Modern Clan Politics: The Power of "Blood" in Kazakhstan and Beyond

4/ Continuity and Change after the Soviet Collapse

For all practical purposes Leninism is extinct as a teleological project, but its leftovers continue to affect the post-Leninist political cultures. - Vladimir Tismaneanu THE DOMINANT PARADIGM FOR STUDYING THE TRANSFORMATION ofstate socialist space in the 1990S came to be known, rather awkwardly, as "transitology." The approach was hopeful and optimistic about the prospects for "transitions" from state socialism to free markets and democratic institutions. Not surprisingly, transitologists harbored strong normative commitments about the need for positive change.l Some ofthe more nuanced analyses recognized that transitions would not everywhere proceed with the same speed and assume the same forms, but all transitologists focused on the ability ofindividual agents to create their own futures. If voluntarism was in the wind, it was welcomed. Sovietological studies had assumed quite the contrary: that Soviet political culture was inherently undemocratic and that perversions of the market and of representative government were inherent to the region. Transitology gave the impression that anything was possible, and, indeed, in some contexts the unexpected did occur. Mongolia established viable democratic institutions, Russia succeeded in institutionalizing major democratic change, and even Kyrgyzstan from Central Asia flirted with democratic institutions (before it "backslid" in the late 1990s), managing macroeconomic reform that launched it into the World Trade Organization.2 Ever forward-looking in orientation, transitology had a tremendous Continuity and Change after the Soviet Collapse 73 blind spot. The legacies of Soviet rule and their significance in shaping political outcomes remained in shadow. The very language oftransitions presumed end points and implied teleologies; it could not give adequate expression to these legacies. It was a language that betrayed the assumption that old practices were being left behind, perhaps slowly, as elites went about the business of constructing free markets and democratic institutions. Such old practices and their effects on transition deserved examination only to the limited extent that they hindered preferred outcomes. Transitology routinely shunted such legacies to the margins ofanalysis. Normative preferences for markets and democratic politics aside, continuity is important to consider because it is a sociological fact. Like the former colonies of the Mrican continent, the ex-Soviet republics replicated many ofthe institutional practices ofthe pre-independence political order. As Beissinger and Young put it, "the texture ofcontemporary stateness in Mrican and Eurasia today embodies the coloniallimperial cloth from which the successor states were tailored."3 Throughout the former USSR, political practice bore striking resemblance to previous forms of behavior; relationships among political actors were perpetuated through habitus, even after the original bases for the relationships evaporated.4 In Central Asia in particular, modern institutions were, and continue to be, a creation ofthe Soviet era, as statehood itselfwas introduced to the region in the twentieth century .5 Thus, state institutions were unlikely to assume something other than a Soviet cast. As Soviet rule receded, some successor states-notably the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia-engineered dramatic breaks with the political practice of their Soviet past. In those contexts more than others, ethnic nationalists had already during the Soviet period mobilized broad public support for radical reforms and, eventually, independence. Post-Soviet practices in those contexts never left the Soviet legacy entirely behind, but they moved further and faster than did their counterparts in the remainder of ex-Soviet space.6 Central Asia experienced the lowest degree of popular mobilization of any region as the Soviet state began to unrave1.7 Perhaps not surprisingly, the Soviet collapse brought not radical rupture to the states of the Central Asian region, but rather an unusual identity with past practices. Elite choices in the construction ofpolitical institutions were 74 Tke Ret..oJRd:ioH- ofC[CO-tti heavily saddled with institutional baggage from the Sovietperiod. PostSoviet leaders were hardly able to make entirely free decisions.8 The passage of time allows us to locate a striking degree of continuity with the Soviet past. Such continuity is multifaceted and broad.9 This chapter focuses attention on two aspects ofcontinuity that have particular consequences for clan politics: the shortage economy and the stigmatization ofclan that drives kin networks underground. Even had there been a radical rupture with the Soviet period, the ways in which clan identities informed politics might have had some staying power. Social and political practices do not change immediately in the wake ofinstitutional reform; one might expect clan politics in the 1990S to bear the imprint of Soviet mechanisms that sustained clan identities. Be that as...