Prospects for a Democratic Left in Postcommunist Russia

Parties of the democratic left have fared surprisingly poorly in postcommunist Russia. The reasons for this have to do with the legacy of the communist state, particularly the weakness of organized social associations outside the state and the continuing strength of patrimonial and corporatist patterns of state-society relations, together with constitutional and electoral institutions in the post-1993 system that undermine incentives for a system of competitive national political parties.

By democratic left I refer to social and political associations with a programmatic commitment to pluralist democracy and guarantees of individual civil and political rights in the political sphere, combined with state policies that counteract the tendency of the market economy to exacerbate social inequality. Consistent with European norms, policies associated with the democratic left would emphasize social solidarity and the protection of vulnerable strata of the population against poverty, give priority to the provision of public goods over the dismantling of state-provided public services, and employ fiscal and monetary tools to redistribute income so as to reduce inequality. During the heyday of Soviet perestroika (restructuring) under Mikhail Gorbachev, many reformers hoped that it would be possible to overhaul the Soviet political and economic system in such a way as to combine continued state ownership of the most important productive assets of the Soviet Union with a pluralistic, competitive political system that protected individual liberties and provided society with institutional means to shape policy and keep policymakers accountable. As Gorbachev's glasnost policy evolved into the partially democratized parliamentarism of the 1989-91 period and ultimately into irretrievable economic and political crisis, the contradictions of such a gradualist path became increasingly evident. Although Gorbachev often made reference to democratic socialist principles, neither his institutional reforms nor his policies were capable of bringing about such a system and his efforts to reconcile the policies and institutions of the Soviet system with liberal values led to the collapse of the entire Soviet system. The nationalist movements in several republics—most important, Russia—could not be contained in any reformed federal or confederal model of the union, and the profound contradictions between market competition and the hypercentralization of the Soviet economic model proved to be too severe to overcome with piecemeal reforms. Most scholars would agree with the conclusion that the Soviet institutional framework could not be reformed into a democratic socialist state; a network of independent social associations integrating the diverse class and ethnic segments of Soviet society and aggregating the demands of a population that was abruptly given the freedom to voice demands was simply absent. Moreover, the bureaucracy could not readily be adapted to a change in political regime: it was heavily politicized by the demands for loyalty to the CPSU, sapped by corruption, stretched over immense territorial and functional spans of control, and, consequently, far more adept at insulating itself from effective political accountability than it was at delivering effective public services. ¹

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left behind fifteen nominally independent republics as its successor states. This essay will concentrate on Russia, asking why the democratic left remains so weak. Let us start by examining the relationship of state and society at the moment in 1991 when the Soviet state gave way to a partly democratized independent Russian federation.

Democratization and the Soviet State Legacy

Richard Rose has argued that in Russia, as in many third-wave democracies, democratization occurred before the state became modern. ² The consequence is that people's new liberties are often employed in ways that undermine the state's capacity to enforce democratic and market rules impartially and impersonally. Lacking effective means to exert a collective influence over policymaking, many ordinary citizens continue to regard the state as remote and unresponsive with respect to policymaking, but treat particular state officials as susceptible to demands for personal favors or corrupt influence. Social relations in the post-Soviet era, Rose's surveys...