Searching for Russia's Future from Its Past

VOICEOVER
Welcome to Melbourne University Up Close, a fortnightly podcast of research, personalities and cultural offerings of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Up Close is available on the web at upclose.unimelb.edu.au.

JENNIFER COOK
Hello and welcome to Up Close coming from the University of Melbourne, Australia. I’m Jennifer Cook and in today’s episode we’re asking just how well is Russia positioned to cope in an evolving and uncertain world order. US Vice President, Joe Biden, recently said that Russia had to make some very difficult calculated decisions about its future. With a shrinking population base, Biden said they have a withering economy. They have a banking sector infrastructure that’s not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years. They’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.

So in this episode we’re asking to what extent is Russia’s future hostage to its past and with us to discuss these issues is the Vice President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in Victoria, Leslie Rowe, who was Australian Ambassador to the Russian Federation in Moscow from 2002 to 2005 when he retired from the Foreign Service. Joining him is Leslie Holmes who has been, since 1998, the Professor of Political Science at the School of Social and Political Science here at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a past president of both the International Council for Central and East European Studies and the Australasian Association for Communist and Post-Communist Studies. Professor Holmes’s research focuses on post-communism, especially in Central and Eastern Europe with an interest in official corruption and organised crime. Gentlemen, welcome to Up Close.

LES ROWE
Thank you very much.

LESLIE HOLMES
Good to be here.

JENNIFER COOK
Now, Leslie Holmes, if I could begin by asking you to what extent is policy-making in Russia informed by history and historical views of its own culture? What I’d like to get an insight into here is just how far back are policy-makers taking their cues.

LESLIE HOLMES
I think we have to distinguish what’s actually happening within decision-making bodies and how it is presented to the public. I think the reference to the past is more often when you’re presenting your decisions to the public and you’re wanting to show continuity or not. It depends what the particular decision is. I think that as with any political system within the main political decision-making bodies a lot of the pressure will be contemporary party politics, the so-called tandem relationship between the President, Medvedev, and the Prime Minister, Putin. These contemporary realities, I think, within the confines of decision-making bodies are probably more significant.

JENNIFER COOK
So are they using the past as leverage to sell it to the people? Is that what you’re saying?

LESLIE HOLMES
Absolutely. When it suits them, they will refer it to the past and when it doesn’t, they won’t. And of course it depends which part of the past they want to bring up.

JENNIFER COOK
What sort of issues of the past would they tend to gravitate to? Could you give us some examples? What would fire their imagination? What would they use to try and sell to the people? And what would they avoid as well?

LESLIE HOLMES
One of the things is when Russia was great. We mustn’t forget that in 1991 when the USSR was dissolved, that country was a superpower and had been recognised as a superpower by pretty much the whole world for decades. So one of the things that they like to talk about is how they’re going to make Russia great again and in that sense they’re harking back to the past. The kinds of things they want to avoid are the excesses of the Stalin period. That’s a tricky one because there are aspects of Stalin that they know are still popular and that they want to focus on, but in terms of the terror and so on, obviously they want to steer clear. The current president, Medvedev, has made it clear that he wants to turn Russia into a rule of law state and that’s very, very different from the kind of arrangement that existed in Stalin’s time.

JENNIFER COOK
Has there been a whitewashing of the Stalin era?

LESLIE HOLMES
A whitewashing is one way of putting it. Selective presentation, yes. Often it’s because of popular demand. There’s a lot of citizens who still admire Stalin, partly because he was a strong leader, partly because they see him as someone who helped to create that superpower. This is something that appeals to a lot of Russians. They feel proud of that past.

JENNIFER COOK
Exactly and also putting World War II effort, that huge effort, on a pedestal as something to be admired and valued as part of their history.

LESLIE HOLMES
Absolutely and it’s interesting that the Russians themselves don’t usually call it the Second World War. They call it the Great Patriotic War, which is a very clear symbol, clear indication, of they way that they’re playing on patriotism, or even maybe nationalism, to go here, what is after all still a very large population, 150 million, but spread over such a huge area and you need something to cohere people.

JENNIFER COOK
Leslie Rowe.

LES ROWE
Yes. Within the Russian psyche, I suppose, there is an enormous regard for the Russian contribution during the Second World War not withstanding the fact that Stalin probably was personally responsible – (a) he was responsible for the pact with Hitler; (b) he was responsible for the dreadful carnage that took place at places like Stalingrad. He is nonetheless regarded as the strong leader who enabled Russia to play a defining role in the conclusion of the Second World War, the Great Patriotic War. They don’t believe that we in the west have ever given Russia the credit that is due for the role that Russia played. If you go back in the history of the Second World War, if the Nazis had not got bogged down in the Russian campaign, events might’ve turned out very differently.

If I just pick up one of the points you made earlier in relation to what events do Russians dwell on in history and certainly war is one of those things. If you think back, the Russians still talk with horror about the Mongol invasions where for 300 years the Russian heartland was under the control of Mongols who’d swept out of Central Asia. They are also very mindful, of course, of the fact that Napoleon’s troops got as far as Moscow and burnt Moscow. The Nazis got about 20, 25 kilometres outside Moscow and were stopped. So they do have a sense of having been victims in the past and this I think is an underlying factor in their whole approach to strategic policy in terms of developing barriers against would be aggressors.

LESLIE HOLMES
In terms of invasions, the other one that occurs to me and that they’re aware of is immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution when a number of Western powers were considering invading. That’s also in their minds.

LES ROWE
Including Australia.

LESLIE HOLMES
Including Australia.

LES ROWE
Yes. One point I did mean to mention earlier when we were talking about the effect of the war, one thing that is really striking when you live in Russia is to see weddings taking place. In Moscow, brides and grooms and the wedding parties come into Red Square and they will then go to the war memorial on the other side of the Kremlin and lay wreathes and that happens everywhere in Russia, that’s the bride leaves her bridal wreath.

JENNIFER COOK
For the fallen soldiers?

LES ROWE
For the fallen soldiers.

JENNIFER COOK
That’s extraordinary.

LESLIE HOLMES
Talking about statistics and to show that this isn’t fading at all, I just saw some survey results from earlier this year, 2009, in which approximately 66 per cent of the respondents said that they think that Russia essentially won the war and didn’t need any Western help and only about a third of Russians considered that the help from the West was critical.

JENNIFER COOK
That there was anyone else involved in the war apart from them; they single-handedly won it…

LESLIE HOLMES
Yep, they basically think they won it. It’s an interesting perception.

LES ROWE
Well it reflects the fact of course that history books were written by the Communist Party and that those elements dealing with the war have barely been changed. So to the extent that people have a view of the past, it’s a view that’s been handed on.

JENNIFER COOK
You’re listening to Up Close and we’re coming to you from the University of Melbourne, Australia where I’m talking with Professor Leslie Holmes and Leslie Rowe about Russia and its past and its future direction and how we can possibly understand one more by examining the other. Now Leslie Rowe, as a former ambassador to the Russian Federation, it’s been said recently in the Western media that there’s been a return to cold war thinking. Could you tell us what this means and has the Cold War ever truly ended, do you think? And I’m thinking here of Obama’s reference to Putin having one foot in the Cold War.

LES ROWE
Well I think it’s a bit misleading to say that we’ve got cold war thinking returning. What that is shorthand for I think is the fact that the Russians, after having in their view endured a period in the ‘90s when they were pretty much on their knees after the fall of the Soviet Union and the terrible period for most Russians of the economic privations of the privatisation process, the transition from a centrally planned Communist economy to something that wasn’t quite as centrally planned and the uncertainties and there was a lot of illegal activity, people weren’t paid, the notion that you would be looked after by the state from kindergarten to the grave finished. Also it was a period when Russians looking back feel that they were brought to their knees by the Americans particularly, by Western interests. It’s a bit misleading of course to see the current situation as a return to cold war. The Cold War was an ideological struggle and there is no ideology distinguishing Russia and other countries these days.

JENNIFER COOK
Yes, it seems a particularly emotionally charged expression to use doesn’t it, of Obama to sort of throw that out there, because immediately in Western minds it conjures up all kinds of fears. That brings me to the question, this consciousness of history. How does this consciousness of history in Russia, do you think Les Holmes, compare with that in the West?

LESLIE HOLMES
I think it’s stronger than in most countries. There are western countries which focus very much on their history still, often to learn from it. Germany is a classic example. They’re still very, very aware of their Nazi past and are constantly still apologising for that. The Americans do in a sense in ideology and the way they talk about the continuity and the strength of their constitution which is over 200 years old and they’re very proud of the fact that they don’t actually change the constitution; they just pass amendments every so often. So I think plenty of Western countries do focus on the past but I personally don’t think that many would focus in the way the Russians do, because we haven’t lost as much in some ways.

LES ROWE
No, and one of the reasons, I guess too, is that for example in Western Europe the European Union as it’s evolved since the Second World War has taken a lot of the sting out of old animosities and antagonisms. You do of course have countries, like in the Balkans, where history hangs very heavily and I would suspect that in the former Warsaw Pact states in Eastern Europe there is a real sense – an apprehension. And this is one of the elements that we need to take into account when we look at the relationship between Russia and Europe. Those countries that felt that they were under the yoke of the Soviet Union are much more likely to be wary of contemporary Russia than perhaps the French or the Italians or even the Germans.

JENNIFER COOK
Can you speculate perhaps on how Russia’s not coming to terms with or only up to those difficult, those unpleasant aspects of its past, what effect that will have on its future social and political trajectory?

LESLIE HOLMES
They do need to address this because, unlike a lot of other post-communist states, they haven’t been through a proper, as it were, a cleansing phase. There’s something called decommunisation and lustration which is basically about looking at people’s pasts and seeing who overstepped the mark in terms of working with the security forces and so on and, you know, East German border guards and so on. Other countries have been through that and they can move on and face the future. I think Russia still hasn’t addressed a lot of issues from the past. We mentioned earlier about the Stalin era. I think there are still an awful lot of people who don’t appreciate just how awful, how much terror there was, particularly in the ‘30s but right through til Stalin’s death in 1953, just like there are other countries that need to address their past. In my opinion Japan’s a good example. If they really want to be accepted by the rest of the world they’ve got to accept the good points and the bad points of their own past, deal with them and move on.

LES ROWE
But I think one of the real differences between Russia and almost anywhere else is that everybody in Russia was caught up, over generations, in this communist experiment. After all, Russia became communist in 1918 and was communist until 1991, whereas the Eastern European countries had been, to varying degrees, capitalist until the Second World War. So that there were people in those societies who had a remembrance of what it was like to live in a democratic society and were therefore much better equipped to deal with the consequences of the ending of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rest of it than were the Russians. When Russia had to come to terms with no longer being the principal element in the Soviet Union, it had to deal with a massive set of problems and the people of course who were directing this process were themselves communists. There was nobody else. So they had no, as it were, first-hand experience really of how to build a non-communist society and of course the process was pretty chaotic and it remains pretty chaotic. I think it’s going to take a very long time for Russia to sort its way through these processes. I know that in the 1990s there were a number of human rights organisations, Memorial was a major one, which set about trying to undertake these truth and reconciliation processes and to some extent they had some success. But there are a lot of people who simply don’t want to know about it. It’s happened; don’t dig up the past.

JENNIFER COOK
Just leave it be.

LES ROWE
Leave it be.

JENNIFER COOK
You’re listening to Up Close and we’re coming to you from the University of Melbourne, Australia. I’m Jennifer Cook and today’s episode I’m talking with Professor Leslie Holmes and Leslie Rowe about Russia, its past and its possible future. Now, George Friedman points out that in Russia the status of the economy doesn’t historically correlate to Russian military power. That’s something I find quite fascinating. Les Holmes, could you take that a bit further for us?

LESLIE HOLMES
Absolutely. During the Stalin era in particular, the focus was on building up the military. A lot of people think he was brilliant in predicting and saying in 1931 if we don’t build up our military forces within 10 years we’re in trouble and of course 10 years later in march the Nazis. Then thereafter there was this huge emphasis on the military, on heavy industry and so on and it skewed – that’s the term economists use – it skewed the economy. In other words it made it very imbalanced and one of the problems that post-communist Russia has faced is trying to redress this imbalance that the later Soviets tried to do it and never succeeded in any satisfactory way. It’s coming good but the trouble is that a lot of people associate, equate, military power with the pride of the nation and they feel if we’re going to be impoverished Russians at least we can take pride and that’s dangerous for the rest of us because they will put up with an enormous amount. Russians, one thing that is very marked about Russian culture is their tolerance level. They put up with things that other countries would’ve – in the 1990s they weren’t coming out on the streets in the way that other countries did, Poles for instance. If you look at the last 40, 50 years, whenever there’s a major problem they come out and demonstrate. Russians are much, much calmer and much more tolerant but in return they want that pride in their country.

JENNIFER COOK
Let’s move now, Leslie Holmes, to your research where you’ve done a lot of study into official corruption and I’m very interested in knowing what attitudes and what’s the bedrock that this can take hold and become part of a culture?

LESLIE HOLMES
Well President Medvedev himself has said on numerous occasions that corruption is just about the biggest problem in the country, that it’s ingrained in the system. He himself in a recent speech said this is largely to do with a historical tradition in Russia. Now he has done something that neither Putin nor Yeltsin was able to do, which is he’s pushed through new laws, anticorruption laws. We’ve got the first ever definition, proper definition in legal terminology, of what corruption means. However, despite the fact that he’s passed all these laws, he himself said in July 2009, just a few weeks ago, that the progress made so far in the last 12 months is minimal. He said it could and probably will take decades to overcome that legacy.

JENNIFER COOK
Could you give us an insight into or some examples of the sort of corruption, the kind of practices that go on?

LESLIE HOLMES
Another former leader we haven’t mentioned yet is Gorbachev and Gorbachev also gave a very interesting speech earlier this year, early in 2009, where he said the two biggest problems were bureaucracy and corruption and they’re closely linked. One of the things that Medvedev has done just this year, 2009, is to supplement his original 2008 legislation on corruption. He’s now got a new law going through about regulation, saying that there are problems with the way the bureaucracy has too much discretion, basically, and that he wants to look at all new laws to see where there are potential loopholes. Because he said unless we get the bureaucrats under control we’re not going to get corruption under control. The bureaucrats is one area. Small enterprises, for instance, are heavily controlled by bureaucrats. Very often they come along and they look at your fire escapes and say they’re inadequate and of course they’re expecting a bribe. The other main area of corruption is the police force. The level of trust by the average Russian citizen in the police is amongst the lowest in the world. The police in all countries have some problems of trust amongst the population but it’s, I think off the top of my head, I seem to think it was three per cent in the last survey I saw.

JENNIFER COOK
Leslie Rowe, what was your experience when you were in the country?

LES ROWE
Well I suppose I was in a privileged position. I didn’t, happily, never had to get involved in it but no, no we didn’t get people offering to check the fire escapes but – well I did have one. It wasn’t a case of corruption at all, but I lost a suitcase or a suitcase was damaged at the airport. In order to get a report submitted for that to be repaired I had to get about 15 signatures and the signatures had to be in exactly the right section of the form. Each had to be signed or countersigned and if it was out of the alignment it was invalid; if it wasn’t signed by the right people it was invalid. So when you’ve got that sort of insane bureaucracy then the opportunities for corruption are that much greater. It’s exactly the point that Leslie was making. This goes back. The Russian novelists of the 19th century talked about corruption. The corruption within the Tsarist bureaucracy was probably as intense as it was. During the communist period if you wanted to get to see the doctor you took a chicken along or your sister gave mathematics lessons to their children. There was a vast informal sector of the economy which dealt with this. Russians were very inventive in getting around the problems of the communist system but of course it involves petty corruption. But In addition to petty corruption of course there has been some enormous corruption, very high level corruption and that saps people’s faith in the system.

JENNIFER COOK
Let’s now focus on Russia going forward. So Leslie Holmes, what does the future hold for Russia?

LESLIE HOLMES
One of the things they’ve got to do is get their economy under control because Putin was very lucky because of the oil spike. But they haven’t been investing in a serious way in alternative sources of income. Now admittedly Russia has these enormous stocks of oil and gas and we’ve seen how they’ll use that for leverage. But that’s irritating other countries. Other countries are now looking for alternative sources, alternative pipelines and so on and so forth. One of the things they really must do is get that under control. Medvedev himself, the current president, has said that the rule of law is what must be introduced. It’s very interesting that Milton Friedman, one of the great gurus of neoliberal economics and so on, in 2002 – I don’t know if you would call it recanted but he certainly corrected himself to some extent. He said in the 1990s I’d been telling the post-communist states, including Russia, privatise, privatise, privatise. He said I now realise that I should’ve said before you do, introduce the rule of law and that’s definitely what Medvedev’s trying to do. Medvedev is also trying to improve the lot of smaller political parties. So democracy needs to be strengthened and I think Medvedev knows that, but it’ll be democracy à la Russia.

One thing we haven’t mentioned in terms of history is the influence and the debate between the so-called slavophiles and the westernisers, a 19th century concept but which still has echoes, ramifications, today. Are we sui generis, are we unique or are we part of Europe and this is something that they still haven’t resolved, that they will have to decide their position in the world vis-à-vis Europe, vis-à-vis China. They still haven’t been admitted to the World Trade Organisation and this is causing some consternation and some back-flips on policy. That has to be sorted out. But I think in terms of the average Russian, what they want is to be respected again. It’s so easy to forget or not appreciate just how significant 1991 was. I call it the quintuple loss. All of a sudden they lose the Cold War. They lose the so-called outer empire. They lose the inner empire, in other words the Soviet Union itself. They lose their role as a model of socialism, the home of socialism.

JENNIFER COOK
That’s a crisis of identity.

LESLIE HOLMES
Absolutely and they lose their role as a superpower. All of those in such a short space. You look at other empires. Okay, some of them lost things very quickly at the end of the First World War but in recent times that’s unprecedented. That identity is what they’ve got to get together again. Unfortunately some Russians now, particularly some young Russians, are going to extreme right-wing politics. I’m not saying it’s only in Russia. It’s in other parts of Europe unfortunately. That has to be kept an eye on.

LES ROWE
It’s just worth noting that however the bad the picture might appear of what’s happening in Russia, Russia probably now is about as democratic as it has ever been in its history. It’s not the democracy that we would want but it’s not inconceivable that it will turn into something a bit more like, if you like, a more managed form of democracy that exists in some countries. Just one other point that I’d like to pick up is what is its future and what are the issues that it has to deal with, one of which is a declining population which potentially could turn out to be quite catastrophic. The population of Russia, I think was about 149 million in 1991. It’s now down to about 143 or 144. Some of the most pessimistic projections have it going down to 100 million by the middle of the century and if you look at the size of the country, it’s such an enormous country it just throws up all those questions of sustainability and defendability, how you develop your economy, how you develop your society when you’re not renewing your population. Also that the Slavic, the Russian if you like, the real Russians as they see them, have a much lower birth rate than do many of the ethnic minorities and particularly the Muslim minority. So that as the population goes down, the Russians, real Russians, they are being replaced by people who don’t share the necessary, the core cultural and historical background of the Slavic majority.

JENNIFER COOK
So very complicated indeed.

LES ROWE
So very complicated.

JENNIFER COOK
Very complex, isn’t it? Gentlemen, thank you both for your time today. I’ve been speaking with Leslie Holmes, Professor Leslie Holmes, and also Leslie Rowe about Russia and how it’s poised to face its future and how its past has shaped its image of itself as a nation. Gentlemen, thank you both for your time today.

LESLIE HOLMES
Thank you.

LES ROWE
Thank you.

JENNIFER COOK
You’ve been listening to Up Close from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Relevant links, a full transcript and more information on this episode and any others can be found on our website at upclose.unimelb.edu.au. You can leave a comment on any of the Up Close episodes by clinking at the link at the bottom of the page. Melbourne University Up Close is brought to you by the Marketing and Communications Division in association with Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Up Close is created and produced by Eric van Bemmel and Kelvin Param. Our audio engineer is Ben Loveridge and our theme music was performed by Sergio Ercole. I’m Jennifer Cook. Until next time thank you for joining Up Close. Goodbye.

VOICEOVER
You’ve been listening to Melbourne University Up Close, a fortnightly podcast of research, personalities and cultural offerings of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Up Close is available on the web at upclose.unimelb.edu.au. Copyright 2009, University of Melbourne.