing quite another.
The first of these has allowed and
been reinforced by Putin’s authoritarianism, the second has meant that Russians
have been unable to escape the historical matrix in which reforms are carried
out rapidly and often crudely and then are followed by longer periods of
inertia, and the third means that individual anger is typically submerged in a
grudging conformity.
In the course of this wide-ranging interview, Dubin
makes numerous observations. Ten are
especially striking. First, he argues,
the model of the Soviet man he and his colleagues have developed includes the
idea that these individuals are defined in the first instance by their
relationship to and acceptance of a paternalistic power.
Second, he continues, those imbued
with Soviet values see power being “build according to a hierarchy and headed
by one man,” someone who “is not a real politician, whose program is not
important; and no one evaluates his actions in the category of usefulness or
effectiveness.” Instead, this leader “does not any responsibility” for the
power he has acquired.
In 1989-1990, Dubin says, “a large
part of the population was against the concentration of power in the hands of
one man,” but now Levada Center researchers have found that “the majority of
the people support it.” At the same time, people have lost faith in one another
and are less willing to “unite and integrate with other people.”
As a result, Dubin stresses,
Russians are not joiners and come together only “as a rule” on an ad hoc basis,
a form of interpersonal links that ends when the occasion does, thereby limiting
the importance of any of these incipient institutional ties.
Third, as the Levada Center sociologist
notes, “the Soviet man and the early post-Soviet man grew up in conditions of a
closed society.” That society was at least in part maintained by the image of
an enemy. In 1990, the enemy declined in
salience, “but by the endof the 1990s and in the course of the 2000s, enemies
again appeared in the consciousness” of Russians.
“The main enemy in military,
economic and political spheres, albeit in a latent form,” Dubin argues,
“continued to be the US for Russians.”
Fourth, he suggests, his pollsters
have found that as in Soviet times, for Russians now, there is a willingness to
live with a duality that involves saying one thing and doing another. He gives as an example the way in which
Russians use the word “Rossiyane,” a non-ethnic descriptor introduced by Boris
Yeltsin.
As Yeltsin’s image has become more
negative, “people sometimes say ‘Rossiyane’ but say it as if in quotes, as if
they are literally citing Yeltsin. (In face, people who populate Russian
largely consider themselves ‘Russkiye’ – athough there are among them Jews,
Tatars and Armenians, and an enormous number of various assimiltated nations
and nationalities.
Fifth, according to Dubin, “an
important parameter of the model of Soviet and post-Soviet man is his negative
relatioinship to the basic institutions of society.” He suggests that “the
newer and the more formal these iinstiutions are, the less they resemble a
collective family, the less they are trusted. That means dissatisfaction has no
channel other than grumbling.
Sixth, Dubin continues, nostalgia is
an insufficient explanation. On the one hand, “almost a majority never knew the
Soviet system.” And on the other, “at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the
1990s, the majority of our people (not only in Russia but in all other
republics and especially the Baltic ones as well) had a more negative attitude
to everything Soviet.”
Seventh, the reformers of the 1990s
bear enormous responsibility for this return to the past. As in earlier
episodesof Russian history, the reformers rushed ahead often without thought of
the consequences and, not having created longterm institutions, virtually
ensured that the populace would be outraged and would turn back to the past.
Eighth, the Putin regime took over
the electronic media and promoted itself by denigrating Yeltsin and
re-legitimating the Soviet experience.
Neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin entirely broke with the past – that was “only
one component” of their activity -- but Putin largely eliminated that aspect
from his program.
As a result, Dubin says, “today all
forces which worked for a break with the Soviet [system of values] and the
overcoming of the Soviet [past] of whatever name – Gorbachev, Yeltsin,
reformers, liberals, Gaidar, Chubais, are viewed in extremely negative terms by
the majority of the people of Russia.”
Ninth, there are exceptions, Dubin
says, people whom he says he “provocatively call non-Soviet people.” They are
the ones who take part in demonstrations. But it is critical to understand who
they are: “This [is] not the middle class, not only the intelligentsia, and not
only the young.” Rather it consists of those dissatisfied with the system and
want openness and responsibility.
“The majority of those going into
the streets and squares are not the very young,” Dubin says. Instead, they are
“people from 25 to 40 who have children growing up, who have achieved something
themselves and want to know what the prospects are for their children.” These
people, unlike the majority, display “a readiness for solidarity.”
And tenth, although such people are
now in a minority, their values and the working of the Russian system mean,
Dubin says, that their role will grow, one in which “the share of Soviet
‘vodka’ inside them will decrease,” even as Russia continues to live “in the
shadow” of the totalitarian past.
Other post-Soviet peoples are going
through much the same process, Dubin says, but in some cases, especially the
Baltic countries, “the question has been solved” already. But for that to
happen, there must be “the will of a majority,” not simply quantitatively but
of “those people who create and translate images, take decisions, react to what
is taking place, and respond to the activity of the media, schools, and the
transmission mechanisms of culture.”
Russians are not there yet, Dubin
concludes, and he observes that “as long as we live in a country where people
are more concerned that things not get worse than that they have the chance to
get better … then even without knowing it, we will preserve in ourselves the
Soviet people” Russians once were.
