Volume 8 Numbers 1-2

Winter/ Spring 1999

How Russians cope:

Living in an Antimodern Society
Richard Rose

Modernization can refer to numerous forms of social change; for example, the replacement of religious faith with secular ways of thinking; replacing arbitrary rule with the rule of law; creating a money or an industrial economy; or bringing in democracy. The idea came to the fore in Central and West European societies because modernization occurred there first, long before it began in Russia. Before the Second World War, Europe could be divided along a north–south line between countries that were modern or modernizing in the social and economic sense, such as Britain, Sweden, Germany, and the Czech lands, and southern European countries, such as Portugal, Greece, and Bulgaria, countries that were premodern. The east–west divide was less important, for the Baltic states were more modern than the Iberian peninsula, and France had as many peasants as Hungary. Now we can see that the division between west and east is a successor to the north–south split, a distinction, roughly speaking, between modern and antimodern.

The culturalist approach to Russia argues for continuity between the Russia of today and the premodern folkways of unreformed czarist rule. Communist rule is seen as modifying patterns of behavior from the past century, adapting (and, in part, being transformed by) what was already there. From a cultural perspective, events of the past half-dozen decades, and even more so, of the past half-dozen years, are assumed to make little difference to the relationship that Russians have to life, nature, work, and vodka. While the truth of this culturalist perspective may be exaggerated, its relevance to us is clear: that the distinctly unmodern past of Russia still exists as an unacknowledged legacy, and one with which the country must still come to grips.

The Russian Revolution resulted in communist efforts to modernize a society that was premodern by any standard and thus produced a regime radically different from the communist regimes imposed in Central Europe after 1945. A lot was needed to introduce the attributes of a modern society into Russia. The communist goal, in attempting to transform society, was to create a New Soviet Man. The methods used to accomplish this, such as the mobilization of resources by the organizational weapon of the Communist Party, were radically different from the ways in which modernization had occurred in Western Europe. In Russia, the legacy of the modernization process is different, too.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, many fixed on a new goal: the transformation of Russia into a modern society with a market economy and democratic political institutions. The idea of "plugging in" the market assumed that, if only one followed the appropriate macroeconomic policy and enacted the correct institutional structures for enterprise ownership, behavior would automatically be transformed. "Market bolsheviks" sought to introduce capitalism into a country that had none of the prerequisites of a capitalist economy, as had England, for example, centuries earlier. In Russia, there was privatization without a private sector. Political parties were created as readily as a budding entrepreneur might print designer T-shirts—and with as little concern about what the logo on the T-shirt represented, as long as it caught the consumer's fancy. The voyage on which the Russian Federation was launched may now be seen for what it was, an attempt to "rebuild the ship at sea." And after the financial collapse of August 17, 1998, one might describe what is happening now as an attempt to "relaunch a holed ship that has run aground"—without repairing the hull.

In the excitement of past and present upheavals, there was much talk about Russia being in transition. Unfortunately, less attention has been given to its starting point before "transition" began. In parts of the former Soviet Union that have been going nowhere or altering only very slowly, the past remains important today, even though the Russian government is committed rhetorically to change. The governors of the Russian Federation cannot "go home" to the Soviet Union, anymore than they (or their successors) can turn the clock back to the era of Stalinist purges or Russia before the introduction of electricity. But the actions of the new government show that "the idea of Europe" is, once more, a minority taste in Russian politics, as it has been in turbulent times past.1 Since Europe symbolizes a "modern" form of governance and economy, we ought to consider, then, to what extent Russians continue to live in an antimodern society.

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Recognizing an antimodern society

The creation of the Soviet bloc split Europe between those countries that were modern in the Weberian sense and those that were modern in the Marxist-Leninist sense. The orthodox communist position was that late-capitalist industrial societies were not modern but decadent, and the more apparently developed they were, the sooner they were doomed to collapse. Marxism-Leninism was trumpeted as the truly modern doctrine, and the Soviet Union as its prime exponent. Even though the communist system had mass education, big cities, and jet airplanes, it was different because it created a nonmarket economy without private property and a party-state that administered affairs without regard for the principles of the Rechtsstaat.

A modern society is a knowledge-based society, rich in information. A modern society is transparent; everyone can observe relations of cause and effect and make rational calculations about how to vote or spend money. A democratic government creates, as it were, a cybernetic system with continuing feedback between governors and governed. For all the prattle about cybernetics in the Soviet era, the communist system was opaque. Rulers ignored or repressed feedback. Ideology provided an a priori framework for predicting, prescribing, and interpreting events. To point to evidence contradicting Marxist-Leninist assumptions was to risk being branded an enemy of the state. Neither votes nor prices were used to determine what people wanted. Instead, party leaders and party committees decided what the people were supposed to want, and elections offering no choice meant the party-state did not have to worry about the expression of popular dissatisfaction at the ballot box. A 99.9 percent vote for the party was intended to remind the electorate that they could enjoy only what Vaclav Havel has called "the power of the powerless."

Communist societies shared two attributes with modern Western societies: they were complex and, up to a point, effective. A communist society was complex, because of the conflicting interests and ambitions within and between communist institutions, and because of the desire of the party-state to centralize control of the political, economic, and social institutions and their respective values. A communist system could also be effective, as was demonstrated by the capacity of the Soviet Union to put man into space, to maintain an elaborate system of internal surveillance for the repression of political dissidents, or to manage ruthless border controls over thousands of kilometers.

To the casual observer of material phenomena, the subjects of communist systems appeared to be living in modern, if not yet "postmodern," societies. There were increasing numbers of cars on the streets, television sets in rural cottages as well as in high-rise flats, and more people could jet to the seaside for holidays—albeit in enterprise-controlled resorts within the Soviet bloc. Official statistics appeared to confirm modernization, for there was—in theory—a high level of investment, continuing economic growth, full employment, and little or no inflation. But the presence of some elements of a modern society—whether refrigerators or space satellites—does not mean that all materially prosperous societies are the same, much less that they are modern.

In Weberian terms, Russia was not just different, in some small ways, from conventional modern societies; it was antimodern. The rule of law had limited practical utility; in a system of socialist legality the demands of the party were of overriding importance. And given the absence of the rule of law, subjects could not rely on bureaucrats to deliver services to which they were, from another perspective, legally entitled. Without any sort of predictability, people who wanted things from the state either had to accept, fatalistically, what officials did or had to turn to an "economy of favors" involving blat.2 Money was neither necessary nor sufficient to secure valued goods, since bureaucratic commands allocated resources to enterprises and administered wages in what Janos Kornai characterized as a command economy. In extreme cases, factories subtracted value instead of adding it, as their output could be worth less than the resources used to produce the goods. The unrealistic targets of five-year plans encouraged factory managers routinely to engage in deceit and exaggeration to give the appearance that everything was working all right—on paper.

In a developing country that is modernizing, by definition, a significant portion of the population lives outside the modern economy. Some lead the marginal existence of a first-generation urban underclass or follow a traditional lifestyle in rural areas. The movement of rural offspring to join the urban underclass is a collective step leading to a modern society. This is so because a developing country also has a modern sector. Modernization is a process of shifting people between sectors, increasing the proportion living in the modern sector while reducing the number of those living in the traditional rural areas virtually to nil.

The Soviet system was antimodern because the institutions it created to build its new civilization were intended as an alternative rather than as a prelude to "bourgeois" norms and lifestyles. To get things done required much more time and energy than in Weber's paradigm of a modern bureaucracy working with the predictability of a vending machine. The communist system was a perverse example of Weber's dictum that "power is in the administration of everyday things." The power of the communist party-state was evident in the stress created by the maladministration of everyday things.3

The legacy of the Soviet era is that of social failure—and the consequences remain palpably evident. The institutions of a market economy have not yet been created by a few "big bang" actions, such as the overnight creation of a stock market. Ironically, the supposedly smart institutions of Western societies, such as commercial banks and the IMF, have paid the biggest dollar price to learn this obvious lesson—of Russia's social failure—from the financial collapse of last August. Ordinary Russians did not need to lose dollars to learn this lesson, nor were they well enough off to have savings in foreign currencies. As John Earle of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economies has pointed out, long before the Russian Federation defaulted on Western bankers it defaulted on its own citizens, failing to pay the wages and social benefits to which they were entitled.

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Getting things done in an antimodern society

Even in an antimodern society there is no escape from organizations. The modern element of such a society is represented by the fact that most households depend on large organizations for education, health care, housing, and employment. The "anti" element arises because these organizations do not work as they are supposed to. What do Russians do?

To determine the degree to which formal changes in society have made a difference in the way Russians get things done—and thus, the extent to which Russia is or is not an antimodern society—the seventh New Russia Barometer survey of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy, in 1998, collected data about how Russians deal with organizations that would be crucial to both large, complex, modern and antimodern societies. Unlike political-culture surveys, the Barometer study focused on behavior rather than attitudes and opinions. The behavior it emphasized is that required to get the goods and services individuals want, rather than voting behavior, which can produce a Duma or president that few people want. The survey was part of the World Bank's "Global Initiative on Defining, Monitoring, and Measuring Social Capital," supported by overseas-development funding from the government of Denmark. (The author is solely responsible for the survey and for interpretation.4)

Since institutions differ in how they work—doctors are much more personal than bureaucratic municipal landlords—the questionnaire covered various situations affecting a majority of households. The questionnaire thus treated relations between Russians and organizations as variable, rather than assuming that everything works in Russia as in a modern society or, the opposite error, that nobody knows how to get anything done. Second, the questionnaire dealt with situations in which various formal organizations are the major sources of welfare and income, such as hospital treatment, education, and employment. To focus on the delivery of goods and services that concern ordinary people yields more concrete evidence than questions about trust in distant national institutions, for which the television and press are the primary media of information.5 Third, individuals were asked what they had done or would advise friends to do to obtain from organizations such things as admission to a university or a job.

The timing of the survey was particularly propitious: the Russian Centre for Public Opinion Research (VCIOM) undertook the actual fieldwork—asking the questions—between March 6 and April 13, 1998. The date was far enough distant from the old regime for evidence of change to have become evident. A total of 1,904 adult Russians were interviewed face-to-face in a multistage, randomly stratified sample covering the whole of the Russian Federation, urban and rural, with 191 widely dispersed primary sampling units. A big, nationwide sample avoids the trap of assuming that "everyone's doing it," however "it" is defined. This is a big limitation of generalizations made by Westerners living in Moscow or anthropologists in rural villages.

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Alternative tactics for getting things done

In a modern society, people do not require a repertoire of tactics for dealing with formal organizations. Bureaucratic organizations predictably deliver goods and services to individuals as citizens and customers. In a modern society, a person claims a good or service, to which he or she is entitled by law or payment, and it is delivered, fairly and efficiently, by employees of a large, impersonal organization. In such a society no one thinks it unusual that electricity is supplied without interruption, and bills for payment are regularly received; an airline ticket booked by phone is ready to be picked up at the airport; and wages and pensions are routinely paid each month. If people use informal networks, it is to supplement or complement what is provided routinely by organizations; it is not a vote of no-confidence in the institutions of the state and market.

But what if modern organizations do not work in this way? Given the central importance of money, in a modern society, the inability of organizations to pay wages or pensions is a good indicator of the extent of organizational failure. The New Russia Barometer found that, in the early spring of 1998, three out of five Russians did not routinely receive the wages or pensions to which they were entitled; the proportion has undoubtedly increased since the financial collapse. Moreover, the state itself is more likely to pay wages late to employees of state enterprises, such as those in the military, teachers, and health workers, than the private sector is likely to pay its employees late. Pensions, a state responsibility that is easy to routinize in a modern society, are even more likely to be paid late than wages.

Confronted with organizational failure, individuals have a choice about how to respond. Informal networks can substitute for the failure of modern bureaucratic organizations. Or, for instance, if a landlord will not repair a broken window, you can fix it yourself—or freeze in the winter. In many developing countries, people who have grown up in a traditionally clientelistic culture can try the "premodern" approach of personalizing relations with impersonal bureaucrats. (Similarly, a generation ago, in rural Ireland old people thought they needed a member of parliament to "speak for them" in order to receive a pension to which they were entitled by law.)

Another alternative is the antimodern perversion of the rule of law, using connections or bribery to get bureaucrats to violate rules. In anticipation of frustration, people fatalistically assume that nothing can be done to make an unpredictable organization deliver as it should.

In each module of the questionnaire, respondents were asked what they had done or would advise a friend to do to get something done. For each situation, a multiplicity of tactics was offered in response. A majority of Russians assume that the organizations on which they depend for goods and services do not work with mechanistic predictability (Table 2). For example, only 35 percent think the social-security office will pay claimants the money to which they are entitled, and less than half think the police will protect their house from burglary. The percentage ready to rely on other types of organizations is lower still.

Whereas in a modern society, the market offers those with sufficient income an alternative to the failure of government organizations, in Russia choosing what you want from competing shops is a novelty. The great majority have sufficient money to pick and choose their food in the marketplace, and stores now regularly have stocks of food to sell. The 1998 New Russia Barometer survey also found that 86 percent of the households studied had a color-television set and 37 percent a video-cassette recorder, both goods that can only be bought with "hard" currencies. However, when more costly items are involved, the proportion able to turn to the market declines. Fewer than one in three ever expect to have sufficient financial resources to consider buying a house, and only one in six reckons they could borrow a week's wages from a bank (Table 2 [1]).

Individuals can end their reliance on organizations by substituting a nonmonetized production organized into a traditional informal network (Table 2 [2]). Past experience with food shortages and a desire to save money results in four-fifths of Russian households, including a large majority of city dwellers, continuing to grow some food for themselves. Informal networks are the most practical form of social security, too. While only one out of four Russians has any savings, and a big majority of the unemployed do not receive any state unemployment benefit, most can turn to family and friends for money if in need. Two-thirds report they could borrow a week's wage or pension payment from a friend or relative. In a developing society, such informal networks can be described as premodern, but in the Russian context they are evidence of "de-modernization"—reflecting the failure of large bureaucratic organizations to provide the social protection to which people are entitled.

When a formal organization does not deliver and the market or an informal network cannot be substituted, an individual can try to "de-bureaucratize," that is, find a way to make an organization produce goods and services. The relationship can be personalized (Table 2 [3]) by begging or cajoling officials to provide what is wanted or pestering officials until success is achieved. This is a stressful attempt to compensate for the inefficiencies of bureaucratic organizations by taking a step backward into a clientelistic relationship.

Organizations in Soviet times encouraged Russians to adopt antimodern tactics (Table 2 [4]); 68 percent of those interviewed said that to get anything done by a public agency, in those days, you had to know party members, and it was even more widely assumed that you had to have connections through friends, friends of friends, or even friends of friends of friends. The Russian concept of blat often refers to using connections to misallocate benefits by "bending" or breaking rules on behalf of people in a "circle" (svoim). Connections continue to be seen as significant; for example, close to one-quarter of the respondents endorse connections as the way to get a government-subsidized flat.

The introduction of the market has increased opportunities for overt corruption, that is, paying cash to get officials to break the rules for personal benefit. Whereas one's party connections were most important in Soviet days, the average Russian thinks that dollars or deutsche marks now speak more loudly than a party card.

Taxation illustrates the way in which different defects of the Russian system combine to deprive the state of revenue that would be collected if Russia were modern. There are estimates that more than half the anticipated state revenue is not collected—and some of what is collected is "levied" rather than paid by modern means. Among employed persons, only 41 percent say that taxes are deducted when their employer pays wages; 5 percent that no taxes are deducted; and a little over half (54 percent) do not know whether taxes are deducted. These replies leave open the question of what proportion of taxes deducted by employers are actually paid into the public purse, which institution controls the money, and what is done with it.

A majority of Russians say that there is no need to pay taxes if you do not want to do so, for the government will never find out, and three-quarters believe that a cash payment to a tax official will enable a person to evade payment of the taxes claimed. Altogether, five-sixths think taxes can be evaded; they differ only in whether the best tactic is not to pay at all or that a "tip" to a tax official is needed to avoid legal problems.

The resources that individuals need to get things done are not equally distributed throughout a society. Networks are exclusive as well as inclusive; social exclusion (Table 2 [5]) describes the position of individuals lacking networks to secure everyday goods and services. In an antimodern society, vulnerability is greatest when the only network that an individual has is represented by public-sector organizations. When these fail, the vulnerable are effectively excluded from social services by an antimodern state.

To measure exclusion, for each situation the New Russia Barometer survey offered the statement: "nothing can be done." A great majority of Russians are not socially excluded, that is, unable to draw on some form of social capital when problems arise in everyday situations (Fig. 1). Depending on the situation, those able to rely on a network to get things done range from 60 percent to more than 90 percent. Similarly, when Russians are asked how much control they have over their lives, on a scale with 1 representing "no control" and 10 "a great deal" the mean reply is almost exactly in the middle, 5.2. Only 7 percent place themselves at the bottom, feeling that they are without any control over their own lives.

Although only a minority are prepared to rely on the police, hardly any Russian thinks nothing can be done to protect his or her home from crime. People invoke alternatives, such as making sure there is always someone in the house, keeping a dog, or even getting a gun. The situation most likely to produce a sense of helplessness is the nonpayment of wages, because enterprises are so short of money that cajoling or bribing is of no avail.

While it is common to talk about categories of people as socially excluded (pensioners, unemployed persons, or women with children), social exclusion tends to be specific to a particular situation. Most Russians have a variety of networks on which they can rely. While very few have the social as well as economic resources to cope with all contingencies, relatively few are consistently without any network at all to fall back on. Across ten different situations, only 18 percent said that "nothing can be done" in a majority of situations, and only 4 percent feel excluded in eight situations out of ten.

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Implications

For Russians, organizational failure is not a sign that nothing works—but only that organizations do not work as in a modern society. When a formal organization fails to operate routinely, individuals have recourse to a variety of social-capital networks to get things done—informal do-it-yourself cooperation, personal cajoling of bureaucrats, the antimodern bending or breaking of rules, the market, or even—under the right circumstances—the state delivering goods and services.

How common is the Russian experience? Tianjian Shi's ironically titled Political Participation in Beijing (Harvard University Press, 1997) describes phenomena familiar to observers Of Russia. Shi documents how the Chinese ure cronyism, resistance, boycotts, adversarial activities, and personal appeals as standard operating procedures to spur officials to act. Chinese behaviour is nit a reflection of "Asian" values, for empirical studies in the Republic of Kora show that, even though Korea has its share of elite corruption, there is much less corruption at the grass roots of Korean society, and the market is an effective modern alternative to state failure. In the Czech Republic, where the rule of law existed prior to the arrival of Soviet troops, and there was strong resistance to communist rule, the public today is much less inclined to turn to antimodern techniques to get things done.6

Organizational failure in Russia reflects the combination of too many regulations and too little adherence to bureaucratic norms. A surfeit of rules imposes delays and unresponsiveness, as different public agencies must be consulted. Individuals are forced to invest an unreasonable amount of time in pleading with and pushing bureaucrats to compensate for organizational inefficiencies. If bureaucrats offer to waive obstructive regulations in return for a side payment, this delivers a service—but in an antimodern way. The result is popular ambivalence about the rule of law. Among Russians, 71 percent hold that the national government is a long way from the idea of a law-governed state (pravovoye gosudarstvo). But not everyone would welcome Russia's becoming such a state, since 62 percent believe the laws are often very hard on ordinary people. In such circumstances, law enforcement may not be desirable.7 Among Russians, 73 percent endorse the belief that harsh Russian laws are softened by their nonenforcement.

The classic electoral solution for the failure of government to deliver as it should is for the voters to throw the rascals out, giving the opposition an opportunity to show what it can do. But what is to be done if a sequence of elections simply results in the "circulation of rascals," as one unpopular president or Duma representative is replaced by another who appears to be no better? At this point, a society has reached the limit of what elections can achieve.

Where antimodern practices are rampant—and that is the case in most of the successor states of the former Soviet Union—the result is a crisis of governability, such that the state is too weak both to collect taxes and to control its own expenditures. It delivers too much money to the few, who are inside an elite svoim, and too little to the great majority. Recognizing this, there are those who argue for strengthening the capacity of the state to promote both welfare rights and classical liberal rights and are optimistic that this can be done. But one does not have to be Riga-born, as was Isaiah Berlin, to know that the paths that may be followed can involve great sacrifices (or a choice between sacrifices) in whichever direction one goes.

Russians, by contrast to the average Western adviser, understand how to survive by working with the system as it actually is. While people might desire better social services from the state, there is a high degree of skepticism about the capacity of the state to deliver the services available in a modern European society. For the time being, at least, the position appears to be a relatively stable, low-level equilibrium trap in which people cope with a system that is inefficient and corrupt. While one can argue that there is a better way, many
Russians have also known worse.

Given a state in which bureaucrats, at best, break laws to help people and, at worst, break laws to popular disadvantage, what is to be done? Insofar as the selective enforcement in laws is a major problem in an antimodern society, a logical prescription would be to deregulate, repealing laws that create opportunities for extracting bribes and profiting from connections. A second policy would be to repeal taxes that otherwise can be evaded easily and to concentrate on those that can be collected, for example, on oil exports or on electricity supply. To the extent that public budgets would then have to be reduced, because of less expected revenue (though actual revenue could remain constant, given the current level of tax evasion), cuts in spending should be targeted at nondelivered services and unpaid public employees. While this will reduce the services that individuals and households may rely on, the government could give vouchers so that those affected could make their own choices.

In the abstract, the above prescriptions would reduce the theoretical capacity of the government to behave like a modern Scandinavian or German social-welfare state. In reality, such measures would move in the direction of matching the commitments of the Russian state to its actual capacity. Cutting back notional public services, an acknowledgement of government failure, might even stimulate the demand from ordinary Russians for government by the rule of law rather than forcing people to bend or break laws that have ceased to be relevant. This demand by the people is a precondition for the state's having the capacity to deliver, fairly and effectively, the benefits of a modern nation, whether it is a nightwatchman Hayekian state, which concentrates on the law of liberty and the market, or a social-democratic state, delivering a large number of welfare benefits—a goal that is conceivable but remote from the Russia of today.

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Richard Rose is the director of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, and founder of the New Russia Barometer and related survey studies of mass response to transformation in the postcommunist societies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. His latest book is Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies, with William Mishler and Christian Haerpfer (Polity Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

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Notes

1. Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and
International Relations (London, 1996).

2. See Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, 1998).

3. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 5th ed. (Tübingen, 1972), p. 126.

4. For full details of the survey sample, questionnaire, and answers, see Richard Rose, Getting Things Done with Social Capital: New Russia Barometer VII, University of Strathclyde Studies in Public Policy, No. 303 (Glasgow, 1998). On the Internet, see <http://www.cspp.strath.ac.uk>.

5. For details about how Russians evaluate the institutions of society, such as political parties, the police, and private enterprise, see William Mishler and Richard Rose, Trust in Untrustworthy Institutions, University of Strathclyde Studies in Public Policy, No. 310 (Glasgow, 1998).

6. See Richard Rose and Doh Chull Shin, Democratization Backwards: The Problem of Third
Wave Democracies, University of Strathclyde Studies in Public Policy, No. 314 (Glasgow, 1999).

7. Andras Sajo, "Corruption, Clientelism, and the Future of the Constitutional State in
Eastern Europe," East European Constitutional Review, 7, no. 2 (spring 1998), pp. 37–46.

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