Window on Eurasia

Russia Needs Family Dynasties Not Regional Clans, Russian Nationalist Says

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 3, 2006 – Since 1917, Russians have found it difficult to
organize political successions because their country has had regionally
based clans rather than family dynasties based on blood ties as was the
case in the tsarist period and is, a Russian nationalist insists,
increasingly typical of capitalist countries in the West.

“In the Soviet period as at present,” Aleksandr Yeliseyev argues in
an essay posted online last week, “political clans have been based
not on the family principle but on a territorial one.” That pattern has
an historical explanation, he insists: “among the Slavs, the territorial
principle has ominated over the familial” unlike in Europe.

Not only does that weaken the country’s government by encouraging
competition within elites all the time, but he says it ensures that the
country is especially at risk when changing from one leader to another,
something family-based clans but not regionally-grounded ones can
faciliate.

Yeliseyev does concede that the regionally based clans have had two
advantages: On the one hand, they have helped to limit “oligarchic
appetites.” And on the other, they have prompted the aristocratic
elite to focus on cultural affairs, something that has benefited Russia
culturally even while weakening it politically.

In his essay, Yeliseyev traces the history of regionally based clans in
Soviet and post-Soviet times, when most leaders were tied to groups
from this or that part of the country, before advancing his argument that
“today it is time for Russia to begin to think about how to begin
gradually to reestablish family-based political clans.”

Unless, the country takes this step, he continues, Russians “will
always lose out to the aristocratic West” where family dynasties have
played such a role in the economy and politics and find itself “at
best on its periphery” rather than at the center of world
developments.

Unfortunately, Yeliseyev says, most Russians now have a very negative
image of all clans because of their experience with regionally based
ones. Some Russians view clans and a clan-based political system as
“a survival of the past.” Others pont to what is going on in the Central
Asian republics where clans are in fact “a brake on development.”

But if there are clans like those of the Rashidovs and Kunayaevs –
two Central Asian leaders – Yeliseyev notes, there are also clans like
those of the Bushes in the United States and the Nehrus and Gandhis of
India. And in both of those countries, family-based clans have played a
positive role.

In India, these family clans have been integrated into the country’s
political system in such a way that they have promoted economic
development not only overall but in the information technology sector
that is certain to be increasingly important in the future.

Thus, Russians should keep in mind, he suggests, that some clans are
good and others are bad, and they should “begin talking about what
the real possibilities are” for the development of family-based clans in
their own country, something that even Yeliseyev their advocates
believes won’t happen soon.

At the very best, he says, Russia will likely have to wait “a
generation under conditions of relative stability and social peace”
for the kind of clans that are powering development in India and the
U.S. to emerge and guarantee a brighter future for the Russian economy
and hence the country as a whole.