Stalemate in Russia

The death of Alexei Navalny has been interpreted as evidence that Russia has once more entered a stalemate. This doesn't refer to the minimal movement of the frontline in Ukraine but to the belief that Russian society is once more stuck, much as it was in the Brezhnev years, and that all anyone, inside or outside the country, can hope for is Putin's inevitable demise by natural or unnatural causes. The current gloomy predictions, centred on this weekend's presidential election, are that he isn't going anywhere soon. He has stablised the economy on a war-footing, international sanctions have proved ineffective in bringing social pressure to bear on the military campaign, and weariness in the West means that Ukraine will face a frozen conflict for years to come if not pressure to negotiate the partial surrender of invaded territory. I have no particular insight into the military situation, though I would note that my simplistic assessment that Russia hasn't got the materiel to take Kiev and Ukraine hasn't got the mapower to liberate the Donbass and Crimea remains sound, if hardly original. What I'm more interested in is the changing perception in the West of Russia, that "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma", as Winston Churchill patronisingly put it. 

The trigger for this line of thought was an article in Eurozine by Kirill Rogov - Russia's Future and the War - published in the immediate aftermath of Navalny's death. The heart of Rogov's argument is the oscillation between pro-European and anti-European sentiment, with Navalny presented as an ikon of the former: "This regular pendulum movement can be seen throughout Russian history – periods of pro-European modernization, followed by periods when the anti-European agenda is prevalent. The rapid adaptation of European models and practices is then replaced by hostility to the European ideal and efforts to replace it with Russia’s ‘national’ or even ‘civilizational’ identity." There are two problems here. One is the claim that "As the face of European idea in Russia, Navalny incorporated everything that the forces of revanchism in the country oppose." Even the most superficial review of Navalny's history reveals a man who was happy to play the Russian chauvinist when it suited him. Like many Eastern European politicians (and many Western European ones), he moved seamelessly between liberalism, nationalism and Islamophobia. As Jeremy Morris noted, "the anti-Putin contains many ingredients of Putin himself".

The second, and bigger, problem is the idea that Russia is bipolar. Some of this is simply recycling of old tropes about Russia's propensity for suffering and its tendency towards manic depression, which owed as much to the long shadow of serfdom and the knout as to the tortured speculations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The modern equivalents are the trope of alcoholism as an expression of social ennui and, topically, the accusation of fatalism in the face of political corruption. But there is an obvious inconsistency in the idea that Russia is governed both by a persistent structure of feeling (the "Russian soul") and by a tendency towards a periodic volte-face centred on its attitude towards Europe and its associated "modernisation". Rogov's attempt to prove the reality of the latter leads to some questionable history: "The Bolshevik project in the twentieth century was probably the longest period of Russian anti-Europeanism. It was certainly the most extensive and bloody attempt to establish in Russia a system of institutions and values completely opposed to European ones. However, after the Soviet regime entered the phase of its demobilization in 1960s, it was only a matter of decades before a pro-European elite had formed in the Soviet Union, leading to an anti-communist and pro-western revolution."

As any fule kno', the Boshevik project was consciously pro-European and modernising, hence the belief that revolution in Russia might trigger a general proletarian uprising throughout the continent. The Comintern was focused on generalising a Marxist analysis of history, not on emphasising Russian exceptionalism. Marx and Engels themselves contributed to the debate in the late-nineteenth century on whether Russia could proceed directly from the "primitive communism" of its agrarian base to socialism. They said no (the proletarian phase was necessary), but the key points to draw out here are that the Russian left was looking to European models and Marx and Engels were insisting that revolution in Russia would require first revolution in the West. This was finessed by Lenin as an alliance of workers and peasants, and would eventually give way, after the failure of revolutions in Germany and Hungary, to Stalin's "socialism in one country", but at no point did this entail a rejection of Europe. Even at its most extreme interpretation in the 1930s, Soviet Communism remain infatuated with European ideas of industrial modernity, scientific rationality and the appreciation of high culture (if not its contemporary expressions).

It's perfectly reasonable to characterise Russian history as one of warmer and cooler relations with the West - nobody would claim that today's froideur over Ukraine is the same as the sympathy shown towards Putin during the Second Chechen War. But the stronger claim being made is that these changes in temperature can be sourced to a reaction by Russia - the West being blameless (the idea that Putin was incited to invade Ukraine by the expansion of NATO is a version of this, albeit one that points the finger at Western carelessness as much as Russian pique). As Rogov puts it, "Periods of pro-European orientation in Russia often coincide with – and are stimulated by – signs of the success of Europe and the European project. ... when Europe reached a trajectory of sustainable growth at the end of the twentieth century, democratizing citizens’ access to the benefits of this growth by creating a mass consumer society, while at the same time making a breakthrough in European integration, it provoked the crisis and collapse of the totalitarian anti-European empire in the East." 

If this dynamic were really at work, you'd have to ask why the USSR didn't collapse in the 1960s when the signs of the success of the European project were visible to everyone (consider the UK's repeated requests for accession to the EEC) and at a time that Rogov claims the Soviet regime was "demobilizing". He explains the delay as the gradual formation of a pro-European elite, as if Khrushchev inherited a backwater that had to be slowly opened to the West in the manner of Peter the Great, rather than a major power with broad international influence and two decades of close political, economic and cultural involvement with half the European continent. And can we really say that the 1980s and 90s in Western Europe was a period that "democratized citizens' access to the benefits of growth"? That phrase echoes the rhetoric of Thatcherism, but it doesn't chime with popular experience during an era of privatisation and rising inequality. The benefits of growth since 1979 have not been equally shared and the neoliberal political economy that has dominated Western Europe these last 40 years cannot be plausibly described in terms of greater democratisation.

The simple truth is that the bipolar nature of Russia reflects a lasting ambivalence in the West about how the country should be treated, rather than something innate to Russian society. Insofar as Russians do resent the West, it relates to that ambivalence: the unwillingness to accord the country equal respect and the sense that it can never quite qualify for membership of the club. That ambivalence ultimately reflects Russia's Eurasian position, hence the disproportionate focus in the West on its relations with China: the worry that they might ally and so present a threat to the US hegemony in which Western Europe has invested so much. Such an alliance would probably have little impact on geopolitics, contrary to the "heartland" theory of Halford Mackinder that Rogov alludes to with talk of Russia as part of the "Greater European Periphery". That 77% of Russia's population is west of the Urals, and that much of the other 23% were moved east by diktat, doesn't lessen the suspicion in the West that the country is essentially an Asiatic horde waiting to descend on European civilisation, hence the quagmire in Ukraine is easily translated into a clear and present danger for the Baltics and even Poland.

Rogov's analysis is hopeful in the sense that he thinks the pendulum will inevitably swing back: "Breaking off economic ties with Europe so abruptly and maintaining hostility towards Europe at such a high degree would produce strains on society and very strict forms of authoritarian control. After some time, when this control proves too expensive, or for other economic or political factors, prevailing opinion will turn back in favour of Europe." This strikes me as naive on two counts. First, it imagines that Russian politics is always and only ever about Europe and attitudes towards it, which is obviously ridiculous. And second, it implicitly identifies public opinion with a narrow band of the middle-class: the liberal intelligentsia that admires an idealised Europe as a way of avoiding having to think about Russia in domestic terms - a stratum that Rogov himself represents. As Tony Wood pointed out in Russia Without Putin, what ultimately matters is the post-Soviet system of capitalism, of which Putin is as much a prisoner as anyone in a Siberian labour camp. 

That system has functioned well enough in the interests of the elite, and even the liberal intelligentsia. It has been coming under pressure in recent years, and the Ukraine misadventure can certainly be tied back to that fact and the regime's need for positive achievements, but it has yet to produce a coherent domestic opposition to that system, let alone a credible challenger to Putin. Alexei Navalny's narrow focus on elite corruption meant that the wider economic system never really came into view politically, while his personalised approach to campaigning presented too many in Russian society with the excuse of preferring the devil (and relative stability) they knew. As Wood put it in 2020: "Russia's imitation democracy is capable of reproducing itself whether Putin is in charge or not. It if is to be replaced by something substantively different, an alternative to the system as a whole will have to coalesce - not just an anti-Putin who can take the current president's place." Insofar as Russia is once more in a stalemate, it is because of the failure to develop an anti-capitalist opposition.