Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Autocratic Ideology as an Obstacle to Liberal Democratic Thought in Post-Soviet Russia

  • Chapter
Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism

Part of the book series: Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations ((PPCE,volume 8))

Abstract

The autocratic nature of Bolshevik ideology gave rise to the mass bloodshed and atrocities of Stalinism. Although the ideology moderated somewhat after Joseph Stalin’s death, it continued to impose severe constraints that blocked the rise of deep-rooted liberal thought in the USSR. After Mikhail Gorbachev launched wide-ranging reforms in the late 1980s that shook the foundations of the Soviet system, many erstwhile staunch adherents of Marxism-Leninism began to have doubts about the legitimacy of what they had believed. The wholesale demise of Communism in Eastern Europe greatly reinforced those doubts, causing many to begin renouncing what they had long believed. But the process was so compact in time that it did not permit the rise of genuine liberal democratic thought as an alternative. The “democratic” thinking that briefly took root in post-Soviet Russia was shallow and did not really fit into the liberal democratic tradition of Locke, Kant, Rousseau, and Mill. But because officials in the new Russian government used the term “democracy,” the very concept became discredited in the eyes of many Russians, who came to associate it with hardship and instability. As a result, Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian retrenchment proceeded with little public opposition and was even widely supported. Because the autocratic nature of Soviet ideology had prevented the emergence of deep-rooted liberal democratic thought, an ideological abyss was left after the demise of the USSR, and Putin stepped in to fill it with his personalistic autocratic rule.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    By “liberal democratic thought”, I mean the long tradition of political thinking reflected in the works of, among others, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill. This tradition has many strands and many internal divisions, but the commonality of liberal democratic thinking is that all individuals should be free and equal (or of equal moral worth). My own thinking is closer to that of Rousseau and Mill than to that of Kant, and in more recent literature I am much closer to the libertarian strand of liberalism developed by Robert Nozick than to the meliorist liberalism of John Rawls. For the purposes of this essay, however, my references to “liberal democracy” and “liberal democratic thought” encompass all the strands of the tradition of liberal democratic thought.

  2. 2.

    See Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 5th ed. (London: Macmillan, 2012).

  3. 3.

    Leszek Kołakowski and P. S. Falla (transl.), Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); George Lichtheim, “The Origins of Marxism”, Journal of the History of Philosophy 3, no. 1, April 1965, pp. 96–105; and David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969).

  4. 4.

    Neil Harding, Leninism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 42–44; and Alfred G. Meyer, Leninsim (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 37–38. See Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” (Chto delat?) pamphlet for the distinction.

  5. 5.

    For varying conceptions of Soviet ideology as a hegemonic discourse, see Tom Casier, “The Shattered Horizon: How Ideology Mattered to Soviet Politics “, Studies in East European Thought 51, no. 1, March 1999, pp. 35–59; Joseph C. T. Schull, “What is Ideology? Theoretical Problems and Lessons from Soviet-Type Societies “, Political Studies 40, no. 4, December 1992, pp. 728–741; Neil Robinson, “What was Soviet Ideology? A Comment on Joseph Schull and an Alternative “, Political Studies 43, no. 2, June 1995, pp. 325–332; and Rachel Walker, “Thinking about Ideology and Method: A Comment on Schull “, Political Studies 43, no. 2, June 1995, pp. 333–342.

  6. 6.

    See, for example, Stephen Kotkin, Stalin , Vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), with its convincing refutation of such notions.

  7. 7.

    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipleag GULAG, 1918–1956: Opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniya, Vol. 1 (Paris: YMCA Press, 1973–1975), p. 111.

  8. 8.

    Peter Kenez, “Dealing with Discredited Beliefs “, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 2003), p. 376. Kenez notes that in the Soviet Union “the people who consciously and completely repudiated the lies that are at the foundation of every repressive society were in a tiny minority […]. People who were dedicated Communists now think back and think of their beliefs as if they had always been Social Democrats. The past is malleable, and we recall what we want to recall”. Ibidem, pp. 374, 377.

  9. 9.

    M. S. Gorbachev, Perestroika i novoe myshlenie dlya nashei strany i vsego mira (Moskva: Politizdat, 1987), pp. 3–7, 21–41, 68–79.

  10. 10.

    See the article “Na perelomnom etape perestroiki: Vystuplenie M. S. Gorbacheva na vstreche v TsK KPSS s rukovoditelyami sredstv massovoi informatsii”, Pravda, 30 March 1989, p. 1. On the ideological dimension of Gorbachev’s program, see, among many other works, Sylvia Woodby and Alfred B. Evans Jr. (eds.), Restructuring Soviet Ideology: Gorbachev’s New Thinking (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); Alfred B. Evans, Jr., Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993); and Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System: A Critical History of Soviet Ideological Discourse (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1995), pp. 107–169.

  11. 11.

    This theme was especially salient in the literature on East Germany. See, for example, A. James McAdams, East Germany and Détente: Building Authority after the Wall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Henry Krisch, The German Democratic Republic: The Search for Identity (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985); Horst Dähn, Das politische System der DDR (Berlin : Wissenschaftlicher Autoren-Verlag, 1985); Klaus von Beyme and Hartmut Zimmermann (eds.), Policymaking in the German Democratic Republic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983); C. Bradley Scharf, Politics and Change in East Germany: An Evaluation of Socialist Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983); Henry Krisch, “Political Legitimation in the GDR “, in T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Fehér, (eds.), Political Legitimation in Communist States (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), pp. 110–127; and Klaus von Beyme, Ökonomie und Politik im Sozialismus: Ein Vergleich d. Entwicklung in d. sozialist. Ländern (Munich: Piper, 1975). Western academics were not the only ones who had this impression of life in East Germany. Sir Rodric Braithwaite, the final British ambassador to the Soviet Union, noted in his memoir that “by the 1970s the experts in the Foreign Office in London and the Foreign Ministry in Bonn were convinced that a genuine patriotism was developing in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and that the rising generation of East Germans had forgotten about the West”. See Rodric Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 126. For a cogent critique of these assessments and the effect they had on Western (especially West German) policy, see Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York: Random House, 1993).

  12. 12.

    Cited in Chuck Sudetic, “Bulgarian Communist Stalwart Says He’d Do It All Differently”, The New York Times, 28 November 1990, p. A8.

  13. 13.

    “Vypiska iz protokola No. 184 zasedaniya Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot 5 aprelya 1990 goda: O linii KPSS i merakh v podderzhku kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii v vostochnoevropeiskikh stranakh “, No. P184/38 (Top Secret), 5 April 1990, in RGANI (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History), f. 89, op. 9, d. 103, ll. 1–9.

  14. 14.

    Marina Pavlova-Silvanskaya and Sergei Yastrzhembskii, “Vostochnaya Evropa: Probil chas sotsial-demokratii?”, Izvestiya, 4 April 1990, p. 5.

  15. 15.

    “Vypiska iz protokola No. 184 zasedaniya Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot 5 aprelya 1990 goda”, ll. 3–4.

  16. 16.

    Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin : Politicheskii portret, Vol. 1 (Moskva: Novosti, 1994), p. 11.

  17. 17.

    Interview with Dmitry Volkogonov, by the author, in Moscow, 11 August 1995.

  18. 18.

    George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 367.

  19. 19.

    Ibidem. For Akhromeyev’s own interesting account, written shortly before he committed suicide in August 1991, of his “overwhelming frustration” and “feelings of helplessness” as he “watched what was happening to the country” and saw “the socialist alliance being destroyed” see also S. F. Akhromeyev and G. M. Kornienko, Glazami marshala i diplomata: Kriticheskii vzglyad na vneshnyuyu politiku SSSR do i posle 1985 goda (Moskva: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1992), pp. 214–216.

  20. 20.

    Boris Yeltsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Moskva: PIK—Nezavisimoe izdatel’stvo, 1990), p. 183. Yeltsin later wrote that “the USSR ended the day that the first hammer banged against the Berlin Wall “. See Boris Yeltsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Moskva: Ogonek, 1994), p. 52.

  21. 21.

    “Novosti “, Soviet Central Television, 13 July 1990, videotape, in Harvard University, Cold War Studies Archive, Soviet Television News Broadcast Collection, 1987–1991.

  22. 22.

    Aleksandr Yakovlev, Sumerki (Moskva: Materik, 2003), pp. 373–375. Both here and elsewhere in Sumerki, Yakovlev vividly describes his growing ideological disillusionment in the 1980s and early 1990s. In this respect and others, the book provides a fascinating account of the Gorbachev years—the only extended treatment of those years that Yakovlev published.

  23. 23.

    XXVIII s”ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza 2–13 iyulya 1990 goda: Stenograficheskii otchet, Vol. 1 (Moskva: Politizdat, 1991), pp. 137, 139.

  24. 24.

    Shevardnadze himself had left the CPSU in protest soon after he resigned as Soviet foreign minister in December 1990.

  25. 25.

    Vladimir Todres, “‘Ya ne volnuyus’, chto oni menya isklyuchili’: Fragmenty iz interv’yu Aleksandra Yakovleva ‘Nezavisimoi Gazete,’” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 17 August 1991, p. 1. On the expulsion of Yakovlev from the CPSU, see “V Tsentral’noi Kontrol’noi Komissii KPSS: O publichnykh vystupleniyakh i deistviyakh chlena KPSS A. N. Yakovleva, nesovmestimykh s Ustavom KPSS “, Pravda, 16 August 1991, p. 2.

  26. 26.

    Yakovlev , Sumerki, p. 374.

  27. 27.

    For an illuminating discussion of Gorbachev’s ideological shift in the final 2 years of the Soviet Union, see Gregory Freidin, “How Communist Is Gorbachev’s Communism?” in George W. Breslauer (ed.), Dilemmas of Transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Berkeley: Center for Slavic and East European Studies, University of California, 1991), pp. 25–44.

  28. 28.

    “Sokhranit’ i obnovit’ rodnuyu strany: Vystuplenie M. S. Gorbacheva v Belorussii”, Izvestiya, 1 March 1991, p. 1.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., p. 2. To gauge how much (and how rapidly) Gorbachev’s views were changing by mid-1991, it is worth recalling that only a year earlier he had explicitly rejected proposals to rename the CPSU. Nonetheless, even if by this point he genuinely was hoping to transform the CPSU into something much closer to a Western-style social democratic party, it is not entirely clear how he would have achieved that goal. There is little doubt that he would have had to split the Communist Party to ensure that hardline Communists like Nina Andreyeva and the “Soyuz” faction would not be around to obstruct his efforts. Some observers at the time speculated that Gorbachev would leave the CPSU, align himself with the newly-founded Democratic Reform Movement (headed by Yakovlev, Shevardnadze, and Popov), and establish a separate party to compete with the CPSU, but this seems highly doubtful. Gorbachev was well aware that the CPSU controlled vast resources (financial assets, real estate, buildings, etc.) and that only by remaining leader of the party would he be able to keep those resources under his control. If he were to leave the party and allow hardline Communists to regain control of it and use its resources for their own purposes, a newly-founded social democratic party would have found it very difficult to compete, no matter how many members left the CPSU and joined the new party. Because of this risk, it seems far more likely that Gorbachev would have sought to force the hardline Communists to provoke a split themselves, leaving them no choice but to establish a separate party of their own outside the CPSU. Then he could have transformed the Communist Party as he saw fit, including by giving it a new name. Because the August 1991 coup intervened and led (indirectly) to the demise of the CPSU, it will never be known for sure what Gorbachev might have done if the coup had not been attempted (and therefore if the Union Treaty had been signed on 20 August and a 29th Congress of the CPSU had been held in December 1991, offering a likely venue for the bifurcation of the party).

  30. 30.

    Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), pp. 51–52.

  31. 31.

    V. V. Zhuravlev et al. (eds.), Vlast’ i oppozitsiya: Rossiiskii politicheskii protsess XX stoletiya (Moskva: ROSSPEN, 1995), pp. 308–309.

  32. 32.

    George Schöpflin, “The End of Communism in Eastern Europe”, International Affairs 66, no. 1, January 1990, p. 6. On the same point, see Walter Laqueur, The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 127.

  33. 33.

    Data calculated from “Svodnye statisticheskie otchety o sostave partiinykh organizatsii za 1989”, January 1990 (Secret), in RGANI, f. 77, op. 6, d. 10; “Svodnye statisticheskie otchety o sostave partiinykh organizatsii za 1990 god “, January 1991 (Secret), in RGANI, f. 77, op. 6, d. 14; “Svodnye statisticheskie otchety o sostave partiinykh organizatsii na 1 yanvarya 1991 goda”, January 1991 (Secret), in RGANI, f. 77, op. 6, d. 15; and “Spravochnik ‘KPSS v tsifrakh,’” June 1991 (Secret), in RGANI, f. 77, op. 6, d. 22. Similar data are cited by Gorbachev in his keynote speech to the CPSU Central Committee plenum in July 1991: “O proekte novoi programmy KPSS: Doklad M. S. Gorbacheva na plenume Tsentral’nogo Komiteta KPSS 25 iyulya “, Pravda, 26 July 1991, pp. 1–2.

  34. 34.

    “O proekte novoi programmy KPSS”, p. 2.

  35. 35.

    Annual data on Komsomol membership and on many other matters pertaining to the huge efflux of young people from the Komsomol in 1989–1990 can be found in “VLKSM: Statisticheskii i spravochnyi material “, prepared by the Komsomol Central Committee apparatus, April 1990, in RGASPI, f. 1M, op. 110, dd. 483, 580.

  36. 36.

    For a perceptive, well-documented account of the decline of the Komsomol, see Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 102–124, 285–291.

  37. 37.

    See, for example, the testimony of the Belarusian writer Kastus Tarasaŭ (Konstantin Tarasov) on why he left the CPSU, in “Pochemu ya vyshel iz partii”, Moskovskie novosti, no. 15, 15 April 1990, p. 7.

  38. 38.

    Brinton , “Anatomy of Revolution”, p. 252.

  39. 39.

    “Dokladnaya zapiska: O politicheskoi obstanovke v strane”, Memorandum No. 219-k (Top Secret—Special Dossier), from V. A. Kryuchkov to M. S. Gorbachev, 18 February 1991, in LYA, f. K-1, apy. 49, b. 87, ll. 14–19.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., l. 15.

  41. 41.

    “Tainyi agent: ‘A ya gorzhus’”, Literaturnaya gazeta, no. 46, 14 November 1990, p. 11.

  42. 42.

    “Dokladnaya zapiska: O politicheskoi obstanovke v strane “, l. 17.

  43. 43.

    All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, Reitingi Borisa El’tsina i Mikhaila Gorbacheva po 10-bal’noi shkale (Moskva: VTsIOM, 1993); Yurii Levada, “Chto zhe dal’she? Razmyshleniya o politicheskoi situatsii v strane”, Izvestiya, 10 April 1990, p. 3; Yurii Levada and Leonid Gudkov, “Golos naroda: Sotsiologicheskii opros o polozhenii del v partii”, Moskovskie novosti, no. 15, 15 April 1990, p. 7; Igor Yakovenko, “Reiting “, Dialog: Zhurnal TsK KPSS, no. 9, 1990, p. 38; Igor Yakovenko, “Reiting”, Dialog: Zhurnal TsK KPSS (Moscow), no. 10, 1990, p. 8; and Semen Lebedev and Igor Yakovenko, “Reiting”, Dialog: Zhurnal TsK KPSS, no. 11, 1990, p. 3. In mid-1989, before the main upheavals in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev’s favorable rating had ranged as high as 55–60%. The precise figures varied slightly depending on the specific survey, but the pattern was the same in all the polls. Yeltsin’s favorable rating surpassed Gorbachev’s in mid-1990, and the disparity widened thereafter.

  44. 44.

    Data compiled by the All-Union Center for Public Opinion, presented in “Sovetskii chelovek—eskiz portreta: Vsesoyuznyi opros obshchestvennogo mneniya “, Moskovskie novosti, no. 11, 16 March 1990, p. 11. See also A. Grazhdankin, “Obshchestvo i armiya “, Izvestiya, 15 June 1990, p. 3.

  45. 45.

    Data compiled by the All-Union Center for Public Opinion based on surveys in 1989, 1990, and 1991, summarized in Aleksei Levinson, “Opros: Poleznye sovety sovetam “, Izvestiya, 19April 1991, p. 7.

  46. 46.

    Valeriy Musatov, “Vostochnaya Evropa: ‘Taifun’ peremen “, Pravda, 13 March 1991, p. 5.

  47. 47.

    Ibid.

  48. 48.

    “TsK KPSS: O prodolzhenii politicheskogo dialoga KPSS s zarubezhnymi partiyami i ikh mezhdunarodnymi ob”edineniyami “, Report No. 04605 (Secret), from V. S. Rykin, deputy head of the CPSU International Department, 7 June 1991, in RGANI, f. 89, op. 11, d. 95, ll. 1–5.

  49. 49.

    See, for example, Analiticheskii Tsentr Yuriya Levady, Obshchestvennoe mnenie – 2010: Ezhegodnik (Moskva: ATsYuL, 2011), pp. 34–41.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Mark Kramer

Authors
  1. Mark Kramer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mark Kramer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Riccardo Mario Cucciolla

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Kramer, M. (2019). Autocratic Ideology as an Obstacle to Liberal Democratic Thought in Post-Soviet Russia. In: Cucciolla, R.M. (eds) Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05784-8_7

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation