The comparison of post-Soviet Russia with Weimar Germany is often made, and there are good reasons for it. But there are two overriding reasons why, overall, it fails to convince:
- In Germany, national feeling long preceded the formation of a German state; Germany was a country of super-saturated national identity with positive attitudes toward the state. In Russia, on the contrary, the state long preceded the nation--if a nation can be said to exist, even now. As a result, most Russians distrust their state, or at least identify weakly with it.
- Most Russians are not interested in joining political parties. They do not feel that their problems are best solved through the organization or program of a party, let alone through paramilitary squads such as those that disfigured the late years of Weimar Germany.

For historical reasons, Russia has built up its state system not through institutions and laws, but through persons. Owing to its over-stretched and vulnerable geopolitical position, from the sixteenth century onwards Russia's rulers have had to improvise the mobilization of resources in situations of emergency, and they have done so by using whatever means lay at hand, usually the power of local strongmen, rather than through institutions and laws. This is what I call the statization of personal power.

In tsarist Russia, the networks of personal power ran from the court outwards through landed nobles, provincial governors and police chiefs; in Soviet Russia, the networks ran through the nomenklatura appointments system controlled by local party committees and were directed from the top by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. At each level of political and professional life every employee depended greatly on the personal power and patronage of his superior or employer, not just for pay and conditions of work, but also for housing, food supplies, education, medical care and other basic facilities necessary to everyday life. The Soviet Union was not, as planned, an egalitarian society of abundance, but rather an unequal and shortage-ridden society whose hierarchy was determined by the devices needed to get around the shortages.

The political history of the Soviet Union is the story of the attempts of its various rulers to combat the excesses of the nomenklatura system that they themselves had created. As a result, certain restraints did operate: the NKVD, Gosplan, the party hierarchy itself. Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, however, those restraints were finally removed. Nomenklatura appointees, especially those at the mid- and lower levels, were able to use their position to turn administrative control into personal possession and to exploit the resources of Soviet society to make considerable personal fortunes. In the process, they allied themselves with operatives from the old underground extra-legal "black" economy, an alliance which helps to explain the widespread criminality that characterizes the post-Soviet economy.

So the contours of post-Soviet society are, literally, post-Soviet. The economy is grouped around large corporate conglomerates, led by individual "oligarchs," who typically have a stake in industry, commerce, finance, and the media. The political system revolves around loose and fluctuating coalitions of activists, each led by an individual, rather than around political parties. In the provinces, the elected governor becomes his own oligarch in both the economy and politics. Society is fragmented and poorly organized to respond to or resist initiatives coming from above.

This political and economic system has now become rather stable, and it may be time to talk of the end of the "transition." Russia has a democracy and a market economy of sorts, even if we in the West do not approve of many of its features.

If that were all there was to say, then one would have to be pessimistic about the future. But there is another side to developments in Russia. That is that Russia is becoming a nation, which it has never been before. Wholly contrary to the intentions of its leaders, the Soviet Union did a great deal to advance the cause of the national consciousness of its constituent peoples, both Russian and non-Russian.
- Its education system gave the great majority of the population the elements of literacy in their own language, subordinated to an overall Russian concept of culture, history and social evolution.
- The social security system gave the population the sense of having certain entitlements which they had never had before--to education, health, housing, pensions, and so on. Even if the expectations were only imperfectly fulfilled, nevertheless a kind of passive citizenship was thereby established.
- Victory in the Second World War gave many of the nationalities, and above all the Russians, a sense of their own historical destiny.

However, the sense of nationhood thereby generated is still incomplete. Few Russians regard the present Russian Federation as constituting what they understand as Russia, and some of the gains of the Soviet period in education and social security have been jeopardized.
- Nevertheless, there is now for the first time a state called Russia--not the Russian Empire or USSR--with its own boundaries, its own flag and its own national anthem.
- Russia's leaders and politicians are now democratically elected, even if doubts remain about the full legitimacy and fairness of the elections.
- A lively mass media exists, even though it is increasingly under pressure from the oligarchs who own it and from the state, which regards information as part of national security.

Putin would like to strengthen this new Russian state and give it a firmer identity, but the methods he has chosen are contradictory, as will come out later in this conference.

There are dangers in the growth of Russian national feeling. In the past it has tended to be imperialist rather than national. However, I believe there are good reasons for believing this is not necessarily the case right now.

US National Intelligence Council