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Summary
To understand the political constraints on Russia’s economic development, three dimensions should be explored simultaneously. The relations between Russia and the outside world (where Russia stands in comparison to others, and what it is prepared to do to advance its position), Russia’s relations with its own past (the evolution of the Muscovite matrix ), and the relations between ideas and political action (“the practical value of ideas in solving political dilemmas” ). In this paper I will briefly discuss the first two aspects and then focus more closely on the third.
The purpose of this working paper is to look at how certain ideas, perhaps as yet rather vague ones, as to preferable futures for Russia are interlinked with the specific policies for advancing their implementation. In other words, I am interested in explicating political meaning of modernization and hence, emphasis on the relation between ideas and political action. Consequently, the research interest is linked with what in academic parlance is known as conceptual history. The key idea of this research tradition as summarized by Melvin Richter is that it “combines the study of the language used to discuss state, society, and economy with identification of the groups, strata, orders, and classes that used or contested this language”. As a first step in this direction, I will explore lines of thought considered as Russia’s vision for future, as put forward by President Medvedev. I will also put this vision into a larger context by presenting nationalist and liberal economist criticism towards the current modernization policies of the Russian government.