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1 Introduction Piotr Dutkiewicz and Dmitri Trenin This book seeks to “re-think Russia.” Over the past years, there has been a tendency, in the global academic community but even more widely in the world media, to focus on Russia’s failure to transit from communism to democracy. The verdict reads, sternly, “lost in transition.” A countertendency, actively propagated within Russia, has extolled the virtues of the country’s stabilization after the tempest and tumult of the 1980s and 1990s. The motto of this group proudly states, “Russia has risen from its knees.” From that perspective , it is the outside world’s responsibility to be more objective toward Russia. Both arguments were superseded by the world economic crisis, which did not spare Russia as a safe haven, as some of its leaders had hoped. In fact, Russia turned out to be among the world’s worst-hit economies. The recovery has been slow. The crisis, however, also has laid bare the flaws in the economic, social, and political systems of North America, Europe, and Japan, which had been touted as models for the rest of the world, including Russia . Thus, the debate along the familiar lines of the mimicry of the “Western model” is now definitely over, and a new round of thinking is about to begin. In Russia, the buzzword is “modernization.” President Medvedev’s “Go, Russia!” article, first posted in September 2009, set the tone for a wide-ranging debate. There is a broad realization that unless the country curbs its runaway corruption, diversifies its economy, thus diminishing its dependence on energy exports, and builds a knowledge industry, Russia’s future might be 2 Dutkiewicz and Trenin bleak. The alternative to modernization is marginalization. However, while the shining image of an “ideal Russia” finds few contestants, there is a lot of confusion and vigorous discussion about how to proceed toward that goal. The problem, of course, is deeper than the size of the GDP or even its structure, the rate of growth and its quality, or the share of innovation technology . A country’s economy is inseparable from the people who work in it, and this raises a whole range of issues dealing with society. Russia’s has been very resilient. It absorbed a series of incredibly hard blows that came with the passing of the ancien régime and the advent of new, often harsh realities. It survived , but it—inevitably—mutated. Once reputedly collectivist, today’s Russia has gone private. It is a country of consumers but not—at least not yet— citizens; it is also a state in search of a nation. As Yevgeny Yassin, a former cabinet minister and the informal dean of Russian liberal economists, wryly observed, “There is no drive behind the modernization slogan.” Russian modernizations, however, traditionally came in a top-down fashion . Suffice it to recall Peter the Great and Alexander II; Stolypin, Stalin, and Gorbachev. Would the twenty-first century be different? It might well be: entrepreneurial spirit, in the age of globalization, trumps mobilization directives. The bigger problem is, can modernization succeed in the economic realm, while the system of government remains a closed and wellprotected area? Liberal critics of the authorities are quick to quip that it is hard to change anything without changing anything. The dilemma that the Russian authorities face is, indeed, very serious. Those who sincerely want to modernize the country—if only to keep it in one piece and earn a decent ranking in the global pecking order—have the image of the hapless Mr. Gorbachev before their eyes. He, too, genuinely tried to make the country more modern, but, in the end, lost his bid and the country with it.Those, on the other hand, who lay emphasis on regime stability as the highest value—if only to protect their own vested interests—need to have the image of the hapless last tsar who lost the country and his entire family to the waves of popular discontent. Thus, the channel of Russian modernization seems to pass somewhere between the Scylla of Gorbachevian ill-informed enthusiasm and the Charybdis of Nicholas’s stubborn reaction. Despite the usual fog prevailing in the channel, Russia is hardly doomed. Both the elites and the ordinary people have learned a lot from history. There are fewer illusions of any kind. Cure-all solutions are not in high demand. There is more appreciation of the results achieved so far, however modest, [52.15.63.145] Project MUSE (2024...

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