COMMENTARY
by Gordon Hahn
As Mikhail Gorbachev moved toward the political reforms that put perestroika on the map as a major reform project, he seized upon several models and anti-models from Soviet history pointing out the democratic direction in which he sought to move. He promoted Nikolai Bukharin, who was killed in Stalin’s purges, and Vladimir Lenin’s quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy (NEP), which was killed by Stalin’s forced collectivization and industrialization and the Great Terror. On November 7, 1987 Gorbachev condemned Stalin and his “crimes” in order to pave the way for the CPSU’s adoption of political reforms.
Similarly, as Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev continues to push forward his economic modernization and political liberalization program or ‘thaw’ forward along with his tandem partner Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin he also needs historical models and anti-models from Russian and Soviet history to hold up as lightbeams pointing both to and from where he plans to take the country.
The early months of this year brought three anniversaries each of which offered an opportunity to claim the mantle of three of Russian history’s greatest reformers: the last CPSU General Secretary and father of the only real Soviet era democratization project, Mikhail Gorbachev; the USSR’s destroyer and free Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin; and the Tsar Liberator, Aleksandr II, assassinated by socialists on March 1 (Old Style), 1881.
In each case, President Medvedev went out of his way to honor these men and their political reforms. In the cases of Gorbachev and Alexander II the president could have taken a much less pronounced approach while still giving them the proper attention due on their respective jubilees. The extra measure Medvedev devoted to these reformers indicates that he intentionally sought to co-opt these historical figures’ reformist legacies and marshal their symbolic power in service of his continuing reform agenda.
On February 1st, Medvedev traveled to Yeltsin’s home town of Yekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk) to open a monument to the founder and first president of post-Soviet Russia’s on the occasion of his 80th birthday. In many ways, Putin’s two terms as president were a refutation of the Yeltsin era. At a minimum, they were an effort to repair the state’s lost autonomy as a result of its privatization by powerful oligarchs and the state’s weakened institutional integrity compromised by Yeltsin’s hyper-federative system.
By contrast, Medvedev’s speech in Yekaterinburg stressed Yeltsin’s legacy as the father of modern day Russia. Yeltsin, according to the president, always conducted himself “with honor” in “dealing with very complex things” and serving “to create the bases of a new state” and “the Constitution of a modern and strong state.” Thus, in Medvedev’s view, “today’s Russia should be grateful to president Yeltsin that in the most difficult period of our history our country did not turn away from the path of changes, carried out very complex transformations, and continues to move forward today” (“V Yekaterinburge otkryt pamyatnik pervomu Prezidentu Rossii Borisu Yel’tsinu,” Kremlin.ru, 1 February 2011).
Medvedev took full advantage of an opportunity to reinforce the historical symbolism of reform on March 2nd, Mikhail Gorbachev’s 80th birthday. It needs to be put in context that the majority of Russians hold Gorbachev in rather low esteem, and Putin has certainly been critical of perestroika’s results and has never had a positive word to say about the last Soviet leader. By contrast, Medvedev, in a meeting shown repeatedly on all Russian television channels, announced he had signed a decree awarding Mikhail Gorbachev Russia’s highest honor, the Order of St. Andrei and would hand him the medal at an official award ceremony in the Kremlin. In announcing the award, Medvedev praised Gorbachev for his “large and difficult work” as leader during “a very difficult and very dramatic period” of the country (“Dmitrii Medvedev pozdravil Mikhaila Gorbacheva s 80-letiem,” Kremlin.ru, 2 March 2011).
The most dramatic of his efforts to impart the tradition and gravitas of Russia’s greatest reformers came one day later in St. Petersburg at a conference titled “Great Reforms and the Modernization of Russia” in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Aleksandr’s freeing of the serfs. In a stunningly pro-reform speech, which was excerpted repeatedly on Russian television news reports, Medvedev said the word ‘freedom’ eighteen times and took on those who have opposed the establishiment of democracy in Russia. The contents of the speech deserve the kind of attention that the U.S. mainstream media certainly made no effort even to cover. By contrast, Russian state television sometimes gave the speech even more overtly reformist spin. In St. Petersburg at the time, I saw Petersburg’s ‘Vesti+’ program which at 00:39 on March 5th described Medvedev’s message as “As under Alexander II then, today Russia needs great reforms.”
In particular, Medvedev noted that although Alexander II “was discouraged by many and for various reasons. Some resorted to the arguments always used in such cases, that the country would fall apart, that it would descend into chaos and most notably, that the people were not ready for freedom, that they wouldn't appreciate it and wouldn't know what to do with it basically, that they simply didn't need freedom,” the Tsar-Liberator “understood that Russia needed freedom, that it yearned for freedom.”
He continued:
Some believe that our country's tragic 20th century history was the result of an unsuccessful freedom injection and that the sceptics who believed the great reforms were not suitable for the people of our country had been right.
I hold a different view.… Alexander II had inherited a country whose major political institutions were serfdom and the military and bureaucratic chain of command. He saw the weakness and futility of these institutions behind the apparent might of the empire.”
Alexander II and his supporters abandoned conventions, although it was extremely difficult, and showed Russia the path into the future. This is their greatest achievement. This path was long and very difficult, and we cannot say that it has been completed to this day. …
I hope that 21st century Russia will bear witness to the rightness and far-sightedness of the 19th century reformers.
Today we are continuing to improve our democratic institutions, which are still very imperfect, trying to change our economy and to transform our political system. In fact, we are continuing the course that was laid 150 years ago. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that it is not the fantasy about our nation's special way or the Soviet experiment that turned out to be the most viable, long-lived ideas, but the concept of a normal humane order conceived by Alexander II. And ultimately, from the historical perspective he was right, and not Nicholas I or Stalin.
The experience of that distant age remains relevant to our practical efforts. I would like to name a few principles that I consider important today. In a way, this is part of processing the experience of 150 years ago.
First of all, freedom cannot be postponed until later and we must not be afraid that a free individual may make improper use of a personal freedom. That path leads to a dead end. Second, political and social transformations should be thought out, rational and gradual but unfaltering. Third, intolerance, extremism and terrorism as its extreme manifestation will remain the enemies of free development. Bear in mind that terrorism, which is a huge problem for our country, in fact, appeared as a phenomenon almost simultaneously with the great reforms. Fourth, we must be clear that the state is not the purpose of development but a development tool. Only the involvement of all of society in these processes can give the desired positive effect, and only in this case do we stand a chance of success. Fifth, we must remember that the nation is a living organism and not a machine for replicating the prevailing ideas of the day. It cannot be kept together by tightening the screws. It is also clear that excessively harsh policies and an excess of control usually do not lead to the triumph of good over evil, or with reference to modern reality, to a victory over corruption but to its growth, not to the evolution of governance but to its degradation. It is therefore essential to give society opportunities for self-organisation (“Dmitrii Medvedev vustupil na konferentsii ‘Velikie reformy i modernizatsiya Rossii’,” Kremlin.ru, 3 March 2011).
All of these events could have met with much less fanfare and involvement of the Russian president. Thus, the message is clear: more reforms, including political reforms, are in the offing, and they will not stop until Russia can be said to be a free and democratic country.
Russian and Western cynics and Russophobes will assert that Medvedev is simply appealing to the liberal wing of Russia’s political spectrum in order to maximize the vote for United Russia in next week’s regional elections and December’s elections to the State Duma. Afterwards, they will say, there will be another ‘tightening of the screws’ and ‘neo-imperialist’ upsurge that the same people predicted would occur after Medvedev’s election.
There was a similarly cynical reaction to Gorbachev’s assumption of power in the Kremlin. He was no reformer, most Sovietologists said, and any appearance of reforms was a KGB rouge to establish Soviet hegemony over Western Europe and beyond. They were wrong; Gorbachev was a real reformer and the reforms were so real they helped to precipitate the fall of the Soviet totalitarian regime and the collapse of the USSR.
The herd’s ‘analysis’ was wrong then, and it is wrong today. As I predicted three years ago, Medvedev’s Russia is on a trajectory of gradual reformism, and its outcome is intended to be a free and democratic Russia. It is another story whether this can be achieved without yet another great, Russian upheaval.
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