To Russia, with scepticism

While both in Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union ethnic Russians were dominant, the multi-national imperial nature of both systems was evident: in the Czarist period much of the bureaucracy was run by ethnic Germans from the Baltic, and the Soviet system was - at least at its inception - run by an elite in which non-ethnic Russians (Georgians, Jews, Poles, Armenians) were predominant.

Today, Russia still has to find its own identity - something complicated by the fact that the Russian language has two terms which are then loosely translated as "Russian" in other languages: "Russki", which means ethnic Russians, and "Rossisski" which means those who live within, or under, the Russian state.

The last few years have seen extremely fierce debates about such questions as: can Russian writers of Jewish origin "really" be viewed as Russians, i.e. Russki? Recent remarks by Putin about "immigrants", mainly non-ethnic Russians from the other republics of the former Soviet Union, play up to this xenophobic strain in Russian public opinion, which is still groping for a definition of the identity of the state.

To this specific Russian problem are added the fundamental differences in both the political and economic traditions of Russia as compared to other post-communist countries in Eastern Central Europe.

While none of the post-communist countries, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, had been a consolidated democracy prior to 1939 or 1945, they all had representative and liberal traditions embedded in their institutions, social structures and self-understanding. Russia lacked these structures. There was very little in Russian historical traditions and memory (again: both real and constructed) on which a Russian liberal and democratic state could be built: no historical representative institutions, no ingrained traditions of tolerance or pluralism.

Part of Yeltsin's failure had to do with the fact that parliamentary traditions, a multi-party system, a free press - in other words: the ingredients of civil society - were totally lacking in Russia.

Yes, there were Russian liberal intellectuals in the 19th century (the "Westernises"), but they were weak and sometimes tainted with the foreign provenance of their ideas - and successfully confronted by the "nativists" or populist Slavophiles. And when "Westernises" looked for role models, they could come up only with Czar Peter I, whose modernisation meant an attempt to bring Russia up to the standards of European absolutist monarchies.

No wonder that the picture which adorns Putin’s presidential office is that of Peter "The Great". The chaos into which Yeltsin's regime disintegrated was not just due to his personal inadequacies, but had deep roots in the lack of a legitimate institutional memory ("a usuable past"), which was so helpful in the historical nation-states of Central Eastern Europe.

A quick word about the economic aspect: while Central Eastern European countries had an independent peasantry and some burgher traditions, this too was lacking in Russia.

The emancipation of the serfs in the l860s did not really create a robust land-owning peasantry, and brutal Soviet collectivisation put an end to whatever independent peasantry managed to emerge before 1917.

Poland and Hungary under communism did try collectivisation after 1947, but this was quickly abandoned: so when they emerged from communism, these societies already possessed a private sector.

Likewise, petty commerce and manufacture were allowed under "goulash communism" in Hungary and similar arrangements in Poland and Czechoslovakia, greatly facilitating the transition to a market economy. As one Russian entrepreneur said: for capitalism you need capitalists. Eventually, the only ones to emerge in Russia were the so-called oligarchs, i.e., former apparatchiks who managed to rob the public ownership system by turning it into their own fiefdoms