The August 1998 financial crash and its aftermath shattered all conventional schemes for explaining Russian post-communism. The latter can hardly be viewed any longer as an instance of “modernization” or “transition” (however hazardous) from something blameworthy or undeveloped to something laudable or mature. The August crisis revealed that policies and strategies based on the idea of “transition” have not worked. Or, better perhaps, they “worked”, but brought about the results opposite to those they were expected to yield. “What went wrong in Russia?” - this is the popular question these days; it expresses a new awareness of Russia’s “times of trouble”.

But this question does not provide a sufficiently radical departure from the modernization/transition schemes. It still suggests that there is a right course of development, which should be followed, all current deviations from it notwithstanding. I want to oppose to this question and to all it implies politically another question, namely, “What is happening after the disintegration of Soviet modernity?” The latter question switches our attention from the laws of history to actual historical events and from uniformity to diversity - from the anticipation of some single Modernity to the analysis of multiple modernities. I want to look at Russian post-communism as a version of post-modernity  - since it was brought about by the collapse of a distinctive version of modernity known as “Soviet Communism”.

The emergence of a post-modern condition should not be understood as “an advance over the modern one” (Zygmunt Bauman). Were it so, the logic of progress would be preserved, thus making the appearance of post-modernity as something genuinely different from modernity impossible. This is important to keep in mind if we are to understand Russian post-modernity, which represents an astonishing regression in comparison with both its Soviet past and all internationally accepted standards of modern life. But this certainly cannot disqualify Russian post-communism as a post-modern condition.

Post-modernity can be interpreted benevolently as modernity turned reflectively to its own foundations and (presumably) capable of transforming them. Perhaps this mode of (self-) transformation is actually or, some time in the future, may be exemplified in certain contemporary societies. However, Soviet modernity belongs to a different type. It has exhibited little capacity for self-reflection, and its conversion into post-modernity occurred in a different way. Soviet modernity slid into its post-modern condition through a series of events that had very little, or nothing at all, to do with those modes of transformation familiar to us from modern history - revolutions from below, reforms from above, wars of national liberation, conquests by foreign powers, and so on. None of these events took place. When something like them seemed to happen, like Gorbachev’s reforms from above, known as perestroika, it turned out to be a shocking failure.

Probably the most appropriate metaphor to capture the nature of the Soviet slide into post-modernity is Jean Baudrillard’s “implosion”. The modern institutional structures that “implode”, that is, explode inwardly, are more likely to lose their meaning than to collapse physically, although the latter may happen as well. Quite often the institutions simply become “unfamiliar” both to their staff and to outsiders and are no longer recognized by them. Institutional practices begin to parody themselves and then this parody turns into the actual mode of their continued existence.

The crucial cases of  “implosion” mark the slide of Russia into post-modernity. The so-called August 1991 putsch turned the repressive organs of “the most ruthless regime”, as Soviet totalitarianism was widely known, into the jovial participants in a fantastic carnival that seemed to be masterminded by Mikhail Bakhtin rather than by the actual members of the grotesque junta. The dissolution of the “evil empire” is another example of the same kind. First, those who were reluctant to leave the empire (like the former Central Asian republics) had to be “forced to be free” and then those who yearned for independence (Chechnya) had to be repressed. Forcing to leave and forcing to stay do not represent two sides of an incomprehensible paradox. In fact, they are equally legitimate manifestations of the “imploded” power of the Center that produces agony and convulsions of the (former?) Periphery.

Another feat of “imploding” and parodying was provided by the sweeping voucher de-nationalization of the Soviet state-owned property. Officially this operation was meant to put into practice Mrs. Thatcher’s utopia of a “society of proprietors” and to boost economic efficiency. Needless to say, neither of these objectives was achieved by this swindle of incredible proportions. National labor productivity, the key indicator of economic efficiency, fell in comparison with the Soviet past by more than one-third, and the last hope for the emergence of a “society of proprietors” was irredeemably destroyed by the August crash.

Parodies and “implosions” can be brutally oppressive. This is how they are experienced whenever they are inescapably actual, whenever they are not limited, as in the contemporary West, to the realm of sensibility and to “a generation for whom scarcity seems remote, a generation preoccupied with liberty rather than necessity” (Pauline Rosenau). When post-modernity is real,  or is the dominant component of reality, it is hardly compatible with liberty, but only with the licentiousness of those who are suitably positioned in the macabre carnival and the exploitation and impoverishment of everyone else.

The slide into post-modernity means the collapse of modern life. What emerges instead is a world of simulacra, of free-floating signifiers detached from what they once signified. This is exactly what has happened in Russia in most domains of its national life.

Take, for example, the domain of politics and such a pivotal simulacrum as the Russian Federation. To begin with, the Federation has no (legal) reality whatsoever. Its supreme legislative body by a vote of 250 to 98 on March 15, 1996, renounced the earlier abrogation of the treaty that established the USSR, thus proclaiming that the USSR still exists and that Russia is an illegitimate state. However, this did not and does not bother its citizens since neither the “new Russia” nor such a pillar of democracy as the Russian parliament is taken seriously. Can people have any other attitude toward a parliament that adopts laws that blatantly contradict the federal constitution? Can they regard with respect a state whose sovereignty and independence are mocked by the existence of other sovereign and independent states on its territory (Chechnya is not the only example of such paradoxes)? Was not the importance of the constitution undermined by the president himself who sponsored the conclusion of the dubious “Federal Treaty” meant to be the foundational document of the federal state? Was not this treaty devalued later in its turn by forty “exclusive treaties” concluded separately between the Kremlin and different regions of the country? So what is the Russian Federation after all this but a free-floating signifier detached from whatever is associated in modernity with a state, sovereign or any other?

Consider the economy and the “market-oriented reforms” as another example of the collapse of (modern) life. According to the president, these reforms have been carried out unceasingly for nearly a decade. The infrastructure of the market including such key institutions as private property in capital goods, commercial banking, convertibility of national currency, unregulated trade in most of articles of public and private consumption, and so on, have been practically completed. This was confirmed internationally by the removal of Russia from the black list of nations with non-market economies (July 1998). Yet with all these achievements, two-thirds of  total national production continues to be realized outside the sphere of money circulation. 73 percent of all transactions that take place in the sector of real economy are held on the basis of barter both because of unreliability of market institutions and desirability to hide revenues and basic assets from criminal extortions. The most primitive forms of subsistence economy have been revived and flourish all over the country, serving as a source of survival for at least 42 million people, 29 percent of the population, who find themselves beneath the official poverty line.

It is not enough to say that “market-oriented reforms” actually shrank the monetarized economy and expanded modes of production that are conventionally identified as “pre-modern”, “pre-capitalist”, or “archaic”. These “reforms” also undermined such a critical cornerstone of capitalism as wage labor. What is known in Russia as “arrears on wages” means, in fact, that wage labor has to a very large extent been replaced by corvee or serf labor. This phenomenon contributed importantly to the single most impressive result of the “market-oriented reforms” -  the drop in the proportion of wages to GDP from 49 percent in 1990 to 18-20 percent in 1998. The drop continued at a faster pace after the August financial crash. From January 1998 to January 1999 national production went down by 4.5 percent, whereas the average real wage plummeted by 40 percent. During 1999 real incomes probably fell further by 15-18 percent - this time despite a modest  growth of industrial output.

It would be optimistic and naive, however, to think that the rhetoric of “market-oriented reforms” disseminated by “democratic reformers” and accepted by communists as a reality they pretend to struggle against, is just a whirlpool of signifiers referring to nothing real. If we understand reality as the result of the social processes accepted as normal in a specific context, then we can grasp how “market-oriented” rhetoric, although mirroring nothing, helps to shape and sustain the post-modern reality of Russia.

First of all, despite its intellectual poverty, it has proven its efficiency as a method of deconstructing all alternatives available in Russia so far. The elimination of alternatives reproduces one of the crucial dimensions of the (Russian) post-modern condition, namely, the closure of the future and of history. Nothing is available any longer but the present which, it goes without saying, has to be “improved”. The mood stemming from the elimination of alternatives is widespread enough in Russia to have secured Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, and this after the catastrophic war in Chechnya and after his conspicuous failure to keep any of the promises he made in 1990-91 and later. This mood was brilliantly, although involuntarily, evoked by Martin Malia in the conclusion to one of his recent articles: “The only possible policy has been tried, and it didn’t work, or at least didn’t work in the way anticipated. <...> At the same time...it is clear that someday, in some form, Russia will have to resume active marketization and privatization” (Journal of Democracy, April 1999, p.p. 45-46). According to one nation-wide poll, 34 percent of Yeltsin’s supporters said that they could not “adapt themselves to the new life”. Still, they did support his “course of reforms” because they “rejected the possibility of going backwards” and no other alternatives except this unacceptable one were visible. These people decided the outcome of the struggle in 1996!

Secondly, “market-oriented” rhetoric has shaped and circumscribed the political and ideological reaction of the opposition, rendering it impotent. Today communists and other opponents of the government focus only on the pace, scope and “grounds” of privatization, on the forms of the division of power, on social rights vis-a-vis civil and political rights, on the structure of the Federation, and on the problems of CIS. It never struck the leaders of the opposition that discussing all these matters is meaningless inasmuch as the subjects of these discussions, private property, political power, social and other rights, Federation, and so on, have already “imploded”.

The only way to change things is to escape from the post-modern condition, to remove its basic prerequisites and constituents. Theoretically these are well-known: the fusion of public and private, unbounded privatization of individual concerns, the collapse of political representation, the “death of the subject” resulting in subjectless individualism. All this, however, has been completely overlooked by the communists and the other major opponents of the “democratic reformers”, partly because of their vulgar Marxist intellectual background, which made them insensitive to the issues of this kind, and partly because their own constituency embraces individuals who are more thoroughly privatized than the rank and file of Yeltsin’s camp. After all, opinion polls indicate that among the supporters of the communist leader Gennadii Zyuganov, 60 percent believe material well-being to be of supreme importance, whereas political liberty is thought to be less valuable. Among Yeltsin’s supporters only 30 percent share this opinion.

But the incapacity of the opposition to put forward a political agenda focused on de-post-modernizing the country should also be attributed to the unprecedented novelty of the problem. Never and nowhere but in Russia has the task of de-post-modernization emerged so far as the sine qua non of national survival. Never and nowhere has the potential for anger created by the appalling degradation of national life been so efficiently defused as it has been in Russia. Observers should be perplexed by Russia’s amazing political tranquility in circumstances that would bring explosion to any modern nation. What can the opposition do if people are reluctant to protest after their average real wage has been reduced to eighty dollars a month? Massive popular protests have not been brought either by declining life expectancy, by dramatic degradation of national health care, social security and education, by apparent defenselessness of the country (of the 1.2 million members of the Russian armed forces, less than 100,000 are combat ready), by shortages of electricity and hot water, by rampant crime. Only 3 percent of the adult population of the country took part in any kind of strike in 1996-98; only 6 percent can imagine themselves participating in politically oriented actions; and only a negligible minority of this small group did in fact participate. At the same time, only 8 percent of the nation believes that the course of reform serves “the interests of the majority”.

If all these familiar modern causes of unrest and all the methods of political mobilization based on them don’t seem to operate in the post-modern condition, what can be said about post-modern politics? Its central elements -  “ironic detachment”, fluid coalitions and temporary issue-oriented alliances, ideological pastiche, the affirmation of local customs and practices at the expense of vast projects, and so on - serve in Russia to reproduce post-modernity rather than to resist it. “Ironic detachment”, for example, is exactly what characterizes political attitudes of those 70-80 percent of voters who systematically ignore the local elections that have been taking place in different regions of the country since 1996. Irony proves to be good for nothing, its only practical result being the consolidation of power by local autocrats. Like most post-modernists, these autocrats wish to abandon the universal (federal law) and are strongly in favor of local customs and practices ranging from polygamy in this region to the Soviet-style collectivism in that one, which serve to justify the cliques and clans they patronize. As for the fluidity of coalitions, it is not easy to find in Russia coalitions that are not fluid. The Communist party is one of very few exceptions. But this party is still strikingly post-modern in other respects, for example, in its ideology, which is a wonderful pastiche of Leninism, Russian Orthodox piety, liberal parliamentarism, and visionary “post-industrialism” reminiscent of the nearly forgotten writings of those whom the ideological guardians of the party used to call “bourgeois sociologists”.

Post-modern politics may have some critical edge when it confronts the still predominantly modern reality of the West. After all, despite the proliferation of all kinds of “post” hardly anybody speaks seriously about the “implosion” of capitalism, or CIA, or NATO... Post-modern politics loses its critical edge completely, however, when it finds itself in the real environment of post-modernity. Perhaps, the single most important difference between Russia and the West is (following Craig Calhoun) that in the West modernity is still so diverse that what is called post-modernity is really a subtype of the modern, whereas for Russia the opposite is true.

If this is right, several conclusions follow. Some of them are negative, pointing to what cannot happen in Russia as long as its post-modernity prevails. Some are positive, addressing in a tentative way the question of what can be done to liberate Russia from post-modernity.

The negative conclusions are as follows.

The spontaneous development of Russia will never be able to transform its present criminal capitalism into a productive capitalism. In Russia, capitalism turned out to be a product of post-modernity rather than modernity. This is why it manifests irresponsibility, contempt for universal law and morality, and a loss of “productivist” orientation. If we compare it with what still prevails in the West, we will find a difference in types of capitalism rather than in stages of evolution of one and the same entity. These differences will not disappear spontaneously. They cannot be removed except by a political will realized in concrete revolutionary actions. 

Procedural democracy, even if brought to formal perfection, cannot by itself produce or facilitate the radical changes that Russia needs. The “outputs” of procedural democracy will not be substantially different from its “inputs”. If the inputs consist of “ironic detachment”, apathy, corruption, and frustration, then no other outputs can be expected than the forms that political power takes in Russia today. But what passes for power in Russia today (i.e. “imploded power”) is first of all impotence in everything that is necessary for the functioning of the state and, second, a kind of Foucauldian omnipresence that seduces, cripples, and tarnishes all independent initiatives, all forms of autonomous life. Unless the electorate re-establishes itself as a “people” - as it managed to do in 1989-1991 - unless the capacity for political action beyond voting is regained, elections in Russia will have little significance except for the personal careers of the members of the political class. I think this will prove to be true for the 1999 parliamentary and for the 2000 presidential elections.

No matter how long the turmoil in Russia lasts no return to communism can occur. By the same token, all other alternatives to the present condition do not look practicable in the foreseeable future. This has little to do with the laws of history or the imperatives of modernization, but much to do with the absence of political subjects capable of willing such alternatives (the difference between “willing” and “longing for” should not be neglected). The dilemma “democrats or communists” has long since become obsolete. Both these forces complement one another as perpetuators of Russian post-modernity. What is tragic about Russia is that forces that make for modernity are either missing from its political arena or too weak to shape its history.

What can be done in order to make Russia less inhospitable to change? Here we come to my tentative positive conclusions.

The cultural-ideological battle against the closure of the future has to be joined. It must be demonstrated that possibility did not disappear from history after the collapse of Soviet Communism, that there really are alternatives to “the only possible policy” of Yeltsin’s regime, and that these are worth struggling for. This means as well that the dilemma “market or non-market” is intellectually shallow and politically harmful; it has to be replaced by the problem of choosing politically among different types of capitalism and different modes of linkage to other spheres of society.

Every occasion, however insignificant, should be used to practice resistance to Russian post-modernity. To defend a neighborhood park from being turned into a construction site for the villas of the nouveaux riches, even if the chances of success are slim, is a good example of such an occasion. To insist that exposed corrupt officials be ousted, even though they are likely to be replaced by no less corrupt colleagues, is another. At the present juncture, the aggregation of social forces and the experience of collective resistance are more important than the achievement of immediate material results. For the aggregation and experience might eventually produce what some sociologists call the “return of the actor”.

This development might also generate new interest in the practice of civil disobedience. At the moment it may be premature to discuss this possibility in greater detail. Nonetheless, I want to conclude by suggesting that in the context of post-modernity civil disobedience is likely to have several distinctive characteristics. Today in Russia disobedience in the forms of contempt for, or evasion of, the law, has become nearly universal. And so civil disobedience, in the first place, represents a defiance of the general mode of uncivil disobedience that is now the true modus operandi of the post-modern condition. In the second place, and even more importantly, civil disobedience is a way of fighting for a new social and political order – one that we can rightly call just and rational, therefore, legitimate and post-post-modern.