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Gordon Hahn - Russias Revolution from Above, 1985-2000: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime

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Book:
Russias Revolution from Above, 1985-2000: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime
Author:
Gordon Hahn
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Routledge
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Books / Politics
Year:
2018
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The fall of the Soviet communist regime in 1991 offers a challenging contrast to other instances of democratic transition and change in the last decades of the twentieth century. The 1991 revolution was neither a peaceful revolution from below as occurred in Czechoslovakia nor a negotiated transition to democracy like those in Poland, Hungary, or Latin America. It was not primarily the result of social modernization, the rise of a new middle class, or of national liberation movements in the non-Russian union republics. Instead, as Gordon Hahn argues, the Russian transformation was a bureaucrat-led, state-based revolution managed by a group of Communist Party functionaries who won control over the Russian Republic (RSFSR) in the mid-1990s.Hahn describes how opportunistic Party and state officials, led by Boris Yeltsin, defected from the Gorbachev camp and proceeded in 1990-91 to dismantle the institutions that bound state and party. These revolutionaries from above seized control of political, economic, natural and human resources, and then separated the party apparatus from state institutions on Russian Republic territory. With the failed August 1991 hard-line coup, Yeltsin banned the Communist Party and decreed that all Union state organs, including the KGB and military were under RSFSR control. In Hahns account, this mode of revolutionary change from above explains the troubled development of democracy in Russia and the former Soviet republics.Hahn shows how limited mobilization of the masses stunted the development of civil societies and the formation of political parties and trade unions with real grass roots. The result is a weak society unable to nudge the state to concentrate on institutional reforms society needs for the development of a free polity and economy. Russias Revolution from Above goes far in correcting the historical record and reconceptualizing the Soviet transformation. It should be read by historians, economists, political scientists, and Russia area scholars.

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Russias Revolution from Above

1985-2000

Russias Revolution from Above

Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime

Gordon M. Hahn

First published 2002 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2001054204

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hahn, Gordon M.

Russias revolution from above, 1985-2000 : reform, transition, and revolution in the fall of the Soviet communist regime / Gordon M. Hahn.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7658-0049-7 (alk. paper)

1. Soviet UnionPolitics and government1985-2000. 2. Russia (Federation)Politics and government1991- I. Title.

LDK288.H33 2001

947.0854-dc212001054204

ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0049-7 (hbk)

This book is dedicated to:
My Parents, Gordon and Carol Hahn
my wife Marina
my son Gordon III
my tyosha Karina
my test Mark and his novaya supruga Veronika
and my grandparents Nicholas and Dorothy Lombardy

Contents

CC	Central Committee
CP	Communist Party
CPSU	Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Gorkom	Gorodskoi komitet (City Party Committee)
GKChP	Gosudarstvennyi komitet chrezvychainnogo polozheniya (State Emergency Situation Committee)
ID	International Department
Ispolkom	Ispolnitelnoi komitet (Executive Committee of a soviet)
KGB	Komitet gosudarstennoi bezopasnosti (Kommittee for State Security)
MosGor	Kom Moskovskii gorodskii komitet (Moscow City Party Committee)
MVD	Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del (Ministry of Internal Affairs)
OrgOtdel	Otdel partiinnoi organizatsii i kadrovoi raboty (CPSU CC Party Organization and Cadre Work Department)
Raikom	Raionnyi komitet (District Party Committee)
Reskom	Respublikanskoi komitet (Republic Party Committee)
RSFSR	Rossiiskaya Sovetskaya Federativnaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika (The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic)
UD	Upravleniye del (Administration of Affairs) of the CPSU CC
USSR	The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

This present book is an attempt to understand what was the most important case of political change in the last decade of the twentieth century, if not in the century itself: the sudden, and to some, surprising demise of the Soviet communist regime and state in 1991 and the rise of an illiberal post-Soviet Russia stifled by a weak electoral democracy and cleptocratic capitalism. It is an attempt to elucidate the multi-causality, contingency, and factoral complexity that produced the unintended revolutionary outcome of Mikhail Gorbachevs reform program known as perestroika.

In thinking about the fall of the Soviet communist regime and the collapse of the Soviet Union, political scientists have tended to put the theoretical cart before the empirical horse. This regrettable practice is an outcome of political sciences infatuation with formal theory. Academic fashion pressures many young scholars to rush to plug recent historical events or data points (as the science reduces them to) into the theories that dominate the extant literature and dictate who gets the much coveted tenure-track positions in university political science departments, leaving time-consuming empirical approaches and possibilities for new theory-building by the wayside. Post-Soviet Rusologists and comparative political scientists alike began immediately to plug the fall of the Soviet regime into the proto-theories of democratization and even more problematically transitology, largely eschewing theories of revolutionary change, let alone the present books more exotic model of revolution from above. The present book presents a conceptualization of the Soviet communist regime and state by applying it to various theories of regime change, but it does not do so by drawing on selective data in a rush to develop presently popular theories.

Political scientists rarely grace the halls of archives, foreign or domestic. Rational choice theorists seem to consider the idea as preposterous as the learning of foreign languages and cultures. Opinion surveys, an important tool for political scientists, are useful for studying open societies contemporaneously, but are a blunt instrument for studying totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies and virtually useless for historiographical investigation. I take another approach. This book is informed by three years of living and traveling in the USSR and Russia, more than a decade of careful research, including interviews and three years of archival research into the politics, broadly conceived, of the Soviet Union and its post-Soviet successor states, especially Russia. I have attempted to cover the empirical lay of the land thoroughly before constructing what will hopefully be considered a sturdy, if still incomplete structure housing a very different theoretical conceptualization of the great Soviet transformationa civilian bureaucrat-led revolution from above.

Besides the fields structural and methodological pitfalls, there is another problem clouding the lens through which we might get a clear focus on the nature and causes of the Soviet demise. A good part of the old sovietological community argued that the Soviet communist regime was unreformable. The integral and rigid nature of the Soviet system and its supporting ideology were writ large, according to some analysts, such that the system could not and would not undergo substantive change. This view has its counterpart in the early (and not so early) Gorbachev era: Gorbachev was no reformer, and perestroika was no more than the next KGB disinformation campaign designed to lower the Wests guard against the advance of international communism. In post-Soviet analysis the USSR is viewed as having been incapable of transforming into a new form of rule by way of transition, and the new Russia is seen as not so new, destined to revert to its authoritarian and Asiatic past and fail in its quest to become a member of the community of democratic states, the globalizing free market, and a re-united Europe. This book concludes that the jury is still out on post-Soviet Russias transformation and offers an explanation as to why.

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