Encyclopedia of Russian History
Page 94
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democ-racry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.
NIKOLAI PETROV
DEMOCRATIC UNION
The Democratic Union (DS) is a radical liberal party, the first political organization to emerge as an alternative to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), formed out of the dissident movement shortly after the beginning of pere-stroika. It was established in May 1988 on the basis of the seminar “Democracy and Humanism,” which began in the summer of 1987. The Democratic Union’s nonconformism distinguishes it from democratic parties that appeared later. Political tendencies that initially coexisted in the DS alongside the liberal-such as social democratic or Eurocom-munist tendencies-gradually broke off. Under the strain of numerous ideological and personal disagreements, the DS went through numerous splits. Where internal conflict arose between radical and more moderate elements, the radical always gained the upper hand.
The Democratic Union’s political activity consisted mainly of conducting unsanctioned meetings and making sensational announcements. In the words of DS leader Valeria Novgorodskaya (chair of the central coordinating council from 1996), DS activists were “genuine Bolsheviks, albeit with an anticommunist leaning.” In December 1992, on the initiative of Novgorodskaya and N. Zlotkin, the party “Democratic Union of Russia” (DSR) was established, declaring itself a constituent of the DS. In the spring of 1993, the DSR supported Boris Yeltsin in the conflict with the Congress of People’s Deputies, regarding him as a “fighter against Soviet power,” and broke sharply with the DS, which continued to view the president and government as heirs of the Communist regime. Novgorodskaya’s group was excluded from the Moscow DS organization, and from that point on, the DS and DSR existed separately. After troops were brought into Chechnya in 1994, the DSR moved into extreme opposition to the government, idealizing the Chechen side in the meantime. In 1996, the DSR first called for a repeal of the presidential elections, in order to avoid a situation in which “the formal observation of democratic procedures leads to the liquidation of democracy,” then it supported the candidacy of Grigory Yavlinsky after Yeltsin’s second term. During the Yugoslav crisis, the DS unequivocally sided with the U.S. and NATO and announced that it would send a detachment of volunteers to the Balkans as aid to NATO, headed by Novgorod-skaya.
DEMOCRATIZATION
Officially the DSR never registered as a party, first because of identification with “opposition from outside the system,” then because of low numbers and lack of organizational structures in the provinces. In 1993 Novgorodskaya entered the ballot in a single-mandate district as a candidate from the bloc Russia’s Choice; in 1995 on the list of the Party of Economic Freedom, which a significant portion of the DSR entered in order to receive official status. In the 1999 elections, the DS joined with “A Just Cause,” but with the registration of the latter, left for the Union of Right Forces (SPS). In the 2000 presidential elections, the DS supported Konstantin Titov. Since then, the DS’s only appearances in the news have been thanks to Nov-gorodskaya’s activity and high profile. See also: PERESTROIKA; POLITICAL PARTY SYSTEM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democ-racry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.
NIKOLAI PETROV
DEMOCRATIZATION
While modern times have seen more than one, however partial, attempt to democratize Russia, democratization in the narrow sense refers to policies pursued by Mikhail Gorbachev and his closest associates, roughly from 1987 to 1991.
The language of democratization was widely employed within a one-party context by Gorbachev’s predecessors, most notably by Nikita Khrushchev. Yet their interpretations of demokrati-zatsiya and democratizm diverged fundamentally from universal definitions of democracy. “Soviet democratization” implied increased public discussions, mostly on economic and cultural issues; increased engagement of Communist Party (CPSU) leaders with ordinary people; and some liberalization, namely, expansion of individual freedoms and relaxation of censorship. However, electoral contestation for power among different political forces was out of the question. The openly stated goals of democratization Soviet-style included reestablishing feedback mechanisms between the leadership and the masses over the head of the bureaucracy; encouraging public pressure to improve the latter’s performance; and improving the psychological and moral climate in the country, including confidence in the CPSU leadership, with expectations of a resulting increase in labor productivity. Additional, unspoken goals ranged from strengthening a new leader’s position, through public discussion and support, vis-?-vis conservative elements, to promoting Moscow’s international image and its standing vis-?-vis the West.
Gorbachev’s initial steps followed this pattern, relying, at times explicitly, upon the legacy and experience of Khrushchev’s thaw; the official slogan of the time promised “more democracy, more socialism.” Soon, however, Gorbachev pushed democratization toward full-scale electoral democracy. The reforms sparked demands for ideological pluralism and ethnic autonomy. As the momentum of reform slipped from under his control, Gorbachev’s own policies were increasingly driven by improvisation rather than long-term planning. Emerging nonparty actors-human rights organizations, independent labor unions, nationalist movements, entrepreneurs, criminal syndicates, proto-parties, and individual strongmen such as Boris Yeltsin- as well as old actors and interest groups, with new electoral and lobbying vehicles at their disposal, introduced their own goals and intentions, often vaguely understood and articulated, at times misrepresented to the public, into Gorbachev’s original design of controlled democratization.
Preliminary steps toward electoral democracy at the local level were taken in the wake of the CPSU Central Committee plenum of January 1987 that shifted perestroika’s emphasis from economic acceleration to political reform. A subsequent Politburo decision, codified by republican Supreme Soviets, introduced experimental competitive elections to the soviets in multi-member districts. They were held in June 1987 in 162 selected districts; on average, five candidates ran for four vacancies; election losers were designated as reserve deputies, entitled to all rights except voting. Bolder steps toward nationwide electoral democracy-multicandi-date elections throughout the country and unlimited nomination of candidates (all this while preserving the CPSU rule, with the stated intent of
DEMOCRATIZATION
increasing popular confidence in the Party)-were enunciated by Gorbachev at the Nineteenth CPSU Conference in June 1988. The Conference also approved his general proposals for a constitutional change to transfer some real power from the CPSU to the representative bodies.
Seeking to redesign the Union-level institutions, some of Gorbachev’s advisers suggested French-style presidentialism, while others harked back to the radical participatory democracy of the 1917 soviets, when supreme power was vested in the hands of their nationwide congresses. Idealisti-cally minded reformers envisaged this as a return to the unspoiled Leninist roots of the system. Gorbachev initially opted for the latter, in the form of the Congress of People’s Deputies, a 2,250-mem-ber body meeting once (and subsequently twice) per year. Yet only 1,500 of its deputies were directly elected in the districts, while 750 were picked by public organizations (from Komsomol to the Red Cross), includ
ing one hundred by the CPSU Central Committee, a precautionary procedure that violated the principle of voters’ equality. The Congress was electing from its ranks a working legislature, the bicameral Supreme Soviet of 542 members (thus bearing the name of the preexisting institution that had been filled by direct however phony elections). The constitutional authority of the latter was designed to approximate that of Western parliaments, having the power to confirm and oversee government members.
The relevant constitutional amendments were adopted in December 1988; the election to the Congress took place in March 1989. This was the first nationwide electoral campaign since 1917, marked-at least in major urban centers and most developed areas of the country-by real competition, non-compulsory public participation, mass volunteerism, and high (some of them, arguably, unrealistic) expectations. Though more than 87 percent of those elected were CPSU members, by now their membership had little to do with their actual political positions. The full ideological spectrum, from nationalist and liberal to the extreme left, could be found among the rank and file of the Party. On the other hand, wide cultural and economic disparities resulted in the extremely uneven impact of democratization across the Union (thus, in 399 of the 1,500 districts only one candidate was running, while in another 952 there were two, but in this case competition was often phony). And conservative elements of the nomenklatura were able to rig and manipulate the elections, in spite of the public denunciations, even in advanced metropolitan areas, Moscow included. Besides, the two-tier representation, in which direct popular vote was only one of the ingredients, was rapidly dele-gitimized by the increasingly radical understanding of democracy as people’s power, spread by the media and embraced by discontented citizenry.
The First Congress (opened in Moscow on May 25, 1989, and chaired by Gorbachev), almost entirely broadcast live on national TV, was the peak event of democratization “from above,” as well as the first major disappointment with the realities of democracy, among both the reform-minded establishment and the wider strata. Cultural gaps and disparities in development between parts of the Union were reflected in the composition of the Congress that not only was extremely polarized in ideological terms (from Stalinists to radical West-ernizers and anti-Russian nationalists from the Baltics), but also bristled with social and cultural hostility between its members (e.g., representatives of premodern Central Asian establishments versus the emancipated Moscow intelligentsia). Advocates of further democratization (mostly representing Moscow, St. Petersburg, the Baltic nations, Ukraine, and the Caucasus, and ranging from moderate Gor-bachevites to revolutionary-minded dissidents), who later united in the Interregional Deputies Group (IDG) and were widely described as “the democrats,” had less than 250 votes in the Congress and even a smaller proportion in the Supreme Soviet. The bulk of the deputies had no structured political views but were instinctually conservative; they were famously branded by an IDG leader Yuri Afanasiev as “the aggressively obedient majority.” The resulting stalemate compelled Gorbachev to abandon legislative experiments and shift to a presidential system, while the democrats (many of them recently high-ranking CPSU officials, with only a handful of committed dissidents) also turned their backs on the Congress to lead street rallies and nascent political organizations, eventually winning more votes and positions of leadership in republican legislatures and city councils.
Thus, democratization’s center of gravity shifted away from the all-Union level. The key events of this stage were the unprecedentedly democratic republican and municipal elections (February-March 1990), with all deputies now elected directly by voters, and the abolition of Article 6 of the USSR Constitution that had designated the CPSU as “the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system” with the right to
DEMOGRAPHY
determine “the general policy of the country.” The elimination of this article, demanded by the IDG and mass rallies and eventually endorsed by Gorbachev, was approved by the Congress on March 13, 1990, thus removing constitutional obstacles for a multi-party system-arguably the major and perhaps the only enduring institutional change of the period achieved through public pressure.
From that time issues of democratization yielded center stage to institutional collapse and economic reforms. A major transitional point was Gorbachev’s decision to become USSR president through a parliamentary vote, instead of running in direct nationwide elections. As a result, his presidency and other Union-wide institutions lagged behind republican authorities in terms of their democratic legitimacy. This was accentuated by Yeltsin’s election as Russian president (June 1991), the first direct popular election of a Russian ruler, which initially endowed him with exceptional legitimacy, but with no effective mechanisms of accountability and restraint. And the disbanding of the Soviet Union (December 1991) had an ambivalent relationship to democratization, for while it was decided by democratically elected leaders, Yeltsin had no popular mandate for such a decision; to the contrary, it nullified the results of the Union-wide referendum of March 1991, where overwhelming majorities in these republics voted for the preservation of the Union.
As a result of the events of the years 1988-1991, Russia acquired and institutionalized the basic facade of a minimalist, or procedural democracy, without providing citizens with leverage for wielding decisive influence over the authorities. The disillusionment with democratization has been shared both in the elite-some viewing it as a distraction or even an obstacle in the context of market re-forms-and among the population presented with the impotence and malleability of representative institutions in the face of economic collapse. Lilia Shevtsova describes post-Soviet Russia as “elective monarchy”; others emphasize a gradual reversal of democratic achievements since 1991, under Vladimir Putin in particular. The judgement about the ultimate significance of democratization on its own terms will hinge upon the extent to which a new wave of democratizers learns the accumulated experience and is able to benefit from this knowledge. See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; PERESTROIKA; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. New York: Oxford University Press. Chiesa, Giulietto, and Northrop, Douglas Taylor. (1993). Transition to Democracy: Political Change in the Soviet Union, 1987-1991. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Cohen, Stephen F., and vanden Heuvel, Katrina, eds. (1989). Voices of Glasnost. New York: Norton. Dunlop, John B. (1993). The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hough, Jerry F. (1997). Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991. Washington, DC: Brook-ings Institution. Kagarlitsky, Boris. (1994). Square Wheels: How Russian Democracy Got Derailed. New York: Monthly Review Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. Starr, S. Frederick. (1988). “Soviet Union: A Civil Society.” Foreign Policy. Steele, Jonathan. (1994). Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Theen, Rolf H. W., ed. (1991). The U.S.S.R. First Congress of People’s Deputies: Complete Documents and Records, May 25, 1989-June 10, 1989. Vol. 1. New York, NY: Paragon House. Urban, Michael E. (1990). More Power to the Soviets: The Democratic Revolution in the USSR. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar.
DMITRI GLINSKI
DEMOGRAPHY
The demography of Russia has influenced, and been influenced by, historical events. Demographic shifts can be seen in the population pyramid of 2002. The imbalance at the top of the chart indicates many more women live to older ages than men. The small numbers aged 55-59 represents the drastic declines in fertility from Soviet population catastrophes during the 1930s and 1940s, followed by a postwar baby boom aged 40-55. The relatively smaller number of men and women aged 30-34 reflects the echo of the 55-59 year old cohort. The larger cohorts at younger ages reflect the echo effect of Soviet baby boomers. The Russ
ian population pyramid is unique in its dramatic variation in cohort
DEMOGRAPHY
Table 1
size, and illustrates how population has influenced, and been influenced by, historical events.
Trends in migration, fertility, morbidity and mortality shaped Russia’s growth rate, changed the distribution of population resources, and altered the ethnic and linguistic structure of the population. The implications of demographic change varied by the historical period in which it occurred, generated different effects between individuals of different age groups, and influenced some birth cohorts more than others. Throughout Russia’s history, demographic trends were largely determined by global pandemics, governmental policies and interventions, economic development, public health practices, and severe population shocks associated with war and famine.
As in other countries, population trends provided a clear window into social stratification within Russia, as improvements in public health tended to be concentrated among elites, leaving the poor more susceptible to illness, uncontrolled fertility, and shorter life spans. Two unique aspects concerning Russia’s demographic history warrant note. During both the Imperial and Soviet periods, demographic data were manipulated to serve the ideological needs of the state. Second, Russia’s demographic profile during the 1990s raised questions concerning the permanence of the epidemiological transition (of high mortality and deaths by infectious disease to low mortality and deaths by degenerative disease). Life expectancies fell dramatically and infectious diseases re-emerged during the 1990s as demographic concerns became significant security issues.