Elites after State Socialism: Theories and Analysis, Edited by John Higley and Gyrgy

Lengyel, Lanham: Rowman & Littleeld, 2000

Reviewed by PETE G LATTER

Not Much Class

There is an extraordinary contrast between the condent, optimistic tone at the
beginning of this book and the confusion and uncertainty at the end. The editors
introduction presents a comprehensive pattern of lites and rgimes and sums up the
entire political development of Eastern Europe and Russia from the late 1980s to the
late-1990s. A large part of the conclusion, it is true, follows this up by arguing that
lite theory has eclipsed Marxism as a credible explanation of political change
(p. 238). Actually, this boils down to little more than saying that the term lite has
become fashionable for the second time in a century, but the voluntary confessions
which the authors themselves then make are much more damaging to their cause.
The widespread use of the word lite, they admit, has not been the result of any
revival or development of ideas about lites. On the contrary, there is something like
a theory void. In other words, this is a theory which lacks any widely-accepted system
of basic terms and concepts even among its own adherents. It is therefore extremely
difcult to test and not much use as a criteria by which to select data.
The essays in this anthology do, however, share certain basic attitudes: litism, for
example. On the very rst page, the editors put forward as the premise of the entire
volume the view that the prospects for stability and democracy are crucially dependent
on the extent to which elites trust and cooperate with one another (p. 1). This is
echoed in the chapter on Slovakia, while the chapter on Poland declares: After state
socialism in East Central Europe, politics have become what the majority of politicians,
or at least the dominant politicians, do (p. 87). The contributors do not develop
thought-out arguments to substantiate such points or support them with evidence,
they are simply asserted. Another common attitude favours description rather than
analysis. For instance, in the Introduction, the editors mention that in their model,
reproduction (the occupation of lite positions in the new rgime by the same type
of people as in the old) is associated with fragmented elites (p. 11). However, they
do not attempt an explanation as to why this should be so. In his essay on Serbia,
which, while muddled, is a degree more thoughtful than the others, Mladen Lazic
characterises lite theory as trivial, descriptive, and nonanalytical at the abstract level,

Historical Materialism, volume 11:1 (243255)

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Also available online www.brill.nl

244 Pete Glatter

though it has often spawned compelling empirical research (p. 126). I thought this
really hit the nail on the head when I rst read it; however, upon further consideration,
I found it over-generous. In my experience of the literature on Russia, it is more often
the case that interesting research on lites dabs itself here and there with a touch of
something fashionable from the world of ideas: it might be a touch of lite theory, or
a hint of democratisation theory, or a soupon of globalisation theory; it might not
have much to do with the rest of the outt.1
Then there is the light-minded attitude to issues of evidence and data. The essay
on the Czech Republic claims that an almost complete circulation of the political elite
has taken place. However, the reader is referred to other publications for details of
the research on which this claim is based. The authors of the essay confess in an aside
that methodological problems of sample selection and representativeness were
substantial. But there is no hint here of what these problems were. The last research
exercise cited in the chapter appears to have been conducted in 1994, six years before
this anthology was published (pp. 289, 36). The chapter on Poland is rather more
forthcoming, so we know that it is based on interviews in 1996 with 215 parliamentary
deputies and with 61 runners-up. As the authors make clear, their research was about
political elite perceptions of how politics were being played and what the elites own
roles were in Poland during the mid-1990s: just the stated perceptions of politicians,
nothing else. This is not uninteresting, but is clearly of limited signicance and not a
very rm basis for a condent prediction that there is little danger of explosive
political conict . . . because conicting elite perceptions . . . are substantially undercut
by the common conviction . . . about the overriding importance of continuing market
reform and keeping democracy stable (pp. 889, 101). The essay on East Germany,
which argues that there has been an extensive circulation of the political lite, is based
on a 1995 survey again published elsewhere (pp. 11315, 120, fn. 12). The nature of
the lite samples in the essay on Serbia is not made clear. Nevertheless, they are
interpreted to support the argument that the country has an entirely new class structure
(pp. 130, 1335). The essay on business lites in four East European countries in 1993,
seven years before this anthology was published, is very sketchy about methods,
samples and some of its results (pp. 220, 222).
It is important to understand that such attitudes are not conned to this particular
work. They are integral to lite theory and go right back to the founding fathers. The
terms lite theory and litist theory have been used interchangeably, and no wonder: 2
litism sought to justify a prejudice as an idea and was fundamental to the intellectual
reaction against Marxism. The originators of lite theory were predisposed to overestimate the innate abilities of lites who succeeded in remaining or who came out

1
2

See, for example: Hughes 1994, p. 1133; Melvin 1998, pp. 619, 643.
See, for example, Meisel 1958, p. 10.

Reviews 245
on top. lites appeared in the work of Robert Michels, for example, as the infallible
architects and supreme beneciaries of their own victories.3
In the particular case of Eastern Europe, lite analyses, as Michael Burawoy has
pointed out, exclude subordinate classes which in effect become the bewildered
silent and silenced spectators of transformations that engulf them.4 These are not
real subordinate classes, of course. Burawoy is just describing the way the lower orders
appear to the lite mind. The role of the masses and their relations with their masters
and mistresses is a central issue to which we will return. For the moment, two aspects
of it as regards lite theory are worth mentioning. One is the part mass action played
in bringing about the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Uprisings and
workers movements were, for forty years, the main and most successful forms of
opposition to local lites and their Soviet backers. Burawoy argues that their signicance
was not conned to the Soviet period. As it came to an end, the compromises struck
between dominant and subordinate classes set the prior conditions for alliances among
the dominant classes. In other words, the class struggle in Eastern Europe had a lot
to do with the terms on which the transition from Communist rule took place and
on the nature and extent of pacts among the lites. Since then, class divisions have
deepened and the struggles they engender have continued into the new age. Indeed,
in large parts of the former Soviet Union, the passing of the old order marked the
beginning of open class struggle for the rst time in over sixty years.5 The second
point is that lite theory frees its adherents from having to pay any attention to the
actions of the vast bulk of the population. This certainly makes the job of the researcher
a lot simpler. My own experience of lite research suggests that it is also very convenient
for the lites themselves: the last thing any important Russians I spoke to wanted to
admit was that anything any ordinary people did had inuenced them in any way
whatsoever. The omnipotence of the powerful and the impotence of the powerless
are not tools of analysis: they are complementary aspects of litist fantasy.
Similar points can be made about the weakness of classical lite theory in terms of
analysis and evidence. Vilfredo Pareto, for example, was not much concerned with
the factual basis of his ideas about lite circulation. His interpretation of history
harsh, vigorous lites alternating with mild, degenerating lites derived from racist
theory, and he limited his serious research to only one actual case: ancient Rome.6
But it is not just a question of the theoretical leftovers from some reactionary
intellectuals of a bygone age. The contemporary study of post-Communist lites
is heavily inuenced by US literature of the 1980s about political evolution
away from authoritarian political rgimes in South America and southern Europe.

3
4
5
6

Beetham 1981, p. 99.

Burawoy, 2001.
See, for example, Haynes 2001; Haynes 2002, pp. 1828, 21417.
Bottomore 1987, p. 275.

246 Pete Glatter

This literature of transition, or transitology, depicts various scenarios in which
arrangements for change or pacting between lites (and counter-lites) take pride
of place. Once such arrangements have been made, a liberalising rgime can, if it
keeps a cool head and a rm grip, expect an enthusiastic boost from certain social
groups as they feel the chains of authoritarianism slacken. Transitions from Authoritarian
Rule, one of the basic texts of transition theory, looks with particular favour on the
role of artists and intellectuals, privileged sectors, and middle sectors. You may like
to know, by the way, that it describes the accumulated anger of the working class and
its capacity for independent action as being likely to make it the greatest challenge
to the transitional rgime.7
Although rgime change is its central issue, this key text has great difculty in
dening what a rgime actually is.8 Everything tends to be seen in terms of relationships
between lites, rather than in terms of structures of power, whether these are formal
or informal, or in terms of relationships between those who have power and those
who do not. What might dene such relationships is completely out of the picture.
Instead, the authors make a virtue of necessity by touting the notion of the uncertainty
of transitional outcomes. Looking at this idea in terms of workers experience of rationalisation and redundancy in Eastern Europe, Burawoy remarked: Neoclassical
sociologists may celebrate indeterminacy and uncertain futures, but for most this
simply means insecurity. In this conception, even the lites are agents of obscure
origin in an uncertain universe: the political structures and socio-economic relationships
through which they operate shift hazily in and out of focus in a thoroughly postmodern
manner. The notion of uncertainty seems to apply most aptly to the theory itself, as
a mid-1990s debate in a major US journal illustrates.9
What, for example, is the certain democracy these writers are implicitly contrasting
transitional rgimes with? Given their elitist predilections, it is likely to be some variety
of the democratic litism so favoured by New Labour, in which so-called democracy
is more important as a method of generating effective and responsible government
than as a means of providing signicant power for the majority.10 The asco of the
last US presidential election springs immediately to mind. A Russian joke of the time
showed the narrowness of the East-West divide: we know the result of our elections
before the ballot starts you dont know it even after the votes are counted. There
is a connection here between Western litism and the westernism of East European
intellectuals like Lazic which comes out in odd remarks like this:

ODonnell & Schmitter 1986, p. 52.

ODonnell & Schmitter 1986, pp. 6, 65, 73 (fn. 1).
Schmitter & Karl 1994; Bunce 1995; Karl & Schmitter 1995; see also: Munck 1997, pp. 54250.
10
Giddens 1990, p. 310; for a related, more recent and more pretentious exposition see
Finocchiaro, 1999; Finocchiaro, who approvingly cites Dahl (pp. 20813) and Giddens (p. 214)
claims that democracy for both Mosca and Gramsci consists of a special relationship between
lites and masses in which the lites are open to renewal through the inux of elements from
the masses (p. 206).
7
8

Reviews 247
to anyone who has lived in a socialist country, the need for expertise in a
political lite is self-evident; the individuals who successively ran state
agencies in the elds of culture, manufacturing, defence, and elsewhere,
obviously and woefully lacked the necessary expertise. (p. 135)
Nothing like Railtrack, then, or Enrons superb efciency in disrupting the electricity
supply to large parts of California. And, remember, these are among the highest levels
of expertise (and democracy) the West has to offer.
The litism of lite theory, its neglect of relations between the powerful and the
powerless, the strength of its prejudices, the depth of its commitment to the status
quo, its failure to develop explanations, and its weakness with empirical verication
deeply mark this anthology. One result is confusion in the ranks; as this anthologys
conclusion could hardly avoid acknowledging. Not, at any rate, when the essay on
the Czech Republic, the very rst case study in the book, opens with a series of highly
sceptical pronouncements about the idea that lites have played a central let alone
exclusive role in rgime change (p. 26). Confusion and scepticism are symptomatic
of the inadequacy of the lite school of thought. Most of the book subscribes unreservedly
to what Colin Sparks and Anna Reading describe in their shrewdly acute survey of
theories of change in Eastern Europe as the total transformation thesis: The dominant
view in the West is that the revolutions involved profound changes at all levels of
society from the spiritual to the economic.11 Some of the essays do contain elements
of an alternative, but these are not developed. Yet these dissenting voices are worth
listening to. The authors of the four-nation business lite study put their emphasis
on continuity not just with the Communist period but even with the one preceding
it (pp. 2213).
A related pattern comes to light in a number of the other essays. The pattern is
one in which there is a generally more signicant degree of continuity in economic
lites than in political lites. The claimed almost complete circulation of the political
lite in the Czech Republic is balanced by a much more sober assessment on the
economic side:
It is obvious, in other words, that economic elite circulation has not been
as comprehensive as political elite circulation. The economic elites composition
has changed more slowly and has resulted partly from the normal life cycle
(accelerated somewhat by political considerations), partly from ongoing
structural change (mainly the increased size of the tertiary sector), and partly
from changes in the occupational order itself (for example, the relative and
absolute increases in the number of people working in information services
with business, as opposed to technical training) (p. 33).

11

Sparks & Reading 1998, p. 80.

248 Pete Glatter

Despite claiming that Serbia acquired a new class structure during the 1990s (well
before the overthrow of Milosevic), the data Lazic presents on Serbia suggests, according
to his own evaluation, that about 60 per cent of the new entrepreneurial class of 1993
gained their positions directly or indirectly through paternal or spousal linkages from
the old ruling class (p. 133).
This pattern of differential continuity is not accounted for by schemes of change in
which lites inevitably play the crucial role. There is a general assumption in lite
theory that power is primarily about political position. It is implied that if old lites
want to hang on to power then political ofce will be the primary focus of their
resistance to change. At the same time, there is plenty of evidence that Communistera lites were far more interested in grabbing assets and property than they were in
maintaining the old political status quo.12 Such issues go to the heart of the nature of
change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU). For, as Sparks and
Reading point out, total transformation necessarily implies radical discontinuities
of structures and personnel in all aspects of life, particularly in the most important
economic, social and political organisations. What Sparks and Reading found in the
media in Eastern Europe was that the old institutional structures and personnel
remained largely intact, despite the introduction of a market-oriented system comparable
to that in the West. The bulk of the senior staff remained comfortably in post and
retained control of the institutions. They concluded that change was limited to political
life in the narrow sense and that the social structure displayed a marked continuity:
Those views that stress discontinuity, and in particular the ofcial Western version
as promulgated by Fukuyama and others writers, bear no relationship whatsoever to
what actually occurred. The only exceptions were East Germany and, to a lesser
extent, Czechoslovakia, where popular mobilisations broke through top-down control
over transition and drove the Communists from power.13
The argument that political change in Eastern Europe and the FSU, important though
it was, did not affect basic socio-economic power relations originated in the early
1990s, notably with Alex Callinicos. Marxists like Callinicos are often accused of being
too rigid in their ideas ironically, in this case, as one of the key features of his
conception is its exibility. A substantial continuity in the core apparatuses of state
power and in the personnel of the ruling class itself14 is clearly central to this approach.
But it does not exclude all kinds of changes in the political rgime. On the contrary,
it is precisely the combination of continuity and change which is characteristic of the
experience all over the former Soviet bloc:

12
See, for example, the fascinating study of the dismemberment of the Komsomol, the ofcial
Communist youth movement in the USSR, by its own ofcials in Solnick 1998, pp. 60124.
13
Sparks & Reading 1999, pp. 86, 96105.
14
Callinicos 1991, p. 58.

Reviews 249
As she contemplated todays recycled communists, who miraculously have
discovered the virtues of pluralism, one Polish lady gave me the following
denition of her erstwhile homelands governments throughout this century.
Same shit, different ies!15
The extent to which things altered depended largely on local circumstances, such as
the extent to which people in the mass tried to go further than purely political change.
A tad less monolithic than the total transformation thesis, for which signicant
elements of continuity can mean theoretical overload and a ashing self-destruct
button. An example of this is the work of David Lane, who is represented in this
anthology only by a limited study of the Russian oil lite, Russia being otherwise
largely excluded from the scope of the book. Lane is, in fact, a key member of the
Western intellectual establishment, a leading sociologist both of the Soviet Union and
of post-Soviet Russia. He is also one of the few specialists to have argued, together
with Cameron Ross, that the new Russian political lite has hardly anything in common
with the old Soviet lite (as usual, a slightly higher level of continuity was conceded
in respect of the economic lite).16 In order to produce this result, they were compelled
to insist that only people who were in an lite position both before and after the
collapse of the Soviet Union counted as evidence of continuity. By applying such
breathtakingly narrow criteria to the interpretation of their research, Lane and Ross
were able to boast that the biggest single grouping in the Yeltsin political lite,
accounting for 45.7 per cent of the total, had no service in the government or Communist
Party of the Soviet Union. But, even on their own gures. this leaves a majority of
54.3 per cent who had between one and forty years service of this kind. 17
Lane and Ross are a good example of what can happen when a total transformation
thesis is bulldozed through the evidence. Other Russian specialists have emphasised
continuity, notably Olga Kryshtanovskaya, who produced the classic general study
of lites in post-Soviet Russia, and James Hughes, who laid much of the groundwork
for an understanding of Russias important regional lites. The problem here, as with
ODonnell, Schmitter and the other transitologists, was that they tended to overestimate
the importance of direct relations between the lites and underestimate the role of the
political rgime. The result was that Kryshtanovskaya, in collaboration with Stephen
White, could not decide whether the new Russian lite was bifurcated (into political
and economic lites) or trifurcated (once they added the security services). There
followed what was in some ways a mercifully brief contest between Kryshtanovskayas

15
16
17

The Independent on Sunday (letter), 6 May 1990.

Lane & Ross 1999, pp. 160, 2023.
Lane & Ross 1999, p. 155.

250 Pete Glatter

three-layered pie and the marbled cake effect put forward by Hughes, who was
trying to picture the highly integrated lites he had found in Siberia.18
The truth is that there is a high level of continuity and integration within lite
groupings in Russia, while their relations with each other are competitive and hostile,
features which are quite new. The ruling class is more or less the same as in Soviet
times. So how is it that relations between different parts of that class (and, by extension,
between its top managers and ofcials) are so different? An important part of the
answer lies in the impact on the ruling class of the unforeseen and unexpected way
the political rgime changed. This was a class whose internal relations had been
structured into a hierarchy by Stalinist institutions, above all the Communist Party,
since its inception. The unexpected collapse of the party in the course of marketisation
and related political reforms predisposed the ruling class to disunity. The unforeseen
collapse of half the economy provided a keen motivation for rivalry competition
over the few key assets which remained: raw materials, especially oil and gas, the
processing of raw materials such as metals, and arms, the one signicant branch of
manufacturing which survived. The ruling class remains but its cohesion has been
damaged by changes in the political rgime, largely as a result of its own miscalculations. This is, of course, a very crude summary.19 But it again emphasises the exibility
of the relationship between political and social power outlined by Callinicos. Actually,
it is not just a question of Callinicos, or even of Marx. The sad truth is that you can
nd a more subtle understanding of the relationship between rgime and social
structure in Aristotle than in the rigid formulations of lite theory.20
Shorn of its intellectual pretensions, the basic message of lite theory is that the
best you can hope for is what the lites give you. If you want something better, then
you need better lites not better in terms of some impossible, utopian ideal, but
more like lites in nice places like the USA or the better parts of Islington (p. 239).
Marxist thought leads in exactly the opposite direction: from the great and the good
to the despised and underestimated. Once one starts looking, the potential of antilite struggles soon becomes apparent, even in Russia, where movements from below
hardly existed for sixty years, where the mobilisation against the old rgime was
relatively modest and where the difculties of daily life are hardly to be exaggerated.21
To start with, tell-tale phrases like the danger of a rise in social tension, crop up
even in the writings of the least radical Russian specialists. Here, for example, is a
description of the dilemma faced by regional lites in oil- and gas-rich western Siberia
in the mid-1990s: Obviously, the territorial authorities are not ready to undertake

Kryshtanovskaya & White 1996, pp. 713, 7213; Hughes 1997, p. 1031.
A longer version can be found in Glatter 1999 and Glatter 2001a.
See, for example, Aristotle 1996, pp. 947.
21
Further details of the following three examples can be found in Glatter 1999, 2001a, 2001b,
2003.
18
19
20

Reviews 251
additional expenditure, but, on the other hand, they cannot not do so on account of
the danger of a rise in social tension in the territory.22 What was being said here?
The central government was trying to keep as much revenue as possible owing in
to the centre. To a great extent, it did so by transferring obligations like welfare benets
to lower level authorities without a corresponding provision of funds. This pushed
regional budgets into the red even in this comparatively prosperous region. But the
cause of the dilemma was not pressure from the centre on its own. It was the fact
that there was a simultaneous, countervailing pressure from the local population,
which included, of course, the workers who kept the crucial oil and gas industries
running.
If the danger of a rise in social tension could have such an effect on lites, then
what happens when there is an actual rise in social tension? In what became known
the railway war of 1998, miners who had not been paid for many months set up
railway blockades all over Russia and were joined by other public sector workers
with similar grievances. Political and economic lites at all levels were reported to be
reacting rather sharply as soon as the action began to bite. Enterprise directors sent
picked workers to plead with the blockades for raw materials and fuel. First deputy
prime ministers were packed off to major trouble spots with crisis funds. Central and
regional lites blamed each other for money which had disappeared on its way to
the coalelds. The extensive media coverage of the conict, the heated denunciations
of the miners by ministers and prominent journalists, not to speak of the parallels
drawn with the British miners strike of 19845, indicated how serious an issue it was.
There were even signs that some of the blockaders were beginning to identify themselves
with enemies of the state such as Chechen ghters, and an attempt by leading
Communist MPs to foment a wave of anti-semitic attacks after the blockades had
been lifted fell at.
Those who are in thrall to lite theory dismiss such struggles as being the result of
manipulation by one lite against another. Throughout the autumn and winter of
2000, thousands of parents and children in the Urals city of Ekaterinburg stopped
general Latyshev, President Putins new regional representative, from occupying his
designated residence a building traditionally used by 4,000 children for a huge range
of out-of-school activities. In the end, Latyshev had to go elsewhere. A leading
information service (the Russian Regional Report) concluded that the whole thing was
just about the local governor, Eduard Rossel, giving his new superior a public relations
black eye. Of course, ordinary people are prone to manipulation by lites. But this
does not mean that such struggles are not in their own interests. One man taking a
building away from 4,000 children was not in the interest of the people of Ekaterinburg

22

Kriukov, Sevastianova & Shmat 1995, p. 219.

252 Pete Glatter

in 2000, just as being six months behind on pay was not in the interest of the rail
warriors in 1998, and cuts in welfare benets were not in the interests of claimants
in 1995.
One of the best pieces of evidence against the litist view comes right from the top.
The latest volume of Boris Yeltsins memoirs records the shudders with which he and
his cronies recall the railway war. Some of them wanted to take a hard line but the
strength to do so was lacking. The mood in the corridors of power bordered on panic,
and the head of the federal security service (the re-branded KGB) had to be replaced
by the more reliable Vladimir Putin, a crucial step on his road to the presidency. But
Putin did not make much difference at the time. One deputy prime minister, Yeltsin
recalls, raced from one coal district to another, signing agreements almost without
looking at them anything to come to terms. The rgime muddled through, largely
because the miners and their supporters were politically unclear about how to take
advantage of the governments weakness. The rouble crash in the summer of 1998
added to their difculties and hardships. Yet the memory remained to haunt the most
powerful, most lite people in the country. Anatolii Chubais, the architect of privatisation
and currently the head of the electricity monopoly, is one of those people. Two years
later in the summer of 2000, a worried Chubais warned Yeltsin about the danger of
replacing the then prime minister with Putin the fourth such change in little more
than two years. What worried Chubais was not personal ability or the detail of lite
arrangements, it was that ordinary people might not stand for it. Remember the
railway wars?, he said, This is something you want to face only once.23
One of the appeals of litism is that it invites complicity. I remember some time in
the late 1970s seeing a couple of National Front members trying to persuade some
young men from West Indian backgrounds that they were not against all black people,
just Asians. This kind of thing was so common that a militant bus workers paper I
was involved in printed an anti-Nazi poem called something like Its not you its
the other bloke over there. Nazism is an extreme example, admittedly. There are less
extreme, more sophisticated variants. At least one of them has a direct bearing on the
z eks answer to the question Where do the Balkans
subject of this review. Slavoj Zi
begin? is simple: the Balkans are always somewhere else, a little bit more towards
the southeast . . . But his exploration of this simple answer in terms of specic national
perceptions in Europe leaves none of these identities unquestioned:
For the Serbs, they begin down there, in Kosovo or in Bosnia, and they
defend the Christian civilization against this Europes Other; for the Croats,
they begin in orthodox, despotic and Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia
safeguards Western democratic values; for Slovenes they begin in Croatia,

23

Yeltsin 2000, pp. 16970, 3268, 333. Quoted in Haynes 2002, p. 218.

Reviews 253
and we are the last bulwark of the peaceful Mitteleuropa; for many Italians
and Austrians they begin in Slovenia, the Western outpost of the Slavic
hordes; for many Germans, Austria itself, because of its historical links, is
already tainted with Balkan corruption and inefciency; for many North
Germans, Bavaria, with its Catholic provincial air, is not free of a Balkan
contamination; many arrogant Frenchmen associate Germany itself with an
Eastern Balkan brutality entirely foreign to French nesse; and this brings
us to the last link in this chain: to some conservative British opponents of
the European Union, for whom implicitly, at least the whole of continental
Europe functions today as a new version of the Balkan Turkish Empire, with
Brussels as the new Istanbul, a voracious despotic centre which threatens
British freedom and sovereignty . . .24
The litist attraction of the westernising intellectual tradition in Eastern Europe is just
as false as the less subtle blandishments of Nazism. You always run the risk of becoming
someone elses Balkans, someone elses alien, someone elses unproductive capitalist,
someone elses other bloke over there.
Which brings me, nally, to Machiavellis smile. You can see it in the portrait on
the front cover of the Penguin edition of The Prince. Actually, it is more like a faint
smirk, and the lips are tightly pressed together. I have often wondered in recent years
whether Putins team has not been studying Machiavelli, especially his warning that
there is nothing more difcult to handle, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous
to carry through than initiating changes in a states constitution. Certainly, they have
avoided making any formal changes in the constitution at all, despite introducing
some important alterations in Russian federal arrangements and in the composition
of the upper house of parliament. I imagine, too, that few Russians could read this
phrase without thinking of Gorbachevs ill-judged tinkering with a Soviet structure
in which deep cracks had already appeared. Machiavellis warning comes in a passage
extensively quoted by Isaac Deutscher at the beginning of his classic three-volume
biography of Trotsky: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast.25
The gist of the passage is that unarmed prophets who rely on popular support are
doomed since the populace is by nature ckle. Only armed prophets have the means
to urgently arrange matters so that when they no longer believe they can be made
to believe by force.26 I sense the same faint smirk, the same knowing, superior tone
in these words as in the lesser writings of lite studies today.

zek 2000, pp. 34.

Zi
The fact that Deutscher quotes the passage without comment may hold a clue to his own
capitulation to Stalinism.
26
Machiavelli 1999, pp. 19, 20. Not only Putins team: one of the leading Russian companies
specialising in black PR and dirty technology, especially in elections, goes by the name of
Nikkolo M.
24
25

254 Pete Glatter

This tone is singularly absent from Machiavellis dedicatory letter to his real prince,
the Magnicent Lorenzo d Medici. On the contrary, Lorenzo was blessed with
Machiavellis most elegant grovelling. Despite many differences of detail, it is curiously
reminiscent of the style in which modern intellectuals apply for funding. At the letters
climactic conclusion, Machiavelli pictures Lorenzo, on the high peak of his achievement,
letting his glance drop to its foot, where undeservedly, I have to endure the great
and unremitting malice of fortune.27 So, the faint smirk. And the lips pressed tightly
together. If, like Machiavelli, one is a believer in lites as well as a student of them,
then it makes sense to depict them as if they inhabited a lofty region too remote from
the mob to be sullied by it. If not, then the sullying bears the promise of liberation.

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