Window on Eurasia: The Russian State Again Wins Out Over the Russian People

Paul Goble

Vienna, December 3 – Despite the efforts of many Russians and their friends over the last 15 years, the Russian state -- s just-completed Duma campaign and its outcome show -- has once again won out against the Russian people, a victory that precludes progress toward democracy and freedom in which many had placed so many hopes.
The reasons for that, as an analysis posted online on Friday suggests, have their roots in the deepest recesses of Russia’s history, roots that Moscow commentator Sergei Pereselegin argues make such continuing victories by the state likely but that suggest the only time that Russia can advance is when state and society are in more equal balance.
On a day when much of the Moscow media is devoted to the victory of Vladimir Putin and United Russia, Perselegin’s perspective provides a context for assessing both what has just taken place and the chance Russia has missed by following Putin’s lead (http://www.russ.ru/layout/set/print//politics/docs/vybory_07_vozvrascenie_imperii).
In most countries, the Moscow commentator notes, nations have created the state rather than the other way around. That has two consequences: On the one hand, it means that the nation on occasion is ready to sacrifice the state in order to advance or defend its own interests.
And on the other, Pereselegin continues, that relationship between nation and state requires that the latter maintain a constant dialogue with the latter and so act as to bring the members of the nation into their natural historical role as the makers rather than the victims of history.
But to every rule, there is an exception, he says. And in this case, the exception is Russia. “The post-Mongol Russian state,” he argues, has developed in a manner that promotes the inclusion into this broader historical process “not of the nation [as a political community] but rather of territory [as the chief possession of the state].”
This “’spatial character’ of Russian statehood,” he continues, means that the state typically operates largely independently of the people and that it is prepared to sacrifice the nation in order to protect itself much as normal states based on nations are willing to sacrifice an army or a province to defend themselves.
This long-standing arrangement, Pereselegin argues, explains “many of the particular features of Russian history, including its cruelty” and also why “the Russian colonial Empire outlasted its competitors” -- although in the end because of outside pressures and internal developments, it could not survive forever.
But even more important is its impact on the way its regime acts –“repeating one and the same reforms, organizing one and the same revolutions, suffering from one and the same disorders, but nonetheless developing rapidly by combining it itself the past and the future, the most archaic and most contemporary arrangements.”
In most other countries, Pereselegin suggests, politics is about issues, but in Russia it is “something like” a permanent chess match, one in which four key groups interact and in which much can be done when they are all involved but little when one or more of them is frozen out by the search for order.
The four groups in this chess game, the Moscow writer says, include, first, the Russian national elite which lives in Moscow and believes that Russian can only flourish under an authoritarian system, and second, a global counter-elite, which lives in Europe and seeks to transform Russia into a European-style polity.
The third group is made up of local elites who live in the provinces and seek a redistribution of assets and income away from Moscow into their hands, and the fourth consists of local counter-elites who live in Moscow and view their provincial counterparts as secessionist and thus a threat to the territorial integrity of the country.
Throughout most of Russian history, the regime has relied on the first and fourth and excluded the second and third, an arrangement that provides order but that represents “the main Russian problem;” the fact that the country and its government are not able to introduce fundamental changes.
Only when the country has a leader who seeks to reach out to all four groups and combine them in creative ways – Pereselegin points to Peter the Great as the classic example – or when the country finds itself “at a moment of transition from Chaos to Order” or back again is there any chance for real progress.
Russia had that opportunity as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. “Russia ceased to be the Evil Empire (and in general an Empire).” And thus it had “a unique chance to choose” a radically different set of arrangements, ones that would allow it to escape from the spatially defined anti-democratic imperial arrangements of the past.
In the 1990s, it appeared that Russia would do just that, but as both his own statements and the campaign just concluded show, Vladimir Putin has moved away from such a possibility by choosing end any conversations with either the global counter-elite or the local elites.
Instead, he has preferred what is perhaps the more “natural for a Russian leadership” stance of seeking to rebuild the “power vertical,” promote Moscow’s influence and control over territory, and ignore the two other players in this chess game in the name of stability.
In the short term, of course, Pereselegin concedes, such a strategy is likely to be more or less successful. After all, it guarantees Russia a rapidly growing economy, increased military power, and dramatically increased influence over those who are either dependent on or intimidated by Moscow.
But what Putin and his backers have said in the course of this election campaign demonstrates is that none of them are prepared to confront Russia’s long-standing existential problem, its existence as a state based on territory rather than its possibilities as a nation with a state.
And until it does, Pereselegin concludes, Russia will not be able to escape its past, involve its own people in defining the future of their country and themselves, and thus move as most advanced countries are doing into rapidly approaching and radically different world of the post-industrial future.
To the extent that one accepts Pereselegin’s argument – and a large number of people in virtually all political camps will challenge one or another aspect of it – that makes yesterday’s parliamentary vote a defining election, albeit one that represents the regime’s success in preventing a redefinition of what the Russian state will be.

Window on Eurasia: One Russian Household in Three Now Has a Computer at Home

Paul Goble

Vienna, December 3 – One in every three Russian households now has a computer at home, a development that helps to explain why ever more Russians are using the Internet for information and entertainment but also one that provides part of the reason why they are reading printed materials less.
The All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) reports the results of a recent poll in which 33 percent of Russians said they or members of their families now have a computer, with the figures for younger, wealthier and urban significantly higher (http://wciom.ru/novosti/press-vypuski/press-vypusk/9271.html).
This rise in home ownership of computers helps to explain the dramatic rise over the last four years in the number of Russians who say they know how to use computers and can surf the Internet, as found by the Yuri Levada polling agency at the end of September this year (http://www.levada.ru/press/2007092804.html).
In that sampling, 46 percent of Russians said they knew how to use a computer and 83 percent said they knew how to use the Internet, in a country-wide survey of 1600 respondents, compared with 36 percent and 21 percent respectively in a similar poll conducted in by the same Center four years ago.
The rise in the number of people who have computers at home and know how to use the Internet is especially important in helping to determine the extent to which Russians are able to get news and information from this channel, now that the Kremlin has reduced the amount of freedom in other media.
But there is one striking finding of the latest VTsIOM survey that may undercut much cause for optimism. Unlike in most other countries where the rise in computer ownership has been followed closely by a similar rise in ownership of computer printers, in the Russian Federation, that has not yet happened.
Instead, for all but the most well-off groups in Moscow and St. Petersburg, home ownership of computer printers is under 10 percent, a figure that means few Russians can print out articles off the Internet. And that in turn suggests that relatively few of them will read any Internet item that is much longer than a single page view.
Another survey, conducted by the Romir/Gemius Audience research firm, provides the most detailed information yet on how Russians are currently surfing the net. The first batch of data from this survey, published today, show that Russians behave much like citizens of other countries when they go online.
That is, there are deep and completely expected divides along gender and regional lines, but that most people now use the Internet not only for entertainment and shopping but also for news and information at least over the last month when interest in the campaign was relatively high (http://www.romir.ru/news/res_results/437.html).
With regard to the just completed elections, however, at least one Internet expert, Anton Nosik, said in comments published today that he does not think the efforts of political parties to conduct agitation online had any effect at all on the outcome (http://www.ng.ru/ngregions/2007-12-03/19_nosik.html).
That may be the case, but clearly the behavior of the Russian authorities suggested that they believed otherwise. And a new Institute of War and Peace Reporting study finds that the Uzbek authorities are going even further to make sure the Internet does not affect voting there (http://iwpr.net/?p=rca&s=f&o=341048&apc_state=henh).
But if the rise of the Internet is giving Russians a new window on the world, it may also be contributing, as it is in other countries, to a decline in the share of Russians who read newspapers, journals and books, a decline especially striking in a country that has long prided itself for its high rates of reading.
In 1991, 48 percent of young Russians regularly read books, but 15 years later, only 28 percent of them did, according to one survey. And while in the 1970s, 80 percent of Soviet parents read aloud to their children, now only seven percent do, a decline so precipitous that the Kremlin is worried about the future.
Other statistics on readership among Russians are equally bleak. The percentage of Russians reading at least one book a year has declined from 79 percent in 1991 to 63 percent, and the quality of the books they are reading appears to have fallen as well (http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var1857688.0.0.php). Similar declines have been observed over the same period for other parts of the hard copy print universe. In 1991, 61 percent of Russians read a daily newspaper; now, only 24 percent do. And overwhelmingly, Russians have stopped reading journals at all – with only one in 14 indicating that he or she does at present.
Competition from electronic media rather than cost appears to be responsible, as hardcover books in Russia now appear about 60 rubles (2.50 U.S. dollars). For poorer groups and for the poor and for non-Russian language outlets whose smaller print runs mean that they have to charge more now that they are without government subsidies.
Indeed, at a meeting of Finno-Ugric publishers last week, some editors said that “a book must not cost more than a piece of sausage, or people won’t buy it,” and all of them agreed that non-Russian language outlets must seek government aid – or aid from Finno-Ugric countries abroad (http://www.rosbaltvolga.ru/2007/11/27/435087.html).
But perhaps the clearest change in the landscape of Russian reading habits is marked by the remarkably small number of bookstores still around and the decline in the number and quality of the Russian Federation’s once impressive network of public and research libraries.
If in Europe, there are approximately 60 bookstores for every 100,000 residents, in the Russian Federation as a whole, there are only four per 100,000 and even in relatively well-off Moscow, there are only eight -- one-fifth the number relative to population compared to European standards.
And the country’s libraries are in worse shape, with cost-cutting measures not only leading to the closure of many smaller libraries outside of Moscow but also to a decline in the quality of holdings and services at the Russian National Library and at libraries attached to the Academy of Sciences.
Things have become so dire at these institutions, some librarians there say, the future of Russian scholarship and science is at risk. Indeed, they suggest, the Russian Federation is approaching the point where it may have “an Academy without Sciences” (http://www.za-nauku/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=222&Itemid=35).
The Internet and television are far from the only forces responsible for these trends, but they do play a role in leading some – including several prominent members of the Academy – to argue that with the Internet, libraries as a repository of the printed word are now of little use even for them.