Civil Society in Russia: Russia's Democratic Development
Friday, October 31, 2003
by George E. Hudson

The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the Russian oil company Yukos, and the freezing of about 44 percent of Yukos stock, has conjured up a media image of the rise of a new authoritarian state in Russia and a significant drift away from democratic development. An analyst on a recent broadcast of PBS's The Evening News with Jim Lehrer even claimed that the event provides further evidence that, after 1991, Russia was never democratic in the first place.

These images are incorrect. They are based on an incomplete understanding of what constitutes democracy and focus exclusively on national-level elite conflict, as if nothing happening in society below counts in how we evaluate Russian politics.

The creation of civil society underpins democracy. The civil society encompasses voluntary associations of individuals, generally free of government control, which ban together to advance their interests both nationally and locally, but mostly locally, and which form horizontal contacts to inform and support each other. Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French commentator on America in the early to mid-1800s, noted that these groups were the foundation for American democracy. And, indeed, they were and are. Many people worry that Americans do not associate enough these days, with a weakening of the political system as a result.

While Russia's political development is, for many reasons, different from America's, there can be no mistaking that group formation is fundamental to democratic development there, too. The excess attention paid to elite politics in Russia-a heritage from the old days of analyzing Soviet politics, when we knew very little of what happened in society-has drawn us away from seeing the real progress toward democratic development below the level of the elite.

Consider the following:

• According to the newspaper Izvestiia, there are 350,000 registered civil associations in Russia, of which about 70,000 are actually operational. Some of the more active ones, such as the Russian Foundation for Legal Reforms (RFLR), constitute "mother" groups, the purpose of which is to help other groups form. In the RFLR case, the groups it helps to organize teach individuals how to use the law and the Russian Constitution to protect themselves (sometimes from other citizens and sometimes from the state, itself). Individuals have waged successful prosecution against the state, lending a view of Russian law as something that can be used to protect individual rights, rather than as an instrument that only the power elite can use as it wishes.
  
  
• Essential horizontal contacts among groups are forming. In November 2001 about 4,000 representatives of civic associations from all over Russia met in Moscow to discuss their operations and to assess their impact on Russian politics and society. The meeting provided a forum in which the groups could communicate to the top leadership (President Putin addressed the meeting and stayed on for part of it to listen) and could network among themselves. The internet has taken hold in Russia, as well. A landmark study by Olga Vendina of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the impact of the internet on civil society in Moscow notes that housing advocacy groups have been using the internet ever more frequently to communicate with each other. Internet political campaigning is even responsible for the relatively respectable, second-place showing of Seigei Kiriyenko in the 1999 Moscow mayoral election, according to Vendina. The internet society has arrived in Russia and it is helping to construct civil society.
  
  
• Civil society is being built not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg-Russia's largest cities-but in many other regions. A Russian study of Volograd, for instance, demonstrates the existence and effectiveness of these groups in assisting veterans and enabling the "greening" of the city. Another study focuses on the nation-wide reach of legal rights organizations, which have established local offices to assist normal Russians with their pension rights, access to courts, and issues concerned with civil rights and liberties. None of this is to say that a civil society has been built in Russia. There is no end point to the evolution of civil society or of democracy. It took a civil war in the United States to begin to resolve key questions of civil rights-many of which have still not been realized today. In only thirteen years, Russia has made a start toward civil society and, therefore, toward democracy. We should recognize it.
  
  

George E. Hudson is a Visiting Scholar at the Mershon Center, Ohio State University, where he is currently conducting research on civil society in Russia. He is also Professor of Political Science at Wittenberg University.

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