On his book Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd
Cover Interview of November 26, 2017
The wide angle
In recent years, we have witnessed the overthrow of
authoritarian regimes and the difficulties new regimes have in their transition
to liberal democracy. This book provides a clue to understanding this issue.
We can approach this issue from two directions. From the
bottom up perspective, the Russian Revolution can be seen as the process of
social disintegration into the state of anomie: the state that commonly
accepted norms and values that sustained social cohesion disappeared and the
social structure that ensured its norms crumbled. Antonio Gramsci stated: “The
crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot
be born: in this interregnum a great variety of moribund symptoms appear.”
The old system of hierarchical classifications based on
estates, values, and customs associated with the old system were rejected. In its
place, the Provisional Government proclaimed new norms based on equality and
freedom for all citizens. But various social groups challenged and contested
the meaning of freedom and equality, as the age-old differences between
political freedom and economic equality sharply divided society. In this
cultural confusion the distinction between what was acceptable and what was
unacceptable became blurred and confused.
As “culture” became normless, social structure lost the
capacity to enforce its norms. The law became ambiguous, the court system
malfunctioned, and police became ineffective. As a consequence, violence, not
sanctioned by the legitimate authority, became the most effective and favored
means to settle disputes.
From the top down perspective, what happened in the Russian
Revolution is a clear case of the failed state. According to Max Weber, the
state must possess two essential ingredients: monopoly of coercive power and
legitimacy. The Provisional Government had neither. It could not monopolize the
means of coercion, the military and the police, at the exclusion of private
military organizations such as the workers’ militia and the Red Guards. Sharing
power with the All-Russian Soviets, it never acquired legitimacy. It was a
failed state that could not provide essential service to its citizens.
These aspects provide a key to understanding the
difficulties in the transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. It
is exceedingly difficult for a post-authoritarian regime to restore order out
of chaos and establish new norms that assure liberal democracy in the face of
new forces that contest advancement of their values and under the pressure of
impatient rising expectations. Some kind of coercive power is required to
restore a semblance of law and order that might lead to the restoration of
authoritarianism that is often worse than the one that the revolution initially
toppled. The reassertion of the central state under the Bolsheviks with the use
of brutal coercion, without legitimacy, was a tragic consequence of the Russian
Revolution.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
The wide angle
In recent years, we have witnessed the overthrow of authoritarian regimes and the difficulties new regimes have in their transition to liberal democracy. This book provides a clue to understanding this issue.
We can approach this issue from two directions. From the bottom up perspective, the Russian Revolution can be seen as the process of social disintegration into the state of anomie: the state that commonly accepted norms and values that sustained social cohesion disappeared and the social structure that ensured its norms crumbled. Antonio Gramsci stated: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of moribund symptoms appear.”
The old system of hierarchical classifications based on estates, values, and customs associated with the old system were rejected. In its place, the Provisional Government proclaimed new norms based on equality and freedom for all citizens. But various social groups challenged and contested the meaning of freedom and equality, as the age-old differences between political freedom and economic equality sharply divided society. In this cultural confusion the distinction between what was acceptable and what was unacceptable became blurred and confused.
As “culture” became normless, social structure lost the capacity to enforce its norms. The law became ambiguous, the court system malfunctioned, and police became ineffective. As a consequence, violence, not sanctioned by the legitimate authority, became the most effective and favored means to settle disputes.
From the top down perspective, what happened in the Russian Revolution is a clear case of the failed state. According to Max Weber, the state must possess two essential ingredients: monopoly of coercive power and legitimacy. The Provisional Government had neither. It could not monopolize the means of coercion, the military and the police, at the exclusion of private military organizations such as the workers’ militia and the Red Guards. Sharing power with the All-Russian Soviets, it never acquired legitimacy. It was a failed state that could not provide essential service to its citizens.
These aspects provide a key to understanding the difficulties in the transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. It is exceedingly difficult for a post-authoritarian regime to restore order out of chaos and establish new norms that assure liberal democracy in the face of new forces that contest advancement of their values and under the pressure of impatient rising expectations. Some kind of coercive power is required to restore a semblance of law and order that might lead to the restoration of authoritarianism that is often worse than the one that the revolution initially toppled. The reassertion of the central state under the Bolsheviks with the use of brutal coercion, without legitimacy, was a tragic consequence of the Russian Revolution.