The first Russian Republic, which began in the fall of 1991 and lasted until December 1993, was outside the organizing framework of the Soviet doxa. Instead, this was a period of contestation over power and the system of authority that would structure political and economic relations in the Russian Federation. Politically, it was a game of musical chairs: All the rules and paths to power had been upset, and no one knew which institution would turn out to be the relevant one. The Federation Treaty and the Constitution were works-in-progress, and there were many organizational choices facing political actors including multiple seats of authority in the region. But, who knew which chair would be left when the music stopped – would it be the executive or the legislature, the center or the regions? On the economic side, the de facto decentralization of economic resources that began under perestroika and accelerated with the decline of the CPSU represented the transformation from Soviet principles of redistribution to a Hobbesian every-region-for-itself state of anarchy that exacerbated regional inequality. During this period, regions came to appreciate the new opportunities that had opened up to them and the urgency of making choices; consequently, at this time they developed a sense of post-Soviet regional economic interests.

In this chapter, I analyze the post-doxa period of the first Russian Republic from the late fall of 1991 to December 1993 as a space for the development of new, differentiated, regional understandings, that is, heterogeneous conceptualizations and solutions to problems.

Federalism and sovereignty movements in Russia during 1990–3 have mainly been examined in terms of the actions of non-Russian ethnic republics. To gain a deeper understanding of the economic basis of sovereignty and autonomy movements for all regions of Russia, in this chapter I test existing explanations on an original data set that captures the spectrum of sovereignty-oriented activism among the Russian regions (oblasts and krais). I show that economic variables found in traditional quantitative data sets and used in previous explanations do not explain the pattern of Russian regionalism very well, but I analyze the complexity of economic data in Russia to suggest a different approach to the role of economic factors in sovereignty movements.

Regions and Federalism in the USSR and Russia

Any discussion of regionalism and federalism in the USSR and Russia must begin with an acknowledgment of the fact that the USSR was territorially divided in a very complicated way. The administrative and ethnic territorial divisions that constituted the state were irregular, uneven, and subject to change over the course of Soviet history. They were also fundamental in making and breaking the Soviet state.

Beyond urban and rural districts, there were, broadly speaking, three main administrative levels in the USSR, although not all levels existed in every territorial unit. As shown in Table 1.1, as of 1989, there were 15 union republics (Sovetskaia Sotsialisticheskaia respublika or Soviet Socialist Republic, SSR), whose specific names and institutional structures corresponded to ethnic groups (e.g., Estonian SSR, Ukrainian SSR).

Do economic conditions determine people's interests? Most social science teaches us to presume so. Scholars, consequently, tend to account for the innumerable anomalous cases, which fail to conform to expectation, by resorting to arguments focused on informational deficiencies. Such explanations reinforce the presumption that a proper appraisal of economic conditions would produce the correct articulation of interests. The imagined economies framework offers a powerful and less presumptuous alternative to the traditional notion of how material conditions and articulated interests relate to each other, particularly in cases where there is, objectively, significant difference between them. What people think about the economy, however far-fetched it may seem vis-à-vis measured economic data, can be more important than what we might otherwise consider the statistical truth about their conditions. The originality and usefulness of the framework lie in its explanation of the articulation of interests not in the usual materially measurable terms but in terms of local experience, local categories of analysis, and local intersubjective notions of what economic conditions mean.

Regionalism in the Russian Federation, or nationalism in the USSR, poses two questions for which we still do not have satisfactory answers: First, why do economic interests in greater sovereignty develop beginning in the late 1980s and not before? Clearly, economic conditions had been comparably woeful before 1989. And, second, given the pattern of regionalism, how did a centralized system produce such differentiated understandings of the regional economies – in other words, how did different regions that share a Soviet history, but especially those that share a common language, ethnicity, and even economic structure, come to interpret similar economic events differently.

This chapter, building on the previous one, attempts to explain the different outcomes of the transnational cycle of protest that erupted across colonial Southeast Asia during the decade following World War II. I claim, once again, that a state-centered approach best explains these outcomes. I argue, more specifically, that the success or failure of Communist movements in actually seizing state power in this region was determined by the specific characteristics of colonial (or neocolonial) rule in each national society, particularly policies toward moderate nationalists. This chapter, then, takes the existence of the Communist-led national liberation movements that emerged during and immediately after the Japanese occupation of World War II as “given” for present purposes.

The analysis of this chapter reflects two growing concerns in recent analyses of social movements.

This chapter analyzes the strengths and limitations of the state-centered perspective on revolutions, which I briefly introduced in the previous chapter and which I deploy in the chapters that follow. As I noted earlier, the discussion here is primarily theoretical and somewhat abstract, although I do try to ground this discussion in a short case study of the Cuban Revolution, itself one of the major revolutionary conflicts of the Cold War era. Nonetheless, some readers may wish to forge straight ahead into the more empirical chapters on revolutionary movements in Southeast Asia and Central America in Parts 2 and 3, respectively.

I argue in this chapter that state-centered theoretical approaches comprise some of the most powerful analytic tools that are currently available to analysts of revolutions – more powerful (as I argued in the previous chapter) than the modernization and Marxist perspectives.

The previous chapter characterized the Salvadoran and Guatemalan revolutionary movements as failures, which is true by definition if a revolution, or a “successful” revolution, requires the overthrow of the existing state. But there is another side to the proverbial coin: As we have seen, the Salvadoran and Guatemalan states were themselves unable to defeat militarily the revolutionary movements that challenged them. This raises a question that has received relatively little attention in the literature on revolutionary movements (and social movements more generally): Why have certain movements (but not others) been able to persist for many years or even decades, maintaining a significant base of popular support, even when subjected to extraordinary levels of state violence? To address this question, I compare in this chapter cases of “persistent insurgency” in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru (with a glance at Colombia) with major defeated rebellions in Malaya and the Philippines (discussed in Part 2) as well as Venezuela.

Revolutionary movements are not simply or exclusively a response to economic exploitation or inequality, but also and more directly a response to political oppression and violence, typically brutal and indiscriminate. This is the principal thesis of this book, one that I reach through an examination of revolutionary movements that emerged during the second half of what has been called the “short” twentieth century (1914–91), a period characterized by the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union.

The Cold War era (1945–91) was truly an “age of revolution,” even more so, arguably, than the great revolutionary age of 1789–1848 (see Hobsbawm 1962). Dozens of powerful revolutionary movements emerged across the globe during this period, mainly in the Third World, and a number of them successfully overthrew existing political authorities. In the process, some movements also radically restructured, destroyed, or replaced key institutions, social relationships, and shared beliefs.

Between the incineration of Hiroshima and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, dozens of revolutionary conflicts shook the world. Most revolutionary movements of the Cold War era, including several quite powerful ones, were defeated. But many successfully seized state power, remaking large parts of the globe and, in the process, the international balance of power. In East Asia, revolutionaries seized power in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and challenged imperial and neo imperial rule in several other countries, including Burma, Malaya, and the Philippines. In Africa, French Algeria and Portugal's far-flung colonies violently threw off imperial rule, and popular revolts in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa hastened the demise of imperial and/or white-supremacist rule in those countries. In Latin America, meanwhile, revolutionaries seized power in Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua, nearly triumphed in El Salvador, and powerfully shook Venezuela, Guatemala, Peru, and Colombia. Finally, a series of popular rebellions in 1989 finished off the more recalcitrant Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, which had been demoralized by Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union and his rejection of the Brezhnev Doctrine.