Politics and communism: figure and ground

Abstract

The rebirth of politics in Russia is historically coextensive with the collapse of Soviet communism. More than mere contingency informs this temporal relationship. The key terms in it – politics and communism – define one another, like figure and ground, thesis and antithesis. On one hand, communism had represented a double-excision of politics: suppression of political activity, plus compulsory participation in ubiquitous pseudo-political rituals sponsored by the party-state. Here, we have in mind not only the repressive functions performed by the secret police, informers, prisons and labour camps, but also the appropriation of political forms for the purpose of preventing political practice, such as the empanelling of millions of individuals on Soviets by means of single-candidate ‘elections’ who would represent their constituents by unanimously endorsing whatever measures the authorities had placed before them. On the other, the return of political life in Russia would witness a double-relationship to communism. Politics would be reborn as a struggle against the communist system that had denied it. It would reappear as heroic action, challenging, resisting and defying the communist system in the name of human dignity, national restoration, freedom and democracy. Measured against standards such as these, the prosaic aspects of political activity – ambition, advantage, influence and so on – would seem so many miscreants subverting this struggle from within. But the institutional inheritance bequeathed by communism to the new Russian polity would complicate the matter of rebirth in far more profound and ramified ways.