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THERMIDOR:
The Beginning of the End of the Second Russian Revolution?
Have you wondered what Mikhail Gorbachev is thinking now as Boris Yeltsin, his policies in tatters, clings to life? Maybe he's shouting, 'I told you so!', as the parliament reasserts itself against Yeltsin's imperial presidency, and as a liberal-democratic reformer, Galina Starovoitova, is assassinated. Perhaps he's muttering, 'If only...', as another secretary of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Yevgeny Primakov, has taken up the reins of state.
Some say history, like sports journalism, is always written from the victors' perspective. I beg to differ. Reminding ourselves of the history others forget helps put current events in Russia into perspective.
The Russian revolution of our time is drawing to a close. We are reaching the moment in the history of this second Russian revolution when it begins to cease to radicalise, when it starts to stop unravelling new agendas. Look back. First came Gorbachev's 'acceleration', then his 're-structuring', then his 'pluralism', finally Yeltsin's 'privatisation'; and these were only the buzzwords for change in the politico-economic order! A reckoning is now at hand. People in the ruling élite now seem to want some going back. A new, less radical, consensus is being sought.
The historian in me labels such times Thermidor: the beginning of the end of the revolution. At Thermidor, the ruling élite changes course - anxiously, uncertainly renouncing past excesses. Like most things in the study of revolutions, the concept of Thermidor comes from the French revolution. On the Nineth Thermidor of the Year II (27 July 1794), Robespierre was overthrown. On the Tenth his head was severed. The White Terror began thereafter; Jacobin terrorists were now terrorised. Before Thermidor, those who'd renounced the core agendas of the revolution lost power to those who'd insisted on them more emphatically. In their case, liberty, equality and fraternity were on the agenda. In the case of the Russian revolution of our time, it's democracy, the market and normalisation. Thus, Gorbachev and Ryzhkov's 're-structuring' (1987-89) outbid Gorbachev and Ligachev's 'acceleration' (1985-87) till Gorbachev and Yakovlev's 'pluralism' edged out 're-structuring' (1989-91). Yeltsin's nationalism and 'privatisation' gazumped them all. In the French revolution, there was a similar ballet of braggadocio as citizenship came to be defined, before Thermidor, ever more emphatically: declarations of rights in 1789, oath takings in 1790, a revolutionary war and universal suffrage in 1792, terror and direct democracy in 1793-94.
Thermidor is a time of review. What are the results of the second Russian revolution? Corruption, selfishness and cynicism were once the province of unreformed party élites in the USSR. The rest of society found fulfillment in family and intellectual life, joking about Brezhnev's gerontocracy, whispering about its rapacity. What has happened? Among Russia's élites, the revolution of our time has just spread the malaise of corruption and cynicism. Though it has redefined its pathology. Among ordinary people, there's no sanctuary to be found in jokes anymore, and certainly no security, financial or physical, to underpin family life. A new set of bastards are out to get them. Such is the fate of Russia's fledgling democracy. Power élites have closed ranks around cash flows, not hierarchies, corruptly seizing financial and managerial control of any severable part of the national wealth. Yeltsin's people (and the IMF!) naïvely supposed that capitalism would bring freedom and prosperity to Russia. In fact, it has only buttered a few people's bread. The new power élite's accounting (khozrashchët) of their stewardship of the national estate has been a sick joke. IMF millions disappear into vast black holes, re-surfacing as grandiose weekenders (dachas), foreign holidays, or in US and Swiss Bank private accounts. The only people who get paid on time are the racketeers, consultants and managers who've raked things off first.
So the age of revolutionary idealism is over in Russia. Power is (once again) to belong to those who have the property. Only this time, after the fall of Communism, the élite is (corruptly) subdividing the national estate, owning it and manipulating it to suit a few more of themselves. The new élite includes 'middle-class' professionals, entrepreneurs, criminals and nationalists. In the Soviet past, unless they'd infiltrated the Communist party, these people were excluded from power. The old order comprised rather fewer people, though they acted to suit themselves too. They called themselves nomenklatura, the 'numbered-ones', bespeaking the cashless, ranked bureaucratic technocracy which was the source of their power.
Have we therefore come full circle? Nearly, I think. The shadowy people now ruling Russia around Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov seem as unknown to us as Thermidorians of the past must have seemed to their contemporaries. The originals were people like Bertrand Barère, Boissy d'Anglas and Boudon de l'Oise, hitherto bit players in the history of the revolution who came together in fear and from all manner of political backgrounds. Executing Robespierre, they helped found a new order as dedicated to the republic as it wasn't dedicated to democracy. By such means, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics of class were born.
Like these leaders before, Primakov is ushering in policies that spell the beginning of the end of the second Russian revolution. What can we expect of him? His President, Boris Yeltsin, is gravely ill. If Yeltsin dies, Primakov will step in and there'll be new elections. His rivals are likely to be: Gennadi Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist party, now really just a coalition of authoritarian nationalists and anti-market traditionalists whose coherent imperial foreign policy cloaks their incoherent national economic policy; and Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, a liberal populist modelling himself on a much younger Yeltsin, but one who won't be able to benefit from an electorate as naïve as Yeltsin enjoyed in his heydays (1988-91, 1994-95). Yeltsin's government has been running on auto-pilot for quite a while already, since it became clear that his first (Gaidar) and third (Kiriyenko) Prime Ministers' plans for radical liberal reforms threatened the stability of corrupt ruling networks. So, under Primakov as PM, the usual lies about budgets and fiscal stabilisation have been told the IMF. The usual breast-beating has occurred over symbolic matters like Serbia. But don't be mislead. Thermidor has arrived.
Primakov may appear new to us, but he's far from that. During the August 1991 coup, he was one of the few who stood by Gorbachev and his idea of a USSR. Primakov believes in the Russian tradition of a strong paternalist state, organising and shielding the masses. But he's also printing money. And he has allowed Yeltsin's bogey, the parliament, to re-assert itself. A Thermidorian coalition is emerging. Communist nationalists and traditionalists have entered his cabinet. This new Thermidorian cotérie has watched Yeltsin manipulate the media in referenda and two presidential elections. They'll do the same, I guess. Media and business magnates will happily assist them. What alternatives do they have? Radical market reforms are to be abandoned in favour of moderate ones. The corruptly acquired property rights of the new élite will be legitimated to fashion the stability needed for industrial re-investment. Hear no evil, see no evil... Genuine democratisation, local and central, will be put on hold to enable the state to maintain full employment and a semblance of social welfare.
A Thermidorian age of cynical realism is superseding an age of liberal revolutionary idealism. People are weary. Russia's under-propertied, un-moneyed, insecure masses are too ready to trade grassroots political participation for bread and perhaps some butter and jam. Russia's over-propertied, moneyed insecure élites may now be ready to furnish some taxes and surrender some behind-the-scenes power for security of tenure. Something of the secure, traditional and nepotistic atmosphere of the Brezhnev years will thereby be restored. 'Trust in (Marketised) Cadres!' The revolution is beginning to be over!
The historian in me wants to point out how Thermidorian revolutionaries have all faced the same problems. They all think they now know what not to do to correct the excesses of the past. They now know that to stabilise the revolution they must dispense with revolutionary democracy, disarm the people, usurp power and use it to reserve property for themselves. But equally, they're still not sure what to do with the other revolutionary agendas they've inherited. For Thermidorians are still revolutionaries of a kind. This is why the process of the ending of revolutions is far from quick or even easy to accomplish. Napoleon's and Stalin's unalloyed dictatorships came later, in 1801-04 and 1929-36 respectively. French Thermidorians still wanted a Republic and war for revolution. They still attacked nobles and clergy. Napoleon didn't. Most Soviet leaders still wanted voluntary collectivisation of farming and the worldwide proletarian revolution. Stalin didn't (... really). So too, Yevgeny Primakov's people must still resolve the contradictions of implementing capitalism and ensuring political stability. The economic liberalisation and accountability promised by Yeltsin and demanded by the IMF has been rendered hollow by high inflation, by de facto de-centralisation (most provincial places are run as fiefs of some elected boss) and by corruption. Meanwhile, only Yeltsin's promise, in defiance of the IMF, of full employment has been delivered; not yet the grassroots democracy, the underlying social security or the regular wages.
Will a dictatorship of élites over the masses be the post-Thermidorian circuit breaker again? The French Executive Directory and NEP Russia were like this. And will that circuit breaker again involve a trade of the masses' political interests for their economic ones? NEP was the trade off in Russia in the 1920s; the Executive Directors avoided it in France by prosecuting a harsh White Terror in 1794-97.
So the long second Russian revolution is now drawing to a close. It began with Gorbachev's winging rhetoric in 1985 about discipline and alcoholism. At first it seemed just a replay of Khrushchev and Andropov's carrot and stick approaches. Ho hum. Then Gorbachev stunned us all. He suddenly started to enlarge the sphere for a real politics of opinion and discussion, first with talk of glasnost' in 1985. 'Open-ness' is what we called it, but perhaps we'd be better recalling the senses evoked in English by old racist concepts like 'inscutability'. Soviet politics had once been meant to be inscrutable (neglasnyi). No-one (outside the apparatchiki) knew when the Politbiuro met or what they were discussing. Their demeanours on the Kremlin wall on May and Revolution Days showed they'd never faced competitive elections; their etched faces and stooping coats seemed to suggest that they either had piles or were senile. We still remember the heady excitement of Gorbachev's disavowal of all that. His birthmark was not excised from photographs. At his first Congress of People' Deputies in May 1989 he even made his interior minister and chief of police, Vadim Bakatin, answer questions directed to him by parliamentarians, and he made his audience shut up and listen to the admonitions and provocations of windy dissidents like Andrei Sakharov. Russia was in tutelage for democracy. Hopes were high. Progress seemed just around the corner.
Then, after the Chernobyl accident of 1986, Gorbachev began to talk of perestroika. 'Re-structuring' is what we called it, but it meant so much more than the little piece of techno-speak it seemed. A new discursive realm was unveiled. 'What open-ness? What re-structuring?' Gorbachev's game was that everyone was supposed to answer for themselves. He was clearing a space, slowly and steadily, for people to listen to a variety of answers and then to develop, with the assistance of a vanguard of reformers in the Party, a consensus about how to arrive at the best answer. At first that realm always carried an comforting adjective: a 'socialist' market, 'socialist' pluralism, 'socialist' property etc. But by 1990, the 'socialist' dummy was being spit, to reveal a simple faith in social democracy.
Yet Gorbachev also believed in the Communist party. He knew it had to reform. That's why he fanned blow torches of glasnost' and competitive Soviet elections to drive it to change. But he was also convinced that the Party was the only institution that could manage a transition to a looser federalism (unveiled in May 1991), social democracy (implicit at the XIXth Party Conference of June 1988, explicit at the XVIIIth Party Congress in 1990) and a measure of capitalism (matters of fierce debate in 1990, in which Ryzhkov's supposedly conservative views seem to have been proved prescient). Though we now know, with hindsight after the August Putsch, that Gorbachev over-estimated the capacity of the Party to adjust, we also know, after the Yeltsin's successive shelling of (1993) and surrender to (1997) his parliament, that Gorbachev may have been correct to conclude that the Party alone could superintend an orderly transition.
Yeltsin's approach was much more radical. Dare I say, Yeltsin's approach was a irresponsible as Lenin's leap into the dark with 'Peace, land and Bread'? Like Jacobins to Gorbachev's Girondins, Yeltsin's 'Democratic Russia' was an extraordinary coalition of slick and silver-tongued urban élites: free-marketeers, professionals, technocrats, liberal democrats and illiberal nationalists. All were hell-bent on undermining (from 1989) and destroying (perhaps since the demise of the Shatalin plan in late 1990, but apparent in aggressive posturing in the spring of 1991) the old Communist party and with it the USSR. They didn't think they needed any institutions of the old order. They wanted a carte blanche. The folly of the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev gave them their chance.
Supported by a rather naïve West, they've now had that chance. The results of their fancy have been excesses far worse than the offenses for which they scorned and chided Gorbachev. Their hyper-inflation, for a long time, replaced his inflation. Their profiteering and asset stripping masquerading as privatisation superseded his cautious laws on cooperatives and competition among enterprises. Their shelling a Russian parliament in December 1993 contrasted with his gentle gerrymandering of an interim Congress of People's Deputies. Their attempt to ban the Communist party in 1992 was a mockery of his tolerance of them in 1989-91. Their sordid imperial war in Chechnia dwarfed his clumsy curbing of his lieutenants' intemperate actions in Vilnius and Tbilisi.
The key question has always been how this transition to European norms of democracy and market social relations was to be achieved. This was the great issue of the second Russian revolution, the underpinning of its agendas of democratisation and normalisation. Some people pretended that the IMF, foreign investment or some other fairy godmother would do the job for everyone, but no-one could really be expected to believe that except in the fætid atmosphere of elections. Russians really have to work things out for themselves. Gorbachev had one answer. Yeltsin had another. Though Primakov has only just begun to open his mouth, we can confidently say that the time of revolutionary enthusiasm for unalloyed markets and westernisation is over. 'Long live the end of the Revolution!' Now that all revolutionary illusions of transcendence and heroism have finally been dispelled, the real work of reconstruction and institution building can now begin in the chastening, constructive realism of a truly Thermidorian cynicism.
Adrian Jones teaches Russian and European History at La Trobe University. He begs forgiveness for not being a political scientist and writing this opinionated piece (adrian.jones@latrobe.edu.au).