Wendy Slater, Andrew Wilson - The Legacy of The Soviet Union (2004)

The Legacy of the
Soviet Union
Edited by
Wendy Slater and Andrew Wilson
The Legacy of the Soviet Union
This page intentionally left blank
The Legacy of the
Soviet Union
Edited by
Wendy Slater
Former Lecturer in Contemporary Russian History
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
University College London, UK
and
Andrew Wilson
Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University College London, UK
Editorial Matter and Selection © Wendy Slater and Andrew Wilson 2004
Chapters 1–13 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2004
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The legacy of the Soviet Union / edited by Wendy Slater and
Andrew Wilson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–4039–1786–8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Former Soviet republics. 2. Nationalism – Former Soviet republics.
3. Former Soviet republics – Ethnic relations. 4. Former Soviet republics –
Politics and government. 5. Former Soviet republics – Economic
conditions. I. Slater, Wendy, 1967– II. Wilson, Andrew.
DK293.L444 2004
909⬘.09759180829—dc22 2003064663
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
Contents
List of Contributors vii
Preface and Acknowledgements x
1 Introduction: Soviet Union in Retrospect – Ten Years

After 1991 1
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Part I National Identity 15

2 A Future Russia: A Nation-state or a Multi-national
Federation? 17
Vera Tolz
3 Rival Versions of the East Slavic Idea in Russia,
Ukraine and Belarus 39
Andrew Wilson
4 Separatist States and Post-Soviet Conflicts 61
Dov Lynch
5 Management of Ethnic Relations in Kazakhstan:
Stability without Success 83
Bhavna Dave
Part II The Economy 101

6 Transactions in the US–Russia Relationship:
Representational Gymnastics, Shifting Agency
and Russia’s Decline 103
Janine R. Wedel
7 Blat Lessons: Networks, Institutions, Unwritten Rules 122
Alena Ledeneva
8 Administrative Regions and the Economy 144
Philip Hanson
Part III Politics, Law and Foreign Policy 169

9 Law Reform and Civil Culture 171
W. E. Butler
v
vi Contents
10 Censorship and Restrictions on Freedom of Speech in

Russia: 1986–1991–2001 186
Martin Dewhirst
11 Politics Beyond the Garden Ring: Rethinking the

Post-Soviet Experience 208
Vladimir Gel’man
12 Westernism, Eurasianism and Pragmatism: The Foreign

Policies of the Post-Soviet States, 1991–2001 228
Peter J. S. Duncan
13 Conclusions: Stalin’s Death 50 Years On 254

Wendy Slater
Index 266
List of Contributors
W. E. Butler is Professor of Comparative Law at the University of

London; Director, the Vinogradoff Institute, UCL; M. M. Speranskii
Professor of International and Comparative Law, Moscow Higher School
of Social and Economic Sciences; Foreign Member, Russian Academy of
Natural Sciences, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Russian
Academy of Legal Sciences.
Bhavna Dave is Lecturer in Central Asian Studies, Department of

Political Studies, SOAS. She has written widely on Kazakhstan, and is
currently completing a book on post-Soviet Kazakhstan, to be published
by Harwood Academic Press.
Martin Dewhirst has been on the staff of Glasgow University since 1964.
He lectures on Russian language, literature and the media, and has a special
interest in samizdat and the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet systems of cen-
sorship. He co-edited The Soviet Censorship (1973) and Russian Writing
Today (1977). His most recent publication is an article (with Alla Latynina),
‘Post-Soviet Russian Literature’ in The Routledge Companion to Russian
Literature (2001).
Peter J. S. Duncan is Senior Lecturer in Russian Politics and Society,

SSEES, UCL. Among his books are The Soviet Union and India; The Road to
Post-Communism: Independent Political Movements in the Soviet Union,
1985–1991 (with Geoffrey Hosking and Jonathan Aves, 1992); and
Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (2000).
Sheila Fitzpatrick is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service

Professor in Modern Russian History, University of Chicago. Recent pub-
lications include Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian
Village after Collectivisation (1994); edited with Robert Gellately, Accusatory
Practices. Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989 (1997);
Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the
1930s (2000); In the Shadow of Revolution. Life-Stories of Russian Women
from 1917 to the Second World War (2000).
Vladimir Gel’man is Lecturer in Russian politics at the Faculty of

Political Science and Sociology, European University at St Petersburg. He
has authored or co-authored more than eighty articles; and co-edited
vii
viii List of Contributors
Elections in Russia, 1993–1996 (1999). His recent publications in Russian

include Transformatsiia v Rossii: Politicheskii rezhim i demokraticheskaia
oppozitsiia (1999) and Rossiia Regionov: Transformatsiia politicheskikh
rezhimov (2000).
Philip Hanson is Professor of the Political Economy of Russia and Eastern

Europe at the University of Birmingham (retired), and formerly Director
of that university’s Centre for Russian and East European Studies. He has
published mainly on the Soviet and Russian economies. His most recent
book, co-edited with Michael Bradshaw, is Regional Economic Change in
Russia (2000). Earlier books included From Stagnation to Catastroika (1992);
and Trade and Technology in Soviet–Western Relations (1981).
Alena Ledeneva is Reader in Russian Politics and Society, SSEES, UCL.

Her publications include Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking
and Informal Exchange (1998); Bribery and Blat in Russia (2000); Economic
Crime in Russia (edited with S. Lovell and A. Rogatchevskii, 2000); and How
Russia Really Works (edited with M. Kurkchiyan, 2001).
Dov Lynch is Lecturer in War Studies, King’s College, London, and

Director of a US Institute of Peace project on ‘Eurasian Security and de
facto States’. Research Fellow at EU Institute of Security Studies in 2001.
Recent publications include Russian Peacekeeping Strategies towards the
CIS (2000); co-editor, Energy in the Caspian Region (2001).
Wendy Slater is Lecturer in Contemporary Russian History, SSEES, UCL,

1999–2003; and deputy editor of The Annual Register. She has written
widely on the ideology of Russian nationalism in the late- and post-
Soviet eras, and on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church. She is cur-
rently preparing a book to be called The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II,
planned for publication by Routledge Curzon in 2005.
Vera Tolz is Professor of Contemporary Russian History, Department of
Politics and Contemporary History, University of Salford. Her books
include The USSR’s Emerging Multiparty System (1990); Russian
Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionalism and Politics
(1997); and Russia: Inventing the Nation (2001).
Janine R. Wedel is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at

George Mason University. Winner of the 2001 Grawemeyer Award for
Ideas Improving World Order for the ideas set forth in her latest book,
Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe
(1998, 2001). Publications also include The Private Poland: An
Anthropologist’s Look at Everyday Life (1986); and The Unplanned
List of Contributors ix
Society: Poland Before and After Communism (1992). Wedel is a three-

time Fulbright fellow, and recipient of awards from numerous other
foundations.
Andrew Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies, SSEES, UCL. His
recent publications include The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (2000) and
Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith (1997).
Preface and Acknowledgements
The idea for this book came out of a conference held at the School of
Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College, London
in November 2001, timed to mark the ten years that had then passed
since the fall of the USSR. The aim of the conference was to provide
some pointers as to how academic understanding has developed in the
decade, both in terms of our knowledge of the 15 successor states and
our reassessment of the USSR itself. A subsidiary theme involved the
assumption of studying the post-Soviet space as a whole. Do the 15 states
still have enough in common to justify a comparative perspective? Is
‘post-Soviet’ still a meaningful term, both in terms of a collective legacy
and a decisive influence? If yes, what would have to change for this no
longer to be the case?
The papers included in this volume reflect these themes. They cover a
variety of inter-disciplinary and geographical perspectives, although they
cannot of course claim to cover every aspect that is worthy of study. Sheila
Fitzpatrick sets the scene by examining how Soviet history is now subject
to ‘reconfiguration’. ‘When the Soviet Union collapsed’, Fitzpatrick writes,
‘the Russian Revolution abruptly ceased to be a nation-founding event and
became an episode. Soviet history stopped being an ongoing process
and became finite, bounded not only by a beginning (1917) but also by an
end’. The First World War (1914–17) became more important; different
boundaries – 1945 rather than 1953 – suggested themselves. What was
once ‘mature socialism’ became the ‘end-Soviet’ era; it became possible to
choose to ‘see Brezhnevism (“high Sovietism”?) as the destination point
of Soviet history’. Fitzpatrick ends by speculating about some of the
directions (post) Soviet studies might take in the next decade.
Part I looks at how – and if – the post-Soviet states are reconstructing
their national identities. Vera Tolz argues that the Russians, the suppos-
edly ‘imperial’ nation under the USSR, are in fact most troubled by post-
Soviet identity transformations, given that the Soviet era redeveloped in
a different form the Tsarist habit of confusing Russian ‘nation’ and
‘state’ (and, without explicitly using the latter term, also conflating
‘state’ and ‘empire’). Andrew Wilson addresses the East Slavic idea as one
possible solution for post-Soviet identity problems for the three core
nations of the old USSR (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus), but one that is
still profoundly influenced by the Soviet era; redefining as it does the
x
Preface and Acknowledgements xi
Soviet family of nations at the same time as retaining key aspects of

Soviet mythology. Dov Lynch looks at the legacy of Soviet ethnic micro-
management, arguing that ‘de facto states’ like Abkhazia and the Dnister
Republic must now be considered as realities the international commu-
nity has yet to deal with. Lynch challenges the myths that such conflicts
have only persisted because of third-party interference and are somehow
‘frozen conflicts’ – in fact local situations have continued to develop
since ‘cease fires’ in the early 1990s. Bhavna Dave looks at Kazakhstan as
a prime example of a state that re-embodies the Soviet legacy in differ-
ent forms by combining both the nation-building and multicultural
approaches to rationality issues. The result has been ‘stability without
success’. ‘Although Kazakhstan has managed to steer clear of conflict
along ethnic lines’, Dave assets, ‘the top-down management of ethnic
relations has exacerbated a deep sense of alienation of the citizenry from
the state, bringing about a massive population flight and a steady dete-
rioration of the quality of life and norms governing the public sphere’.
Part II on The Economy considers some of the deep-rooted problems
that may threaten the current trend towards tentative recovery in most
of the former USSR. Janine Wedel looks at the moral hazards ignored by
purveyors of Western assistance, and the missed opportunities for more
constructive engagement. Alena Ledeneva mines the culture of blat
(‘favour’) to see why informal practices and patronage networks still con-
strain the possibilities for long-term economic recovery. Philip Hanson
addresses the proposition that Russia’s economic decline is due to fiscal
federalism and the loss of central control over budgetary flows, but finds
it wanting. A remodelled federation is no barrier to Russia building on its
current recovery. Hanson also examines changing patterns of regional
inequality since independence, and their interaction with political and
ethnic factors, including ‘the intense debate in Russia about “donor” and
“recipient” regions’. ‘Public finances, and their centre–region dimension
in particular, remain problematic’, he concludes, but the Federation is
more cohesive than some more alarmist reports might suggest.
In Part III on Politics, Law and Foreign Policy, William Butler argues for
the supreme importance of legal reform and a genuinely independent
judiciary for Russia’s overall ‘transition’ prospects – and of course those
of the other successor states. Although many elements of the Soviet legal
system have ‘displayed surprisingly robust residual strength’, including
the tendency to ‘over-legislate’, Butler argues, Russia does have alter-
native traditions to build on. ‘For Russian jurists of the present genera-
tion the “rule of law” and the “rule-of-law State” are a rediscovery rather
than an invention.’ Properly interpreted, Butler argues, Russia also has a
xii Preface and Acknowledgements
tradition of civil society (obshchestvennost’). Martin Dewhirst, on the other

hand, stresses the continuities in the culture and practice of censorship. If
anything, in fact, Russian society ‘is less open in 2001 than it was a decade
ago’. Vladimir Gel’man looks at regional politics outside of Moscow’s
‘Garden Ring’. He classifies the various approaches to ‘regionology’ that
have developed since 1991, and examines how ‘the diversity of regional
political processes in Russia helps to test different theories of political
transformations and theories of institutional changes’. Peter Duncan looks
at the foreign policies of all the successor states in comparative perspective,
and examines whether the geopolitical pluralism that emerged after the
USSR can be fitted into a tripartite typology of ‘Westernism, Eurasianism
and Pragmatism’.
Finally, Wendy Slater looks at another anniversary, the commemora-
tion, condemnation and retrospective contemplation provoked in 2003
by the 50 years since Joseph Stalin’s death in March 1953. Only in the
brief periods after the XXII CPSU congress in 1961 and in the years
either side of 1991 was a partial reassessment of Stalin ever possible.
Ambivalence is therefore characteristic of even mainstream assessments
in the media and in history writing. Even the current fashion amongst
younger politicians for dismissing Stalin as just ‘history’ is testament to
the lack of real elucidation.
Thanks are due to the organizers of the original conference. The com-
mittee was led by Geoffrey Hosking, who first raised the idea for such an
event, and included the editors, Peter Duncan and Alena Ledeneva.
Financial support for the conference was very generously provided by
the British Academy and the United Kingdom Foreign and Common-
wealth Office, to whom the organizers once again extend their thanks.
Thanks are also due to all the staff at SSEES, and to Amy Warner, who
provided determined administrative support. Finally, the editors are
grateful to Alison Howson and Guy Edwards at Palgrave, for helping
to guide and smooth the final publication.
Some of the material in Philip Hanson’s chapter was previously
included in a paper entitled ‘Federalism with a Russian Face’ that was
prepared for a Carnegie project to be published as The Dynamics of
Russian Politics: Putin’s Reform of Federal–Regional Relations, Vol. 2, edited
by Peter Reddaway and Robert W. Orttung (Lanham, MD, Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004). The chapter by Vladimir Gel’man includes material
that was published in Beyond the Garden Ring: Dimensions of Russian
Regionalism (Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2002).
ANDREW WILSON
1
Introduction: Soviet Union
in Retrospect – Ten Years
After 1991
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Soviet history looks different today than it looked ten years ago. That is
a truism, of course. We would be surprised, regardless of the time or
occasion, if scholars were dealing with their subject in exactly the same
way as they had done a decade earlier. Scholarly fashions and emphases
change. Answers to new questions are sought, preoccupations of the
present projected back on the past.
But the difference between how Soviet history looks now and how it
looked before 1991 is a more profound one. When the Soviet Union col-
lapsed, Soviet history – the thing, not the writing of it – came to an end.
With that collapse, the Russian Revolution abruptly ceased to be a
nation-founding event and became an episode. Soviet history stopped
being an ongoing process and became finite, bounded not only by a
beginning (1917) but also by an end.
I take as my starting-point in this chapter the premise that Soviet his-
tory will necessarily be reconfigured in our minds in the aftermath and
as a consequence of 1991. This is not a question of new data, though of
course our greater access to information will also inevitably produce
new insights and perspectives. What I have in mind is the reconfigura-
tion brought about by a great change in the world. In 1991, ‘Soviet his-
tory’ suddenly became the period that came before Russia’s ‘post-Soviet’
history. That requires a change in historical thinking something like the
mental shift required of European historians when, as a result of the
Second World War, the ‘postwar’ period starting in 1918 became bounded,
requiring reconceptualization as ‘interwar’.
The subject of this chapter is the reconfiguration of the Soviet past in
the light of the Russian present. That means reconfiguration by Western
1
2 Sheila Fitzpatrick
and Russian scholars, and to some extent also by ordinary Russians.

First, I will discuss memory and how the Soviet period, particularly the
Stalin period, is remembered in Russia in different contexts and by dif-
ferent people. Second, I will explore the question of reconfiguration:
how the framework of our thinking about Soviet history has changed as
a result of 1991. I will conclude with some reflections on the legacy of
the Soviet Union.
Memory
In the early 1990s, some Russians were talking about the 74 years of the
Soviet period as a deviation from the proper path of Russian history, some-
thing better forgotten, an empty space. In Russia that attitude has largely
vanished, but there are sharply divergent ways in which people remember
Soviet times. In addition to individual personal memories, two dominant
narratives of the Soviet past emerged in Russia in the 1990s. The first was
the ‘repression and suffering’ narrative, associated mainly with the Stalin
period: arrests, deportations, Gulag, the whole oppressive sistema. These
stories have been systematically collected and published since perestroika
by groups like Memorial. The second dominant narrative, less likely to be
written down but a staple of conversational exchanges especially among
the older generation, is about the ‘good old days’. This is the nostalgia
story – order, low prices, the nation held in respect in the world.
Memories are often tailored to fit into familiar narratives – reframed,
corrected, smoothed over to eliminate things we would prefer to forget.
Even worse, scientists tell us that after we have recalled and recounted a
memory, the brain then stores it in the narrated form (like a computer
with an edited version of a file) rather than the original. The problems
of memory are compounded when people are remembering discredited
periods of the national past (for example, Germans and Italians remem-
bering the Fascist/Nazi periods after the Second World War), especially
when they are being questioned about these memories by outsiders. In
collecting oral autobiographies of Italian workers in the late 1970s, for
example, Luisa Passerini was struck by the silence of her interviewees
about fascism and the inapplicability to their attitudes of the categories
‘consent’ and ‘dissent’. She found that the more political of the respon-
dents ‘would often skip the period between the wars’, while those with
little interest in politics ‘ignore[d] certain phenomena and processes
considered of great importance by historians’, including clandestine
resistance.1 Interviewing German workers from the Ruhr in the 1980s,
Ulrich Herbert was disconcerted to find that the prewar Nazi period
Soviet Union in Retrospect 3
figured in people’s memories as ‘good, normal times’ (in contrast to the

times of economic depression and civil disorder that preceded them and
the postwar hardship that followed).2
Yet for all the problems of reported memories, historians would
scarcely want to do without them. One can only regret that since 1991
there have been no big oral history projects comparable with the
Harvard Interview Project of the early 1950s or even with the Soviet
Interview Project of the 1980s.3 Nevertheless, there have been a number
of small-scale interview and memoir projects conducted by individual
scholars or small groups, which provide us with fascinating (if some-
times apparently contradictory) insights. Suffering and stoical victim-
hood on ‘the road to Calvary’ are key tropes in most of the repression
and Gulag memoirs published in the 1990s.4 In an oral history of child-
bearing conducted in the early 1990s, David Ransel found that peasant
women of the older generation (born before 1912) were often eager to
relate stories of dekulakization and other miseries, despite the fact that
they were not directly asked about such experiences.5 Catherine
Merridale, investigating attitudes to death a few years later, expected
and elicited a strong ‘repression’ narrative from her respondents, whilst
noting that her respondents were unwilling simply to ‘relate their lives
as tales of suffering’, preferring to talk about survival.6
The survival theme was also prominent in the stories of elderly
women collected by Barbara Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck
in the 1990s; in this case, the editors’ Western feminist perspective,
which entailed a belief that the equality and opportunity officially
claimed for Soviet women was a fraud, ‘encountered incomprehension
and outright resistance’ from respondents.7 Despite the remarkably high
representation in this small sample of women stigmatized in the 1920s
and 1930s for bad social origins, most of the women embraced at least
one major tenet of Soviet ideology, namely ‘that contributing to pro-
duction and working for the public good were of utmost importance’,
and they ‘apparently derived genuine satisfaction from their participa-
tion in public life’.8 Positive attitudes were even more marked in the
responses of elderly men and women interviewed by a Leningrad team
in the late 1990s, who generally remembered their working and every-
day lives in Leningrad in the 1930s with pleasure and even nostalgia.
Although most were recent arrivals from the countryside, they tended to
deal briefly and matter-of-factly with dekulakization and claimed to
have had no or little personal contact with other aspects of terror.9
Clearly many of those who remember the 1930s positively do so
because – like their German counterparts interviewed about the Nazi
period, and the Italians interviewed by Passerini10 – this was the time of
their youth, and youth was the time of greatest happiness. All the same,
as a coherent discourse starts to emerge in post-Soviet Russia about the
‘good old times’ (variously under Brezhnev, Khrushchev, or Stalin, or gen-
erally Soviet), certain themes emerge which, taken together, offer a retro-
spective interpretation of the meaning of ‘Sovietness’: welfare provisions,
guaranteed employment, order on the streets, respect for authority (com-
parative) egalitarianism, a sense of national purpose and national pride, a
spirit of community (including at the workplace – a valued site of friend-
ship and support), respect and financial support for culture and science,
and ‘friendship of nations’ rather than hostility between ethnic groups.
Needless to say, this is not how Western observers of the late Soviet period
tended to describe Soviet society. It is probably not how the same Russians
would have described their society 20 years ago. Is this, then, what
‘Sovietness’ really meant, or is it simply a nostalgic recasting of the past?
Such questions are unanswerable, since the concept has no absolute
meaning that can be divorced from perception. The characterization cited
above is essentially a list of ‘what we lost’ in the passage from Soviet to
post-Soviet life – and no doubt it was partly the losing of these things that
made them recognizable, retrospectively, as once possessed.
Reconfigurations
With respect to historiography, the ‘repression’ theme – always popular

with Western historians – has flourished both in Russia and the West
since 1991; this is where the opening of Soviet archives has produced
the most abundant new data, since by definition the relevant files were
previously secret and inaccessible. The ‘good old days’ theme has been
less well represented historiographically, although there are signs that
this may change as the Soviet welfare state becomes a focus of historical
investigation; and one might also interpret the recent success of ‘Soviet
subjectivity’ studies11 as to some extent nostalgia-driven. However, it is
not my purpose to give a detailed review of recent historiography. I want
to address a broader issue, namely the way in which 1991 has reconfig-
ured the shape of Soviet history.
I began with the statement that we see Soviet history differently now
from the way we saw it before 1991. This is not just a matter of seeing it
more clearly and fully (although that may well be true). What I have in
mind is that our sense of the meaning of the journey is almost inevitably
changed by the fact that, as far as the Soviet period of Russian history is
concerned, the train has now arrived at the terminus. Much historical
writing has always had an implicit teleology or sense of destination:

think of Leonard Schapiro’s Origin of the Communist Autocracy and
E. H. Carr’s Foundations of a Planned Economy,12 for example. But when
real life provides us, dramatically, with a destination, as, say, in the
defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War or the Soviet Union’s
collapse in 1991, even the least teleologically-inclined historian is likely
to react. The existence of an end-date necessarily affects our sense of
periodization. Our sense of relevance is likely to change, too, bringing
adjustments to the relative importance we attach to different historical
events and phenomena. Two particularly striking reconfigurations have
occurred since 1991. The first is a historiographical recovery of the First
World War, coupled with sharply reduced interest in the Bolshevik
Revolution. The second is the repositioning of the Second World War in
Russian/Soviet history, which has important implications for the con-
ceptualization of Stalinism.
First World War and Revolution

For more than 70 years, the Bolshevik (October) Revolution of 1917 had
a special status. In the Soviet Union and for sympathizers throughout
the world, it was the glorious event that founded the first socialist state.
For other socialists, it was the glorious event that should have founded
the first socialist state, but went wrong. For anti-Communists, October
1917 was the fatal Russian misstep that made the whole world vulnera-
ble to revolution and/or Communist takeover. Now, in the wake of
1991, the Revolution’s place in history has not been lost – 1789 is still
around as a milestone, after all, despite the Bourbon restoration in
France in 1815 – but it has been, at least temporarily, significantly
diminished. It is no longer a state-founding event, no longer a focus of
national pride (or international suspicion). The old debates about
whether or not the Revolution had popular support arouse much less
passion once there is no powerful state in the picture whose legitimacy
is tied to them.
Two reconfigurations follow from the downgrading of the Revolution.
The first, perhaps only of minor historiographical interest, is the notion
of a ‘pre-revolutionary’ period. The term ‘pre-revolution’, associated pri-
marily with Leopold Haimson and his school at Columbia in the 1970s,
was used to denote the late imperial period, viewed teleologically as pre-
cursor to 1917. Now, if anything, the teleology is going the other way.
Historians (especially Russians) are inclined to study the late imperial
period in terms of trends pointing not towards revolution, but anywhere
else. Historiographically, the Romanovs are back in fashion and so

(under the label ‘civil society’) are Russian liberals.
The second major reconfiguration is the return of the First World War.
Looking back, it is remarkable how effectively hidden the First World
War was in pre-1991 historiography. The Revolution and Civil War
totally overshadowed it. Soviet historians almost ignored it; Western
historians followed suit. A huge First World War scholarship blossomed
in virtually all other national historiographies (British, French, German,
US), but Russianists paid little attention. Memory was prominent in that
Western historiography, so perhaps Russianists’ lack of involvement was
understandable: we had, almost literally, forgotten about the First World
War. If we dealt, say, with the experience of war as it affected Soviet soci-
ety in the 1920s and 1930s, it was the Civil War that was under discus-
sion. Now all that is in the process of changing,13 which is all to the
good since the subsuming of the First World War in Revolution and Civil
War obviously produced significant distortion of individual and,
indeed, collective experience. We should not, however, expect this dis-
tortion wholly to disappear, as it is by now embedded in the memoir as
well as the historical literature. Generations of Russians in the Soviet
Union learned to tell their life-stories with the Revolution and Civil War,
not the First World War, as a key milestone; émigrés publishing in
Europe and America, though for different (commercial) reasons, also
tended to focus on revolutionary rather than First World War experi-
ences and atrocities. Thus, the partial obscuring of the First World War
in Russian historical memory has become an artefact not just of second-
ary but also of primary sources.
The Second World War and the concept of Stalinism

For more than 40 years, the Second World War held a position of great
importance in Soviet understanding of Soviet history, but not in
Western understanding. For Soviet historians, along with the rest of the
Soviet population, the Second World War was ‘the Great Patriotic War’,
the definitive test of the nation’s strength, a demonstration of popular
heroism and resilience and, finally, a great though costly victory that
vindicated Soviet power in the eyes of the world. In the postwar West,
by contrast, historians of the Soviet period tended to neglect the Second
World War as an object of study.14 There were various reasons for this. In
the first place, the War and the Great Purges, existing in close chrono-
logical proximity but belonging to different historical narratives, were to
some extent competitors for historians’ attention. The Great Purges
were the key episode in what might be called the negative (‘crimes of
Lenin and Stalin’) story of Soviet history, whilst the Second World War
was associated with a more positive ‘Soviet achievements’ narrative that,
with the onset of the Cold War, quickly became suspect in the West. In
the second place, Western historians did not see the Second World War
as a major formative experience because in their big picture of Soviet
history it did not change anything important. The ‘totalitarian’ (or, for
other scholars, ‘Stalinist’)15 regime established before the war continued
essentially unaltered afterwards. The war, lacking any system-changing
significance, was simply an episode.
The idea of Stalinism as a central template for Soviet history (recently
presented under a new guise by Stephan Kotkin)16 is deeply entrenched in
Soviet studies. For scholars working with the totalitarian model in the
postwar period, Stalinism was ‘totalitarianism full-blown’, as opposed to
the half-blown or embryonic versions that preceded it. To be sure, the
émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff proposed a different interpretation
of the relationship of Stalinism to the Bolshevik Revolution in The Great
Retreat,17 and revisionists like Stephen Cohen similarly rejected the notion
of essential continuity between original Bolshevism and Stalinism.18 But
there were many other revisionists of the 1970s and 1980s (for example,
Arch Getty, Roberta Manning, Lynne Viola, Hiroaki Kuromiya and myself)
who shared with the totalitarian school the assumption that Stalinism was
the central problem of Soviet history. Most Western Soviet historians,
whatever their position in our Historikerstreit of those years, understood the
course of Soviet history as, first, movement towards high Stalinism, and
then, after Stalin’s death, movement away from it.
While some scholars’ notions of Stalinism emerge primarily from the
1930s and others from the postwar years, few if any scholars suggested
that there were essential differences between the two periods. Those
whose research expertise was in the postwar period tended to assume
that the same general patterns applied to the 1930s, whilst those with
1930s expertise made a similar assumption about the postwar years. The
paucity of published data on most aspects of the postwar period, together
with the total inaccessibility of postwar archives to Western scholars,
made it extremely difficult to make reliable judgements about change. I
was one of many historians working on the prewar period who assumed
that the postwar period was essentially ‘more of the same’,19 so it came as
quite a surprise when the opening of Soviet archives revealed all sorts of
substantive differences. I remember vividly that as I read my first set of
postwar Central Committee files I felt I had landed in another world
than the one I knew from the 1930s archives.
If the postwar era was another world, that implied that some really
important changes had occurred since the prewar era – in other words,
that the Second World War had had a transformative impact. Looking
back, this may seem almost self-evident: not only would commonsense
suggest it, but virtually all other national historiographies treat the war
in this way. In the Soviet case, however, in addition to the blind spot
associated with the concept of an unchanging Stalinist (totalitarian) sys-
tem, there was also the structural difficulty of accommodating two
apparent watersheds – the war and the end of Stalin’s rule – in such close
proximity. Just as in the past the old consensus on a 1953 watershed
threw 1945 into the shade, so in the future we might expect that a new
consensus on the watershed status of the Second World War will dimin-
ish the significance of 1953 in historians’ eyes.
That new consensus, most passionately proposed in Amir Weiner’s
Making Sense of War,20 already seems to have become established among
historians, particularly the younger generation. For the sizeable cohort of
young scholars in the US currently working on postwar topics, the War is
the conventional starting-point, sometimes with just a nod or two to ori-
gins in the 1930s. So where does that leave Stalinism? My guess is that the
next ten years will see at least a partial deconstruction of the concept. In
the first place, as historians find more and more divergences between the
prewar and postwar periods, ‘Stalinism’ in its current static, reified form
will lose utility. In the second place, the outer edges of the Stalinist period
are likely to blur as historians start discovering (as is already happening)
that reform projects and new processes previously thought to start after
1953 in fact predate Stalin’s death. There may be more radical reconfigu-
rations to come that will perhaps push Stalinism off center stage
altogether. I had an intimation of this recently when a graduate student
discussing possible research topics in Soviet history expressed a preference
for working, not on the messy period of turmoil and upheaval at the
beginning, but on ‘how it all turned out’. Ten years ago, that would
have meant the 1930s, then usually understood as the outcome of
the Revolution, but this student meant something different: for her, the
outcome – when a stable Soviet order emerged – was the 1960s and 1970s.
This is, in fact, a perfectly reasonable way of understanding the story of
Soviet history. Historiographically, however, it would mark a major
departure – perhaps even a new teleology with Brezhnevism (‘high
Sovietism?’) as the destination point of Soviet history.
To return briefly to the Second World War, there is some irony in the
fact that its discovery by Western historians as a key myth of Russia’s
twentieth century has occurred simultaneously with the waning of that

myth among Russians. Victory Day is still celebrated in post-Soviet
Russia; veterans still turn out (if in ever-declining numbers) with their
medals on their chests. All the same, most observers agree that the
‘Great Patriotic War’ is finally retreating from the centre of Russian pop-
ular consciousness, especially the consciousness of the young. This is, of
course, understandable, both for generational reasons and because the
War was the great vindication of the Soviet nation, the beginning of
Soviet superpower status. Now, that nation has ceased to exist and that
status has been lost. The War, consequently, loses significance in popu-
lar memory. In addition, it should be noted that for many years the
Second World War also fulfilled another function, that of instantiating
the familiar Russian story of suffering and survival. Since perestroika,
however, the most popular versions of that story have been set in the
frame of Stalinist repression.
How the Second World War will be configured in the new national his-
tory is a question yet to be answered. Or rather, it is a set of questions,
since Russia is not the Soviet Union’s only successor state, and the new
national history to be written includes histories of the Ukraine,
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the rest, as well as the history of Russia.
Indeed, it is in the non-Russian successor states that new national histo-
ries are sprouting most vigorously in response to an urgent nation-building
need. One of the interesting things to watch about those national histo-
ries is whether they retain the old periodization of Soviet history or gen-
erate new, non-uniform periodizations. If the successor states do
undertake such acts of historiographical de-Sovietization, it seems likely
that one of the ways in which they will differ from each other and the
old Soviet model will be in regard to the Second World War. The new
Ukrainian nation will surely see the Second World War as a milestone in
the national history of suffering and heroism. But in the new Kazakh
national history will the War necessarily feature as a heroic or even a sig-
nificant episode? This is not just an issue for national historians in the
successor states, but for historians in general, for there are substantive
questions here as well as symbolic ones. If the Second World War was a
watershed in the history of twentieth-century Russia and the Ukraine,
was this equally true for Armenia and Uzbekistan? Or, for that matter, for
Buriatiia and the Russian Far East? As the study of regional history devel-
ops, we may learn some surprising things about Russia’s different wars, as
experienced, say, in Kuibyshev (the temporary seat of government),
Siberia and occupied Rostov-on-Don, as well as Moscow and Leningrad.
Legacy
It’s very hard for me as an old person, you know, to refashion

myself [ perestroit’sia], to adapt to the new situation, very hard.
It’s hard to give up your former convictions, your former way of
thinking … (interview with Vera Fleisher, Moscow)21
In the 1930s, celebrating the defeat of the classes hostile to the

Revolution, Stalin noted with regret that there was only one drawback:
while the classes were defeated and annihilated, unfortunately many
members of those former classes remained, with all their old habits of
thoughts, prejudices and resentments.22 The same can be said this time
around. The world has been turned upside down, the structural bases of
Soviet socialism (most of them, at least) have been abolished – and yet
people remain, people who were formerly Soviet citizens, schooled in
Soviet schools, thinking like Homo sovieticus. This is not to deny that
Russians, former Soviet citizens, have made remarkable efforts to reforge
themselves as post-Soviets, or to suggest that this endeavour will not
ultimately succeed. It is a struggle, nevertheless, just as it was in the
1920s, when people had to achieve the opposite transformation, that is,
turn themselves into Soviets. The huge amount of new information and
behavioural patterns that have to be mastered can be gauged by reading
the Russian press of the 1990s, full of new words, foreign borrowings,
and ‘how to …’ advice about unfamiliar processes. The sense of confu-
sion and alienation, that everyone is playing a role in the ‘made for tel-
evision’ play that is the substitute for real life – is vividly conveyed in a
recent Russian bestseller, Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’.23
How does ‘your former way of thinking’ impinge on the present?
What Vera Fleisher probably had in mind were Soviet norms and values
that no longer seem appropriate to the post-Soviet era: for example, a
negative view of profit-taking (‘speculation’) and large income differen-
tials; deference to the opinion of the collective; the assumption that the
state should provide work, cheap housing and welfare services and
maintain low prices on basic consumer goods; acceptance of the state’s
tutelary responsibilities vis-à-vis the citizen, including protection from
deviant thoughts and images; a desire for strong leadership and distaste
for party (factional) politics; belief (on the part of Russians) in the Soviet
civilizing mission towards backward ethnic groups and the Soviet
Union’s brotherly guidance of Eastern Europe.
There are also aspects of the Soviet legacy that relate not so much to
Soviet values as to the mentalités and practices developed in the Soviet era.
Among these were fatalism, the habit of dwelling on suffering and

negative thinking. Nancy Ries relates that ‘when a Russian translation of
Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking began appearing
in kiosks around Moscow, people clamored to buy it and read it’.
Although her informants were impressed by the book, ‘with their jokes
and sighs they let it be known that they thought [their own] negative
thinking was powerful enough to encompass and absorb any instruction
in positive thinking that could be offered’.24 Several anthropological
studies of Russians in the transition period of the early 1990s emphasize
their informants’ sense of collective victimhood.25 This links up
with themes explored by historians of everyday life and popular opinion
in the Stalin period,26 as well as with the stories of suffering recounted in
the Gulag memoirs and oral histories discussed earlier in this chapter.27
So strong is the sense that the gulf between the powerless ‘we’ and the
omnipotent ‘they’ is unbridgeable and that the Russian people have
been collectively victimized that there has been, remarkably, no real dis-
cussion about complicity or responsibility for Stalin-era repression.
Russia has no counterpart to the German agonies about national
responsibility for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. All of the
Russian ‘we’ are victims and only ‘they’ (nameless but for Stalin and a
few henchmen) are perpetrators.28
As for the legacy of unofficial Soviet practices, the most notable are
those involving networks, personalistic connections, patronage and blat
relationships – in short, the phenomena on which Alena Ledeneva has
written so well.29 There is a paradox here, for many of these were regarded
in Soviet times as perezhitki proshlogo – undesirable survivals from the past
undermining the planned economy and corrupting the state bureaucracy.
Now they are perezhitki once again, this time from a Soviet past, undesir-
able because they impede the advance of the money economy, the rule of
law, and impersonal contractual relations in business. One could argue, of
course, that these informal practices should be regarded not as Soviet
at all but rather as traditional Russian. That argument certainly applies to
patronage. But blat – the horizontal network of connections used to
obtain goods and services, conceptualized as friendship-based – was defi-
nitely a phenomenon of the Soviet period, generated and shaped by
Soviet institutional structures as well as by endemic Soviet shortages; and
in general the whole complex of informal practices of the Soviet era was
so interwoven with official Soviet structures (not least the centrally
planned economy) that it should surely be allowed full Soviet citizenship.
The legacy of informal practices is often spoken of in negative terms,
but I would suggest that its contribution in the 1990s might also be
assessed in a positive light. The 15 years starting with Gorbachev’s

perestroika was an era of initiatives from above, aimed at systemic
reform, mainly unsuccessful. As each centrally generated reform effort
foundered and the old institutional structures unravelled, Russians and
Westerners alike announced Russia’s descent into primal chaos. Yet
chaos (in the colloquial sense of total confusion, lack of any order
or pattern) is not what exists in Russia today. The society turned out to
have its own self-organizing capacities (although it lacked a language to
describe and conceptualize them), and the organizational forms that
have emerged are clearly derived from pre-existing informal practices,
the old ‘second economy’ that has now become the first.30
If I were to suggest a research agenda for post-Soviet studies, it would
focus above all on what I have called self-organization:31 the sum of mil-
lions of instinctive, unarticulated adjustments and re-connections,
based partly on principles and habits learned in Soviet times. Far more
effectively than any orders from above, these multiple adjustments have
produced a new kind of social, economic and political order. The process
of self-organization is harder to study than policy or discourse because
of the irrelevance of official pronouncements and the absence of texts.
It may be particularly hard to study in the Russian case because of local
discursive conventions that routinely deny agency (‘we’ are powerless,
‘they’ alone are in control). The research agenda I am recommending
makes the opposite assumption about agency. Throughout the transi-
tion period, millions of people all over Russia have been making inde-
pendent individual (and family) decisions that determine not only their
place in the new order, but also the nature of the new order itself. Our
job now is to understand how they did it and what kind of new order
has emerged.
Notes and references
1. Luisa Passerini, ‘Oral memory of fascism’, in David Forgacs (ed.), Rethinking

Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture, London, 1986, p. 185.
2. Ulrich Herbert, ‘Die guten and die schlechten Zeiten’, in Lutz Niethammer (ed.),
‘Die Jahre weiss man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll’. Faschismus–Erfahrungen
im Ruhr-Gebiet, Berlin and Bonn, 1986, pp. 233–66 (hereafter ‘Die Jahre’), and
idem, ‘Good times, bad times: memories of the Third Reich’, in Richard Bessel
(ed.), Life in the Third Reich, Oxford and New York, 1987, pp. 97–110.
3. Valuable Russian efforts to record and collect individual memories, notably
those of Tsentr Dokumentatsii ‘Narodnyi arkhiv’, in Moscow, have been hin-
dered by lack of funding.
4. See, for example, Simeon Vilensky (ed.), Till My Tale is Told. Women’s
Memoirs of the Gulag, Bloomington, IN, 1999, p. 169 (‘road to Calvary’) and
passim; Inna Shikheeva-Gaister, Semeinaia khronika vremen kul’ta lichnosti

1925–1953, Moscow, 1998.
5. David L. Ransel, Village Mothers. Three Generations of Change in Russia and
Tataria, Bloomington, IN, 2000, p. 5.
6. Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone. Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century
Russia, Harmondsworth, 2001, p. 18. Merridale’s respondents, many of
whom were contacted via Memorial and similar organizations, were familiar
with the conventions of the Soviet repression narrative and tended to balk at
her efforts to provoke more concrete, physical discussion of the deaths result-
ing from repression: ‘We thought you wanted to talk about repression, but all
your questions were about death’, one interviewee objected (p. 209).
7. Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck (eds), A Revolution
of Their Own. Voices of Women in Soviet History, Boulder, CO, 1998, p. 220.
8. Ibid.
9. M. Vitukhnovskaia (ed.), Na korme vremeni. Interv’iu s leningradtsami 1930kh
godov, St Petersburg, 2000. The focus of the interviewers’ interest in this oral
history project was migration from village to town and subsequent adjust-
ment to urban life. On repression, the editors write that although it was not
their specific purpose to investigate this topic, neverthless ‘questions about
arrests, exiles, and purges were given to almost every informant’ and ‘the
answers convince us that the theme of repression was much closer to the
intelligentsia and party and economic élite than to workers’ (p. 14).
10. See, for example, Niethammer (ed.), ‘Die Jahre’; Alison Owings, Frauen.
German Women Recall the Third Reich, New Brunswick, NJ, 1993; see also Luisa
Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory. The Cultural Experience of the Turin
Working Class, trans. Robert Lumley and Jude Bloomfield, Cambridge, 1987.
11. For example, Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist soul: the diary of
Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–9’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions,
London and New York, 2000, pp. 77–116 and Anna Krylova, ‘ “Healers of
Wounded Souls”: the crisis of private life in Soviet literature, 1944–1946’, The
Journal of Modern History, 73(2), 2001, pp. 307–31.
12. Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy. Political Opposition
in the Soviet State: First Phase, 1917–1922, Cambridge, MA, 1955; E. H. Carr,
Foundations of a Planned Economy 1926–1929, 2 vols, London, 1969–71.
Vol. 1 is co-authored with R. W. Davies.
13. See, for example, Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I,
Ithaca, NY, 1995; Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia
During World War I, Bloomington, IN, 1999; Joshua Sanborn, ‘Drafting the
Russian nation: military conscription and the formation of a modern polity in
Tsarist and Soviet Russia, 1905–1925’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University
of Chicago, 1998; Eric Lohr, ‘Enemy alien politics within the Russian Empire
during World War I’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1999.
14. Military and diplomatic historians, comparatively isolated from the main-
stream of Soviet historiography, are the exception to this generalization.
15. The concept of ‘Stalinism’, introduced into historiographical debate by
Robert C. Tucker in the 1970s, was intended to avoid the built-in value judge-
ments and pejorative Nazi–Soviet comparison associated with the totali-
tarian model. In this context, however, the two terms were functional
equivalents.
16. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley, CA,

Los Angeles, CA and London, 1995.
17. Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat. The Growth and Decline of
Communism in Russia, New York, 1946.
18. See his article ‘Bolshevism and Stalinism’, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism.
Essays in Historical Interpretation, New York, 1977. Revisionist historians of
1917 like William Rosenberg, Ronald Suny and Alexander Rabinowitch were
also sympathetic to this view.
19. See, for example, my article ‘Postwar Soviet society: the “Return to
Normalcy”, 1945–1953’, in Susan J. Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on
the Soviet Union, Totowa, NJ, 1985, pp. 129–56.
20. Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War. The Second World War and the Fate of the
Bolshevik Revolution, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2001.
21. Engel and Posadskaya-Vanderbeck (eds), A Revolution of their Own, pp. 87–8.
22. Sovetskaia iustitsiia, 1934, 9, p. 2.
23. Viktor Pelevin, Generation ‘P’, Moscow, 2000.
24. Nancy Ries, Russian Talk. Culture and Conversation during Perestroika, Ithaca,
NY, 1997, pp. 118–19.
25. Ries, Russian Talk; Dale Pesman, Russia and Soul, Ithaca, NY, 2000.
26. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, Oxford and New York, 2000, espe-
cially pp. 218–27. On the ‘we/they’ dichotomy, see Sarah Davies, Popular
Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, Cambridge and New York, 1997, pp. 124–46.
27. See above, pp. 2–4.
28. For an illustration of the difficulty of finding perpetrators or getting away from
the universal ‘victim’ story, see Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost. Russians
Remember Stalin, New York and London, 1994. Note also that one of the most
memorable statements on Russia’s historic victimhood came from none other
than Stalin in his much-quoted speech of 4 February 1931 in which he
described Russian history as characterized ‘by the tremendous beatings she suf-
fered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She
was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers.
She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by British
and French capitalists. She was beaten by Japanese barons. Everyone beat her …’
I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 vols, Moscow, 1949–51, xiii, p. 38.
29. Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours. Blat, Networking and Informal
Exchange, Cambridge and New York, 1998; on blat in the 1990s, see also
Pesman, Russia and Soul, pp. 126–45.
30. For a valuable discussion of the organizational contribution of informal prac-
tices in post-Soviet Russia, see Alena Ledeneva, Unwritten Rules: How Russia
Really Works, London, 2001.
31. The term comes from physics. I owe its application to post-Soviet circumstances
to Michael Danos.
Part I
National Identity
2
A Future Russia: A Nation-state
or a Multi-national Federation?
Vera Tolz
There is a tendency among scholars to understand political developments

in post-communist states within the framework of nation-state building.
Thus, as far as Russia is concerned, the dominant approach among
Western scholars as well as many Russians is to see the disintegration of
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the emergence of the
independent Russian Federation as a new chance for the Russians to build
a nation-state. Some Russians imagine their new state in rather exclusive
ethnic terms, others advocate a civic (rossiiskaia) nation-state of fellow
citizens regardless of their ethnicity.
There is also a tendency both among scholars and political élites to view
the majority of modern states as nation-states, even if they unite peoples
speaking different languages and belonging to different cultures. Thus,
Switzerland, Belgium and Canada, to cite just a few examples, are usually
classified as nation-states. From this perspective, the Russian Federation is
a nation-state in the making. Moreover, some observers argue that it is
‘more culturally homogenous’ than most other states.1 Indeed, 81 per cent
of the Russian Federation population are ethnic Russians, and scholars
argue that a state where a dominant ethnic group constitutes over 80 per
cent of the population is usually stable. Representatives of ethnic minori-
ties in Russia are well versed in the Russian language. Historically,
Russians have been open to foreigners as members of their community, if
the latter are versed in the Russian language; and have acknowledged
these foreigners’ contributions to the development of Russian culture.
Despite the proliferation of xenophobic, extreme ethnic nationalist
groups in post-communist Russia, this feature of Russian identity allows
some Russian and Western scholars to see the creation of a civic rossiiskaia
nation-state, where Russian culture will be the unifying force, as a realistic
goal for which the country should strive.2
17
18 Vera Tolz
This chapter questions the applicability of the concept of the nation-

state to a country uniting more than one ‘more or less institutionally
complete’ historical community, where each community occupies a
given territory and has a distinct language and culture. A country which
unites several such communities cannot be a nation-state (even if one
community is overwhelmingly dominant), but is a multi-national state.3
According to Will Kymlicka, multi-national states are created ‘either
because they incorporated indigenous populations or because they were
formed by a more or less voluntary federation’.4 (A multi-national state is
to be distinguished from a polyethnic nation-state, where the source of
cultural pluralism is immigration.) On this basis, the chapter argues that
the Russian Federation is a multi-national state. It has national (rather
than ethnic) minorities, whose élites are determined to preserve political
self-government – a goal which seems to be supported by many ordinary
people in the ethnic republics.
Second, this chapter argues that ‘nationalizing’ policies, similar to the
ones pursued by the majority of post-Soviet governments in the newly
independent states, are likely to lead to the disintegration of the Russian
Federation. Political élites in post-communist countries regard nation-
building as one of their main goals. The term ‘nationalizing’ is used by
Western scholars to describe government policies aimed at achieving cul-
tural and linguistic homogeneity as well as fostering the political loyalty of
citizens in their states.5 Some scholars, however, argue that the word
‘nationalizing’ should not be applied only to post-communist regimes.6 In
the nineteenth century in particular, West European countries, which are
regarded as civic nation-states, also pursued policies aimed at assimilat-
ing people into a dominant language and culture. Indeed, virtually all
the civic nations have a cultural component to their national identities.
‘What distinguishes “civic” nations from “ethnic” nations is not the
absence of any cultural component to national identity, but rather the
fact that anyone can integrate into the common culture of the former,
regardless of race or colour’.7 In most post-communist countries, espe-
cially those which granted citizenship to all those permanently residing
on their territories at the time of the collapse of the communist regime,
the civic idea of a nation therefore prevails.
Yet the existence of clear parallels should not make us overlook
some significant differences between nation-building processes in post-
communist countries and those in West European civic nation-states.
First, the political discourse in post-communist states is often somewhat
ambiguous about the status of people with an ethnic origin different
from that of the eponymous nationality. More importantly, in Western
A Future Russia 19
Europe, through the creation of the universal state-sponsored education

and armed service, the ruling élites ‘nationalized’ pre-national, often illit-
erate groups. In contrast, post-communist states are trying to ‘national-
ize’ minorities whose identity is connected with literary language and
high culture. The problem with Russian-speaking minorities, for instance,
is exacerbated by their perception that this culture is superior to those of
‘nationalizing’ regimes. Since in the modern world nationalism provides
an answer to questions about people’s dignity and self-worth, it is much
more difficult today to assimilate people with some sense of national
identity than it was in the nineteenth century, when élites in Western
Europe carried out their ‘nationalizing projects’ in societies where peo-
ple’s self-worth was defined by their position in a hierarchical society, not
by their belonging to a national community.8 It remains to be seen how
successful the regimes in the non-Russian newly independent states will
be in integrating Russian-speaking minorities into the emerging nation-
states by applying ‘nationalizing’ policies.
For the Russian Federation to pursue ‘nationalizing’ policies similar to
those of the governments of the non-Russian newly independent states
is not an option. To argue that, since ethnic Russians constitute 81 per cent
of the population and the majority of non-Russians are well versed in the
Russian language, the Russian Federation can easily become a fairly cul-
turally homogenous nation-state is to overlook major historically rein-
forced peculiarities of the country. In fact, despite the high degree of
Russification of the non-Russians, obstacles on the path to Russia becom-
ing a nation-state within the current borders of the Russian Federation
are greater than in the case of the majority of the non-Russian newly
independent states. In the Russian Federation some non-Russian ethnic
groups enjoy political autonomy within self-governing units. There is lit-
tle chance that the élites as well as ordinary people in the autonomies
will agree to relinquish peacefully the rights which the existence of
these autonomies allots to them. If anything, the late perestroika and
post-communist periods have witnessed a broad expansion in the political
powers of these autonomies, whose leaders are busy strengthening what
they view as the ‘national’ identities of residents of these autonomies,
which are separate from and not necessarily subordinate to the pan-
Russian (rossiiskaia) identity. In another newly independent state, where
similar ethnic autonomies were created in the Soviet period – Georgia –
‘nationalizing’ policies resulted in a civil war.
In sum, the aim of the federal government in Russia should be to
manage a multi-national state, rather than to build a nation-state. On
the one hand, Russians have a rich historical experience of dealing with
20 Vera Tolz
ethnic and national diversity. Historically, not all Russian policies

towards non-Russian nationalities can be regarded as imperial. Both
tsarist and Soviet governments never managed or even attempted to
Russify non-Russians consistently. At different times, different policies
were pursued which not only tolerated, but even fostered ethnic and
national diversity in the country.9 But what both tsarist and Soviet
regimes failed to do was to foster a binding patriotism which would con-
vince all different ethnic groups and nationalities that they should live
together in one state.
Arguing that it is difficult to maintain unity in a multi-national society,
Kymlicka has stressed that possible sources of such unity are common
political values, common mythical history and shared identity.10 Through
analysing intellectuals’ discourse about identity and various policies of
federal and republican élites in the Russian Federation, this chapter will
assess to what extent they contribute to promoting the ingredients neces-
sary to keep a multi-national Russia together. In conclusion the chapter
will analyse possible outcomes of these often conflicting policies. It will
also explain why the tendency on the part of Russian intellectual élites
and the federal government to conceptualize the Russian Federation as a
nation-state rather than as a multi-national state is not simply a matter of
terminology, but a phenomenon which might have a negative impact on
the stability and even territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.
The Russian project: views of the federal élites
This section will analyse debates among ethnic Russians on the question
of national identity and the relevant policies of the federal government.
Scholarly literature on nationalism and identity formation emphasizes
the role of élites in determining the membership and other parameters
of a national community. Both Russian intellectuals and politicians are
clearly conscious of their role in the formation of a compound identity
in post-communist Russia.
Conflicting visions of Russia

The question of Russian national identity was at the top of the agenda
of many intellectuals and politicians in the 1990s. In the early 1990s,
some participants in the debate on Russian identity stuck to the idea of
‘Russia’ as inseparable from the empire, imagined the just borders of
Russia as roughly coinciding with those of the USSR and argued that all
Soviet citizens belonged to a single ‘unique civilization’. However, by
A Future Russia 21
late 1992 or early 1993, traditional imperialism began to decline.

Instead, various new conceptions of ‘Russia’ with different memberships
and different ‘just’ state borders were articulated. One can adopt differ-
ent approaches to classifying these concepts. But for the purpose of this
chapter, I will divide these concepts according to whether they focus on
the ethnic Russian component or emphasize the multi-cultural nature of
Russia. The emphasis on the ethnic Russian component predominates
in the visions of Russia as the East Slavic union, a state of Russian speak-
ers and in various racial concepts of Russianness. The multi-cultural
nature of the new Russia is emphasized in the concept of a civic
rossiiskaia nation and in non-imperial Eurasianism.
The visions of Russia as the East Slavic Union and as a state of Russian
speakers focus on ‘ethnic’ elements of statehood – the cultural similarity
and alleged common historical origins of East Slavs in the medieval state
of Kiev Rus´ in the case of the former and language as the main marker of
identity in the case of the latter. In both cases, Orthodox Christianity is
also seen as a unifying force in the community. There are major problems
with both concepts. First, they are irredentist, as their proponents
make territorial claims on Ukraine, Belarus and those newly independent
states which have sizeable Russian-speaking minorities. The most
extreme representatives of these views deny that Ukrainians and
Belarusians have an identity separate from the Russians. Second, by
focusing on ‘ethnic’ Russian ingredients of nationhood – the Russian lan-
guage, Slavic descent and the Russian Orthodox Church – they ignore the
presence of non-Slavic, non-Christian peoples in the Russian Federation.
The majority of those who claim Ukraine and Belarus and parts of other
newly independent states do not necessarily seek independence for non-
Russian ethnic autonomies of the Federation and do not advocate dis-
criminatory measures against non-Slavs and non-Christians.
However, some people do. These are representatives of extremist
organizations of Russian nationalists which began to proliferate in the
late 1980s. Such groups as Nikolai Barkashov’s Russian National Unity,
Nikolai Bondarik’s Russian Party, Nikolai Lysenko’s National Republican
Party to name just the best known groups portray non-Russians, particu-
larly people from the Caucasus (as well as the Jews) as traditional enemies
of the Russian nation, which is defined in purely exclusive terms by
descent. Consistent with his views, Lysenko has argued that the new
Russia should let non-Russian ethnic autonomies of the Russian
Federation become independent. All these organizations propose dis-
criminatory laws against non-Slavs if they remain in Russia, and a ban on
mixed marriages.
22 Vera Tolz
Similarly, there is no unity among those intellectuals who treat

seriously Russia’s multi-ethnic nature. In the late 1980s, leading ethnog-
rapher Valerii Tishkov began to promote the idea of a civic nation as a
community of citizens regardless of their ethnic origins and united by
loyalty to political institutions and the Russian constitution. Tishkov’s
concept of Rossiia is often quoted as the most viable path for Russia.11
Tishkov believes that this community can be forged by the efforts of
politicians and intellectuals. He has identified the élites of Russia’s ethnic
autonomies as creating the main obstacles to the emergence of a civic
community within the borders of the state, as their policies and propa-
ganda reinforce the traditional Soviet view of a nation as a primordial
ethnic community with an exclusive right to a particular territory.
Tishkov therefore supports the introduction of extra-territorial ethno-
cultural autonomy as a framework to protect cultural diversity in the
Russian Federation.12 In his analysis of nation-building, Tishkov adopts a
post-modernist approach in its extreme form. He denies links between
ethnic groups and communities which are defined as modern nations.
He views ‘nations’ as ‘exclusivist’ projects driven by the élites or ‘armed
sects’, who aim to ‘usurp the state’ (its power and resources), while pre-
tending ‘to speak on behalf of their people’.13 For Tishkov, there is little
reality and stability behind cultural and linguistic bonds between ordi-
nary people, as people’s identities are always ‘multiple, situational and
fluid’.14 Thus, ‘[t]here are no other arguments for a nation but a chosen
project and its followers’.15 As there are no real nations in the world, the
maintenance of the territorial integrity of existing states is usually in the
best interest of the majority of people.
It can be questioned to what extent Tishkov’s model allows one to
estimate realistically the strength and weakness of exclusive ethnic
nationalism among non-Russians in the Russian Federation. Tishkov’s
model denies the importance of a sense among ethnic (national)
minorities of being different from others, for instance, from the domi-
nant nationality. However, the strength of ethnic nationalism in post-
communist Eastern and Central Europe has made some scholars stress
the limitations of a post-modernist approach to nationalism. In the
words of Kymlicka:
[R]ecent history suggests that to some extent national identities must

be taken as givens. The character of a national identity can change
dramatically … But the identity itself – the sense of being a distinct
national culture – is much more stable […] If anything, attempts to
subordinate these separate identities to a common identity have
A Future Russia 23
backfired, since they are perceived by minorities as threats to their

very existence.16
A final approach, which takes into account Russia’s multi-ethnic/

multi-national nature is Eurasianism. It is not always acknowledged by
students of Russia that the term has at least three different meanings in
contemporary political and intellectual discourse.17 These three different
versions can be called messianic Eurasianism, Eurasianism as a foreign
policy orientation and Eurasianism as an approach to managing inter-
ethnic relations in the Russian Federation.
The original term Eurasianism was coined by the intellectual move-
ment of the 1920s whose members viewed the territory of the Russian
Empire as a unique civilization where a new national community of
Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian, Finno-Ugric and Mongol peoples with a com-
mon culture had been formed. The version of Eurasianism that became
fashionable among intellectuals in the late 1980s reiterated some of the
views of the original Eurasians with the initial aim of defending the terri-
torial integrity of the Soviet Union and later of justifying the support for
its revival. This Eurasianism was imperialist and its adherents did not
regard the Russian Federation as a legitimate political entity. Today, this
version of Eurasianism continues to be propagated by the Moscow-based
movement Eurasia, headed by Aleksandr Dugin. He and his followers
argue that Eurasia (within the borders of, at least, the former USSR) is a
separate and self-contained civilization under ‘the wing of the Russian
nation’. For Dugin, Eurasia ‘stands irreconcilably in opposition to the
Atlantic world’, that is, particularly the USA. In an article in Krasnaia
zvezda on 29 May 2001, Dugin claimed that Eurasianism was on the way
to becoming a common ideology of the entire political leadership in the
country.
If Eurasianism in Dugin’s aggressively imperialist and anti-Western ver-
sion were indeed to become an official ideology of the Russian political
establishment, this would be a very worrying development. However, this
does not seem to be the case, despite the fact that Dugin clearly has some
links with representatives of security services and other federal institu-
tions.18 More often, the term Eurasianism is used by Russian intellectuals
and politicians in meanings which are much less messianic and which are
markedly different from the original vision of the conservative Eurasianists
of the 1920s. It was already in the early 1990s that President El’tsin’s for-
eign policy advisor Sergei Stankevich started to use the word Eurasianism
to describe Russia’s particular foreign policy orientation. Arguing against
what he viewed as the then foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev’s sole focus on
24 Vera Tolz
improving Russia’s relations with the USA, Stankevich stressed that

Russia’s national interests were also connected with Asia. Rather than talk-
ing about Russia’s special civilising mission, Stankevich presented his posi-
tion as purely pragmatic. The use of the term Eurasianism to define Russia’s
foreign policy orientation has become particularly popular in the late
1990s. According to this view, as the countries of the Asian-Pacific rim
increasingly play a key role in the world economy, it makes sense for Russia
to use its geographical location to its own advantage.19
Similarly the term Eurasianism is often used in Russian intellectual
discourse to describe the political, religious and social interaction of eth-
nic Russians and non-Russians in the Russian Federation.20 As will be
shown later, it is in the latter meaning that the word Eurasianism has
been used by the majority of Russian and non-Russian politicians since
the late 1990s.
The federal government and identity formation

A similar disagreement in the thinking about Russian or rossiiskaia identity
exists at the level of federal and regional Russian governments with
inevitable policy implications. First, particularly until 1999, there were
major differences over the question of what is Russia between representa-
tives of the executive and legislative branches of government. In addition,
policies related to identity formation pursued by politicians from the exec-
utive branch, including the presidents, have been highly inconsistent.
Between the autumn of 1991 and late 1992, Boris El’tsin’s government
demonstrated unequivocally its commitment to de-ethnicized state-
building and to strengthening the civic identity of all citizens of the
Russian Federation regardless of their ethnicity. The Russian citizenship
law of November 1991 did not refer to ethnic attributes. Thus only resi-
dence within the borders of the Russian Federation and, initially, USSR
citizenship, determined whether a person could obtain citizenship of
the Russian Federation. The law did not require knowledge of the
Russian language as a condition for citizenship. All other newly inde-
pendent states of the former USSR incorporated language requirements
into their citizenship laws. The 1993 Russian constitution described the
federation as the community of all citizens regardless of their ethnicity.
Yet, since 1992, some traditional views on what Russia was and who the
Russians were began to influence government rhetoric and policies.
Thus the position that Russia should defend all Russian speakers in the
territory of the defunct USSR reflected the view that Russian identity was
primarily characterized by language. This approach strongly influenced
A Future Russia 25
government policies from late 1992 to 1995. The idea that Russians are
an inseparable part of the East Slavic community reinforced the decision
of the Russian government to enter into a Union with Belarus, despite
the negative economic implications of this move. This approach also
delayed the signing of a bi-lateral treaty on friendship and co-operation
with Ukraine until May 1997. The Russian government’s insistence
throughout the 1990s that Russia was entitled to play a special role on
the territory of the USSR, which constituted its natural sphere of inter-
est, reflected the view that Russian identity was inseparable from Union
identity.21 As for the Russian State Duma, until 1999 it was dominated
by opposition forces – the communists and the Liberal Democratic Party
of Vladimir Zhirinovskii. Both groups argued that Russian identity
was closely connected with the Union, whose recreation they desired.
As their programme minimum, the communists and the nationalists
viewed the incorporation of the areas populated by the Russian speakers
in the ‘near abroad’ into greater Russia and the recreation of an East
Slavic Union, hence the Duma’s resolutions declaring the Belovezh’e
accord (which created the CIS) null and void (1996) and a series of reso-
lutions questioning the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Neither the com-
munists nor Zhirinovskii’s followers supported the idea of a civic
community within the borders of the Russian Federation.
At the same time, El’tsin’s government never abandoned its attempts
to pursue consolidation within the borders of the Russian Federation by
forging a compound identity among all its citizens. But these attempts
were contradictory and inconsistent. This can be demonstrated by look-
ing at the officially sanctioned search for a new ‘Russian idea’ and at
El’tsin’s 1996 decree on nationalities’ policies. It was in the aftermath of
El’tsin’s victory in the 1996 presidential elections that, in July 1996 in
his address to the people, El’tsin urged society to search for a new
‘Russian national idea’. This call came in response to the criticism of his
government on the part of people like Tishkov for not doing enough to
unite society within the borders of the Russian Federation by promoting
common symbols and values with which all citizens of the country could
identify. (Although Tishkov lost his post as head of the State Committee
on Nationalities in October 1992, he continued to advise El’tsin’s
government.) Rossiiskaia gazeta was chosen to publicize the results of the
search.22 The newspaper described the endeavour as a contest for an idea
for pan-national unification. Yet, maybe unconsciously, the appeal was
formulated in such a way that it found a resonance primarily, if not
exclusively, among ethnic Russians. First, by calling the idea russkaia
rather than rossiiskaia, the organizers of the contest introduced an ethnic
26 Vera Tolz
Russian element. Second, the announcement of the contest was illustrated

by quotes exclusively from Russian intellectuals, some actually Russian
ethnic nationalists as well as by the picture of Russian nationalist painter
Il’ya Glazunov, ‘Eternal Russia’. The symbolism of this picture has mean-
ing only for ethnic Russians. Subsequent material, published in Rossiiskaia
gazeta, also tended to represent the ethnic Russian point of view. In line
with nineteenth-century historiography, Russia was presented as ‘the
shield protecting Europe from Asia’. A letter by Gurii Sudakov, which was
awarded a prize, was strongly influenced by the ideas of the nineteenth-
century Slavophiles. It discussed Russia’s uniqueness in comparison with
Europe and presented Orthodoxy as a symbol of Russianness.23 The latter,
in fact is in line with the government policies, which since the second half
of the 1990s have been increasingly supportive of the Moscow Patriarchate
in its attempts to attain a privileged position compared to other religious
denominations.24
The contest for a new national idea provoked considerable criticism
among Russian liberals, who saw in it an attempt to introduce a new
state ideology. Yet the critics overlooked arguably a more seriously neg-
ative aspect of the endeavour. By promoting ethnic Russian symbols,
this contest not only did not draw in, but also could only alienate non-
Slavs and non-Orthodox citizens of the country. Indeed, residents in the
Muslim republics of the Russian Federation, for instance, complained
about the ‘Orthodoxization’ (pravoslavizatsiia) of the Russian media at
the federal level.25
More sensitive to the presence of non-Russian minorities was El’tsin’s
decree of 16 June 1996 which promoted the state’s new nationalities’
concept. Using the word Eurasianism to indicate the peaceful coexis-
tence of equal nationalities within the borders of the Russian Federation,
the decree defined as a key goal of the state’s nationalities policy ‘the
maintenance and further development of national distinctiveness and
the traditions of interaction between the Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian,
Finno-Ugric, Mongol and other peoples of Russia in the framework of the
Eurasian national-cultural space’. Thus the decree promoted the idea of
co-operation between all nationalities of the Russian Federation towards
coexistence in one country. Eurasianism as the basis of Russia’s national-
ities policies is also promoted by some leaders of ethnic republics.26
In order to strengthen the unity of the Russian Federation, the decree
tried to diversify federal arrangements by recognizing ‘multiple forms of
national self-determination’. National cultural autonomy not tied to ter-
ritorial autonomy was to be promoted, thereby offering a possibility
for cultural self-determination to those ethnic minorities ‘who either
A Future Russia 27
do not possess their own administrative homeland or live outside the

ethnorepublic claimed by their titular co-nationals’.27 Instead of having
their ethnicity registered under the rubric of nationality, as was the case
in Soviet passports, ‘each citizen of the Russian Federation would declare
his or her national affiliation in an electoral register, and national
groups would then be represented in a second chamber of parliament
that should take responsibility for matters such as language education in
schools’.28 Thus, the decree was informed by the fact that in essence the
Russian Federation was multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. It also looked
for ways of representing the interests of all major nationalities at the
state level, while downplaying the role of ethnic territorial autonomy
(something which many observers regard as potentially threatening to a
country’s territorial integrity) as the only avenue for dealing with
nationalities’ demands for representation.
Yet this decree had its weaknesses as well. First, it did not have bind-
ing force, and after the adoption of the decree Moscow’s nationalities’
policies continued to be formulated on an ad hoc basis against the back-
ground of an increasingly weakened federal center. Moreover, the decree
was ambiguous about the status of ethnic Russians in the Federation. On
the one hand, the decree proclaimed the equality of all nationalities. At
the same time, it claimed that ‘thanks to the unifying role of the Russian
(russkie) people’ the unity of the Russian Federation had been main-
tained. Second, as Graham Smith rightly noted, ‘Eurasianism leaves
fluid the sovereign boundedness of Russia, which might again include
the full extent of the Russian historical community, including Ukraine,
Northern Kazakhstan and North-east Estonia’.29 Indeed, while ostensi-
bly dealing only with the nationalities policies of the Russian
Federation, the decree nevertheless linked these domestic policies with
Russia’s foreign policy. It claimed that Russia should defend the rights
and interests of citizens outside the federation and provide help for
compatriots in preserving and developing the language, culture, tradi-
tions and links with Russia.
Not surprisingly, the disarray in the thinking and policies of the El’tsin
era was reflected in the political symbolism of the state. The introduction
of old Russian imperial symbols – the two-headed eagle as the national
herald, the white-blue-red flag and the music from Mikhail Glinka’s first
Russian national opera, ‘A Life for the Tsar’ – by presidential decrees in
the early 1990s was opposed by a State Duma dominated by the opposi-
tion. (In January 1998, deputies overwhelmingly voted against the
national anthem and the flag proposed by El’tsin.) In particular the com-
munists in the Duma were in favour of returning to the Soviet national
28 Vera Tolz
anthem and the red flag. At the same time, even the communists were in
favour of seeing the Orthodox Church as a symbol of Russianness. State
awards also reflect the conflict between pre-revolutionary Russian and
Soviet symbolism. The order of the Apostle Andrew the First Called,
introduced by Peter the Great in 1699, coexisted with the title of the
Hero of Russia (formerly the Hero of the USSR).
The new/old symbolism was not only transitional and contradictory.
It was also insensitive towards non-Russian nationalities. Imperial or
ethnic Russian symbols could hardly have a resonance for them. Thus at
a round-table discussion on the new ideology for the Russian Federation,
organized by Svobodnaia mysl’ in 1999, a journalist from Tatarstan,
T. S. Saidbaev, complained about the insensitivity of the federal govern-
ment in its choice of symbols. He noted that [Muslim] Dagestanis who
fought on the Russian side against the Chechens were awarded medals
decorated with Russian Orthodox crosses.30
With the accession of Vladimir Putin to power, the leadership has con-
tinued to address the questions of forging a compound identity and of the
consolidation of society. It is possible to argue that Putin’s approach to
this issue has been more consistent, if not less controversial, than El’tsin’s.
As Putin is not held responsible by the population for the demise of the
USSR, he does not feel under pressure to promote CIS integration or the
East Slavic union to the same extent as El’tsin. Putin’s focus is thus clearly
on the consolidation of the community within the borders of the Russian
Federation. Soon after his election as president, Putin published a pro-
grammatic article entitled ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millenium’, in which
he warned that, as had been the case after October 1917, so in the 1990s
Russian society was in a state of schism (raskol). It was essential to over-
come this raskol by making people united around one common rossiiskaia
[sic] idea.31
There are three main areas in which Putin’s policies will have a partic-
ular impact on the formation of national identities of the peoples of
Russia. These are the adoption of the new state symbols and of a new cit-
izenship law as well as the president’s regional reforms. In the first area,
Putin seems to have achieved an important breakthrough by offering a
fairly sophisticated compromise between Russia’s two different pasts
(pre-revolutionary and Soviet) and the present. On the one hand, a
major concession was made to those who wanted to see the rehabilita-
tion of some important symbols of the Soviet era. Sergei Mikhalkov, the
author of the text of the Soviet anthem, was asked to write new words,
while the Soviet music was restored. Putin also suggested that the Soviet
red flag become the official flag of the Russian Armed Forces. Although
A Future Russia 29
the return to Soviet music in the anthem provoked a wave of criticism

among liberal intellectuals, arguably the Soviet period can offer more
examples of a ‘usable past’ necessary for the consolidation of a common
identity from the point of view of non-Russian minorities than can pre-
revolutionary, imperial history. The latter is much more unequivocally
rejected by the élites in non-Russian autonomies than many parts of
Soviet history. On the other hand, Putin made a gesture towards those
who wanted to stress ties between contemporary and pre-revolutionary
Russia. The tricolour was finally accepted as Russia’s state flag as was the
double-headed eagle as the new national emblem. The Russian parlia-
ment accepted the new state symbols in December 2000, thus marking
an important stage in the legitimisation of the new Russian state.
Another important development in the sphere of nation-building
within the borders of the Russian Federation is a new citizenship law,
which was endorsed by Putin and approved by the Duma in April 2002.
The law does not give any privileges to former Soviet citizens outside
Russia in obtaining Russian citizenship, as had been the case in the 1991
law. Commenting on the new law, Oleg Kutafin, the chairman of the
Presidential Commission on Citizenship, argued that the new legislation
was aimed at ‘finally stabilizing the situation inside the country’. He
stressed that the hitherto loosely used word compatriot (sootechestvennik)
should not be applied to any Russian speaker in the ‘near abroad’ but
only to the citizens of Russia who live outside its borders.32 The new law
is thus aimed against the influential perception of the Russian nation as
a community of Russian speakers, regardless of their current citizenship.
A drive for consolidation also informed one of Putin’s most significant
reforms – the restructuring of the relationship between the centre and
the periphery. The creation of seven federal districts overarching the
ethnic divisions in the federation, with appointed plenipotentiaries
instructed to ensure the conformity of regional and republican laws to
the federal constitution, was aimed at reversing a growing trend towards
autarchy in the Russian republics and regions.33 In June 2000, the fed-
eral Constitutional Court issued a ruling on the violation of the federal
law by the constitutions of six republics. Most of the violations were in
areas relating to the question of identity formation. For instance, some
constitutions stipulated the republics’ right to award citizenship outside
the framework established by federal legislation and included provisions
for secession from the Russian Federation, which the federal constitu-
tion does not allow.
By the end of 2000, Putin’s government also reached a compromise
with the republican élites over the introduction of a new all-Russian
30 Vera Tolz
(rossiiskii) passport. Overcoming the resistance of the leadership of

Tatarstan and Bashkortostan who had lobbied for the introduction of
special republican passports, the federal and republican authorities
agreed that residents of all republics would receive all-Russian passports,
together with an insert page in the language of a republic’s titular
nationality. In another compromise, entry no. 5 on ethnicity was abol-
ished in the passports but retained in birth certificates.
If the unity of the Russian Federation is to be maintained there is a
clear need to bring republican constitutions in line with federal law and
to eliminate from them provisions which are appropriate for independ-
ent states rather than administrative units of the federation. At the same
time, while demanding the revision of republican legislation, Putin has
not unleashed a similar ‘war’ against policies of regional governors
which, in violation of federal laws, promote inter-ethnic strife in the
provinces. Particularly after the beginning of the war in Chechnia in
1994, a number of governors have been pursuing policies which openly
discriminate against people from the Caucasus, even if they are citizens
of the Russian Federation.34 If anything, the anti-Caucasian, and by
implication anti-Muslim, rhetoric among federal and regional officials
as well as in the federal media increased further with Putin’s accession to
power and with the renewal of military operations in Chechnia. Putin
himself has portrayed Islam as a force threatening Russia and indeed the
entire world.35
Non-Russian project: the position of the

élites in ethnic autonomies
The upsurge of ethnic nationalism in Russia’s ethnic autonomies in the

late 1980s and the early 1990s brought about speculation that the
Russian Federation could, like the USSR, disintegrate along ethnic lines.
In this period, movements advocating the separation of the republics
from Russia were proliferating. More importantly, the republican élites
considerably broadened their political and economic rights, facilitated
the adoption of constitutions describing republics as sovereign states
and introduced laws aimed at fostering the language and culture of titu-
lar nationalities. Newly introduced state symbols of the republics were
usually meaningful only to titular nationalities, and, at times, pointed
to the latter’s struggle against the Russian rule.
By the mid-1990s the fears of disintegration subsided, with analysts
emphasizing the structural differences rather than similarities between the
USSR and the Russian Federation. Indeed, at present, politically significant
separatist movements exist only in Chechnia and Dagestan.36 In other
A Future Russia 31
republics, there are either no sizeable ethnic secessionist movements or,

even if they do exist as in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, they are not repre-
sented in republican legislative and executive institutions. Top political
leaders in these republics began to state their commitment to keeping their
units in the Russian Federation.
But in the later part of the 1990s, particularly after the collapse of the
ruble in 1998, a new wave of concern over the unity of the Federation
resurfaced. Thus, after assuming the post of prime minister Evgenii
Primakov stated in September 1998: ‘This issue [of Russia’s territorial unity]
is far from theoretical at the moment, and far from hypothetical […] We
are facing a most serious danger, the most serious danger that our country
will split into separate parts.’37 This was a reaction to the increasing weak-
ness of the central government, accompanied by the increasing independ-
ence of regional and republican élites, often acting in outright defiance of
the Russian constitution.
It has been widely believed by scholars that the achievement of greater
economic powers, particularly greater control over economic resources,
has been the main goal of the republican élites since the late 1980s. And
it is precisely in the economic and legal spheres that Putin has attempted
to reintroduce central control. According to this reading, politicians in
the ethnic autonomies opportunistically employ nationalist rhetoric and
use the threat of separatism in their dealings with Moscow simply as a
tool to achieve greater economic powers at the expense of the central gov-
ernment. However, a closer analysis of the rhetoric employed by the élites
in the ethnic autonomies in justifying their policies to the population of
the republics reveals a different picture. In contrast to the leaders of the
non-Russian newly independent states, who justified laws stimulating
cultural and ethnic revival of titular nationalities on the grounds that
these nationalities’ very existence was threatened in the Soviet period, the
leaders of Russia’s ethnic autonomies justified similar laws by reference to
the economic advantages of political sovereignty and decentralization.
Both political leaders of the newly independent states as well as leaders of
Russia’s ethnic autonomies have been influenced by the Soviet concept of
a nation as an ethnically defined primordial, unchangeable community,
to whom the territory of the state/autonomy exclusively belongs. At the
same time, the élites of the ethnic autonomies did not want to alienate
the Russians, who in 15 out of 21 of the autonomies constituted the
majority of the population, hence their reference to non-ethnic benefits
of decentralization.38
On the one hand, the importance of the very way in which the dis-
course related to the questions of nationalism and identity is structured
should not be underestimated. Graham Smith rightly observed that the
32 Vera Tolz
fact that the élites in the ethnic autonomies preferred to frame political
struggles as centre–periphery rivalries rather than inter-ethnic ones indi-
cated that federalism ‘can act as a counterweight to primordial nation-
alism’.39 In theory, such rhetoric does not promote exclusive ethnic
identities, but reinforces a civic identity of titular and non-titular
nationalities, at least within the borders of the ethnic autonomies, as all
residents are expected to benefit economically from decentralization. At
the same time, the focus on economic issues seems to have made
Moscow overlook the significance of some policies aimed at ethnic
revival adopted in a number of the republics. This is particularly true in
the sphere of education, the control over which Moscow has loosened,
being happy about the republics’ and regions’ willingness to take over a
significant part of the financial burden in this area. Thus, in 1997,
‘because of the lack of funds in the federal budget for textbook publish-
ing’, the Russian Ministry of General and Professional Education offered
the subjects of the federation ‘the right to determine themselves the way
in which their localities will be supplied with textbooks’.40 This move
increased the number of textbooks produced at the republican and
regional levels, thus allowing local élites to strengthen their control over
one of the key spheres of identity formation.
The 1990s witnessed the proliferation of history textbooks and in the
late 1990s, particularly, many such books were published outside
Moscow. Overall, post-communist history textbooks in Russia are even
more Russocentric than their Soviet predecessors. Post-communist text-
books often depict the history of Russia focusing entirely on the activi-
ties of ethnic Russians, whereas Soviet books included obligatory, even if
perfunctory, chapters on the activities of non-Russians in the Russian
Empire/USSR.41 Not surprisingly, there is a counter-trend in the non-
Russian ethnic republics, as some of the textbooks published there go to
the other extreme of completely separating local histories from the his-
tory of the Russian state.42
Public opinion
As far as ethnic Russians are concerned, the dominant identity is a civic

identification with the Russian Federation as a multi-ethnic society.
According to a study, conducted by the Independent Institute of Social
and Nationalities Problems and published in February 1996, 74 per cent
of those polled perceived Russia as a ‘common home’ of all nationalities
of the federation. In turn, in a poll conducted in July 1996 by the All-
Russian Central Institute of Public Opinion (VTsIOM), 54.6 per cent of
A Future Russia 33
the respondents agreed that ‘Russians are all those who live in Russia
and regard themselves as Russians’. Only 11.8 per cent thought that
Russians are only those who are defined as such in the nationalities
entry in internal passports.43
At the same time, there are some attitudes among Russians which can
complicate the stability of Russia as a multi-national community within
the current borders of the Russian Federation. First, the overwhelming
majority of Russians still believe that Russia, Ukraine and Belarus should
constitute one (union) state. Few, however, believe that force should be
employed to achieve this result.44 An even greater implication poten-
tially is a relatively high level of intolerance among Russians towards
some ethnic minorities, and the growing negative attitude towards
Islam. On the one hand, extremist groups which promote racial intoler-
ance consistently fail to receive the support of the electorate. In the 1999
elections, the vote for the only extremist group represented in the Duma,
the LDPR, fell to 5.98 per cent, as compared to 22.9 per cent in the 1993
elections and 11.8 per cent in the 1995 elections. Yet an opinion poll
conducted by Moscow University’s Centre for the Study of Public
Opinion in 1992 revealed that 40 per cent of the respondents had a neg-
ative attitude towards the Chechens.45 At the same time, 17 per cent
thought that Islam ‘was a bad thing’. By the end of the decade, the level
of intolerance increased dramatically. In 1996, 70–80 per cent of
St Petersburg residents endorsed the view that ‘the fewer people from the
Caucasus come to the city, the more safe it will be’;46 in 2000, 80 per cent
subscribed to the negative view of Islam.47 Anti-Islamic protests, particu-
larly against the construction of mosques in predominantly Russian
regions of the Russian Federation, are also on the increase.48
The question of the popular perception of identity among non-
Russians in the Russian Federation is even more complex. On the one
hand, the overwhelming majority of non-Russians who live outside their
ethnic autonomies primarily view themselves as rossiiane and feel
supreme loyalty to the Russian Federation, even though the majority do
not deny their own cultural identities.49 (67 per cent of non-Russians
do not live in their ethnic autonomies.) But, according to Dmitry
Gorenburg, in six out of 21 republics, 50 per cent or above of the titular
nationalities identify exclusively or primarily with their republic (in
Dagestan 50 per cent, in Tatarstan – 52 per cent, in Buriatiia – 53 per cent,
in Sakha-Iakutiia – 59 per cent, in Tuva – 64 per cent and in Chechnia –
87 per cent).50 In a further manifestation of exclusive ethnic nationalism,
in Chechnia, Kalmykiia, Sakha-Iakutiia and Tuva, the majority of the rep-
resentatives of the titular nationality support the proposal of making the
34 Vera Tolz
language of the titular nationality the only state language of the republic.
(At the moment, these republics also have Russian as the second state
language.) In turn, the majority of the representatives of the titular eth-
nic groups in Chechnia, Ingushetiia, Sakha-Iakutiia and Tuva support the
inclusion of the right of secession in the republican constitutions.51
Conclusions
The need to forge a shared identity which would hold Russia together
has been acknowledged by Russian intellectuals and politicians. Despite
the fact that members of the Russian ruling élite, particularly the oppo-
sition, have articulated various irredentist projects, the aim of keeping
the Russian Federation together by fostering a shared identity among all
its citizens has been a priority for both the El’tsin and the Putin govern-
ments. To this end, the federal government has been trying to come up
with a unifying ‘Russian idea’ and to define values which different mem-
bers of society can share. The government also attempted to propagate
various historical achievements of which all citizens of the federation
could feel proud, and this goal made both El’tsin and Putin rehabilitate
parts of the Soviet heritage which were denigrated in the late 1980s and
the early 1990s. Putin has also launched reforms aimed at overcoming
the increasing autarchy of constituent units of the federation in the
legal and economic spheres, albeit with controversial means, to
strengthen the federal centre and to command the respect of citizens.
Yet, as this chapter has shown, the policies of the federal government
have been inconsistent. In particular, even those politicians who claim
commitment towards fostering a unifying civic identity among all citi-
zens of the Russian Federation have, on occasion, shown a lack of
sensitivity and respect towards non-Russian minorities, especially by pro-
moting the idea that Russia is an exclusively Christian Orthodox country
and by anti-Islamic and anti-Caucasian propaganda. It is also possible to
argue that this insensitivity towards the aspirations of non-Russians is
reinforced by the overwhelming conceptualization of post-communist
Russia as a nation-state, with the inevitable domination of the culture of
the national majority, rather than as a multi-national state. It is precisely
this conceptualization that makes Russian élites not question the legiti-
macy of the Russian Orthodox Church campaign for the status of the
state Church and to utilize widely ethnic Russian or imperial symbolism.
Moreover, even Tishkov’s vision of Russia as a civic nation-state rather
than a multi-national state is prone to the danger of underestimating
the fact that ‘whenever and however a national identity is forged, once
A Future Russia 35
established, it becomes immensely difficult, if not impossible (short of

genocide) to eradicate’.52 This is particularly true for the Russian
Federation, where politically institutionalized ethnicity is inherited from
the Soviet period. By conceptualizing the Russian Federation today as a
nation-state, Russian élites may well be repeating the mistake of their
pre-revolutionary and Soviet predecessors who imagined the tsarist
empire and the USSR as a Russian nation-state.
While failing to promote consistently symbols and values that appeal
to all citizens of the Russian Federation regardless of their ethnicity, the
federal government has, to some extent, relinquished control over edu-
cational policy in the federal units. This allows some republican élites to
promote identities among local residents, in which there is no place for
identification with the Russian Federation as a whole. In turn, many
textbooks written by ethnic Russian authors offer interpretations of
Russian history which are insensitive and even, at times, offensive
towards the cultures and traditions of Russia’s non-Russian nationalities.
Kymlicka has pointed out that one of the key unifying forces in a
diverse society is the value attached by its members to the preservation of
this diversity. Citizens must value ‘deep diversity’ in general and also ‘the
particular ethnic groups and national cultures with whom they currently
share the country’.53 This feeling has been present in Russia historically
and this continues to be the case today, as opinion polls indicate. But the
feeling of value of some ethnic groups and national cultures represented
within the borders of the federation, particularly of peoples from the
Caucasus and Muslims in general, is diminishing among Russians in the
post-communist period.54 As for the non-Russians in the Russian
Federation, the ‘national revival’ of the 1990s was undeniably accompa-
nied by some growth of resentment towards the Russians.
At the moment, the disintegration of the Russian Federation is not an
immediate danger. The factors that make the federation less susceptible
to ethnic fragmentation are still at work: the majority of ethnic
republics lack external borders, Russians predominate in the majority of
republics and economically many provinces are heavily reliant on
investment from Moscow. However, the provinces’ response to the 1998
economic crisis and the increasing weakness of the federal centre in the
form of greater political and economic autarchy is a warning that a fur-
ther deterioration of the economic situation and weakening of the state
at the central level could well lead to the disintegration of the Russian
Federation. Evidently, a shared identity and patriotism are not properly
forged and, more importantly, no clear vision exists of how this can be
achieved.
36 Vera Tolz

1. V. A. Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union.
The Mind Aflame, London, 1997, p. 261.
2. Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, London, 1996, p. 203; Tishkov,
Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict, p. 260.
3. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship. A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights,
Oxford, 1995, pp. 12–13.
4. Ibid, p. 13.
5. The term was introduced by Rogers Brubaker, see Brubaker, ‘National minori-
ties, nationalizing states, and external homelands in the new Europe’,
Daedalus, 124(2), 1995, pp. 107–32.
6. See, for instance Taras Kuzio, ‘ “Nationalising States” or nation-building?
A critical review of the theoretical literature and empirical evidence’, Nations
and Nationalism, 7(2), 2001, pp. 135–54 (p. 143).
7. Kymlicka, Multicultural citizenship, p. 24.
8. Charles Taylor, ‘Nationalism and modernity’, in John A. Hall, The State of the
Nation, Cambridge, 2000, p. 207.
9. Theodore Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. Nationalism and
Russification in the Western Frontier, 1863–1914, DeKalb, IL, 1996; and Ronald
G. Suny, The Revenge of the Past. Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the
Soviet Union, Stanford, 1993.
10. Kymlicka, Multicultural citizenship, pp. 184–91.
11. Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, p. 261.
12. V. A. Tishkov, ‘Natsionalizm i national’naia identichnost’,’ Novoe vremia, 7,
1991; and his Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict, pp. ix–x.
13. Valery A. Tishkov, ‘Forget the “nation”: post-nationalist understanding
of nationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(4), 2000, pp. 625–50 (pp. 631
and 636).
14. Ibid, p. 630.
15. Ibid, p. 647.
16. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 184–5.
17. See for instance, the interesting article by Graham Smith, ‘Russia, multicul-
turalism and federal justice’, Europe–Asia Studies, 50(8), 1998, pp. 1393–411
(p. 1401), which, however, does not clearly indicate that El’tsin’s 1996 decree
on nationalities’ policy in the Russian Federation uses the term Eurasianism
in a sense markedly different from how it was originally used by members of
the 1920s movement.
18. Conferences, which discuss the concept of Eurasianism and in whose organ-
ization Dugin often plays a prominent role, are attended by representatives
of the security forces as well as politicians (Vremia MN, 29 June 2001, report-
ing the conference ‘Islamskaia ugroza ili ugroza Islama’, www.vremyamn.ru).
19. Viktor Zotov, ‘I zapad i vostok’, Svobodnaia mysl’, 6, 1998, pp. 67–73 and
D. V. Dragunskii, ‘Etnopoliticheskie protsessy na postsovetskom prostranstve
i rekonstruktsiia severnoi Evrazii’, Polis, 3, 1995, pp. 41–5.
20. L. Vorontsova and Sergei Filatov, ‘Tatarskoe evraziistvo; evroislam plius evro-
pravoslavie’, Druzhba narodov, 8, 1998, pp. 131–5.
21. Vera Tolz, ‘Forging the nation: national identity and nation-building in post-
communist Russia’, Europe–Asia Studies, 50(6), 1998, pp. 993–1022.
A Future Russia 37
22. Rossiiskaia gazeta, 19 July 1996, p. 1.

23. Rossiiskaia gazeta, 17 September 1996, p. 4.
24. S.B. Filatov, ‘Novoe rozhdeniie staroi idei: pravoslavie kak natsional’nyi
simvol’, Polis, 3, 1999, pp. 142–9.
25. R. Ryvkina, ‘Mezhdu etnokratiei i grazhdanskim obshchestvom’, Svobodnaia
mysl’, 4, 1997, p. 88.
26. Elena Chinyaeva, ‘A Eurasianist model of interethnic relations could help
Russia find harmony’, Transition, 2(22), 1 November 1996, p. 30.
27. Smith, ‘Russia, multiculturalism and federal justice’, p. 1402.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid, p. 1401.
30. Svobodnaia mysl’, 12, 1999, p. 31.
31. Putin, ‘Rossiia na rubezhe tysiacheletii’, in the section ‘Putin za i protiv’,
http://www.panorama.ru; as well as Putin’s interview with India Today in
September 2000, quoted in Astrid Tuminez, ‘Russian nationalism and
Vladimir Putin’s Russia’, Programme on New Approaches to Russian Security
Policy Memo Series (memo no. 151) at www.fas.harvard.edu/~ponars/
policy%20memos/.
32. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 20 November 2001, pp. 7, 8 and Rossiiskaia gazeta,
20 April 2002.
33. For the analysis of Putin’s regional reforms, see Jeff Kahn, ‘What is the new
Russian federalism?’ in Archie Brown (ed.), Contemporary Russian Politics.
A Reader, Oxford, 381–3.
34. Aleksandr Verkhovskii, Ekaterina Mikhailovskaia and Vladimir Pribylovskii,
Politicheskaya ksenofobiya. Radikal’nye gruppy, predstavleniia liderov, rol’ tserkvi,
Moscow, p. 54.
35. Putin’s interviews with the London Times, 21 March 2000 and in Brussels in
November 2002 as quoted in Kommersant, 12 November 2002, pp. 1, 3.
36. ‘Etnicheskii separatism na sovremennom etape’, http://www.panorama.ru.
37. Quoted in Gail W. Lapidus, ‘State building and state breakdown in Russia’, in
Brown (ed.), Contemporary Russian Politics. A Reader, p. 350.
38. Dmitry Gorenburg, ‘Regional separatism in Russia: ethnic mobilisation or
power grab?’ Europe–Asia Studies, 51(2), 1999, pp. 245–74.
39. Smith, ‘Russia, multiculturalism and federal justice’, pp. 1407–8.
40. Osnovnye napravleniia i itogi deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Obshchego I Professional’nogo
Obrazovaniia Rossiiskoi Federatsii v 1997 g. i pervoocherednye zadachi na 1998 g.,
vyp. II, Saransk, 1998, pp. 98–9.
41. L.I. Semennikova, Rossiia v mirovom soobshchestve tsivilizatsii, Briansk, 1996,
pp. 488–9.
42. Katherine E. Graney, ‘Education reform in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan:
sovereignty project in post-Soviet Russia’, Europe–Asia Studies, 51(4), 1999,
pp. 611–32.
43. Stephen White, Alex Pravda and Zvi Gitelman, Developments in Russian
Politics, Basingstoke, 5th edn, 2001, p. 281, table 14.2.
44. Tolz, ‘Forging the Nation’, p. 292.
45. Moskovskii komsomolets, 12 March 1992, quoted in Aleksandr Verkhovskii,
Ekaterina Mikhailovskaya and Vladimir Pribylovskii, Politicheskii extremizm v
Rossii, Moscow, 1996–99, the section ‘Uroven’ ksenofobii i uroven’ revoliut-
sionnosti’ (see http://www.panorama.ru).
38 Vera Tolz
46. Z.Sikevich, Raskolotoe soznanie, St Petersburg, 1996, pp. 75–85.

47. Paul Goble, ‘Idel-Ural and the future of Russia’, RFE/RL NewsLine, 17 May
2000.
48. Aleksei Malashenko, ‘Islam v Rossii’, Svobodnaia mysl’, 10, 1995, pp. 48–9.
49. Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict, p. 266.
50. Quoted in ibid, p. 262 on the basis of the results of a survey conducted in
November and December 1993 under the supervision of Timothy Colton
and Jerry Hough.
51. Quoted in Dmitry Gorenburg, ‘Nationalism for the masses: popular support
for nationalism in Russia’s ethnic republics’, Europe–Asia Studies, 53(1), 2001,
pp. 73–104 (pp. 79 and 81).
52. A. Smith, ‘A Europe of nations – or the nation of Europe?’ Journal of Peace
Research, 30(2), 1993, pp. 129–35 (p. 131).
53. Kymlicka, Multicultural citizenship, p. 191.
54. These tendencies are not entirely new. The idea that peoples of the Caucasus
and Muslims were Russia’s main others and even ‘traditional enemies’ of the
Russian people started to be articulated by Russian nationalists in the late
1960s.
3
Rival Versions of the East
Slavic Idea in Russia,
Ukraine and Belarus
Andrew Wilson
In May 2000, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, under the
approving eye of Moscow Patriarch Aleksii II, met near Kursk in a cere-
mony to mark the fifty-fifth anniversary of Soviet war victory, near the
site of the great tank battle of 1943.1 The four celebrated the opening of
a ‘Chapel of Unity’ of the East Slavic peoples in the church of SS. Peter
and Paul. A ‘Unity Bell’ was hung in the chapel, decorated with images of
St Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, (d. 1015), St Euphrosyne of Polatsk
(c.1102–73), and St Sergii of Radonezh (b. 1314).
Vladimir was for Ukraine, Euphrosyne for Belarus and St Sergii for
Russia; but the trio did not necessarily represent an equal Trinity.
Vladimir (Russian spelling) is also Volodymyr (Ukrainian spelling), seen
by many Ukrainians as the founder of Ukraine-Rus´ – a theory first pop-
ularized by the historian Mykhailo Hrushevs´kyi (1866–1934). But as
Vladimir he would still tend to be appropriated by many Russians as one
of their own, the founder of the East Slav condominium as a whole and
therefore the spiritual father of the other elements in the Trinity.
Euphrosyne might again suit the Russian world view – not a ruler of a
state as such, but a nun, the lost princess of the would-be local dynasty
of north-western Rus´. St Sergii on the other hand is strongly associated
with myths of the origins of Russian statehood. First and foremost a
hesychastic aesthetic and founder of the Trinity Monastery, legend also
has it that he inspired Dmitrii Donskoi to victory at the Battle of
Kulikovo Field (1380) – and possibly also spurred on Metropolitan
Kiprian in his attempt to reunite the two sees of Moscow and Lithuania
in 1381–82 (i.e. the embryonic ‘Russian’ north and the ‘Ukrainian’ or
‘Ruthenian’ south).
39
40 Andrew Wilson
At a second ceremony in June 2001 at a ‘friendship monument’ in the

village of Veselovka symbolically situated on the triangular border of
Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, the cast was less impressive. Only the
Belarusian President Lukashenka and Aleksii were present.2 Kuchma was
busy meeting the Pope back in Ukraine, and Putin was presumably wary
of giving too obvious support to Lukashenka in a re-election year. Instead
of the grand designs symbolized by the full house at Kursk, this seemed a
more parochial affair – and unilateral initiatives by Lukashenka would of
course have much less chance of success.
Finally, there are seemingly eccentric versions of the East Slavic project.
Ukraine’s most consistently newsworthy nationalist group, the Ukrainian
National Assembly (UNA) and its paramilitary wing the Ukrainian Self-
Defence Union (UNSO), have twice hosted congresses for their seeming
Russian equivalents in Kiev in 1993 and 1996. Their Russian guests,
pleased by their enthusiasm for ‘a new Slavic Empire’, were somewhat
surprised by the suggestion that its capital should be in Kiev.
However, if the three peoples are truly free and equal, all roads need not
lead to Moscow. Rather than a single common version of the East Slavic
idea in the post-Soviet space that might serve as a post-imperial identity,
there are in fact many competing visions, all capable of throwing up
unexpected options. It is the aim of this essay to suggest that the East
Slavic idea is indeed still popular amongst all three nations, but that it is
both differentiated and diffuse. The essay begins with a short historical
overview, then looks in turn at Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian ver-
sions of the idea, before ending with a brief examination of how different
visions have been embodied in public symbolism since 1991.
Historical roots
It is difficult to date the origins of the concept of East Slavic unity. Some
historians might claim to find it already at the time of Rus´, but it makes
little sense to search before the time when its three would-be constituent
parts were distinctly formed but politically disunited. In other words,
identity-building in Rus´ – the contemporary idea that all the Rus´ shared
a common identity when they shared a common polity – is not here the
subject of analysis. Some might, however, go as far back as the reign of
Ivan III (1462–1505) and Metropolitan Spiridon’s Tale of the Princes of
Vladimir (c.1505) when the princes of Muscovy first claimed the lineage
of all of Rus´.3
Others might start with the great Ruthenian writers of the seventeenth
century,4 churchmen such as Zakhariia Kopystens´kyi, archimandrite of
Rival Versions of the East Slavic Idea 41
the Kiev-Pechers´ka Caves, 1624–27. His most famous work Palinodiia, or a

Book in Defence of the Eastern Church (1621–22) provided a tentative ideo-
logical programme to underpin political moves, such as Metropolitan Iov
Borets´kyi’s appeal to Moscow to support the local Orthodox in 1625.
One of his successor scribes, the Ruthenian–German Innokentii Gizel
(c.1600–83), most probable author of the Sinopsis (1674), first properly
articulated the idea of a collective East Slavic ‘Slaveno-Rus´-ian’ nation
and its partner image of a pravoslavnii Rossiiskii narod – the spelling of
Rossiia then first becoming fashionable as a Hellenicized version of ‘All
Rus´’. The Ruthenians of course assumed that Moscow and Kiev would be
equal partners in such an enterprise; in fact, the whole project was
arguably designed to tame a potentially imperial relationship by sub-
suming it under a protective common identity. The idea that Kiev was
the ‘New Jerusalem’, ‘the mother of all Rus´-ian cities’, potentially placed
it first in importance,5 either as an equal partner to Moscow or its older
superior.
Gizel’s treatise was in fact the only history of Romanov Rossiia until
the 1770s. Its schema was therefore hugely influential in the nineteenth
century Russian nation-building project. This had many layers and
many variations, and was arguably least successful when most narrowly
conceived. The more inclusive East Slavic idea of a bol´shaia russkaia nat-
siia, assumed to be an ethnic commonality distinct from periphery
inorodtsy at the empire’s geographical or social margins,6 had potentially
broad appeal, but only when built on true principles of cultural synthe-
sis and fraternal equality. This was rarely the case after the 1860s. ‘All-
Russian’ nationalism was therefore not the force it could have been.
Whereas the Ukrainian and (smaller) Belarusian intelligentsias accepted
the idea of dual identities in the first half of the nineteenth century, this
assumption was increasingly challenged in the second half.
The building of a Soviet identity also went through many twists and
turns, although there was something of a reversion to a type of East
Slavic ‘neo-rossiiskii patriotism’ in 1941–44.7 However, the ‘National
Bolshevism’ of the time wavered in its definition of the nation. The myth
of joint East Slavic struggle against the common German enemy was
potentially extremely powerful; but David Brandenberger describes how
a seemingly innocuous Ukrainian attempt in 1943 to catalogue its prece-
dents, going back to Danylo of Halych fighting alongside Aleksandr
Nevskii, was criticized for assuming equal partnership rather than
Russian leadership.8 Wartime rhetoric was in any case quickly under-
mined by Stalin’s notorious Kremlin victory toast to the Russian people
as ‘the guiding force […] the outstanding nation’ in the Union in 1945.9
42 Andrew Wilson
The ‘Soviet Slavic’ project was fleetingly revived in 1953 when Beria tried
to build alliances with republican élites during his abortive leadership
bid;10 but largely remained an undercurrent in the postwar era,11 when
rather more attention was paid to building up the myth of a general
sovetskii narod – an amalgam of state-centred great power patriotism and
welfare civics. The element of East Slavic predominance – and of Russian
leadership – in the union of fraternal peoples was less pronounced than
it might perhaps have been, and the relationship between the first two
elements awkwardly undefined. Hence, the relationship of the East Slavic
idea to other possible identity projects in the post-Soviet era – Soviet or
Eurasian, Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian ethnonationalist – also
remains underdeveloped.
The first East Slavic project – in the two centuries either side of Gizel’s
1673 Sinopsis – had most chance of success, because it was genuinely
synthetic. In fact Ruthenians (Ukrainians) largely defined its terms.
Subsequent version of the project – the nineteenth century Romanov
version and its ‘Soviet Slavic’ successor – still had prospects, but would
clearly have been more successful if less unilateral. Will the same lessons
be learnt today? Would the East Slavic idea be more powerful if it were
not mainly in Russian hands?
The view from the centre: family metaphors

and composite nouns
How important is the East Slavic identity today? For post-Soviet Russians,
some commentators, such as Vera Tolz in this volume, have presented it
as only one of many identity options.12 Mikhail Molchanov has argued
that it is now their most logical identity choice, especially given the
problems with the alternatives.13 Significantly, pace Molchanov, it would
he hard to describe any Russian political party as programmatically East
Slavic; even most nationalist parties segue between different versions of
the national idea.14 It is therefore easier to look for East Slavic sentiment
expressed in more general terms.
The ‘indissoluble union of fraternal peoples’ is no longer with us.
Many Russians still express their nostalgia for the Union, or even the
Empire of old, in all-Soviet terms, particularly if making reference to its
collective might in the lost bi-polar superpower world. For others, how-
ever, the first step back towards the East Slavic idea is the tendency to
discard or disregard periphery nations now admitted to be culturally or
historically ‘alien’ (the Baltic States, probably most of Central Asia and
the South Caucasus),15 or regarded as having held back the core (Central
Asia). For those who have gone this far, Molchanov argues, the alterna-
tives to an East Slavic identity hold little attraction: ‘extracting a sepa-
rate Russian ethno-nation from a rather amorphous “all-Russian”
mixture is hardly possible at the moment because of the blurred
national identity of the Russians themselves’ and their past history of
assimilation; while Eurasianism fails ‘to anchor the Russian national
identity in the [the] pre-Mongol Kievan past that Russians share with
Ukrainians’ and Belarusians.16
However, when embracing the idea of a triune identity, Russians all
too often make one of three mistakes. They exaggerate the degree of
family intimacy, assume unity instead of unity-in-diversity, and/or
repeat unhelpful assertions of Russian primacy. The first tendency can
be demonstrated by examining the family metaphors that Russians now
use when groping around for a post-Soviet identity. One perceptive
Ukrainian commentator has argued that the tendency to ‘over-intimatise’
relations in all such metaphors reflects an archetypal nostalgia for a vir-
tual USSR or bol´shaia Rossiia, one much better than the real versions or
their vestiges.17 Most imply some sort of trajectory towards the East
Slavic idea. In presumed order of intimacy, they include:
Siamese twins (or triplets). The idea that the post-Soviet peoples cannot
exist without the other; and/or that separation has proved or is proving
fatal, can accommodate twins of conceivably triplets, but not the whole
15 former Soviet states. The intense and emotional metaphor is therefore
most often applied to Russia and Ukraine (Russia and Belarus being sib-
lings of very different sizes),18 but hardly ever to historically less ‘inti-
mate’ relations. The metaphor of course falls down if it is implied that
the separation process can be reversed.
Painful divorce. Again this carries perhaps unwanted overtones of
finality – remarriage not being that common in the former USSR.
Family quarrel. In a speech devoted to the 1997 Russian–Ukrainian
‘Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership’, President Boris
El’tsin recalled Gogol’s short story ‘The Two Ivans’ (1835): ‘remember how
Ivan Ivanovich quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich and how easily they
destroyed their friendship over a trifle’.19 This time, the metaphor works
in the sense that reconciliation is as normal a part of fraternal relations as
periodic breakdown – although not, as El’tsin seemed to forget, in the case
of the ‘Two Ivans’, who went to their graves still cursing one another.
The Communal flat. In the same 1997 speech, El’tsin reminisced how
‘Russians and Ukrainians lived in a communal flat, so to speak. Our sepa-
ration was painful. We had to divide the indivisible and test the resistance
44 Andrew Wilson
of normal human, even family, links.’ This is the least powerful image, as
the metaphor is also so often used to bemoan the crowded coexistence of
all the former peoples of the USSR,20 with the obvious connotations of
relationships spoiled by enforced intimacy.
Brotherhood. Finally, the most common default option asserts frater-
nity or brotherhood (almost never sisterhood), a middle range option as
it were. Once reduced to this level, the metaphor is acceptable to most
Ukrainians and Belarusians; but then it has fewer direct political impli-
cations, if any. Adult siblings, of course, do not have to live together.
Of a different order still is the assertion that the Eastern Slavs have a
common identity as a single whole. There is no clear dividing line in
practice with ‘fraternity’ rhetoric, but certainly conceptually a much
closer connection is assumed when the Eastern Slavs are referred to as
some kind of collective whole. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example,
clearly assumed such a unity when he bemoaned in an interview in
2000, ‘the way I feel about the division between Russia and Ukraine is
the same sort of pain as was felt over the division of the German people’
in 1949–89.21 In a similar vein, according to Metropolitan Cyril, ‘the
borders which were artificially traced through [the middle of] the Slavic
peoples remind me of the Berlin Wall, which divided the Germans’.22
After 1991 most Russian nationalists have returned to pre-revolutionary
formulae as a means of expressing this myth of unity-in-diversity, of a
collective East Slavic whole.23 The family of such expressions is centred
around the trinitarian myth of a ‘Three-in-One Rus´ Nation’ or triedinaia
russkaia natsiia (or triedinii russkii narod – more rarely ruskii with one ‘s’),
with its useful undertones of ‘Holy Rus´’, and includes phrasing such as
triedinaia pravoslavnaia russkaia narodnost´ or (Solzhenitsyn’s term) edinii
treslavianskii narod.24 This reversion is typified in a text by the Russian
Communist leader Gennadii Ziuganov. First, he recycles the myth of
indissoluble popular affection (see below): ‘the basic mass of the fraternal
Ukrainian people well understand that together with the Great Russians
and Belarusians they belong to one Orthodox all-Russian (obshcherusskoi)
culture.’ Then in his discussion of the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty he makes
the key verbal move himself, arguing that, ‘this union of two fraternal
peoples [Soviet version] – more exactly, of two parts of the same people
[old and new version] – became a great stimulus to the development of
the state’ allowing it finally ‘successfully to resolve its [longstanding]
external political tasks’.25
The third problem – the unhelpful assertion of pre-eminence and/or
primogeniture – is also easily illustrated. Modern equivalents of Stalin’s 1945
victory toast are common enough. Aleksandr Rutskoi for example claimed
in 1995 that every group needs a leader and ‘throughout the whole mil-
lennial history of Rus´, this leader has been the Russian people’.26
These three problems can crucially affect the broader nature of East
Slavic mythology. There are several myths that are powerful enough to
challenge alternative national narratives, but only if they are presented as
something that all three nations can indeed share. First, it is interesting
that the new version of the East Slavic idea is only partially de-Sovietized.
In particular, it plays a variation on the old Soviet friendship myth. In the
words of a Communist activist, ‘in the last decade, with the disintegration
of the Soviet Union’ and so much ‘interethnic conflict […] only the
Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians have preserved fraternal and
friendly relations between themselves’.27 The claim that the three peoples
still maintain their affections whatever projects politicians pursue is
extremely common. According to Ziuganov for example, ‘beyond the rul-
ing circles of Ukraine, people are demonstrably fed up with anti-Russian
forces’, ‘the sympathies of the basic mass of the fraternal Ukrainian peo-
ple are on the side of Russia’;28 – and there is much sociological evidence
to back up this assertion.29 The contrast with civil strife elsewhere in the
former Union, or at least the yearning for civic peace in the heartland, is
also real enough.
Second is a persistent myth of common endeavour – again adapted from
earlier Soviet versions. The paper Brother Slavs, printed in eastern Ukraine
with alleged Russian support, recounts a thousand years of joint struggle
in its standard advertising appeal. The three peoples ‘together with count
Vladimir were baptised in the Orthodox Faith; together with count
Sviatoslav destroyed and crushed the Khazar Kaganate and together with
Dmitrii Donskoi won the battle over the Tatars at Kulikovo Field;
together with Minin and Pozharskii beat off the Poles, and together with
Peter the Great – the Swedes; together with Suvorov and Ushakov
crushed the Turks, and with Kutuzov – the French; and together with
Georgii Zhukov your grandfathers, fathers or you yourself won the vic-
tory over Germany’.30 Hence the potentially powerful symbolism of the
2000 Kursk meeting mentioned at the start of this piece. Significantly,
this appeal appears under Viktor Vasnetsov’s famous painting The
Bogatyrs (1898), with the three legendary defenders of Rus´ – Ilia of
Murom, Dobrinia Nikitich and Aliosha Popovich, giants on horseback
side by side awaiting the call to arms – here also standing for the
three component nations of modern Rus´.
Then there are myths of cultural synthesis, the idea that ‘the term
“rosiis´ka [the Ukrainian spelling of all-Russian] culture” does not mean
46 Andrew Wilson
Russian ethnic culture nor even the culture of the all-Russian [again
rosiis´ka] people, but the state culture of Russia, which has formed over
the ages’.31 It is sometimes also argued that this cultural synthesis has
resulted in a common East Slavic civilizational ‘space’. East Slavic ideo-
logues may even place the ‘civilisational divide’ in the same place as
Samuel Huntington, between the diaposonic ‘symphony’ of the Orthodox
East and the Catholic West, so as to exclude the west Ukrainian (less often
west Belarusian) Greek Catholics, who (as with Huntington) are rather
crudely lumped together with the Roman Catholics.32 At least in terms of
western boundaries, therefore, East Slavism echoes the geopolitics of both
Eurasianism and the High Soviet era.
The one great institutional expression of the myth of cultural unity to
be found in all three states is of course the Orthodox Church. The official
title of Aleksii II is after all still Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus´ – not
Patriarch of Russia.33 On the one hand, the Church still likes to have it
both ways. It still refers to Moldova and Estonia as its ‘canonical terri-
tory’.34 But a special place is clearly reserved for the core territories of
Rus´. According to one Church source, ‘only a United Rus´ can serve as a
self-sufficient and full-bodied culture, historical and political unit’ for the
Eastern Slavs.35 Significantly, this is the view of a certain Father Tikhon of
the Ukrainian branch of the Church in Luhans´k (the Moscow
Patriarchate is still the largest Church in Ukraine in parish terms).
Between the Church’s ugly Ukrainophobes and the official position of
Patriarch Volodymyr, who supports autonomy so long as it is achieved by
an evolutionary and ‘canonical’ process, this is actually the mainstream
view – the Church is only Ukraine’s largest because it includes so many
Ukrainians as well as Russians.
The Orthodox Church has not only resisted the consolidating logic of
post-1991 political boundaries. Given the profound weakness of other ele-
ments in would-be civil society (political parties, voluntary organizations,
trade unions) it is often the only force underpinning any kind of collective
identity and/or collective action in East Slavic society.36 A glance at Russian
nationalist websites in all three countries confirms the linkage.37 Putin rec-
ognized this fact when, at a joint ceremony with Ukraine’s President
Kuchma to mark the reopening of the cathedral on the supposed site of
Vladimir/Volodymyr the Great’s baptism in Crimea in July 2001 – an event
of potent symbolic importance in itself so close to Ukraine’s tenth anniver-
sary celebrations the following August – he remarked that people too often
‘use clichés referring to fraternity and brotherhood without people really
thinking about what they meant. Spiritual values constitute[d] the
foundation of unity between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.’38
Periphery versions: Ukraine
Fraternity does not necessarily require equality, even if the French

Revolution bracketed the two together. Too often, Russian claims of pre-
eminence amongst the Eastern Slavs disrupt calls for ever closer reunion.
Things tend to look different in Ukraine and even Belarus, however,
where even enthusiastic advocates of the East Slavic idea are likely to put
more stress on the principle of an interaction of equals, and prefer rela-
tively pluralistic formulae of the friendship of ‘fraternal peoples’ to the
risks of subsuming their identity in any collective whole, however amor-
phous. Stephen Shulman has argued that the idea of an ‘East Slavic
nation’ competes for loyalties in Ukraine with the rival ‘civic nation’
and ‘ethnic Ukrainian nation’;39 but it is important to consider what
type of ‘East Slavic nation’ is under consideration, just as it is crucial to
examine what is in the ‘civic’ box.40
The current mainstream Ukrainian version of the East Slavic idea is
based in the vision developed by Ukrainian thinkers in the Romanov
Empire in the nineteenth century – even amongst leading Ukrainian
Communists like Borys Oliinyk. Oliinyk served as an adviser to Gorbachev
and chair of the Moscow Supreme Soviet’s Council of Nationalities in the
perestroika era: in his more normal life as a poet he has penned eulogies to
‘our house’ (nasha khata), the joint homestead of the Eastern Slavs.41 At the
June 2001 Moscow ‘Sobor of the Slavic Peoples of Belarus, Russia and
Ukraine’, however, he denounced ‘political pyrotechnics of the type
“three-in-one nation”, “Great-Russian, Little Russian” which then, you
see, develop into “all more or less Russian (rossy)”. We must set out not
from the romantics of abstract theoretical (kabinetnykh) deductions, but
from the real fact of life of three equal and equally great peoples –
Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian.’ Moreover, he continued, ‘with all
respect to Moscow, we must explain to [our] disoriented citizenry that
the idea of Slavic unity began with Kievan Rus´ and was [first] formulated
conceptually not on the Volga, but more than a century and a half ago
on the banks of the Dnipro, where the Cyrylo-Methodian Society was
born, in whose constitution a model was laid out for uniting all free (read –
sovereign) Slavic peoples’.42
The main ideologue of the Cyrylo-Methodian Society (1845–47) men-
tioned by Oliinyk was the historian Mykola Kostomarov (1817–85).
Kostomarov worked within the nineteenth century paradigm of a
bol´shaia russkaia natsiia, but subtly undermined its Russocentric
assumptions by arguing in his main work Two Rus´ Nationalities (1861)
that the Ukrainians and Russians were kindred peoples distinguished by
48 Andrew Wilson
contrasting political cultures (he can be forgiven for ignoring the

Belarusians, whose national movement was practically non-existent in
1861). The Ukrainians, he argued, were natural democrats – even if over-
inclined towards license over liberty and anarchy over order – in con-
trast to the patriarchal and statist Russians and aristocratic Poles.43 With
Kostomarov’s mythology as an assumed background therefore, modern
Ukrainian politicians find it surprisingly easy to sidestep awkward
questions of ethnicity and language and combine East Slavic fraternity
rhetoric with a steadfast defence of Ukrainian independence.
The former can be confusingly prevalent, and was in fact almost
universal amongst ‘centre’ and ‘left’ politicians in the 1999 presidential
election, disguising the fact that only two political forces were cam-
paigning for real change. The first were the fringe ‘Slavic’ parties: includ-
ing such groups as the Party of Rus´–Ukrainian Union (RUS´), the Party
of One Rus´, the Party of One Kievan Rus´, and the longstanding Party
of Slavonic Unity of Ukraine, formed in April 1992. None received sig-
nificant support in 1999; Aleksandr Bazyliuk, of the Slavonic Party (but
actually a Ukrainophobe), won a derisory 0.14 per cent. Most such grou-
puscles backed the then chairman of parliament Oleksandr Tkachenko
in return for his playing the east Slavic card quite heavily. Tkachenko
was running at a respectable 2–3 per cent in the polls before making a
late withdrawal in favour of Communist leader Petro Symonenko (and
formally joined the Communist Party in 2001).
Nor have Ukraine’s specifically ‘Slavic’ parties enjoyed much success
at parliamentary elections. In 1998, there were three rival parties aiming
rather too narrowly at Russian ethno-nationalism. The Social–Liberal
Union or SLOn suffered from targeting the Russian intelligentsia, and
won only 0.91 per cent; a Crimea based party of Soviet nostalgia,
‘Union’, won 0.7 per cent; the Party of Regional Revival, discretely
backed by the Moscow Patriarchate only 0.9 per cent. In 2002 the
‘Russian (Rus’kyi ) Block’ could only manage 0.7 per cent. The more
explicitly East Slavic ‘Party For the Union of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia’
also fared poorly, with a mere 0.4 per cent.
The one party which does enjoy electoral success are the Communists,
who won 20 per cent at the 2002 elections, down from 24.6 per cent in
1998 and Symonenko’s 22.2 per cent in 1999. It has taken the party
almost a decade to begin gradually mutating from a party of ‘Leninist’
Soviet patriotism to one making a specifically East Slavic appeal, includ-
ing campaigning in support of ‘canonical’ Orthodoxy.44 Nevertheless,
since the Kosovo campaign in 1999 and the Papal visit to Ukraine in
2001, the Ukrainian Communists have quite markedly begun to ape

‘Ziuganovism’ and move into a position of open support for the Moscow
Patriarchate in Ukraine.45 The Communist Party of Ukraine remains the
one significant force that directly advocates East Slavic political reunion
(although often only as a step to full Soviet restoration); usually with no
reservations, although Oliinyk has accepted that ‘with Ukraine, the
Belarusian model will not succeed’.46
Periphery versions: Belarus
In Belarus, on the other hand, the main East Slavic voice is of course
President Lukashenka himself; but he is supported by most significant
opposition groups, excluding the Popular Front but definitely including
the Communist Party of Belarus,47 and is powerfully echoed by the
‘Belorussian Exarchate’ of the Russian Orthodox Church.48 Political par-
ties are less important under Lukashenka’s regime, although the ‘Slavic
Council of Belarus’ (Slavianskii Sobor – ‘Belaia Rus´’) led by Yurii Azarenok
has been granted covert license by Lukashenka to act as a sounding
board for his own ideas.
The local version of the East Slavic idea does not refer back to the kind
of ‘middle ground’ doctrine typified in Ukraine by Kostomarov that can
act as a counterweight to Russian discourse. It is naturally enthusiastic
about all projects for political reunion. Nevertheless, it has own distin-
guishing dynamic. First, Lukashenka still relies to a great degree on Soviet
symbolism and on a version of Belarusian identity formed almost entirely
by the experiences of war and postwar reconstruction, rather the distant
tribal past.49 His version of national history begins in the 1940s when a
Soviet Belorussian nation was created almost ex nihilo, apart from the com-
mon fundament of Orthodox folk culture. Belarusian nationalists (tradi-
tionally the oppositional ‘National Front’), on the other hand, tend to
begin their story with Polats´ka-Rus´ or the supposedly Slavic Grand
Duchy of Lithuania/Litva. Their Belarus is therefore a central European
and historically Greek Catholic nation emerging from two hundred years
(1795–1991) of Russo-Soviet repression. However, most of that history is
now lost. The trouble faced by Belarusian nationalists since 1991 is not
that their version of national identity is implausible, but that it has little to
say to the life experiences of the vast majority of the population, domi-
nated by the twin myths of wartime suffering and postwar reconstruction.
There are therefore two versions of the ‘Belarusian’ idea, one of which
is still happy to spell itself ‘Belorussian’. Furthermore, Lukashenka’s
50 Andrew Wilson
version of national identity is also necessarily a nested one. In fact his

preferences require that which is adjectival in the ‘Soviet Belorussian’
identity also to be some part of the overarching East Slavic identity. The
‘official ideology’ of the Lukashenka era, as propagated by papers like
Slavianski nabat and the printing house ‘Art and Literature’, is therefore
the superficially curious hybrid idea of a ‘Slavic-Soviet civilization’. He
therefore favours ‘Slavic’ ideas that match the ideology of the late Soviet
era; such as civilizational opposition to the West and Russian as ‘the lan-
guage of inter-ethnic communication’. Significantly, as a self-styled
‘Orthodox atheist’, Lukashenka has been unable to play the religious card
as much as he might; and the Belorussian Exarchate does not have the
self-sustaining mythology of any branch of the Orthodox Church in
Ukraine – being institutionally part of the Russian Orthodox Church
(ROC). Nevertheless, Lukashenka likes to bracket together the local
(Greek) Catholic tradition and Belarusian nationalism as equally ‘alien’
(the 2002 Law on Religion discriminates against faiths that have not been
active in Belarus for ‘at least twenty years’).
Even Lukashenka, however, does not really speak of a collective
(i.e. Russian–Belarusian) ‘we’. In his address to the Russian Duma in
October 1999 he stressed that ‘we are not “fragments” of the great Soviet
people, we are Belarusians and Russians – proud, free, strong peoples. And
nobody is allowed to put us down’. At the same time, of course, the two
share a community of fate. Much of Lukashenka’s speech was devoted to
the Second World War, when together, to what his website claims was sus-
tained applause, ‘we saved the world’.50 Moreover, since the arrival of
Putin in the Kremlin, his obvious disdain for ‘virtual’ integration, and his
harder definition of the choices facing Belarus, Lukashenka has been
forced to pay more attention to this singularity. In speeches made in 2002
and 2003 he has stressed that, although ‘the ideas of Belarusian statehood
are inseparably linked to the idea of Slavonic unity, brotherhood and
co-operation of peoples … the absorption of a small state by a great state is
a historical anachronism … the sovereignty, the state independence of
Belarus (Russia as well) will remain unshakeable’.51
As Olexii Haran´ and Serhii Tolstov have correctly argued therefore,
the differential appeal of the East Slavic idea cannot be explained ‘by
simple references to history and culture (the “clash of civilizations”
approach) or even by economic dependence on Russia. It is the result of
the correlation of political forces and the position of the elite.’ In
Ukraine, it is important ‘to explain why the slogans of [east] Slavic unity
have not been translated into practical steps’.52 In Belarus they have – to
an extent. Ukrainian and Belarusian élites have made different choices.
Imperial Kiev
A further difference between Russia and Ukraine and Belarus is the

existence in the latter of radically different versions of the East Slavic
idea – even if only at the margins of political thought. The mainstream
Ukrainian and/or Belarusian nationalist position is that the extremely
loose bonds of common East Slavic origin can exercise but little restraint
on the separate trajectories of what are now three very distinct nations.
One Ukrainian nationalist group, the Ukrainian National Assembly–
Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNA–UNSO), however, advocates an
interestingly inverted version of East Slavic identity. Its ‘Slavic Doctrine’
is based on the idea of ‘a united Slavic state with its centre in Kiev’
and the birth of an ‘Ukrainian empire as a factor in nourishing Slavic
civilisation’.53
In answer to its own rhetorical question ‘which of the existing Slavic
states on the territory of the former USSR can lead the process of restor-
ing its former might?’, the UNA–UNSO has argued that this ‘mission of
[re]uniting Rus´ lands’ cannot be entrusted to Moscow, because ‘in
Russia the Slavic peoples are far from dominant in all regions’, and the
‘cosmopolitan ruling elite’ and ‘denationalised and weak central gov-
ernment’ is ‘incapable of establishing ethnocontrol’ over potentially
separatist peripheries. Nor can
Belarus lift the flag of unity for the Slavic peoples on account of its
smallness of number[s]. It is settled by history itself and by God that
the [true] successor of Kievan Rus´ – Ukraine must take up the mis-
sion of uniting Rus´ lands. First, because Ukraine is a unitary Slav
state, 98% of whose [no longer] 52 million population is Slav. Second,
because it has the only national army which is practically 100% Slav.
Third, because Ukraine has a [proper] national government [sic],
capable not just of representing the interest of the nation, but of
becoming the consolidating principal for the Slavic world. Moreover,
Ukraine was and remains the religious centre of Orthodoxy, which it
took over from Byzantium. Fourth, it has a powerful diaspora
on all the territory of the former USSR [sic], which can establish
ethnocontrol on the territories it occupies.
The UNA–UNSO has defined its ultimate aims as follows: as a ‘first

step the creation of a confederation of Slavic states, and later a powerful
unitary empire in the borders of the former USSR under the protection
of Ukraine with its capital in Kiev’.54 The position is extreme: nevertheless
52 Andrew Wilson
it informs much of the ‘nativist’ thinking of a significant part of the

governing élite in Kiev, helping to square the circle of their own neo-
Soviet identity and neo-Belorussian authoritarian autarkism.55
We are not all Slavs
If the UNA–UNSO would like to invert the recent historical pattern of

East Slavic interaction and take the Russians under their wing, radical
versions of both Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism have more often
made the opposite argument – that the Russians are not really Slavs at all.
This myth of Russian miscegenation arose in the nineteenth century
among writers like Max Müller (1823–1900) and Franciszek Duchin´ski
(1816–93), and was then popularized by Ukrainians like Dmytro Dontsov
(1883–1973), Yurii Lypa (1900–44) and Yevhen Malaniuk (1897–1968).56
According to Lypa, in his 1941 book that enthusiastically predicted the
eventual Division of Russia, ‘the Muscovites are not a pure people […]
they have strong Finnish admixtures’, the Russian language is full of
‘Finnish words’. This was not a mere original encounter, the Russian cul-
ture was built over the Finnish, and ‘the digestion of the Finnish ethnos
took six–seven centuries’ (until the end of the eighteenth century in
some backwaters). Moreover, in general, Lypa argued, ‘the development
and formation of the Muscovite people was a very unsteady process. An
unnatural external force uprooted this people from their incubation
stage in the remote (hlukhykh) forests of the Volga. The stimulus to unit-
ing the as yet immature Muscovy was the animal energy of the Mongols.’
Even now (as he wrote in 1941) the apparent ‘ethnic unity of the
Muscovites – is only an outer skin, the result of the strident centralisation
of their government and their difficult living conditions’. Russia’s ten-
dency towards aggressive expansion was only a hyperbolic inversion of
the more natural tendency to collapse back into what would eventually
turn out to be a small mini-state on the Volga.57
The Belarusian version of this myth is that their national name (the
White Rus´) derives from their unique East Slavic purity. The historian
Usevalad Ihnatoŭski in his Short Outline of a History of Belarus (1919)
argued that ‘the Belarusian tribe throughout all its glorious past has
never mixed with peoples of other races’. In particular they were spared
by geography (the protection of forests and marshes) from the effects of
the ‘Turkic–Mongol avalanche’, while ‘things were different with the
Great Russians and Ukrainians: they lived under such difficult condi-
tions that it was impossible to preserve their ancient ethnic type’.58 In
other words, the original proto-Russians may indeed have been the most
easterly of the East Slavic tribes, but their ‘blood’ now forms but a tiny
percentage of the Russian whole. The most high-profile modern propo-
nent of such views is Zianon Pazniak, exile leader of the Belarusian
Popular Front.59 Critics might claim that they made it easier to force him
into exile.
Sometimes, on the other hand, Belarusian nationalists have, again,
argued more or less the opposite. Not only was intermingling between
local East Slavic and Baltic tribes the original basis of Belarusian ethno-
genesis, the modern historian Mikola Ermalovich has claimed, we are
‘more like Slavicised Balts than Balticised Slavs’.60 This myth may be rad-
ically different to Ihnatoŭski’s. Nevertheless, it still serves the same
function of establishing imagined divides in the East Slavic whole and
distinguishing the Belarusians from the Russians.
It might be pointed out that echoes of these arguments are occasionally
to be found in Russia, though they are far from mainstream. Lev Gumilev,
for example, in From Rus´ to Russia (1992) agreed that the Russians were
only partially East Slavic, their ‘ethnogenesis’ largely dating to the period
after the fall of Rus´, through ‘positive complementarity’ with first Finno-
Ugric and then Tatar-Turkic elements.61 The limited audience for such
views demonstrates how difficult it will be to disentangle the myths of
Russian national and general East Slavic origin. Much more common in
Russian nationalist circles therefore are rival theories of the bastardized
origin (Turkic, Polish) of the Ukrainians and less often Belarusians, or,
more likely, of the Galicians in particular. According to the (Ukrainian)
paper Brother Slavs, in Kiev, the ‘mother of Russian cities, they have closed
almost all Russian schools (sic)’ and ‘dance the “hopak” in Turkish
clothing – “sharovars” [baggy trousers] (even the word is Turkish!). So who
are the “yanichary” (“Turkish occupants”) here?’62
Signing symbols
East Slavic mythology exists in a variety of guises. One way of looking at

this practical diversity is to examine the semiotics of public symbols and
public space. Since independence, both Russia (in 1993) and Ukraine
(1997) have put up new statues to Yaroslav the Wise, ruler of Rus´ from
1019 to 1054. Russia chose the city of Iaroslavl´, the monarch’s name-
city, as he supposedly personally founded it in 1010. In his book on
the post-Soviet city, Blair Ruble mentions the controversy over giving
the statue a more ‘Russian’ image, specifically as to whether it should be
placed above the river or in the centre of the city square in the ‘Western’
style.63 Moreover, unlike Ukraine in particular, most of Russia’s other
54 Andrew Wilson
new symbols and monuments have not really been constructed with the
East Slavic ‘question’ in mind. Moscow’s new statue of Peter the Great
and the Cathedral of the Christ the Saviour all refer to the Imperial era
(in the latter case to the victory over Napoleon). The new national
anthem skilfully avoids direct mention of the East Slavic idea, referring
to ‘an age-old union of fraternal peoples’ without specifying which.64
It is therefore worth looking in more detail at the way in which
Ukraine, in contrast, has tried to have it both ways on this issue, particu-
larly because the Ukrainian case involves many more layers of nuance.
The authorities in Kiev are well aware that East Slavic symbols are popu-
lar with the considerable numbers of Ukrainians and local Russians who
have varying degrees of nostalgia for the old Empire and/or Union.
Suitably branded, however, the very same symbols can also representing
the mythology of Ukraine-Rus´. Ukraine’s version of Yaroslav stands next
to Kiev’s Golden Gates, providing on the surface a very catholic image.
Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin (since Spring 2001 ambassador to
Kiev) indicated his approval on a visit in 1997 by declining an invitation
to lay flowers at the Shevchenko monument and visiting Yaroslav
instead.
However, on closer inspection the monument is branded as more
specifically Ukrainian. First, by what might be called a fast-forwarding
technique, that is linking the Rus´ era to later, more identifiably
‘Ukrainian’ periods. Yaroslav is given a mustache and depicted without
a beard – in short made to look like a seventeenth century Cossack
rather than an eleventh century monarch (the same technique is used
on Ukraine’s new currency – for Yaroslav on the two hryvna note and
Volodymyr on the one). Second, there is an element of ‘rewind’.
Yaroslav is depicted in the style of Constantine holding the plans to his
city, with the implication that he is building more than just the nearby
church (St Sofiia’s), but a whole (Ukrainian) nation. Third, the
Ukrainians had no worries about placing the statue right in the centre of
the square. Fourth, the statue is linked by geographical proximity and
symbolism to a new statue to Hrushevs´kyi unveiled by President
Kuchma with great fanfare in 1998. On the one hand it is placed near
the building where Hrushevs´kyi served as president of the Ukrainian
People’s Republic in 1917. This was probably what persuaded even the
leaders of the Communist Party to come to the ceremony. On the other
hand, the statue is opposite the Academy of Sciences (emphasizing his
function as a historian), and at the beginning of Volodymyrs´ka Street,
thereby implicitly endorsing Hrushevs´kyi’s version of the history of
Ukraine-Rus´ and giving a subtle sign to the other important symbols on
the thoroughfare (which runs to the statue of Yaroslav, on to St Sofiia’s

and finishes at St Michael’s – see below).
Other examples of the ‘rewind’ technique can be seen in the two stat-
ues to Andrew the Apostle that now stand in Kiev. Myth has long had it
that Andrew ‘the first-called’ visited Kiev in 55 AD – this myth being cen-
tral to Russian as well as to Ukrainian nationalism. But the mythology of
Andrew is being significantly reworked by the Ukrainian Orthodox
Church (Kievan Patriarchate). First, because it can be claimed that, in
the words of Patriarch Volodymyr in 1993, Andrew’s blessing was con-
ferred not on any future Russia, or even collective Rus´, but on the spe-
cific spot where he stood and placed his cross. This can therefore
be represented as ‘the land of Rus´-Ukraine, blessed by Andrew the
Apostle’ – Andrew supposedly never having made it any further north.65
Second, the modern version of the Andrew myth helps to bolster
another myth – that the Ukrainian Church was an ‘original apostolic’
creation and a completely different entity to the Russian Church. To
emphasize the point, one of the new statues to Andrew has been placed
on the hill overlooking the river Dnipro where he supposedly originally
placed his cross.
Also typical of modern rebranding techniques is the Monastery of
St Michael of the Golden Domes, the key symbol of the new Ukraine,
rebuilt at great expense in time to be used as the centrepiece in President
Kuchma’s television adverts for his 1999 re-election campaign.
St Michael’s is an interesting choice. It is obviously intended to be Kiev’s
rival to the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. As such,
the monastery was undoubtedly one of the greatest examples of the
Ukrainian or Cossack Baroque style of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, before it was demolished by the Soviets in
1935–36. However, Ukraine could just as well have rebuilt the grandest
church from the period, the St Nicholas, built in 1690–93 and famous for
its fifty-foot seven-tier iconostasis before its destruction in 1934.
So why not? One reason is that the St Nicholas was also famous as
‘Mazepa’s church’. The Hetman who built it is still perceived as too ‘anti-
Russian’ a figure, given that he sided against Peter the Great at the Battle
of Poltava in 1709. A more interesting reason, however, is the mytholog-
ical function of the new rebuilding. The St Nicholas was a ‘pure’ Baroque
church. The St Michael monastery is a mixture, which better serves the
function of linkage. The fact that it was originally built in 1108–13 and
the exterior remodelled in the Baroque era helps to signal a more
Ukrainian version of Rus´ (in contrast, not just in rivalry, to Moscow’s
Christ the Saviour) – by linking one era, that of Rus´, to another, the
56 Andrew Wilson
Ukrainian Baroque, serving to strengthen myths of continuity and to

brand Rus´ more as Ukraine-Rus´.
Conclusions
Why is any of this important? President Putin needs some ideological

cover for his reassertion of Bolshoe Prostranstvo. An identity of sorts is
also available for Ukraine and Belarus if European and/or Euroatlantic
integration projects turn sour. The current Ukrainian approach to Rus´
symbolism could embrace traditional Ukrainian nationalism, the East
Slavic idea and a new ‘nativism’, or any combination of the three. More
broadly, Mikhail Molchanov has argued that East Slavism is the most
viable alternative identity for all three nations.66 Russian versions of the
East Slavic idea, however, cannot be assumed to coincide with versions
popular in Ukraine or Belarus; just as the political projects sketched
above do not necessarily coincide.
Clearly, moreover, the East Slavic ‘idea’ does not provide a fully
national identity, on most any definition of the latter term. According to
Anthony Smith, for example, a nation ‘can be defined as a named
human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and
historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and
common legal rights and duties for all members’.67 The latter two fea-
tures (which arguably make the definition overly state-dependent) and
are only vestigial in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. As outlined above, East
Slavic ideologues are much stronger on ‘common myths and historical
memories’. As regards the ‘common name’, there is no real consensus
and the adjective is too often dropped. Papers like ‘Brother Slavs’ are also
full of pan-Slavic politics, thereby diluting their message. Moreover, as
with ‘British’, or even worse, ‘UK’, ‘East Slav’ does not easily provide a
full range of cognate vocabulary, of commonly used identity pronouns
and adjectives. The historical territory of Rus´ is of course not the same
as the current joint territory of the three East Slavic states. Much may
ultimately depend on the middle factor: the extent to which three
national systems of cultural reproduction maintain elements of an East
Slavic message and/or pan-national cultural institutions (above all,
Russian press and television and their local conduits) retain their impor-
tance, but that is a topic beyond the scope of the current essay.
Short of mobilizing a true ‘nation’, however, most East Slavic rhetoric
and ideology is necessarily vague. In Russia, the East Slavic idea is a ver-
sion (one version) of being Russian. In Belarus, it is a means of sidestep-
ping the National Front’s version of Belarusian identity. In Ukraine only
a relatively small minority see East Slavism as their primary identity;

otherwise it is a means of nesting Ukrainian identity (identities) in a
safely broader whole. Nevertheless, it is remarkable just how much of
mainstream politics in all three countries is still conducted within the
framework of fraternity discourse. This is the largest and loosest of the
concentric circles outlined above and certainly does not imply any spe-
cific foreign policy project. It does, however, narrow the range of other
possible ‘vectors’ or ‘trajectories’, at the same time as leaving the broad
mass of the population uncertain as to how close their future relations
will actually be.
1. Liudmila Romanova, ‘Stil´ politicheskogo simbolizma’, Nezavisimaia gazeta,

4 May 2000. My acknowledgments to Serhii Plokhy, who has also used the
Kursk meeting to begin an article on religious trends.
2. ‘Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Belarusian President urge Slavic unity’, The
Russia Journal, 28 June 2001.
3. For a critique of traditional Russian historiography of the era, see Edward
Keenan, Rosiis´ki istorychni mify, Kiev, 2001.
4. For a modern commentary, see Nataliia Yakovenko, Paralel’nyi svit:
Doslidzhennia z istoriï uiavlen’ ta idei v Ukraïni XVI–XVII st., Kiev, 2002,
part three.
5. See the section ‘Kyïv – druhyi Yerusalem’ in Yakovenko, Paralel’nyi svit,
pp. 324–30.
6. Alexii Miller, ‘Ukrainskii vopros’ v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom
mnenii (vtoraia polovina XIX v.), St Petersburg, 2000, pp. 31 and 37.
7. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian
Federation, London, 2001, p. 522; Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected
Nation, New Haven and London, 2000, p. 143.
8. David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism. Stalinist Mass Culture and the
Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956, Cambridge, MA,
2002, pp. 158–9.
9. The speech is reproduced in Bohdan Nahaylo and Viktor Swoboda, Soviet
Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR, London, 1990, p. 95.
10. Dmytro Vedienieiev and Yurii Shapoval, ‘Chy buv Lavrentii Beriia
ukraïns´kym natsionalistom?’, Dzerkalo tyzhnia, 7 July 2001.
11. Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State,
1953–1991, Cambridge, MA, 1998, p. 43.
12. See also, inter alia, Vera Tolz, Russia. Inventing the Nation, London, 2001,
chapter eight.
13. Mikhail A. Molchanov, Political Culture and National Identity in Russian–
Ukrainian Relations, College Station, Texas, 2002.
14. See, for example, the sites at www.eurasia.com.ru and www.rne.org and the
Pamiat’ site at http://abbc.com/pamvat
15. This is the main theme of Solzhenitsyn’s essay The Russia Question at the End
of the Twentieth Century, London, 1995.
58 Andrew Wilson
16. Molchanov, Political Culture and National Identity in Russian–Ukrainian

Relations, pp. 111 and 102.
17. Ihor Losev, ‘Ukraïns´ki kompleksy rosiis´koï svidomosti’, Heneza , 1999,
pp. 48–54.
18. See for example Fakty i kommentarii, 11 November 1999, and ‘V provintsii
russkoiazychnoi’, www.slavonic.iptelcom.net.ua/vybor/province.htm, the site of
the ‘Slavonic Party’.
19. Radio Russia, BBC SWB, SU 3083, 22 November 1997, pp. 14–15.
20. Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a communal apartment, or how a socialist state
promoted ethnic particularism’, Slavic Review, 53(2), 1994, pp. 414–52.
21. From Solzhenitsyn’s interview in the Guardian (as translated from Der
Spiegel), 18 March 2000.
22. Quoted in Oleh Hryniv, Spokuta malorosiï: derzhavotvorennia bez paradoksiv,
L’viv, 2001, p. 77.
23. Tolz, Russia: Inventing the Nation, p. 241.
24. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rossiia v obvale, Moscow, 1998, p. 82.
25. Gennadii Ziuganov, Geografiia pobedy: osnovy Rossiiskoi geopolitiki, Moscow,
1998, pp. 256 and 252.
26. Aleksandr Rutskoi, Obretenie Very, Moscow, 1995, p. 34.
27. Serhii Syrovats´kyi, ‘Dukhovnoe edinstvo Sviatoi Rusi’, Komunist Ukraïny, 3,
2001, pp. 55–7 (p. 55).
28. Ziuganov, Geografiia pobedy, p. 256.
29. The current sociology of the relationship is beyond the scope of this work;
but see for example A. V. Razumkov, ‘Mezhetnicheskoe soglasie kak factor
natsional’noi bezopsatnosti Ukrainy’, in N. A. Shul’ha et al. (eds), Dialog
ukrainskoi i russkoi kul’tur v Ukraine, Kiev, 1999, pp. 18–22. At p. 21, quoting
both Ukrainian and Russian research undertaken in 1997, Razumkov reports
that 61 per cent of Ukrainians had a ‘more or less positive’ attitude to
Russians, only 6 per cent ‘more or less negative’. The figures for Russians’ atti-
tudes to Ukrainians were, respectively, 53 per cent and 14 per cent.
30. See the paper’s website at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Embassy/
2561/about-e.html
31. Oleksandr Maiboroda, Rosiis’kyi natsionalizm v Ukraïni (1991–1998 r.r.) (Kiev:
University of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, 1999), p. 22; quoting from the pro-
gramme of the party Soiuz (‘Union’), in Hryhorii Andrushchak (ed.), Politychni
partiï Ukraïny, Kiev, 1998, pp. 376–7. Retranslated from the original.
32. Petro Symonenko, ‘Komunisty pro tserkvu ta ïï rol’ u zhytti suchasnoï
Ukraïny’, Holos Ukraïny, 26 May 1999; Oleksandr Hosh, ‘Sotsialistychnyi
shliakh – shliakh vidrodzhennia kraïny’, and Vladyslav Suiarko, ‘Relihiinyi i
politychnyi klerykalizm’, Komunist Ukraïny, 2, 1999, pp. 17–24 and 41–8.
33. The official title of Filaret, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kievan
Patriarchate) is ‘Patriarch of all Rus⬘-Ukraine’; caricatured in one ROC source
as the ‘Metropolitan of Galicia and all Ukraine’, Father Tikhon (Zhiliakov),
‘Avtokefaliia na Ukraine: eto zlo’, Rus´ Pravoslavnaia, 9, 2000, p. 3.
34. From Patriarch Aleksii’s speech to the August 2000 Sobor, ‘Imet’ derznovenie
i ne postydit’sia …’, Rus´ Pravoslavnaia, 9, 2000, p. 1.
35. Tikhon, ‘Avtokefaliia na Ukraine’.
36. Anatol Lieven, ‘Russia’s passive fury. The weakness of Russian nationalism’,
Survival, 41(2), 1999, pp. 53–70.
37. See for example the web site of ‘Russian rebirth’, one of many ROC sites with
good links, at www.zaistinu.ru and especially www.zaistinu.ru/ukraine. See also
the networks Edinaia Rus’, at www.mrazha.ru and www.russ.ru
38. BBC SWB, 28 July 2001.
39. Stephen Shulman, ‘The Internal–External nexus in the formation of
Ukrainian national identity: The case for Slavic integration’, in Taras Kuzio
and Paul D’Anieri (eds), Dilemmas of State-Led Nation Building in Ukraine,
Westport, 2002, pp. 103–30 argues that the ‘East Slavic nation’ would poten-
tially have more popular support.
40. Stephen Shulman, ‘Sources of civic and ethnic nationalism in Ukraine’,
Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 18(4), December 2002,
pp. 1–30.
41. Borys Oliinyk, ‘Khto zh tse nashu khatu rozvalyv?’, Tovarysh, 30, 2000. See
also his poetry collection, Taiemna vechera. Poeziï 1989–2000, Kiev, 2000.
42. Borys Oliinyk, ‘Gei, bratía slaviane! U nas put´ i sud’ba ediny’ (his speech at
the Sobor), Komunist, 24, 2001. Oliinyk was one of three leaders of the group
ZUBR (‘For the Union of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia’), along with Gennadii
Seleznev, Chairman of the Russian Duma since 1999, and Leonid Kozik, then
Deputy Prime Minister and representative of the President of Belarus in
Russia. In 2001 the group could count on the support of 65 out of 110
deputies in the Belarusian ‘Palace of Representatives’ and 19 out of 450 in the
Ukrainian Rada; Pavel Baulin, ‘Zelenoglazaia sestra Belarus’’, Komunist, 21,
2001.
43. N. I. Kostomarov, ‘Dve russkie narodnosti’, Osnova, 3, 1861 (reprinted in
Kiev by Maidan, 1991); ‘Mysli o federativnom nachale drevnei Rusi’, Osnova,
1, 1861 and Thomas M. Prymak, Mykola Kostomarov: A Biography, Toronto,
1996, pp. 104–8 and 110–11.
44. See Andrew Wilson, ‘The Communist Party of Ukraine: From Soviet man to
east Slavic brotherhood’, in Joan Barth Urban and Jane Leftwich Curry (eds),
The Left Transformed in Post-Communist Societies: The Cases of East-Central
Europe, Russia and Ukraine, Lanham, 2003, pp. 209–43. For some typical
Communist views, see Petro Symonenko, ‘Komunisty pro tserkvu ta ïï rol´ u
zhytti suchasnoï Ukraïny’, Holos Ukraïny, 26 May 1999, pp. 6–7; and Serhii
Syrovats’kyi, ‘Dukhovnoe edinstvo Sviatoi Rusi’, Komunist Ukraïny, 3, 2001,
pp. 55–7.
45. Petro Symonenko, ‘Krestovyi pokhod protiv Ukrainy’, at www.kpu.kiev.ua/
Arhiv/si011205.htm dated 5 December 2001.
46. Quoted in Olexiy Haran’ and Serhiy Tolstov, ‘The Slavic triangle. Ukraine’s
relations with Russia and Belarus: A Ukrainian view’, in Arkady Moshes and
Bertil Nygren (eds), A Slavic Triangle? Present and Future Relations Between
Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, Stockholm: Swedish National Defence College,
2002, pp. 75–94, at p. 91, note 47.
47. Joan Barth Urban, ‘Kommunisticheskie partii Rossii, Ukrainy i Belorussii
(bezuspeshnyi poisk edinstva v raznobrazii)’, in Dmitrii Furman (ed.),
Belorussiia i Rossiia: obshchestvo i gosudartsvo, Moscow, 1998, pp. 393–415.
48. Its website is at www.belarus.net/church/gener_1.htm
49. ‘Vystuplenie Prezidenta Respubliki Belarus’. A. G. Lukashenko v Gosdume
Rossii 27 oktiabria 1999 g’., www.president.gov.by/rus/president/Speech/
duma99.shtml
60 Andrew Wilson
50. ‘Vystuplenie Prezidenta Respubliki Belarus’.

51. From speeches given on Independence Day in July 2002 and in April 2003;
www.president.gov.by/eng/president/speech/2002/02den.html and www.
president.gov.by/eng/president/speech/2003/message. The author is grateful
to David Frick for pointing out that the president’s website (by the time of
access on 9 June 2003) contained a much more eclectic section on Belarusian
history. See www.president.gov.by/eng/map/ist1.shtml
52. Haran’ and Tolstov, The Slavic Triangle, p. 76.
53. Valentin Yakushyk (ed.), Politychni partiï Ukraïny, Kiev, 1996, p. 120. Andrii
Shkil´, Viter imperiï. Zbirnyk stattei z heopolitiki, L´viv, 1999.
54. ‘Ukraïns´ka imperiia, yak factor vyzhyvannia Slov´íanśkoï tsyvilizatsiï’,
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/5331/ukrimp.html. See also www.
una-unso.org
55. See Ola Hnatiuk, Pożegnanie z imperium: Ukraińskie dyskusje o tożsamości,
Lublin, 2003, part VI.
56. Markus Osterrieder, ‘Die Kultur des slavischen Ostens und der Schatten von
Turan,’ Das Goetheanum, 79, 2000, pp. 28–31.
57. Yurii Lypa, Rozpodil Rosiï, L´viv, 1995 (reprint of the 1941 edition), pp. 57
and 54.
58. Usevalad Ihnatoŭski, Karotki narys historyi Belarusi, Minsk, 5th edn, 1991,
pp. 25–6.
59. David Marples in his article ‘National awakening and national consciousness
in Belarus’, Nationalities Papers, 27(4), 1999, pp. 565–70, recommends
Pazniak, ‘O russkom imperializme i ego opasnosti’, Narodnaia hazeta, 15–
17 January 1994 as a guide to his views on this question.
60. Rainer Lindner, ‘Beseiged past: National and court historians in Lukashenka’s
Belarus’, Nationalities Papers, 27(4), 1999, pp. 631–47 (p. 633), quoting
Ermalovich; ‘Tsi byŭ starzhytnaruski narod?’, in Z´mister San´ko, 100 pytan-
niaŭ i adkazaŭ z historyi Belarusi, Minsk, 1993, p. 5. See also Lindner, Historiker
und Herrschaft : Nationsbildung und Geschichtspolitik in Weissrussland im 19.
und 20. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1999.
61. Lev Gumilev, Ot Rusi k Rossii. Ocherki etnicheskoi istorii, Moscow, 1992.
62. Bratía slaviane, 18, 2001. See also http://slavica.maillist.ru/abakumov
63. Blair Ruble, Money Sings: The Changing Politics of Urban Space in post-Soviet
Yaroslavl, Washington, DC, 1995, pp. 127–9.
64. For the text, see Nezavisimaia gazeta, 30 December 2000.
65. Patriarch Volodymyr, then head of the UOC(KP), Pravoslavnyi visnyk, 1993,
pp. 10–11.
66. Molchanov, Political Culture and National Identity in Russian–Ukrainian
Relations.
67. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity, London, 1991, p. 14.
4
Separatist States and
Post-Soviet Conflicts
Dov Lynch
Introduction
Even the most casual glance at a map of the world provides the onlooker
with a satisfying sense of completion: the globe has been divided up
into legally equal sovereign states, and all territories and peoples fall
under the jurisdiction of one or another of these units. The world is a
complete matrix of colours and lines that leaves nothing to chance. The
blank spots have been filled in. The map of the former Soviet Union con-
jures a similar satisfaction. Fifteen new states emerged from the Soviet
collapse. All of the territory has been divided up. Formal jurisdiction has
been claimed across all of the post-Soviet space. At least, so it seems.
In late November 2000, the city of Tiraspol, formally under the jurisdic-
tion of the Republic of Moldova, held an unusual summit.1 The summit
brought together the Foreign Ministers of the four separatist regions
that have declared independent statehood in the former Soviet Union: the
Pridnestrovyan Moldovan Republic (PMR) inside Moldovan borders, the
Republic of South Ossetia and the Republic of Abkhazia within Georgian
borders, and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic inside Azerbaijan.2 The sep-
aratist foreign ministers agreed to create a permanent forum called the
‘Conference of Foreign Ministers’ to coordinate their activities. There had
been similar meetings between the separatists in the early 1990s, none of
which had much impact on the conflicts. This summit also is unlikely to
have dramatic effect.
However, it performed an important service in highlighting an endur-
ing and forgotten reality of security in the post-Soviet space ten years after
the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition to the 15 successor states
that emerged in 1992, four other states exist that are unrecognized. These
separatist states are not found on any map of the former Soviet Union.
61
62 Dov Lynch
They are completely isolated in international relations, and they all face
deep internal problems and existential external threats. If ever they are
discussed, the separatist areas are often dismissed as criminal strips of
no-man’s-land, or as the ‘puppets’ of external states. There has been much
analysis devoted to individual cases of conflict in the former Soviet
Union. However, there has been no comparative study of the separatist
states.3 A critical gap has emerged in our understanding of security
developments in the former Soviet Union.
Without a clear grasp of the nature of these separatist states, attempts
to resolve the conflicts in Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan have been
reactive and largely ineffective. Ceasefire agreements have been reached
in all of the separatist areas. Internationally led negotiations have been
underway in all of them since the early 1990s. However, there has been
no progress towards conflict settlement. From these circumstances, four de
facto states have emerged.4 These de facto states are the main reason for
the absence of progress towards settlement.
This chapter will examine the role played by the de facto states in
blocking conflict settlement. The argument is divided into three parts. As
a foil to the argument, the chapter will start with a brief discussion of the
reasons for progress towards the settlement of the Tajik civil war. This is
a unique case of conflict settlement, which throws revealing light on the
peculiar nature of the conflicts in Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The
second part will seek to define briefly the de facto state. The third part of
the chapter will examine the forces that have driven the de facto states.
The discussion will focus on the logic that underpins the separatist states
at the internal and external levels.
The Tajik foil: why has the civil war ended?
The Tajik civil war provoked many statements about the threat it posed to
regional stability.5 The civil war did have devastating results, with an esti-
mated 20 000 to 40 000 victims, 600 000 Internally Displaced Persons
(IDP), and at least 100 000 refugees.6 However, there has not been a wave
of Islamic fundamentalism sweeping through to Tatarstan in the Russian
Federation. Tajikistan’s Central Asian neighbours have not collapsed in
the flames of conflict spillover. A peace process has advanced following
the General Agreement of June 1997 and the creation of the Commission
for National Reconciliation. IDPs, as well as some 50 000 refugees in
northern Afghanistan, have resettled in Tajikistan with the support of the
United Nations (UN) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation
in Europe (OSCE). Though flawed, new presidential and parliamentary
Separatist States and Post-Soviet Conflicts 63
elections occurred in November 1999 and February 2000. Islamic figures

of the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) were appointed to high-level posts
in the government leading to formal power-sharing with the conservative
regime under President Immomali Rakhmonov. The progress towards
conflict settlement in Tajikistan is unique.
The reasons for this success merit close attention as they provide a foil
for understanding the obstacles to settlement in Moldova, Georgia and
Azerbaijan. Concepts of state weakness are helpful for understanding
the reasons for progress in Tajikistan. A brief detour into political theory
is revealing for the study of all post-Soviet conflicts. The literature on
state weakness falls broadly into two categories.
A first approach to state weakness focuses upon the institutions and
individuals that make up the state, as well as the capacities of state agen-
cies.7 According to Joel S. Migdal, state strength is weighed in terms of a
state’s capacity to ‘penetrate society, regulate social relationships, extract
resources and appropriate or use resources in determined ways’.8 In this
view, weakness is a syndrome, which is characterized by corruption, the
collapse of a state’s coercive power, the rise of ‘strongmen’ and the seg-
mentation of the political community into several ‘publics’. The socio-
economic pressures on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic had risen since
the 1970s, with demographic changes placing increasing demands on
limited resources. These were exacerbated in the uncertain political situ-
ation of the late 1980s in the Soviet Union. This institutional perspective
on state weakness is helpful for understanding the causes behind the
Tajik civil war. However, it is not fully satisfactory. The Tajik state and its
institutions have remained desperately weak. Why has settlement been
possible?
A second approach has interpreted state strength in more than political-
institutional terms. Barry Buzan stressed the importance of the ‘idea’ of
the state in terms of people’s perceptions of its nature and legitimacy.9 If
it is widely held, this ‘idea’ may act as an organic binder that links the
state and its parts with coherence, as well as mechanisms to allow for
popular subordination to its authority. However, without such an ‘idea’,
and in circumstances of institutional weakness, Buzan saw the possibil-
ity of the ‘disintegration of the state as a political unit’.10
With weak institutional structures, the civil war was a contest over
power in the new state. By 1996, the fundamental dispute over the ‘idea’
of Tajikistan had receded. The Tajik opposition sought a share of power
in Dushanbe, and a weakened President Rakhmonov recognized the
need to compromise. The absence of conflict over the fundamental
‘idea’ of Tajikistan, its territory, Tajik boundaries and citizens, created
64 Dov Lynch
enough common ground between the parties for progress in the peace
process. This conflict also lacked the ethno-political dimension that has
been fundamental to the conflicts in Russia, Moldova, Georgia and
Azerbaijan.11
In contrast, the conflicts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transdniestria,
Chechnia and Nagorno-Karabakh reflect conflicts over the domain and
scope of the territory of the new states of Georgia, Moldova, Russia and
Azerbaijan (otherwise referred to as the metropolitan states). The aim of
the separatist groups is not to capture power in the capitals of the met-
ropolitan states, or to renegotiate the division of state powers within a
given territory. Their objective is to exit the metropolitan state. At the
least, the aim is to build new relations with it on an inter-state level as
equal units. The linkage of ethnicity with territory has made the objec-
tives of these separatist areas state-orientated – nothing less than state
sovereignty will suffice for their authorities. This absolute disagreement
about the ‘idea’ behind the new states of Russia, Moldova, Georgia and
Azerbaijan has made conflict resolution unattainable on the lines set by
settlement of the Tajik civil war. In this light, it may be worth viewing
these not as civil wars but inter-state wars.
Defining the de facto state
Before proceeding, it is worth defining the notion of a de facto state. In

his theoretical examination of this phenomenon, Scott Pegg defined
them as follows:
A de facto state exists where there is an organized political leadership,

which has risen to power through some degree of indigenous capac-
ity; receives popular support; and has achieved sufficient capacity to
provide governmental services to a given population in a specific
territorial area, over which effective control is maintained for a sig-
nificant period of time. The de facto state views itself as capable of
entering into relations with other states and it seeks full constitu-
tional independence and widespread international recognition as a
sovereign state.12
In order to understand the de facto state, several points must be made.

First, Pegg’s definition is based on a distinction between empirical and
judicial notions of statehood. The de facto state is not recognized by
other states or the international community. As a result, it has no judicial
status in the international arena.
However, it may have an empirically defined claim to statehood. The

classical definition of an entity that may be regarded as a sovereign state
was set forth in the Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of
States, 1933. The Montevideo criteria are that an entity have: (1) a perma-
nent population; (2) a defined territory; (3) a government; and (4) the
capacity to enter into relations with other states. The de facto states fulfill
the first three of these criteria, and claim to be able to pursue the fourth.
However, the empirical qualifications of the de facto state cannot make it
legal or legitimate in international society. As Pegg argued, it is ‘illegiti-
mate no matter how effective it is’.13
Second, it is necessary to distinguish between internal and external
sovereignty. Internal sovereignty refers to the supreme authority of a
body within a given territory.14 External sovereignty, on the other hand,
may be defined as ‘being constitutionally apart, of not being contained,
however loosely, within a wider constitutional scheme’.15 The de facto
state claims both of these; that is, to be sovereign over its self-defined
territory and people, and to be constitutionally independent of any
other state. The key difference for the de facto state resides in its non-
recognition. This status prevents it from enjoying membership of the
exclusive and all-encompassing club of states – the de facto state does
not have recognized external sovereignty.
The logic driving Eurasian de facto states
There are two pieces of conventional wisdom that require rethinking.

First, most discussions focus on external factors as key obstacles to settle-
ment. On the ground, the parties themselves are the first to blame exter-
nal forces for everything – from creating the conflict to holding off its
resolution. Vasily Sturza, the Moldovan Presidential Envoy to the negoti-
ations with the PMR, made the point bluntly in July 2000: ‘The resolu-
tion of the conflict depends exclusively on the Russian Federation.’16
Clearly, Russian forces did play a role in the initial phases of these con-
flicts, and ambiguity in Russian policy has done nothing to help resolve
them since. External factors have been, and continue to be, critically
important inhibitors. However, the balance of analysis needs to be
redressed. This chapter will concentrate first on the internal forces that
inhibit conflict settlement. The political, military and economic dimen-
sions are more essential obstacles to settlement. These internal drivers
combine with external forces to create a sustained status quo.
The second piece of conventional wisdom concerns the oft-repeated
view that these are frozen conflicts. They are not frozen. On the contrary,
66 Dov Lynch
events have developed dynamically in the separatist states and in the

conflict zones. The situation on the ground in 2002 is very different from
the context that gave rise to these conflicts in the late 1980s. The follow-
ing analysis will examine the main dimensions of the new reality that
has emerged. An understanding of the current situation, and the logic
sustaining it, is fundamental for thinking about ways to move beyond
the current impasse. Any settlement will have to be based on the reality
of 2002, and not on that of 1992.
Internal drivers
There are three internal factors driving the continuing existence of the
de facto states.
Absolute sovereignty
The first factor resides in the insistence by the authorities of the de facto
states on absolute sovereignty. The amalgam of territory, population and
government in these areas has produced something that is greater than
the sum of these parts – a deeply felt belief in sovereignty. Vladimir
Bodnar, the Chair of the Security Committee of the Parliament of PMR,
stated: ‘What defines a state? First, institutions. Second, a territory. Third,
a population. Fourth, an economy and a financial system. We have all of
these!’17 The de facto states draw on two legal sources of legitimacy to
justify their claim to statehood and two historical/moral sources.
First, the authorities adhere to an empirical definition of sovereignty
on the lines of the 1933 Montevideo Convention. They maintain that
they fulfil all the conditions for being considered to have positive sover-
eignty. Drawing on Pegg’s definition, all of the de facto states have a sys-
tem of organized political leadership, which has received popular
support, provides basic governmental services to a given population
over a specific territory, over which effective control is maintained for a
significant period of time. There are similarities between them at this
level. They all maintain presidential systems and have very poorly
developed party structures. In all of them, while there may be significant
political differences, politics is far from pluralistic. In general, politics is
deeply personalized, and the mechanics of the decision-making process
are opaque and highly controlled.
The post-Soviet cases also show significant variation. The level of gov-
ernmental service is vastly different from one to another. At an extreme,
the Abkhaz government maintains the daily running of legislative, exec-
utive and judicial institutions, but performs very few services for its
population. The UN and international non-governmental organizations,

such as Accion Contra la Hambre, International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC), and Médecins Sans Frontieres, have become the pillars of
social security in Abkhazia. Moreover, the state is unable to provide for
law and order across its claimed territory. The war between Abkhazia and
Georgia in 1992–94 occurred solely on Abkhaz territory, and it left the
area devastated, its infrastructure destroyed and now crumbling, and its
population marked by a vicious war of looting and plunder. By contrast,
the PMR and Nagorno-Karabakh are much stronger. In both of them, a
sense of state presence in people’s lives is palpable. The degree of state
control over territory is also variable. Abkhazia maintains very weak con-
trol over its territory. The PMR and Nagorno-Karabakh are much stronger
in this respect, with clear armed force structures, police agencies, border
troops and customs.
Moreover, the separatist leaders adhere to the declaratory approach for
understanding the recognition of an entity as a state by other states.18
These governments maintain that recognition does not create a state, but
reflects an existing reality. In the declaratory approach, the attribution of
statehood arises from the empirical existence of sovereignty, and not
juridical recognition of its creation by other states. As a result, formal
recognition is seen as secondary for these governments.
The second source of legitimacy claimed by the de facto states draws
on the right of self-determination. On 25 July 2000, Sokrat Jinjolia, the
Chairman of the Abkhaz Parliament stated: ‘We are independent. We
have passed an act of independence. Non-recognition does not matter.’19
All of the de facto states have cloaked their claims to independence on
the basis of popular elections/referendums and legislative acts to this
effect. The de facto states also have approved new constitutions which
enshrine legally what are seen as popular/democratic resolutions on
independence and sovereignty. For example, the Abkhaz Constitution,
approved in a referendum in November 1994, states that the Republic of
Abkhazia is a ‘sovereign democratic state based on law, which historically
has become established by the rights of nations to self-determination’.
Popular will is held up as a key pillar of legitimacy.
Third, the state-building projects in the separatist areas are based on
the position that the current states represent but the latest phase in a
long historical tradition. The Abkhaz Foreign Minister, Sergei Shamba,
placed great stress on this: ‘Abkhazia has a thousand year history of state-
hood since the formation in the 8th century of the Kingdom of Abkhazia.
Even within the framework of empires, Abkhazia kept this history of
stateness. No matter the form, Abkhaz statehood remained intact.’20
68 Dov Lynch
Sovereignty here is seen as an idea that does not need necessarily an

institutional form. The primordialist rhetoric of the de facto states
strengthens their claims to absolute sovereignty: any compromise would
be seen an injustice in the present and a violation of the very movement
of history.
Finally, as stated by Grigory Maracutsa, ‘Pridnestrovye (PMR) is a sov-
ereign and independent state because the Republic of Moldova
attempted to resolve the conflict through the use of force. Seven hundred
were killed and three thousand wounded from this act of aggression.’21
All of the separatist authorities insist on an inherent moral entitlement
to self-determination when faced with ‘alien’ and ‘imposed’ rule.
The insistence on absolute sovereignty by the de facto states has sev-
eral effects. First, it means that conflict settlement will be difficult to
reach through federal power-sharing. It is often assumed in Chişinaŭ,
Tbilisi, Baku, as well as European capitals, that the ‘statehood’ of these
entities is a resource that they will be willing to bargain away once the
circumstances are propitious. Many peace proposals put forward over
the last decade have been based on notions of federal power-sharing.
The assumption underlying many of these proposals is that sovereignty
is the maximal, and thus negotiable, aim of the break-away areas, and
that their minimal and non-negotiable objective resides at some lower
form of autonomy. In fact, sovereignty is non-negotiable for the de facto
states. They may be willing to negotiate a new relationship with the
metropolitan states, but not one based on a federation. At most, the self-
declared states will accept confederal ties with the metropolitan state.
A confederation has elements of power-sharing, but these do not
infringe on the internal sovereignty of its constituent subjects. All of
these de facto states insist on developing voluntary and equal ties with
their former rulers. In their view, co-operation could be deep in certain
areas, such as trade, customs and communications, but it would not
infringe on their basic sovereignty, whose destiny will remain integral. In
the negotiations that have occurred in all of these conflicts, the separatist
areas have supported the proposals put forward for ‘common statehood’
with the metropolitan state that draw on confederal elements. However,
Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan have rejected confederal proposals as
threats to their own sovereignty. Moreover, the metropolitan capitals are
reluctant to abandon one of their strongest weapons with regard to their
separatist regions: that is, withholding formal recognition of their exis-
tence. Non-recognition relegates the self-declared states to continued
pariah status in international relations. It also ensures that the metropol-
itan state may consider using all means at its disposal, including force,
to restore its territorial integrity at some point in the future. The Russian
use of force against Chechnia despite the peace agreement struck in 1997
is a case in point.
The second effect stemming from the insistence on absolute sover-
eignty concerns IDPs and refugees in the conflicts in Abkhazia and
Nagorno-Karabakh. Absolute internal sovereignty means that the de facto
states will not welcome back the IDPs who fled during the wars.
Demography resides at the heart of the conflicts. Before the war, the
Georgian population represented the overwhelming majority of inhabi-
tants of the Abkhaz region. At the last census of 1989, the Abkhaz repre-
sented 17.8 per cent of the population of Abkhazia (the total was 525 000)
with 95 840 registered, with the Georgian population measured at 230 523.
The Georgian population in Abkhazia did not flee their homes as an indi-
rect consequence of the war. This population was a target of the conflict.
One of the driving forces behind the Abkhaz was a fear of the extinction
of Abkhaz culture, and eventually the Abkhaz people. ‘Citizenship’ of the
self-declared Abkhaz state cannot be allowed to include the displaced
Georgian population, as this would leave the Abkhaz as a small minority
once again in their own region. The tight link between ethnicity and
land in these conflicts makes the return of refugees and IDPs difficult to
consider for the de facto state.
Nagorno-Karabakh is different. Over 80 per cent of the 600 000
Azerbaijani IDPs lived in the seven districts of Azerbaijani territory that are
occupied by Karabakh forces but are not inside Nagorno-Karabakh itself.
These lands were occupied in 1993–94 to provide a security buffer, and as
bargaining chips in the peace process. The separatist Armenian state could
countenance the return of Azerbaijani IDPs to at least six of these districts
(not Lachin, which is the main link to Armenia). However, the repatriation
of the Azerbaijani population to towns and areas inside Karabakh itself,
such as the town of Shusha that towers above Stepanakert, is considered
impossible by the Armenian authorities. The blanket right to return of all
IDPs and refugees to their previous homes is unlikely to be a part of a
settlement package in these cases, although partial returns may be.
Fear: source and resource

Insecurity represents another internal force driving these states. Behind
all the rhetoric of sovereignty, self-determination and justice, there
reside calculations of power that have led the separatist authorities to
seek security based on force alone.
Fear was the factor that gave rise to the conflicts at the outset. In late
March 1992, the first Moldovan President Mircea Snegur declared a state
70 Dov Lynch
of emergency, which set Moldova and the PMR on the path towards
larger-scale clashes than any since late 1990. The new Moldova, as it was
then emerging, seemed to be a Romanianizing state, in which the tradi-
tionally more Slavic and more Russophone elites on the left bank would
be sidelined. Fear was also a driving force behind the conflicts in Georgia
and Azerbaijan. In August 1992, Georgian guardsmen seized the Abkhaz
capital. Similarly, in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian population lived
in a vulnerable enclave embedded in Azerbaijan.
Insecurity has remained a defining condition of life since the end of
the wars in each de facto state. The cease-fires reached in Moldova
(1992), Georgia (South Ossetia in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1994) and
Azerbaijan (1994) have frozen a status quo reached on the battlefield.
Historically, these peoples have rarely, if ever, won wars. Victory has left
them bewildered.
On the one hand, victory is a source of strength. Naira Melkoumian, the
Nagorno-Karabakh Foreign Minister, stated: ‘After a history of tragedy, we
have won a war at last!’22 As a result, the authorities are determined at all
cost to retain the fruits of victory. During the armed phases of the conflicts,
the strategies of the de facto states remain total, because in their view, the
threat posed by the metropolitan states is itself total. Naira Melkoumian
argued: ‘History gave Armenia so little territory. We cannot make any con-
cessions that would threaten Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.’23
At the same time, the separatist authorities profoundly distrust vic-
tory. They are all aware that they have won a battle and not the war. The
example of renewed armed conflict in Chechnia has been edifying in
this respect. The distrust of victory has led them to elevate self-defense
over all other policy areas. None of the de facto states are military states.
However, all of them are devoted to the military.
Fear is an instrument also, that is wielded by the separatist authorities
in state-building. Since the early 1990s, the metropolitan states have
started to move away from exclusive state-building projects and more
moderate politicians have led the movement towards state consolida-
tion. By contrast, in the de facto states there has been very little shift
away from the type of political discourse that was prevalent in the early
1990s. Public rhetoric has remained largely defined by dichotomies of
‘us/them’. The ‘other’ – the former central authorities – is used to justify
the very existence of the de facto state. The existential challenge posed
by the former central power, whether it is accurate or not, is a powerful
glue binding the residual populations of these areas together into some
kind of cohesive whole. The discourse of insecurity also makes power-
sharing very difficult to accept, as it has totalized the conflicts.24
Two conclusions flow from the condition and exploitation of insecurity.

First, these are racketeer states. As defined by Charles Tilly, ‘some-one who
produces the danger and, at a price the shield against it, is a racketeer’.25
This is not to say that the metropolitan states do not pose a real threat.
However, the emphasis placed on the metropolitan threat goes beyond a
rational assessment of needs and requirements. The PMR is a case in
point. Any objective assessment of the threat posed by Moldova to the
PMR would conclude that it is almost nil, in terms of capabilities and
intentions. However, the PMR Minister of Security runs a number of social
organizations and newspapers that inflate the Moldovan threat. As a
result, the extensive role played by the Security Ministry in all aspects of
political and economic life in the PMR may appear justified. This logic
affects more than the Ministry of Security. The PMR itself depends on the
threat posed by Moldova and the West, against which the self-declared
state proposes to defend the population on the left bank of the Dnestr
River. An existential threat, which does not exist, has become a funda-
mental pillar justifying the existence of the de facto state – in essence, this
is racketeering.
The racketeering dimension also affects civil–military relations. In
Nagorno-Karabakh, the racketeering tendency made the former Defense
Minister, Samvel Babayan, the most powerful economic and political
actor until March 2000 when he was arrested for the attempted assassina-
tion of the Nagorno-Karabakh president. The president and government
have sought since then to reduce the weight of the military in Karabakh
politics. In an interview in August 2000, Prime Minister A. Danielyan
stated: ‘The armed forces should not be distinct or separated from the
government – not a force of its own […] All must obey the law. The
armed forces hold the line. That is all.’26 At the least, in Abkhazia and
the PMR, the military and security agencies dominate security policy-
making. At the most, in Nagorno-Karabakh, the military is dominant in
politics.
The second conclusion is that the self-declared states have no faith in
the rule of law as a means to guarantee their security. Military power is
seen as the only means by which to deter the metropolitan state. The dis-
trust of law is a legacy of the Soviet Union where politics were founded
on the rule by law and not of law. In the early 1990s the separatist regions
experienced how new laws enacted in the metropolitan capitals (consti-
tutions, declarations, resolutions, and so on) were used as weapons
against them. As noted by Svante Cornell, ‘there is no confidence
(in these separatist areas) in the implementation of the basic principle of
international law, Pacta sund servanda’.27
72 Dov Lynch
This distrust has implications on the nature of any agreed future

relationship between the de facto and metropolitan state. Again, it is dif-
ficult to imagine that the self-declared authorities will agree to federa-
tion relations, where, by definition, ties between federal subjects and the
federal centre are based on the transformation of fundamental political
questions into legal questions.28 Any settlement of these conflicts must
consider at its heart the requirements of hard deterrence and security in
order for the de facto states to be willing to compromise on the victories
they have already achieved on the battlefields.
Subsistence syndromes
The de facto states are failing. They have the institutional fixtures of
statehood, but they are not able to provide for its substance. The wars of
the early 1990s devastated their economies and exacerbated the difficul-
ties that resulted from the Soviet collapse. Since the cease-fires, little
progress has occurred towards economic reform. The enduring threat of
war has combined with economic mismanagement to result in hyper-
inflation, demonetized economies, the collapse of the social services, and
the extensive criminalization of economic activities. These problems
have been exacerbated by the legal limbo in which all of these de facto
states exist.
In the cases of Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, economic blockades
by Azerbaijan and Georgia are a means of coercion against the separatist
areas with two aims: first, to compel them to compromise in the negoti-
ations; and second, to ensure that the de facto state does not prosper
while the negotiations are underway. The economic lever has also been
raised as a potentially positive tool by the international community
to encourage the de facto states to compromise through the promise of
eventual assistance for reconstruction.
On both accounts, the economic tool plays a far less important role
than is assumed. The de facto states are driven first and foremost by polit-
ical and not economic imperatives. The severe economic difficulties that
are common to all of them have not compelled them to compromise.
On the contrary, economic isolation has only strengthened subsistence
syndromes in which the authorities are determined to survive at all costs,
and have developed structures which are appropriate for this purpose.
The subsistence syndromes, which are based on a combination of firm
political determination, deep economic weakness and extensive criminal-
ization, are a key part of the internal logic sustaining the de facto states.
All of these states have dwindling and aging populations. Many of
those who could do so have fled, mainly to Russia. Much of the remaining
populations represent the weak and the vulnerable, and those who have
nowhere else to go. The residual populations have become deeply
impoverished. However, it is no accident that the separatist states are
not situated near the Arctic Circle – sunny and favourable climates, ben-
eficial geographical positions with access to the Black Sea and important
rivers, and fertile lands have been key to their continuing survival,
allowing people to retreat into difficult but sustainable subsistence
strategies.
Inside the de facto states, political stability is founded on corrupt corpo-
ratism. The authorities have sought to neutralize potential internal threats
by co-opting them. In these economies, shadowy figures often play
government-supported monopolistic roles. In the PMR, the financial–
industrial group ‘Sheriff’ runs important sectors of the separatist econ-
omy, including several cable television stations, the only telephone
communications company in the region (InterDnestrCom – which fol-
lows the U.S. Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standard as
opposed to Moldova’s use of the European Groupe Systemes Mobiles
(GSM) standard), a weekly newspaper called Delo, a Western-standard
supermarket chain, and a series of petrol stations. In exchange, the
Sheriff Group has performed social functions for the separatist state,
including the construction of a new cathedral called ‘Christ’s Rebirth’ in
Tiraspol. The mingling of criminal and official structures is dramatic
in the PMR, where a ruthless form of monopolistic state capitalism has
been created in a land where statues of Lenin remain standing in the
streets and parks.29
The armed forces are always very well protected in the separatist
states. In Nagorno-Karabakh, the military became the most prominent
political/economic actor under the former Defence Minister Samvel
Babayan. Babayan was able to benefit from his position to secure a
monopoly over the cigarette and petrol trade. Babayan was also deeply
involved in reconstruction of the Karabakh infrastructure. A most
famous case of abuse is known mockingly as the ‘Babayan Underpass’ in
Stepanakert. This was a major underpass that took years to build by
military-related contractors in a state where there are very few cars, and
traffic is not a problem.
Many groups inside and outside the de facto states profit from the sta-
tus quo. Crime and illegal economic activities have come to reside at the
heart of these conflicts. These activities include large-scale cigarette and
alcohol smuggling from the PMR to Moldova to avoid sales taxes. For
Moldova, such smuggling has become a ‘major, major problem’, with
millions of dollars lost in state revenue.30 Clearly, important forces in
74 Dov Lynch
Moldova profit from this situation. For example, the PMR steelworks at
Rybnitsa, which is one of the mainstays of PMR independence, is not a
full cycle factory: 50 per cent of its scrap metals are provided by
Moldova. The factory exports steel to world markets, mainly the United
States, with Moldovan customs stamps, provided to the PMR by Chişinaŭ
in February 1996. A number of figures in the Moldovan government
profit greatly from this very lucrative trade. Russian groups have also
invested in the PMR. Most notably, the Russian-owned Itera gas provider
is the majority owner of the Rybnitsa steelworks. Similarly, South
Ossetia has become a major channel for smuggled goods to and from
Georgia and Russia (including most of the flour and grain sold in
Georgia).
Crime mingles with geopolitics in these conflicts in an unsettling
manner. Russian peacekeeping troops have become involved in smug-
gling activities across the front lines in Georgia and Moldova. In the Gali
District of Abkhazia, crime and smuggling have become a way of life for
the vulnerable Georgians who have returned, the Georgian paramilitary
groups that are active there, and the peacekeeping troops. The trade in
hazelnuts and citrus fruits, and also petrol from the Russian Federation,
has blurred the lines between ethnic groups in the conflict, uniting
them all in the search for profit.
It is clear that enough people, inside and outside the de facto states,
profit enough from their existence to make the status quo durable. A
perverted and weak, but workable, incentive structure has emerged over
the last decade that sustains the separatist areas.
External drivers
These internal forces combine with three groups of external forces to
sustain the de facto states.
The role of the metropolitan states
Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan themselves play important roles in
sustaining the status quo. This is not to blame them for the impasse, but
it is important to recognize their part more clearly. Their role is both
indirect and direct.
At the indirect level, Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan have not
become magnets, which might be sufficiently attractive to compel the
separatist areas to compromise in order to benefit from the restoration
of political and economic relations. At the economic level, the authori-
ties of the de facto states believe that the economic situation in
Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan is just as bad as theirs, if not worse.
More fundamentally, the nature of politics in the former centres has

reinforced the de facto states’ determination. Radical nationalist parties
continue to exist, providing ammunition for the separatist authorities to
justify the possibility of renewed war. Since the war, the Georgian gov-
ernment has subsidized structures of government for ‘Abkhazia in exile’.
Tbilisi supports an Executive Council of the Autonomous Republic of
Abkhazia, which has 25 delegates and a supreme presidium. The ethni-
cally Georgian government in exile maintains 11 ministries, 13 state
committees, nine general offices and five inspectorates. This ponderous
and expensive government in exile performs an important service for
President Eduard Shevardnadze in channeling the political force of the
250 000 strong IDP population. After all, Shevardnadze has survived two
very close assassination attempts, and new attempts cannot be ruled out.
Government support to these structures is a control valve in domestic
politics.
However, the existence of Abkhazia-in-exile reinforces the separatist
view that Tbilisi has not recognized their position as having any legiti-
macy, and still sees them as a ‘fifth column’ for the return of the Russian
empire. In addition, the activities of Georgian ‘partisan’ groups inside
Abkhazia has strengthened Abkhaz views that Tbilisi seeks to undermine
Abkhazia by force.
The protection of human rights has remained problematic in the met-
ropolitan states. In Azerbaijan, in particular, the treatment of national
minorities and ordinary citizens has been blemished by strong-arm tac-
tics of the police and security forces. At the indirect level, therefore, not
enough change has occurred in the politics and economics in the met-
ropolitan states to convince the separatist authorities to seek renewed
ties through compromise. In the striking words of Paata Zakareishvili,
a moderate Georgian political commentator: ‘What has Georgia done to
make Georgia more attractive to Abkhazia? Georgia is hardly attractive
to Georgians.’31
Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan also play a direct role in sustaining
the status quo. On the economic level, the metropolitan states face a
dilemma. A first option they face is to develop economic ties with the
separatist area, as Moldova has done. But, while certain groups in
Moldova have profited from this co-operation, it has done nothing to
decrease the number of PMR customs and border posts illegally deployed
in the Security Zone along the Dnestr River. Nor has it increased the
degree of trust between the two parties. Quite the contrary, co-operation
has been exploited by the separatist authorities to strengthen their inde-
pendence. The other option available is to blockade the separatist area, as
76 Dov Lynch
has been done by Georgia and Azerbaijan. These blockades have affected
deeply the economic development of the separatist states. However,
every official and academic analysis of these blockades has highlighted a
counter-productive effect. They have served only to entrench the
intractability of the de facto authorities, and pushed them to develop
subsistence economies. In their economic policies, both paths adopted
by the metropolitan states have worked to strengthen the de facto states.
At the direct level, the existence of de facto states inside the metropol-
itan borders is not entirely undesirable – the situation could be worse for
Chişinaŭ, Tbilisi and Baku if these states were recognized by the interna-
tional community. The metropolitan states are not compelled to recog-
nize the defeat they suffered in the wars of the early 1990s. The open
recognition of defeat, and the loss of territory, would challenge political
stability and threaten the current leadership. Particularly in Georgia and
Azerbaijan, there exist strong opposition forces, which would readily
seize such an opportunity to attack compromise as ‘defeatist’. Put
bluntly, the status quo allows the Georgian and Azerbaijani authorities to
avoid grasping the nettle of defeat.
Moreover, the status quo has allowed Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan
to focus on domestic areas that are perceived to be more vital for their
future; that is, attracting foreign direct investment, developing strategic
areas of their economies, and pursuing economic reform. The metropoli-
tan states accepted the ceasefires in the early 1990s to gain time. The status
quo is seen as a window of opportunity in which to gain external sources
of support, while the separatist area is blockaded and undermined.
The Russian role

As the former imperial centre, Russia has played a key role in these con-
flicts. Russian intervention was important in the outbreak and then
freezing of the conflicts in Moldova and Georgia. Russian peacekeeping
forces are now deployed on what have become de facto borders inside
these states. Since the end of the wars, Russian policy towards these con-
flicts has retained enough ambiguity to reinforce the status quo.
The first level of Russian engagement lays with peacekeeping opera-
tions. The deployment of Russian forces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia,
and in the PMR between June 1992 and May 1994 reflected Russia’s
re-engagement throughout the former Soviet Union after an initial
period of neglect.32 At this point, Russian operations were deployed to
re-establish Russian hegemony over these states. In Moldova and Georgia,
Russia sought to compel Chişinaŭ and Tbilisi to accede to Russian security
demands in the shape of forward basing rights, military co-operation,
and border co-operation. Support to the separatist movements played a

critical role in the Russian strategy.
Russian policies changed after 1996. After the appointment of Evgenii
Primakov as Foreign Minister in 1996, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
re-emerged as the leading decision-making agency towards these con-
flicts. The relative downscaling of the Ministry of Defense at that point
allowed room to the Foreign Ministry to seek a balance between the mil-
itary and political aspects of Russian policy. The exacerbation of Russia’s
economic and financial situation, particularly after August 1998, rein-
forced a retrenchment of Russian peacekeeping positions.
Despite the change, Russian operations continue to sustain the status
quo in these conflicts. The fact that Russian peacekeeping forces played
a role in the conflicts, supporting either one or the other side, remains at
the forefront of the security calculations of the conflicting parties. As a
result, the operations have not promoted trust between the parties, but
only reinforced a prevailing sense of distrust. The Moldovan govern-
ment’s confidence in the security guarantee provided by the peacekeep-
ing forces has been undermined by Russia’s permissive attitude towards
the PMR construction of border posts in violation of the peacekeeping
agreement. In Georgia, any trust that Tbilisi might have had in the
peacekeeping operation has been destroyed by its passive approach
to providing security to the returning IDPs in Gali. Put bluntly, Russian
peacekeeping troops guard the borders separating the parties, thereby
entrenching the separatist state. Russia’s position has reinforced the met-
ropolitan state’s propensity to disregard the legitimacy of the separatists –
they are seen as the ‘fifth column’ of an aggressive external power.
In October 1999, at the OSCE summit in Istanbul, Russian President
Putin agreed to withdraw Russian bases from Moldova and Georgia.
Under Putin, Moscow has far from abandoned its strategic interests in
the former Soviet Union. Despite the OSCE agreement, Russia is intent
on maintaining a small military presence in Moldova and Georgia. All of
the conflicting parties have adopted positions to place themselves so as
to benefit most from a coincidence of their own interests with Russian
strategy. Russian peacekeeping operations, therefore, have only increased
the distrust between the parties in Moldova and Georgia and entrenched
the status quo through their protection of the de facto state. In the case
of Nagorno-Karabakh, where no peacekeeping forces were deployed,
extensive Russian military support to its strategic ally, Armenia, has had
similar effects.
Russian engagement has also been political and economic. At the
political level, radical nationalist forces in the Duma have pledged support
78 Dov Lynch
to the de facto states on numerous occasions, through resolutions and

public debates. The Duma has little impact on the course of Russian for-
eign policy. However, its activities are followed closely in the capitals
of the de facto states, and actively drawn upon in their own rhetoric as
sources of support. This is not a negligible factor strengthening their
determination, as they hold out for an eventual victory of radical forces
in Russian politics.
At the economic level, the Russian government has been liberal in
allowing various forms of economic co-operation with the de facto
states. In the PMR, the Russian Central Bank played a direct role in sup-
porting the separatist budget in 1992. Since then, this support has
stopped. Nonetheless, Moscow has not prevented the numerous eco-
nomic and trade agreements that have been struck between the de facto
states and subjects of the Russian Federation. In December 2000, Russia
established a visa regime on the Russian–Georgian border, which made
the crossing prohibitive for Georgians. Much to Tbilisi’s dismay, the
regime was not applied to Russian borders with Abkhazia and South
Ossetia, which are legally Georgian. Abkhazia exists thanks to its posi-
tion on the Black Sea, and mainly because of its border with Russia.
There is furious trade across the border. Abkhazia also remains a part of
the ruble zone. Russian support, while far less than is assumed in Tbilisi,
is just enough to sustain the existence of Abkhazia.
Other sources: state, sub-state and supra-state actors

The separatist areas depend on other sources of external support for their
existence. In Karabakh, independence is really a sleight of hand, which
barely covers the reality that it is a region of Armenia. Karabakh’s inde-
pendence allows the new Armenian state to avoid the stigma of aggres-
sion, despite the fact that Armenian troops fought in the war between
1991 and 1994 and continue to man the Line of Contact between
Karabakh and Azerbaijan. Moreover, every year, Armenia provides an
‘inter-state loan’ to Karabakh that covers 75–80 per cent of its needs. The
Karabakh de facto state is very different from Abkhazia and PMR, which
do not have such a reliable and dedicated patron.
Kinship groups are another source of external support. Nagorno-
Karabakh presents a unique case again. Nagorno-Karabakh has pride of
place in the minds and hearts of the Armenian diaspora, and has been
the focus of intensive assistance. As a separatist area, Karabakh has been
terra incognita for most international organizations. Thus, diaspora sup-
port was crucial in the early 1990s in allowing Karabakh to survive the
difficulties of the war. It is difficult to overestimate the role this support
has played in creating Karabakh in material terms, as well as a pressure

valve displacing any urgency for compromise with Azerbaijan.
In the PMR, Cossack groups from the Don and Kuban played an
important role in the clashes that occurred in 1992. The Cossacks
remain a pillar of support for the separatist regime. In general, the PMR
has benefited from a degree of support from a range of Slavic groups,
including radical forces in Russia, and also ordinary Russians seeking a
retirement place. The Slavic heart of the PMR is personified in its presi-
dent, Igor Smirnov. Smirnov retains a Russian passport and votes in all
Russian elections.
In Abkhazia, support from ethnically related peoples in the North
Caucasus was crucial in the war. The support of Basaev and his Chechen
group to the Abkhaz is well known. Also, it is estimated that a few hun-
dred Turkish-Abkhaz returned to Abkhazia and play a part in trade with
Turkey. However, support has not been provided on any scale similar to
Nagorno-Karabakh.
Finally, international humanitarian organizations also strengthen the
status quo. Particularly in the case of Abkhazia, such organizations are pil-
lars of the separatist state. A Needs Assessment study conducted by the
UN Development Programme in Abkhazia in February 1998 concluded:
‘A large proportion of the population receives assistance either directly or
indirectly at a cost of almost 17.5 million U.S. dollars in 1997.’ Since 1997,
the levels of international support have remained at a comparable level,
and the proportion of Abkhaz dependent on international humanitarian
aid has if anything increased. International aid is several times larger than
the budget of the break away state. With regard to Nagorno-Karabakh, the
levels of international humanitarian support are also not negligible. The
aid provided by the US government through Save the Children has aver-
aged around 15 million US dollars a year. The assistance policies of other
international organizations, such as the European Union, also work to
entrench the current situation. For example, the EU has committed
5 million European Community Currency (ECU) to the rehabilitation of
the Inguri Dam, which is the primary source of electricity generation for
Abkhazia and western Georgia.
Conclusions
The de facto states have survived since the Soviet collapse, and they
seem entrenched to last another ten years. Their claim to statehood car-
ries a logic that is difficult to overcome now that it has been launched.
As the anthropologist Ann Maria Alonso noted: ‘Baptized with a name,
80 Dov Lynch
space becomes national property, a sovereign patrimony fusing place,

property and heritage, whose perpetuation is secured by the state.’33 In
their own view, the de facto states have been playing already in the
game of states for ten years. The attributes of statehood, internal sover-
eignty and empirical statehood, are no longer negotiable in practice.
These states will hold out as long as they possibly can. In their perspec-
tive, the status quo plays in their favour. Non-recognition and isolation
are prices that they are willing to pay. The Abkhaz Defense Minister told
me in July 2000: ‘How long will we have to wait? [for recognition] Ten,
20, 30 years? Let it be, we will wait.’34 On similar lines, the Prime Minister
of Nagorno-Karabakh, Anushavan Danielyan, stated: ‘Non-recognition
does not affect Nagorno-Karabakh’s existence, or its status as an inde-
pendent state […] Nagorno-Karabakh is the same as Azerbaijan, but it is
just not recognized!’35 The de facto states are playing the long game, in
which not losing means winning.
Any settlement will have to be based on the reality of the self-declared
states. These conflicts are fundamentally different to the Tajik civil war.
The absence of a sense of shared destiny, and common state ‘idea’,
makes power-sharing inappropriate. The initial causes for the conflicts
are less important now than this fundamental reality. The de facto states
are driven by interweaving internal and external forces that have sus-
tained them for over a decade.
Since the early 1990s, the international community, the metropolitan
state and international organizations have applied a number of policies,
ranging from outright hostility to limited engagement of the de facto
states. The result has been a mixed and contradictory bag of approaches
with little coherence and no strategy. In order to move towards conflict
settlement the international community faces the task of creating a new
logic on the ground that addresses the logic driving the self-declared
states.36 The conflicts will not resolve themselves, and the de facto states
will not disappear of their own volition. Ten years after the Soviet col-
lapse, the separatist states have become deeply embedded, and they are
likely to remain a feature of the post-Soviet space.

1. Reported in Jamestown Monitor, 6(224), 1 December 2000.
2. Henceforth, these will be referred to as PMR, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and
Nagorno-Karabakh.
3. An exception is Edward Walker, ‘No Peace, No War in the Caucasus:
Secessionist Conflicts in Chechnya, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh’, Center
for Science and International Affairs (CSIA), Occasional Paper, SDI: Harvard
University, February 1998.
4. On the notion of a de facto state, see the theoretical work of Scott Pegg,
International Society and the De Facto State, Aldershot, 1998.
5. This section draws on the author’s chapter, ‘The Tajik Civil War and the
Peace Process’, Civil Wars, Special Edition on post-Soviet conflicts, 4(4)
Winter 2001.
6. See Human Rights Questions: HR Situations and Reports of the Special Rapporteurs
and Representatives, United Nations A/51/483/Add 1, 24 October, 1996, pre-
pared by Francis Deng for 51st Session of the GA.
7. See discussion by author in ‘Euro-Asian Conflicts and Peacekeeping Dilemmas’,
in Y. Kalyuzhnova and D. Lynch (eds), The Euro-Asian World: A Period of
Transition, London, 2000.
8. See, for example, Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States, State–Society
Relations and States Capacities in the Third World, Princeton, 1988; Mohammed
Ayoob, ‘State-making and third world security’, in J. Singh and T. Berhauer,
The Security of Third World Countries, Dartmouth, 1993; and William Zartman
(ed.), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority,
London, 1995.
9. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies
in the Post-Cold War Era, Hemel Hempstead, 1991.
10. Ibid., p. 82.
11. Shirin Akiner noted the stress placed on the Tajik identity in her recent work
on Tajikistan, Tajikistan: Disintegration or Reconciliation?, London, 2001.
12. Scott Pegg, International Society and the De Facto State, Aldershot, 1998, p. 26.
13. Ibid., p. 5.
14. Gunnar Agathon Stolsvik, The Status of the Hutt River Province (Western
Australia), A Case Study in International Law, Bergen, 2000, p. 29.
15. Alan James, ‘Sovereignty – a ground rule or gibberish?’, Review of International
Studies, 10, 1984, p. 11.
16. Interview with the author, Chişinaŭ, Moldova, 13 July 2000.
17. Interview with the author, PMR, 11 July 2000.
18. On the difference between the declaratory and the constitutive approach, see
discussion in Michael Ross Fowler and Julie Marie Bunce, ‘What constitutes
the sovereign state?’, Review of International Studies, 22, 1996, pp. 400–2.
19. Interview with the author, Abkhazia, 25 July 2000.
21. Interview with the author, PMR, 14 July 2000.
22. Interview with the author, NKR, 24 August 2000.
23. Interview with Melkoumian, NKR, 17 August 2000.
24. On this notion, see Graham Smith, V. Law, A. Wilson, A. Bohr, and
E. Allworth, Nation Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of
National Identities, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 13–19.
25. From ‘War-making and state-making as organized crime’, in Peter Evans,
D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In, New York,
1985, cited in an interesting article by Hugh Griffiths, ‘A political economy
of ethnic conflict: Ethno-nationalism and organized crime’, Civil Wars, 2, 2,
Summer 1999, pp. 56–73.
26. Interview with the author, NKR, 15 August 2000.
27. Svante E. Cornell, 2001, p. 47.
28. This point emerged from a discussion between the author and Bruno
Coppietiers in November 2000.
82 Dov Lynch
29. See the comments by Boris Pastukhov, 18 April Moldovan information

service, Infotag.
30. Interview with the author, Chişinaŭ, Moldova, 13 July 2000.
31. Paata Zakareishvili, ‘Political responsibility and perspectives for conflict reso-
lution in Georgia–Abkhazia’, in Natella Akaba (ed.), Abkhazia–Georgia:
Obstacles on the Path to Peace, Sukhum, Abkhazia, 2000, pp. 9 and 24–9.
32. For an examination of Russian peacekeeping, see the author’s Russian
Peacekeeping Strategies towards the CIS, London, 1999.
33. Ann Maria Alonso, ‘The politics of space, time and substance: State forma-
tion, nationalism and ethnicity’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 23, 1994,
pp. 379–405.
35. Interview with the author, Nagorno-Karabakh, 15 August 2000.
36. For a discussion of ways to move towards settlement of these conflicts, see the
author’s Managing Separatist States, EU Institute of Security Studies Paper, 2001.
5
Management of Ethnic Relations
in Kazakhstan: Stability
without Success
Bhavna Dave
Introduction
The resilience and survival of multinational states, in the long run, are
contingent upon the ability of the institutional mechanisms of the state
to accommodate ethnic and cultural diversity and create a shared public
culture.1 The availability of legal and institutional safeguards for both
individual and group-based rights and the presence of civil society are
indispensable in maintaining the effective functioning of multiethnic
states and crediting them with legitimacy.
Obviously, the liberal theory of minority rights and cultures has found
little grounding in post-Soviet states in which participatory norms are
extremely weak and the status and legal rights of minorities depend largely
on the personal preferences of the ruling élites. These states exhibit an
enduring dominance of Soviet era categories ‘nationalities’ and ‘peoples’
(narody), in which an ethnic group is conceived as an objective category in
possession of its distinct homeland, language and psychological make-up.
Embedded in the use of these categories is a clear distinction between the
titular and non-titular groups, in which the former is endowed with a spe-
cial status whereas the latter collectively referred to as ‘nationalities’,
whose ethnic homeland is located elsewhere. Inherent in the continuing
characterisation of ethnic groups as ‘nationalities’ is the psychological and
institutional resistance to recognizing them as ‘minorities’, entitled to
equal, though differentiated, civil and political rights. ‘Nationalities’ often
lack the institutional avenues for integration into the state structure which
is closely identified with the titular nation, and also lack the institutional
means for preservation and regeneration of their ethnonational heritage.
83
84 Bhavna Dave
The presence of a large Russian population along its nearly 5000 km

border with Russia appeared to imperil Kazakhstan’s territorial integrity
in the aftermath of independence in 1991. With Slavs forming either an
absolute majority or plurality in the north-eastern oblasts, Kazakhstan
contained several necessary preconditions for ethnic mobilisation along
the triangular pattern of conflict delineated by Brubaker.2 Notwith-
standing earlier warnings of a potential ethnic cauldron3 or challenges
to the nationalizing agenda stemming from the deep historical rooted-
ness in the host state, there has been little public display of ethnic
unrest, either in Kazakhstan or elsewhere in Central Asia. Instead, the
course of nationalisation has been remarkably smooth and swift and no
effective resistance has ensued from non-titular groups.4
In the Central Asian states in particular, the Slavs and the European
groups have either opted to return to their purported kin state, or emi-
grated to Russia. Their decision to leave is not simply a consequence of
the growing ethnocratic nature of the state, but is influenced by a per-
vasive assumption of the ‘civilizational’ superiority of the ‘European’
groups over the Muslim populations and the ensuing psychological
resistance to their reduced status as ‘non-titular’ group. Those who have
opted to remain in the host state have sought a tactical accommodation
with its nationalizing framework in light of the lack of options to exit or
mobilize for their rights. Another important factor that deters ethnic
mobilization is the fear of reprisal by the state against their actual or
perceived disloyalty.5
A high degree of coercion employed by the state and the extensive
state surveillance of the public or ‘ethnic’ sphere have so far been instru-
mental in deterring minority ethnic mobilization in several post-Soviet
states. This chapter will shed light on the absence of an ethnic mobiliza-
tion in Kazakhstan and the apparent success of the state in preventing
overt conflict along ethnonational markers. The argument is laid out in
two sections. In the first section I show how the demotion of the status
of Russian-speakers through the law making Kazakh the sole state lan-
guage (denying Russian an equal status) established a clear rank ordering
of ethnic groups: the new ethnic hierarchy eliminated the potential
ground for conflict over language, the single most contested issue, thus
legitimating the nationalizing course. The second part describes the erec-
tion of a surrogate institutional infrastructure for symbolic representa-
tion and co-optation of various ethnic representatives or ‘leaders’ in a
hierarchical or ranked ethnic system. Here I highlight the role of presi-
dential patronage as a leading force behind the institutional structure of
ethnic representation, established to solicit domestic and international
Management of Ethnic Relations in Kazakhstan 85
recognition of its ‘peaceful’ ethnic situation. The chapter ends with an

assessment of the long-term implications of the top-down coercive
ethnic strategy for Kazakhstan’s state identity and the quality of
interethnic relations.
Language status reversal and new ethnic hierarchy
The elevation of Kazakh and demotion of Russians

and Russian-speakers
Kazakhstan witnessed one of the most acrimonious debates in the post-
Soviet sphere on the language issue in the aftermath of independence.6
The trend in all the post-Soviet states was to ‘restore’ the status of the tit-
ular language. Such a choice was not straightforward in Kazakhstan,
where Kazakhs did not constitute a majority and did not uniformly
favour the choice of their purported mother tongue as the state lan-
guage. The key question at the early stage of language debate was
whether Kazakhstan would constitute an exception, given its multi-
ethnic composition and the fact that Kazakhs did not form a majority.
Titular language proficiency among the non-titular population was
the lowest in Kazakhstan among all post-Soviet republics: only one in
100 non-Kazakhs could claim proficiency in Kazakh. The underlying
concern for the post-independent Kazakhstani leadership in Kazakhstan
was not whether Kazakh could become the primary language of intra-
ethnic communication or the effective language of state business, but
how legal status of the sole state language could be conferred upon
Kazakh when Russian had been deeply entrenched as the de facto
language of inter-ethnic communication.7
Kazakh’s status as the sole state language was justified on the dual
grounds of a primordialist linkage of nationality and language and affir-
mative action. These can be summarized in views such as: ‘Where else
can Kazakh be spoken, if not on its own homeland? Kazakh needs pro-
tection as the state language precisely because it is a weak language,
unable to withstand a natural competition with Russian.’ The overall
agreement was that Kazakh would not survive if bilingualism, that is,
the existing status quo, were to prevail and needed extensive state sup-
port in order to revive and flourish in its own homeland. The primary
conflict in the language issue was not between Kazakhs and Russians or
Russian speakers (Slavs, Germans, Tatars and Koreans, as well a sizeable
stratum of urban Kazakhs who practically use Russian as their native lan-
guage), but between the Kazakh ‘nationalists’ championing the rights
of rural, mainly Kazakhophone, Kazakhs advocating an ethnic vision
86 Bhavna Dave
of the state, and urban Russophone Kazakhs, more at home in an

‘internationalist’ milieu and ill-at ease with a nationalist conception of
the state. The subsequent passing of the ‘Law on Languages’ in 1997,
which made Russian the ‘official’ language, to function on a par with
Kazakh, served to appease the majority of Kazakhs more at ease with
using Russian.
The status of the sole state language granted to Kazakh was the single
most crucial act that codified the primacy of the titular group and sealed
the controversy over language and ethnic issues. The salient subtext of
the law was the denial of the state language status to Russian. A decisive
impact of the language legislation was to produce what Horowitz
describes as a ‘ranked’ system in which social class and ethnic origins are
seen as broadly coinciding and groups are hierarchically ordered within
a single system.8 Mobility opportunities in a ranked system are restricted
by group identity. The language law, in an unranked setting, would por-
tend a cultural and political marginalization of Russophone Kazakhs,
and not just of Russian-speakers. The inextricable linkage posited
between one’s nationality and language and the absence of any formal
reliable means of testing state language proficiency, make it easy and
natural for a Kazakh to claim proficiency in Kazakh.9 A similar claim on
the part of a non-titular Russophone, however, would be incredible and
subject to greater scrutiny as hardly one out of 100 had any facility in
Kazakh according to the 1989 census. The state symbolism granted to
Kazakh has certainly appeased a vast majority of representatives from
rural parts of southern and western regions of Kazakhstan who hold
sway within the state apparatus. Although a visible stratum of urban
Russophone Kazakhs, referred to as the technocrats or ‘Young Turks’,
occupy crucial positions within the state apparatus, they appear to lack
the clientelistic networks possessed by Kazakhs of more rural origins and
remain dependent on presidential patronage. Russian-speakers are
further marginalized as a result of Kazakhisation policies.
The ten-year state programme on language policy introduced in early
1999 emphasizes ‘increasing the demand for the use of the state language’
and ‘creating conditions for learning it’. It lays down how these objectives
are to be realized through administrative and bureaucratic measures,
steering clear of any discussion of ‘political’ or ‘ethnic’ issues. Erbol
Shaimerdenov, the head of the Committee on Implementation of the
State Language, pointed at the increasing volume of official documenta-
tion in the state language (that is, translations of existing Russian texts
into Kazakh) as evidence of the ‘success’ of the language policy.10 The
state language programme is geared towards demonstrating success in
meeting targets rather than in attaining a qualitative improvement and

widening of the linguistic domain. The 1997 language law asserts that it
is the duty of every Kazakhstani to learn the state language. Lacking polit-
ical will, administrative capacity or resources to execute the language pro-
gramme, the state officials have opted to achieve the targets through
statistical means. The 1999 census data demonstrating that 99.4 per cent
of Kazakhs know the state language runs counter to the prevalent socio-
linguistic scenario in the country.11 Almost 97 per cent of Kazakhs indi-
cated Russian as the ‘other’ language in which they are fluent. The near
universal proficiency in the state language (and their ‘mother tongue’)
claimed by Kazakhs has for the time being put a lid on concerns mobilized
by Kazakh nationalists over the fate of the Kazakh language and the ensu-
ing cultural loss. It has also made it easy for the Russophone Kazakhs to
claim native language proficiency without actually having to prove it.12
It was in reference to this ‘success’ that Nazarbaev declared the language
issue resolved politically, emphasizing that it was now the responsibility
of the people, the intelligentsia in particular, to co-operate by speaking in
Kazakh with their children.13 The supposed ‘solution’ of the language
question is a decisive step towards consolidating the idea of Kazakhstan as
a Kazakh state. The denial of the state language status to Russian is seen
by Slavs as an affirmation of their ‘second class’ status. The Kyrgyz experi-
ence is quite similar in that although the Kyrgyz parliament debated the
proposals of making Russian the second state language, including holding
a referendum on changing its status, it only voted to grant Russian the sta-
tus of an ‘official’ language in October 2001. Notwithstanding interna-
tional pressures, such as the recommendations by the OSCE High
Commission on National Minorities, to embrace the model of ‘civic’ state-
hood, the historical and institutional legacy of the Soviet state push the
new states to engage first in the process of ethnic state building. The study
of inter-ethnic relations, demography and migration has increasingly
turned into a politicized enterprise since Nazarbaev enshrined the notion
of constructing Kazakhstani statehood on the ‘ancestral land of the
Kazakhs’ in the Preamble of the Constitution.14
While non-titular emigration needs to be framed in the context of
post-imperial migration trends,15 the growing Kazakhization and anxiety
over a decline in status following the adoption of the language law are
among the key factors that have triggered an exodus of the Russian-
speaking population from Kazakhstan since 1991.16 Altogether, about
two million Russian speakers (including 750 000 ethnic Germans, out of
about a million living in Kazakhstan) have left Kazakhstan between
1989–99, with the combined European share in the population dropping
88 Bhavna Dave
to under 40 per cent from almost half in 1989. The drop in the population
over the past decade amounts to almost 8 per cent of the total. In the typo-
logy of Albert Hirschman,17 ‘exit’ has been the dominant response by
culturally and politically disgruntled Russians who perceive the nation-
alizing course as irreversible and see little future for their children in the
ethnically reconfigured landscapes of the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Whereas in 1993 Nazarbaev objected to the questions about the plight of
the ‘Russian-speaking population’ of Kazakhstan posed by Russian jour-
nalists by asserting that ‘all Kazakhstani are Russian-speakers’ and there-
fore no separate problem of ‘Russian-speakers’ exists, seven years later he
described Kazakhstan as a Turkophone state.18
Conflicting visions of multiethnicity and national homogeneity

Simultaneously pursuing a nationalizing strategy geared towards estab-
lishing the primacy of the Kazakh language and titular claims, the
Nazarbaev leadership has continued to characterize Kazakhstan as a
‘multinational’ state, consisting of ‘over a hundred nationalities’, ‘living
harmoniously side by side’. Kazakhstan is a unitary, centralized state,
which neither offers legal–constitutional provision for territorial rights
and cultural autonomy for nationalities, nor any formal institutions pro-
viding for proportional representation of minorities. The continuing dis-
tinction between the ‘titular’ and ‘other’ nationalities, and the covert
attempts to cast the titular nation in the role of a state-forming group
contradict the rhetorical commitment to ‘integration’.
In a comparative study of state-building policies of Kazakhstan and
Latvia, Kolstø offers diverse explanations of the absence of ethnic con-
flict in both countries. Describing both as ‘culturally bipolar societies’,
Kolstø explains that Latvia has escaped violent ethnic conflict by steer-
ing nationalist sentiments into legal channels and evolving in the direc-
tion of an ‘ethnic democracy’ in which general democratic principles
prevail alongside with ethnic favouritism.19 In contrast, Kazakhstan has
managed to avoid ethnic conflict through a simultaneous pursuit of the
incompatible goals of ethnic and civic nation-building, intended to
appease both Kazakh nationalists as well as non-titular élites.20
I have argued so far that the Kazakhstani state has pursued an exclusive
nationalizing strategy since the adoption of the language law in 1997,
while undertaking formal symbolic measures to portray a civic or multi-
ethnic profile. The projection of Kazakhs as the principal ‘state-forming’
nation, implemented by the state by employing juridical means, such as
the elevation of Kazakh language as the symbol of the state, as well as
informal titular preferences are examples of exclusive ethnic strategies

intended to manipulate the multi-ethnic climate in favour of the titular
nationality. The Kazakh language is an exclusive national symbol and
not a shared language of the groups inhabiting Kazakhstan. The pursuit
of exclusive ethnic strategy to the detriment of democratic participation
has aided the evolution of Kazakhstan into a personalistic authoritarian
system in which wealth and political power are concentrated in the pres-
idential family and close allies, and mobility within the state administra-
tion is governed by a network of patron–client relations. The fact that the
Slavs formed the majority of the electorate who actively participated in
the previous parliamentary and local elections was a significant factor in
clamping down on the initial democratization policies.21
While pursuing an exclusive ethnic agenda, the Kazakhstani élites have
sought to portray the country as a homeland of Kazakhs as well as a multi-
ethnic republic in which various nationalities peacefully cohabit.
Although Kazakhstan is no longer required to maintain an ‘international’
profile by accommodating waves of settlers and speaking Russian, as in
the Soviet period, a significant Slavic presence is nonetheless regarded by
the ruling élites as a strategic necessity for maintaining a ‘Eurasian’ image
and projecting Kazakhstan as an aspiring civic state, committed to pre-
serving its multi-ethnic make-up and maintaining ‘inter-ethnic har-
mony’. This emphasis on multi-ethnicity and ‘internationalism’ remains
ontologically and ideologically continuous with Soviet-era practices. If in
the Soviet era under the ideology of ‘Soviet community’ internationalism
had a distinctly Russian face, post-Soviet Kazakhstani internationalism,
shaped by many of the discursive and institutional legacies of its Soviet-
era predecessor, displays a distinctively ‘Kazakh face’.22
The draft of the present constitution (adopted in 1995) described
Kazakhstan as a state founded on the principle of the ‘self-determination
of the Kazakh people’. The clause was subsequently deleted in the final
version but a distinction between ‘Kazakh’ and ‘other’ people of
Kazakhstan has continued to prevail in semi-official, academic, journal-
istic and popular references.23 The Preamble to the Constitution refers to
Kazakhstan as the ‘indigenous homeland of the Kazakhs’, inhabited by
‘Kazakhs and other nationalities’. The present constitution also intro-
duced the notion of ‘the people of Kazakhstan [narod Kazakhstana]’, rem-
iniscent of its ideological precursor, ‘the Soviet people’. Notwithstanding
Nazarbaev’s rhetorical support to the notion of a Kazakhstani narod,
there is no recognizable policy of erecting institutions to promote a
supra-ethnic ‘Kazakhstani’ identity. Instead, the mandatory stamping of
‘nationality’ in passport and identity documents, introduced in the
90 Bhavna Dave
1930s, has served as a most influential mechanism of institutionalizing a

biologically governed, ‘backward-looking’ conception of a language-
based identity in which a departure from one’s ascribed nationality or
native language is an instance of (forced) assimilation.24 Article 10 of
Kazakhstan’s Constitution allows a citizen to ‘indicate or not indicate
his/her national, party, or religious affiliation’.25 However, the state has
done little to make the citizens aware of the right not to indicate their
nationality and there is a near universal tendency to fill the nationality
column as if it were required.
Kyrgyzstan was the only Central Asian state to generate some debate
on the infamous ‘fifth column’ and propose its deletion. In early 1996,
keen to obtain international approval by embracing a civic model of
statehood, and particularly eager to impress the Organisation for Security
and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) High Commissioner on National
Minorities, Kyrgyzstan proposed to eliminate the column ‘nationality’
and replace it with ‘citizenship’ on its new passports, to be issued later
that year.26 The decision was subsequently revoked in the face of the real-
isation that the nationality stamp on passport is not merely a form of
ethnic categorization but also a crucial criterion in determining the dis-
tribution of privileges and positions among the titular and non-titular
nationalities.27
Territorial and administrative reorganization

Kazakhstan’s transformation from a multi-ethnic Soviet republic to a
nationalizing Kazakh state is neither an outcome of a self-conscious
manifestation of a collectively shared sense of nationalism, as in the
Baltic states, nor a result of any pre-existing sense of cultural distance
between the two dominant ethnic communities. Having proposed a
‘solution’ to the language question, the Nazarbaev leadership turned to
administrative measures, such as territorial gerrymandering, to produce
Kazakh majorities in the newly constituted regions and thus undermine
any potential irredentist threat. The changes, affecting all Russian-
dominated border regions (except Pavlodar), enlarged the size of these
oblasts and turned Kazakhs into majorities in the reconstituted units.
These changes were presumably guided by the calculations that the
large size of these oblasts with titular majority would undermine the
basis for a potential secessionist claim. If in the early 1990s the Kazakh
demographers and linguists were united in affirming that ‘[the chang-
ing] demography will bring about a shift to Kazakh’, by the end of the
decade we see that the ethnic and linguistic policies of the state accelerated
the desired demographic effects, culminating in the recognition of

Kazakhs as the majority group in the 1999 census and as the majority
nationality in all the reconstituted units along the border with Russia.
The administrative mergers, the implantation of Kazakh officials from
the southern regions into the city and oblast offices of the reconstituted
units in the north-eastern regions, and above all, an extensive surveillance
by interior affairs ministry and Kazakh national security officials over pub-
lic and private life have weakened the mobilizational potential of Russians.
However, the integration of northern and eastern regions into the central
structure is far from a fait accompli. Russian claims over entire north-
eastern regions of Kazakhstan, as articulated by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn,
are grounded in nationalist thinking rather than a differentiated knowl-
edge of historical facts, and have found little political support from within
Russia or an unequivocal endorsement by Russians within Kazakhstan.
However, as a Kazakhstani historian Irina Erofeeva notes, ‘an undisputed
belief in their civilisational superiority and deep-seated historical claims
over the region’ among local Russians manifests itself as ‘profound intro-
version and apprehension of all outsiders – whether from other oblasts
of Kazakhstan or from Russia’.28 Erofeeva also points out that the north-
western parts of the East Kazakhstan oblast, along the right bank of river
Irtysh, including the city Ust-Kamenogorsk, belong to the Siberian ecolog-
ical landscape (not the Kazakh nomadic pastures) and were under the West
Siberian governorate all through the tsarist period until their inclusion
into Soviet republic of Kazakhstan in the 1920s.29 These points undermine
the validity of Kazakh ‘historical’ claims over the region.
Kazakhstan’s law on public assembly, in force since 1998, requires
prior permission of the authorities for holding a public rally. Participa-
tion in an ‘unsanctioned’ rally or meeting can lead to arrest, fines and
ultimately a disqualification from contesting any public position.
Furthermore, Article 337 of the Criminal Code also provides stiff penal-
ties for participation in an ‘unregistered’ public association. A rigid
surveillance by the interior ministry forces, legal restrictions and harsh
penalties make it extremely difficult to engage in any spontaneous pub-
lic action. Accusation of inciting ethnic discord or displaying national-
ism is one of the most dangerous charges a person can face. Piotr Svoik,
a leading Russian opposition activist in 1998, was accused of insulting
the dignity of the Kazakh nation by publishing an article in a popular
Russian language newspaper.30 The intimidation by authorities (Svoik
was beaten up in December 1997 by ‘unidentified assailants’) appears to
have been instrumental in ending his association with the opposition
and securing co-optation into the regime.
92 Bhavna Dave
The arrest of a group of some 13 Russians in Ust-Kamenogorsk by

Ministry of Interior officials in November 1999 for allegedly plotting an
‘armed insurrection’ to overthrow the regional administration in the
East Kazakhstan oblast and proclaiming an Autonomous Republic of
Altai is similarly reflective of the paranoia of the regime rather than any
mobilizational potential of Russians. Independent observers and human
rights advocates have pointed out that the amount of explosives seized
was too small to be called an insurgency and the confiscated materials
may have been planted by the authorities themselves.31
New institutions of ethnic patronage
National-cultural centres and the assembly of people

An important feature of Nazarbaev’s ethnic strategy is the use of presi-
dential patronage to erect institutions of ethnic representation.
Formally speaking, each ethnic group is given the constitutional right to
form an official national cultural centre committed to developing the
cultural heritage of its national community as a whole. At the same
time, the constitution prohibits the formation of a public association or
political party propounding an ethnic, religious or nationalist ideology.
In the official conception, each ethnic group is a homogeneous, bounded
entity which can be represented by a single official national-cultural
centre. The national centres are also encouraged, and expected, to solicit
help from the ‘kin’ state for the cultural and material advancement of
their group. Indeed the German and Korean centres have vastly bene-
fited from material support from their kin-states, as well as from their
individual ethnic sponsors, but most other centres remain largely
dependent on modest (Kazakhstani) state support.32 The lack of ethnic
cohesiveness among Russians, their territorial dispersion and varying
degrees of rootedness make it impossible for any single national-cultural
centre to represent these multitudes of claims and interests. The single
largest group representing Slavs, Lad, is ineligible for the status of a
‘national-cultural’ centre as it is founded on the notion of Slavic unity.
The national-cultural centres serve to promote and legitimate the offi-
cial policies, rather than attempt to channel group or societal aspira-
tions to the state institutions. They are socialized into denying the
appropriateness of the idea of self-determination and instead acquiesce
to their ‘diaspora’ status through an orientation towards the kin state.
Alexander Dederer, the leader of Kazakhstan’s Germans admitted that
‘no group will voluntarily seek to limit their rights’, if the principle of
national-cultural autonomy were to be endorsed.33
The most visible institution wielding ethnic patronage is the Assembly

of Peoples of Kazakhstan (Assembleia narodov Kazakhstana), established in
1995 by President Nazarbaev. The President also serves as its chairman
and is looked upon as the Guardian-Protector of small minorities. Both
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan set up these structures of ethnic representa-
tion ostensibly in compliance with the recommendations of the OSCE
High Commissioner on National Minorities. The assembly at the centre
consists of over 300 representatives of various ethnic groups and has
branches at the oblast levels. The various national-cultural centres nom-
inate delegates to the assembly. The President nominates other members,
who include academics, artists, writers and social activists of various
nationalities, after a formal consultation with the national-cultural cen-
tres. Membership of the assembly is viewed as an honour personally
bestowed by the President that the recipient cannot refuse.
The national-cultural centres and the Assembly of Peoples are non-
political associations whose activities are focused on ‘cultural’ or ‘ethno-
graphic’ issues, such as organizing language lessons, concerts, plays,
national festivals, ‘days of culture’, anniversaries of major literary and
historical figures and so on. A crucial obligation of the Assembly of
Peoples is to refrain from political activity or any form of ethnic entre-
preneurship. The law mandating that these centres be registered with the
ministry of justice serves as an important screening mechanism. Groups
such as Russkaia obshchina and the various Cossack formations have
encountered a series of bureaucratic obstacles at the central and oblast
levels in securing long-term legal status and have remained on the
fringes of the official framework. The ban on the various oblast branches
of Russkaia obshchina and Lad was lifted in August 1999 on the eve of the
parliamentary elections.
At the same time, the state élites acclaim the ‘conflict resolution’ role
of the Assembly, citing an agreement, supposedly brokered by the
Assembly, between the Union of Cossacks of Semirech’e and the law and
order authorities of Almaty.34 The Union of Cossacks of Semirech’e was
denied registration because of its members’ insistence on wearing mili-
tary uniforms and bearing arms. Max van der Stoel, the OSCE High
Commissioner on National Minorities, facilitated negotiations between
Cossack representatives and government officials, urging that Cossack
participants be invited to national and international conferences on
ethnic issues. Two Cossack representatives were nominated by the
Kazakhstani government to attend a conference in Locarno in Switzerland
in 1996 amidst allegations that they had been ‘bought off’.35 Subsequently,
state officials have successfully exploited the divisions between two rival
94 Bhavna Dave
Cossack organizations, the Semirech’e Cossack group headed by

Gennadii Belykov, which is closely associated with the Russkaia
obshchina, and the Union of Semirech’e Cossacks headed by Viktor
Ovsiannikov, which enjoys the tactical support of the authorities.
The state policy of enshrining the country’s multi-ethnic legacy is ori-
ented towards celebrating the cultures and national heritage of numer-
ous small ethnic groups while fomenting factions and divisions within
larger groups (Russians). The state has entrusted the Assembly with the
task of apportioning the 10 per cent quota in universities for the ‘small’
ethnic groups – a provision that excludes Russians. While Russians are
psychologically resistant to being reduced to the status of a ‘minority’,
spokespersons for other ethnic groups, notably ethnic Germans, Koreans
and Uighurs have made steady demands for the recognition and institu-
tionalization of their minority status. For example, the German Council of
Kazakhstan, enjoying the sponsorship of Germany, obtained membership
of the Federal Union of European Minorities.
Minority leaders have used more informal and personalistic connec-
tions to secure certain political concessions for their groups. The Koreans
have been able to work out an informal arrangement, which allows them
to nominate their own akim (head of the region or oblast) in the city of
Ushtobe in the Taldy Korgan oblast, which has a sizeable Korean popula-
tion.36 This arrangement is an ad hoc one, a personal favour granted by
Nazarbaev arising from informal negotiations and has no legal status or
wider ramifications for other ethnic groups.
Ethnic frontmen and co-optation

One problem particularly afflicting Russians, and to a large extent all
other ethnic groups, is the absence or weakness of ethnic leaders capable
of creating a support base within their ethnic communities. Horowitz
also points to the absence of a legitimately recognized élite in a certain
ethnic group as a characteristic of the ranked nature of the system.37
While the legitimacy of the Kazakh élite is under question,38 a non-
titular élite is simply absent in the system, attesting to the ‘lack of group
autonomy in leadership selection’, which Horowitz describes as ‘a sure
sign of ethnic subordination’.39
The ethnic faces in the official apparatus are invariably appointees from
the top, either unknown to their ethnic constituencies or unpopular
among them. Examples of these are Sergei Tereshchenko, a former Prime
Minister (1991–93), native of Shymkent and fluent in Kazakh; Aleksandr
Pavlov, a former Finance Minister from North Kazakhstan; and Viktor
Khrapunov, current Mayor of Almaty who has made public gestures of

speaking rudimentary Kazakh and accompanying his Kazakh wife to
mosque. Indeed, the few Kazakh-speaking Slavs serving in the high polit-
ical echelons are extensively plugged into the ‘internal’ clan and zhuz pol-
itics (which critics dub a mainly ‘Kazakh’ phenomenon) and pejoratively
referred to as the ‘fourth zhuz’.40 Integration through co-optation is the
only means of attaining mobility available to the Russian-speakers within
the nationalizing apparatus. Co-optation brings in security of tenure as a
reward for loyalty and support. The rewards for compliance are generous,
just as the penalties for undertaking autonomous political action or dis-
loyalty are severe. Scorned as Kazakhicized (‘okazacheny’), Russians occu-
pying major positions in the state apparatus tend to enjoy little support or
credibility among their ethnic kin and are ill-suited to provide leadership
to their ethnic communities.
The state has also sought to exploit anti-Russification sentiments
among other Slavic groups (mainly Ukrainians) by emphasizing their eth-
nic distinctiveness and ‘suffering’ under the Soviet rule. The common
plight of Kazakhs and Ukrainians is highlighted in references to the losses
both ethnic groups suffered under collectivization of the late 1920s. An
overwhelming majority of Ukrainians of Kazakhstan are linguistically and
culturally Russified. Indeed the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Almaty,
Astana and a few other oblasts may be the only places in Kazakhstan
where Ukrainian is spoken. Led by Aleksandr Garkavets, a linguist and
Turcologist, the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Almaty has enjoyed the
sustained ideological support and patronage of President Nazarbaev.
Although the Ukrainian state has little financial means to help its dias-
pora and sustain the national-cultural centre, the independence of
Ukraine and the adoption of Ukrainian as the sole state language have
injected a certain degree of ethnic differentiation from Russians and
desire to learn Ukrainian. As a doctoral student working on the Ukrainian
diaspora in Kazakhstan at the Almaty State University noted, numerous
Ukrainian cultural centres all over the country have become the domain
of a small group mainly of Western Ukrainian extraction who came to
Kazakhstan after the Second World War and do not have intimate ties
with the historical Ukrainian diaspora.41 While the personal background
of the activists of the Ukrainian Centre and the patronage-based ethnic
segregationist policy of Kazakhstani state may have facilitated the exit of
the Ukrainian cultural centre from the Slavic movement Lad in the early
1990s, such a separation is also reinforced by the efforts of independent
Ukraine to build a ‘European’ image through a cultural disassociation
with Russia.
96 Bhavna Dave
Members of the Assembly representing the relevant ‘kin’ states are

encouraged to cultivate close contacts with their kin states and obtain
the necessary funding for cultural regeneration. They are often included
in the presidential or governmental delegations to that country and also
assigned a visible role during visits by foreign dignitaries of their kin
state. For instance, Pavel Atrushkevich, the President of the Assembly
and a Belarusian by nationality, accompanied President Nazarbaev on a
visit to Belarus; Oleg Dymov was a prominent face in the President’s visit
to Bulgaria and Aleksandr Garkavets has been a consistent presence in
the various meetings with Ukrainian governmental delegations. On the
other hand, none of the representatives of Lad, Russkaia obshchina or
Cossack groups have been invited to partake in similar dealings with
Russian delegations. As the above examples show, the absence of an
autonomous ethnic élite or institutionalized power-sharing arrange-
ments enables the state to co-opt individual ethnic members and use
them as ethnic figureheads. Their symbolic representation allows the
state to affirm its ‘multi-ethnic and international’ image and deter the
emergence of a counter-élite outside the official organs of power. As Piotr
Svoik noted in 1997, ‘as individuals, these are respectable and intelligent
people, but together they demonstrate an incredulous callousness and
willingness to rubber-stamp almost anything’.42 Svoik himself is a typical
example of an individual who has been co-opted into the state apparatus
after periodically dabbling in opposition activism and attacking the eth-
nic policies of the state.
Implications of Kazakhstan’s ethnic strategy
The Kazakhstani case shows how a rank ordering of ethnic groups and
state support to the titular ethnic group have served to deter direct eth-
nic competition. The framing of the language issue in terms of status
and survival of the titular group allowed the state élites to justify nation-
alization measures as motivated by affirmative action, thus representing
Russians as an advantaged group and Kazakhs as the victims. Lacking an
autonomous ethnic élite or effective leadership, and further constrained
by the unavailability of an institutional framework, most Russian-speakers
have exercised the exit option. Symbolic appeasement, as attempted
by Kazakhstan with respect to smaller groups (such as Koreans, Germans,
Tatars), including the use of patronage, have had some success when the
group concerned does not claim an indigenous status and accepts its
diasporic or non-territorial status in the host country. Furthermore, the
covert discrimination against Russians has not evoked resistance
primarily because Russians as a group remain deeply acculturated into

seeing themselves as civilizationally superior and do not covet inclusion
in the ethnic hierarchy. The emigration of Russian-speakers as well as
the political disempowerment of non-titular groups have accelerated the
transformation of Kazakhstan into a Kazakh national state. Ethnic ‘sta-
bility’ has come at a high cost to the principle of ethnic equality and
pluralism.
Although Kazakhstan has managed to steer clear of conflict along eth-
nic lines, the top-down management of ethnic relations has exacerbated
a deep sense of alienation of the citizenry from the state, bringing about
a massive population flight and a steady deterioration of the quality of
life and norms governing the public sphere. The 1999 census states the
population to be 14.9 million, down from 16.7 million in 1989, and
declining further. Kazakhstan has lost about 8 per cent of the total pop-
ulation due to non-titular emigration over the past decade. Such a high
drop in population is especially alarming for a country that has not been
subject to any ethnic turmoil or civil strife and has taken pride in pre-
serving ethnic ‘stability’. The population decline is compounded by
the absence of the projected increase in the Kazakh birth rate. Despite
the government’s efforts to boost the birth rate through economic
incentives, the birth rate attained an all-time low of 1.6 per cent in 1999
and has declined further.43
As the conflict avoidance strategy of the state has generated preferential
conditions for the mobility of Kazakhs, particularly those proficient in the
Kazakh language, it has deepened the social and cultural tensions between
Russified urban élites and a rural, newly urbanizing group of Kazakhs.
With the growing marginalization of Russians and non-titular groups in
the political arena, intra-ethnic competition and rivalries are more likely to
come to the fore, thus dampening the vision of a nation-state founded on
the principles of ethnic harmony and cultural homogeneity.

1. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights,
Oxford, 1995.
2. Rogers Brubaker, ‘National minorities, nationalizing states, and external
national homelands in the new Europe’, Daedalus, 124(2), 1995, pp. 107–32.
According to Brubaker, ethnic conflict in the post-Soviet states is likely to
be manifested along a triadic nexus of the titular nationality, the largest non-
titular group and its external homeland.
3. Anatoly Khazanov, After the USSR: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Commonwealth
of Independent States, Madison, WI, 1995.
98 Bhavna Dave
4. Strong secessionist attitudes are present in the regions bordering Russia in

East and North Kazakhstan (most notably in Ust-Kamenogorsk and
Petropavlovsk). Although the paper makes some references to these regions,
this issue merits a separate study.
5. Fear of reprisal has similarly been a most crucial factor that explains the lack
of ethnic activism on the part of other major non-titular groups in Central
Asia – notably Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, concentrated heavily in the Osh oblast
in Southern Kyrgyzstan, and Tajiks in Uzbekistan living in Samarkand and
Bukhara. Barring a few local organizations or movements generally devoted
to cultural or other symbolic ethnic issues, the non-titular groups (‘minori-
ties’) lack a cohesive leadership or close ties with the ‘kin’ state.
6. For a detailed account, see Bhavna Dave, ‘The politics of language revival in
Kazakhstan: National identity and state-building in Kazakhstan’, unpublished
PhD. Dissertation, Syracuse University, 1996.
7. About 64 per cent of Kazakhs claimed fluency in Russian in 1989 and almost
98 per cent have a basic proficiency in the language. Estimates of native lan-
guage proficiency among Kazakhs remain varied. My own ethnographic
observations during the period 1992–95 suggest that almost two thirds to
three fourths of Kazakhs living in urban settings almost exclusively spoke
Russian though many of them claimed to understand Kazakh and be able to
speak it if the situation warranted.
8. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Berkeley, CA, 1985, p. 22.
9. According to the 1999 Kazakhstan census, 99.4 per cent of Kazakhs claimed
proficiency in the state language. The ‘proficiency’ in question was deter-
mined solely on the basis of subjective assessment and did not differentiate
between distinct domains, such as speaking, reading and writing. For details,
see Bhavna Dave, ‘The Entitlement through numbers: nationality and lan-
guage categories in the first post-Soviet census of Kazakhstan’, Nations and
Nationalism, 2004.
10. Interview with Erbol Shaimerdenov, Astana, 9 September 1999.
11. It also showed that 15 per cent among the ethnic Russians claim to know the
‘state language’, a remarkable improvement from 1989 when less than 1 per
cent claimed any facility in Kazakh. It should be noted that the 1999 census
questionnaire did not contain the more emotionally charged category
‘mother tongue’ and only required respondents to list knowledge of the
‘state language’ and ‘any other language they know fluently’.
12. For a comprehensive discussion on how the 1999 census has facilitated the
attainment of state’s language and ethnic policies, see Dave, ‘Entitlement
through numbers’.
13. Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 15 December 2000.
14. See Nurbulat Masanov, ‘Migratsionnye metamorfozy Kazakhstana’ in
S. A. Panarin, A. N. Vyatkin and N. Kosmarskaya (eds), V dvizhenii dobrovol’nom
i prinuzhdennom: postsovetsie migratsii v Evrazii, Moscow, Natalis, 1999,
pp. 127–53 (p. 143); Alexander N. Alekseenko, ‘Perepis’ naseleniia 1999 goda
v Respublike Kazakhstana’, http://www.zatulin.ru/institute/sbornik/001/03.shtml
15. Rogers Brubaker, ‘Aftermaths of empire and unmixing of peoples: Historical
and comparative perspectives’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 18(2), 1995,
pp. 189–218.
16. David Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Population in the

Near-Abroad, Ithaca, NY, 1998.
17. Albert O. Hirshman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms,
Organisations and States, Cambridge, MA, 1970.
18. Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 15 December 2000.
19. Aina Antane and Boris Tsilevich, ‘Nation-building and ethnic integration
in Latvia’ in Pål Kolstø (ed.) Nation-Building and Ethnic Integration in Post-
Soviet Societies: An Investigation of Latvia and Kazakhstan, Boulder, CO, 1999,
pp. 63–152.
20. Jørn Holm-Hansen, ‘Political integration in Kazakhstan’ in Kolstø (ed.), ibid.,
pp. 153–226.
21. The Slavs form about two thirds among the group of pensioners, who are the
most politically-engaged social group.
22. Edward Schatz, ‘ “Tribes” and “clans” in modern power: The state-led pro-
duction of subethnic politics in Kazakhstan’, unpublished PhD. Dissertation,
University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2000, pp. 129–30.
23. A similar distinction between ‘Ukrainian and other people’ has been retained
in Ukraine although the Ukrainian state professes to be a ‘civic’ state. It has put
forth the notion ‘people of Ukraine’ (narod Ukrainy) as an inclusive category.
Ukrainian deputies voted to capitalize the first letter to refer to the civic cate-
gory, whereas the ethnonym is to be written without capitalization. See
Dominique Arel, ‘Interpreting “Nationality” and “Language” in the 2001
Ukrainian census’, post-Soviet Affairs, 18(3), 2002, pp. 213–99. Russia has dis-
tinguished between the ethnic (russkii) and civic (rossiskii).
24. Dominique Arel, ‘Language categories in censuses: Backward-or forward-
looking?’ in David Kertzer and Dominique Arel (eds), Categorizing Citizens:
The Use of Race, Ethnicity and Language in National Censuses, Cambridge, 2000,
p. 168.
25. Konstitutsiia Respubliki Kazakhstana, Almaty, 1996, p. 9.
26. Radio Free Europe /Radio Liberty Newsline, 15 March 1996.
27. Valery Tishkov, ‘The Osh riots’ in Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict
in and After the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame, London, 1997.
28. Interview with Irina Erofeeva, Almaty, 19 September 1999.
29. Ibid.
30. Karavan, 20 March 1998, p. 37.
31. www.eurasia.org.ru/arkhiv/december1999
32. Germany has offered extensive help to enable the shrinking German com-
munity to remain within Kazakhstan. The Deutsches Haus in Kazakhstan dis-
tributes free medicine, produce and fuel for winter and runs free German
language classes. Similarly, South Korea has offered a large renovated build-
ing for housing the Korean Cultural Centre and the Korean theatre. It also
offers facilities for learning Korean, training in English, as well as other sub-
jects related to the growth of market economy and marketing skills in Korean
institutions. Samsung and Daewoo, huge investors in Kazakhstan, use local
Koreans for promoting business ties.
33. Panorama, 13 August 1999, p. 6.
34. Pavel Atrushkevich, ‘Politikov s chervotochinoi pugaet edinstva naroda’,
Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 8 October 1998, p. 2.
100 Bhavna Dave
35. Author’s conversations with some Cossack leaders in Ust Kamenogorsk,

July 1997.
36. Author’s interview with Gennadii Mikhailovich Ni, President of the Koreans’
Association of Kazakhstan, Almaty, August 1999.
37. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, p. 25.
38. Among the works by Kazakhstani scholars detailing the domination of
regional and clientelistic networks among the ruling Kazakh élite, see
Nurbulat Masanov, ‘Kazakhskaia politicheskaia i intellektual’naia elita:
klanovaia prinadlezhnost’ i vnutrietnicheskoe sopernichestvo’ (hereafter,
‘Kazakhskaia elita’), Vestnik Evrazii, 1, 1996, 2, pp. 46–61 and Vitalii Khliupin,
Bol’shaia sem’ia Nursultana Nazarbaeva: politicheskaia elita sovremennogo
Kazakhstana, Moscow, 1998.
39. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, p. 25.
40. Masanov, ‘Kazakhskaia elita’, p. 56.
41. Author’s interview (name withheld), Almaty, August 1999.
42. Delovaia nedelia, 27 June 1997, p. 7.
43. On the ethnonational roots of the impending demographic crisis in
Kazakhstan, see Aleksandr N. Alekseenko, ‘Demograficheskaia katastrofa v
Respublike Kazakhstana’, 2001, http://www.zatulin.ru/institute/sbornik/001/
03.shtml
Part II
The Economy
6
Transactions in the US–Russia
Relationship: Representational
Gymnastics, Shifting Agency
and Russia’s Decline
Janine R. Wedel
When the Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe collapsed

in 1989, it seemed that the West, particularly the United States, finally
had what it had always wanted: the chance to remake former enemies
into its own image as capitalist democracies. Friendly, co-operative rela-
tions could be built, and Western aid would help the region construct
democratic, free-market states. Rather than continuing to confront the
East, the West would buy security.
Ten years later, that view appears naïve. To be sure, some effective aid
projects were developed following the early years of aid misadventure.
Some assistance provided by the European Union (EU) to the Central
European nations in recent years has been helpful, as those nations enter
into pre-accession negotiations with the EU. However, in other cases,
foreign aid has failed, and may even have been counterproductive.
Assistance to Russia is a case in point.
Debates on foreign aid typically turn on how much to spend and what
to spend it on. Western policymakers also ask ‘What’s in our national
interest?’ so they can sell the programme at home. But as an anthropol-
ogist who has studied relationships among people and societies, I ask
who gets the aid on both sides – on the donor side who gets the con-
tracts, and how the contracts are set up; on the recipient side whether
the aid will have any effect, and if so, how it will rearrange the local
political, social and economic structure.
So a major theme of my work on foreign aid (and my book, Collision
and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe) is that it
is relationships – between Easterners and Westerners, among Easterners,
103
104 Janine R. Wedel
and among Westerners – that shaped the outcome of nearly all grant aid
to the region: This is true whether it is technical assistance through
person-to-person contact; grants to nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) in the recipient nations, or assistance for economic reform to a
single political-economic group. Although these strategies differed sig-
nificantly, in all of them it was crucially important exactly who partici-
pated and how these participants connected to their counterparts and
compatriots.
Aid policies, like any policies, do not exist in a vacuum. They are only
as successful as their implementation by individuals and institutions:
individuals, with their own interests and cultural backgrounds; institu-
tions, grounded in culture and politics. Foreign aid to Eastern Europe
came at a crucial moment, but the lack of attention paid to the agendas
of the people involved in foreign aid on both sides has played a major
role in its failures.
First, a few words about the focus and methods for this study. My
focus is primarily on priority projects in priority countries, as seen by
the donors. Since the main objective of the donors was to build market
economies – often, to privatize what they considered to be inefficient
state owned enterprises – I concentrate on economic projects.
With regard to priority countries, my empirical research begins in the
Central European countries of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia,
which were viewed as the most likely to succeed among the transitional
countries, and which were the first to receive aid, at least initially. When
the aid story moved to east to Russia, and then Ukraine, both considered
crucial to strategic and political interests, so did I.
My method of research is what anthropologists call ‘studying
through’. Traditional anthropology studies ‘bounded’ groups, some-
times isolated, sometimes as part of complex societies and world sys-
tems, and frequently disenfranchised. But this study required examining
both sides of the aid chain and how the sides link together.
To capture the aid story, aid issues were followed through actors and
processes on both donor and recipient sides, with aid as the common
thread. The connections explored (for example, among a Russian ‘clan’,
representatives of a Harvard University institute and US officials)
required me to develop access to and trust among a variety of informants
familiar with the same project or set of projects.
Following issues that involve actors in multiple settings required the
tracking of policy in different settings. I moved back and forth between
donor and recipient societies, a rather messy process that required a lot
of tracking events and players and cross-checking on all sides. It also
Transactions in the US–Russia Relationship 105
helps to have verification from other scholars and independent investi-

gators. In the course of the study, I found common ground not only
with fellow anthropologists but also with political scientists, econo-
mists, public administration specialists, and investigators working on
pieces of the same issues. Perhaps this is an indication that cross-
fertilization of methods may increasingly be called for in studies of
global issues and interactions.
My research on Western assistance began in 1989 immediately after
the Communist East Bloc fell apart. At the time I had spent about six
years in Poland. I had described the inner workings of a complex, ingen-
ious society – a society in which an elaborate system of informal distri-
bution of goods and services paralleled and often overshadowed the
official economy; a society in which the state and its rules were treated
less as opponents to be destroyed than as inconveniences to be over-
come; a society rearranged by its informal practices in profoundly
un-Communist directions.
So when visitors from the West came to Poland in 1989–90 to look at
the ‘miracle’ of the end of the Cold War, I suddenly found myself in the
role of informal broker between local people and their would-be
Western partners. I witnessed the many misconceptions and unrealistic
expectations on both sides.
Triumphalism
The years 1989 and 1990 launched an era of excitement, of high hopes
and great expectations in Central and Eastern Europe. People hoped the
‘transition’ would be simple and swift. As ‘transition to democracy’
came into vogue in the West, carpetbaggers, political tourists, business
scouts, bargain hunters and hundreds of instant experts came to the
East. The environment of adventure and newfound opportunity
attracted joint venture seekers, dealmakers, and often, people who could
‘play on any team’ – Communist, capitalist or mafia.
Although some steadfast and persistent advisers made contributions in
the region, the jet-setting ‘econolobbyists’ were more about public rela-
tions and their own publicity than they were about serious policy advice.
Although not necessarily funded by government aid programmes
(Western foundations were frequent supporters), the econolobbyists,
through their promises and illusive relationships with their hosts, cre-
ated an image that persisted throughout the aid saga. In the West, the
econolobbyists wrote op-ed pieces, delivered speeches calling for aid,
and thereby helped define the ‘reform’ agenda. They were perceived as
106 Janine R. Wedel
able to effect market reforms in the East. In the East, the econolobbyists’
value was seen in their ability to deliver Western money and access
and to help policymakers ‘sell’ controversial reforms in the transition
countries.
Unregistered, unregulated and unrestrained, a few highly visible
econolobbyists were an integral part of the phase of Triumphalism and
even gave it definition. As attention shifted from one country to
another, the econolobbyists moved in and received attention during the
period of high expectations in whatever country they were helping to
put ‘on track’. Yet they were scarcely to be found in the subsequent
phase of Disillusionment. Both at home and abroad, the econolobbyists
effectively leveraged their supposed access to and influence with
policymakers and money sources. And, as public hype over one country
undergoing ‘reform’ diminished, they typically abandoned it and
moved on to another.
This was a period I call Triumphalism, and it existed in both East and
West. It was an era of big schemes; the post-war Marshall Plan was held
up as a shining model of what could be. However, although the Marshall
Plan served as a rhetorical and ideological reference in both East and
West, aid to Central and Eastern Europe bore little resemblance to it.
Whereas the Marshall Plan consisted largely of capital assistance, aid to
Central and Eastern Europe was largely technical assistance. The
Marshall Plan was funded and directed by the United States, whereas in
the 1990s many donor nations (such as Germany, the United Kingdom,
other individual Western European governments, and the EU) con-
tributed aid to Central and Eastern Europe. If the Marshall Plan was
high-level and focused, aid to Central and Eastern Europe was dispersed.
Aid to the region also differed significantly from the ‘Third World’
model: it was thought that the countries of Central Europe could be
brought up to ‘our [Western] standards’ within a few years – in part
because of their high educational and literacy levels. And a higher pri-
ority was placed on the task of transforming the Second World: aid agen-
cies were reorganized, with foreign ministries playing a large role in the
new effort.
Technical assistance and disillusionment
The major method that the bilateral donors (and the EU) employed in
their aid-giving was ‘technical assistance’. This meant sending thou-
sands of consultants and supposed experts on just about everything to
the region. It did not take long, though, before local people had had
enough of the fly-in fly-out consultants and the so-called ‘introductory

visits’ of consultants who never returned. In the early days, this was
common with aid-paid consultants, who would come to lecture on
how to build democracy by giving a talk on, say, the Danish or the
French constitutional system. The Poles soon coined a derisive term –
the ‘Marriott Brigade’ – for the consultants who came and stayed in
Warsaw’s only five-star hotel at the time – the Marriott – and then
proceeded on to Budapest and Prague. This launched the second phase
of East–West aid relations, which I call Disillusionment.
A Polish aid official suggested that the main benefit of the Marriott
Brigade was not their expertise, but the hard currency – the payments to
hotels, restaurants, taxis and translators – that they contributed to the
local economy. A Slovak aid official told me, ‘the Western consultants
collect information, get the picture, then they go home. […] We are
solving the West’s unemployment in this way.’
The Disillusionment experienced in Central and Eastern Europe was
duplicated a few years later as the focus of Western aid – and many of
the same programmes and consultants – moved East. The same despair-
ing language that officials used in Central Europe was repeated almost
verbatim further east in Russia and Ukraine, despite considerable cul-
tural differences. In other words, the same dynamic of East–West contact
and of Disillusionment was repeated in each country. Within a year or
so of its arrival, the Marriott Brigade had alienated many of the people it
was trying to help.
Adjustment
After a period of frustration and resentment on both sides, however,

some adjustment took place. In Central Europe, this could be seen
around 1994. This phase, which I call Adjustment, occurred as donors
and recipients began to work out how they could use each other to
mutual advantage. During this period there began to be some effective
technical assistance, which was characterized by two conditions.
First, effective technical assistance consisted of long-term resident
advisers who were requested by and integrated into the host institutions
that had invited them. One example of such assistance was a US
Department of Treasury program, in which consultants worked closely
with their hosts on issues such as debt relief, and lived for long periods
in the recipient countries.
The second characteristic of effective technical assistance is that it
does not advantage one political group over another: in other words, it
108 Janine R. Wedel
is neutral. Aid must be perceived as impartial and as working on behalf

of the recipient country generally, not as propping up a particular group
within the country.
One program sponsored by the US Congressional Research Service
provided support to the new parliaments of the region, so that they
could develop impartial systems of information that all parliamentari-
ans, regardless of political affiliation, could use. This program was
successful and perceived as such because it was politically neutral.
Aid can encourage the development of a more comprehensive market
system or inadvertently promote opposition to it. Aid can foster friendly
relations with the donor nation, or animosity towards it. The phase I call
Adjustment took place in some countries after a period of learning.
Aid to Russia
In other countries, however, there has rather been anti-Adjustment. In

Russia, Western aid has contributed to economic decline, and a backlash
effect against the United States, since many Russians know that
American dollars were behind many of the so-called ‘reforms’ that have
made many of their lives harder.
How did the United States, by far the dominant partner in the rela-
tionship, allow one of the most promising rapprochements of the last
century to founder? Rather than proceeding on the basis of common
sense and well-established modes of representation between states, it
acted upon an ideology implemented through a most dubious mode of
conducting relations between nations. The ideology – that of radical pri-
vatization and marketization, applied in this instance in a cold-turkey
manner to a society with no recent experience of either – is well known.
The way in which advice and aid were given is much less familiar, but it
is a vital part of the story.
It is necessary to give this distinctive way of conducting business a
name, and, drawing on my experience as an anthropologist, I call it
‘transactorship’. By ‘transactors’, I mean players in a small, informal
group who work together for mutual gain, while formally representing
different parties. Even though transactors may genuinely share the stated
goals of the parties they represent, they have additional goals and ways
of operating of their own. These may, advertently or inadvertently, sub-
vert or subordinate the aims of those for whom they ostensibly act. The
behaviour of members of such groups is marked by extreme flexibility
and a readiness to exchange roles, even to the extent of representing
parties other than the ones to which they are formally attached.
During the 1990s, the cosy manner in which American advisers and
Russian representatives – that is, the transactors – interacted and the out-
comes of their activities ran directly counter to the stated aims of the
US aid program in Russia. As a new century begins, key transactors in this
program are being sued by the US government for ‘using their positions,
inside information and influence, as well as USAID-funded resources, to
advance their own personal business interests and investments and those
of their wives and friends’.
Transactorship, as it applies in the US–Russia relationship over the last
decade, involves individuals, institutions and groups whose official sta-
tus is difficult to establish. Indeed, nearly everything about transactors is
ambiguous. Their sphere of activity is neither fixedly public nor private,
neither firmly political nor economic; their activities are neither fully
open nor completely hidden and conspiratorial; and the transactors are
not exclusively committed to one side or the other. Their enormous
flexibility enhances their influence on all sides.
The emergence of transactorship
How in the case of Russia and the United States did the transactors come
together? As the vast Soviet state was collapsing in late 1991, Harvard
professors Jeffrey Sachs, Andrei Shleifer and others participated in meet-
ings at a dacha outside Moscow. There, young would-be Russian
‘reformers’ were in the process of devising a blueprint for economic and
political change. The key Russians present at the dacha were the econo-
mists Egor Gaidar and Anatolii Chubais. These meetings occurred at the
time when Boris El’tsin, then president of what was still Soviet Russia,
was putting together his team of economic advisers. Gaidar would
become the first ‘architect’ of economic ‘reform’ in post-Communist
Russia. A long-standing group of associates from St Petersburg, centred
around Chubais, was to figure prominently in El’tsin’s team. Indeed,
Chubais would go on to replace Gaidar, and to become an indispensable
aide to El’tsin.
While at the dacha, Sachs and several other Westerners offered their
services to the Russians, including that of facilitating access to Western
money – an offer the Russians accepted. In the ensuing months and years
the members of the Harvard and Chubais teams saw to it that they
became the designated representatives for their respective sides – and
transactors in the sense I have described. On the American side, represen-
tatives from the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID)
would provide the theory and advice to reinvent the Russian economy.
110 Janine R. Wedel
Maintaining that Russian economic reform was so important, and the

‘window of opportunity’ to effect change so narrow, US policymakers
granted the Harvard Institute special treatment. Between 1992 and 1997,
the Institute received US$40.4 million from the US Agency for Inter-
national Development (USAID) in non-competitive grants, and – until
USAID suspended its funding in May 1997 – had been slated to receive
another US$17.4 million. Harvard-connected officials in the Clinton
administration, citing ‘foreign policy’ considerations, largely bypassed
the normal public bidding process required for foreign aid contracts. The
waivers to competition were backed by friends of the Harvard Institute
group, especially in the US Treasury. Approving such a large sum of
money mostly as non-competitive amendments to a much smaller award
(the Harvard Institute’s original award was US$2.1 million) was highly
unusual, according to US government procurement officers and
US General Accounting Office (GAO) officials, including Louis H. Zanardi,
who later spearheaded GAO’s investigation of HIID activities in Russia
and Ukraine. Indeed, the US government delegated virtually its entire
Russian economic aid portfolio – more than US$350 million – for man-
agement by the Harvard Institute. The Institute was also provided the
legal authority to manage other contractors (some of whom were its
competitors), leaving it in the unique position of recommending
US aid policies while being itself a chief recipient of that aid. In 1996 the
GAO found that the Harvard Institute had ‘substantial control of the
US assistance program’. According to US government procurement
officers and GAO officials, delegating so much aid to a private entity was
unprecedented.
In Russia, the Harvard representatives worked exclusively with
Anatolii Chubais and the circle around him, which came to be known as
the Chubais Clan. The interests of the Harvard Institute group and those
of the Chubais Clan soon became one and the same. Their members
became known for their loyalty to each other and for the unified front
they projected to the outside world. By mid-1993, the Harvard–Chubais
players had formed an informal and extremely influential transactor
group that was shaping the direction and consequences of US economic
aid and much Western economic policy towards Russia.
Providing pivotal support to the Harvard–Chubais transactors was
Lawrence Summers, earlier a member of the Harvard faculty and at this
time chief economist at the World Bank. Summers had strong ties to the
Harvard team, including Shleifer, the economist who served as project
director of the Harvard Institute’s program in Russia. Soon, Summers
would play a principal role in designing US and international economic
policies at the US Treasury, where he would occupy the posts of under-

secretary, then deputy secretary and, finally, secretary.
The Chubais transactors were advertised by their promoters as the
‘Young Reformers’. The Western media promoted their mystique and
overlooked other reform-minded groups in Russia. Western donors
tended to identify Russians as reformers not on the basis of their com-
mitment to the free market but because they possessed personal attrib-
utes to which the Westerners responded favorably: proficiency in the
English language; a Western look; an ability to parrot the slogans of
‘markets’, ‘reform’ and ‘democracy’; and name recognition by well-
credentialed fellow Westerners. Members of the Chubais team possessed
all of these qualities. By their sponsors in the West, they were depicted
as enlightened and uniquely qualified to represent Russia and usher it
down the road to capitalism and prosperity. Summers dubbed them a
‘dream team’, which, given his position and status, was a particularly
valuable endorsement.
In Russia, however, the Chubais transactors’ primary source of clout was
neither ideology nor even reform strategy, but precisely their standing
with and their ability to get resources from the West. As the Russian soci-
ologist Olga Kryshtanovskaia explained it, ‘Chubais has what no other
élite group has, which is the support of the top political quarters in the
West, above all the USA, the World Bank and the IMF, and consequently,
control over the money flow from the West to Russia. In this way, a small
group of young educated reformers led by Anatolii Chubais transformed
itself into the most powerful élite clan of Russia in the past five years.’
US support proved decisive in this transformation. The administra-
tion’s ‘dream team’ seal of approval bolstered the Clan’s standing as
Russia’s chief brokers with the West and the international financial insti-
tutions, and as the legitimate representative of Russia. It also enabled the
Harvard–Chubais transactors to exact hundreds of millions of dollars in
Western loans and American aid.
The modus operandi
The transactors employed five basic operating principles.
Democracy by decree. The transactors’ preferred way of proceeding in the

Russian context was by means of top-down presidential decree. US offi-
cials explicitly encouraged this practice as an efficient means of achiev-
ing market reform. Rule by decree also allowed the transactors to bypass
the democratically elected Supreme Soviet and the Duma. The Harvard
112 Janine R. Wedel
Institute’s Russia director, Jonathan Hay, and his associates went so far as
to draft some of the Kremlin decrees themselves. Needless to say, this did
nothing to advance Russia’s evolution towards a democratic system, nor
was it consistent with the declared American aim of encouraging that
evolution.
Flex organizations. A similar anti-democratic ethos pervaded the net-
work of Harvard–Chubais transactor-run organizations. The transactors
established and oversaw a network of aid-funded, aid-created ‘private’
organizations whose ostensible purpose was to conduct economic
reform, but which were often used to promote the transactors’ parochial
agendas. These organizations supplanted or circumvented state institu-
tions. They routinely performed functions that, in modern states, are
typically the province of governmental bureaucracies. They bypassed
the elected Duma and other relevant actors, whose support was in the
long term crucial to the successful implementation of economic reforms
in Russia. Further, the aid-created organizations served as a critical
resource for the transactors, a vehicle by which to exploit financial and
political opportunities for their own ends. I call these bodies ‘flex organ-
izations’ in recognition of their impressively adaptable, chameleon-like,
multipurpose character.
The donors’ flagship organization was the Russian Privatization
Centre, which had close ties to Harvard University. Its founding docu-
ments state that Harvard University is both a ‘founder’ and ‘Full Member
of the [Russian Privatization] Centre.’ The Centre received funds from all
major and some minor Western donors and lenders: the United States,
the IMF, the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development, the EU, Germany and Japan. The Centre’s chief executive
officer, a Russian from the Chubais Clan, has written that while head of
the Centre he managed some US$4 billion in Western funds. The
Chamber of Accounts, Russia’s rough equivalent of the US General
Accounting Office, investigated how that money was spent. An auditor
from the Chamber concluded that the ‘money was not spent as desig-
nated. Donors paid […] for something you can’t determine’.
The Centre was an archetypal ‘flex organization’, one that switched its
identity and status situationally. Formally and legally, it was non-profit
and non-governmental. But it was established by Russian presidential
decree and received aid because it was run by the Chubais transactors,
who also played key roles in the Russian government. In practice, the
Centre played the role of government agency. It negotiated loans from
international financial institutions – which typically lend to govern-
ments, not private entities – and did so on behalf of the Russian state.
According to documents from Russia’s Chamber of Accounts, the

Centre wielded more control over certain privatization documents and
directives than did the Russian government agency formally responsible
for privatization. Two Centre officials, its CEO from the Chubais Clan
and Harvard’s Moscow representative, Hay, were in fact authorized to
sign privatization decisions on Russia’s behalf. Thus did a Russian and
an American, both of them affiliated with a private entity, end up acting
as representatives of the Russian Federation.
Transidentities. It was not only organizations that could change guises.
The flex organization had its individual equivalent in the phenomenon
of ‘transidentity’, which refers to the ability of a transactor to change his
identity at will, regardless of which side originally designated him as its
representative. Key Harvard–Chubais transactors were quintessential
chameleons. To suit the transactors’ purposes, the same individual could
represent the United States in one meeting and Russia in the next – and
perhaps himself at a third – regardless of national origin.
Jonathan Hay, who alternatively acted as an American and a Russian,
provides a telling example of this phenomenon. In addition to being
Harvard’s chief representative in Russia, with formal management
authority over some other US contractors, Hay was appointed by mem-
bers of the Chubais Clan to be a Russian. As such, he was empowered to
approve or veto high-level privatization decisions of the Russian govern-
ment. According to a US official investigating Harvard’s activities, Hay
‘played more Russian than American’. The financial arena yields many
such examples of transidentity, in which Chubais transactors appointed
Americans to act as Russians.
It was (and is) difficult to glean exactly who, at any given time, promi-
nent consultants on the international circuit represented, for whom they
actually worked, all sources of funds, and where their loyalties and ambi-
tions lay. Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, who served as director of the
Harvard Institute from 1995 to 1999, and conducted advisory projects in
the region (in the early 1990s sometimes under the umbrella of Jeffrey D.
Sachs and Associates, Inc.), provides a case in point. According to jour-
nalist John Helmer, Sachs and his associates (including David Lipton,
vice president of Sachs’ consulting firm who later went to Treasury to
work for Summers) played both the Russian and the IMF sides of the
street. During negotiations in 1992 between the IMF and the Russian
government, for example, Sachs and his associates appeared as advisers
to the Russian side. However, Helmer writes that ‘they played both sides,
writing secret memoranda advising the IMF negotiators as well’.
Compounding this ambiguity is the question of whether Sachs was an
official adviser to the Russian government. Although he maintains that
114 Janine R. Wedel
he was, key Russian economists as well as international officials cast

doubts on his claim. Jean Foglizzo, the IMF’s first Moscow resident
representative, was also taken aback by Sachs’s practice of introducing
himself as an adviser to the Russian government. As Foglizzo put it,
‘[When] the Prime Minister [Viktor Chernomyrdin], who is the head of
government, says “I never requested Mr. Sachs to advise me” – it triggers
an unpleasant feeling, meaning, who is he?’
Sachs presented himself to leading Russians as a powerbroker who
could deliver Western aid, according to Andrei Vernikov, a Russian repre-
sentative to the IMF, and other sources. In 1992, when Egor Gaidar (with
whom Sachs had been working) was under attack and his future looked
precarious, Sachs offered his services to Gaidar’s parliamentary opposi-
tion. In November 1992 Sachs wrote a memorandum to the chairman of
the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov (whose reputation in the West
was that of a retrograde Communist), offering advice, Western aid and
contacts with the US Congress. Khasbulatov declined Sachs’s help after
circulating the memo. Sachs also proved adept at lobbying American pol-
icymakers. The proponent of ‘shock therapy’, he has now emerged as a
champion of AIDS assistance and other humanitarian causes. The most
effective and influential transactors are extremely adept at working their
multiple roles. One such ubiquitous transactor was Anders Åslund, a for-
mer Swedish envoy to Russia who worked with Sachs and Gaidar. Åslund
seemed at once to represent and speak on behalf of American, Russian
and Swedish governments and authorities. Accordingly, he was under-
stood by some Russian officials in Washington to be Chubais’ personal
envoy. Though a ‘private’ citizen of Sweden who played a leading role in
Swedish policy and aid towards Russia, he nonetheless participated in
high-level meetings at the US Treasury and State Departments about US
and IMF policies. Åslund was also allegedly involved in business activities
in Russia. According to the Russian Interior Ministry’s Department of
Organized Crime, he had ‘significant’ investments in the Russian
Federation. In addition to his work for governments, the Harvard–
Chubais transactors and the private sector, Åslund was engaged in public
relations activities. His assignment in Ukraine, where he was funded by
George Soros, explicitly included public relations on behalf of that coun-
try, according to other Soros-funded consultants who worked with
Åslund there. His effectiveness in this role was no doubt enhanced by his
affiliation with Washington think tanks, his frequent contributions to
publications such as the Washington Post and the London Financial Times,
and the fact that he presented himself on these occasions as an objective
analyst, despite his many promotional roles.
Interchangeability. Groups also had transidentity capabilities. The

Harvard Institute group, though formally representing the United
States, also represented the Chubais group. Thus, some US officials and
investigators requesting meetings with Russians were instead directed to
Americans. In lobbying for aid contracts, the Harvard Institute group
continually cited its access to Russian ‘reformers’ as its primary advan-
tage; this was in fact a key component of its public relations effort. In
turn, Harvard acted as the Chubais Clan’s entrée to the eyes and ears of
US policymakers and to American funds. In the United States, the
Harvard transactors touted Chubais as the voice of Russia, and he
became the quintessential enlightened Russian in the eyes of many
US officials and commentators.
Not surprisingly, then, in times of crisis for the Harvard–Chubais
nexus – such as the ruble crisis of August 1998 and the Bank of New York
money laundering scandals – the transactors and their associates have
sought to bolster their colleagues’ continued clout and standing in both
Russia and the United States. Summers has frequently rushed to the
defense of Chubais and other key transactors. In testimony before the
US House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations, for
example, Summers stoutly defended Chubais and asked that Chubais’
prepared statement (‘I Didn’t Lie’) be placed in the congressional record.
Similarly, Åslund serves as a staunch defender of and advocate for
Chubais. Of late, he also has been arguing Vladimir Putin’s cause.
Lack of accountability and self-perpetuation. Transactors are largely above
formal accountability, at least in the short run. The group places its mem-
bers in various positions to serve its agendas, which may or may not con-
flict with those of the government or public interest they supposedly
serve. The result is a game of musical chairs. For example, a key agency in
Russian ‘reform’, the State Property Committee, was headed by a succes-
sion of Chubais transactors, among them Chubais himself, Maxim
Boycko and Alfred Kokh. Kokh was named chairman of the Committee
after Boycko was fired by El’tsin for accepting a thinly veiled US$90 000
bribe from a company that had received preferential treatment in the pri-
vatization process. Kokh himself was later removed for accepting a
US$100 000 payment from the same company. Chubais, Boycko and
Kokh also held a variety of key positions in the Harvard–Chubais
transactor-run, aid-funded Russian Privatization Centre.
The Chubais transactors are unlikely to disappear in Vladimir Putin’s
Russia. In fact, Putin has long been intertwined with them. An operative
in the KGB and briefly head of its successor agency, Putin, like most
members of the Chubais Clan, hails from St Petersburg and was
116 Janine R. Wedel
intimately involved in the ‘reforms’ there. After moving to Moscow to

work with Chubais, Putin helped to suppress criminal investigations
that implicated El’tsin and members of his family – as well as Chubais
himself. Chubais, in addition to running the country’s electricity con-
glomerate, helped to run Putin’s presidential campaign.
Consequences of transactorship
What, it might be asked, is wrong with the transactorship mode of

organizing relations? Many US officials have argued that it was the most
effective method by which to implement market reform in Russia –
through a committed group with intimate access to both sides (and to
many activities in both countries). In fact, there are several reasons for
which this argument is seriously flawed.
Transactorship has served to undermine democratic processes and the develop-

ment of transparent, accountable institutions. Operating by decree is
clearly anti-democratic and contrary to the aid community’s stated goal
of building democracy in Russia. It has weakened the message to the
Russians that the United States stands for democracy. Further, the aid-
created flex organizations have supplanted the state and often carried
out functions that ought to have been the province of governmental
bureaucracies.
As well, the flex organizations have likely facilitated the development
of what I have called elsewhere the ‘clan-state’, a state captured by unau-
thorized groups and characterized by pervasive corruption. In such a
state, individual clans, each of which controls property and resources,
are so closely identified with particular ministries or institutional seg-
ments of government that the respective agendas of the state and the
clan become indistinguishable. Thus, while the Chubais transactors
were closely identified with segments of government concerned with
privatization and the economy, competing clans had equivalent ties
with other government organizations, such as the ministries of defense
and internal affairs and the security services. Generally, where judicial
processes are politically motivated, a clan’s influence can be checked
or constrained only by a rival clan. By systematically bypassing the
democratically elected parliament, US aid flouted a crucial feature of
democratic governance: namely, parliamentarianism.
Transactorship has frustrated true market reform. Without public sup-
port or understanding, decrees constitute a weak foundation on which
to build a market economy. Some reforms, such as lifting price controls,
may be achieved by decree. But many others depend on changes in law,

public administration or mindsets, and require co-operation among a
full spectrum of legislative and market participants, not just a clan.
Although transactors may share the overall goals of the sides they
represent, they may advertently or inadvertently subvert those goals in
pursuit of their own private agendas. The Chubais–Harvard transactors
were known to block reform efforts on occasion. In particular, they were
inclined to obstruct reform initiatives when they originated outside
their own group or were perceived to conflict with their own agendas.
For example, when a USAID-funded organization run by the Chubais–
Harvard transactors failed to receive the additional USAID funds it had
expected, its leaders promptly obstructed legal reform activities in the
areas of title registration and mortgages – programs that were launched
by agencies of the Russian government.
Lack of transparency characterized the transactors’ operations. Secrecy
shrouded the privatization process, with numerous, unfortunate con-
sequences for the Russian people. Privatization, largely shaped by the
Chubais–Harvard transactors, was intended to spread the fruits of the
free market. Instead, it helped to create a system of ‘tycoon capitalism’
acting in the service of corrupt oligarchs. The ‘reforms’ were more about
wealth confiscation than wealth creation; and the incentive system
encouraged looting, asset stripping and capital flight.
Transactorship has encouraged the maximization of opportunities for
personal gain. The prestige and access of the Harvard–Chubais transac-
tors facilitated their involvement in other areas, including allegedly the
Russian securities market, both in Russia and internationally.
Providing a small group of powerbrokers with a blank cheque
inevitably encouraged corruption, precisely at a time when the interna-
tional community should have been demanding safeguards in Russia
such as the development of a legal and regulatory framework, property
rights and the sanctity of contracts. Over the years there have been
many substantiated reports of the Chubais transactors using public
monies for personal enrichment. Today some of these same persons are
under investigation for alleged involvement in laundering billions of
dollars through the Bank of New York and other banks.
The Harvard Institute has also had its difficulties. In 1996 the GAO
found that USAID’s management over Harvard was ‘lax’. In 1997 the gov-
ernment cancelled most of the last US$14 million earmarked for the
Institute, citing evidence that the project’s two managers – Hay and
Shleifer – had used their positions and inside knowledge to profit
from investments in the Russian securities markets and other private
118 Janine R. Wedel
enterprises. The two, together with their wives and Harvard University,
are now being sued by the US government for US$120 million following
an investigation by the US Department of Justice. In January 2000 a
Harvard task force issued a report alluding to that scandal and recom-
mending that the Harvard Institute for International Development be
closed. It was shut down.
Because the transactors’ success is grounded in mutual loyalty and
trust, and because of their shared record of activities, some of which
have left them vulnerable to allegations of corruption, the transactors
have ample incentive to stick together. Any desertions must be well con-
sidered, as they could have serious consequences for all involved.
Transactorship has encouraged not only corruption but also the ability to
deny it. Transactorship affords maximum flexibility and influence to the
transactors, and minimal accountability to the sides the transactors pre-
sumably represent. If the Harvard Institute’s manager in Russia was
asked by US authorities to account for privatization decisions and
monies, he could respond by claiming that he made those decisions as a
Russian, not as an American. If USAID came under fire for funding the
Russian state, it could claim that it was funding private organizations.
When the issue of ‘Russian’ corruption captured American headlines
in 1999, Treasury Secretary Summers began insisting that the Russian
government make amends. ‘This has been a US demand for years’, he
claims, as if he had not himself addressed letters to ‘Dear Anatolii’ and
met with Chubais as recently as the summer of 1999. This only months
after Chubais admitted that he had ‘conned’ from the IMF a US$4.8 bil-
lion installment in July 1998, the details of that deal having been
worked out in Summers’ home over brunch – a meeting that the New
York Times deemed crucial to obtaining release of the funds.
Transactorship has proved particularly harmful in a setting in which
Communism until recently prevailed. The transactorship mode of organiz-
ing relations is reminiscent of precisely those features of Communism
that the international community should be concerned not to reinforce.
The informal, but influential, parallel executive established by the
Harvard–Chubais transactors recalls the powerful patronage networks
that virtually ran the Soviet Union. Political aid disguised as economic
aid is only too familiar to Russians raised under a system of political con-
trol over economic decisions. As Shleifer acknowledged in a 1995 book
funded by Harvard, ‘Aid helps reform not because it directly helps the
economy – it is simply too small for that – but because it helps the
reformers in their political battles.’
And yet US officials have defended this approach. In a 1997 interview,
Ambassador Richard L. Morningstar, US aid coordinator to the former
Soviet Union, said, ‘When you’re talking about a few hundred million
dollars, you’re not going to change the country, but you can provide
targeted assistance to help Chubais’ – an admission of direct interference
in Russia’s political life. US assistance to Chubais continued even after
he was dismissed by El’tsin as first deputy prime minister in January
1996: he was placed on the Harvard payroll, a demonstration of solidarity
for which senior US officials declared their support.
Conclusion
The US–Russian experience of transactorship is interesting and disturb-

ing not only in its own right, but because this mode of operating may
grow more common in the twenty-first century. With the ongoing
processes of globalization, the nationality of actors is becoming increas-
ingly irrelevant. Already global élites, with ever closer connections to
one another and fewer to the nation-state, see themselves not so much
as American, Russian or Brazilian, but as members of an exclusive and
highly mobile multinational club, whose rules and regulations have yet
to be written. Many met as students at prestigious universities. And
many are members of what sociologist Peter Berger has identified as the
overlapping ‘Davos’ and ‘Faculty Club’ cultures, which have much more
in common with each other than they have with their fellow nationals.
As Berger observes, ‘it may be that commonalties in taste make it easier
to find common ground politically’ – and, of course, economically.
While all this is true, global élites will continue to operate in a world
organized into nation-states. In such a world, assumptions about repre-
sentation, grounded in national and international law, are based on the
idea that an individual can formally represent either one state or
another, but not both. The transactor mode of behaviour may seem to
offer a means of having it both ways, of squaring the circle. But it also
raises crucial public policy questions. What are the implications of a
state of affairs in which the ‘choice’ of who represents one side is shaped
to a significant degree by self-selected representatives of the other? What
are the consequences when the same player represents multiple sides?
Wherein lies the accountability to electorates and parliaments in a
world of growing cosiness and joint decision-making among governing
élites? Where, if at all, do representation and democracy enter the
picture? The US–Russian case in the last decade provides a cautionary
lesson in all these respects.
Why did transactorship emerge in Russia, but not in Central Europe?
The answer lies both in the choices made by donors about who they
trusted as brokers and representatives of both donor and recipient sides,
120 Janine R. Wedel
and in the political, societal, institutional and legal frameworks of the

recipient countries. Significant differences characterized the structures
within which aid was distributed in Central Europe, as compared with
Russia. Although reform-oriented groups in Central Europe garnered
much of the aid, they did not have a monopoly on it, in contrast to the
Russian Chubais Clan. Moreover, very different frameworks developed
in the 1990s in Russia as compared, for example, with Poland, where
there is little evidence of criminal mafia infiltration in the political
establishment, as there is in Russia. Polish recipients generally operated
in a more transparent and accountable way, and their primary motiva-
tion was largely to build a political base, not self-enrichment, in contrast
to some Russian recipients.
What is the ultimate outcome of the aid over ten years to the region?
As I indicated earlier, some regions of Central Europe are muddling
through relatively well. Some countries are entering into negotiations to
join the EU. Some of the aid, which after all created traffic between East
and West and promoted relationships, no doubt served this process. But
Russia’s problems are deeper and complex and Western aid has exacer-
bated them. Many Russians now believe that the United States deliber-
ately set out to destroy their economy. As with anything, if relations
among nations are allowed to deteriorate for a long time they become
more difficult to repair.
If my work on assistance to Central and Eastern Europe accomplishes
anything, I hope it will urge an examination of how we implement for-
eign aid and what outcomes it produces. In particular, I hope to draw
attention to the importance of relationships: how they are set up; who
wins, who loses; and how the choice of representatives influences social
and political organization on the recipient side. The structure of rela-
tionships among individuals crucially shapes the effectiveness of billions
of dollars of foreign aid and the relationships of nations.
Sources
Janine R. Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern
Europe, New York, 2001.
Janine R. Wedel, Clans, Cliques, and Captured States: How We Misunderstand
‘Transition’ in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Working
Paper prepared for the National Council for Eurasian and East European
Research and the National Institute of Justice, Fall 2000.
Janine R. Wedel, ‘Clique-run organizations and US economic aid: An institutional
analysis’, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, 4(4), Fall
1996, pp. 571–602.
Janine R. Wedel, ‘Tainted Transactions: Harvard, the Chubais Clan and Russia’s
Ruin’, The National Interest, 59, Spring 2000, pp. 23–34.
United States District Court, District of Massachusetts, Civil Action
no. 00CV11977DPW, United States of America, Plaintiff, v. The President and
Fellows of Harvard College, Andrei Shleifer, Jonathan Hay, Nancy Zimmerman,
and Elizabeth Hebert, Defendants.
7
Blat Lessons: Networks,
Institutions, Unwritten Rules
Alena Ledeneva
In their conclusion to a volume of early post-1991 reflections on the

collapse of world communism Frederic Fleron and Erik Hoffman admit:
We have been unable to understand scarcity and bargaining. We have

found it difficult to comprehend the politics of survival in economies
that are dominated by nonmarket forces and that reward blat, stability,
conformity, and material equality rather than work, risk, creativity, and
personal achievements. Because we live in consumer-oriented societies
where virtually all goods and services are available to those who have
the money to pay for them (i.e. societies with no nomenclatura elites),
we have brought too many Western economic, social, and psychological
assumptions to our analyses of Communist systems.1
A few years later John Barber made an even more radical statement. ‘If
we had not underestimated blat’, he said, ‘we would have been able to
predict the collapse of the Soviet Union’.2 In fact, this could be said of all
the other informal practices hiding behind the six paradoxes of socialism
as they appear in a popular anecdote:
No unemployment but nobody works. [Absenteeism]

Nobody works but productivity increases. [False reporting]
Productivity increases but shops are empty. [Shortages]
Shops are empty but fridges are full. [Blat]
Fridges are full but nobody is satisfied. [Privileges]
Nobody is satisfied but all vote unanimously in favour. [Cynicism]3
Blat is the use of personal networks and informal contacts to obtain

goods and services in short supply and to circumvent formal procedures.
122
Blat Lessons 123
The word is virtually impossible to translate directly into English. As

Joseph Berliner, one of the earliest observers of blat, has remarked, ‘the
term blat […] is one of those many flavoured words which are so intimate
a part of a particular culture that they can be only awkwardly rendered in
the language of another’.4 The ubiquity of blat was obvious to every citi-
zen of the ex-Soviet Union5 and was also reported by Western researchers,
who first described the phenomenon in the 1950s.6 Edward Crankshaw
referred to it as ‘an extremely elaborate and all-pervading “old-boy” net-
work. Everyone, including the most ardent Party members, deals in it’.7
Yet although blat has long been recognized, there have been no attempts
to assess its role and to conceptualize its function for the workings of the
Soviet system. As Sheila Fitzpatrick suggests:
Very little attention has so far been paid to sociability in the Stalin era,
or for that matter in the Soviet period as a whole. Perhaps thinking
about blat as a form of sociability, as well as a form of economic
exchange, will provide an entrée into this wider field of enquiry. The
importance of friendship and small-group loyalties in Soviet (espe-
cially late Soviet) life was something well-known, at an impressionis-
tic and personal level, to several generations of western Soviet
scholars; yet for some reason this impressionistic knowledge was usu-
ally compartmentalized as ‘field lore’, not applicable to our theoretical
understanding of how Soviet society worked.8
The 1990s have provided a window of opportunity for research on

blat. People were no longer inhibited from discussing sensitive issues,
yet their memory of the Soviet past was still fresh. Before perestroika peo-
ple were unwilling to talk for fear of the consequences or because they
were fundamentally unused to speaking openly. The political and eco-
nomic reforms of the 1990s resulted in dramatic social changes which
made Soviet realities a thing of the past. With these changes, people lost
their inhibitions and even began to talk about the old ways with nostal-
gia. Although they still remembered how Soviet society functioned,
people had already had some time to reflect on how this had changed in
post-Soviet conditions. This has made it possible to collect data on
Soviet blat that would otherwise have been inaccessible to researchers.
The research that I conducted in 1994–95 resulted in the following
definition of blat.9
● Blat is the use of personal networks (kin, friends and acquaintances)
to obtain goods and services in the economy of shortage [form of
sociability];
124 Alena Ledeneva
● Blat is also the informal exchange of ‘favours of access’ given at the

expense of institutional resources [parallel currency];
● Blat is instrumental both to people (to satisfy the needs of personal
consumption) and to the state (to cope with the extreme centralisa-
tion of the Soviet system), and it illustrates one of the unwritten rules
necessary to operate a system which cannot work according to its
own proclaimed principles.
The theoretical account of blat offered in my Russia’s Economy of Favours

is concerned with the institutional characteristics of Soviet society which
necessitated a gradual expansion of blat networks; with the ways in which
these networks were interwoven with other forms of power (despite the
fact that not much has been written on political power or vertical
patron–client relationships);10 and with the ways in which actors have
used these networks to pursue their own aims and interests. A central
argument of the book is that blat should be considered as the ‘reverse side’
of an overcontrolling centre, a reaction by ordinary people to the struc-
tural constraints of the socialist system of distribution – an indispensable
set of practices which enabled the Soviet system to function, made it
tolerable, but also subverted it.
The research into blat has prompted three further areas of investigation.
First, blat is a network phenomenon, which raised my interest in the
nature of networks used for getting things done in Russia. Second, blat is
both functional and subversive, which required a conceptualization of
the relationship between formal institutions and informal networks.
Third, blat was a form of ‘know-how’ in the Soviet system. Understanding
blat was the key to understanding how the Soviet system really worked
and posed questions about the whole system of unwritten rules and their
role in non-transparent economies. These three themes are much wider
than blat and, I think, much more interesting, particularly when explored
in a post-Soviet context. Revealing the nature of networks, explaining the
relationship between the formal and the informal, and providing insight
into the unwritten rules are all essential to understanding the informal
order in Russia.
The nature of networks that serve the economy of favours
Blat is an important part of the Soviet legacy and blat networks are still
instrumental in getting things done in post-Soviet Russia.11 The rele-
vance of the Soviet term blat, which is associated mainly with the econ-
omy of shortage and access to items of everyday consumption, however,
Blat Lessons 125
becomes questionable in the post-Soviet context. The term ‘economy of

favours’ is better suited as a generic term for blat, both in post-Soviet
studies and for comparative research.
The fact that the economy of favours makes use both of personal/
informal networks (the terms are used interchangeably) and institutional
resources has considerable bearing on the nature of personal networks
and institutions. Not only do personal relationships become ‘colonized’
and used for matters going far beyond sociability, but formal contacts
also tend to become ‘informalized’, which results in ‘privatising’ the
state, as Vladimir Shlapentokh puts it.12 Thus formal institutions can also
be seen as ‘colonized’ by personal networks and involved with the
economy of favours. Richard Rose associates this impact with the ‘anti-
modern’ nature of formal institutions in Russia.13 The literature on the
sociology of organizations has examined the impact of personal
networks on organizations. But what kind of impact does the economy
of favours have on personal networks themselves? We know that not all
personal relationships and not all formal institutions become ‘colo-
nized’, as not all rules can be broken and those which do tend to get
broken are still considered to be rules. Is it possible then to distinguish
those personal/informal networks that serve the economy of favours
from a wider class of social networks?
Analytically, the networks that serve the economy of favours are,
quite literally, ‘in-formal’; that is, they penetrate the formal institutions
and reside in them (say, when a friend becomes a colleague at work). In
framing the phenomenon, I follow the logic of Endre Sik and Istvan
Janos Toth’s concept of the ‘hidden economy’ and Eurostat classifica-
tions, which do not take account of housework, do-it-yourself activities,
social work, the exchange of produce between households, crime and
activities which count as productive but which are not legal (for exam-
ple, the production of and trade in drugs). Under this category, Endre Sik
and Toth do list the unreported activities of registered enterprises and
the activities of enterprises which, although not registered, conduct oth-
erwise legal activities.14 Following this logic, networks that serve the
economy of favours include not all informal contacts but only those
used to access or penetrate formal structures.
Favours exchanged within those networks informally are given not at
one’s own expense (do-it-yourself activities or exchange of produce
between households), but rather at the expense of institutions. They are
so-called ‘favours of access’ that serve to channel institutional resources
into private pockets, thus constituting a parallel currency exchanged
within circles of ‘svoi’ people (people belonging to the circle).
126 Alena Ledeneva
Now that we have narrowed down the range of informal networks

under consideration, the nature of these networks can be clarified.
Generally, the term ‘network’ refers to a large number of people, groups
and institutions that have a connection with each other and work
together as a system.15 It is used to describe anything from a public tele-
phone or television network to the supportive network of the extended
family and global production networks.16 Technically speaking, it is a
system of nodes and ties representing a ‘web’ principle of organization
applicable to a wide range of nodes. Thus, Manuel Castells promotes the
idea of a network society based on new technologies and communica-
tional networks characteristic of the information age,17 while Dirk
Messner in his The Network Society18 focuses on social networks and
excludes electronic networks, media networks, intra-firm networks or
even production networks.19
In conventional sociological discourse the term ‘network’ is used to des-
ignate social ties between people and to cover ‘sociability’ – that is, rela-
tionships with friends, leisure associates and professional contacts. In this
context, networking can be defined as connecting nodes and building up
networks. In the context of the command economy and economy of
shortage, as I argued in Russia’s Economy of Favours, friendship and the use
of friendship become blurred. Friends (and acquaintances) are supposed
to provide each other with access to goods and services in short supply
and help out in other ways too. Networking acquires a connotation of the
pragmatic, or sometimes strategic, use of networks, and the term ‘net-
work’, therefore, ceases to be a neutral concept. Apart from sociability,
personal networks also provide access to institutional resources, and
thereby form historically and economically shaped patterns of mediation
between state and society. There is no Soviet word to denote ‘personal
network’ or ‘networking’ (although post-Soviet academic discourse uses
the term ‘seti’), while the most related idioms, such as ‘blat’, ‘people of the
circle’ (svoi liudi), ‘one of us’ (svoi), and ‘circles of mutual dependency’
(krugovaia poruka) carry a connotation pointing to the exclusive nature of
networks and their calculated use. This prompts one to look into the
nature of ties constituting networks in addition to the analysis of their
functional or dysfunctional significance for the economy. In fact, it is
possible to argue that it is the latter – the role networks play in the
economy – that makes the difference for the former – the nature of ties
within a network. The more dependent the formal economy is on econ-
omy of favours, the more instrumental the ties within informal net-
works20 and the less developed the impersonal systems of trust. In such
economies, the fact of belonging almost automatically provides a member
Blat Lessons 127
of an informal network with access to a whole variety of institutional

resources available ‘for people of the circle only’, while a wider social fab-
ric is rather unwelcoming and even hostile. Needless to say, the predomi-
nance of such informal networks impedes the emergence of impersonal
systems of trust and the development of a fully fledged market economy
in the post-Soviet period.
To summarize, networks do not only organize and facilitate, they also
divert and misappropriate the structures organizing the economy’s dom-
inant functions and processes. For example, networks that have been
used as a resource, say, in starting up businesses (studies of social capital
emphasize this aspect of networks), can later become a serious obstacle
for the further development of the business environment (competition,
transparency, market incentives). Let me outline the features of informal
networks that serve the economy of favours, relying on my own
research,21 and the features of networks in the network society as sug-
gested by Castells,22 which can be used as ideal types in analysis of
existing networks and their transformation (see Table 7.1).
Table 7.1 Networks in the economy of favours and in the network society
Networks in the economy of favours Networks in the network society
Existing structures grounded in Emerging structures permeating

the past all societies
Networks account for anti-modern Networks are the institutions of
nature of institutions the information age, enabling and
innovative
Socio-political basis: statism Socio-political basis: global
capitalism
Networks are exploitative of the state, Networks transcend all states
parasitic on state property
Networks are personalized, based Networks (both technological
on a priori existing social contacts and social) are of an impersonal
nature
Networks of ‘svoi liudi’ bound by mutual Networks imply openness,
obligations and closed to outsiders dynamism and flexibility for
individuals, firms and countries
Discipline imposed by ethics, etiquette Discipline imposed by global
and unwritten rules financial markets, military
technology, control of knowledge
Unwritten rules are followed more The only rule is that there are no
than laws rules – laws are enforced with
difficulty by global and
national institutions
128 Alena Ledeneva
Table 7.1 (continued)
Networks in the economy of favours Networks in the network society
Ambivalent relationship between Networks generate a new order

networks and the socio-economic (assumes decline of the state)
order: networks are both functional
and subversive
Fragmentation of the state, with state The new state will be a decentralized
institutions being ‘colonized’ by network state (devolution of power
antagonistic networks and resources to regions, local
governments and NGOs, initiated
by the state)
Indicators of economy of favours: Indicators of network society:
diversion in workings of formal number of communication devices
institutions (ineffectiveness of the rule (telephone lines, TV, PCs, Internet
of law, oversized informal economy, hosts etc.)
spread of corruption and customary
practices)
It follows from the evidence provided by Castells and Kiselyova23 that

some features of the network society model are already visible in Russia.
My own views on the possibility of Russia’s smooth transition to a net-
work society are rather pessimistic. There is evidence that even emerging
networks of a ‘network society’ type still have the features of Soviet infor-
mal networks. For a fully fledged market economy to emerge, networks
will have to cease being ‘circles of friends’ that are exploitative of institu-
tional resources – features that have been described as inherent to the
Russian character.24 This raises the issue of the dynamics of the relation-
ship between the formal and the informal constituents of the economy.
The relationship between formal institutions

and informal networks
Many works published in the 1990s contributed towards the conceptu-

alization of the relationship between the formal and the informal. Some
of them derived from the debates on the self-subversive nature of the
Soviet system among social historians seeking to transcend the totalitar-
ian concept of that system,25 and some of them from the analysis of
Soviet institutions.26
The formal/informal relationship has also been explored in studies of
the informal economy in the later period of Soviet history. In the mas-
sive literature on the ‘second economy’, many of the informal practices
Blat Lessons 129
pervading the Soviet command system were identified and thoroughly

examined.27 The characterization of these practices as ‘informal’ testi-
fied to the Soviet regime’s ability to ensure that, for the most part, they
contributed to rather than subverted the formal goals and activities of
society. The informal economy took care of many needs that were not
met by the command economy, and thus contributed to the function-
ing of the Soviet system. According to Ken Jowitt, however, at some
stage informal practices subverted more than contributed to the party’s
formal goals and general interests.28 The role of informal practices in
subverting the Soviet system can be summed up as follows.
First, the so-called ‘socialist’ economy should be viewed as self-
contradictory and self-subversive, as it could not have worked according
to its proclaimed principles. The planned economy would not have
worked had it not been for tolkachi (from tolkat’ – to push, to jostle), who
‘pushed’ for the interests of their enterprise in such matters as the
procurement of supplies or the reduction of plan targets. Their ‘profes-
sional’ role was to support the Soviet ‘command’ economy and to
enable it to work which, paradoxically, could only be done by violation
of its declared principles of planned allocation.
Second, all institutional positions, including the party apparatus, were
subject to informal influences. Classically defined as rational and imper-
sonal and known to be particularly oppressive and inflexible under the
Soviet regime, the bureaucratic system, in fact, was personalized and
penetrated by informal networks which often made use of the ‘party
line’ for their own interests.
Third, indicative of the legal system and political regime, informal
networks had to be used to secure civil rights. Historical evidence from
1940 suggests that to have blat meant a ‘close connection with a
swindler, speculator, fiddler, thief, flatterer and the like. Though to have
no blat is equal to having no civil rights, for it means that everywhere
you are deprived of everything. You can obtain nothing in the shops. In
response to your legitimate demands, you will get a simple and clear
answer “no”. If you appeal, they are all numb, deaf and mute.’29
Finally, blat networks cushioned the discrepancies between the insti-
tutional and the personal in the authoritarian state: between shortages
and (even if repressed) consumerism; between a rigid ideological frame-
work and human needs.
Many scholars, ranging from Merle Fainsod to J. Arch Getty, viewed
informal networks primarily as a hindrance to efficient governance.
Others, building on the work of T. H. Rigby and Graeme Gill, viewed
personal networks as central to the workings of the system. It seems
130 Alena Ledeneva
essential to reveal both the functional and the subversive roles of informal
networks for the formal economy. On the one hand, personal networks
became embedded in the institutional order to such an extent that
agents stopped reflecting upon them, which made them an integral to
the functioning of the system. On the other hand, they also subverted
the formal system, especially its ideological and moral foundations. The
highly exploitative nature of the Soviet state has resulted in an extreme
parasitism inherent in the popular attitudes towards the state itself,30
which had to accommodate such attitudes in exchange for its own legit-
imacy. The concept of ‘economy of favours’ grasps such a mutually
exploitative dependence between the formal institutions and the infor-
mal networks within the system. Informal networks permeate formal
institutions, thus transforming the way they operate; while the func-
tioning of formal institutions in turn becomes dependent on channels
and influences supplied by the informal networks. This phenomenon
has been emphasized by Saskia Sassen in her definition of the informal
economy:
We can only obtain an operational definition of the informal econ-

omy against the backdrop of an institutional framework for eco-
nomic activity in which the state intervenes explicitly to regulate the
processes and products of income generating activities according to a
set of enforced legal rules. Nevertheless, the informal economy does
not include every transaction that happens to evade regulation.
What makes informalization a distinct process today are not these
small cracks in the institutional framework, but rather the informal-
ization of activities generally taking place in the formal economy.31
Watching the dynamics of the formal/informal relationship during

the radical political and economic change in Russia in the 1990s has
been eye-opening in many ways. The informal networks shaped by the
Soviet system were well adjusted to it. The Soviet regime not only
enabled, but also restricted, the ‘colonizing’ effects of the economy of
favours. Once the Soviet system collapsed, the transformation of the
informal order was inevitable.
The key feature of the Soviet economy of favours – parasitism on the
state – was bound to change in market conditions. First, the reforms
aimed at liberalization, privatization and financial deregulation under-
mined ‘socialist’ doctrine. The process of privatization in combination
with the severe economic trends of the 1990s, such as the decline of
industrial production, the investment crisis and the crisis of mutual
Blat Lessons 131
arrears, meant that the system of socialist guarantees ceased to operate.

This ruled out previously dominant forms of solidarity and mutual help
between industrial enterprises, and destroyed a social security system
centred on care for collectives in organizations; people were thereby
provided with a justification (‘they betrayed us’) and a free hand to help
themselves to whatever they could in the new system.
Second, a fundamental change in property rights in the post-Soviet
order has radically transformed the nature and scale of ‘helping oneself’.
The omnipresence of state ownership in the Soviet era produced an idio-
syncratic attitude towards state property. Public resources were widely
interpreted as quasi-private, as grasped in the saying ‘public means that
part of it is mine’. Practices of ‘petty privatization’ of the state, that is,
the trickle-down of state property through ‘carrying out’ (vynos), minor
theft and siphoning resources from the official economy into informal
networks, have been replaced by strategies of privatizing state property.
Privatization has engendered a whole new set of problems, as entrenched
attitudes of entitlement towards socialist property impede the transition
to notions of ‘private property’, ‘corporate governance’, ‘minority
shareholders’ rights’ and the like.
Third, parasitism on the state transmuted into parasitism on business.
To illustrate this tendency, let us return to an example of blat: the mass
practice of informal exchange of so-called ‘favours of access’ (access to
state property and its distribution systems). Favours of access were given
or exchanged by official ‘gatekeepers’ on two conditions: the ‘gate’ itself
was never alienable, and gatekeepers remained in charge of re-distribution.
This enabled gatekeepers to receive and accumulate, with time, various
forms of non-monetary returns – loyalties, obligations and potential
favours of access to various distribution systems. Today, most ‘favours of
access’ demanded from officials by the protagonists of business are
about privatizing resources or facilitating this by means of licences, per-
missions, tax privileges and so on. For officials, providing such favours
effectively means cutting off the branch on which they are sitting – that
is, losing their ‘gate’. It is not surprising therefore that representatives of
the state and market sectors join forces, thus shaping the phenomenon
of ‘nomenklatura business’. Lump-sum corruption has given way to
more sophisticated arrangements by which, in exchange for ‘alienating
access’ to state property, state officials receive ‘inalienable access’ to pri-
vate resources. Commissions, percentages, securities and shares in busi-
nesses are now common forms of favour repayment. Thus, parasitism
towards the state merges with parasitism on the private sector (see the
change in the use of blat networks in Table 7.2).32
132 Alena Ledeneva
Table 7.2 Role of networking in a command economy and in a market economy
Sector Role of networking in a Role of networking in

command economy a ‘market’ economy47
State ● To obtain goods and services in Similar role plus the following
short supply; tendencies:
● To serve the needs of personal ● Change of items in short supply
consumption and to ‘humanize’ and corresponding change in

the official distribution of needs and favours;
material welfare; ● Monetarization of blat exchanges
● To exchange ‘favours of access’ (favours become measurable as

to the centralized distribution money becomes ‘real’);
system of resources and ● Long-term reciprocity gives
privileges (parallel market); place to short-term (as a result

● To build ‘social capital’ and to of changes in patterns of trust);
accumulate parallel currency in ● Restructuring of blat networks
a society where money played (as a result of polarization of

little role; society, collapse of the socialist
● To sustain friendships and social security system);
acquaintances. ● Changes resulted from the
privatization of state property

(see below).
Private
Personal contacts are used:
● To earn money or to arrange a
‘good’ job;48
● To reduce risk of keeping
deposits in a bank – good

contacts can ensure their safety;
● To invest in and to run business
and trade (in business, networks

are instrumental in giving access
to bureaucratic decision-making
and information, especially
where bribery is impossible);
● To access means of making
money, such as budget

resources, export licenses,
privileged loans or business
information (institutions where
personal contacts have become
most important are thus those
of tax, customs, banking and
regional/local administration);
● To protect one’s capital, business
or interests.
Blat Lessons 133
The wider implications of the economy of favours for the Russian

‘market’ of the 1990s can be summarized as follows.
Market institutions do not operate according to ‘market’ incentives.
The economy of favours is likely to account for the super-profits made
on the Russian market, for the 1995 loans-for-shares auctions, as well as
for large-scale corruption33 and the intermingling of political and crim-
inal networks. It might also help explain a paradox of the post-Soviet
economy – that with the development of the market, a growing propor-
tion of ‘market’ transactions is being conducted in various money sub-
stitutes.34 The use of barter for serving the shadow economy, for shifting
debts and creating the anti-bankruptcy alliances between industrial
firms and local authorities, the establishment of so-called ‘authorized’
business structures and so on all indicate the impact of the economy of
favours on the post-Soviet economy.
State institutions are corrupt and their legitimacy is eroded. The situ-
ation is best described as the fragmentation of the state monopoly on
legitimate violence, taxation and law enforcement, which prompted the
emergence of alternative state-related and independent agents. The
organized groups that command the means of violence and take over
the function of enforcing laws and contract relations in the private
sector of the economy use a ramified network of informal control and
protection business.35 They also offer, among other things, their services
in ‘solving problems’ in local and regional authorities, tax inspection
offices and the state’s coercive institutions.
The institutions of civil society have been also influenced by the
economy of favours. The networks of mutual help and informal
exchange developed under the Soviet regime could hardly be considered
embryos of ‘civil society’ due to their state-dependency and exploitative
use of the state.36 These networks still dominate the niche of civil soci-
ety, undermining people’s loyalty to the state and order. Other implica-
tions of the state-dependency discussed above should be also viewed as
distorting market institutions.
Other institutional implications of the post-Soviet economy of
favours are grasped in the notion of ‘bargaining’,37 which is applicable
to both market and bureaucratic orders. For example, Gerald Easter
describes methods of revenue extraction in terms of elite bargaining
which entails using informal personal relations in place of formal
bureaucratic mechanisms for revenue extraction.38 In this approach,
revenue was not so much extracted by the state, as obtained by negotia-
tions between agents of the central government and a new financial
elite. Easter rightly emphasizes that although revenue collection is a
134 Alena Ledeneva
post-Soviet concern, the state’s inability to administer tax collection is

also rooted in the Soviet system of infrastructural, or administrative,
power. He argues that the Soviet infrastructural power was based on ‘pat-
rimonial’ rather than ‘bureaucratic’ principles. The emphasis on personal
networks in the functioning of institutional structures is crucial – not
only because they serve as a basis for the analysis of post-Communist
institutional transformation by disclosing aspects of both continuity and
change, but also because such a perspective captures the ambivalence of
the relationship between personal networks and institutional struc-
tures.39 As Easter puts it, ‘while the patrimonial system enhanced the
state’s administrative capabilities in the short term, over the long term it
had the unintended consequence of weakening state capacity’.40
The effects of the Soviet legacy on the post-Soviet economy and soci-
ety substantiate the idea of ‘path dependency’ suggested by David
Stark.41 His view is based on the assumption that processes for selecting
technologies and organizational forms are governed more by routine
than by rational choice – the point illustrated by recent research in evo-
lutionary economics and organizational ecology.42 It does not preclude
the possibilities of dramatic change, but it departs emphatically from
those ‘all too prevalent approaches that argue for rapid, radical, extensive
(and even exhaustive) replacement of the current institutions, habits and
routines of the former economies by an entirely new set of institutions
and mentalities’. The strength of the concept of ‘path dependency’ is
its analytic power to explain disappointing outcomes where strategic
actors are deliberately searching for departures from long-established
routines and are attempting to restructure the rules of the game. The
economy of favours is a perfect example of a powerful set of routine
practices that persistently impedes such restructuring. It follows that it is
impossible to achieve real change by reforming only the formal frame-
work. The informal order has to be addressed as well. The next section
illustrates such a shift in perspective in detail.
Unwritten rules
A reflection of the importance of the informal order in Russia can be

found in popular wisdom: ‘Russia is a country of unread laws and
unwritten rules.’ Or, as they say, ‘the imperfection of our laws is com-
pensated for by their non-observance’ (nesovershenstvo nashikh zakonov
kompensiruetsia ikh nevypolneniem). It is not that the requisite compo-
nents of the rule of law are absent in Russia; rather, the ability of the rule
of law to function coherently has been diverted by a powerful set of
Blat Lessons 135
practices that has evolved organically in the post-Soviet milieu.

Adopting a perspective of ‘unwritten rules’ and understanding how they
work can help to make the rules of the game in Russia more transparent
and therefore subject to positive change and reform. In other words,
rather than looking only at what does not work in Russia and why, one
should concentrate on what does work and how. An example will best
illustrate such an approach. The ineffectiveness of the rule of law in
Russia is one of the main obstacles to Russian economic and political
development. Not only does the weak rule of law deter much-needed
foreign investment in the Russian economy, it also undermines efforts
to rein in acute problems such as capital flight, tax evasion and abuses
of corporate governance. Following our alternative perspective, one
should ask: ‘if the rule of law does not work in Russia, then what does?’43
Given the scale of the informal economy in post-Soviet Russia, there
is no shortage of examples that illustrate how ‘unwritten rules’ operate.
Tax evasion and tax bargaining alone provide an excellent ground for
studying the informal order. In the corporate sector, the most damaging
practices for the transparency of the new Russian economy are those
based on the so-called ‘corporate identity split’ and false reporting. This
means that firms insulate themselves by at least two front companies
and create various shell-firms or scam-firms, which are organized in
sophisticated financial networks. Specially established offshore compa-
nies conduct financial transactions in order to reserve profits for the
insiders’ club of shareholders or managers. Unwritten rules also prevail
in regulating non-monetary exchanges and help in fighting business
and political wars. What are these unwritten rules?
● Unwritten rules are the know-how needed to ‘navigate’ between formal and
informal sets of constraints and to manipulate their enforcement to one’s
own advantage. Without being articulated, they ‘prescribe’ which rules
to follow in which context and ‘set’ the best approach for getting
things done. Applying one formal rule rather than another, using
restrictions (quotas, filters etc.) and small print, and enforcing some
decisions but not others, are all examples of how constraints can be
mediated. The focus of unwritten rules is not on constraints per se, as
in the case of formal and informal codes, but on the enabling aspects
of those constraints. To put it more bluntly, unwritten rules define the
ways of circumventing constraints, both formal and informal, of
manipulating their enforcement to one’s own advantage, and
of avoiding penalties by combining the three elements of the rules of
the game creatively.
136 Alena Ledeneva
● If we distinguish between organizations as enforcing mainly formal

constraints and social networks as enforcing mainly informal con-
straints, unwritten rules regulate the ways in which organizations and net-
works interact. In other words, they shape the interaction between
organizational principles and ties of kinship and friendship. For exam-
ple, the ways in which old-boy networks or nepotism permeate mod-
ern institutions are guided by unwritten rules. Soviet blat, as already
mentioned, is a classic example of unwritten rules by which resources
of the formal distribution system were siphoned into the informal
networks of the ‘gatekeepers’. Blat was functional for the Soviet sys-
tem as it helped in lubricating the rigid constraints of the formal econ-
omy. In present-day Russia, unwritten rules bridge the formal and
informal sectors of the economy and prevail in areas vacated by the
state but not yet filled by civil society – thus deforming both organi-
zational and network principles.
● Unwritten rules exist in all societies, but predominate (and even become
indispensable) in those where enforcement, formal and informal rules are
not synchronized and do not constitute coherent rules of the game. Douglas
North shows that when people perceive the structure of the rules of the
system to be fair and just, transaction costs are low and enforcement
costs are negligible, which helps the efficiency of the economy.44 When
people perceive the system to be unjust, transaction costs rise. In other
words, if one cannot follow both formal and informal sets of rules
coherently, this will be reflected in their merger and certain patterns of
rule-following or unwritten rules. It might be tempting to think that
unwritten rules are generally disadvantageous for the system. This is
only true, however, if the rules of the game – formal and informal con-
straints and their enforcement – are tied to the public interest and are
beneficial to economic performance. As this has not always been the
case in Russia, the impact of unwritten rules is rather ambivalent.
Reliance upon unwritten rules is an outcome of the loopholes in leg-
islation plus the inefficiency of formal rules and their enforcement on
the one hand, and people’s lack of respect for formal rules on the other.
Traditionally, distant and sceptical attitudes to the law create a funda-
mental problem of public governance and limit the constituency for an
effective institutional framework, essential for a market economy.
Overcoming Russia’s dependency on unwritten rules means breaking
free from the following chain reaction:
● The ‘rules of the game’ in the economy are non-transparent and fre-
quently change because the existing legal framework does not function
Blat Lessons 137
coherently. Some key building blocks of a transparent market system,

such as a land code, anti-corruption legislation and a fully function-
ing banking system, are not in place and basic market institutions,
such as open competition, property rights and transparent corporate
governance, do not work as they should. The incoherence of formal
rules forces almost all Russians, willingly or unwillingly, to violate
them and to play by rules introduced and negotiated outside formal
institutions.
● Anybody can be framed and found guilty of some violation of the formal
rules, as the economy operates in such a way that there is always some-
thing on which to be caught out. For example, everybody is forced to
earn in the informal economy to survive – a practice that is punish-
able, or could be made so. Businesses are taxed at a rate that forces
them to evade taxes in order to do well. Practices such as the embez-
zlement of state property or tax evasion become pervasive. Inside state
institutions, a whole gamut of corrupt practices, such as bribe-taking
and extortion in the granting of licenses and so on, has been preva-
lent. The ubiquitous character of such practices makes it impossible to
punish everyone.
● Due to the pervasiveness of the offence, punishment is bound to occur selec-
tively on the basis of criteria developed outside the legal domain.
While everybody is under the threat of a punishment, the actual pun-
ishment is ‘suspended’, but can be enforced at any time. The principle
of ‘suspended punishment’,45 by which a certain freedom and flexi-
bility did exist but which could be restricted at any moment, worked
well in the Soviet system. It brought about the routine practice
whereby authorities switch to the written code only ‘where necessary’.
A similar tendency is noticeable today and apparently for the same
reasons: formal rules are insufficient to operate fully on their own and
impossible to enforce as it is not feasible to catch everybody.
● Unwritten rules come into being to compensate for the defects in the rules
of the game and to form the basis for selective punishment. Violation of
unwritten rules can result in the enforcement of written ones which,
paradoxically, makes it more important to observe the unwritten
rules rather than the written ones. This, in turn, feeds back into the
non-transparency of the ‘rules of the game’ in the Russian economy.
Unfortunately, these attributes of the system seem not to have changed

much during Russia’s transition to a market economy. In the same way
that the planned economy was not really a planned economy and was
actually run with help of tolkachi (‘pushers’), blat and other informal
138 Alena Ledeneva
arrangements operating according to unwritten rules, the market

economy today is not really a market economy. This is due primarily to
the key role that unwritten rules still play in the system.
Western aid programs have funded ambitious macroeconomic
reforms aimed at ‘shocking’ Russia into a functioning market economy,
and foreign investors have attempted to introduce and apply Western
business practices and norms within the Russian context. Despite these
external efforts and the internal political will to change the foundations
of the system, it turned out not to be an easy task. Unwritten rules have
long been a powerful invisible hand within Russian political culture and
their presence is unlikely to melt away.
In the 1990s, unwritten rules surfaced in the opportunistic and manip-
ulative use of formal constraints and the possibility of building corporate
strategies on such a basis. In order to get routine business tasks accom-
plished companies, firms and enterprises are often compelled to secure a
‘roof’ (krysha), or to employ individuals and private security companies
skilled at both navigating Russia’s complex financial and legal spheres
and at mastering so-called ‘informal negotiation techniques’. The former
implies professional expertise in the tax code, licensing requirements,
insolvency law, accounting and banking procedures in combination with
the necessary know-how to manipulate these codes to the firm’s advan-
tage. The latter refers to sophisticated intelligence-gathering capacities
and the informal use of blackmail files (kompromat), including copies of
bank statements, currency transfers, business and real estate transactions
and other official documents as well as general correspondence, personal
information and unofficial transcripts of telephone conversations of a
compromising nature.
Rather than restricting their activities to ‘traditional’ tasks such as
physical protection and information security, private security services in
Russia have become the de facto administrative force of the present
economy: their extra-legal activities enable Russia’s imperfect institu-
tional framework to operate. Representatives of security agencies facili-
tate interactions with both state bodies and with other economic agents,
including business competitors, organized criminal groups and protec-
tion agencies. The transaction costs incurred by private security services,
pervasive corruption and a high-risk environment undermine the sol-
vency of small firms in competitive markets and serve to maintain the
unwritten rules which benefit those interested in keeping transaction
costs high.
Will Russia be able to break free from the dependency on unwritten
rules? We should not necessarily be pessimistic. But in order to reduce
Blat Lessons 139
the prevalence of unwritten rules in the economy and to make the econ-
omy more responsive to market stimuli, it is not enough simply to
change the formal constraints. It is crucial to influence the system of
informal constraints and to target the unwritten ways in which these
informal constraints divert, redefine and enforce the formal ones.
Otherwise it will be impossible to prevent an endless string of frustra-
tions in the course of further reforms in Russia.
The key question is: ‘how can we reduce the significance of unwritten
rules if they are instrumental for the functioning of the economy?’
Following my approach some practical steps can be suggested,46 espe-
cially now that the stage of the ‘shock’ macroeconomic reforms is more
or less over and more sophisticated targets, such as judicial reform and
corporate governance are on the agenda. The fundamental assumption
behind such steps is that awareness of the informal order and of the
unwritten rules regulating it, followed by the focused efforts of policy-
makers to transform the informal as well as the formal, should become
a necessary condition for reforms to work and for a fully fledged market
economy to develop.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have discussed the constituents of the informal order by

considering three important dimensions of the economy of favours.
First, I considered its impact on both formal institutions and on infor-
mal networks, with particular emphasis on the latter. I identified some
ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the formal and the
informal in the Soviet and post-Soviet economy. Finally, I revealed some
of the unwritten rules that regulate this relationship and ensure that
rules are broken only to the extent to which the informal order is not
violated. In doing so I have also illustrated the ways in which unwritten
rules impede reforms in Russia and have argued that targeting them is a
necessary precondition to fundamental change in Russia.
A great deal has been done in the field towards understanding the
informal order operating both before and after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. At the same time, there is much more that still has to be done.
In this sense it might be useful to formulate not only what we have
learnt in the past ten years, but also what needs to be done:
(1) The informal field needs some rigour. So far, a variety of terms such
as informal structures, sectors, economy, institutions, networks,
practices, rules and constraints has been used interchangeably,
which leaves too much uncertainty for the reader.
140 Alena Ledeneva
(2) The same point can be made about networks. Until network analysis
is adequately integrated with the field of post-Communist network
studies, dominated by qualitative research, there will be very little
consensus on methodology and even on definitions. The simple fact
that ‘networks’ could be both exclusive and inclusive, and that there
are both functional and subversive dimensions to networks, has
often been overlooked in the keen attempts either to view post-
Communist networks as corrupt or to interpret them as social capital
for the sake of quantitative and comparative studies.
(3) Learning from mistakes, it seems mandatory not to get biased in the
other direction and to see everything in an informal light. This
means studying the ‘in-formal’ in conjunction with its formal frame-
work and trying to achieve a balanced view. It used to be the case that
the existing order often went unnoticed behind the façade of ‘chaos’
theories. It is important to prevent the reverse from being the case.
(4) Finally, the informal order has to be taken into account for policy-
making however difficult it might be. Such concepts as anti-modern
institutions, chaotic capitalism or economy of favours have been use-
ful analytically, but can they be applied to policy-making? It is here
that some innovative thinking still needs to be done.

1. Frederic J. Fleron and Erik P. Hoffman, Post-Communist Studies and Political
Science: Methodology and Empirical Theory in Sovietology, Boulder, CA, Oxford,
1993.
2. Personal communication, 9 May 1996, PhD viva.
3. Peter Rutland suggested a seventh paradox: ‘Everybody voted in favour but
the system collapsed’.
4. Joseph S. Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR, Cambridge, MA, 1957,
p. 182.
5. According to Berliner, anecdotes such as ‘Blat is higher than Stalin’ and
‘You’ve got to have ZIS (znakomstvo i sviazi)’ were common currency. See
J. Berliner, ‘Blat is higher than Stalin’, Problems of Communism, 3(1), 1954.
6. Edward Crankshaw, Russia Without Stalin. London, 1956; D. J. Dallin, The
New Soviet Empire, London, 1951; J. Berliner, ‘Blat is higher than Stalin’.
7. Crankshaw, Russia Without Stalin, p. 74.
8. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Blat in Stalin’s time’, in S. Lovell, A. Ledeneva, and
A. Rogatchevsii (eds), Bribery and Blat in Russia, London, 2000, pp. 166–82,
p. 179.
9. Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal
Exchange, Cambridge, 1998.
10. For analysis of patronage see Geoffrey Hosking, ‘Patronage and the Russian
state’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 78(2), April 2000.
Blat Lessons 141
11. Richard Rose, ‘Getting by in the three economies: The resources of the official,
unofficial and domestic economies’, Studies in Public Polity, 1983, p. 110.
12. Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People, New York,
Oxford, 1989.
13. Richard Rose ‘Living in an anti-modern society’, East European Constitutional
Review, 8(1/2), Winter–Spring 1999, pp. 68–75.
14. Endre Sik and Istvan Janos Toth, ‘Some elements of the hidden economy in
Hungary today’ in Tamas Kolosi, Istvan Gyorgy Toth, Gyorgy Vukovich (eds),
Social Report 1998, Budapest, 1999, p. 100. See also Endre Sik, ‘Network capi-
tal in capitalist, communist and post-Communist societies’, International
Contributions to Labour Studies, 4, 1994, pp. 73–93.
15. Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary, London and Glasgow, 1987,
p. 966. See also Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz, Social Structures:
A Network Approach. Cambridge, 1988.
16. David Held and A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton, Global
Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 259–82.
17. Manuel Castells, The Rise of Network Society (Vol. I of the trilogy: The
Information Age. Economy, Society and Culture), Oxford, 1996, p. 165.
18. Dirk Messner, The Network Society: Economic Development and International
Competitiveness as problems of Social Governance, London, 1997.
19. Martin Perkmann, ‘The two network societies’, Economy and Society, 28(4),
1999, pp. 615–28, p. 620.
20. The instrumental use of networks is usually ‘misrecognised’ by the members.
The aspect of misrecognition is not considered in this chapter. For details see
Ledeneva, 1998.
21. My research was prompted by the question ‘what kind of networks existed
under the Soviet regime and do they continue to exist?’ (see Ledeneva, 1998).
22. Castells, The Rise of Network Society.
23. Manuel Castells and Emma Kizelyova, ‘Russia and the network society: an
analytical exploration’, paper at the Conference on ‘Russia at the End of the
20th Century’, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University,
5–7 November, 1998 (www.stanford.edu).
24. Ksenia Kasianova, O Russkom Natsional’nom Kharaktere, Moskva, 1994.
25. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia.
Ithaca, CA and London, 1992; and Everyday Stalinism, Oxford, 2000;
S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley, CA, 1995;
G.T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social
Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933–1953, Philadelphia, 1991.
26. Stephen L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions.
Cambridge, MA, 1998.
27. Gregory Grossman, ‘The second economy of the USSR’, The Problems of
Communism, 26(5), 1977, pp. 25–40; G. Grossman, ‘The second economy in
the USSR and eastern Europe: A bibliography’, Berkeley-Duke Occasional Papers
on the Second Economy in the USSR, Paper No. 21, July 1990.
28. Kenneth Jowitt, ‘Soviet neotraditionalism: The political corruption of a
Leninist regime’, Soviet Studies, 35(3), 1983, pp. 275–97, p. 275.
29. The letter of a citizen of Novgorod found in the correspondence of
Vyshinskii, the head of the People’s Deputies Soviet. The State Archive of
142 Alena Ledeneva
Russian Federation, f. 5446, op. 81a, file 24, p. 49. I am grateful to Professor
Sheila Fitzpatrick for prompting me to see this document.
30. The blat system of exchange was grounded in the possibility of extending
favours at the expense of state property. The dubious nature of state property
and the repressive nature of the Soviet state have contributed to the spread
of all-pervasive practices of cheating and outwitting the state: blat and other
forms of diversion of state property, smuggling out (vynos), false reporting
(pripiski), stealing, and so on.
31. Saskia Sassen, ‘The informal economy: between new development and old
regulations’, in Saskia Sassen, Globalisation and its Discontents: Essays on the
New Mobility of People and Money, New York, 1998, pp. 153–74, p. 156.
32. See also Alena Ledeneva, ‘Continuity and change of blat practices in Soviet
and post-Soviet Russia’, in Lovell, Ledeneva and Rogatchevsii (eds), Bribery
and Blat in Russia, pp. 183–205.
33. See Heiko Pleines, ‘Large-scale corruption in the Russian banking sector’ and
other articles in Alena Ledeneva and Marina Kurkchiyan (eds), Economic
Crime in Russia, Kluwer Law International, 2000.
34. See Alena Ledeneva and Paul Seabright ‘Barter in post-Soviet societies: what
does it look like and why does it matter?’ in Paul Seabright (ed.) The Vanishing
Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies,
Cambridge, in press. See also website at www.kings.cam.ac.uk/histecon/
barter/ on barter economy and its multiple implications.
35. See Vadim Volkov ‘Organized violence, market-building, and state formation
in post-communist Russia’ in Alena Ledeneva and Marina Kurkchiyan (eds),
Economic Crime in Russia.
36. See Alena Ledeneva, ‘Neformal’ naia sfera i blat: grazhdanskoe obshchestvo
ili (post)sovetskaia korporativnost’ ’ and other articles in a special issue of Pro
et Contra on civil society, Fall, 1997.
37. David Stark defines bargaining as a loose term denoting patterns in which
price setting is strongly influenced by network connections that differ from
purely market transactions or political considerations that differ from purely
administrative criteria. Stark, 1994. Ibid., p. 69.
38. Gerald M. Easter, ‘Institutional legacy of the old regime as a constraint to
reform: the case of fiscal policy’ in S. Harter and G. Easter (eds) Shaping the
Economic Space in Russia, Aldershot, 2000, p. 11.
39. Gerald M. Easter, Reconstructing the State: Personal Networks and Elite Identity in
Soviet Russia, New York and Cambridge, 2000.
40. Translated into the networks discourse, one can say that ‘forged under con-
ditions of soft-budget constraints, [the] cohesive networks of trust and
friendship will promote dynamism in the short run, but when times get dif-
ficult, they will be used to defend perceptions of “interests” shaped by long-
term habits and routines inimical to marketization’. David Stark, ‘From
system identity to organisational diversity: analysing social change in east-
ern Europe’, Contemporary Sociology, 21(3), 1992, pp. 299–304, p. 302.
41. David Stark, ‘Path dependence and privatisation strategies in East Central
Europe’ in J. M. Kovacs (ed.) Transition to Capitalism?, Budapest, 1994, p. 66.
42. See Michael T. Hannah and John H. Freeman, Organizational Ecology,
Cambridge, MA, 1989 and others quoted by David Stark, ‘Path dependence
Blat Lessons 143
and privatisation strategies in East Central Europe’ in Kovacs (ed.) Transition

to Capitalism?, p. 91, fn 3.
43. See Alena Ledeneva, Unwritten Rules: How Russia Really Works, London, 2001.
44. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance,
Cambridge, 1990.
45. For details see Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours.
46. See Alena Ledeneva, Unwritten Rules: How Russia Really Works.
8
Administrative Regions and
the Economy
Philip Hanson
It is widely believed that a country as large and diverse as Russia needs

devolved government. Yet Russia has for most of its history been a cen-
tralized state. In the 1990s, partly because the centre was weak, a process
of federalization began. From early 2000 President Putin has been seeking
to strengthen central control. This chapter will focus on the economics of
Russia’s wavering federalization. That topic cannot be pursued without
our stumbling, however awkwardly, into political issues. Still, the focus
will be on the economy.
President Putin’s re-assertion of central control in Russia has worried
political analysts more than it has economists. The reason for this is
simple. Regional leaders have typically had close links with business, have
characteristically acted to impede the working of competition, and have
dealt with their budgetary problems by encouraging the development of
non-monetary settlements (arrears, barter, tax offsets, bills of exchange). It
has been tempting for economic commentators to see the degree of
regional autonomy in 1990s Russia and the incoherence of centre–region
budgetary relations as a main source of the country’s economic difficulties.
Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, writing before the recent eco-
nomic recovery began, blamed the post-1995 stagnation of output on a
failure ‘to construct a democratic, fiscally stable federal order on the basis
of a ruined communist state’.1 David Woodruff attributed Russian eco-
nomic difficulties above all to the central government’s ‘unsuccessful
attempt to gain a monopoly over the definition of the generally accepted
means of payment’.2
In contrast, other studies have treated sub-national government in
Russia as merely part of Russia’s economic difficulties, not a prime source
of them. The OECD, in its most recent survey of Russia, drew attention
to the damaging consequences of the large unfunded mandates of
144
Administrative Regions and the Economy 145
regional authorities: that is, the loading on to them by the centre of

spending commitments that they could not meet, and which prompted
the growth of barter and other forms of non-monetary payments.3 The
Birmingham group, trying to understand regional patterns of economic
change in Russia, concluded, amongst other things, that by the late
1990s most of the cronyism and corruption that hampered the develop-
ment of open and competitive markets in Russia involved regional and
local governments, and that even regions with reformist reputations
exhibited much of the same pathology.4
Such studies have also made it clear, however, that this is not the whole
economic story of modern Russian regionalism. Some of the worries about
regional devolution in Russia have been misplaced. There is evidence of
market integration across regional boundaries in the 1990s. The case for
Russian administrative regions having established trade barriers and differ-
ent economic rules of the game, blocking such integration, is not proven.5
This chapter argues by contrast that the more far-reaching claims made
for bungled federalization as the key economic problem of late 1990s
Russia are overstated; that regional government is indeed weak and often
damaging to the market, but that the impediments to growth in Russia
are not chiefly the product of territorial–administrative structures, how-
ever messy those structures may be; and that the economic case for a
resumption of federation-building in the long run is strong. However, it
is also the case that a general lack of respect for formal institutions and
due process, together with geographically very uneven development,
make the creation of a decently operating federation in Russia difficult,
and that there is, on balance, some economic benefit to be expected in
the medium term from President Putin’s re-assertion of central control.
The chapter is organized as follows. First, there is a brief summary of the
economic arguments for devolved powers of taxing and spending – a
core issue in Russia. In the second section, the evolving regional administra-
tive structure of Russia is described, together with its main economic weak-
nesses. Then the ways in which the economic fortunes of Russian regions
have diverged are assessed, together with the ways in which the central gov-
ernment has tried to cope with that divergence. The fourth section is an
assessment of the possible role of devolved government in contributing
both to great regional inequality and to poor overall economic performance.
The standard case for fiscal devolution
Public finance theory provides arguments about the appropriate role of

regional and local governments in taxing and spending.6 This topic
146 Philip Hanson
of multilevel budgets is known in the trade as fiscal federalism. The

issues, however, are not restricted to states with a formal federal struc-
ture: they arise in any state that has governments with budgets below
the national level.
In a market economy, government taxing and spending can serve
three main purposes. It can help provide macroeconomic stability (that
is, it can keep both inflation and unemployment low). It can rectify
market failure where the balance of advantages may justify government
intervention: this can include the provision of public goods, such as
defence and law and order, that would be under-provided if left to the
market. And it can reduce inequality of incomes, perhaps providing
some minimum level of material provision for all.
Of these three functions of government, the first, macroeconomic sta-
bility, is a national public good that can be provided (if at all) only by
the central authorities: that is, the government and the central bank.
The same goes for national public goods like national defence, but not
for all public goods. Some are local, such as parks and fire brigades, and
might be more efficiently provided by sub-national government. The
third function, of providing a minimum real income for all, is probably
best seen as a function of central government, since it is to do with
inequality amongst all households in a nation.
The grounds for thinking that at least some things (mainly local pub-
lic goods and the local provision of some national public goods) would
be better organized by local or regional governments are the following.
First, these are matters on which a public administration that is closer to
the local situation is likely to be better informed. Second, if that admin-
istration is elected, it has an incentive to respond to local wishes. Third,
the mix of the population’s preferences between the cost of paying more
tax and the benefit of having more public provision may vary across
communities, and different levels of local taxing and spending can
reflect this. Finally, people, including the owners of firms, can vote with
their feet to leave one local tax jurisdiction for another if the mix else-
where is more attractive to them. This option of exit reinforces that of
voice – that is, voting. Both exit and voice at the local level help to dis-
cipline a regional or local government’s activity.
The stress on people moving comes, naturally, from American econo-
mists, but such mobility is not a uniquely American phenomenon.
People move for a better deal everywhere, even if in many countries
they move less readily than Americans do. Russians also move, despite
residence restrictions and an underdeveloped housing market.
In 1993–96 the rate of inter-regional migration in Russia was about
1 per cent of the population per annum, about the same as the rate of
movement from southern to northern Italy in the 1970s and 1980s.7
This approach to allocating responsibilities between levels of govern-
ment provides arguments for sub-national governments having their
own, clearly identified tax bases and for their being as fiscally self-
supporting as possible. When they are largely fiscally self-sufficient and
can set their own rates of tax on particular sets of transactions, they have
strong incentives to collect ‘their’ taxes as cost-effectively as possible,
and to exercise discipline over their own spending; they are not relying
on hand-outs from above, derived from national tax collection in which
their own input is small.
It follows that the taxing of the more mobile tax bases (such as profits
tax in a world of more-or-less footloose business) should generally be left
to central government. At the other extreme, the taxation of particularly
high-yielding, but immobile, natural resources (oil, gas, diamonds)
located in only some regions of a country should also be a preserve of
central government. Such resources otherwise make some localities for-
tuitously tax-rich.
One final implication of the standard fiscal-federal analysis is that
transfers from central to regional budgets should be kept to a minimum
for the sake of sub-national fiscal autonomy, and should be to do mainly
with ensuring that some national minimum of public-goods provision
can be assured even in the poorest regions. Inter-budgetary transfers
should not be aimed at reducing inequality; that should be something
tackled directly by the central budget.
Even a cursory acquaintance with some of Russia’s centre–region
issues makes it obvious that Russian public finances do not conform to
these prescriptions. Still, for the reasons given above, there is a prima
facie economic case for federalism in Russia. The fact that devolution has
so far been inconsistent does not alter that.
When economists offer these prescriptions for a successful devolved
fiscal system, they are not endorsing any sort of barrier between the
regions of a country. Goods, labour and capital should be entirely free to
move across regional borders. The economic rules of the game, from the
laws on bankruptcy to competition policy, should be the same in each
region, even though the taxes may be somewhat different. Russian
regional politicians are sometimes alleged to have created inter-regional
trade barriers, and even substantially different regional economic
regimes. Whether or not such problems have been significant, the case
for sub-national budgetary autonomy, with politically accountable
regional governments, remains a strong one on the grounds of efficiency.
148 Philip Hanson
Russia’s regions and their relations with the centre
Russia has, counting Chechnia, 89 administrative regions. All the divisions

are inherited from the Soviet Union. (Vladimir Putin’s introduction in
2000 of seven federal districts, each with its presidentially appointed rep-
resentative (a polpred in the usual Russian abbreviation), is so far a moni-
toring, not an administrative, arrangement.) One peculiarity of the
administrative inheritance is the existence of regions with non-Russian-
ethnic labels. Many of these in fact contain more ethnic Russians than
members of the so-called ‘titular nationality’. Nine of the 89 administra-
tive regions are autonomous districts within larger regions. The regular
economic data available for those larger regions are not uniformly avail-
able separately for these sub-divisions, so the account that follows will
focus on 79 regions, covering the whole country except Chechnia: 20
nominally ethnic republics; two cities of federal status that are run as sep-
arate regions: Moscow and St Petersburg; 55 standard regions (oblasti and
kraia), the Jewish Autonomous oblast’ (which is on the Chinese border and
contains hardly any Jews) and Chukotka autonomous district (okrug).8
Below the regional level are municipal and rural–district administra-
tions: 2958 of them altogether. These also are elected governments, with
substantial responsibilities, including the disbursement of the largest
single remaining state subsidy: the provision of housing maintenance
and housing utilities (water, gas, electricity, sewerage and often, through
centralized heat supply, space heating) at well below cost to almost the
whole population. What they do, and how well they do it, matter, but
are not the subject of this chapter. So far, their budgets are derived from
the ‘consolidated budget’ (regional plus local) of their region. Rules gov-
erning the relations between regional and local budgets are still only in
the process of being established.
The 79 regions have an average population of 1.8 million but
their sizes vary enormously around that average. At the beginning of
2000 Moscow had 8.6 million residents and Chukotka had 72 000.9
(Census figures for late 2002 showed Moscow with a population of over
10 million.)
Their economic conditions, insofar as they are captured in official fig-
ures, also vary enormously. Per capita production (gross regional prod-
uct [GRP] per head) in 1998 ranged from one-fifth of the Russian average
in Ingushetia (next to Chechnia and badly affected by the war) to
3.8 times that average in the oil-and-gas-rich province of Tiumen’.10
These two regions are not outrageous extremes in an otherwise
fairly homogeneous set of regions. A handy measure of dispersion, the
coefficient of variation, is 0.61, or 61 percent, for these GRP data.11

Broadly speaking – and with some caution because of the rather poor
quality of the Russian data – the unevenness of development levels
amongst Russian regions probably exceeds that among level-two regions
of the present European Union: regions with about the same average pop-
ulation size as those of Russia. In 1996 the coefficient of variation of per
capita GDP among EU level-two regions was estimated at 26.9 per cent.
The ratio between the per capita GDP of the richest region, Hamburg, and
the poorest (excluding the French overseas region of Guadeloupe) –
Epeirus in Greece – was 4.4: 1, far less than the range from Tiumen’ to
Ingushetiia.12 In other words, from the poorest parts of Greece and
Portugal, through the uneven development of Italy and Great Britain, to
the most prosperous parts of Sweden or Germany, regional variability is
apparently somewhat less than in Russia. And of course the Russian aver-
age is much lower (about one-fifth that of the EU, in terms of per capita
GDP at purchasing power parity in 2000).13
There is a particularly striking contrast between Moscow and the rest
of Russia. If Moscow were an independent city-state it would be a roar-
ing post-communist success: huge tracts of Russia, however, more
closely resemble the Middle Ages. In February 2001 the average money
income in Moscow would buy 8.94 times the standard ‘subsistence’ bas-
ket of food items at local, that is, Moscow, prices. The average for the rest
of the country (at average Russian prices) was 2.45.14 The Russian
Communications Ministry reckoned in mid-2001 that there were
30 mobile phones per 100 Moscow residents, and 2 per 100 in the rest of
the country.15
This huge and varied patchwork of regions acquired in the 1990s con-
siderable independence from the centre. Presidents of the ethnic republics,
in particular, had a great deal of leeway. But the governors of ordinary
regions, even when they had been appointed by the president and could
in principle be removed by him, typically depended more on the local
business elite than on Moscow. Reformists despatched from Moscow in
1991 and 1992 to govern many regions soon either were replaced by peo-
ple more acceptable to the directors of large local enterprises or adapted to
the local scene. The unsuccessful Chubais–El’tsin effort to remove Evgenii
Nazdratenko from the governorship of Primorskii krai in 1997 illustrates
the importance of the local power base.16
The pattern of events tended to be that the local business and politi-
cal elite, already closely interwoven, was able to seize control in most
areas once the communist party chain of command from Moscow
ceased to function. At the same time, the federal government passed
150 Philip Hanson
down to the regions and their constituent local governments much of

the responsibility for social provision: benefits, health care and housing
subsidies. The sub-national governments lacked the tax revenue to meet
all their obligations. They also lacked the centre’s ability to print money.
Regional political leaders had opportunities to serve the interests of
close allies running large enterprises in the region, and to profit person-
ally from doing this. But they also had real problems with the public
finances of their regions, and in the early- and again in the late-1990s
had to worry about re-election.
This combination of circumstances played out differently in different
regions, partly because of variations in their initial conditions.
In Ul’ianovsk Governor Goriachev managed for a time to subsidize
local retail food prices and retain price controls, restricting new business
development and using subsidies informally provided by a network of
large and initially profitable enterprises. This alliance, and the local
price controls, broke down as the finances of the large enterprises dete-
riorated. In late 2001 Goriachev’s successor, Vladimir Shamanov, was
still seeking to control local producers.17
In Kostroma, which was poor and had few large and influential pro-
ducers, the regional government used what limited resources it had in
trying to preserve the inherited production structure, which has simply
crumbled.18
Moscow city was one – perhaps the only – region in which a dynamic
and diverse economy delivered rising tax revenues throughout most of
the 1990s. This left the mayor with resources to meet expenditure obli-
gations and to maintain and even improve roads, buildings and trans-
port. At the same time it allowed Mayor Luzhkov to waste resources
propping up large enterprises that were failing.
The small number of regions containing large, natural resource-based
export capabilities (Tiumen’, Irkutsk, Krasnoiarsk, Perm’, Komi,
Belgorod, Lipetsk, Vologda, Sakha) have fared better than most, but the
struggle for control of dollar-earning assets has been intense.19
Two phenomena have been observed throughout Russia.
First, close links between governors and the more powerful local
enterprises (those with large export earnings or significant influence in
Moscow) have been the norm. Governors have often been on the boards
of such enterprises and, if not overtly linked, still very often act in the
interests of those enterprises. Iuliia Latynina’s novels, which draw on
her experience as a journalist, routinely portray local and regional politi-
cians as being in the pockets of a local tycoon.20 The difficult, poten-
tially damaging situation that results on the rare occasions when a
governor acts against a local tycoon can be seen in the bitter struggle in
Krasnoiarsk between Aleksandr Lebed’ and Anatolii Bykov.21
These links impede competition. It has been routine in Russian busi-
ness to hamper business rivals by deploying against them local politi-
cians and local judges, not better products or lower costs.
Three examples of criminal cases in progress in September 2001 illus-
trate what vague terms like ‘cronyism’ and ‘corruption’ can mean. The
Mayor of Vladivostok was under investigation for selling off state prop-
erties at far below market prices to allies, while excluding other bidders.
He was himself an ally of the former governor, Evgenii Nazdratenko, and
consequently an enemy of Nazdratenko’s successor, just as his own pred-
ecessor, Cherepkov, was a foe of Nazdratenko. In Kursk the former
regional head of government was being tried for embezzlement. He and
his family, it was reported, already controlled much of the region’s
vodka production, oil products distribution, and many of the casinos,
restaurants, and security firms. In Smolensk, in a case stemming from a
murder investigation, the former Deputy Governor was charged with
abuse of office for selling vodka factories illegally. Several officials of the
regional administration, reportedly, were refusing to testify.22
Second, regional governments have unfunded mandates (legally bind-
ing spending commitments for which funds were lacking) that have led
them to collude with local large enterprises to have taxes ‘paid’ in over-
valued barter deliveries of goods or by offsetting tax, allowing the
regional governments to pass on less in tax revenue to the centre. The
sum of such unfunded mandates was estimated at 5 per cent of GDP in
1998 by the OECD; a recent Russian government projection for 2001
puts the sum, surprisingly, even higher at 8 per cent of GDP.23 This
means, since the usual budget figures are given on a cash-flow basis, that
the state of overall government finances is correspondingly worse than
is shown in the usual figures. It also means that the inefficiencies
associated with non-monetary settlements are perpetuated.
The diverging fortunes of Russia’s regions and

the centre’s response
The sharp divergence of regional economic fortunes in Russia has

already been touched upon. How can this best be measured, given that
people’s real incomes are the most important indicator? These can be
approximated by taking reported per capita money income and dividing
it by a measure of local costs of living. This deflation of money values is
important because prices differ widely across Russia. A higher money
152 Philip Hanson
income in Magadan, for example, may buy less than a much lower
money income in Ul’ianovsk. Local living costs are approximated by the
various ‘food basket’ costings provided in the official data and by local
‘subsistence minima’. All these data are unquestionably poor. The pat-
tern they reveal nonetheless roughly fits with other evidence, including
that of one’s own eyes, though some adjustments may be needed for the
assessment of some individual regions.
Figure 8.1 is a scattergram of average regional per capita real incomes
in February 2001 derived in this way, plotted against the population size
of regions at the beginning of 2000. There is a relationship between a
region’s size and its prosperity, indicated by the trend line in the chart.
That relationship is strongly influenced by a few samples – notably,
Moscow city, which is in the top right-hand corner – but it remains sig-
nificant even if that extreme is removed (see below).
There is also, and more predictably, a relationship between regional
per capita real income levels and levels of per capita gross regional prod-
uct (GRP): that is, regional production. However, the relationship is not
5
Population as % RF, 1/1/00
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Per capita real income (Feb 2001)
Figure 8.1 Russian regions: per capita real incomes and population-size, 2000–01
Note: Population-size is shown as a percentage of the Russian total. The real income measure
is money income divided by the local (i.e. regional) cost of a 25-item food basket. This under-
states the real income of predominantly rural areas where subsistence food production plays
a larger role. See the text.
Sources: Goskomstat, Regiony Rossii 2000; Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii v fevral’e
2001. See notes 9 and 13.
as close as might have been expected. See Figure 8.2 below. These
relationships will be explored further in the penultimate section.
Differences in regional prosperity, measured in this way, tended to
increase from 1992, with a break after the 1998 financial crisis. Table 8.1
illustrates the development of regional divergence over a period of nine
years from 1992 to 2001.
The measurements in Table 8.1 are a little ragged, in ways discussed in
the notes to the table. That is the result of gaps in the data available and
some changes over time in the official series. Comparisons with the
communist era are impossible. Shortages, not prices and money
incomes, were then the main source of regional inequality, and there are
no decent data on those shortages and how they varied across regions.
What can be said is that regional inequality increased from 1992
through 1998, declined after the crisis of August 1998, and has appar-
ently increased again since mid-1999.
A plausible conjecture about this regional divergence and its (tempo-
rary?) reversal might run as follows. The post-communist Russian econ-
omy experienced a drastic fall in economic activity up to late 1998.
Domestic final demand collapsed, whilst imports were allowed in more
freely and competed with domestic production. Two kinds of regions
coped less badly than most: those with strong natural resource-based
3.5
Per capita GRP 1998 (RF = 1)
2.5
1.5
0.5
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Per capita real income 2/01
Figure 8.2 Russian regions: per capita real income 2/01 and per capita GRP 1998
Note: For definitions, see the text.
Source: As Figure 8.1.
154 Philip Hanson
Table 8.1 Russia: regional variation in real incomes, 1992–2001
1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2001
III 6 2
Coefficient of 30.6 26 32.2 39.5 42.3 49.8 55.7 39.9 48.0

variation (%)
Number of 74 74 77 77 76 77 77 77 79
regions
Memorandum 2.54 3.79 2.38 2.3 3.2
RF real y (I)*
Ditto (II) 2.2 2.3 1.7 1.5
Ditto (III) 2.8
Note: Data are annual averages except for 1997, where ‘III’ denotes third quarter, 1999 and
2001 (June and February, respectively). The coefficient of variation is the author’s calcula-
tion, discussed in the text. The number of regions changes slightly over the period, depend-
ing on data availability. * real y (I) is average money income divided by the local cost of a
19-item food basket, and is the basis for the calculations for 1992 through 1996. Real y (II) is
average money income divided by the local cost of the ‘subsistence minimum’, and is the
basis for the calculations for 1996 through 1999. Real y (III) is average money income divided
by the cost of a 25-item food basket. The substantial difference between I and II is evident in
the 1996 figures. III is roughly, though not exactly, comparable with I.
Sources: 1992–97: Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, Table 3.5; 1998: derived
from Goskomstat, Regiony Rossii 1999, 1999: derived from Goskomstat, Sotsial’no-ekonomich-
eskoe polozhenie Rossii v yiule 1999, 2001: as Figure 8.1.
export capabilities (the nine or so listed in the previous section), and a

handful of regions that contained emerging commercial and financial
hubs (Moscow above all, and to a lesser extent also St Petersburg,
Samara, Nizhnii Novgorod and Sverdlovsk). Other regions, dependent,
in varying proportions, on manufacturing and agriculture, had nothing
much to sell to the outside world and were also unable to profit from the
emerging businesses of consumer-goods importation and financial mar-
kets. This last, most numerous, category of regions suffered most. Hence
the divergence of fortunes through 1998.
The devaluation of the rouble from six to the dollar in July 1998 to 25
(1999 average), 28 (2000 average) and the level of around 30 in late
December 2001 revived Russian manufacturing, especially engineering
and food processing. Imported items became drastically more costly, the
domestic production of import substitutes recovered. The previously most
damaged regions began to revive, narrowing the gap between themselves
and the fortunate minority of natural resource and commercial-hub
regions, at least up to mid-1999 and perhaps for a while longer.
Subsequently, real exchange-rate appreciation eroded the original
competitive boost to domestic producers of import substitutes. That is to
say, Russian domestic inflation outpaced the further depreciation of the

rouble, lowering domestic competitiveness. Net exports therefore fell in
2001 over 2000.24 The new competitiveness of the ordinary, old bits of
the Russian economy began to wane, and with them the comparative
strength of the majority of regions that are dominated by ordinary, old
Russian/Soviet production. However, overall growth continued, raising
the national average level of real income. If that conjecture is on the
right lines, regional inequality is likely to continue to increase in the
medium term.
High and growing inter-regional inequality can create two kinds of
problems. First, it makes it difficult to combine an acceptable minimum
public provision for all with genuinely devolved government. The poor-
est regions may simply lack an autonomous tax base from which to pro-
vide a nationally acceptable basic provision of health, education and
local public goods. If they are to make such provision, their budgets have
to be supplemented from the centre – in effect, from richer regions. The
benefits of devolved taxing and spending powers are lessened as poorer
regions remain heavily dependent on transfers from the centre.
Second, pronounced regional inequality may be a source of social and
even political fragmentation. The European Union’s structural funds to
benefit poorer regions, for example, were established for the sake of
‘cohesion’. But one source of inter-regional tension may be the very fact
that people in better-off regions perceive themselves as subsidizing the
population of poor regions: northern Italy versus the Mezzogiorno, for
example.
The first of these difficulties arises in Russia and impedes the devel-
opment of a properly functioning federation. The second has so far,
despite much griping by so-called ‘donor’ regions, not really threat-
ened the unity of the state. The Chechen push for independence has a
long history that is not best described in economic terms. The other
North Caucasus republics are also both poor and unstable, but the
instability has much to do with ripples from Chechnia and from
Abkhazia, across the border in Georgia. There are other very poor
regions, such as Tula and Ivanovo in the Central Federal District, that
are not the least bit restive. And the region most assertive of its auton-
omy, after Chechnia, is Tatarstan – one of the comparatively prosperous
parts of Russia.
Before coming back to the consequences of extreme economic differ-
entiation for the development of a federation, let us try to put the
present degree of inter-regional inequality in perspective.
In international perspective, it was suggested in the previous section,
Russia’s regional inequality seems to be roughly of the order of that
156 Philip Hanson
amongst similar-sized regions of the EU. It may in fact be somewhat

less than this if we allow for regional differences in subsistence food
production. This does not come into the available personal income data.
If subsistence food production forms roughly half the real personal
income of the rural population but only a fifth of the average real
income of the entire Russian population, then an appropriate adjust-
ment for heavily rural regions such as Krasnodar, Stavropol’, the North
Caucasus republics, Tyva, the Altai Republic and a few more, would
make the dispersion of real real incomes somewhat more compressed
than has been estimated here. In this case, the dispersion of regional real
incomes might not stand out as extreme for a large country – though it
is certainly very great.
Another way of putting inter-regional inequality in perspective is to
compare it with Russia’s overall, or inter-household inequality. The dif-
ferences amongst regions are the differences between the average real
incomes in each region. If inter-regional inequality were the only form
of inequality that existed, everyone in a given region would have the
same per capita household income as the regional average. That would
be a situation in which Russia’s inequality amongst households was
purely regional. How much of total inequality stems from the fact that
incomes are not equal within each region? How much, in other words,
is accountable as intra-regional inequality?
The answer for early 2001 is, as a rough order of magnitude, about
three-fifths. In the first quarter of 2001, according to Goskomstat data,
the richest 10 per cent of the Russian population accounted for 33.3 per-
cent of all personal income, and the poorest 10 per cent for 2.4 per cent.25
The richest tenth had 13.9 times the income of the poorest tenth: a
decile ratio, in other words, of 13.9. Using the regional data for February
2001 from which the figures in Table 8.1 and Figure 8.1 are derived, one
can ask how the decile ratio would look if there were no intra-regional
inequality. The answer is approximately 5.4.
Briefly, this calculation involves adding up the populations of the
richest regions downwards from the very richest, Moscow, until one has
cumulated approximately 10 per cent of the Russian population; calcu-
lating the weighted average of the incomes of those regions, and com-
paring it with an equivalent calculation working upwards from the
poorest regions. The four richest regions, starting with Moscow and
Tiumen’, account for 9.57 per cent of total population. The poorest
14 regions, starting (at the bottom) with Ingushetiia and Chukotka,
account for 9.80 per cent of the population. In each case, adding the
next region takes one well above 10 per cent. The average for the richest
four is 7.23 food baskets. The average for the poorest 14 is 1.35 food
baskets. Hence the approximate decile ratio: 5.4.
In purely arithmetical terms, then, inequalities across regions are not
the bulk of the problem. They may however have become a slightly
larger part of the problem in the last four or five years. A similar calcula-
tion for November 1996 produced a hypothetical decile ratio of 4.4 if
there were no intra-regional inequality, against an actual decile ratio
across all households of about 13.26
Provisionally, at least, it can be said that economic divergence across
Russian regions may not in itself be threatening to the social cohesion
of the country. It does however impede the development of a well-
functioning federation. Even if the Russian leadership wanted to
encourage devolved government – which Putin does not – it would be
impossible to have a system in which all regional governments gener-
ated revenue from their own internal tax bases and provided broadly
similar public provision across regions.
The state as a whole – federal plus regional plus local – depends heav-
ily for its resources on a few regions. In 1999 Moscow provided 32.7 per-
cent of federal budget revenue, and the ten leading regions together
provided 62.8 per cent.27 This is not surprising in a country where the six
strongest regions (Moscow, Tiumen’, Moscow oblast’, St Petersburg,
Sverdlovsk, Samara) in 1998, with 21.3 per cent of the population, pro-
duced 37.8 per cent of total gross regional product (GRP) and 51.5 per cent
of Russia’s merchandise exports.28
The corollary is that around 30 poorer regions regularly depend on
transfers from the federal budget for half or more of their own budget-
ary revenue. These regions contained about 30 per cent of the popula-
tion in 1999.29 In that year one of the poorest regions, Tyva, relied for
81 per cent of its budgetary revenue on assistance from the centre.30
Hence the intense debate in Russia about ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’
regions. The flows of resources from regions to centre and back to
regions, through the budgetary system, are a complicated subject whose
details have been mastered by few. Aleksei Lavrov, an economic geogra-
pher who has been working as an adviser to Deputy Prime Minister
Viktor Khristenko, is the leading master of those details.31 Here only a
broad summary will be attempted.
The tax collection and tax police services are federal, with regional
branches. Revenue collected in a region now flows into a regional
branch of the Federal Treasury, with accounts held in federally approved
banks. Even Tatarstan now (in 2001) does not control the tax revenues
raised on its territory but has a Tatarstan branch of the Federal Treasury
158 Philip Hanson
performing this function. Part of that revenue goes directly into the
sub-national budget of the region where the revenue was raised. The bal-
ance goes to Moscow, into the federal budget. From the federal budget
some funds are transferred back to the regions, partly through the Fund
for Financial Support of the Regions (FFPR).
Despite the great unevenness of production, incomes and tax capacity
across regions, the flows from the centre back to the regions have until
2001 been modest in scale (see Table 8.2). In addition, the main revenue-
raising taxes (value-added tax or VAT and profits tax) have been split
between national and regional levels. Excises on oil and gas and export
and import duties accrue only to the centre.
The system as it evolved during the 1990s has been subjected to a
great deal of justified criticism. One line of criticism is that the sharing
of the same tax base leads to over-taxing, just as common land tends to
be overgrazed.32 The basis on which tax revenues were retained initially
at sub-national levels was subject to a great deal of manipulation, chiefly
by collusion between regional governments and local large enterprises
for taxes to be paid in kind. The pattern of subsequent centre-to-region
Table 8.2 Russia: budgets and transfers as per cent GDP, 1994–98
1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
Federal budget
Revenue 13.0 11.8 12.3 10.2
Expenditure 18.6 19.9 19.6 15.2
O/w planned transfers to
regions 4.3 1.9 2.7 2.7 1.9
Actual transfersa 3.3 1.7 2.2 1.7
Planned FFPR 1.9 1.0 1.8 2.1
Actual FFPR 0.9 1.3 1.1 1.3
Sum regional budgets
Revenue 18.9 15.5 15.0 16.3 14.7
Expenditure 16.0 16.0 17.7 15.2
FFPR/reg. (revenue, per cent) 4.9 8.1 7.3 8.0
Memorandum item:
GDP, 1994 ⫽ 100 100 95.9 92.5 93.4 89.1
Number, donor regionsb – 14 12 8 7
Notes: Details of primary sources and calculations are given in the source. Gaps indicate data
not available when the original calculations were made (mid-1999). a derived from a source
that gave actual as per cent planned; b in Russian parlance, donor regions are merely those
that receive no FFPR transfers. As Aleksei Lavrov has shown from Ministry of Finance data,
most Russian regions transmit more tax revenue (collected on their territory) to the federal
budget than they receive back from it either in FFPR transfers to their budgets or in direct fed-
eral spending on their territories.
Source: Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, Table 5.1.
transfers was shown in some analyses to be driven by the need to buy off
obstreperous regional leaders rather than by measures of regional need
(although there was a fairly strong statistical association between
regional poverty and per capita transfers). There was no doubt that
incentives both to collect tax efficiently and to spend public funds
wisely were, at the sub-national level, especially weak. 33
Table 8.2 brings together data on the relations between budgetary lev-
els through 1998.
The main point to be made about these numbers is that the centre was
making only very modest transfers to regional budgets. The figures in
row 6 do not, it is true, represent the whole of federal-to-regional budg-
etary flows. They do however constitute a large part of those flows, and
they are the one part that is deliberately designed to help boost the
undernourished budgets of poorer regions. Russia was providing less in
the way of centre–region transfers, relative to resources available, than
many established federations. Lavrov, citing a figure of 1.5 per cent of
GDP for 1999, quotes significantly higher figures for Canada (4 per cent
in 1995), Australia (6.5 per cent) and the US (3.0 per cent).34
Since 1998 a lot of effort has gone into trying to reform the budgetary
system as a whole. One aim is to move towards separate tax bases for dif-
ferent levels of government. Another is to do away with unfunded man-
dates (see above). A third is to establish clear tax bases and revenue
allocations for local, as distinct from regional, governments.35 The strong
upturn in the economy has helped: as the tide rises, more regional boats
can float. In particular, liquidity has increased, enabling more taxes to be
paid in ‘live money’ (zhivye den’gi) rather than barter and tax offsets. This
makes regional tax and spending flows more intelligible and impedes
local capture of federal revenue. Putin’s drive to strengthen the centre’s
control of regional activities, and at the same time to clarify the division
of powers between levels of government, has also helped.36
Nonetheless, public finances, and their centre–region dimension in
particular, remain problematic. The federal government is aiming in
2002 at initial disposition of 55 per cent of revenues, having in the
recent past had 50 or slightly less. In a growing economy with growing
tax revenues, this is less apt to generate conflict than it would if the
economy were stagnant. But a fall in world oil prices could easily halt
growth.37 Even in the current situation, regional leaders have been com-
plaining about the pressure from the centre on their budgets.38
Meanwhile, substantial shared tax bases remain and federal transfers to
the regions, though helping to reduce the most extreme differences in
regional budgetary resources per head of population, are still modest.39
160 Philip Hanson
At the same time, other measures emanating from Moscow tend to

reduce sub-national control over resources. The plan to split the electric-
ity monopoly, United Energy Systems (UES), between the distribution
grid and the generating companies, and to sell off shares in the latter,
should bring cost-reducing competition into the industry. It also threat-
ens to remove from regional leaders the control they have exercized over
local electricity tariffs, which they have predictably used to subsidize
local producers in general and to favour close allies in particular.
There has also been more overt pressure from central government on
the debt and spending levels of regions. On 4 December 2001 a Deputy
Finance Minister, Bella Zlatkis, threatened that central government
would declare seven (unidentified) regions bankrupt and take over their
finances. Press speculation suggested that there were in fact eight regions
that were in trouble because (contrary to federal law) their outstanding
debt exceeded their annual revenue. These eight constituted a sad list of
very poor places: Tyva, North Ossetia, Buriatiia, Kabardino-Balkariia,
Karachaevo-Cherkessiia, Kurgan and – rather less predictably – Nizhnii
Novgorod and Omsk.40 Zlatkis’s statement was a bark, not a bite, but it
may have helped to encourage the others.
Putin’s drive to reduce the mass of licensing and regulation of busi-
ness, and therefore to reduce the opportunities for corruption, also
removes (if it is implemented) the economic power of regional politi-
cians. It is mainly the regional and local authorities who operate these
controls. At least some of the seven presidential representatives
( polpredy) are trying to promote this policy. In Ul’ianovsk, in former
Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko’s Volga district, the inspector from the
federal district was in spring 2001 requiring books to be printed in
which enterprises would log the visits of officials in order to expose
excessive, bribe-seeking inspections.41 To what extent the net effect of
the polpredy is to reduce, rather than increase, bureaucracy, is not clear.
But there is no doubt whose resource controls they are trying to weaken.
All these policies tend both to improve the business environment
and to weaken the regional leaders’ command over resources. For the
time being, at least, the centre’s new assertiveness probably helps the
economy.
Does territorial administrative division alter

economic outcomes in Russia?42
Devolved government in Russia might have had adverse economic

effects of two kinds: it might have accentuated inter-regional differences,
and it might have damaged overall economic performance. In this

section, these two questions will be explored in that order.
The fact that Russia’s regions have diverged economically over the
past decade does not by itself support the hypothesis that devolved
government has contributed to Russia’s economic weakness.
What distinguishes Russia, so far as regional developments are con-
cerned, is the sheer scope that its geography offers for regional diver-
gence. Even in the absence of internal administrative barriers great
distances, and therefore transport costs, limit flows of goods and people.
It may also be difficult to acquire in poorer regions the skills and train-
ing needed to work successfully in richer regions. For these reasons,
regional disparities in real incomes are likely to be larger, other things
being equal, in large than in small countries.
In a well-functioning market economy one would expect some move-
ment of capital from richer to poorer areas in order to take advantage of
cheaper labour and land. This tends, along with labour movement from
poorer to richer regions, to reduce regional income differences. At the
same time, however, the effects of agglomeration favour further con-
centration of economic activity in areas where concentrations already
exist.43 There is some evidence of a long-run tendency towards inter-
regional income convergence within countries.44 But it is also obvious
that agglomerations of economic activity persist over time.
Post-communist economic change may be particularly favourable to
very large cities. New firms can more easily grow, and old firms more
easily be restructured, where a variety of skills, materials and capital
goods is close at hand to be recombined in order to change the pattern
of production. A large plant in a big city can more easily, for example,
lease parts of its property to small shops and cafes than a large plant in
a small town. Underemployed workers in that large plant can find alter-
native employment more easily in a big city. These differences in local
adjustment will matter more in a very large country than in a small or
medium-sized country.
For the February 2001 data, almost three-fifths of the variance in average
real incomes across 79 Russian regions can be accounted for by two factors:
the region’s population and its per capita gross regional product (GRP).
Y ⫽ 0.738 ⫹ 0.427 popn ⫹ 1.000 GRP adjusted R2 ⫽ 0.573 n ⫽ 79

(4.714) (5.479) (6.674)
where Y ⫽ per capita real income of a region (money income divided by
the 25-item food basket at local prices); popn ⫽ the region’s population
in 2000 as a percentage of total Russian population; GRP ⫽ per capita
162 Philip Hanson
gross regional product as a proportion of the Russian average (i.e. total

Russian GRP per capita ⫽ 1); bracketed figures are t-statistics.
Source: Based on Goskomstat data as in Figures 8.1 and 8.2.
The two explanatory variables work reasonably well, in the sense that
their influence is statistically significant when they are used together
but also when used as single-factor explanations; the coefficients are rea-
sonably stable in different specifications, and together they account for
a fair amount of the variance. Adding further explanatory variables
(dummies) for the presence of major natural-resource exports in a region
and for the presence of a city of more than a million inhabitants slightly
reduced the coefficient of determination, without either of the addi-
tional variables appearing significant at 5 per cent.
The two explanatory variables here have a common sense rationale.
One would expect a region with higher per capita (recorded) produc-
tion to have higher per capita real incomes, other things being equal,
unless there was massive inter-regional redistribution through taxes and
benefits – which there is not. There are, nonetheless, intriguing differ-
ences between the GRP distribution and the real income distribution:
for example, Tiumen’ tops the per capita GRP list and Moscow city – by
far – the personal real income ranking. The location of recipients of oil
and gas profits must play a part.
Population-size roughly captures local market-size, in a country whose
regions tend to have high concentrations of population in regional capi-
tals and large distances between regional capitals. It is striking that most
of the Russian business ratings of regions, such as those produced by
Ekspert magazine, favour larger regions. The exceptions are instructive:
Krasnodar, large and comparatively poor, is, unusually, an amalgam of
two very different regions: the coastal strip of resorts and ports and a
large, poor, rural hinterland.
Still, more than two-fifths of the differences amongst regions in real
income levels remain statistically unaccounted for. Have regional lead-
ers’ policies contributed to these divergences?
Previous research casts doubt on this.45 Two main possibilities come to
mind: that some regions have enriched themselves at the expense of
others by imposing barriers to the movement of goods (some sort of
optimal tariff policy), or that some have adjusted less badly to economic
change than others by adopting significantly different policies, creating
different business environments.
The first of these is implausible. Many governors have from time to
time declared that controls would be placed on the movement of food
products out of their regions. However, these appear since 1994 or so to

have been empty declarations, not effectively implemented (quite apart
from being contrary to federal law). Moreover, the regions most prone to
such declarations have been the net food exporters, which are typically
below average in prosperity.
The second conjecture is also unconvincing. Evidence on inter-regional
migration and on regional patterns of development of small private firms
shows both the movement of people and the development of new firms
apparently responding (across regions) in ‘normal’ ways to market stim-
uli. Higher unemployment pushed people out of some regions; higher
real income pulled people into others. In the early-to-mid-1990s small
firms developed better the lower the unemployment level and the larger
the size of a region (proxies for demand), other things being equal, and
the lower the wage-level (labour costs), other things being equal. All of this
indicates rather normal patterns of behaviour, without a massively differ-
entiated pattern of regional business environments.46
That some regional leaders adopted more market-friendly policies
than others is beyond doubt. However, the case-study evidence suggests
that corruption and political meddling have been the norm across all
regions, and that initial conditions strongly influenced the sort of lead-
ership elected and the policies adopted. If regions such as Nizhnii
Novgorod and Samara have done comparatively well, this is at least
partly to do with their size, the absence of large natural resource-based
exports favouring status quo incumbents in local management posi-
tions, and the presence of a large number of highly educated people pre-
viously attached to defence production and research and urgently
needing to find new employment.
All in all, the case for regional leaders contributing significantly to
regional economic divergence is not strong. The divergence arose out
of differences in adaptation heavily determined by a region’s initial
conditions – including its size. The centre did rather little – see above –
to reduce inter-regional differences, but that is another matter.
The consequences of regional leaders’ policies for overall economic
performance are harder to assess. Two channels of influence seem
potentially important. The first is regional leaders’ resistance to the
immediate local consequences of macroeconomic stabilization. The
eventual benefits of comparatively low and predictable inflation are a
national public good. The immediate costs of attaining that public good
are felt locally by particular people in particular places. Local politicians
in any country tend to do what they can to protect ‘their’ workplaces.
The problem in Russia has been that they could, and did, do a great deal
164 Philip Hanson
in the way of propping up local large enterprises that needed either to be

closed or to be vigorously restructured.
This propping-up has taken many forms, from direct subsidy through
cross-subsidizing of electricity supplies to collusion in non-monetary
settlements. These are not arrangements peculiar to the more old-style
governors: they are general. The preservation of soft budget constraints
for ‘important’ local enterprises could be observed in progressive Samara
as well as in Retrograd (the Wall Street Journal’s name for Ul’ianovsk
under Goriachev).47
The second channel, which merges with the first, is the whole fiscal-
federal mess already described. Unfunded mandates and shared tax
bases helped to foster non-monetary settlements, which in turn delayed
economic restructuring.
It is hard, however, to interpret all these impediments to reform as
stemming from the administrative structure of Russian government. Sub-
national budgets have indeed been the immediate source of a great many
distortions; and cronyism and micro-management by regional political
bosses have been pervasive and have impeded structural change. It was
however the central government that failed to control its own budgetary
balance in 1995–98 and built up short-term debt it could not repay. After
1994 national macroeconomic stabilization was done with smoke and
mirrors – control of the money supply and reduction in inflation without
fiscal discipline – and was not sustainable. And it was the central govern-
ment that enforced unfunded mandates on sub-national budgets.
Conclusions
The most obvious reason for not treating the federal structure as the
prime source of Russia’s economic difficulties is that output has since
recovered, and has been growing for almost three years, without the fis-
cal-federal system being radically reformed. This view is reinforced by
the similarity of economic fortunes across the CIS, including the for-
tunes of states without substantial devolution in government.
Russia’s slow and troubled economic adjustment after the collapse of
communism has root causes not related to its hesitant movements
towards a real federation. Occam’s Razor dictates that explanations that
will also work for other so-called ‘transition laggards’ are, other things
being equal, to be preferred. Of the approximately 400 million people
living in European ex-communist countries, at least 300 million live in
countries whose economic recovery is at best only just beginning. Russia
accounts for only 144 million of those people.
An extreme difficulty in developing institutions and rules of the game

appropriate to a well-functioning market is common to all these coun-
tries. There are many ways of characterizing, diagnosing and perhaps
ultimately removing that difficulty. Richard Rose emphasizes the resist-
ance of an ‘anti-modern society’ to such change: a society in which for-
mal institutions are not expected to operate according to due process and
formal procedure, but where everyone expects informal networks to
prevail. Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaia draw attention to the
revolutionary nature of post-communist change in the former Soviet
Union (as distinct from Central Europe), place Russian experience in the
context of earlier revolutions (English and French, particularly), and
point out that it takes a long time for output to recover after a revolution.48
In short, it seems mistaken to put a great deal of weight on Russia’s
administrative structure when one is trying to identify the determinants
of Russia’s post-communist economic decline and the limits on its sub-
sequent recovery. If, however, the development of market-friendly gov-
ernment institutions is far more problematic in Russia than in, say,
Hungary or Estonia, the complicated arrangements needed for a federa-
tion to function well are going to be particularly difficult to establish.
Moreover, the present large regional inequalities make it impossible for
many regions to operate with any real fiscal autonomy.
Putin’s re-centralization of government power, insofar as it really works,
could well reduce corruption and micro-meddling in the economy and
leave producers more equally at the mercy of competition, to the benefit
of production and productivity levels. As an expedient for a few years, this
may be beneficial. A real federation is desirable, but not just yet.
1. Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, Without a Map. Political Tactics and
Economic Reform in Russia, Cambridge, MA, 2000 (hereafter Without a Map),
p. 113.
2. David Woodruff, Money Unmade. Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism,
Ithaca, NY, 1999 (hereafter Money Unmade), p. xii.
3. OECD, Economic Survey. The Russian Federation, Paris, 2000 (hereafter OECD
Survey).
4. Philip Hanson and Michael Bradshaw (eds), Regional Economic Change in
Russia, Cheltenham, 2000 (hereafter Regional Economic Change).
5. Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, chapter 3.
6. See W. Oates, Fiscal Federalism, New York, 1972; idem, Principles of Fiscal
Federalism: A Survey of Recent Theoretical and Empirical Research, College Park,
MD: University of Maryland, Center for Institutional Reform and the Informal
Sector working paper no. 21, 1992.
166 Philip Hanson
7. Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, p. 85.

8. Chukotka is now separate from Magadan oblast’. Its 72 000 people are gov-
erned by a young oil tycoon, Roman Abramovich. He has given them more
money than the federal government ever did: reportedly, some US$30–
40 million. For a fascinating account of his rule see Elena Dikun, ‘Abramovich’s
Golden Hills in Chukotka’, Prism (Jamestown Foundation), 7(9), 2001, part 3.
9. Regiony Rossii 2000, Table 2.1, from http://www.info.gks.ru/scripts
10. Ibid., derived from Table 10.1. The Russian average here is derived from the
total of all gross regional product, which was almost 12 per cent less than
gross domestic product (GDP) since some economic activity is not regionally
allocated.
11. Author’s calculation. The coefficient of variation shows an average of the
deviations from the average as a proportion of the average itself (standard
deviation over mean; the standard deviation is the square root of the mean
of the squared deviations from the mean).
12. Derived from European Commission, Sixth Periodic Report on the Social and
Economic Situation and Development of the Regions of the European Union, Brussels,
1999, pp. 20, 200, 201. The Commission’s figures show little difference, in fact,
between the Guadeloupe and the Epeirus per capita GDP levels. In Table 3
(p. 201) the measure of variance cited is a standard deviation of 26.9. Since the
mean is 100, that translates into a coefficient of variation of 26.9 per cent.
13. Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) estimates in EIU, World investment
prospects, London, 2001, Table 8.
14. Derived from Goskomstat, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii v fevral’e
2001, from http://www.info.gks.ru
15. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (hereafter RFE/RL), RFE/RL Newsline, 24 July
2001.
16. On the political economy of Nazdratenko in Primor’e and Leonid Gorbenko
in Kaliningrad, see Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, chapter 9.
Both have lost gubernatorial office under Putin, although Nazdratenko had
to be offered the national administration of the fisheries (a major source of
illicit gain in Primor’e) to get him out.
17. East–West Institute, Russian Regional Report (hereafter RRR), 14 November 2001.
18. Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, Chapter 6.
19. I have included here regions containing the biggest steel producers, whose
exports have been based partly on high-quality ore and partly on Western
steel-making technology imported in the 1970s; Krasnoiarsk’s aluminium-
smelting is based on cheap hydropower. I have not included Sakhalin,
although its large offshore oil and gas deposits are currently being developed,
because it did not inherit significant exporting capabilities.
20. For example, Okhota na iziubriia, Moscow, 1999, about the struggle for con-
trol of steelworks.
21. Bykov’s conviction and imprisonment have not ended the power struggle.
Andrew Yorke’s summer 2001 trip report from Krasnoyarsk tells of Bykov, in
Lefortovo prison, arranging for the local TV station’s electricity bills to be
paid, RRR, 6(30), 29 August 2001.
22. RRR, 6(32), 17 September 2001.
23. The 1998 estimate is from OECD, Survey; the projection for 2001 is from
Nezavisimaya gazeta, 24 May 2001, as cited in RRR, 6(20), 30 May 2001.
The higher figure for 2001 is surprising because the post-1998 economic
recovery has made public finances much healthier (and the GDP larger). It
may be that the Ministry of Finance was scaremongering in support of its
plans for the 2002 budget.
24. Data in RECEP, Monthly Update, July 2001, www.recep.org and Ekonomicheskaia
kon”iunktura v iune-iule, www.forecast.ru
25. Cited in RFE/RL Newsline, 4 May 2001.
26. Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, pp. 65–6. It should be added
that the ‘approximate deciles’ in this calculation were close to 11 per cent of the
total population – that was the way the particular regional populations stacked
up. That would tend to lower the hypothetical, no-intra-regional-inequality
decile ratio slightly. But the conclusion that the regional element has increased
probably still holds. Inter-regional inequality increased between 1996 and 2001
(see Table 1) rather more than overall inequality.
27. Alesksei Lavrov et al., Federal’nyi biudzhet i regiony. Struktura finansovykh
potokov, 2001 (hereafter Lavrov Federal’nyi), Table 2.10.
28. Ibid, Table 2.10. The share of Tiumen’ in total exports and GRP in current
prices will have risen since then with the rise in world oil prices. The attribu-
tion of exports to regions of origin is by point of shipment of the gross value
of exports rather than by value added.
29. Ibid, Table 2.3.
30. Lavrov, Federal’nyi, chart 3.8.
31. He is also a major source of both analyses and of Ministry of Finance data
used by others. In addition to the draft cited above, see Aleksei Lavrov et al.,
Federal’nyi biudzhet i regiony, New York, 1999.
32. This argument is well developed in Shleifer and Treisman, Without a Map.
Shared tax bases are nonetheless a feature of some established federations.
33. These issues and the debates about them are reviewed in Hanson and
Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, Chapter 5.
34. Lavrov, Federal’nyi, Chapter 3.
35. Olga Kuznetsova, ‘Finance ministry seeks improved center–periphery budg-
etary relations by 2005’, RRR, 6(24), 27 June 2001.
36. On 26 June 2001 Putin set up a presidential commission headed by Dmitrii
Kozak to clarify the legislation on the powers of central, regional and local
governments. The delimitation of powers has been fuzzy; the aim is to clarify
it. This is in addition to the efforts of the seven presidential representatives in
the seven presidential districts to eliminate conflicts between national and
sub-national legislation.
37. On the basis of values and quantities in the year 2000, Russian exports of oil,
oil products and natural gas were equivalent to 25 per cent of GDP (when
GDP is valued in US dollars at the average exchange rate). It follows that a fall
of US$1 per barrel in the oil price would reduce GDP by 0.5 per cent.
38. On the complaints of Perm’, Cheliabinsk and Kursk, see RRR, 6(31), 5 September
2001. The centre will continue to take just under a third of the profits tax after
the rate is cut from 35 to 24 per cent. RRR, 6(29), 9 July 2001. Centrally decreed
increases from 1 December 2001 in public officials’ pay, not covered by
increased transfers to sub-national budgets, provoked complaints and criticism
from (among others) the leaders of Voronezh, and Irkutsk (RRR, 17 October and
28 November 2001).
168 Philip Hanson
39. But the FFPR transfers have been increased, which is appropriate given the
increased initial centralization of public revenue. They were 2.6 per cent of
GDP in the first three quarters of 2001 – well above the earlier levels criticized
by Lavrov (see above): www.eeg.ru/budget,html
40. BBC Global Newsline, FSU (Economic), 7 December 2001.
41. RRR, 6(17), 9 May 2001.
42. This section draws on my paper, ‘How is the Russian economy different? Size
and regional diversity,’ presented at the ICSEES Congress, Tampere, in August
2000, and published in Russian as ‘Vliianie faktora regional’nogo raznoobraziia
na ekonomicheskuiu transformatsiiu Rossii’, in Problemy prognozirovaniia, 3,
2001, pp. 78–88.
43. Agglomeration effects can be industry-specific, where the clustering together
of producers in the same industry produces economies of scale for the indus-
try as a whole, for example through specialist sub-contractors being enabled
to operate on a scale that brings them internal (intra-firm) economies of scale,
lowering the price of the inputs they supply. Agglomeration effects can also be
of a more general kind, where producers in different lines of activity benefit
from the local availability of a wide range of skills and capabilities. The latter
sort of agglomeration effect, known as Jacobs externalities, seems especially
relevant to post-communist change, when resources need to be drastically
re-allocated and available inputs re-assembled in different combinations to
produce a greatly changed assortment of final output. Hence, perhaps, the
comparative vitality of the biggest cities in ex-communist countries.
44. See R.J. Barro and X. Sala-I-Martin, ‘Convergence across states and regions’,
Brookings Papers in Economic Activity, 1, 1991, pp. 107–82.
45. See Hanson and Bradshaw, Regional Economic Change, particularly Chapter 3
and some of the other studies on market integration cited there, and the
eight regional case-studies in Chapters 6 through 9.
46. Ibid, Chapters 3 and 4. Changes in the definitions of small firms make analy-
sis over the whole of the 1990s problematic.
47. Examples for Samara are given in ibid., Chapter 7.
48. Richard Rose, ‘Getting things done in an anti-modern society: Social capital
networks in Russia’, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde Studies in Social
Policy, 1998. Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaia, The Challenge of
Revolution. Contemporary Russia in Historical Perspective, Oxford, 2001. I have
surveyed several accounts of constraints on Russian economic progress in
‘Barriers to long-run growth in Russia’, Economy and Society (February 2002).
Part III
Politics, Law and
Foreign Policy
9
Law Reform and Civil Culture
W. E. Butler
A decade after the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,

Western specialists in Russian affairs and policymakers are divided as to
whether an opportunity has been missed by the West to materially pro-
pel the CIS countries towards a rule-of-law, social State, a market econ-
omy, and a civil society. This is the same discipline which, at a large
assembly in Switzerland held in 1988, predicted that the Soviet Union
would last another 15–20 years and ultimately would self-destruct in a
violent counter-revolution.
Those in the West who followed – and in due course participated in –
the course of law reform during perestroika were on the whole more per-
ceptive and less apocalyptic. To many of us, forces were at work in Soviet
society and the Soviet legal system which suggested a Russian legal con-
sciousness was in being, that it shared key common values with Western
understandings of human rights and the rule of law, and that Russia was
seeking the reformation of legal rules and institutions along lines
more congenial with international standards.1 While the ultimate
course and result of these forces was by no means assured, they proved
in the end to be, in my perception, extremely powerful and influential –
and remain so.
In this article I seek to bring together, however necessarily superficially
and briefly, several large strands of law reform in the first post-Soviet
decade: (i) the place of law reform in the large social, economic and
political reforms undertaken in Russia (and the CIS); (ii) the measure of
accomplishment in law reform; and (iii) the putative legal and quasi-legal
standards which Russian society (above all) and the legal system are striv-
ing, however unsatisfactorily, to address, to wit: the rule of law and the
formation of a ‘civil society’.2
171
172 W. E. Butler
The place and context of law reform
If I state that in any transition from a Soviet-style socialist economic

order to a market-oriented economy law reform is the primary, funda-
mental and central element against which any financial, institutional,
social or economic changes pale in importance, this is not intended to be
an expression of professional chauvinism or myopia. The Soviet system
was a profoundly ‘law-based’ social system.3 It depended upon – thrived
upon – the formalities of and a hierarchy of legal and administrative rules
designed to preserve the status of the ruling elites, agencies and organi-
zations, maintain order and rationality in the management of State own-
ership, discipline citizens and inculcate in them a loyalty to values which
the regimes of the day wished to emphasize. Soviet Law was positivism
run rampant. Just as any positivist system, it contained some rules purely
self-serving to the system and others that contained, under the proper
conditions and circumstances, the seeds of the system’s own destruction.
Soviet positivism drew upon and reinforced attitudes towards law that
profoundly affected post-Soviet attitudes towards and implementation of
legal change in the post-Soviet era. Here lay the heart of the law-reform
challenge: to dismantle the pernicious elements of the Soviet legal sys-
tem (repeal); to preserve and reshape the desirable elements along lines
supportive of a market economy, the rule of law and the formation of a
civil society (amendment); and to introduce new components of the
system necessary to these ends (new law).
Leaving aside for a moment the quality and measure of achievement
during the past ten years, a staggering amount has been done on all
three core fronts. It is therefore bewildering to read two of the most
thoughtful critiques4 of what has transpired in Russia during the past
decade and find not a serious mention of law reform, never mind a pen-
etrating evaluation of its successes and failures. Both studies invoke
‘tragedy’ as the leitmotif of their studies, a term chosen for its aptness,
in the authors’ views, in describing the Russian situation and presum-
ably the ‘failure’ of Western policymakers, statesmen and agencies to
properly diagnose and support (above all, finance) measures of the
proper kind and on the proper scale. The implication is that the tragedy
might have been averted or at least reduced in scale.
For better or for worse, law reform was not in fact as marginalized in
the practice of international institutional and governmental assistance
programmes as Cohen and Reddaway/Glinski implicitly suggest. The
governments of the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and
Japan funded substantial law reform programmes, as has The World Bank,
Law Reform and Civil Culture 173
the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the

International Monetary Fund and especially the European Union. Each
of their projects had its merits and drawbacks; some were more success-
ful than others; and the process continues. The intention of the best
projects was to aim at the very heart of the pre-existing legal system, to
eliminate, adjust or introduce legal rules that would further institutional
change and the formation or reinforcement of democratic values. I
would venture to suggest that on the scale of significance for potential
value the monies, comparatively modest, spent on law reform projects
of this kind gave better value than those in any other domain of foreign
assistance.
While the lawyers have concentrated on legislation and legal institu-
tions, the other social sciences seem to have been preoccupied primarily,
insofar as law is concerned, with crime and corruption. If it were possible
to extinguish crime and corruption in any social system by studying it to
death, Russia doubtless would be a crimeless society. Here the returns as
measured by an enhanced understanding and corresponding reduction
of criminality are nil, and the genuine insights into the Russian social
order on this score only slightly higher.
But how do we measure the course of law reform? Dismantling was the
first order of the day under late perestroika and the early days of sover-
eignty and independence. Here surely the record is impressive, the more
so for being accomplished without Western assistance and in the midst
of deep-seated Western scepticism and even suspicion: the abolition of
the monopoly role of the Communist Party and, eventually, of the Party
itself; the introduction of constitutional supervision agencies and, in
good time, constitutional courts; the fashioning not merely of separation
of powers (which had existed under the USSR-era constitutions), but of
checks and balances among those powers; the transition to strong presi-
dential models in place of party or parliamentary models; the replace-
ment of State arbitrazh by a system of economic courts and concomitant
transition throughout the judiciary to a professional corpus of judges
and, gradually at local levels, to justices of the peace; the embodiment of
basic human rights and freedoms in the 1993 Constitution in a way
which makes them exceptionally difficult to remove or abridge by
amendment; and the partial abolition of structures of the Planned
Economy so pernicious to an entrepreneurial market economy.
Not all of these changes have commended themselves to everyone.
The multi-party system lacks the elements of party responsibility, loyalty,
accountability and solidity, which the Anglo-American world associates
with such a system. Many are apprehensive of a strong President, even
174 W. E. Butler
though the fragmentation of political alignments within parliament

seriously obstructed the pace and direction of reform. Human rights and
freedoms are indeed duly ensconsed, yet difficult to balance in a complex
societal structure which for generations at least has placed stronger
emphasis upon the collective over the individual. Federalism proves to
be a shifting equation of centralism and devolution whose dynamics
need to mature. Destatization and privatization have been accompanied
by or perpetuated concentrations of economic wealth and power deemed
by most to be unjustified or corrupt. The disappearance of certain power
structures from the former USSR has led to the criminalization of others
erected in their place, a process facilitated by inept and unconscionable
foreign companies who passively or actively encourage or tolerate these
structures within their own operations.
The course of law reform
Against this background, virtually any legislative change amounts to

law reform. The early decisions of the Independent States, following
their declarations of sovereignty and/or independence, to apply on their
territories only that legislation of the USSR which has not been repealed,
or is not inconsistent with subsequent Independent State legislation, or
which is not contrary to new or amended constitutions was an early ‘law
reform’ of immense consequence. In fact this was a staggering measure,
comparable in scale (but not in tone) to what the Bolsheviks undertook
after 7 November 1917 – to escape instantaneously from the socio-
economic and political structures of the prior social system. A legal
vacuum is always intolerable; not even the Bolsheviks tolerated one.
And in the case of the Independent States, the peculiar form of ‘USSR
federalism’, which did leave residual powers to the union republics or
required that the union republics replicate and adapt all-union enact-
ments to their own individual circumstances, provided a safety net –
perhaps too resilient a safety mechanism – against legal nihilism under
post-Soviet circumstances.
The manner in which the former Soviet Union was dismantled con-
tributed significantly to the setting. Few Western soothsayers predicted
that the process would proceed without large-scale violence, not to men-
tion in accordance with law. The relevant union republics simply exer-
cized their rights as sovereign States to denounce and withdraw from a
Treaty concluded some 69 years earlier. They resolved issues of State con-
tinuity and succession amicably and rapidly; property was divided, for-
eign indebtedness assumed or balanced, the treasury dispersed, and the
foreign economic monopoly eliminated. With relatively minor difficulties,

the resources of the armed forces were distributed and centralized com-
mand systems decentralized. All this in the context of a massive with-
drawal from Central Europe with concomitant reductions in the size of
forces and the social problems such reductions inevitably entail.
State-disintegration and State-formation have occurred on a stupen-
dous scale within the former USSR during the past decade before our
very eyes. Excluding local conflicts principally in the Caucasus, it has
done so with remarkably little bloodshed and instability. In part this
must be attributed to the fact that Soviet legal structures lent themselves
to change of this order once the political will and opportunity existed to
take advantage.
The late perestroika and early independence periods, viewed from the
standpoint of law reform, thus amounted initially to stripping out cer-
tain Soviet institutions by way of abolition and by way of substitution.
More awkward was the next step: determining what should replace
them, and precisely where one should commence. Here was a challenge
to comparative law so monumental that the comparative law commu-
nity found itself paralysed in response. Comparative law as a discipline
usually is preoccupied with incremental, passive legal change; rarely are
comparativists called upon to apply their method, their insights, their
lore to legal change on such an extraordinary scale or, more impor-
tantly, within a relatively brief time-span.
All of the fundamentals were found wanting: the lack of a shared legal
vocabulary to work with Russian law reform and, worse, the absence of
consensus on how to approach such terminology; the want of legal prac-
titioners suitably trained to work in the CIS; the apparent irrelevance of so
much comparative legal ‘theory’ to local conditions; and the total vac-
uum in the CIS itself of any familiarity with the precepts of comparative
law. To chart a new course for a legal future, it is desirable, if not essential,
to know exactly what is being dismantled and why. Indeed, where to
begin may be dictated by one’s comprehension of the pre-existing system
rather than any convictions about in what direction to proceed.
Law reform is not a ‘crusade’, and the failure to extract as much as one
might have wished from the political processes of making law is not a
‘tragedy’. Civil Law was and is widely regarded as the central pillar of a
market economy: it is that branch of law which regulates ownership,
obligations, responsibility, inheritance, intellectual property and con-
flicts of law. To ‘manipulate’ those concepts and principles is to play
with the very interstices of a market system; in some legal systems fam-
ily law and land law would be assimilated to civil law. It is instructive to
176 W. E. Butler
recall that in the early 1990s international financial institutions

required legislation of a civil-law nature to be enacted – enterprises,
bankruptcy and the like. Their concern was a proper, albeit rough and
ready, reflection of how these legal institutions were the fulcrum point
of legal transition from a planned to a market economy.
A task force appointed by the European Commission to chart a strategy
for law reform in the CIS, while acknowledging the central role of Civil
Law, found it impossible to isolate any branch of law as decisive in com-
parison with others. Constitutional law, administrative law, budgetary
law, natural resources, branches of transport, the family, civil and crimi-
nal procedure, court organization, social security and so on – all had their
crucial parts to play in what had been in the Soviet Union and is, in its
own way, as in other societies – a veritable seamless web of legal rules and
institutions. To tamper with one produced ripple effects that required, in
the end, all be addressed. There is perhaps no more compelling insight
for those who doubted the importance of law in Soviet society; disman-
tling a legal system wedded to a particular socio-economic and political
order is a gargantuan undertaking.
Ten years on, the strong impulse in favour of law reform initially expe-
rienced met various forms of passive resistance. The social and psycho-
logical costs of drastic reform, proposed in 1992 as part of the Shatalin
Plan, were rejected at the outset. Privatization was achieved in substan-
tial part, but privatization legislation is in substance ‘procedural law’: it
regulates how to move from ‘A’ to ‘B’.5 Mostly privatization law has
served its purpose, accomplished its task. The intention to complete the
transfer of State-owned property to non-State owners is proceeding
more deliberately, sufficiently so as to frustrate, for example, the recodi-
fication of civil law along entirely market principles. Accordingly, we see
retained in civil law such principles as unitary enterprises, operative
management, economic jurisdiction, trust management and the like –
all creations of the penultimate stage of the Soviet legal era which are
counter-productive in a true transition to market relations.
During the Putin era significant judicial reforms have already been
achieved: a Tax Code, a long-awaited and deeply controversial Land
Code, Part III of the Civil Code, the Code of Internal Water Transport,
Labour Code, Code of Criminal Procedure, Code on Administrative
Violations and Law on Environmental Protection, together with new
codes of civil and arbitrazh procedure and perhaps a new housing code.
Elements of what we attributed (perhaps wrongly) to Soviet legal expe-
rience have displayed surprisingly robust residual strength. Planned or
market economy, Russia seems disposed to ‘over-legislate’. Whether they
respect normative rules or not, Russians are evidently uncomfortable

without some sort of normative act to guide them. The principle that
‘everything is permitted, unless prohibited’ rests uneasily in a people
accustomed to having subordinate legislation play such an overwhelm-
ing role in their lives. Witness the recommended internal structures of
Russian commercial organizations – a morass of internal statutes and reg-
ulations for company subdivisions, posts and positions that no Western
corporate structure, however large and sophisticated, would tolerate.
The ‘limited State’ has little meaning if there is a broad social expecta-
tion that the State should, and must, regulate so many details of economic
and domestic being. Theory, or doctrine, continues to be important in
Russian Law, and there is no theory as to precisely when and how the
State should refrain from intruding into affairs where its presence is not
required. It is not laws in the strict technical sense that are overproduced,
that is, enactments of the Federal Assembly; it is the secondary layer of
subordinate legislation that is so burdensome, yet regarded as so essential.
To observe that other advanced societies may have an overabundance of
regulation is no answer; the Russian situation is so very Russian as to defy
meaningful analogy with Europe or North America.
Yes, there do occur abuses by departments of their rights and powers.
Many of these are caught by the system devised to reduce their inci-
dence, notably the registration system of subordinate normative legal
acts operated by the Ministry of Justice. But although the Ministry has
the right to refuse to register departmental normative acts which in its
expert opinion are contrary to law, it does not have the right to suggest
that they are superfluous.
It would be inappropriate to conclude observations on the course of
law reform without remarking on what in my view is one of the most
far-reaching achievements of law reform – the inclusion of Article 15
into the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation.6 Although each of
the four subpoints is of importance in its own right, the achievement in
point four is in a class of its own, for here the Russian fathers of the
Constitution have incorporated another system of law to redress the
imbalances of the Soviet legal heritage: ‘generally-recognised principles
and norms of international law and international treaties of the Russian
Federation shall be an integral part of its legal system’. The virtues of
such a provision are several. First, it achieves an instantaneous symbio-
sis with the international legal order from which Russia was self-isolated
for so much of the twentieth century. Second, given Russia’s stature in
the international legal community, it imports rules to which the Russian
Federation has assented and in the formation of which it has played a
178 W. E. Butler
role. Third, it establishes a priority for international legal rules as against

inconsistent Russian national legal rules. Fourth, international legal stan-
dards are automatically, in relevant instances, Russian legal standards.
Fifth, the process of harmonization, approximation and unification of
legal rules is greatly facilitated by way of treaty, where international mar-
ket standards are likely to already have been articulated and agreed, and
tampering by opposed parliamentary factions is likely to be minimized.
Article 15 of the Russian Constitution remains one of the unsung
achievements in the domain of law reform, whose operation in practice
is real in individual cases. The collected decisions, rulings and decrees of
the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in only eight years
already make absorbing reading on this score alone.
Naturally, Article 15 has its detractors. The principal assault upon its
application is to be found in the doctrinal assertions that the reference
to ‘international treaties’ must have in view only those treaties ‘subject
to ratification’. Such a qualification, not found in the formulation of
Article 15 itself, would eliminate from the scope of Article 15 those
treaties concluded at intergovernmental or interdepartmental levels, of
which there are many.
Towards a rule-of-law State

Article 1(1) of the 1993 Russian Constitution committed the Russian
Federation to being, inter alia, a ‘rule-of-law’ State. The expression came
to prominence again during the late days of perestroika, although its
roots in the Russian language date back to the nineteenth century as a
borrowing either from English (Dicey) or German legal writings and the
fundamental notions underlying the concept reach far back into
Russian history, to the earliest days.
It has been suggested that the Russian expression pravovoe gosudarstvo,
which is the term used in the Russian Constitution, is ‘often mistranslated
in English as “rule of law” or “State based on the rule of law” ’.7 On the
contrary, this is the only translation which least obscures the heart of
the issue in Russian law and society: law (jus, pravo) or law (lex, zakon).
The question is not merely the relationship of law to the State, but which
law? In the Russian language, as in most European languages but not
English, there are two words for law: jus and lex (Latin); Recht and Gesetz
(German); droit and loi (French); pravo and zakon (Russian), and similar dis-
tinctions in Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Dutch and many other languages.
Depending upon the position developed or defended by the individ-
ual jurist concerned, the rule of ‘law’ may be jus or lex, or he may be
contending that they are in substance the same. But unless the possibility
of the distinction is preserved, those who advocate the broader and

more fundamental concept of jus, that is, those who believe in a law that
connotes right and justice, consistency with moral principles that pre-
vail always and everywhere, that may not be transgressed by citizen or
State, that may originate in community custom or other sources besides
the State proper, can not plausibly argue their case or defend their posi-
tion because there are no words left to describe it.8 How, for example, is
one to understand such expressions as ‘pravovye zakony’, that is, laws
(lex) which are in conformity with law (jus), or ‘antipravovye zakon’, that
is, laws (lex) which are contrary to law (jus), unless the essential distinc-
tions are drawn by a rigorous distinction in the terminology.
For Russian jurists of the present generation the ‘rule of law’ and the
‘rule-of-law State’ are a rediscovery rather than an invention. German9
and English legal writings of the second half of the nineteenth century
inspired Russian jurists to take up the question, although, as one noted
Russian authority wrote: ‘the idea of a rule-of-law State has a significantly
longer past in the history of European political thought than do its
underlying plans and programmes for State transformation; to trace its
roots is to review virtually the entire heritage of theoretical works
explaining law ( jus) and State’.10 Outspoken proponents of the rule of
law (jus) prior to the October 1917 Revolution were B. N. Chicherin,
B. A. Kistiakovskii and P. I. Novgorodtsev, to name but a few. The attrac-
tion of the rule of law in its Anglo-American manifestation as a doctrine
limiting State power by the force of law (jus) was considerable, for this
principle held out the prospect of introducing genuine democracy into
Russia at the expense of autocratic power claimed, albeit not actually
possessed, by the Russian Imperial throne.11
Although the jurisprudential distinction between jus and lex is now
well understood in Russian legal theory, and its implications (I would
like to believe), there remains a profound reluctance, even amongst
those who posit or accept the existence of Russian jus, to identify the
source(s) of jus and/or legal principles of jus, or to develop the relation-
ship between the 1993 Constitution and Russian jus. Most Russian
jurists who accept the concept of jus would probably accept that the
Articles of the 1993 Russian Constitution devoted to the rights and free-
doms of man and citizen fall into the category of jus; the very nature of
these rights as ‘human’ rights which inhere in individuals from birth
(whenever that moment is deemed to occur) and by virtue of the human
condition necessarily places them in the category of pravo.12
Even these, however, are being treated by some jurists, just as the
Constitution, as ‘relative’: ‘Any constitution not only fixes the level of
180 W. E. Butler
State and legal development achieved by society, but also determines

its purposes, forms, and value ideals which must serve as an orientator in
future development.’13 Commentators of this disposition accept the
‘natural law’ origins of human rights and freedoms; that is, these are
‘natural rights, inalienable’. The rule-of-law State guarantees this system
of rights and freedoms ‘in accordance with modern standards of inter-
national law’ and deems them to be the highest value for the State. Thus
is the extra-State origin of these rights acknowledged. The rule-of-law
State further ensures the supremacy of jus and subordinates legislation,
executive normative legal acts, and judicial activity of the State to rules
of jus, it is argued.
Yet human rights are the easy case for proponents of jus. Their natural-
law definition in the human rights covenants and incorporation into
the 1993 Russian Constitution offer an inescapable and compelling con-
clusion for the Russian jurist of whatever persuasion. More difficult are
rules of Russian jus which do not fall within the express text of the
Constitution nor the law of human rights. Are there nonetheless rules of
conduct not codified, or not fully codified, that constitute rules of
Russian jus; if so, where do they originate and what is their relationship
to Russian lex. An example might be the principle that obligations and
duties must be performed in good faith, that this principle underlies all
branches of Russian Law, and that the legislator is not at liberty to
revoke or repeal this principle. The Civil Code of the Russian Federation,
for example, prohibits abuse of right (Article 10), a principle which
would seem to presume the good-faith fulfillment of obligations and
duties generally. However, the Civil Code does not expressly make pro-
vision for the general principle of good-faith. One may argue that such
a principle is subsumed within every general principle of civil law and is
expressly mentioned, in addition, in several individual articles of the
Code. Similarly, abuse of right has constitutional origins, but one may
equally maintain that the 1993 Constitution does not necessarily set out
exhaustively the content of abuse of right, nor do other branches of
Russian Law to which this principle is relevant.
Accordingly, one would affirm that Russian citizens and juridical per-
sons (and the State?) fulfill their obligations and duties in good faith and
may not abuse their rights in accordance with Russian pravo ( jus). One
might advance a natural-law argument in support of such a proposition,
but more persuasive would be the view that such principles inhere in the
Russian concept of jus, override any legislation to the contrary, and,
more importantly, do not require formal codification in order to be
enforced by Russian State institutions and officials. The interpretation and

application of jus is then the prerogative of Russian judicial institutions
and the guiding explanations and case law which they develop.
There are other principles of law of a non-human rights nature funda-
mental to a market economy and a rule-of-law State that might be men-
tioned in this connection, mostly suppressed under a planned economy.
It is easier to identify those principles, however, than the sources of their
binding effect. They do not inhere in the human condition, although
they are incontestably an ingredient of a civil society. They assist in the
balancing of rights among individuals, or between the individual and the
State. They need not necessarily be relegated to the domain of constitu-
tional rights, though they be higher than the Constitution and principles
and rules to which the Constitution and laws must correspond. Here lies
the challenge for Russian Law: to identify, articulate and enforce the
body of Russian jus, including its source(s), as part of the foundation of
the rule-of-jus State. A first step in this process is to reformulate the
sources of Russian law (jus and lex), giving precedence of place to pravo.14
If there is occasion in the year 2011 to review what has happened
in Russian Law during the previous decade, the course and outcome of
the debate surrounding these issues should be a key benchmark to be
evaluated.
Towards a civil society

‘Civil society’ is not a legal term in the Russian language, so far as I can
determine. It does not appear in the 1993 Russian Constitution; in par-
ticular, it does not appear in Article 1 of that document, where other fea-
tures of a State are enumerated: ‘social’, ‘democratic’, ‘rule-of-law’. Since,
indeed, it is describing ‘society’ as a whole, that is entirely appropriate.
The word combination ‘grazhdanskoe obshchestvo’ first appeared in the
Russian language at least by 1787,15 in translations of European writers.
Its precise meaning has been nebulous throughout the centuries, how-
ever. In Russia the concept had an inherent appeal insofar as a civil soci-
ety represented the antithesis of Tsarist autocracy. Karl Marx dismissed
the idea of civil society as a world in which individualism ran rampant,
subject to State intervention, in its pursuit of private gains at the heart
of a capitalist system. While the doctrine has attracted its own adherents
among historians of Russia,16 features of the civil society that attracted
Russian liberals early in the twentieth century continue to do so early in
the twenty-first century.17 It is not without relevance that the promi-
nent role in various ways of obshchestvennost’ in Russian life gives the
182 W. E. Butler
notion of civil society a particular cachet and attractiveness lacking in

more individualistic European and North American societies.
The reasons are not difficult to fathom. Just as the transition to a
constitutional monarchy in 1905–06 marked an unprecedented empow-
erment, however imperfect, of the general public in the exercise of State
rule, so too has the dismantling of the Soviet Union led to a new real-
ization of the importance of both a limited State and a role for the indi-
vidual which recognizes both his private and public responsibilities. The
rule of law is recognized, universally it would seem, as an integral com-
ponent of any civil society, although which ‘law’ remains to be resolved.
The phrase ‘civil society’ is already viewed with opprobrium in some
quarters. Stephen Cohen sees it as an expression associated with ‘transi-
tology’, a phrase ‘inherently ideological’ contrasted with the ‘totalitar-
ian’ approaches, now discredited, and promising the ‘near certainty’ of
change based on a ‘singular idea of causal factors and outcomes’. The
‘civil society’ in this perception is contraposed to the totalitarian inter-
pretation, yet seen to be the product of an ‘elliptical or blinkered
approach, highly selective in what it chooses to study and emphasize
and thus in what it ignores, obscures, or minimizes’.18 On an immediate
policy level the concept of a ‘civil society’ is favoured in some quarters
as a means of seeking support for Western ideals and policies directly
within the Russian public, bypassing the political regime of the day and
assisting Russian society and the Russian people at large. As a ‘policy’, it
is viewed as being driven by directed Western funding and subsidies to
those Russian individuals, media, political groupings, interest groups
and philanthropic bodies who profess support for ideas that find favour
with Western policymakers.19 Small wonder that insofar as this is the
motive of Western assistance it meets with suspicion and hostility in
Russian political circles.
Taken on its concededly nebulous merits, however, to the extent that
there is genuine movement towards achieving a ‘civil society’, there are
plain implications for the principle of the rule of law and for law reform.
Most proponents of a civil society regard the rule of law as an essential
ingredient, a part of the larger whole. Proponents of the rule of law ( jus)
could be justified in reversing the proposition, treating the civil society –
that is, the proper balancing of a limited, liberal State with the public and
private rights, freedoms, duties and responsibilities of the individual in
his purely personal and in his collective capacities (as a member of non-
State organized groups) – as an essential feature of the rule-of-law State
and of the rule of law itself. The particular merit of the civil society, in
my view, is that it requires us to face and to articulate the social dimension
of the individual, his affiliation to sundry collectives (family, work,

leisure) or statuses (gender, pensioner, minor, disabled, etc.). It draws
our attention to the reality that the equation of individual -v- State is but
one dimension; that collectives or groupings of individual -v- State are
another, as are collectives of individuals vis-à-vis one another. All are enti-
tled to the rule of law, and the rule-of-law State, limited and liberal, must
intervene within its prescribed limitations to defend the rights of individ-
ual and collective participants inter se and with respect to the State.
The proposition that the State should be subject to control and super-
vision by non-State groups is one that, given the Soviet legal heritage,
will not be uncongenial to the Russian mentality. From Khrushchev
onwards, the Communist Party experimented with sundry mechanisms
to transfer State functions to non-State bodies (comrades’ courts, peo-
ple’s guard), or to share State functions with non-State organizations
(e.g., administration of the State pension and social security systems
with massive trade union involvement), or to require lay participation
in the dispensation of justice (people’s assessors elected by labour col-
lectives or other social groupings). The notion that social organizations
(NGOs being the functional equivalent) have a substantial and positive
function to perform in the body politic would, conceptually, perhaps
find fertile ground more easily in Russian society than most others.
Perspectives
Theorists, social and legal, will disagree about what should come first:
the civil society, or the rule-of-law State. How long the debate over a civil
society will command the attention of the Russian philosophical and
legal communities remains to be seen. One suspects it may be of con-
siderable duration simply because the numbers of social organizations
and other nongovernmental organizations are great and their role unde-
fined, yet in most conceptions of a civil society such organizations are
key players. That they have a role to play in Russia is undoubted, and the
Russian tradition is to seek to formalize those roles.
To jurists, however, the rule of law can be a matter of profound prac-
tical concern. Once the process of identifying rules of jus transcends the
natural rights and freedoms of man and citizen and the preoccupation
with constitutionalism to reach beyond to those rules of behaviour
latent or dormant in the Russian community, expressive of standards,
precepts, values and morality long accepted in Russian culture and soci-
ety, the dialogue over the sources of jus and their relationship to the
hierarchy of sources of law can commence properly. Although legal
184 W. E. Butler
doctrine and theory have their role to play, it is to the Russian courts
that one must look for guidance and assistance. The future of the rule-
of-law State is more likely to depend upon the judiciary than on the
other branches of State.
1. For the case that Russia has been following this course, and largely succeeding
albeit at a different pace than in Europe and North America, for some three
centuries or more, see B. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii
(XVIII–nachalo XX v.), 2nd edn, St Petersburg, 2000, 2 vols. Translated by Boris
Mironov with Ben Eklof, A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917,
Boulder, CO, 2000, 2 vols. It is not clear that the American translation is
necessarily of the second Russian edition as published.
2. I omit here the aim of achieving a ‘social’ State, which is a subject of its own,
not unrelated but beyond the scope and ambitions of this analysis.
3. I will comment below on the ‘rule-of-law’ State and do not use the term ‘law-
based’ here in that sense.
4. See Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-
Communist Russia, New York and London, 2000; P. Reddaway and D. Glinski,
The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy,
Washington DC, 2001.
5. For a cogent jurisprudential analysis of privatization, its consequences and
proposals for readjusting those consequences, see V. S. Nersesiants, The
Civilism Manifesto: The National Idea of Russia in the Historical Quest for Equality,
Freedom, and Justness, London, 2000.
6. Translated in W. E. Butler and J. E. Henderson, Russian Legal Texts: The
Foundations of a Rule-of-Law State and a Market Economy, The Hague, London
and Boston, 1998, p. 7.
7. See H. J. Berman, ‘The rule of law and the law-based state (Rechtsstaat) with
special reference to the Soviet Union’, in D. D. Barry (ed.), Toward the ‘Rule of
Law’ in Russia? Political and Legal Reform in the Transition Period, White Plains,
NY, 1992, p. 43. W. G. Wagner has preferred a phrase to translate the words: ‘a
state governed by law’, which in its stunning ambiguity leaves unclear
whether the State is subordinate to law or whether the State is one in which
law governs. See W. G. Wagner, ‘Law and the state in Boris Mironov’s
Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii’, Slavic Review, 60(3), 2001, pp. 558–65 (p. 558).
8. I have addressed this issue on various occasions and draw upon those in
preparing this Section of the article. See, in particular, W. E. Butler, ‘Towards
the rule of law?’, in A. Brumberg (ed.), Chronicle of a Revolution: A Western-Soviet
Inquiry into Perestroika, New York, 1990, pp. 72–89; ‘The rule of law and the
legal system’, in S. White, A. Pravda and Z. Gitelman (eds), Developments in
Soviet Politics, New York, 1990, pp. 104–05; Butler, ‘Perestroika and the rule of
law’, in idem (ed.), Perestroika and the Rule of Law: Anglo-American and Soviet
Perspectives, London, 1991, pp. 7–21; idem, Russian Law, Oxford, 1999, p. 79.
9. Berman, ‘The rule of law’, succinctly reviews the principal early German writ-
ings, suggesting that the term Rechtsstaat first appeared in 1829 in a work of
Robert von Mohl, although the conceptual origins date back to Immanual
Kant. Some would date the concept back to the twelfth century as a natural-
law doctrine. Which periodization is accepted depends largely upon whether
one speaks of jus or lex.
10. S. A. Kotliarevskii, Pravovoe gosudarstvo i vneshniaia politika, Moscow, 1909,
p. 338. Also see N. Khlebnikov, Pravo i gosudarstvo v ikh oboiudnykh otnosheni-
iakh, Moscow, 1874.
11. On the role of the Russian legal profession in reforms which led ultimately to
constitutional monarchy in Russia, see R. Wortman, The Development of a
Russian Legal Consciousness, New York, 1976. The rule of law, for which a legal
consciousness is a prerequisite, was amongst the jurisprudential contribu-
tions to the forces at work.
12. The literature on the rule-of-law State in Russia has become substantial. For a
good summary of the principal positions, see V. M. Boer et al., Pravovoe
gosudarstvo: real ‘nost’, mechty, budushchee. 2nd edn, St Petersburg, 1999.
13. See V. A. Chetvernin (ed.) Konstitutsii Rossiiskoi Federatsii: Problemnyi kom-
mentarii, Moscow, 1997, p. 41.
14. The reluctance of Russian jurists to face the issue squarely is well illustrated
in the excellent study edited by I. I. Kal’naia (ed.) Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo:
istoki i sovremennost’, St Petersburg, 2000. The authors, I. L. Chestnov and
Iu. N. Volkov, lay down as a ‘cornerstone’ principle of the rule-of-law State
the supremacy of jus, which, they say, includes two elements: (1) the formal
aspect, supremacy of lex; and the substantive aspect, the conformity of lex to
jus. After disposing of the first element, which comes down chiefly to com-
pliance with the procedure for enacting lex, the second proves to be a damp
squib: ‘the principle of the supremacy of jus is the requirement[s] for legisla-
tion, and above all, the procedure for working out normative legal acts’
(pp. 230, 234).
15. See Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XVIII veka, Leningrad, 1989, V, p. 214, citing
Rassuzhdenie o nachale i osnovanii grazhdanskikh obshchezhitii, transl. from the
French by A. F. Malinovskii, Moscow, 1787. The term also appeared in the
Russian title of Adam Ferguson, Opyt istorii grazhdanskogo obshchestva, transl.
I. Timkovskii, St Petersburg, 1817–18. 3 parts.
16. See D. Wartenweiler, Civil Society and Academic Debate in Russia 1905–1914,
Oxford, 1999, p. 5.
17. Kal’naia, Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo.
18. Cohen, Failed Crusade, p. 23.
19. Cohen, Failed Crusade, p. 217.
10
Censorship and Restrictions on
Freedom of Speech in Russia:
1986–1991–2001
Martin Dewhirst*
Only the censorship of school text-books can save our children.

After all, even in the USA all text-books for schools are censored
by the state. If this requires registration in law (zakonodatel’noe
oformlenie), we are ready to take the initiative.
Vladimir Pekhtin, leader of the Unity (Edinstvo)
faction in the Duma, 20011
Several recent reports in the press state that, according to public opinion
surveys carried out in the spring of 2001, some 57 or 58 per cent of the
population of the Russian Federation would welcome the establishment
of an official censorship organization in their country,2 despite the
existence of a law on state secrets (since 1993), of a military censorship
directorate within the Ministry of Defence,3 and of a wide range of unof-
ficial types of censorship and self-censorship.4 According to an even
more recent source,5 71.9 per cent of the population thinks that, ‘on the
whole’, state control over the media should be introduced, with only
22.1 per cent opposed to this.
It has been suggested that by the end of 1964 the ‘three-headed mon-
ster’ which enabled the Party and state authorities to keep Soviet society
under their tight control had reached maturity.6 The ‘troika’ consisted of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the Committee on
State Security (KGB) and Glavlit (as the official censorship agency was
widely known). Much has been written about the first two of these
organizations. By 2001 the CPSU had been replaced by the Communist
Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) (still, apparently, the largest and
most popular political party) and, to some extent, by Edinstvo (Unity),
186
Censorship and Freedom of Speech Restrictions 187
an ‘establishment’ party that appeared out of nowhere in the autumn of

1999 and attracted almost a quarter of the votes in the Duma elections
a few months later. Unity is now approaching other groups represented
in parliament with a view to creating a broader alliance which might
attract some current members and supporters of the KPRF. Now that the
population is said to be building capitalism, the ideals of communism,
as a supposedly unifying idea, are being replaced by something else –
perhaps by the patriotic notion of the Russian Federation as a strong,
independent, Eurasian state. The KGB and its successor organizations
are, of course, very well represented by the Russian President himself
and in the Presidential Administration, the government, the ‘strong-
arm’ ministries and other power structures. The Russian Federal Security
Service (FSB), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Federal Government
Communications and Information Agencies (FAPSI), General Staff’s
Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), and so on may be more powerful
and autonomous now than when they were under the control of the
CPSU, and they have recruited a large number of desperadoes tough-
ened (to put it mildly) by service in Afghanistan and/or Chechnia. To
complete the vertical axis of power so greatly desired by Putin, and
thereby ensure that society – especially the intelligentsia – is kept in its
place, a reincarnation of Glavlit, with some explicit preliminary (e.g.
pre-publication, predvaritel’nyi) and not merely subsequent (e.g. post-
publication, posleduiushchii) control, if not censorship, over the media
(and possibly over other areas of activity), may be wishful thinking, but
it is evidently an attractive idea to a large section of the rossiiskie ‘masses’
and to at least some of their leaders. It should be remembered that,
although censorship is banned by the Constitution and by the Law on
the Press, the term ‘censorship’ is nowhere defined and that certain
types of publications (e.g. calls for the forcible overthrow or change of
the existing state and/or social system, the propagation of war, violence
and cruelty and/or of racial, national and/or religious exclusivity and/or
intolerance, pornography and/or materials leading to the commission
of these and/or other criminally punishable actions), as in most other
countries, are illegal. A further relevant point is that although the first,
1922, Statutes of Glavlit frequently feature the word tsenzura, as early as
1931, when the second edition of the Statutes came out, the Ts-word
was usually replaced by the more politically correct (but much broader)
term kontrol’. This convenient euphemism not only enabled Soviet
spokespersons to claim that there was no censorship in the USSR, but
could easily be used by the ‘post-Soviet’ authorities to insist that any
pressures they might bring to bear (e.g. on the Media-Most holding)
188 Martin Dewhirst
and restrictions they might impose (for instance, on reporting about

and from Chechnia) are intended ‘merely’ to ‘control’ a situation which
is verging on disorder and even chaos (after all, besporiadok can easily
lead to besporiadki). This is a perfectly legitimate and not necessarily
cynical way of ensuring that the supposed interests of the state (and,
incidentally, of the old–new oligarchic establishment) take precedence
over the supposed interests of society.
So far there has been very little published Western research on the
third of the ‘whales’ (kity) which provided the essential props on
which the USSR depended for its existence. Glavlit as an institution could
not be examined until after 1991 because very few of its employees
left the Soviet Union and went public,7 and remarkably few samizdat
documents dealt with the internal workings of this very small,8
but extremely important organization. It goes almost without saying
that most of the relevant archival materials were completely off limits
even to loyal Soviet scholars,9 and that periodically Glavlit incinerated
or sent for reprocessing (e.g. into roofing material) many of its own
files and records.10 The following pages are therefore devoted, with
apologies for the abundance of quotations, to an examination of a few
of the official censorship documents issued during the period of
glasnost’. They should help us to assess the situation in this area in 1991.
After a brief survey of some of the relevant developments in the 1990s,
we may then be able to make a preliminary comparative and contrastive
assessment of the state of affairs regarding freedom of speech in the
Russia of 2001.
It is a plausible hypothesis that since at least the mid-1960s the strin-
gent restrictions placed on the circulation, exchange and discussion of
information and ideas within the USSR (let alone between the USSR and
the rest of the world) tended over the longer term to weaken rather than
strengthen not only Soviet society but also the Soviet state. This may
well have been the view of Mikhail Gorbachev, and after the serious mis-
handling of the Chernobyl’ disaster in April 1986 he apparently felt that
the communist regime would benefit more than it would lose from the
introduction of the policy of glasnost’ (‘sounding off’). In the present
context it is important to note that this untranslatable Russian word,
which is not a synonym of the term ‘freedom of speech’, means nothing
more, but also nothing less, than ‘the relaxation of censorship’. And
indeed, one of the first new tasks allocated, on 13 January 1987, by the
CPSU CC to Glavlit, together with the USSR Ministry of Culture and
the USSR State Committee for Publishing, was to declassify parts of the
‘special collections’ (spetskhrany) of large public libraries, making available
to the general public numerous titles that had, in some cases for nearly
60 years, been at best unmentioned in the libraries’ catalogues and
could be consulted only by special permission (most other copies of
these items had of course been destroyed). ‘During the period from
March 1987 up to October 1988, 7930 editions were returned to the gen-
eral collections of the libraries, while 462 editions of a clearly anti-Soviet
character, containing libel on V.I. Lenin, the CPSU, the Soviet state and
the Soviet people, White Guardist, Zionist [and] nationalistic editions
were left in the special collections.’11 In addition to returning the works
of 28 named authors to the general stock, Glavlit proposed the same
procedure for the Russian-language works of some 600 émigrés, ‘includ-
ing a number of well-known writers such as I. Bunin, V. Nabokov,
N. Gumilev (sic), E. Zamiatin, I. Brodskii, philosophers and publicists –
N. Berdiaev, V. Khodasevich (sic), B. Zaitsev (sic) and others’. This
suggestion was supported by A. Kapto, the Head of the Ideological
Department of the CPSU CC, on 31 December 1988.12
However, an excellent example of how uncertain the prospects for
genuine glasnost’ really were is provided by another document signed by
Kapto a fortnight earlier, on 16 December 1988:
The Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press
attached to the USSR Council of Ministers (Comrade Boldyrev)
reports that the CPSU CC Resolution No. 177/77gs of 7 March 1961
empowers the USSR Glavlit to implement secret control (neglasnyi
kontrol’) over information transmitted abroad by foreign correspon-
dents in order to receive essential information and for the timely
organization of counter-propaganda. For these purposes, the special
service of the USSR Glavlit is connected up in parallel to the lines of
communication of a number of foreign correspondents.
Of late, because an ever greater number of Western news agencies
have been switching over to the transmission of materials with the
assistance of high-speed computer technology and other contempo-
rary means of communication (e.g. ‘telefax’), the work of the special
section of the USSR Glavlit, equipped [as it is] with obsolete appli-
ances (teletype machines) has been seriously impaired. Without the
appropriate renewal of its technological base, in the near future
this special service will not be able to carry out fully the functions
that have been entrusted to it.
In this connection it is proposed to task the USSR Ministry of
Communications, together with the USSR Committee of State
Security and the USSR Glavlit, with working on the question of the
190 Martin Dewhirst
technological upgrading (obespechenie) of the special service of the

USSR Glavlit. This question has [already] been agreed with the USSR
KGB (Comrade F.D. Bobkov), the USSR Ministry of Communications
(Comrade V.A. Shamshin) … .13
This is the only reference found so far to the ‘special service’ of Glavlit.
One of the very few ex-employees of this organization to have gone
public, Vladimir Solodin, does not mention it in his description of the
structure of the head office on 1 August 1991, shortly before the end of its
existence. Working under the Chief of the Main Directorate for the
Protection of State Secrets in the Press (V. Boldyrev) were four Directorates
(Upravleniia) and five Departments (Otdely): the First Directorate, for
the Control of Scientific and Technical Literature; the Second Directorate,
for the Control of Foreign Literature; the Third Directorate, for the
Coordination of the Work of the Local Organs of Glavlit; the Fifth (sic)
Directorate, for the Drafting of Normative Documents; the First Depart-
ment, for Secret Correspondence; the Second Department, for the Control
of Foreign Periodicals; the Third Department, for the Control of the Mass
Media; the Fourth Department, for the Control of Social, Political and
Artistic Literature (political censorship); and the (unnumbered) Depart-
ment for the Dispatch of Manuscripts Abroad.14 This breakdown is some-
what different from that provided, without reference to any source, by
Paul W. Goldschmidt in his pioneering book on anti-pornography legisla-
tion in post-Soviet Russia.15 Goldschmidt mentions only the first three
Directorates and allocates the preparation of ‘normative documents’ to a
Sixth Department. He reallocates the function of the First Department to
a Seventh Department, and adds a Fifth Department, for the Preparation
of Agreements (copyright licenses, etc.) with Foreign Countries. Perhaps it
should be explained at this point that the ‘normative documents’ (extracts
from one of which will be provided later) are the innumerable orders,
instructions, and so on, to all Glavlit employees throughout the USSR,
informing them of what is not to be divulged to the public. It will be noted
that political censorship (the Fourth Department) was still in good shape
in what turned out to be the last years of the Soviet regime, when Glavlit
was officially supposed to be concerned only with state (and not, as earlier,
also military) secrets; a particularly good example of ideological censorship
at the height of glasnost’ is the 1989 ‘Conclusion’ on the ‘inexpediency’ of
the ‘propaganda and circulation’ of Sasha Sokolov’s novel Palisandriia in
the USSR.16 The Department for the Dispatch of Manuscripts Abroad
apparently handled articles and other typescripts written in the Soviet
Union for publication in other countries. Whether the First Department’s
speciality (‘Secret Correspondence’) meant that it had sole responsibility

for the interception (the undetectable ‘perlustration’ of letters was one
of the greatest achievements of pre-Revolutionary Russian censorship) of
mail entering and leaving the Soviet Union is still unclear, as this impor-
tant task might have been shared with the KGB.
In 1991 Glavlit was operating in accordance with its new Provisional
Statutes (Polozhenie) of 24 August 1990, issued a fortnight after the
USSR Law on the Media of 12 June 1990 banning preliminary censor-
ship came into force. (The previous Glavlit Statutes, of 19 November
1974, have apparently not yet been declassified.) The parts of the
1990 Statutes that have been published,17 include the following
points (the translation attempts to convey the Soviet equivalent of
Whitehallese):
1. The Chief Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press
and Other Mass Media attached to the USSR Council of Ministers
(GUOT SSSR) is a Union-Republican organ.
On the basis of legislation currently in force and in accordance
with the procedures set out in the present Provisional Statutes, the
USSR GUOT implements the agreed state policy for the protection
from unauthorised disclosure of information constituting a state
secret in materials circulated within the country via the press and
other mass media (book production, newspapers and periodicals, tel-
evision and radio programmes, documentary films and other forms
of the public circulation of information), and also in textual, audio-
and audio-visual materials intended for export abroad; …
4. In compliance with the tasks entrusted to it, the USSR GUOT
performs the following functions:
(a) draws up and issues, on the basis of constitutional norms and the
legislation currently in force, an index [perechen’] of information
barred from publication, orders and instructions which are bind-
ing on ministries, agencies, organizations, organs of the press and
other branches of the mass media when preparing materials for
public circulation and also for transmission abroad; when essen-
tial GUOT issues orders and instructions jointly and in coordina-
tion with other ministries and agencies;
(b) scrutinizes the drafts of other agencies’ [vedomstvennye] indexes of
information which is banned from publication [which have been]
submitted for [GUOT’s] agreement [soglasovanie], and also [drafts]
of other agencies’ indexes of information which have been passed
for open transmission by radio. And gives its conclusions on them;
192 Martin Dewhirst
(c) countermands, following the established procedures, outdated

restrictions on the publication of information, provided that a
decision of the organs of state power or the organs of state gover-
nance of the country is not required for this;
(d) implements, on a contractual basis, the scrutiny of and advice
[konsul’tirovanie] on materials circulating in the press and other
forms of the mass media for the purposes of detecting in them
information barred from publication; in the event of discovering
such information, [GUOT] informs the management of the organs
of the press and other branches of the mass media about this;
(e) provides systematic informational support [metodicheskoe obe-
spechenie] for the activities of those employees of the organs of the
press and other branches of the mass media who are responsible
for the protection of state secrets in materials intended for
public circulation [and] implements for these purposes training,
instructional and other measures; [GUOT] informs the editorial
staff of the basic requirements of the normative documents on
matters concerning the security of information subject to protec-
tion from disclosure in the press and other branches of the mass
media;
(f) scrutinizes, while observing the USSR’s constitutional norms and
international obligations, textual, audio- and audiovisual materi-
als which are being sent or taken [vyvozimye] abroad, including
items mailed to other countries or intended to be communicated
to foreign organizations or persons, with the purpose of detecting
in the aforesaid materials information banned from publication;
(g) carries out spot checks on materials in the press and other mass
media after publication and informs the leading personnel of min-
istries and agencies, organizations, founders, publishers [and] edi-
torial boards (editors) of organs of the press and other mass media
of facts confirming [any] violations in the area of the protection of
secrets, with the aim of closing [zakrytie] the sources of the circu-
lation of such information; …
(h) controls foreign publications, audio- and audiovisual materials
entering the USSR through open (postal) channels [and] provides
methodological [metodicheskaia] assistance to organizations and
institutions whose collections [fondy] receive these publications
and materials; …
5. The USSR GUOT has the right
(a) to exempt [osvobozhdat’] individual materials entering the USSR
by open (postal) channels from control, and likewise to re-impose
such control;
(b) to restrict the use of foreign publications and audio and audio-
visual materials entering the country through open (postal)
channels if they contain information banned from circulation
by legislation currently in force;
(c) to prevent the taking or sending abroad, including in items of
mail addressed to foreign countries, of materials containing
information banned from disclosure;
(d) to set up, in case of need and following the established proce-
dures, production-editorial organizations, operating on a self-
supporting basis and attached to the USSR GUOT and its local
agencies, including the cities of Moscow and Leningrad; …
11. The financing of the USSR GUOT and its branches situated on the
territory of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) is
effected from the resources of the budget of the [Soviet] Union …
There is probably little need to comment on the above document,

which makes it clear that Glavlit was still heavily involved in postal cen-
sorship and in the work of the Soviet customs service. What is new is the
proposed establishment of consultancy services which would earn fees
from contracts with any parts of the information industry that would be
willing to ask offshoots of Glavlit to vet their output and clear it for cir-
culation. Other documents specify the rates to be charged for this task,18
the assumption being that clients would be prepared to pay to be cen-
sored and thus relieved of legal responsibility for revealing any official
secrets or offending public taste. During the last few years Glavlit’s
budget had been reduced and it had had to shed some employees. In an
article published in March 2002 in the Journal of Communist Studies and
Transition Politics (vol. 18, no. 1) I wrote about the branch (upravlenie) of
GUOT covering the city and oblast’ of Gor’kii (Nizhnii Novgorod),
where by mid-1991 the number of Glavlit’s staff was down from a peak
of over twenty full-time employees in the 1970s to a mere seven or
eight.19 Among their tasks (for which they earned a special bonus) at the
end of 1991 was to burn nearly all their office files, including every
single copy of their main instruction manual, the famous secret Index
(Perechen’ svedenii, zapreshchennykh k opublikovaniiu), commonly known
as the Talmud (the fount of all learning and wisdom). Because no copies
of any edition of the Index had apparently reached the West and as none
was available in Nizhnii Novgorod, I have been unable until now to give
a documented account of what the remaining censors (usually officially
registered as ‘editors’) were actually censoring in 1991. Thanks to a
colleague in Germany, I managed to obtain a copy of the last edition of
the Soviet Perechen’, approved by Boldyrev, the last head (Nachal’nik) of
194 Martin Dewhirst
Glavlit, on 17 April 1990, at the height of glasnost’. So far as I know,

none of the many editions of the Perechen’ has so far been the subject of
any detailed examination and analysis in any language, including
Russian, so a brief description of the 1990 edition seems to be called for.
The first surprise about the 96-page Index (presumably printed on
Glavlit’s in-house press)20 is the print-run: 20 000, the same as that of
previous editions.21 One can assume that many copies went to the head-
quarters of the separate military censorship, headed at this time by
Major-General Sergei Filimonov and located at No. 19, Kropotkinskaia
Street,22 especially as a large proportion of the areas of secrecy enumer-
ated on the following pages do relate to military matters, and especially
to secret military research, 49 areas of which are listed in Appendix No. 1
on pages 89–95. (As mentioned earlier, Glavlit was officially supposed to
be handling state, but not military, secrets.) Some copies no doubt went
to the KGB, which is mentioned before the Ministry of Defence as the
first of the two other organizations with which the text of the previous
issue of the Perechen’, that of 26 June 1987, had been agreed (soglasovan-
nyi). It is interesting to note, however, that the KGB is mentioned only a
handful of times in the 1990 edition. Other copies evidently went to the
chief editors of periodicals, newspapers and publishing houses and to
the numerous other ministries, committees and other bodies which are
here given the right, on certain matters, to decide whether or not some
sensitive information can be published.
The 1990 Perechen’ is divided into 14 sections: General Provisions; The
Armed Forces of the USSR and the Defence of the Country; Geodesy,
Gravimetry, Cartography and Hydrography; Hydrometeorology; Science
and Technology; Industry; Minerals; Transport; Communications;
Agriculture; Finances; Foreign Policy and Foreign Economic Activities;
Medical and Sanitary Questions; Sundry Information. All in all, some
355 areas of secret information are covered – far fewer, so far as one can
tell, than in 1984, but considerably more than the 59 points listed in the
mother of all Soviet Indexes, that of 14 December 1922,23 long before
the information explosion of the second half of the twentieth century.
To the layman, perhaps the most intriguing section of the 1990
edition is the last. Section 14.1 bans the publication, without the
permission of the USSR KGB, of information about codes and ciphers
and about research in the field of cryptography. 14.2 appears to be the
main catch-all clause, banning any mention of work being carried out in
conditions of secrecy (rezhim sekretnosti), of secret record-keeping or
secret business correspondence (deloproizvodstvo), ‘of the disclosure of
secret data, of the loss of secret documents and also of products, data
concerning which are secret’. 14.4 covers such phenomena as secret

‘directorates, departments, groups, sections (bureaux), departments
(bureaux) for secret technical documentation, secret libraries [and]
secret archives in state committees, ministries, agencies, institutions,
organizations and enterprises’. 14.5 requires the KGB’s permission
before any reference is made, inter alia, to the ‘existence, real [and] cover
(uslovnye) names and whereabouts (dislokatsiia) of subdivisions of the
organs of state security and their training establishments’. 14.6 requires
the permission of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs before any pub-
lic mention can be made of, for instance, the operational and investiga-
tory work of its organs, the ‘methods used by its fighting (auxiliary)
sambo division’, and so on. 14.8 forbids any reference to the number of
people sentenced to death in any town or larger area in the USSR, and to
the number of inmates of ‘places of deprivation of liberty’, such as
in any particular ‘corrective labour institution, investigation prison,
district, town and upwards’. A closed trial cannot be mentioned unless
the court chairperson agrees (14.9). 14.11 forbids the publication of
aggregate data on the whereabouts (dislokatsiia – this is presumably a
euphemism for ‘number’) of corrective labour institutions in the USSR
as a whole and in a Union Republic. Without the consent of the USSR
State Committee for Physical Culture and Sport, no information can be
given to the public on the training methods used to prepare candidates
for the USSR’s national teams (14.15).
Among other subjects which are off limits in 1990 and 1991 we find,
at 13.8, ‘technical devices (generators, emitters (izluchateli)) for influ-
encing a person’s behavioural functions (creation of biorobots), apart
from medical appliances, the possibility of controlling a person’s activi-
ties (behaviour) through the influence of psychics (ekstrasensy), [and]
the influence of a person’s bioenergetic fields on technical objects (laser
installations, computer systems)’. The section on Soviet foreign policy
and foreign economic activities covers all intended publications on the
period since 1950 (other sections classify information on their areas
going back as far as 1946), and begins at 12.1 by banning information
contained in Soviet ‘Directives’ (Direktivy) on questions of the USSR’s
foreign, commercial, foreign economic, credit and currency policy with
regard to foreign states. This section ends by barring information ‘on the
activities of the Patrice Lumumba University of the Friendship of the
Peoples, including the syllabuses [and] the number, surnames and
photographs of foreign students and postgraduates who are studying or
who have studied at the University – without the permission of the gov-
erning body (rukovoditeli) of the University’ (12.17), and, at 12.18, any
196 Martin Dewhirst
mention ‘of the subordination of Amtorg, and of other companies

abroad which have Soviet participating capital, to the USSR Ministry of
Foreign Economic Relations’.
It would be interesting to compare this edition of the Perechen’ with
the ones drawn up in the 1990s, but this is still impossible, as the new
Indexes are classified and writers themselves often do not know whether
certain information is a state secret or not.24 El’tsin’s second Decree
(Ukaz) on the subject after the formal dissolution of the USSR was signed
as early as on 14 January 1992 and published in Rossiiskaia gazeta on
22 January. In the interests of safeguarding state secrets, people were ‘to
be guided on his matter by normative acts that were adopted earlier’ –
that is, in Soviet times. Special self-dependent (samostoiatel’nye) sub-
divisions or ‘specially appointed employees’ were to be organized in the
appropriate institutions (strukturakh), and questions pertaining to the
‘coordination of activities for the organization of the protection of state
secrets’ were to be handled by the (soon to be abolished) Russian
Ministry of Security and Internal Affairs.25 This was obviously a
makeshift arrangement, and until the Law on State Secrets was adopted
in July 199326 such censorship as there was, appears to have been carried
out by the Ministry of Security, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and, of
course, the Ministry of Defence (this last had its representatives on the
staff of most of the major newspapers.27 In due course, on 24 January
1998, El’tsin approved by decree a new list of state secrets, but as
A. Rikhter and F. Kravchenko wrote that month, ‘No-one but the cen-
sorship knows what constitutes a state secret. But for revealing one a
newspaper can be shut down.’28 According to a 1998 special feature on
censorship in Russia and the West in Kommersant’’-vlast’,29 the publica-
tion of ‘information on the preparations for and conclusion, content
and implementation of international treaties whose circulation could
cause damage to the political or economic interests of Russia – a typi-
cally imprecise use of words – constitutes a breach of the law on state
secrets. A major problem, according to an article on page 12, is that
(in the absence of a single official censorship body) there is no longer, as
in Soviet times, one aggregate or consolidated list of state secrets; now
there are about forty. Some secrets are listed in the Law on State Secrets,
some in the new presidential decree, and others in the 36 (another
source gives 38) special indexes (perechni) drawn up in a wide variety of
ministries and agencies.30 If in doubt, a writer is supposed to contact
either the special interagency commission for the protection of state
secrets, established by presidential decree on 30 March 1994,31 or the
Federal Licensing Centre of the FSB, whose head, Vladimir Gladyshev,
gave a rare interview for this issue of Kommersant’’-vlast’, which pub-

lished it on page 12. Among the matters discussed were the following:
Question: According to the Constitution, the index of information

that constitutes a state secret is ratified by a law. In fact it
has been ratified by a presidential decree and by agency
documents (vedomstvennye akty) which are not published.
Is there not a contradiction here?
Gladyshev: There is an index in the law ‘On State Secrets’, while the
presidential decree supplements it to some extent (v kakoi-
to chasti), but does not go beyond [its] guidelines … But to
publish the complete lists of information regarded as a
state secret – there wouldn’t be enough paper. It would be
several thousand pages of text, and in addition it would
be detrimental to the defence and security of the country
[if it were published] …
Question: Does it not seem to you that the decree on the index of
information constituting a state secret contains exces-
sively imprecise formulations?
Gladyshev: In the decree it says that information can be classified.
In reality this is done by [the appropriate] agency …
Question: Should not a detailed index of state secrets be provided
in the law?
Gladyshev: No doubt that’s correct, but it would be awkward in
practice. After all, the index changes constantly, and if
this list was provided in the law, it [the law] would have
to be constantly changed.
It is against this background that we must try to assess how much

change there has been in this area of Russian political and civic culture
since 1986 and 1991. A useful working hypothesis might be that society
has become much more open than it was in 1986 but is perhaps no more
open in 2001 than it was in 1991. Similarly, the state may now be more
secretive and closed, at least in some important respects, than it was ten
years ago. Obviously, the results of post-Soviet as well as Soviet opinion
surveys, like all statistics, have to be assessed with caution, and the 2001
returns mentioned at the beginning of this paper cannot be compared
or contrasted with the results of polls held ten years earlier (if any were
held) on whether or not Glavlit should be abolished. What can be
asserted is that there is no need to set up a special organization devoted
only to censoring or controlling the media if the state and/or society
198 Martin Dewhirst
wishes to impose certain restrictions on what the public can readily

access. One of the most ferocious periods of censorship in Soviet history,
from late 1917 until 1921, ended before Glavlit was established. Another
point on which all the (very few) students of censorship in the USSR are
united is that Glavlit merely carried out the wishes and instructions of
the CPSU, the GPU and its successors and, on occasion, the Soviet leader
himself. One can speculate that had Gorbachev remained in power
longer, or had the State Committee for the State of Emergency suc-
ceeded in its bid to prevent the further weakening of central authority,
Glavlit would have taken on a new lease of life and grown stronger and
larger. As it was, the Soviet regime, which came about by a tragic fluke,
also ended by a tragic fluke – the second coup d’etat in August 1991
which brought El’tsin to power and, by subsequent dubious methods,
kept him in power through the crises of 1993, 1996 and 1998. The pop-
ulation of the country as a whole had very little direct influence over all
these political developments, and the greater part of Russian (rossiiskoe)
society may not want to participate more actively in public life – we are,
after all, talking about Eurasia, not Europe. Those who think that Russia
is a country of extremes (the icon and the axe, etc.) could point to the
sudden change from a largely closed and tightly controlled society, in
which there was, for instance, remarkably little pornography, to a very
open society, where suddenly, for a short time in the late 1980s and early
1990s, obscene and racialist publications were more widely and easily
available than in most of Europe. Russians who had earlier complained
of claustrophobia now found themselves victims of something like ago-
raphobia, making it difficult for them to cope with the new uncertain-
ties, now that they were told that they were no longer constructing
socialism but building capitalism. It is a truism to say that virtually no-
one anywhere expected the Soviet system to break down so soon, that
very few people had thought hard about ‘what to do’ (chto delat’) after it
collapsed, and that many of the people (including some foreigners) who
played key roles in the immediate post-Soviet period were (and in some
cases still are) among the most arrogant, ignorant and unscrupulous
of those smart operators who are always and everywhere much more
interested in their own quick profits than in the welfare of most of their
fellow human beings. The resulting ‘democracy’ (der’mokratiia, shitoc-
racy) and ‘privatization’ ( prikhvatizatsiia, piratization) naturally made
many ex-Soviet citizens appreciate more fully the benefits of the ‘Russia
they had lost’ and long for the return of some of the certainties and
security of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. One could therefore suggest
that Russian society did change somewhat between 1986 and 1990
or 1991, but then changed back again, as people decided that they
preferred order to chaos and found the burden of the responsibilities of
a Western type of political, economic and personal freedom too heavy
to bear.
In this situation, an important role was and is played by the Orthodox
Church (ecclesiastical censorship in pre-revolutionary Russia has a rich
history),32 ever mindful of the nation’s moral standards and since about
1987–88 able to play a more prominent part in public life, nearly always
supporting the current political establishment – for instance, by oppos-
ing the burial of Lenin in the foreseeable future. As early in the post-
Soviet era as 25 April 1992, an exceptionally well-educated and cultured
Moscow priest, Mikhail Ardov, published an article in a newspaper for
adults entitled ‘Do not Offend These Little Ones’ (Ne soblazniaite malykh
sikh’ – St. Mark, chapter 9, verse 42).33 Like the recently expired CPSU, he
treats the entire population of the country as though they were children
in need of guidance from the authorities. After mentioning the
‘demonism and blasphemousness’ of rock music, Father Mikhail calls
for ‘the introduction of censorship (tsenzura) and harsh punitive meas-
ures against those who distribute pornography. Of course, I have in
mind moral and reasonable censorship, not the total and murderous
Bolshevik sort.’ Writing about Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in a very
eighteenth-century way, Ardov notes with pity that hardly anyone
involved in this tragedy realises that ‘if this book had had, as in the good
old times, a reasonable and enlightened censor, nothing like this could
have happened’. He goes on, ‘I myself would not be averse to summon-
ing up a wave of indignation on the part of Christians against, for
instance, the highly talented novella by the late Venedikt Erofeev,
Moskva-Petushki, where on almost every page there are blasphemies
against our Lord Jesus Christ and His gospel.’ Six years later a publishing
house decided not to issue a Russian translation of Rushdie’s novel after
receiving threats to punish both the translator and the employees of the
firm involved – an excellent example of shared values and mutual
understanding between at least some currents in Islam and Russian
Orthodoxy.34 It goes almost without saying that a television screening,
even very late at night, of The Last Temptation of Christ came in for
vociferous criticism.35 There has even been a case of a public auto-da-fe
of books by insufficiently orthodox Orthodox theologians.36
One could easily get the impression from Ardov’s article that all
censorship in Russia had already disappeared without trace, although the
Nizhnii Novgorod directorate of Glavlit, for instance, did not finally
close down until June 1992.37 Although some professional censors did
200 Martin Dewhirst
vanish into thin air, many of them were able to find gainsome employ-
ment in its official successor organization, the RSFSR (later: RF) State
Inspectorate for the Defence of Freedom of the Press and Media, estab-
lished on 22 November 1991 by the RSFSR Ministry of the Press and
Media ‘based on’ (na baze) the territorial directorates of Glavlit.38 This
seamless transformation of Glavlit into an organization whose stated
purpose was to defend media freedom was a useful stop-gap measure for
the period until a new law on state secrets had been published and the
first post-Soviet perechen’ of items and subjects banned from mention and
discussion in the media had been drawn up. The Inspectorate was then,
on 6 July 1994, abolished.39 It should not be thought, however, that this
was a case of gamekeepers turning into poachers, trying to expand the
limits of freedom. Thanks to another colleague in Germany, we can
quote a document dated 14 January 1993 and addressed by I. V. Morozov,
the head of the Voronezh regional inspectorate for the defence of press
and media freedom, to the chief editors of local publications:
Respected Dmitrii Stanislavovich!

We are informing you that, as a result of numerous appeals from the
RF Procuracy, the RF Ministry of the Press and Information proposes
to apply to the mass media measures provided for by legislation in
connection with the publication of subject matter which can be
qualified as utilising the mass media for the purposes of committing
criminally punishable acts.
‘The model index ( primernyi perechen’) is as follows:
1. Items calling for the forcible change of the constitutional order,
for the commission of crimes against the state, including calls for
acts of civil disobedience, for the organization of and participation
in actions disturbing [public] order or entailing patent disobedi-
ence of the legitimate demands of the representatives of authority,
for the disruption of public transport [and/or] state or public
organizations – can entail criminal responsibility in compliance
with articles 70, 70–1 and 190–2 of the RF Criminal Code /RF CC/.
2. Items containing propaganda of war – in compliance with article 71
of the RF CC.
3. Items calling for the violation of national and racial equality,
demeaning the honour and dignity of any nation – in compliance
with article 74 of the RF CC.
4. Items aimed at hampering the activities of the constitutional organs
of power, calling for the non-observance of the Resolutions of the
Councils of People’s Deputies of all levels, for the obstruction of their
normal activities [and] for the creation of unconstitutional organs

of power – in compliance with article 79–1 of the RF CC.
5. Items calling for the avoidance of the periodic call-up for military
service – in compliance with article 80 of the RF CC.
6. Items on the purchase and sale of freely convertible currency – in
compliance with article 88 of the RF CC.
7. Items advertising the performance of abortions [and] the treat-
ment of venereal diseases – in compliance with articles 115,
115–1 and 116 of the RF CC.
8. Items on the purchase and sale of USSR decorations [nagrady] – in
compliance with article 194–1 of he RF CC.
9. Items on the purchase and sale of work record-books [trudovye
knizhki] – in compliance with articles 195 and 196 of the RF CC.
10. Items on the provision of intimate services, on erotic massage, on
the advertising of services for homosexuals, on the search for sex-
ual partners, and so on – in compliance with articles 120, 121,
210 and 226 of the RF CC.
11. Items concerning pornographic products, and also items propa-
gating the cult of violence and cruelty – in accordance with
articles 228 and 228–1 of the RF CC.
‘At the same time we draw to your attention [the fact] that the publi-
cation of advertising material concerning the firm “Siesta” falls under
article 226 of the RSFSR CC (procuration).
With respect,
I. Morozov’
An interesting point here is that in his last paragraph Morozov refers

to the RSFSR, not the RF, criminal code, suggesting that the RSFSR Code
was still operational in areas not covered by the RF Code. (The RSFSR
Criminal Procedural Code (CPC) was still being applied in 2001, as the RF
CPC was not yet ready.) Much of this document is unexceptionable,
although it does relate to a number of borderline cases, such as the right
of conscientious objection to compulsory military service and the
decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults. The
inspectorate’s activities no doubt helped to reduce the amount of porno-
graphic materials in circulation, although it should be pointed out
that in documents on this subject – for instance, the 12 April 1991
Resolution (Postanovlenie) of the USSR Supreme Soviet on pornography
and ‘the cult of violence and cruelty’40 – no distinction whatsoever is
made between pornograficheskii and eroticheskii. It would be interesting
202 Martin Dewhirst
to learn whether the Inspectorate ever argued with the ‘numerous

appeals’ for help that it received from the procuracy.
It has to be admitted that the dividing line between what is erotic and
what is pornographic is difficult to define. Another very interesting area
where it has proved hard in post-Soviet Russia to draw a clear dividing
line between what is legal and what is not, and where the Constitution
and the laws themselves appear to be at variance, covers the numerous
ecological problems endangering the health and even the lives
of Russian citizens. The Constitution states quite clearly that information
on environmental hazards cannot be regarded as classified, but
the Law on State Secrets and other documents from 1993 onwards make
it an offence to publish information, especially of a military nature,
which could endanger the security of the state.41 The steady trickle
of pressure on and trials of people who have supposedly contravened the
regulations on the disclosure of classified information, from Mirzaianov
and Fedorov (1992–95)42 through Nikitin (1996–2000)43 to Pas’ko
(1997–2001 and possibly beyond),44 suggests that not all the lessons of
Chernobyl’ have been and are being taken seriously. What is also impor-
tant in the context of this paper is that these trials have presumably
deterred more than a few Russians from going public about other life-
threatening dangers which the increasingly powerful and now virtually
autonomous FSB, in particular, may prefer not to be disclosed.
This form of intimidation, inducing an almost Soviet degree of self-
censorship on what people publish, is one of the six forms of censorship
listed in an article published in 1996 by Aleksei Simonov,45 the head of
the Glasnost’ Defence Foundation, established in June 1991 and finding
that it has even more work to do ten years later (its slogan is ‘Glasnost’
is a tortoise crawling towards freedom of the word’). The five other
types of censorship in Russia in the 1990s are listed as administrative
censorship; economic censorship; censorship resulting from actions or
threats from criminals; censorship resulting from editorial policy; and
censorship resulting from editorial taste. I have explained and discussed
these types of control (found, of course, in many other countries) else-
where, so it might be more interesting here to quote a few of the numer-
ous newspaper headlines from the mid-1990s which make it clear that
some Russians knew, or at least thought, that they were being censored,
either directly or by having their privacy invaded:
‘Glavlit umer. Da zdravstvuet Glavlit?’ (‘Glavlit is dead. Long Live

Glavlit?’), Rossiiskie vesti, 3 March 1994, p. 4. El’tsin has given the
right to decide what constitutes a state secret to the leading person-

nel of 38 ministries and agencies.
‘Terror kak forma tsenzury’ (‘Terror as a form of censorship’), Novoe
vremia, No. 43, October 1994, pp. 6–7. The murder of the journalist
Dmitrii Kholodov (still unsolved seven years later) as a warning to
others.
‘Govorite gromche, vas proslushivaiut’ (‘Speak up, they’re listening to
you’), Novaia ezhednevnaia gazeta, 15 November 1994, p. 2. The
lawyer of some human rights activists discovered a bug in her tele-
phone at home.
‘Chinovniki ne mogut oboitis’ bez tsenzury’ (‘The bureaucrats can’t do
without censorship’), Izvestiia, 17 December 1994, p. 1. On the tight-
ening of censorship at the beginning of the war in Chechnia.
‘Sozdaetsia tsenzurnyi komitet … ’ (‘A censorship committee is being
established … ’), Rossiiskaia gazeta, 26 April 1995, pp. 1–2. On plans
to increase official control of the media by setting up a state informa-
tion agency (Gosinform).
‘ “Komsomolku” ne tol’ko chitaiut, no i podslushivaiut’ (‘They don’t
just read Komsomolka, they bug it too’), Komsomol’skaia pravda,
23 August 1995, pp. 1–2. The Volgograd militia has been bugging
the local office of this newspaper in an attempt to blackmail its
investigative journalists and thus persuade them to stop writing
about crimes committed by or involving some of the regional
authorities.
Looking at the problem of eavesdropping, bugging, clandestinely

opening envelopes on the way to their addressees and intercepting
email communications (this last type of interference and the various
attempts by the authorities to control the Internet have been much writ-
ten about in the last two years, and not only in Russia in the Autumn of
2001,46 we can say that, if only as a result of the increasing danger of ter-
rorism, history has not come to an end and the positive, even essential,
role of some forms of censorship is undeniable. One of the problems of
the new millennium everywhere is to decide how intrusive and perva-
sive the controls over our private lives and activities should be. The ten-
dency of the ambiguous and hypocritical authorities in Russia at present
is to clamp down rather than to let go (the traditional tashchit’ i ne
pushchat’), and as Russian society as a whole now seems to be prepared
to accept this we can hypothesize that it is less open in 2001 than it was
a decade ago.47
204 Martin Dewhirst
Postscriptum
This article was written just before the melodramatic attacks on the USA
on 11 September 2001. Since then the highly selective ‘war on terrorism’
has, among many other consequences, made it easier for President Putin
to continue to crush Chechnia and to tame the Russian media without
provoking any coherent or effective high-level protests abroad. Despite
some hopes raised in the autumn of 2001,48 it was clear by the end of
March 2002 that the supposed security of the state would continue to take
precedence over the wellbeing of society and that the persecution of peo-
ple like Pas’ko, Igor’ Sutiagin, Valentin Danilov and Valentin Moiseev
would continue, if only as a warning to others.49 TV-6, Russia’s last
remaining national independent television channel, was temporarily
closed down in January 2002 and what was left of the original NTV team
of journalists will in future have to work under the friendly guidance of
two pillars of the old Soviet establishment (E. Primakov and A. Vol’skii),
perceived by some as even more odious than the new, post-Soviet
oligarchs V. Gusinskii and B. Berezovskii, the former owners of NTV and
TV-6.50 The future of the Ekho Moskvy radio-station and its team looked
uncertain, and pin-pricks continued against some of the few national lib-
eral newspapers (Novaia gazeta, Nezavisimaia gazeta and even Izvestiia).
Ongoing attempts to control the Russian internet provoked outbursts like
that of Vsevolod Sakharov in Russkaia mysl’.51 After the liquidation of the
Judicial Chamber for Information Disputes shortly after the inauguration
of President Putin,52 and the endorsement in September 2000 by Putin of
a new 46-page Doctrine on Information Security,53 the prospects for
greater freedom for the media and for the expansion of the ‘information
space’ in Russia appeared to be rather gloomy.
* I would like to thank the British Academy for the grant I was awarded in 1999
to conduct research on this subject in Russia.
1. ‘Spasti detei mozhet tol’ko tsenzura uchebnikov’, Nezavisimaia gazeta,
7 September 2001, p. 2.
2. See, for instance, the interview with Igor’ Iakovenko, Nezavisimaia gazeta,
19 April 2001, p. 8; A. Minkin, ‘Tsenzura ili smert’ ’, Moskovskii komsomolets,
8 June 2001, p. 3; and M. Zheleznova, ‘Chtob tebia tsenzor obkornal’, Novaia
gazeta, on-line (ed.) no. 21, 26 March 2001. According to Zheleznova, the cor-
responding figures for five and nine months earlier were, respectively,
49 per cent and 15 per cent.
3. See the interview with Colonel Aleksandr Manichev, head of the Defence
Ministry’s Department for the Protection of Secrets in the Press and Other
Mass Media, ‘Tsenzury net. No tainy ostaiutsia’, Krasnaia zvezda, 11 July

1996, p. 2, and the article referred to in note 26.
4. See A. Simonov, ‘Shest’ vidov tsenzury’, Vecherniaia Moskva, 6 April 1996, p. 2.
5. Profil’, 27 August 2001.
6. Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury: Dokumenty i kommentarii, comp.
T. M. Goriaeva, Moscow, 1997 (henceforth: ISPTs), pp. 14 and 21.
7. A notable exception is Leopol’d Avzeger. See his Chernyi komitet: Zapiski tain-
ogo tsenzora MGB, Tel-Aviv, 1987.
8. A senior censor, Vladimir Solodin, puts the total number of Glavlit employ-
ees (he probably means just the professional full-time censors) at less than
1500 (Iskliuchit’ vsiakie upominaniia: Ocherki istorii sovetskoi tsenzury, comp.
T. M. Goriaeva, Minsk and Moscow, 1995 (henceforth: Iskliuchit’), p. 317).
Goriaeva herself (ibid, p. 39) suggests that in 1947 Glavlit had over 6000
employees, including part-timers (tsenzory-sovmestiteli).
9. The doyen of specialists on the Soviet censorship system is Arlen Blium. See,
inter alia, his monographs Za kulisami ‘Ministerstva pravdy’: Tainaia istoriia
sovetskoi tsenzury 1917–1929, St Petersburg, 1994; Evreiskii vopros pod sovetskoi
tsenzuroi 1917–1991, St Petersburg, 1996; and Sovetskaia tsenzura v epokhu
total’nogio terrora 1929–1953, St. Petersburg, 2000. During the Soviet period
Blium published many articles on Russian censorship before 1917. For a brief
history of the Soviet censorship system in English, see the entry on censor-
ship in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the former Soviet Union,
Cambridge, 1994, pp. 485–7. The main books in English on this subject are
The Soviet Censorship, ed. Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell, Metuchen, NJ,
1973; The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR, ed. Marianna
Tax Choldin and Maurice Friedberg, Boston, MA, 1989; and Herman
Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917–1991, Lanham, MD, 1997.
10. On this see Solodin, Iskliuchit’, p. 327. The State Archives in Nizhnii Novgorod
(henceforth: GANO) hold the documents (akty) listing the titles of 434 items
that were burnt at the end of 1991 at f. 4254, op. vr. khr., d. 12, ll. 1–41.
11. See Zensur in der UdSSR: Archivdokumente 1917–1991, ed. Arlen V. Bljum,
Bochum, 1999 (henceforth: Zensur), p. 542. (Despite the title, this volume is
entirely in Russian.)
12. See Zensur, p. 543. Gumilev was not an émigré, and Khodasevich and Zaitsev
were neither philosophers nor publicists. It should be added that many items
in the spetskhrany of at least some of the major provincial libraries were still
unavailable to the general public a full decade later. In 1999 I had the privi-
lege of looking at the approximately 40 000 volumes from the Gor’kii
spetskhran which for many years had been literally imprisoned in a former
jail (Staryi Ostrog) on Freedom Square (Ploshchad’ Svobody) in what is now
Nizhnii Novgorod. Two devoted librarians had only recently begun to reclas-
sify and recatalogue these items for their eventual return to the general stock
of the library.
13. See Iskliuchit’, pp. 58–9.
14. See Sovershenno sekretno, No. 1, 1992, pp. 12–13.
15. See Pornography and Democratization: Legislating Obscenity in Post-Communist
Russia, Boulder, CO, 1999, p. 247.
16. See Zensur, pp. 544–6.
17. See ISPTs, pp. 230–2.
18. See Zensur, p. 550.
206 Martin Dewhirst
19. Compare, in GANO, f. 4254, op. 3, d. 81, l. 9 with op. 5, d. 101, l. 62.
20. See Goldschmidt, p. 247.
21. See Zensur, pp. 415–16. According to this source, the previous edition, which
came out in November 1987, had only 40 pages (ibid, p. 538). The index of
banned subject matter was almost ten times shorter in the 1987 issue than in
the 1984 edition (Iskliuchit’, p. 56).
22. On Filimonov and his attempt to ban Sergei Kaledin’s novella Stroibat
(The Construction Battalion), see Dos’e na tsenzuru, 1, 1997, pp. 81–89.
23. This perechen’ was finally published in Otechestvennye arkhivy, No. 6, 1993,
pp. 80–6.
24. See, for instance, E. Coron, ‘Passport Denied: the New “Refuseniks” ’, The
Christian Science Monitor, 6–12 October 1995, p. 12: ‘Since the criteria
for what falls under which degree of secrecy are themselves a secret, the
applicant /for a passport to go abroad/ finds himself in a Catch-22 situation.
“He can only find out where he stands by having access to the list – but
by doing so, he becomes the bearer of a secret’, says Boris Altshuler of the
organization Movement Without Borders. A written request by The Christian
Science Monitor to the FSB for a definition of what is now considered a state
secret in Russia was refused.”
25. See N. Gevorkian, ‘ “Gossekretnyi” ukaz’, Moskovskie novosti, 5 (February), 1992.
26. The Law on State Secrets was published in Rossiiskaia gazeta on 21 September
1993, and in Zakonodatel’stvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii o sredstvakh massovoi infor-
matsii, with a commentary by M. A. Fedotov, Moscow, 1996, pp. 68–90. See
the interview on state secrets with General Iu. A. Iashin, the chairman of the
State Technical Commission attached to the President of the Russian
Federation, Krasnaia zvezda, 12 August 1995, p. 4.
27. For allegations of the infiltration of newspapers by the military and by
‘former’ KGB officers, see A. Kravtsov, ‘Kazachki-to zaslannye: armeiskie
razvedchiki v bastionakh glasnosti’, Moskovskii komsomolets, 31 July 1992,
p. 2, and M. Deich, ‘KGB vPRESSovyvaetsia, a pressa oKGBeshivaetsia’, Golos,
42–43, October 1992.
28. See A. Rikhter and F. Kravchenko, ‘Nikto, krome tsenzury, ne znaet, chto
iavliaetsia gostainoi. No za ee razglashenie gazetu mozhno zakryt’ ’,
Zhurnalist, 1, 1998, pp. 50–1.
29. Kommersant’’-vlast’, 9(261), 17 March 1998, pp. 8–21.
30. See, for instance, V. Rudnev and S. Tarasov, ‘Prezident nadeliaet rossiiskuiu
biurokratiiu pravom na grif “sov. sekretno” ’, Izvestiia, 26 February 1994,
pp. 1, 4.
31. On this rather shadowy body, initially functioning as the State Technical
Commission attached to the President of the Russian Federation, see the
interview mentioned in note 23; Rossiiskaia gazeta, 14 September 1995, p. 3;
and, for further details, the Biulleten’ Gosudarstvennogo komiteta Rossiiskoi
Federatsii po vysshemu obrazovaniiu, 11, 1995, pp. 14–25.
32. See the bibliography provided on p. 161 of The Soviet Censorship (fn 8).
33. See Nezavisimaia gazeta, 25 April 1992, p. 8.
34. See the section devoted to this terrorist threat in Dos’e na tsenzuru, 2, 1998,
pp. 127–43.
35. See, for instance, N. Babasian, ‘Tserkov’ i sredstva massovoi informatsii:
razvitie konflikta’, Russkaia mysl’, 8–14 January 1998, p. 18.
36. On this incident see the coverage in Russkaia mysl’, 3–9 September 1998,
pp. 20–1.
37. See GANO, f. 4254, op. 5, d. 101, l. 79.
38. See Zensur, p. 556.
39. See Rossiiskaia gazeta, 21 July 1994, p. 4.
40. See ISPTs, pp. 234–5.
41. For a good, brief article on this clash of concepts, see S. Abrashkin and
K. Nikolaev, ‘Realizatsiia ukaza o gostaine mozhet nanesti ushcherb bezopas-
nosti Rossii’, Kommersant’’-daily, 29 January 1998, p. 1.
42. This first long-lasting post-Soviet attempt to silence those genuinely
concerned about the environment got underway after their article
‘Otravlennaia politika’ was published in Moskovskie novosti, 20 September
1992, p. 16. On the background to the Mirzaianov case, see D. Clarke,
‘Chemical weapons in Russia’, RFE/RL Research Report, 2(2), 8 January 1993,
pp. 47–53.
43. On the background to the Nikitin case, see, for instance, B. Whitmore, ‘The
reluctant dissident’, Transitions, 5(5), May 1998, pp. 68–73.
44. On the background to the Pas’ko case see, for example, B. McLaren, ‘High
seas treason’, Transitions, 5(7), July 1998, pp. 79–81.
45. See the reference in fn. 3.
46. See, for example, Frank Ellis, From Glasnost’ to the Internet: Russia’s New
Infosphere, Basingstoke, 1999, especially the ‘Concluding Remarks’.
47. See, for instance, the interview, ‘Avtoritarizm neizbezhen, no diktatury
mozhno izbezhat’ ’ with S. Karaganov, the Chairman of the Presidium of the
Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, in Segodnia, 21 June 2000.
48. See ‘Perechen’ sekretov Minoborony perestal byt’ sekretnym’, Russkaia mysl’,
20–26 September 2001, p. 7.
49. See Issue 81 of the Daidzhest Fonda Zashchity Glasnosti, http://www.gdf.ru/digest/
50. See Moskovskie novosti, 1–2, 2002: 8–21 January 2002, pp. 2–3.
51. Russkaia mysl’, 4–10 April 2002, p. 4.
52. See (the now defunct) Segodnia, 7 June 2000.
53. See G. Herd’s article in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 13(4), December
2000.
11
Politics Beyond the Garden Ring:
Rethinking the Post-Soviet
Experience
Vladimir Gel’man
Introduction: regional political studies vs. ‘regionology’
It was not until the 1990s that regional aspects of Russian politics first
came to the attention of Russian and foreign scholars. In Russia, how-
ever, this delay was for different reasons than in the West. In Russia
political science as a discipline was officially acknowledged only in
1989, and the first empirical political research dated back to that time.
The events of the next few years, including the collapse of the Soviet
Union, processes of federalization and regionalization in Russia, as well
as elections to all levels of government encouraged both academic and
practical interest in this research area and formed a new niche for
regional political studies. Western Sovietology, which thrived during
the Cold War period, did not as a rule pay much attention to regional
matters.1 In the post-Soviet period, however, the number of publications
devoted to regional politics has grown dramatically.2 During the
post-Soviet decade research on the regional aspects of politics became a
central theme of Russian studies. Dozens of books and hundreds of arti-
cles were written, PhD dissertations were defended, conferences and
seminars were held, lecture courses were read and the first textbooks
were published. Thus the institutionalization of Russia’s regional politi-
cal studies may be considered complete. The end of this period of devel-
opment was symbolically marked by the publication of an actual
memoir of the period.3
The institutional history of Russia’s regional political studies has been
described in considerable detail.4 The goal of this essay is to discuss
the content of these works without claiming at a comprehensive
208
Politics Beyond the Garden Ring 209
bibliographical analysis of the research field. I would rather try to

answer the following questions: How do these studies add to our under-
standing of the ways in which politics works in Russia’s regions and in
the country in general, as well as in the world at large? What are the the-
oretical and methodological principles of this new sub-discipline? How
do they relate to general trends in political science and particularly to
the study of Russian politics? What tendencies and specific patterns has
the new discipline managed to identify, if any? And, finally, are regional
political studies in Russia a coherent field of research with its own
specific subject matter, or are they, rather, a conglomeration of separate
studies with a common geographical area of scholarly interests?
To answer these questions, this chapter will begin with a review of a
number of general approaches by both Russian and Western authors.
Then it will summarize the results of existing scholarly works according
to two major topics: (1) Russia’s federalism and centre–regional relations
in Russia; (2) regional political institutions and political processes in
Russia. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the achievements
and failures of regional studies in Russia, as well as their findings and
prospects.
First of all it is necessary to clarify some definitions. The term ‘regional
political studies’ is used here to define the studies of regional and local
politics (such as political regimes, political participation and behaviour,
etc.) as well as those specific aspects of regional and local government,
which are connected with national politics.5 Thus Russia’s regional polit-
ical studies are a sub-discipline of studies in Russian politics in the same
way as, say, studies of state and local government are a sub-discipline of
studies in American politics. At the same time a number of Russian and
Western authors use the term ‘regionology’, which relates to the interdis-
ciplinary field known as regional science.6 In other words, in regional
political studies the ‘regions’ are the object of research, but the subject
matter of their analysis is defined by the framework of political science;
as was done, for example, in the classic works on community power
in the USA7 and on regional government performance in Italy.8
‘Regionology’, however, does not distinguish between the subject matter
and the object of research. Thus research on the regional aspects of
Russia’s politics reproduces de facto the traditional dichotomy of Russian
studies: comparative politics versus area studies, the two scientific
discourses being, if not completely independent, at least very loosely
related to each other. Moreover, while the majority of Western scholars
adhere to the discipline of regional political studies, most of their Russian
colleagues are either spontaneous or conscious ‘regionologists’.
210 Vladimir Gel’man
The two sub-disciplinary views also differ in the ways their research
processes develop. As will be shown below, the ‘research cycle’9 of
regional political studies begins from the illustrative notes on single
cases, and proceeds through the interpretative stage of ‘thick descrip-
tions’ and deviant case analyses towards comparative political studies
(including quantitative research).10 ‘Regionology’, in its turn, builds on
the focus of ‘region’ while seeking to use the whole complex of diverse
ideas borrowed from political science, sociology, economics, ethnology,
history, cultural studies, geography, law and so on. This approach is
most explicitly expressed by Kimitaka Matsuzato, who described
‘regionology’ as ‘an attempt to break down the barriers between tradi-
tional academic disciplines by exploring the key concept of “space” ’.11
Both research schools confront certain methodological problems, the
nature of their difficulties, however, being different. Regional political
studies often suffer from the problem of ‘conceptual stretching’, due to
the inappropriate use of the existing theories and the neglect of the real
context of the phenomenon in question.12 Besides, a certain normative
bias, which is widespread for regional political studies as well as for stud-
ies of Russian politics in general, impedes the understanding of some
political patterns and realities. Scholars are often trapped by their incli-
nation to gauge political processes in Russia by the normative ideals of
democracy, market economy and the rule of law. As a result, scholars are
appalled by how far the Russian realities are from those ideals, and
start to blame the causes of this state of affairs. And sometimes this is the
very end of the analysis: the academic value of such research is thus
negligible.
Given that one of the typical features of ‘regionology’ is its eclectic
nature, the best it can ever do is to give an ad hoc explanation to the
phenomena observed. At worst, the research question ‘Why?’ is never
asked at all. The majority of Western and Russian scholars tend to use
concepts from their ‘native’ disciplines.13 In this way legal scholars seek
to explain the problems of federalism and centre–regional relations by
the contradictions of legal regulations and inappropriate law enforce-
ment mechanisms. Economists speak about them in terms of redistribu-
tion of taxes between the national and regional governments, while
ethnologists refer to ethnic issues in some of Russia’s republics, and
so on. Unfortunately, no inter-disciplinary perspective on the whole
complex of these (and other) problems has been gained as yet.
It is hard to tell whether the above mentioned problems are a type of
‘growing pains’ or if they reflect several ‘path-dependent’ trends in
Russia’s regional political studies. At the same time, there is no doubt
that during the post-Soviet decade both Russian and Western scholars
have succeeded in gaining substantial experience in regional political
analysis in Russia and have done so nearly ‘from scratch’. If we keep in
mind the vast complexity of all the institutional changes that have
occurred in Russian politics and its regional aspects during the last
decade, we can imagine how difficult it is to explain all these processes
hot on the trail. How successful have scholars been in meeting the
challenges of Russia’s regional politics?
Federalism, Russian style: the swing of the pendulum
The abrupt disintegration of the USSR and the threat of the further
disintegration of Russia in the early 1990s triggered both practical and
scholarly interest in Russian federal relations. It is true that the growth
of separatism and the escalation of ethnic conflicts endangering Russia’s
territorial integrity called for an in-depth analysis of the problems
of Russia’s federalism. It is also true that the negative legacy of Soviet
federalism with the rigid hierarchy of its territorial and ethnic federal
structure, with its territorial claims and the potential for ethnic con-
flicts14 gave grounds for such speculation. That is why, when a number
of Russia’s ethnic republics proclaimed their sovereignty, it was initially
assumed to be a decisive step towards separatism and the beginning of
secession.15 But in fact these predictions have never been realized. As the
price the republics had to pay for their independence grew, the stimuli
to leave Russian Federation diminished, and the incentives to look for
compromise with the centre increased. This is well illustrated by the two
contrasting cases of Tatarstan, which made effective use of its ‘blackmail
potential’ to gain utmost advantage in its long bargaining with the
centre;16 and Chechnia, which plunged into a series of bloody wars.17
When in 1992 all regions of Russia except Tatarstan and Chechnia
signed the Federal Treaty, it showed the limits beyond which the sepa-
ratism of ethnic republics would not go; and made other regions, com-
posed on non-ethnic principles, fully fledged subject units of the
federation.18 However, as a side effect of this arrangement, different
regions in Russia gained different statuses, which led to a series of new
conflicts, the most notorious being that around the so-called ‘Urals
Republic’ in Sverdlovsk oblast’. Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s the
threat that separatist movements and ethnic conflicts would result in
the country’s disintegration had considerably diminished.19
In fact, the claims for sovereignty and greater control over the
economic resources on their territories were simply the attempts of
the ethnic (republican), and later the non-ethnic (regional), élites to

gain from the centre’s loss of some of its state capacity.20 Similarly, the
possible ethnic mobilization of the masses was an argument the
republics used in their efforts to strike a better bargain with the centre.21
At the same time, by asserting their position towards the weak centre the
ruling republican and regional élites were able to confirm their political
power within their territories. This connection was most precisely
expressed by Mikhail Afanas’ev, who said: ‘the exact Russian translation
of the concept “sovereignty” is “autocracy” ’.22 These tendencies were
most prominent in the most ‘sovereign’ of Russian republics.23
These type of strategies pursued by the regions towards the centre
were further encouraged by conflicts in national politics – first, between
the Soviet and Russian leaderships (1990–91), and later between Russia’s
President and the Supreme Soviet (1992–93). The feeble attempts by the
federal government to re-centralize the country after the coup of 1991
by appointing regional governors and presidential representatives were
rather inconsistent and did not apply to ethnic republics.24 On the
contrary, in making their bids for regional support the participants in
federal conflicts had to outdo each other to satisfy the demands of
regional élites. The latter, quite naturally, were inclined to maintain the
stalemate and keep these conflicts unresolved as a zero-sum game.25
After the October events of 1993 and the adoption of Russia’s
Constitution in December 1993, the uncontrolled decentralization of
Russia seemed to have been restrained for a while,26 and the existing
legal and political asymmetry of the federation was eliminated to some
extent.27 This situation, however, only lasted until February 1994, when
a campaign was started to sign bilateral agreements on power redistrib-
ution between the centre and the regions (and, first of all, between the
centre and the ethnic republics). In this way, federal asymmetry and
the tensions between republics and non-ethnic regions increased again.
Referring to this situation, Steven Solnick insisted that in 1994–95 a
coalition of republics against the centre was forming in Russia.28 The
goal of the coalition was to secure unilateral privileges for its members,
which presented a considerable threat to federal integrity. To balance
the situation early in 1996, other regions were invited to sign bilateral
agreements with the centre but, instead of alleviating the problem, this
rather deepened the existing asymmetry and legal anarchy.
In a large number of cases these bilateral agreements became
the means of providing regions with exclusive privileges that had
neither economic29 nor legal grounds.30 Towards the beginning of
the presidential election campaign of 1996 this ‘bilateral agreement
campaign’ skyrocketed, and by 1999 as many as 46 regions had con-

cluded their ‘private’ deals with the centre. Most of these agreements
have never been fulfilled, but it did not stop analysts from regarding
them as a threat to Russia’s development. In a sense, those treaties put
on paper and legalized existing informal relations between federal and
regional leaders, which could be described as ‘loyalty in exchange
for non-interference’.31 The relations built according to this principle,
especially in the cases of economically influential ethnic republics, were
considered to encourage anti-constitutional trends.32 The majority of
observers blamed the centre for making unreasonable concessions to
local élites. There being no effective political mechanisms of federal
integration and law enforcement, these compromises seemed to lead
towards further federal asymmetry and to the substitution of the legal
system by informal bargaining practice.33 Whether consciously or not,
this critique of Russian federalism was based on the assumption that
the ideal standard of federalism was its US model34 although, according
to some comparativists, the universality of this model is rather
questionable.35
Daniel Treisman suggested an alternative model for Russia’s federal
development in the first half of the 1990s.36 Using rational choice the-
ory, he built his analysis around the following central question: Why did
the Russian Federation remain intact while all other ex-socialist federa-
tions (like the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) fell apart after
the collapse of their Communist regimes? Treisman believes that the
answer to this question lies in the political course of the federal centre.
Unlike Solnick he thinks that the centre had enough means (particularly
financial) to exercise control over the regions. According to Treisman,
the centre used the strategy of selective appeasement and managed to
soften the most separatist claims and to secure favourable results during
the federal elections in these regions. In other words, the federal
government was able to buy the loyalty of the masses and élites in the
regions by sending them enough money. Treisman proves his thesis by
a careful quantitative analysis of budgetary and electoral statistics. It is
difficult to tell how grounded this approach is, since it is based exclu-
sively on analysis of the federal budget and does not take into account
extra-budget funds, barter, ownership redistribution and last but not
least, to what extent this budget was observed. For these reasons
Treisman’s conclusions were severely criticized. Using a wider empirical
base, Vladimir Popov, for example, after a detailed analysis of budget
transfers distributed by the centre in the late 1990s, came to completely
the opposite conclusion.37 According to Popov, the centre encouraged
the most loyal regions (in terms of electoral results) while punishing the
rebellious ones. Undermining Treisman’s model, Popov’s research also
demonstrates that the centre sacrificed its regional economic policy for
political interests, although for different reasons.
Even if we agree with Treisman’s conclusions, we must admit that
Russia had to pay a high price for maintaining the federation and
preventing separatism and secession (with the exception of Chechnia).
The major feature of federal relations in Russia in the late 1990s, as pre-
sented by Leonid Polishchuk, was regional lobbying.38 As a result Russia
developed a model of ‘bargaining federalism’, characterized by the pre-
dominance of informal institutions, which not only undermined con-
stitutional order in Russia and its regions, but also impeded consistent
economic policy.39 Under these circumstances, the spontaneous and
inconsequent policy adopted by the federal government created prece-
dents whereby the political authority was de facto passed to the
regions.40 It would be wrong to say that the federal government had
no political will whatsoever and did not try to change the situation.
For example, the centre tried to link its financial support to the regions’
willingness to adopt a more open economic policy and market
reforms.41 But these attempts did not amount to any sort of consistent
plan and most of the time did not lead to any significant results.
No wonder, then, that different scholars referred to Russian federalism
as ‘defective’,42 ‘market-distorting’,43 and the like.
The definitions above emphasize the problems of institution-building
in Russia, which were closely connected to the decline of state capacity.
The political weakness of the centre and its loss of enforcement mecha-
nisms further intensified these difficulties.44 At the same time, political
parties45 and the Federation Council,46 which could have been the
major political institutions of centre–regional relations, played no
significant part in the decision-making process, the latter increasingly
slipping out of federal control. Irrespective of bilateral agreements, both
federal legislation47 and civic and political rights48 in the regions were
regularly violated. In other words, the very label ‘federalism’ was used to
mask the most archaic and/or authoritarian forms of government.49
After the economic crisis of 1998 and before the election cycle of
1999–2000, it was suggested that if these trends continued they would
lead to the complete disappearance of the federal centre, that is,
to Russia’s political disintegration.50 But, as with previous alarmist
predictions, these prophecies were never to come true.
In May 2000 when Vladimir Putin promulgated his plan to re-
centralize power, the situation around federal relations seemed to
change dramatically. The plan included the establishment of federal

districts, the consolidation of all financial resources in the centre, and
changes in the way the Federation Council was formed. Despite the fact
that observers had unanimously acknowledged the pressing need for
federal reforms, their estimates of Putin’s plan and its consequences
were controversial. In the beginning it was even feared that ‘Russia […]
can once again become a unitary state with some regional and ethnic
features’.51 Both the very content of the reforms and the way in which
they were implemented were criticized. It was stated, for example, that
the Federation Council, which in 1996–2000 included ex officio the
heads of the regional executive bodies and the chairpersons of regional
legislatures, had failed to become an effective tool for representing
regional interests.52 But the new mechanism, according to which
members of the upper chamber were appointed by regional authorities,
conformed even less to the principles of democracy and federalism or to
regional interests.
Generally speaking, this reinforcement of the ‘executive power
vertical’ had the very pragmatic aim of strengthening the President’s
influence by weakening the position of regional élites in a zero-sum
centre–region struggle.53 Thus the problem of state weakness was
resolved by increasing the state capacity of the centre, while the need for
the rule of law was the lowest priority.54 The so-called ‘dictatorship of
law’ meant that legal mechanisms became nothing but tools for
strengthening the centre. The campaign to bring regional laws into con-
formity with federal legal norms, for example, resulted in the deteriora-
tion of the situation regarding human rights in a number of regions.55
In general, however, the possible negative consequences of the centre’s
arbitrary rule towards the regions were neutralized by the lack of imple-
mentation mechanisms, since even presidential envoys in federal dis-
tricts did not have tools to carry through this course.56 Already by the
beginning of 2001 it had become obvious that the policy towards federal
re-centralization had its limits. As Leonid Smirniagin noted,57 the com-
bination of several negative tendencies had, paradoxically, brought
about favourable changes, and in respect to state building the general
effect of federal reform was rather positive. The rationalization of
the budget federalism model, for example, allowed financial transfer
mechanisms to be aligned with the real economic potential of Russia’s
regions.58
Nikolai Petrov has very appropriately compared the development of
federal relations in Russia to a pendulum.59 Using this metaphor we may
say that, following a number of swings in the 1990s, the pendulum
reached the peak of decentralization after the economic crises of 1998.

At this point there existed a very real threat that the centre would lose
its position as an important actor in federal relations. Immediately after
that, the pendulum made an abrupt swing in the opposite direction,
without slowing down at the point of balance, and moved on to the
extreme point of unreasonable centralization. A good illustration of this
situation is the energy crisis of 2001 in Primorskii krai, when the federal
government had not only to pay the damage costs but also to take on
the political responsibility for the crisis as such. The pendulum has
stopped swinging, but its position today is far from being balanced. The
crucial difference between the current state of affairs and the situation
in the 1990s is that further development of federal reforms today is asso-
ciated primarily with the political processes in the centre and, as time
goes on, with the processes of internationalization and globalization.60
The politics of Russia’s regions: 89 puzzles
The development of regional political studies in Russia followed the

logic of the above mentioned ‘research cycle’, although some of its
stages overlapped in time. It is commonly believed that the cycle was
started by the publication of the first contemporary Russian book on
regional politics, describing the 1989 elections to the Congress of
People’s Deputies.61 Alongside essays about the election campaign in
five regions, the book included some elements of comparative political-
geographical analysis. Soon after this, Russia’s regional politics began to
attract the attention of foreign scholars. At that very time the restric-
tions limiting foreigners’ trips to Russia were lifted and hundreds of
Western Sovietologists flooded the country to conduct field research in
the regions. Both Russian and Western scholars were inspired by the
democratization going on in the regions. The main foci of their atten-
tion at that time were the development of the democratic movement,62
elections to regional Soviets,63 the first steps of the new legislatures64
and mass political attitudes.65 There being no comprehensive theoreti-
cal models for studying Russia’s regional politics, it was only natural to
borrow the teleological model of ‘transition to democracy’. Under the
fast changing conditions of the 1990s, however, it became clear that
some of the statements and judgments made under this approach would
not stand the test of time. For this reason, some authors tried to avoid
any sort of theoretical conceptualizing and concentrated on gathering
empirical material. As a result, several projects aimed at monitor-
ing regional political development were started, and a number of
monographs on regions were published. These works often rejected any

theoretical framework, compensating for this defect by scrupulous
detail. The most impressive of these works are Political Almanac of Russia
published by the Moscow Carnegie Centre,66 and the multi-volume
series Regions of Russia. Chronicle of Events and Leaders,67 which is being
published by the Slavic Research Centre at Hokkaido University in
Sapporo. These works belong to the genre of ‘thick descriptions’, thick
by their informative value and by their physical weight.
The weaknesses of this sort of ‘atheoretical’ approach, however, soon
became apparent. Towards the middle of the 1990s most of the scholars
grew dissatisfied with mere descriptions. Their knowledge of the devel-
opmental patterns of Russia’s federal and/or regional politics, however,
was too limited to be used as the foundation for any consistent theories
so, for a while, case studies became the major research method. As a rule
the topics of these studies were political issues, such as State Duma elec-
tions,68 conflicts and compromises of regional élites,69 and so on.
Practically every one of Russia’s 89 regions represented a unique ‘puzzle’,
with different patterns and rules to be investigated. And it was only in
the second half of the 1990s that these case studies were built into a
comparative perspective (meaning both that the cases were compared,
and that the empirical data were incorporated into theories within the
framework of comparative politics).
Research in this field was further promoted by political developments
in the 1990s. Federal and regional elections required more knowledge of
the possible directions the political situation could take, and businesses
needed to minimize the political risks of their regional investments.
The pivotal point for regional political process was a sequence of guber-
natorial elections in the autumn and winter of 1996. As a result of these
elections, in the majority of Russia’s regions political regimes were estab-
lished which enjoyed different degrees of autonomy from the centre.70
The elections also became an important source of information about
regional electoral politics. This information was used to test existing
theories of electoral behaviour.71 In other words, scholars took a crucial
step from describing regional politics in Russia towards explaining it.
It is worth mentioning that with the development of regional politi-
cal studies, scholars grew more critical towards the object of their
research. The turning point here was the October events of 1993 when
the dissolution of the Soviets was followed by the ‘reassertion of execu-
tive power’.72 In the majority of regions the new institutional design73
became a fertile ground for the demolition of democratic institutions.
In a situation where powers were separated, the predominance of the
executive authorities allowed governors and republic leaders to gain full

control over their territories.74 In several cases the established political
regimes were labeled as ‘regional authoritarianism’.75 The notion of
‘delegative democracy’ was another popular concept used for the
description of regional regimes.76 Many observers mentioned the
insignificant role of local legislatures,77 the weakness of political par-
ties,78 corporatist trends in the relations of the state towards the ‘third
sector’ NGOs,79 direct or indirect state control over the mass media,80
state suppression of economic interest groups (or vice versa),81 and the
general spread of patronage and clientelism.82 The political monopoly
of the ruling groups was not limited to the informal practices of
decision-making but had a tendency to institutionalize itself. This often
happened either through regional electoral systems,83 or through sys-
tems of local government,84 which impeded the development of politi-
cal parties, municipal autonomy and regional political contestation in
general.
At the same time it should be noted that political processes in Russia’s
regions are highly diverse.85 According to Gail Lapidus, the regions
‘make the Russian Federation a virtual laboratory for testing different
developmental models’.86 Discovering and classifying these models of
political development and/or regional political regimes were the first
results of comparative regional studies. Thus Mary McAuley distin-
guished the following types of political regimes: conservative (similar to
the late-Soviet), consensus, pluralist and patronage (personal rule).87
Nataliia Lapina recognizes four models of political and economic élites’
interactions: patronage, partnership, suppression (‘wars of all against
all’) and ‘privatization of power’.88 In our comparative study of
six Russian regions we managed to identify the following types of political
regimes: monopolistic (‘winner takes all’), cartel (‘élite settlement’) and
oligopoly (‘struggle according to the rules’).89 The typologies mentioned
above (and some others)90 were more or less explicitly built around dif-
ferent configurations of actors and political institutions.91 While creat-
ing empirical typologies of political processes, scholars had to explain
regional similarities and differences from the cross-regional comparative
perspective. This was done in several different ways.
First to evolve was the ‘transformation of nomenklatura’ model, which
linked the direction of post-Soviet regional political development to the
reproduction or replacement of old political élites.92 Since in the middle
of the 1990s the reproduction of the old regional élites reached up to
85 per cent,93 this model gave a simple and feasible explanation of why
regional democratic institutions had failed. At the same time, it did not
help to understand the differences in the reproduction of political and

economic élites,94 and gave only occasional explanations of intra-élite
conflicts.95 Besides, the connection between regional political regimes
and the reproduction level of the old nomenklatura was not too
obvious.96
Economic explanations of regional political diversity were based on the
assumption that the economic resource bases of the regions predeter-
mined their political development. Thus Mikhail Afanas’ev linked
‘depressive’ regional political regimes to the undeveloped economy, and
‘closed’ regimes to a local economy with a high share of agrarian and/or
military-industrial complex, while the ‘open’ type was connected
with a well developed, diversified economy and/or significant interna-
tional economic involvement.97 Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, on the contrary,
believes that the high concentration of economic resources promotes
consensus among political and economic élites and contributes to
effective control and management much better than the diversified
economy.98 In practice, however, the connection between political
development and social and economic development is not obvious even
from the cross-national perspective. As to political regimes in Russia’s
regions, it is clear that the situation in pre-industrial Kalmykia99 did
not differ much from that of post-industrial Moscow.100 While Nizhnii
Novgorod oblast’101 and Sverdlovsk oblast’102 have very similar economic
potentials, their political regimes differ significantly.
The culturalist approach is primarily used to explain the peculiari-
ties of political development in ethnic republics. Many of these
republics enjoy extremely antidemocratic reputations which need to be
explained. Dmitrii Badovskii, for example, believes that the traditional
type of political legitimization prevalent in the republics makes their
political development very different from non-ethnic regions.103 In
some of them, like, for example, in Bashkortostan,104 there are certain
trends towards ‘ethnocratization’, whereby the representatives of non-
titular ethnic groups are displaced from the élites. It is not uncommon
to explain this phenomenon by ideas from ‘popular anthropology’. The
latter assumes that the Turkish people and the Muslims are more
inclined towards authoritarianism than other ethnic groups. But as
Kimitaka Matsuzato states, these arguments fail when those republics
are compared to other republics and to non-ethnic regions.105 It seems
that here the culturalist perspective gives way to common sense, which
suggests that the ethnic status of the republics is used by their élites not
only for bargaining with the centre, but inside the republics as well.
This usually leads to the confirmation of the ruling élite monopoly
(as in Tatarstan), or to the struggle between different ethnic élites. The

latter, in its turn, results in open ethnic conflicts (as in Karachaevo-
Cherkessiia), or in the coexistence of different groups on the grounds of
consociationalism (as in Dagestan).106 Some authors try to link different
patterns of regional political development with certain types of local
political subcultures.107 Thus the political culture of small towns and
rural areas is described as ‘parochial’, that of middle-sized cities as ‘sub-
ject’, and the culture of big cities and megalopolises as ‘participant’.108
These approaches, however, are not based on comparative studies and
their validity seems rather questionable.
The élitist model concentrates on the internal relations among regional
élites. According to the transitological approach, one of the most impor-
tant conditions for democratization is a compromise between élites.
In Russia’s regions, however, it is not always true, and although in
some cases the consensus between élites is observed to lead to effective
regional governance,109 these sorts of compromises rather impede the
development of political contestation.110 The opposite was found to
be true in the ‘deviant case analysis’ of Sverdlovsk oblast’, which is
known to possess a relatively developed party system.111 The scholars
came to the conclusion that unsolvable conflicts between regional
élites may create favourable conditions for the establishment of political
parties (and political competition in general). In his quantitative analysis
of the elections to regional legislatures, Grigorii Golosov demonstrated
that the split between élites had led to the success of party candidates
over independent politicians and had promoted the development of
political parties in the regions.112 One might say that in a broader sense
irresolvable conflicts between regional élites encourage the installation
of democratic rules of the game in Russia and its regions.113 The reasons
for the split between élites is often related to the regional resource bases,
which were formed in Soviet times and then underwent certain changes
during the reform period. As yet, though, it is hard to say whether a
synthesis between élitist and economic approaches is possible, and
whether this synthesis can lay the grounds for complex neo-institutional
politico-economic models of regional transformations.
As a logical consequence of the research trends mentioned above, the
next stage in the development of regional political studies is closely con-
nected with the quantitative comparative analysis, its primary focus being
regional elections.114 Other aspects of regional politics are more difficult
to quantify, not only because fewer data are available, but also because
they are less developed theoretically and methodologically. For this
reason the first attempts to create comprehensive ratings of political
development in Russia’s regions, similar to the Freedom House indica-

tors used in national states, encountered substantial difficulties.115 The
time for such estimates has probably not yet come.
One may ask whether such trends are inevitable temporary hardships
of the ‘transition to democracy’, or whether they have long-term conse-
quences. Michael Brie compares the ‘political machines’ in Moscow
under the current mayor Luzhkov with the similar practices of patron-
age politics in American cities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries and in Southern Italy after the Second World War.116 Brie
shows that economic growth and social development in those countries
gradually undermined the ‘political machines’ which had prevailed in
the early stages of democracy. However, the transition from oligarchy to
pluralism that occurred in a number of American cities117 is not the only
possible outcome of political transformation. Even if such a transition
were to occur in Russian local politics, it could be expected to take a long
time. Besides, it is obvious that political development at a national level
in Italy and the USA followed a democratic course, which created favor-
able conditions for regional and local political democratization. In
Russia the situation is reversed, and the lack of political contestation
and the lack of the rule of law at the federal level impede democratic
processes in the regions. Thus the standard of democracy set by the
centre defines the future of regional politics. Currently, this standard is
not too high. If it does not go up, and more so if it continues to drop,
regional political development will be endangered.
Conclusion: problems and prospects
During the decade of its existence, regional political studies in Russia

have gone a long way from simple observations and ‘wishful thinking’
to serious comparative studies and theoretical analyses. While present-
ing a lot of challenges for the authorities at all levels, the complexity
and diversity of Russia’s regional politics create a fertile ground for vari-
ous kinds of research. Viewing Russian federalism through the prism of
theories of a ‘weak state’ has helped broaden our knowledge of how
centre–regional relations are developing in the country. The diversity of
regional political processes in Russia helps to test different theories
of political transformations and theories of institutional changes.
It is worth noting that here we should rather speak about the cross-
fertilization of comparative politics and Russian studies.
The further development of regional political studies in Russia
depends not only on the results of current research projects, but also on
how much academic and practical interest towards this field promotes
new horizons of analysis. This will require considerable joint efforts by
Russian and Western scholars as well as the development of new
research programs. How fruitful will these efforts be in bearing new
knowledge? One might suspect that ‘regionology’ would continue to
occupy its rather narrow niche with an extremely limited focus of inter-
ests shared by a narrow community of students of local lore and area
development specialists. Regional political studies, in its turn, if it ever
seeks to break through its isolation and join mainstream political stud-
ies, will have to start comprehensive cross-regional and cross-national
comparative research projects, to develop new theories and to define
more precisely the limits of the old ones.
One might say that owing to the efforts of numerous specialists,
Russia’s regions have been charted on the political map of Russia and
the world. The map is still incomplete and has many blank spots. We
still have to add more detail and to try to see the whole pattern more
clearly. Until now Russia’s regional political studies have answered the
‘What?’ and the ‘How?’ questions. We still have no answer to the ques-
tion ‘Why?’ and we are not able to make any forecasts. Further develop-
ments will show whether the new generations of Russian and Western
scholars will be able to cope with this task.
1. For one of the few exceptions, see Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects: The Local
Party Organs in Industrial Decision-Making, Cambridge, MA, 1969.
2. See John Lowenhardt and Stephen White, Beyond the Garden Ring: A
Bibliography, Mimeo, University of Glasgow, 1999; Neil Melvin and Rosalia
Puglisi, Bibliography of Sources on Russia’s Regions (www.leeds.ac.uk/lucreces/
biblio.html).
3. Nikolai Petrov, ‘Tsentr politiko-geograficheskikh issledovanii: ot “Vesny 89”
do “Almanakha 2001” ’, in Nikolai Petrov (ed.), Regiony Rossii v 1999 godu,
Moscow, 2001, pp. 295–316.
4. See Michael Bradshaw and Philip Hanson, ‘Understanding regional patterns of
economic change in Russia: An introduction’, Communist Economies and
Economic Transformation, 10(3), 1998, pp. 285–304; Vladimir Gel’man and
Sergei Ryzhenkov, ‘Politicheskaia regionalistika Rossii: istoriya i sovremennoe
razvitie’, in Yurii Pivovarov (ed.), Politicheskaya nauka sovremennoi Rossii:
tendentsii razvitiya, Moscow, 1999, pp. 173–255.
5. Gel’man and Ryzhenkov, ‘Politicheskaia regionalistika’, p. 173.
6. Andrei Makarychev, ‘Vliyanie zarubezhnykh kontseptsii na razvitie rossi-
iskogo regionalizma: vozmozhnosti i predely zaimstvovaniya’, in Andrei
Makarychev (ed.), Sravnitel’nyi regionalizm: Rossiya – SNG – Zapad, Nizhnii
Novgorod, 1997, pp. 97–129.
7. Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City,

New Haven, CT and London, 1961.
8. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy,
Princeton, NJ, 1993.
9. Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, ‘The use of comparative history in
macrosocial inquiry’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22(2), 1980,
pp. 174–97.
10. Grigorii Golosov, ‘Sravnitel’noe izuchenie regionov Rossii: problemy
metodologii’, in Vladimir Gel’man et al. (eds), Organy gosudarstvennoi vlasti
sub’’ektov Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow, 1998, pp. 130–8 (pp. 137–8).
11. Kimitaka Matsuzato, ‘Preface’, in Kimitaka Matsuzato (ed.) Regions: A Prism to
View the Slavic-Eurasian World: Towards a Discipline of ‘Regionology’, Sapporo,
2000, pp. ix–xii (p. ix).
12. Giovanni Sartori, ‘Concept misformation in comparative politics’, American
Political Science Review, 64(4), 1970, pp. 1033–53.
13. Gel’man and Ryzhenkov, ‘Politicheskaia regionalistika’, pp. 174–83; Michael
Bradshaw and Andrey Treyvish, ‘Russia’s regions in a “Triple Transition” ’, in
Philip Hanson and Michael Bradshaw (eds), Regional Economic Change
in Russia, Cheltenham, 2000, pp. 17–42.
14. Gail W. Lapidus and Edward Walker, ‘Nationalism, regionalism and federalism:
centre–periphery relations in post-communist Russia’, in Gail Lapidus (ed.)
The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, Boulder, CO, 1995, pp. 79–113;
Alfred Stepan, Russian federalism in comparative perspective, Post-Soviet
Affairs, 16(2), 2000, pp. 133–76.
15. Daniel Treisman, ‘Russia’s “Ethnic Revival”: The separatist activism of
regional leaders in a postcommunist order’, World Politics, 49(2), 1997,
pp. 212–49; Jeff Kahn, ‘The parade of sovereignties: Establishing the vocabu-
lary of the new Russian federalism’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 16(1), 2000, pp. 58–88.
16. Pauline Jones Luong, ‘Tatarstan: Elite bargaining and ethnic separatism’,
in Timothy J. Colton and Jerry F. Hough (eds), Growing Pains: Russian Democracy
and the Election of 1993, Washington, DC, 1998, pp. 637–68; Gulnaz
Sharafutdinova, ‘Chechnya versus Tatarstan: Understanding ethnopolitics in
post-communist Russia’, Problems of Post-Communism, 47(2) 2000, pp. 13–22.
17. The analysis of the developments in Chechnia is beyond the scope of this
chapter.
18. Vladimir Lysenko, Razvitie federativnykh otnoshenii v sovremennoi Rossii,
Moscow, 1995.
19. Nikolai Petrov and Andrey Treyvish, ‘Risk assessment of Russia’s regional
disintegration’, in Klaus Segbers and Stephan De Spiegeleire (eds), Post-Soviet
Puzzles. Mapping the Political Economy in the Former Soviet Union, vol. 2, Baden-
Baden, 1995, pp. 145–76.
20. Leonid Polishchuk, ‘Rossiiskaia model’ ‘peregovornogo federalizma’:
politiko-ekonomicheskii analiz’, in Vladimir Klimanov and Natal’ya
Zubarevich (eds), Politika i ekonomika v regional’nom izmerenii, Moscow and
St Petersburg, 2000, pp. 88–108.
21. Dmirty Gorenburg, ‘Regional separatism in Russia: Ethnic mobilisation or
power grab?’ Europe–Asia Studies, 51(2), 1999, pp. 245–74.
22. Mikhail Afanas’ev, Ot vol’nykh ord do khanskoi stavki. Pro et Contra, 3(3),
1998, pp. 5–20 (p. 6).
23. Gorenburg, ‘Regional separatism’; Kahn, ‘The parade of sovereignties’.

24. Vladimir Gel’man, ‘Regional’naya vlast’ v sovremennoi Rossii: instituty,
rezhimy i praktiki’, Polis, 1, 1998, pp. 87–105.
25. Olga Senatova and Aleksandr Kasimov, ‘Federatsiya ili novyi unitarizm?
Povtorenie proidennogo’, in Vladimir Gel’man (ed.), Ocherki rossiiskoi politiki,
Moscow, 1994, pp. 42–52.
26. Lapidus and Walker, ‘Nationalism, regionalism and federalism’.
27. Lysenko, ‘Razvitie federativnykh otnoshenii’; Irina Umnova, Konstitutsionnye
osnovy sovremennogo rossiiskogo federalizma, Moscow, 1998.
28. Steven Solnick, ‘Federal bargaining in Russia’, East European Constitutional
Review, 4(4), 1995, pp. 52–8.
29. Polishchuk, ‘Rossiiskaia model’.
30. Lysenko, Razvitie federativnykh otnoshenii; Mikhail Guboglo (ed.), Federalizm
vlasti i vlast’ federalizma, Moscow, 1997; Umnova, ‘Konstitutsionnye osnovy’.
31. Vladimir Gel’man, Sergei Ryzhenkov and Michael Brie (eds), Rossiya regionov:
transformatsiya politicheskikh rezhimov, Moscow, 2000, p. 58.
32. Guboglo, Federalizm vlasti; Sergei Mitrokhin, ‘Defektivnyi federalizm: simp-
tomy, diagnoz, retsepty vyzdorovleniia’, Federalizm, 2, 1999, pp. 61–74;
Polishchuk, ‘Rossiiskaia model’; Steven Solnick, ‘Is the centre too weak or too
strong in the Russian federation?’ in Valerie Sperling (ed.), Building the Russian
State: Institutional Crisis and the Quest for Democratic Governance, Boulder, CO,
2000, pp. 137–56.
33. Peter Ordeshook, ‘Russia’s party system: Is Russian federalism viable?’ Post-
Soviet Affairs, 12(3), 1996, pp. 195–217; Solnick, ‘Is the centre’.
34. William H. Riker, ‘Federalism’, in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby
(eds), Handbook of Political Science, vol. 5, Reading, MA, 1975, pp. 93–172.
35. Alfred Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, Oxford, 2001, pp. 315–61.
36. Daniel Treisman, After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in
Russia, Ann Arbor, MI, 1999.
37. Vladimir Popov, Fiscal Federalism in Russia: Rules versus Electoral Politics,
program on new approaches to Russian security, Nizhnii Novgorod Academic
Conference Paper, 2001.
38. Polishchuk, ‘Rossiiskaia model’.’
39. Darrell Slider, ‘Russia’s market-distorting federalism’, Post-Soviet Geography
and Economics, 38(8), 1997, pp. 445–60.
40. Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, ‘Central weakness and provincial autonomy:
Observations of the devolution process in Russia’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 15(1),
1999, pp. 87–106.
41. Segei Pavlenko, ‘Novyi federalizm: intriga i kontrintriga’, Pro et Contra, 2(2),
1997, pp. 34–46.
42. Mitrokhin, ‘Defektivnyi federalizm’.
43. Slider, ‘Russia’s market-distorting federalism’.
44. Stoner-Weiss, ‘Observations’; Solnick, ‘Is the centre’.
45. Ordeshook, ‘Russia’s party system’.
46. Nikolai Petrov, ‘Sovet Federatsii i predstavitel’stvo interesov regionov v
Tsentre’, in Nikolai Petrov (ed.), Regiony Rossii v 1998 godu, Moscow, 1999,
pp. 180–222.
47. Lysenko, Razvitie federativnykh otnoshenii; Guboglo, Federalizm vlasti; Jeff
Kahn, Dictators in Law? The Uses and Abuses of Constitutionalism in Russia’s
Republics, Paper presented at the conference ‘Ten years of post-communist

Russia’, European University at St Petersburg, 2001.
48. Mitrokhin, ‘Defektivnyi federalizm’; Kahn, Dictators in Law?
49. Nikolai Petrov, ‘Federalizm po-rossiiski’, Pro et Contra, 5(1), 2000, pp. 7–33.
50. Nikolai Petrov, ‘Regiony Rossii ili Rossiia regionov: perspektivy territorial’no-
gosudarstvennogo pereustroistva strany’, Moscow Carnegie Centre Briefing,
1(3), 1999, pp. 1–4.
51. Petrov, ‘Federalizm po-rossiiski’, p. 33.
52. Petrov, ‘Sovet Federatsii’.
53. Steven Solnick, ‘The new federal structure: More centralised, or more the
same?’, PONARS Policy Memo, 2000, 161 (www.csis.org/rusera/ponars/
policymemos/pm_0161.pdf); Matthew Hyde, ‘Putin’s federal reforms and their
implications for presidential power in Russia’, Europe–Asia Studies, 53(5), 2001,
pp. 719–42; Leonid Smirnyagin, ‘Federalizm po Putinu ili Putin po federalizmu
(zheleznoi pyatoi)?’ Moscow Carnegie Centre Briefing, 3(3) 1999, pp. 1–4.
54. Vladimir Gel’man, ‘The dictatorship of Law in Russia: neither dictatorship
nor rule of Law’, PONARS Policy Memo, 2000, 146 (www.csis.org/rusera/
ponars/policymemos/pm_0146.pdf).
55. Kahn, Dictators in Law?
56. Solnick, ‘The new federal structure’.
57. Smirnyagin, ‘Federalizm po Putinu’.
58. Popov, ‘Fiscal federalism in Russia’.
59. Petrov, ‘Federalizm po-rossiiski’.
60. The analysis of international influence on Russia’s centre–regional relations
and regional development is beyond the scope of this chapter.
61. Vladimir Kolosov, Nikolai Petrov, and Leonid Smirnyagin (eds) Vesna-89:
Geografiya i anatomiya parlamentskikh vyborov, Moscow, 1990.
62. Robert Orttung, From Leningrad to St Petersburg: Democratisation in a Russian
City, New York, 1995.
63. Timothy J. Colton, ‘The politics of democratisation: The Moscow election of
1990’, Soviet Economy, 6(4), 1990, pp. 285–344.
64. Jeffrey W. Hahn, ‘Local politics and political power in Russia: The case of
Yaroslavl’’, Soviet Economy, 7(4), 1991, pp. 322–41.
65. Jeffrey W. Hahn, ‘Continuity and change in Russian political culture’, British
Journal of Political Science, 21(4), 1991, pp. 393–421.
66. Michael McFaul and Nikolai Petrov, Politicheskii Al’manakh Rossii, 2 vols.
Moscow, 1998.
67. Kimitaka Matsuzato, Regiony Rossii: khronika i rukovoditeli, 7 vols. Sapporo,
1997–2000.
68. Colton and Hough, ‘Growing pains’, pp. 311–668.
69. Neil Melvin, ‘The consolidation of a new regional elite: The case of omsk
(1987–1995)’, Europe–Asia Studies, 50(4), 1998, pp. 619–50; Petra Stykow,
‘Elite transformation in the Saratov region’, in Vladimir Shlapentokh,
Christopher Vanderpool and Boris Doktorov (eds) The New Elite in Post-
Communist Eastern Europe, College Station, TX, pp. 201–22.
70. Vladimir Gel’man, ‘Regional’nye rezhimy: zavershenie transformatsii?’
Svobodnaya mysl’, 9, 1996, pp. 13–22.
71. Grigorii Golosov, ‘Povedenie izbiratelei v Rossii: teoreticheskie perspektivy i
rezul’taty regional’nykh vyborov’, Polis, 4, 1997, pp. 44–56; Steven Solnick,
‘Gubernatorial elections in Russia, 1996–1997’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 14(1),

1998, pp. 48–80.
72. Mary McAuley, Russia’s Politics of Uncertainty, Cambridge, 1997, p. 232.
73. Gel’man, ‘Regional’naia vlast’ v sovremennoi Rossii’, pp. 96–7.
74. Afanas’ev, ‘Ot vol’nykh ord’; Marie Mendras, ‘How regional elites preserve
their power’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 15(4), 1999, pp. 295–312.
75. Olga Senatova, ‘Regional’nyi avtoritarizm na stadii ego stanovleniya’, in
Tat’iana Zaslavskaya (ed.) Kuda idet Rossiya? Transformatsiya postsovetskogo
prostranstva, Moscow, 1996, pp. 146–51.
76. Gel’man, ‘Regional’nye rezhimy’; Andrei Tsygankov, ‘Manifestations of del-
egative democracy in Russian local politics: What does it mean for the future
of Russia?’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 31(4), 1998, pp. 329–44.
77. Afanas’ev, ‘Ot vol’nykh ord’; Grigorii Golosov, ‘Izmereniia rossiiskikh region-
al’nykh izbiratel’nykh sistem’, Polis, 4, 2001, pp. 71–85.
78. Ordeshook, ‘Russia’s party system’; Grigorii Golosov, ‘Gubernatory i parti-
inaya politika’, Pro et Contra, 5(1), 2000, pp. 96–108.
79. Elena Belokurova, ‘Gosudarstvo i blagotvoritel’nye organisatsii: transformat-
siia modelei vzaimodeistviia’, Unpublished PhD dissertation, European
University at St Petersburg, 2000.
80. Laura Belin, ‘Political bias and self-censorship in the Russian media’, in
Archie Brown (ed.) Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader, Oxford, 2001,
pp. 323–42 (pp. 340–1).
81. Sergei Peregudov, Natal’ya Lapina and Irina Semenenko, Gruppy interesov i
rossiiskoe gosudarstvo, Moscow, 1999, pp. 195–210.
82. Mikhail Afanas’ev, Klientelizm i rossiiskaya gosudarstvennost’, 2nd edition,
Moscow, 2000.
83. Golosov, ‘Izmereniya rossiiskikh regional’nykh izbiratel’nykh sistem’.
84. Sergei Ryzhenkov and Nikolai Vinnik (eds) Reforma mestnogo samoupravleniia
v regional’nom izmerenii, Moscow, 1999.
85. Gel’man, ‘Regional’naya vlast’ v sovremennoi Rossii’; Petrov, ‘Federalizm
porossiiski’, pp. 20–1.
86. Gail W. Lapidus, ‘State building and state breakdown in Russia’, in Archie
Brown (ed.) Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader, Oxford, 2001, pp. 348–54
(p. 354).
87. McAuley, Russia’s Politics of Uncertainty.
88. Peregudov, Lapina and Semenenko, Gruppy interesov, pp. 195–210.
89. Gel’man, Ryzhenkov and Brie, Rossiia regionov.
90. Afanas’ev, ‘Ot vol’nykh ord’, pp. 11–13.
91. Gel’man, Ryzhenkov and Brie, Rossiia regionov, pp. 19–20.
92. Mary McAuley, ‘Politics, economics, and elite realignment in Russia:
A regional perspective’, Soviet Economy, 8(1), 1992, pp. 46–88.
93. Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, ‘From Soviet nomenklatura to
Russian elite’, Europe–Asia Studies, 48(5), 1996, pp. 711–33.
94. James Hughes, ‘Sub-national elites and post-communist transformation in
Russia: A reply to Kryshtanovskaya and White’, Europe–Asia Studies, 49(6),
1997, pp. 1017–36.
95. Kimitaka Matsuzato, ‘The split and reconfiguration of ex-communist party
faction in the Russian oblasts: Chelyabinsk, Samara, Ulyanovsk, Tambov, and
Tver (1991–1995)’, Demokratisatsiya, 5(1), 1997, pp. 53–88.
96. McAuley, Russia’s Politics of Uncertainty; Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes:

The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance, Princeton, NJ, 1997.
97. Afanas’ev, ‘Ot vol’nykh ord’, pp. 11–13.
98. Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes.
99. Senatova, ‘Regional’nyi avtoritarizm’.
100. Michael Brie, ‘The political regime of Moscow – creation of a new urban
machine?’ Wissenschafszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung Working Papers,
1997, P97-002.
102. Vladimir Gel’man and Grigorii Golosov, ‘Regional party system formation
in Russia: The deviant case of Sverdlovsk oblast’’, Journal of Communist
Studies and Transition Politics, 14(1/2), 1998, pp. 31–53.
103. Dmitrii Badovskii, ‘Transformatsiia politicheskoi elity Rossii: ot “organisatsii
professional’nykh revoilyutsionerov” – k “partii vlasti’’, Polis, 6, 1994,
pp. 42–58.
104. Rushan Gallyamov, ‘Politicheskie elity rossiiskikh respublik: osobennosti
transformatsii v perekhodnyi period’, Polis, 2, 1998, pp. 108–15.
105. Kimitaka Matsuzato, ‘Vvedenie. Nekotorye kriterii dlya sravneniia politich-
eskikh rezhimov Tatarstana, Udmurtii i Mordovii’, in Kimitaka Matsuzato
(ed.), Regiony Rossii: khronika i rukovoditeli, vol. 7, Sapporo, 2000, pp. 3–14
(pp. 6–7).
106. Robert Bruce Ware and Enver Kisriev, ‘Ethnic parity and democratic plural-
ism in Dagestan: A consociational approach’, Europe–Asia Studies, 53(1),
2001, pp. 105–31.
107. Vladimir Kolosov and Aleksei Krindach, ‘Tendentsii postsovetskogo razvitiia
massovogo soznaniia i politicheskaia kul’tura iuga Rossii’, Polis, 6, 1994,
pp. 120–33.
108. Segei Biryukov, ‘Legitimatsiia statusa regional’noi politicheskoi vlasti’,
Vestnik MGU, series 18(4) 1997, pp. 77–95 (pp. 81–2).
109. Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes.
110. Melvin, ‘The consolidation of a new regional elite’.
111. Gel’man and Golosov, ‘Regional party system formation’.
112. Grigorii Golosov, ‘From Adygeya to Yaroslavl’: Factors of party development
in Russia’s regions’, Europe–Asia Studies, 51(8), 1999, pp. 1333–65.
114. Golosov, ‘Povedenie izbiratelei v Rossii’; Golosov, ‘From Adygeya to
Yaroslavl’.
115. Nikolai Petrov, Russia’s Regions: Post-Soviet Transit, 1991–2001, Program on
new approaches to Russian security, Nizhnii Novgorod Academic
Conference Paper, 2001.
116. Brie, ‘The Political regime of Moscow’, pp. 13–21.
117. Dahl, Who Governs?, pp. 11–86.
12
Westernism, Eurasianism and
Pragmatism: The Foreign Policies
of the Post-Soviet States,
1991–2001
Peter J. S. Duncan
This chapter will ask what we have learned about how, and to what
extent, the 15 former Soviet republics, after the sudden collapse of the
USSR, broke from the imperial nexus and the Soviet legacy in the field of
foreign policy. How did they succeed in creating functioning and pro-
fessional ministries of foreign affairs and diplomatic services, and begin
to define their own national interests and concepts of foreign policy?
What orientations and divisions did they have, and how successful were
they in achieving them in the first ten years, from 1991 to 2001? How
did their policies change, as a result of political struggles at home and
developments in the international environment?1
Probably the most comprehensive attempt to answer these questions
to date is that of Mark Webber, whose valuable comparative monograph
covers events up to 1994.2 A useful collection of country studies cover-
ing nearly all the states of the former Soviet Union (FSU) was edited by
Adeed and Karen Dawisha, also dealing with the early years.3 Taras
Kuzio has produced a more recent comparative analysis of the foreign
policies of all fifteen states.4 There is no implication in these works, or in
the present essay, that because these states all belonged to the Russian
Empire and then the USSR, they are historically destined ultimately to
share the same fate, part of a single security complex. On the contrary,
not only the Baltic States but also the other 12 former republics, which
have all joined the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), have
discovered their own interests which sometimes converge with and
sometimes diverge from those of Russia. At the same time, Russia
has continued to dominate the CIS area and also to play a major role in
the security thinking of the Baltic States.
228
Westernism, Eurasianism and Pragmatism 229
The environment in which the new foreign policies developed was

one of perhaps unprecedented change. Internationally, the biggest
change in world politics was the disappearance of the Soviet Union
itself. No longer balanced by its former rival, the United States acted
with increasing confidence as the sole superpower in a uni-polar
international system. The collapse of Communism also gave renewed
impetus to the processes of globalization, the penetration of interna-
tional capital, the spread of new information and communications tech-
nologies and pressure from the international community to promote
democratization and the observance of human rights. The new states
were simultaneously faced with the growing international problems of
organized crime, drug trafficking, ethnic conflict, illegal arms trading,
uncontrolled migration flows and terrorism. Internally, the USSR had
already begun, hesitatingly, on the path of economic reform. The new
states showed great variations in the pace at which they continued this;
typically the process of privatization reflected Russian and Soviet tradi-
tions of corruption, and indeed reinforced them, benefiting only a small
number of people close to the state. With the level of economic activity
continuing the fall which had begun in the last years of Soviet power,
the bulk of the population saw their living standards tumble and many
fell into poverty.
Foreign policy and national identity
For these newly emerging or newly re-emerging states, foreign policy is

closely linked with national identity. In the well-established states of the
West, foreign policy is about the pursuit of the interests of the states or
of groups within them, and the promotion of their own values. The
states seeking to overcome the consequences of Communism have had
to define their own post-Communist values, their place in the world,
and the categories of states they wish to align themselves with. This has
been difficult enough for states such as Poland and Romania, which
formally maintained their independence; the post-Soviet states have
additionally had to create foreign policies which promote the internal
legitimacy of these new polities while serving the broader interests of
the new élites.
What type of national identity did these new states seek to build? All
of them, with the exception of the Russian Federation, have emphasized
to a greater or lesser extent the special link between the state and the
ethnic group after which it was named. The Russian Federation, on the
other hand, like its predecessor, the Russian Soviet Federative Soviet
230 Peter J. S. Duncan
Republic (RSFSR), has normally promoted a geographical (rossiiskaia)

rather than ethnic (russkaia) Russian identity; it was not the whole
homeland of the Russian people but rather the residual of Soviet
territory after the non-Russian union republics were subtracted.
The rehabilitation of ethnic and, in the Russian case, imperial identi-
ties and the ending of state-sponsored atheism gave new possibilities
for the external orientation of national identities and the type of state
with which the 15 might ally. Among these possible trajectories were
liberal-Westernizing or European, Communist, nationalist, Central
Asian, Eurasian, pan-Orthodox, pan-Slav, pan-Turkic, pan-Islamic, pan-
Romanian, Nordic, pan-Persian and imperial Russian conceptions (not
all being mutually exclusive). Samuel P. Huntington’s theory of the
‘clash of civilizations’ predicts that the essential conflicts in world poli-
tics will be between the great religio-cultural blocs of the world, such as
the Western (Catholic and Protestant), the Orthodox-Slav and the
Islamic.5 Adherents of this theory might predict that the Central Asian
states and Azerbaijan should join the Islamic world, Russia, Moldova
and Georgia should emphasize their Orthodoxy, the Baltic States should
join the West and Ukraine and Belarus should split up on religious lines.
Certainly such culturally orientated movements exist in all these states,
hoping to push the regimes in the desired direction. Nevertheless the
states themselves, have all tended towards, or moved between, policies
of Westernism, Eurasianism and pragmatism.
Classifying foreign policies
Earlier attempts at classification of the foreign policies of the post-Soviet

states have focussed on the relationship with Russia and the CIS.
Hendrik Spruyt divided the states, other than Russia itself, into those
with a ‘cooperation–acquiescence’ or a ‘disengagement–resistance’ atti-
tude to CIS integration in the early years. His classification has the merit
of allowing for policy change; for Spruyt, Georgia, Moldova and
Azerbaijan moved from being in the latter category in 1992 to the for-
mer in 1994.6 Kuzio in 2000 divided the fifteen states into ‘Westernizers’
and ‘Russophiles/Slavophiles’, and further divided both these groups
into ‘radicals’ and ‘pragmatists’. The radical Westernizers were, not sur-
prisingly, the Baltic States while the pragmatic Westernizers were the
member states of GUUAM (see later), that is, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan,
Azerbaijan and Moldova, and also Turkmenistan. Belarus was the
only radical in the Russophile group, the pragmatic members of which
were Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Armenia.7 These
six Russophiles were the remaining members of the CIS Collective

Security Treaty, or Tashkent Treaty, signed in May 1992.
One weakness of Kuzio’s approach is that it presents the GUUAM states
as more uniformly consistent in their opposition to Russia’s policies than
they really are. Another is that it obscures the Westernizing tendencies
that are present among all the pragmatic ‘Russophiles’, above all in
Russia itself. Indeed in the early 1990s Russia was more Westernizing
than Russophile in its foreign policy. The term ‘Russophile–Slavophile’
hides the extent to which the Central Asian states, including Uzbekistan,
have been aiming not only at maintaining Russia’s interest in the region
but have also sought to increase co-operation among themselves. For
this reason the term ‘Eurasianism’ is preferable to Russophilism or
Slavophilism.
Eurasianism (evraziistvo) emerged as a trend among Russian émigré
thinkers in the 1920s. They argued that the peoples of the Soviet Union,
be they Slav and Orthodox or Turkic and Muslim, had melded together
over the centuries of Russian rule and now shared particular characteris-
tics which laid the basis for political unity.8 In the post-Soviet context,
‘Eurasianist’ refers to policies which give priority towards promoting the
co-operation and unity of the post-Soviet states. In general, Eurasianists
tend towards co-operation with China and certain Middle Eastern states
such as Iran, rather than with the West; and give low priority to human
rights questions in international affairs. Westernism, on the other hand,
refers to policies aimed at co-operating with the United States, the
European Union, NATO, and the plethora of international organizations
dominated by Western states which promote market economies and
democracy, and from which the USSR was excluded. Not all those who
favoured a Westernist foreign policy were also attracted to liberal
democracy and market reform; Leonid Kravchuk, for example, President
of Ukraine from December 1991 to July 1994, pursued an anti-Russian
and pro-Western foreign policy while failing to implement much-
needed domestic economic reform. On the other hand those imple-
menting policies of democratization, human rights and economic
reform nearly always favoured a Westernist policy, or failing that a prag-
matist position. ‘Pragmatism’ is here taken to mean a policy which
avoided ideological commitment to Westernism or Eurasianism, and in
practice took elements from both, showing flexibility in the pursuit of
state, institutional or personal interest. Those regimes whose domestic
ideology was based on nationalism tended towards a Westernist foreign
policy. This applied to the Baltic States, to Georgia under Zviad
Gamsakhurdia, President from April 1991 to January 1992, and to
Azerbaijan under the pan-Turkist Abulfaz Elchibei, President from June

1992 to June 1993. No regimes based on political Islam or any other
religion-based ideology came to power in the 15 states; all pursued poli-
cies of Westernism, Eurasianism or pragmatism.
Making foreign ministries
The new states did not have to build their foreign ministries out of noth-
ing. In 1944 Stalin had ordered the creation of People’s Commissariats
of Foreign Affairs in all the Union Republics, with the aim of them all
entering the new United Nations as full members, with the right to vote
in the General Assembly. The West refused to agree to a situation in
which Stalin would have a bloc of 16 votes automatically in support of
his policies, and allowed only the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics,
which had suffered particularly from the Nazi occupation, and the
USSR itself, to take their seats in the UN. Consequently Ukraine and
Belarus, while undeviatingly loyal to the Soviet line, developed a signifi-
cant diplomatic cadre, experienced in the work of the UN and associ-
ated international organizations. The foreign ministries of the other
republics, however, were small and insignificant bodies, with no foreign
representation, and concerned with matters such as the visits of foreign
dignitaries to the republic.
This inactivity continued until the elections to the republican
Supreme Soviets in 1990, when in some republics the victorious opposi-
tion forces sought to put content into their foreign ministries as part of
their struggle for sovereignty or independence against the central insti-
tutions of the USSR. In the RSFSR, following the election of Boris El’tsin
as Chair of the Supreme Soviet and the Declaration of State Sovereignty
of the RSFSR, in May and June 1990 respectively, a search began for
a new foreign minister. While the CPSU Central Committee and the
USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) wanted to foist on El’tsin some-
one who would be loyal to them, Vladimir Lukin, Chairperson of the
Committee on International Affairs of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet,
recommended the appointment of Andrei Kozyrev.9
Born in Brussels in 1951, Kozyrev was a radical supporter of
Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy, which promoted interna-
tional co-operation and interdependence instead of confrontation with
capitalism. Kozyrev had risen to be head of the Department of
International Organizations within the Soviet MFA. When appointed
head of the Russian MFA in October 1990, Kozyrev inherited a staff of
70, while the USSR ministry had 3500 employees at the headquarters in
Smolensk Square and ‘thousands’ more abroad.10 Between then and

December 1991, the Russian MFA grew rapidly, recruiting among Soviet
diplomats who were disillusioned with Gorbachev’s vacillations and
compromises with the conservative wing of Soviet politics. It was
the Soviet MFA, however, which continued to be internationally
recognized.
Following the formation of the CIS, El’tsin decreed on 16 December
1991 that the Russian MFA would take over Soviet embassies and prop-
erty abroad and decide on the future of Soviet diplomatic cadres.11
Kozyrev returned to Smolensk Square and his ministry absorbed the
bulk of the Soviet MFA. While Russia was thus incomparably better off
in the construction of its foreign ministry than any of the other post-
Soviet states, it still suffered problems. Some of its older employees
retained the mindset of the Cold War era, remaining suspicious of the
United States and of the new Russian leadership. The attempt at ‘shock
therapy’ to reform the Russian economy in January 1992 led to a crisis
in tax collection and a drastic reduction in the funds available to the
MFA. This led to cuts in the real value of salaries and the defection of
many of the younger generation of diplomats to careers in business.
Foreign travel was no longer the privilege of a few but available to all
who could afford it, subject to visas from the receiving country.
Graduates from the traditional sources of recruitment, the Moscow State
Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and the Diplomatic
Academy, both within the MFA, preferred to go straight into business
careers. Nevertheless, by mid-1998 the ministry still had 3170 people
working in the central apparatus and 8227 abroad.12
At the other extreme from Russia, Estonia started from scratch. In
1990 the new Estonian Supreme Soviet, with a pro-independence major-
ity, appointed Lennart Meri as Foreign Minister. Born in 1929, he had
been deported with his family to Siberia in 1941 after the Soviet occu-
pation of the Baltic States, and later made a career as a film-maker in
Estonia. Having been founder of the Estonian Congress, on the radical
wing of the nationalist movement, he began his work as Foreign
Minister by liquidating the old ministry and sacking all the employees.
They were replaced by supporters of Estonian independence and
Estonians returning from exile.13 Meri’s successor as Foreign Minister
had been in Sweden, managing the pop group Abba. From 1997 to 2002
the Foreign Minister was an Estonian-American, a former analyst at
Radio Free Europe, Toomas Hendrik Ilves. One characteristic of the
Estonian ministry in particular, although also apparent in the other
Baltic States and to a lesser extent elsewhere, was the extreme youth of
top officials; Juri Luik was only 26 when he became Minister without
portfolio with responsibility for dealing with Russia, while the Political
Director of the ministry was only 22.
Although Lithuania was more radical than Estonia in its approach
to independence in 1990, the Landsbergis leadership was less radical
in relation to the foreign ministry. The Supreme Soviet, its Foreign
Relations Committee, and its Presidium under Vytautas Landsbergis
became the central focus of foreign policy-making. Algirdas Saudargas,
an MP from the victorious nationalist movement Sajudis, was appointed
Foreign Minister. Only one of the deputy foreign ministers was sacked,
and at least half of the fifteen-strong staff were retained. This reflected
the extent to which the desire for independence had penetrated the
Lithuanian élite. There followed a big expansion to around 50 or a
100 within a year, and now to around 300. The emigration was a source
providing five or six ambassadors, nearly all from the USA. Given the
low salaries, the limited opportunities to travel and the perilous state of
the government, which was subject to a trade blockade by Moscow in
retaliation for its declaration of independence, those who joined the
Lithuanian foreign ministry in 1990–91 were probably motivated more
by a sense of civic duty and patriotism than by careerism.14 At the top
level of the ministry, politicization seems now to be giving way to pro-
fessionalism. Changes in government have not necessarily led to the
sacking of deputy foreign ministers; and Saudargas has been Foreign
Minister for most of the independence period, serving two and a half
years after his first appointment in 1990 and returning to office in 1997,
where he remained despite the return of the Left in the 2001 elections.
The diaspora has played a greater role in Armenia. The American-born
Raffi Hovannisian was the first Foreign Minister of independent
Armenia, but resigned in October 1992 in protest at what he consi-
dered President Levon Ter-Petrosian’s conciliatory attitude in relation
to Nagorno-Karabakh (see below). This reflected a clear trend for the
diaspora to take a harder line than Ter-Petrosian, who remained
President until February 1998, not only on Nagorno-Karabakh but also
in relation to Turkey over the demand for recognition of the genocide of
Armenians during the First World War. In 1994 the government banned
the anti-Turkish Armenian Revolutionary Federation (the Dashnaks),
which was supported by the diaspora, calling it a foreign organization,
and the 1995 Constitution banned dual citizenship, in an attempt to
prevent diaspora Armenians from participating in Armenian politics.
The other eight post-Soviet states reacted less radically to the need to
enhance their foreign ministries. In Ukraine, Anatoliy Zlenko, a career
diplomat in the Ukrainian service, born in 1938, had been promoted

from First Deputy Foreign Minister to Minister in July 1990. He
remained at his post after independence. Similarly Belarus retained
Pyotr Krauchanka; he had served in Party posts until being appointed
Foreign Minister, also in July 1990. Other states sought the return of
compatriots who had been serving in Soviet diplomacy. Thus
Kyrgyzstan called back Roza Otunbayeva, who had been Kyrgyz Foreign
Minister from 1986 to 1989 but since then had been working in Moscow
on the Soviet Commission for UNESCO and had been named as Soviet
Ambassador to Malaysia and Brunei. When the Russian Ministry took
over the Soviet Ministry, this appointment was confirmed, but she
returned to Bishkek to resume as Foreign Minister in January 1992.15
While all of the post-Soviet states succeeded in creating and main-
taining independent foreign ministries, problems persisted for some
time in finding premises for embassies. Here the Baltic States were at an
advantage because the West had not recognized the Soviet occupation,
and in most cases preserved the pre-war embassy buildings for their
former owners. By the end of the 1990s, most states had embassies in
New York, Geneva and at least the major Western capitals. Russia had
140 embassies, while Lithuania had 30. An exception was Moldova,
which appears to be the poorest country in Europe and lacks funds for
staff and premises.
Implementing foreign policies
Russia
Whether Russia is, or should be, part of the West, or whether it is a
fundamentally different sort of society with its own role was at the core
of Russian foreign policy debate in the first decade after 1991. This time-
honoured discourse on Russian national identity was now complicated
by divisions over how Russia should be defined: was it just the Russian
Federation, or was it the whole of the FSU, or the CIS? Russians had
always identified with the USSR as a whole, so if the borders of the state
were now to be restricted to the RSFSR, then surely Russia should still
have some special role within the former Soviet borders? On the forma-
tion of the CIS in December 1991, it was agreed that Russia would be the
successor state to the USSR, inheriting its rights and obligations, includ-
ing its permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Russian foreign
policy was initially linked with the adoption of an IMF programme of
economic reform in January 1992 and the desire of El’tsin and Kozyrev
for Russia to become a ‘normal’ country and to join the ‘civilized’ West.
Indeed, this early period was the most Westernist of Russian policy.
Kozyrev hoped to join organizations such as the IMF, GATT, to make the
G7 the G8, and to win from the West large amounts of aid, investment
and market access.
The original plans for CIS strategic co-operation failed, partly due to
Ukrainian opposition, and Russia created its own Ministry of Defence
under General Pavel Grachev in May 1992. Western concerns about
nuclear proliferation led ultimately to Russia taking over the missiles
sited in other CIS states, or their being destroyed. As far as the defence
of borders was concerned, Moscow considered that it was cheaper,
where possible, to defend the old Soviet borders, in co-operation with
local forces, rather than to create a new border around the Russian
Federation. Russia asserted its control over units of the former Soviet
Army deployed outside the Russian Federation, except where they had
been taken over by the host state, as in Ukraine. This meant that Russia
necessarily found itself involved in ethnic and political conflicts outside
its territory, which had emerged under perestroika and contributed to the
weakening of the Soviet regime. The Transdnestrian Republic had been
proclaimed in the eastern part of Moldova by the local Russian-speaking
nomenklatura, capitalizing on the fears of ethnic Ukrainians and
Russians about their future if Moldova should unite with Romania. In
June 1992, the Russian 14th Army intervened to prevent the Moldovan
forces from moving against Transdnestria.16 In Tajikistan, the 201st
Motorized Rifle Division found itself in the middle of a Civil War in
1992. Although supposedly neutral, from late 1992 to mid-1993 the
Russian forces consolidated the defeat of the Islamist forces and the
return to power of a coalition led by ex-Communists, headed by
Immomali Rakhmonov, with the Russian Federal Border Service keeping
out Islamists based in Afghanistan.17 In Georgia, Russian forces were
caught up in the struggles for autonomy being waged by South Ossetia
and Abkhazia.
It was not the Foreign Ministry but the Ministry of Defence, however,
which was taking the lead in issues relating to the FSU. Kozyrev came
under repeated attack for neglecting Russia’s interests in the ‘near
abroad’ while concentrating on building relations with the West. In par-
ticular, the Vice-President, General Aleksandr Rutskoi, and leaders of the
Russian Supreme Soviet criticized the Foreign Ministry for abandoning
the Russian-speaking population in the former republics. In May 1992
the Supreme Soviet declared the transfer of the Crimea, where two thirds
of the population were ethnic Russians, from the RSFSR to Ukraine in
1954 invalid; this was tantamount to a claim on Ukrainian territory and

embarrassed El’tsin and the government. In July 1993 the Supreme
Soviet declared the principal naval port of the Crimea, Sevastopol,
a ‘Russian city’. Ukraine took the matter to the UN Security Council, and
the Russian delegate found himself in the awkward position of having to
vote for a resolution condemning his own parliament. Opposition
between executive and legislature was compounded by disarray between
the Foreign and Defence Ministries. With ethnic conflict continuing in
various parts of the CIS, El’tsin proposed in February 1993 that the
United Nations or the Conference on Security and Co-operation in
Europe should give Russia a ‘security mandate’ to maintain order
throughout the FSU. Russia feared that its own security could be threat-
ened by spill-over effects, such as arms smuggling and uncontrolled
flows of refugees. While El’tsin’s proposal was accepted neither by the
international community nor by the CIS states, the military assumed
the duty of acting as ‘peace-keeping forces’ (literally ‘peace-making
forces’, mirotvorcheskie sily) in Moldova, Tajikistan and Georgia, in the
latter cases with a CIS mandate.18 The way this was carried out, however,
was often against the policies of the Foreign Ministry, prompting
Kozyrev to object that ‘the armed forces have a foreign policy of their
own’ in the FSU.19
El’tsin succeeded in winning Western support for the violent dissolu-
tion of the Supreme Soviet in October 1993. The victory of the Russian
nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovskii, whose Liberal Democratic Party of
Russia won the party-list section of the seats in the December 1993 elec-
tion to the new State Duma, was not a major factor in Russia pursuing a
more assertive foreign policy in the ensuing period. Rather, the eupho-
ria at the ending of the Communist system and at Russia’s independence
from Soviet rule had disappeared among much of the population and
the élite, and been replaced by nostalgia for the superpower era. It was
the feeling among the policy-makers that while Russia had co-operated
with the West over sanctions on former friends of the USSR, and given
in to American pressure over the supply of cryogenic rocket engines to
India, the IMF reform plan had failed miserably and the West was not
giving Russia the expected aid. While Russia joined the International
Contact Group on the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina set up in April
1994, its opinion was ignored when NATO proceeded to launch air strikes
on the Bosnian Serbs.20 Russian public opinion was supportive of the
Serbs, and Russian nationalist politicians made much of the similarity
between the positions of the Serbs and the Russians, as Orthodox
peoples who after the break-up of a federation had found themselves as
minorities in the new states. Kozyrev, however, pointed out that Russia
itself had a partly Muslim population, and should follow a policy dic-
tated by international law and the support of human rights.
Most importantly, the whole of the Russian political spectrum felt
betrayed by plans for NATO enlargement. Russia saw NATO as a relic
of the Cold War, and argued that the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which included all the FSU states,
should have increased powers and be the main forum for European secu-
rity issues. Already in August 1993, when El’tsin in an unguarded state-
ment in Warsaw said that Russia would not object to Poland joining
NATO, the Foreign Ministry had been swift to clarify that the opposite
was the case. Despite much opposition in Russia, Kozyrev was able to
sign up for NATO’s Partnership for Peace in June 1994,21 but in December
El’tsin forced him to postpone signing Russia’s partnership agreement, in
protest at the Clinton Administration’s renewed support for NATO
enlargement. Russia’s potential was also weakened by the completion
of its military withdrawal from Germany and the Baltic States in
August 1994.
Among Kozyrev’s critics were not only Zhirinovskii and the
Communists, led by Gennadii Ziuganov, but members of the security
structures. In November 1993 Evgenii Primakov, leader since 1991 of the
Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), issued a report on the dangers of
NATO enlargement.22 A counter to this was to strengthen integration in
the CIS, which Primakov advocated in another report in September
1994.23 Until then the Russian Westernist reformers had favoured reori-
enting Russia away from the CIS, and had effectively ended the rouble
zone to avoid Russia having to pay for the budget deficits of the former
republics. El’tsin, however, was tending more to a pragmatic Eurasianist
view that favoured CIS integration, but on terms which were favourable
to Russia; this was put forward in his presidential decree of September
1995, ‘Russia’s Strategic Course with the Member-States of the
Commonwealth of Independent States.’24
Russia’s position with both the West and the CIS was weakened,
however, by the moves to crush Chechen independence. The indiscrim-
inate bombing of Chechnia, beginning in December 1994, and the cruel
treatment of Chechen civilians led to protests in the West, culminating
in the suspension of the Partnership and Co-operation Agreement with
the EU. Russia’s neighbours were not only horrified by the preference for
force and repression rather than negotiation but also concerned by the
poor performance of the Russian Army. In particular the Central Asian
states began to question whether they could rely on Russia to guarantee
their security.25 Kozyrev publicly supported Russia’s actions in Chechnia

and in April 1995 even went so far as to warn that Russia might have to
use force to protect the rights of ethnic Russians in the former Soviet
republics.26
Under attack from both Eurasianists and Westernists, Kozyrev was
further undermined by El’tsin’s open declaration that he would sack
him. In fact, when Kozyrev finally resigned as Foreign Minister after
being re-elected to the State Duma in the December 1995 elections, he
was the only member of the 1991 Gaidar government still in office. The
Communists emerged as the largest party after the elections, forcing
El’tsin to adopt a new strategy to ensure his re-election as President in
July 1996. He promoted Primakov to be Foreign Minister, aware of the
wide following that the experienced politician had in Russia.
As Foreign Minister, Primakov devoted much of his attention to
relations with CIS states. Little progress was made in improving the
functioning of the CIS as a whole, which continued to produce a mass
of decisions that remained largely unimplemented.27 Primakov prag-
matically focussed on those states which were more susceptible to closer
links with Russia. When in March 1996 the Communist-dominated
Duma passed a resolution denouncing the dissolution of the Soviet
Union, CIS and Baltic States leaders condemned the move. Primakov
responded by pointing to the unreality of the Communists’ rhetoric, but
at the same time appealed to the popular nostalgia for the Soviet super-
power by creating, together with Belarus, a ‘Community of Sovereign
Republics’ (SSR in Russian). This was not a USSR (SSSR in Russian) but
evidence for the voters that El’tsin’s Russia was beginning to gather the
lands together again.
El’tsin defeated Ziuganov in the July presidential elections, but had
already disappeared from public view because of the heart ailments that
were to dog his presidency to the end. NATO, which had soft-pedalled
the enlargement issue in order to ensure a Communist defeat, now
made clear its intention to expand. Primakov countered by moving
closer to China, which was now a major customer of the Russian arms
industry, and persuaded it to join Russia in declarations of opposition to
NATO’s plans. The CIS states, on the other hand, were unwilling to incur
American displeasure; only Belarus openly supported Russia, and in
April 1997 was rewarded with a ‘Treaty of Union’. Liberals in the Russian
government were wary of integration with Belarus, because of the eco-
nomic cost to Russia and the authoritarian behaviour of President
Aliaksandr Lukashenka. Despite Primakov’s vocal opposition, NATO
made clear that Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary would be
admitted to NATO, taking the alliance up to the Polish border with the
Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Nevertheless Primakov negotiated the
NATO–Russia Founding Act, which was signed in May 1997, creating a
Permanent Joint Council of the 16 NATO members plus Russia, giving
Russia a consultative voice in the alliance.
Almost at once Russia also signed a long-awaited friendship treaty
with Ukraine, having reached agreement over the status of Sevastopol.
This did not prevent Ukraine together with Georgia, Azerbaijan and
Moldova from forming GUAM, which appeared to be an anti-Russian
grouping within the CIS, in October 1997. A further setback to Russia’s
world role was the default on government debt and the crash of the
rouble in August 1998. Because of this crisis, Primakov was promoted to
Prime Minister, at the insistence of the State Duma, and his deputy Igor’
Ivanov replaced him as Foreign Minister. Relations with the West wors-
ened, as Russia became more concerned about America’s international
behaviour. In late 1998 Primakov, an Arabist, condemned the Anglo-
American bombing of Iraq. He raised the rhetoric still further after
NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in March 1999, without the approval
of the UN Security Council, in an effort to prevent President Slobodan
Milošević from driving out the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo.
In protest against the bombing, Primakov, en route to the IMF in
Washington, turned his plane around in mid-air and flew back to Russia.
Against the background of the Kosovo War, the April 1999 Washington
summit of NATO marked the organization’s 50th anniversary by adopt-
ing a new ‘Strategic Concept’. This changed the nature of NATO from
being a defensive alliance to one claiming responsibility for security
throughout Europe. It admitted the three new members and promised
that its doors were open to future enlargement.28 Russia was further
humiliated by the announcement in Washington that Uzbekistan
would join GUAM, which then became GUUAM.
The Kosovo War seems to have begun another period in Russia’s for-
eign policy. Despite opposition to the NATO bombing, Russia remained
a part of the Western-led negotiating process, and agreed to contribute
forces to the UN force in Kosovo, K-FOR. Before NATO forces were able
to move in, a Russian unit from the UN force in Bosnia moved through
Serbia to take control of the main airport in Kosovo, near Priština. This
was deeply embarrassing to Igor’ Ivanov, but clearly won El’tsin’s
approval. At the same time, NATO found that it needed Russia to per-
suade Milošević to accept a settlement. Russia’s apparent success in the
Second Chechen War, at least in late 1999 to early 2000, the resignation
of the infirm El’tsin and the election of the young and active Vladimir
Putin as President in March 2000 all gave Russia a new image in the
world.29
Putin embarked on an extensive programme of foreign travel, visiting
CIS countries, Europe, China, India and America, and including states
such as Mongolia, North Korea and Cuba that had been friends of the
USSR but which had been neglected for the previous decade. He suc-
ceeded in pushing through the State Duma the START-2 treaty, agreed
between Kozyrev and the USA in January 1993 and significantly cutting
Russia’s nuclear arms burden, which El’tsin had never been able to get
ratified. The June 2000 foreign policy concept expressed goodwill to
nearly all humanity; it expressed hopes for good relations even with
Estonia and Latvia. Only the United States was mentioned in a negative
context. It criticized the latter’s ‘economic and power domination’ and
the consequent weakening of the role of the UN Security Council, but
emphasized the need for Russian–American co-operation.30 Putin
sought to build a coalition against American proposals to withdraw
from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty and build a missile defence
system, gaining the support of the EU in October 2000.
Seeking support for Russian action in Chechnia, which was now
described as an anti-terrorist operation, Putin linked the Chechen rebels,
who were increasingly stressing their Islamic identity, to terrorism
in Central Asia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kashmir, the Arab world and
the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Following terrorist incursions of the
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) into Batken, Kyrgyzstan, in the
summer of 2000, CIS interior ministers agreed in September to establish
an anti-terrorist centre in Bishkek. Putin’s dynamism, together with a
Russian economic recovery, strengthened Russia’s position among
all the CIS states. Russia continued to blame the West for allowing
the activity of ethnic Albanian armed groups, which it linked with
international terrorism, in Kosovo and Macedonia. Following the
attacks on New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001, Putin
overcame Russian military resistance to enforce co-operation with US
security organizations in the fight against Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban.
While Putin was initially seen as a Russian nationalist, the tactical
flexibility he demonstrated when he was given the opportunity of a
coalition with the West places him firmly in the pragmatist category.
Talk of closer relations with the EU and even NATO was accompanied
by the pursuit of integration with Belarus, now accepted by nearly
all shades of Russian opinion, and by a closer involvement with the
security of the CIS states.
The Baltic States

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania began to run their own foreign policy
not in December 1991 but in March 1990. The aim was to win foreign
support in their struggle for independence from the USSR. With the col-
lapse of the August 1991 coup, independence and recognition were
achieved by early September. There was no question, for the indigenous
populations, of the countries joining the CIS; rather, they wished to join
the Euro-Atlantic institutions as quickly as possible. The immediate
need, however, was to secure the withdrawal of the Soviet, and then
Russian troops. El’tsin and the Russian democrats had developed work-
ing relations with the Baltic nationalists from at least May 1989, in the
USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and these had developed further
after the republican elections in March 1990, when all began to
work together against Gorbachev’s centre. El’tsin was committed
to withdrawing troops.
The Russian leadership, however, was deeply disillusioned by the
citizenship and language laws passed in Estonia and Latvia. These gov-
ernments feared that if all the Russians and other minorities were given
citizenship, they might form an important political block in favour of
continued links with Russia. Lithuania, which gave all its residents the
opportunity of citizenship, caused some suspicion in Estonia and Latvia
by agreeing to a deal for the withdrawal of Russian forces by August
1993, a full year before the withdrawal from the others. Russia needed to
retain transit rights across Lithuania to Kaliningrad oblast’, and this may
perhaps also have made it more amenable to the Lithuanians. The par-
liamentary victory of the ex-Communists in 1992 and the election of
Algirdas Brazauskas, their leader and former First Secretary of the
Communist Party of Lithuania, as President in 1993 led to a softening in
attitudes towards Moscow, although the orientation was still towards
the West. Brazauskas succeeded in resolving the differences over transit,
and persuading Moscow not to take seriously the occasional claim by
Lithuanian nationalists on the territory of Kaliningrad.31
As far as Estonia and Latvia were concerned, however, Russia more
than once threatened to interrupt its troop withdrawal because of the
treatment of the Russian minority. The main issue, however, was mili-
tary pensioners’ rights rather than those of the Russians in general.
Kozyrev’s policy of internationalizing human rights issues led to Russia
criticizing Estonia and Latvia at the OSCE. Indeed an important activity
for Estonia and Latvia in the 1990s was the rebuttal in European fora of
Russian accusations about the ill-treatment of minorities, and making
counter-accusations against Russia over Chechnia. Estonia was admitted

to the Council of Europe in 1993 and Latvia in 1995 after some amend-
ments to its citizenship rules. These decisions led to accusations of dou-
ble standards from Russia, which was not admitted until 1996. The
OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities continued to monitor
the situation in Estonia and Latvia until December 2001. Estonia has
dropped territorial claims on Russia, but both countries are offended
by Russia’s continued refusal to recognize that they were forced into
joining the USSR in 1940.
The Baltic States retain close co-operation among themselves and with
the Nordic States. All belong to the Council of Baltic Sea States, which
includes Russia, Germany and Poland. Like all the post-Soviet states, the
Baltic States joined Partnership for Peace, and all three are vigorously
asserting their claims to NATO membership. NATO has encouraged the
formation of BALTBAT, the Baltic Peacekeeping Battalion, and Poland is
helping Lithuania develop its defence capability.32 Although Putin has
toned down the rhetoric, Russia remains as opposed to their member-
ship of NATO as to that of the CIS countries. The Baltic States are the
only post-Soviet states to become associate members of the Western
European Union, which Russia sees as less threatening than NATO.
Moreover, the Europe Agreements signed with the EU in 1995 gave them
a higher status than the CIS states. Estonia had the advantage of its close
relationship with Finland, which promoted its claims within the EU.
Tallinn opened membership negotiations in March 1998, with Riga and
Vilnius following in February 2000. Undoubtedly the Baltic States are
the most Westernist of the post-Soviet states, with considerable success
in relations with Western institutions. In 2002 they were invited to join
NATO and the EU.
Belarus
At the other extreme is Belarus. With the Belarusian Communists
discredited after the August coup, supporters of sovereignty came to
the fore and Stanislau Shushkevich, Chairperson of the Supreme Soviet,
was one of the founders of the CIS. But Belarusian identity has rarely
manifested itself in opposition to Russian identity. It can be compared
more with Siberian identity, in the sense that people in Belarus usually
considered themselves part of the wider Russian identity. The more
Polonized, Catholic population in the West was not as influential
in Belarus as Western Ukrainians were in Ukrainian politics. Moreover, the
Belarusian economic élites, unwilling to embrace reform, sought

support from Russia as preferable to independence. In April 1993, the
Supreme Soviet approved the CIS Collective Security Treaty, but
Shushkevich refused to sign it, relenting only in January 1994. By the
1994 presidential elections, both leading candidates, Prime Minister
Viacheslav Kebich and the former collective farm chairperson,
Lukashenka, agreed on the need for closer relations with Russia. Since
his victory, Lukashenka has been a fervent advocate of union with
Russia. Belarus was a founder member of the Customs Union with Russia
and Kazakhstan formed in January 1995, joined later by Kyrgyzstan in
March 1996 and Tajikistan in February 1999, and re-designated as the
Eurasian Economic Community in October 2000.33 The development of
the ‘Union State’ with Russia has proceeded under Putin. The geograph-
ical position of Belarus, with Minsk on the main route from Moscow via
Smolensk to Warsaw and Berlin, makes the country a bridge to (or shield
against) Europe, and for Westernists the Union State brings Russia closer
to Europe. For Eurasianists, reunion with Belarus is important for its
strategic value and as a model for all the CIS countries, especially
Ukraine.34
Lukashenka has dealt harshly with his opponents, several of whom
have disappeared, believed murdered. The OSCE and EU criticized his
dissolution of the Supreme Soviet and the November 1996 referendum
extending his term of office. Lukashenka is outspoken in his denuncia-
tion of the West and his opposition to NATO enlargement is more
virulent that Russia’s.35 Moscow and the CIS states, however, support
Lukashenka despite his dictatorial regime and have criticized the
OSCE for meddling in Belarusian affairs. When Lukashenka was re-
elected President in September 2001, Putin congratulated him on his
‘convincing victory’.36
Ukraine
On 1 December 1991 the voters of Ukraine not only opted for inde-
pendence by referendum with 90 per cent in favour, but also elected the
former ideology secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Leonid
Kravchuk, as President. Riding on a nationalist tide, Kravchuk’s aim was
to preserve the power of the old nomenklatura. The independence refer-
endum was the event which triggered the formation of the CIS. Whereas
the Russians hoped that the CIS would be a viable organization,
Kravchuk soon made it clear that he shared the views of the leader of the
nationalist movement Rukh, that it was ‘a civilized form for [managing]
the collapse of the Union’.37 His aim was to lead the ‘return to Europe’
from which Ukraine had supposedly been excluded by Russian imperi-
alism. He was hampered by the image which Ukraine soon attracted
in the West, of corruption worse even than in Russia, hyperinflation
and potential nuclear disaster arising from the plant at Chernobyl. Faced
with unofficial Russian claims on the Crimea, some nationalists argued
for Ukraine to retain its nuclear weapons, provoking Western pressure
and an American-mediated solution to persuade Ukraine to implement
unilateral nuclear disarmament. While Rukh called for leaving the
CIS, the pragmatic Kravchuk maintained Ukraine’s membership, while
frustrating attempts by Russia and others at promoting integration.
By 1994 it was clear that Ukraine was geographically split, with the
ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the East favouring a
Eurasianist restoration of economic links with Russia and the CIS while
Ukrainian-speakers in the West favoured closer ties to the Euro-Atlantic
community. Leonid Kuchma defeated Kravchuk in the presidential elec-
tions of June–July by appealing to the Easterners, and promising to
restore Russian as an official language. In office Kuchma failed to do the
latter, and was consequently criticized by the Russian Foreign Ministry,
but restored more balance in Ukrainian foreign policy between a
Westernist and Eurasianist position. Ukraine officially pursues a ‘multi-
vectored’ foreign policy. The country was dependent for its energy on
Russia, and despite becoming the third largest recipient of US aid (after
Israel and Egypt), because of its economic crisis it built up billions of dol-
lars of debts to Russia for oil and gas deliveries. In May 1997 the dispute
over the division and location of the Black Sea Fleet, unsolved since
1991, was settled by Ukraine agreeing to lease to Russia for 20 years the
principal bays of Sevastopol, in exchange for debt forgiveness amount-
ing to 2.5 billion US dollars.38
As noted above, the subsequent Russo-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty
did not prevent Ukraine from becoming a major force in GUAM. These
countries all had the perception of Russia having exploited ethnic con-
flict on their territory for political gain; and they sought to reduce their
dependence on Russia for energy supply or transit, by promoting the
Transport Corridor Europe–Caucasus–Asia (TRACECA). Ukraine actively
participated in Partnership for Peace, and in March 2000 the North
Atlantic Council met outside a NATO state for the first time, in Ukraine.
The West failed, however, to meet Ukraine’s economic expectations; the
EU did not see Ukraine as a candidate for membership.
Soon after his election as President, Putin put pressure on Ukraine
for a reorientation. Ukraine joined the CIS Anti-Terrorist Centre in
June 2000, and took part in a CIS air defence exercise in August. In
September 2000 Kuchma dismissed the Foreign Minister, Borys Tarasiuk,
seen as the most pro-Western member of the government. He brought
back Anatoliy Zlenko, and made clear that Russia was henceforth to be
treated more favourably.39 Foreign policy in Ukraine has become more
presidential, with the National Security and Defence Council playing an
important role alongside the Foreign Ministry.40 The scandal around the
headless body of a journalist, Grigorii Gongadze, apparently murdered
on Kuchma’s orders, and discovered in November 2000, further isolated
Kuchma in the West. Putin chose the moment to offer political support
and economic co-operation.41
Moldova
Independent Moldova did not join Romania. It did not want to lose
Transdnestria, which would refuse to join, and moreover the Chişinaŭ
élite did not want to give up the independence it had tasted. By 1994,
after Russian pressure which included interrupting the supply of
energy,42 Moldova had a Constitution which described its language as
Moldovan, not Romanian (contrary to the claims of the pan-
Romanians) and had ratified CIS membership. The focus of Moldovan
foreign policy has been, with the help of the OSCE and together with
Russia, Ukraine and Romania, to regain control over Transdnestria and
the withdrawal of Russian forces; and to secure trade, investment and
aid from the EU. An agreement of 1994 for Russian withdrawal has
been implemented only very slowly, and the enclave remains out
of Moldova’s control. Moldova’s participation in GUUAM is directly
related to what appears to be a continued Russian occupation. The vic-
tory of the Communists, who had talked of joining the Russia–Belarus
Union, in the March 2001 Moldovan parliamentary elections led to
hopes of an improvement in relations with Russia and a settlement with
the rebel region.
Transcaucasia
It was expected in 1991 that Transcaucasia and Central Asia might
become regions where Russia would be strongly challenged by Turkey
and Iran for influence, but ten years on Russia still remains more impor-
tant. Foreign policy in Transcaucasia remains dominated by ethnic con-
flicts, which helped to undermine the Soviet Union and which are now
‘frozen’ behind cease-fire lines but still unresolved. After Shevardnadze
was restored to power in Georgia in 1992, he was unable to regain
control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.43 Ethnic Armenians and

Azerbaijanis fought a war in and around the Armenian enclave
in Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, between 1991 and 1994. While
Armenia denied official involvement, ethnic Armenians gained control
of Karabakh and the Lachin Corridor linking it to Armenia, establishing
a Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. The poor performance of the Azerbaijani
troops contributed to the return to power of the former Communist
First Secretary, Heydar Aliev in 1993. Both Shevardnadze and Aliev suc-
cumbed during 1993 to Russian pressure to join the CIS, in the hope
that this would help them to regain full control over their republics.
Russia brokered a cease-fire in Karabakh in 1994, which has held, but the
subsequent negotiations led by the OSCE Minsk Group have foundered
over the phasing of moves to implement self-determination for the
region. Ter-Petrosian was forced to resign as President of Armenia in
February 1998 because of his attempts to conciliate Azerbaijan, and was
replaced by the Karabakh leader, the more bellicose Robert Kocharian.44
Losing hope in Russia, and seeking Western support, including per-
haps even NATO membership, Georgia and Azerbaijan helped to found
GUAM in 1997. The Clinton Administration was supportive of their
efforts to encourage Western oil companies to build new pipeline sys-
tems to avoid Russia, such as one from Baku through Azerbaijan,
Georgia and Turkey to Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean. The oil
companies have been reluctant to pay the costs, particularly if there are
existing alternatives through Russia. While Azerbaijan has excluded all
Russian forces, Georgia has been in dispute with Russia, demanding the
withdrawal of Russian troops from its remaining bases, and criticizing
the Russian peace-keepers for not allowing Georgian refugees to return
to Abkhazia. Both Azerbaijan and Georgia have developed relations with
Turkey. Georgia and Azerbaijan have also come under pressure from
Russia over suspicions that Chechen fighters have been taking refuge on
their territory,45 and Georgia responded by coming closer to the USA.
Armenia, on the other hand, perceiving hostility from Azerbaijan and
Turkey, has developed a close defence relationship with Russia, giving it
basing rights for 25 years. Armenia also has good ties with Iran, which
itself became an ally of Russia in Caspian affairs.
Central Asia
The five countries of Central Asia – Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – are located between three great
entities: Russia, the former imperial power; China, with its dynamic
economy and vast population; and the Islamic world, represented by

Iran and Afghanistan as immediate neighbours, and to which the region
traditionally belongs. Central Asian foreign policies derive from the
need to prevent domination by any one of these three; the need to
attract foreign investment to develop raw materials and mineral extrac-
tion and help them break out of their geographical isolation; and
the desire to preserve their authoritarian, largely ex-Communist nomen-
klatura regimes from the threat of popular unrest and political Islam.
Turkmenistan, with its gas wealth, proclaimed a policy of neutrality. It
avoided participation in the CIS Customs Union, the Collective Security
Treaty, and the Central Asian Economic Union (CAEU). Its security is
bolstered by bilateral military relations with Russia, and good relations
with Iran.46 After the capture of Kabul by the Taliban in 1996,
Turkmenistan developed a working relationship with the unrecognized
regime in Afghanistan.47 Kazakhstan, with its substantial Slav popula-
tion, and possibly fearing Russian claims on the ethnically Russian
northern and eastern parts of the republic, has been a firm advocate of
CIS integration. Nazarbaev’s idea of a Eurasian Union has been regarded
unenthusiastically by Russia, however, possibly because it moves too far
towards supra-nationality. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have
all joined the Collective Security Treaty and the Eurasian Economic
Community. These states may also fear the aspirations of Uzbekistan
for regional leadership, revealed in its involvement in the factional
struggles within Tajikistan.48
Cutting across these, however, has been the CAEU, formed in August
1994 by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, with both economic
and defence dimensions. With NATO’s encouragement, this led to the
formation of the Central Asian Battalion (CENTRASBAT), analogous to
BALTBAT. Tajikistan joined the CAEU in July 1998 and it was renamed
the Central Asian Economic Community. All five Central Asian states
joined the Economic Co-operation Organization, with the regional
Muslim states of Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey.49
Kyrgyzstan has been the only CIS state to be accepted into the World
Trade Organization, joining in 1998.
Since the Tajik civil war, the states have been concerned at the threat
of Islamic rebellion emanating from Afghanistan. Uzbekistan and Russia
gave support to the Northern Alliance of ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks fight-
ing the Taliban. In 1998, following Taliban victories, Russia, Uzbekistan
and Tajikistan established a coalition to fight ‘religious extremism’.50
This did not prevent Uzbekistan leaving the CIS Collective Security
Treaty and joining GUAM in 1999. Uzbekistan has generally called on
the Central Asians to rely only on themselves for their security, while
the others have been keener to involve Russia. The incursions by the
IMU, which has been linked by the US State Department to bin Laden,
into southern Kyrgyzstan in summer 1999, and again in summer 2000
to Batken and Uzbekistan, gave impetus to security co-operation
between Russia and Central Asia, as noted above.51 The Central Asians
have sought the intervention of the OSCE, accusing it of concentrating
on human rights at the expense of security issues. Additionally, China,
with its own concerns about nationalists in Xinjiang, has become
involved. The Shanghai Forum was originally established by China and
the CIS countries bordering it, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan, to discuss border issues and economic co-operation. In
June 2001 Uzbekistan joined, and it was transformed into the Shanghai
Co-operation Organization, agreeing to establish its own anti-terrorism
centre (like the CIS centre, in Bishkek).
The multitude of organizations that the Central Asians have
established or joined reflects their desire to seek help from all possible
quarters and their pragmatic orientation, even though Uzbekistan has
pursued a much more pro-Western policy than the other states. In these
circumstances it is not surprising that Uzbekistan agreed to host US
forces involved in the fight against the Taliban in October 2001, nor that
the other states together with Russia should co-operate with the
American action. Tajikistan joined Partnership for Peace in February
2002, the last post-Soviet state to do so, at a time when longer-term
American military involvement in the region was looking more likely.
Conclusion
The decade has generally seen a shift towards pragmatism in foreign

policy among the post-Soviet states. The nationalist regimes of
Gamsakhurdia, Elchibei and the Moldovan Popular Front have fallen,
replaced by governments which would deal with Russia within the
framework of the CIS. The leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, in dif-
ferent ways, have lost their illusions in the West, and seen the need to
forge new links in Eurasia, while taking advantage of opportunities in
the West as well. Allen Lynch’s attribution of ‘realism’ to Russian foreign
policy, which he rightly says appeared already under Kozyrev,52 could
be extended to most of the other post-Soviet states. From Lithuania
to Azerbaijan, former Communist leaders have returned to power, or
in most of Central Asia never lost it. These élites are normally a source
of stability in foreign policy. Armenia is an exception, where policy on

Karabakh has if anything become more intransigent; while the Baltic
States have held to a stable Westernist course.
Prior to 11 September 2001, the CIS states were divided into a
Eurasianist group of six states adhering to the Collective Security Treaty
and the Westernist GUUAM group, with Turkmenistan avoiding affilia-
tion to either. The most important set of factors influencing whether a
state has tended to take a Westernist or a Eurasianist position are those
linked with ethnicity and conflict. Where states perceive that Russia has
gained from such conflict on their territories, as in Karabakh, Georgia,
Transdnestria and the Crimea, they have turned to the West. Where
there is already an interest from outside powers, such as the Nordic
countries have in the Baltic States or Western countries have in Caspian
energy resources, this can be an important factor in reducing Russia’s
influence. Less important, but still a factor, is the degree of economic
reform, with the more reformed states being more open to the West as a
partner. Of little relevance is the nature of the political regime.
Uzbekistan, for example, has been consistently more authoritarian than
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, but nonetheless less oriented towards
Russia. Neither is religion a factor; both the Collective Security Treaty
and GUUAM contain a mix of predominantly Christian and predomi-
nantly Muslim states, thereby tending to refute Huntington’s thesis.
Undoubtedly Putin has made a difference in strengthening Russia’s
position in the region as a whole, highlighting the importance of
contingency in foreign policy. Equally, however, if America opts to
take a long-term military interest in Central Asia and the Caucasus, the
political shape of the whole FSU, and indeed the world, could change
dramatically.
1. I gratefully acknowledge information and ideas from the SSEES Post-Soviet

Press Study Group, and particularly from Martin Dewhirst, John Moukas,
Rebecca Carey and Johannes Toepfer.
2. Mark Webber, The International Politics of Russia and the Successor States,
Manchester and New York, 1996.
3. Adeed Dawisha and Karen Dawisha (eds), The Making of Foreign Policy in Russia
and the New States of Eurasia, Armonk, NY and London, 1995.
4. Taras Kuzio, ‘Geopolitical pluralism in the CIS: The emergence of GUUAM’,
European Security, 9(2), 2000, pp. 81–114, and idem, ‘Promoting geopolitical
pluralism in the CIS: GUUAM and Western foreign policy’, Problems of Post-
Communism, 47(3), 2000, pp. 25–35.
5. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations’, Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 1993,

pp. 22–49.
6. Hendrik Spruyt, ‘The prospects for neo-imperial and nonimperial outcomes
in the former Soviet space’, in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott (eds), The
End of Empire: The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective,
Armonk, NY and London, 1997, pp. 315–37 (p. 323).
7. Kuzio, ‘Geopolitical pluralism in the CIS’, p. 82.
8. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, ‘The emergence of eurasianism’, California Slavic
Studies, 4, 1967, pp. 39–72.
9. Andrei Kozyrev, Preobrazhenie, Moscow, 1995, pp. 277–9.
10. Ivan G. Tiouline, ‘Russia. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Through decline
towards renewal’, in Brian Hocking (ed.) Foreign Ministries: Change and
Adaptation, Basingstoke, 1999, pp. 170–87 (p. 171).
11. Ibid, pp. 170–1.
12. A. V. Torkunov et al., Vneshniaia politika Rossiiskoi Federatsii 1992–1999,
Moscow, 1999, p. 19.
13. Interview with Raul Mälk, Ambassador of Estonia in London, and formerly
Minister of Foreign Affairs, London, 6 August 2001.
14. Interview with Justas Paleckis, Ambassador of Lithuania in London, London,
22 August 2001. Paleckis was formerly Vice-Chairperson of the Foreign
Relations Committee of the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet and later adviser to
President Algirdas Brazauskas.
15. Interview with Roza Otunbayeva, Ambassador of the Kyrgyz Republic in
London, London, 28 August 2001.
16. Dov Lynch, Russian Peacekeeping Strategies in the CIS: The Cases of Moldova,
Georgia and Tajikistan, Basingstoke, 2000, pp. 111–18.
17. Lena Jonson, The Tajik War: A Challenge to Russian Policy, London, 1998,
pp. 8–9.
18. Lynch, Russian Peacekeeping Strategies.
19. Roy Allison, ‘Military factors in foreign policy’, in Neil Malcolm, Alex Pravda,
Roy Allison and Margot Light, Internal Factors in Russian Foreign Policy,
Oxford, 1996, pp. 230–85 (p. 264).
20. Michael Anderson, ‘Russia and the former Yugoslavia’, in Mark Webber (ed.)
Russia and Europe: Conflict or Cooperation?, Basingstoke and New York, 2000,
pp. 179–209 (pp. 188–91).
21. Andrei Kozyrev, ‘Russia and NATO: A partnership for a united and peaceful
Europe’, NATO Review, 42(4), 1994, pp. 3–6.
22. Neil Malcolm, ‘Foreign policy making’, in Malcolm et al., Internal Factors,
pp. 101–68 (p. 145).
23. ‘Russia and the CIS: Does the West’s position need adjustment?’, Rossiiskaia
gazeta, 22 September 1994, in Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, 56(38),
1994, pp. 1–5.
24. Mark Webber, CIS Integration Trends: Russia and the Former Soviet South,
London, 1997, pp. 14–16.
25. Roy Allison, ‘The Chechenia conflict: Military and security policy implica-
tions’, in Roy Allison and Christoph Bluth (eds), Security Dilemmas in Russia
and Eurasia, London and Washington, DC, 1998, pp. 241–80 (pp. 264–67).
26. Michael Binyon, ‘Kozyrev threatens force to protect ethnic Russians’, The
Times, 19 April 1995.
27. Richard Sakwa and Mark Webber, ‘The Commonwealth of Independent

States, 1991–1998: Stagnation and survival’, Europe–Asia Studies, 51(3), 1999,
pp. 379–415; Martha Brill Olcott, Anders Åslund and Sherman W. Garnett,
Getting it Wrong: Regional Cooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent
States, Washington, DC, 1999, esp. pp. 1–36.
28. NATO Review, Summit edition, 47(2), 1999.
29. For a liberal Russian view of Russia’s international situation, see Vladimir
Baranovsky, ‘Russia: A part of Europe or apart from Europe?’, International
Affairs (London), 76(3), 2000, pp. 443–58.
30. ‘Kontseptsiia vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Nezavisimaia gazeta,
11 July 2000.
31. Mette Skak, From Empire to Anarchy: Postcommunist Foreign Policy and
International Relations, London, 1996, pp. 192–222.
32. Atis Lejinš, ‘Joining the EU and NATO’, in Atis Lejinš (ed.), Baltic Security
Prospects at the Turn of the 21st Century, Helsinki, 1999, pp. 9–50.
33. Vladimir Mikhailov and Konstantin Drachevskii, ‘Po puti vzaimodeistviia i
sotrudnichestva’, Nezavisimaia gazeta, 4 November 2000.
34. Clelia Rontoyanni, ‘Building the wider Europe: Ambitions and constraints in
Russia’s policies towards Belarus and Ukraine’, Glasgow Papers, No. 3, 2000,
pp. 4–9.
35. Anatoly Rozanov, ‘Belarus: Foreign policy priorities’, in Sherman W. Garnett
and Robert Legvold (eds), Belarus at the Crossroads, Washington DC, 1999,
p. 25.
36. Alice Lagnado, ‘Belarussian election landslide “Undemocratic” ’, The Times,
11 September 2001.
37. Viacheslav Chornovil, quoted in Andrew Wilson, Ukrainian Nationalism in the
1990s: A Minority Faith, Cambridge and New York, 1997, p. 176.
38. James Sherr, ‘Russia–Ukraine rapprochement?: The Black Sea fleet accords’,
Survival, 39(3), 1997, pp. 33–50 (p. 43).
39. James Sherr, ‘The dismissal of Borys Tarasyuk’, Conflict Studies Research Centre
Occasional Brief, 79, 6 October 2000.
40. Paul D’Anieri, Robert Kravchuk and Taras Kuzio, Politics and Society in Ukraine,
Boulder, CO and Oxford, 1999, p. 227.
41. Tat’iana Silina, ‘O chem sheptalis’ prezidenty?’, Zerkalo nedeli, 17 February
2001.
42. Michael W. Miller, ‘Moldova: A state nation. Identity under post-
communism’, Slovo, 7(1), 1994, pp. 56–71 (p. 70).
43. Jonathan Aves, Georgia: From Chaos to Stability?, London, 1993, pp. 26–37.
44. On Karabakh, see Edmund Herzig, The New Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia, London, 1999, pp. 65–73.
45. Nodar Broladze, ‘Gruziia vozvrashchaetsia v sferu vliianiia Rossii?’,
Nezavisimaia gazeta, 27 September 2001.
46. R. Freitag Wirminghaus, ‘Turkmenistan’s place in Central Asia and the
world’, in Mehdi Mozaffari (ed.), Security Politics in the Commonwealth
of Independent States: The Southern Belt, Basingstoke and New York, 1997,
pp. 66–84.
47. John Anderson, The International Politics of Central Asia, Manchester, 1997,
p. 200.
48. Annette Bohr, Uzbekistan: Politics and Foreign Policy, London, 1998, pp. 49–56.
49. Rafis Abazov, The Formation of Post-Soviet International Politics in Kazakhstan,

Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Seattle, WA 1999, pp. 42–9.
50. Lena Jonson, ‘Russia and Central Asia’, in Roy Allison and Lena Jonson (eds),
Central Asian Security: The New International Context, London and Washington,
DC, 2001, pp. 95–126 (p. 100).
51. Roy Allison, ‘Structures and frameworks for security policy cooperation in
Central Asia’, in ibid., pp. 219–46 (pp. 220–3).
52. Allen C. Lynch, ‘The realism of Russia’s foreign policy’, Europe–Asia Studies,
53(1), 2001, pp. 7–31.
13
Conclusion: Stalin’s Death
50 Years On
Wendy Slater
Our past hasn’t become past yet – the main problem of this
country is that we don’t know when it will become past.1
The chapters in this book were prompted by an anniversary – the pass-

ing of a decade since the demise of the Soviet Union. Contributors to the
conference from which this book developed were asked to reflect upon
what those ten years had taught them about their various fields of study.
Between holding the conference and publishing the volume, there
was another significant anniversary in the former Soviet Union –
50 years since the death of Stalin in March 1953. Despite the artificiality
of ‘round number’ anniversaries as historical markers, there is still
an argument for using them to prompt timely analysis. In this case,
I want to ask how the half-century anniversary of Stalin’s death was
marked in Russia, and what this reveals about perceptions of Russian
history.
Commemorating Stalin
VTsIOM (the All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion) con-
ducted a poll of 1600 adults to coincide with the 50th anniversary of
Stalin’s death. As a snapshot of public opinion, the poll left VTsIOM
director Yurii Levada ‘perplexed’. The most significant finding was
that over half the respondents (53 per cent) believed that Stalin
had played a positive role in the history of the country, while only
33 per cent believed his role to have been negative. The remaining
14 per cent were unable to answer. As reported by Interfax,2 the poll also
gave the following results (respondents were allowed to agree with more
254
Stalin’s Death 50 Years On 255
than one statement – the total thus exceeds 100 per cent).
● 36 per cent answered that the most important thing about Stalin
was that Russia won the Great Patriotic War under his leadership,
whatever mistakes he had made;
● 27 per cent agreed with the statement that Stalin was ‘a cruel,
inhumane tyrant, guilty of killing millions of people’;
● 27 per cent believed that the truth about Stalin was not yet known;
● 20 per cent agreed that Stalin was ‘a wise leader who made the USSR
a powerful and prosperous country’;
● 20 per cent believed that only a tough ruler could have maintained
order in the circumstances of ‘class struggle and external threat’;
● 18 per cent agreed that Stalin left the USSR unprepared for war in
1941;
● 16 per cent believed that ‘Russia needs leaders like Stalin’ and
expected such a leader to emerge.
For all the crudity and possible room for error or manipulation in
opinion polling (although VTsIOM is universally recognized as the most
experienced and ‘scientific’ of Russian polling organizations), the evi-
dence does seem to point to a fairly widespread acceptance of Stalin and
Stalinism. This, in fact, is a trend that began in the late 1990s, reversing
the total rejection of Stalinism that was seen under perestroika, and it can
be seen in parallel with the growing attitude of ‘neo-traditionalism’, or
nostalgia for Russian greatness and negative feelings towards the West.3
The figure of Stalin seemed to evoke positive responses when associated
with concepts like ‘law and order’; prosperity (for the country, rather
than the individual); and military victory. This is unsurprising, given
the general dearth of such things in Russia since the demise of the Soviet
Union. The increase in lawlessness, particularly violent crime, has been
shocking with three million criminal acts committed in 2001 – half of
them serious. Putin rebuked senior law enforcement officers in February
2002 because, he said, ‘murder, kidnapping, robbery, and burglaries
have become a fact of life’. Another negative phenomenon since the col-
lapse of the Soviet Union has been the impoverishment of large swathes
of the population – 30.9 million people in the fourth quarter of 2002
received an average monthly income below the subsistence minimum
(set at 1893 roubles), according to State Statistics Committee figures.
This is more shocking when coupled with the enrichment of the few.
The same figures suggested that the richest 10 per cent of the population
received nearly one-third (29.3 per cent) of national income during
256 Wendy Slater
2002; whilst at the pinnacle of national wealth the number of billionaires

in Russia (measured by Forbes magazine) reached 17 in 2003: there had
been none in 2000.4 Finally, Russian foreign policy since the end of the
Soviet Union has been prickly, but largely impotent, faced with the over-
weening might of the USA. Nevertheless, issues of national pride have
dictated some foreign policy departures from a generally pro-Western tra-
jectory, particularly since the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.5
Thus, a more favourable attitude towards Stalin is generated by his
positive associations with the order, stability and prosperity that so
many in Russia lack. There is also a need to reclaim the episodes in
Soviet history that Russia can best appropriate – most obviously, of
course, the Great Patriotic War. Pro-Stalin sentiment in Russia should
not surprise us, however, when we remember that Stalin’s name was
only completely blackened for two relatively short periods in the last
half-century. The first of these coincided with the removal of his body
from the Mausoleum in 1961 following the 22nd Party Congress; the
second, at the height of perestroika in the late 1980s, saw the figure of
Stalin and the ‘Stalinshchina’ (time of Stalin) come to embody all that
was negative in the Soviet system.6 Neither occasion lasted more than a
few years; neither was successful in producing a more measured evalua-
tion of Stalin; both were largely determined by contemporary political
needs. Now, the figure of Stalin seems to have its uses for the ‘managed
democracy’ of the Putin era. Boris Dubin, who analysed the VTsIOM
survey, claimed that there was a covert policy of rehabilitating Stalin:
‘the symbolic attempts to restore the name and person of Stalin to the
official pantheon of Russia’s heroes have become more frequent and the
level at which these attempts are made more elevated’.7 More direct
claims came from State Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalev, at one time a
political prisoner in the post-Stalinist system, who suggested on 5 March
2003, that the current Russian presidency should bear responsibility for
Stalin’s rising popularity, for it continued to back the concept of a strong
hand to govern Russia. Kovalev, admittedly making a political point,
implicated Putin’s background in the Soviet security system in the
Stalin revival: the President, said Kovalev, had held a small private party
to celebrate Stalin’s birthday in 1999.8
The Russian media marked the 50th anniversary of Stalin’s death in
various ways, but the main characteristic of the commemoration was
its ambivalence. Take, for example, the commentary on 5 March from
TV-Tsentr:
Stalin exterminated so many independent-minded people from all

social strata that many survivors were happy that they survived and,
at the same time, had no idea how to live without him, the all-seeing
man who always knew what was right and what was wrong.
Hitler lost everything and ended his days in a locked bunker. Stalin
could act consistently and step by step; he knew when to hide in the
shade. He won over Lenin, Trotskii and Bukharin. Then he won over
Hitler – at what price is a different story – and conquered half the
world. He was defeated only by death. He lost no battles in his life.
What all of us gained from his rule and whether we gained anything
at all, is still a subject for argument.9
The glossy popular history magazine, Rodina, devoted much of

its February 2003 edition to a collection of articles entitled ‘Fifty Years
without Stalin’, to which the editors penned a similarly ambivalent
introduction:
Under [Stalin] Russia, having lived through the most terrible

cataclysms – war, destruction, famine – achieved the status of a global
superpower. Not considering the losses, Stalin directed all his energy
and will towards creating a powerful, centralized state. This state
seemed so strong that no-one could even conceive of its swift demise
in the twentieth century.
However, the immense human losses, the colossal popular efforts,
the imbalanced economy all meant that the burden of global leader-
ship was unbearable. The Stalinist world collapsed surprisingly
quickly, without war and even with the help of the CPSU itself. The
system, envisaged to endure for centuries, passed into history, but its
heritage remained. Its birthmarks are visible in politics, economy, sci-
ence and literature. On the cusp of the millennium, Russia is again in
search of its path and its history. So what role has been prepared for
Stalin? Do we reject his heritage?10
The anniversary also saw more polarized positions emerge, reflecting

the contemporary political situation. Human rights activists railed
against the tenor of the commemoration, which they saw as overly
positive and having succumbed to a kind of national myth-making.
In an interview with Interfax on 5 March, Aleksandr Iakovlev – the
‘godfather of perestroika’ and Chairman of the Presidential Commission
for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Oppression – expressed
outrage at the attention being paid to the anniversary of Stalin’s death.
The Russian mass media have been dancing around this figure for
nearly five days. It’s amazing. What this petty occasion deserves is
258 Wendy Slater
just a line reading that the tyrant died 50 years ago. The worst thing
is that Stalin is being pictured as a martyr who was probably poi-
soned, or probably strangled.11 Now it turns out he was a good guy
who smiled at kids and gave them sweets. It’s shameful! This man
signed a decree which said that children can be executed from the age
of twelve. He eliminated all of his relatives and all of his comrades-in-
arms who were unfortunate enough to learn what they shouldn’t
have. This man destroyed the peasantry, and nobility and Russian
culture as a whole. Are we as Russians so oblivious?
Iakovlev concluded his tirade with a significant, if somewhat obvious,

point. ‘If the same hullabaloo had been staged in Germany over Hitler,
a countless number of court actions would have followed.’ Similarly,
state Duma deputy Sergei Yushchenkov – himself shortly to become a
victim of Russia’s crime wave or political intrigue (he was murdered on
17 April) – likened Stalinism to Fascism, both of which, he said ‘appear
only in countries where the majority of people are pauperized and
turned into a crowd of slaves longing for a heavy hand. This crowd
masochistically takes for the impulses of willpower the sadistic measures
implemented by the authorities.’12 The German prohibition on Nazi
propaganda, facilitated by the defeat and post-war occupation of Nazi
Germany, was not mirrored in post-Stalinist Soviet Russia for obvious
reasons – the system had been vindicated by military victory and was
only ever modified, rather than eradicated. But the question of why it
might be acceptable (albeit in a qualified manner) to praise Stalin, but
not Hitler, has also exercised most recently and controversially British
author Martin Amis who, in Koba the Dread (and citing Solzhenitsyn),
expresses it far more vividly as the ‘Little Moustache versus the
Big Moustache’.13
Unsurprisingly, Stalin’s death was commemorated by the largely
elderly adherents of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation
(KPRF), who laid flowers at his tomb on 5 March. Their leader, Gennadii
Ziuganov, seems now to have overcome the embarrassment that used to
characterize his excursions into Soviet history when forced to evaluate
Stalin. After all, Ziuganov was a man who managed to write on the
entire Soviet period without mentioning Stalin’s name once.14 His cur-
rent position is that ‘Stalin was a great statesman who had a strong fight-
ing character and a strong will’; and that the ‘repressions’ (the Terror)
were ‘mistakes which the party evaluated in due course and did its best
to avoid’.15
Stalin in Russian history
Stalin is evidently still a live political issue in Russia. For this reason, and
because Stalinism is inextricably woven into the fabric of the individual
histories of so many living Russians, it continues to be a past that has
not yet passed. According to archivist and historian Oleg Khlevniuk
In Russia, Stalinism continues to be perceived (justly or not) as a past

that has not yet been overcome. Portraits of Stalin in the street
demonstrations of ultra-leftists are a reflection of attitudes that are
widespread throughout society, in the government bureaucracy, and
also among a certain segment of historians. On the opposite end of
the spectrum there are anti-Stalinists who view any kind of scholarly
objectivity according to the maxim ‘to explain is to excuse’.16
The Stalinist past remains tangibly evident in the infrastructure

of the the country (the layout of Moscow, the steel (stal’) plant of
Magnitogorsk);17 it is also embedded in the personal memories of
numerous individuals. The recovery and recording of these recollections
has been a major feature of the last 15 years or so, managed by civic
organizations like Memorial.18 Irina Paperno describes this ‘motley (and
evolving) corpus of texts: memoirs, memoir-novels (written by profes-
sional writers and by amateurs), memoiristic essays, diaries, notebooks,
scattered notes, and at least two address (or telephone) books’ as a
‘virtual community’. Whether polished memoirs or personal papers
deposited in the ‘people’s archives’ organized by groups like Memorial,
and whether written contemporaneously or much later, this corpus of
material signifies a movement for self-realization that coincided with
the end of the Soviet Union. ‘Something happened’ writes Paperno,
‘people’s accounts of life under the Soviet regime have become a matter
of public record, marking the end of the Soviet regime and the end of
the twentieth century’.19 In many of these accounts, the Stalin era occu-
pied a central place as the definitive Soviet experience and the frame-
work for crucial experiences in people’s lives. Whether victims or
beneficiaries of the Soviet 1930s (and one could argue that all were vic-
tims), such people were shaped by the Stalinist project. This was not
accidental: indeed, it was a conscious policy of Stalinism to mould the
‘new Soviet man’ (and woman), and one mechanism for doing this was
to encourage a stylized autobiographical narrative of the process.20
Translating this mechanism into private diary form, however, could
260 Wendy Slater
produce intense psychological conflict for those who wanted, but felt in
some ways unable, to become part of the Soviet project, as Jochen
Hellbeck demonstrates in his analysis of the diary of Stepan Podlubny,
a young man from Ukraine trying to reforge himself into the approved
vision of a new Soviet man in Moscow.21
Thus, the vast corpus of autobiographical narratives that emerged at
the end of the Soviet period had antecedents in the Stalin era. However,
the demise of the Soviet Union gave this phenomenon new meaning.
Paperno suggests that this context of the end of the Soviet Union, and
the climax of the twentieth century, created a space where the [Russian]
individual could gain a sense of self through his interaction with his-
tory. ‘Soviet people use history, catastrophic history, as a justification of
authorship and a source of personal significance – an instrument of sub-
jectivization. In the end, the self and history are inextricably linked’.
Paperno also suggests that, for those who lived through Soviet times
when private space was taboo, the new publishing phenomenon has
provided ‘access to the inner recesses of each other’s lives’, and created
‘a virtual communal apartment’.22 This metaphor for post-Soviet society –
an inescapable one for anyone writing about Soviet culture – suggests
that the retelling of life stories has become a substitute for the absence
of the regime, whose disappearance has left both its supporters and its
opponents (the Intelligentsia) inhabiting a void. ‘The individual in
everyday life experiences the memories of the past horrors, the vacuity
of the present, and the uncertainties of the future in apocalyptic per-
spective.’23 It may be that in the telling and reading of life stories, we see
another of those small connections that Sheila Fitzpatrick writes about
in her Introduction to this volume as the next object of investigation for
students of Russian society.
Meanwhile, the teaching of history – that is, history as practised insti-
tutionally, particularly in schools – having lost its ideological carapace,
remains mono-dimensional, lacking the immediacy of the personal
accounts discussed by Paperno. Institutional history also remains shack-
led by the need for an ‘agreed version’ of Soviet history. This, too, can be
seen as a legacy of the Soviet regime. It was not only the mendacity of
the Stalinist ‘Short Course’ that was damaging: it was also the insistence
that there was only one correct version of history, an attitude that
persisted even when that (Stalinist) version was finally consigned to the
‘trash-heap’. In the late 1980s, Stephen Cohen’s interview with one of
‘Gorbachev’s Reformers’, historian Yurii Afanas’ev, revealed their con-
ceptually polarized attitudes towards ‘truth’ in history, with Cohen sug-
gesting that there might be competing ‘truths’, and Afanas’ev seemingly
unable to overcome his positivistic training.24 That mentality persists: the

policy was announced in 2001 of commissioning a single history text-
book for use in schools, although none has yet been created. Meanwhile,
the history school curriculum ‘gallops through the entire past, from the
Stone Age […] to the Chechen crisis, in five years’.25 The twentieth
century is covered at age 15 and again at 17 but, when questioned, the
children in one Moscow school ‘agreed that there were too many “facts”,
that modern history was “grey”, and that they preferred the stories that
they read at home’. Students and school children, moreover, saw no con-
nection between the stories they heard from their parents and grandpar-
ents (about the war, in particular) and the history they learned in school.
As Merridale points out, ‘Memory and school history have come adrift
from one another, the one remaining painful and divisive while the other
is now safe but bland.’26
The historical profession in Russia, meanwhile, has produced very few
young historians in the field of Soviet history since the end of the Soviet
Union. According to Khlevniuk this is in part because the political
changes of 1991 were played out in sharp conflicts between old and new
historiography, and old and new historians. Stalinism, as we have seen,
is still very much a live issue within Russia. Professional historians in
Russia over the last decade have instead focused more on producing col-
lections of archival materials and reference works than on monographs
about Stalinism, although there are examples of highly innovative and
productive collaborations with Western colleagues, and a few notable
individual works by Osokina and Zubkova, for example.27
Stalin and history in the West
Stalinism is not only a divisive issue for Russia. Some of the most
poisonous disagreements between historians in the West have been over
their interpretations of the Stalinist period. The trajectory of the histori-
ography is well known and there is no need to restate it here. But it is
profoundly troubling that, at a time when many historians are produc-
ing exciting and innovative research in the field of Stalinism, the old
arguments between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘revisionists’ continue to be
played out before the wider reading public. Martin Amis, for example,
mocks the revisionist stance: ‘If Getty goes on revising at his current
rate, he will eventually be telling us that only two people died in the
Great Terror, and that one very rich peasant was slightly hurt during
Collectivization.’ This jibe cheapens Amis’s meditation upon why intel-
lectuals, including his father and his closest friend, chose to be on the
262 Wendy Slater
Left, despite the horrors of Stalinism. Koba the Dread, nevertheless, is not
really history, it is a personal memoir about what Stalinism has meant
to Amis and, of course, wonderfully executed even if the history is
somewhat skewed.28
The debate over revisionist views of Stalinism has, at times, soured
into the sort of intemperate attacks upon colleagues that would not
have been out of place in the Cold War era. This is a pity, because so
much new history-writing on Stalinism has been vibrant, engaging, and
courageous, and should be more widely read. Thus, rather than leaving
the newspaper columns to the ‘unproductive and intellectually vapid
name calling’ of many recent post-Cold War critiques of revisionist
history, especially that of Stalinism,29 it would be more productive if
‘those laboring in the field’s trenches [would] pause to convey its current
debates and achievements to comparativists, Europeanists, non-historians,
and the wider public’.30
The last decade has seen both archival and conceptual revolutions in
the study of Stalinism. There has been a serendipitous, and hugely pro-
ductive, confluence between the greater availability of archival sources
since the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new cultural his-
tory (encompassing the ‘linguistic turn’). Historians have attempted to
recreate the separate cultural universe of Stalinism – ‘Stalinism as a
Civilisation’ as one of the first such studies, Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic
Mountain, was subtitled. Historians working on Stalinism have also
looked for new ways to conceptualize it, and have viewed it (as with
Fascism) both as a form of ‘neo-traditionalism’ and as an ‘alternative
modernity’.31 In the future, it is likely that the chronological parameters
of research into Stalinism will be expanded beyond the ‘long decade’ of
the 1930s (1928–39) in order to look back into the 1920s and forward to
wartime and post-War Stalinist society. This is already beginning to hap-
pen: Stalinism can be investigated in terms of its cultural origins after
the Civil War and during the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP),
and in its mutation in the post-war era that gave rise to the later trans-
formation of the Soviet system.32
Prospects for Stalin
The anniversary of Stalin’s death did suggest a way to resolve the fraught
questions of how Stalinism can be remembered and historicized in
Russia. It is clear that divisions about Stalin and Stalinism are becoming
far less relevant with the passage of time. When the newspaper Tribuna
asked politicians to comment on Stalin, Boris Nemtsov, leader of the
centrist, but opposition, Union of Rightist Forces (SPS), positioned

himself as representative of the young generation for whom Stalin was
an irrelevance, or, put less crudely, mere ‘history’. (Nemtsov, born in
1959, has carefully constructed his image – including a personal Internet
homepage – as representative of the post-Soviet generation, untainted
by association with the Soviet regime.)33
I knew neither Lenin nor Stalin, and during the time of Khrushchev
I was a child. I was a young man during the Brezhnev era, and not
personally acquainted with him. Therefore, I can say nothing either
good or bad about these people. Let the old Communists decide what
to think about them.34
Similarly, an attitude of indifference prevailed among 15 per cent of

respondents to one reported opinion poll, who said that the name of
Stalin triggered no associations beyond that of ‘a pipe-smoking boss
with a moustache’.35 It was unclear whether this was a feature of gener-
ational change, but Nemtsov’s position was clear: debates about Stalin
belong to history and have no place in contemporary politics.
The Soviet past is now largely a matter of irrelevance to younger
Russians. It serves as a source of kitsch fashion – for example, the
practice of bringing out the Soviet school uniform of bows and pinafores
on the last day of the final year at school, ‘when teenage schoolgirls
accessorize them with fishnet stockings, garters, and platform boots’,
or as material for advertising campaigns.36 In terms of everyday life,
Stalinism is less of an issue than, say, unemployment. It is no longer
‘more interesting to read than to live’ as it was under perestroika.37 The
enormity and atrocity of Stalinism remain, but perhaps it is at last
becoming a past that has passed.
1. Aleksander Sokurov, director of Russian Ark, quoted in ‘90 Minutes that Shook
the World’, The Guardian Friday Review, 28 March 2003, p. 2.
2. Interfax, 4 March 2003. At the time of writing, the second part of the article
that contextualized and analysed these statistics had not yet been published.
Part 1 was to be found in: Boris Dubin, ‘Stalin i drugie. Figury vysshei vlasti v
obshchestvennom mnenii sovremennoi Rossii’, Monitoring obshchestvennogo
mneniia, 1 (63), January–February 2003, pp. 13–25.
3. Boris Dubin, ‘Stalin i drugie’.
4. Kommersant-Daily, 28 February 2003, reporting the list of the world’s
476 billionaires in Forbes magazine’s March 2003 issue.
264 Wendy Slater
5. On foreign policy see Peter Duncan’s contribution to this volume.

6. For a brief, but comprehensive, summary of this see Maria Ferretti,
‘Rasstroistvo pamiati: Rossiia i Stalinizm’, Monitoring obshchestvennogo
mneniia, 5 (2002), pp. 40–54.
7. Boris Dubin, ‘Stalin i drugie’, p. 13.
8. Kovalev’s statement was reported by RFE/RL Newsline, 6 March 2003.
9. Centre TV, Moscow, 0800 gmt 5 Mar 03, BBC monitoring.
10. ‘50 let bez Stalina’, Rodina, 2 (2003), p. 1.
11. Iakovlev was referring to two documentaries about Stalin’s death, broadcast
on 2 March by ORT and NTV.
12. Yushchenkov’s speech in State Duma, reported on TVS, 5 March (BBC
monitoring).
13. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (London, 2002),
pp. 81–2.
14. In his book Derzhava, ed. N. A. Vasetskii, Moscow, 1995.
15. Reported by RIA news agency, 5 March 2003; see also Ziuganov’s lengthy
comment for Rodina, 2 (2003), pp. 32–3.
16. Oleg Khlevniuk, Kritika, 2(2), Spring 2001, pp. 319–27, p. 327.
17. Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era, Berkeley,
1996, p. 240.
18. Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory During
the Yeltsin Era, Ithaca, 2002; Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and
Memory in Russia, London, 2000.
19. Irina Paperno, ‘Personal accounts of the Soviet experience’, Kritika, 3(4), Fall
2002, pp. 577–610, p. 581.
20. In his Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation, Stephen Kotkin used
these narratives, collected for an official history of Magnitogorsk that was
never written, as source material.
21. Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist soul: The diary of Stepan
Podlubny, 1931–1939’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 44, 1996,
pp. 344–73.
22. Paperno, ‘Personal accounts of the Soviet experience’, pp. 584, 600.
23. Ibid, p. 609.
24. Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina van den Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost: Interviews
with Gorbachev’s Reformers, New York, 1989.
25. Catherine Merridale, ‘Redesigning history in contemporary Russia’, Journal of
Contemporary History, 38, 2003, pp. 13–28, p. 26.
26. Ibid.
27. Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘Stalinism and the Stalin period after the “Archival
Revolution” ’, Kritika, 2(2), Spring 2001, pp. 319–27. Khlevniuk provides a
succinct synthesis of the new research on Stalinism. His observations about
Russian historians are supported by Yuri Afanasyev, ‘Reclaiming Russian his-
tory’, Perspective, 7(1), 1996.
28. Martin Amis, Koba the Dread. The jibe at Getty is a footnote on p. 160. For a
response to the book by one of Amis’s two interlocutors, see Christopher
Hitchens, ‘Lightness at midnight: Stalinism without irony’, The Atlantic
Monthly, September 2002.
29. Lynne Viola, ‘The Cold War in American Soviet historiography and the end
of the Soviet Union’, Russian Review, 61, 2002, pp. 25–34, p. 33. See also other
articles in this issue ‘Historiography of the Soviet period in post-Soviet per-

spective’, pp. 1–51.
30. Kritika, 2(4), Fall 2001, pp. 707–11, p. 711.
31. For example, Stephen Kotkin, ‘Modern times: The Soviet Union and the
interwar conjuncture’, Kritika, 2(1), Winter 2001, pp. 111–64; articles in
David Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis (eds), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge,
Practices, 2000.
32. ‘ “1930s studies” ’, Kritika, 4(1) Winter 2003, pp. 1–4.
33. http:www.nemtsov.ru
34. Tribuna, 5 March 2003.
35. Public Opinion Fund poll, reported by ITAR-TASS on 4 March 2003.
36. Merridale, ‘Redesigning history’, p. 25. On kitsch see also chapters by
Svetlana Boym and Theresa Sabonis-Chafee in Adele Marie Barker, Consuming
Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, Durham and London,
1999.
37. Quoted by Ferretti ‘Rasstvoistvo pamiati’, p. 41.
Index
Abkhazia, Abkhaz xi, 61–82 passim, Basaev, Shamir 79

155, 236, 247 Bashkortostan 30, 219
Afanas’ev, Mikhail 212, 219, 260 Bazyliuk, Aleksandr 48
Afghanistan 62, 187, 236, 241, 248 Belarus, Belarusians x, 21, 25, 33,
Aid 79, 103–21 passim, 236 39–40, 41, 43, 46, 49–50, 51,
Albania, Albanians 240, 241 52–3, 56–7, 95, 230, 232, 235,
Aleksii II, Patriarch 39, 40, 46 239, 243–4
Aliev, Heydar 247 Belarusian Popular Front 53
Almaty 93, 94, 95 Belgium 17
Alonso, Ann Maria 79 Belorussian Exarchate 49
Altai, Autonomous Republic 92, 156 Belovezh’e Accord 25
America, Americans 23, 24, 79, 106, Belykov, Gennadii 94
108–21 passim, 159, 172, 209, Berger, Peter 119
213, 221, 229, 231, 239, 241, 245, Beria, Lavrentii 42
255 Berezovskii, Boris 204
Amis, Martin 258, 261–2, 264 n 28 Berliner, Joseph 123
Andrew the Apostle, Order of Andrew bin Laden, Osama 241, 249
28, 55 Black Sea Fleet 245
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) Blat xi, 11, 122–43
241 Blium, Arlen 205 n 9
Anthropology 11, 104 Bodnar, Vladimir 66
Ardov, Mikhail 199 Bolsheviks, Bolshevism 7, 174
Armed forces, army 51, 71, 73, 186 Bondarik, Nikolai 21
Armenia, Armenians 9, 61–82 Borets’kyi, Iov, Metropolitan 41
passim, 230, 234, 240, 247 Bosnia, Bosnia-Herzegovina 237, 240
Åslund, Anders 114, 115 Boycko, Maxim 115
Assembly of the Peoples of Brandenberger, David 41
Kazakhstan 93–4 Brazauskas, Algirdas 242
Astrushevich, Pavel 96 Brezhnev, Leonid x, 4, 8, 263
Australia 159 Brie, Michael 221
Azarenok, Yurii 49 Britain, British 56, 106, 149, 165,
Azerbaijan, Azeris 61–82 passim, 230, 172, 178
232, 240, 247 Brubaker, Rogers 84, 97 n 2
Bukharin 257
Babayan, Samvel 71, 73 Bulgaria, Bulgarians 96
Badovskii, Dmitrii 219 Buriatiia 9, 33, 160
Baku 68, 76, 247 Buzan, Barry 63
Baltic states, Balts 42, 53, 228, 230, Bykov, Anatolii 151, 166 n 21
231, 233–4, 242–3, 250 Byzantium 51
Bank of New York 115
Barber, John 122 Canada 17, 159
Barkashov, Nikolai 21 Carnegie Centre, Moscow 217
Baroque 55 Carr, E.H. 5
266
Index 267
Castells, Manuel 126, 127–8 Cold War 7, 105, 208, 233, 238, 262
Caucasus, Caucasians 21, 23, 26, 30, Commonwealth of Independent
33, 34, 35, 38 n 54, 42, 79, 88, States (CIS) 25, 28, 164, 171,
155, 156, 246–7 175, 176, 228, 230, 231, 235–50
Catholic Church, Roman Catholics passim
46, 230, 243 Communism, Communist project 5,
Censorship xii, 186–207 passim 122
Central Committee (of CPSU) 7, 188, Communist Party of Belarus 49
232 Communist Party of Lithuania 242
Central Asia 42–3, 62, 84, 88, 230, Communist Party of the Russian
231, 238, 241, 246–9 Federation 44, 186,
Central Asian Battalion 248 187, 258
Central Asian Economic Union Communist Party of Ukraine 48–9,
(CAEU) 248 54, 244
Central Europe 22, 103, 106, 107, Communist Party of the Soviet Union
120, 165, 175 (CPSU) 186, 199, 257
Ceyhan 247 Confederation 68
Chechnia, Chechens 28, 30, 31, 33, Constitutions 24, 34, 65, 67, 87, 89,
34, 70, 79, 148, 155, 187, 188, 90, 173, 176, 178–80, 187, 202,
204, 211, 238–41 passim, 243, 261 212
Chernobyl’ 188, 202, 245 Constitutional Courts 29
Chernomydrin, Viktor 54, 113 Cornell, Svante 71
Chicherin, A.V. 179 Corruption 73–4, 145, 229
China 231, 239, 241, 247, 249 Cossacks 79, 93–4, 96
Chişinaŭ 68, 74, 76, 246 Council of Europe 243
Christ the Saviour Cathedral, Moscow Crankshaw, Edward 123
55 Crime, criminal groups 72–4, 145,
Christianity, Christians 21, 34, 199, 173, 202, 255
250 Crimea 46, 48, 236–7, 245, 250
Chubais, Anatolii, ‘Chubais Clan’ Cuba 241
109–20 passim, 149 Cyrylo-Methodian Society 47
Chukotka 148, 156 Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic 104,
Citizens, citizenship, citizenship laws 213, 239
10, 11, 17, 24, 27, 28–9, 34, 35,
90, 183, 202, 242 Dagestan, Dagestanis 28, 30, 31, 33,
Civic identity, civic states 17, 18, 21, 220
24, 25, 32, 34, 47, 87, 90 Danielyan, Anushavan 71, 80
Civil Code (of the Russian Federation) Danylo of Halych 41
180 Dashnaks 234
Civil society xii, 6, 127–8, 171–85, Dawisha, Adeed 228
197 Dawisha, Karen 228
Civil War, the Russian 6 Dederer, Aleksandr 92
Civilizations (clash of) 23, 46, 50, De facto states xi, 61–80 passim
91, 230 De-kulakization 3
Civilising mission (Russia’s) 10, 24, 91 Democracy, democratisation 111–12,
Class, class struggle 10 116–17, 198, 216, 221
Clinton, Bill, Clinton Administration De-Sovietization 9
238, 247 Devaluation (see August 1998 crisis)
Cohen, Stephen 7, 172, 182, 260 Dicey, A.V. 178
268 Index
Dnester Republic xi, 61–82 passim, European Union (EU) 79, 103, 106,
236, 246, 250 112, 149, 156, 173, 231, 238, 241,
Donskoi, Dmitrii 39, 45 243–6 passim
Dontsov, Dmytro 52
Dubin, Boris 256 Fainsod, Merle 129
Duchiński, Franciszek 52 Fascism 2, 4, 258
Dugin, Aleksandr 23 Far East 9
Duma 25, 27–9 passim, 50, 77, Federal Governments’
111–12, 187, 217, 237, 239, 241 Communication and Information
Dushanbe 63 Agency (FAPSI) 187
Dykov, Oleg 96 Federal Security Service (FSB) 187,
196–7, 202
Easter, Gerald 133, 134 Federalism xi, 27–9, 144–68 passim,
Eastern Europe 10, 22, 103, 174, 211–16, 237–8
105, 107 Federation Council 214–15
East Kazakhstan 91, 92 Feminism 3
East Slavs, East Slavic idea x–xi, 21, Filaret, Patriarch 58 n 33
25, 28, 33, 39–60 passim Filimonov, Sergei 194
Economy, economics xi, 11, 32, 72, Finland, Finns, Finno-Ugric 23, 26,
103–68 passim, 213–14, 255–6 52, 53, 243
Education, education policy 32 First World War x, 5–6, 234
Elchibei, Abulfaz 232, 249 Fitzpatrick, Sheila 123, 141 n 29, 260
Elites 18, 20, 22, 31, 35, 50, 83, 88, Fleischer, Vera 10
89, 93, 100 n 38, 119, 217–18, Fleron, Frederic 122
220, 244, 249 Flex organizations 112–13
El’tsin, Boris 23, 24, 28, 34, 43, 109, Foglizzo, John 114
115, 119, 149, 196, 198, 202, 232, Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR)
235, 237–9, 241 187, 238
Engel, Barbara 3 Foreign policy xii, 23–4, 27, 76–8,
England, English (see Britain) 195, 228–53, 256
Ermalovich, Mikola 53 France, French, French Revolution
Erofeev, Vendikt 199 5, 45, 107, 149, 165, 178
Erofeeva, Irina 91 Freedom House 221
Estonia, Estonians 27, 46, 165, Frick, David 60 n 51
233–4, 241, 242–3
‘Ethnic democracy’ 88 Gaidar, Yegor 109, 114, 239
Ethnic minorities 19, 26, 31, 33, 34, Galicia, Galicians 53
83, 94, 211, 242 Gamsakhurdia, Zviad 231, 249
Ethnic states 18, 85–6 Garkavets, Aleksandr 95, 96
Ethnicity 4, 17, 22, 30, 47, 64, 83 General Accounting Office (GAO),
Euphrosyne of Polatsk 39 USA 110, 112
Eurasia, Eurasianism xii, 21, 23–4, Getty, J. Arch 7, 129, 261
26–7, 36 n 17 and 18, 43, 89, 198, Georgia, Georgians 19, 61–82 passim,
230, 231, 232, 244, 249, 250 155, 230, 231, 236–7, 240, 246–7,
Eurasian Economic Community 244, 250
248 Germany, Germans 2, 3–4, 5, 11, 41,
European Bank for Reconstruction 45, 85, 87, 92, 94, 96, 99 n 32,
and Development (EBRD) 112, 106, 112, 149, 172, 178, 184–5 n 9,
173 193, 258
Index 269
Gill, Graeme 129 Homo sovieticus (see Soviet identity)

Gizel, Innokentii 41–2 Hokkaido University 217
Gladyshev, Vladimir 197–8 Horowitz, Donald 94
glasnost’ 188, 190, 202 Hovannisian, Raffi 234
Glasnost’ Defence Foundation 202 Hrushevs’kyi, Mykhailo 39, 54
Glavlit 186–95 passim, 197–200, 202 Human rights 75, 238
Glazunov, Il’ya 26 Hungary 104, 107, 165, 239
Glinka, Mikhail 27 Huntington, Samuel P. 46, 230, 250
Glinski, Dmitrii 172
Gogol, Nikolai 43 Iakovlev, Aleksandr 257–8
Goldschmidt, Paul W. 190 Iaroslavl’ 53
Golosov, Grigorii 220 Ihnatoŭski, Usevalad 52, 53
Gongadze, Grigorii 246 IMF 111–21 passim, 173
Gorbachev, Mikhail 12, 47, 164, 188, Imperialism 20–21, 34, 76, 247
198, 232, 242, 260 Incomes, real incomes 152–8
Gorbenko, Leonid 166 n 16 Informal practices (see blat)
Gorenburg, Dmitry 33 Ingushetia 34, 148
Grachev, Pavel 236 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)
Great Patriotic War 6, 9, 156, 255 62, 69, 77
Greek Catholic Church 49 International Committee of the Red
GRU (see Main Intelligence Cross (ICRC) 67
Directorate) Internet 203
GUAM (see GUUAM) Iran 246–8 passim
Gulag 2, 3, 11 Iraq 240
Gumilev, Lev 53 Islam, anti-Islamic views 30, 33, 34,
Gumilev, Nikolai 189, 205 n 12 38 n 54, 62, 199, 232, 236, 241
Gusinskii, Vladimir 204 Italy, Italians 149, 155, 178, 221
GUUAM 230, 231, 240, 245–8, 250 Ivanov, Igor’ 240
Haimson, Leopold 5 Japan 112, 172

Haran’, Olexii 50 Jews 21, 148
Harvard 109–20 passim Jinjolia, Sokrat 67
Harvard Institute for International Jowitt, Ken 129
Development (HIID) 109–10,
111–12, 114–20 passim Kabardino-Balkariia 160
Harvard Interview Project 3 Kabul 248
Hay, Jonathan 112, 113, 117–18 Kaliningrad 240, 242
Hellbeck, Jochen 260 Kalmykia 33, 219
Helmer, John 113 Kapto, A 189
Hendrik, Toomas 233 Karachaevo-Cherkassiia 160, 220
Hero of Russia/the Soviet Union 28 Kazakh language 85–90 passim,
Hirschman, Albert 88 98 n 9
Historikerstreit 7, 11 Kazakhstan, Kazakhs xi, 9, 27,
History, historiography x, 1–12 83–100, 230, 247–9, 250
passim, 13 n 14, 26, 32, 41, 67–8, Kebich, Viacheslav 244
91, 254–65 passim KGB 187, 194, 195, 206 n 27
Hitchens, Christopher 264 Khasbulatov, Ruslan 114
Hitler 257–8 Khazar Kaganate, Khazars 45
Hoffman, Erik 122 Khlevniuk, Oleg 259, 261, 264 n 27
270 Index
Khodasevich, Vladislav 189, 205 n 12 Latvia, Latvians 88, 241, 242–3

Kholodov, Dmitrii 203 Latynina, Iuliia 150
Khrapunov, Viktor 94–5 Lavrov, Aleksei 157, 159
Khristenko, Viktor 157 Law xi, 134, 171–85, 187, 199–201,
Khrushchev, Nikita 4, 183, 263 210
Kiev 40, 41, 43, 50–1, 53–6 Lebed’, Aleksandr 151
Kiev Rus’, Kievan Rus’ (see Rus’) Ledeneva, Alena 11
Kiprian, Metropolitan 39 Lenin 7, 73, 189, 257, 263
Kirienko, Sergei 160 Leningrad 3, 9, 193
Kiselyova, Emma 128 Levada, Yurii 254
Kistiakovskii, B.A. 179 Liberal Democratic Party of Russia
Kocharian, Robert 247 (LDPR) 33
Kokh, Alfred 115 Liberalism, liberals 6, 83, 105–6, 181,
Kolstø, Pål 88 230, 239
kompromat 138 Lipton, David 112
Kopystens’kyi, Zakhariia 40–1 Lithuania, Lithuanians 39, 49, 234,
Korea, Koreans 85, 92, 94, 96, 99 n 235, 242–3, 249
32, 241 Luhans’k 46
Kosovo 48, 240, 241 Lukashenka, Aliaksandr 40, 49–50,
Kostomarov, Mykola 47, 48, 49 239, 244
Kotkin, Stephen 7, 262, 264 n 20 Luik, Juri 234
Kovalev, Sergei 256 Lukin, Vladimir 232
Kozak, Dmitrii 167 n 36 Luzhkov, Yurii 150, 221
Kozyrev, Andrei 23, 232–3, 235–9 Lypa, Yurii 52
passim, 241, 249 Lynch, Allen 249
Krasnodar 156 Lysenko, Nikolai 21
Krasnoiarsk 151, 166 n 19
Krauchanka, Pyotr 235 Macedonia 241
Kravchuk, Leonid 231, 244–5 Magadan 152
Kryshtanovskaia, Olga 111 Magnitogorsk 259, 264 n 20
Kuchma, Leonid 40, 46, 54, 245, 246 Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)
Kuibyshev 9 187
Kulikovo Field, Battle of (1380) 39, Malaniuk, Yevhen 52
43 Manning, Robert 7
Kurgan 160 Maracusta, Grigoriy 68
Kuromiya, Hiroaki 7 ‘Marriott Brigade’ 107
Kursk 39, 45, 151, 167 n 38 Marshall Plan 106
Kutafin, Oleg 29 Marx, Karl 181
Kutuzov 45 Matsuzato, Kimitaka 210, 219
Kuzio, Taras 36 n 6, 228, 230, 231 Mau, Vladimir 165
Kymlicka, Will 18, 20, 22, 35 Mazepa, Ivan 55
Kyrgyzstan, Kyrgyz 87, 90, 93, 98 n McAuley, Mary 217
5, 230, 235, 241, 244, 247–9, 250 Melkoumian, Naira 70
Memorial Society 2, 259
Lachin corridor 247 Memory 2–4, 260–1
Lad 92, 93, 95 Meri, Lennart 233
Landsbergis, Vytautas 234 Merridale, Catherine 3, 13 n 6, 261
Lapidus, Gail 218 Messianism 23
Lapina, Nataliia 218 Messner, Dirk 126
Index 271
Middle East 231 Nazarbaev, Nursultan 87–9 passim,

Migdal, Joel S. 63 92–5 passim, 248
Mikhailov, Sergei 28 Nazis, Nazism 2, 3, 5, 11, 258
Milošević, Slobodan 240 Nazdratenko, Evgenii 149, 151,
Minin 45 166 n 16
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia Nemtsov, Boris 262–3
(MFA) 232–3, 237 NEP (New Economic Policy) 262
Minsk 244 Networks 126–7, 142 n 40
Molchanov, Mikhail 42–3, 56 Nevskii, Aleksandr 41
Moldova, Moldovans 46, 61–82 Nizhnii-Novgorod (aka Gor’kii) 154,
passim, 230, 235, 237, 246, 249 160, 163, 193, 199, 205 n 12,
Mongolia, Mongols 23, 26, 43, 52, 219
241 NGOs (nongovernmental
Montevideo Convention on Rights organisations) 104, 128, 183,
and Duties of States (1933) 65, 218
66 ‘Non-Russian nationalities’ 20, 21,
Morningstar, Richard L. 118–19 28, 31–5 passim
Moscow, Muscovy 9, 10, 11, 23, 32, North Atlantic Council 245
35, 39, 40, 51, 52, 55, 109, 148, North Ossetia 160
149, 150, 152, 157, 193, 219, 236, Nostalgia 2, 42, 43, 123
242, 259, 260 Novgorodtsev, P.I. 179
Moscow State Institute of
International Relations (MGIMO) Oliinyk, Borys 47, 49
233 Omsk 160
Müller, Max 52 Oral history 3, 13 n 9
Multiculturalism 27 Organization for Economic
Multi-national states 18, 34, 83, Cooperation and Development
88 (OECD) 144, 151
Muslims 26, 28, 30, 34–5, 38 n 54, Organization for Security and
84, 219, 231, 238, 250 Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)
Myths, mythology 19, 35, 42–3, 62, 77, 87, 90, 93, 237, 238, 242,
44–6, 53–5, 67–8 244, 246, 249
Orthodoxy, Orthodox religion 26,
Nagorno-Karabakh, Nagorno- 34, 41–3, 44, 45, 46, 48, 51, 199,
Karabakh Republic 61–82 230, 231, 237–8
passim, 234, 247, 250 Otunbayeva, Roza 235
Nations, national identity, Ovsiannikov, Viktor 94
nationalism x, 17, 19, 20, 22,
31, 34–5, 56, 70, 83–4, 88–9, Paperno, Irina 259, 260
229–30 Parasitism 130–1
National Republican Party 21 Party for the Union of Ukraine,
Nation-states, nation-state building Belarus and Russia 48
17–19, 22 Party of One Kievan Rus’ 48
National Bolshevism 41 Party of One Rus’ 48
Nationalizing policy, nationalizing Party of Slavonic Unity of Ukraine
states 18, 19, 36 n 5, 84 48
Nativism 56 Party of Rus’-Ukrainian Union 48
NATO 231, 237–41 passim, 243–5, Passerini, Luisa 4
247–8, 255 Passports 27, 30, 33, 90
272 Index
Patronage 11, 100 n 38, 122–43 Revolution, the Russian (1917) 1,

passim, 218 5–6, 7, 10, 179
Pavlodar 90 Rigby, T.H. 129
Pavlov, Aleksandr 94 Ries, Nancy 11
Pazniak, Zenon 53 Romania, Romanians 229, 246
Pegg, Scott 64, 66 Romanovs 6
Pekhtin, Vladimir 186 Rose, Richard 164
Pelevin, Viktor 10 Rostov-on-Don 9
Pereiaslav, Treaty of (1654) 44 Rossiiskii or rosiiskii, pan-Russian
perestroika 2, 9, 12, 19, 47, 123, 171, identity 17, 19, 21, 22, 28, 40–2,
256, 257, 263 43, 46, 230
Peter the Great 28, 45, 55 Ruble, Blair 53
Petrov, Nikolai 215 Rukh 244–5
PMR – Pridnestrovyan Moldovan Rule of law xi, 134, 171–85 passim
Republic (see Dnester Republic) Rus’ 21, 39–40, 44, 46, 47, 55
Podlubny, Stepan 260 Rushdie, Salman 199
Poland, Poles 45, 48, 104, 105, 107, Rus’-Ukraine (Ukraine- Rus’) 39, 55
229, 238, 239, 243 Russia, Russians, Russian identity x,
Polats’ka-Rus’ 49 4, 6, 9, 10, 17–38 passim, 39–57
Poltava, Battle of (1709) 55 passim, 83–100 passim, 105, 107,
Pope 40, 48 128, 230, 235
Popular opinion, public opinion 11, Russian Block (Ukraine) 48
32–4, 35, 197, 216, 254–5 Russian Federation 17–27 passim,
Posadskaya-Vanderback, Anastasia 3 30–35, 62, 63, 177
Post-Soviet x, 1, 42, 43, 66, 130–4, Russian culture 10, 17, 183
208, 260 Russian Empire 23, 32
Post-Communist, Post-Communism Russian language 10, 17, 19, 21, 24,
17, 19, 109, 134, 140 27, 34, 85–7, 98 n 5, 181, 245
Post-modernism 22 ‘Russian idea’ 25, 34
Post-war, post-war era 1, 8 Russian national symbols 27–9, 34–5
Popov, Vladimir 213 Russian National Unity 21
Pozharskii 45 Russian Orthodox Church 21, 28,
Primakov, Yevgenii 31, 77, 204, 34, 46–50 passim, 55
238–40 Russian Party 21
Primordial, primordialism 22, 32, Russian peacekeepers 77
68 Russian Privatization Centre 112,
Primorskii krai 216 115
Pris̆tina 240 Russians abroad, Russian minorities
Purges, Great Purges 6–7, 258, 261 19, 21, 29, 84–8, 91–7 passim,
Putin, Vladimir 28–9, 34, 46, 56, 77, 230, 238, 242–3, 245
115–16, 144, 145, 148, 157, 165, Russification 19, 95
187, 204, 214, 215, 240–1, 243–6 Russkaia obshchina (Kazakhstan)
passim, 250, 255, 256 93–4, 96
Russkii, ethnic Russian identity 25,
Rakhmonov, Immomali 63, 236 230
Ransel, David 3 Russophones, Russian-speakers 19,
Reddaway, Peter 171 21, 29, 84–8, 245
Regions, ‘regionology’ xii, 37 n 33, Ruthenia, Ruthenian identity 39,
144–68, 208–27 40–1
Index 273
Rutskoi, Aleksandr 45, 236 Solnick, Steven 212–13

Rybnitsa (steel factory) 74 Solodin, Vladimir 190
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 44, 91, 258
Sachs, Jeffrey 109, 113, 114 Soros, George 114
St. Michael’s Monastery of the Golden Sovereignty 65–9
Domes 55 South Ossetia 61–82 passim, 236,
St. Nicholas Church 55 247
St. Petersburg 33, 109, 115–16, 148, Soviet ideology, mythology x, 3, 8–9,
154, 157 22, 41–2, 45, 49
St. Sofiia 54 Soviet identity x, 4, 8–9, 10, 19, 23,
Sajudis 234 28, 34, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 89,
Sakha-Iakutiia 33, 34 259–60
Sakhalin 166 n 19 Soviet Interview Project 3
Samara 156, 157, 163, 164 Soviet Slavic project 41–2
Saudargas, Algirdas 234 Soviet society 1–12, 123–4, 127–8,
Save The Children 79 176, 186
Schapiro, Leonid 5 Spiridon, Metropolitan 40
Secessionism, separatism 31, 34, Spruyt, Hendrik 230
61–82 passim, 90, 98 n 4 Stalin, Stalinism xii, 2, 4, 5, 6–9, 10,
Second World War 1, 5, 8–9, 39, 41, 11, 13 n 15, 41, 44, 123, 232,
50, 95, 106, 221 254–65 passim
Serbia, Serbs 237, 240 Stankevich, Sergei 23–4
Sergei of Radonezh 39 Stark, David 134
Sevastopol 237, 240, 245 Starodubrovskaia, Irina 165
Shamba, Sergei 67 START-2 Treaty 241
Shatalin plan 176 State-building 70–1, 175
Sheriff Group, (Dnister Republic) 73 Stavropol 156
Shevardnadze, Eduard 75, 246–7 Stepanakert 69, 73
Shevchenko, Taras 54 Stoner-Weiss, Kathryn 219
Shlapentokh, Vladimir 125 Sturza, Vasiliy 65
Shleifer, Andrei 109, 110, 117, 118, Sudakov, Guril 26
144 Susha 69
Shulman, Stephen 47 Summers, Lawrence 110, 118
Shushkevich, Stanislau 243–4 Suvorov 45
Siberia 9, 91, 233, 243 Sviatoslav, Count 45
Sik, Endre 125 Sverdlovsk 154, 157, 211, 218, 220
Slavophiles 26, 231 Svoik, Piotr 91, 95
Slavic Council of Belarus 49 Sweden, Swedes 45, 114, 149
Slavs 21, 23, 26, 47, 50, 51–3, 56, 79, Switzerland, Swiss 17, 93, 171
85, 89, 92, 231 Symonenko, Petro 48
Slovakia, Slovaks 107
Smirniagin, Leonid 215 Tajikistan, Tajiks 62–4, 98 n 5, 230,
Smirnov, Igor 79 236–7, 244, 247–9
Smith, Anthony D 56 Tallinn 243
Smith, Graham 27, 31–2 Tarasiuk, Borys 246
Smolensk 151, 244 Tashkent Treaty (1992, aka Collective
Snegur, Mircea 69 Security Treaty) 231, 244, 248,
Social-Liberal Union (SLOn) 48 250
Sokolov, Sasha 190 Taliban 241, 248, 249
274 Index
Tatars 45, 53, 85, 96 Ulrich, Herbert 2–3

Tatarstan 28, 30, 33, 62, 155–8, 211, Ul’ianovsk 150, 152, 160, 164
220 UNESCO 235
Tbilisi 68, 75, 76, 77 Union (party) 48
Television, Russian 204 Union of Cossacks of Semirech’e
Tereshchenko, Sergei 94 93–4
Ter-Petrosian, Levon 234, 247 Union of Right Forces 263
Terror, the (see Purges) United Energy Systems (UES) 160
Terrorism 206 n 34, 229, 241, 245, United Kingdom (see Britain)
249 United Nations (UN) 62, 67, 79, 232,
Three Bogatyrs 45 235, 237
Tikhon, Father 46 United States Agency for International
Timasheff, Nicholas 7 Development (USAID) 110, 117,
Tiraspol 61, 73 118
Tishkov, Valerii 22, 25, 34 United Tajik Opposition (UTO) 63
Tiumen 148, 150, 156, 167 n 28 Unity (Edinstvo ) 186
Tkachenko, Oleksandr 48 ‘Urals Republic’ 211
Tolstov, Serhii 50 USA (see America)
Tolz, Vera 42 Ushakov 45
Totalitarianism 7, 8, 182 Ushtobe 94
Toth, Istvan Janos 125 Ust-Kamenogorsk 91, 92
Transactorship 109–12, 114–20 Uzbekistan, Uzbeks 9, 98 n 5, 230,
passim 231, 240, 247–9, 250
Transdnistria (see Dnister Republic)
Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus- van der Stoel, Max 93
Asia (TRACECA) 245 Vasnetsov, Viktor 45
Treisman, Daniel 144, 213 Veselovka 40
Trotskii 257 Victims, victimhood 11, 14 n 28
Tsars, Tsarist era 20, 28, 91, 181, 182 Victory Day 9
Tucker, Robert C 13 n 15 Vilnius 243
Turkey, Turks, Turkic identity 23, 26, Vincent, Norman 11
45, 52, 53, 88, 219, 230, 231, 232, Viola, Lynne 7
246 Vladimir, Prince (see Volodymyr,
Turkmenistan 230, 247–9 Prince)
Tula 155 Vladivostock 151
Tuva 33, 34 Volga, Volgograd 52, 160, 203
Volodymyr, Patriarch 46, 55
Uighurs 94 Volodymyr, Prince of Kiev 39, 45,
Ukraine, Ukrainians x, 9, 21, 25, 27, 46, 54
33, 39–57 passim, 95, 96, 99 n 23,
104, 107, 110, 114, 230, 232, Webber, Mark 228
234–5, 236–7, 240, 243, 244–6, Weiner, Amir 8
249, 260 Welfare 10
Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA) – West, Western scholars xi, 1, 3, 6–7,
Ukrainian Self-Defence Union 8–9, 17, 103–21 passim, 171, 172,
(UNSO) 40, 51–2 174, 182, 208, 210–11, 216, 222,
Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kievan 230, 238, 246, 255, 261
Patriarchate) 55, 58 n 33 Western Europe 18–19
Ukrainian People’s Republic 54 Woodruff, David 144
Index 275
World Bank 110, 111, 172 Zaitsev, Boris 189, 205 n 12

World Trade Organization (WTO) Zakareishvili, Paata 75
248 Zanardi, Louis H. 110
Zhirinovskii, Vladimir 25, 237, 238
Xinjiang 249 Zhukov, Georgii 45
Ziugnaov, Gennadii 44, 45, 49, 238,
Yaroslav the Wise 53–5 239, 258
Yugoslavia 213, 240, 255 Zlatkis, Bella 160
Yushchenkov, Sergei 258 Zlenko, Anatoliy 234–5, 246

Wendy Slater, Andrew Wilson - The Legacy of The Soviet Union (2004)

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The Legacy of the

List of Contributors vii

Preface and Acknowledgements x

1 Introduction: Soviet Union in Retrospect – Ten Years

Part I National Identity 15

Part II The Economy 101

Part III Politics, Law and Foreign Policy 169

10 Censorship and Restrictions on Freedom of Speech in

11 Politics Beyond the Garden Ring: Rethinking the

12 Westernism, Eurasianism and Pragmatism: The Foreign

13 Conclusions: Stalin’s Death 50 Years On 254

W. E. Butler is Professor of Comparative Law at the University of

Bhavna Dave is Lecturer in Central Asian Studies, Department of

Peter J. S. Duncan is Senior Lecturer in Russian Politics and Society,

Sheila Fitzpatrick is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service

Vladimir Gel’man is Lecturer in Russian politics at the Faculty of

Elections in Russia, 1993–1996 (1999). His recent publications in Russian

Philip Hanson is Professor of the Political Economy of Russia and Eastern

Alena Ledeneva is Reader in Russian Politics and Society, SSEES, UCL.

Dov Lynch is Lecturer in War Studies, King’s College, London, and

Wendy Slater is Lecturer in Contemporary Russian History, SSEES, UCL,

Janine R. Wedel is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at

Society: Poland Before and After Communism (1992). Wedel is a three-

Soviet family of nations at the same time as retaining key aspects of

tradition of civil society (obshchestvennost’). Martin Dewhirst, on the other

and Russian scholars, and to some extent also by ordinary Russians.

figured in people’s memories as ‘good, normal times’ (in contrast to the

With respect to historiography, the ‘repression’ theme – always popular

writing has always had an implicit teleology or sense of destination:

First World War and Revolution

else. Historiographically, the Romanovs are back in fashion and so

The Second World War and the concept of Stalinism

twentieth century has occurred simultaneously with the waning of that

It’s very hard for me as an old person, you know, to refashion

In the 1930s, celebrating the defeat of the classes hostile to the

Among these were fatalism, the habit of dwelling on suffering and

assessed in a positive light. The 15 years starting with Gorbachev’s

Notes and references

1. Luisa Passerini, ‘Oral memory of fascism’, in David Forgacs (ed.), Rethinking

passim; Inna Shikheeva-Gaister, Semeinaia khronika vremen kul’ta lichnosti

16. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley, CA,

There is a tendency among scholars to understand political developments

This chapter questions the applicability of the concept of the nation-

Europe, through the creation of the universal state-sponsored education

ethnic and national diversity. Historically, not all Russian policies

The Russian project: views of the federal élites

Conflicting visions of Russia

late 1992 or early 1993, traditional imperialism began to decline.

Similarly, there is no unity among those intellectuals who treat

[R]ecent history suggests that to some extent national identities must

backfired, since they are perceived by minorities as threats to their

A final approach, which takes into account Russia’s multi-ethnic/

improving Russia’s relations with the USA, Stankevich stressed that

The federal government and identity formation

Russian element. Second, the announcement of the contest was illustrated

do not possess their own administrative homeland or live outside the

the return to Soviet music in the anthem provoked a wave of criticism

(rossiiskii) passport. Overcoming the resistance of the leadership of

Non-Russian project: the position of the

The upsurge of ethnic nationalism in Russia’s ethnic autonomies in the

republics, there are either no sizeable ethnic secessionist movements or,

As far as ethnic Russians are concerned, the dominant identity is a civic

established, it becomes immensely difficult, if not impossible (short of