Eurasia's New Frontiers: Young States, Old Societies, Open Futures

II. Politics as Elite Infighting

II Politics as Elite Infighting “Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax . . . ” Lewis Carroll If civil society is anemic across the post-Soviet space, what does that do to the area’s politics? The answer is that politics comes to consist largely in struggle among factions in the elites, groups in entrenched or competitive positions within existing power structures. To some extent politics is like that everywhere, including the United States. But politics is particularly a preserve of elites in the post-Soviet countries of the world. Politics seemed much more wide open in the early years after the dissolution of the USSR. It was not just that millions of people were taking to the streets: it was also a time when every new country endowed itself with a hopeful parliament and when political parties proliferated . This had little to do with direct Western inspiration. As I noted in the first chapter, in those years Western assistance programs concentrated on humanitarian help and economic reform, with civil society and the rule of 38 law lower priorities, and political development—such as party building and election monitoring—far behind. It is true that there was a desperate aspiration to be Western, as a lifeline out of post-Soviet miseries, economic , moral, and political. That aspiration included democratic politics. Communism had lost the Cold War, and as in Central Europe after 1918 there was an urge to fill the spaces that defeat had left behind with the ideals and structures of the victors. And just as Central Europe had a decade of parliamentary democracy after 1918, the West’s liberal democratic politics had great appeal again after 1991. Technically and politically, moreover, democratic political forms—elections and parliaments—are easier to introduce than market economics.1 For all these reasons, the democratic impulse seemed natural after the fall. Two major drags on the impulse became apparent quite early on, however. First, the post-Communist political class was overwhelmingly post-Soviet: the bulk of its members had come of age and learned their political inclinations and habits in the Soviet system. Second, as an ideological replacement for Soviet Communism, the nation-state was everywhere surprisingly weak.2 There had been no room at all in the Soviet Union for the rise of creative counterelites on the East Central European model. Soviet dissent had been successfully contained. No Solidarity arose to join workers and intellectuals in politics. No Charter 77 arose among the intelligentsia . The late Soviet Union had had peasant and worker and housewives’ riots, but no sustained oppositional politics. Rioters were crushed or bought off, leavPolitics as Elite Infighting 39 ing no footprint in the political structure. Ethnic clashes had begun before the dissolution, between Armenians and Azeris in the Caucasus, between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia. But until dissolution came, such clashes were “merely” pogroms: they had no crystallized political content. The same could be said even of the high-level political contestation that was permitted at Union level in the last Gorbachev years: the infighting between fellow Party stalwarts Yegor Ligachev and Boris Yeltsin, from 1987 on, the campaigning for the new Congress of Peoples’ Deputies in 1989. To be sure, the limits on political activity were also purposeful: contestation was modest because it was the only kind allowed. In fact it was so modest, and it was allowed over so brief a period, that there was no chance for alternative elites to take shape. Those on whom freedom and independence devolved in 1991 were products of the system that had dissolved. Georgia’s inflammatory first president Zviad Gamzakhurdia, for example, had been a dissident under the Soviets, but he was also the son of (Soviet ) Georgia’s most honored novelist; his successor Eduard Shevardnadze had been Soviet Foreign Minister, and before that Georgia’s interior minister. In the five new Central Asian countries, four new Presidents had been Republic Party First Secretaries. Everything was up in the air, it seemed, except the new-old people in charge. In fairness, there were some new openings for upward mobility into the elites during those early years. Data from 2001 show there was new room for new individuals , even for new leaders, who were still usually secondlevel members of the elite moving up.3 The bureaucracy 40 Eurasia’s New Frontiers was more adhesive. That same year upwards of three- fifths of...