The Revolution is Over, Forget It: To the 30th Anniversary of the Russian Federation (original) (raw)

The estate of change: The specialist rebellion and the democratic movement in Moscow, 1989–1991

Theory and Society, 1997

The August 1991 overthrow of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union destroyed the institutional foundation of the Soviet political order, presenting a classic case of political revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville's sense.' The following study reconstructs the relation between systemic change and collective action before, during, and after "the August Revolution" by means of a sociological analysis of the principal organization of the democratic movement in Russia at the end of the Soviet period, Democratic Russia or DemRossiia. In 1990, DemRossiia united a plethora of voluntary associations, nascent political parties, pro-reform factions in the CPSU, opposition candidates running in semi-free elections, and prodemocracy deputies in soviet bodies under a broad opposition umbrella intent on democratizing Soviet society. DemRossiia's key role in Boris Yeltsin's June 1991 election as the first president of the Russian Republic-creating a "dual power" situation that culminated in political revolution-underscores the movement's historical significance? In framing pro-democracy protest in late-communist Russia, scholars and journalists alike have repeatedly turned to the image of society mobilizing against the state? The history of Russia's perestroika-era democratic movement, however, runs counter to this image: as we shall see, DemRossiia was mobilized from above, as an extension of a prodemocracy rebellion launched from within the highest echelons of the Soviet Party-state. Indeed, this top-down pattern distinguishes Russia's democratic movement from Poland's Solidarity and Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution": how different our image of Solidarity would be if Lech Walesa had been, like Boris Yeltsin, a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee. The following analysis explains the overlap between fragments of Party officialdom and the democratic movement by identifying a shift of pol it

Civil Society in Russia: Bearing the Unbearable in the Name of the State

In the fall of 1999, Russia suffered a series of high-profile terrorist attacks. Two hundred ninety-three people died as a result of explosions in residential buildings in Buinaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk. These incidents served as a prologue to the second Chechen war, the death of thousands of people, public consolidation under the banner and rhetoric of a "fight against terrorism," and the subsequent process of what some call stabilization. Today, few people still remember the 1999 terrorist attacks in Russia. At the same time, just as the world changed after September 11, 2001, it is fair to say that Russia changed after September 1999. It crossed an important and tragic threshold as Russian society was forced to recognize the extent of the terrorist threat to which it was exposed, a threat whose origins still remain unclear. In the meantime, it also found what it had long sought-the rule of an iron fist. As society fell more and more under government control, not many Russians noticed the changes taking place-the curtailing of media freedoms, the gradual marginalization of the opposition, and the undermining of regional governors' authority, to name a few. Subtle transformations usually occur in the course of natural evolution. However, these changes were different: whereas evolution, in the traditional meaning of the term, signifies a movement forward, these "reforms" would take Russia back to a time in which civil society was a subject to the will of the state. Unfortunately, these.changes are here to stay, and they are informing the future. We can trace these transformations from the collapse of the Soviet Union up to the present day. In the 1990s, Russian society suffered through deep crises penetrating all spheres of public life. The old political and economic values came crashing

Revolutionary Passage: From Soviet To Post-Soviet Russia 1985-2000

Revolutionary Passage: From Soviet To Post-Soviet Russia 1985-2000, 2005

Numerous accounts of pro-democracy rebellion in perestroika-era Russia explain democratization as an effect of the formation of a Russian "middle class." While survey, interview and archival data on the Moscow branch of Russia's united democratic opposition in 1990-91 (Democratic Russia or DR) identifies intellectuals and professional as DR's primary base, the study emphasizes the reproduction of Soviet-style political authoritarianism within DR. By developing an institutional profile of Soviet specialists as a state-dependent social estate that distinguishes Soviet specialists from Western middle classes, the study provides an alternative account of democratic sentiments among Russian specialists framed in terms of the disintegration of the Communist Party's organizational capacities and the demonstration effect of relative Western prosperity. The assumption that the mere numerical increase of Russian specialists explains democratization is thus refuted.

Russia -One Hundred Years After Revolution

Political Insight, 2017

In contrast to 1917 or the late 1980s, when respectively, socialism and Western-style liberalisation were seen as almost magical solutions to all problems, there is no consensus on the formula for change today, while Russia’s current zeitgeist in the form of great power nationalism is completely appropriated by Putin. In addition, the majority of the Russians already lived through the experience of the major upheaval during Perestroika and post-Soviet transition. Under these circumstances current evolution of the regime, which increasingly looks like stagnation, is much likelier than a new revolution. But the longer necessary changes are delayed, the higher the chance of a violent, sudden transformation in Russian affairs.