Post-sovietology blues: Reflections on a tumultuous decade

Peter Rutland is a professor of government at Wesleyan University.

It is generally agreed that Soviet studies was caught flat-footed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Observers of the Soviet scene were trapped by a kind of groupthink: Institutions such as the Communist Party and central planning had existed for seventy-five years; hence the task of the academic was to explain how they worked. Critical thinking about the viability of the Soviet system only took place at the margins of the profession, on the political extremes of left and right.

More than a decade has passed since 1991. Have academics done a better job of analyzing the post-Soviet trajectory of Russia than they did studying the final years of the USSR? It would be hard to give an unequivocal "yes" in answer to this question. Events moved with bewildering rapidity, especially in the first half of the decade, and observers were constantly running to catch up. Developments in Moscow continually took Western analysts by surprise. Consider, for example, the following events. None of them was foreseen; even the possibility of their occurring was not widely discussed before they actually happened.

First, Mikhail Gorbachev, a career party functionary and dyed-in-the-wool Leninist, decides to introduce democratization. In trying to save the Soviet Union, he destroys it. Out of the blue, Gorbachev's hard-line opponents launch the August 1991 coup--and then, bizarrely, prove themselves unwilling to shed blood to save their system. Contrary to all expectations, the Soviet Union is calmly and quickly dismantled by the communist bosses who had risen to rule each of its republics. Russia embarks on a program of radical market reform, even though the domestic interests lined up against such a program seem overwhelming.

Almost unnoticed, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan become the first states in history to give up nuclear weapons. Uberdemocrat Yeltsin solves his separation-of-powers dispute with parliament, his former power base, by dismissing the Constitutional Court and sending tanks against the White House. (And this time, the tanks open fire.) The first democratic election in Russian history is won by a mad nationalist who favors irradiating Lithuania (Zhirinovsky's party scores 23 percent in December 1993). A year later, the tanks roll again, into the hitherto ignored republic of Chechnya. Westerners are shocked to discover that the privatization that they so warmly welcomed has been hijacked by corrupt excommunist elites and Mafia bosses. A slick and expensive media campaign resurrects Yeltsin from political oblivion, helping him to go from a 3 percent approval rating to electoral victory in less than six months.

The August 1998 economic crash proves that Russia has achieved neither fiscal nor monetary stability, nor does it have a functioning banking system. Then comes the millennium surprise: Yeltsin resigns, becoming the first Russian leader in history to voluntarily relinquish power. Yeltsin's hand-picked successor is a virtually unknown seventeen-year KGB veteran, who surprises the West by becoming very popular among Russians. Again confounding expectations, Putin embraces market reform and at least the rhetoric of democracy, while pursuing a strongly pro-Western foreign policy.

Not only were these developments baffling at the time, but they remain, for the most part, unexplored and enigmatic. It is a struggle to find a few books or articles on each of these phenomena that offer a really profound analysis.

It was, understandably, difficult for researchers to keep pace with the developments in real time, as they occurred. Graduate students in particular--the workhorses of primary research--were in a quandary. The gestation cycle of a doctoral dissertation is at least five years, so doctoral students who focused on the hot topics of 1989 (such as miners' strikes or the USSR Congress of People's Deputies) found their subject long since buried by the avalanche of history come dissertation-defense time, five years later.

Who Lost Russia?

Chastened by their failure to foresee the Soviet collapse, and by a decade of shattered illusions and false predictions, many ex-Sovietologists fell to arguing among themselves over who got Russia wrong. In a sense, this was nothing new. The old Sovietology had itself been heavily politicized, divided between a minority who saw the USSR as an "evil empire" and a majority who saw it as an alternative path to modernity, for better or worse. Recall that up until the Soviet collapse it was professionally risky for academics to use the term "totalitarianism" when talking about Russia.

The dramatic fate of Russia in the 1990s could not fail to produce strong responses among observers of developments there. But although they were useful for stimulating discussion, one cannot help thinking that these debates generated more heat than light.

Much of the writing on Russia in the 1990s was marred by needlessly partisan polemics. For some, Yeltsin was an evil genius who had destroyed Russia in his ruthless drive for power. To his defenders, Yeltsin was the father of Russian democracy, who had dismantled the largest and most nuclear empire in history, in a process that could have been a lot more bloody than it was. There was a similar polarization with regard to the economic transition: either the market and the West could do no wrong, or they could do no right. Nobody seemed to be staking out the middle ground in either of these debates. At least, if they were, nobody was paying any attention to them. Thankfully, amid the fray some Sovietologists managed to preserve their objectivity and continued to ply their trade of close institutional analysis. One thinks, for example, of Thomas Remington's continuing work on the Russian parliament, Eugene Huskey's on the presidency, or Ellen Mickiewicz's on the all-important television.