Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Over the past decade Aleksandr Tsipko has been one of Russia's most thoughtful social scientists. In the lead article he laments the moral and political void left by the collapse of, yes, Communism. It is less nostalgia for Communism per se than dismay with what has followed that evokes Tsipko's lament. The "democrats," he charges, have senselessly destroyed the state and foolishly ridiculed the need of Russians to be proud of their state. Unlike the East European democrats, who because of Russian occupation were able to combine the ideal of democracy with the resurrection of their national statehood, the Russian democrats linked democracy with national defeat (i.e., the collapse of the USSR). The Communists also had the political virtue of satisfying the popular need for equality, especially sweet when it took the form of revenge against "the upper classes." Arguing that the world of Moscow and St. Petersburg is increasingly divorced from the realities of real (rural) Russia, Tsipko deplores the fact that Yeltsin's liberal revolution came to be seen as an intrigue of the capital's egghead (yaitsegolovye) elite. The abandonment of collective farms was, he says, a catastrophe, depriving millions of peasants of their livelihood. At the human level, "no one brings bread to old people any longer."