Even a casual reader of the literature on postcommunist Russia will quickly realize that scholars who study that country face two main challenges. The first is doing research in a place where the course of events is hard to reconstruct, information is distorted or concealed, and relations of power are opaque. The second is to resist the temptation to make evidence from Russia fit preexisting intellectual agendas. Of these two challenges, the latter seems more formidable—even scholarly projects that enrich our factual knowledge may be led astray by the ambition to cast one's findings as a confirmation of pet grand theories. Lamentably, Marc Garcelon's book brings this quandary into sharp relief; reassuringly, Allen C. Lynch's book proves that it may be avoided.
In Revolutionary Passage, Garcelon presents a detailed examination of an important story: the rise and fall of the Democratic Russia movement (DR). He demonstrates persuasively that the unleashing of perestroika precipitated the creation of an asymmetrical matrix of political opportunities that was advantageous to political entrepreneurs networking within the ranks of the Moscow-based intelligentsia. The term that Garcelon uses to describe the awakening of this constituency—“the specialist rebellion”—is rooted in his convincing analysis of, first, patterns of social stratification in the late Soviet period, and specifically the oversupply of university graduates, and, second, a solid general survey of the political and institutional dislocations triggered by Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms (Chapter 1). Deftly exploiting various openings into the hitherto monolithic façade of the communist regime—such as Andrei Sakharov's electoral campaign in the Academy of Sciences and the controversy surrounding Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution—the cohort of “specialists” was able to transform the amorphous movement into a winning electoral coalition, which captured most of Moscow's municipal councils, and to sustain the pro-reform political momentum, even as Gorbachev himself embraced the party's hard-liners in late 1990 (Chapter 3). Thus, one of Garcelon's major accomplishments is that his carefully crafted research, which illuminates the organizational genesis of DR and the social profile of its activists, provides a useful map of politically mobilized, late-Soviet Moscow.
The other accomplishment for which Garcelon should be commended is his cogent analysis of DR's heterogeneity. Since the very beginning, the movement was torn by internal conflicts pitting 1960s countercultural elites against 1970s dissidents, human rights activists against Russian nationalists, and party members against anti-party militants. The very process of transforming the movement into a potent political force aggravated these cleavages. The struggle of two groups in particular—“proceduralists” and “executive liberals”—proved to be crucial (Chapter 2). The former wanted to ensure “popular access to the democratic process” and valorized mass participation. The latter sought to streamline DR's organization with a view to ensuring its candidates access to power, and regarded the design of reforms and implementation of policies as the movement's ultimate raison d'être.
“Tragic” is how Garcelon describes the last phase of the story. When Boris Yeltsin emerged as Russia's undisputed leader in the aftermath of the failed August 1991 coup, he recruited some of the executive liberals in his team, disregarded the aspirations of the proceduralists, and generally spurned DR. The central trope in the last chapter of the book is therefore “abandonment”: Political elites clustered around the presidency “abandoned” DR. Denied access to power, DR found itself relegated to the political fringes and soon unraveled—a development Garcelon implies, that hampered the progress of democracy in Russia.
What analytical perspectives can help us make sense of this drama? What are the broader implications of DR's fate? It is Garcelon's answers to these questions that are problematic. The analytical framework offered in the introductory chapter is unabashedly eclectic, a concoction of conceptual borrowings from the Annales school, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, the comparative study of social movements, theories of revolution, and network analysis—but how these diverse vantage points are related to the DR story is not immediately clear. The relevance of certain approaches is undisputed, for example, Marc Garcelon's sociology of the late-Soviet period, or his account of how political openings galvanize anti-regime mobilization. The relevance of others is harder to grasp, for example, the invocations of the Russian longue durée. And still others are confusing, for example, the randomly repeated notions of “feudalization” and “habitus.” Inexplicably, the one body of literature that seems directly related to the subject matter is omitted: classical writings on party building. It seems that Robert Michels's “iron law of oligarchy,” Weber's explorations of “the routinization of charisma,” and Moisei Ostrogorsky's analyses of “party machines” might shed ample light on phenomena like the split between executive liberals and proceduralists. Overall, then, Garcelon's project would have benefited from a more careful articulation of analytical assumptions and conceptual considerations.
But the most questionable message of the book is that Russia's crises stem from the fact that Yeltsin repudiated DR and embraced the “neo-liberal Washington consensus.” To begin with, the passages where neoliberalism is singled out for anathematizing are utterly unoriginal—having offered a vivid empirically grounded narrative, Garcelon then succumbs to the temptation to become an undistinguishable voice in the huge choir denouncing this ideology. More importantly, the emphasis on neoliberalism as an overarching cause contradicts Garcelon's own findings. His study demonstrates that the fracturing of DR was well under way in September 1991—and therefore preceded the launching of Yeltsin's reforms. Moreover, Garcelon makes it clear that “neoliberalism” was a “causal” factor for a brief period of time, from late 1991 until early 1993, when, in his words, “the consolidation of [Victor] Chernomydrin as Prime Minister brought an end to the attempt at revolution from above” (p. 196). Finally, this book yields ample evidence that Yeltsin was driven not by ideology but by power-struggle considerations (e.g., Garcelon convincingly explains that Yeltsin was indifferent to the content of the neoliberal “500-days plan” and endorsed it only because Gorbachev had rejected it). In light of the author's own analysis, then, to portray Yeltsin's strategy as the pursuit of an ideological project would be inexcusably simplistic. In sum, Garcelon's defense of a unilinear, unidimensional narrative of how neoliberalism triggered socioeconomic collapse in Russia is at odds with the data presented in his study.
How Russia Is Not Ruled demonstrates that students of Russia who avoid the hot ideological debates of the day stand a better chance of offering theoretically engrossing and intellectually provocative ideas. Lynch's interpretation of recent Russian developments revolves around clearly delineated and compellingly developed analytical themes: the enduring impact of Soviet legacies, the weakness of the Russian state, the inescapable importance of Russian geography. This study should set the standard for what it means to take Russia's problems seriously.
To scholars like Garcelon who obsess about the vices of neoliberalism, Lynch points out that “many of the debates in the US and Western Europe about the responsibility for Russia's path of development in the 1990s are beside the point,” because there is plentiful evidence that Yeltsin's governments “never pursued a policy of “shock therapy” as envisaged by Western advisors” (p. 94). But the author's more important point is that Russia's post-Soviet path was largely shaped not by ideological visions but by late-Soviet patterns of institutional decomposition and resource allocation. The key facet of this Soviet legacy is “the spontaneous seizure of the bulk of Soviet state economic assets by those who were also in control … of the emerging new national states”—a process that solidified Russian “crony capitalism” even “before the post-Soviet Russian political order was itself consolidated” (p. 50).
As Lynch shows, the crucial consequence of this pattern of strategic elite behavior was that “the Russian state that emerged in the 1990s was extraordinarily weak and unable to shape effectively much of its economic, social and political environment” (p. 75). It was the institutional restructuring, which occurred in the late-Soviet era, that accounts for the fact that postcommunist Russia had to confront the multiple challenges inherent in the political condition without possessing a viable infrastructure of governance. The dysfunctionality of the state is particularly damaging in the case of Russia, where, in addition to everything else, the state “must: a/ in effect find ways to compensate prospective investors for the higher degree of risk that they are likely to assume under Russian circumstances, and b/ redistribute a portion of the wealth from those few sectors of the economy that can be competitive … to the bulk of the country that cannot” (p. 205). Lynch amplifies this argument by surveying an array of infrastructural problems that are likely to derail any attempt to jump-start the Russian economy by means of injections of oil money (e.g., in 2001, 71% of the railroad system was considered obsolete by Russian standards, and the telecommunications grid is in need of $40 billion in capital investment over the next decade). Reflecting on the undeniable enormity of these problems, the author points out that the claims of shock therapy's critics that they had “a better plan … is a dubious proposition” (p. 94)—an observation whose cogency is hard to dispute.
Chapter 6 presents a masterful treatment of a key theme: the role of geography in Russia's development. Lynch's main insight is that it we “take geography seriously,” it would be easy to see “that there is an enormous difference between geologically existing resources and economically available resources” (p. 235). Russia has resources—but they are hard to get. Russia has productive units—but in most areas of the Russian economy, the intrinsic and irreducible costs of infrastructure as of production itself are two to three times that of almost any other country in the world. And attempts to expand resource “inputs” into the Russian economy would have to reckon with the fact that “market economics and Arctic development do not mesh well” (p. 233).
In his Conclusion, therefore, Lynch offers a somber assessment of Russia's prospects. He predicts that it will remain an “enclave economy” in which both government and society are dangerously dependent on the price of oil and economic recoveries will remain tentative and fragile. He also argues that the political system will continue to be “superficially institutionalized” and chronically incapable of generating the “organizational efficiencies” enjoyed by accountable and therefore legitimate democracies. In short, what Lynch makes clear is that there may be no shortcuts to Russia's post-Soviet prosperity. This message will certainly be ridiculed by experts who insist that they know “who is to blame” and “what is to be done.” For the rest of us, it should become the cornerstone of any serious analysis of Russia's predicament.
