Content area
Full text
We are making such a large turn that it is beyond anyone's dreams. No other people has experienced what has happened to us.(1)
--Mikhail Gorbachev
To describe Russia as a society in transition is politically convenient because it implies predictability: we know where Russia is heading, as well as where it is coming from. A destination model is the basis for policy prescriptions designed to achieve the goal of a modern market economy and a stable democracy. Transition then becomes a "mere" problem of ensuring that the necessary steps are taken to achieve the desired goal, just as classic Marxist-Leninist prescriptions addressed the "mere" problem of the transition to socialism.
By contrast, an origins model starts with Russia as it is today. The state of Russia today is a matter of inheritance not choice; it reflects the legacy of seventy years of communist efforts to build a new civilization by rejecting the market economy and ruthlessly suppressing the institutions of civil society. Some Russian experts argue that the legacy also includes antimarket and antidemocratic elements of czarism. From this perspective, the creation of a market economy and a stable democracy requires transformation, an unpredictable and sometimes erratic search for escape from dissatisfaction with the past and present through a process that Joseph Schumpeter described as "creative destruction."(2)
The next steps in Russia's journey from a turbulent present to an as yet undetermined destination must start from where Russia is today. The "de-statization" of a society that was once ruled by
party with a totalitarian vocation(3) is both satisfying and disturbing. Russians want to put the repression and waste of the past behind them, but it is difficult to live amidst the wreckage of the old system.
To understand how Russians are getting by we need to adopt a bottom-up perspective. This means paying less attention to leading individuals (Yeltsinology), institutions (Kremlinology), or abstract aggregates (GDPology) and paying more attention to everyday concerns of ordinary people, especially since the collapse of the old system has given Russians a chance to ignore politics. The party that claimed to know what ordinary people think no longer has the whip hand.
A SOCIETY UNDER STRESS NOT A MODERN SOCIETY
A modern society is not so much characterized by its...