[Marxism] Carlos Rebello reviews Medvedev book on Post-Soviet Russia

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Yes, this is our very own Carlos Rebello.)

H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-Russia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (August, 2004)

Roy Medvedev. _Post-Soviet Russia: A Journey through the Yeltsin Era_. 
Translated and edited by George Shriver. New York: Columbia University 
Press, 2001. viii + 360 pp. Bibliography, index. $37.50 (cloth), ISBN 
0-231-10606-8.

Reviewed for H-Russia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx by Carlos Eduardo Rebello de 
Mendonca, Department of Social Sciences, State University of Rio de Janeiro.

A Political Chronicle of Post-Soviet Russia

Put into a nutshell, this work is, above all, an attempt at a compressed 
chronicle that allows for quick understanding of the last ten years of 
Russian political history. It is what the French call _histoire 
evenementielle_: an account of recent political history concentrating on 
hard political facts. Therefore this history concentrates on events that 
were from the beginning conventionally acknowledged as such, that is to 
say the public actions of the main political players. One should not 
look for a heterodox understanding of the scope of the historical facts 
in this work, as it is political history as conventionally 
understood--what Yeltsin and his team did or did not do. Nevertheless, 
in his choice of facts and his explanations of them, Medvedev does have 
an interpretive framework, which he never formally states, but which can 
be summarized as follows.

It is not one of the smallest paradoxes in the history of post-soviet 
Russia that, while the political developments that led to the demise of 
the USSR were consciously directed by all relevant political actors 
towards the sheer destruction of the political and ideological 
structures of "really existing socialism," nevertheless, in the telling 
of the setting-up of a market economy and liberal democratic 
constitutional structures in post-1991 Russia, comparisons with the 
October Revolution offer themselves readily, as it was only possible to 
understand post-Soviet history as under the shadow of the Bolshevik 
Revolution. Both processes are taken as instances of "revolutions from 
above," in that in both cases the conscious action of a handful of 
ideologically prone and politically organized individuals sufficed to 
stage a sharp turn in all things political, economic, and social, as 
opposed to all reasonable expectations of a more "organic" process of 
change. That such swift change came to imply the enormous and painful 
sociopolitical dislocation of masses of people, as opposed to a more 
gradual process of change, is something that critics of both processes 
were quick to point at--most critiques, however, coming not from the 
right (which tended more or less to accept the "state-centered" 
character of Russian society as a matter of fact) but from the moderate 
Left.

In a certain way, given that Medvedev started his international career 
as an author with _Let History Judge_ (1971), a dissident critique of 
Stalin's "revolution from above," it is not altogether surprising to see 
him, when dealing with the character of the transitional process led by 
Yeltsin's team in post-1991 Russia, to echo arguments strangely 
reminiscent of the ones used by the social-democratic wing of the 
socialist movement--above all, Kautsky--when criticizing the Bolsheviks. 
This is particularly the case in that both the Bolshevik _coup de main_ 
of 7 November 1917 and Yeltsin's August-December 1991 sleight-of-hand, 
while backed by the majority of the masses as a reaction against an 
authoritarian (and decaying) political order, nevertheless exceeded by 
far the political limits of the "mandate" given to both and eventually 
came to rely too much on "exclusively administrative methods"--as 
Medvedev states when talking about Yeltsin's suppression of the Russian 
parliament in 1993 (p. 4). In both processes, pressures exerted by 
"particular interests"--lust for power or profit--prevailed against the 
general "yearning for social justice" (p. 5). Therefore also, as stated 
in the Introduction, the aim of the work: to offer witness ("I am merely 
posing the question, not giving the answer" [p. 6]) to the peculiarities 
of a process of political development where the actions and aims of the 
main individual actors ran counter to the general wishes of the majority.

As we have remarked, this "peculiarity" of Russian history of offering 
examples of sharp and swift turns in all matters political and social 
has been noted by various authors, not only those with social democratic 
views. When Medvedev writes about political actors relying exclusively 
on administrative methods, he is actually quoting Lenin's famous remark 
about Trotsky. And it was actually Gramsci--surely no social 
democrat--who wrote the famous observation that the Bolshevik Revolution 
had been made "as against _Das Kapital_," that is, as against the 
commonly held Marxist view that change in the mode of production cannot 
happen until the old mode of production has exhausted itself 
spontaneously and has begun to act as a hindrance to further development 
of the forces of production. Medvedev adheres to this view: "no social 
system or form of civilization can be built if it has not already taken 
place in the interstices of the previously existing form of 
civilization, or social system" (p. 51). That Russian history--perhaps 
since Peter the Great--has, however, "refused" to conform to this view 
is something that should be perhaps integrated into the "core" of this 
explanatory system, is an issue which Medvedev evades, as he seems to 
take only from the Russian case its value as an aberration from the 
proper rule, a pathological case, or even a felony committed as against 
the (Marxist?) rules of proper historical development. Bent on striking 
a moral point against the fundamentalism of radical change, Bolsheviks 
and Yeltsin's team of reformers alike, fails to recognize, beneath the 
outward similarities, the differences between them.

Medvedev does point out, while describing the swift market-oriented 
changes in 1992-1993 Russia, that Yeltsin's team of reformers was 
composed above all of intellectual and political mediocrities 
unexpectedly risen from the middle ladders of the _nomenklatura_; 
witness his comment about Yeltsin's first premier Gaidar, who had made 
his first step towards preeminence by means of a candidate's degree 
granted through a dissertation on economics whose central idea was 
"whether under capitalism or socialism, an enterprise has to make a 
profit" (p. 14). Of course, he does not compare this with the pre-Soviet 
intellectual achievements of the Bolshevik leaders, as any comparison in 
quality between Gaidar's dissertation and, say, even Stalin's tract on 
the national question would be simply unthinkable.

One of the most striking traits of Medvedev's account is that most of 
the characters in it simply fail to make an impression; they are raised 
onto the scene, do something, and then sink into oblivion--which makes 
for painstaking reading not to be attributed to the author's lack of 
literary qualities--Medvedev writes in a simple and clear style--but to 
the obscurity of most of the people portrayed. Even when they are 
plunged into the most dramatic events--such as the October 1993 storming 
of the Russian parliament--they fail to say or do anything noteworthy. 
Yeltsin himself, from the beginning to the end of the account, rises 
repeatedly from slumber, saves himself, and then relapses again into 
torpor. Reading through Medvedev's dire and obscure chronicle, one is 
reminded of Marx's comments in the opening of _The 18th Brumaire of 
Louis Bonaparte_ (1852) that great events first occur as tragedy, but 
repeat themselves as farce. However, perhaps it was Marx who could offer 
some kind of a key to this puzzle when he remarks that the bourgeoisie, 
having reached its proper level of development, could forget the Old 
Testament rhetoric of a Cromwell and instead put in its place Locke. The 
Bolsheviks had somehow to search Marx's works for inspiration; for 
Yeltsin's team, IMF working papers sufficed.

But then, for the Bolsheviks (as for Yeltsin's reformers) the 
backwardness of Russia in the world capitalist system was taken for 
granted. Therefore it was necessary somehow to tie Russia to the 
international socialist movement in order to overcome such backwardness; 
one need not to adhere to Trotsky's views about permanent revolution to 
realize this. This "internationalization" of Russian domestic politics 
was a feature of the views and actions of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks 
alike. For example, the early twentieth-century Russian socialist 
movement developed much of its debates in the ranks and papers of German 
Social Democracy. The Russian Marxists, however, operated from the outer 
reaches of an international socialist movement that was a Gramscian 
"historical bloc" still in the making; therefore, they had to sharpen 
their arguments and give them greater intellectual sophistication 
against an established bourgeois ideology. For Yeltsin's team, the task 
was comparatively easier; they also accepted the passive role of Russia 
in the overall system, but they operated within a long-established 
bourgeois consensus. Their task, as it were, consisted only in putting 
the system's ideological commonplaces into practical application.

Part one of the book deals with the course and consequences of the 
all-out process of privatization that took place in Russia between 1991 
and 1995, which Medvedev sees as consisting primarily of a wholesale 
sell off of state property in shady conditions, mostly through 
speculation in privatization vouchers and underpriced auctioning, 
leading neither to the entrance of productive foreign capital into the 
Russian economy nor to the strengthening of its technological bases. On 
the contrary, it led to a scrapping process that left Russia reduced to 
the condition of an exporter of raw materials and cheap labor power, 
without regard for national interest, objective economical needs, or 
even ideology.

And here we stumble against a starting point for understanding the whole 
process. Medvedev chides Yeltsin himself, his aides, and supporters 
(while posing as "liberal democrats") for providing only the crudest 
basis for their political stance, something easily proved by the fact 
that "only in recent years have books on the history of Western or 
Russian liberalism begun to appear in Moscow. The number of copies 
printed is small, and there is no great demand for these books" (p. 81). 
I could limit myself to noting that this did not hinder Yeltsin's "New 
Russians" from reforming themselves very effectively as an emerging 
bourgeoisie.

However, given that it would be useless to try summarizing Medvedev's 
clear, detailed chronicle of the various swindles and heterodox ways of 
pricing, selling, and purchasing state property that fill this part of 
the book, I must say that it is the above quote that struck me the most 
at this point. Somehow, the author believes that a ruling class, long 
after its ideology has become general common sense, must somehow refresh 
its legitimacy by perusing the work of its ideological founders. This 
strikes me as a very peculiar understanding of Marxist views about 
ideology. An emerging ruling class must create an ideological consensus 
by opposing the existing one; therefore, it must develop sophisticated 
intellectual tools in order to successfully overcome the ruling 
ideology. The Russian reformers did not need to read Adam Smith, Locke, 
Bentham, J.S. Mill, Jefferson, Humboldt, or Cavour (sic, p. 81) in order 
to justify ideologically their actions any more than they needed to have 
read Lenin's _Collected Works_ in order to operate functionally as the 
ruling bureaucratic caste in the pre-Perestroika era; as long as a 
centrally planned economy could operate functionally in the outer 
periphery of a world capitalist economy, it did not need to elaborate 
ideological justifications to become accepted as such; it offered 
concrete opportunities for a career, and that was all. The fact that it 
did not function anymore could have offered the opportunity for a new, 
more sophisticated socialist ideology to emerge; however, in the absence 
of an international socialist movement, such an ideology did not 
develop. Also, the development of such an ideology would have run 
counter to the concrete interest of the bureaucracy as a privileged stratum.

The option chosen by the bureaucracy, through its individual members, 
was to accept the existing ideological consensus as a thing in itself, 
and for that there was no need of sophisticated ideological 
justifications; ideological commonplaces sufficed. Medvedev unwittingly 
strikes this nail on the head when he tosses off the remark that most 
people who adhered to protest movements during Perestroika were "people 
whose careers had not been particularly successful and who saw a chance 
of advancement through activism in protest movements" (p. 83). I could 
add that, in entirely changed circumstances, most of the individual 
members of the major Latin American bourgeoisies, when hit by the 
economic crisis of the 1980s, came to forswear the efforts at economic 
modernization made by the populist and authoritarian governments of the 
preceding decades in favor of positions as compradors and junior 
partners in the globalized world economy of the 1990s, with no more 
effort at intellectual understanding than accepting Thatcherite 
commonplaces as common sense.

The account of the political crisis of October 1993 offers nothing that 
is altogether new, as it argues that it was ultimately a crisis within 
the Russian political establishment, which ultimately failed to involve 
actual ideological issues. Since Medvedev's history centers on the 
Russian political elite, such an appraisal is entirely reasonable. To 
find an account of October 1993 "from below" in English, one should read 
Boris Kagarlitsky's _Square Wheels_ (1994), or Buzgalin's and Kolganov's 
_Bloody October in Moscow_ (1994). Part one closes with a denunciatory 
account of the prevailing mores of the "New Russian" bourgeoisie--which 
are more or less the same mores of all peripheral bourgeoisies, 
"emergence" excesses notwithstanding--and an account (written by 
Medvedev's brother Zhores) of the demographic catastrophe borne by 
Russia during the 1990s, with reduced life expectancy and a diminished 
population.

Part two is an account of the events that led to Yeltsin's first 
election to the presidency of a post-Soviet Russia in 1996, and above 
all of the role played in this process by the leader of a rebuilt 
Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennadi Zyuganov, whose 
political views are analyzed in detail in chapter 7. Here Medvedev's 
strengths and shortcomings as an historian offer themselves more 
readily. As a chronicler of Russian political life, Medvedev does well 
with the unsavory material he chooses as his subject, but, intriguingly 
for a Marxist, he fails to integrate this material into an ideological 
whole. He makes it clear that Zyuganov, consistent with the position of 
a Stalinist bureaucracy long cut from any actual ties with the working 
class, is ideologically a right-wing populist aiming at making a 
nationalistic (and petit bourgeois) response to the wounds inflicted on 
Russia by globalization. This is an ideological framework very close to 
that of some right-wing Latin American populists of the early twentieth 
century.

Latin American nationalists operated in societies that were mostly 
historically multiethnic and monolingual; there enlightened despots were 
more successful in the task of imposing a common language. Zyuganov's 
brand of nationalism suffers from the common bane of East European 
nationalism: it is based on ethnicity and anti-Semitism. However, that 
does not means that Zyuganov is removed from his original ideological 
outlook; his notions about "a cosmopolitan elite of international 
capital" bent on destroying Russia over the last thousand years (p. 262) 
have, of course, their roots firmly in the High Stalinism of Stalin's 
last years. But then this is a connection which Medvedev does not 
emphasize. As Stalinism lost contact with its international socialist 
roots, the prospect that it should more and more become plain petty 
bourgeois nationalism is hardly inspiring. Such a program could at best 
point to the stabilization of post-Soviet Russian capitalism under the 
aegis of a more or less benevolent authoritarian order that would 
proceed to Russia's "latinamericanization" as a more or less closed 
economy and a nonentity in world affairs. At worst, it could lead to 
open warfare with the "near abroad" (by the way, the two wars in 
Chechnya are barely mentioned). Perhaps it is the unappealing character 
of such an alternative that explains the general political passivity of 
the Russian masses and not, as Medvedev notes, the fact that "a 
substantial number of those who have been impoverished in the last few 
years are marginal types, people who are not very capable or energetic" 
(p. 272)--which is an intriguing outburst of elitism.

Finally, Part three deals with the 1998 economic collapse, which is 
described somewhat hastily, mainly as the cause of Yeltsin's appointment 
of Primakov as premier, followed by a brief interregnum between 
Primakov's dismissal by Yeltsin and the appointment of Putin as premier 
(and afterwards presidential candidate) before Yeltsin's resignation on 
New Year's Eve 1999. Given that both Primakov and Putin favored the 
continuation of Yeltsin's politics and economics by milder means (above 
all a relaxation in the application of economic IMF orthodoxy), the 
account closes with a lull under the stabilization of an 
institutionalized quasi-authoritarian order and a diminished presence in 
world politics. And Medvedev ends with the resigned remark that "let us 
hope that inevitable changes will not take the form of a new 'cult of 
personality'" (p. 362). Medvedev's book exposes the quiet acceptance by 
the former nomenklatura of Russia's new lower status in world affairs as 
a backward capitalist society. Whether this shall be accepted by future 
generations, or if Russia will choose again to align itself with new 
international social movements, only actual historical developments can 
tell.

Medvedev's book is a first-rate political chronicle that will 
undoubtedly figure as one of the best accounts of the events described, 
displaying qualities of both clearness and brevity. At the same time, it 
displays little interest in a theory-based discussion of the meaning of 
the same events; its strengths as an historical account are at the same 
time its shortcomings as a work of either Marxist or _marxisant_ 
history. Nevertheless, it is a work of reference that will endure for 
quite a long time, especially for graduate-level studies.

Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the 
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational 
purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web 
location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & 
Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews 
editorial staff at hbooks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx .

--

The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org



_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism