New at Reason
Reporting from an American Enterprise Institute conference on the future of Russia, Cathy Young looks for glimmers of hope in politics and popular attitudes. She doesn't find any, but she did end up spotting a shiny quarter in the foyer at AEI.
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I haven't Red TFA yet, but I just wanted to say, that's freaking hilarious, Julian.
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I haven't Red TFA yet, but I just wanted to say, that's freaking hilarious, Julian.
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Whenever I hear about Russian political culture these days, I think of some of the essays on the same subject in Maxim Gorky's Untimely Thoughts. One of his main points was that it was unsurprising that the Russian people, having been ruled by tsars who behaved like criminal thugs for centuries, would install the Bolsheviks as the new government, since they were the most criminally thuggish of the possible successors. Are we not largely seeing the same cycle repeated post-Communism?
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SR,
If I remember correctly, George Kennan and Henry Morganthau made a similar point, that Stalin's aggresiveness and repression needed to be understood as continuing the tradition of Russian governance, and not just as novelties created by Communism.
They had a particularly brutal and corrupt monarchy, a particularly brutal and corrupt version of 20th century Big Government, and now, a particularly brutal and corrupt version of a capitalist republic. -
Wasn't the capitalist "shock therapy" of the 1990s supposed to innoculate Russia from this slide into authoritarianism?
Wasn't the vesting of economic power in private hands supposed to be a method of preventing the rise of a powerful state? -
Joe, all of that might have been true, had any of it actually happened. The move toward a market-based economy in Russia was halted years ago.
Their economy is almost nonexistent outside of the energy sector--sort of like a pale, badly groomed version of Saudi Arabia. -
Dadgummit, if we can't bring democracy to Russia, then why do they think we can bring democracy to Iraq???
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That's rather my point, ChrisO. The transfer of ownership of the "means of production" to private hands was supposed to create powerful economic and civil society interests who could push back against any government that would attempt to reassert its power.
It didn't work. All those private sector capitalists jumped quite happily into bed with Putin. That idea - that seizing the 'commanding heights' for the industrialists would lead them to protect the country against authoritarianism - is belied by what has occured.
I don't know why this is so surprising, given the snuggly relationship between the state and the industrialists in Italy and Germany in the first half of the century, but the shock therapists seemed quite certain that billionaire CEOs to whom so much was given would restrain, rather than cooperate with, anti-liberal politicians. -
My point was that there wasn't really any such transfer in the first place, or that it was merely a sham transaction. Actual attempts to create private Russian business were met with a government fist. Just ask that wealthy businessman dude (whose name escapes me) rotting away in the Siberian gulag right now.
Those "private sector capitalists" you refer to were simply well-connected apparatchiks who changed hats, not legitimate businessmen.
In the end, though, you are right that European business and government have always had, shall we say, blurry boundaries. Russia's cartels and and their buddies in the govt simply operate in a much clumsier and more ham-fisted way than, say, Krupp did. And in Russia, most of those businesses (apart from the energy sector) would not long survive in a market environment. -
SR, joe - I think Richard Pipes has made some similar comments. Despite their outward "modernity", Russia never really went through a modern period like Western Europe did. They had the last absolute monarchs in Europe, switched over to a system of terror, lived another 70-odd years under an undemocratic oligarchy, and then are suddenly expected to be free and liberal and democratic? No wonder the Russians don't seem to desire much beyond a strongman government that will make Russia respected. Liberal democracy is something that has to evolve culturally, and they never did the evolution. Here's the short version of Pipes' history of Russian politico-cultural development.
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Hopefully, she got some of the cookies. AEI has the best cookies.
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ChrisO, "Those "private sector capitalists" you refer to were simply well-connected apparatchiks who changed hats, not legitimate businessmen."
Agreed. The conclusion I draw from this is that liberty is protected primarily not by the formal structure of the economic system - the placing of economic decision making authority in private hands - but by a culture that is dedicated to liberty. I further conclude that, contrary to some heady assertions that Free Minds and Free Markets are the same thing, simply setting up a capitalist economic system will not produce a liberty-loving civil society. -
...which is very similar, in its own way, to the heady assertions that establishing a system of doling out goverment offices by majority balloting will cause Iraq to become a liberal democracy.
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thanks