The Russia Conundrum

It has been traditional in Russian historiography to equate democracy with the European ‘West’ and autocratic despotism with the Asiatic ‘East’. It is not that we believe these stereotypes to be accurate descriptions of today’s geopolitical reality, simply that they have become shorthand in our history for the two models of governance we feel we have been torn between. Russia sits geographically at the intersection of East and West but, for 500 years, the West has been the more important influence on her. There is every likelihood, even in today’s difficult times, that Russia will cement her enduring cultural and ideological union with the Euro-Atlantic civilisation she belongs to.

Shortly before my arrest in October 2003, I reflected on the weight of Russia’s history that makes our challenge so much greater than that of Western nations. ‘Our country has a history of serfdom and slavery. A very brief exception to this ended recently,’ I wrote, referring to the democratic experiment of the 1990s. ‘And, unfortunately, the psychology of society is the psychology of serfdom. In this situation, the responsibility of a successful businessman is to support the democratic process, regardless of its potential problems. This is the moral duty of people – a duty to our own children to take part in this process.’ Despite my optimism for the future, I did not disguise or play down the damaging impact of centuries of autocratic rule in Russia, both on the political and judicial structures of the state and on the minds of the Russian people.

Regrettably, we still do not have the institutions of civil society, which would allow us to hand this function over to political parties and public organizations. For a society like ours, with a history like Russia’s, this is normal. We have to understand this, but we also have to struggle to change it. First of all, through education – preparing the future generation. We must say that we have a choice … a real choice: between people in military uniforms and a civil society. Our strength is pretty much equal. And the problem is not that one side has military uniforms and weapons while the other side has nothing. The problem is the mentality.

I set up Open Russia, to help create the missing institutions of a strong civil society and – even more importantly – to change the ‘mentality of slavery’ that I identified as holding back the nation’s progress. This is what the New York Times correspondent was referring to when he told me that Russia could never be a democracy. He was expressing a point of view known as historical determinism, or path determinism, which states that Russia’s destiny is fixed and can never be changed – that Russia’s history and the Russian mentality mean it must forever remain a despotic, centralised autocracy.

Let’s look at the historical evidence for this. It is a fact that up until the middle of the thirteenth century, the city states of Novgorod, Kiev, Pskov and elsewhere had been developing a participatory form of governance in which citizens were allowed to have their say, laws were respected and the princes who ruled them could be removed from power by the people. It wasn’t democracy as we know it today, but it was similar to what was happening in the rest of Europe. Then, in 1237, disaster struck. The Mongol hordes, highly militarised warriors from East Asia, stormed into Russian lands, capturing and enslaving the population. The Mongol Yoke would last for 240 years, disrupting Russia’s economy and setting back her development as a European state.

It is a long-accepted shibboleth of our thinking that Russia needs to be governed by the iron fist; that her vast size and ethnic, linguistic and national diversity make her unsuitable to freedom and democracy. For these reasons, even Catherine the Great, who began her reign as a champion of liberal ideas, ended up endorsing the old system of autocracy.

The possessions of the Russian Empire extend upon the globe to 32 degrees of latitude, and to 165 of longitude. The Sovereign is absolute, for no authority but the power centred in his single person can act with the vigour proportionate to the extent of such a vast dominion. The extent of the dominion requires that absolute power be vested in the one person who rules over it … All other forms of government whatsoever would not only be prejudicial to Russia, but would provoke its entire ruin.

What could be clearer? Russia, Catherine asserted, is too big and too unruly ever to be suited to democracy; only the strong hand of centralised autocracy can keep such a disparate, centripetal empire together and maintain order among her people.

For their part, the Bolsheviks were little different. They, too, imposed a despotic centralised rule that enslaved the very workers and peasants they had claimed to liberate. Writing in the 1960s, the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman compared Russia to a ‘slave girl’ held captive by Lenin’s tyrannical zealots: