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.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
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.