Russian liberals have been warning the U.S. administration recently that making concessions and compromises with the current Russian government only strengthens this authoritarian regime and foils democratic and liberal processes in the country. They mostly criticize U.S. realists who defend the need to respect Russia’s interests and sovereignty.

This position taken by U.S. realists is supposedly based on the assumption that the Russian nation is not ready to accept democratic values and institutions, and, consequently, there is no point in trying to promote democracy in Russia from the outside. However, the realists’ concept implies no such argument regarding the Russian nation.

This erroneous interpretation of the realists’ views has led to a no less mistaken and persistent assumption that Russians are striving towards democracy and have a good idea of what it is. Remarkably, Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Center, an independent polling and research organization, co-authored an article published in The Washington Post that stated such views, although he should be more knowledgeable than most about the results of opinion polls that show exactly the opposite.

The article, citing an opinion poll conducted by the Levada Center in 2008, said Russians “would like to see their Motherland becoming more open to the outside world, and would like the abuses of power and corruption among officials to stop.” Meanwhile, when asked in 2008 “Would you like to live in a country that actively defends its culture and traditions or a country open to the whole world and all modern trends?”, 77 percent of the respondents preferred a country that protects its heritage, and a mere 18 percent chose the second option (the figures cited hereafter have been released by the Levada Center). But it is illogical to string together “openness to the world,” corruption and abuse of power.

“Two-thirds of Russians would like to see the establishment of democracy and the supremacy of law in the country,” the Levada Center reports. However, this is not supported by the results of the poll. Moreover, when asked what kind of democracy Russia needs, only 20 percent of those polled said it should be a Western-style democracy, while 45 percent opted for “a completely different democracy, which conforms to national traditions and Russian specifics.”

It should be noted that since 1996 (near the end of the Yeltsin era), Russia has profoundly re-evaluated its political system, opting for the one that exists at present (i.e. Putin’s system), and rejecting both the Western and Soviet systems. When asked in 1996 which political system is better, 39 percent of those polled preferred the Soviet system; 28 percent selected the Western one; and a mere 8 percent liked the Russian political system of that time. In 2008, the answers were 24, 15 and 36 percent, respectively. Clearly, Russians prefer authoritarianism to Yeltsin’s democratic anarchy.

Recent propaganda targeting both the communists and the West has had its effect, as well. This ideology also aimed to reinforce the concept of “a hostile environment” where Russia is portrayed as a besieged fortress. The ratio between positive and negative answers to the question “Does Russia have enemies?” in 2004 was 41 to 22, whereas in 2008 it rose to 68 to 14.

How then can we say that Russia is striving towards a society “open to the whole world” if the same poll in 2008 reports that four-fifths of the respondents, against just 15 percent, answered in the affirmative to the question “Is our country noted for special originality and spiritual culture, which surpasses all other countries?” The assertion that “Russia is a great country that can be understood only by believing in its great destiny” is supported by 82 percent of respondents and rejected by 9 percent. These figures signify the highest level of national conceit, self-complacency and messianism in Russians.

CULTURAL GENETICS AND ITS OPPONENTS

Today the issue of power in Russia and the vector of its political evolution boils down to a discussion of two problems: first, why the country failed once again to implement a liberal government system project – which envisions public control over the authorities, power-sharing and mutual respect and trust between the government and society; and, second, how to define the type of the government system and inherent power relations that are sidelining the liberal-democratic one. There are two different approaches to resolve the first problem, with the controversy akin to the debates between the geneticists and Lysenkovites (the dogmatists of biology) in the first half of the 20th century.

The cultural-genetic premise holds that launching liberal undertakings and borrowing liberal Western institutions run into barriers created by differences in the systems of values, or even deeper, archetypal and often subconscious correlations with reality, which may be called “perception of the world” or “sensation of the world.”

The genetically predetermined mistrust of the West, along with rejecting the Western lifestyle and values, plays a fatal role in forming the system of governance in Russia. Pollsters have ample evidence on this account. In March 2006, the following answers were recorded to a question about the specifics of democratic development in various countries: 78 percent of those polled claimed that each country was going along its own path (“sovereign democracy”) and a mere 10 percent said all countries were moving towards democracy along the same path.

In March 2001 (a year after Putin came to power), the problem was subjected to a thorough study. The question “What kind of government would you like to see in Russia?” was answered as follows: 34 percent of the respondents wanted “a Western-style democracy (including the market, private property, democratic institutions, etc.)”; 28 percent preferred a socialist state with a Communist ideology; and 27 percent opted for a state with its own, specific government system. Another question was “Which historic path should Russia take?” It turned out that only half of those who wished to see Russia as a Western-style state said it should follow the path of Western civilization common for all modern states, while the other half said it should go its own way to achieve the desired objective. So 15 percent of Russians supported both the line towards a Western-style state and a common path, while 16 percent believed that Russia needs to find its own way to achieve common goals with the West. In total, a special path (regardless of what it implies) is supported by 53 percent of the respondents, including 23 percent who believe that this will lead to a special political system. If we compare these figures with the latest data, we will see that the number of supporters of a special path for Russia has increased during Putin’s administration from 53 to 70 percent.

Democratic values make up the core of the Western civilization’s system of values, whereas they look marginal in the Russian system. That democracy for Russians is not the necessary element of good governance is shown by the results of a joint Russia-U.S. study, conducted in April 2006 (1,000 respondents in Russia and 1,023 respondents in the U.S.). One of the questions was “What do you think about the governments of China, the U.S. and Russia?” China’s governance system drew positive opinions from 54 percent of Russians and 14 percent of Americans (the ratio of negative opinions was 14 to 80 percent, respectively). As for the U.S. government, 54 percent of Russians and 83 percent of Americans approved of it, against 27 percent of Russians and 14 percent of Americans who answered in the negative.

Forty-seven percent of Russians and 26 percent of Americans believe in the effectiveness of the Russian governance system, while 42 percent of Russians and 68 percent of Americans think otherwise.

It follows from these figures that Russians place the Chinese governance system above that of the U.S., although the answers to another question indicate that they regard the U.S. system as more democratic. It is therefore obvious that Russians, unlike Americans, do not think that a good government must necessarily be democratic.

A considerable portion of Russians do not believe that authoritarian trends gained momentum during Putin’s rule, although many experts and liberal politicians criticized him for that.

The results of a poll conducted in January 2009, which asked the question “In what direction is political life developing in this country?” were as follows: “democratic development” – 36 percent; “chaos, anarchy gaining momentum” – 21 percent; “emerging authoritarianism, dictatorships” – 14 percent; “a return to the old Soviet order” – 8 percent; and 20 percent were undecided. It should be noted that contrary to efforts by the authorities to revive old Soviet symbols and style, and the opinion of some experts that Putin’s government is associated with the Soviet period, a relatively small portion of Russians see a return to the Soviet past in government policies, despite the obvious infringement upon the rights of the mass media. A majority of those polled say the situation with the mass media improved during Putin’s rule.

A constant recurrence – at various stages in Russian history – of relations and traditions peculiar to its civilization pattern is quite obvious to anyone who takes a careful look at Russia’s historical experience. For instance, Russian historian Vassily Klyuchevsky defended the idea of genetic succession in Russian history: “Why should we understand our past they say, if we have renounced it, as we’re building our lives on entirely new principles? But we ignore a key point: exhilarated and thrilled at how the Reform [the reform of 1861 – L.S.] changed Russian tradition, we forget how this tradition, for its part, changed the Reform.” Similarly, is the traditional lifestyle not showing from under the market and liberal-democratic guise of the present-day reformed Russia?

The modern Lysenkovites in political science, not unlike their predecessors in biology, believe that conditions play a crucial role in forming a political system. Emil Pain, a staunch opponent of the civilization concept, writes: “If traditional mentality lives on, it means that either the conditions that generated it have survived, or new conditions have emerged, which function as a refrigerator or a hothouse for reviving seemingly withered traditions.” It follows that in order to form civil consciousness and a civil society, Russia needs an institution such as a society-nation, i.e. precisely what cannot be achieved within the context of traditional civilization specifics. This kind of logic boils down to the proposition: “There is no civil society in Russia because it has no civil society.”

ADOLESCENT MENTALITY

Those who oppose the civilization concept fear it is close to the idea of “a special way for Russia” professed by statism, which provides the groundwork for isolationism as a means to protect the country from the influence of foreign cultures and dependence on them.

But even these opposed to cultural genetics acknowledge that at least some traits of an average Russian have “a much longer past history (than the Soviet period), and are deeply rooted in the traditions of Russian political or social serfdom” (Lev Gudkov).

Admittedly, the supporters of Russia as a great power are more sensitive to the interests and aspirations of Russian culture and history. But whereas finding genetic traits and historical continuity have a positive meaning for them, liberals should be careful not to underestimate the influence of traditional mass sentiments on politics and state-building. One should always bear in mind that the authorities in Russia tend to meet people’s expectations in order to win more supporters. In addition, government officials are Russians who share a special mentality inherent in the nation. The most merciless definition of the Russian situation in terms of cultural genetics was recently given by Yuri Afanasyev, one of the ideologists of post-Soviet liberalism, in an article called “The Special Way of Russia – Running in Place in History” published by Novaya Gazeta. He writes: “The character and type of the Russian government is as important a system-making element of the ‘Russian track’ as a never-ending war – accompanied by a constant and daily militarization – and Orthodoxy. To put the idea in modern terms, the Russian government could put the word ‘violence’ on one side of its business card, and ‘occupation’ on the other. ‘Occupation’ means that the authorities treat the population of their own country as strangers, the occupied.”

“A regime of self-occupation” and a type of government that can be defined as “of the Horde” would most adequately describe the Russian government system during all periods of its history, including now. Elaborating on the “Horde-type government,” Afanasyev includes, in addition to violation and occupation, “autocracy, monologue instead of dialogue, a dictate instead of negotiations, no compromise, an unwillingness to accept an accord as a means of communication, and, lastly, Manicheanism.”

The author of the present article is probably the first to have introduced the notion of “self-occupation” into the political vocabulary (in Novaya Gazeta in 2004). At the dawn of perestroika I wrote: “Power has been the primary value in Russia at all times. All Russian social reality is arranged around the key notions of chin (rank), and nachal’stvo (bosses) (both stemming from the Russian word nachalo [beginning]). There is nothing more alien to the Russian mentality than pluralism or power sharing. Power should be single and hierarchical, otherwise the beginning will disappear and a vicious circle will emerge.”

These traits of the national mentality have been confirmed by public opinion polls in recent years. For example, 51 percent of the respondents support the notion that the concentration of power benefits Russia, compared to 29 percent who object to it. Characteristically, it is mostly young respondents aged 18 to 24 who favor authoritarianism. There is no way that they could be influenced by the Soviet lifestyle and their answer is a manifestation of adolescent mentality, which is seen in many adults.

An understanding of what was happening at the beginning of market reforms and democratic changes from the point of view of cultural genetics would protect liberals from too much euphoria and show in what ways the tradition would inevitably disrupt the reform.

It would be difficult to disagree with Yuri Afanasyev’s description of the reforms: “Genuine changes only took place in a small number of life-support sectors, but they did not affect the very principles of the social order. They never touched the core of the crucial element of the Russian system: the government, its role, structure, function and its main pillars of violence and reprisals: the army, the judicial system, law-enforcement, the political police, the education system, etc. The government system remains, as in Soviet times and before, a Horde-type – it does not depend on society in any way, is unbalanced and uncontrolled by any public forces or institutions. It is only guided by its own material interest and a tendency for self-preservation.”

THE HISTORY OF MAFIAS

Russian society tends to form tiers of mafias through the actions of the principles of hierarchy and rank-worship on the one hand, and adolescent group solidarity on the other, with the upper-ruling mafia as the occupational force. The social order has been dismantled three times in post-Kievan Rus. This was accompanied by an increase in social mobility and the establishment of a new ruling mafia based on new recruiting principles and socio-economic benefits. The first dismantling occurred in the middle of the 15th century, when the mafia of boyars [the nobility before Peter the Great ordered that rank depend on state service – Ed.] sided with the Moscow princes. The second took place after the Time of Troubles, when the boyars and the relatively independent clergy were replaced by a new government and clerical class – the gentry’s mafia. Finally, the emancipation of the serfs heralded the end of the gentry’s mafia and the emergence of a mafia of bureaucrats, which eventually turned into the elite of functionaries after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The revolution of 1989-1991 ushered the corporate mafia into the government, a symbiosis of bureaucrats and business people on a clan/criminal basis.

But after the triumph of the new principle of social order, decades had to pass before a new stratum – the new mafia – could fully triumph, as it needed time to mature for its final, murderous assertion. For example, the supremacy of Moscow as a principle was established after the arrival of the metropolitans; the appointment of Metropolitan Iona (1446) independent from Constantinople; the elimination of independent areas within the Principality of Moscow; and after a majority of the largest principalities submitted to Moscow. The final blow to the separatist mentality and its advocates was delivered by Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki, a squad notorious for violence and massacres. The gentry-in-service principle became prominent under the Romanov royal family and was fixed in the Code of 1649, but the new mafia finally secured a firm grip on power during the totalitarian period of Peter the Great’s rule. The principle that brought together bureaucrats, functionaries and intellectuals who did not belong to the gentry replaced the class-gentry principle in 1861, but its final establishment took place during the years of Stalinist repression. If one follows this pattern the incumbent corporate mafia will only be completely established by 2060. It is impossible to predict what forms of totalitarianism will develop by that time; however, it should be taken into account that all totalitarian periods in Russian history have been ideocratic.