On Cannon Fodder and Straw Men

This summer I read with great admiration my St. Petersburg Institute of History colleague Boris Mironov's monumental Rossiiskaia imperiia: Ot traditsii k modernu (yes, all three volumes!). In more than 2,100 pages Mironov amasses here an extraordinary amount of statistical and other material arranged to evidence a familiar, even shopworn argument: that contrary to the best late and post-Soviet scholarship both in Russia and abroad, imperial Russia was on a firm path to European modernization in ways that deny its view as a failing state or that the "principle and necessary cause of revolution was the oppression and impoverishment of the narod."¹ In Mironov's view, the "direct cause of the Russian revolutions was the struggle for power between various groups of [Russia's] elite: the counterelite of society's liberal-radical leaders wanted themselves to lead the process of modernization and ride the revolutionary wave to seize power from the old elites."²

It is thus not a surprise that Boris Nikolaevich takes his argument one (large) step further in his essay here. Like Berdiaev in Vekhi, he seems eager to demonstrate that the elements of objective truth have been completely submerged by historians and "liberal-radicals" in a subjectively constructed "class" point of view, ignoring the actual nature of who Russian workers were, how and why they behaved, and why their actual historical roles were that of manipulated puppets and "extras" on the revolutionary stage, the cause for their own self-destruction. Judging by his italics, Mironov's main effort is to prove that Russia's workers were not mentally or otherwise able to fulfill the revolutionary roles assigned to them by Marxist ideologists consciously or otherwise, or were not even for that matter a clearly defined social class.³ Can it be that 107 years after Vekhi a distinguished Russian social historian wants to mark the 100th anniversary of 1917 by again scolding a liberal-radical intelligentsia, demolishing the notion that Russian workers were a self-identified politically conscious revolutionary class whose socialist vision enabled the Bolsheviks to lead them and themselves to power? What informed student of the revolution still believes this?

The analytical problem is not with objective statistics showing the improvements "modernization" brought to Russian social welfare or the thoughts and behavior of workers and others who were affected by these processes. Nor is it the obvious importance of political struggles between Russia's late imperial elites or the nature of utopian or more realistic hopes among the intelligentsia. Rather, it lies with the degree to which a focus on these matters as historical determinants ignores the comparable or even greater determining power of socioeconomic processes; the social, economic, and emotional specificities especially of revolutionary contexts; and the relation of these to the more familiar ideologies and politics of political figures and their parties. Internalized notions of fairness, the anxieties and insecurities of scarcity and social displacement, the elemental passions that related to loss, fear, humiliation, anger, want, dignity, and other shades of feeling on the emotional spectrum—all these (and more) must to be taken into account in some sensible way to explain political outcomes, along with the roles of social actors in the processes of producing and distributing social wealth. Even the visual representations of hierarchies of power and social domination can play important historical roles; and even in our post-Marxist, postsocialist age, an elemental understanding of the ways economic processes affect different social formations is essential to fully explain political outcomes.⁴

Set in the broader context Mironov himself lays out in Rossiiskaia imperiia, the central questions of Russia's late imperial and revolutionary transformations, in my view, must therefore include the following. Can fundamental social change involving the transformation of well-established socioeconomic formations and relations, beliefs, and values (aka "modernization") occur successfully without institutions capable of mediating social conflict and conflicting understandings of "fairness" and "right"? Can the dislocations of urbanization, industrialization, and their effects on traditional political and social economies be managed through complementary changes in local, regional, and national political institutions? And if institutional change is...