6 Russia
Feygin
One of the big debates in the historiography of the USSR is the so-called “neo-traditionalist” versus “alternative modernity” schools. Neo-traditionalists argue that the USSR should be understood in the context of a broader continuity of Russian historical trends. They tend to be social historians who look at the persistence of practices like the economy of favors and see a state that, whatever its intentions, operates through the habits of Edward Keenan’s concept of “Muscovite Political Folkways.” On the other hand, scholars who subscribe to the multiple modernities framework tend to study the USSR as a variant of the modernist state, with roots in the Western enlightenment tradition and the broader global political conjuncture. These tend to be historians influenced by the cultural turn and thus often examine how Soviet social relations are created by the subject’s engagement with what Steve Kotkin called the “grand strategy of the state.” In turn, the USSR is not something outside of the modern experience but a specific variety of modernity: one amongst many. There are, of course, many debates within these paradigms and nuances, but this is the rough idea.
Interestingly, this whole debate is mostly about the Stalin era and, even more specifically, pre-war Stalinism. The post-war, post-Soviet, and late-Soviet periods don’t play into things that much. This is because of how the field evolved over time and because the bedrock question for these histories is the legacy of 1917: how that revolution turned into that regime? Was it an inevitable result of Leninism, or was it something particular to Russia’s social structure?
What things like understanding Wagner as a PE firm force us to do is not only go beyond the usual timeframe of this debate but also make some assumptions very explicit. First, it has to contend with modernity as a moving target, one that the USSR’s existence shaped. Is the Cold War part of modernity or post-modernity? Is the American hegemonic system the same as the European Imperial one that the USSR was born under? Maybe that was easier to put aside in the 1990s when these debates began, but it is not so easy now. Second, we should have a very thick and explicit distinction between “micro” and “macro.” Historians hate theory, but the micro-macro distinction, even if it is reductionist, does help other social scientists have a language about causality. Do we have to root our model of the world on some micro actor’s rationality, or do macro conditions themselves form the concept of rationality is as much a debate in economics (well, not in the mainstream of the field but increasingly more so) as it is in the Soviet subjectivity debate within the multiple modernities approach (whether there is some subject that rationally reacts to ideological projects or whether we should not see these reactions as a cost-benefit analysis and examine belief as an articulation of genuine beliefs).
Why I find this thought about the Concord group and violent PE so intriguing is that it offers us a way to look at the Russian state through the lens of political economy: that is to ask how it has adapted very liberal institutions like a private equity firm to very illiberal means. This does not mean that Russia or the USSR is some perversion of or final boss of modernity. Nor that it is traditionalist and guided by folkways more or less than any other society. Rather, it is a set of elites with tools that they adapt to do something at a certain cost and with some form of leverage that is structured via lots of complex path dependencies and constraints. Concord Group’s adaptation of the PE model, by some accounts, the ultimate representative of globalist neoliberalism to achieve the Russian state’s very un-globalized Great Power political ends provides a lot of food for thought.