BY BORIS KAGARLITSKY
MOSCOW — For 10 years now, a chorus of politicians, journalists and sociologists has been telling the Russian people a story as simple and appealing as Little Red Riding Hood.
It goes like this: society was deformed by seven and a half decades of life under the Communist regime; public consciousness was warped because of this; to the extent that a new life takes shape in Russia, people's consciousness will change (echoing Karl Marx's famous thesis, existence determines consciousness); in the fullness of time, society will come to understand the wisdom of liberal reforms; and future generations will be proud to stand up for free enterprise, private property and Western values.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the launch of the economic and political "reforms" that dismantled Soviet socialism, the Academy of Sciences' Institute of Integrated Social Research, together with the Independent Institute for Social and National Issues, summarised the results of sociological surveys conducted over that period.
If the ruling elite and its ideologues have any interest at all in what their own citizens are thinking, they would do well to study this report.
Public consciousness has definitely changed — in which direction is another matter. At the dawn of the reforms, more than 63% of Soviet citizens supported the idea of private enterprise. Over the next 10 years, during which the ruling elite promoted market values with all their energy, the number of people viewing private business favourably dropped to 52.6%.
During the 1990s, scores of pundits explained that people would have to get used to social inequality. But even here, the propaganda met with only limited success. In a recent poll, 35% of respondents said that Russian capitalists were ruthless and exploitative. At the beginning of the reform era only 26% were of that view.
The poll results become even more interesting when you look at the issue of property rights. After 10 years of privatisation, the public's attitude toward private property is significantly more negative than it was during the Communist era.
In fact, the notion of re-nationalisation is finding ever wider support: 88% of the population is in favour of state ownership of the energy sector; 72% believe that machine-building plants and foundries should belong to the state; and 63% of the population now insist the state should exercise exclusive authority over the housing sector.
The percentage of the population that supports the liberal Western market economy model has decreased steadily during the past decade, a period in which a series of revolving-door governments have been busily constructing that very market economy.
In 1994, 12.5% of the population backed the Western model — a low number in itself, given the nearly unanimous support for this model among the ruling elite. Now popular support for that model has fallen to just 8%. The Soviet economic model continues to enjoy the support of 18% of those polled. But 37% now favour a mixed economic model with a strong state sector.
The most unpleasant surprise for the champions of Russian capitalism is that people's views on political and economic issues vary little with age.
Two-thirds of those polled consider Russian-style democracy to be mere window-dressing designed to conceal the authoritarian state beneath. It doesn't follow, however, that Russian society is incapable of achieving democracy. While the population overwhelmingly rejects liberal economics, it still gives strong support to such basic democratic principles as equality before the law (up from 54% to 83%), an independent judiciary (up from 41% to 46%) and so on.
It is no wonder that the majority of those polled rated the results of reform as unsatisfactory. And if our chief criterion for determining the success of reform is not loyalty to the system, but rather people's capacity to think critically and to draw their own conclusions despite the constant din of propaganda, then the polls paint a rather optimistic picture. Ten years have not passed in vain.
From Green Left Weekly, July 24, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.