The Structure of Russia’s Historical Path Dependency

Abstract

Vladimir Ilyin – Doctor of Science in Sociology, Professor, St. Petersburg State University, Syktyvkar State University; Associated Researcher, Sociological Institute RAS. Address: 7–9, Universitetskaya Guay, Saint-Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation.
E-mail: ivi-2002@yandex.ru

Citation: Ilyin V. (2017) The Structure of Russia’s Historical Path Dependency. Mir Rossii, vol. 26, no 4, pp. 30–50 (in Russian). DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2017-26-4-30-50

This article deals with a number of topics raised in the two monographs “Russia as a Civilization” and “Is New Russia New?”. It clarifies the categorical apparatus which allows the integration of the civilizational approach and path dependency. An important problem with the civilizational approach is rooted in its origin: the approach was first developed within the framework of the philosophy of history, the methodology of which is not sensitive to empirical details. Later the popularity of this approach led to its transmigration into more exact disciplines – history, including economic history, and sociology. However, the shift in the subject field was not supported by the adequate development of a particular scientific methodology. As a result, the question of Russia’s place in the system of local civilizations remains more a matter of faith, and none of the contending parties are able to supply arguments that can convince their opponents.
The main drawback of existing civilizational studies is their voluntary treatment of historical data: countries are often contemporaneously compared regardless of the fact that they may be going through different stages of development, analogies are often drawn arbitrarily in order to fit into the deductive logic, and the facts are generally cherry picked to justify chosen theoretical concepts. Not surprisingly, despite its long history, civilizational analysis in Russia still remains more integrated into ideological, rather than scientific discourse. On the other hand, the concept of path dependency, which originated in the economic sciences, is much more accurate and specific, yet precisely for this reason it struggles to explain the dynamics of history over the scale of a thousand years.
In this paper I propose two sets of categories which may be helpful for integrating the civilizational approach and path dependency. The first set of categories pertains to the analysis of the mechanisms of historical continuity within a single civilization:
1) a civilizational core as a set of factors acting throughout a civilization’s history;
2) a historical track as a real trajectory in the context of available resources;
3) civilizational traps (often political) as specific developments that lead to irreversible consequences. The second set of categories distinguishes between different domains of historical continuity such as geography, geopolitics, politics, religion, the history of ownership relations and historical memory. I argue that such a categorical grid allows for the proper empirical testing of hypotheses often drawn from civilizational analysis.