COMMENTARY
This argument, though flawed, shows Russian liberalism is alive and kicking
Autumn 2008
Boris Kapustin announces the death of Russian liberalism, claiming that it is no longer even the subject of public debate. It is true that liberalism can be said to have vanished from Russian national television, but that is not the sole forum for public debate. Indeed, Prof. Kapustin’s controversial article invites a great deal of public debate. And according to the logic of his own argument, if liberalism is still being discussed then it must still be alive.
Kapustin also argues that Russian liberals forsook their independent popular base in the 1990s. I subscribe to this view, but I have great reservations about his assertion that liberals were to blame for all the democratic failures of the 1990s, which he says “determined the moral and political bankruptcy of post-communist Russian liberalism.” Yes, people like Yegor Gaydar, who was closely associated with the economic reforms of the early 1990s, could no longer be elected to the Duma. But that is not the same as saying all liberals are morally and politically bankrupt.
To understand why Russia's liberals became so unelectable, we have to remember the particular situation those liberals had to deal with in the 1990s. The communist regime had left the country without enough food to eat at a time when the price of oil and Russia's other natural resources was too low to pay for food imports. In those dire circumstances, the liberals had to act to prevent hunger and perhaps civil war by resorting to highly unpopular measures. These were the conditions that subsequently prevented liberals from being elected.
It is certainly true, too, that the liberals sided with President Boris Yeltsin in 1993 and 1996, but the alternatives were much worse. The political ideas of the leaders of the Congress of People’s Deputies, or of the Communist Party who admired Lenin and Stalin, were manifestly incompatible with liberalism and human rights. I don’t want to say that sending in tanks to shell the seat of Congress in 1993 was the best solution to the country’s political crisis, far from it. But it is also wrong to make victims out of the leaders of the Congress who would, perhaps, themselves have shelled the Kremlin had they been able to gain the upper hand.
Unlike now, there were real contenders in the presidential elections of 1996, when the winner had to receive support from the runner-up in the third place to win the second round. This competitive situation would have been unimaginable during the 2004 or 2008 presidential “races”. Furthermore, it was the 1998 financial crisis that led to a government with a parliamentary majority opposed to Yeltsin and a period of cohabitation between the president and the prime minister.
Contrary to what Boris Kapustin implies, the 1993 Constitution is generally accepted by Russian society. As proof of this has been the flood of applications to the Constitutional Court from individuals who claim that their basic rights under this Constitution were violated. Many Russians also benefit from another achievement of Yeltsin and the liberals: they can apply to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, whose jurisdiction Russia recognised in 1998. There have been thousands of claims of human rights violations, hundreds of which have succeeded. I also recall the 2005 protests against the reform of social benefits, which made those in power tremble and forced them to reverse their decision to withdraw benefit payments. All such actions prove that not everyone was happy with Vladimir Putin’s rule, regardless of what Prof. Kapustin might say.
I can only partially agree with his conclusion that people with liberal convictions should now confine themselves to “small deeds”. First, there are lots of people in Russia who already do this, working within non-governmental organisations or informal cooperation networks. Second, under the Russian system of “vertical power,” all important changes at the lower levels of society come from above. But it was the liberal reforms of the 1990s that allowed individuals to intervene at a higher level of decision-making. And despite all these objections to some of his arguments, I have to be thankful to Kapustin, because his article demonstrates that Russian liberalism is still alive and kicking.