IR Theory and Hegemony

The earliest and most prominent theorists of hegemony were predominantly materialist in orientation. Kindleberger's argument, which has become standard, concludes that the crisis of hegemony in the 1930s could have been averted had the United States only recognized its material interests in succeeding Britain as the global lender and market of last resort.Footnote ⁵ Despite Kindleberger's obvious reliance on ideas, or, more precisely, misperceptions of presumably objective interests, IR scholars did not go on to develop a systematic account of ideas in hegemonic transitions. The same could be said for Krasner's hugely influential work on hegemony and world trade.Footnote ⁶ Arguing that rising concentrations of power in a single state facilitate an open global trading system, and declining hegemons beget closure, Krasner's theory is fraught with some important disconfirming eras in the past 200 years. British decline in the latter part of the nineteenth century did not result in Britain abandoning openness. And the U.S. rise in the 1920s and 1930s did not result in openness. As in the case of Kindleberger, the anomalies were explained by ideas. The City of London, long accustomed to being a financier of global trade and investment, did not recognize Britain's material interests until too late. U.S. finance capital, still parochial and inward-looking, did not recognize U.S. interests in replacing Britain as the global hegemon. Again, despite the reliance on ideas, the latter were not systematically included in any account of hegemony. I could add here the contemporary period of U.S. decline, and its continued commitment to a neoliberal order. Perhaps in twenty years, one could be told that the United States did not recognize its material interests because of its idea of itself as a postwar global hegemon.

Gilpin's theory of hegemony is materialist in the sense that powers rise and fall depending on their relative material economic and military resources.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, he argues that material decline is inevitable because of the diffusion of technology, knowledge, and best practices from the hegemon to its ultimate challengers. Keohane's account of hegemony also relies on material interests, arguing that hegemons construct international regimes to accord with their material interests.Footnote ⁸ Their decline may not result in the dismantling of the regime because, first, the regime assumes an institutional life of its own, and so has a material interest in its own perpetuation; and second, because of the material transaction costs that have to be incurred by any new prospective hegemon in its pursuit of creating a new collection of institutions. Snidal, surveying the hegemony literature from Kindleberger to Keohane, also concludes that material interests may save a declining hegemon's institutional arrangements. The master variable for Snidal is the material interests of the “k group,” or the states that are less powerful than the declining hegemon, but still significant enough players to derive continuing benefits from the present arrangements.Footnote ⁹ But the crucial variable is whether they have material interests in the preservation of the previous system. As I mentioned, however, the material interests posited for states by IR theorists are often ignored by those states' policymakers.

Finally, Wallerstein's world systems theory shares a primarily materialist ontology with the realist and neoliberal theories just discussed. World systems theory provides a macro-historical account of the operation of the world capitalist economy for the past thousand years. Its constantly operating principle is a division of labor in the world between an exploitative advanced core, an exploited impoverished periphery, and a semi-periphery that simultaneously exploits the periphery and is itself exploited by the core. Wallerstein stipulates that three major mechanisms enable a world system: (1) concentration of military power in the core, (2) an ideological commitment to the system as a whole, and (3) the existence of a semi-periphery that is both exploiter and exploited. In raising ideology, Wallerstein quickly robs it of any autonomy by asserting that “I don't mean the legitimation of the system … I mean rather the degree to which the cadres of the system feel that their own well-being is wrapped up in the survival of the system as such.”Footnote ¹⁰

Cox is the first scholar to systematically combine material power, ideas, and institutions in a comprehensive theory of hegemony. Relying on Gramsci's insight that hegemony is not only coercion, but subscription to a shared and legitimized ideology, Cox reinterprets British and U.S. hegemony from 1815 to 1985. He argues that British naval power and its ideology of free trade, combined with the institution of the City of London as the world's financial hub, allowed British domination of world politics to endure for most of the nineteenth century. Pax Americana, relying on the U.S. military, a neoliberal ideology of its own, and a far thicker set of international institutions, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or World Bank, and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO), has been in place since the end of World War II.

Despite Cox's huge advance over previous scholarship in developing a more complete theory of hegemony that productively marries material power, ideas, and institutions, Cox's theory still falls short of its Gramscian promise. It fails to capture Gramsci's concern with mass public common sense, not just elite ideologies, and it neglects Gramsci's concern with mass ideas about daily concerns, not just attitudes toward socialist or capitalist economic orders.

Cox's narrowing of Gramsci's ideas about common sense in turn narrows Cox's theorization of international institutions. The institutional dimension of hegemony concerns the international mechanisms by which the hegemon's material power and ideas are reproduced by acquiescent partners. Cox's model of hegemony treats institutions as transmission belts for the dominant powers' economic ideology. This is critical but ignores institutions that reproduce hegemonic power more broadly construed. It is not just ideas about how the economy works, or should work, that cement a hegemonic order.

There are more than economic institutions, such as the WTO, at work. Hegemonic orders are also reproduced through the myriad interactions that occur among states and their citizens in cultural, educational, and informational sites. Beyond both economic and security institutions are institutions that are not so tailored to specific functions, but do systematically cultivate hegemonic ideas in their participants. I have in mind here university and graduate education, cultural productions, media-scapes, tourism, and other structures of ideational exchange and contact.

According to Gramsci, hegemonic ideas are those that advance the interests of the dominant classes but are veiled in language that presents them as if they were advancing the universal interests of the people in general. Hegemonic power is maximized to the extent that these ideas become taken for granted by the dominated population. A taken-for-granted truth is one that people assume to be so without questioning its empirical or normative validity. A legitimate truth is one that people consciously regard as “right” in a given context. Hegemonic theorists, to the extent that they treat ideas at all, as Cox certainly does, limit themselves to assuming that the only ideas that matter are ideas about political economy. Ikenberry goes farther in assuming that the ideas that matter are those about the legitimacy of the hegemonic order.Footnote ¹¹ Both are certainly important—but I do not think they get to Gramsci's notion of common sense.

Two problems accompany Cox's translation of Gramscian hegemony into IR: first, it privileges the material in that even the ideas that matter to Cox are ideas about economic order and class arrangements. Nonmaterial ideas about the good life, justice, political or social order, religion, values, norms, family relations, gender, and such are simply excluded from what matters. Moreover, this is not consistent with Gramsci's understanding of common sense. In addition, Cox's ideas are situated exclusively in the minds of ruling elites; publics are absent from Cox's account of hegemony.Footnote ¹² But Gramsci's notion of common sense was all about the masses.

For Gramsci, one could not explain whether or not a hegemonic ideology on offer would resonate with the masses/proletariat without an investigation of their everyday common sense. He asserted that “one cannot but start in the first place from common sense” when analyzing a social setting.Footnote ¹³ There are two steps here, one of intelligibility, and one of legitimacy.Footnote ¹⁴ Gramsci addressed both of them. Common sense is not reducible to popular beliefs about political economy. Gramsci conceptualized it much more broadly, linking it, only in the last instance, to popular receptivity to different ideas about political economy and its attendant social and political order.

Gramsci asked “can modern [revolutionary] theory be in opposition to the (spontaneous) feelings of the masses, what has been formed through everyday experience illuminated by ‘common sense,’ that is, by the traditional popular conception of the world… ?” He answered unequivocally: “It cannot be in opposition to them.”Footnote ¹⁵ It cannot be in opposition, that is, if it ever expects to be, first, understood by them, and second, taken up as the legitimate way to think about the world. Common sense is “closely linked to many beliefs and prejudices, to almost all popular superstitions.”Footnote ¹⁶ Gramsci places so much emphasis on these “popular beliefs” that he calls them “material forces” in and of themselves.Footnote ¹⁷ Common sense is “the philosophy of non-philosophers, the conceptualization of the world that is uncritically absorbed.”Footnote ¹⁸

What is under discussion here is the “discursive fit” between a set of ideas being propounded by a revolutionary party and the set of ideas, mostly taken-for-granted, that inform the daily life-world of average people. In the context of this article, I am investigating the discursive fit between the Western hegemonic ideology of neoliberal democratic free-market capitalism and Russian elite and popular ideas about how their own local worlds work, and should work. If one ignores Russian common sense, one could be satisfied, following Cox, that if Russian political elites express a commitment to a democratic neoliberal ideology, Russia is helping to reproduce Western hegemony. But this ignores Gramsci's warning of common sense's capacity to thwart elite projects.

Constructivist IR scholars have long been preoccupied with the issue of discursive fit or resonance.Footnote ¹⁹ Consistent with Gramsci's discussion of the difficulties socialist organizers encountered in southern Italy, Keck and Sikkink conclude their book on transnational norm entrepreneurs by noting that the ideas being propagated must “fit or resonate with the larger belief systems and real life contexts” of the target societies.Footnote ²⁰ Building on Gramsci and constructivist work on norm diffusion, one can divide discursive fit or resonance into two parts. In its thinnest conceptualization, one can merely look at intelligibility. Are the ideas and positions enunciated by the political elite comprehensible to the broad public? One could call this thin intersubjectivity. A thick conceptualization of discursive fit or ideological resonance would entail not only comprehension, but also evaluative agreement. In other words, not only do the masses understand the ideology, but it is compatible with their own commonsensical view of the good life, of how to go on in the world, of a desirable daily life.Footnote ²¹

Gramsci was aware that attempts at political mobilization will fail if there is no resonance between the ideology being propagated and mass common sense. But one can apply common sense in a different, but related, context. Instead of revolutionaries trying to mobilize Russian masses to overturn the status quo, Russia's place in Western hegemony depends on whether Russian political elites can convince Russian masses that democratic neoliberalism is compatible with their implicit sense of a good, just, and normal daily life.

Gramsci argues that for any hegemonic project to succeed it must make compromises with common sense. In this way the masses can exercise power over the political elites who are trying to impose their ideology on society. Given that this article is a “plausibility probe” to ascertain the potential value of pursuing common-sense constructivism as an alternative account of international order, it is premature to hypothesize which precise avenues of influence common sense may take in constraining an elite's hegemonic project. Moreover, since common sense is a structural variable, I cannot deduce determinate predictions for how common sense will work its way on policy outcomes. Instead, common sense may make its influence felt politically in myriad different ways. A common sense that is at odds with an elite hegemonic ideology may impose political, that is, selectoral or electoral, costs on an elite that ignores it. Failure to heed mass common sense may result in demonstrations against neoliberal policies, the emergence of alternative political parties and movements, and/or fractionation within the ruling party.

These are examples of common sense in active opposition to political elites. But mass common sense may not be limited to masses per se, or to open conflict. There is no reason to reject the possibility that state officials share the common sense of the masses, and so, in their implementation of the elite's hegemonic project they might behave in ways that undermine elite intentions. This institutional slippage allows common sense to infuse state practices with content contrary to the will of political elites. Finally, common sense works its way structurally, through the vast array of daily practices average Russians employ when going about their daily lives. These can be conscious “weapons of the weak,” or the unconscious habitual conduct of people whose taken-for-granted understanding of daily life is reflected in countless behaviors that daily undermine elite neoliberal prescriptions and proscriptions.Footnote ²²

This article determines Russia's material place in the world, the hegemonic project of its political elite, and the relationship of that project with Russian mass common sense. What emerges is a Russia materially situated in the semi-periphery, or even periphery in some respects, of the world capitalist economy. This material semi-peripheriality tracks closely with only the most selective engagement with Western institutions. This semi-peripheriality is paradoxically accompanied by an elite discourse that aspires to become a neoliberal democratic part of the core, or of Western hegemony. This would make no sense at all if it were not that mass Russian common sense tracks nicely with a semi-peripheral, neo-Soviet, self-isolating Russia offering social protection to a people unwilling to tolerate what acceptance of Western hegemony would mean for their daily lives, thereby demonstrating the theoretical power of a theory of hegemony that takes into account mass common sense.

Resarch Design and Methods

As a plausibility probe, this article aims to establish the value of a research program on the connection between mass common sense and international order.Footnote ²³ Eckstein suggested one way to increase the validity of a plausibility probe is to choose a crucially hard case for the theory under consideration.Footnote ²⁴ While Russia is not a crucially hard case, it is a hard case in that one would not expect mass common sense to influence policy outcomes in an authoritarian state. So, if the evidence presented here makes a convincing case that mass Russian common sense affects Russian elites, one should expect this to be still more likely the case in more democratic countries, such as India or Brazil, if not China.

Four empirical questions must be addressed: Russia's material position in Western hegemony, Russia's mass common sense, Russia's elite hegemonic project, and the discursive fit between the latter two. Establishing Russia's material position is straightforward. I have gathered both economic data and data on Russia's integration with the rest of the world. Establishing Russian mass common sense is much harder.

Common sense has both depth and variety. What is “taken for granted” may be so commonplace it is never articulated. Taken-for-granted common sense goes unchallenged or uncontested. In other words, there is a kind of consensus about what the world is, or should be, that often goes without saying. But when it is said, most people say more or less the same thing. That is the aspect of common sense that I explore. In order to see just how consensual common sense might be, I look at a variety of mass popular texts. The first are four textbooks on Russian history for seventeen-year-old high-school students.Footnote ²⁵

Western media and some scholars have paid great attention to the alleged whitewashing of Stalinism in recent Russian textbooks. The advantage of collecting a sample of required Russian high-school textbooks is that it provides a more representative sample than merely relying on the two optional college textsFootnote ²⁶ that have been singled out for their revisionist history, identified on the Russian Memorial website.Footnote ²⁷ These two books do indeed present a far more “positive” rendering of Soviet domestic life and foreign policy than the high-school texts sampled for this article, but they are hardly constitutive of Russian common sense, since they are not read by millions of Russian high-school students, and they are outliers in any case in their treatment of the Soviet past.

The second contributor to the sample of Russian common sense is a best-selling novella by Pelevin, A Macedonian Critique of French Thought. The third is a best-selling novel by Marinina, A View from Eternity. Good Intentions, her first foray beyond her wildly popular, and lucrative, crime thrillers.Footnote ²⁸ The last is the 24 September 2009 edition of Segodniashniaia Gazeta/Today's Newspaper from Krasnoiarsk, a city of one million in western Siberia.

These sources are chosen because their audiences are Russia's masses. Nearly all Russian teenagers are in secondary education and are compelled to take courses in contemporary Russian history. The four textbooks are required reading for several million Russian students. Pelevin's audience is the Russian upper middle class and intelligentsia. Marinina's audience is a broad swath of the Russian middle and working classes; her novels are almost ubiquitous on any random Russian subway ride. The newspaper was chosen based on its circulation in a “typical” provincial Russian urban area.

Russia's elite discourse is easier to sample than common sense, but it is not so self-evident as Russia's material position in the world. I read and coded all speeches, press conferences, and interviews given by Presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev from September 2007 to September 2011 across both foreign and domestic audiences, yielding a sample of 1,446 individual texts. In order to generate a larger sample of elite ideology, I polled twenty experts on contemporary Russian politics, asking them to name the five most powerful people in Russia today. I also looked at the results of Nezavisimaia Gazeta's (NG) anonymous survey of twenty-seven experts: political scientists, political “technologists,” sociologists, representatives of the media, and representatives of Russia's political parties. Each year the newspaper asks them to rank the most powerful people in Russian political life.Footnote ²⁹ Based on my poll and that of NG, the rankings of the most powerful are unanimous: Putin, Medvedev, Vladislav Surkov, Igor Sechin, Aleksei Kudrin, and Sergei Ivanov.Footnote ³⁰ While the speeches of Putin and Medevedev have been systematically posted on the web since 2001, those of Surkov, Sechin, Kudrin, and Ivanov are not so universally available.Footnote ³¹ I have sampled them for the past five years using the yandex.ru search engine.

One of the advantages of a large-n discourse analysis is the capacity to put the most famous remarks of Putin about the Soviet Union in April 2005, namely, that its disappearance was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” into context. First, it was uttered a single time and hence is hardly representative of Putin's dozens of other negative characterizations of the Soviet Union. And second, and most importantly, it was made in the context of the U.S. decision to unilaterally invade Iraq in March 2003, over the opposition of most of the rest of the world, including its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies.

Russia's Position in the World

The most recent economic data available places Russia squarely within the semi-periphery of the world capitalist economy. Compared to the highly developed U.S., European, and Japanese core, Russia lags on many indicators of economic development. But compared to countries in the economically underdeveloped periphery, Russia is clearly closer to the core. While it has some peripheral characteristics of its own, such as being primarily a raw material and energy exporter, it also has its own regional periphery that it exploits like a typical semi-peripheral player. In this sense, Russia materially reproduces Western hegemony through its objective material position in the world capitalist economy. On the other hand however, and consistent with a counterhegemonic common sense at home, Russia is significantly more isolated from Western hegemony, institutionally speaking, than other, similarly situated, semi-peripheral states. Both these measures of Russia's position are elaborated below.

Russia's Semi-Peripheral Position, Materially Speaking

On most measures, Russia is located squarely in the semi-periphery, ranked around other semi-peripheral states such as China, India, and Brazil, but far behind core states such as the United States and Europe. Figure 1 illustrates Russia's semi-peripheral position.

FIGURE 1. Relative material capabilities

Russia's population, life expectancy, gross domestic product (GDP), per capita GDP, and level of annual foreign direct investment (FDI) place Russia squarely within the semi-periphery. But the concentration of that growing foreign investment primarily in the area of raw material extraction underlines Russia's peripheral status. Russia is emerging as a significant source of FDI abroad, but primarily in the former republics of the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe. This cements its position as a part of the semi-periphery, both exploiting its own periphery, while simultaneously serving as a raw material appendage for the core. Russia's overseas investments are dominated by the same sectors that dominate its economy, state budget revenues, and foreign trade: energy and metals, accounting for about half Russia's foreign investment in 2006. Boston Consulting Group, however, includes only six Russian companies as “global challengers,” based on revenues, international presence, and overseas investments, compared to thirty from China, twenty from India, and thirteen from Brazil.Footnote ³²

Russian foreign investment has concentrated in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), all of which are former Soviet republics. Armenia, Belarus, and Uzbekistan accounted for over three-quarters of that investment.Footnote ³³ All of this shows Russia's material position as a regional semi-peripheral hegemon dominating its local periphery. The content of Russia's exports also demonstrates its semi-peripheral position. While earning $380 billion from its exports in 2010, 49 percent of this total came from oil and natural gas, only 5 percent from manufactured products. Only $5 billion of this, or much less than 1 percent, came from high-technology exports. Only three-fifths of 1 percent of Russian exports were information technology or telecommunications equipment. Looking at the “Balassa index of revealed comparative advantage,” one sees that Russia's competitiveness is almost completely concentrated in raw materials and energy.Footnote ³⁴ Finished products rarely figure in the mix, with the important exception of weaponry. Of the top twenty most competitive Russian exports on the world market, only nuclear reactors, armaments, fertilizers, rolled steel, and boilers are nonperipheral products.Footnote ³⁵ In several measures of technological prowess or potential, patent applications, scientific journals, and scientific and technical journal articles, Russia also is firmly semi-peripheral.Footnote ³⁶

In sum, materially speaking, with the exception of military power, rates of infant mortality, and literacy, Russia is an unambiguous member of the semi-periphery: a country whose income is middling, whose export mix is dominated by low value-added raw materials, whose inward foreign investment is concentrated in producing the raw materials needed by the core economies, whose own foreign investment is directed primarily toward its periphery, and whose technological and educational development still ranks it among other semi-peripheral countries.

Russia's Relative Isolation from Western Hegemony, Practically Speaking

A semi-peripheral country should contribute to the core's reproduction of its hegemony by participating in those institutional arrangements that facilitate the propagation of its ideology and its material power. I have shown that Russia certainly contributes to the material reproduction of the core by its role as raw material and energy exporter and site for foreign investment. But institutionally speaking, Russia is less connected to Western hegemony, and so less reproductive of its ideology, than one would expect from a typical semi-peripheral state. Later, I suggest this is because of a counterhegemonic mass common sense prevailing in Russia, but for now, I present evidence on Russia's relative isolation from Western hegemony.

In terms of Internet use and broadband availability, Russia has little communication with, and connectivity to, the rest of the world. According to indexes of international connectivity, Russia finds itself far behind the United States and the West, and mostly behind the other BRICS.Footnote ³⁷ In a similar measure, the 2010 Digital Economy rankings of the Economist Intelligence Unit, Russia again is far down the list, at fifty-ninth, slightly behind China and India, and well behind Brazil. Russia does much better than both China and India, although still behind Brazil, in the Knowledge Economy Index of the World Bank, largely because of its high levels of literacy and universal access to education. Even so, it is still semi-peripheral.

The Foreign Policy “globalization index” includes measures for political engagement (foreign aid, treaties, organizational memberships, and peacekeeping), personal contacts (phone calls, travel, and remittances), technological connectivity (Internet users, hosts, and secure servers), and economic integration (trade and FDI). Of 125 countries rated in 2011, all emerging economies are relatively “unglobalized,” with Russia ranked fifty-second. While there is a pretty strong correlation between prosperity and high rankings, Jordan is ranked ninth overall, Malaysia twenty-third, Panama thirtieth, Ghana thirty-third, the Philippines thirty-eighth, and many other lower-income countries above the BRICs, including Russia.

On another, perhaps increasingly archaic, measure of global interconnectivity, international postal traffic, Russia is relatively isolated. In the age of e-mail, most countries' international postal traffic peaked in 1996–97, but the figures are striking, nonetheless. Russia ranks second to last among BRICs, above only Brazil, in the sending and receiving of mail internationally, with only about 32 million letters in 2007. This compares with more than 800 million in the United States in the same year (which peaked at nearly one billion in 1996).Footnote ³⁸

According to the 2010 Quacquarelli Symonds Top 200 Universities,Footnote ³⁹ Moscow State University, at ninety-third, was the only Russian school to make it into the top 200. More telling, however, is the absence of any Russian business schools in the top 100, according to the Financial Times ratings of 2011. This newspaper, given its ideological commitment to neoliberal economics, is a perfect source for measuring how deeply Russia is integrated into the world capitalist economy. If Russia has business schools with faculty and curriculum devoted to mastering the hegemonic canon, it is good evidence of progress toward training Russians to participate in that hegemony. Instead, Russia has zero top-one-hundred business schools, implying that Russian business elites are not being captured by neoliberal orthodoxy, at least not in their formal training.

One of the most important institutions of hegemonic reproduction are universities and graduate schools. The more foreign undergraduate and graduate students a country can educate in its own universities, the more likely its hegemonic ideology will be propagated throughout the world. Two features from the data in Figure 2 stand out: first, the United States and the core dominates the education of the rest of the world; second, Russia is a solid semi-peripheral player, educating many thousands of students from its regional periphery.

FIGURE 2. Relative global integration

Almost one million foreign students are at U.S. and UK universities, accounting for more than one-half of all foreign students abroad. The United States and Western Europe account for two-thirds of all foreign students. In terms of the semi-peripheral countries that I track in this study, each of them sends the overwhelming majority of its students to hegemonic centers. The top five destinations for Chinese students are the United States (110,000), Japan (78,000), Australia (58,000), the UK (45,000), and South Korea (31,000). A third of Brazilian students abroad study in the United States. The top five destinations for Indian students are the United States (95,000), Australia (27,000), UK (26,000), New Zealand (4,000), and Germany (3,000). Russia, as well, while in far smaller relative numbers than either China or India, has most of its students opting for education in the core. The top five destinations for Russian students are Germany (10,000), the United States (5,000), Ukraine (5,000), France (3,000), and the UK (3,000).

But at the same time, Russia, while hosting only 60,000 foreign students, has become a regional core for a number of peripheral countries, fulfilling its role as a true semi-periphery. Students from Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and Ukraine make Russia their top choice for studies abroad. Central Asia is the only region in the world for whom North America or Western Europe is not the top spot for studies abroad. Only 17 percent of them go to school there, while 78 percent of them travel to Eastern and Central Europe and elsewhere in Central Asia.

Finally, Russia is a relatively rare destination for international meetings. The Union of International Associations reports that in 2009, there were almost 8,900 meetings of international organizations with at least 300 participants of which at least 40 percent were foreigners to the host country. Again, it is the practical significance of this that matters. Somehow, Russia is neither desired as a site for the rest of the world, nor is Russia making effective efforts to make itself into a more desired locale. More interestingly, perhaps, is that Russian elites are trying to make Russia more attractive, but it has not worked. Either the rest of the world still prefers other destinations, or the Russian public, through its own commonsensical daily practices, thwarts the efforts of Russian elites to make Russia into a site that resonates with the rest of the world.

To summarize Russia's material place in the world, by most economic measures it is squarely in the semi-periphery, simultaneously a raw-material appendage of the core and a neocolonial investor and trading partner with its own collection of peripheral states. One critical anomaly, however, concerns its relative lack of connectivity with the rest of the world, partly depriving Western hegemony of its full potential in colonizing Russia ideologically. By having less communication with the world, hosting fewer international meetings, visiting tourists, and foreign students, Russia has denied the West full hegemonic advantages. On the other hand, as I will show, this lack of integration into Western hegemony is consistent with Russian common sense, but not with the elite's hegemonic project.

Elite Russian Discourse and Mass Common Sense

Elite Russian discourse reflects a semi-periphery that aims to become a member of the democratic neoliberal core, a part of Western hegemony. Meanwhile, Russian mass common sense does not reflect this aspiration, neither in positively asserting the desire to become part of Western hegemony, nor in having features that resonate with elite discourse. Instead, it is infused with a neo-Soviet identity for Russia that makes it a less-than-perfect fit with the democratic neoliberal project. The Russian elite has not succeeded in masking its neoliberal ideology in such a way as to make it resonate with taken-for-granted Russian realities.

Russian Common Sense: Mass Support for Remaining Semi-Peripheral

Russian mass common sense mostly contradicts elite neoliberal discourse and more accurately reflects Russia's objective semi-peripheral position. One could say that Russian political and economic elites, whether intentional or not, have ended up implementing, or practicing, Russian common sense, as much, if not more than neoliberal discourse. The objective material position of Russia can be explained by Russian common sense. The latter shows virtually no positive regard for neoliberal economic principles or liberal democracy.Footnote ¹¹⁷ It also has little to criticize about daily corruption and criminality in society. Moreover, while critical of the Soviet experience, it is far more positive about many features of Soviet life than elite discourse. Finally, while Russian common sense is as enamored of Western material accomplishments as elite discourse, it wishes to consume them, but not adopt the neoliberal practices that elite discourse thinks is necessary to attain them. In other words, Russian mass common sense is a bulwark of Russia's semi-peripheral position in Western hegemony, and hence a significant obstacle to Russia's elite aspiration to join the neoliberal core, just as the Russian elite, save Surkov, have recognized and lamented.

With the single exception of a reporter in Krasnoiarsk who argued against protectionism for Russian shoe producers, because “our designers have no imagination, and we consumers pay for it,” none of the other texts contained a single sentence lauding a neoliberal Russia, or recommending it as Russia's future.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Like the neoliberal model in general, the idea of Russia becoming a democratic state with the rule of law finds little resonance in Russian common sense. With the exception of Volobuev's textbook lamenting the lack of a Russian middle class a hundred years ago, and Aleksashkina observing that a law-governed state is one of Medvedev's objectives, the other texts surveyed here instead vindicate elite fears about habitual traditional Russian attitudes toward law and criminality.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The presence of corruption and criminality is just taken for granted. Pelevin, for example, has a character who grew up in Soviet Tatarstan, Nasykh (Kika) Nafikov, “in whose circle while growing up, nobody would use the words ‘buyer of stolen goods’ as an insult.” In Marinina's novel, Ministry of Internal Affairs Major Nikoali Golovin has a daughter Tamara, who is the hairdresser to the stars, including to Culture Minister Ekaterina Furtseva.Footnote ¹²⁰ As a consequence, she gets gifts as tips. She meets a boyfriend, a tailor, who makes her a dress. Her father, accusing the tailor of “speculation” for making a dress at his own house, literally throws Tamara out of the house, onto the street, for wearing this “blackmarket” dress in his house. The book is littered with his tirades over chocolates, flowers, and other gifts that Tamara brings home. Marinina depicts him as ridiculous, that is, enforcing Soviet law is presented as absurd.Footnote ¹²¹ Meanwhile, Major Golovin's son-in-law, Rodik, also a cop, thought that his job of policing “crimes against socialist property” was silly; he should be tracking down “real” criminals, like murderers and robbers.Footnote ¹²² In other words, stealing from the state, just like President Medvedev feared, should not even be deemed a crime, thinks Rodik.

Finally, of ten articles in Today's Newspaper, three concerned corruption. Lednyeva's “Rightless Existence” informed readers that it cost 80,000 rubles to get your driver's license back once it was revoked, part of which went to pay off the judge. Drunk drivers paid off judges to get their licenses back, and those just driving on New Year's Eve could expect to pay 30,000 to any cop who happened to stop them, whether they have been drinking or not. This article was not a critique of any of these practices, but a handy practical guidebook for what the local corruption market costs. This was exactly the taken-for-grantedness of criminality that Medvedev would like to “drive out of Russian heads.”Footnote ¹²³

Anna Merzliakov wrote a travelogue about her hitchhiking from Krasnoiarsk to Moscow. She was picked up by a truck driver, Slava. She asked about cops and bribes; he told her 500 rubles got you on your way again. Sure enough, they were stopped. Slava paid 400 rubles for a load that was somehow measured as 500 kilograms heavier than when he left that morning. Artem Mikhailov's article pointed out that despite the labor code, employers often fined their employees at work. At the end of the article, the author helpfully suggested that if this happened to you, you should contact the Inspectorate of Labor.

The four history textbooks offered a more mixed, somewhat more positive, assessment of the Soviet project than either Putin or Medvedev. While there were many differences in interpretation of particular historical events, it was accurate to say that the four texts shared some broad common evaluations. First, the Bolshevik project and its Stalinist successor were mostly disastrous. Second the period from 1953–85 was a complicated time with some pluses and some minuses. The Gorbachev years were a disaster. The Yeltsin years were mostly disastrous, but at least he had the good sense to appoint Putin in December 1999. Putin's reign has been an unblemished string of successes and correct decisions. There was not a single sentence in these four books that criticized Putin in any way. So, it was not Stalin who was whitewashed in history texts, but Putin. It should be noted that alone among all the sources of Russian common sense surveyed here, as well as elite neoliberal discourse, the textbooks maintained a Marxist-Leninist ontology, discussing events in terms of class relations, proletarian consciousness, national liberation movements, imperialism, and other Soviet commonplaces. This in itself produced a Soviet common sense about how to understand the world.Footnote ¹²⁴

Pelevin's Macedonian Critique of French Thought is a relentlessly ironic critique of the Soviet Union. It is also the most elite of the texts under review, read more by members of the Russian middle class, intelligentsia, and elite than Marinina's more middle-brow and working-class novels. Pelevin's novel resonates most with Putin and Medvedev's consistent derogation of the Soviet experience. Indeed, Medvedev, asked what he reads in his free time, answered he kept Pelevin's latest works on his nightstand next to his bed.Footnote ¹²⁵

Pelevin ironizes Russia's love-hate relationship with Europe. As his stand-in for “Russia” he creates the character of Kika, a Tatar, who criticizes French (European) philosophy from the standpoint of a (Russian) “ignoramus who never in his life has read these philosophers, but has only heard several citations and terms from their works.” Pelevin also offers a theory of how the Western victors in the Cold War will ultimately be defeated by the loser—the Soviet Union. The West, but the United States, in particular, will become infected by the same disease that afflicted the Soviet Union, “the aggressive military paranoia of their leaders.” Using good old Soviet jargon, Pelevin concludes that “the international financial plunderers (the United States and the West) have miscalculated—instead of sucking the blood out of Russia, they have sucked out the centuries-old poisonous rot which they now cannot digest.”Footnote ¹²⁶ This “blood” of which Pelevin writes is the “Soviet afterlife.” As a child, Kika asked, “Where did the builders of developed socialism go? Where are they now, the happy builders of Magnitka, the virgin land tillers, the subjugators of the Gulag and the Arctic? Where have the millions of those who believed in communism in their souls gone after the closure of the Soviet project?”Footnote ¹²⁷ Kika finds out that all these good Soviets have been turned into oil, just like “dinosaurs” of previous eras. “Here is revealed the mystery of the disappeared Soviet people … The life of a miner-Stakhanovite is ticking in a diamond Cartier watch or foaming in a bottle of Dom Perignon.” Others have gotten rich off of the thankless toil of Soviet workers.

Marinina's novel, View from Eternity, is the mirror image of Pelevin's. It is perhaps the first “neo-Soviet” novel, in the sense that its action is set in the period from 1957–80, and concerns the daily life concerns of an average Soviet family living in Moscow. This novel presents daily Soviet life as if the flaws of the Soviet Union as identified in the textbooks, Pelevin, or Putin's and Medvedev's speeches did not exist, or, at least, were not so important for how daily life was lived. This is a common-sense rehabilitation of the quotidian Soviet experience and so makes the attractive aspects of that experience still more so. While Marinina makes glancing allusions to a man repressed in the 1930s, laws against homosexuality, and how boring discussing Brezhnev's memoirs are at a party meeting, the rest of the 400 pages are filled with warm family scenes, good food, summer swims at the countryside dacha, good friends, professional educations and jobs, and all-around solid bourgeois experiences, hardly marred by living without democracy, civil rights, or economic plenty.

A couple of Marinina's main characters, Tamara, the hairdresser daughter of Major Golovin, and her friend Aella, the daughter of a Greek communist refugee who becomes a famous plastic surgeon in Moscow, spend most of their time sporting European acquisitions to the wide-eyed approval of all in attendance. So Tamara's recommendation for her sister Liuba's wedding dress and hair style were from the pages of the West German magazine, Burda.Footnote ¹²⁸ Liuba's father, the idealistic Soviet police officer, rejected Tamara's advice, instead, insisting Liuba wear a “good Soviet dress.” Aella's appearance at Liuba's wedding was a real sensation, “more captivating than the sloppy bride in her provincial dress … Her present of linen had been brought back from England by a Central Committee member. Let everyone envy her Italian dress, English shoes, and wonderful jewelry.”Footnote ¹²⁹ The police major's son, Rodik, was a fan of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and got his English records as gifts from Aella.Footnote ¹³⁰ Aella's last collection of gifts for Liuba and Rodik included a Finnish coat, American blue jeans, Canadian shirts, Austrian underwear, but a Soviet fur coat.Footnote ¹³¹

In sum, Russian common sense is at odds with elite neoliberal discourse, and is consistent with the objective outcome one can observe: a Russia firmly planted in the semi-periphery of Western hegemony.