Evert van der Zweerde (Radboud University)
It is a commonplace that Russia does not have a strong democratic tradition. While what is usually called “the West” and sometimes “the Atlantic world” usually traces back its democratic history to, on the one hand, the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries in Great Britain, the USA and France, and, on the other, the gradual extension of the franchise in the 19th and 20th centuries, up to the point where, after World War II, democracy even made it into the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Russia had an entirely different history, both politically and intellectually. A bulwark of autocracy in the 19th C, it switched to a Leninist and later Soviet conception of one-party democratic centralism which, though entailing elements like representation and elections, was generally considered a dictatorship. This changed, the story goes, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced democracy as one of the elements of his perestroika program. After a brief period of democratic euphoria around 1990, post-Soviet Russia quickly developed a system of manipulated and managed democracy, today officially called sovereign democracy. Today, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin can claim democratic legitimacy in the sense that the vast majority of the Russian population supports him, and it is generally assumed that he would win free elections. At the same time, very few Western observers would qualify present-day Russia as “democratic”.
There are certainly elements of truth in the standard view just summarized. At the same time, three questions can be raised. First, is the story this simple if we look at Russian history? The answer is: no. There is more to the “democratic elements” and episodes than is often assumed, even if we should also steer clear from the tendency to read more into them than there actually is to be found. Second, we may ask if we, as scholars, are not too easily identifying “democracy” with the system of liberal democracy that we know, in the majority of cases, as our own political reality. At least the realization that liberal democracy is a contingent –even if lucky- historical combination of democratic and liberal principles, as has been highlighted by several Western political philosophers (Ch. Mouffe, J. Habermas, N. Bobbio, C. Schmitt, M. Oakeshott), should make us pause and think. Third, we might take the trouble to have a look at what Russian political thinkers, who one way or another were closer to actual Russian political history, have to say about democracy. While being brief on the first two points, the focus of my paper will be on the third issue: which conceptions of democracy do we find in Russian thinkers? Examples will be taken from Vl.S. Solov’ëv, V.I. Lenin, I.A. Ilyin, and contemporary authors like G. Golosov, A. Verkhovskij, T. Lokshina, E.G. Yasin. Thus engaging in comparative political philosophy, it will prove important to avoid both the pitfall of universalism (“They have not understood, and probably never will understand, what democracy is.”) and that of relativism (“They have another, Russian understanding of democracy”). Rather, the aim is to reopen and broaden the field of democratic theory.