Slavophiles and Commissars: Enemies of Democracy in Modern Russia by Judith s> Devlin (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 777 came to recognize the legitimacy and utility of the nascent third sector. This does not quite add up to a study of democratization under Gorbachev, as promised in the title, but it does provide theoretical and empirical depth to our understandingof the contradictionsand resistancesthat accompanied the emergence of civil society in the carapace of a decaying authoritarianregime. This is, then, a fruitfuland encyclopedic study conducted within a robust theoretical and analytical framework. It provides much source material to examine the way that the old regime dissolved from below as well as from above. Some of the new voluntary associations quite consciously saw themselves in the vanguard of reconstitutingcivil society, while otherssought to find a niche in a deconcentrated society. All elements in the new voluntary sector, however, added to the avalanche of social mobilization of this period, although the degree to which the emergence of the voluntarysector is typical of the broadermovement is not made clear. Social activism from below, perse, was only part of the story. As White suggests(pp. 138-39, I82) but does not explicitlydevelop, this was all part of a broader 'democratic' revolution. We are not concerned here with the institutions of liberal democracy, but with the establishment of the universal citizenship that lies at the basis of a modern democratic society. The concept of partial (or segmented) citizenship was implicit in work-based Soviet-style welfarism,as it was more broadly in the leading role arrogatedby the Party. The self-helpmovement dealt not only with the needs of its constituenciesbut also more profoundly represented a shift in the nature of citizenship itself. New patterns of exclusion developed later, something that in part has made the development of the third sector in post-communist Russia such an ambivalent process, and which provoked something of a backlash.YetWhite has done us all a service in providing evidence about the social roots of the strugglefor universaland equalcitizenship. Democratization in Russia under Gorbachevwas more than a revolutionfrom above. Department ofPoliticsandInternational Relations RICHARD SAKWA University ofKent atCanterbury Devlin, Judith. Slavophiles andCommissars. Enemies ofDemocracy inModern Russia. Macmillan, Basingstokeand London, and St Martin's Press,New York, 1999. xx + 3I8 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. [47.50. THESlavophiles andCommissars of the title are respectivelythe anti-Communist right-wing and collectivist left-wing varieties of authoritarian nationalism which have formed the principal opposition to the economic and political reforms promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris El'tsin.Judith Devlin's detailed and usefulvolume takesthe storyup to the I996 Presidentialelection. Devlin dividesthe book into two parts, 'Ideas'and 'Politics'.Since the ideas of the political groups and institutions described in Part One developed in response to the political events discussed in Part Two, the reader needs a certain knowledge of the political context before beginning the book. With well-chosen quotations, Devlin portraysthe growing anxiety of the conservative Russian writers at the threat to the integrity of the Soviet state posed by 778 SEER, 79, 4, 200 I glasnost'.Then she examines the ideas of Pamiat',Russian National Unity (RNE), Eduard Limonov's National BolshevikPartyand Vladimir Lysenko's National Republican Party of Russia. These 'neo-fascist'groups had ideological similaritieswith the mainstream opposition, but were less restrainedin their militancy in words and on the streets, and did not attract the voters. RussianOrthodoxy was centralto the ideasofmany of the nationalistthinkers, such as AleksandrSolzhenitsynand ViktorAksiuchits.Nationalistswithin the Church protested against ecumenism and against the Church's ban on the anti-Semitic propaganda of Metropolitan Ioann of St Petersburg, and Devlin suggeststhat duringthe I990S the Patriarchwas forced to give ground to them. In Part Two, Devlin investigates the network of alliances of right and left which led to the publication in July I99 I of 'Slovo k narodu', usuallyseen as an invitation to the putschistsof the following month. Devlin points out that the lack of a socialist dimension and the emphasis on the unity of the motherland in both this appeal and the statement of the August plotters prefigured the programme of Gennadii Ziuganov in the post-Soviet period. With the Communistsbanned afterthe coup, Ziuganov,the ideology secretary of the RussianCommunist Party,turnedhis energiesto the National Salvation Front(FNS).This was a predominantlyextra-parliamentaryoppositionwhich sought to...