Window on Eurasia

For Russians, Force without Ideology Increasingly Illegitimate

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 25, 2006 – The naked use of force by Russian officials and businessmen represents not the decay from the law and order of Soviet times as many think but rather an advance on those times because Russians increasingly view the use of force without an ideological cover as illegitimate, according to a leading Moscow philosopher.

And that in turn, Vladimir Kantor argues in the current issue of
“Slovo/Word,” opens the door to the possibility that they will
insist on force being restrained by law rather than simply redirected
according to a new ideological paradigm as in the past

[http://magazines.russ.ru/slovo/2006/51/ka31.html].

Kantor examines the ways in which first Russian and then Soviet leaders
used various ideological claims to cover their pursuit of power and
even personal gain. And he argues that “the secret of totalitarianism is
the use of ideas for the achievement of [the Bolsheviks’] completely
practical, non-ideological and criminally punishable goals.”

Indeed, he continues, “totalitarianism, by covering itself with
ideas, conceals its criminal essence. More than that, it acquires what appear
to be entirely legal aspects and thus social-political legitimacy.”
But if one examines what the totalitarians do as opposed to what they
say they were doing, this criminal dimension becomes obvious.

The Red Terror of the early Bolsheviks, documented in such detail by
historial S.P. Mel’gunov, reflected not the supposedly glorious
ideological gains that the Communists proclaimed but rather the
immediate “material interests” of the Chekists and the Party
leadership as well.

Mel’gunov documents the fact that the Bolsheviks, well in advance of
the Nazis “pulled out the gold fillings” of their victims and stole
the property of their opponents to support what was often an extremely
lavish lifestyle, one that allowed them to live very differently from
the rest of the population and thus become “a state within a
state.”

As long as their ideological cover was in place, Kantor continues, the
Bolsheviks had little to fear. Indeed, as the historical record shows,
they did not fear “ideological” opponents who challenged them in
the realm of ideas but rather those who were capable of “independent”
thought, of comparing what the Bolsheviks said with what they did.

When the Communist ideology began to collapse, Mikhail Gorbachev and
his allies tried to introduce “an imitation of freedom” as a new
ideological cover. But they failed, not only because this step ignored
the power of national liberation movements but also because it opened
the door to a further examination of what Bolshevism in fact was.

And consequently, the Soviet system and the state within which it had
been contained collapsed, Kantor continues. And given rising
educational levels, the post-Soviet state faced a far more difficult challenge in
re-ideologizing the political system and thus maintaining the
relationship between state, ideas and force that had existed.

But those who had grown up in the Soviet system continued in many
cases, Kantor insists, to engage in criminal activities and even to be
supported in this by parts of the electorate which could not imagine
living in country whose system was not justified by ideology or some
kind of national idea.

One consequence of this development was that many Russians have come to
blame attempts to establish democracy and free market capitalism for
the rise in crime and violence when in fact it is simply the case that
these have been “privatized” and “de-ideologized” – that is
deprived of the cover under which they had functioned in the past.

And another consequence is that ever more Russians now view such crimes
and those who engage in them as fundamentally “illegitimate.” While
that has led some to back a partial return to the past, a mood that
President Vladimir Putin has exploited to the full, it has led others
to conclude that such criminal use of force is simply wrong.

In the short term, those who seek a little temporary safety by a kind
of return to the past may gain the upper hand, Kantor suggests, but in the
longer haul, the shifts in public attitudes about force without an
ideological cover may open the way for Russia to escape the syndrome it
has been caught in for much of the last millenium.

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