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I am a graduate student in the History Department at UCLA in Modern Russian and European History.  My thoughts on Russia past, present and future can be read at Sean's Russia Blog.

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"Mirror, mirror upon the wall . . ."

posted by Sean Guillory at 18h38 GMT on Oct 12

"Mirror, mirror upon the wall, Who is the fairest of all?"
The mirror answered-
"Thou, O Queen, art the fairest of all,"
and the Queen was contented, because she knew the mirror could speak nothing but the truth.”
--The Brothers’ Grimm, Little Snow White

Vladimir Putin's recent announcement that he seeks to become Russia's Prime Minister after his Presidential term is over next March has resulted in a discursive cacophony about failure of Russian democracy. The London Times wrote that Russia is "moving toward some form of post-Soviet dictatorship." The Moscow Times said that democracy in Russia "is more a facade than a reality." The LA Times called Putin's move yet another sign of Russia's "pseudo-democracy."

Some sought the explanation of why the Russians can't get it right like
us in the venerable West in the former’s supposedly inborn
authoritarian nature (the Russians like a “firm hand” etc.), an
explanation that harks back to the worse forms of Orientalism. Hearing
this, one is reminded of assertions that Russia's "Asiatic" remnants,
thanks to the yoke of the Golden Horde, are the reason for its
backwardness. Others sought the explanation for the lack of "democracy"
in the recent past, namely the 1990s, where there were the roots of
democracy, but as Fred Kaplan writes in Slate,
Yeltsin "never created the institutions of a democracy" (Emphasis his).
Kaplan's argument that Russia lacked democratic institutions stems all
the way back to the Tsarist period, where historians blame Tsarism's
failure to reform, and thus the rise of Bolshevism, on the lack of
institutions that make up a "civil society."

The problem with all these views is not so much the criticism of
Putin's "managed democracy"; it’s the assumptions behind it--that
democracy is a transhistorical entity whose present articulation in the
United States and Western Europe acts as the measure of all other
"democratic" states. Not only does this measure allow for the
continuance of Russia's regulation outside of Europe, a positioning
that gives the West the moral right use "democracy" as a rhetorical
truncheon to knock the Russians back into shape, it also doubles back
as a triumphalist mirror. As Edward Said said about Orientalism, and I
think it applies here, the West’s discourse about Russia’s lack of
democracy has "less to do with [them] than it does with 'our' world."
In many ways our sense of our own democracy is so atrophied that we can
only find solace that it still exists through its lack among our many
"Others." In this ideological formulation "our" democracy is always
eternal and progressive while "theirs" is always almost but not quite
up to snuff or under constant threat of reversal.

When this last point is emphasized—that the West’s lambaste of Russian democracy functions much like the evil Queen’s mirror in Little Snow White—it
reveals that the charges that Russian democracy is a façade, while
certainly arguable, suggests a similar crisis of democracy in the West.
Placing the Russian Other at the center only masks the fact that we are
really talking about ourselves.

How else to explain the discursive uproar about Putin’s decision at the
same time the United States, as the self-proclaimed symbol of Western
democracy, if the words of Jimmy Carter are taken seriously, has
reached its own democratic nadir. "Our country for the first time in my
life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights," Carter
told CNN’s
Wolf Blitzer. "We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to
those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we've said we can
torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which
they are accused."

This is a bold statement from an ex-President. And a rare one. And
course Carter doesn’t take his statements to their logical conclusion.
Namely, that if the U.S. has really “abandoned the basic principles of
human rights” then has it not also abandoned democracy? This can’t be
said because if it was then our mirror would begin to crack and our
faith in its truth would be shattered.

This is where the Russian Other comes in. It allows us to displace
things about ourselves that we not only can’t say, but won’t say, on to
them. When we look into the Russian’s eyes, press our finger in his
chest, and lecture him on the nature of democracy, our concern is not
really about Russian democracy per se. What we are really asking is
“Who is the fairest democracy of them all?” The answer always
inevitably comes back, "Thou, O Queen, art the fairest of all." And our
delusions about ourselves continue undisturbed.

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Mirror? Hardly.

I just posted a response to one of the Edward Lucas' blog entries on a very similar subject. I will have to borrow from myself replying to you, Sean.

Democracy is just a concept. A concept of popular governance and it varies greatly in implementation from a very limited Athenian aristocratic democracy to universal suffrage. Societies develop and their implementations of popular governance change. To my Marxist trained mind there is a clear trend that parallels (and in my opinion determines) current form of democracy in a given society - the ever expanding institute of private property of means of production. Private property is the foundation and guarantor of democracy.

Democracy and freedom are often used interchangeably but very often refer to political freedom only, although both freedom and democracy span beyond purely political speech and cover economic freedom just as much. In a monopolistic environment a consumer of (gas, telephone service, health care, jobs, workforce, food, water, anything tangible or intangible) has less choice then a free market would provide.

From this perspective current Putin's Russia is not very free, not very democratic and not very capitalist either. It is almost impossible to determine where state ends and private sector begins. Some areas have been privatized more then others and there is more freedom in these sectors. Governance has been re-nationalized to the point of democratic institutions becoming irrelevant. Is there any pretense at all regarding upcoming presidential elections having any value?

Sean is also making a convenient substitution between democracy and human rights and specifically a very marginal case of legal disagreement whether Geneva Convention applies to non-uniform saboteurs, extrapolating it on democracy in general. Using Jimmy Carter, arguably one of the worst Presidents the US ever had, and a person indirectly responsible for quite a share of current problems with Islamic militants does not fortify the case either.

Cyrill

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What standards?

Sean, what standards do you think Russian democracy should be measured against? You're making it way too easy for yourself by saying that "Western" criticism of developments in Russia is just a way of deflecting what you see as a crisis of Western societies. Shouldn't we hold Russia to the same standards as we hold our own democracies? Shouldn't we look for political equality, free and fair elections, free media and freedom of speech, a functioning civil society, and as Cyrill says, freedom in the economic sphere -- shouldn't we look for all these things and more in Russia just as we look for them in Norway, the US, Greece or wherever? If we do that, then we treat Russia just as we treat ourselves, and we precisely _do not_ conveniently discover Russia as the new orientalist other. But if we said that, hah, the Russians, they always need an iron man at the top to tell them what to do etc etc, _then_ we would be doing what you say critics of Russia are doing now.

And by the way: it is entirely possible that a great variety of democracies can exist side by side, even though they share some essential traits like the rights I listed. Russia can find its way into this very colourful club of democracies with its identity intact. I think you would agree that there are distinct differences between Norway, the US and Greece, but they are all democracies. A parliamentary monarchy, a parliamentary republic, a presidential republic.

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