Pre-Modern State-Building in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

‘Transitology’, or the study of transitions from communist rule to what was expected to be applications of Western-style democracy, suffered from fatal misapprehensions that ensured its failure to explain, predict or effectively guide the developments that took place during the 1990s. In particular, it lacked a historical dimension, and it misunderstood the proper function of the state in establishing a political regime. Stateness, or state strength, is an essential variable, and the acquisition of that quality is vital. It involves two fundamental aspects: asserting the state's political autonomy from the social context, i.e. its ability to formulate interests of its own, and establishing its governmental capacity, or the state's ability to achieve its goal. Historical analogies with ‘feudal’ and ‘absolutist’ political regimes are helpful in explaining the task that confronted Putin on assuming office as the designated heir of the chaotic legacy of Boris Yeltsin. The assertion of state power under Putin's leadership should not be seen as an authoritarian reversal that followed a democratic wave, but is comparable with the pre-modern process of state-building that took centuries following the decline of feudalism in Western Europe. Whether the Russian state will strengthen and become an institutionalized democracy following the European sequence remains unclear; but even democratic leaders need a government able ‘to control the governed’.