Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia-From Lenin to Gorbachev

1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Lewis H. Siegelbaum ◽  
Robert C. Tucker
Stan Rzeczy ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 55-77
Author(s):  
Anna Shor-Chudnovskaya

This article is devoted to the attitude to truth as a part of political epistemology and of political culture in post-Soviet Russia. It considers the extent to which the Great Terror contributed to the development of a specific political epistemology, which is also largely characteristic of later periods of Soviet history and perhaps even of today. Of particular interest is the population’s perception of the terror as inaccessible or poorly accessible to logical understanding. As main sources, the article relies on two literary texts: Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna and Veniamin Kaverin’s The Open Book. Despite all the apparent differences between the Soviet system and today’s Russia, one important similarity is striking: over the last two decades (after 1999) there has been a visible increase in the belief that it is impossible for a political subject to separate truth from lying and that the sphere of public administration and political interests is, by definition, a place where deception prevails. This article discusses the potential historical roots of this certainty.


1988 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 549
Author(s):  
Robert W. Clawson ◽  
Robert C. Tucker

Slavic Review ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 630-641 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Zimmerman

There are two basic and conflicting views among scholars about the malleability of political culture—a group or nation's basic orientations to politics. By one account, culture is a relatively stable, ethnically or spatially specific predictor variable that shapes a nation's political institutions. In Russian studies, this is an approach that has emphasized the connection between the Russian autocratic past and the similarities between tsarist and bolshevik political institutions. Those attracted by this assessment of political culture are prone to think a statist, authoritarian political economy in Russia will be a constant regardless of the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. The other approach views political culture as being more malleable. It has two variants. One snares with the first approach the assumption that culture is a predictor variable, but emphasizes the effects of secular changes in education and changes in work experience on the distribution of attitudes in a society.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-44
Author(s):  
David Lane

Professor Bauman's article is certainly a welcome contribution to the analysis of state socialist societies. He succeeds in breaking away from the myopic Kremlinological study of individuals and he also conducts his argument on a comparative sociological plane transcending the Sovietologist's ideographic viewpoint. However, he may be criticised at many points: it is very doubtful whether the state under capitalism is as ‘autonomous’ an institution as Bauman suggests; distinctions should be made between the socialist states of Eastern Europe, for what may be true of Poland and Rumania may not be true of the Soviet Union; international relations, particularly those between the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe and between East and West, have important effects on the political culture and significantly restrict the possibilities for social change; the diachronic development of the societies under consideration needs to be given more prominence, for what may have been the case in Soviet Russia in 1920 or in Poland in 1948 may not be so for either society in 1971. Here, I shall have to leave on one side such general criticisms to concentrate on a number of specific points in Bauman's argument relating to stratification in Eastern Europe which seem to me to be debatable.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 620-632
Author(s):  
Yuriy M. Pochta

In the article, the author uses the example of Islam to examine the interconfessional relations, developing in the Russian Federation in the context of return of religion and religious beliefs to public life (revival of religion). This process affects both institutional aspects (evolution of the state’s federal structure, political system, formation of civil society) and value aspects of religion, such as its influence on the political culture of society, ideology of federalism and change in the content of secularism of the state. J. Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy, the concepts of post-secular society and federalism, as well as the civilizational approach are used as the methodological base of the research. The author justifies his conclusion about the necessity to ensure respect for religious values while preserving the secular nature of the Russian state as an asymmetric Federation.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document