Dear colleagues,
NZ No. 37 is out, and its contents are currently being
uploaded to www.nz-online.ru. This issue’s main focus is
on conservatism, and specifically on Russian
neo-conservatism as embodied by the Seraphim Club and the
so-called ‘Putin levy’ of politicians. Other topics
include the future of Russian liberalism and splits in the
Russian liberal movement; the social and cultural
functions of fashion, the history of Nazi groups in the
Soviet Union, and myths of ethnic origins in Russian
regional history textbooks. Our summary gives more detail:
Almost half of this issue of NZ is about the way two great
political ideologies, Conservatism and Liberalism, have
fared in Russia recently. Conservatism gets pride of
place. In the Liberal Heritage, we start off with a
shortened Russian translation of Chapter 2 of Ted
Honderich’s Conservatism (from the forthcoming second
English edition), entitled Theory, Other Thinking,
Incentives in the original, and Conservatives and Theory
in our version. Honderich reviews different Conservative
claims about the sources of Conservative ideas, and argues
that references to intuition, common sense, empiricism and
the like as distinguishing marks of Conservatism are
ill-guided and indefensible, and goes on to argue that if
Conservatism rests upon a unifying principle, this
principle is not to be sought in any distinctive
Conservative ways of thinking. Our editorial introduction
maintains that while Honderich’s indebtedness to the
tradition of analytic philosophy and his exclusive
references to British and US Conservatives may seem to
render his argument irrelevant to a Russian context, the
former actually compensates for the latter: while the
specific political ideas and projects of Anglo-American
and Russian Conservatives may differ, their arguments
about the superior sources of their ideas do not. This
renders Honderich’s non-contextual enquiry applicable to
Russian political debates.
Topic 1 (New Russian Conservatives in Search of a New
Russian Conservatism) looks at the latest attempts to
forge a Conservative ideology for Russia. Alexander
Verkhovsky presents a detailed analysis of the Seraphim
Club, an association of intellectuals centred around
Expert magazine. He looks at the evolution of this club
and the different currents within it, and concludes that
its most active protagonists, Alexander Privalov and Maxim
Sokolov, are best dubbed ‘liberal Conservatives’ since,
despite a strong nationalist streak and much talk about
Orthodoxy, the basic principles they expound and their
reactions to most major political events remain rooted in
liberal values (The Seraphim Club: The Romantic Appeal of
Liberal Conservatism). Andrei Kolesnikov, a liberal
journalist who has followed the Club’s activities closely,
concurs with Verkhovsky’s assessment. In an interview
entitled Conservatism in Salons and Big Politics: A
Liberal’s View, he shares his observations on how
disillusioned former liberals turn to Ñonservatism as a
sort of anti-liberalism that has no positive content of
its own, and how this leads to a type of conformism which,
unwillingly, contributes to the radicalisation of the
Russian political climate and the rise of extreme
nationalism. Finally, Galina Kozhevnikova analyses the new
fashion for Conservative rhetoric since the run-up to the
2003 Duma election, showing that this essentially boils
down to a destructive anti-liberal discourse rather than a
set of positive policies (The Putin Levy: Ideologues or
Myth-Makers?).
In his Sociological Notes, Alexei Levinson asks, For How
Long? After reviewing the parallels between 9/11 and the
Beslan tragedy, he reports findings to the effect that
most Russians are prepared to tolerate a down-scaling of
democracy and civil liberties for the sake of combating
terrorism. However, Levinson argues, this new thirst for a
unifying political totality symbolically headed by Putin
is merely a compensation for growing social
differentiation. While this disregard for democracy is
dangerous, it is also transitory since it functions as a
palliative rather than an expression of real group
interests.
Topic 2 continues the debate on Russian liberalism that
has flared up again since Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s infamous
‘letter of repentance’ published earlier this year. Sergei
Turkin looks at the two main structural issues that divide
Russian liberals: remaining in the opposition vs.
participating in government, and blaming the current
regime vs. blaming the Soviet heritage, and concludes that
in order to survive, the liberals need to find a way of
working together despite those cleavages (The Russian
Liberal Movement: Anatomy of a Schism). Boris Kagarlitsky
thinks that all of this is A Useless Debate, since Russian
liberalism is now a thing of the past, though its main
tenets have been integrated into the current political
system. Society, and especially young people, he argues,
are turning to socialism in response to the regime’s
anti-democratic drift. Putin’s authoritarianism and
nationalism, writes Kagarlitsky, is a logical consequence
of Russia’s new place in the capitalist world-system. In a
comment on Kagarlitsky’s article entitled Self-Alienation,
NZ editor Anton Zolotov argues that the latter’s criticism
of Russian liberals rests upon a distortion of liberal
principles. The main problem of Russian political and
economic development, Zolotov contends, is an absence of
social institutions that could act as checks and balances,
and striving to create such institutions is a project
around which liberals and socialists should unite, if only
for the sake of self-preservation.
In his Humane Economics column, Yevgeny Saburov discusses
Figures, Prices, and Values, calling upon us to pay
attention to the social facts behind economic figures such
as teachers’ salaries, and discussing the recent
government attempt to use a German bank to lend legitimacy
to its project of selling Yukos assets at a ridiculously
low price.
In this issue’s helping of the Culture of Politics,
Historian Semyon Charny reviews Nazi groups in the USSR in
the 1950s–80s, showing how elements of Nazi style and
ideology were first appropriated by a handful of bizarre
groups, laying the basis for the fully-fledged Nazi
movement that emerged in the later 1980s to become one of
the major parts of the Russian nationalist camp.
The Politics of Culture section continues our previous
issue’s focus on school history textbooks with an article
by ethnologist Viktor Shnirelman on Myths of Origin in
Contemporary School Textbooks which discusses the
competing myths about historic origins to be found in
textbooks published in some of Russia’s ‘ethnic’
republics.
Topic 3 is entitled Distinguish and Display: On the
Cultural Functions of Fashion. In Bows and ruches,
flowers, cockades, Olga Vainshtein reviews different
approaches to analysing the function of fashion in
establishing social distinctions. Political scientist
Christoph Bieber discusses Adidas, Nike, and the Origins
of Athletic Fashion, showing how competition between the
world’s major sneaker producers led to the spread of
sportswear as a mass fashion. Anna Tikhomirova presents an
analysis of Russian provincial attitudes fashion in late
Soviet times, in 280 km from Moscow: Fashion and Clothing
Consumption in the Provinces (Yaroslavl, 1960s—80s).
The Morals and Mores section features a reflection by
writer and artist Julia Kissina on the evolution and
significance of dress code in the globalised West and
their adoption and transformation in post-Socialist
Eastern Europe (The Symbolic Body of Clothing).
Under the New Institutions rubric we present the People’s
Assembly Club which co-ordinates joint actions and
reflection by major players of civil society, ranging from
human rights groups to defenders of consumer interests.
This issue’s Journals Review focuses on periodicals in the
social and political sciences. The New Books section
includes a review article by Anatoly Vishnevsky and Nikita
Mkrtchyan on two recent volumes analysing the run-up to
the 2002 census in Russia, as well as ethnicity-related
aspects of the census itself. Shorter reviews cover recent
books in Russian and English on Conservatism, Empire,
elections in Eastern Europe, Russian political, science,
and trade history, and the Frankfurt School.
Forthcoming issues of NZ will feature Russian and
international authors discussing topics such as the future
of Russian federalism, the state of the Russian political
system after Putin’s recent reforms, the future of the
welfare state in Russia, historical and sociological
approaches to the Russian state, the international Left’s
problems with nationalism and anti-semitism, the political
role of music in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, recent
books on Chechnya, uses of the Great Patriotic War in
collective memory, and much else.
Mischa Gabowitsch
Editor-in-chief
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