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Synoptic Thinking and Political Culture in Post-Soviet Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

William Zimmerman
William Zimmerman*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
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Extract

There are two basic and conflicting views among scholars about the malleability of political culture—a group or nation's basic orientations to politics. By one account, culture is a relatively stable, ethnically or spatially specific predictor variable that shapes a nation's political institutions. In Russian studies, this is an approach that has emphasized the connection between the Russian autocratic past and the similarities between tsarist and bolshevik political institutions. Those attracted by this assessment of political culture are prone to think a statist, authoritarian political economy in Russia will be a constant regardless of the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. The other approach views political culture as being more malleable. It has two variants. One snares with the first approach the assumption that culture is a predictor variable, but emphasizes the effects of secular changes in education and changes in work experience on the distribution of attitudes in a society.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , Fall 1995 , pp. 630 - 641
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1995

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References

Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and at a seminar at the University of Michigan for His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Thanks hoth to him and to James Scanlan for their comments and encouragement as well as to the National Council for Soviet and East PJuropean Research for funding the surveys which are the basis of this research.

1. Fainsod, Merle, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953 Google Scholar; Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics (New York: Praeger, 1962 Google Scholar; White, Stephen, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (London: Macmillan, 1979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. For a good, relatively recent statement of this perspective, see Inglehart, Ronald, Culture Shift (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.Google Scholar

3. Lewin, Moshe, The Gorbachev Phenomenon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 Google Scholar.

4. An excellent statement of this view remains Barry, Brian, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1978)Google Scholar. Edward N. Muller and Mitchell A. Seligson ( “Civic Culture and Democracy: The Question of Causal Relationships,” American Political Science Review 88 [1994] 635–52)Google Scholar have written an important paper that largely supports the notion that civic culture results from rather than causes democracy. At the same time, they also find that support for gradual reform has a positive impact on the chances for democracy.

5. Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977); also Munro, Donald J., “One-Minded Hierarchy versus Interest-Group Pluralism: Two Chinese Approaches to Conflict” in Zimmerman, William and Jacobson, Harold K., eds., Behavior, Culture, and Conflict in World Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) 247–75.Google Scholar

6. Lindblom, 249.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 255.

9. A nice clarification of the reforms that Soviet leaders after Stalin and before Gorbachev were willing to entertain which centers on their reluctance to entertain either political or economic markets is contained in Breslauer, George, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 5.Google Scholar

10. I happened to be in Moscow for the first Easter after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I could not help but notice that the banners across the streets proclaiming that Christ had risen were located precisely where in previous years banners greeting the coming CPSU Congresses had been hung.

11. This has been the topic of a long-running conversation between myself and James Gibson. For the latter's effort, using panel data, to address precisely the same issue, see James L. Gibson, “A Mile Wide but an Inch Deep (?): The Structure of Democratic Commitments in the Former USSR,” paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, New York, 1994.

12. Both surveys were conducted by ROMIR (Rossiiskoe obshchestvennoe mnenie i issledovaniie rynka) directed by Elena Bashkirova. A third survey that virtually parallels the two reported in the text was administered throughout the Ukraine in March 1994.

13. I am indebted to Christopher Achen for this point.

14. Sullivan, John L. et al., “Why are Politicians More Tolerant?” British Journal of Political Science 23(1993): 51–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Gibson, James L. et al., “Democratic Values and the Transformation of the Soviet Union,” Journal of Politics 54 (1992): 329–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Factual questions concerning three different areas were used to ascertain the respondents’ knowledge of the outside world. They were asked to associate five western leaders with their country. They were asked whether Crimea was part of Ukraine, part of Russia or neither. If they correctly said that Crimea was part of Ukraine, respondents were coded as having given a correct answer if they gave a date in the 1950s. Finally, they were asked if they had heard of the International Monetary Fund and, if so, did they know whether Russia was a member and when it had joined. Any answer in the 1990s was considered correct. For a more detailed discussion of this measure and the overall role of knowledge and the diffusion of ideas in contemporary Russia see, William Zimmerman “Knowledge and Value Acceptance in Russian Public Opinion,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Chicago, February 1995.

17. Zimmerman, William, “Markets, Democracy and Russian Foreign Policy,” Post-Soviet Affairs 10 (1994), 103–27Google Scholar; Zimmerman and Allan Stain, “Constrained Belief Systems, ‘Rational Publics, ’ and Post-Soviet Russian Foreign Policy” paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Meeting, Washington DC, 1994.

18. Bahry, Donna, “Rethinking the Social Roots of Perestroika,” Slavic Review, 52, no. 3 (Fall 1993), 512–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Lindblom, 253.

20. Meyer, Alfred G., Marxism: The Unity of Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954 Google Scholar.

21. Lindblom, op.cit.