Russian Reform Is Dead

Yuri N. Afanasyev

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994

Article preview: first 500 of 2,473 words total.

Summary:  Statism has routed reform in Russia. Imperialism is back, with Yeltsin?s blessings, and the ingrained depend­ency of Russian culture has carried the day.

Yuri N. Afanasyev, a historian, is rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow and former Co-chairman of the Interregional Deputies' Group in the U.S.S.R. Congress. This article was translated by Antonina W. Bouis.

The political arrangement in Russia that began with the attrition of reform forces in mid-1992 has come to an end. The January departure from government of economic and political reformers Yegor Gaidar, Boris Fyodorov and Ella Pamfilova erased all doubts. Until then, despite reactionary successes in the December parliamentary elections, it was possible to believe that the necessary reforms urged by Gaidar, however inadequate the half steps, would continue. Those economic reforms were only monetarist and anti-inflationary, not structural. But now it is clear that there will be no reforms, not even bad ones.

Under the guise of social welfare policies, a planned economy will be reestablished. Its executors will be Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin; his ally, industrialist Oleg Soskovets, who will be the sole first deputy prime minister; Aleksandr Zaveryukha, deputy prime minister of agriculture; and Yuri Skokov, an industrialist and former head of the Russian National Security Council.

President Boris Yeltsin has become merely decorative. His professed understanding of Gaidar's resignation as first deputy prime minister means that he understands there will be no radical economic reforms. While Yeltsin vows that his role as president is to guarantee structural reform, his office will be ornamental. If reform is to come, the work will be done by others.

Meanwhile, Gaidar vows that from his perch in the new parliament he will not become an opponent of Yeltsin; Andrei Kozyrev, holding on as foreign minister, will further learn how to talk tough foreign policy to out-Zhirinovsky the openly fascist parliamentarian, Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

The West will continue to insist that Yeltsin represents democracy. Russia, instead of moving along the axis of time, will continue spinning in the Western-versus-Slavic circle codified in Russian thought by the early nineteenth century writings of Petr Chaadayev. This tension promises further conflicts like the failed coup of August 1991 and the forced shutdown of the Soviet parliament in October 1993. 1

AN AUTHORITARIAN LEGACY

Zhirinovsky's victory in the December elections resulted from the failure of Yeltsin's reforms, but the vote also indicated something broader about Russian society and its mentality. It suggested cultural forces that lie beyond the enduring support for communist and fascist blocs, that go to the essential nature of the Russian people. In prerevolutionary Russia, public awareness was primarily traditional and mythological. The irrational predominated, with pagan and Christian concepts, symbols and ideals. People lived and acted, led not by reason but by superstition. Their freedom was confined by these intellectual limitations and habits. After 1917 an additional constraint on freedom was imposed, this time the allegedly rational ideology of Marxism-Leninism. The double bondage of these totalitarian heritages is most evident in the spiritual life of contemporary Russia. That legacy is the main reason for the sense of lost, or rather never acquired, Russian identity and the deformed perception of the surrounding world as a threat.

The main reason the Russian people have not escaped totalitarian systems, before or since 1917, has been the lack of a civil society. The state monopolized ...

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