The Agony of the Russian idea

Boris Yeltsin's attempts at democratic reform have plunged a long troubled Russia even further into turmoil. This dramatic break with the Soviet past has left Russia politically fragmented and riddled with corruption, its people with little hope for the future. In this ambitious and fascinating account, Tim McDaniel illuminates Yeltsin's failure by placing it in the larger context of many ill-fated efforts by Russia's rulers to transform their country over the last two hundred years. He demonstrates that the inability of the last tsars and all Communist rulers to create the foundations of a viable modern society is rooted in a cultural trap endemic to Russian society. By analyzing the perspectives and values of not just rulers and elites but also workers and peasants, McDaniel shows that throughout the whole modern period there was widespread loyalty to the "Russian idea." In its most basic sense, the Russian idea is the belief that Russia could have forged its own, separate path in the modern world through adherence to shared beliefs, community, and equality. These cultural values, however, mainly reversed the values of Western society rather than having provided a real alternative to them. The effort of dictatorial states, both tsarist and Communist alike, to rely on the Russian idea in their programs of change led almost unavoidably to social breakdown. . No matter how tragic, such a history cannot simply be cast aside, McDaniel maintains. In declaring war on the Communist past, the Yeltsin government also broke with deeply held Russian values and traditions. In cutting people off from their pasts and promoting the West as the sole model of modernity, the reformers simultaneously undermined the foundations of Russian morality and the people's sense of a future. Unwittingly, the Yeltsin government thereby annihilated its own authority.