History – if it had ever departed – is back.
There are perhaps few ideas more poorly understood and shamelessly caricatured than Francis Fukuyama’s argument about “the end of history”.Footnote1 Fukuyama was anything but triumphalist. The emerging era he saw dawning was one in which he predicted the death of altruistic ambition, the replacement of idealism with idealessness. The end of history that Fukuyama feared consisted not in the end of time, but in the end of our ability to imagine that time could ever bring us to something radically better or worse than our present situation – and with that failure of imagination, he wrote, would come the failure of both hope and dread.
There are aspects of Fukuyama’s predictions that seem to have come true. It does seem as though “worldwide ideological struggle” has indeed been “replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” (Although, of course, all of those things coexisted with worldwide ideological struggle, too.) But in 2021, hope and dread do seem more present in our lives than Fukuyama might have imagined.
Hope and dread are, in a way, the theme of this issue. For as long as this journal has been around, most issues of Russian Politics & Law have tended focus either on academic analysis in the fields of political science and sociology, or else on applied policy analysis. However, attentive readers of the journal in recent years, as well as attentive observers of the state of the world, will have noted a growing gap between what is printed on these pages and what is printed in most western journals. Politically and academically, Russia and the west have once again grown apart, and this journal provides some testimony to that effect. Some articles we have printed – in particular Viktoria Zhuravleva’s piece on Russia and the USFootnote2 , or Lev Gudkov’s essay on the changing face of Russian sociologyFootnote3 – have tried to describe at least some of the contours of this gap in detail. In fact, a large part of Volume 56 – including articles by Kirill Rogov, Ella Paneyakh, Vladimir Magun and Maria Volkenshtein – was devoted to Russian explorations of the country’s departure not only from the expectations of most western observers, but of the authors themselves.Footnote4
This issue is an attempt to face that gap head on, not by cataloging the differences between Russia and the west – that has been done before, and is not always productive – but by listening carefully to Russian voices exploring what modernity means to them. In a series of searching essays, this issue attempts to immerse western readers as deeply as possible into the hope and dread that have accompanied the return of history in Russia. Unusually for this journal, the texts in this issue are not so much about Russia, as of Russia. They strike this editor as conversations that the authors are having as much with themselves as with others, as attempts to come to terms with the world as it is – as they live in it, for their own purposes, not for ours – rather than to make it conform to the expectations of academic analysis.
Political scientists Alexey Malashenko, Yuliy Nisnevich and Andrei Ryabov re-engage with the idea of barbarism, not so much to understand the barbarians, as to understand the minds – the hope and the dread – of those who are threatened by them. They seem to suggest that the real gates that need defending from the barbarians are not those that stand between the citadel and the outside world, but those within each of “us” residents of that citadel, which prevent us from acting barbarically.
Looking back at the “revolutionary” processes of 1969 and 1989 and their underwhelming consequences, sociologist Georgi Derluguian, too, worries that if we have failed to achieve progress, it is because we have ceased to want it. On the other hand, the world is a bit better of a place than it was before both 1969 and 1989 – and that is both the good news, and the bad news.
Alexander Filippov is – perhaps unusually for a philosopher in the company of political scientists and sociologists – rather more optimistic. The critical subjectivity unleashed by modernity, he argues, cannot be leashed and will always undermine attempts at traditionalist revanchism.
Finally, the historian Kirill Kobrin – editor of Neprikosnovennyi zapas, the Russian-language journal to which Russian Politics & Law owes so much of its material – takes a literary turn, engaging in a long reevaluation of the character of Hans Castorp from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. What is a philosophical tract on a literary character doing in Russian Politics & Law? This: “If disease is universal, if everything in the present condition of the world is a disease, if the attempts to shift responsibility for the emergence and spread of the disease to émigrés from the fringes of ‘our’ world are symptoms of the same disease, if the attempts undertaken from clearly different positions to think through the disease are lumped together to the point where they are completely indistinguishable, then abandoning the locus of the disease means abandoning the world and dying.”
If, then, there is room for hope amid the dread, it is this: no one appears ready to abandon the locus of the disease.
Notes
1 Fukuyama, F. (1989) “The End of History?” The National Interest, No. 16, pp. 3-18.
2 Zhuravleva, V. (2019) “Russia and the United States: Reflecting on the Conflict” Russian Politics & Law 55(6): 401-418.
3 Gudkov, L. (2019) “A Crisis of Understanding ‘Reality’” Russian Politics & Law 56(1-2): 4-52.
4 Rogov, K. (2020) “The Elephant and the Whale of Russian Sociality. Does Modernization Theory Work in the World, in China, and in Russia?” Russian Politics & Law 56(3-6): 170-174; Paneyakh, E. (2020) “The Withering Away of the State. Russian Society Between Postmodernism and Archaism” Russian Politics & Law 56(3-6): 175-182; Magun, V. (2020) “In the Circle of ‘Self-Efficacy’. The De-statization of the Post-Soviet Individual” Russian Politics & Law 56(3-6): 183-188; Vokenstein, M. (2020) “Variety and Adaptation. How Russian Society Modernizes” Russian Politics & Law 56(3-6): 189-195.