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Soviet Political Parties and Leadership

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Soviet Political Parties and Leadership ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: EMANCIPATION FROM DOUBLETHINK? POST- SOVIET POLITICAL PARTIES AND LEADERSHIP Peter Voitsekhovsky, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor Vladimir Tismaneanu Department of Government and Politics This study examines the phenomenon of doublethink as a core feature of the “mental software” that continues to define the character of post-Soviet societies. It is revealed in patterns of prevarication and equivocation that characterize the thinking and behavior of both the elites and the masses. Doublethink is also manifested in incongruous values and duplicitous rules that prevail in society. It accounts for the perpetuation of simulative and fake institutions of “façade democracy.” Political parties in post-Soviet Ukraine are analyzed as a major example of simulative and imitative institutions. Here, traditional ideology-based party taxonomies prove misleading. Political parties are quasi-virtual entities with the character of “post- Orwellian political machines”: they operate in a topsy-turvy world of imitated supply and deluded demand. The study employs three levels of analysis: macro (surveys data and “Tocquevillean” observations); meso (biographical data and political discourse analysis); and micro (in-depth interviews). EMANCIPATION FROM DOUBLETHINK? POST-SOVIET POLITICAL PARTIES AND LEADERSHIP Peter Voitsekhovsky Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Advisory Committee: Dr. Vladimir Tismaneanu (Chair) Dr. Bartolomej Kaminski Dr. Scott Kastner Dr. Karol Soltan Dr. Kira Gor 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………… ….4 PART ONE. THE CHALLENGE OF POST-SOVIET REALIGNMENT WITH MODERNITY..………………………………………..…..7 Chapter 1. Post-Soviet Experience: En Route from Communism “to Elsewhere...............................................................................................................8 1.1 Discouraged Theories of Post-Soviet Transitions……….………. .....8 1.2 Frustrations of Departure from Soviet Civilization………….….…...18 1.3. Western Capitalism and Democracy Not Fitting for Post-Soviet Societies? …………………………………………………… .……......24 1.4. Ukraine as a Showcase of Post-Soviet Ambiguity………..…………29 Chapter 2. Pseudo-modernity: the Ultimate Legacy of the Soviet Civilization.....43 2.1.”Deficient Modernity” of Soviet Communism………………….… ...43 2.2. Potemkinism: A Perpetual Trait of Russian and Soviet History….....49 2.3. Pseudo-modern Features of Post-Soviet Societies……..………...….56 Chapter 3. Doublethink: the Mental Virus of Pseudo-modernity………….……..61 3.1. Orwell Still Matters………….…………………………………….…61 3.2. Doublethink: the Mental Software of “the Soviet Mind”…………....69 3.3. From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Praevaricatus: Post-Soviet Doublethink…………………………………………………….……………..….115 Chapter 4. Dimensions of Post-Soviet Doublethink in Contemporary Ukraine…125 4.1. Controversies of Collective Identity and Memory…………………...125 4.2. Doublethink and Social Values…………………………………… .133 4.3. Divergence between Formal Laws and Informal Rules………… … 140 2 PART TWO. PSEUDO-MODERNITY AND POST-SOVIET INSTITUTIONS: POLITICAL PARTIES AND LEADERSHIP IN UKRAINE………146 Chapter 5. Political Parties in Old and New Democracies…………………………147 5.1. Democracy and Political Parties……………………………………….147 5.2. Political Parties after Communism…………………………………….151 5.3. The Puzzle of Post-Soviet “Parties in Translation”…………...……….153 Chapter 6. From a “Party of Power” to the “Pluralism of Clans”……………...….158 6.1. The “Party of Power” from 1991 to Present………………..………….158 6.2. Falseness of Conventional Party Taxonomies…………………….…...168 6.3. The “Market Side” of Party Politics………………………...…………178 Chapter 7. Post-Orwellian Machine Politics: Simulated Supply and Deluded Demand……………………………………………………………………………..184 7.1. Supply and Demand Model of Electoral Politics………………….......184 7.2. New-Old-Speak of Party Messages……………………………………187 7.3. “Please Fool Us Again”: Paradoxes of Voting Behavior………….......193 7.4. Demand for “Anti-politics”: Strengths and Limitations……………....200 Chapter 8. Doublethink and Political Leadership…………………… …………213 8.1 Legacies of the Nomenklatura………………………………………….213 8.2 Virtuosi of Doublethink: Selected Examples…………………………..220 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK…………………………….…………..227 APPENDICES……………………..………………………………………………230 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………..……………………………………………………..241 3 INTRODUCTION The starting point of this research project is an intellectual inquiry into the reasons for the failure of the “transition paradigm” in post-Soviet polities. The meanings of the ambiguous post-Soviet “transition” and the factors that caused this ambiguity present a puzzle that is not fully resolved in political science literature, as shown by the review presented in Chapter 1. Further, this study addresses what is deemed to be the “missing link” of the “transition paradigm” – namely, the problem of metanoia, or the mental change. For more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “Soviet legacies” are still a significant factor in post-Soviet politics and societies. Although that factor is frequently mentioned, it is rarely specified. This work attempts to define the mental legacies of the Soviet past – conspicuously called “Soviet mental software” – and examine how they influence the formation and functioning of new political institutions. As discussed in Chapter 2, the Soviet civilization was a project that imitated modernity Therefore, the challenges of post-Soviet transition are discussed here as challenges of realignment with modernity. The deficient modernity of Soviet communism perpetuated the historical Russian trait of “potemkinism.” It produced complex patterns of prevaricative and equivocative thinking and behavior. Their essence was insightfully captured by George Orwell in his conceptual frame of “doublethink.” Doublethink was the key element of the “Soviet mental software” -- a product of a number of factors that played together in the formation of the “New 4 Soviet Man,” as argued in Chapter 3. By the same token, the trait of doublethink became a major cultural legacy of the post-Soviet societies. It accounts for confused and ambiguous orientations, attitudes, and political behavior of both the elites and the masses. While doublethink is shown to be a generic feature inherent to all post- Soviet societies, this study discusses post-Soviet Ukraine as a prime example and a showcase of that phenomenon – the society where the ambiguity of ideological values overlaps with the duality of collective identity and memory: “creole” Russophile and “post-colonial” anti-Russian. The impact of those dual orientations is briefly discussed in Chapters 1 and 4. The overall argument presented in Part One of this work is that doublethink – the trait of post-Soviet collective mind – breeds not only ambiguous and confused orientations, but also deluded political behavior, as well as virtuality and fakeness in political institutions. As a feature of mass consciousness, doublethink is manifested in political practices and thus inhibits the development of modern political institutions. Part Two of this work examines one specific example of such negative impact: the stalled development of political parties in post-communist Ukraine. The central question asked here is as follows: is the legacy of doublethink compatible with democratic consolidation? This study also addresses a related normative question: is there a cure for doublethink, and where can it come from? 5 The primary method of this study is interpretive research focused on analysis of human self-reflection and meaning-making. 1 The body of data embraced by the study includes media news, commentary, interviews, published sociological surveys, as well as field observations and interviews performed by the author over a number of years. 1 Primary methodological guidance was taken from: Peregrin Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow. Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes. Routledge, 2011. 6 PART ONE. THE CHALLENGE OF POST-SOVIET REALIGNMENT WITH MODERNITY 7 CHAPTER 1. POST-SOVIET EXPERIENCE: EN ROUTE FROM COMMUNISM “TO ELSEWHERE” 1.1. Discouraged Theories of Post-Soviet Transitions Grand theories of political science have not fared well in the world of post- Soviet politics. In the opinion of some leading scholars, many comparativists have chosen to “simply ignore the post-Soviet cases altogether as a way to protect the validity of their findings derived from other regional studies.” 2 Reality disproved the “triumphalist” notion that the end of the USSR was synonymous with a victory of the liberal democratic order. Instead of an orderly and “paradigm-consistent” transition to democracy, we observe “a confused process with no clear direction.”3 The early post-communist discourse of “transitology” and “consolidology” – subsequently characterized as ‘imperial and messianic’4, as well as ‘intellectually neocolonialist’5 – was based on a set of unstated assumptions. The most erroneous among them, as it transpired later, was the idea that post-communist transitions were 2 After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transition. Michael McFaul and Katheyn Stoner Weiss (eds.), 2004, p. 3. 3 Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr. Revolutions Reconsidered. Journal of Democracy 18.1 (2007) 42-57, p. 51. 4 Michael McFaul and Katheyn Stoner Weiss The Evolving Social Science of Postcommunism. After the Collapse of Communism…, p 2.
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