Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Many question how such effects of corruption can be measured or even defined in a society that sees it as a normal part of everyday life. Pollster Lev Gudkov, on the other hand, maintains that corruption is measurable and says the assessment must include far more than the amount of cash that changes hands. “Big business can only function by ‘paying’ with political loyalty to the authorities, for example,” he told me.

  Gudkov heads the Levada Center, Russia’s only major independent polling agency. It was founded early in Putin’s presidency after the state, upset about statistics that reflected badly on the Kremlin, forcibly took over a previous incarnation of the organization, in which a state-controlled company held a minority stake. That was a common tactic of the time: television stations, newspapers and other media were seized in Putin’s drive to take control of the enterprises that shape public opinion. (Many Russians now compare their once vibrant national television news to Soviet propaganda broadcasts.) But the Levada Center’s experts left their old employers and have since flourished, although in 2013 they began to fear the organization would be forced to close under a new law that requires all groups receiving funding from abroad to call themselves “foreign agents.”

  Gudkov blames corruption on Russia’s “cynical climate of immorality.” That can’t be tackled as long as most Russians see a benefit in it, namely as a necessary means of getting things done, he said. “It’s like oil in a car’s engine. The system can’t work without it. It makes up for the ineffectiveness of institutions.” In that scheme, Gudkov said, the government’s ongoing anticorruption campaign is “political theater.” “It’s not because Russians are deficient in morality,” Gudkov concluded. “It’s caused by how our practical social and political systems are structured.” Real change, he said, must be seen as being in people’s interests. “But who’s going to deprive himself of his own bread and butter?” he concluded. “That’s just not realistic.”

  Although many Russians believe corruption exists to a similar degree in Western countries—the source of much misunderstanding on both sides—most are well aware that their economy is very different. That’s a very old story, the perception of economic backwardness having played a huge role in Russians’ conception of themselves for much of their history. One of the reasons is that Moscow’s models for a great number of important things have come from the West, a central aspect of a very complicated relationship.

  Muscovites first began looking westward in earnest in the second half of the fifteenth century, when Tsar Ivan III (the Great) consolidated the formerly weak medieval state of Muscovy. Crucial for Ivan’s success was that Moscow—previously one of many small warring principalities in the northern Slav forests—had recently instituted a change in its rules of succession that gave it a great competitive advantage. Previously, the throne had passed to the ruling grand prince’s eldest male relative. That scheme prompted inevitable battles between brothers, cousins and others with claims to leadership and also spread wealth so thinly that ruling families’ older branches often grew impoverished and weaker than those of new aspirants.

  A ruinous civil war probably drove home the realization to Moscow’s rulers that their system, like those of the other Slav principalities, worked less than satisfyingly well. In any case, they settled on primogeniture—passing the throne to the eldest son only—and developed a complex ranking system. One of the new rules forbade younger sons from marrying until the eldest produced his own heir.2 That arrangement gave the principality some guarantee against the previously habitual infighting among senior members of the ruling clan and provided a degree of stability not enjoyed by other formerly more powerful principalities such as nearby Novgorod and Vladimir.

  Moscow’s advantage enabled it to absorb the neighboring principalities of Tver and Novgorod shortly after Ivan ascended to the throne in 1462. He soon renounced allegiance to the Tatar rulers of the Golden Horde, a remnant of the Mongol Empire to which Moscow still paid tributes. In 1493, Ivan began calling himself tsar—derived from the Latin word caesar—and naming himself sovereign of all Russia. (The title remained in formal use until 1721, when Peter the Great renamed himself imperator, emperor.)

  Moscow’s new wealth also prompted Ivan’s newly ascendant court to search for an imperial style that would befit its grander status. Understandably, it first looked to the recently vanquished Tatars. So tsar and boyars—a rough equivalent of European nobles—dressed themselves in Turkic robes and called themselves “white khans” in their first correspondence to Italian courts.

  When that failed to impress the crowned heads of Europe, it didn’t take long for Muscovites to realize the going power lay not in the East but the West. At that point they quickly abandoned Turkic terms and styles. Instead, Ivan began copying European princes. He sent to Italy for architects who would rebuild the Kremlin. The walls that still stand today—then painted white—date from that period, and the main entrance, the Spassky Gate, still bears a Latin inscription praising the Italian Renaissance architect Petrus Antonius Solarius for its design. At the same time, Ivan’s Greek wife, the Byzantine princess Sophie Paloelogue—who had been raised in Italy and was the niece of Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor—was helping Westernize Moscow’s imperial style.

  But as historian Edward Keenan points out, rather than slavishly copying its counterparts in the West, Muscovy’s emerging culture was unique and dynamic. Despite talk of Moscow as the “Third Rome”—Constantinople, which fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, was the second—the cultural borrowing indicated not so much a lack of imagination on the part of the Muscovite princes as, Keenan believes, an ambitious search for their own imperial style. Not seeing themselves as successors to the Tatars, the fallen line of rulers, they were also not interested in the heritage of medieval Rus’, the Kiev-based civilization that had preceded Muscovy by a couple of centuries and that some began perceiving as Russia’s first incarnation only later. Keenan points to a list of 2,900 courtiers under Ivan III, nine-tenths of whom had distinctly Muscovite names—Ivan, Dmitri, Vassily—as opposed to Kievan names, such as Vladimir, Yaroslav or Sviatoslav.3

  But if Russia’s early political culture started out as new and unique, comparisons to the West nevertheless soon came to play a very important role. Moscow’s growth set the tone for its future relations with Western countries, historian James Billington argues, by propelling it into a world it was “not equipped to understand… The Muscovite reaction of irritability and self-assertion was in many ways that of a typical adolescent; the Western attitude of patronizing contempt that of the unsympathetic adult.”4 I feel that that dynamic continues shaping Russian identity today.

  In the 1950s and ’60s, Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron theorized that the farther east one travels in Europe, the more agrarian and backward the societies become. Born in the Ukrainian Black Sea city of Odessa and educated in Austria, Gerschenkron believed those levels of economic development deeply affected political regimes: the less developed a country, the faster it needed to catch up in order to keep pace with the constantly rising level of modernity in the West.5 The only possible way for one as backward as Russia to accomplish that was to force change from above. Hence the tyrannical regimes.

  Berkeley historian Martin Malia went further to explain the often severe nature of Russian autocracy. Disadvantaged by its meager natural resources (before the extraction of oil and metals began), and challenged by its lack of mountains and other natural obstacles that would help stop invaders, only “brutal state action from above” enabled imperial Russia to become a major European power in the eighteenth century.6 The constant introduction of new agricultural techniques and technology that facilitated the Industrial Revolution was constantly helping the West raise the standard of what it meant to be European and modern. Russia’s difficulty in implementing the increasingly complex adaptations necessary to help it keep up forced it to rely on some segments of the population for innovation. Thus the vanguard of modernizatio
n passed to growing sections of the gentry and merchant classes—still a tiny part of society—that became more Westernized than the peasants who made up its vast bulk. Over time, that gap threatened to destabilize a highly conservative society. Although change was necessary to keep up, change that came too fast could be highly damaging.

  The most rapid bursts of industrialization in Russian history, together with urbanization and other forms of modernization, took place in the 1890s and the 1930s. The first led to a collapse of the ruling structure and revolution in 1917, but the second did not. Why the difference? Keenan asks, seeking to explain the nature of those changes in “Muscovite Political Folkways,” one of the most seminal articles about Russian history.7

  Normally, change among the elite—in education, Westernization, the absorption of foreign theories—is passed down to the rest of the population slowly over time. The end of the nineteenth century wasn’t normal, however. In the 1890s, the reforming Finance Minister Sergei Witte—who oversaw the institution of the state liquor monopoly that would vastly improve the quality of domestic vodka—orchestrated Russia’s greatest industrialization drive. That spurt was a response to Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War of the 1850s.8 Like the Great Reforms of Alexander II, who freed the serfs in 1861 and instituted the first jury system, industrialization was seen as imperative for survival.

  Witte’s modernization was massive, but not necessarily well thought out. With the push geared toward heavy industry, factories were built near the center of major cities, as I’ve mentioned. As with the Soviet modernization drives of decades later, its planners largely ignored light industry and the production of consumer goods. As Malia pointed out, another similarity was the peasantry being “squeezed through taxation to finance the whole undertaking without benefitting from it in any tangible way.”9

  Literature and art reflected the momentous change. At the turn of the century, Russia went from being a follower in culture to a global leader. In painting, modernist literature, dance and other forms of expression—Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist painting, Osip Mandelshtam’s Acmeist poetry and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, to name a few—St. Petersburg and Moscow took over from Paris and other capitals as the avant-garde’s spearhead.

  Governmental changes were also great. In the country with a tradition of highly centralized rule, representative politics emerged for the first time. However, Alexander II, who had instituted the zemstvo—an organization of local self-government—and taken steps to grow municipal institutions, was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881. His son Alexander III was reactionary and suspicious of the masses, as was his son, Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar. Nevertheless, one of Nicholas II’s concessions following a short revolution in 1905 was permitting the founding and operation of the Duma, the empire’s first parliament. It was a dramatic development. “This state and political culture,” Keenan wrote, “in which political power had always flowed downward and outward through politically castrated military and civil bureaucracies, suddenly gave birth to, and tried to accommodate, new political formations that had, or claimed, a share of real political power: parties, assemblies, committees of industrialists, Dumas, city soviets [councils], soviets of workers and peasants, trade unions and innumerable leagues, societies and associations.”10

  Very unfortunately for Russia, however, Nicholas failed to avert a collision between the massive pressure for change and the more powerful inertia of historical continuity. Already barely able to keep a lid on a pot of boiling water, he stumbled badly in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), when Japan dealt Russia a huge humiliation by becoming the first Asian power to defeat a European one in modern times. Russia lost not only its Pacific but also its Baltic fleet, which had steamed all the way to the Far East only to be dispatched. The defeat proved the final straw that caused the revolution of 1905, but reactionary Nicholas soon backpedaled on most of his concessions.

  Entry into World War I, in 1914, proved even more disastrous. Weakened by a woeful supply of weapons and ammunition, Russia suffered immense casualties. At one point in 1915, a quarter of the soldiers sent to the front were unarmed. Despite the troops’ often heroic fighting, the incompetence of Nicholas—who was increasingly relying on his wife, Alexandra, and her spiritual adviser, the peasant Grigory Rasputin—and his top generals stoked the flames of the general disillusionment that culminated in another revolution in 1917.

  Under times of such rapid change, Keenan stressed, the usual slow processes of “socialization and acculturation” of new ideas and practices from the elite to the masses weren’t enough to maintain stability. The Bolsheviks, who seized power in November of 1917—following an earlier revolution in February, which gave rise to a provisional government led by moderate socialists—reinstated a traditional political culture. When the “spectacularly disruptive” rapid transformation destroyed the ruling elite, it was the peasant culture that provided stability—Russia’s traditional “normalcy.”11

  The social culture stabilized once again by the end of the 1930s, evidenced by the fact that not even World War II, which took a far greater human and economic toll than World War I, unseated the political structure. A new political elite had reestablished extreme centralization. The Communist Party, which muffled, suppressed and rid society of the rising classes and groups that had threatened to upend the traditional political culture, became the new beneficiary of Russia’s age-old system of closed, conspiratorial rule.

  The new elite was composed of people of peasant or proletarian background whose attitudes derived from the centuries-old village political culture that grew from the need to survive extreme risk. Keenan described the continuity:

  After a long period of social and political chaos, the great bulk of the Russian population shared with its leaders a conviction that only a powerfully centralized and oligarchic government can provide the order which they all crave. Having had little contact or experience with the notions of democratic electoral constitutionalism, they share the view that one can rely more confidently upon informal and personal relationships than upon those defined by the legalistic niceties so admired elsewhere. Having had decades of “wrong” government whose claims to legitimacy were generally considered within the political culture to be meaningless, they are more concerned that a government be “right” than that it be legitimate.12

  Although there are many exceptions, Keenan’s observations about Soviet reality hold largely true about contemporary Russia. After another decade of radical change that threatened to overthrow the traditional political culture—the post-Soviet 1990s—Putin, in essence, reimposed the old way of doing things. As always, it has been fear of disintegration and chaos, the eternal specter of anarchy, that has helped unite Russians in their support of him. Putin has gone to extraordinary lengths to paint the 1990s as a period of chaos and criminality, tacitly appealing to people’s traditional anxieties. Despite the first major visible signs of public dissatisfaction among the urban middle class during protests in December 2011, a Levada Center poll conducted four months earlier showed that most Russians still believed order to be more important than democracy. Forty-five percent of respondents said the country needs democracy, but a “special” kind suited to its traditions.

  “May God forfend a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless,” Pushkin wrote, referring to a very destructive peasant uprising that took place during the reign of Catherine the Great in 1774. Paradoxically—and maybe also predictably—it was precisely that kind of revolt that led to the Bolshevik Revolution.

  It’s well known that forced labor is highly unproductive. Like serfdom, which lasted until 1861, the subjection of tens of millions of people to slave labor in the Soviet Gulag—the backbone of economic expansion under Stalin—did nothing to help Russian productivity. Although the Communist Party authorities may have put people to work very efficiently on paper, official statistics obscured the truth, just as government figures continue to do in Russia today.


  Shortly after the Revolution, Lenin backpedaled on implementing economic centralization by adopting a temporary New Economic Policy, the NEP, in the 1920s to avert utter economic collapse by strengthening small private enterprises. After that experiment with limited “state capitalism,” Stalin introduced full central planning and enacted the first of many Five-Year Plans in 1929. Its aim was to “scientifically” translate schemes for building socialism into targets for industrialization according to schedules drawn up by Gosplan, the state planning agency.

  With the country facing mass starvation following revolution, civil war and state-induced famine, the first plan projected that the national income would rise by a staggering 500-plus percent within four years.13 In fact, the scheme was a tool for aiding forced collectivization of the country’s farmland, part of Stalin’s “war” against the peasantry, which had disastrous effects on productivity. By comparison, NEP’s policy of allowing farmers to sell surplus yields instead of having the whole lot confiscated by the state had been a stunning success. Nevertheless, the dictator’s policies did transform peasant Russia into a largely urban society. A small part of the population before the Revolution, industrial workers doubled in number between 1928 and 1937, from 3.8 to 10.1 million, and later became the majority.14 Malia called Stalin’s industrialization the “Soviet experiment’s only real achievement.”15