Washington Times/United Press International
Jan 11 2005
Eye on Eurasia: No revolution for Russia
By Paul Goble
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Tartu, Estonia, Jan. 10 (UPI) — Yuri Levada, Russia’s most
distinguished pollster, says that the fragmented, post-imperial
condition of Russian society and the absence of opposition figures
capable of attracting significant support make it highly unlikely
that there will be a Ukrainian-style “Orange” revolution there before
the year 2100.
In a lecture delivered last month in Moscow on “What Sociology Can
and Cannot Do” that was posted online last week
(polit.ru/lectures/2005/01/04/levada.html), Levada, a founding father
of sociology in Soviet times and a pioneer in the use of polling data
more recently in the Russian Federation, outlined the reasons for his
pessimism.
First of all, Levada suggested, Russia has a far more “fragmented”
and “atomized” society than is the case in Ukraine, Georgia or
Poland. Today’s Russians do not feel the kind of collective sense of
identity needed to transform “a mass society into an organized
people.” Instead, each Russian focuses almost exclusively on
protecting his or her personal interests.
Indeed, this process of atomization has proceeded so far in the
Russian Federation that even Moscow and St. Petersburg, the two
places where all Russian revolutions and putsches have taken place in
the past, no longer can play that role. The special qualities of
those two cities that earlier allowed them to play that role, Levada
continues, are no longer present.
Second, according to him, the Russian Federation lacks the kind of
opposition leaders who could help organize society to stand up for
itself. “All the opposition we have now belongs to the past.” And
however remarkable a role its members may have played a decade or
more ago, “we do not see any perspective” either for them or for new
figures to play comparable leadership roles anytime soon.
Third, Levada argues, the Russian Federation continues to suffer from
a strong imperial inheritance, one that he suggests makes national
mobilization based on the self-assertion of the population at large
almost impossible.
Sometimes, he said, national mobilization of this kind can involve
the taking in of an irredenta population as was the case with the
Armenians and Karabakh. It can also involve the assertion of one’s
own national self as is now the case with the Ukrainians. “This
factor is strong,” Levada noted. But “it does not exist in Russia.”
Why? According to the Russian sociologist, the reasons are to be
found in the continuing inability of Russians to overcome “the legacy
of empire.” “An empire,” he said, “is practically incapable” of
acting in this way. It may “long for its past, but nothing useful
will come from this.”
More specifically, he says, all too many Russians seem incapable of
treating Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics as independent
countries separate from themselves. Levada reported on his very
latest polls. They show, he says, that Russians “do not understand
and do not want to understand” what is happening in Ukraine.
That is because, he added, “a majority of our people do not see that
Ukraine is a foreign country.” His poll showed that only 28 percent
of Russians view Ukraine in that way: “The rest think that this is
something like our province” temporarily split off and destined to
return to the fold.
Such attitudes, Levada pointed out, reflect not only the inertia of
earlier views but also views advanced by Russian television “and
other propaganda.” And consequently, many Russians view what is
happening in Ukraine “in the best case” as “a struggle among clans”
rather than something else.
The only good thing his polls show, Levada said, is that “fewer than
20 percent” of Russians view what has taken place in Ukraine as the
result of the work of outside forces hostile to Russia — despite the
statements of some Russian leaders and the way in which the Russian
media have described events there.
Levada concluded his remarks with the observation that this lack of
understanding condemns Russia to yet another repetition of its
eternal “situation” as described by Russia’s great liberal thinker
Alexander Herzen more than a century ago.
Whenever there has been progress in Europe, Herzen wrote, the Russian
powers-that-be would “beat” their subjects lest the latter develop
the strength within themselves to copy those developments and then
challenge the government.
As a result, and again according to Levada, Russian history has been
marked by explosions and their suppression, but not by the growth of
a society capable of mobilizing itself. And even now, he concluded,
Russians do not appear likely to be ready anytime soon to make a
genuine popular revolution like the one that just took place in
Ukraine.
—
(Paul Goble teaches at the Euro-college of the University of Tartu in
Estonia.)