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Contemplating Collapse and “Democracy” in Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Martha Merritt
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Extract

Political science is uncomfortable with collapse, given the discipline's reliance upon stable political institutions and the presumably thick soup of political culture in which they stand. Even after Barrington Moore's classic study of revolution, the lingering question of Why did the state collapse when it did? troubles those who failed to anticipate profound change; but this rarely inhibits the accusation that ideological opponents made an even poorer job of prediction. In this respect the last six years in the study of Russian politics have been very lively.

Type
Review Essay
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , Spring 1997 , pp. 351 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1997

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References

1 Moore, Barrington Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966).Google Scholar

2 For a summary of cutbacks, see “Sovietologists, Years After the Collapse, Cope With a New Reality”, The New York Times, 13 03 1996, p. B7.Google Scholar

3 Gleason, AbbottTotalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Orlovsky, Daniel, ed., Beyond Soviet Studies (Washington, D. C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Fish, M. Stephen, Democracy From Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995Google Scholar); Petro, Nicolai N., The Rebirth of Russian Democracy: An Interpretation of Political Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

4 The original transitions literature is noteworthy for its subtlety relative to the academic movements it spawned (see O'Donnell, Guillermo, Schmitter, Philippe C. and Whitehead, Laurence, eds., four volumes headed Transitions from Authoritarian Rule [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986]Google Scholar).

5 For a demonstration of the debate, see the exchanges in Slavic Review (Philippe Schmitter with Karl, Terry Lynn, “The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidoligists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?” vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 173–85Google Scholar and “From an Iron Curtain to a Paper Curtain: Grounding Transitologists or Students of Postcommunism?” vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 965–78; and rejoinders from Valerie Bunce, “Should Transitologists Be Grounded?” vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 111–27 and “Paper Curtains and Paper Tigers”, vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 979–87).

6 Hanson, Russell L., The Democratic Imagination in America: Conversations with Our Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

7 Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

8 See also Fish, M. Steven, “Democracy Begins to Emerge”, Current History 94 (10 1995): 317–21.Google Scholar

9 Konrád, George, Antipolitics (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984Google Scholar).

10 Especially relevant here is O'Donnell's, Guillermo “Delegative Democracy”, Journal of Democracy 5, no. 1: 55–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar