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Essay on Russia's Post-Communist Transition
A revolution may well put an end to dictatorial authoritarianism and to greedy or power-seeking tyranny, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. Instead, new prejudices, like the ones they replaced, will serve as a leash to control the great unthinking mass (Kant, 1970).Russia, the core of the former Soviet Union, is at once the largest transition of politics and economy of Eastern Europe and also, perhaps, the one most burdened by its own past. Its present-day assets of natural-resource wealth and a well-educated labor force are making up for by hypertrophied defense industries, unhelpful location of manufacturing capacity, and excessive predominance of large enterprises.
Russia has shared with other transition economies the problems of macro-economic stabilization and reconstruction of economic institutions following the disappearance of the command-administrative system, which set guiding principles for production under Communism.For most of the modern era Russia has been looking for an appropriate political form to institutionalize its diversity and to defend its distinctiveness while searching for useful ways to interact with the rest of the world. This tension can be defined, on the one hand, as self-affirmation, the attempt to remain loyal to some sense of self-identity (samobytnost’) rooted in national traditions, and conversely, adaptation to the norms and technological imperatives of parts of the world that have taken the lead in defining the nature of the advanced modernity of a particular time.
The discussion over the nature of the transition in contemporary Russia is, once again, a debate over Russia's past and how to draw the balance between self-affirmation and adaptation. The ‘self’ to be affirmed, obviously, does not remain a constant, since it is modified by previous patterns of affirmation and adaptation. By the same token, the political form taken by defenders of self-affirmation in contemporary Russia is not homogeneous, but in broad terms.......
