More than three decades of fruitful academic co-operation between western and Russian scholars, even in areas of political sensitivity, have enriched our understanding of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian politics and society. This collective volume is a worthy addition to that corpus of work. The editor, Kirill Rogov, has assembled a strong team of authors. In addition to Rogov, the Russians, who numerically predominate, are Vladimir Gel΄man, Evgenii Gontmakher, Lev Gudkov, Vladimir Magun, Andrei Melville, Nikolai Mitrokhin, Andrei Riabov, Maksim Rudnev, Georgii Satarov and Dmitrii Travin. East-central Europe is represented by the Bulgarian Ivan Krastev and Hungarians Bálint Madiar and Bálint Madlovics, and the US by Samuel Greene, Henry Hale, and Daniel Treisman.
The authors are all critical of Russia's retreat over the past quarter century from the political pluralism that emerged in the late 1980s. Yet, this volume appeared in Moscow in 2021 with a tirazh of 1,000—a reminder that in book-publishing, at any rate, the pre-2022 Russian political order remained a lot freer than the Soviet Union prior to perestroika. Heterodox material got past the censor even in Leonid Brezhnev's time, but usually between the lines, whereas in this volume it is there in plain sight. The tightening of the authoritarian screws accompanying the war on Ukraine makes it hard to envisage a similar collaborative work of political analysis being undertaken any time soon.
The book contains stimulating discussion of, inter alia, nationalism and ethno-federalism, the notion of political generations, the merits and limits of the “transitological” literature, and debates over the scope and applicability of the concepts of “Soviet man” and “post-Soviet man,” drawing on sociological literature (with the work of the late Yurii Levada much referenced), and social psychology, as well as political science, the discipline of the majority of the contributors to the volume. It is a work that is less about the political history of recent decades than about the social scientific literature that tries to make sense of post-communism, with particular reference to post-Soviet Russia. Apart from the absence of an index, the book is a credit to its Russian publishing house.
Gel΄man draws (121) on Thomas Remington's work to note that, though inequality greatly increased in post-Soviet Russia, this is an inadequate explanation of the reversal of the democratization process, given that there is no shortage of politically democratic Latin American countries with still higher levels of inequality. Satarov, with a somewhat Monty Pythonesque “look on the bright side of life,” notes a rich resource at Russia's disposal that should not be neglected—“our social and political experience, especially the negative experience,” for to “squander this unique resource” would be as immoral, he adds, as squandering natural resources (114). Gudkov draws on the Levada Center's survey research over the past three decades to summarize the attitude to democracy and authoritarianism of “post-Soviet ‘Soviet man’”: “He is not an opponent of democracy (but will not make sacrifices to establish it in Russia), he doesn't like corrupt authoritarianism, but he will not speak out against it, so long as it doesn't touch him personally” (297).
Several of the authors discuss the late Soviet period as well as the post-Soviet. Melville notes the extent to which the high hopes for democracy, which existed in Russia in 1989, have not been realized. He argues, however, against the dismissal of the ideas and ideals of the later perestroika years, viewing recent criticism of democracy and apologias for authoritarianism as part of a phase of development and not as an epitaph for democracy. Travin, in turn, makes good points about the difficulties of reforming the Soviet economy and on the mistakes of the Gorbachev era. But when he writes about the “Leninist principles” to which “the perestroika leadership of the country sincerely wished to return” (383), this shows little understanding of the evolution of Mikhail Gorbachev's thinking, while he was party general secretary, toward a social democratic conception of socialism that was far removed from Leninism. Moreover, criticisms of the limitations of the contested elections of 1989–90 are too easily made by those for whom such political pluralism was beyond their wildest dreams in 1985. Ultimately, though, Travin opts for a glass half-full evaluation of perestroika, and observes—rightly, I think—that “without Gorbachev's intention to change the country we would, even today, be continuing to live in the old Soviet system” (388). Whether he is correct in believing that this would be with a lower standard of living than that of the Soviet Union in the 1980s is more doubtful. A surviving Soviet leadership would likewise have benefited from the windfall that came Vladimir Putin's way with the sharp rise this century in energy prices.
In the book's final chapter, Mitrokhin notes how the appearance of nationalism as a mobilizing force, involving first thousands, and then millions, of people in the perestroika era, came as a shock “for the Soviet person” (415). There were, in fact, individuals in the Soviet Union who were aware of the latent power of nationalism, ready to take off in the unlikely event of a new tolerance being displayed by the authorities. But the strength of national sentiment did surprise and disconcert the Soviet leadership. Many western specialists on the Soviet Union were, as Mitrokhin notes (416–17), far less surprised. It is another example of the benefits of intellectual exchange between Russian and western scholars, a process that appears to be heading for a long intermission.
