Window on Eurasia

Looking Back to the Russian Who Invented ‘The Party of Power’

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 10, 2006 – Each number of the Russian journal “Kontinent” features extraordinarily detailed review essays about articles about politics, history, and philosophy that have appeared in Russia during of the previous three months, often in magazines whose contents are not readily available on the Internet.

The current issue, available at
[http://magazines.russ.ru/continent/2006/128/], features reviews of a
large number of such articles. Among the ones especially worthy of note
because of what they contain are the following three:

The Russian Policeman Who Invented the “Party of Power.” A Russian
did invent the concept of “the party of power,” historian Yuri
Pivovarov writes in an article in “Polis,” no. 1 (2006), but it was
not a post-Soviet Russian but rather one of the most notorious police
officials of the late tsarist period, Dmitriy Trepov.

Trepov, who served at various points as Moscow’s police chief, St.
Petersburg governor general, and deputy interior minister, won a
footnote in history by telling the troops under his command in October
1905 not to use blanks or to spare bullets in putting down
worker protests.

But Pivovarov says that Trepov also should be remembered as the man
behind the idea of a party of power. Trepov specifically called for
setting up a party consisting not of those who subscribed to a
particular program but rather of senior officials so as to use this
nominally democratic political form to resist the democratic
aspirations of other groups.

In his article, Pivovarov also makes two other observations of note. On
the one hand, he suggests that the state-centric nature of Russian
history means that authoritarianism and Russian revolutions are two
sides of the same coin. And on the other, he argues that corruption in
the past and now helps to facilitate the redistribution of assets, and
as such serves as a kind of “plasma” within which conflicts occur.

The Role of Empire in Russian Life. In an article in
“Obozrevatel’,” no. 2 (2006), S. Shatirov and V. Pavlenko argue
that Russia’s future will be secured only if it returns to its
spiritual and geopolitical roots, something they describe as “the
Byzantine Orthodox tradition.”

That tradition, they suggest, includes not only a commitment to empire
as a higher form of existence than a nation state but also “the
restoration of ‘the unique to Russia vertical-integration form of
administration and the personification of all-national leadership
(Stalin and Putin.)”

“Variants of the Leninist, Khrushchevite, Brezhnevite or even more
Gorbachevite and Yeltsinite experience,” they suggest, “are
incompatible with the imperial context” and therefore fatal for
Russia because they involve either narrow nationalism or a too-broad
internationalism.

And finally, they argue, Russia will be able to achieve this
“recovery of the future” only by borrowing from the West only what it needs to
build the state and limiting Western influence by forming an alliance
“with Islam and other Eastern cultures.”

Why Russia Needs a Miracle. Issue no. 1-2 (2006) of “Svobodnaya
mysl’-XXI” features a conversation between Moscow historian Yuri
Afanas’yev and Orthodox Father Georgiy Kochetkov. Afanas’yev argues
that the underlying causes of Russia’s misfortunes are to be found in
two unresolved contradictions.

On the one hand, he suggests, Russia has sought expansion without
limits and without regard to the rights of the individual human person. And on
the other, it has developed the power of state to the point that the
country’s political arrangements are in permanent contradiction with
the needs of society.

As a result, “the government has become ever more pitiless. And
society has ever more been converted into a false, oppressed mass
deprived of its human dignity.” To escape this contradiction,
Afanas’yev says, will require “a miracle” rather than the working
out of normal politics.

Father Kochetkov implicitly agrees and argues that the Russian Orthodox
Church is in a position to facilitate just such a miracle, a
possibility that he calls on Afanas’yev and others who remain pessimistic about
the fate of Russia not only to recognise but also to support.

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