'Revolution' Realism

The optimist who expected a quick consolidation of democracy and the market in Russia and the pessimist who argues that Russia is lost both have gotten it wrong. Unrealistic expectations have led to bitter disappointment and to recent calls for vigilance in the face of a supposed resurgent nationalism. These are the fruits of a grand misunderstanding about the nature of the "Second Russian Revolution" and Russia's transformation from Soviet totalitarian rule.


The 1991 Soviet revolution was neither a peaceful revolution from below, like Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, nor a negotiated transition to democracy, as in Poland and Hungary. Nor has it been like the violent first Russian revolutions against tsarist autocracy or the Chinese revolution won by political movements organized in "councils of workers, peasants and soldiers" rooted in society and independent from the state.


The essence of the Soviet/Russian transformation has been a bureaucratic, state-led revolution from above. Opportunistic Communist Party members led by Boris Yeltsin, elected chairman of the new RSFSR Congress of People's Deputies in June 1990, and state apparatchiks who defected from the reform camp led by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev were instrumental in overthrowing the communist regime. Soviet Party bureaucrats and younger members of its nomenklatura ruling class won control in mid-1990 over the core republic in the Soviet Union - the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic - and carried out a creeping bureaucratic revolution against the central Soviet party-state machine. Their weapons were RSFSR state institutions, parliamentary laws, presidential decrees and administrative orders, not the marches, strikes and bullets of revolution from below.


The RSFSR Supreme Soviet declared Russia sovereign in June 1990. Russian law then transferred all property, financial and natural resources in Russia from Soviet to RSFSR jurisdiction. The Central Bank and new quasi-commercial banks destroyed the Soviet centralized financial and banking systems. By winter, the country took the first steps toward establishing its own presidential, KGB and military institutions.


Upon election as president in July 1991, Yeltsin decreed the removal of Party organizations from all state institutions and enterprises in Russia. During the August 1991 coup, Yeltsin placed under RSFSR control all Soviet institutions, including the KGB and military. When the coup failed, the Party was banned, effectively abolishing the old regime. With the Party gone, Russia abolished or expropriated the Soviet state, ministry by ministry. With the regime and state apparatus gone, there was little reason for the republics to maintain the union.


The Soviet Union was tossed into history's dustbin. Throughout this period, the masses were rarely mobilized, but when they were it was most often to defend revolutionaries from above, not to overthrow the remnants of the partocratic regime. This explains the limited extent of social revolution and the lack of violence during the fall of the Soviet regime. This also explainsmuch of the troubled development of democracy and the market in post-Soviet Russia. The co-opting of Party and state apparatchiks and entire structures by the revolutionary Russian regime has left the nomenklatura in power along with its limited understanding of and weak commitment to building political and economic institutions based on the rule of law.


Acting President Vladimir Putin is typical of Russia's revolutionary bureaucrats, having defected from a key Soviet institution, the KGB, in 1990 to the administration of Leningrad's Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Thus, state institutions are politically divided, diminishing the cohesion needed for concerted revolutionary economic transformation. This contributed to undemocratic, uneconomical insider nomenklatura privatization and cemented the relationship among corrupt bureaucrats and criminalized semi-private and private financial-industrial groups.


The expropriation of the old regime's structures has also prolonged old operating procedures, preserving the bureaucracy's strong role in the economy. The result is a weak state unable to defend its own interests or those of society from the preferences of bureaucrats and oligarchs, as well as an inefficient state that does too many things and does them all poorly.


The limited mobilization of the masses, while it may have helped avert the violence associated with revolution, stunted the development of civil society, especially the formation of political parties and trade unions that defend societal interests. The consequence of these limitations in Russia's revolution is an unstable, corrupt, oligarchic and almost anarchic quasi-democracy and market.


If Russia's revolution had been properly understood, there would have been more realism regarding the prospects for even mid-term progress toward the consolidation of democracy and the market. Because of the limited nature of elite and institutional change under revolution from above, the institutionalization of democracy and the market should have been understood as a decades-long process, greatly dependent on generational change and the slow grind of cultural transformation and nonviolent institutional change.


An appreciation for the duration of such a project might have suggested that foreign assistance target institution-building on behalf of the polity, the market and civil society, reforming the courts, developing small business outside Moscow and funding public associations rather than state structures. Having failed to seize the historical moment and having ensured a more drawn-out period for development, the challenge now is not to react to every fleeting political change in Moscow. It is time to hunker down to the business of building civil institutions and exploiting avenues for expanded cooperation as long as they last.


Gordon M. Hahn is the coordinator of special Russian research programs at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He submitted this comment to The Moscow Times.