Introduction
This work combines and condenses the final reports on three colloquia I held in Russia with Dr. Kathleen Parthé on the search for a Russian national identity in the post-Soviet era. The colloquia, as well as two seminars at the Library of Congress in 1996 and 1997 that involved primarily American experts on Russia, were conducted under the auspices of my grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
My idea was to survey the Western, primarily American, perspective on the topic and then to conduct some intense, in-depth meetings in Russia with small groups of high-level Russian politicians and thinkers. The outcome, I hoped, would help Western observers better to understand some of the key issues and options facing the Russian people as they attempt to forge a post-Soviet national identity and political legitimacy.
The first colloquium for this project was held in June 1998 in Istra, Russia, at the newly renovated New Jerusalem Monastery-itself a symbol of Russian transformation and renewal. Dr. Parthé, my chief partner in this project, and I surveyed a broad group of American thinkers to identify the most creative Russian politicians and thinkers. We then selected ten from this pool for the Istra meetings. After an exhaustive reading of the current literature on this subject, we prepared three central questions and several corollary topics in both English and Russian versions, and gave them to the participants in advance of the colloquium so they could prepare talking points to use in the discussions.
The second colloquium took place on November 5-6, 1998, in Tomsk, Siberia, at the American Center and at Tomsk State University. We brought together high-level Russians from Tomsk and Novosibirsk to try to gain a regional perspective. To the three main questions from the Istra meeting we added several questions that were formulated to elicit more specifically a Siberian point of view on Russian national identity.
The Institute for World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow was the site for the Third Colloquium, which was held on December 3, 1999. The discussions there examined national identity in the context not just of Russia, but of contemporary culture. Questions on these topics were again distributed to participants in advance of our meeting.
The colloquia discussions have been masterfully condensed, translated, and presented here by Dr. Parthé. She has done outstanding work on this volume. She has brought to this project a rich background of writing and reflection on Russian thinkers often overlooked by Western observers: the village writers of the late Soviet period and the variegated nationalists of post-Communist Russia. In the afterward to this report, she draws on her own research in briefly summarizing and interpreting the major ideas presented by the colloquia participants. She has properly left out transitions and conversations that took place during breaks. Thus, the connections between subjects discussed may at times seem surprising. For instance, my own improvisations on religion and American identity1 were in response to repeated requests by the Russians to say something about these subjects.
The Russians who participated in these conversations generally shared two basic beliefs: that Russia's painful transition from Communism to democracy was worth supporting; but that, at the same time, Russia could and should sustain its own uniqueness. As the discussions clearly reveal, it is very difficult to say either how this transition will work out or what remains unique about Russia. Just as Soviet totalitarianism was in many ways an unprecedented phenomenon in human history, so is the decompression from it.
Russia has become for the first time in history a nation rather than an empire, and Russians are now living in a pluralistic society without an established ideology. Yet the Russian Federation is a far more ethnically monolithic state than the Soviet Union. Citizens of the Federation had to accept the exclusion of 25 million ethnic Russians from their new nation-state and the removal from their obligatory reading list of books that had put them at the center of world history. Add to all of this a decade of crime and corruption in which life expectancy and living standards have fallen and great military, cultural, and academic establishments have lost most of their subsidies. The wonder is not that there is not a clear sense of national identity, but that there has been so little social violence or extremist polarization.
What has taken place is one of the most wide-ranging and many-voiced discussions about national identity and political legitimacy in modern times. In broad outline Russia is struggling between its authoritarian tradition and its new freedoms; and Russians are experiencing an inner conflict between the material and the spiritual imperatives that have been freed up within individuals. It is a highly idiosyncratic discussion conducted in a chaotic, distinctively Russian way. Yet it is full of insights and outlooks on the future that are often of universal interest. This discussion involves more people in Russia than any previous intellectual debate-yet it has been less noticed, let alone studied, in the West than almost any other aspect of the current Russian scene.
I originally expected to complete my project on the search for a post-Soviet, post-communist Russian national identity with a long introductory essay to this report. But the importance and the complexity of the debate that is suggested by the three discussions presented here-along with my study of the extraordinarily rich literature on this subject that has by now been published in Russia-have prompted me to write a separate book on Russia in search of itself. In my book I describe the broader debate taking place in Russia, the different approaches to its resolution, and my own conclusions. With its publication in late 2003, I will bring this long-labored project to a conclusion.
