Flight from Theory

Abstract

For Sovietologists, who for some reason refuse to belong to the community of historians of Russia, the recent elevation of Iurii Andropov poses one major question: will he manage to consolidate his power and to break the stagnation that characterized the previous regime? To historians, who have seen so many alternating periods of stagnation and seemingly successful reforms, liberal overtures and unbelievably cruel dictatorships in the course of the last halfmillennium of Russian history, the question appears rather technical. Let us assume, the historian would reason, that Andropov is no less shrewd a manipulator than Nikita Khrushchev was, and that he succeeds in the 1980s, as Khrushchev did in the 1950s. What then? Could Andropov's reforms assuming they take place bring a major breakthrough in the coercive Russian political system as we have known it for centuries, or would they again lead to stagnation or possibly to another dictatorship? There is a fundamental fact that the historian, unlike the Sovietologist, cannot ignore: all of Andropov's predecessors, all Russian reformist leaders throughout the centuries, have failed to make their reforms irreversible. There were men among them younger and brighter, more energetic and more powerful than Andropov. The long and tragic list of reformers who failed includes Aleksei Adashev in the 1550s and Mikhail Saltykov in the 1600s, Dmitrii Golitsyn in the 1720s and Alexander I in the early 1800s, Alexander II in the 1860s and Vladimir Lenin in 1921, Nikolai Bukharin in the 1920s and Nikita Khrushchev in the 1960s. All of these men initiated reforms, some of which were successful, some even glorious. None of them, however, formulated a political strategy that could have brought about irreversible change. Why has the Russian empire resisted political modernization despite reforms and revolutions that brought the most radical institutional, economic, and ideological changes? Why has it been the maverick in the family of empires, the only one that does not fit into the global pattern of imperial behavior in modern history? Epochs, personalities, costumes, language, manners, and the order of events changed: the refined aristocrats of the eighteenth century had very little in common with their bearded ancestors in long caftans, and still less with the former e6migres in worn jackets who seized power in the Kremlin in the twentieth century. And yet the pattern of the Russian political process seems to be reproduced again and again in all its monstrous consistency: a dictatorship gives birth to an era of reform, a reformist regime leads to a dead season of political stagnation, another desperate attempt at reform is followed by a counterreform carrying on its crest another dictatorship. Why this horrible repetition of the same pattern all through tne centuries? Whence the historical pendulum swinging mercilessly from dictatorship to reform and back again? This question may seem academic to Sovietologists, but it is a vital one for Russian reformers and certainly for my generation, hopelessly lost among the