The Sustainability of Russia and Other Post-Socialist Societies: 20 Years after Reform

Abstract

Gordey Yastrebov — Lecturer, Sub-department of Economic Methodology and History, National Research University “Higher School of Economics”. Address: Bldg. 1, 40, Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: gordey.yastrebov@gmail.com

Anna Krasilova — Senior Researcher, Laboratory for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Development, National Research University “Higher School of Economics”. Address: Bldg. 1, 40, Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: akrasilova@hse.ru

In this paper, we argue that the existing divergence of development paths in the post-socialist world appears to have been caused by reformers’ poor (and, perhaps, intentionally wrong) understanding of the certain cultural and historical contexts of these countries’ development. Such understanding was blindly focused on institutional building rather than setting milestones for development and achieving certain goals in terms of society’s well-being as a whole. However, since the 1990s, the literature on development has accumulated a rich line of arguments in favor of non-European modernity and variability of development, and attempts to distinguish modernization from Westernization (Eisenstadt’s multiple modernities, varieties of capitalism approach, and the renaissance of civilization theories).

It is no wonder that such ideas have gained a lot of support in many developing countries, where authors draw attention to the lack of explanatory power of existing social theories and their incompatibility with non-Western forms of modern society. However, in Russia, for instance, there are still many scholars and even decision makers who regard the country’s previous historical experience and culture as a constraint, rather than a specific context for its modernization. But let’s suggest that a certain society undergoes radical transformation, just as it happened once to all of the post-socialist states. The transformation is then followed by a lengthy period of adaptation from one arrangement of social and economic structures to another. During this period, new structures are being implanted and accustomed to the common way of thinking and behavior, and make the society gradually accept the new order of things. However, this process would not always go smoothly and the reason for this is that institutional change is to a large extent shaped by the mentality of the people, which, in turn, may lead to corruption and misinterpretation of new practices, or even their rejection.

This is what seems to have happened in Russia in the 1990s. Many people were at first very optimistic about change, but could not and actually did not want to give up some of the former practices incompatible with modern institutions (a usually ritualistic disregard for the legal and electoral systems, avoidance of competition, absence of respect for the private property, etc). However, we do not claim that the system of social and economic relations that existed earlier was much better than the one built on top of it. We only want to draw attention to the fact that the previous experience of life under an autocracy of Tsarist Russia and state socialism could not go unnoticed.

The question is, whether the current state of the system is optimal for Russia and other post-socialist countries. This is a difficult problem to solve, especially given that in spite of the more or less similar reforms, social and economic development in Russia and some CIS countries has spun off (and now follows) in a direction certainly different from most countries in central and eastern Europe. And these differences concern not only the rate and the quality of their economic growth, but a certain environment which determines the capacity for human development throughout every social stratum and, thus, makes social development sustainable. Yet if we evaluate the outcomes of the radical market change in most post-socialist countries from the standpoint of purely economic achievements, we are more likely to deal with a different story. For instance, achieving somewhat higher economic efficiency thanks to the enforcement of market and private property seemingly does not guarantee an even rise in well-being in every given society. At least, that is what follows from the CIS experience. While today the liberal “push” is being gradually transformed into a moderate social democratic development in some Vyshegrad countries, it has certainly brought about a devastating effect for Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, not to mention the former Soviet “stan” republics.

All of this implies that we should consider another important factor of sustainable development; meaning, the population itself, with its particular attitudes, values and behavior models. These can either be appropriate (like in most countries of central and eastern Europe) or inappropriate (in Russia and some CIS countries) to the principles that govern their systems of health provision, education, security, and so on. It appears to us that the persistence of such contrapositions may be the major reason for low or even negative efficiency of social programs introduced by some of the post-socialist governments.

And so, finally, all of this raises a number of questions. How do we evaluate the success of post-socialist development if we are to consider an obvious insufficiency of such criterion as economic growth or economic efficiency? Are there universal parameters of development for each society which make such comparisons possible? And, what is most important, how do these parameters interact with the particular logics of development?

By following such a line of analysis, we suggest putting aside the rather economocentric, or economically determinist approach, and evaluating the transformation outcomes by distinguishing certain vectors of human development with respect to physical, social and mental aspects of society’s well-being. What we suggest is to extend the widely accepted notion of human development, suggested by United Nations Development program, to a notion of ‘societal health’ by analogy with classical definition of the World Health Organization. That is, ‘health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing’. The reason for treating the United Nations Human Development Index as insufficient is its narrow and even biased understanding of social progress, where its elementary components, such as life expectancy, education enrollment and wealth, are set as key goal indicators. And although wealth is important to provide society with resources for future development, it alone has nothing to deliver on human development per se. Rather, it is a tool of many different uses, some of which may even be incompatible with social progress.

We assume that the goals of human development are independent of local and historical contexts, and, hence, should be regarded as universal. In this case, we follow the ideas of Amartiya Sen and accept that any progressive or progress-oriented societal transformation — be it economic, political or social change — should pursue the goal of human fulfillment in terms of personal growth, creativity and promoting individual talent. In other words, we regard the extent of human development as a sort of universal barometer, through which the existing vectors of political, social and economic organization of societies can be evaluated as adequate with respect to their particular cultural context.

In the wide sense we are concerned with human development as a process which is central to maintaining the sustainability of contemporary societies. And that is, first of all, their integral ability to withstand certain dysfunctions or pathologies, among them social (extreme inequality, social disintegration, anomie, crime and so on), physical (low life expectancy and physical health) and mental (moral and intellectual degradation and self-destructive behavior). That is, so to say, the qualitative aspect of sustainability. While the possible proxy for quantitative reproduction is society’s persistent ability to withstand depopulation.

To measure the relative success of countries in reaching the true goals of human development, we constructed our own index that aggregated information about each of different aspects. We were, of course, constrained by the availability of data for certain periods and countries, as well as their comparability, since many statistical records have nation-specific methods of keeping data. All evaluations are based on sources, such as the World Bank, Human Development Indicators, World Health Organization, Eurostat and the European Social Survey.

Several general conclusions were drawn based on empirical analysis. First of all, as far as success of the ‘Great Transformation’ is concerned, it is possible to conclude that the outcomes were highly unequal. While central and eastern Europe today can more or less enjoy the levels of social development comparable to that of western Europe, the CIS countries still have a lot to catch up to do. Russia is in particularly poor shape in spite of the fact that it has enjoyed higher economic performance in the recent years (thanks to the favorable oil markets).

Second, economic performance is, indeed, important as it provides a certain endowment to social development. However, the actual relationship between the two is still very uncertain, since better economic performance may be a consequence of better human development. In the case of the underperformance of Russia and, to a lesser extent, Kazakhstan, it is clear that in both countries the problems of human development are highly neglected.

Third, democracy seems to be a good cure to social development, as it helps to develop consensus in the population on the corresponding goals and measures. However, this truth is convincing only in a certain context. For example, a European context, where better democracies are associated with higher levels of human development. And we would dare to suggest that particular countries such as Turkey, Kazakhstan and Belarus look quite challenging to this experience.

Finally, we introduce our preliminary theoretical and methodological framework for further analysis and argue in favor of considering a civilization context, within which any kind of social, political or economic change is implemented.