Conceptualizing Contemporary Russia

Abstract

SEER, Vol.8i,J\o. 2, April2003 Rev iew Article ConceptualizingContemporaryRussia EDWIN BACON Alexander, James. PoliticalCulture inPost-Communist Russia.Formlessness andRecreation ina Traumatic Transition. Macmillan,Basingstoke,and St Martin's Press, New York, 2000. Xii + 267 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography.Index. [52.50. Bonnell, Victoria E., and BreslauerGeorge W. (eds). Russiain theNew Centu:y.StabilityorDisorder? Westview Press, Boulder, CO, and Oxford, 200I. xii + 380 pp. Tables. Notes. Index. [i6.95 (paperback). Brown, Archie (ed.). Contemporary RussianPolitics:A Reader.Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 200I. xvi + 574 pp. Notes. Tables. Index. [X8.99 (paperback). Shaw, Denis. Russiain theModernWorld: A NewGeography. The Institute of BritishGeographersStudies in Geography, Blackwell,Oxford, 1999. xxii + 314 pp. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index. [ I 7.99 (paperback). White, Stephen. Russia'sNew Politics.Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2000. xiii + 386 pp. Notes. Tables. Figures.Illustrations.Index. 05.95 (paperback). WHEN did the post-Soviet era end? Picking dates is subjective and overly specific though my personal preference is for 26 December 2000, when Russia, with great symbolism,formallyadopted the music of the old Soviet national anthem as its own. What all bar one of the books under discussion here appear to agree on, however, is that the post-Soviet era has ended. We are into 'new', 'contemporary', 'modern '. El'tsin'sfin desiecleresignationwill be remembered by history as the end of the transitional period between Communism and what comes next. After all, the distinguishingprefix 'post'has a limited shelf life almost by definition. As the similaritiesbetween, say, Estonia and Uzbekistan have increasingly disappeared in the past decade or so, what logic remains in lumping them together in the post-Soviet state Edwin Bacon is Senior Lecturer in Russian politics at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, the University of Birmingham. He is at present on secondment as Director of Research at Bishop Grosseteste College in Lincoln, where he also heads up an ESRC-sponsored research project on the securitization of Russian politics under Putin. 292 EDWIN BACON box? How long can politicians, analysts,and citizens describea statein termsof what it was, ratherthan what it is? In Russia's case the post-Soviet era has ended in the sense that Russia is no longer experiencing the transitional chaos of the El'tsin years, when almost every policy seemed to aim at being as 'post' the Soviet Union as possible. Not of course that everythingin the Russian polity, economy and society is sorted and static;but ratherthat under Vladimir Putin there is a more settled and familiar air about policy. The great upheavals of privatization, democratic institutionalization, and the establishmentof a formof federalismhave by and largepassed. Gone too is the iconoclastic disdain for the Soviet era perse. Putin's view is that although Soviet communismproved to be an historicalculde -sac, the real achievements of the Soviet regime should not be disowned but celebrated. There is even talk of putting Dzerzhinskii back on his plinth in Lubianka Square, from where his removal represented one of the most memorably symbolic moments of the Soviet collapse. Instead of the 'whatwill happen next?' momentum of El'tsin'stransition,Putin'spresidencyhas adopted an approachwhich is more 'what you see is what you get'. This is twenty-first-century Russia: a democracy, yes, but distinctively Russian; a foreign policy based avowedly on national interests;an economic policy strugglingto break free of endemic corruption and seeing a market economy with stateinfluence at keypoints as the way ahead;and a civil society fenced on every side with new laws on religion, on political parties, on social organizations,on foreigners,on the media, and on extremists. The one book under review here which focuses firmly on the immediate post-Soviet era, rather than what came next, is James Alexander's PoliticalCulture in Post-Communist Russia.Alexander might take encouragement from the shifts in tone of the Putin era noted above. His work is based on research carried out in Siktyvkarand Kirov in 1993 and 1994 into the often maligned concept of political culture. Even then and there, away from the political elite of Moscow and St Petersburg,his view was that 'the dominant trend among the Russian people is expressedin supportfor the symbols and...