When the State Is Weak, Who Is Strong?
Russia's New Configuration of
Social Groups and Practices

Vadim Volkov

(European University in St. Petersburg)

This paper addresses the major puzzle and paradox of Russia's post-communist transformation: the movement against the state and for civil society proved self-defeating. The axiom shared by the majority of the democratically-minded intelligentsia was that one needs only to get rid of the "totalitarian" state in order to allow civil society to grow strong and human rights to take firm roots in Russian political culture. As a whole, this scenario did not work, although its first act, the weakening of the state, was carried out successfully. While historical experience of some western countries does tell us that the weak state can be successfully compensated by civil society, i.e. by strong self-government, the experience of other countries, Russia now included, demonstrates that the strong state is indispensable in the process of democratic transition. To reverse this proposition, the weakened Russian state cannot protect its citizens and their rights and paradoxically gives civil society less chance that its totalitarian predecessor. This is a very uncomfortable situation, pregnant with worst scenarios for the future. The decline of the state power did not lead to the rise of civil society (unless the latter is understood a la Marx, i.e. as chaotic struggle of private and egoistic interests in the economic domain). However, this is not to say that everybody is loosing in the course of post-communist transition. Power in Russia may be a zero-sum game. The question, therefore, is: when the Russian state is weak, who is strong?

The modern state rests on the monopoly of legitimate violence and, consequently, on the monopoly of taxation. Moreover, the group that effectively controls means of organized violence also acquires the monopoly over the enforcement of rules of economic and civic life. A weak state, then, is one which has lost the ability to effectively maintain these key monopolies. In late- and post-communist Russia, a constellation of factors led after 1987 to a progressing privatization of the state. The privatization of the state is understood here as the process whereby the function of protecting juridical and economic subjects was taken over by criminal groups, private protection companies, or units of the state police force acting as private entrepreneurs. The consequence of that can also be defined as the covert fragmentation of the state: the emergence, on the territory under the formal jurisdiction of the state, of competing and uncontrolled sources of organized violence and alternative taxation networks.

The paper proceeds to explore the process of emergence of new powerful groups that are engaged in the conversion of organized force and administrative capacity, the two major resources of the communist state, into other resources such as money, power, and status in the new market economy. To generalize, the weakness of the state in certain areas has often been converted into somebody's strength - for example, that of clans, or private corporations, or local elites. The weakness of the Soviet state in the sphere of production and distribution of consumer goods - the economy of deficit - was effectively turned to the advantage of the shadow economy and black market dealers. The consumer deficit gone, the deficit of power has emerged to take its place. This stimulated the emergence of various power brokers who, by using unlicensed violence, profit from this shortage of state power. The dissolution of the monopoly of violence and the deficit of state power are thus the two major structural conditions that are responsible for a major reconfiguration of social groups and practices in the course of Russia's post communist transition.

The sociological tradition of the Mafia studies offers several models of the emergence of alternative powers challenging those of the state. The political model sees the Mafia as a corollary of the state failure and the role of Mafiosi as power brokers, while the economic model conceives of the Mafia as the business of private protection, i.e. the conversion of potential violence into a marketable commodity. A useful discovery made by the Mafiology can be summed up in a rather simple manner: the Mafia-like groups emerge when the link between the state and the civil society is weak. I shall explore the relevance of this proposition to the Russian case.

Finally, I shall argue that in a situation that clearly demands a consolidation of the state and the monopolization of force, if the transition to a market economy is to be accomplished at all, Russia faces hard political alternatives: