>There's hope for Russia after all! Today Jakarta, tomorrow Moscow. I'll
>bet Berezovsky is buying his plane tickets (or maybe the entire
>plane itself, God knows he has the money) to Geneva as we speak. Looks
>like the seven merchant bank/industrial groups are going to have to decide
>whether to be an Indonesian-style oligarchy of robbers or a South
>Korea-style oligarchy of investors. But is the Russian Left prepared to
>help them make up their minds?
Dennis
Well, this raises a major question of whether an anti-systemic
understanding is at all possible in the current world.
The notions of Left and Right are very confusing in a place like Russia.
The Communist party, for instance, is definitely an imperial chauvinist
force that is embarrassed by Marx's Jewishness. The neo-liberals who are
not in power currently or Yavlinsky may well qualify to be the Left (which
they would abhorre, but we are not talking with their ideologues) -- these
are the descendants of radical anti-systemic intelligentsia and clearly a
system-destroying force. If you look at them, you often see former hippies
or countercultural bohemian folks. Or take Western feminists who find the
women's agenda in the former USSR disgustingly patriarchal, while Russian
women have few words dirtier than feminist (even the Western-funded gender
research centers in Russia often avoid the word in their Russian-language
names.) Yet, the struggle of Soviet women against gender domination was
quite genuine, its goal was to undo the Stalin's period induction of all
women into the wage-earner laborforce.
So, in this situation the Russian Left probably is General Lebed and his
various supporters. They are mostly populists in the old American sense,
anti-Big-Business patriotic guys, who take liberalism at its literal
meaning -- and, as often happens with ideologies (Communism was a major
example itself), when you take the normative statements literally they
become quite subversive. Regarding Academician Berezovsky, he is
intelligent and ambitious enough not to go to Switzerland other than for
the vanity vacations. And he underwrote Lebed's campaign in Krasnoyarsk not
just to subvert it.
Yours,
georgi
Georgi M. Derluguian
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60208-1330
(847) 491-2741 (rabota)