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The Political Challenge for Yeltsin
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19982 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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8 / 1992 |
2,780 Words |
| Author
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Herbert J. Ellison
Herbert J. Ellison is chairman of Russian and east
European studies at the University of Washington. He was
formerly secretary of the Kennan Institute for Advanced
Russian Studies in Washington, D.C. |
The distinguished Russian émigré philosopher Andrei Sinyavsky once compared Europe to a honeycomb, immensely complex and strong despite its delicate appearance. Even a powerful blow could destroy only part of the structure, and repairs were made spontaneously by the industrious inhabitants. Russia, by contrast, was like a sack of flour, entirely dependent on the enclosing fabric that bound it. If the sack broke, the contents, lacking the internal structures of the European honeycomb, simply spilled out, uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
The image of a broken flour sack would doubtless seem sadly apt to President Boris Yeltsin as he pursues the task of building a functional governmental structure and reform policy for the Russian Federation. What had seemed so recently a powerful state structure has collapsed, threatening a period of anarchy--a smuta (time of troubles). It epitomizes an old Russian quandary: When the state power erodes or collapses, as it has done periodically throughout Russian history, it reveals a weak and fragmented society lacking the capacity to reorganize a satisfactory structure of state power by internal social initiative.
1917 and 1991: Comparing revolutions
What was true of the pre-Revolutionary Russian autocratic state is truer still of its communist successor. Soviet communism built a vastly more pervasive and monopolistic state power than that of the czars. Moreover, czarist autocratic power had been substantially dismantled from the 1860s to World War I, creating independent judicial and legislative branches of government.
And Russian society had acquired increasingly organized, independent, and outspoken social and professional organizations, as well as political parties and a substantially free press. It also had a structure of private property and a market economy that was growing rapidly, providing new and independent social groups that possessed both the capacity and the desire for self-government.
In Soviet society, communist power virtually eliminated private property and private economy and established political control of political, social and cultural institutions, crushing the independence that a self-governing society requires. The task of political transition is, therefore, far more difficult today than in 1917. Even now, national political parties have not been formed.
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