by TONY WOOD
The winter of 2011–12 produced a paradoxical combination of the inevitable and the unexpected in Russia. [1] The return of Vladimir Putin to the presidency was never in doubt; his crushing margin of victory in the March 2012 elections—officially, he scored 64 per cent, almost 50 percentage points more than the second-placed Communist Party candidate, Gennadii Zyuganov—gained him a third term in the Kremlin without the need for a further round of voting. However, the months prior to this democratic coronation brought a series of demonstrations of a scale not seen in these lands since the last days of perestroika. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in dozens of cities, from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad—the largest gathering, on 24 December, drawing as many as 100,000 people to Moscow’s Sakharov Avenue—to protest first against the fraudulent results of the December 2011 parliamentary elections, and then against the impending reinstallation of Putin as president. On the one hand, then, seeming confirmation of the ruling elite’s unhindered control over the political system; on the other, signs of a growing rejection of that system by a substantial part of the population.
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I. Soviet transformations
Three interrelated processes dominated the twentieth century in what became the Soviet Union: urbanization, the shift from an agrarian to an industrial base, and the system-wide installation of non-capitalist socio-economic relations. These processes unfolded very rapidly, bringing the creation of new social groups, the destruction of old ones and the expansion or metamorphosis of existing categories. Looking over a 70-year span—see Figure 1, below—we can see in broad outline what the main social outcomes in the ussr were, according to the official view (on which more shortly). Firstly, and most strikingly, there is the long, steady dwindling of the peasantry—for centuries the unmoving foundation of the Tsarist social order. In the Soviet period the peasant world was dismantled not only by urbanization and industrialization, but also by the heavy hand of repression, with the collectivization programme of 1929–32. Despite the return of some private plots thereafter, what was left of the peasantry had by mid-century been transformed into a rural proletariat. To be sure, alongside these pressures came a system of positive incentives: education, more rights for women, improved housing, sanitation, health care, and so on. But the main impact of the Soviet order on the peasantry was to destroy, for good and for ill, the traditions and life-world of this rural class—an outcome at stark variance with, for example, the fate of China’s peasant masses. [4]
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