Russia Turns the Corner

TAKING WEIMAR SERIOUSLY

Drug dealers, gangsters, flagrantly corrupt bureaucrats, destitute pensioners, an embittered intellectual class--it is sorry figures like these who increasingly shape our image of Russia. Together, they are thought to have made the recent electoral victory of Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his neofascist party almost inevitable. They give weight, moreover, to forecasts of grimmer things--unappeasable popular anger, the collapse of public order and eventually dictatorship.

New democracies in danger always call forth comparisons with the doomed Weimar Republic, and there is no denying that the analogy is useful for thinking about Russia’s prospects. But, it is only useful if we take the similarities, and differences, seriously enough. The Weimar record teaches more than the lesson that well-organized, charismatic thugs can feed on social distress. It is a reminder to look at political fundamentals and beyond the mood of the moment to the institutions, interest groups and issues that define the new regime.

Over the long term, Russians have to create what they call a "rule of law" state, based on legal norms consistently applied. Without progress in this direction (and Boris Yeltsin’s new constitution is a major step forward), any democracy remains precarious. Yet here again the Weimar analogy can keep us from too narrow a focus. Germany in the 1920s was both a Rechsstaat and a highly vulnerable democracy, and its fatal weaknesses suggest how Russia, too, could lose its way. German generals endured civilian rule, but they adapted to it little and identified with it less; the industrialists who had produced decades of rapid economic growth under the Kaiser saw their achievements threatened in the Weimar years; worst of all, fascist ideologues were able to say that liberalism was a byproduct of national defeat and could never restore German greatness.