What is stagnation? I personally define it as a historical situation where the ruling elite does not want to adopt a new way of life, while the opposition does not know how or is unable to do so. In an era of stagnation both the government and the opposition circulate the same myth about the predestined fate of the country or its “special path.”

The liberals, who bitterly reject the idea of Russia as a “very special civilization” understood as “a thousand years of Russian glory,” willingly accept the same myth in a different wrapping – that of a civilization marked by “a thousand years of slavery.”

The phrase “Russia is very special” is the buzzword most commonly heard today. Yet one question remains unclear: Compared with what countries is Russia very special and in what particular ways do the special features of Russia reveal themselves? There is not much comparative research on this matter.

Opposing ideological groups are unaware of the true tendencies that characterize the dynamics of national culture and, unfortunately, are equally reluctant to be aware of them. “Such is the mentality of this nation” they keep saying as an incantation. The understanding of these tendencies is hampered by the common use of popular terms like ‘the cultural code,’ ‘the civilizational matrix’ and ‘the national archetypes,’ which continue to be metaphors or poetic images that fail to explain how these tendencies work. I strongly believe that scientific research must demythologize public consciousness and draw a distinct line between myth and rational knowledge. In line with this understanding of the key role of science, I will try to present my hypothesis of why certain seemingly traditional behavioral stereotypes are so persevering and how the dynamics of genuine traditions works under the impact of global challenges.

TRADITIONS AND THEIR SEMBLANCES

Publicists and, not infrequently, scholars tend to label any historically persistent phenomena as tradition. This factor impedes in many ways the understanding of many of today’s social and political developments. Tradition is a handing down from one generation to the next of the norms of conduct, ideas and values that all members of the community are expected to abide by. Far from all recurrent phenomena will fall into the category of tradition. If people wrap themselves in clothes in winter and take off most of those cloths in the summer, this is not a tradition but a situational self-adjustment to the environment. On the other hand, what you should wear in winter and how much of your body you can expose in summer is a precept of tradition. To hand down traditions to posterity, society needs institutions which play the role of carriers, custodians and – most importantly – controllers of these precepts. Social control uses moral incentives to maintain traditions and moral sanctions for their violations.

In today’s Russia, social control mechanisms have been practically dismantled together with the institutions that perpetuated them. Peasant communities had been buried in oblivion already by the middle of the last century. Religious communities and Russian Orthodox parishes were destroyed during the Soviet era and the possibility that their role will be restored is very small, considering the fact that more than 87 percent of people who consider themselves Russian Orthodox do not associate themselves with one or another parish and only go to church occasionally. Quite recently, one could see babushkas sitting on benches outside urban apartment blocks and gossiping about the moral merits of one family or another. This would compensate to a certain extent for a pattern of social control that operates along the principle of “What will others think of you?” Now this is gone too. Moreover, it is a commonly recognized fact that family relations in the Russian community – primarily in the ethnic sense – have been destroyed and previously tight contacts among family members have changed into periodic contacts. All of this suggests that the perception of Russian society as one ruled by collectivism and a communal consciousness is just a myth.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has drawn the conclusion that society is doomed to extinction and there will be a full collapse of social norms if the decay of traditional institutions of collectivity is not made up for by new institutions of informal contacts, mutual assistance and social control. This replacement or recombination of the old and the new traditions is taking place in many countries. Many traditional mechanisms of social regulation have survived in Germany, for instance. Russians who move to Germany do not find it difficult to get accustomed to new laws – those laws are very much like Russian ones except that they are followed more often. What they really find problematic is informal control – such as their neighbors telling them all the time what one can or cannot do in one’s own home or out in the street. New institutions that bring together people of the same age, gender or profession, charity funds and others have augmented traditional institutions. Informal associations – traditional (neighborhood and religious) and also new – embrace about 60 percent of adult Germans. In Scandinavia, that percentage is even greater and stands at 69.5 percent.

The U.S. provides one more example of this, as more than 80 million Americans eighteen years and older, or 45 percent of the total population, spend at least five hours a week in voluntary social activity, including charity and religious community events. For 75 percent of Americans, solidarity and orientation at social commonwealth are no smaller values than personal self-actualization. In Russia, the traditional institutional environment has been demolished and has not been replaced with anything new. This fact per se casts doubt over society’s ability to hand down any standards at all, whether traditional or not.

If so, how could one explain the recurrence of monotypic collisions and the so-called ‘traditionalization,’ which analysts refer to as an indisputable feature of contemporary Russia? Or how would one interpret such historically persistent patterns of behavior as mass non-compliance with the law?

Alexander Herzen, a 19th century Russian pro-Western thinker, highlighted this feature as a purely ethnic one. “Whatever social rank a Russian belongs to, he will bypass the law anyplace where he can go unpunished, and the government acts in precisely the same way,” he wrote. It should be noted, however, that neither the much-respected Herzen nor the numerous experts of the past who frequently quoted this thought ever did comparative research and thus were hardly able to say against what countries and peoples this feature of Russian life looks specific.

Cross-cultural research done with the aid of sociological polls and social/psychological tests has appeared but only fairly recently and the results seem surprising at first glance. The European Social Survey (ESS) taken in 2004 and 2005 in 24 countries shows that the citizens of post-Communist European countries have common features, while at the same time dramatically differ from other Europeans. In the first place, they are far less ready to respect the law and – most remarkably – have a greater inclination to justify possible violations of the law.

It should be noted that disrespect for the law took root in many post-Communist countries during the lifetime of just one generation of people who got trapped in the millstones of the totalitarian system. The impact of this system is easy to explain: if the standards of law and order are established through violent interference on the part of an authoritarian power instead of being naturally assimilated by an individual, this coercive obedience inevitably estranges people from the power and the law. In such cases the severity of Russian/Soviet, Czech, Polish, Hungarian and other laws was cushioned off by an optional non-abidance of the laws. Estrangement of this kind does not flow out of tradition; it is a product of people’s situational adjustment to monotypic conditions of life.

Another remarkable fact is that in societies in which a sizable number of elements of traditional organization has been preserved, estrangement from the authoritarian power leads to entirely different consequences than in societies with demolished institutions. Take for instance the North Caucasus republics, where people’s alienation from the authorities and their laws has been replaced by the growth of informal traditional institutions – family, territorial, communal and religious. This has not happened, however, in most other parts of Russia and other post-Communist states except Poland, where the Roman Catholic Church has a prominent role.

In traditional societies, people’s alienation from the external environment increases the importance of trust in “their immediate” environment, while in de-traditionalized societies alienation affects even the immediate environment. According to the EES, a poll conducted in Ukraine showed that more than a half of the respondents treat suspiciously even the social environment which they are closely related to – in the questionnaire they underlined the statement “the majority of people will try and treat you dishonestly.” Russia – which was left out of the survey – obviously displays a much higher level of anxiety and suspicion than Ukraine; far fewer traditional civil institutions have been preserved in Russia and the new ones are not as mature. Russia also displays far less interpersonal contacts even within the limits of a local social medium. If the social environment in today’s Russia resembles a punctured sieve, how can it keep up the archetypes of collective notions and cultural codes?

When the traditional institutions for safeguarding and reproducing cultural norms no longer work or become weakened, the socio-cultural dynamics become subject to the general systemic law of inertia.

INERTIA

Everyone knows from their school years that an object retains quiescence or continues a uniform steady motion until it encounters resistance (friction) or gets a new external impulse. This principle of inertia perfectly explains the mechanism of cultural dynamics. The names of nations have the most endurance – they can exist for centuries and even millennia as they do not encounter resistance and do not impede people’s adaptation to historical changes. Customs that have lost their original meaning and have turned into rituals can also endure for a long time. With some ethnic groups, you shake hands when meeting other people; with some others, you clap hands; and with others you press the hands against your chest. All of these customs do not interfere with the changing world.

Yet the more resistance that the fast-changing world puts up to a tradition, the lesser the degree of the latter’s survival. For instance, urbanization wiped out ethnic clothing, only leaving a place for it in some ritual activities. It also changed traditional ethnic dwellings into standardized houses equipped with central heating, running water, sewage, and adapted to the endlessly rising cost of property.

Traditions may take centuries to form, but only a few years to vanish. The siesta (the long period of rest in the afternoon between the peak of activity in the morning and after sundown) was the Spaniards’ calling card for centuries. Many great Europeans cited that tradition while saying that the Pyrenees were the border of Europe. “A nation that sleeps during the day and is awake at night can’t be called European.” But then industrialization came and pushed the siesta to the sidelines, leaving a space for it only in the leisure and entertainment business. Late-night public carnivals on the squares of Spanish cities stress the country’s colorfulness and attract tourists, while putting up no obstacles to economic development or integration in the European Union.

The changing environment does not always destroy traditions. It can even energize them for a while, especially when the symbols of national and ethnic identity become the targets of aggression, which triggers resistance. However, it is not the mental traditions, but rather the social institutions defending them that put up resistance. If tradition-based consciousness lives on, this happens because either the conditions that gave birth to a tradition have survived, or new conditions have appeared, playing the role of a freezing chamber or, vice versa, a greenhouse to regenerate the withered traditional norms. More often than not, analysts ignore precisely these institutional conditions. In Russia, the protective shell of traditional institutions has been torn off, which has opened up a broad alley for any cultural borrowings, including the most bizarre ones. Russia is the only country where the biggest newspapers publish the predictions of astrologers more often than weather forecasts. It has generated unique opportunities for manipulating the mass consciousness and construing any public moods, however volatile they may be.

And what about the archetypes of consciousness that ostensibly predestine values like paternalism and orientation toward a “strong arm?” They are a myth – there is no proof that archetypes can affect the choice of a political system or social relations. Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence of a rapid and radical transformation of paternalism.

The mass consciousness of the German nation experienced a drastic change in less than fifty years. In the 1930s, Germany lived under the sway of paternalism and totalitarian collectivist values, which dominated individualistic ones. Ulrich Beck said the people lived according to the principle: “You’re nothing and the State is everything.” Today, Germany is a pylon of European liberalism with its powerful accent on the individual who gets involved in various free associations. Germans in the 1930s had the heaviest imaginable militarization mindset, but over time this changed into an extremely peace-loving disposition.

The consciousness of Scandinavians has gone through the same kind of metamorphosis, although over a longer period of time. The progeny of the once horrific Vikings evolved into quite meek nations. They used to be the heaviest drinkers imaginable and now they cannot compete in drinking either with the Russians or with the Finns. Even the Chinese mentality has seen revolutionary changes. I said ‘even’ because the case in hand is a country that still has a predominantly rural population that has retained traditional institutions to a larger degree than others. China’s cultural specificity is nurtured by the extreme density of the practically monoethnic population and a very small inflow of ethnic immigrants. Now China – which preserved its virginal self-identity for centuries and isolated itself from cultural borrowings by the Great Wall – has become the world’s largest copycat. It replicates and mimics everything that is Western – from Rembrandt paintings sold at Chinese flee markets to cars and computers.

Today, few people would not point out the mythical cultural codes running through the life of various peoples and allegedly determining susceptibility to some ideas and the obstruction of other ideas. But reality shows an entirely different picture. King Juan Carlos of Spain and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez speak the same language, belong to the same religion and share the same imperial history, and yet they do not accept each other’s views. On the other hand, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a Moslem, Chavez is a Roman Catholic and the Belarusian father superior Alexander Lukashenko is an Orthodox Christian atheist. These three represent different cultural codes, but understand each other perfectly and love each other tenderly. North Korea’s Kim Jong Il could easily join this group, although he represents the extremely distant Korean Buddhist civilization.

The same nation divided by a border (like the North and South Koreans) may build very different political systems, while different peoples may build similar regimes – such as the forms of socialism built in North Korea and Cuba. Communists in Russia acknowledge both of these forms of socialism as their kin. Such observations are open to one and all. Now let us turn to aspects that are hidden from the eye unequipped with science.

Many changes take place unnoticed as they come about under the guise of traditions. Japanese sociologists insist that the current collectivism in Japan’s society is traditional only at the surface. They claim that it stands in contrast to the traditional coercive and, in many ways, gregarious collectivism. These scholars point out some kind of a new, conscientious and selective collectivism of “solidary individualism.” The reason is that the ongoing rise of individualism causes a compensatory reaction demanding new collectivism. That is why it is not surprising at all that voluntary organizations and various collective actions are found exactly in the individualistic countries with ‘open societies,’ whether in the West or in the East.

Russia is a different story. Analysts typically link the work style characteristic of Russians – shturmovshchina (literally ‘storm work,’ which suggests haphazard surges of activity in industry depending on the demands of the season) – to the specificity of Russia’s natural conditions and the traditional seasonal distribution of work in rural areas with super-intensive work in the summer and almost no activity during the long Russian winters. However, for more than fifty years now, Russians have been living in an urbanized country and hence ‘storm work’ reflects rather a fundamental trait of the socialist economy as a system of chronic shortages, which bred short supplies of produce throughout the year and the fatally irreversible need “to assimilate allocations” at the end of the year. That is why this tradition could be seen during the Soviet era in regions as different climatically and geographically as Estonia and Turkmenistan, or East Germany and Mongolia.

The above-mentioned European Social Survey revealed that a multitude of stereotypes in behavior and consciousness attributed to national character or age-old life in specific civilizational conditions (terrain, geography, language, religion, etc.) actually took shape within the rather brief Communist period of history. People living in post-Communist countries that belong to different ethnic and religious groups and have different natural conditions – Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Estonia – display much more similarity than divergence. All these countries display a far smaller rate of engagement by citizens in public associations and movements (from 2.5 to 6 times less, depending on the type of associations). Also, the value of these associations is much lower than in the West. The comfort level and security of living in post-Communist states is also lower and, consequently, the value of human life is underrated there compared with the other countries under review. When people become accustomed to living in an unsafe environment unprotected by law, life loses its value regardless of whether one lives in the South or in the North. And all of the above-mentioned post-Communist nations are among the top ten in the ranking of countries with the biggest percentage of people who have been forced to give bribes. It is not surprising then that the same countries are in the top of the list in terms of readiness to give bribes.

Surprisingly, the Estonians are the most ready to give bribes, not the Slavs; while the Finns – ethnically close relatives to the Estonians – are at the bottom of the list. This leads us to the conclusion that the age-old ethnic closeness of the Estonians and Finns and their relative long life within the Russian empire have had less impact on the specificity of their actual behavior and consciousness than the decades when Estonia was part of the Soviet Union.

The Russians have a fashion for describing the ethnic character of one or another nation in the form of jokes that ascribe light-headedness to the French, pedantry to the Germans, Victorian mannerism to the English, and spirituality to the Russians themselves. But what is the much-lauded German order or the proverbial English traditionalism? They are ethnic markers; images formed in discourse. They have seen changes throughout history. It is commonly accepted now that the French are light-headed and the English are prim and reserved, but in the 17th and the 18th centuries the two nations enjoyed radically different assessments. Charles-Louis de Montesquieu claimed that England had no tyranny due to English flippancy. His claim does not sound absurd if you recall which of the two nations turned down the traditional religion, was the first to recognize women as supreme rulers, trenched upon the sacred life of the monarch, and legitimized sporting houses.

Meanwhile, the ESS indicates that neither tradition nor order can be found on the list of values that dominate among the British, Germans or French today. Both values are of a protective nature, while these three nations find it much more important now to adapt to the briskly changing conditions of life. Britain occupies a place closer to the bottom on the list of 24 countries in terms of emphasis on tradition. The leading positions belong to the countries with high levels of religious devotion – Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland. They also outdo post-Communist countries in what concerns respect for tradition. Moreover, this quartet fully conforms to all the legal standards of the EU and is undergoing a dynamic modernization. Why then does the specificity of less traditional Russian mentality allegedly predetermine “a special path of development?” Russia does have a specificity of its own, though – one that stems neither from tradition nor from ossified consciousness.

FRICTION

The bitter satire of Russia in the works of the 19th-century writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin looks like observations by a contemporary, as the fundamental characteristics of life in Russia “have successfully withstood the test of time.” Raw materials remain the backbone of Russian exports – the same as they were during the reign of Peter the Great, with the only difference being that oil and gas have replaced timber. The top rulers continue to set up governors in provinces quite like the Russian tsars did in the past.

Where does paternalism come from? It arises from estrangement. This conclusion was prompted by an interesting explanation of the results of the past election in one of the republics of the North Caucasus. “Votes are not blood, we don’t begrudge them; we’ll vote for those whom the bosses choose,” people would say. But when the same bosses encroached on the people’s genuine interests during the distribution of land, they immediately encountered mass resistance. The more a person is estranged from some sphere of life, the more he is inclined toward paternalism. “The Duma is alien, so let the bosses decide on it, but the land and pensions are our own, and so we’ll stand for them ourselves.”

Things acceptable at one period of time may become totally unacceptable at other times. At the time of Peter the Great, absolute monarchy was a standard feature all over Europe, but it had become an anachronism by the 19th century. The enlightened part of Russian society perceived the change as a historical challenge then. The authorities noticed it too, but reacted to it with repressions and circulation of protective ideas, which was a forerunner of today’s idea of a ‘special civilization.’ In the 19th century, the official idea of narodnost, or staying true to the interests of the people, was used as a shield against the idea of popular sovereignty in much the same way as the special ‘sovereign democracy’ is used today to “protect” Russia against the idea of a genuine rule of the people. It is amazing to see how the consciousness of the ruling class combines two mutually exclusive convictions – that Russia’s path is predestined and simultaneously that Russia can be steered away from the right path by whiffs of “alien influences.”

Today, like in the 19th century, Russia does not have a society capable of influencing the authorities. That type of society, formed within the boundaries of a country and fastened together by a common identity and awareness of being the true sovereign of its land, is called a political nation. Such societies exist but only in a small number of countries, which brings us to the problem of civilizational specificity. I view it, first and foremost, as a set of specific conditions that create different opportunities in different countries; the varying force of friction for the response to general impulses – the challenges of time.

Political nations take less time to form in those places where traditional societies produce social strata capable of leading the forces that counteract the concentration of power. In England, the aristocracy had to rely on the people in the struggle with the monarchy already in the Middle Ages, thus gaining the role of the nation’s leaders. The same process was far more difficult and took longer in France, but it eventually made the Third Estate play the leading role. In contrast to that, the Russian aristocracy relatively rapidly devolved into a class of civil servants fully dependent on the monarch. As for Russia’s Third Estate, it simply did not have enough time to grow into an independent political class over the five decades that separated the emancipation of the serfs (1863) and the Socialist Revolution (1917). The formation of the Third Estate in Russia is still in progress now.

Political nations emerge as a rule in the footsteps of ethnic consolidation. The lack of ethnic consolidation creates huge obstacles to political consolidation. The Arab world has separate states but no nations, as people there associate themselves to a greater degree with an Arab supranation and even more frequently with religion than with individual countries. Such forms of identity allow people to unite at times against such events as the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper, but national consolidation inside those countries goes on painfully and this torpedoes their modernization. There are also many countries in Latin America and in some of them nations have failed to take shape. There is no ground for the national ‘We’ idea to take hold there, as those countries have the same Roman Catholic religion, practically the same language – except for Brazil – and a patchy ethnic composition. Each country has a national soccer team, and in soccer championships one can see plainly against whom ‘We’ are playing. However, this does not provide enough ground for ethnic consolidation. And what does all of this produce? According to the eminent Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, attempts to modernize Latin American countries have been made more than eighty times, but they all have failed. A national project cannot be implemented if there is no nation to support it.

Friction does not predetermine the vector of motion; it simply conditions the difference of speed and trajectory. The peculiarities of settlement by ethnic groups and of the formation of Latin American countries did not prevent some of them from beginning to set up political nations. National cultures have arisen in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Chile. The nation-state’s self-identification of citizens is gaining momentum there; people are uniting around common non-ethnic cultural symbols and, most importantly, around a growing self-awareness that they are masters of their land. Still, in most cases in human history it was the ethnic consolidation that preceded the national-political one.

Russia has formed its statehood and the Russian ethnos – established many centuries ago – has created a great culture and a multitude of national symbols. But Russia’s statehood could not consolidate on the ethnic basis in the conditions of the Empire. Soviet-era sociological research showed that ethnic Russians had a much weaker ethnic consciousness than peoples in other former Soviet republics. Research done in the early 1990s, which compared Russians with other ethnic peoples of the Russian Federation, produced the same results. However, the situation has changed since the end of the 1990s – the consciousness of ethnic Russians has started to outstrip that of other ethnic groups.

This phenomenon might have various consequences. On the one hand, the entire set of social problems is getting an increasingly intensive ethnic coloring, sounding like “Look at those strangers! They rob, buy up property, deal drugs, breed corruption, and bring infections here.” On the other hand, the growth of ethnic consciousness helps many people assimilate the idea that they must become masters of the country. This is synonymous with popular sovereignty, which nurtured the rise of most political nations. Unfortunately, people very often strive for the right to be masters not with regard to the country, but with regard to the “aliens.” Still, let us recall that in France, the birthplace of the popular sovereignty idea, its authors and the leaders of the French Revolution espoused bellicose xenophobia, both toward neighboring nations – above all, Germany – and toward their own minorities – the Bretons and the Corsicans.

Russia is currently seeing a rapid growth of nationalistic organizations against a general decrease in people’s participation in the institutions of civil society. But the specialty of national values has nothing to do with this. Ethnic traits are just the simplest markers for distinguishing between ‘Us’ and ‘Them,’ especially in an environment of make-belief party stratification. It cannot be ruled out that ethnic consolidation in Russia could open up the road to the rise of a political nation – the way it happened in most European countries. Yet the aftermath of a two-stage rise of such nations has not always been similar.

Integration of various ethnic and religious groups around the majority took place only in countries where ethnic-cultural unification was a mere instrument for further consolidation of people to resolve the pressing political and social problems, such as elimination of despotic regimes, poverty, diseases, etc. In these countries ethnic nations transformed into civil ones and modernization gained pace. This was the case with peoples fighting against empires for their national liberation (for instance, the Dutch fighting Spain and the Greeks fighting the Ottomans), and with ethnic groups that made up the backbone of empires (for instance, the Spaniards and the Turks consolidated in the struggle with internal defenders of imperial complexes in the 20th century).

However, there have also been cases when ethnic values and objectives themselves played dominant roles, thus paving the way toward an ideology of ethnic and racial superiority. Fascism was born this way – as a radical racist theory coupled with the myth about a mystical predetermination of a “special path,” i.e. the mission of a chosen people, race or civilization. As seen by the Third Reich, this option brings tragic results both to the nation that accepts it and to millions of innocent victims in other countries.

Which path will Russia choose? The programs and actions of today’s Russian nationalistic organizations suggest that most of them are already imbued with racism. However, their numeric strength does not exceed 2 to 3 percent of all the people who are now assimilating ethnic consciousness. The vast majority of them are not racist or nationalistically minded. They are simply disoriented people with a vague understanding of the real causes of problems and an even vaguer idea of how to cope with them. Frankly speaking, it would be hard to expect anything different from people who are being indoctrinated with the idea of mental and national superiority and the idea of a special path for Russia. Furthermore, the mass media hammers into people’s heads ideas about alien influences and the malicious designs of the barbarians who destroyed the Byzantine Empire and are now set to destroy the Third Rome.

IMPULSES

Japanese Kabuki theater and the Russian theater founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky retain their national uniqueness because they do not compete with each other. But armed forces are made to compete and that is why a national army equipped with bows and arrows cannot defend its self-identity in fighting with an army that has artillery guns and tanks. Understandably, national economic systems cannot remain unchanged while competing with the economies of other countries and responding to new challenges. Some countries are still in the process of transition from agrarian to industrial development, while others have already entered post-industrial development. Nor can nations escape urbanization, which in its turn transforms lifestyles, family types and demographic behavior. If a need for change emerges, it will not be blocked by any mental archetypes. However, any change requires a stimulating impulse.

One good example is the so-called qwerty effect – a standard positioning of those six letters on the upper left side of computer keyboards. It is clear now that the choice of this position was far from the best possible, but to remodel it now would be too expensive and irrational. Why? Because the impulse to alter this position is very weak. It is a very different case when foreign airports stop accepting Russian jets with a higher-than-admissible noise level. This is a serious impulse for the airlines to start overhauling their fleets – regardless of the costs. And when a big country loses in the Crimean War to a foreign naval task force, the impulse for change is all too strong.

The current political system in Russia shows inertia not so much because of tradition but, rather, owing to the weakness of impulses for a change of the political regime. Even if society becomes fully aware of the problems, this does not immediately create prerequisites for their removal.

There is a consensus in Russian society today in recognizing the many social and economic problems and this can be seen in the promulgation of the so-called ‘national projects.’ However, these are not genuinely national projects since they do not rely on a civil nation. These are governmental projects which suggest the use of tools traditional for a civilization with ‘a special path’ – mobilization measures and distribution of resources. This very fact dooms such projects to failure.

Science. The Soviet authorities were well aware of the significance of scientific and technological progress. At the same time, Soviet modernization based on mobilization ripped science from its natural groundwork – emancipation of the individual and the existence of incentives for creative research. As a result, great achievements were beneficial only for a rather narrow sphere of life, mostly military defense. The authorities had the power to arbitrarily suppress important branches of science, such as genetics or cybernetics, while at the same time thrusting forward false ones. Eventually, the shackled development of science led to a situation where the thin ranks of research intellectuals were further thinned by repressions and the brain drain, as scientists would flee the country at the first opportunity.

The situation has changed now, but not necessarily for the better. The prestige surrounding research has fallen below Soviet-era benchmarks, and low salaries are not the only cause here. Even in developed countries, scientists do not earn the same money as bankers or lawyers do, yet research activity tops the charts of social prestige. This is typical of societies where the idea of progress has turned into a creed; in Russia, it has drowned in neglect and hopes for the future are pinned on growing demand for resources in other countries. Russia boasts of spirituality and keeps slipping into obscurantism, an indispensable attribute of stagnation. There is no honorable place for science. Great achievements that meet the requirements of science are possible only in a scientific community, and that community is falling apart in Russia. A lecturer at a provincial university can make a great discovery, but it will be buried right where it was made – unless someone from Moscow steals it. Horizontal links among scientists are weakening, while the vertical subordination of the scientific and cultural space is increasing. The government has monopolized the distribution of funds for science and culture, earmarking funds in strict compliance with the hierarchic status of cities and towns.

Demography. Modernization based on mobilization counts on demographic resources. A country can win wars by sacrificing many more human lives than its enemy and launch great construction projects without sparing other people’s lives. This way of doing things might be still possible in China, but Russia’s human resources are waning. And what does the Russian government do in such conditions? It mobilizes resources and distributes them to stimulate births. Yet Russia does not differ from the rest of Europe very much in terms of birth rates, although social spending in Europe is already more than what Russia will be able to afford to spend in 2020. It is a different story when you look at the mortality rate in Russia – it is the highest in Europe and life expectancy is the lowest. The mortality rate has grown even in comparison with “the horrific 1990s.” Why? Because reducing death rates cannot be resolved through mobilization. Former Socialist countries which used to have similar levels of mortality and life expectancy as Russia before they entered the EU have made sizable improvements in that sphere. This has happened largely thanks to the adoption of EU standards which put the highest value on human life. Healthy lifestyles have become prestigious and sought after in these countries. The EU has renounced smoking on a national scale. People have started exercising not only for the sake of the prestige of a great power, but for their own health.

Corruption. There is no need to explain that the problem of corruption, if it keeps growing, can halt life in any country. Yet many Russians still don’t realize that this illness cannot be remedied through government efforts alone. Moreover, the corruption clot gets bigger if power is increasingly accumulated in the hands of the state. The more inspections there are, the bigger the bribes and the wider is the spread of corruption.

However, Russia is not the first country to deal with this problem. In the late 1970s, after a single party had been in power for thirty years, Italy had higher corruption levels than Russia does today. Police frightened the rank-and-file more than criminals, as people thought the police were a government protected mafia. People could live “by the notions” – not by the rule of law – for quite some time, until the size of bribes exceeded income. At that point, the people united in a “clean hands” movement that consolidated the nation and pushed a resolution to the problem out of deadlock. Today, Italy is number one in the EU as regards the quantity of volunteer organizations watching the courts, the police and other agencies of law and order.

Inter-ethnic relations. In the 2000s, Russia has seen an annual increase in violence on ethnic and racial grounds. The authorities have not left the problem unattended, and the number of people convicted for such crimes offers a testimony to this. I am not against court sentences of the kind, but I do realize that they are not very efficient amid a passive attitude on the part of society that sympathizes with “indigenous” nationalism.

The ethno-political situation has deteriorated in many countries in this century, as seen in the riots in the Arab-populated districts of Paris, clashes with ethnic immigrant groups in the Netherlands, and terrorist acts in Spain and Britain. The aggravation of inter-ethnic tensions is a global problem now and is linked in many ways to a new stage of demographic transition.

It is common knowledge that the demographic transition began when high rates of childbirth and mortality, characteristic of traditional societies, were replaced with low ones. The next stages saw an increase in life expectancy due to progress in medical science and changes in lifestyles. However, these factors do not make up for the drop in births or, consequently, for the shrinkage of the population and labor resources. That is why developed countries have come to a new stage of the demographic transition, in which immigration is behind the greater part of population growth in Europe and the U.S.

The global problem prompts a universal solution, namely, a revision of priorities and the foundations of self-identity. Civil forms of identity begin to prevail in society over racial, ethnic and religious ones. For the first time in the history of France – the birthplace of chauvinism – Nicolas Sarkozy, a descendant of Hungarian immigrants, was elected president. The Americans could elect Barack Obama, the son of a black man from Africa, to the White House. The surge in Obama’s popularity is amazing, especially when one considers that this has become possible in a country where racism was commonplace a mere forty years ago and where there were official racial segregation regulations, above all in southern states.

Those who think that the striking changes that have occurred over a brief historical period came about only thanks to government efforts are making a fundamental error. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not be called a supporter of racism, but he would not even dare think about striking down segregationist laws. He realized that the electorate would not support him on that. President John F. Kennedy did not launch segregation reforms until the U.S. elite became aware that society might collapse after the racial upheavals in American cities in the 1950s. An offensive against racism began in those conditions. The process became irreversible after the ideas of racial equality had received support from the leading mass media and the Hollywood “dream factory” and – most importantly – after public opinion changed. Reliance on society opened the doors to a reform of racial relations and ensured its efficiency.

In my view, the world has only now started assimilating the idea of popular sovereignty and the government’s reliance on society, which was put forward more than two centuries ago. However, this idea embraces a limited number of countries and where – unfortunately – it is meant exclusively “for internal use;” i.e., where national public opinion matters only in solving domestic problems. As for international affairs, the U.S. and France display a total disregard for public opinion in many countries, as has been vividly shown in the recent decision on Kosovo. As for Russia, society has virtually no influence on vital decisions even in its own country. At best, it is allowed to legitimize the decisions already taken.

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Any hopes to resolve the problems facing Russia today by derelict methods of state mobilization are a sheer illusion. Russia has lost its traditionalism and the goal it faces today is not so much to move forward, but, rather, to restore a balance between the elements of state and society that have already been reformed and those that still remain intact. Given this situation, a further fragmentary modernization of a slumbering society and perseverance of the principle “the king knows what his subjects need best” is a path that will lead the country into a blind alley, and in this sense it really is a “special path.”

However, the claims on the part of many Russian liberals that the resources for modernization through mobilization have run shallow are also deceptive. We must draw a distinction line between the moral outdatedness of a construction and the exhaustion of resources. A certain model of car may be morally outdated but customers might continue driving it for quite some time. The resource of that model will be exhausted when demand for it runs out. The same applies to models of political development. They run out of resources only when society, or its most active part, realizes that the models are no longer useful for solving pressing problems. Then the problems themselves will turn into challenges calling for changes. As for today, the current consumer boom in Russia shows that the majority of Russians share a conviction that it is quite possible to live in the present situation. A Russian proverb says: “The peasant needs thunder to cross himself and wonder.” When that thunder comes, Russians will cross themselves – in all senses of the word, including a change in their political creed.