State Against Civil Society: Contentious Politics and the Non-Systemic Opposition in Russia by Cameron Ross

Author:Cameron Ross [Ross, Cameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138926301
Google: qcEErgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 26408148
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-08-13T14:02:13+00:00

Modernity and Russia: an uneasy relationship?

The philosophical matrix that evolves as a result of debates on the nature of modernity becomes the keystone of Russia’s civic debates, marking a watershed between traditionalist–conservatives and liberals. Interestingly, all participants of the debate, from the liberal to traditionalist–conservative spectrum of left and right, agree that Russia follows a special path towards modernity that is divergent from the West. Yet, this path is narrated and assessed differently. While both conservatives and liberals agree that modernity has not occurred in Russia ‘properly’, in the Western understanding of the term, they disagree on what Russia is to do about this. Likewise, the attitudes and appreciation of the nature of Western modernity and the post-modern world by Russian liberals and conservatives is starkly different. This leads to different proposals on the nature of Russia’s developmental trajectory.

Russian liberals understand modernity in line with its various Western observers as a political and economic project that ‘reflects growth-oriented planning and production, a pluralist political system, in which class politics is replaced by interest-group struggles, with a strong bureaucracy that can regulate relations among, and between, money and human capital’ (Aronowitz 1988, p. 46). These thinkers and activists feel that the modernity project in Russia has been crippled and that the country should struggle to implement this project, fully setting such a goal as the main objective for the country’s future. Vadim Mezhuev, chief researcher at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy (RAN), insists that ‘one cannot talk about Russia’s modernity in any meaningful manner in that modernity implies civil society, citizens, and a legitimate state that guarantees equal opportunities and justice for all. None of that has been realised in Russia at any time of her modern history’ (Tretyakov 2005). Thus, to Mezhuev and to most of his liberally minded colleagues, Russia’s priority lies in building these fundamental elements of modernity before logically proceeding to the progressive post-modern age. Post-modernism in this case is welcomed as a finalisation of modernity’s fundamental endeavour to grant ‘justice and equality to all’ (Aronowitz 1988, p. 47) and as a logical extension of its socio-cultural paradigm. ‘Since I live in Russia’, claims Mezhuev, ‘I am a devout modernist, but if I were to live in the United States, I would have stood with the post-modernist positions’ (Tretyakov 2009).

For Russian liberals, post-modernity’s main attraction lies in its emphasis on a multiplicity of norms, forms, cultures, discourses, and lifestyles, as well as the absence of universal ambitions of modernity’s main ideologies. The absence of meta-narratives, liberals claim, provides multitudes of new opportunities and changes a single-dimensional matrix of the real life-world. Meta-narratives must finally give way to particular, personal narratives of each individual man (Tretyakov et al. 2005). It is from this point of view that Irina Prokhorova, a founding member of the Civic Platform (Grazhdanskaya Platforma) political party and the editor-in-chief of the New Literary Review (Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie), praises post-modernism as an era of peace, toleration, and opportunity, to which Russia should strive after it has dealt with constructing modernity in the Western fashion.

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