,

The long life of Homo sovieticus

MOSCOW
This week's elections and upheavals in Russia show how hard it is, 20 years after
the system collapsed, for the country to put away its Soviet past
T
WENTY years to the month since the
So_viet Union fell apart, crowds of an-
gry young people have taken to the streets
of Moscow, protesting against the ruling
United Russia Party ("the party of crooks
and thieves") and chanting "Russia with-
out Putin!" Hundreds have been detained,
and the army has been brought into the
of Moscow "to provide security".
Although the numbers are a far cry from
the half-million who thronged the streets
to bury the ussR, these were the biggest
protests in recent years. The immediate
trigger for this crisis was the rigging of the
parliamentary elections on December 4th
(see page ss). But the causes lie far deeper.
The ruling regime started to its le-
gitimacy just as Vladimir Putin, Russia's
prime minister, declared a final victory for
"stability", promised to return to the Krem-
lin as president and pledged to rebuild a
Eurasian Union with former Soviet repub-
lics. The Soviet flavour of all this had been
. underscored at United Russia's party con- .
gress at the end of November, where Mr
Putin was nominated for the presidency.
"We need a strong, brave and able leader
... And we have such a man: it is Vladimir
Vladimirovich Putin," enthused a film di-
rector. A steelworker told the congress how
Mr Putin had "lifted our factory from its
knees" and supported it "with his wise ad-
vice". A single mother with 19 children
thanked Mr Putin for a "bright future".
Such parallels with the now idealised
late Soviet era were supposed to be one of
Mr Putin's selling points. No tiresome po-
litical debate, fairly broad personal free-
doms, shops full of food: wasn't that what
people wanted? Instead, unthinkably, Mr
Putin has been booed: first by an audience
at a martial-arts event on November 2oth,
then at many polling stations, and now on
the streets. The Soviet rhetoric conjured an
anti-Soviet response.
According to Lev Gudkov of the Levada
Centre, an independent polling-research
organisation, this reaction against the mo-
nopolistic, corrupt and authoritarian re-
gime is itself part of a Soviet legacy. It is dri- .
ven by the lack of alternatives rather than
a common vision for change. For Russia is
still a hybrid state. It is smaller, more con-
sumerist and less collective than the Soviet
Union. But while the ideology has gone,
the mechanism for sustaining political
power remains. Key institutions, including
. courts, police and security services, televi-
sion and education, are used by bureau-
crats to maintain their own power and
wealth. The presidential administration,
an unelected body, still occupies the build-
ing (and place) of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party.
Morf important, the Soviet mental soft-
ware has proved much more durable than
the ideology itself. When, in 1989, a group
of sociologists led by Yuri Levada began to
study what they called Soviet Man, an arti-
ficial construct of doublethink, paternal-
ism, suspicion and isolationism, they
thought he was vanishing. Over the next
20 years they realised that Homo sovieti-
cus had mutated and reproduced, acquir-
ing, along the way, new characteristics
such as cynicism and aggression. This is
not some genetic legacy, but the result of
institutional restrictions and the skewed
economic and moral stimuli propagated
by the Kremlin.
This mental software was not a genera-
. tional feature, as the Levada group at first
suspected. The elections were rigged in
Moscow not only by middle-aged people
with Soviet memories, but by thousands
of pro-Kremlin younger folk gathered from
across the country and dispatched to cast
multiple ballots around the city. Symboli-
cally, they made their camp in an empty
pavilion of the Stalinist Exhibition of Peo-
ple's Achievements. Most of them had no
memories of the Soviet Union; they were
born after it had ceased to exist.
Yet the election results also revealed the
reluctance of a large part of Russian society
to carry on with the present system. Thou-
sands of indignant men and women,
young and old, tried to stop the fraud and
protect their rights. One election monitor,
who was thrown out of the polling station,
wrote in his blog that "I thought I would
die of shame .. .I did not manage to save
your votes ... forgive me." Such voices may
still be a minority, but the clash between
these two groups was essentially a clash of
civilisations-and a sign that the process of
dismantling the Soviet system, which
started 20 years ago, is far from over.
A moral vacuum
When the Communist regime collapsed in
1991 there was an expectation, both in the
West and in Russia, that the country would
embrace Western values and join the civi-
lised world. It took no account of a ruined
economy, depleted and exhausted human
capital and the mental and moral dent
by 70 years of Soviet rule. Nobody
knew what kind of country would suc-
ceed the Soviet Union, or what being Rus-
sian really meant. The removal of ideologi-
cal and geographical constraints did not
add moral clarity.
In particular, the intelligentsia-the en-
gine of Soviet collapse-was caught unpre-
pared. When their "hopeless cause" be-
came reality, it quickly transpired that the
country lacked a responsible elite able and
willing to create new institutions. The So-
viet past and its institutions were never
properly examined; instead, everything
Soviet became a subject of ridicule. The
very word "Soviet" was shortened to so-
vok, which in Russian means "dustpan". In
fact, says Mr Gudkov of Levada, this self-
mockery was not a reasoned rejection of
the Soviet system; it was playful and flip-
pant. Sidelined by years of state paternal-
ism and excluded from politics, most peo-
ple did not want to take responsibility for
. the country's affairs.
The flippancy ended when the govern-
ment abolished price regulation, revealing
the worthlessness of Soviet savings, and
Boris Yeltsin, faced with an armed rebel-
lion, fired on the Soviet parliament in 1993.
Soon the hope of a miracle was replaced
by disillusion and nostalgia. As Mr Le-
vada's polling showed, it did not mean
that most people wished to return to the
Soviet past. But they longed for order and
stability, which they associated with the
army and security services rather than
with politicians.
Enter the hero
Mr Putin- young, sober, blue-eyed and
calm-was a perfect match for people's ex-
pectations. Although picked by Yeltsin, he
made a striking contrast with the ailing
leader. Though he owed his career to the
1990s, he stressed that his own times were
very different. Two factors made him pop-
-
ular: a growing economy, which allowed adopted by the West. What mattered in the
him to pay off salary and pension arrears, world-East or West-were money and
and the prosecution of a war in Chechnya. power, and these were the things he set out
Both symbolised the return of the state. to consolidate.
'
In the absence of any new vision or The country was tired of ideology, and
identity, the contrast with the 1990s could he did not force it. All he promised (and
only be achieved by appealing to a period largely was to raise incomes; to
that preceded it-the late Soviet Union. Yet restore Soviet-era stability and a sense of
although Mr Putin exploited the nostalgia worth; to provide more consumer goods;
for an idealised Soviet past and restored and to let people travel. Since these things
the Soviet anthem, he had no intention of satisfied most of the demands for "Free-
rebuilding the Soviet Union either eco- dom" that had been heard from the late
nomically or geographically. As he said re- 1980s onwards, the people happily agreed
peatedly, "One who does not regret the to his request that they should stay out of
passing of the Soviet Union has no heart; politics. Though Mr Putin was an authori-
one who wants to bring it back has no tarian, he seemed "democratic" to them.
brain." The ease with which Mr Putin eliminat-
As a KGB man,MrPutinknewperfectly ed all alternative sources of power was a
well that the state-controlled Soviet econ- testimony not to his strength but to Rus-
omy did not work and that the ideology sia's institutional weakness. Yeltsin, who
was hollow. But also as a KGB man, he be- hated communism, had refused to censor
lieved that democracy and civil society the media or interfere in the court system.
were simply an ideological . cover-up Mr Putin had no such qualms. First he
brought television under his control, then
oil and gas. Igor Malashenko, who helped
to establish NTV, the first private television
channel in Russia, says he thought that
"there would be enough young journalists
who would not want to go back to the sta-
bles. I was wrong."
Russia was much freer in the 1990s than
it became Mr Putin. But the change
was gradual rather than sudden, and was
based on a relationship between money
and power inherited from a previous era.
The privatisations of the 1990s put proper-
ty in the hands of the Soviet officialdom
and a small group of Russian oligarchs. As
Kirill Rogov, a historian and analyst, has
observed, the real problem was not that
the accumulation of capital was unfair- it
usually is-but that clear rules of competi-
tion and a mechanism for transferring
property from less to more efficient own-
ers were never established.
Under Yeltsin, the oligarchs were
shielded from competition by their politi-
cal clout. Mr Putin simply flipped the for-
mula, turning owners into vassals who
were allowed to keep their property at his
discretion. From now on it was the power
of the bureaucrat, not the wealth of the
owner, that guaranteed the ownership of
an asset. The nexus between political pow-
er and property was never broken-as it
must be in a functioning democracy.
Monetising privilege
Under communism, the lack of private
property was compensated for by power
and status. A party boss did not own a fac-
tory personally-he could not even buy a
flat-but his position in the party gave him
access to the collective property of the
state, including elite housing and special
food parcels. The word "special" was a fa-
vourite one in the Soviet system, as in "spe-
cial meeting", "special departments" and
"special regime".
The Soviet system collapsed when top
officials decided to "monetise" their privi-
leges and turn them into property. The
word "special" was also commercialised,
to become eksklusivny (exclusive) and
elitny (elite). It was used to market almost
anything, from a house to a haircut. Under
Mr Putin, "special" regained its Soviet
meaning without losing its commercial
value. A black Mercedes with a blue flash-
ing light, ploughing its way through pedes-
trians, became the ultimate manifestation
of power and money. It was also one of the
symbols of injustice which helped to trig-
ger the latest protests.
Stories of bureaucrats, and especially
the security services, putting pressure on
businesses are now common. The most
famous example is that of Mikhail Khodor-
kovsky and the dismembering of the Yu-
kos oil company. But there are thousands
of others. The statistics are staggering: one
in six businessmen in Russia has been
~ 0
~ prosecuted for an alleged economic crime
over the past decade. Most of the cases
have no plaintiff and the number of ac-
quittals is close to zero, according to studies
by Russia's Centre of Legal and Economic
Research. This means that the vast number
of Russian businessmen in jail are victims
of corrupt prosecutors, police and courts,
which can expropriate a business with im-
punity.
As Yegor Gaidar, a prominent liberal
economist, warned in 1994, "The carcass of
a bureaucratic system can become the car-
cass of a mafia system, depending on its
goals." By the time his book appeared in
2009 his warning had become reality. In
the past few years this "monstrous hybrid"
has started to extend its tentacles into ev-
ery sphere of public life where money can
be made. Examples of violence against
businessmen abound. This adds up to a So-
viet-style policy of negative selection,
where the best and most active are sup-
pressed or eliminated while parasitic bu-
reaucrats and law enforcers are rewarded.
What Stalin wrought by repression and ex-
termination, today's Russia achieves by
corruption and state violence.
The bureaucracy's main resource is par-
ticipation in the rent-distribution chain.
While this allows it to channel money to-
wards sensitive regions and factories, it
also increases the country's addiction to
oil and gas and fans paternalism. Mr Putin
has worked hard to build up the image of
thestate as the sole benefactor, taking cred-
it for rising incomes generated by high oil
prices. As he stressed at the United Russia
congress, only the state and its ruling party
are capable of sorting out people's pro-
blems. "No one else is responsible for af-
fairs in a village, town, city or region or the
whole country. There is no such force."
This idea was spread by local gover-
nors, who told their citizens before the
elections that regional funding depended
on voting for United Russia. "If we are re-
sponsible, we have no choice," the gover-
nor of impoverished U dmurtia told his
people. "We must go and vote for the [Un-
ited Russia] party candidates 99.99%. This
is how it was in Soviet times, and if we had
not broken this order, we would still be liv-
ing in the Soviet Union ... much better than
now." In practice, critics say, the state has
failed to perform many of its functions,
such as providing adequate health care,
education, security and justice. But in Rus-
sia words and symbols often count for
more than experience.
A fortress mentality
Among Mr Putin's rediscovered Soviet
symbols, none is more important than that
of Russia as a great power surrounded by
enemies. Having promoted a version of
history in which Stalin represents Russia's
greatness (his repressions just an unfortu-
nate side-effect of a cold war forced upon
him by America), Mr Putin has employed
one of Stalinism's favourite formulas: Rus-
sia as an isolated and besieged fortress.
Although Russia has no iron curtain
and the internet is free, "it is as though an
invisible wall still counterpoises every-
thing that is 'ours' to everything 'foreign',"
M ~ Levada has written. Indeed his polling
showed that, by 2004, the number of Rus-
sians who considered themselves no dif-
ferent from people in other countries had
fallen, while the opinion that Russia is sur- .
rounded by enemies had grown stronger.
The recenf parliamentary elections
were accompa.nied by a heavy-handed
propaganda campaign that portrayed
America's anti-missile system as an exis-
tential threat to Russia. Dmitry Medvedev,
Russia's president, made belligerent state-
ments and state television showed lengthy
footage of Russian missiles, radars and oth-
er threatening stuff, accompanied by a
tense soundtrack. It was as though Russia
was about to be attacked. The target of this
campaign was not the West, where the
Russian elite spends much of its time and
money, but the domestic audience.
Anyone who criticises the government
from within Russia gives aid to the enemy
without. In his speech to the party con-
gress Mr Putin particularly attacked NGos
which receive money from the West "to in-
fluence the course of the election cam-
paign in our country". The "so-called grant
receivers" were like Judas, he said, ending
his speech with a quote from Stalinist
times: "Truth is on our side. Victory will be
ours!" He conspicuously left out the third
bit: "The enemy will be destroyed!" But no
sooner had he spoken than Russia's slav-
ish television (which has shown none of
the current protests) aired a propagandist
film about Golas, a leading independent
election monitor, trying to frame its staff as
Western agents.
Such tactics, in which enemies are
everywhere and no one is allowed a noble
motive, breed a general cynicism. In this,
post-Soviet Russia feels very different from
the Soviet Union. Leaders then had values,
not just interests. The Communist Party
might have been sclerotic and repressive,
but it was not called "a party of thieves and
crooks". Soviet leaders did not encourage
cynicism: they took themselves and their
words seriously. It would have been im-
possible, for example, for a chief Soviet
ideologist to write an anonymous novel
exposing the vices of the system he him-
self had created, as Vladislav Surkov, the
chief Kremlin strategist, has just done.
Many Kremlin politicians in fact per-
ceive themselves as progressive Westernis-
ers struggling with a backward, inert popu-
lation which has neither the taste nor the
skill for democracy. They assume people
will swallow anything as long as their in-
comes keep rising. But when Mr Putin said
that his job swap with Mr Medvedev had
been planned long ago, people felt duped.
These blatant machinations, where every-
thing was imitation and nothing was real,
leached away support for United Russia
even before the elections. When the Krem-
lin decided to rig the ballot openly, fury
boiled over.
After a decade of "stability", Russia
now looks as vulnerable to shock as the
Soviet Union was at the end of its days.
The big difference, however, is that the So-
viet Union had a clear structure and, in
Mikhail Gorbachev, a leader who was not
prepared to defend himself with force. To-
day's circumstances are very different.
Mr Putin is unlikely to follow the advice
of Mr Gorbachev and cancel the results of
the rigged election. He may instead resort
to more active repression, there by making
the country look a lot more Soviet. This
would only make the crisis worse. How Mr
Putin's highly personalised power might
be challenged, and what the consequences
would be, remain unanswerable ques-
tions. But it is obvious that unless Russians
create a system that promotes honesty,
openness, tolerance and initiative, no
change of leader will free their country
from the Soviet grip.