There looms in the background of the Russo-Ukrainian War a vexing question: By what process did post-Soviet Russia devolve into today’s despotic, predatory state?
When the red flag was lowered for the last time from the Kremlin on 25 December 1991, there were great hopes for the future, both in Russia and around the world. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more; the dead weight of the party-state no longer oppressed the Russian people. But no liberal democratic order arose in its place. Instead there developed a corrupt oligarchy and a political culture, if such it can be called, based on toxic nationalism and xenophobia. The USSR had been the old Russian empire in cast in a new form—red imperialism. But on Christmas Day 1991, that imperium became extinct and Russia itself was diminished, demoted from the rank of global superpower, humiliated, condescended to by the triumphant West. That, at least, was how it appeared to many Russians, and their burning resentments facilitated the rise of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
There’s nothing surprising in all this; historical precedents abound. Mussolini rose to power in similar circumstances, as did Hitler. The rise of a post-Soviet Russian strongman was not, perhaps, inevitable. But the modern history of Russia should have given pause to the optimistic prognosticators of the Nineties.
Except for the twelve years between the Revolution of 1905 and the October 1917 coup that brought the Bolsheviks to power, untrammeled despotism has been the default setting of Russian governance. In the tsarist era it was a conservative despotism, exercised to maintain the existing order, occasionally moderated by efforts at reform. In the Bolshevik period, which began with Lenin and ended with Stalin, it was a revolutionary despotism, exercised to demolish all existing institutions and replace them with “scientific socialism.” That accomplished, the Soviet regime reverted to conservative despotism, in the sense that its purpose became the preservation of what Lenin and Stalin had built.
But socialism rested on a foundation of rubble. The Party’s claim to absolute power was accompanied by a demand for absolute control of everything, everywhere, all the time. There could be no competing institutions—civil society in its entirety had to go. Not only the economy but science, art, literature, sports, even innocuous hobbies like philately, were subjected to Party control and supervision. Outside the Party, there was nothing. Thus when the Soviet party-state collapsed, there was nothing to take its place.
Discussions about democracy often assume an abstract character, focusing on concepts like equality and freedom. This was the mistake that the optimists made in the Nineties. They analyzed the decline and fall of the despotic Soviet regime in evolutionary terms, as the prelude to the rise of a democratic political order. This was what Francis Fukuyama meant when he wrote about “the end of history”: Liberal democracy, he believed, was the inevitable end point of a grand historical process. Karl Marx, had he been capable of amusement, might have smiled to see the historical determinism that lay at the heart of his own science of history so casually employed.
Here is what history might have taught Fukuyama & Co., if they’d been less dazzled by optimistic hope: There are no inevitable outcomes. Liberal democracy is not an abstract concept but an organic growth dependent on a complex of institutions: religion, community, intellectual inquiry, political forms, legal principles, economic relationships. In the right proportions, under favorable conditions, these institutions can slowly transform sovereigns and subjects into a constitutional body politic.
This happens rarely. In most of the world, conditions favorable to the process sketched above do not and have never existed. In Russia, the late tsarist regime might have evolved into a constitutional monarchy, had not war and revolution intervened. The tsarist regime was not reformed but destroyed, and once the Bolsheviks took power, the first item on their agenda was the root and branch abolition of all remaining impediments to their revolutionary program. In this they succeeded all too well, and by the end of the Stalin era there was nothing left in Russia but an atomized mass of subjects, ruled by a Levithan party-state.
With the death of Stalin, the ideological elan that sustained that party-state in its early years gradually dissipated. The outlook of Stalin’s heirs was summed up by one of them, Leonid Brezhnev: “Don’t talk to me about socialism. What we have, we hold.” And indeed, the final phase of Soviet history can be characterized as a holding action motivated in equal measure by fear of decline and fear of reform. The price of stability was the renunciation of progress. That was the paradoxical logic of scientific socialism.
The critics and dissidents who formed the opposition in the Soviet regime’s final phase were too few and too fragmented to fill the void created by the dissolution of the party-state. As for the Russian people, seventy-five years of despotic rule had had reduced them to dumb apathy. But when the crash came things had to be kept going somehow, and the only people who could keep them going, however inefficiently and corruptly, were the apparatchiks of the former regime. Thus they became Russia’s new elite, its nascent oligarchy; thus all possibility of progress toward a liberal democracy was negated; and thus the stage was set for the rise of V. Putin.
While the Bolsheviks appealed to revolutionary elan and the inevitability of a Radiant Future, the current Russian despot appeals to a poisonous, devolved Russian nationalism. Self-pity, resentment, envy, fear—these are its elements. An escape from the intolerable present, the recreation of a glorious Russian past—these are its aims. It is not by accident, to use Pravda’s old expression, that Putin characterizes his assault on Ukraine as a battle against “Nazis.” The Great Patriotic War for the Motherland (1941-45) is the epic myth of modern Russian history, and the despot’s exploitation of that myth is a flight from reality, one more sad and futile attempt to Make Russia Great Again.