Stephen White Rethinking Postcommunist Transition*

IT SEEMED, AT THE TIME, ALL TOO EASY TO MAKE SENSE OF THE

changes that swept communist parties from power across Russia and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. Communist rule, after all, was authoritarian. It held elections that had no choice of candidate or party, and it was dominated by communist parties that operated on the basis of democratic centralism (in practice, simply centralism). More than this, it denied any autonomy to what came to be known as civil society: the parties, churches, trade unions and other bodies that allowed citizens to associate with each other outside the direct control of the state. Appointments were regulated by the party authorities through the nomenklatura system; and the mass media were regulated by a censorship system that had been established three days after the 1917 revolution on a basis that was supposed to be provisional (it lasted until 1990). Communist rule could at least be identied by a number of important characteristics, including the leading role of the party. It was less clear how to classify the societies that emerged from communist rule, in some cases incompletely. Arguably, communist rule had come to an end in the USSR some time before the state itself disappeared in December 1991: perhaps at the time of the August coup, perhaps when the partys political monopoly was removed from the constitution in March 1990, perhaps even earlier. But what came afterwards? Was it postcommunism? Or was it a society in transition but if so, when would the transition come to an end? How adequate were

* This is the text of the Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Memorial Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics on 6 May 2003. The printed version omits the informal opening remarks that were included in the oral presentation, but develops other points more fully. I should like to express my thanks to the journal and to Rosalind Jones in particular for their invitation and hospitality, to Christian Haerpfer for his permission to use data from the New Democracies Barometer and to Thomas Munck for his wise counsel on the French Revolution.
Government and Opposition Ltd 2003 Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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the labels that had been used in Latin America and the Iberian peninsula, where there was usually an earlier experience of democratic government and in any case the changes were less profound? And did it make sense to speak of a transition, rather than of a complex of changes that were marked by important national specicities? Perhaps the largest issue, in a large and often disputatious literature, was the nature of the change of system that had apparently taken place as communist rule gave way to freely elected governments throughout the region. Was this, in particular, a revolution in the classic sense, involving the forcible displacement of an incumbent elite and the fashioning of a new social order? Or was it more limited, a power metamorphosis as Hungarian scholars described it,1 involving no more than a temporary acceleration of the normal process of elite renewal? For those who had promoted it, this was certainly a revolution and it had led to a capitalist democracy: history provided no other options. But for others the changes were altogether more limited and longer-term continuities remained, in particular the authoritarianism that had marked Russian history over many centuries. Drawing upon recent discussions of these issues in Russia itself and in the West, I shall rst of all examine these contending approaches to the interpretation of the end of communist rule, and then explore the light that can be thrown upon the discussion by some recent data.

A FUNDAMENTAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION?

A helpful way into the discussion is provided by a recent article in the main Russian sociological journal by Tatyana Zaslavskaya, the doyenne of the profession in Russia and one of the scholar-activists who laid the intellectual basis of perestroika.2 Zaslavskaya takes issue
1 Gordon Wightman (ed.), Party Formation in East-Central Europe, Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1995, p. 178. 2 For a selection of writings see Tatiana I. Zaslavskaya, A Voice of Reform: Essays, Armonk NY, Sharpe, 1989. Zaslavskaya explained in an interview that she was not a personal adviser to Gorbachev, but that he seem[ed] to read what I write very carefully (Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachevs Reformers, New York, Norton, 1989, p. 117).

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with her own earlier writings as well as with many of her colleagues in a bold restatement of the social mechanism of the process of postcommunist changes in Russia. As she suggests, at least three views are presently taken of the nature of Russias postcommunist changes. According to some, Russia has witnessed a Great Revolution of the classic kind. A second view sees the changes as the completion of an antisocialist seizure of power launched by Stalin in the 1920s that had now been brought to its logical conclusion (we might think of this, broadly, as a Trotskyist view; Trotsky, certainly, had argued that the bureaucracy would not be content with its monopoly of political power, but would seek the longer-term guarantee of its position that could only be provided by private property).3 A third view, with which Zaslavskaya herself seems most in sympathy, perceives that there was the potential for a democratic revolution at the end of the 1980s, but one that for various reasons did not materialize; rather, it was taken over by the nomenklatura and used as a vehicle to conduct a series of reforms from above in its own interests.4 As Zaslavskaya notes, different judgements of the recent past are closely related to assessments of the current situation. Not surprisingly, it is the political right, those most committed to the post-1991 changes, who are the most concerned to establish their far-reaching nature. Boris Yeltsin himself claimed in the immediate aftermath of the attempted coup of August 1991 that the Russian people had thrown off the chains of seventy years of slavery and were well on the way to establishing a parliamentary democracy.5 Writing later, his judgement was even more extravagant. If the election of Russias rst president had been a national development, he wrote, the defeat of the coup had been something more: a global, planetary event that had brought the twentieth century itself to an end, when in three short days one century ended and another began (the implicit reference to Hobsbawms Short Twentieth Century was presumably unintentional).6

Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? London, Faber & Faber, 1937, p. 240. 4 T. I. Zaslavskaya, O sotsialnom mekhanizme postkommunisticheskikh preobrazovanii v Rossii, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 8, 2002, pp. 316 (pp. 34). 5 Izvestiya, 23 August 1991, p. 1, and 12 November 1991, p. 1. 6 B. N. Eltsin, Zapiski Prezidenta, Moscow, Ogonek, 1994, p. 67.
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Yeltsins prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, was another who held that the end of communist rule had been a revolution comparable in its inuence on the historical process to the Great French Revolution, the Russian revolution of 1917, and the Chinese revolution of 1949: a revolution that involved radical changes in the socio-economic system, and in the dominant ideology. The crisis of French public nances in the 1780s, for instance, was very reminiscent of the collapse of Soviet public nances in the late 1980s; and the food shortages of the winter of 199192 made it easier to understand what the situation must have been in Russian towns in the years immediately after the October revolution. But the new order, in his view, had not been established until 1993, and it had not been consolidated until Yeltsins second electoral victory in 1996.7 In a larger, more explicitly comparative study, two of those who had worked most closely with Gaidar, Starodubrovskaya and Mau, also claimed that Russia had experienced a revolution, indeed a fullscale social revolution of a kind that was fully comparable with the classic revolutions of the past. Revolutions of this kind were likely, in their view, to occur at critical points of economic development: early modernization, mature industrialism and early postmodernization. The Russian revolution of the 1990s, they argued, fell into this third stage, in which regimes faced the challenges of globalization, the environment and information technologies; it was marked by a contradiction between the new, postindustrial tendencies of the modern international economy and the rigid institutional structure, oriented towards the mobilisation of resources that had evolved in the Soviet period. The results, in their turn, were no different from those of other revolutions: they included a crisis of the state, a deep fragmentation of society, and a full-scale redistribution of property.8 Those who are less enthusiastic about the changes of the 1990s have been less willing to concede these far-reaching claims, and less willing to applaud the results. As Zaslavskaya pointed out, there has been no agreement even among those who believe a genuine revo-

7 Egor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, Moscow, Vagrius, 1996, pp. 89 (there were similar references to a liberal, anti-communist revolution, p. 80). 8 I. V. Starodubrovskaya and V. A. Mau, Velikie revolyutsii ot Kromvelya do Putina, Moscow, Vagrius, 2001, pp. 364, 354, 365.

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lution has taken place about the social forces that are supposed to have carried it through (Yeltsin himself began to ask with some anxiety, in the spring of 1992, if any of his associates could identify the social base of the policies they were promoting).9 Nor was there much agreement about the moment when the revolution was supposed to have taken place had it followed the collapse of the August coup, for instance, or the crushing of his parliamentary opponents by Boris Yeltsin in October 1993? Others argued that there had indeed been a genuine revolution, but that it had taken place only in the major cities, not throughout the country as a whole.10 For Zaslavskaya, there were several serious objections to the idea of a fundamental social revolution. One of them was that the new ruling group, at least in Russia, consisted overwhelmingly of the previous nomenklatura unlike Central and Eastern Europe, where it had generally been a political opposition that had come to power. Within the Yeltsin leadership, for instance, 75 per cent had a nomenklatura background; 74 per cent of the government had a similar background, and 82 per cent of the regional elite.11 Russias postcommunist president was a party member of thirty years standing who had been a member of the ruling Politburo; his prime minister for most of the 1990s, Viktor Chernomyrdin, was a former gas minister who had been a member of the partys Central Committee. This was clearly a rather different group of insurgents from, for instance, those in Poland, Hungary or the Czech Republic, where the rst postcommunist presidents had all been political prisoners. In Russia, again, there had been no mass movement, no people power that had driven the former ruling group from ofce. It had been the regime itself that had been the driving force of change, and the political energies of ordinary people had scarcely been engaged at any point. There had been very little violence, compared even with the velvet revolutions in East-Central Europe. And, Zaslavskaya added, it was hard to conceive of a great social revolution if, as in Russia, it had scarcely been noticed by the society in which it had taken place.12 The survey evidence certainly suggested that there was
E. Gaidar, Dni, p. 173. T. I. Zaslavskaya, O sotsialnom mekhanizme, p. 5. 11 Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, From Soviet nomenklatura to Russian elite, Europe-Asia Studies, 48: 5 ( July 1996), pp. 71133 (p. 729). 12 T. I. Zaslavskaya, O sotsialnom mekhanizme, p. 6.
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overwhelming regret that the USSR had been dissolved; the August coup was widely dismissed as an episode in the struggle for power within the countrys top leadership; and if the October revolution were to be repeated, nearly half of those who were asked said they would support the Bolsheviks (although signicant numbers would also stay neutral or move abroad).13 For Zaslavskaya, accordingly, there had hardly been a revolution; but after so many years, what had taken place could scarcely be seen as a counter-revolution. It was better, perhaps, to conceptualize the changes that had taken place as a movement against nomenklatura power, and against a system that had become authoritarian and bureaucratic. Its driving force had been the well-qualied but socially and politically marginalized intelligentsia, whose aim had been the perfection of socialism rather than its replacement, giving it a human face by extending civil liberties and improving the living standards of ordinary people. But the reform movement led by the intelligentsia had been blocked, and did not survive the collapse of the USSR itself; the political initiative had passed at this point to a clique around Boris Yeltsin, who had presided over the plundering of public assets, wholesale criminalization and the collapse of state authority.14

WESTERN SCHOLARS PERCEPTION

Western scholars have found it equally difcult to categorize the changes that have taken place in Eastern Europe since 198991, and have had similar problems with the idea that they might be described as revolutions. Tilly, in one of the earliest studies to deal with these issues, thought it important to distinguish between narrow denitions of revolution based upon the Communist Manifesto and broader denitions in terms of which a revolution was an abrupt, wide-reaching, popular change in a countrys rulers. A revolution, in either case, included two components: a revolutionary situation, in which a group made a claim to state power with the support of a
13 B. Z. Doktorov, A. A. Oslon and E. S. Petrenko, Epokha Eltsina: mneniya rossiyan, Moscow, Institut fonda Obshchestvennoe mnenie, 2002, pp. 51 and 49; and on attitudes to the October revolution, Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya, 2, 2003, p. 34. 14 T. I. Zaslavskaya, O sotsialnom mekhanizme, pp. 67.

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signicant proportion of the population, and a revolutionary outcome, in which a forcible change of power actually took place.15 In Tillys view, there had been a revolutionary outcome in most of the countries of Eastern Europe in 198991; but only in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had there been a revolution, because only in these cases had there also been a widely supported challenge to the existing holders of state power. Either way, there could be no simple analogies with the classic revolutions of the past; indeed they could scarcely be repeated, given the changes that had taken place in the international system over the intervening period.16 The historian of revolutions, Eric Hobsbawm, has also been cautious. After all, he pointed out, none of the regimes in Eastern Europe had been overthrown; all of them had abdicated quietly, except in Romania, and even there resistance was brief. The USSR itself had not been defeated by a revolution or rising of the people either, for the population of Moscow remained quiet, and the call for a strike against the coup went unheeded.17 There were related difculties in conceiving of a revolution that was to replace a regime that had itself been the outcome of a revolution.18 It was in this sense that Habermas described the changes of 198991 as rectifying revolutions, in that they aimed to connect up constitutionally with the inheritance of the bourgeois revolutions, and socially and politically with the styles of commerce and life associated with developed capitalism. And he was one of several who pointed to the total lack of ideas that [were] either innovative or oriented towards the future.19 Writing elsewhere, Kumar emphasized the relative lack of violence, except in Romania, and the relatively minor role that had been played by the mass public. Solidarity in Poland, certainly, had been a powerful inspiration. But mass action of this kind could never have overthrown entire regimes, and was not necessarily

15 Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 14921992, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993, pp. 4, 10, 14. 16 Ibid., pp. 2345. 17 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 19141991, London, Michael Joseph, 1994, pp. 487, 488, 494. 18 Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999, p. 52. 19 Jrgen Habermas, What Does Socialism Mean Today?, New Left Review, 183 (SeptemberOctober 1990), pp. 321 (pp. 45).

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intended to do so. It was far more important that the Soviet leadership had exercised its considerable inuence to encourage reformminded members of the local leaderships, and to undermine the position of the elderly and often corrupt generation that had held power, in some cases, for many decades. The changes of power that took place in 198991, accordingly, had increasingly . . . the appearance of frondes, or palace revolutions. Nearly all the classic revolutions, admittedly, had started in the same way, with a widening division within the established leadership. The distinctive feature of the changes of 198991 was the high degree of control exercised by the ruling nomenklaturas throughout the period of transition to democracy and [a] market society.20 There was, in fact, some doubt if the changes had led to a social formation that could usefully be dened in these terms. Had there, for instance, been a transition to capitalism? Nominally, there had been a wholesale transfer of property from state to private owners; but although there were rich people, there was hardly a capitalist class. The structure of ownership was itself most unclear, and it was often difcult to distinguish private ownership from the ownership of a state that was controlled by the same people and administered in their collective interest.21 There had, of course, been private ownership of the means of production in the USSR during the 1920s, and yet it was considered to be a communist system. Conversely, there was still a high level compared with other countries of state ownership and economic activity. According to ofcial statistics, the private sector, a decade or more after the end of communist rule, accounted for less than half of the countrys workforce, and for less than half of its industrial output.22 Certainly, if it was capitalism at all, it was a very special kind of capitalism: a crony capitalism, run by an interlocking clique of business elites who use[d] their political

Krishnan Kumar, The Revolutionary Idea in the Twentieth-century World, in Moira Donald and Tim Rees (eds), Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-century Europe, London, Macmillan, 2001, pp. 17797 (pp. 1945). 21 David Lane, What Kind of Capitalism for Russia? A Comparative Analysis, Communist and Post-communist Studies, 33: 4 (December 2000), pp. 485504. 22 Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik, Moscow, Goskomstat Rossii, 2001, pp. 140, 343.

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connections to shield themselves from domestic and international competition; perhaps even a mutant of an entirely new kind.23 There were similar arguments about whether Russia and the other post-Soviet republics could usefully be called democracies, at least in more than a minimal or procedural sense. There were competitive elections, but they were heavily inuenced by the way in which candidates and parties were covered in the media, particularly state television. There were political parties, but very few that had an enduring presence (three of the six that won party-list representation in the 1999 Duma election had been formed the same year) and even fewer that had an organized national membership. The parliament within which they were represented had few means of inuencing the government, which was constitutionally non-party and accountable to the president; while the president himself had in a sense taken over the leading role of the communist party, with farreaching powers of decision-making and appointment. Within the wider society, secondary associations of all kinds were weak, the freedoms of the media were increasingly restricted, and the rule of law was most uncertain. Again, this was scarcely democracy, at least without a qualifying adjective; but what was it? For some, it was best considered a kind of hybrid regime; for others, a neo-liberal autocracy or competitive authoritarianism.24 Others still were more inventive: for the East European Constitutional Review it was emergency-based authoritarian rule behind a quasi-democratic faade;25 for an Australian scholar, a form of third world patrimonialism with Bonapartist tendencies.26 The Kremlin itself spoke approvingly of a managed democracy that
23 Cited in Stephen White, Russias New Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 141. Another suggestion was a virtual economy: Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, Russias Virtual Economy, Washington DC, Brookings, 2002. 24 Larry Diamond, Thinking about Hybrid Regimes, Journal of Democracy, 13: 2 (April 2002), pp. 2135; Boris Kargarlitsky, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy, London, Pluto, 2002; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism, Journal of Democracy, 13: 2 (April 2002), pp. 5165. 25 East European Constitutional Review, 11: 4 (Fall 2002/Winter 2003), pp. 437 (p. 47). 26 Roger Markwick, What Kind of State is the Russian State if There is One?, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 15: 4 (December 1999), pp. 11130 (p. 127).

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reected Russias particular circumstances. Russia, Putin explained, would not become a second edition of, say, the US or Britain, where liberal values ha[d] deep historic traditions, but was a country in which the state and its institutions and structures ha[d] always played an exceptionally important role.27 There were few, in these circumstances, who continued to insist that Russia had experienced a revolution in the early 1990s, and even fewer who argued that if there had been such a change it had led to a transition to democracy and capitalism as they were understood elsewhere.

THE LIMITS OF CHANGE

So far our concerns have been with continuity or change in general terms, and in Russia rather than the whole range of independent states that have emerged from the USSR and the still larger numbers that have emerged from communist rule. In what follows I propose to examine the process of change in a more differentiated way by considering some of the activities that might be expected to have been affected by the end of communist rule and the introduction of liberal-democratic institutions, such as the separation of powers and multiparty elections. I shall also consider the process of change across a number of the post-Soviet republics, including but not limited to Russia, and drawing on two bodies of evidence: the judgements of outside authorities on the nature of regime change in the former Soviet republics, and the judgements of the people who live in these societies as they are reported to us through survey research. The classication I propose to employ is the one developed by Freedom House of New York, and published annually since the early 1970s.28 Freedom House considers regime performance worldwide in terms of two criteria. The rst is political rights, which means the ability to participate freely in the choosing of leaders and the shaping of public decisions (and not necessarily in the manner that is char-

Rossiiskaya gazeta, 31 December 1999, p. 5. See www.freedomhouse.org. There has been some discussion of Freedom House and its indicators; see for instance Youcef Bouandel, Human Rights and Comparative Politics, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1997, ch. 8.
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Figure 1 Classication of Regimes, 19802002

Soviet period 198081 Free 199091 Post-Soviet period 199293 Lithuania (2,3) 200203 Estonia (1,2) Latvia (1,2) Lithuania (1,2) Armenia (4,4) Azerbaijan (6,5) Georgia (4,4) Moldova (3,4) Russia (5,5) Ukraine (4,4)

Partly free

USSR (5,4) Armenia (4,3) Azerbaijan (5,5) Belarus (4,3) Estonia (3,3) Georgia (4,5) Kazakhstan (5,5) Kyrgyzstan (4,2) Latvia (3,3) Moldova (5,5) Russia (3,4) Ukraine (3,3) USSR (6,7)

Not free

Tajikistan (6,6) Belarus (6,6) Turkmenistan (7,6) Kazakhstan (6,5) Uzbekistan (6,6) Kyrgyzstan (6,5) Tajikistan (6,5) Turkmenistan (7,7) Uzbekistan (7,7)

Source : Compiled from www.freedomhouse.org. Scores are for political rights and civil liberties respectively, on a seven-point scale; the classications are those of Freedom House.

acteristic of Western democracies). The other is civil liberties, or the freedom to develop views, institutions, and personal autonomy apart from the state, expressed in practice through an independent media and well-protected minority rights. Each of these dimensions is rated from 1 (high) to 7 (low); these scores are then combined into a threefold classication of free, partly free or not free. Freedom House draws its evidence from a variety of sources, including the press, nongovernmental organizations, academic analyses, and sometimes eld visits. I have set out the results for the USSR and its fteen successor republics at two points in the Soviet period, and at two points in the postcommunist period (Figure 1). What conclusions can we draw from this evidence? One is certainly variety. There is no single pattern here, and least of all a general transition to democracy. Rather there are four distinct groups:
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The free, typically Christian (Lutheran or Roman Catholic) and under communist rule for a shorter period of time, with higher living standards, and located on the USSRs western perimeter (It is location and not Christianity, education, or economic development that provides the causal push towards democracy, as Michael McFaul has observed).29 A second group, the partly free: typically Orthodox, under communist rule since about 1917, with low or middle incomes in terms of World Bank classications, and Eurasian rather than Central European (no longer, apparently, is there an Eastern Europe). A third group, the unfree, is typically Muslim, with low incomes by World Bank standards, and located for the most part in Asia (Belarus, the most obvious exception, may be a misjudgement, and Azerbaijan, considered partly free by Freedom House, belongs among the unfree on its published scores). In almost all of these countries a powerful presidency, based upon the party leadership of the Soviet period, has been extended even further by popular referendum; in Turkmenistan, a bizarre leadership cult has developed. Freedom House, indeed, includes two of these countries, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, in its list of the worlds most repressive regimes, a category that includes North Korea, Equatorial Guinea and pre-invasion Iraq. There is also a fourth group, not shown, of the non-transition countries, including China, North Korea and Vietnam. These are typically Asian rather than European, with a traditional religion that is not Christian, and with low income levels in World Bank terms. They include the worlds most populous country, China, and another country, Vietnam, that on some projections will exceed Russias population by 2050.30 Cuba is another member of this group, although its geographical location gives it a number of unique characteristics. A further conclusion is that there is no common trajectory in which all of the former Soviet republics move steadily, even if at different speeds, from not free to free. There is certainly movement up

29 Michael McFaul, The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncompetitive Transitions in the Postcommunist World, World Politics, 54: 2 ( January 2002), pp. 21244 (p. 242). 30 Svobodnaya mysl, 2, 2003, p. 61.

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the hierarchy, but also movement down. And different countries have moved in different directions. It is helpful to recall that Huntingtons three waves of democracy had been followed, in the rst two cases and at least partially in the third, by reverse waves;31 and that the early 1990s had apparently been a high point of democratization worldwide, followed by a steady fall in the proportion of countries that were liberal and not simply electoral democracies.32 The post-Soviet republics have certainly seen a widening spread, comparing 199293 with 200203. Two have moved up during this period, but three have moved down; indeed, half of the former Soviet republics, outside the Baltic, are now classied as not free. Finally, in terms of net change, several of the former Soviet republics in 200203 were actually below the level of the USSR in the last year of communist rule. By 199091, the USSR had established a legal multiparty politics, censorship had been abolished, freedom of conscience had been proclaimed, and cooperative or even private ownership had been recognized. Freedom Houses judgement was that it was partly free. Russia, in 200203, was also partly free, but its scores were slightly lower; Freedom House was particularly worried by the moves that had been taken against the independent press (the Russian media, taken as a whole, were considered not free), and by the politicization of the judiciary. Indeed, a majority of the former Soviet republics had scores for political rights and civil liberties that were lower than those of the USSR in its nal year of existence. On this evidence, there had been more of a move away from than towards democracy across the entire post-Soviet region.

THE VIEW FROM BELOW

What, then, about the views of the citizens of these countries themselves? I draw at this point upon survey data collected at the end of 2001 in association with the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, under the direction of Christian Haerpfer, as part of the New

31 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman Okla., University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, pp. 1516, 2904. 32 Larry Diamond, Is the Third Wave Over?, Journal of Democracy, 7: 3 ( July 1996), pp. 2037 (p. 28).

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Democracies Barometer.33 In each case a representative national survey was carried out by a well-established local agency, using a common and carefully pre-tested questionnaire; the ndings that are presented here have not previously been published in any form. Responses of the kind that are available in the New Democracies Barometer give us the views of ordinary citizens, ten years or more after the changes that were supposed to have transformed their lives as they joined the other democracies. And they do so in respect of eight of the former Soviet republics: four that are European (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova), two that are Caucasian (Armenia and Georgia) and two that are Central Asian (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan). Our survey responses include, for instance, broad judgements about forms of rule (democracy was the rst choice, but closely followed by communism and a strong leader, with little enthusiasm for army rule or monarchy). The responses also included judgements about the past, the present and the future. In every case the Soviet political and economic system was preferred to the political and economic system that presently exists, and the one that was expected to exist in ten years time (Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova were the most positive about the past, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine the least hopeful about the future). And in every case the differences were substantial: from Russia, where 47 per cent were positive about the Soviet political system and only 20 per cent were positive about the future, to Georgia, where 75 per cent took a positive view of the Soviet past and only 13 per cent took the same view of the future. These, obviously, are judgements of entire systems; we can consider popular responses in a more discriminating way by considering a range of more particular activities of a kind that might be expected to reect the nature of postcommunist change. Let me start with a number of the classic individual liberties freedom of speech, movement and so forth. As Figure 2 makes clear, in the view of ordinary citizens and of scholars also these have been greatly enhanced since the end of communist rule. For instance, there is a widelyshared belief (except, for some reason, in Armenia and Georgia) that citizens are free to express their religious beliefs if they wish to do
An analysis of the rst ve Barometers is available in Christian W. Haerpfer, Democracy and Enlargement in Post-Communist Europe, London, Routledge, 2002.
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Figure 2 Evaluations of Postcommunist Rule, 2001 (percentages) Agree Disagree I have a right to join any religion I have the right to say what I think I can travel freely anywhere I want I can join any organization I like I can take an interest in politics I need not be afraid of illegal arrest 64 81 71 69 31 40 30 15 23 21 58 47 83 79

I can have an inuence on the national government 10 I can have an inuence on the regional government 14

Source : New Democracies Barometer 6, eldwork November 2001.

so. There is also a generally shared belief that ordinary people are free to say what they like. There is also the freedom to join any organization, unlike the regimentation of the communist past; and the freedom to travel wherever I want, subject to the necessary resources. In all of these respects, the freedoms of ordinary citizens would appear to have been greatly enhanced at least in their own opinion. But a very different picture is apparent if we look at relations between citizens and the state. In relation to the rule of law, for instance, it was widely believed that there was still a serious risk of illegal or arbitrary arrest: a majority took this view in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, and a substantial plurality in Russia and Ukraine. It was a view that found its counterpart in the widespread distrust among our respondents of the agencies of law enforcement, and particularly police and the courts; ordinary people are clearly much more suspicious of law enforcement than in Western countries, and in some cases more afraid of the police than of the criminals from whom they are supposed to be protected.34 Another surprising nding was that ordinary citizens did not think they were, on balance, free to take an interest in politics or not to do so: a distinction of some importance in a society that is evolving from commu34

Izvestiya, 15 April 2003, p. 8.

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nist rule, in which (broadly speaking) everything that was not banned was compulsory. And what about political efcacy the belief held by ordinary citizens that they can inuence government? We asked about the extent to which respondents believed they could inuence their national governments, and also regional governments. The results were striking. Almost everywhere, there were very low levels of belief that the views of ordinary citizens could inuence national government. Just 610 per cent thought they had at least some inuence in matters of this kind (Kyrgyzstan was an isolated exception); 8090 per cent or even more thought they had little inuence, or more often no inuence at all (this was true of 67 per cent of our Russian respondents, and 69 per cent of our Ukrainians). There was somewhat more condence in regional levels of government, but again the disparities were enormous, and large majorities (63 per cent in Russia and 66 per cent in Ukraine) said they had no inuence at all. The relative lack of inuence of ordinary citizens is of course a universal. There was a striking conrmation of this on 15 February 2003, when historically unprecedented numbers of demonstrators took to the streets across the globe to protest against the declaration of war upon Iraq; the war began a month later. But feelings of powerlessness in the former Soviet republics are very much higher than in the Western countries. In Ukraine and Russia, just 8 or 9 per cent thought they had at least some ability to inuence the government that spoke in their name; in the United Kingdom 25 per cent thought they had at least some say in government decisions, and in the United States fully 50 per cent thought they had some inuence of this kind.35 There is no evidence in this or other surveys that ordinary people in the former Soviet republics are actually opposed to democracy, competitive elections or the rule of law; but there is little belief that they have actually been introduced, ten years or more after the end of communist rule. Individual liberties may have been enhanced, but the indicators of efcacy including the belief that it is possible to inuence government, and that elections are a means of exercising this inuence are at a very low level across the region. There is little
35 For the United Kingdom, see the 2001 British Election Study held at the UK Data Archive (question BQ65A); for the United States, the National Elections Studies database at www.umich.edu/~nes (table 5b.2).

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evidence in these ndings, any more than in the judgements of Freedom House, that there has been a decisive break in forms of rule and a departure from much longer-standing authoritarian patterns.

CONCLUSIONS

Let me offer some general conclusions. First, the evidence we have considered scarcely testies to a transition, but rather to a variety of patterns of change, including movement away from Western-style democracy and no movement at all. Arguably, these patterns, more than anything else, reect the varying political cultures of the postcommunist region, and important differences in (for instance) the length of independent statehood, the date at which at least an adult male franchise was established, the extent to which church and state are independent of each other, the existence of an autonomous civil society (including trade unions and the press), and a rule of law. Differences of this kind are among those that, for Huntington, dene the West.36 It is certainly striking that there are no post-Soviet republics that are free in the terms dened by Freedom House that are not also culturally Western; and that there are no post-Soviet republics that are Muslim which are even partly free (with the doubtful exception of Azerbaijan). Secondly, this, in turn, reminds us of the electoralist fallacy,37 in which a necessary condition of democracy free elections is seen as a sufcient condition. In most postcommunist countries elections are held regularly, there is a choice of candidate and party, and international observers pronounce them free and fair. But it is also clear that ordinary people have little condence that elections represent an effective means of holding government to account, however much they are valued in principle. Elections, clearly, are not enough, especially when they are separate from measures to ensure a reasonably balanced media, limits on campaign expenditure, and limits on the
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 6972. 37 Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, Baltimore MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 4.
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use of administrative resource (or the power of ofce). Changes of this kind are in turn unlikely to be effective if they are not sustained by a culture that is more respectful of the proper limits of government action, and of the importance of the accountability of the elected to those who elect them. Thirdly, just as we should not overvalue the mechanisms of liberal democracy, nor should we dismiss some of the mechanisms of the Soviet system. The survey evidence certainly suggests that, not only are Russians and others sceptical about the inuence on government that they currently enjoy they also believe they have less inuence than in the Soviet period, that government is less likely to treat its citizens fairly and equally, and that they are less likely to be safe from arbitrary or illegal arrest.38 One reason may be the corruption that, in the view of ordinary citizens, has become rampant at the highest levels of government since the communist period. It also appears that the end of communist party rule has, among other things, deprived ordinary people of one of the means of exercising political inuence that was formerly at their disposal: no longer is there a body to which they can appeal over the heads of local ofcials, and one that can help them to resolve their individual difculties.39 Finally, ten years or more after the end of communist rule, the language of transition is increasingly difcult to justify.40 Many of the postcommunist regimes are not (any longer) going anywhere, they have reached the point they wished to reach at least as far as their governing elites are concerned. A different language becomes appropriate: one that no longer denes these regimes on the assumption that they are in transition to Western-style democracy, but places them within the context of regimes in much of the developing world in which it is not unusual to nd competitive elections coexisting with a dominant elite that exercises its control through de facto control of the economy, the media and the agencies of law enforcement. It has been suggested that these may usefully be
38 Stephen White, Ten Years on, What Do the Russians Think?, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 18: 1 (March 2002), pp. 3550 (p. 40). 39 See Sarah Ashwin, Theres No Joy Any More: The Experience of Reform in a Kuzbass Mining Settlement, Europe-Asia Studies, 47: 8 (December 1995), pp. 136781 (pp. 13758). 40 Thomas Carothers, The End of the Transition Paradigm, Journal of Democracy, 13: 1 ( January 2002), pp. 521.

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classied as semi-authoritarian regimes:41 a distinct and, it appears, enduring form of contemporary government. It may be that in the future we will nd it more productive to explore the place of many of the postcommunist countries within this framework than within the culturally specic context of liberal democracy.

See Marina Ottoway, Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism, Washington DC, Carnegie Endowment, 2003.
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