Cultural Legacies or State Collapse? Probing the Postcommunist Dilemma

Cultural Legacies or State Collapse? Probing the Postcommunist Dilemma

Description

In one vertiginous decade, the term “postcommunism” has gone from being virtually inconceivable to being shockingly self-evident, only to revert to being flatly unintelligible once again. To a limited extent, we comprehend the postwar period, but not even a coherent disagreement about what cluster of factors triggered the earthquakes of 1989 and 1991 has taken shape, and informed observers readily acknowledge that the shattered and ceaselessly evolving ex-East bloc still lies beyond our powers of classification. Indeed, the future seems more unknowable than ever, which is why the overused term “transition” should probably be junked, implying, as the noncommittal “postcommunism” does not, that we somehow know where we are headed. Optimists and pessimists will no doubt continue to sneer at each other in the journals, but their exchanges probably tell us more about their own moods than about the future of the region. While seven years have elapsed since the old systems began to dissolve and the military division of Europe was ended, Western politicians and political scientists continue to stumble forward, groping in the dark. True, essayists opine about the upsurge of nationalism and a return of the communists. And a farfetched analogy with the 1930s (Chicago or Weimar) is currently in vogue. But our wholly unforeseeable fin d'epoque still awaits its convincing interpreter. In the meantime, frequent references to “chaos” accurately express a general lack of confidence about emerging patterns and long-term trends. All we know for sure is that the multiple processes under way are unscripted and unsteered and that there is no guarantee of a happy end. One unfortunate consequence of our interpretive failure, so far, is that policymakers to proceed blindfolded, without a global account of the new world disorder, without a simple map to help them distinguish minor nuisances from lethal threats or to decide when an incident is a portent. Admittedly, to sketch a “simple map” is a formidable task. There is not one postcommunism, after all, but many postcommunisms, strewn across a fifth of the globe, comprising 27 countries with over 400 million inhabitants. One-size-fits-all theories are obviously useless in such a sprawling context. The sheer miscellaneousness of the states and quasi-states in question is made even harder to bring into focus by the roller coaster of political, social, and economic developments throughout the region. Although some exceedingly interesting scholarly works have begun to appear, the basic inscrutability of the swiftly changing scene is undeniable. Even a well-researched journal article is likely to have a painfully ephemeral shelf life. Inundated by an unmasterable flood of half-reliable and arbitrarily selected facts, anecdotal or statistical, specialists speculate and surmise. They extrapolate trends from crumbs of information and are quickly overtaken by unfathomable events. Surface conflicts are brightly lit, but deeper changes remain shrouded in darkness. Electoral percentages are duly reported, but their wider implications are not well explained. The situation in Russia has been particularly fluid and difficult to interpret. No one has any idea what will happen when Boris Yeltsin passes from the scene. Even if CIA spymasters could infiltrate the innermost Kremlin and secret police circles, they would still be clueless about what was happening in the rest of the vast Russian Federation or even, for that matter, elsewhere in Moscow. What forces may counteract or accelerate territorial unraveling? How reliable is the chain of command? Will privatization hit a snag once unwieldy state enterprises contain nothing more worth stealing? Will the wholesale larceny of state assets by public officials and “red directors” eventually produce a popular backlash? Was the war in Chechnya a turning point, or just another bump in the road? What do seemingly endless contract murders of bankers, businessmen, deputies, and TV personalities mean for the country's future? And how will generational conflicts, which are increasing with time, play out politically? To watch Russian politics is to observe a football game through a soupy fog where you can make out the teams only faintly and in outline, where you are unsure who has the ball or which way he is running, and where you strongly suspect there are some other strange players on the field whose intentions are perhaps sinister but in any case unknown. The variety, complexity, and pauseless revamping of postcommunist systems baffle students and practitioners alike. But part of the difficulty for onlookers, domestic as well as foreign, stems from the fact that embezzlers and asset-strippers dislike being observed. Many important actors in these societies are waist deep in clandestine operations where millions of dollars are at stake. With immensely valuable state assets and raw materials waiting to be carted off or acquired semilegally at dirt-cheap prices, “cherry pickers” have learned to organize their lives in order to deceive the eye. Official statistics, as is well known, are useless indicators of activity in the unrecorded shadow economy. Off-the-books transactions, kickbacks, cash-filled envelopes, and forged invoices are ubiquitous, as is natural when newly prosperous individuals strive to present a moving target to tax collectors and ruthless extortionists, as well as to stockholders and bureaucratic overseers. Skills of duplicity and disinformation, not to mention cloakroom “connections” and techniques for ducking public responsibility, all honed under the old regime, have proved unexpectedly useful, and not only to privileged groups, in the new conditions.

Source Publication

Postcommunism: Four Perspectives

Source Editors/Authors

Michael Mandelbaum

Publication Date

1996

Cultural Legacies or State Collapse? Probing the Postcommunist Dilemma

Find @ NYU

Share

COinS