For Dignity in Democratic Citizenship:

Russias Unfinished Moral Revolution and

Anti-authoritarian Movements Today
By Leon Aron
A close examination of the causes of the Russian Revolution of 198791 indicates that it was precipitated
not by the traditional structural calamities of economic or financial crises, military defeat, or natural disasters but by a moral and intellectual awakening of the Soviet people. The tug of war between the power
of the state and the conscience of the citizen became a source of widening conflict. Moral and intellectual
revolution of the late 1980s attempted to recover peoples dignity by constructing democratic citizenship
rooted in economic and political liberty and personal responsibility. Russias revolution is an example of
moral renewal generated from below by civil society rather than the state. In Russia today, burgeoning
grassroots movements appear to continue what glasnost started by seeking to inculcate and widen modern, enlightened, democratic citizenship.

oads to the Temple (Yale University Press, 2012),

likely the first account of the 198791 revolution in the history-of-ideas mode, started as a means
to recover and relive what I remembered as a nearly
incredible excitement that the revolution stirred
in those of us lucky to be alive and watchful at
the time. The rapid succession of events left little
time to linger, to savor, and to look deeper. Reviewing the more than 8,000 pages of Russian originals
from the period brought me to a place where it
seemed possible to take on the questions that had
troubled me and many others for the past 20 years:
why and how did the Soviet Union collapse so
swiftly and largely nonviolently, and why could
we not see it coming until almost the last moment?
None of the traditional, so-called structuralist or institutional approaches to revolutions
(all stemming from Karl Marxs historical materialism) gave a fully satisfactory explanation. There
was no sharp economic downturn or financial
Leon Aron (laron@aei.org) is a resident scholar and
the director of Russian Studies at AEI.

Key points in this Outlook:

No external (structural, material, or
institutional) factorslike economic
downturns or military defeatssatisfactorily
explain the Soviet Unions downfall; rather,
the moral revulsion over the regimes past
and present destroyed the Soviet states
legitimacy in the eyes of the politically
active minority that led the revolution.
Confronting the terror and the complicity
in it of millions of people is critical to spiritual, civil, andin the endpolitical
progress not only in Russia, but in other
transitional societies such as China.
Constructing a new, equitable, and dignified
political and social order is impossible without democratic citizenship; the moral imperative of dignity in political and economic
liberty is the engine of anti-authoritarian
movements in todays world, as it was for
the glasnost revolution.

1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

202 .862.5800

www.aei.org

Russian Outlook

Fall 2012

-2crisis until the political revolution was well underway by

the second half of 1990. There was no famine, epidemic,
flood, or earthquake, nor was there a major military
defeat or, indeed, a defeat of any kind.
On the contrary, by the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union
was at the apex of its power, at nuclear parity with the
United States, in possession of the largest armed forces
in the world, with 5 million men under arms and, following the imposition of martial law in Poland in
December 1981, in seemingly total and unshakable control of its East Central European empire. To be sure, a
savage war in Afghanistan was grinding on with no end
in sight, but its impact on the economy was negligible
and the casualties small by the Soviet Unions standards
forged in World War II. The totalitarian control over
information and airtight censorship made the war impervious to domestic and, for the most part, international
scrutiny and thus perfectly manageable politically.
Insteadfirst hinting, then insistingthe material
began to persuade me that the Soviet state was undermined not nearly as much by extraneous factors as by
something snapping, cracking irreversibly and fatally
deep inside the soul of the Soviet state. Its legitimacy
was fatally injured. In Citizens, his superb history of
the ideas and words that made the French Revolution,
Simon Schama wrote: It does not seem too much to say
that it was oratory that created the People, not vice
versa.1 I am persuaded that it is definitely not too much
to say that glasnost created the people who turned their
backs on the Soviet state.

Asking Ultimate Questions

How, then, in less than four years, did that which seemed
so powerful and glorious and invincible come to be
regarded shameful and pitiful? In trying to find an
answer, I found myself writing a story of a great people
who woke up one morning, looked in a mirror no longer
distorted by censorship and lies, and recoiled in horror.
They began to ask the ultimate questions: Who are
we? Do we live honorably? How should we live? What is
virtue and what is evil? How often do we see such an
impassioned quest for moral guidance, a kind of secular
reformation gripping a great nation?
I write secular, but one of the startling things about
the glasnost discourse was the seemingly un-self-conscious
recovery of religious vocabulary: after the slaughter of
hundreds of thousands of priests and believers, after
seven decades of murderous state atheism, after almost

four generations in whom religious feeling had been

burnt out. Suddenly, words we thought Russia had forgotten decades ago were everywhere: pokoyanie (repentance), iskuplenie (redemption), grekh (sin), dobrodetel
(goodness), voskresenie (resurrection).
Like great revolutions before it, this one engaged and
grappled with some fundamental issues of human existence, unresolved and perhaps ultimately unresolvable. In
doing so, it has spawned its own futuredirecting us,
instructing, and warning.

State versus Citizen

By far the most portentous of these moral and intellectual
quests was an attempt to settle the perennial conflict
between the power of the state and the conscience of the
citizen.2 What is a proper, dignified relationship between
individual and state? This was one of the first questions
asked by those whom in the book I call the troubadours of
glasnost. They returned to it again and again, for they had
seen the master state in all its sinister arrogance and
intoxication of unlimited power, confiscating first politics,
then economy, and finally morality and taking away what
makes us human: free will and moral choice. The glasnost
authors found the people to be separated from their dignity, as they put it, and every second of this multifaceted
and petty denigration reinforced the sense of the states
omnipotence and their powerlessness.3
Lifes defenselessness against the power of state
was endless and enforced by the equally boundless
violence.4 Gorbachevs right-hand man, Alexander
Yakovlev, who became known as the godfather of glasnost wrote, In 70 years . . . a system had been built
that is organically indifferent to the real, existing man,
hostile to him. And not only in the mass repressions, the
victims of which are millions, but in daily life, where a
person means nothing, has nothing, and cannot obtain
even the most basic things without humiliation.5 The
leaders of glasnost were determined for this never to
happen again.
An individual for the stateor the state for an individual? This is the main question, wrote two Russian
intellectuals in the summer of 1989.6 In the preamble to
a new Soviet constitution, on which he worked until an
hour before his death, Andrei Sakharov wrote, The goal
and responsibility of . . . the state is to secure social, economic, and civil rights of the individual.7
But how to create such a state? First, cut off the tentacles of the old one. End the states ownership of truth

-3by outlawing censorship and allowing nonstate media.

End the state ownership of justice: laws must be laid
down between man and state, a leading Russian jurist
insisted in the fall of 1988, and these laws were to protect individuals from the state, not the other way
around, as had been the case until then.8
Second, unknown for over half a century, private
property was deemed the first and last bulwark against
the return to the tyranny of state. Where the statebureaucratic apparatus dominates, democracy is
deprived of its economic base, making political liberties
impossible in principle. 9 With the abolition of private
property, the foundation of individual freedom is
destroyed, wrote one of the most influential of the glasnost essayists, Vasily Selyunin. Nothing is left to a man
but to serve the state on the condition that the state dictates, he concluded.10 Speaking to students at Moscow
State University in February 1990, Yakovlev declared,
Authoritarianism, totalitarianism, Stalinism became
possible in our country because all the sources of individuals well-being, all the means of his existence were in
the hands of state.11 Thus, privatization was to be the
most urgent political, not economic, task.

Constructing a New Citizen

But the key condition for a new and equitable political,
economic, and social order was to be a new citizen.
He and she were to take the prostrate, sullen, anemic,
anonymous and atomized people and make them into a
civil society: vibrant and confident, self-aware and vigilant, willing and able to take on the executive at every
level. After four generations in the state employ and
total dependence on the state, the people were to be
responsible for themselves, their family, their townand
their country.
Yet as they looked around them after decades of terror, lies, and state-owned morality, the authors of glasnost saw in most of their compatriots and themselves
slaves or conceited authoritarians (triumphant boors)
or, most often the case, a mixture of both.12 This, they
concluded, was an utterly unsuitable foundation for
national renewal.
One of the most popular quotes of glasnost, almost its
mantra, was a famous passage from Anton Chekhovs letter
in which he wrote about the squeezing of the slave out of
ones soul. Until this was done, until mans dignity and
mastery over his life was restored, any talk of the guarantees against the relapse of tyranny was senseless, contended

a participant in a roundtable at one of the key liberal publications, the weekly magazine Ogonyok, in spring of
1988.13 Enough! exclaimed popular writer Boris
Vasiliev in March 1987. Enough lies, enough servility,
enough cowardice! Lets remember that that we are all
citizens, proud citizens of a proud nation!14
How, was this new, unslaved citizen to be constructed? By nothing short of remoralizing the nation. In
Great Disruptions, his excellent book about moral crises
in the history of nations, Frank Fukuyama called this
process renorming.
This task suited the glasnost authors very well. They
were editors and journalists, historians and philosophers,
writers and professors, experts and literary critics. But
like others who had led great revolutions before them,
they were, first and foremost, moralists. That is, they
believed passionately in the absolutes of good and evil,
in the absolute difference between the two and in their
mission to advance the former and eradicate the latter.
The great American literary critic and political philosopher Dwight Macdonald wrote that the only serious
aspect of politics is its relation to morality. In truly consequential, watershed eventsbe they crises or revolutions or truly fateful electionsfor a brief and brilliant
moment, all politics is serious because all of it is about
morality. Of all the many and dazzling themes of glasnost,
none was more explicit, more urgent, and more passionately articulated than the necessity of virtue, of moral
renewal as the central condition of political, social, and
economic progress. This overarching moral urgency is
the final and weightiest evidence that what happened
between 1987 and 1991 was a great revolution indeed.
For the man who started it all, Mikhail Gorbachev,
the renewal of society was inseparable from the struggle
for the dignity of man, his elevation, his honor.15 Perestroika is a natural development toward . . . every persons right to be a conscious creator of ones own fate . . .
toward rationality and responsibility, and toward the
moral basis as the center of personal and social life,
Yakovlev said in February 1989.16 Only a moral democracy could secure a progressive Russian state, he told
Moscow News a year later.17 Our revolution, a leading
jurist, Marat Baglai, wrote in July 1988, would succeed
only as a highly moral process.18 (Five thousand miles
away and two centuries before, John Adams wrote,
Liberty can no more exist without virtue . . . than body
can live and move without a soul.19 It is these sorts of
echoes that send shivers down your spinea historian of
ideas greatest reward.)

-4This is what they hoped for, these teachers of truth

(the name I borrowed from another passionate moralist,
Samuel Johnson20): Perestroika is creating a new type
of social relations, wrote philosopher Leonid Goldin.
Instead of the government taking care of the welfare of
an infinitely submissive people, everyone truly becomes
the master of ones own fate. Instead of equality in poverty
and powerlessness, everyone is given a chance to change.21
The title of his article was We must re-learn how to
live (Nado snova nauchitsya zhit).

Ways and Means

How, then, should this new citizen be constructed? First,
the glasnost authors urged themselves and their compatriots to continue to say and print truth. Truth cleanses,
uplifts, ennobles, and frees. Second, find and uphold a
usable past. Not everything and everybody in the past
was shameful. It is important to recover and celebrate
resistance to the indignity of totalitarianism and the
state takeover of conscience!
This being Russia, literature was the source of much
of this pride. The chapter of my book titled The Freedom Canon, records the return, after decades of statedirected oblivion, of the lives and art of the five great
Russian writers who epitomized an unbending existential
and artistic challenge to the ethical and aesthetic order
around them: Yuri Dombrovsk, Vasily Grossman, Osip
Mandelstam, Andrei Platonov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Among others whose lives and art were central to
the foundation of a new Russia were two heroic women:
the great poet Anna Akhmatova, whose poem about her
sons arrest in the Great Purge of 193739, Requiem,
was published after half a century in hiding; and Lydia
Chukovskaya, whose two novels,22 like Akhmatovas poem,
recorded, almost in real time, the torment of the mother
of an arrested son and a wife of an arrested husband.

Confronting the Totalitarian Past to

Secure a Democratic Future
But the most important strategy advocated by the troubadours of glasnost was national repentance and atonement for the complicity in tyranny and mass murder.
This national act of acknowledgment and commemoration, they insisted, would have to be more than a tribute
to the dead, no matter how noble and urgently needed.
Only the perpetual, living, and constantly renewed
memory of the mass murder and oppression could in

time become a reliable barrier against the restoration of

the criminal regime,23 and prevent them from allowing
the country to be taken down that road again.24 Unredeemed, the burden of past national crimes could be too
heavy a load for a new Russia to carry. It could break the
countrys back, the glasnost authors warned.
The teachers of truth were right yet again: the ability
to face a murderous past and atone for it had been
shown to be the key to moraland thus, political and
socialprogress both inside and outside Russias borders.
Indeed, this has become one of the most reliable predictors of the success of democracy in virtually all postcommunist nations. It is often not easy in political history to
untangle causes and effects, but the closing or distortion of the past on one hand and the neo-authoritarian
Putin regime on the other clearly are mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing. A Russia in which a high
school textbook under President Vladimir Putins personal patronage extols Joseph Stalin as a great manager
and the creator of the great Soviet Union;25 a Russia
whose ministry of foreign affairs stands by the Stalinist
canard about the Baltic republics joining the Soviet
Union voluntarily,26 offending the memory of the
hundreds of thousands of victims of the terror of the
Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania following the 1939 Soviet-Nazi Pact; and a Russia in which
the allegedly liberal President Dmitry Medvedev during
his four years in the Kremlin was expected to sign a
decree establishing a national museum for the victims of
Stalinist terror and never did27such a Russia is not
likely to become a liberal democracy any time soon.28
Tiny Moldova leapt miles ahead of Russia this past
July when its parliament adopted a law condemning the
totalitarian communist regime in the Moldovan SSR,
which committed crimes against humanity, and banning propaganda of totalitarian ideologies.29 It took
Serbia 15 years to apologize to Bosnia for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. It has been 72 years since the massacre
of thousands of Polish officers in Katynand still no
unambiguous apology from the Kremlin.
Perhaps nowhere in the post-totalitarian world is confronting the past more germane to progress than in China.
Younger generations know literally nothing about the
man-made famine, during the Greap Leap Forward campaign in the late 1950s, in which an estimated 40 million
starved to death; about the Cultural Revolution, which
cost millions more lives; or about the Tiananmen Square
massacre. The party enforces a rigorous amnesia, writes
Liu Xiabo, a leading dissident intellectual and Nobel Prize

-5laureate, who is currently serving an 11-year prison term.30

This policy, he wrote, had produced generations of people,
whose memories are blank and is a key, perhaps the key,
impediment to a more liberal, more humane order.31
This compulsory amnesia, Liu continues, has produced a values vacuum, which suits those whom he
called todays dictators because it fits the moral rot
and political gangsterism that years of hypocrisy have
generated, and it diverts the thirst for freedom into a
politically innocuous direction.32 Trust witnesses willing to sacrifice their lives, Blaise Pascal said.33 Liu is
one such witness.

legs: barely a few inches into the soil of civil society,

which was only beginning to thaw from 70 years of totalitarian permafrost. It was so easy to topple and replace
with Putins managed democracy or sovereign
democracy, sustained by suddenly skyrocketing oil prices.
As my Russian friends like to point out, sovereign
democracy is as different from democracy as an electric
chair from a chair. Yet for almost a decade, Russia sat on
this chair and seemed quite comfortable there.

Chair and Electric Chair:

The Putin Restoration

The chair started to wobble between December 2009

and March 2010, when rallies, meetings, and picketing
shook several dozen Russian cities, culminating in the
national Day of Wrath in 48 cities on March 20. Unlike
previous protests that were dominated by groups (mostly
pensioners) who wanted more from the state, these
demonstrators wanted less government intrusion in their
lives and businesses. They demanded fewer taxes and
tariffs, less corruption, less incompetence, and less police
brutality. The glasnost theme of a contest between citizen and state appeared to be reemerging. And although
the movement seemed to dissipate by mid-2010, its
record seemed intriguing enough to investigate.
In the summer of 2011, research assistant Dan Vajdic
and I crossed Russia from east to west, Vladivostok to
Kaliningrad, to interview leaders and activists of half a
dozen grassroots organizations. It had been only a few weeks
since I sent the last page of Roads to the Temple to Yale
University Press, and it was truly astonishing to hear many
of the words I had cited in the book (and have recounted
in this Outlook). These echoes of glasnost were all the more
striking since 25 years ago most of the civil society leaders
we met on the trip had been children or early teens, while
virtually all the activists were even younger or not born yet.
As they emerged from over 40 hours of interviews
and over 300 pages of transcripts,34 these men and
women were not awed by the state and neither feared it
nor lusted after its power. Instead, they aimed at a dialogue and interaction of equals. One of the leaders, a
27-year-old woman from Vladivostok, encapsulated this
attitude: Sometimes it is partnership, sometimes competition. We do not shy away from criticizing the authorities when they deserve it. I have never been part of any
government or pro-government structures and dont plan
to [be]. Our views on many issues and those of the government are quite different.35

Whatever the strategies of its implementation, it was the

idea of national progress as moral renewal generated
from inside and from below by civil society, and not
imposed from above by the state, that distinguished the
glasnost revolution from previous Russian upheavals. It
is hard to think of a sharper break with the national
political culture, which until then had enshrined statedirected progress, longed for and worshiped the good
tsar, the hero, the wise and all-powerful reformer and
was in the thrall of revolutions from above (what Stalin
called great ruptures, or velikie perelomy) as political
and social engines of progress.
In addition to the economic dislocation that accompanies every revolution (and oil at $18 per barrel) it was
most likely the depth of this departure from the tradition
that made the glasnost revolution hard to sustain. After
the two instances of decisive participation in choosing
the countrys fatethe referendum of 1993 and the presidential election of 1996civil society seemed to revert
to its role of a passive observer. People left the squares.
Of course, Russias is far from the first revolution that
ended in restoration. The reasons are many and many
are specific to a particular revolutions time and place.
Yet one overarching theme is common to almost all of
them: the contrast between the speed of political change
and the inertia of social and economic institutions. As
an attacking army under an overly ambitious command,
the political headquarters of a revolution finds itself far
ahead of the rest of the troops, losing communication
and supply lines and becoming easy to capture. Or, to
use the staple of Russian fairly tales, the revolutionary
institutions, including the great democratic constitution
of 1996, were like the witch Baba Yagas hut on chicken

The New Protesters and Grassroots

Organizations

-6This readiness for a dialogue did not presuppose indulgence. Do you know why people protested against the
[construction of the Gazprom skyscraper] tower? the
groups leader, Natalia Vvedenskaya, asked in our interview.
Most of all, because [the construction] was [a]
visualization of violence [vizualizatsiya nasiliya]. We
have corruption, of course . . . but it is not always
easy to see how people are daily humiliatedand to
become outraged. But here, people had something
onto which they could concentrate all their hatred
[of the system]. And all the more so because
[the culprit was] the very same company that is turning the country into a senseless oil-producing
appendage [of the world economy]. And this, subconsciously realized, truly was a stronger motivation
than the struggle for the purity of the skyline. . . .
Because you [the state], without asking our opinion,
tell us that your model of life, which you are foisting
on the country, is the only correct oneand we are
not asking you [the people]!36

The Goal: New Society of New Citizens

The daily agendas of the organizations and movements
whose leaders and activists we interviewed could not
have been more diverse. Their advocacy areas ranged
from environmental and urban preservation to highway
safety to anticorruption, honest elections, and, yes, lower
gasoline prices. And yet, in almost identical words, they
all insisted that their countrys progress could come only
from civil society and not state; that creating such a
society was therefore their paramount goal; and that
remaking their countrymen into citizens was the key to
achieving this objective.37
In the words of one organizations manifesto:
There are no mechanisms for the defense of common people in Russia. . . . We have no civil society
that would keep politicians to their promises, that
would force businesses to be socially responsible, and
that would make government functionaries remember that they are servants of people who pay their
salaries. . . . Under these circumstances, a political
agenda makes no sense since there are no mechanisms for its realization. To create such a mechanism
is precisely what constitutes our agenda. And this
mechanism is called civil society.38

The new civic mentality was defined, first and

foremost, as self-respect and personal responsibility
responsibility for what is happening in the country.39 If
there was a common strategy, it could be summarized as
voluntary collective action in pursuit of moral objectives. Often, there is a situation when people are a little angry, and this is enough. It is enough to feel dignity
in oneself, said Vvedenskaya. If goodness wins, then
we have a chance.40
We are no longer fighting just for the forest, said the
environmental activist Evgenia Chirikova. Our struggle
is a struggle for peoples minds. . . . We are trying to change
the most difficult thing of all: peoples mentality. We are
making real citizens out of citizens. This is more important than any seizure of power, because this is the foundation for serious and long-term changes in the country.41

The December Marchers

Enchanting as it all was, in July 2011 these echoes of the
glasnost revolution seemed almost utterly removed from
the politics of a Russia that, after a brief flirtation with
reforms in the aftermath of the 200809 world financial
crisis, appeared to be slipping back into the political stupor
that high oil prices seem invariably to cause. Then, only
four months after our travels, on Bolotnaya Square in
Moscow and then throughout Russia, what we saw on banners and posters carried by tens of thousands of protesters
seemed to be informed by the same moral sensibility.
A leading Russian political sociologist summarized
the protesters credo as the rejection of total corruption,
lies and violence as incompatible with decent life.42
To Lev Gudkov, the president of the nations leading
independent polling firm, the Levada Center, the moral
character of the movement was starkly undeniable
and remarkable after years of political apathy: I have
not seen anything like it in the past 20 years!43
As they were on glasnosts banners, honor,
decency, dignity, and conscience were (and
remain) the staples of the protesters vocabulary.44 One
of their leaders, the anticorruption crusader Alexei
Navalny, described the protests as being not so much
about politics, as it was about a very simple idea of
struggle for ones rights, for ones voice, ones choice.45
We dont want revolutions, a prodemocracy opposition
activist said in a rally in the Siberian city of Omsk on
February 4. We simply want to be able to live and work
honestly but this [system] does not give us such a right.46
I am here because in my country my government

-7ignores my interests and humiliates me, a middle-aged

female demonstrator told a reporter this past February in
Novosibirsk.47 Asked why they turned out to protest
Putins inauguration on May 6, demonstrators in Moscow
cited self-respect.48 We are learning to be citizens,
one of them added.49
The credo of the glasnost revolution also seemed to
inform what a Russian commentator described as the protesters demand for the right to choose their own fate
and to live in a lawful state.50 They wanted equality
before the law, now again controlled by the authorities at
the national and local levels, and the end of de facto disenfranchisement when their votes did not count if they
were cast for the wrong party or candidates. Russias
first civil rights movement appeared to be on the march.

Syria, China, Iran

This past May, AEI hosted a conference on the moral
foundation of antiauthoritarianism. One of the panelists
was a Syrian prodemocracy activist, Ammar Abdulhammid, who asked whether we knew the very first slogan of
the Syrian revolution, when it began in March 2011. He
said something very quickly in Arabic and then translated: Death, but not humiliation. His fellow panelist
was Yang Jianli, who survived solitary confinement and
daily beatings in Chinese prisons. He said, The thirst
for freedom is universal. Chinese people want human
rights. Nobody wants to be a slave. And Iranian dissident Akbar Atri told us that he and his comrades in the
Green Movement sought to act on what he called universal civic values.
Atris words reminded me of my books earlier brush,
if this is the right word, with Iran. At the end of June of
last year, Foreign Policy magazine published an essay of
mine that drew on the books first chapter, in which I lay
out the case for the ideal (as opposed to the material) causes of the Soviet collapse. The piece appeared as
a cover story under an unassuming, almost nondescript
title: Everything You Think You Know about the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong.
Three days later, I received an email from an Iranian
journalist by the name of Saman Safarzaee, who inquired
if his weekly magazine could reprint the essay along with
an interview with the author. Eight fairly long questions
were attached to the message. Among them were ones
about an unethical situation in the Soviet Union as
the key cause of the revolution; the reason for the Wests
surprise, then and now, about the Arab Spring; and the

lessons of the latest Russian revolution for Iran and the

Middle East.
After I sent in my answers, I received another email
from Saman, asking if I would agree with deleting some
of my answers, because they could not be published.
You know how things are going on over here, Saman
wrote. I have to tell how ashamed I am of asking you
this kind of request. I learned later that the magazines
editor, Mohammad Qouchani, had been arrested after
the 2009 presidential elections, tortured and released
only after he had confessed to all manner of transgressions against the authorities.
In the first week of September 2011, two months
after the excerpts and the interview were published, the
magazine was closed down by the Media Supervisory
Authority. The magazines name was Sharvand Emrooz,
or Citizen Today.
Saman speculated that the publication was shut down
because it had crossed the line of the permissible with
respect to the Arab Spring and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But if the excerpts from this book had contributed at all
to the decision of the Iranian censors, I cannot think of
a more gratifying recognition.
Shorter versions of this essay were delivered as a Bradley Lecture
at the American Enterprise Institute on September 17, 2012, and
as a seminar presentation at the Harriman Institute, Columbia
University, on November 13, 2012.

Notes
1. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 168.
2. Tracey Lee Simmons, Gods Law and the Power of the
State, Washington Post, February 5, 2012.
3. Evgeny Starikov, Marginaly [The marginal people],
Znamya (October 1989): 225; Zh T. Toshchenko, Zastoy
dukha i ego preodolenie [The stagnation of the spirit and how
to overcome it], in M. I. Mlekumian, Drama obnovleniya [The
drama of renewal] (Moscow: Progress, 1990), 575.
4. Vladimir Shubkin, Trudnoe proshchanie [The difficult
farewell], Novy mir (April 1989): 177; Mikhail Kapustin,
Kamo gryadeshi? [Whither art thou?], Oktyabr (August
1987): 155.
5. Alexander Yakovlev, Ob opastnosti revanshizma, [On
the danger of revanchism], in Alexander Yakovlev, Muki prochteniya bytyiya [The torments of the reading of life] (Moscow:
Novosti, 1991).
6. Rayr Simonyan and Anatoly Druzenko, Kuda my
idyom? [Where are we going?], Ogonyok, no. 37 (1989): 3.

-87. Andrei D. Sakharov, Konstitutsiya Soyuza Sovetskikh

Respublik Evropy I Azii [Constitution of the Union of Soviet
Republic of Europe and Asia], in Konstitutsionnye idei
Andreya Sakharova [Constitutional ideas of Andrei Sakharov],
Oktyabr (May 1990): 146.
8. Alexander M. Yakovlev, Otverzhenie i utverzhdenie
[Rejection and affirmation], Ogonyok, no. 43 (1988): 14.
9. Igor Klyamikin, Trudniy spusk s ziyayushchikh vysot [The
difficult descent from the yawning heights] (Moscow: Pravda/
Biblioteka Ogonka, 1990), 4; Alexander Tsypko, Khoroshi li
nashi printsipy? [How good are our principles?], Novy mir
(April 1990): 174; Sergei Alexeev, Ploshchad pered parlamentom [The square in front of the parliament], Komsomolskaya
pravda, July 11, 1989, 2.
10. Vasily Selyunin, Planovaya anarkhiya ili balans interesov?
[Planned anarchy or a balance of interests?], Znamya (November
1989): 212.
11. Alexander Yakovlev, Socialism: From a Dream to Reality, speech at the Moscow State University, February 12, 1990,
in Yakovlev, Muki prochteniya bytiya, 100.
12. Alexander Vasinsky, Terpimost k inakomysliyu [The
tolerance of dissent], Moskovskie novosti, September 11, 1988, 13.
13. Leonid Gozman, Bolshe sotsializma! [More socialism!],
roundtable discussion, Ogonyok, no. 14, (1988): 7.
14. Boris Vasiliev, Prozrenie [The recovery of sight], Sovetskiy ekran, no. 6 (1987): 5.
15. As quoted in Mikhail Antonov, Tak chto zhe s nami
proiskhodit? [What is really happening to us?], Oktyabr
(August 1987): 55.
16. Alexander Yakovlev, Rabotat po sovesti, zhit chestno
[To work conscientiously, to live honestly], Pravda, February 28,
1989, 2.
17. Alexander Yakovlev, Only Moral Democracy, Moscow
News, January 1, 1990, 6.
18. Marat Baglay, Moral i politika [Morality and politics],
Sovetskaya kultura, July 27, 1989, 10.
19. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967), 135.
20. Samuel Johnson, Resselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed.
Bertrand H. Bronson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1971), 259.
21. Leonid Goldin, Nado snova nauchitsya zhit [We must
relearn how to live], Sovetskaya kultura, August 29, 1989, 3.
22. Sofya Petrovna [The heroines name and patronymic] and
Spusk pod vodu [Descent underwater].
23. Dmitry Kazutin, Zhertvoyu pali [Fallen a victim], Moskovskie novosti, November 27, 1988, 5; and Vitaly Korotich, Uchimsya nazyvat veshchi svoimi imenami [We are learning to call
things by their right names], Moskovskie novosti, July 3, 1988, 15.

24. Alexander Tsypko, Khoroshi li nashi printsipy? [How

good are our principles?], Novy mir (April 1990): 201.
25. Leon Aron, The Problematic Pages, The New Republic
(September 24, 2008): 3541.
26. Vladimir Socor, Russian MFA Defends Soviet
Annexation of Baltic States, Eurasia Daily Monitor, December 6, 2011.
27. See, for example, Masha Gessen, Medvedevs Time,
International Herald Tribune, November 3, 2011.
28. Those who write editorials for Russias leading liberal
daily, Vedomosti, may not be old enough to remember much of
what happened a quarter century ago, but an article in the
papers July 10, 2012, issue reads as if they had read and
absorbed dozens of essays from Moskovskie novosti, Ogonyok, Literaturnaya Gazeta, or Komsomolskaya Pravda between 1987 and
1991. Titled, very glasnost-like, Our Past Today it reads,
Understanding Stalinism is not just literature. It is a real, palpable process, which should lead to the impossibility of any
limits on human rights in Russia. The state that remained
unpunished for the crimes of the XX century will commit
crimes in the XXI century until we realize that the tragedies of
the past concern not only historians but each of us. It continues, until the tragedy of the XX century is comprehended to
the end, the Russian society will not develop immunity to the
disparagement [diminution/belittling] of human rights. The
society would not have tolerated or arbitrariness of police or
the unfairness of the courts or assault on liberties in general.
Yet Russia is destined to wander around in circles because 20
years after the fall of the Soviet Union the country still has not
reflected on the legacy of Stalinism and thus have not created
institutions that would impede the repetition of the tragedy of
our past. A leader of the new protesters movement, writer
Boris Akunin (Chkhartishvili), also believed that the specter
of an effective manager under whom the country was a great
power must be buried deeply and run through with a wooden
stake. When he asked the readers of his blog to vote on the
issue, over a quarter felt that Stalinism has not been exposed
to the end and that is dangerous. See Boris Akunin, Razgovor
s politikom [A conversation with a politician], Part 1, January
3, 2012, www.echo.msk.ru/blog/b_akunin/845341-echo/.
29. Vladmir Socor, Moldova Condemns Communism at
Long Last, Eurasia Daily Monitor, July 17, 2012.
30. As quoted in Simon Leys, He Told the Truth about
Chinas Tyranny, New York Review of Books, February 9, 2012.
See also Sergey Radchenko, Chinas Lockdown on Truth,
Washington Post, December 31, 2011.
31. Leys, He Told
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.

-934. Leon Aron, A Quest for Democratic Citizenship: Agendas, Practices, and Ideals of Six Russian Grass-Roots Organizations
and Movements, AEI, September 2012, www.aei.org/papers
/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/europe/a-quest-fordemocratic-citizenship/.
35. Anastasiya Zagoruyko, written responses to the questionnaire. The Far Eastern (Maritime) coordinator of the Federation of Automobile Owners of Russia, Ms. Zagoruyko could
not attend a face-to-face interview and, instead, responded
in writing to the questions submitted in advance to all the
respondents.
36. Interview with Natalia Vvedenskaya in Aron, A Quest
for Democratic Citizenship.
37. Aron, A Quest for Democratic Citizenship.
38. About TIGR, Tigr, February 14, 2009, 1 (copy in the
authors possession).
39. Authors interview with Maxim Vedenev and Evgenia
Chirikova. If people had even a little bit of self-respect, then
we would not have the impunity, said Vedenev.
40. Authors interview with Natalia Vvedenskaya. The
emphasis is added.
41. Authors interview with Evgenia Chirikova.
42. Will Englund, Putin Presents Himself as Key to Russias
Future, Washington Post, January 17, 2012.
43. Lev Gudkov, Delegitimation of an Authoritarian

Regime: Mass Protests and Controlled Elections (presentation,

Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington,
DC, June 4, 2012).
44. See, for example, Boris Nemtsov, For RussiaDignity,
Honor and Consciousness Are Not Empty Words, Livejournal
blog, February 5, 2012, http://b-nemtsov.livejournal.com
/140977.html.
45. Protestny dekabr 2011: chem eto zakonchitsya? [The
Protest December 2011: How Will This End?], interview with
Alexei Navalny by Evgenia Albats, Polny Albats show, Ekho
Moskvy, December 26, 2011, http://echo.msk.ru/programs/albac
/842708-echo/.
46. Georgy Borodyansky, Omsk. Glavnymi geroyami aksii
Za chestnye vybory stali Putin i Polezhaev [Omsk: Putin and
Polezhaev became the main heroes of the rally for honest elections], Novaya Gazeta, February 4, 2012.
47. Ekaterina Kuzmina, Aktsiya Za chestnye vybory v
Novosibirske opros mitinguyushchikh [A rally for honest
elections in Novosibirsk: A survey of the participants], February
5, 2012, www.epochtimes.ru/content/view/57851/54/.
48. Will Englund and Kathy Lally, Fighting Erupts at
Moscow Protest, Washington Post, May 7, 2012.
49. Ibid.
50. Alexei Zubov, Net povoda dlya ogorcheniy [No need
to be upset], Vedomosti, March 5, 2012.