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The Collapse of Liberal Hopes

Russia's clumsy attempt at democracy has soured the population.

BY JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN

Tuesday, April 20, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West has only begun to confront a disheartening paradox: That at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev's program of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, the prospects for democratic reform seemed more promising than they do today in a nominally democratic post-Soviet era.

The Russian media, including television news, once carried far more critical discussions of Stalin's crimes. Intellectual journals reached millions of readers and explored the country's history and politics, and its economic failings. And the parliamentary elections of 1989 confirmed that liberal, independent-minded figures, like the physicist and veteran dissident Andrei Sakharov, could run against the Communist Party and command sizable support.

But the country's badly managed attempts at capitalism and democracy in the 1990s have soured a majority of the population. Privatizatsiia, or privatization, of the country's industrial and natural resources has resulted in such an audacious pattern of grand theft that Russians have coined the term prikhvatizatsiia, or confiscation, to mock the process. The brutal war in Chechnya continues to inflict untold suffering on civilians. Meanwhile the rule of law is a hollow shell. Since 1994, nine members of the country's Parliament, and 130 journalists, have been murdered, no doubt because they either sought to expose the truth about official corruption and organized crime or because their political activity got in the way of someone's plans to turn a fast buck.

There was a moment, particularly after Boris Yeltsin stared down a last-ditch attempt to restore Bolshevik authority in August 1991, when things seemed headed in a different direction. As James H. Billington observes in "Russia in Search of Itself," the country seemed ready "to synthesize Western political and economic institutions with an indigenous recovery of the religious and moral dimensions of their own culture."

Andrei Sakharov and Dmitri Likhachev, the distinguished historian of Russia's religious culture, were not afraid to look for inspiration in Western societies, but their images have faded into the shadows. Now other thinkers have broad followings. The bulk of "Russia in Search of Itself" is a well-informed survey of writers and visionaries who have embarked on the "most wide-ranging discussions of a nation's identity in modern history." Many of them remain fixated on extravagant claims for Russia's spiritual superiority and appear open to reactionary confections of nationalism and anti-Semitism and a nostalgia for Stalinist glory and controls.

Some advocates of "Eurasianism," for example, want to see Orthodox Christianity work together with Islam "against their common enemy: Western secularism and individualism." Still others, like the radical activist Alexander Dugin, have "many of the characteristics of Nazism." According to Mr. Billington, Mr. Dugin longs for Russia to resume its quest for world domination and reconstitute its empire, in order to pursue a global struggle against "Atlanticism." In the face of such extreme nationalism, liberals have had difficulty urging Russia to accept its status "as a nation rather than an empire, a democracy rather than an autocracy."

Vladimir Putin alone is not responsible for this collapse of liberal hopes. It was Boris Yeltsin who insisted on too much power for the office of the presidency. And with increasing government control of the mass media, there remain few outlets for critical reporting on Mr. Putin's policies. The increasing appeal of Russian nationalism has brought with it frequent, physical attacks on foreign-looking outsiders, including dark-skinned people from the Caucasus, African students and even U.S. Embassy Marine guards, as well as assaults on Jews and Jewish institutions. Mr. Putin has condemned such provocations only half-heartedly.

Mr. Billington has been the Librarian of Congress since 1987, but it is his renown as one of our foremost historians of Russia that makes this book particularly striking. He is acutely aware of how culture can influence political developments. Try as he might to be hopeful, he cannot but provide compelling reasons for doubt.

Near the close of his book, he reluctantly concedes that Russia is abandoning the liberal democratic impulses that emerged in the final years of perestroika. Under Mr. Putin's leadership, the country is moving toward "some original Russian variant of a corporatist state ruled by a dictator, adorned with Slavophile rhetoric, and representing, in effect, fascism with a friendly face." In other words, a type of regime that seeks to maintain order "through a Pinochet interlude."

It is true that Russia has changed dramatically since the end of the Cold War. The borders are open for travel. Street life in Moscow and St. Petersburg resembles the capitalist bustle of Western cities. But the democracy upon which so much else depends has not fared well at all.

Mr. Rubenstein, northeast regional director of Amnesty International, is the author of "Stalin's Secret Pogrom." You can buy "Russia in Search of Itself" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.