Property, Power, and Revolution in Russia, 1917-2017: Institutional Transformations in the ‘Longue Durée’

Abstract

This paper unfolds an analytical perspective on the evolution of property rights in Russia from Tsarist times until today, combining the theory on violence and institutions suggested by North, Wallis and Weingast with Foucault’s analysis of power in society, especially his notions of biopolitics and governmentality. I argue that a historical constant is the subordination of property rights to the biopolitics of catch-up modernization, independent from their specific form, private or public (state-owned). This is embedded in the persistence of informal and ideational structures of Empire, manifest in peculiar forms of governmentality. The bridging concept between these different phenomena is that of ‘state capacity’. State ownership under socialism and Stalinism emerged as the default solution to the challenge of weak state capacity in the Empire. In Tsarist times, the transfer of absolute private property rights from the West had resulted in a developmental stalemate. However, after the biopolitics of the war economy had shifted to cold war rivalry, socialist planning was a mere formal shell in which the informal structures of governmentality in the Soviet Empire evolved. These provided the setting in which the privatization of the 1990s resulted in the emergence of an oligarchic ownership regime, eventually morphing into Putinist state capitalism which can be interpreted as a ‘neo-patrimonial regime’. These developments can be explained by the role of rent distribution in stabilizing intra-elite conflicts. With Imperial structures still prevalent, informal governmentality remains an important means to make up for weak state capacity, thus also weakening private property rights in their role of drawing boundaries between the political and the economic system.