How many upgrades has Russia gone through? Lecture by Igor Klyamkin
At the beginning of 2006, Igor Klyamkin gave a lecture “Order and Law. The problem of Russia’s modernization” in the “Bilingua” club. Today we deal with only part of his lecture. The full text is available here.
Klyamkin reconstructs the experience of improvement in Russia and makes his own forecast. According to the statement, a new technological modernization in Russia cannot be carried out without political modernization.
Igor Klyamkin is a political scientist, Doctor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute of Sociological Analysis, Liberal Mission Foundation.
On April 28, sinologist Yevgeny Verlin will give a lecture on China-Russia-Ukraine: geopolitical swings at the Club within the framework of the Polit.ru Public Lectures project. Registration desirable but not required.
Today the authorities present themselves as democratic. And in this regard, it can present itself as “not much different” from any government in any European or any other democratic country. This requires unification and history, which should manifest itself not as some deviation from the European path, but as part of European history.
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I will divide the general conquest of Russia into two groups. The first group is technological and the second is socio-political. They did not coincide in time, they were, as a rule, asynchronous, sometimes spherical, but, in principle, asynchronous. They are fundamentally different from those in Europe. Nevertheless, within the framework of the goals that they set for themselves, they were quite common. And the whole question is how much their experience can be regulated today. The fact is that very often the experience of Peter and Stalin is treated as positive. <...> Despite the fact that they were the most diverse within the framework of the goals that they once set, they do not have that opportunity today.
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Technological modernization of Peter was carried out by militaristic means. She was purely dependent. Its meaning was to renew a narrow, very calculated modernized layer in the form of the gentry, or, as it was then called, the nobility, to educate it by sending it to start, inviting the beginning of the opening, opening some schools, primarily considered with military affairs. At the same time, this modernization did not penetrate the mass of the population at all.
The result was that we managed to create a fairly modern industry for those times, establish order, increase the amount of production materials and move to the modern technological level, primarily in productivity, in technical solutions, to serve a significant army. It was, I repeat, such a way of improvement, which was associated with the utmost militarization of the entire state life, with the fact that practically all administrative functions were carried out or controlled by the military. Guards took place, including over the Senate, the guards were sent in order to revise the activities of local authorities. At the end of his reign, the heads of state bodies were engaged in almost all civil functions, including tax collection. Finally, the per capita agenda was introduced, which was carried out until 1887, which was indeed completely unacceptable by European standards for world tax time, i.e. tax not on property, not on installation, tax on life. Those. everyone paid it by post because he lived in this country. It was an extremely militarized model, and the country was practically run the way an army was run. Many historians have written about this, I am not discovering anything new here. Nevertheless, today Peter is referred to, including, like me, by representatives of those parties that consider themselves liberal. Then, however, they got better, and in recent years we have seen symptoms, as B.E. Nemtsov already propagated Alexander II, which, of course, is closer to the model that they profess.
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Speaking about how relevant this is for us, it is important to realize the effect of this improvement. Yes, it led to the creation of the army. Yes, it creates modern systems of influence. Yes, it happened in Russia, which didn’t happen before. But it was a modernization that can be called extensive, which subsequently was practically not repeated, although in other forms, and which was reduced to the preservation of ready-made innovations abroad and their transfer. At the same time, there were no such sources and incentives for their innovations. Therefore, such modernization led to the fact that this attempt was replaced by a new lag. Because they implemented this technological base, i.e. did not leave extensive development, but transferred extensiveness to a new technological level. After Petra took it about 100 years before the Industrial Revolution began in Europe, and its results began to be delayed, including in military affairs.
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The second technological modernization took place, as is known, during the period of Alexander III and Nicholas II, and above all with the name of Sergei Witte. She was not detained and militaristic, as under Peter. But she also had to do with Peter’s trade. The state was endowed with the subject of this modernization. And it also extended to a minority of the population. It practically did not spread to the village, which, in the end, blew up the country. It was carried out at the expense of two sources: the collection of foreign capital and the export of bread according to the recipe “we will not eat it, but we will take it out.”
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The militaristic nature of the war is most clearly illustrated by the mechanism of creating the image of the enemy, in which there is a special model – the concept of constant civil war in the conditions of the surrounding world. For Stalin, it sounded like “Eviction of the class connection as we approach socialism”, when the military situation was constantly imitated, all failures were attributed to threats. At the same time, these enemies were agents of other countries, intelligence agencies. How it was treated can be judged by the militaristic vocabulary of that era: everything was a “front”, everything was a “struggle” – from literature to “cast iron”.
This modernization was also extensive. She also took extensiveness to a new technological level. But, given the pace of development in the 20th century, in principle, it became obsolete after 20-25 years, and after Stalin’s death, his successors – both Bulganin and Khrushchev – murder that we are lagging behind not only in agriculture, but also in industry and science. This steel system also did not create any impulses and incentives for the development of innovations. In the 30s. 30 thousand machine tools were purchased abroad. That this is so can be judged, in particular, from one of Kapitsa’s letters to Stalin in 1952, where he wrote that in almost all areas Soviet science and technology lag behind Western ones, and in cases where In the Soviet Union, new promising directions were previously discovered, they are being blocked. So it was, for example, later, with radar, when it was necessary to buy radars from the British in 1940.
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After that, for more than fifty years after the death of Stalin, the country faces a challenge, it needs to carry out the fourth technological modernization in its history. She still can’t get through it. There cannot be its technology, because the challenge of the current situation is the challenge of the situation, there are no conditions for features here.
The task was recognized. Brezhnev spoke about this when he called for joining socialism with the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution. Even Chernenko spoke about this when he stated that the possibilities for extensive development had been exhausted. Gorbachev spoke about this, and he also began to act in the same logic. His whole concept of collecting data on the scale of equipment purchases abroad, in order to boost domestic engineering. But all these purchases took place throughout the entire Soviet period. When they got into this environment, they gave a tangible smaller effect than where they were brought from. Simply put, this challenge of the fourth stage of reaching the country has not yet been answered. In search of an answer to it, she managed to fall apart.
She cannot find an answer to it because of the simple situation that the answer will be obtained in a departure from state modernization, i.e. modernizations, repeated from above, the majority of the subject is the state, which knows what and how to preserve and what to transfer. But it itself cannot create an innovative environment without private business, without its freedom and innovative activity. The answer lies in the transition from state modernization to the achievement of the state itself.
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The modernization of the state is nothing new for Russia. In this respect, our history is very useful, because here, in accordance with the rules of the 18th century, an interesting movement is being treated, connected with the transition from the system of orders to the system of the judiciary, the legal system. <...> The Petrine system was combined with the law, but the law was just a means to justify the right by order.
The law has been improved. Everything that Peter introduced here, he implemented through his decrees. beginning with Peter III and especially Catherine II, here the transition to the state level, which can be called legal. His “Decree on the Liberty of the Nobility” and Catherine II’s “Letter of Letters” to the nobles and cities practically introduced rights into this idea, albeit class-based, albeit extending to certain groups, but they introduced it. In this sense, the movement to Europe did not begin with Peter, not with nonpossessors, as we are told today. And it began precisely in 1762 and was attached by the “Charters of Complaint” of 1785.