Soon after New Year in 1881, in deep midwinter, a man called Kobozev was running a phantom cheese shop at 56 Malaya Sadovaya Street in St Petersburg with a woman who was pretending to be his wife. Suspicious neighbours and angry competitors brought the shop to the attention of the authorities. A health commission from the St Petersburg city government called in unannounced. It must have been a heart-stopping moment for Kobozev, because his real name was Yuri Bogdanovich, and he was a senior agent of Narodnaya Volya, the People’s Will, the most murderous of Russian revolutionary societies.
The cheese shop was in fact a front for a plot to assassinate the tsar, but then the inspectors were not from the municipal government. They were members of the Imperial Corps of Engineers, charged with protecting the tsar. With their backs to the wall – there had been half a dozen assassination attempts since late 1879, including a massive bomb in the cellar of the Winter Palace, two floors below the tsar’s dining room – the security outfit was acting on connections between tip-offs. The would-be health inspectors, who included an incognito general, didn’t notice some debris in the corner of the shop and left Bogdanovich in peace, for now. It was one of the most catastrophic mistakes in Russian history.
What they missed was the entrance to the tunnel that the terrorists were digging. The tunnel was nearing completion. It was intended as the site of a subterranean explosion when the tsar’s carriage was driving past. Conspirators at street level would then throw the home-made grenades that were designed to finish him off. But despite this missed chance, the police still seemed to be closing in. On 27 February, one of the leaders of the People’s Will, Andrei Zhelyabov, was arrested. His fellow conspirators, still at liberty, decided to activate the assassination plot with the utmost despatch. The following night, fuses were set in the tunnel leading from the shop. In a secret rendezvous at a nearby café, the men who were to throw bombs at the tsar’s carriage were given parcels containing their armaments.
On the next day, on Sunday 1 March, at a quarter past two in the afternoon, Alexander II and his entourage travelled along their customary route, so well known to the People’s Will. They went by the Catherine Canal and past Malaya Sadovaya Street. The assassins were waiting. They set off the bombs in the tunnel. The first bomb that they threw missed, killing a young boy at the side of the road. The tsar went out to try to help. Stranded, he was killed by a second bomb.1
Ivan Turgenev was in Paris when he heard the news. The great Russian novelist, one of the giants of nineteenth-century European culture, was a liberal by sensibility and political conviction. It was a devastating shock. Alexander II was, to him, Russia’s great hope: the tsar who had emancipated the serfs, sponsored a durable experiment in local democracy and seemed set on new reforms. The assassins were villains who had betrayed Russia’s future. ‘Yes, it’s an unhappy country, our motherland,’ he wrote to his friend Pavel Annenkov, five days after the bombing. He added more to the letter the following day: ‘Will Russia fall into the abyss and break its neck on account of this? That’s nothing to our assassins!’2 For Turgenev, the revolutionary terrorists were using violence to destroy the gradual, constitutional reform that had a mild democratic flavour. They only had contempt for the Speransky Conundrum, making autocracy more likely to clamp down aggressively than to mould itself naturally to the demands of a new age. A couple of weeks later, Turgenev wrote an article for La Revue politique et littéraire about the new tsar. He had some upstanding personal qualities, and there were specific policies initiated by his father that he might be hoped to pursue. But the assassins had blown Russia off the general path that Alexander II had set it on. ‘Those who are expecting a parliamentary constitution from the new Tsar will soon be deprived of their illusions,’ he wrote. ‘We are at least convinced of that.’3
For Turgenev, revolutionary terrorism was the opposite of democracy. Seven years earlier, he had written Virgin Soil. Many of the novel’s characters were young radicals who aspired to take part in the ‘going to the people’ movement. This heavy-handed scheme encouraged radicals to spend time in the countryside and teach the peasants about politics. Throughout the novel, the main character, Nezhdanov, struggles with the empty moral quality of this encounter. The young urbanites might be literate, educated, and know about the outside world, but they are also narrow-minded, convinced of their own rightness. By contrast, the peasants’ worldview knows more of human life. Their attitude to these strange outsiders is sceptical, worldly wise. So where does democracy fit in? ‘I see though you are a revolutionist you are no democrat,’ someone says to Nezhdanov early in the novel.
Nezhdanov sees for himself that the radical intelligentsia of which he is a part doesn’t care what people want. As the novel progresses, the weight of this insight becomes an intolerable burden. Faced with the humiliating coquetry of his patron’s wife, and the fact that the ruling-class milieu that she represents holds him in contempt, Nezhdanov’s underlying democratic instincts overcome his revolutionary mission. ‘That bitter feeling which he always had, always carried about in the depths of his soul,’ Turgenev wrote, ‘again stirred within him; the reproachful suspiciousness of the democrat awoke.’4 For Turgenev, the struggle between organic, reasonable, progressive inclusiveness and radical, intolerant exclusivity, between the listener and the knower-best, played out inside Nezhdanov. It was too much: he kills himself at the end of the book.
When the proponents of the Russia Anxiety turn to Russian democracy, Nezhdanov might be their exhibit A. He embodies the violent, disabling struggles that Russia, like all the great powers, faced during modern Europe’s first age of democratization in the decades before the First World War. In Russia, more than elsewhere, the process led to self-destruction. It was a struggle that seemed to show Russia lacked the historical basis for organic democratic development. Nezhdanov brought together within himself a national past of democratic trauma and a future of totalitarianism. For the Anxious, Nezhdanov is a prototype of Russian anti-democracy. He confirms a common understanding about the history of Russian politics, which we might call the dictatorship consensus.
It is an irreducible truth that nearly all of Russia’s history, over hundreds of years, has unfolded in autocratic or dictatorial political orders. But democracy has for long periods been important within these non-democratic political systems. The dictatorship consensus that is so common in Western popular commentary and foreign-policy decision-making might better be considered a dictatorship deception.
Turgenev offered his readers access to such complexity. Even characters that seemed sinister or dangerous possessed different sides and the capacity to change. Nezhdanov died, but not before imagining a calmer and more flexible version of human relations than the revolutionaries wanted. The very fact that he understood the struggle that was going on inside himself offered readers hope. In this chapter, we’ll confront the paradox that democracy is an important way of understanding Russia, even though the political system has scarcely ever been democratic. This is one of the ways that history can reduce the virulence of the Russia Anxiety.
The terrible events of 1 March 1881 marked the collision of two visions of democracy: a representative vision associated with Alexander II’s reforms and a total vision vouchsafed by his assassins. I’ll start by exploring the history of these two understandings of democracy in Russia. Then I’ll discuss two of the biggest obstacles to Russian democratization, the weaknesses of liberal and conservative party politics. And finally I’ll place Russia’s democratic dimensions in an international framework, one that illustrates what democracy does and doesn’t do in Western societies, and clarifies what democracy can mean in Russia. But let’s start with the representative vision of Russian democracy, which we can see, strangely enough, if we peer between Turgenev’s thighs.
‘Look at him now, pacing up and down,’ wrote Leo Tolstoy to the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, ‘deliberately waggling his democratic thighs in my face.’5 The thighs belonged to Ivan Turgenev, and he was waggling them in 1855. Tolstoy had finally come to meet the older and more famous writer. But where Tolstoy wore his Russian heart on his sleeve, Turgenev possessed a different character. Tolstoy was mercurial, changeable, prone to extremes – the hedonist who turned ascetic. Turgenev was also a man of appetites. But his temperament tended to moderation and consistency. Less prone to shoot off an impulsive put-down, he was more inclined to a ‘democratic’ outlook.
Born in 1828 in Oryol to a peaceable provincial noble who died young and his angry, self-centred wife, Ivan Turgenev was skilled at bringing people together and finding a middle way. After all, he negotiated himself into a ménage à trois with his great romantic love, the French opera singer Pauline Viardot, somehow befriending her husband in the process. As a twenty-year-old, studying in Berlin at the end of the 1830s, Turgenev was part of a circle of young Russians who passionately debated how German philosophy could justify their two contrasting outlooks: conservative support for the Russian autocracy and revolutionary opposition to it. Turgenev shunned the two extremes. Back in Russia, he found friendship with moderate opponents of Nicholas I’s ‘reactionary’ version of autocracy, such as the famous writer Belinsky.
Later, Turgenev was in Brussels when revolution came to Western Europe in January 1848. Louis-Philippe abdicated from the French throne. Turgenev came back to Paris, where he had many friends. The Second Republic was declared. He settled easily into the revolutionary rhythms of everyday Paris life, but he disliked the self-regarding balkanization of French revolutionary politics. Worse than the infighting of the Left, however, was the brutality of the Right. In June, revolutionary arguments came to their head: working-class forces rose up. General Cavaignac’s army came in to fight them. Not only did deadly fighting paralyse the city, but so did an awful rash of arbitrary arrests and executions without trial.
Turgenev now knew for sure that he hated revolution. But he hated it in a different way to Nicholas I, who had signed an edict demanding that ‘all loyal subjects combat the French Revolution’. Turgenev believed that the Russian autocracy should be flexible enough to accommodate reform. Democratic aspirations, if reasoned not forced, might even shape its future. Fanaticism of any stripe was the enemy of human dignity and progress.
Even during the reign of ‘reactionary’ Nicholas I, the tsarist social and political order was supple. It allowed some people to make their way successfully, despite the labels it ascribed to them. Most of the time people simply got on with their lives and set about achieving their aims exactly as they did in republics or constitutional monarchies in other parts of Europe, at least until they tried to cross a social boundary.6 Turgenev’s subtle mind could recognize this. He acknowledged the greater dangers of rapid change. But there was a bottom line. Serfdom lacked dignity. It could not go on. With the accession of Alexander II in 1855, Turgenev believed that reform would soon come. As a landowner, he anticipated emancipation, setting about the division of the land that his own serfs tilled in 1859. He was in Paris when the emancipation edict was finally announced in 1861, and he went off to give thanks at the Orthodox church nearby. His vision of reform was coming to pass.
Alexander followed his emancipation edict with the introduction of zemstvos in 1864. These were elected councils in the (large) provinces and (much smaller) districts of much of the Russian Empire. Zemstvos were chaired by marshals of the nobility. Their deputies were chosen through de facto electoral colleges. This made for an in-built bias towards the nobles, enough to offset some of their ill feeling about emancipation. (The ill feeling was also reduced by the redemption payments that the now ‘free’ peasants were required to make to their former owners.) Still, the first time that elections were held to the district zemstvos, 38 per cent of the elected members were peasants (42 per cent were nobles), an astonishing number in European comparison.7 In Nizhnyi Novgorod, a typical example, the assembly worked with the grain of democratizing reasonableness, changing the character of local politics and social policy.8
Even late imperial politics, therefore, sometimes dissolved the dictatorship deception. Over the next fifty years, zemstvos enacted a vast array of social legislation, especially in healthcare, that made a fundamental difference to local life. The zemstvos were responsive to local needs. While their elected composition did not mirror local society, they were in an important sense participatory and representative assemblies. Some of Russia’s regions incubated significant democratic habits in the decades before the Revolution.
The zemstvos moved the Speransky Conundrum onto a new plane of action. They showed that the Russian autocracy of the later nineteenth century contained within it an element of democracy. It existed only in the realm of local government, it did not formally act to restrain the tsar’s power, but it had an enduring practical and educational influence. The zemstvos helped to take Tsarist society in a new direction, which, convoluted and beset by violence as it proved to be, led towards the convocation of a national parliament, or Duma, in 1906. But the zemstvos did not emerge from nothing; they drew on previous experiences. For instance, in 1785, Catherine the Great granted a charter to cities, giving rights to urban dwellers, who could vote for municipal assemblies and mayors. Those who lived in towns, at least those above a certain level of respectability, were divided into six groups, and they elected the town duma, with one representative from each group. There were limits both to the capacity of what a local municipal assembly could do in the face of a provincial governor, who was appointed by the monarch, and there was an issue of legal philosophy, too: town dwellers might have been invested with some rights, but so too were the towns themselves.9 When it came to the promises of her ‘Great Instruction’ of 1767, it was clear that Catherine’s manifesto was not anticipating democracy, for all her interest in rational government and the rule of law. ‘There ought to be some to govern, and others to obey,’ the Instruction declared.10
Catherine was a deliberately European monarch. She started life as a German princess and in later life became friends with the likes of Voltaire and Diderot. But her experiments with popular representation drew on the precedents of Rus and Muscovy as much as on the atmosphere of the Enlightenment. The medieval East Slavic lands were well known for the irregular town meetings at which significant issues concerning the common weal were debated by residents. One such gathering of burghers, known as the veche, took place in Kiev on 15 September 1068 on the market square. They resolved to expel Prince Izyaslav and to welcome a successor (though Izyaslav was soon back).11 More famously, a veche met at Pskov and Novgorod periodically from the ninth century on. Novgorod was well known too for the practice by which the city’s boyars elected their prince. In a reform of 1354, the process was formalized, with the election too of representatives among the boyars. Of course, their interests were not the same as those of many of the town dwellers, even the most privileged ones, but the veche itself was a forum for the wider community.12 This was a prototype of modern urban government, as important in later myth as historic reality, and an obvious point of comparison with Western Europe. But the reality did not survive invasion by the Mongols and the growing rivalry with Moscow. Another body was the Boyars’ Duma, variants of which met between the ninth and eighteenth centuries. A collection of the realm’s top magnates, it received officials, visiting dignitaries, and supplicants, and might even have passed laws, but despite what seems like its importance, its work is difficult to make out from the sources.13
During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, another public assembly emerged. In a different way and on a different scale, it represented powerful classes and protected their interests in cooperation with the monarchy. The origins of the Zemsky sobor, or Assembly of the Land, are not clear, and the term itself is a coinage by historians writing in the nineteenth century. Our knowledge about it is full of gaps. Still, such an assembly was called in 1566 and met between 28 June and 2 July. It included the Boyar Duma, as well as representatives from the Church, the more minor gentry and urban merchants. Their debate covered a limited but vital agenda. Ivan asked the assembly how and whether he should make peace with the Lithuanians, who shared a powerful and expanding Commonwealth with Poland and Livonia (or Latvia). A range of views was brought to the table. Representatives from the Church, for example, insisted that Ivan should press on and go for Riga. On the basis of this consultation, Ivan then returned to his discussions with the embassy from Lithuania.
The Zemsky sobor of 1566 showed that some diffusion of power was possible in the Russian lands. Elections took place – but opposition to the Tsar was not their purpose. Representatives had the authority to act on behalf of their social estate – but never in a way that would conflict with the interests of the government. The process increased the involvement of ‘society’ in government – but did not make society independent of government. Assemblies of the Land were summoned thirty-seven times between 1549 and 1684, choosing tsars, advising about wars and approving the historic law code of 1649. The most important convened in 1613, tasked with the crucial work of deciding whether to hand power to the Romanovs. In general, the Zemsky sobor shared with the French Estates General and the English parliament the basic function of generating a monarch-led consensus, making it easier for a king to rule (though it shared the limits of the Estates General rather than the deeper roots that the English parliament was growing).14 Or think of central Europe. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the parliament-equivalent (the Sejm) met 235 times in the 300 years from 1493. It was one of the most dramatic arenas of proto-democracy in pre-modern Europe. On 6 April 1573, for instance, seven years after Ivan the Terrible called his most significant Zemsky sobor, 40,000 electors gathered in Warsaw to choose the next king.15 But the resolutions of the Sejm required unanimity for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the so-called liberum veto. Convening the Sejm was at the discretion of the king, who determined the agenda and chaired the upper of the two houses, the senate.16
However imperfectly, the Muscovite assemblies fitted inside this tradition. The Zemsky sobor drew on Mongol examples, too. ‘Quriltai’ had earlier emerged on the steppe, and the lessons of these assemblies transmitted themselves to Muscovy.17 This would-be democratic heritage, whose potential can be wildly exaggerated, corrects the assumption that unlimited power resided in the person of the tsar.
Within forty years of the great 1566 Assembly of the Land, Muscovy had become impossible to rule. The Riurikid dynasty had petered out. Political crisis followed. The absence of effective government coincided with invasion and economic dislocation. This was the Time of Troubles of the start of the seventeenth century. But the most influential historian of the period saw in this catastrophe a democratic hope. Vasily Klyuchevsky was a near-contemporary of Turgenev’s, born twenty years after the great novelist; he was elected to the Chair of History at Moscow State University while Turgenev was still an active writer. He saw autocratic rule as a flexible and collaborative instrument that was socially and geographically inclusive.
During the Time of Troubles, power changed hands several times. No doubt, this was dangerous. Power can be exercised in especially cruel ways during times of instability. The risk of misrule greatly exacerbated social and economic crisis. It made life miserable for many people. But it was precisely the rapid changes of ruler that allowed people to imagine a different kind of politics. For Vasily Klyuchevsky, the Time of Troubles created a new way of seeing political sovereignty. It was now possible to think that the people, not the tsar, might be sovereign – because rulers were so temporary and dispensable, while the people were eternal. The ‘will of the people’ might even dislodge a dynasty. A new blueprint emerged in 1610, when Muscovy came to terms with its Polish invaders. For Klyuchevsky, it was ‘a complete draft of a constitutional monarchy’, recognizing individual rights, and limiting the power of the tsar. This idea did not survive the accession of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. But Klyuchevsky drew attention to a ruling class that seemed to be made up of independent-minded magnates who understood sovereignty in their own way, and who were part of a newly bolstered Zemsky sobor. All this, wrote Klyuchevsky, ‘seemed to promise well for the development of the state and the community’. What’s more, he argued, it ‘provided the new dynasty with abundant spiritual and political resources that the old dynasty had never possessed’.18 At the same time, it gave scope to the people, too, to rise up against power when it was being abused, as they did repeatedly for much of the seventeenth century, until Peter the Great came to the throne.
Klyuchevsky’s vision gives historical force to the democratic possibilities that Turgenev hoped for. Seventeenth-century Muscovy was at the cusp of many possible modern futures. Back then, Klyuchevsky showed, Russia had as much or as little democratic promise as many other countries. But Klyuchevsky also taught an important practical lesson to his immediate audience in the late nineteenth century. He demonstrated how a reasoned belief in Russia’s ‘democratic’ precedents might shape the country’s contemporary and future political development at a time of uncertainty and reaction following Alexander II’s assassination. If you’re thinking about embarking on a risky political experiment, it helps to imagine that the past offers you something to hold on to.
In the turbulent period following Alexander’s assassination, it took the Revolution of 1905 to prompt the tsar to make democratic concessions. The Fundamental Laws of April 1906 signalled the creation of a parliament composed of two chambers: the Duma was the lower house, elected on a mass franchise, and most recognizably a national assembly; the State Council was a nominated upper house. Elections were via an electoral college, which favoured rural interests.19 Suffrage was not universal or equal, but it was widespread, and extended into all groups in society, though not to women. Overall, this picture compared favourably with many other parts of Europe, including Britain. Political parties were now legal and enjoyed some protections. Elections were free and not noticeably corrupt. Debate in the Duma and direct reporting of it was not hindered by fear or censorship. Nicholas remained an ‘unlimited’ autocrat, but this was a theoretical posture. If pushed, Nicolaevan autocracy might break the new semi-constitutional order; if flexed gently, it could resolve the Speransky Conundrum for a new generation. So while ministers remained responsible to the tsar alone (and individually so, not collectively), the Duma and State Council were allowed to challenge and question them. And while the tsar had a legislative veto, Duma deputies effectively did too; they could go back to a vetoed law and discuss it again.20 Members formed legislative committees that could call on expert witnesses.21 At their best, the Fundamental Laws of 1906, headlined by the Duma, had elements of a constitution about them. While they might not have held the tsar to account, they did check the government at times. They offered a compelling framework for constitutional development, in which the extremes of conservatism and radicalism, the wilfulness of tsar and parliament, provided mutual restraint.22 But the framework needed time to become secure. It was too immature to withstand the social storms of the decade before 1917, and it could not bend with the transforming forces of popular politics and political violence. Instead, it was blown over.
The Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) dominated the first Duma, with 179 of 478 deputies. They were joined by other liberals, as well as by moderate and extreme socialists – the Social Democrats had ten seats. The Socialist Revolutionaries, the popular peasant-facing radicals, boycotted the elections, so the Duma was probably more moderate than the electorate. The country was veering leftwards as it would in 1917.
Unsurprisingly, government and parliament shared no common ground. In July 1906, the Duma was dissolved. The Kadets fled to Vyborg, near the Finnish border, where they issued a democratic manifesto. The organs of the state struck back. With half their deputies arrested, the Kadets lost their plurality in the elections of summer 1906, and conservatives gained some ground. But the second Duma remained a progressive forum, committed to prolonging the achievements of the 1905 Revolution. This was of symbolic importance, but the Duma could not hold government to account. State coercion, which only irritated the wounds of the country, went on, regardless of the Duma’s composition.
In 1906, Pyotr Stolypin became chairman of the Council of Ministers, or head of government. He had been governor of Saratov Province. Saratov was one of the furnaces of the 1905 Revolution, troubled by many peasant attacks on nobles’ property. Stolypin headed the Ministry of the Interior from April 1906, and three months later became prime minister. He had a rounded view of Russian life and politics, but was convinced that Russia could not progress while parliament and government were in vicious conflict. His electoral law of 3 June 1907 has often been described as a ‘coup’. It fiddled with the electoral college enough to make a permanent conservative majority, but the conservatives were a mixed bunch, ranging from quiet centre-right critics of the monarchy to furious anti-Semites. They were not the material out of which to build a democratic pro-monarchy consensus. Stolypin wanted to manipulate the ‘constitution’ to give people a stake in the ruling order, something he backed up with his ‘wager on the strong’, a reform to rural land law whose aim was to turn the more ambitious peasants into property-owning farmers.
In the end, though, it was self-defeating. The revised Duma made it less likely that a sustainable political order would develop, one which could resolve the Speransky Conundrum by making democracy safe for autocracy. Duma and government were conspicuously on different sides and lacked the most basic of common goals. Political elites were so divided that they had no common loyalty.23 Meanwhile, many people found themselves alienated from all political institutions, while sharing little common ground with those from other classes. True enough, the right to vote and the opportunity to participate to protect one’s interests were strengthened in the last years before 1917. For instance, a major social reform of 1912 concerning workers’ social insurance established welfare boards that were partly made up of elected worker representatives. But here the expansion of civil society actually promoted political instability, because these boards became incubators for revolutionary politics. In a sense, the government could not win. But the potential of non-revolutionary Russian democracy was not exhausted. A wise leader during the emergency of the First World War might have harnessed it. But Nicholas II did not trust his people, and as the war ground on, the prospects of revolution – in which democratic progress would be in peril – gathered pace.
From Rus to the Revolution, amid the long development of autocracy, the Russian lands underwent various experiments in limited constitutionalism and democratic participation. The temporary success and ultimate failure of these experiments largely depended on circumstances. The worst bad luck of all was the assassination of Alexander II. Russia has at times possessed institutions that reflected Turgenev’s vision, based on a measure of individual rights, promoting the interests of different groups, facilitating open discussion. Other countries have built modern democracies on slighter historic precedents. But the more important point is that these traditions, memories and cultural resources still today modulate the operation of institutions, create accommodations and compromises in the interactions between people and power, and make for a legacy that can be useable whenever the political system might evolve more substantially. In the 2010s, the Duma is controlled by the government, but is still a forum for balancing the interests of competing claims by interest groups, at least elite ones in different branches of government and business. The ‘dictatorship deception’ ignores this major element of Russian history, which makes it easier for proponents of the Russia Anxiety to treat the country with disdain or disregard. But the history of Russian would-be democracy gives warnings, too. There is also democracy’s dark side: the spectre of total democracy.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the most famous of Soviet convicts, spending a decade in prisons and labour camps following his arrest in February 1945. He fought in the Second World War as a junior officer (he’d been a schoolteacher before 1941), but the secret police confected a case against him based on a cynical over-reading of his censored letters to friends and family. Solzhenitsyn went on to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel of Gulag life, which was published in the USSR in 1962 and was a milestone in the country’s coming to terms with its Stalinist past (more on this in chapter 9). He then wrote the non-fiction Gulag Archipelago about the country’s whole network of political violence and incarceration, which was published in the West and won its author the Nobel Prize. It also cost him his Soviet citizenship. He was exiled in 1974.
In the first volume of the book, he describes a characteristic arrest during the Great Terror of 1936–8. Imagine the scene (this story is a great favourite of teachers of Russian history). It’s a large meeting of Party members and officials in a provincial district close to the city of Moscow. Everyone there is a person of some substance in the locality: the people who run the provincial government as well as its factories and collective farms, those responsible for schools, hospitals and university departments, ambitious industrial workers, even one or two peasants who had somehow done well out of collectivization. In the chair sits a newly appointed district party secretary. His predecessor is already in the hands of the secret police. As the meeting comes to an end, with the business complete, a paean to Stalin is read out. In these circumstances, the minutes and newspaper reports always record the same response: ‘stormy applause’.
The applause went on. And on. People looked around, ecstatic expressions in place. They carried on applauding because they were afraid to stop. There were NKVD officers in the room, also clapping, looking around. Inside the hall were reasonable people with a sense of proportion and responsibility. There were others who were malicious, quick to denounce those around them. Others panicked easily. They were all applauding.
After eleven minutes, one of the reasonable people in the hall stopped applauding and sat down. It was the signal that everyone had been waiting for, and they followed his example. The man who stopped first was the director of a paper factory, who was sitting on the platform with the local political elite. He was a robust person who knew his own mind. You will already have realized what happened to him next. In such a way, Solzhenitsyn wrote, ‘they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them.’24
The scene in that hall, out in an obscure corner of Moscow’s greater region, is emblematic of the dark side of democracy in the Soviet Union. If elections to zemstvos were a hint of representative democracy, the endless applause of 1937 was the extreme point of total democracy: where everyone has a say but everyone agrees, and the only reason to disagree is because you are the enemy of everyone else.
Turgenev was afraid of stormy applause. His most famous novel, Fathers and Sons, analyses its echoes in the Russia of Alexander II. The novel’s central character is a medical student called Bazarov. He has charmed one of his contemporaries, Arkady Kirsanov, and the two friends go to visit the modest Kirsanov estate in May 1859. Arkady’s widowed father, Nikolai Petrovich, owns 200 serfs in this idyllic backwater. On the estate, the gentle Nikolai has taken up with a young peasant woman, whom he loves and treats as properly as convention allows; they have a small child. Nikolai’s brother, Pavel Petrovich, who has travelled widely but never found his place, is also in residence.
Bazarov disrupts this harmonious existence. Where the ‘fathers’ of the novel see the world as an organic place, governed by compromises, improved by goodwill, characterized by the different and the unique and subject to gradual reform, the ‘sons’ see it as a laboratory in which radical theories can be tested and extreme change brought about. Pavel Petrovich is so mortally offended that he and Bazarov end up fighting a duel. ‘It’s a waste of effort studying separate individuals,’ says Bazarov. ‘All human beings are like one another, in their souls as much as in their bodies. People are like trees in a forest. No botanist is going to study each individual birch tree.’25
But Turgenev showed that uniformity, breakneck change and forced consensus fell outside the boundaries of normal human responses. Bazarov never formally abandons his beliefs, but their collision with reality only reveals their incoherence, something he begins to understand. He falls in love with the owner of a nearby estate, Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova. In theory, love should not exist in Bazarov’s material world: it should be an illusion. Bazarov goes out to work among the local peasants, bringing them some rudimentary medical care, in a risky way that contravenes his apparent views about human nature and implies a wider sense of love. At the end of the novel, Bazarov dies because of an infected cut; the local doctor does not have the right equipment and bungles the treatment. On his deathbed, nothing seems more real than Bazarov’s need for Anna or his parents’ devastation at the pointless loss. In a letter at this time, Turgenev called Bazarov ‘a democrat to his fingertips’,26 and not in a bad way: in the end, Bazarov honestly grappled with the implications of his own worldview, finding complexity and peace where before he had imagined uniformity and violence. Turgenev fell out with lots of people because of Fathers and Sons. Not only did he anticipate Russia’s violent struggle between organic pluralism and stormy applause, but he suggested that you might never be sure who would be on which side.
Variants of these two types of democracy – that which claims to respect all individuals, and that which wilfully tramples on some of them – exist in many places. Turgenev’s own life, much of which was poised between Russia and France, showed that. Not only did he witness the democratic violence of the 1848 Revolution, but he also spent a lot of time in Napoleon III’s strange plebiscitary dictatorship. Coming to power following a coup d’état in December 1851, during which his forces took control of the National Assembly and seized leading deputies in their homes, Louis Napoleon called a referendum to approve his new political system. All men were allowed to vote, to ‘make the entire people judges’ of political life; a new parliament was convened, elected too by universal male suffrage; and a follow-up plebiscite in November 1852 confirmed the return to an Empire, with Louis now crowned as Napoleon III. The ‘democracy’ of the Second Empire looked two ways. It manipulated popular sovereignty, but it allowed rights to develop, especially in the late 1860s, when there was a limited liberalization of the Second Empire. But the core feature of this version of democracy was that Napoleon’s massive majorities underpinned his personal authority, which rested on a high level of state coercion and the suppression of opposition.27
The total and representative dimensions of politics in the Second Empire help to normalize Russia’s democratic limits and potential. But French history of this period also directly influenced early Soviet ‘democracy’. The Second Empire ended in defeat at the hands of Bismarck in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. In the capital, the Empire gave way to the Paris Commune, an exercise in a particular type of democracy that Lenin greatly admired and referred to many times during 1917.28 For a few weeks in the spring of 1871, the capital was run as a participatory community – officials were elected, citizens did guard duty, and institutions were run in accessible and experimental ways. There were shootings and intolerance, too, and the eventual pacification of the city by government soldiers was extremely violent, an example of civil war.29 The Paris Commune was a democracy with a bright side and a dark side. It was about power in the hands of the people, government being run from below, and the central state disappearing. It was also about the emergence of a determined revolutionary government with its own rigorous agenda. But for one of its most prominent historians (no radical socialist), ‘this distinction is clearer in retrospect than it was at the time’; for him, the carnivalesque and the optimistic were the dominant keys of the Commune’s music.30
This had a Soviet legacy. In State and Revolution, which Lenin wrote in 1917 as a sideline while he was organizing the most improbable revolution in world history, the Bolshevik leader drew on the lessons of the Paris Commune to argue in favour of a form of direct, revolutionary democracy that required mass participation. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, the mystique of the Commune sometimes inspired experiments in communal living, whose inhabitants adopted the neologism kommuna to describe their environments, avoiding obvious Russian equivalents such as obshchina or mir (the words used for the traditional peasant commune).31 But the biggest lesson for the Russian Revolution was not what the Paris Commune did, but what it didn’t do. It was the relative moderation of the Commune’s leadership, keen to avoid terror and violence where possible, that provided the most powerful lessons for Marx and Engels, as well as Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin (and their French socialist descendants). Given the chance to build socialism, the Commune had fudged it, according to the Bolsheviks. Too focused on immediate morality to execute all their opponents, the Communards had taken their eyes off the ball. They had missed the chance to be ruthless and therefore to defeat their enemies. Utopia justified violence; socialism justified a dictatorship; the ends justified the means.32
The October Revolution was accompanied by stormy applause. Of all the competing voices in revolutionary Russia, the Bolsheviks’ was the loudest. It prevailed over the others. Some of these voices attracted more people, notably that of the Socialist Revolutionaries, but carried less far, thanks to a lack of clarity and boldness. It was understandable, then, that very early after assuming power the Bolsheviks should compensate for this, introducing the most populist of measures, giving land to the peasants, and the most coercive of decrees, forming their secret police (the Cheka). Peasants hoped to be left alone, to have the chance to follow their own will (volya) and do what they wanted with their lives, but the Bolsheviks and their organs of state coercion soon got in the way. The Cheka was Bolshevik democracy in action: it was the violent tool whose purpose was to make the people agree with the will of the people.
In the year from February 1917 to January 1918, Russia was the setting of an increasingly desperate conflict between the two types of democracy. At the end of it, stormy applause won out decisively: there were elections to a Constituent Assembly in which the Bolsheviks came second, but they shut the institution down and carried on ruling regardless. The Bolshevik Party organized the Red Army and won the Civil War, bolting enforced popular sovereignty onto the dictatorship of the proletariat. In time, stormy applause would find its ultimate manifestation in the vicious public meetings of 1937, where denunciation followed by self-criticism of a victim were met by the unanimous approval of the audience.33 Turgenev’s nightmare had come to pass.
Stormy applause understandably echoes loudly in the ears of those who feel the Russia Anxiety. It’s an important sound in Russian history, most especially in Soviet history, and is an essential accompaniment to totalitarianism. This is a complex term that historians do not use lightly, but it certainly carries weight when one imagines that room in Moscow Region during the Great Terror. Yet the mentality that causes stormy applause probably comes and goes within most people in modern societies across the globe. It is present in the top-down consensus formed in committee meetings; and its natural consequence, when a group rounds on the person who disagrees, is a feature of high-octane residents’ meetings about parking. What makes stormy applause lethal is its political context, which in the case of the Soviet Union derived from the chance combination of events that caused the October Revolution. Stormy applause can’t be the soundtrack of a national character. It was an indispensable feature of Soviet politics until the 1980s, but even then it was never the only feature.
Probably no country held more elections than the Soviet Union. People were always voting in one institution or another, not least for the national parliament that was created by the Constitution of 1936. The Soviet Union called itself a democracy. Famously, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, British socialists, came to visit and believed it; they called Stalin’s rule ‘the most democratic in the world’. This was, of course, absurd. But why did the Stalinist government bother with so many public polls? Was holding elections in the Soviet dictatorship really for the purpose of hoodwinking the Webbs?
One of the fallacies of Soviet history is that it was all about politics. According to the theorists who set up the totalitarian paradigm for interpreting the Soviet system, the government exercised total power, and Soviet life was relentlessly political. Politics flowed in the same direction as power did: top to bottom. Ideology was designed at the top and the population was indoctrinated with its messages. Yet the Soviet Union changed over time, becoming a looser and less politicized dictatorship; and even in the Stalin period, the ‘total politics’ view of Soviet life is exaggerated. During the height of Stalinist rule in the 1930s, politics and ideology on the grand scale were often the last thing on people’s minds. They were frantically busy just getting what they needed to survive.
Nevertheless, Stalinist society contained laboratories of political experience, participation, discussion and conflict. Take trade unions, of which the Soviet Union had 157 in 1937. In that year, there were central committee elections featuring secret ballots and a choice of candidates in 146 of them. The person at the top was often replaced. There were elections to other committees too, at all levels of the unions. Six per cent of the total union membership – 1.23 million out of 22 million – were elected to some position or other in their union hierarchy.34 This was a deliberate reinvigoration of an apparent oxymoron, Stalinist democracy. Meanwhile, elections were held for political posts, from those in ‘primary party organizations’ in workplaces right up to the national assembly, the Supreme Soviet, the ‘parliament’ established by the 1936 Constitution.
So Soviet democracy was about participation. Only exceptionally, though, was it about choice. If the main function of an election is to choose the government, with a realistic possibility of changing it, this was not possible in the Soviet Union, where almost all elections lacked more than one candidate. On 5 October 1945, Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, signed the decree that called Supreme Soviet elections for 10 February on the following year.35 ‘The forthcoming elections won’t give us anything,’ said a citizen from Penza Province in January 1946, ‘but if they were conducted like they are in other countries, that would be a different matter. We only had free elections in Russia under Kerensky.’36 Russia’s ‘freest year’ of 1917 contained examples of total and representative democracy alike, but the idea of choice and pluralism was still a powerful folk memory after the Second World War. The absence of choice was evident by 1946, and the formal existence of non-Party candidates on the list was a patent illusion – though, for some, the leading role of the Party might not be a bad thing. ‘Why do we have to have a bloc of Communists and non-Party members at the elections,’ asked someone in Voronezh, ‘when the Bolshevik Party is the only governing party in the USSR, it leads all organizations and the people trust it with their fate?’37
Probably more important than what happened at the ballot station was the campaign that preceded it. Campaigns provided a powerful mechanism for two-way communication between the authorities and the population. The most significant campaigns were for elections to the Supreme Soviet. Elections were first held to the Supreme Soviet in 1937. Then came the war, and the next election took place in February 1946. After that, they were held approximately every four years. The election campaign that preceded voting day lasted around a month. It was a widespread feature in newspapers, radio, and, later, TV news programmes. Candidates had to be nominated at the level of constituencies, and sometimes by institutions like trade unions or the Academy of Sciences. The process of nomination could be competitive. Candidates made their case at public meetings. Between their formal nomination and polling day itself, they continued to make speeches. Some famous candidates, including Stalin, who stood for election in a Moscow district, did not campaign as such. But many Party officials campaigned on their behalf. Ideologists crafted the message. Banners announced the Party’s favoured slogans. Journalists shaped the message’s delivery. The campaign penetrated all institutions of work and study, not least schools, which sometimes acted as polling stations. Election day itself was a ritual of mass involvement. According to a worker at one of Moscow’s engineering plants, Comrade Lebedev, ‘the elections are a real festival for us.’38 Especially during the Stalin and Khrushchev eras, but to some extent too in the more sceptical period that followed, electioneering was a total performance.
The election campaign was, therefore, an important way for ordinary people to read signals from the authorities about how they should express themselves. But the communication operated both ways. In formal terms, candidates were asking something of the electorate: their votes. As a result, they had to listen to them. They did so in election campaigns, which featured countless public meetings, many on the factory floor or inside the collective farm. The questions people asked or the opinions people shouted out – on how policy affected their lives not on who should be in charge – gave officials the chance to gauge public opinion. Especially in the years of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, when the dictatorship was more responsive to people’s needs, this was a crucial feedback mechanism.39
In the end, though, on extremely high turnouts and with no choice on offer, elections gave people the chance to agree with power. They were a parade of unanimity. The Supreme Soviet and other elected institutions were not simply representatives of the people, therefore: they were the people. They articulated the unanimous and undisputed views of the people, their collective class interest.40 As Bazarov said: the trees in the forest could not be distinguished from each other, the individuals became a mass. For all the apparent pointlessness of a single-candidate election that can’t change the government, elections without choice helped to make Soviet politics work under Stalin as well as in the much less repressive years of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. An extra point was that elections without choice had a useable, valuable legacy. Experienced in political participation and voting, however mechanically, people very quickly adapted during perestroika to the politics of pluralism and to elections that did offer a choice. For all the unreasonable contempt with which the Soviet person came to be regarded – not least by those Russians themselves who coined the term sovok to describe the ‘typical’ Soviet souls they disdained the most – it was obvious that stormy applause was never a hardwired state of mind.
Sunday 9 April 1989 was election day in the USSR. It was a new type of election for a new institution, the Congress of People’s Deputies. The elections were complex, with contests for different types of seats held on different days. As one candidate for election, Anatoly Sobchak, pointed out, ‘it was a cumbersome and not very democratic system [that] Gorbachev had concocted’. But it was unlike elections for the Supreme Soviet: it was an election that offered a choice.
Sobchak was an academic lawyer at Leningrad State University, which was located in the city’s Vasilevsky Island district. The district had always returned a worker from the Baltysky shipyard to the Supreme Soviet. It seemed likely that the shipyard would continue to dominate the working-class politics of the district in the newly competitive era of the Congress of People’s Deputies. At a nomination meeting of his trade union in early 1989, Sobchak decided to buck convention and stand himself. He took part in the packed hustings that would nominate the candidates for the whole-constituency election, standing against representatives from the shipyard. ‘Words about the need for a law-governed state, the priority of common human values over class interests, the necessity of a new approach for ensuring human rights, rolled off my tongue,’ he recalled later. ‘I spoke enthusiastically about reforming the economy, of new ideas for industrial accountability, and of independence for the republics.’ Following voting at the nomination hustings, he became one of four candidates for the district.
Across the constituency, he canvassed for votes, making speeches through a loudhailer near metro stations, debating with the other candidates on local TV, and sharing platforms in public meetings. Honing his arguments in his encounters with the electorate, he engaged keenly with the ‘civil society’ campaign groups that were springing up across the city. He lacked much organization. To some voters, Professor Sobchak was no man of the people, but a journalist called him ‘the voters’ advocate’. He won with 76 per cent of the votes.41
In 1989, Leningrad fulfilled again its independent political spirit. ‘The people have spurned their trust in the city’s party and soviet leaders,’ declared one leading group at the end of the election campaign. ‘We have voted against, because we don’t believe the promises of the nomenklatura to end arbitrary administration, economic irresponsibility, and social injustice.’42 It wasn’t just Leningrad, the cradle of the Revolution: the politics of pluralism were now on display throughout the country. Clubs, pressure groups, and political groupuscules that might be the building blocks of a democratic order proliferated.43 But they were weak. Few lasted. They often seemed to promise anarchy rather than reasonable government. ‘It’s just accidents, rallies and strikes,’ wrote a man called Osipov who lived in Astrakhan. ‘No, we can’t be given democracy; we don’t know how to handle it.’44
By the late 1980s, the deepest question of all was about the meaning of Soviet democracy. It had to remain rooted in the decentralization of economic power, or it would mean nothing at all. ‘It is only through democratization that the workers can be included in the process of perestroika because only democracy can give all power to the people,’ wrote Abel Aganbegyan, one of the economic designers of Gorbachev’s reforms. What could this democracy be? Mystifyingly, it was not about elections to a parliament. ‘We must involve the masses in management, ensure that they participate in discussions about possible developments, about the deployment of funds, or about which measures should be carried out first and which second.’ This was an ideal of grassroots democracy that drew on the half of Leninism that had promised personal liberation. Aganbegyan emphasized that late Soviet democratization was quite different from ‘liberalization’ on a Western model. ‘Liberalization means allowing things; it means power being granted from above,’ he wrote. ‘The people do not participate in liberalization, though some parts of the population might benefit from the process.’ Democratization was about giving power to the people, not about granting concessions from on high or imposing more and more laws on the people. Supporters of perestroika ‘wish to widen and deepen the process. We stand for genuine democratization.’45
In such a way, the designers of perestroika looked back to the legacies of the Revolution and its aftermath to help them steer a route between the hazards of stormy applause and the chaos of Turgenev’s thighs. But perestroika happened much too fast. Its badly conceived policies transformed property relations in perverse ways, giving incentives to political and industrial bosses to bet on a pseudo-Western-style democracy that forsook Soviet and Russian legacies, encouraging them to enrich themselves dramatically. Unsurprisingly, they acted against the real spirit of democracy and the rule of law. As the big-business ‘democrats’ prevailed, small-scale democratic participation, rooted in economic life, had no chance of prospering. And the complete incomprehension of Western outsiders only made the situation worse.
In Western parliamentary and presidential democracies, ‘economic democracy’ remained a niche idea during the 1990s. Only seldom did it influence corporate life, such as in the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, one of Spain’s biggest conglomerates, never touching the mainstream brokers of Western power politics, and only becoming a populist Leftist dream after the financial crisis of 2008.46 After 1991, the Western powers – the ‘Washington Consensus’, made the most short-sighted of errors when they assumed that democracy only meant a very limited range of institutions and practices, a vaguely and lazily understood version of their own. By using a cookie cut-out of democracy-building, failing to support it with full-hearted help, both material and moral, and ignoring the democratic resources that the complicated Russian past made available, the would-be democratic transition was never likely to be a transition to actual democracy. The 1990s were a time of freedom of speech and democratic participation, but they were marked by President Yeltsin’s military assault on his own parliament in 1993, a new constitution which focused power in his hands and an economic system in which politics and big business could overlap. This gave stormy applause a new chance. It ushered in a new phenomenon: sovereign democracy. As the Putin era went on, state and power, sovereignty and democracy became the same thing.
Viktor Chernomyrdin, prime minister to Yeltsin’s president, oversaw the turbulent relations between government and Duma in post-Soviet Russia. In those days, the Duma was a competitive arena, the home of bitter debate, where communists, nationalists and liberals vied to hold the government to account. But what was the natural party of the governing-minded, people like Chernomyrdin himself? In the 1990s, there was, in turn, ‘Russia’s Choice’, led by the architect of the free-market reforms, Yegor Gaidar; the ‘Our Home is Russia’ Party, of which Chernomyrdin himself was chair; the ‘Fatherland’ party, headed up by Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow mayor, and Yevgeny Primakov, prime minister; and then the ‘Unity’ Party, whose leading figure was Sergei Shoigu, who later ran the Ministry of Emergency Situations before becoming defence minister. All these men were tough executive politicians, not natural parliamentarians equipped to serve in opposition, though Primakov arguably had it in him to be the exception.
By the new decade, the ‘United Russia’ Party had assumed the mantle. It swept all before it in Duma election after Duma election. In the September 2016 poll, it was returned with 343 out of 450 seats. ‘Whatever party we create,’ mused Chernomyrdin, years before that, ‘we always end up with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’
United Russia was a vehicle of power, designed to govern, to support careers, and to distribute perquisites; the idea of serving as the opposition or holding the government to account was oxymoronic. But unlike the CPSU, it lacked an ideology and a heritage of grassroots participation. Neither liberal nor conservative, United Russia was the institutionalized consensus of the Russian political and business elite. Should the government change, it would be difficult to see what purpose the party would have.
The only really organic mass party in contemporary Russian life is the successor of the CPSU – the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Although its connections with ‘power’ are no longer transparent, it has been a coherent opposition voice and the consistent runner-up to Putin and United Russia. The other large group is the Liberal Democratic Party, a populist-nationalist vehicle for the perennial comic turn of post-Soviet politics, Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
As time went on, parties of the centre and centre-right were marginalized. Some gave up. The reasons for this were both contemporary and historical. In fact, the long-term weakness of such parties in Russia, of liberals and conservatives alike, has placed an historic limit on Russia’s democratic prospects. But does it suggest, as the Russia Anxiety would have it, that Russians lack the instincts of decent liberalism or reasonable conservatism, and are prone instead, as anti-democrats, to extremes and submissiveness? Has their history missed the crucial steps embodied by a liberal like Gladstone or a conservative like Bismarck?
It became a ritual of post-Soviet politics. Every few years, Grigory Yavlinsky would limber up and run for president. Summoning up a lugubrious authority, displaying an ostentatious grasp of economics, and ruffling his full head of hair – he had something of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about him – he would deliver his nomination papers. But if Brown was a tough machine politician with a vicious temper, Yavlinsky was the opposite. His Yabloko Party, Russia’s leading liberal group, was grounded in grass-roots politics, but it was vulnerable to the massive and unpredictable head-winds of post-Soviet life. There were no party machines in the new Russian politics. Power-broking took place in government offices, not party meetings or smoke-filled rooms of election operatives. Politics offered nothing resembling a career structure. Running for parliament gave little advantage to independent-minded careerists, whose prospects were better served in officialdom and big business (though sometimes they stood for parliament later, a Duma seat conferring legal immunity and proximity to power). And throughout, for better or worse, Yavlinsky conducted himself in a professorial and cool-minded manner, even when tested in the most extreme way: his son was kidnapped in 1994. Yavlinsky became a fixture in post-Soviet politics: the high-minded, apparently incorruptible, quixotic, courageous critic of power who never had a chance.
In June 1996, Yavlinksy scored 7.3 per cent in the first round of the presidential election. Yeltsin and Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist boss, both attracted around one-third of the electorate, and went on to face each other in the second round, which Yeltsin won in controversial circumstances. In March 2000 – the election was slightly ahead of time, because of Yeltsin’s resignation on the previous New Year’s Eve – Yavlinsky came in at 5.8 per cent. Putin beat Zyuganov substantially, scoring over 50 per cent of the vote and winning outright, without the need for a second round. In 2004, Yavlinsky stayed out of the fray. He claimed that there were so many electoral abuses that it was not worth running. Putin won with 72 per cent. With Yabloko boycotting the poll, the closest to a liberal candidate was Irina Khakamada, a less disciplined politician than Yavlinsky, and a leading figure in the small centre-right bloc, Union of Right Forces.
Next, in 2008, Yavlinsky stood aside in favour of the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who was disqualified on a technicality. Dmitry Medvedev attained 71 per cent of the vote, easily sidestepping Gennady Zyuganov, the long-running Communist leader, while Putin, having already been in office for the maximum of two consecutive terms, assumed the role of prime minister. In 2012, however, Yavlinsky tried again. His candidacy failed. The authorities insisted that almost a quarter of the necessary 2 million signatures on his nomination papers were forged. (He had to jump such a high bar because Yabloko was no longer in the Duma, having fallen below the 5 per cent threshold.) Putin beat Zyuganov on a slightly reduced but still overwhelming majority, and then the Duma extended the presidential term to six years. Yavlinsky came back to run again in March 2018. His hair had silvered a bit and he’d grown a smart beard, and now he walked around without a tie. He polled at 1.05 per cent. Although the opposition vote was split between seven candidates, who shared the quarter of ballots that were not cast for Putin, the liberal constituency seemed to have shrunk. Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of the Leningrad professor, stood too, and divided the natural Yabloko vote further, gaining 1.68 per cent. Despite Yavlinsky’s gifts and grit, his political CV was an exhausting record of mixed accomplishments.
Grigory Yavlinsky was Russia’s most famous post-Soviet liberal. Born six months before Vladimir Putin, he shared with him some of the experiences of their generation: coming of age and higher education in the Brezhnev era, career progression during perestroika. If Putin was a man of state service, Yavlinsky seemed more a man of the Soviet intelligentsia. He trained as an economist and worked for research institutes that were focused on national economic problems. He critiqued policy. But he did not stand completely outside power, and so he was not quite the classic Russian intelligent, the type who, however feebly, could claim to ask questions of government because they were not within it. By the end of the 1980s, Yavlinsky was one of Gorbachev’s most senior advisers, and he became a prominent politician in his own right in the 1990s.
A cautious man, seeking to build coalitions rather than to grab headlines, he was a founder member of the Yabloko Party, post-Soviet Russia’s most distinctive liberal group.47 But Yabloko had a problem. It was the home of ‘social liberals’, those who were critical of the devastating social consequences of Yeltsin’s breakneck economic reforms. As in other countries, though, liberals, who shared a commitment to civil liberties, were divided between supporters of economic deregulation and advocates of social welfare. ‘On the one hand, we in Yabloko want Russians to be able to get rich, we want them to be able to earn high pay, we want to foster competition, and we want to exploit our country’s natural resources and untapped potential for wealth creation. In that sense, we are a “bourgeois” party,’ Yavlinsky wrote in 1997. ‘On the other hand, when we see the government spending vast sums on official silverware and candelabras and see legions of public officials driving around in Audis and Mercedes-Benzes, we may sound a bit more “socialistic”. So be it.’48 In the face of this challenge, Yavlinsky consistently failed to press his point home. True enough, by 2018, he had managed to summarize his message in a single word. ‘The most important word’ – he told a Moscow audience, gathered in the snow on a Saturday three weeks before voting – ‘is respect, respect of power for the people.’ On a cold Moscow day, he wasn’t even wearing gloves, taking energy instead from his supporters.49 For a moment, he had the charisma of clarity, but it was too late. Yabloko only got a reasonable shout-out during national elections, though even then the main TV channels were open in their support for Putin. Vladimir Pozner, the veteran TV presenter and an authoritative neutral voice, interviewed Yavlinsky a few months before polling day, and wondered whether the younger generation had ever heard of him.
The after-life of communism has played an outsize role in shaping political values in post-Soviet Russia, which did not make for a promising environment for liberalism. This was partly because a Soviet education encouraged people to think in the structures of Marxism, in ways that seem antithetical to liberalism: in the polarized categories of socialism versus capitalism, or West versus East, or enemy versus loyalist. Most important of all were the enduring habits of mind that defined a citizen’s relationship to the state. Post-Soviet Russians have shown a combination of attitudes to the state: anxiety about its coercive potential, anger about its corrupt tendencies, but also the enduring expectation that it will fulfil its beneficent promise, and remain as a court of final appeal about living standards and social provision. It can be difficult to disentangle the state and the nation in the imaginations of the older post-Soviet generations. Among the opposition parties, the Communists have therefore been best placed to make a straightforward and comprehensible case that can attract substantial support. Paradoxically, the same applies to the successive parties of statist power, which lack a recognizable ideology on the left-right spectrum, such as Our Home is Russia, under Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin, and now Putin’s United Russia Party. The centre and centre-right have little chance by contrast. Alexei Navalny, the most distinctive opposition voice of the 2010s, whose presidential candidacy in 2018 was foxed by put-up criminal charges, was no liberal, but a populist-nationalist anti-corruption campaigner.
And yet the basic message of liberalism, about the special status of the individual, was a neat fit with perestroika and the transition to the post-Soviet period. Discussed in a Soviet tone, with messages paid to the centrality of social and economic rights, Gorbachev’s own ideas were not inconsistent with aspects of a liberalizing agenda. From property rights to human rights, the spectrum of liberal sympathies enjoyed much support. But the devastating economic whirlwind of the 1990s seemed to put paid to Russia’s liberal prospects. The Chernomyrdin Dictum reminds us about the interplay of structure and contingency in Russian history. And so it was events, the chances of politics during perestroika and transition, that kept Yavlinsky and others like him miles from power. Yavlinsky was not the victim of an inbuilt Russian problem with liberalism, as the Russia Anxiety might assume, but of policy failures and political calculations with which he could not contend.
If the glimmers of democracy – reflected when nobles once elected a monarch, or the burghers of a town gathered to make decisions about urban life – date back into the distant past of Rus and Muscovy, then so does the idea that the individual is a person of status in his own right. Vasily Klyuchevsky, one of the nineteenth-century titans of Russian historiography, argued that ‘the very idea of personal rights, scarcely noticeable in Russian political thought before, is for the first time more or less definitely expressed’ in the agreement with the Poles of 4 February 1610 that ended the threat of their takeover of Moscow.50 Under Tsaritsa Anna (1730–40), reforms to property law protected the status of ownership. Peter III (1762) introduced measures defining the legal status of nobles. The instincts and necessities that underlay liberalism existed in the Russian lands just as they did in the West, even if they were not properly elaborated or securely defended.
A more systematic approach to liberal reform began during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Catherine the Great developed policies that looked towards civil rights, such as the Charters to the Nobility and to the Towns. She also imposed a rational approach towards elementary schooling and social protection, especially for orphans and the sick. Meanwhile, the loosening of censorship allowed a more systematic dialogue with liberal ideas from abroad, notably those of Montesquieu. It also made possible the publication of journals that put forward social criticism, and even attempted subtly to criticize the authorities, such as Novikov’s The Drone. Catherine’s Russia was an autocracy, but the scope of freedom had expanded there. Her reign anticipated a reformed autocracy that might one day be based on the rule of law, with a promise of liberal constitutionalism. Then, during the first years of Alexander I’s reign, Mikhail Speransky established the terms of his ‘Conundrum’, aiming for an autocracy governed by laws as well as by a man. As he wrote in the law code of 1809 that was never formalized, ‘What is the point of civil laws if their “tablets of stone” can break at any time on the rocks of the autocracy?’51
By the start of the nineteenth century, the opportunities for Russian liberalism seemed real. But the structure of Russian politics created problems and shaped mentalities in unhelpful ways. For all the rich potential of the Speransky Conundrum, the autocracy was hostile to Russian liberalism. Three out of the four tsars who reigned between 1825 and 1917 made it difficult for liberal ideas to develop naturally. As a result, with its options narrowed, part of the intelligentsia became dramatically more radical, committed to violent revolution. This liberalism was squeezed between an uncompromising state and an extremist opposition. One tendency that flowed from the noble officials of Peter the Great directly to the assassins of Alexander II was the uncritical assumption of Western ideas, the tendency to believe in utopias and the willingness to make use of whatever means might be necessary to achieve the desired ends.52 This anti-liberal tendency was only one part of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian political culture – the liberal tendency itself was another – but it was a powerful one, and it diminished liberalism’s prospects.
It was not as if liberalism did not have a rocky path in other European countries. At best, ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’ everywhere suffered from grotesque lapses; more likely, they were never truly capable of protecting rights for all. Nineteenth-century Spanish history was partly an unsatisfactory dialogue between liberals and the monarchy, starting with the abortive proclamation of a liberal constitution in 1812. More generally, liberalism adopted uncertain forms across the southern European periphery, in the lands of today’s Portugal, Italy and Greece, a zone of slower development and dramatic politics whose modern history can usefully be compared with Russia’s, and which are no less European than France or Denmark.53 Or take the prototypical example of liberal politics: Britain. For all the coherence of John Locke in the seventeenth century or John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth, and for all the increasing influence of liberal ideas on politicians as the Victorian age went on, modern British liberalism was founded on an original sin: the coexistence of civil and political rights at home for those of the right gender and class with their deprivation from the non-white inhabitants of the colonies. Encoded deeply in liberalism’s practice was the assumption that there existed a few people who possessed rights and many others who didn’t. Russia’s liberalism fitted on the European spectrum.
Alexander II’s great reforms increased the space for Russian liberals to breathe and even flourish. The emancipation of the serfs had been the liberal nobles’ preoccupation, and now they could put its possibilities into practice on their estates. Liberals made use of the zemstvos to promote their own values. Reforms to universities and the judiciary made it possible for liberal-minded professionals to honour their political convictions in the institutions in which they worked. The spirit of the 1860s was a brief thing, curtailed by Alexander’s own doubts and then by his assassination, but its influence survived in the more hostile conditions of the later nineteenth century. It cultivated convictions about the status of the individual in law, and expressed a desire for the peaceful, gradual and limited reform of the autocracy, an approach that Turgenev and his ‘fathers’ would recognize.
By 1905, however, the old liberalism had been outstripped by events. Its agenda belonged to a slower-moving world. If liberals were to enjoy relevance in a time of revolution, they had to change gear. Most of them had been long-lasting constitutionalists, but now they had to accept that the Revolution had moved the goalposts, requiring them to back a range of social and economic rights. But in the end, why should a radical vote for the liberal Kadets in the Duma elections when he could opt for something more authentic? Like in any political situation that was becoming more revolutionary, the centre could not hold. This was not really a failure of the liberals, or of liberalism. It was the result of circumstances beyond their control: the exceptional, unanticipated, febrile politics of the decade before the First World War.
And they were undone by the genetic accident of monarchy. Nicholas II was incompetent enough to alienate support when it was offered to him. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, the Duma’s moderates coalesced in the Progressive Bloc. Its aim was to combat extremism, reflect public opinion, enhance the status of the Duma and provide patriotic wartime support to the tsar. Keen to help the government direct the war effort, it was rebuffed: Nicholas signed a decree to adjourn the Duma until September 1915. ‘The extended hand was rejected,’ wrote Pavel Milyukov, the leader of the Kadets.54 The monarch’s intransigence not only reduced the goodwill of the moderates and the capacity of Russia’s war machine, it also strengthened the opportunities of the far-left socialists at the expense of the liberals.
Milyukov had argued before 1905 that Russia had missed its real chance a century earlier, when Alexander I rejected Speransky’s original programme for a reformed autocracy and embraced conservative and mystical visions in the second half of his reign.55 In November 1916, Milyukov made his famous ‘stupidity or treason’ speech in the Duma, in which he outlined the monarchy’s incapacity to fight the war effectively. In both cases, Milyukov pointed out that the failure was the monarch’s. Alexander I and Nicholas II alike were unable to forge the obvious alliance with the liberals, constitutionalists and moderates that would have contributed to the monarchy’s survival. It was not that Russian political culture was naturally hostile to liberalism, but that a succession of tsars made bad decisions. Put it another way: bouts of dangerous political weather, rather than a permanently unmanageable political climate, shipwrecked Russia’s liberals. Milyukov was right that liberals historically fell victim to political circumstances, though in 1916 his own speech was one of those circumstances. In the midst of such a storm, Milyukov’s contemptuous words were reckless. The monarchy fell a few weeks later, but the liberals never had control of events during 1917, and the Bolsheviks destroyed them. Milyukov fled Russia in 1918 and spent the rest of his life in exile.
The Russia Anxiety points to the absence of political pluralism in Russia, sometimes justifiably so, but where it tends to underestimate Russian liberalism, it exaggerates the significance of Russian conservatism. Liberalism might be necessary for a lasting democratic culture, but democracy-building is based on a different truth: it needs conservatives. In mid-Victorian politics, the great political rivalry was between Gladstone and Disraeli, alternately prime ministers for the Liberals and Tories. Benjamin Disraeli was the prototypical modern Conservative; it was no accident that it was he, and not his rival, who was responsible for the Second Reform Act of 1867, the period’s most influential democratizing stride. The Act enfranchised the upper echelons of the male working class, and entrenched an influential relationship between Conservatives and certain types of manual workers that would in some ways shape modern Britain.
Disraeli was a mercurial politician of great talents. But the most brilliant democratizing conservative of the nineteenth century was Otto von Bismarck. He built a country: as minister-president of Prussia, he won the wars, conducted the diplomacy and designed the institutions that unified the German states. Under the sovereign power of the Kaiser, this ‘Second Reich’ came into being in 1871. Bismarck possessed a mastery of tactics: without it, he would not have been able to find his way through the thicket of international and domestic politics that stood between himself and his aim of unification. But he also exercised a strategic vision. This extended not only to the creation of Germany, but to the type of politics that would govern it. More radical than the Second Reform Act, the constitution of the new Germany allowed for a Reichstag that was elected on the basis of universal male suffrage. There were political parties of various stripes, and trade unions. Meanwhile, the status of conservative Prussia in the new ‘democratic’ Germany was assured, and the Kaiser remained powerful in practice; Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck in 1890. This was practical authoritarian politics vigorously pursued, by a statesman whose authority went beyond the patronage of the emperor (until Wilhelm II came to the throne). Russia’s struggles to make autocracy workable seem like arcane theology by comparison.
Late imperial Russia lacked a statesman of Bismarck’s calibre, who could make democracy and autocracy coexist. It was not that Bismarck solved Germany’s Speransky Conundrum. Instead, he showed it was irrelevant, making democracy safe for conservatism – and conservatism safe for democracy. Marxists argued that he tamed democracy and hoodwinked the workers. He gave them the vote, allowed them to organize and supported them with generous social security and welfare measures, but extracted a cost, obtaining their quiescence. For better or worse, this compromise grew into the dynamic and intermittently durable mass democracy of Germany’s modern age. It began as an illiberal democracy under Bismarck, but it had liberal potential, eventually realized.
Bismarck was greatly admired in Russia. Policy enthusiasts wrote tomes about his welfare programme.56 In 1912, a major social insurance law was introduced in Russia; one of its leading proponents in the Duma tried to win traditionalist deputies round by comparing it with the German welfare laws.57 No one thought more of Bismarck than Sergei Witte, prime minister in 1905, when Russia was going through a failed revolution. Witte encouraged Nicholas II to make the political concessions that culminated in the creation of the Duma, first elected the following year; but his premiership was otherwise a failure, because his grip on the politics of the street was so weak, and the monarchy might have collapsed had he remained in office beyond the autumn. His biographer claimed that he even felt ‘adulation’ towards Bismarck. It was partly a matter of the German’s unique mastery of international and dynastic politics: his unrivalled capacity for state building. More deeply felt, though, was Witte’s admiration for the particular type of democracy that Bismarck designed. He had found a way of preserving the magic and authority of the Kaiser while bringing all adult men inside the political nation. Witte called it a ‘social monarchy’. The Russian statesman would have loved to build an analogue of the German social monarchy in St Petersburg. Witte thought that the German model facilitated ‘the defence of the rights of the weak’ in such a way as to make the state stronger.58 This was a conservatism of extraordinary possibilities.
Bismarck’s conservatism channelled the forces of modernization in the direction of monarchism. This was a model too for Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 until 1911. But Stolypin’s tactics were different from Bismarck’s, reflecting a fear of democracy rather than the confidence to use it. In 1907, Stolypin was responsible for changing the electoral rules so that the Duma would be dominated by supporters of the monarchy, a move which reduced rather than extended the political nation. But he did so in a way that assumed that prosperous peasants, and not regular industrial workers, must be the bedrock of the monarchy. This seemed the wrong bet at a time when it was the cities of the Empire which were deciding the future of politics. Stolypin’s ‘wager on the strong’ extended individual property rights by diminishing the power of the village commune. His law allowed ambitious peasants to set up shop as small-holding farmers. This petty-bourgeois class, Stolypin believed, could help to save imperial Russia: it was bound to be conservative, just as it was in Western Europe and the United States, and would thus support the monarchy. The vulnerability of Stolypin’s experiment with dynamic conservatism was revealed by his assassination at the theatre in Kiev in 1911.
But at least Stolypin tried. In Russia, much more often, conservatism was all about vacuously turning one’s back on the forces that were creating the modern world. By the early twentieth century, the potential of conservatism was unrealized. In the place of a dynamic and strategic vision from the centre-right, Russian conservatism was static, and where it was radical, it was violent and intolerant, believing Russian politics was a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. In the polarized conditions of the First World War and the Civil War, this was the ugly face that Russian conservatism presented to the world.
The historic root of Russian conservatism, though, was the autocracy, and the function of conservatism was to provide extra ideological justification for the monarchy. This gave conservatism a static quality, as if it was merely the sycophantic servant of the monarch. Count Sergei Uvarov served Nicholas I as a minister for education. In 1832, he came up with the famous summary of the monarchy’s purpose, ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’, which became a slogan for conservatism. It did not offer a way of making the government accountable, or representing specific interests, or promoting the status of the bourgeoisie or defending organic, age-old rights; instead, it suggested that conservative politics were simply a way of explaining and supporting autocracy. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who was the most influential conservative voice in late imperial Russia, had this stationary worldview. He tutored the last two tsars in their youth and was also procurator of the Holy Synod – the government official in charge of the Orthodox Church – between 1880 and 1905. Lacking the privileges of most high officials, he was brought up in the ranks of the intelligentsia; his father was a professor at Moscow University, though the atmosphere at home was devout rather than sceptical, perhaps reflecting his grandfather’s modest service as a village priest.
Pobedenostsev believed that democracy was always wrong, whether it was calmly representative or the forum for stormy applause. ‘Forever extending its base, the new Democracy now aspires to universal suffrage – a fatal error, and one of the most remarkable in the history of mankind,’ he wrote. In a democracy, it was the demagogues and shady operatives who had the power. Politics became debased and vulgar. The wise reforms of a statesmanlike elite were no longer possible. Parties bribed and manipulated the voters. Parliaments served not the public good, but ‘the triumph of egoism’. Showing he had totally misunderstood the way the wind was blowing, Pobedenostsev even called out Bismarck. ‘In Germany,’ he wrote, ‘the establishment of universal suffrage served merely to strengthen the high authority of a famous statesman who had acquired popularity by the success of his policy.’ For Pobedonostsev, democracy was so malign that it was unspeakable even when it was serving a conservative agenda. Oblivious to the path on which Nicholas II had set the monarchy – 1905 was just round the corner – Pobedonostsev ended his tirade against Bismarck: ‘What its ultimate consequences will be, Heaven only knows!’59
But conservatism did not have to be static and stupid. At its best, but in scattered and unrealized form, nineteenth-century Russian conservatism might have saved the monarchy. It could offer prescriptions that were by their nature particularly Russian, rather than generic and international, as Enlightenment-inspired liberalism inevitably was. As a result, Russian conservatism could sometimes sound inventive, flexible, and responsive to local conditions.60 Take the struggle between Mikhail Speransky and Nikolai Karamzin during the reign of Alexander I. Karamzin deplored Speransky’s instinctive but scholarly desire to reform and thereby renew the autocracy. For him, it missed the point. He thought that Speransky marked a fashionable shift towards abstract ideas and universal theories at the expense of organic, tried-and-tested practicalities. Karamzin argued that the tsar’s power must be undivided: it should not be compromised by elected institutions or curtailed by written-down constitutions. But he also argued that it was not, by definition, unlimited: it was not arbitrary, ungenerous or personalistic.61
Such a conservative view was not a cheap catch-all defence of a tsar. It offered scope for political evolution and practical criticism. Karamzin was a deeper thinker than the usual blind adherents of power. He offered the possibility of a conservatism that did not emerge from within the autocracy itself. Instead, it was a conservatism that might advise the autocracy as a candid friend, point towards a fresh direction or even modestly seek to hold power to account. It did him no good during the reign of Alexander I, who turned against him as he had turned against Speransky.
The Soviet Union was a revolutionary socialist state from the beginning to the end. During the Brezhnev era, however, conservatism re-entered the fringes of Russian political life. The Soviet government permitted the creation of some organizations which drew obliquely on older conservative traditions, such as the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Monuments of History and Culture (VOOPIiK). Cultural trends emerged, exemplified by the novels and stories of the so-called rural writers, as well as journals like Moskva, that were part of the same tendency. Contemporary Russian conservatism has partly emerged from this sometimes wistful, sometimes authoritarian approach. In the 1990s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was, informally, its most famous spokesman, arguing that the state was not simply a collection of economic and military interests, but a spiritual entity, expressing Russia’s uniqueness and its Christian heritage.62 Putin honoured Solzhenitsyn with the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 2007. In a private conversation with the US ambassador shortly after, and just months before Solzhenitsyn’s death, the writer offered qualified praise for Putin’s government.63
This type of conservatism emerged from the Soviet Union and reacted against the circumstances of its collapse. (Its tendencies to explain Russia as a ‘Eurasian’ civilization is something we’ll come back to in chapter 7.) Like most of its predecessors, this form of conservatism existed to promote the state, not to hold it in check. President Putin has used some of its symbols, but he’s not really of the Left or of the Right, let alone of the far Right; he’s a person of the state, a gosudarstvennik, drawing on instincts of authority, imperatives of international statecraft and consolations of nationhood, adapted for the age of politics as business and business as politics.
Yet Russian political culture has generated different conservative traditions that are independent of the state and even exist to keep its excesses in check. Contemporary politics, not Russian history, have made the independent centre-right weak. There were the great thinkers, like Pyotr Struve, who moved from left to right between late-nineteenth-century St Petersburg and 1930s exile, always being guided by the same humane commitment to liberty. And there were the politicians who formed a centre-right that could be an active opposition. Between the Third Duma, elected in 1907, and the Revolution, the Octobrists played a major role under the leadership of Alexander Guchkov. They were an independent centre-right party, not of the state but capable of criticizing it. Other centre-right groups emerged that could dynamically represent particular interests, such as the Progressist Party, which spoke on behalf of sectional groups in business and industry during the First World War. Their post-Soviet successors included the Union of Right Forces and the People’s Freedom Party, and such politicians as Boris Nemtsov and Irina Khakamada. There were politicians of the centre-right who resigned from Putin’s government, such as the former finance minister Alexei Kudrin, who occasionally spoke critically and productively from the edge of power before returning to office in a less central post in 2018. Yet the position of a centre-right opposition became very weak during Putin’s third term, its parties unable to get properly registered with the authorities, let alone elected to the Duma. In early 2015, Nemtsov, the charismatic renegade whom Yeltsin had made a deputy prime minister nearly two decades before, and who had recently become an anti-corruption, pro-democracy campaigner of national importance when his party was squeezed out of parliament, was killed by assassins outside the Kremlin walls in an international cause célèbre. Mikhail Kasyanov, Putin’s former prime minister who came back to lead the People’s Freedom Party, fell victim to a compromising scandal and polled disastrously in the 2016 Duma election. Khakamada had long since returned to private life.
For many Russians, these liberal-conservative politicians could be difficult to stomach. When Mikhail Kasyanov had been prime minister, he was nicknamed ‘Misha Two Per Cent’, for his alleged attachment to bribe-taking. Was he really now a democrat? Boris Nemtsov was in the end a hero to many, and a tragic figure to almost all, but he was just a ‘Soviet playboy’ to one of my Russian teachers in the early 2000s. Russians are quick to call hypocrisy out. Like most people, they find lectures from outsiders difficult to take. And when the teaching from on high concerns democracy, they are quick to respond, having lived through the economic and moral disaster of ‘democracy’ in the 1990s. But democracy flourishes best when illusions about it are most secure. Calling out hypocrisy can have the most unintended of consequences. As we’ll see in the last section of this chapter, the relationship between Russia and the outside world has achieved precisely this, shattering the country’s democratic illusions. The Russia Anxiety requires its proponents to look down on questions of democratic development from the moral high ground, when a more revealing perspective might start from within.
Russian political culture possesses a sensitive radar that detects hypocrisy. It’s always switched on, and it makes plenty of false readings. But not all the readings are false. False or true, the radar’s readings are calibrated in moral equivalences. A questionable action by Russia looks more normal when compared in moral terms with a stupid, thoughtless or malicious policy pursued by a Western government. Some comparisons, especially about empire or invasions, carry more obvious moral weight than others. Ben Rhodes, one of President Obama’s speechwriters and a deputy National Security Adviser in his White House, pointed out in early 2017 that the moral equivalences might be misjudged, but the United States does indeed have a record of intervening in other countries and changing regimes – and also of taking advantage of Russian weakness so that NATO expansion could be facilitated. Speaking of Putin, Rhodes concluded: ‘There is just enough rope for him to hang us.’64
Western journalists coined the term ‘whataboutism’ to define the principle on which the radar works.65 Never was there more whataboutism that during the Cold War, when the actions of the United States provided a natural foil for the rhetoric of the Soviet Union. The KGB? What about the CIA? Human rights? What about Southern Blacks? Shortages of goods? What about unemployment? Housing queues? Homelessness. Afghanistan? Vietnam. As a principle of international political debate, it is now back with a vengeance. Ukraine? Iraq. Crimea? Kosovo. Democracy? Trump.
Critics point out that ‘whataboutism’ merely constructs false moral equivalences by drawing comparisons between quite different phenomena; it’s nothing more than a debating ploy to distract from violations of international law and human rights. ‘Whataboutism’ has a long if not very distinguished record in the history of rhetoric, though the Cold War was a particularly natural environment in which it could prosper. Take John le Carré’s fifth novel, A Small Town in Germany, published in 1968. The action unfolds in Bonn at a fictional moment when the far Right was once more gaining in popularity and making the political weather. ‘The Nazis had persecuted the Jews: and that was wrong,’ le Carré writes, glossing the speech that the would-be fascist leader makes at the culmination of the novel. ‘He wished to go on record as saying it was wrong. Just as he condemned Oliver Cromwell for his treatment of the Irish, the United States for their treatment of the blacks and for their campaigns of genocide against the Red Indians and the yellow peril of South East Asia; just as he condemned the Church for its persecution of heretics, and the British for the bombing of Dresden, so he condemned Hitler for what he had done to the Jews; and for importing that British invention, so successful in the Boer War: the concentration camp.’66
Whataboutism might sometimes be crass, making it easy for the Russia Anxiety to dismiss it out of hand. Yet the history of democracy across Europe is an unlikely story full of cynical subplots rather than an inspiring fairy tale based on the triumph of values. Never does the hypocrisy radar twitch more vigorously than when democracy is up for debate.
Democracy is an emotional subject, discussed in terms of moral values. For Aristotle, democracy was not a morally good form of government; like tyranny or oligarchy, it was a perversion of politics that was based on self-interest and extremism. He heard the stormy applause and imagined mob rule. His lessons were influential. Moral anxieties about democracy have been a staple of modern European politics since at least the eighteenth century. They have diminished with time, but became respectable again in the age of Trump and Brexit, with their assumptions that the people might not know best after all.
Since the 1940s, though, democracy has almost always been described as a moral force for good. During the Second World War, the Allies were ‘making the world safe for democracy’; the language of democracy accompanied the foundation of the United Nations and then the reform of the defeated powers, Germany, Italy and Japan; ever since, democracy became an approximate synonym for human rights and the rule of law. Those countries which seem to fall short in democratic qualities don’t simply have political weaknesses that might be treated, but deep-seated moral failures. They deserve ritualistic condemnation at best, and the ‘shock and awe’ of invasion and occupation at worst.
In the Soviet Union, democracy was also described as a moral good. After 1945, its zone of enforced influence in Eastern Europe was made up of countries called ‘People’s Democracies’. In everyday life, behaving ‘democratically’ was a good thing. Soviet people recognized when the rhetoric rang hollow, but they also valued some of the real consequences of ‘Soviet democracy’. By the Brezhnev era, some of those things for which there was consensus support, notably universal social rights and the rhetoric of international peace, fitted easily inside a framework of notional democracy. Later, Soviet ideology could label Gorbachev’s democratization policies as morally right. Describing democracy in primary moral colours made sense to many citizens, partly because Soviet political culture had given them the words, and partly too because democratic reform offered self-evident remedies to the abuses of late-Soviet politics and bureaucracy. The speeches of Anatoly Sobchak and others were not tin-eared.
This was a narrow window of hope. By 1993, democracy looked very different. Now it was associated not with things of universal value, or aspirations for a better world, but with the likes of Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, Boris Yeltsin’s deputy prime ministers in the early 1990s. Such men proudly called themselves democrats. The label was widely used and unfortunately it stuck. Unelected themselves, and working for a president whose election predated the break-up of the Soviet Union, they had the feeblest of mandates for their headline reform. Beginning on 1 January 1992, they initiated the economic policy of ‘shock therapy’, which unleashed market forces overnight. Eschewing the possibility of more gradual reform, and ignoring the fact that they were leaving tens of millions of their fellow citizens in conditions of utmost peril, they brought about unpaid wages and runaway inflation. Those citizens who did have jobs often found themselves unpaid for months on end. Crime soared. Savings were lost. Corruption was rampant. Pensioners sold their possessions in the street. Some people were lucky and earned tremendous success, but most people’s lives were irretrievably spoiled. This was the most difficult time for Russian people since the aftermath of the Second World War. Meanwhile, at the end of 1993, Yeltsin’s forces fired heavy weapons at parliament.
For Russians in the early 1990s, this was democracy. Those who most self-consciously labelled themselves as democrats and used a high-sounding language of democracy were those who were most impoverishing the population and enriching themselves. There was nothing more Soviet than describing politics in moral terms. Just two years after the red flag came down from the Kremlin, the habit was ingrained in the post-Soviet population. But the language of the reformers was an American language. In post-Soviet Russia, it sounded false. For many Russians, democracy scarcely looked virtuous. As the 1990s went on, the people’s trust in politicians and political institutions was at extraordinary low levels; in one major survey, under 10 per cent of the population expressed trust in parliament between 1993 and 1998, while trust in the president fell to 6 per cent in 1995.67
Meanwhile, in Western capitals, Yeltsin was seen as the best hope for a stable transition out of Soviet power, and the reforms of Chubais and Gaidar were considered appropriate. For the Washington Consensus, pain is something that is worth enduring if it’s happening to other people. Unsurprisingly, a deficit in sympathy led to a disjunction in communication. If democracy is always a good thing, then there must have been something wrong with Russians for not seeing its virtues. In the 1990s, talk of democracy in the abstract generated hollow laughter among Russians who were living with what they assumed were its concrete effects. Since 2000, years after Chubais and Gaidar had left the Kremlin – Chubais to make a fortune as a top energy executive, while Gaidar died young from a heart attack – the hollow laughter became the established backdrop of political culture.
The hypocrisy radar went into overdrive whenever Western politicians waxed lyrical about the moral case for democracy. Not only had these foreign leaders never cared about the fate of ordinary Russians, but many of them were elected into power on a minority of the vote, sometimes when actually coming second. And it was never difficult to find examples of how they also abused power, denied people their rights and looked after their own, all the time maintaining a fixed grin and talking about the power of the people.
The case for democracy might be made in three ways. First, democracy is a universal value. Evidence suggests that democracy can take root in all kinds of cultures, not just the stereotypical ‘Western’. Witness the story of Indian democracy, which has had a continuous history since the end of colonial rule in 1947, and has facilitated changes of government and the protection of freedom of expression (while less successfully securing universal rights and combating corruption). Democracy allows a political community to understand what it has in common and to shape its political values accordingly. It enables people to participate politically, to demand responsiveness from their government, and to maximize the dignity of citizenship. All of these things might work weakly in practice in any democratic state. But democracy can still facilitate the shaping of a minimum level of consensus and respect.
Second, democracy has useful practical consequences. Above all, the government can be replaced, and there’s an established way of doing it peacefully, even in win-win ways, so that the defeated party can recharge its batteries and come back stronger. The rule of law is more likely to work effectively in a democracy. This is not a universal truth. Courts and lawyers can sometimes operate plausibly in the subject territories of empires or in modern authoritarian states. But it’s much easier for them to work without too much fear or favour in democracies. The range of practical rights that people depend on – to walk about freely without being arrested, or to own property securely, or to return faulty purchases, or to have defensible access to social goods like healthcare and education – are also more robustly protected in a democracy. But there are many exceptions to this rule: take internment without trial in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, or the relative sanctity of property in right-wing authoritarian regimes, or the elevation of social rights in socialist dictatorships. Meanwhile, government in democracies is usually more transparent than in dictatorships. This in turn reduces corruption (though not so much in democratic Greece and Brazil).68
Plainly, these two justifications for democracy are subject to detection by the hypocrisy radar. A third, however, which Winston Churchill famously put forward, is less easy for the radar to pick up. This is the truism that of all systems of government, democracy is the worst, apart from all the others. It’s best able to control the worst instincts of elites, gives people something to believe in if they wish to close their eyes, is unlikely to unleash arbitrary violence against its own population, or to start wars against other democracies. No one can really be inspired by the least-worst argument, but they might appreciate its effects; it seems honest rather than hypocritical, and it seems interested in a practical goal: clearing the minimum hurdle of a satisfactory politics.
Ultimately, though, it’s a weak defence, given the democratic deficits of many Western democracies. Without some appeal to political morality, democracy can look enfeebled. What about, a critic might ask, the representative credentials of governments? Democracies look pointless when people are disenfranchised. Donald Trump won a majority in the electoral college – but nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. In Britain’s first-past-the-post system, hundreds of constituencies are not competitive, making it pointless to vote if you live in the heartlands of one of the major parties – in other words, in most of the country. Cynical self-interest makes the problem worse.
Gerrymandering has fundamentally weakened the democratic credentials of the US House of Representatives. This is an historic challenge that has got much worse with time. By taking control of a raft of state legislatures and governors’ mansions in 2010, Republicans were able to execute their REDMAP strategy, by which they could redraw the borders of swing districts to make them safe for their own party. The process was openly cynical; the resulting districts, connecting pockets of supporters in different parts of the states, were so bent out of any rational shape that their purpose was clear. ‘It means basically that the whole constitutional notion of the House as a mirror of popular views comes into jeopardy,’ argued one expert from the non-partisan American Enterprise Institute.69 Awareness in Russia of such democratic failures merely solidifies a sense of American hypocrisy.
But the result of presidential elections, and also British general elections, is almost always in question. Although the value of many people’s votes is discounted, the election overall is competitive. More representative voting systems can actually make it impossible to change the government. Coalitions that nobody voted for are the common consequence of proportional vote-counting. Meanwhile, in the history of Swedish government, the Social Democrats were immoveable between 1932 and 1976. Japan’s Liberal Democrats ran the country without interruption between 1955 and 1993. Democratic elections without real choice can reflect a national consensus, in favour of social welfare and an interventionist state in Sweden, or the prioritizing of economic success in Japan.70 But the system is still stacked against the basic function of democratic elections: making possible a change of government.
Keeping incumbents in power for long stretches, whether as United States Congressmen or as ministers in Sweden or Japan, is still different from the way that dictatorships perpetuate the grip of a party or a small clique in power. It’s true that in nearly all district elections to the House of Representatives, the incumbent will win. But incumbents still have to face the voters; there is a chance they can lose, both in the primary election among their own party supporters and in the general election across the electorate as a whole, even if the chance is remote. One political theorist claims that this is the ideal outcome. Unlike the ‘charade’ elections of dictatorships, the House elections allow voters to express their will and ensure that their choice is respected. So the politicians are kept on their toes, a bit, and by staying in office, they build up expertise and potentially become better politicians. The aim of the election is therefore to make elected officials do their jobs better, and it achieves this by ensuring the election is as uncompetitive as possible without being completely uncompetitive.71
Given all this, it’s unsurprising that the success of democracies requires the voters to undertake a leap of faith. Modern democracies look utterly unlike their predecessors in ancient Greece. Citizens no longer participate in government. Some of them – usually between half and two-thirds – go out to vote once every few years, sometimes with barely a choice before them or an opportunity to be heard. They might be free to say or read what they like, but they cannot but keep in power an elite which is rich and strong, and which bets on democracy as the best way to maintain its privileges.72 Any solution to this problem – such as selecting citizens at random, in a process called ‘sortition’, to take part in lawmaking for a few weeks at a time – is probably unpopular and anyway coercive.73 Unable to formulate policies to deal with medium- or long-term threats, incapable of perceiving how serious any given crisis might be, hysterical and complacent in turn, democracies survive because the voters refuse to reject the shaky theoretical premises on which their politics works. Up on the high wire, the voters don’t look down. The political scientist who makes this argument calls democracy’s predicament a ‘confidence trap’ of a particular kind. ‘People have to believe in democracy for it to work,’ he writes. ‘The better it works, the more they believe in it. But the more they believe in it, the less likely they are to know when something is wrong.’74
The total system shock of the early 1990s destroyed Russians’ capacity to take this leap of political faith. Democracy’s advantages have seemed illusory. The claims made on its behalf have looked obviously hypocritical. Western commentators scoff at Russians’ hypocrisy radar, ignoring those of its results which are obviously true, and refusing to see the stubborn reasons for its existence. But twenty years on from the 1990s, with living standards relatively high, society more stable than it has been for decades and metropolitan life ever more liveable, why take a punt on a political experiment? It is not the campaigners from abroad who are taking the risk with their children’s futures. Russian politics sometimes acknowledges the link between a democratic deficit and the failure of everyday life, such as after the avoidable catastrophe in the Winter Cherry shopping centre in Kemerevo in March 2018, when a fire killed sixty people, including children trapped in a cinema: the governor of this region of Siberia, Aman Tuleyev, was forced to resign. Failures of oversight, regulation and policy increased the risk of disaster, and he took responsibility. But there was a cynicism about this; he reappeared as Speaker of the region’s duma shortly after.
The nightmarish failures of public accountability are one thing, but some commentators have come to link them to a more outlandish picture, comparing Russia’s current political culture to those which feature concentration camps, civil wars and the exclusion of women. In the Freedom House survey for 2016, which ranks a country’s political rights and civil liberties out of 7, with 1 representing the freest, Russia was given scores of 7 and 6 respectively. Hardly any countries did worse; North Korea, which forbids its citizens from travelling abroad, and Syria, engaged in a civil war, both got 7 and 7. Russia’s rating was the same as Libya, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Afghanistan and Iraq were scored significantly better.75 (Freedom House is a non-governmental organization almost completely funded by the American government.)
When it comes to democracy, we know deep down we’re up on the high wire, but for good reasons we cannot admit it openly to ourselves. If we could, we would understand Russia’s predicament more clearly. But that might come at a cost to ourselves. A democratic country is probably more likely to remain so if it does not spend too long weighing up its own democratic weaknesses. It’s much easier to keep going if you don’t look down. In Britain, the intense introspection of two constitutional referendums in two years, over Scottish independence and Brexit, created a crisis of legitimacy; the country’s political culture seemed no longer sure of what it really is. Being able to point or jeer at apparently undemocratic others – the European Parliament, Hungary, above all, Russia – was a helpful if limited safety valve. Wherever democracy seemed most vulnerable, not least in the United States, Russia was talked up as a dictatorial enemy, and was imagined as culpable for democracy’s failings, thanks to hacking and other electoral interference. As the foil for the West’s own insecurities over several centuries, Russia probably needs precisely the kind of moral support that Western governments might be least able to give.
And so the Russia Anxiety not only misinterprets Russia’s democratic experiences, it has stopped the outside world from giving Russia the support it has needed. Western governments missed the chance to redesign international institutions in 1991 in such a way as to incorporate Russia as a natural democratic member. Instead they sent highly paid advisers to help deliver the crushing burden of economic reform, while maintaining the external institutional architecture of the Cold War. And by keeping Russia as their foil, they failed even to provide the rhetorical support that might have made democracy seem right for the Russian people. The great danger of the Russia Anxiety is that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy; Russia’s natural proclivity to dictatorship is a deception, unless enough people believe otherwise.