David Priestland

Soviet Democracy, 1917—91

The Soviet Union was created and destroyed amidst calls for ‘democracy’. In State and Revolution, Lenin wrote of his revolutionary utopia: ‘only in communist society . . . will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized’, superseding the imperfect democracy of capitalist states.1 Seventy years later, speaking at the January 1987 Central Committee plenum, Mikhail Gorbachev also announced that ‘democratization’ was to lie at the centre of his ‘perestroika’, a process that was to lead to the demise of the system Lenin created.2 Indeed, throughout the intervening period, all Soviet leaders claimed that they were perfecting ‘Soviet democracy’. Stalin, in his notorious 1936 constitution, declared the Soviet Union the most democratic country in the world, as did Brezhnev in his constitution of 1977. Stalin even claimed that his terror of 1936–8 was, at least in part, aimed at those who were suppressing democracy. Commentators on Soviet politics have been sharply divided over how seriously to take these claims. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was common for scholars to argue that Bolshevik theory and practice did contain democratic elements, although they differed on the nature of that democracy. For some, a semiliberal democratic Bolshevism did exist, represented by Nikolai Bukharin and Lenin in his later years, which was then destroyed by Stalinist statism.3 Other commentators examined the nonpluralist participatory democracy of the Brezhnev era, arguing that it gave citizens some limited influence over particular areas of public life.4 Yet in recent years it has been rare to take ‘democracy’ or political ‘participation’ in the Soviet Union seriously.5 Lenin’s ambitious claims for the democratic nature of the new state have been seen either as cynical posturing or as a naïve utopianism that provided no answers to the problem of overDavid Priestland

France in a neoliberal age

tured by law and political economy, and thus by unequal and conflictual social relations, it is also the overarching superstructure (to revert for a moment to the Marxian language of an earlier generation) within which they play out. In this sense, and again as Chabal suggests from the outset, we ought perhaps to see the Republic less as a single object of ideology—one as coherent and firmly bounded as an analytical category as the partisans of certain conceptions of it themselves plainly believe—and republicanism(s) less as the languages that define it, than as a broader, national symbolic repertoire, less a single language of French politics (or a single register of that language) than a space, the socio-legal space that is also a universe of discourse in which discursive communities (in Wuthnow’s terms) are constituted, and within which they engage in sometimes sharp disputes both about the boundaries of the community and the meaning(s) of the terms that they hold, and that hold them, together in common: the unequally occupied but shared ‘consensual space’ that frames contemporary French debates over nation, state and citizenship. For example, how ‘silent’ (p. 67) on the headscarf issue, after all, have Muslims really been? Infractions of the law on the ‘wearing of ostentatious religious signs’ by school students were indeed minimal (reportedly 639 cases at the 2004 rentrée; only 3 in 2005), but the young women who demonstrated against the law in Lille and Marseille in June 2004, some of them carrying the tricolour and wearing tricolour headscarves or Republican cockades in their hijabs, were staking their own claim to appropriation of and belonging in the Republic as a space, as both symbolic and physical ground. (As, indeed, Algerian nationalists who argued for the emancipation of an Algerian nation within the French Republic did in the 1920s and 1930s.) The distinctively French postcolonial critique of ACHAC or the Indigènes de la République are equally all about France, and equality of access to the opportunities and liberties that the Republic is supposed to offer. In this respect, the continuing tension between ‘high-minded’ or rhetorical principle and more muddy empirical reality betrays less a ‘failure’ of French politics (pp. 261–262) than one of its great strengths: its (properly revolutionary) quality of having created political space for legitimate popular claims on sovereignty—whether or not, or however unevenly, those claims can actually be realized. Relocating the languages of French politics within the contested space of the Republic might help give this book even greater purchase.

Cold War mobilisation and domestic politics: the Soviet Union

In May 1946, Iosif Stalin complained to writers about their excessive respect for Western culture: ‘They [Soviet intellectuals] still feel themselves minors, not one hundred percent, they’ve got used to considering themselves in a situation of eternal pupils…[a good Soviet man] adores some foreign bastard, a scholar who is three heads shorter than he. He loses his dignity.’ And, thirteen years later, Nikita Khrushchev revealed a similar anxiety about the dignity of the USSR on the eve of his trip to the United States. As he later reminisced: ‘I’ll admit that I was worried … we had to express our point of view…without letting ourselves be humiliated … Stalin [had] kept trying to convince us that we…were no good, that we wouldn’t be able to stand up to the imperialists … Stalin’s words sounded in my head.’ As both of these statements indicate, the Soviet leadership throughout the early Cold War was obsessed with the competition with the West, and was deeply anxious about its status and the need to improve its weak position. The enormous expenditures by the Soviet state on the military and military industrial establishments, at the direct expense of consumption, also ensured that the Cold War had an enormous impact on the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens. Yet, it has not been common for historians to discuss the internal political and social developments within the USSR specifically through the prism of the Cold War, or even to emphasise the role of the Cold War in analysing Soviet domestic political and social developments during the period (though there are of course exceptions). This is in sharp contrast to historians of the United States, who are engaged in a sophisticated debate on whether it is reasonable to define the postwar era as one dominated by the Cold War.