Book Review: Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution, Russia in Search of its Future, Our Politics, Our Selves? Liberalism, Identity, and Harm, towards the Single Currency: The Intergovernmental Conference of the European Union, 1996, The European House of Cards: Towards a United States of Europe?, The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration since 1945, The New Ecological Order, Green Hopes: The Future of Political Ecology, Farewell, Revolution: The Historians' Feud — France, 1789/1989, Farewell, Revolution: Disputed Legacies — France, 1789/1989, on Nationality, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Colonies, Commerce, and Constitutional Law — Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria and other Writings on Spain and Spanish America, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. An Authoritative Edition with a New Introduction by F. Rosen and an Int
| Published date | 01 March 1997 |
| Author | Richard Kuper,Rohit Lekhi,Alan James,Garrath Williams,Peter Nicholson,Jeremy Jennings,Bill Jenkins,Robert Benewick,Keekok Lee,Maurizio Passerin D'Entrèves,Francis G. Castles,Margaret Canovan,Richard Sakwa,Ian Manners,Neill Nugent,Jonathan Seglow |
| Date | 01 March 1997 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00075 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
John Anderson, Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor
States (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi 236 pp., £35.00 ISBN
0 521 46231 2, £14.95 pbk ISBN 0 521 46784 5.
M. Steven Fish, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian
Revolution (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995), xi300 pp., £30.00
ISBN 0 691 03703 5.
Amin Saikal and William Maley (eds), Russia in Search of its Future (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1994), xii 239 pp., £30.00 ISBN 0 521 48260 7, £10.95
pbk ISBN 0 521 48387 5.
Each of these three books provide invaluable insights into the social and political
realities of a changing society in three successive periods. Anderson's well-researched
study makes good use of some newly-available archival material to analyse relations
between organized religion and the state in the post-Stalin years, with some analysis of
the Gorbachev period and of the role of religion in the post-communist polities.
Analysis of Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign from 1958 is crucial to an under-
standing of the period, yet many standard accounts fail to mention the devastating
nature of this renewed onslaught and its signi®cance for the moral evolution of the
regime. Anderson's focus on the policy process sheds particularly interesting light on the
decision making behind the campaign, and although Khrushchev was not slow in
making his atheist fundamentalist views known, his personal hand behind the campaign
(according to Anderson) is dicult to discern.
Anderson notes the emergence of a `public opinion' from the 1950s with which the
authorities were increasingly forced to reckon. The book assumes a fairly high degree of
knowledge about the history of religion in the Soviet years, and about the Soviet system
itself. The work, however, provides a useful case study of the Soviet policy process. As a
relatively highly ideological issue, religious policy allowed little scope for expert `policy
communities', but Anderson con®rms the emergence of what Franklin Griths called
`tendencies'. He also notes the growing impact of the external world on Soviet religious
aairs, if not directly on policy. Above all, the stubborn refusal of religion to die out,
and indeed its sociological renewal from the 1960s as younger acolytes joined, left the
regime with the ticklish problem of explaining the gulf between expectations and reality
in this ®eld (as in so many others).
Fish places the emerging `public opinion' of the Gorbachev years at the centre of
his analysis. Located ®rmly in what might be called the classical American political
science tradition, the book exhibits both the virtues and vices of this approach. On the
plus side, the book is marked by a scrupulous analysis of the existing literature
on approaches to understanding the Soviet system and its evolution under Gorbachev.
The book, moreover, has made impressive use of primary materials, the documents of
the independent movement and interviews with some of its leaders. The whole, however,
adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The tone is unnecessarily strident (typical of
many younger American academics), suggesting for example that the views of non-state
actors up to the August coup were largely ignored by western analysts (p. 12), when
in fact by then a whole cottage industry had emerged devoted to the theme. While
Fish is to be commended for drawing on the large East European and e
Âmigre
Â
socialist oppositional literature (something usually neglected in American discourse
but not, Fish should note, in Western European academic life), his basic discomfort
with the literature is revealed, for example, in attributing views to Marc Rakovski
as a tangible person when in fact the name was a pseudonym for Gyorgy Bence and
Janos Kis.
#Political Studies Association 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Political Studies (1997), XLV, 118± 140
Fish's two main substantive arguments, moreover, are not convincingly developed or
operationalized. The ®rst suggests that the emerging `opposition' under Gorbachev can
be characterized as a `movement society'. The theoretical outline and the detailed
analysis of the phenomenon by Fish is second to none, suggesting, for example that
the opening of 1989± 90 was `both too sudden and too partial' ( p. 73), debilitating the
organizational structuration of political life in the shape, for example, of political parties
or a Solidarity-type movement. It is in the practical application of the notion that Fish
stumbles, and while throwing up some useful insights his analysis of some representative
movements and parties is remarkably traditional in its approach.
The second substantive assertion in the book is that the alternative was largely
structured by the object which it sought to change, namely the Soviet state itself. On its
own this is an unobjectionable argument, although in no wise original. By 1989 the state
was largely reduced to a negative role, inhibiting rather than originating processes of
societal integration. Fish is unclear in what precise sense he aims to replace societal
models of late Soviet development with statist ones.
Marked by a prodigious amount of primary research, the book is invaluable for all
those studying `the transition' in Russia. There are, however, numerous points at which
judgements could be re®ned, as in Fish's assertion that El'tsin should have called
elections immediately after the April 1993 referendum, if not earlier (p. 232). The whole
point was that there was no constitutional way in which the president could do this,
hence the crisis later in the year. In fact, the sections on `Where is Russia's Transition
Leading?' and the Epilogue could well have been dropped, adding little to the substan-
tive arguments. The book was completed in late 1992, and it might well have been best
for the text to have stood as testimony to the author's views of that time.
In Russia in Search of its Future the problems of post-Communist Russian develop-
ment are faced head on, but once again the acceleration of history has left some of the
papers slightly jaded. Written under the impression of the shock of Zhirinovskii's
unexpected relative success in the December 1993 elections and based on a conference
held in Canberra at that time, the book consists of a series of thirteen essays by some
leading experts in the ®eld. Sections deal with politics, economics, international relations
and, most fruitfully, with culture and society. The theme is Russia's ¯awed trans-
formation. Shaped by the imperatives of history, geography and culture the country
emerged from Communism with an essentially negative project, to overcome the past,
but failed to generate a positive vision of the future of its own.
RICHARD SAKWA
University of Kent at Canterbury
Peter Digeser, Our Politics, Our Selves? Liberalism, Identity, and Harm (Princeton NJ,
Princeton University Press, 1995), x 271 pp., £29.95 ISBN 0 69103716 7.
In this book Digeser asks whether a liberal regime should engage with our selves and
seek to improve the quality of our internal lives. The problem is that if `statecraft' is
`selfcraft', as Digeser puts it, this may cause our selves harm. This is a familiar liberal
fear, but there are non-liberal normative notions of an unharmed self to turn to, and the
bulk of the book is an assessment of three alternative conceptions. These are com-
munitarians (MacIntyre, Taylor, Sandel) who advocate a unitary, engaged self; classical
political rationalists (Strauss, Bloom and their followers) who champion an ordered,
reason-governed, truth-seeking self; and ®nally genealogists (Foucault, Connolly,
Butler) who favour an open, performative, dierence-sensitive self. Despite their
dierence, these three schools all believe that liberal theory seriously misconstrues the
self and in consequence that it is liberal practice which causes us harm. Digeser is a
liberal but not a doctrinaire one, and he takes these non-liberal views seriously. His
analyses and interpretations of them are uniformly sensitive and discriminating. In the
end, however, he does not ®nd the three critical models as compelling as the liberal self
and in the main he rejects their arguments against liberal practice. His preferred
119Book Reviews
#Political Studies Association, 1997
To continue reading
Request your trial