These two books deal with an important yet underexplored societal dimension of postcommunist political change in the former Soviet Union. Despite numerous calls for “bringing society back in,” the postcommunist literature is still heavily dominated by institutionalists and/or scholars of political economy, while many crucial research questions remain unanswered. Why do Russian citizens not actively participate in politics? What are the reasons behind the political loyalty of Russians vis-à-vis the country's authoritarian regime, and does their loyalty indicate that Russians are genuinely undemocratic? What is the nature of the relationship between the changing social structures of post-Soviet countries and their regime changes? And to what extent is the level of continuity and change among elites regarded as a key factor in determining the direction of post-Soviet political and economic reforms?
The wave of “color revolutions” of the 2000s and the “Arab Spring” after 2010 brought to the fore our need to understand the societal issues of global politics. Russia's postcommunist experience is worth further consideration for what it can contribute to that understanding. The elite-driven nature of postcommunist change occurred against a backdrop of major economic decline, the subsequent rise of the predatory state, and the major alienation of society from the political process. Indeed, the Russian experience raises numerous questions for scholars of comparative politics and political sociology. Although the books under review are both focused on explaining the postcommunist experience, they deal with different scholarly issues and utilize quite diverse research frameworks, methodologies, and data. It is no wonder that their major conclusions as well as their contributions widely differ from each other.
In Popular Support for an Undemocratic Regine, Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Neil Munro present the results of their longitudinal study, the New Russia Barometer, which was carried out in collaboration with the Levada Center, one of the most reputable Russian polling agencies. This unprecedented research project allowed scholars to create a unique data set of 18 nationwide mass surveys conducted from 1992 to 2009 using similar sampling and questionnaires. Based upon their careful and sophisticated statistical analysis of the results of these surveys, the authors focus on the nature and determinants of mass political support of the status quo political regime in Russia (which in itself drastically changed over time). To a certain extent, the current book is a follow-up to a previous study by the same group of authors, Russia Transformed: Developing Popular Support for a New Regime (2006), but the addition of new data and new dimensions of analysis makes the recent study more current and valuable.
The key argument of the authors might be summarized as follows: Despite the fact that Russian citizens do not deny democratic ideas and procedures (such as competitive elections), they endorse an authoritarian regime, which was able to build a popular basis through coercion and enticement. As scholars convincingly demonstrated, although there existed a major gap between mass democratic demands and what the elite could supply, positive perceptions about the regime's political and, especially, economic performance played a major role in the formation and persistence of attitudes favorable to the regime. In other words, material incentives rather than ideas and beliefs established the social basis of Russian authoritarianism. Also, the increasing longevity of the status quo regime diminished the availability of possible alternatives: Trends toward both hard-line authoritarianism (such as dissolution of the parliament, suspension of political parties, etc.) and fully fledged democracy seem to respondents to be unrealistic and/or unattractive, and so the status quo authoritarian regime is accepted by Russian citizens nearly by default as “the only game in town.”
This explanation, consistent with conclusions by several scholars on Russian politics (such as Timothy Colton, Henry Hale, and Daniel Treisman), looks plausible as providing an understanding of certain paradoxes of Russian politics, such as the basically positive mass evaluation of the fairness of the 2007–8 national elections, which were widely regarded as undemocratic and unfair by the expert community both in Russia and abroad. Moreover, Rose, Mishler, and Munro propose a useful tool for explaining the relative weakness of the protest behavior of Russians despite their numerous troubles, which was outlined by Graeme Robertson and other authors. They also give us a clue for understanding the “Achilles heel” of the Russian authoritarian regime, whose economic performance (and, therefore, mass support) is by and large affected by revenues from the export of hydrocarbons. Although the authors correctly point out that the global economic crisis of 2008–9 diminished the mass basis of regime support to some degree, its impact should not be overestimated.
The approach offered by Rose, Mishler, and Munro provides us with a picture of the equilibrium of Russian authoritarianism that leads to the logical conclusions of its stability and prospects for continuity, but it is a more questionable instrument for explaining and/or predicting its major changes. For example, if one were to look through these scholarly lenses at the rise of contentious politics in Russia in the wake of the 2011–12 postelection protests, one would necessarily ask: Why did previously compliant Russian citizens begin to rebel? These problems are definitely worth further exploration with the use of the New Russia Barometer and other survey data.
David Lane, in his turn, proposes an alternative framework for the analysis of post-Soviet elite changes. In Elites and Classes in the Transformation of State Socialism, he openly refutes the dominant view of the elitist school (represented by John Higley and others) with its emphasis on the key role of elite pacts and settlements as the major drivers of political transformations. He also vividly rejects the popular journalistic and scholarly perception of post-Soviet elites in Russia as a constellation of personalist clique-based networks around political leaders. Rather, Lane argues for a return to a class-based approach to the study of elites and elaborates this perspective with regard to Russia and other postcommunist countries. He identifies two major classes in the process of postcommunist elite changes, namely, the administrative class (i.e., former Soviet bureaucracy) and the acquisition class (i.e., professionals, some of whom later became new post-Soviet capitalists), and suggests that the rise of the latter (which, in his view, formed a part of the global acquisition class) became the major outcome of the transformation of former state socialism, which occurred simultaneously with major changes in global capitalism.
One might discuss the relevance and the usefulness of this explanatory scheme, but what the book certainly misses is a strong empirical analysis in favor of Lane's approach. In fact, the author refers to several surveys of the Russian elites he conducted in the early 1990s, but the problem is that these surveys are addressed merely to the context-bound set of current issues of that period (which probably is without relevance today) and cannot be regarded as robust and valid evidence for his theoretical argument. This leads to a huge and irreconcilable disjuncture between the polemical discussion in the opening chapters of the book and its less empirically sound conclusions and implications.
Lane's book seems to be more or less a collection of some of his previous articles and other writings on the subject, combined without major editorial or substantive updates and/or revisions. For example, an analysis of the 2005 mass surveys in Russia and the Ukraine (presented in Chapter 10), albeit interesting as such, poorly corresponds with the contents of the rest of the chapters. In addition, several paragraphs of the book repeat each other, and some factual errors (such as the misnaming of scholars like Philippe O'Donnell and Karl Schmitter [sic] on p. 24) are irritating.
The overall impression of both books is rather diverse. Rose, Mishler, and Munro produced what might be considered a must-read for scholars of political sociology and public opinion research both in Russia and Eurasia and beyond. As to Lane's book, its merits are not so apparent, because challenging theoretical claims are not always proven by in-depth empirical research, and the many questions it arguably raises are largely left unanswered. However, both books are thought-provoking and stimulating reading for those scholars who are interested in issues on the intersection of politics and society in various states and nations. The relatively low salience of these issues in Russia's postcommunist transformation should be considered not just an exception that proved the rule but also a “crucial case” that might shed some light on the changing nature of the societal dimension of politics around the globe. These books may be used as building blocks for a further research agenda, which would no doubt be a long and rewarding one.
