It has never been easy to advance a credible Marxist analysis or critique of Russian politics. The overwhelming dominance of the state, which is an everpresent reality of Russian life, cannot easily be shoehorned into a critique that takes as its point of departure the primacy of the force of production and the relations that grow out of it. Where the state dominates the economy, it proves difficult to make a credible critique. One need only remember the kind of violent surgery Lenin had to do on Marxism in order to justify that Russia was not just a capitalist state but one that was ready for socialism. Not surprisingly, the violence done to the reality of Russia’s mnogoukladnost’ ultimately claimed millions of sacrifices on the altar of ideological rectitude.
Although Kagarlitsky is certainly not a Leninist, he is a Marxist and seeks to advance a Marxist-like critique of Russia after 1991. Moreover he openly expresses his belief that the recovery of “social being” and a genuine collectivism, along with left-wing radicalism – terms that are nowhere to be defined in the book – are essential preconditions for Russia’s freedom. Thus this critique is supposed to set the cognitive grounds for this process. Naturally, this is not the prevailing or necessarily the most insightful way to understand contemporary Russia. But Kagarlitsky is not deterred by this challenge.
Given the circumstances, it is therefore somewhat surprising that much of Kagarlitsky’s critique of Yeltsin’s and to a lesser degree Putin’s Russia is in many respects not unlike those offered by numerous Western critiques. Much will sound familiar to Western writers: the debauchery of democracy, and the destruction of social equality and previously achieved levels of social security, even if imperfect. Likewise, of course, Kagarlitsky parallels much of other writers’ critiques of the oligarchs who got rich off of privatization and state contacts at the expense of the country as a whole.
But even when he is treading along familiar lines Kagarlitsky frequently uses those avenues of criticism to insert original and telling points to strengthen his insights. Thus he makes the unique point that the very act of privatization and the determination of who was to get what inevitably strengthened the state over civil society. Thus the redistribution of social assets and capital had to be resubordinated again to the dictates of state power. This is the point of departure by which the state and those who could capture state power could assume a preeminent position in Russia. Similarly he is always intent on situating his critique in Russian history. Unlike so many Western observers who should know better, Kagarlitsky asserts that this history did not begin with Gorbachev or even with Lenin and Stalin and observes ironically that Russia today is not unlike Russia under Nicholas II, a peripheral state within the capitalist world system. Similarly he is acutely aware of the historical Russian tendency by which Western and democratic forms are transplanted into facades for autocracy in Russia.
These kinds of insights abound throughout the book alongside calls for a left-wing collective movement and lend it considerable power. Thus Kagarlitsky is able to diagnose many of the pathologies afflicting contemporary Russia from a standpoint that is more informed than that of many other observers who are certainly cognizant of the same phenomena but lack an explanatory framework within which to set their observations. Not surprisingly, Kagarlitsky’s intellectual honesty also obliges him to focus on the role of the state because the circumstances surrounding its birth precluded the emergence of a genuine bourgeoisie, capitalist class, or worse, democracy. This autocracy grows out of the circumstances of privatization, of Yeltsin’s single-minded obsession with hanging onto his power, and of the dependence of the new oligarchical class on favors from above and opportunities for exploitation of the old state economy.
As one would expect in a neo-Marxist analysis, Kagarlitsky moves from his focus on the state to an assessment of the media and intelligentsia. While his analysis of the so-called information wars of the 1990s is not that different from other non-Marxist assessments, its power is enhanced by virtue of its connection to the struggle for power and to the fact hat he sees the succession struggle of 1999 that led to Putin’s assumption of power as the coup d’etat from above that it actually was. Naturally this coup involved the threat of war and violence, which ultimately exploded in Chechnya. Unfortunately on Chechnya he falters. Any objective study of Chechnya must concede that by 1998-99 terrorist phenomena throughout the province were in full flower. It is easy to ascribe this to the refusal of the regime to deal adequately with the problems posed by Chechnya’s attempted secession or with the opportunity afforded by the Khasvayurt agreements of 1996. Nonetheless, that fact cannot be avoided.
Still, the existence of a real terrorist threat does not excuse the regime’s unwillingness to deal with Chechnya after 1996 or its clear efforts to incite a violent denouement in Dagestan and Chechnya in 1998-99, particularly in 1999 as part of a strategy to promote a succession tailored to the Yeltsin’s regime’s preferences. The nationalist violence of the war against Chechnya, materially aided and stimulated by the fear incited by bombings in Moscow, were decisive in creating a mood and atmosphere that allowed Putin and his political bloc to win the elections of 1999.
Kagarlistky calls for a left-wing radicalism and a recovery of social being to be based upon a mixed economy. But a Marxist critique of Russia, for all its power, inevitably falters when confronted with the fact that it has nothing to offer in the future. Whatever promise Marxism may have had was long ago negated by its materialization in reality. We may detest the Russia we see before us today but as other acute analysts understand, this is the only Russia we have and the society’s potential for violence, as seen in the repeated cases of internal strife since 1991, is too enormous to justify radical calls for revolution. Since this is the only Russia we have, a psuedo-democracy or psuedo-constitutionalism as Max Weber described the late Tsarist regime, any pressure for democratization must start from here. Moreover, if the economy’s growth can be shifted onto a more self-sustaining basis, as at least some in Putin’s government seem to want, then it may well be possible to create a genuine civil society and socio-economic basis for democracy. But unless we are ready to countenance the violence that is necessarily attendant upon radicalism, we do not in fact have many other alternatives that we can credibly offer or that can be credibly built in today’s Russia.