#6529
#11
Financial Times (UK)
November 2, 2002
BOOKS: A place where Russians live
By Robin Buss
RUSSIA: Experiment with a People by Robert Service
Macmillan ý20, 408 pages
Robert Service is the author of books about Russia in the Soviet period and a notably unbiased biography of Lenin. His latest work is a sweeping attempt to give an account of the country and its people in the years since the collapse of the Soviet regime, looking at the structures of power, the history of reform and the effects of the changes at different levels. He has no obvious thesis to promote and his conclusions (as far as he gives conclusions in what is necessarily an interim report) seem fair.
He is faced from the start with a problem of definition: what is Russia? The place where the Russians live has seldom had any precise boundaries. Under the Tsar and under the Soviet regime, Russians felt themselves to be citizens of a domain that stretched from Kiev to Kamchatka, and from Karelia to the Crimea. In 1924, when the USSR was officially constituted, the Russians (as opposed to Georgians, Azer- baijanis, Ukrainians and others) got their own Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
However, it had a different status and structures from the other republics. With no separate government and Communist party, this RSFSR was both more and less than the other constituent parts of the socialist sixth of the world.
Stalin discoursed at length on "the nationalities question", but his interest in relations between the centre and the periphery was more than merely theoretical. He manipulated borders to suit the political needs of the moment, carted whole populations from one area to another and settled Russian nationals in areas where the majority belonged to a quite different ethnic and cultural group. What had been possible in the Stalinist USSR became a nightmare for Gorbachev and his successors.
Giving independence to areas such as the Baltic states meant abandoning large Russian minor-ities to local nationalist rule. There were anomalies such as the enclave of Kaliningrad, in what was once German Koenigsberg. Then there were the resentments of peoples such as the Chechens, whom Stalin had transported en masse from their traditional home after the second world war and who felt aggrieved even after they were returned home. In most cases, breaking up the Soviet empire was a much more complex business than it had been for the western colonial powers to give independence to their overseas possessions.
These problems of identity were only part of the mental upheaval caused by the change from the Soviet regime, as Russia moved from a society where, for example, actions that had for generations been viewed and punished as "economic crimes" were suddenly rewarded. The New Russians who emerged after 1991 had been educated in the idea that capitalism was licensed robbery, which may go some way in explaining their behaviour once they found themselves required to be capitalists.
It was inevitable that much of the apparatus of post-Soviet Russia should have been carried across from the previous regime and that its leading cadres, however much they favoured reform, should find it hard to shake off old attitudes.
Service is perhaps too kind to Boris Yeltsin, who was not only embarrassing in his behaviour but brutal, anti-democratic, erratic and powerless to stamp out corruption, even in his own family.
One thing, however, you have to grant Yeltsin: not only was he the first Russian ruler to leave power of his own accord, he even apologised in his farewell speech for not having achieved all that he had set out to do. Now that really was an indication that things had changed.
Vladimir Putin, his successor, has seemed suspect to many people, in his own country and outside. After all, he is an ex-KGB man who is keen to assert his own power in Russia and Russia's power in the world. He has also made a number of symbolic gestures, such as the re-adoption of the old Soviet anthem (though with new words).
The significance of these moves is probably that Putin wants to re-establish the continuity of Russian history, to show the Soviet period as something other than an aberration, and to incorporate the positive feelings that his people have about their victory in the second world war and other achievements under socialism, such as the exploration of space. But there is always suspicion about anything that might signal a return to the Soviet past.
At the moment in Moscow, in the press and on television, there is a heated debate about the proposal to restore the statue of Feliks Dzherzhinsky to its place opposite the Lubyanka. Putting "Iron Feliks", founder of the Soviet secret police, back on his pedestal hardly seems like an innocent gesture of reconciliation with the past.
Service is much better in dealing with the politics than the sociology of the new Russia. He has a chapter on "cultural artefacts" (as he calls them) which glances at rock music, film, literature and the thrillers of Alexandra Marinina. He gives a superficial account of village life, now and as he remembers it from the 1970s, and talks about class in the new society. The problem is that there is little information about life outside the main cities. Perhaps the figures from the recent census will help.
The illustrations to the book, mainly advertisements and cartoons, give an impression of the brashness and vulgarity that has replaced the modest tastefulness of most Soviet design. He ends on a note of relative pessimism about the prospects for Russian democracy. The fact is that it is too early to tell.
Back to the Top Next Article
- Back to the Top -