Sebastian Job Russia The Silence of The Lambs

.ADDRESS.
IN THIS ISSUE
183
1//111/111111//11/11/111
950201472
ARENA journal no. 3, 1994
Like a new-born animal Ca lamb perhaps), awkwardly, sporadically,
wobbly at the knees, the new Russia is wandering toward the wolf of a
new authoritarianism. This is the image that comes decisively to
mind when trying to understand the strange and terrible events of the
last months of 1993 and the relative political equilibrium which
surfaced in 1994. From the abolition of parliament on 21
September, through the subsequent killings and physical desrruction
of 3-4 October, the State of Emergency, the purges, round-ups, break-
ins, censorship, the constitutional referendum of December, and
Russia's 'first free and fair multi-party elections', the new Russia has
wandered .ever further from the promise that was implicit in the fall
of the old regime. By contrast, the new year was hushed. Once the
post-election alarm about the rise of fascism had found its echo in the
expulsion of rhe most vociferous neo-liberals from the cabinet, the
political elite began to look like it was willing ro live with itself.
But certain events suggested a different trajecrory: Presidenr
RUSSIA
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
SeQastian Job
.SUBSCRIPTIONS.
Labour His/ory
Faculty of Economics
University of Sydney NSW 2006
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NOVEMBER 1994
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Luey Tak.sa
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Ann Curthoys
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ARENA journal no. :3, 1994
182
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184 Schasrian Job Silence or the Lambs 185
Yeltsin's Febtuary 24th speech to both houses of parliament 'On the
Strengthening of the Russian State'; the amnestied release [WO days
later of those jailed the previous October; the subsequent scandal of
'Variant No. I " a document which prognosticated an anti-Yeltsin
coup; the growing panic as the scale of the latest phase of the
industrial collapse became apparent; the near cancellation due to lack
of interest in late March of the first ever 'free' local government
elections; the mid-June presidential anti-crime decree that clearly
flouted the new constitution by ignoring its human rights provisions;
and the presidential decision in June-July (again flouting the
constitution) that initiated the second stage of privatization despite
parliamentary objections. Such developments served to further the
preparations for predatory power.
If the direction has since become clear, the motive forces, however,
have not. Any atrempr [0 isolate a primary cause CDuns
simplification. How do we choose confidently between the various
contradictions: between the country-wide economic dislocations of
reform and the desire to hold the nation together; between the
indispensability of democratic legitimation and the impoverishing
demands of the emerging place in the global division of labour;
between the orderly imperatives of state power and the chaotic
consequences of property re-allocation; between the need to stimulate
entrepreneurial initiative and political reliance on mass alienation
and passivity; between reliance on passivity and the recurrent
requirement made of the democratic crowd that it mandate the
government's authoritarian exit from yet another crisis?
At the beginning of this decade the people of Russia and most of
the Soviet Union let slip a precious opportunity. The crisis of the
party had finally happened. The people watched and hoped. A
small minority protested while a larger minority engaged in strikes,
but at the political level they made few enctoachments. The people
withdrew, ceding the task of co-ordinating the transformation to tiny
groups of democtats, most of whom were highly placed in the old
system. In so doing, the people saddled themselves with a new elite
whose functionality extended only to its destructive capacities. Its
conditions of existence were mutually antagonistic, for it sought to
base itself on a class that was as yet embryonic, thus accelerating the
very crisis in the means of production and distribution that had
prepared the way for the new elite's own ascent.
The new elite had no choice however. After the collapse of the
party-state in August 1991 the task imposed on the democrats was to
do what the party could no longer do: that is, to provide itself with a
mode of accumulation able to operate as its stable social support. In
the new conditions appropriated power was to engineer a substitute
economic subject: a new property managing class that would be in
some respects competitive, modernizing, 'civilized'. Private
property emerged at this point not because it was suited to the
demands of the economic-technological complex, but because social
property, social self-regulation, refused to be born.'
The resultant birth of 'the wrong class' threatened the very power
that had sought to vouchsafe the outcome. Power's reaction to this
threat was to accumulate more power. The more the new elite
succeeded in pulling away from the demands of all competing social
and institutional forces, the more it failed to represent anything but
itself. The expulsion of the Gaidar-Fyodorov neo-liberal cabinet
majority was an expression within the elite itself of a failure that had
become too comprehensive, extending even to the class that was its
raison detre. What began as a change of rhetoric and of personnel -
designed nonetheless to continue the previous anti-inflationary
policies - will thus finish quite differently, even if it has to finish
with the Chernomyrdin cabinet (and Yeltsin') to do so. Inherent in
the state's ongoing incapacity to compensate for the incapacities of
the emerging capitalist class is a logic that must shift it towards
domination over that class. Evolving in the interstices of such
developments as the inability of enterprises to support themselves, to
establish profitable intetrelations, to produce quality products when
and where necessary, to allocate funds for amortization, to secure
capital for investment, to suPPOrt research and development, and the
failure of the market to reallocate labour rationally in and across
economic sectors, to stem the outflow of capital, to facilitate the
importation of high-technologies on the scale needed - is a
collective class interest. This collective class interest is to be found
nOt iOn the exercise of property rights or in independence, but in a
partial re-subordination to the state. The longer the particular
interests of capital are combined in such a way as to frustrate this
shift, the more severe will be the rebound to state direction when it
comes. Both aspects of this dilemma - the social and economic
decline attendant upon capital's failure, and the state's more or less
I. L:n:llloyed privale capital is genedly loclln! only in the rt'tail. trading. :1I1<! banking
ThroughoUl much of the economy the (SI ill unfinished) results of privatization have not
produced private property in a StriCI sense hUI rathn. mixtures of forms. often with a
nomin:llly corllrollinl; of going lO ilK l'llev;ull I.lbour ,olkniw. t\ similar
w;Hning can ht' posted againsf most of orhrr primary lwrc _ elite, start',
nationalism, left, neo-liheral - as also against rhe manner of their conception. [n this mohile
situation these concepts should be treatcd as more tentativc than the strictures of narrative
exposition can allow them to appear.
186
Job
Silence of {he I.ambs 187
Incompetent compensatory actions - will remain inimical re any
kind of democratic cirizenship.
This, then, is the first aspect I wish to consider in trying to
understand the current situation in Russia, In order to say anything
about overcoming the dilemma, however, it must first be
acknowledged that there is nothing startling about August 1991 when
viewed in the light of popular non-participation. Indeed, with a few
great exceptions, this same element of popular non-panicipation has
been operative hisrorically as the irreducible condition of the
seemingly interminable crisis of Russian state power. Consequendy,
it is necessary to consider a second imperative that would seem (0 be
at work here. For the purposes of political analysis, there is a first
moment in the social process. although it is a stillness; there isan
over-determining factor, although it is a certain kind of absence. The
structure common to those contradictions that are driving Russia into
ever more lethal forms of state power emerges from the suppression
of a self-assertive social and individual subject.
Beneath all local contradictions, the threat of a return co some kind
of systematic political authoritarianism impels a search for the 'lack'
which would be rhe space of its possibility. The location of that
space will involve assumptions about what ought, otherwise, to
occupy it. Three popular candidates fot this space are problematic
however: to speak of an absence of working class mobilization, or
consciousness, or even of a working class 'in itself assumes that a class
response would be sufficient to make the necessary difference; to fault
the lack of a democratic tradition is to suggest that if Russia could
just govern itself democratically for long enough, the experience
would become self-reinforcing; to speak of the absence in Russia of a
civil society is to suggest that a qualitative growth in activity and
association independent of the state would generate a culture able to
successfully resist the authoritarian revanch. These 'candidates', while
relevant, are ultimately inadequate: an emphasis on democratic habits
forgets that such habits cannot be decreed into existence but must be
engendered in an active civil society; an emphasis on civil society
must recognize firstly, that where it comeS into existence on the back
of private property, civil society is typically uncivil and highly
corrosive of democratic p.ractices, and secondly, that class struggles
and solidarities are among the indispensable correctives; an emphasis
on class struggles has to ask why they have been so weak and diffuse.
One way of theorizing the inadequacy, I want to suggest, is simply
to locate it in the more or less enduring institutional and
psychological relations of the people of Russia, in theit ways of
being, collectively and individually. By abstracting from the
ARENA joumal no. 3, 1994
specific historical and contemporary sources of authoritarianism, it
becomes possible to insist on what more partial, and hence more
apologetic, accounrs would skip over: the stubborn fact of a people
who are forced to try, and to want to try, to be less than they can be.
Put this way, the problem is hardly unique to Russia; what is unique
to this country is the particular kind of suppression of subjectivity,
and intensity of crisis that it precipitates. In Russia the lack has
repeatedly become so aggravated as to be the space not only of the
possibility of authoritarianism, but of its inevitability.2
Taken rogethcr, these points would suggest that the condition of
existence of elite political power is the constant appropriation of
social power, an appropriation whose condition of existence is, In
turn, the suppression of the elemeI1t of the subject in the human object.
In Yeltsin's Russia this condition of the elite's existence is also the
condition of its ineffectuality. The contradiction is instantiated in
the fact that the emerging mode of exploitation is even more
unsustainable than the old; it undermines its own economic and
cultural conditions of existence. To this impasse the executive has
one response. Its singular understanding is that it must enhance its
own power, its own structured regime of suppression, to balance the
equation. But the equation does not balance from above. 'Success'
therefore, is likely to be indistinguishable from failure. Only if
other forces, including those on the left, can take steps to move out of
the void of social self-activity - the void which is also the origin of
their crisis - will the dialectic of authoritarian decline be arrested.
Accumulating Power
The enduring conflict between the previous Russian executive and
legislature was a gigantic, melodramatic expression of a
comradiction between exchange value and use value: the one, operative
primarily In the sphere of finance and trading capital,
internationalized and growing at an astonishing rate; the other,
operative in the sphere of industrial enterprise and the
farm, autarchic and bitterly gnawing at itself: Such socio-economic
2. One llH:rir of the vagueness of tile term 'subject' is that by conveniently indicating both an
individual and a collecrive. both a psychological and a social referent. it can be readily
employed in the debates between cultural and economic determinists. Onc merit of irs
speciflciry. on rhe orher hanG, is thar ir can help to emphasize - againsr now common anri-
foundalionalisl which the self-creating. originary absolmisms of rhe modern
subj(,(t as rhe source of early-twcnrierh cenmry rol:tlirari,1I1isms and posr-Sovier resurgenr
n,Hion,\lisms - lhat the cudcss fXltnsion of rhe subjeerive claim, imbricated in and bv a
gendcred history of Euto and anthropocentric dominarion, is both consequence and condit'ion
of its inwfJicimcy.
3. An all-Russian survey three months befofe Yeltsin acted showed that when asked 'If there was
a presidential election now, would you vote for B. 35.1% of respondents answered
Yes, 46.2% No, and 18.7% Do Nor Know. When people were asked 'Whom of rhe polirical
figures of modern Russia do you trust?' however, only 16:1% named Yelrsin while his
principal rival. Vice-president Alexander Rurskoi. was named by 22.2% of respondents.
Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences (RA;-":) , Monitoring: The /993 RlI.'silll/
Citium' Opinion Poll Results, Moscow, July 1993.
4. There is much debare about rhe extent to which Yclrsin's contldanrs engineered the armed
catharrhis of 3-4 October. The case for the conspiracy is effectively detailed in Alexander
Tarasov's prollokatslja, a self-published pamphlet, January 1994. The probkm with argllmentS
of this kind is that from the existence of conspiracies pa Sf (and who was not conspiring at rhat
rime?) rhey derive evidence for a Conspiracy. Bur this conclusion does nOt account for the
reportS of panic and disorganization inside rhe Kremlin on the night of rhe 3rd, nor explain
why the Yehsinites should have lec the siruarion develop to che poim where the loyalry of the
military, and hence their hold on power, was in question. In general such arguments
rhe dynamic of mass events themselves and overplay the capaciries and foresight of rhe regime.
credicing it with an omnipotence which probably owes more to the old Parry's propaganda
about itself chan to careful analysis. Those interested in tlw evenrs of October should also know
rhat a collection of witness accounts and :lnalysis is currently being
Kolganov for publication in English by Momhly Review.
5. Moscow Timn, 1 December 1993.
forces, moving ar differential speeds in different but overlapping
spaces, fuelled a high-friction struggle between their champions
within the political elite, a struggle which eventually, and hOtribly,
escaped what it represented.
The timing of the clash was nO[ accidental. It corresponded [Q a
moment of Yeltsin's sttength when, after all the dress-rehearsals,
virtually the whole cabinet and the leadership of the security forces
wete finally on side. It also cottesponded to a thteatening weakness:
the disproportions in the economy which were the condition of the
struggle, were also conditioning anitudes rowards the governmenr.
Time was running out for the neo-liberal programme.' Thus in
September and October 1993 the governing citcle saved (and nearly
hung) themselves, provoking a violent struggle and then exploiting it
without compunction.
4
The hand that had ruled by dectee was abtuptly pared back ro its
coercive bone, then sheathed again. Wearing the magic glove of
promised elections Yeltsin teached out and brusquely te-ordeted all
the structutes of political otder. 'By mid-Novembet', as Zhotes
Medvedev wtote, 'aftet Ptesident Boris Yeltsin's decrees had
abolished the tegional, town and othet local councils, the only
democtatically elected politician still in power in Russia was the
president himself. Everyone else in authority - heads of
administration, governors, mayors, representatives and sundry other
people at various levels - had been appointed by presidential
decree.'; It would be ovet-ambitious ro tty to detail the control the
Yeltsin citcle built up befote, aftet, and during the elections. A short
189 ot till.' Larnt)s
lisr of abuses relating only re rhe vore on rhe consriwrion - thar
foremost symbol of rhe post-totalitarian socicty - will have to
stand in for a general illustration of the dedication the neo-liberal
political elite brought to all the democratic tasks entrusted to ir.
Thc official rcferendum question - 'Do you accept the
constiturion of the Russian Federation?' - was creative, putting in
rhe present tense as an already operative document, what people were
rheoretically yet to decide whether to accepr or not. By semantic
ruse the existing (or non-existing?) consritution was conjured away in
a formulation that thereby had the benefit of making a No vote seem
like a vote against Russia itself, given the implication that the choice
was beween acceptance of rhis constitution, or having no constitution
at all.
JUSt how hypothetical this choice was became clear when Yeltsin and
his aides repeatedly told the heads of parties to steer cleat of
criticizing the president and the project-constitution, or face
exclusion from the election. The electronic media repeated the story
entitely within the spurious tetms in which Yeltsin had framed it:
candidates were to 'refrain from using their free air rime to attack the
constitution instead of explaining their platforms'. At firSt it was
unclear why it was that a bloc's platform was necessarily exclusive of
opinions on the constitution only when you were against it, but then
Vladimir Shumeiko, at that point a candidate and a member of the
government, was good enough to clarify things. Participation in the
elections, he explained, was an implicit acceptance of the conStitution
because it would ground the parliament to which all candidates wete
seeking election. Shumeiko fotgot to inform the votets that they toO,
by voting, would be implicitly accepting the constitution which
guaranteed the elections, and that the referendum ballot would
rherefore be re-printed, this rime with only one box: the place to
matk Yes.
The mOSt crucial aspect was the need to have fifty per ,cent of the
voting population taking part. If voters wanted to vote in the
elections but boycott the refetendum they had to tegistet a refusal to
accept the teferendum ballot paper. If not, and even if they burnt the
referendum ballot, they were counted as participating. The existence
of an option to refuse to accept the teferendum ballot received such
little publicity that all the Central Electoral Commission (CEC)
functionaries I contacted, except for rhe one responsible for this very
doubted it was possible.
Nikolai Ryabov, the chairperson of the allegedly neutral
Commission, openly endorsed a Yes vote on television. This 'slip',
was no slip at all. It went to air several times, and each time ir was
Sebastian Job
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190
Scbasrian Job Silence of the Lambs
191
simultaneously reinforced by a 'slip' of an electronic TV pen that
carefully crossed out and voided the No option on the ballot paper
Ryabov was displaying. The show of partisanship provoked queStions
concerning what else the CEC (whose membets were hand-picked by
Yeltsin) was doing ro get the tight tesult. The leader of the
CommuniSt Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady Zyuganov,
would latet claim that the Yes vote amounted ro thirty-one per cent
of those participating and not the fifty-fout pet cent claimed by the
CEC. Doubts such as these wete backed up circumstantially by the
suicide of one member of rhe Commission the morning after the
election. The full text of his suicide nOte was not made public, but
appatently it read in part that he did 'not wish to deceive the people'.
Within a few weeks of the election there was a fire at the CEC's
Novy Arbat headquarters which deStroyed electotal records stored
on the fourth floor. In this atmosphere of generalized corruption and
manipulation it would not be inappropriate to assume .that even the
document founding the rule of law had been passed deceitfully.'
With respect to the elections themselves, however, the government
was confident. Enjoying monopoly power it force-marched' the
country into what it thought would be a benediction. Yeltsin's single
fear was that the people would refuse to legitimize theit own
deception; they would call his bluff by not voting. The people found
another way; even as they 'approved' his authoritarian constitution,
they trumped it. The gteatest single part of the electorate voted fot
chauvinist-nationalist Vladimit Zhirinovsky, and seemed to shout
back: 'Is that all the degtadation you have to offet' At least subject
us to a humiliation we can be proud or.' In the Fathet of the Nation
stakes the nation had found a higher biddet.
6. This is exactly what happened, if an investigatory commission set up under {he prcsidenr
himself is to be believed. Afrer a four-monTh-long investigation. the head of the commission,
Alexander $obyanin, reponed that only 46.1 per ccnc of rhe population had vo{cd in the
referendum and not 54.8 per cent. A rotal of nine million ballots, he said, had been falsified.
The minimum fifty per cent needed to validate the constitution had therefore nOt been reached.
See 4 May 1994. For Sobyanin's reply to critics sce NtZilvisimaya (;aura. 2 August
1994. The idea that they arc the proud owners of an invalid constitution has amacted strenuous
indifference from both the government and the parliamentary opposition (for different
reasons), and genuine indifference from the populaTion. Tanks and swindles, thus is built a
law-based state!
ARENA jDumal no. 3, 1994
Order and Authoritarianism
All the contesting panics had common statist tendencies;
Zhirinovsky expressed this openly, crudely, and was supported for
doing so. Alexander Buzgalin, Party of Labour
Whoever the voters cast their ballots for, they were unanimous that
Russia needed strong authority, that Russia needed order.
Boris Ye1tsin, President
Is Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky a future despot or a future game
show host, a wolf in clown's clothing, or a clown in wolfs clothing?
The secret of his epiphenomenal success is that he is both, depending
on the opportunities of the time. This is what makes him an apt
signifier. He seems to hold within himself the time's opposing
valencies, its farce in his laughable threats, its tragedy in his
threatening laugh. Nevertheless, he will only become dangetous if he
can push beyond the opposition; if he metely remains its faithful
reflection he will become another of its victims. Whatever
Zhirinovsky's fate, at the present momenr his anrics do not make him
trivial, for he continues to play the signal role of ideological scout,
opening up taboo territory which the government can ridicule, and
then edge into. His is the quasi-fascism which makes softer
nationalisms respectable; the disorder on show that reinforces the
ideology of authotitarian order. Given his functionality, it is
legitimate to ask to what extent the Yeltsin tegime is tesponsibie fot
the votet support that brought him to prominence.'
The standatd answer on the Russian left might be summarized
fairly as: Yeltsin gave the body politic shock therapy. When its
chance came, the body vomited Zhirinovsky and, as the Segodnya
newspaper put it, administered its own shock therapy ro the
government. Some additional factors pertaining to the vote for
Zhirinovsky, and to the general complementarity of 'democrats' and
'fascists' in the production of an authoritarian atmosphere, can be
outlined here.
The much bettet showing by pro-government fotces in Moscow,
where Zhirinovsky ran no candidates, tends to confirm the suspicion
that the votes he managed to accumulate elsewhere were those due
rightfully to the neo-liberal 'party of ministers', Russia's Choice.
Zhirinovsky in effect reaped the harveSt of social debasement which
7. As late as July 1993, The above cited survey showcd that givcn a choice offiftccn parries to vote
for in elections to the Supreme SovieT, Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party (LOP) would
have come fourreenth, followed only by Pamyat. Moniroring.
8. Srgodnya. 15 Decemlk'r 1993.
9. Core suppor! for the LDP in the ekctioll canll" from male industri.lI workers bnwccll thc
ages of tWelHy-tlw at,d fony from small cities and towns. Two-thirds of t1lOSl' who votcd for
his candidates werl' in employment, only ten per cent werc fk'nsioncrs. Survey rcsults published
in lZ/lm;ll, cited in R. Chlrkt" "[s Russia going Fascist?', Gran left, I') January 19')4.
the government had sown. The contrary claim that Moscow, as the
seat of the reforms, was and is more democratic by nature, and that
the vote for the LOP represented 'an expansion of the provincial
subconscious' ,s is in line with that liberal thought which excuses dlC'
present by finding all sins hiding in the darkness of the totalitarian or
pre-modern past.') What it cannOt explain is the expansion into the
big cities; it will not admit that archaisms arc not confined merely
to the provinces but are being fertilized in all regions by the
contemporary process. In comparatively cosmopolitan Moscow the
ground had been tilled with special care; in addition to being the
physical site of parliament's destruction (which Zhirinovsky
supported), it offers the ugliest contrasts of wealth and poverty, and
supported the reintroduction in November of registration
requirements akin to the old internal passpon system. This latter
development allowed Mayor Yuri Luzhkov to rid the city of ten
thousand undesirables from the Caucasus.
It is a measure of the advances made under Yeltsin that by the time
of the elections Gennady Burbulis, until then one of the ideologues in
Yeltsin's inner circle, could readily admit that "'Order" now
occupies approximately the place within propaganda that
"democracy" did in 1989-90'. When democracy culminated in the
elections. however, it was clear even to the neo-liberal elite what their
'order' had effected. All blocs were competing ro be the
representative of order, but the middle ground, carefully undermined
by Yeltsin over the previous year, found few vOters to resurrect it. In
this extreme situation only extremists had a chance, and the two
front-running extremists were Russia's Choice, and the LOP. This
was, as Yuri Nechipurenko, art-critic and bio-physicist put it, 'a
choice between murderers and the mentally disturbed. Voters chose
the mentally disturbed.' Driven hard on itself, impotent power
contorted the order it promised into its ugliest form - violence -
and then on to its negation in a spectacle of madness.
The desire for ordn is provoked by current conditions, bur is
grounded in a deeper cultural value - that of 'normality'. In
responding to popular feeling, there is no political force that does not
bow to the endlessly repeated injunction that people be allowed to
lead 'normal lives'. As a socio-political condition, order is to be the
guarantor of normality; as a psychological and behavioural attribute,
order is that which is definitive of the normal person. As an
historical residue 'normality' is a complex of meanings: a repository
of memory, ideology, and fear; of a Brezhnevian (and pre-
Brezhnevian) sense of the dignity of 'simple people'; and of the
images of those things that 'civilized' countries grant to their citizen-
consumers. Wherever else they conflict, the-se sources merge in their
promotion of 'life' as something opposed to and different from
politics. Although often allied to a Russian traditionalist discourse,
normality expresses the internationalist wisdom of the age: the point
of political liberation is liberation from politics. In Russia
liberation from the old system has been indissoluble from a crisis of
national and personal identity. Freedom has been experienced as
bitter, and normality is the narne of that ",,::,hich would trade away any
public use of that freedorn. Normality thus shapes up as that reaction
to toxic freedom which negates any struggle for 'real' freedom. It is
the modest ideology of quietude and non-participation. It is the
highest ambition of a life lived as self-preservation, the mirror
discourse of a partly self-suppressing subject.
As an ideology of the private sphere it is no longer compelled into
existence by a monolithic state, but new sources have appeared as
compensation. From below it is bolstered by the spontaneous
ideologies of the market. On the one hand, the market never fails to
teach that it is money, not political involvement, which meets life's
needs; on the other, Russia's sudden immersion in consumer
capitalism's cheerfully decadent media culture excites a wish for a
dangerous loss of self-control. and normality is called forth as the
policing operation capable of regulating the encounter. From all
sides it is reinforced by the threatening environment - by the crime,
corruption, domestic violence, family break-ups. Iow wages, ill-
health, alcoholism, drug dependency, suicide, and various other signs
of social decay whose message is: keep your head down' From above
it hears a cynical confirmation. Yes, the democratic elite will
guarantee normaliry; after all, normality guarantees the elite. The
exercise of rhe economic capacity to labour, domestically or
192 Sehasrian Job
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Silence: of rhe Lambs
The Paradox of Normality
193
ARENA ja"ma! no. 3, 1994
194 Sebastian Job
Silence or (he Lambs
195
publicly, contributes ro the production of an increasingly diverse and
interdependent social system that requires the exercise of
commensurate political capacities. The need can be frustrated but
not thwarted; it recurns as specialized power wielded on high. The
system which absents itself from self-regulation inevitably looks for
a centte, an axis of order, a father. The 'normal', 'simple' people
seek a leader.
The secret of 'notmality' may thus be humiliation. The individual
and collective refusal to exercise rights and capacities for self-
representation introduces an anxiety, an unrecognizable need - that
is, a disorder - into the orderly, insular, self-sufficiency which the
subject imagined it could guarantee precisely by means of the refusal.
From outside, the disorder is complemented. The greater the unmet
need for social input. the greater the resultant repression or social
chaos. Now that Russia has traded repression for chaos, society's
jagged edges dig at the vulnerable places of anxiety, generating a
desire for a 'control-locus' which would salve the damage. Order, it
seems, can only be secured if the will of the people is mediated by
representation or direct fule. Not surprisingly, those who are least
assertive and least protected sense the lack the most. The damage is
thus perpetuated. The victims of chaos demand hyper-order,
indifferent to its possible costs because they afe already paying more
than they can bear. A wolf-clown getS elected.
And thus to the paradox. Normality is nor a straight road to
fascism. It is also compatible with apathy, cynicism, and loyal
suppon for democratic representatives. More interestingly, it is
necessatily a fluid and contested tetm, and will long temain the
psychological-ideological refetence for almost all the' political
agitation that occurs in Russia. Whether a mobilization that proceeds
from a desire for normality could come to recognize the conflict
between its active practice and its dream of stasis - whether it could
ironize the dream, and then je({ison it - is therefore an open
question.
In the meantime normality remains firmly paradoxical, a
determinedly inward-looking ideology of the private sphere that
sometimes functions as a spur to public involvement. An example of
the resulranr tensions is the Women of Russia electoral bloc.
Ekaterina Lahova and others established the organization in order to
fight fot social welfare policies that would consetve favourable
elements of the gendet otder and the domestic economy, atguing that
'the family is the basis of our state'. The ambiguous radicality of
such thinking is derived not only from the ambiguous role of
ARENA journal no. 3. 1994
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conservatism in the resistance to Russia's free-market radicals,
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but
from the specific role played by the family in pre-Gorbachev Russia.
As the basic unit of friendship networks, the family operated, and ro
some extent operates, as a substitute public sphere, or an alternative
civil society. One of the costs associated with such a public defence
of the family was its dependence on a masculinist humanism.
Alevtina Fedulova, one of the leaders of Women of Russia, may be
the first feminist ever to announce: 'Most important for us is man'.!!
Nation
There are other indications too that normality is a precarious basis
for any progressive politics. If the double family-as-civil-society
role allows masculinist humanism to be relatively easily mobilized
as the family's public suppOrt, the patriarchal character of the family
is also stamping its shape on political debate. The ascendant
ideology of the day is nationalism, and the gendet telations of
normality are now tightly entwined in its spectacular encroachment
on the redoubt of the citizen. If nationalism is not to be treated
solely as an invention of the state or of ethnicity, then it may be that
it is a masculinist militarism, not a humanism, which the normal
patriarchal family now donates to society. In any event, the slippery
character of normality is now more evident in the struggle between
the claims of homeland and human than in that between feminine and
masculine. The big winner in the elections was not Women of Russia,
nOt any other party, but a nationalism which was the first refuge of
almost evety contender. By the time the dust thrown up by the
'fascist threat' had settled, evety leading liberal democrat had
publicly discovered the patriot beating fiercely in his or her bteast,
or had quit the stage. 'Liberal-democracy', ideologically speaking,
was quickly shaping up as that brief incubation period attendant on
10. Dudchenko and Myitil in their study of rhe and 'pscudo-family', argue that women
have been Icss active in rheir adaptarion to {he new condirions, more strongly anached to the past
and to its rigid and passive srereotypes. Presumably one of rhe explanations for (but also one of
rhe consequences of) this reacrion lies in tbe fact that women are fast losing out. According to
the Centre for Gender Studies their wages have dropped to fony per cell{ of men's (down from
seventy per cell[ in rhe late Sovie! era). and on Federal Service figures {hey make up
seventy to seventy-five per cent of the unemployed. Among single mothers fifty-five per cent
live below the poverty line. See Moscow Tinm, Women's Issue. 6th March. 1994. See also O. N.
Dudchenko and A. V. Myi{il. 'Scmcinaya Sarnoidellliflkatsya v Obshestve', in
Sotsialnaya!dmlljikrllSya f.ie/mosli, InstitlHe of Sociology. RAN, 199,), pp, 89-90, on
the problems of anxiety and disorientation attendant on the contemporary fack of this exrernal
'conrrol-Iocus'.
11. Fedulova. decwr:ll broadcast 011 Russian TV, 2 December 199,3,
ARENA journal no, 3, 1994
196 Sebastian Job Silcnc(' or (he Lambs 197
the re-birth of a nationalism whose best impulses would seem to be
grounded in an illiberal and undemocratic chauvinism.
In the St Petersburg elections, censored nationalist media
personality Alexander Nevzorov defeated Ylltin V'dovin, the leader
of the Commission for Free Speech, for a seat in the new parliament.
A week later the eclipse of human rights by nationalist discourses was
underscored again by the reappearance of cult musician Yegor Letov.
When Letov was last in the public eye three years ago his political
position was to be found on the existential side of anarchism. Back
on stage in December 1993, he had metamorphosed into an 'ultra-
Communist' or 'narional-bolshevik'; that is, an extreme srarisr and
imperialist. The concen, which turned into the first serious riot in
Moscow since the October days, was co-organized by Alexander
Prokhanov, editor of the currently suppressed nationalist newspaper
Dyen.
12
The anti-humanist politics of people like Nevzorov and Prokhanov
long predates the curtailment of their freedom of expression, but for
many in their growing audience it is a daily encounter with capitalist
human rights which is now teaching them to clutch at nationalist
defences. J3 The static, defensive, individual yet abstract-universal
12. Sce also the interview with Yegor Lerov and Others in Lavtra (successor n<.:wspaper to
no. 2, p. 7, January 1994,
13. Obviously the profile cited above of those giving elecwral preferences to Zhirinovsk;':s
LDP cannot be conflated with sustained and active support for the LDP or for other groupings
of the far right such as Dimitry Vasililyev's Pamyat faction. General SterJigov's Russian
National Council (SOBOR), Alexander Barkashov's Russian National t..:nity (R;\,E), or Sergei
Barburin's slightly more centrist Russian National Union. To my knowledge no published
research has yet been done on the membership and social background of such groups. Mikail
Chernish of the Institute of Sociology, RAN, reportS that his work on social Stratification and
authoritarian nationalist consciousness presently shows that about ten per cent of the population
identify with chauvinist groups possessing a quasi. fascist image and ideology, while only about
five per cent of the intelligentsia makes this identification; among the larrcr. profeSSionals in
the humanities arc highly represented. Women and men are equally represented, although
women's stated motives for supporting extreme nationalist views more commonly refer to the
security of their families and the future of their children than do the stated mOtives of men.
Interview with Chernish, 12 April 1994. A discussion of the various motives and conditions
for membership in nationalist groups of all kinds has been attempted in M. C. Dzhunusov,
Suvarniur Kak Sotsialnii Fmommen, Moscow, 1994, pp. 95105. Demographic factors
feeding Russian nationalist feeling since the break up of the USSR - for example, the
possibiJiry that at the next census in 1999 Russians will make up only seventy per cent of the
population. down from eighty-two per cent at the last census - arc developed in V, Tishkov,
'Etnichnost, ;-.Jatsionalizm i Gosudamvo v Postkommunisticheskom Obshestve', VoproCl
Sorsiologii, no. 1/2, 1993. In reading these kinds of srudies, however, it becomes obvious that wc
arc in the presence of works which have more than an explanatory function. No affiliation to
far-right groups or to their ideas, should be implied. Neverthdess, a Tishkov will
publicize cautious suggeStions for the introduction of special measures to suppOrt the
development of the cultural traditions and ideals of rhe Russian people, who arc allegedly
losing out relative to some other nationalities in the ex-USSR, the R;\,E, responding to the
same or similar sociological statiStics (which an' now well publicized), will speak of the need
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character of human rights does not provide what people seem to need
to re-affirm their idenrities. It cannot respond adequately to a
situation where people are the victims not of political persecution but
of demoralization and economic dislocation, processes that require
an active, emotionally-involving, extra-personal response. 'Nation'
proffers such an illusion: authoritarian collectivism will safeguard the
normal, decent, simple people. Order will protect the orderly.
Where the exercise of civic freedoms is regarded as useless or alien,
the only response liberalism can make is to focus on the identity of
the consumer.
14
But even this cannot be marketed very convincingly
among those who, as a new Zhirinovsky parliamentarian put it, 'don't
know how to steal or deal'. With few exceptions, liberalism is no
longer the champion of civil society or of the individual against the
parry-stare. It stands exposed rather as the apology for a power of
violation.
Even the driest liberals understand they muSt utilize the
authoritarian nationalist antinomies of 'modernization' to make
good their own lack. An example of this was evident in the electoral
marketing of Russia's Choice. The de facto presidential parry chose
as its symbol the Bronze Horseman or Peter the Great, a legendary
figure who established a westernized St Petersburg on rhe bones of
Russian labourers, The Europeanizing message was enough. Bur
a second idea, that of compensation for the fearful dialectic of
suffering and achievement that characterized Czar Peter's rule was
also significant. For here was a man above men, a quasi-divine and
quasi-natural being who embodied the ancient centre of order, the
active point of judgement, and the nation's iron will. The text in the
image? Perhaps this: Do not worry, for modernization is quite
traditional. The future has happened before. And, anyway, you do
not have to fix the present mess. The subjectivity you yielded to the
free market, to the abstracr and chaotic movement of tradeables, will
not be squandered. The debit of the invisible hand will be cashed in
'to for a cult of the family', so thar women will be:lr lots of children. In this way
it will be possible IQ 'increase the Russian population' and secure 'the health and genetic purity
of the Russian nation'. Sce the R:\E programme, in Russkii Pory"dok, no, 8, p. 11, 20 August
I 99.l
14. Participating in rill' making of important politicll rkcisioJ)S is significant for only four
per cent of the Russian elcctoratc, openness and speech <Ire significant values for only
twelve per cent (!), according to surveys administered by sociologist Nugzar Betaneli :It the
time of the elcnion. St'f.0dnya, 15 Oecember 199.1, However, in another survey in November
199,3, whr'll ,lsked 'Do you belong to a ddim'd politiCll parry or movement?' slightly mort'
than tWO per cent said yes, an illcrease of more dun one per cent from July, /'.(rkfJ/o Mmmii.
Institute of Sociology, RAj\', November 199.3. These arc not insignificant figures given that
they refer {O membership. although the COtltrast with the former figures on attitude only
tll1derlincs dle large gap rill' tiny ,\cri\T minority ,1nd the repulsed maioriry.
198 Sebastian Job Silence of the Lambs
199
';:
by the presidential hand. For consenting to become 'free' objects and
human commodities, we guarantee the concentrated subjectivity of
the secular-czar, the patriarch 'above the fray', the author of your
constitution in whom is invested ultimate'authority.
With the use of such iconography - and much else - the
politicians in Russia's Choice, fearless proponents of the open
society, took ideological cover behind their alleged enemies. With
Zhirinovsky types around to share that cover it might not have been so
wise, but then it would not be the first time that a capitalist state on
the make had risked reconciling its own systemic authoritarianism
with the institutions of formal democracy by recourse backwards to a
patriarchal higher third.
Accumulating Powerlessness
For liberals the social transformation underway in Russia is summed
up as a move from totalitarianism to democracy. Socialists speak
commonly of a trade of power for property. The latter has the merit
of emphasizing that the changes are largely powered by, and to the
benefit of, those already privileged by the old system, and of leaving
open the question of what kind of society will eventuate.
15
What it
may obscure is that the enrire dynamic of the Yeltsin rcgime is
framed by the ongoing contradiction between power and property.
Neither is adequate to the other, and neither is adequate to the
society. Power conjures up nor a property form rhar will guaranree ir,
but one whose operative effecrs rend to undermine ir. Rendered
relatively)neffectual, the government's decrees are in turn incapable
of protecting the capitalist class from itself. The problem of
corruption and the development of banking can serve as illustrations.
According to millionaire and new parliamentarian Artem Tarasov,
'corruption has encroached on all levels of power, including the organs
of law and order'.16 This was to be expected.
Corruption was endemic to the old system because it was necessary
as compensation for the economic ineffectuality of the central plan,
and for the ideological inadequacy of a communist ethic hopelessly
at variance with real relations. Now it is one of the principal and
indispensable means of accumulation. On 16 April 1993, Alexander
Rutskoi, then Vice-President, alleged in parliament that more than
15. Studies by alga Kryshtanovskay; of the Elite Study Section of the Institute of Sociology,
RAN, show that following Yc!tsin's 'democratic revolution' a grand IOtal of ten per cent of the
state elite have come ro be composed of new (previously non.e1ite) people. Businm World
Wukly, 27 June 1994.
16. Stolitsa, no. 43, p. 153, 1993.
forty per cent of Russia's GNP was under the control of organized
crime. He made the mistake of supporting his claims with names,
times, places, and flgures for numerous misappropriations, along with
the decree numbers and signarures of (he cabinet members who had
authorized them. 17 Shorrly afterwards the Anti-Corruption
Commission publicly accused Rutskoi of having an immodestly
sized Swiss bank account. The charge would later be dropped, but
only after Rutskoi's popularity had been weakened, allowing Yelrsin
to strip him of his powers. IS The Commission was then dissolved. 19
The difficulty this level of corruption poses for the state is not only
the enormous income loss, bur the corrosion of the much trumpeted
rule of law even as it is allegedly established. If decrees replace
legislation the separation of powers is null, and if decrees are
constantly used to break even the rules established by prior decree,
the would-be rulers also lose.
20
The situation of the bankers effectively illustrates the contradiction
between steering and profitability, between the rule of law and the
rule of money, between political power and the property forms it is
supposed to guaranree. The new commercial banks are the capiralist
flagship. Despite some irritating legislation bankers are nicely
situated to key into the voucher privatization scheme: they are buying
much of thc expensive real-estatc; they own modern technologies;
they are situated in modern offlces and are associated with the luxury
end of the emerging consumer culture. They also have political clout
via such means as the funding of electoral tickets and rhe simultaneous
17. A few weeks later (6 May) Yeltsin would use the opponunity afforded by a post-referendum
television address to the narion to announce that he had lost his trust in Rurskoi.
18. Even in July. however, survey results showed that t w i c ~ ' as many pt'ople opposed Yeltsin's
decision to suspend Rutskoi as supported it. Sce MOl/itoring. Evidendy Rutskoi was still a
dangerous figure,
19. It would subsequently emerge rhat the evidence against Rurskoi had been forged. h;
Stanislav Govorllkhin commented in an electoral broadcast on Russian TV, 6 December 1993,
it was 'in reality the Anri-RlItskoi Commission'. Govorukhin, a film maker and Democratic
Party leader, has recently published a book describing the contemporary process as The Great
Criminal Revolution',
20, One example of these effecrs was provided when Ycltsin delivered his Address to the Nation
in the Kremlin (24 February 1994). It would later become clear that even as he spoke of the
need for all parries to respect rhe new constiturion - commenting that 'not a single politician
or government official today has as much suppOrt as the constitution' - he was strongly
pressing his new public prosecutor and old ally, Alexei Kazannik. to disregard the constitution
and disallow thl: parliament's decision to amnesty those arrested last October. Knannik
resignl:d in protest at the pressure two days later, the samt' day [hat Yeltsin's enemies walked free.
In a somewhat ironic conclusion ro the episode, the president decided ro appoint Alexei
llyushenko, the former chief of t h ~ above mentioned Anti-Corruption Commission, as his new
public prosecutor. As it turned out the llyushenko appointment itself was unconstit\ltionaJ.
200 Sehsrian Job
Silence of (he LlInhs
201
occupancy of state office. Recently, some of them have also been
getting shot. 21
At the most general level their plight registers the impact of the
money culture they benefit from as it corrodes the state of law that
once might have saved them. However, in this case crime is also
more specifically symptomatic. Criminality, while intrinsic to the
existence of most, if not all the banks, has begun to impose objective
limits on rheir further development. The larger among them, for
instance, have quite enough funds to purchase the communications
technology crucial to modern banking, but cannOt properly utilize it
because information about accounts is often too compromising co be
provided even for money transfer purposes. The banks have
proliferated as laundering operations and pirate privatization outfits
attached to factories, but with more than (WO thousand commercial
banks the market is crowded. Regulations increasing minimum
capitalization and raising Central Bank interest rates above inflation
have imposed a squeeze. The relative stabilization of the ruble
against the dollar has cut into profits from speculation.
Most sympromatically, the sector has become exposed to problems
in other parrs of the economy. Although still capital's preferred site,
the prolongation of the associated disinvestment in productive
infrastructure and, more immediately, governmenr policies which
have forced liquidity crises in the enterptises, have eventually
foreshortened even the hotizon of the banks. The killings, then, have
been the most brutal expression of a battle for market share within an
industty whose glory days ate alteady fading. As the leading edge
of the new class is blunted on the conditions of its own fotmation,
conflict emerges with the politicians that would represent it. In the
midst of the national election campaign dissatisfaction took the
spectaculat form of an owner-led bank strike. Although ostensibly
called to protest the lack of police protection for leading bankers, its
insensitive timing highlighted the extent of the crisis. Even the
heattland was unhappy.
Post-Election Cynicism
Apparently the carnage of 3-4 Ocrober was a fair price to pay for the
consolidation of power, for not a single leading government figure
saw fit ro look back and repent publicly the initial dissolution of the
21. According to unofficial figures based only on rill' fim parr of ill Russia. "120 leadas
or firms and banks were killed, and there were more than 600 explosions. arson J({3cks Jnd
OTher terrorist Jcts related TO businesses. The undeclared war in the market Jnd ror the markel
COlHinues.' Segodllyn. IS December 1993.
ARENA journal no. 3. 1994
parliament that had risked exactly what happened. Better a coup
d'etat than a compromise with the parliament over the budget!
Thtee months and an election later, the need for social spending to
calm the waters saw Yeltsin decreeing the release of additional
Central Bank credits to the government that would increase the
unfunded pottion of the budget deficit by sixty-three per cent fot the
first quarter of 1994. That this and othet measures wete understood
as tactical manoeuvres only made the cynicism the more despicable.
Was it not the alleged opposition of the government free-market
majority to 'conservative, financially irresponsible' proposals of this
kind that lay behind the constitutional crisis and the crisis of power?
Was it not opposition to this that justified the degradation of the new
democracy these laSt two years to a matter of presidential signature
and state seal? Was it not precisely opposition to this that justified
the dissolution of the parliament, the militarization of Moscow, the
concentration of all power, the jailings, the lies, the bombatdment of
the White House, the killing of people' One thing the ctises of the
last part of 1993 seemed to clarify was that justifications of power
precede those of policy." By the end of 1993 the executive power
had come ro support a neo-liberal policy not only in spite of, but also
because of its call for curtailment of the space for dissent. The
economic sacrifices of the population were the reward accruing to the
new capitalist class; the political sacrifices were the reward to the
new political elite.
At the very moment of its consecration, however, the deal came
unstuck. The December election was supposed to be the finale in the
three-act accumulation of power play that ran to mixed reviews
thtough the last months of the year. Instead it revealed the defeat
latent in victory. The effort to exterminate the political centre by
stigmatizing, disempowering and then abolishing the old patliament
had only reproduced a more reactionary element within the new
parliament and a stronger centre inside the government. All the
concentration of power was for a 'reform' now being universally
refused, and the only thing left to do with unusable power was to
panic. With the much sought aftet control over parliament in doubt,
Gaidar discovered overnight that the 'red-browns' or 'communo-
fascists', were not the twin opponents of democracy he had always
told us they were. Finance ministcr Boris Fyodorov, howcver, was
against any 'anti-fascist alliance' on the grounds that its logic would
soon roll right through his policies, and his job. Meanwhile,
22. This conclusion, though simple. is crucial for ,\11 ;lSSt'SSmcnt of the government.
Roy Medvcdev or rhe Socialist Party of Workers cautiously draws the same point in LtvnJa
(,'aU'fa. no 1(l, 22 October 1993.
202 Sebascian Job Silence or ,he Lambs 203
presidential press-secretary Vyacheslav Kosrikov was hinting that
even Zhirinovsky might be welcome ro join in a bloc against rhe
fascisrs! The president, for his part, srayed quiet, furious no doubt at
being weakened in his momenr of strengrh, and busily engaged in
preparing new purges of every wing of the administrative apparatus,
from intelligence ro archives, foreign affairs ro the media. All
wanted to use the elections as a cloak for the concentration of
manipulative means; all forgot that in that case the elections might
silhouette the shape not only of manipulation, bur of irs incapaciries
and its discontents.
Yeltsin's first public reaction to the humiliation of his ream in the
election was to promise to use his powers 'to protect democracy',
meaning by this ro protect his powers from the democracy that had
crept into the elections. The twisted response reflected a dilemma.
Starkly put, this was ro press on and ignore the social process which
Zhirinovsky's vote registered, or to compromise and establish the
'government of national unity' which Volsky, Khasbularov, Rutskoi,
Zorkin, and rhe other side-lined nasties of yesteryear had consistently
urged.
Ar first, neirher of rhese choices seemed possible. The former path
would have yielded undisguised dictatorship, inevitably
accompanied by a magnification of social decay and delegirimarion.
The country had not ye, come to ,hat. The laner path would have
conceded much of the effective powe, which the neo-liberal ruling
circle was now determined to gain. The first chosen option was an
attempt to make some minor concessions so the former could pass. as
the latter: a retreat on "efo'm' would be accompanied by a poli'ical
tightening. It would be less than a month befo'e ,he unstable
momentum of this arrangement had reversed its own terms,
producing a political realignment and a monetary tightening. Those
whom the shift had been designed to save became its firs' victims.
After the Neo-Liberals
Several factors seem to have converged to force the demise of the
most prominent neo-Iiberals. The period 21 September to 4
October saw a monopoly of powet handed to Gaidar, Fyodorov,
Pamfilova and friends. In pushing through decrees ,ha, ,emoved or
'aised ceilings on exportS, in abolishing the s'ate purchase of needed
imports for re-sale at subsidized prices, in eliminating the bread
subsidy and in choking off subsidized credits and low interest loans
to farms and factories, they forced what even an hitherto loyal press
had belaredly ro recognize was an unprecedenred indusrrial fall'.2:1
The neo-libe'al cabinet majori'y was perfecdy aware of these
consequences. These measures were not incidental bur represenred a
second attempt to do what they had failed to do in the winter of
1991/92 with the ini,ial p,iceliberalization: that is, to reduce the
budge' defici' and inflation by bankrup,ing unprofitable emerprises
in non-priority areas, forcing psuedo-marker relarions on producers
and disciplining the labour market with high unemployment. This
rime it would be done in a contexr where the shift to a more
authorirarian phase would make it possible ro quash any prorests.
The new phase of aggressive 'reform' entailed an intensified attack
not only on wages, living conditions, and social support, but on the
other major factions in the political and economic elite. The
increase in the executive's administrative power was thus the necessary
counterbalance to a drastic narrowing of irs socio-economic base.
Though mainly supporting elements in the old parliament, the
industrial and agricultural sectors had been able to live with the
government owing to their access to credit lines from rhe Central
Bank and to rheir possession of sufficienr political weighr to force
advanrageous changes ro the voucher and land privatizations; now rhe
crunch had come.
24
Ar rhe same rime, the tactical alliance between
rhe banking, raw marerials and energy secrors
2S
was beginning to
unravel as the waiving of limirarions on exports - coupled in the
case of oil to the d,op in world prices - decreased the p<ofitability
of exports and increased inreresr in the abiliry of Russian electricity
stations, enterprises, and farms to pay their fuel and input debts.
26
The strategy was producing a nar<ow and britde structU(e of powe,
with the military as its weak point. The army had been mobilized a<
grea' risk, but ,he programme, in whose cause they might well have to
be mobilized again, was necessarily directed at the productive and
23. Headline, Kommersllllf. no.3, 1 February 1994. Upon quitting the cabinet, Boris Fyodorov
would find a less sympathetic audience for his warnings of an 'economic coup d'etat' than he
expected. At the rime, monthly State Staristics Committee figures projected forward showed a
likely fall in industrial production of twenty-five per cent for the month of January alone,
The real fall would later rum out to be closer to between twelve and seventeen per cerH,
depending on whom yOll believe.
24. As Grigorii Yavlinsky has poimed out. in early 1992 enterprises were able to react by
increasing non-payments and reducing their production volumes; this time they were unable to
acquire production Yavlillsky /'(. Ill. Nt'zIwisillltlyil G1IUfII. 14 April
1994.
2'). An alliance embodied sonH"what fortuitOusly in tbe election in December -1992 of gas
industry he;ld, Victor Cht'rnomyrdin, as prime ministcr of a nco-!ibaal cabinet. More
importantly, it was manifest in lhe given to the gOvt'trlrllerll from the newl)' created
.free' trade unions in these sectOrs.
26. Interviews with Andrei Klepach. Institute of Economic Forecasting, RAN, and Boris
Kargalitsky. P,lrty of Labour. early April 1994.
204 Seb,mian Job
Silence of the Lambs
205
technical base of the military's own industrial complex. The heavy
vote for Zhirinovsky inside the army and navy and the very low
popular vote for Russia's Choice showed irrefutably that the August
1991 credit of faith had been squandered; there would be no salvation
here. The conclusion confronting Yeltsin was that, come the next
'October', the divisions in the military would would ptove fatal. He
elected instead for preventative surgery.
Political life under the guidance of Ptime Minister Victor
Chernomyrdin, the person who won the election by nor contesting it,
has since motored into an unlikely calm. Conflict on the street, and
in the parliamentary chambers, all but disappeared: the production
slump deepened; unemployment began to bite; it became obvious to
all that the first stage of privatization had brought no new investment
capital to the enterprises and that private investment in the second
stage, whether foreign or domestic, would not even begin {O
approximate (Q the requirements of the manufacturing and
engineering sectors; and the loss of skilled workers and technological
potential became so pronounced that commentators warned it would
now take decades to rerum even ro the levels of the Brezhnev era. In
other words, the primitivizing dynamic of capitalist modernization
showed its face the more clearly.
In the medium term at least, the defeat of the president's favoured
bloc in the elections proved to be the best possible result for him. A
forced tactical shift from exclusion to inclusion quickly transformed
into a loyal opposition many of those who had barely escaped with
their lives six months before. Most factions in the new State Duma,
receiving real or proxy representation in a pragmatic cabinet pared of
arrogant neo-liberal rheroric, decided to. forsake policy fights in
favour of honing their management skills fot the victory all expected
the proposed 1996 elections to deliver. With their eyes on recent
results in Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Ukraine and Byellorussia,
opposicion leaders, whether relative cenuists such as Grigorii
Yavlinsky and Ivan Rybkin, or members of the 'irreconcilable
opposition' such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Alexander Rutskoi, and
Gennady Zyuganov, were determined to do nothing that would give
Yeltsin an excuse {Q miss his date with defear.
The new 'responsible' stance of the main opposition was made
possible by three further factors: the powerlessness of the Duma as
compared to the old Congress; the relative success of the
Chernomyrdin team in reducing inflation, an occurrence which did
much to alleviate the sense of crisis; and the decline of sueet level
opposition. This last was due partly to the brutal lesson
administered from September to December in 1993, and partly to
disorientation deriving from the confusing visage
of the cabinet and the accommodative politics of the new parliament.
More significant, however, was the fact that even as nationalist and
sentiment won new converts, the corresponding
movements did nor.
Why not' In addition to the institutional and psychological factors
discussed thus far, the political passivity of the populace has been
conditioned by the specific rhythm of the changes. The neo-liberal
reforms have at least been successful in dramatically increasing the
supply of (relatively expensive) food and private consumer services in
the big cities. What its apologists have guiltily called a process of
'primitive accumulation of capital' has been largely a primitive
consumption of accumulated capital; but in major urban areas the
scale and intensity of this consumption has been so great as to spur on
a large petty-mercantile economy into which the most active layers
of the population, including school leavers, have been drawn.
Trading in this economy has in turn enabled people to participate as
consumers of at least some of the imported goods. The mirror of
primitive consumption is the production decline, but for the time
being the interaction of the two sectors is yet to push most people,
materially speaking, to the edge. Unemployment thus far has taken
mainly hidden forms which do not involve the formal loss of
employment and, although the quality of provision is deteriorating,
most people still have secure access to housing, health care and
education.
27
Many of the preconditions for a prolongation of the calm are thus in
place. But the clash of interests between economic sectors, between
forms of value, and hence between factions in the elite, has not been
resolved; it has merely been pUt in abeyance. The longer political
crisis can be forestalled, the less will the elite, whether as a part or as
27. [n Deccmber 1993. the mOJHhly $ubsistence minimum as estimated by the ministry of social
security, was 40,000 rubles. According TO their figures, thirty per cent of the population were
below this minimum, most of them being either young families on low pay, large families.
single pensioners or invalids. However. whik wages in Russia in hue 1993 wen' at forty-eight
per cem of the December 1991 kvel. they had only dropped to ninety-three per cem of the
December 1992 level. Moscow News, no. 14,5 April. The decline in wages therefore slowed
considerably in 1993. Due to the ner transfer from production to consumption, real (average)
incomes rOSt slightly ovcr the laSt year judging by home bank deposits. In addition. giyt'll the
considerahk of lhe informal economy, non-wage incomes mmt Ilt' laken into account.
According ro a survey by Oleg Sabelyov. a sociologisr with the All-Russian Cenrre for the Srudy
of Social Opinion, fony-fiYe per cenl of families say (hey parlially suPPOrt themselves by
growing doing lheir own repairs ;lnd so on. while ;lllorher twellly-six pt'r cem work
a second job. in Fwd. 7 April 1994. An ,Ill-Russian survq in i'iovember 1993 found
slightly more rhan rwenty per cem of people (rollghly onc per cent more than was the case in
July) reponing chat they receive some kind of additional income; bur there arc good reasons
why people might decide nor to repon cenain sources of income. See Zrrknlo.
ARENA jouma! no. 3, 1994
206
Sebastian Job
Silence of (he l.ambs 207
a whole, be able to give even distorted expression to the crisis
unfolding beneath it.
If there is an element of compulsive repetition in this business of a
socio-economic Structure which constantly raises up an elite simply in
order to mock it for its incapacities, that repetition is nevertheless
the shape of rapid change. Certainly Yeltsin is still in position, bur
something has lapsed. It was the October 1993 version of the
repetition - that 'monstrous mixture of impotence and
omnipotence, of impotence in omnipotence' as Mikhail Gefter has
described it - that finally broke the liberal-democratic spelL"
The support that Yeltsin still retains is dutiful but without
conviction. His last stocks of trust were consumed in a fire of shame
and fear. Most stayed bodily clear of the heat, but since then mange
things have begun to simmet in the celebrated patience of the Russian
people. If their quietude is the guarantee of perpetual paralysis for a
representative system that could only be healed by their impatient
participation, paralysis too is stoking what could yet explode the
quiet. Like water molecules collecting in the air, the national idea is
condensing around every grievance and humiliation. As the humidity
rises each ideological droplet grows larger, heavier, begins to work
the shift from confused disbelief to distrust, from avowed distrust to
conviction in something that nationalism seems to name, begins to
reduce the space between the isolated subjects. But the programme of
this accumulation - nationalist, conservative, militaristic,
imperialist - is also capitalist, and its character necessarily
undemocratic. If successful, it will fail and, as likely as not, see the
elevation of a disastrous despotism.
Left Oppositions
In Russia the consequence of the appropriation of social power has
become a means inadequate to the task. But if the government seems
capable only of aiding the suppression that first guarantees it, and
then guarantees its incapacity, the left is similarly incapable of taking
advantage of power's incapacity because much of that suppression is
something people inflict upon themselves. How much can parrly be
gauged. The left is both the political form and the place of the
theorization of the alienated subject's self-representation. Politics is
an irreducible and unavoidable sphere of that representation. The
28. Gefeer speaking on Independent Television's ITOGI program, 10 October 1993. Gcftcr's
comment is the more inreresting because it comes from the belly of the- be-ast; at the time h ~ ' was
a member of the President's Council.
ARENA iournal no. 3, 1994
numerical weakness of the left therefore provides some measure of the
extent to which the task temains unfulfilled.
An exception does not usually confirm the rule, but in September-
October 1993 it did. The opposition to Yeltsin's eventually
triumphant effort to eliminate the Supreme Soviet can be recorded as
a partial qualification to the picture of universal non-involvement.
The final weeks of the old parliament saw an activization of small
but numerous groups in Moscow and to a lesser degree in other cities.
They were composed overwhelmingly of the same nationalists and
Communist conservatives who had dominated the protest movement
ever since the price liberalization of January 1992. Redoubling their
work, they were now joined by small committees of patriots,
women, socialists, human rights activists, anti-semites, monarchists,
and political liberals with a conscience. These gtoupS surfaced
around local soviets and daily papers. in unions, inside the Security
Ministry, in the divisions of the army, among officers in the North
and Black Sea fleets, in churches, museums, and art galleries. They
organized meeting6 and wrote declarations calling variously for
defence of the constitution and the parliament, restitution of the
Soviet Union, jail for the Yeltsin gang, respect for the right of
assembly and other civic rights, recognition for Alexander Rutskoi as
the lawful president, defence of Russian culture, an end to shock
therapy, an end to crime, and an end to cosmopolitanism, the regime
of Jews and foreign occupiers.
The democratic and libenarian left was active in critically
supporting the parliament and in condemning both belligerents but,
caught between ogres, it was unable to make any impact on the course
of events. Its actions were nevertheless significant. In the
mobilizations themselves the ambiguous character of the parliament
- by this stage heavily dominated by chauvinists and impetialists
and yet playing an irreplaceable role in limiting Yeltsin's power -
was reflected and extended, but in an unstable way.
The weight of reactionary ideas in the demonstrations increased
and decreased according to the state of the stalemate between the
factions in the elite. In September, when Yeltsin pushed matters
beyond words, crude and aggressive positions immediately became
dominant on each side. But having secured overwhelming military
might, Yeltsin found hirnself unable to use it; neither his democratic
credentials, nor his generals, would allow him to crush the
parliamentarians unilaterally. At the same time the Supreme Soviet
could not, as the president and his advisers rnistakenly assumed, be
left to rot. The crowds kept coming back, arms were being
stockpiled, allies were being mobilized in the regional soviets, and
ARENA jo","a! no. 3, 1994
on rhe nighr of rhe 23-24 Seprember a local residenr and a member
of rhe miliria were killed in whar was probably an arrempred
weapons grab by Whire House supporrers. The consequent efforr to
choke rhe parliamenr wirh a cordon of special forces only rurned
police-demonstrator clashes into a daily and nighrly occurrence.
Along wirh heavy-handed intrigues in rhe regions, media censorship,
and a government approach to negotiations which insisted on
complete surrender from the opponent for no other reason now than
that it was insisting on simultaneous parliamentary and presidential
elections) this close-range experience of a police state in re-formation
provoked the beginnings of a recomposirion of the street-level
opposition. Constitutional and human rights liberals, genuine
democrats, non-chauvinist republicans, disillusioned social-
democrats and hibernating socialists began to appear as a minor but
growing parr of rhe ctowd. Even rhe resolurely pto-Yeltsin elecrronic
media starred grumbling that it could not capture the requisite
foorage if rhe troops kepr smashing its cameras and rape-recorders.
As rhey rubbed rheir baron-bruised heads ir probably came ro more
rhan one reporrer rhar rhis was a foreraste of life as ir mighr be wirh
no opposition left to misrepresent.
Remarkably quickly rhe shifr in rhe general mood was furnishing
the environs in which a non-revanchisr, non-redundant opposition
could have coalesced. What appeared to be a dangerous development
for Yelrsin gave rhe demonstrarors rhe confidence ro break rhe
sralemare, bringing Yeltsin perilously near ro ruin before kindly
providing him wirh rhe necessary exit. The surge of acriviry peaked
wirh rhe vicrorious breaking of rhe siege on 3 Ocrober; ir was
emptied of all legitimacy by rhe idioric and criminal Rurskoi-
Khasbularov-Makashov decision ro try to rake power by force, and
was rhen drowned by a vindicrively and criminally destrucrive
Yelrsin.
The immediare prospect of country-wide e1ecrions and, ar rhe lasr
minute, the addition of a constitutional referendum, successfully
drove the debate about the coup off rhe front pages, if nor from
people's minds, It was a mark of rhe culture of servility rhar the
popularion would even deign ro acknowledge rhe existence of rhe
pack in the Kremlin who had rransparenrly herded rhe country into rhe
jaws of a convulsion. As it was, most people accepted the upcoming
elections as a jait accompli, and the majority of opposition parties
scurried off to collect signatures for an electoral registration they
would then be denied. Some non-elecroral activity survived, with
anarchist groups and a few of the smaller Communist parties
organizing an 'active bayeon', and the Movement in Defence of
29. The same Pavlovskii who would later come forward as the alleged 'lUthor of 'Variant no. I'.
. ~ O . See the article 'Derzhava' -' meaning state, power or dominion, and used co indicate awe
before the great empire character of the country (and now heard frequently on Poreigll
Minister Kozyrcv's lips) - by Zyuganov in Sw/mktlYlt Russrya, 28 August 199j. The articlt
provoked condemnation inside the Communist parties for its nationalist and conciliatory
emphasis. Sce for example, the response co the expanded version in Lmimkii Put, no. 16, March
1994.
1
209
Sikncl: of dw l.ambs
Democracy and Human Rights, led by Gleb Pavlovskii,29 holding
small conferences and demonsrrarions against the proposed
constitution. The most significant event was a large public meeting a
few weeks before rhe e1ecrion, hosted by rhe so-called Constirurional
Assembly of rhe old parliament. The presence of a broad spectrum
of individuals - such as the former constitutional court chair Valery
Zorkin, rhe chief aurhor of rhe Supreme Sovier's projecr-constiturion
Oleg Rumyantsev, members of Sergei Barburin's Russian Narional
Union as well as members of a number of Communist parties _
seemed to imply the possibiliry of a crystallizarion of forces around
opposition ro the pending constitution. Unfortunately, there was
little specific action and the meeting failed even ro make a
recommendation on the important tactical question of whether to
boycott the referendum or to vote No.
As rhe general polirical conflicr intensified over rhe course of 1993,
virrually every lefrisr grouping underwenr acknowledged or
unacknowledged splits. From rhe various CPSU offshoor panies to
rhe Confederarion of Anarcho-Syndicalists the divisive issue - when
not essentially a matter of internal struggles for influence over
diminishing numbers of members - was that of the correct attitude
to adopt toward an increasingly authoritarian regime in the face of an
increasingly reactionary parliament. In all but one instance these
reorganizarions failed ro improve rhe prospects of rhe leftist panies
in rhe elecrions. They could not provide rhe uniry necessary either ro
parricipate fully, or to refuse to panicipare. The lefr could nor
escape the social contradictions that derived from the abstentionism
of its would-be constituencies; instead these contradictions were
fairhfully reproduced inside ir as organizarional incapaciries.
The single grouping to improve its prospects was the Com'munist
Parry of the Russian Federarion (KPRF) led by Gennady Zyuganov.
Taking a middle-ground posirion during rhe October crisis ir
managed ro avoid being pruned our of contenrion by rhe Central
Electoral Commission. Alrhough losing some vorers to rhe LDP ir
roo benefired elecrorally from a marked narionalist (and religiousl)
turn which coincided wirh Zyuganov's assumprion of rhe leadership.VI
A simple shift towards nationalist positions was evidently no
auromaric panacea. The biggest loser in rhe e1ecriOI) was perhaps rhe
]
j
1
]
.I
,
,
1
.,
,
j
1
I
~
.1
Sebastian Job 208
210 Job
Sikrw.: of ,he Lambs
211
Socialist Party of Workers (SPT) led by Lyudmilla Vartazarova
and Roy Medvedev which, afrer disagreemenr wirhin the leadership,
also accented its patriotism. Long negotiations with Boris
Kagarlirsky's and Alexander Buzgalin's Party of Labour ended as the
SPT backed an otechestvo [Farherland) elecroral bloc in which the
SPT irself soon loSt influence ro less equivocally nationalisric
forces.
lI
Mobilizing behind a slogan of ' Faith in Justice, Hope in rhe
Wisdom of the People, and Love for rhe Farherland', rhe SPT and
rhe otechestvo bloc achieved only obscurity as rhey failed ro garher
sufficient signatures to contest the elections. With the star of the
aurhorirarian leftiSt KPRF rising ir became obvious rhar rhe SPT had
definitively lost the (WO year tussle for recognition as spiritual heir
to the former ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
32
No force on rhe lefr was able ro funcrion as rhe magner around
which a broad elecroral bloc could be formed. Each was denied such
a role on account of the conservatism or the marginality of the social
base rhar ir was trying ro build. The Russian CommuniSt Worker's
Party, for example, was dedicated re re-creating the system of
factory soviets as they had functioned prior to their reorganization by
Sralin in 1937; rhe KPRF had whar it called workers' producrion
colleerives; rhe SPT had links with rhe Russian Union of Workers'
Collectives; rhe Party of Labour had long co-operared wirh the
leadership of rhe Moscow Federarion of Trade Unions and more
recently wirh rhe FNPR. Alrhough different straregies were
adopred, the results were uniformly discouraging.
Bur the left was not content simply t:O live with the contradiction
between objective need and subjective inaction. Knowing there could
be no qualitative break beyond rhe chronic crises of rhe capiralist
project without broad and deep struggle, wirhout a politicized civil
sociery, ir had neverrheless ro look ro influence rhe then relatively
active layers of rhe population - the inrellecruals. There were
reasons for optimism here. As both the authoritarian and the
economically reactionary character of the government became clearer
to more people, the need became acute for an alternative
representative force that could approximate to a majority social
interest. In theory, forces opposed ro reaction ought ro have been able
31, The Pany of Labour 10 WIlh thl' RmSl.lfl SOU,I]'
Democratic Cenrre. but lalks carnc to a SlOp when the Cel)lrC'S leadcr, Okg RumY'lIltsl'\'. opted
to run with the Civi( Union tickel of industrial managers. This movt' was badly (alcllLlled ,IS
the Civic Union would Lller be eliminated upon falling shorl of the VOlt'
threshold for inclusion in rhe counl. Kargalitsky's account of the spoilt fruits of the Pan;.' 01
Labour's cffortS (Q comest the elections can befound in Solidarinost. no 20. p. 69,
32. For an explanalion of lhe $PTs decision to work within the framework of the OlecheS(vo
bloc sce the ilHerview with Var(azarova. '-I'/Iaya (;nUltl,
ro make alliances. In theory, defence of political freedoms and
suppOrt for economic and cultural renaissance ought to have been able
to ally genuine democrats, honest political liberals, uncorrupted
unionists, feminist social-welfarists and non-chauvinist republican
nationalists around what would in effect be a proro-socialist
programme.
Attempts were made. Committees of intellectuals, scienrists, and
cultural figures were set up, The Congress of Left Democratic Forces
and the Union of Labour discussed joint action, while left parries
tried ro co-operate or ro merge with negligible effect. There was no
efforr of will that could enable rhe existing lefr ro shoulder rhe
general burden. Ir was caught on rhe wrong side of the critical mass
thar would allow i, ro gain acknowledgment. Inevirably it lacked
credibility as a force representative of social needs because it was
nor such a force,
This dilemma can be formulated as rhat of a left continually
succumbing to the very crisis of political representation which it
would resolve. Con1me'Hing on the Russian situation, American
socialist Phyllis Jacobson has suggested that: 'The tragedy was and is
that there is no significant organised third force, no popular
democratic, let alone socialist alternative and, therefore, no mass
struggle from below. '33 This kind of perspecrive, which has a long
pedigree particularly in Russia, causes Russian socialists ro put a lot
of energy inro the criticism of democratic intellectuals for their
obstructive, rather than constructive, role in helping the 'people to
recognize and proclaim their inrerests.
Yi
What it overlooks is that the
problem's main hinge is nailed in the subjecr, nor the sign. As
Alexander Buzgalin responded when asked about left arremprs to
link up with the worker's movement: 'Please show me the worker's
movement, and we will try ro connect with it'.JS
As the struggle between the pretenders to political control reached
the point of open illegaliry and violence, Buzgalin and many orher
lefrists reacred by attempting to cement opposition unity around the
defence of human rights. It was a forced move; insuFfIcient, but
revealing in its insufficiency. Rights, as Jay Bernstein has
summarized, 'represent the fact that community in modernity is no
SL't' tilL' in NI'//! /'O/illl",;. vol. ti, no, 4. \X!illll'f 19()tj,
34. SL'l' for ':-":eoslalinizrn "Pridvornoi" !flldligenlsii'. hy L. Bulavka. Nrz(wis;mtlytl
GaUftl, 1 December 1993. and the piece by P, Abovin-Yegidyes and B. Slavin. 'Apologia
AVlOrilarisma', NfZnvisimnya GtlZ('fa. 4 December 1993,
35, [merview with BU7.gaJin. 18 Dt'cembl'r. 1993,
212
Sebastian Job Silence of the Lambs
213
longer given'." However, rights do not represent the fact adequately,
especially in a COUntry where communiry has been lost but moderniry
itself is not yet a given. And rights discourse is only one among
many products of the contradictions of attempted modernization, the
one which, in so far as its appeal is to a traditional natural right,
corresponds to the standpoint of all time, which is to say also and
more pertinently, to that of the present, of how things areY
Though equally tied to modernity, nationalism presents itself as
the standpoint of things as they were. Its apreal in a society which
seems to have lost its past, whose narrative 0 societal becoming has
suddenly become pointless, is explicable. In the same move,
however, the loss of historical meaning also punishes the left.
Socialism has always involved a judgement of how things are
according to how they could be. But a struggle for the future is
difficult when the historical ground has dropped from beneath your
feet. The retreat of some of the left to the perspective of the present,
to the defence of the rights humans are said to have prior to any social
formation, demonstrates their inability to seize the possibilities
inherent in social struggle.
38
Their recoil was necessary. It responded ro a real threat, one that
arose as part of the armoury of the ruling circles where the general
lack of struggle permitted it ro arise. As government 'democrats'
and opposition 'fascists' circled each other, matching authoritarian
step to authoritarian counter-step) human rights became basic to
society's self-defence. The left had ro hope the logic of resistance
would break.the circle, carrying liberal humanists from a defence of
natural rights to a projection of the future social arrangements
necessary ro their guarantee. This development was made all but
explicit in the documents of the newly formed Movement in Defence
of Democracy and Human Rights in Russia to which some Party of
Labour activists were central. The limitations of a strategy aimed at
releasing the practical socialist within each authentic liberal, however,
was evident in the relations between like-minded organizations. The
new Movement was friendly with the Memorial organization's
36. See Bernstein's insightful 'Right, Revolution and Community; Marx's "On the Jewish
Question"', in P. Osbornc (cd.), Socialism And Limits Verso, London, 1991, p.
109.
37. The point is exemplified by the irony that the same ideological terrain was simultaneously
being contested by the regime. Even as it was violating rights and laws rhe present power
presided over the adoption of a constitution which replaced the determinative powers of the
old Congress - the absttact representative community - not only with increased presidential
authority but also with a code of righrs justified ultimately by a clearly Rousseauian recourse
to nature. See in particular article 17.2 of the new Constitution of Russian Federation.
38. An interesting discussion of the social-psychological crisis in the 'post-totalitarian period'
has been advanced by Dydchenko and Myiril who believe they have detected a 'temporal
collapse' associated with a 'thinning out of the "present" in semantic space'. Dydchenko and
Myitil, p. 104.
:j
.)
.,
Centre for Human Rights. This latter group was composed of those
who stressed the legal foundations of rights and who did not approve
of such measures as the abolition of constitutions and the suspension of
judiciaries. In the context of an emerging political settlement within
the elite, however, the Movemenr found it had litrle influence on the
Memorial group itself, whose sympathies, undented by this or that
minor infringement, already lay with the powers that be."
Conclusion
When there is a hunger in the land - and there is a hunger inthe land
- the sufficient condition for the rule of the wolf is the silence of the
lambs. And yet some noises make even silence seem safe. What
cause for 'hope in the wisdom of the people' when at the first official
invitation to speak, the greatest number decided to cry wolf - not as
warning but as invitation!
There is no one else in whom to place hope. Remarkably, rhe
whole of rhe Soviet interlude has lefr Russia confronting the old
paradox first recognized by Leon Trotsky: that is, rhat its peculiar
state-to-society and state-ta-capital relations entail that any
'bourgeois' revolution will not be sustained by the bourgeoisie. The
demand for democratic structures will take on socialist features, or
will be defeated. There should be no more waiting though for a
direct socialist reaction to the ongoing capitalist betrayal of the
democratic promise. It is safe to predict that over the ne.xt decade
or so, regardless of elections, coups, counter-coups, or revolts, Russia
will evolvelplunge towards a politico-economic system that can best
be termed state capitalist. The predominant role of the state will be
assured by the incapacity and dependence of most of irs de jure and
de facto capitalists. Its capitalist character will be guaranteed by the
great cultural, psychological, organizational, and experiential
distances which for a long time yet will separate the population from
any more comprehensive response to its own situation. Within this
broad medium-term outlook, the measure of chaos, corruption,
39. Neither was it evident to the other side that the Movement was able to adequately meet the
concerns of people attracted to nationalist recipes. Officially the Movement depended on a
distinction which stresses 'a division of values according to which "ours" and "nor ours" are
functions of national self-awareness, whereas "higher" and "lower". "bener" and "worse" arc
functions of nationalism" as Dzhunusov (not a member of the Movement) pm it. Suvamiut, p.
102. In fact they had no way of making such a distinction politically operational. My
impression was that many of their supporters considered a return to the true spirit of Russia
(not the building of a people-oriented economy) to be the precondition, and hence the real
meaning of, the rights they were demanding. The negative evaluation of other cultures which
often explicitly inhabited these ideas was tolerated within the Movement as an understandable
reaction to the ongoing destruction of Russian culture.
ARENA i{)urnal no. 3. 1994
214
Sebastian Job
Silence of rhe Lambs
215
violence, and generalized barbarization will depend on many factors.
Not the least of these will be the extent of the self-assertive struggle
of the working people.
40
At present, the level of workplace mobilization is almost certainly
at the beginning of its post-Communist upward curve.
41
It seems
faced with two basic developmental routes. The first possibility is
that social and economic protest, passing through the prism of inrer-
elite struggles, will be organized and/or suppressed with primary
reference to the idea of the nation. Work-collective share-ownership
and continued reliance on budgetary suppOrt will reinforce a tendency
for struggles to bridge the class lines of the undemocratic enterprise
and to take shape as inter-sectoral contests for state funding and
advantageous protective legislation. Defence industry conversion to
consumer production will peter out as a hawkish foreign policy and
edgy internal political atmos.phere bolster the status of the military
and the revenue importance of earnings from weapons exporrs.'L! High
income segmentation of the labour force in the context of rising
unemployment and uneven sectoral development/decline will allow
the continued buying off of select groups of fortunately positioned
workers on condition of depressed living standards for the majority.
Class consciousness will find expression as a respect for Russian
capitalists, whatever their actual roles, because they are 'our'
capitalists. Decreasing state revenues coupled to the objective need
for increasing expenditures will keep the whole POt cooking with each
crisis 'solved' by recourse to further concentrations of an always
elusive power. This route's best-case outcome drives further into the
present muddle. Its worst-case outcome is war, precipitated so as to
consolidate allegiance to the (rulers of the) nation state.
The second possibility will develop, to the extent that it does, as a
subordinate aspect within and against the first. Finding that no part
40. I am nor convinced rhar a struggle organized along class lines without. for instance,
significant transformation rhrough women's and ecological Struggles, will be sufficient ro
provide the foundations for a democratic society. Apart from the difficulty of analytically
incorporating rhese lines of force in an adequare way, rhe emphasis on class here seems justifled
because ir is hierarchies of class power in the public economy thar appear to be most
proximately involved in the induscrial decline and in the blocking of any democraric solution.
41. Compounding rhe confusing but risky crisis of legitimacy, reflecred in and attendant on the
ideological shift from liberalism to paHiotism, factors such as rhe insolvency of enterprises
and institures and the leakage of skilled labour from insritutes, had begun to scimulate all
increasingly widespread and emboldened mobilizarion. Miners and gas workers, television
technicians, students, teachers, metro workers, and ambulance drivers conducted various mass
acrions in the first months of 1994.
42. Milirary chiefs have recently drawn up plans to merge their banks into a large Milirary
Industrial Bank, and are projecting possible earnings from arms exportS of more than double
rhose at present (SUS4 billion, down from SUS15 billion in 1991) to abour SUS10 billion in
a year's time. Moscow T r i b u n ~ , 23 December 1993.
of the economy, whether sectorally or regionally, can hope to
permanently inoculate itself against the crises of the other parrs, the
experience of market failure will reverse the market's lessons. The
social and economic struggle which arises will reconfigure, in turn,
the background associations of appropriate behaviour, anachronizing
'normality', allowing it to be disclaimed as a disastrous and
debilitating apology for inactivity. Struggle's strategic efforts will
be twofold: Thefirst step will be to bring a stop to the 'primitive
consumption' of the country's scientific, technological, labour, and
ecological assets, and to replace this, evencually, with rational
accumulation; the second step will be to demilitarize society. The
first step will involve extensive re-nationalization of many privatized
enterprises, and the further development of intra- and inter-enterprise
survival ties of market and co-operative kinds - extending both
vertically from source ro consumer, and horizontally across senors _
which cogether will provide the objective reference for rational state
co-ordination. The second will require the power of the military
industry managers to be broken. Advancement along either of these
lines will depend upon parallel political developments, both within
enterprises - as workers organize co discipline managers, enforcing
where ",Ievant the shareholding rights of the labour collective _ and,
more generally, as a democratization of the bureaucratic policy
apparatus and as mobilization to institutionalize effective pressure on
and representation within the legislative and executive branches.
Under the present circumstances the hope for this second route can
only be described as romantic, bur it is still the realistic minimum.
Short of significant state involvement, from research co-ordination
to sustained investment, the eventual recovery for most of Russian
industry and farming will be at a level far below even its present
injured capacities. One condition for raising the required revenue
will be to bring an end to the haemorrhage of capital; this in turn will
require actions to limit the weight of banking, merchant capital and
the oil and gas seerors within the state. Only the reorientation of
Russian industry towards the domestic and, secondarily, foreign
consumer markets, can suppOrt a government recovery policy based
on improVing the living standards and consumption levels of the
population. Only in this w"y can the impoverishment and
degeneration which call forth authoritarianism as objective need and
popular yearning be shorr-circuited. Such a development would
amOunt to the institution of a new people-centred logic of
accumulation. But it cannot begin to happen until industrial workers
reach out to those in farming to elaborate their common interests,
bridging the distances between them with the spark of class
216
Sebastian Job
mobilization, offeting fot instance to suppOrt ptice controls on the
manufactured inputs that are helping to bankrupt farms; asking for
support in gerting rid of the Central Bank policy of artificially
boosting the ruble and thus subsidizing the consumer imports which
undermine domestic manufacture and farming. In the pursuit of these
aims alliances will surely be made between the leaders of industry
and agriculture, but there will nonetheless be no breakthrough until
organized labout is the dominant parrner, the class with the initiative.
The military industrial leadership in particular must be
ideologically disarmed, with effective power to organize conversion
passing to enterprise work collectives. Even assuming willingness at a
bureaucratic level, there is no prospect of conversion to viable
consumer production by ministerial fiat. On the other hand, as
Seymour Melman has argued, waiting 'for signals from The Market'
is just a 'cover Story' for Russian (and American) governments afraid
of stimulating the decision making power of working people.
Defence convetsion will not be feasible without the central role of
workplace conversion commirtees with the knowledge to draft and
the power to implement detailed and realistic plans for the
production of new products for domestic use.
43
Such elements of self-management offer a practical solution to
advancing disaster. The economy will need to be drawn more
closely under popular control if the government is ever to become
genuinely democratic. If authoritarianism has yet to re-consolidate
itself properly it is only because its advance is blocked by the
universal weakness of all political forces and of all figures. But what
is to save the country from tule by the weak? The organic instabiliry
of an equilibtium of the impotent is evident, as is its bequest of
corruption and social degradation. That the equilibrium can be
administratively overcome - with bloody consequences - is
evident, as is the chimerical character of that overcoming. Is more
evidence needed that the great soutce of powerlessness into which the
Russian elite is plugged is the non-exercise of power from below?
The elite can perhaps maintain the momentum to career down its
spiral road, but there will be no exit while the population refrains
from building the political forms and the social trajectory which
express its interests; no exit, that is, besides the dead end of
dictarorship. .
43. S. Melman, 'Russia (993) is not Weimar (1932)', Moscow no. 14. pp. 8-14 April,
1994.
Committed to a pluralism of
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