The Russian Tradition

"He was a Hungarian naturalised British historian in the late 70s when I was at university. This is a more arcane choice. His view of history was quite fashionable at that time and has stayed with me. Specifically, his view of Russian history. It’s a rather conservative, right-wing view that says Russia can never be a Western-style democracy or market economy in the way that we know it because of her imbibed tradition of non-freedom and non-democracy. It’s close to the view of Richard Pipes and other US historians, but I can’t say that I completely agree with it. I have some sympathy for Szamuely’s view, but I think he makes it too prescriptive, too definitive. It appeals to me because I was in Moscow during the coup in August 1991 when it looked like this tradition was being thrown off. Autocracy was being replaced by freedom and democracy – the Communist dinosaurs were booted out and so on. Well, it lasted for ten years, until 2000, and it didn’t work particularly well – chaos, recession, ethnic violence. And now Russia seems, on the face of it, to have reverted to the old traditions of autocracy. Everybody seemed very surprised that this plunge into liberal reform didn’t work out. Washington and London were taken aback. But, actually, if you look back through Russian history, this isn’t the first time it has happened. There have been many occasions when Russia could have thrown off autocracy and plunged into democracy – Catherine the Great , the Decembrists in 1825, the liberation of the serfs in 1861, the Witte and Stolypin reforms of 1905-1911 and the February revolution in 1917. All of these looked like they were going to throw off the autocratic tradition and bring Russia closer to Western-style governance. But on every occasion it failed. If you look at the long view we shouldn’t really have been surprised that in 1991 the shift to democracy didn’t work out. But who knows? Maybe Russia today can throw off the mantle of autocracy. We wait to see. Yes, the US sent clever Harvard economists to tell Yeltsin he had to do everything overnight. They told him the Communists were lurking in the wings and if he didn’t create this immediate market democracy they would come back and he’d get booted out. Of course, there was a rationale behind that but it was a disaster. Giving away the whole of Soviet industry overnight… He goes right back to the 13th century when the Mongols crushed the nascent democracy of the Kievan state – and it did have a certain amount of democracy. They had councils called veches (from the Old Church Slavonic vechat meaning ‘speak out’). The people could kick out the prince and elect officials. They were allowed to speak out. But Szamuely says the Mongols imposed a militarised, centralised, autocratic system which the Russians then assimilated for themselves. It worked well for them. They needed to protect themselves against the powerful enemies on their borders. So this ‘Asiatic despotism’, which is the shorthand Szamuely uses for the rejection of democracy, became Russia’s default position. Conservatives say Russia is so big and so disparate – all those time zones and ethnic minorities and different languages – that she can never have democracy. If you allow a freely elected parliament, you’ll end up with hundreds of ethnic nationalist groupings with their own agendas and the whole place will fall apart. That’s the argument. Yes, it’s big and it has democracy. But it isn’t an ethnically and religiously fragmented empire like Russia."