An election observation mission can be composed of experts assessing legal and technical changes, long terms observers monitoring the election campaign, and short term observers observing the conduct on Election Day. In the elections this weekend OSCE/ODIHR sent no mission to France, experts to Greece, long term observers to Serbia, and the whole range of observers to Armenia. (OSCE/ODIHR, Ongoing election activities, http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections)  A massive election observation exercise is not in itself a sign that a countries democracy is in a bad shape.  Rather it is a sign that things are happening that is of interest to the International Community to investigate and an interest from the country in question to gain approval from the outside world. Boycott of observers, on the other hand, which happened in the 2008 Russian elections, is a signal of distress, as it shows profound disagreement between the organizer of elections and the International Community. Election observation is also not only targeted at new democracies. A better way of describing it is that monitoring seeks out evolving democracies. In the recent Norwegian local elections OSCE experts monitored the experiment with electronic voting and assessed its compliance with European standards. The reason why no mission was sent to France was, according to OSCE, that no changes worth mentioning had been made to the electoral system. A massive mobilization of observers is, thus, a sign that both international and domestic forces share an interest in showing the progress of an evolving democracy, and a hope of change for the better.  

In the case of Armenia the elections was seen as a chance for the government to show to the world and its citizens that it has changed its ways since the last presidential elections in 2008, and broken a trend of a deteriorating political climate. After the 2008 elections the opposition claimed widespread falsification and carried out massive protests. The protests ended in tragedy as the government declared a state of emergency and violently beat down the protesters.  The confrontation resulted in ten deaths, many more wounded and thousands of protesters put in prison. These events have since poisoned the political atmosphere in the country. The situation did not begin to normalize until 2011 when parliament proclaimed a general amnesty for those taking part in the protests and investigations regarding what happened and who was responsible were reopened.  But still a general lack of trust in the political elites and politics was evident. According to an opinion poll made before elections (http://www.eufoa.org/uploads/OpinionPoll_EN.pdf) Armenians had very low trust not only in their politicians and government officials, who were considered to be too closely linked to business interests and bent on enriching themselves, but also in their fellow citizens, who were considered to expect financial compensation to vote. All of this created a kind of resentment of politics that said that engaging in politics is futile. The oligarchs (politicians/businessmen) were understood as being above the law and the people were said to sell their votes for a gift or a small amount of cash. The feeling was that elections in such an environment thus could be nothing but a charade.

The hope of the elections in 2012 was that, if they were considered free and fair, could serve as a starting point to normalize relations between the political groups in the country and begin to restore faith in politics. A successful election would be an election that no party could seriously challenge, paving the way for less confrontational politics. Hopefully this could begin a process of normalization of politics and show that parliamentary politics can make a difference in the lives of people. For Armenia as a European state it was also important to be seen as serious in its commitments to democratic rule, otherwise further integration with Europe and the soft security it provides could be put into question.

In the election eight parties and one party bloc competed for 90 seats in parliament. The threshold is 5% for parties and 7% for party blocs. The remaining 41 seats are single seat constituencies.  The two dominating parties in the old parliament and in opinion polls were the Republican Party and the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP).  The Republican Party is the current president Serzh Sargsyan’s party and headed the majority coalition in parliament together with the smaller Rule of Law Party. PAP is led by Gagik Tsarukian who is considered to be one of the richest businessmen in Armenia.  It was until recently part of the ruling coalition, but positioned itself against the current government and engaged in cooperation with the Armenian National Congress (ANC) and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) in a joint headquarters to ensure a fair election campaign. The ANC is a coalition of parties outside parliament founded after the 2008 events, and led by Armenia’s first president Levon Ter-Petrosyan. The ARF is connected to the Armenian Diaspora and has been in existence since the 1890ies. It has affiliations all over the world, and is also represented in the parliament of Lebanon. The last contender in the election is the Heritage Party, which has distanced itself from both the government and the opposition forces.

I visited Yerevan about a month before elections and had the chance to speak with analysts and political activists. Commentators before elections were not overly optimistic that a change in the composition in parliament would mean a new political climate. Even though elections would probably be calm and largely free from open fraud and violence, the names on the party lists basically contained the same old politicians. Things would therefore most likely return to business as usual after elections, meaning that politics would remain mainly a way of securing business interests of the elites. There were also concerns about the practices of vote buying.  Armenia is a very poor country and “people want their bribes”. There were however also some signs that the political apathy was beginning to lift. One such sign was the apparent break up between the two major ruling coalition parties, the Republicans and PAP. This had made the elections truly competitive. Another hopeful sign was that a new wave of youth activism was showing itself, inspired by the global “Occupy movement” and focusing on issues like environmental problems and corruption.  In February urban activists occupied a couple of kiosks being constructed in a public park in the center of Yerevan. The activists protested against privatization of public spaces, construction in green zones, and against oligarchs acting as if they were above the law. Their main demands were that the legal requirements should be fulfilled before construction. The protests became symbolic of a new atmosphere as the activists were unafraid of police and their occupation was allowed to continue, creating a symbolic win of ordinary citizens against the oligarchs. During the election campaign the occupation also gained political importance. A week before election the president of Armenia gave his support to the demonstrators and asked the mayor of Yerevan to remove the kiosks from the park.

The election campaign thus made politicians more concerned about the issues in society. There were political debates held and a growing awareness that job creation was the key issue to be solved. Job creation was obviously important in a country with underemployment, but it was also presented as a security issue. If jobs were not created the drain of people would not be stopped and the economy would stagnate, and if Armenia failed to keep up with Azerbaijan in economic terms this would eventually change the military status quo and increase the risk for war. Economic and political development thus is seen as a matter of survival. One political analyst described the situation to me in literary terms: “if Azerbaijani politics is Shakespearian, like Macbeth, with father-son dynamics, then Armenian politics is more James Fenimore Cooper, the Last of the Mohicans”.  The Mohicans being the old guard of oligarchs that grew rich during the Nagorno-Karabach war. Since the war Armenian economy has been characterized by monopolies on imports of basic goods like sugar and cigarettes. There are signs that a new breed among the elites now challenges the monopolies and wish to open up Armenia more to the outside world in order to attract investments and stimulate growth of the economy. The coming to life of the PAP could mean a brewing internal struggle among the ruling elites. A less monopolistic economy would hopefully also lead to a more pluralistic type of politics. The challenge that remains is to get the oligarchs to work within the laws.

The result of the election largely confirmed the expectations before elections. Observers described the conduct of the elections as a whole as improved, although many concerns remained and improvements could be made.  There were reports of misconduct and pressure on voters that affected the political playing field before elections. There had also been a number of incidents with people who got beat up and problems with the ink that was used to stamp passports to prove that people had voted. But there was no evidence of systematic fraud that affected the results and the official result did not differ much from the result in exit polls made by international polling organizations such as Gallup. Voter turnout was around 62 %, which was a little bit higher than in 2007, and described as impressive. The main problem was vote buying and control of the voter lists. In general the tone was that Armenia had made an important first step on the road to recovery, stressing the need for the Armenians to be proud, but not content.   

“I cannot stress enough how important it is to see these elections and our preliminary findings in the broader context and as the beginning of the process, not the end,” said Krzysztof Lisek, the Head of the European Parliament delegation. “Our preliminary conclusions today and the final recommendations of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, once they are published, should be taken as the goal to achieve in view of the upcoming presidential election.” (OSCE press release 7 may 2012 http://www.osce.org/odihr/90334)

The actual results were not that dramatic. The Republican Party increased its support among the electorate from 34% to 44%, remained the biggest party in parliament and managed to secure a majority with the help of the single seat constituencies. The new opposition force, PAP, almost doubled its support from about 15% to about 30%. The main drama during the tabulation of results was if the smaller parties should pass the threshold. The previous extra parliamentary opposition in the ANC managed to pass the 7% threshold and enter parliament and all the three smaller parties with representation in the old parliament managed to clear the 5% threshold. What, then, is the significance of the results?

One thing is that there are no clear losers. Although the smaller parties lose representatives no one is shifting places and everyone can entrench their position in preparation for the next round in the game. In the mainly personality focused political landscape this year’s parliamentary election is often described as a preparation for next year’s presidential election. There are now at least three distinct forces in the parliament that can serve as platforms for the presidential campaign. One persistent rumor is that the former president Robert Kocharyan is behind the repositioning of Prosperous Armenia. This means that next year’s presidential election could be a race between three presidents: The current president Sargsyan, the first president Ter-Petrosyan and the second president Kocharyan. 

Another thing is that cleaner elections in Armenia may set a new standard for the region. The countries in the South Caucasus region look at each other as competitors in terms of what is possible to achieve given the circumstances. They are also often lumped together in the eyes of the world. If one country shows that something is possible then this creates a pressure on the rest. Parliamentary elections will be held in neighboring Georgia in October and Georgia likes, since the Rose Revolution 2003, to present itself as leader in the region when it comes to liberal standards.

The elections in Armenia 2012 were far from revolutionary, but perhaps it was a sign of a gradual evolution of Armenian democracy towards normality. The election results have not yet being challenged and parliament is better representing the political forces in the country and the party system is more consolidated. This also reflects that people know their politicians and have more realistic expectations. If we believe in parliamentary politics, flawed as it is, the gradual acceptance of election results could bring more faith in politics. Perhaps next parliamentary election the observation effort from the International Community will be more moderate in size. Meanwhile the next crucial test for Armenia will be the presidential elections 2013. Whether that race will be truly competitive or not remains to be seen.  But the observer’s findings this time means new goals for Armenia to meet.

To note, Armenia’s Central Electoral Commission has issued the preliminary results of the May 6 parliamentary elections. Five parties and one political bloc will be represented in the 131-seat National Assembly (Parliament) of Armenia:

What happened in the election? 

The left won; another new “party” erupted; everybody else lost

The table below presents the basic results of Slovakia’s 2012 election.

Table 1. Election Results in Slovakia 2012

In context these results reflect five distinct patterns:

• The stabilization of turnout:  Although many pollsters and political scientists predicted a significant drop in turnout because of disillusionment created by corruption allegations, turnout actually rose (very slightly) to 59.1%.  As in 2010 and in previous elections, turnout was higher in the north and central regions of the country and in the capital.
• The victory of left over right: For the first time in the country’s history a single party—the left-leaning Direction-Social Democracy (Smer-SD)—won a clear majority in the elections: 44.4% of the vote and 55.3% of the 150 seats in Slovakia’s parliament. Smer’s leader, Robert Fico, returned as prime minister after a two-year interlude of government by a four-party right-leaning coalition that took power in Slovakia in 2010 but collapsed over internal disagreements culminating in a no-confidence vote related to the Greek bailout.
• The emergence of new competitors on the right:  As in nearly every Slovak election, a newly created party—the evocatively named “Ordinary People and Independents” (OĽaNO)—crossed  the 5% threshold into parliament.  In other right wing parties, voters made significant use of preference voting to rearrange party lists and elevate relatively uncorrupted newcomers over less-than-angelic party regulars.
• The decline of Slovak-national parties:   The Slovak National Party (SNS) failed to pass the country’s threshold and followed in the footsteps of its former partner the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS), the once-mighty electoral machine of Slovak politics, which fell below 5% in 2010 and in 2012 could not muster even a single percent.
• The continued split among Hungarian-national parties: On the other side of Slovakia’s national divide, the Hungarian vote split nearly evenly between the Party of the Hungarian Coalition (SMK), which fell just below the 5% threshold, and Bridge (Most-Híd), which managed parliamentary representation with a 7% showing.

What happened in the campaign: 

The left ran smoothly; the right ran into a gorilla; other parties ran into each other

As with the results themselves, the world’s news sources had little doubt about the reason for the Smer victory: corruption.  The actual circumstances are more complicated, since surveys show a drop in right-wing party coalition well before the scandals hit the headlines.  By mid-2011, Fico’s Smer-SD was already polling consistently at levels sufficient for a one-party parliamentary majority.  As a result Smer-SD took almost no campaign risks.  It managed to avoid significant taint (even in scandals that concerned some of its own members), campaigned relentlessly on the key words “certainty” (istota) and “stability”, and maintained a unified, calm and confident voice all the way through.

The same cannot be said of Fico’s competitors.  Their election campaign itself was overshadowed by the “Gorilla scandal,” so called after the leak of an eponymously purported police file highlighting lucrative, mutually-beneficial deals between financial groups and the right-wing government in power between 2002 and 2006.  Gorilla cast a particular shadow over what was the leading government party, the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union-Democratic Party (SDKÚ-DS).  Scandal had hit SDKÚ already in 2010 when allegations of campaign finance irregularities forced party leader and two-time former prime minister Mikuláš Dzurinda to resign from the party’s electoral list.  SDKÚ managed to recover by placing popular cabinet minister and presidential candidate Iveta Radičová at the top of its party list, but even after forming a coalition and becoming prime minister Radičová still faced intra-party challenges from Dzurinda and his allies.  Dzurinda regained his ballot position when Radičová withdrew from party competition after the vote of no confidence over the Greek bailout, but his intra-party victory put him directly in the line of fire over accusations in the Gorilla files that specifically concerned the period of his second government.  Dzurinda’s return thus accelerated the ongoing decline of SDKÚ-DS’s popular support, and the electoral verdict of his party’s own voters (Dzurinda received the preference vote support of only one sixth of his own party’s voters a drop from 165,000 in 2006 to just 27,000 in 2012) forced him to cede control of the party he had led from its inception in 2001.

SDKÚ’s partner, the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), managed to maintain its share of the vote from 2010 its reliance on its loyal electorate and its weak campaign (encapsulated in the ill-judged slogan ‘white Slovakia’) prevented it from capitalizing on SDKÚ-DS’s woes and taking clear leadership on Slovakia’s right.  The party did see a shift in preference votes toward younger and more energetic figures including party vice-chair Daniel Lipšič but did not (yet) move toward leadership change. 

Another party of the right, Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), only narrowly scraped past the 5% threshold.  The party managed to hang on to some voters through its unique combination of libertarian morality and pro-market values and its prominent negative stance on the Euro bailout (a position so important to party leader Richard Sulík that he allowed his opposition to bring down the government of which he was a part), but it suffered from pre-election revelations of Sulík’s monthly meetings with dodgy businessmen.

Within the Hungarian electorate, neither of the contenders faced a similar taint but neither could boast of particular accomplishments or a particularly noteworthy campaign.  On the other end of the national spectrum the Slovak National Party did manage to attract attention, but only by pushing the boundaries of decorum.  In its 2010 campaign, SNS had projected aggressively xenophobic images of bandit Hungarians and indolent Roma with (photoshopped) chains and tattoos.  In 2012 the party went even further, borrowing liberally from anti-Semitic caricature and even internet pornography (one billboard featured a female model wearing only an EU-flag thong and the message “the EU is screwed.”)

Finally, the 2012 election produced its share of new parties.  Political upstarts are common not only in Slovakia but also in the Baltics and Bulgaria and recently even in Hungary (Jobbik, Politics Can Be Better), the Czech Republic (Public Affairs, TOP09), Poland (Polikot’s Movement), and Slovenia (Jankovic’s List, Virant’s List).   Igor Matovič, who had been elected unexpectedly on the SaS party list in 2010 through preference votes and then split from SaS, took full advantage of the corruption scandals (including a publicity stunt involving a revision of the Slovak seal replacing its hills and cross with a similarly-shaped gorilla and banana). 

A second new party, evocatively called “99%” briefly succeeded in attracting voters with a well-designed and lavishly-funded campaign, but quickly lost momentum as questions emerged about the sources of its spending and the possibility of systematic falsification of signatures on the party’s establishing petition.  With its final tally of only 1.6% of the vote, 99% suggests that there are limits on the degree of artificiality that even the most disillusioned voters are willing to accept from a new anti-corruption, anti-elite party.

What stayed the same?

Despite the shift in seats, the relative vote share of electoral blocs changed little.

Although the world’s news sources explained their election predictions on the basis of the corruption scandals—Reuters suggested that Slovaks were “Slovaks set to dump centre-right after graft scandal”—the actual footprints of the Gorilla-scandal appear to have been relatively shallow. The figure below suggests that although the scandal helped remove Dzurinda from SDKÚ and rearrange the composition of the right, it otherwise had little effect on overall preferences.

The figure above shows votes and seats for Slovakia’s four relatively distinct electoral blocs: left, right, Hungarian national (those of Hungarian ethnicity) and Slovak national (those of Slovak ethnicity for whom ethnicity is particularly important). Bloc-level voting among Slovakia’s right and among the Hungarian national parties was particularly stable: the relative percentage in these two categories has not changed by more than five percentage points over the four elections of the past decade (and not much before that). The other half of the political landscape saw a more significant shift—the decline of the Slovak-national parties and the rise of the economic left—but these two developments were almost perfectly reciprocal, and the overlap of themes suggests a high degree of compatibility between the voters in these two blocs.

The horizontal mid-line of the graph suggests that unlike the combination of left and Slovak-national parties, the coalition of right and Hungarian-national parties never actually constituted a majority of Slovakia’s voters. The right was able to form coalitions only in alliance with the left (as for a brief time in 1994 and again from 1998 to 2002) or by benefitting from fragmentation that pushed some left and Slovak-national parties below the 5% threshold (as in 2002 and again to a lesser extent in 2010).  In the 2012 election, threshold failures occurred on both sides and produced a roughly even redistribution of seats, but the combination of fragmentation among Slovak-national parties and consolidation of the left, meant the (almost) exclusive domination of this segment by Robert Fico’s party, Smer.

What changed?

Despite stable vote shares, some blocs lost seats when small parties fell below the 5% threshold.

The dynamics of public opinion are always filtered through the institutions of electoral politics and in Slovakia those institutions have recently made the difference between winners and losers. Party change more than voter change has produced most of Slovakia’s recent political volatility.

As an example, of such “supply-side” volatility, it is worth noting that while Slovak-national parties disappeared from parliament in 2012, the vote for Slovak nationalist parties actually changed relatively little. Together, parties using Slovak-national themes managed to win nearly 8%, only two points less than two years ago, but parliamentary representation dropped from 6% to none because of divisions in the nationalist vote. The 0.6% won by the breakaway Nation and Justice (NaS) or the 1.6% won by the People’s Party-Our Slovakia (LS-NS), would have been sufficient supplement to the 4.6% won by SNS to take the Slovak-nationalists back over the threshold and into parliament.

Similar institutional conflicts affected parliamentary representation on the Hungarian-national side, where Hungarians tended to form electoral coalitions or even common party structures to avoid the risk of falling below 5%. That changed  when former Hungarian party leader Bela Bugar broke away to form Most-Híd. Since the Hungarian parties tend to garner around 12% of the vote, there is only a narrow window in which two competing parties can both exceed the 5% threshold. In 2010 and 2012 both Hungarian parties remained competitive, but only Most-Híd passed the threshold while SMK just fell short.  The competition between the two parties may benefit Hungarians in the long run by helping to keep its parties responsive, but in the short run it has cost the Hungarian population two-fifths of its potential representation in parliament.

Perhaps the biggest institutional challenge lies on Slovakia’s right. Observers blame the right for losing the 2012 election, but as the figure above suggests, its combined vote was not much worse than in 2002 or 2006. The figure below indicates that its seat total is actually slightly higher than in 2006.

In retrospect, the exceptional election for the right may have been not 2012 or 2006 but 2010. In that year, four years of Fico government, with some sizeable scandals, sent some moderate, anti-corruption Smer voters across bloc lines to vote for anti-corruption right wing parties such as SaS. In 2012, by contrast, the right parties were the target of anti-corruption motivated votes and some migrated (back) to Smer, while others left for OĽaNO or a host of small new parties which had (so far) avoided the taint of the major parties. OĽaNO, however, has few of the attributes one would associate with a stable party and will be hard-pressed to survive this parliamentary term in one piece.

Much of Fico’s victory derives from his party building.  He maintained party unity and waited for other parties to fall apart. He thus secured near complete dominance of a large part of the political spectrum, consolidating the left under his leadership and attracting the support of the more nationalistically-inclined voters from his erstwhile coalition partners, SNS and HZDS. In 2010 this poaching proved self-destructive when it left him without a sufficiently large partner to form a coalition, but Smer’s larger base in 2012 could survive even the demise of its partners.

As the figure below shows, Fico’s Smer-SD gained an impressive number of seats in the 2012 election: 21 out of a 150 seat legislature. (Indeed the additional MPs in Fico’s party would, if they defected, immediately become the second largest party in parliament). The growth was the result both of transfer between sides (a swing of 12) and a nearly equal size transfer within his own side (a swing of 9 from SNS to Smer).

What happens now?

One-party government tests Slovakia’s institutional development.

The magnitude of Smer’s victory creates new risks and new rewards.  For the party, the victory is not entirely unambiguous.  Smer must now govern alone and unlike the 2006-2010 government—when the most viscerally-unpleasant corruption cases were those perpetrated by its coalition partners—it will not be able to escape close identification with everything that goes wrong.  The right benefitted from disillusioned anti-corruption voters in 2010 but Fico got some of those back in 2012 when the right seemed to behave no better.  The flow of those crucial swing voters in the next election will depend on what Smer does next.

When Fico left the communist-successor Party of the Democratic Left in 1999 to form Smer, observers asked whether he was “a man to be trusted or feared”? The question is even more relevant today. In the early 2000s, Fico offered Slovakia “new faces” and a “new direction.” In the 2012 campaign he offered the promise of certainty and stability. After a year and a half of the right’s fractious coalition government, a one-party Smer government can indeed offer more certainty and stability, but what kind of certainty and stability?The recent example of Hungary shows, the push for institutional stability can also threaten key mechanisms of accountability. Slovakia’s political institutions have thus far been protected by tense coalitions whose internal disagreements have hampered the ability to deliver fundamental change (good or bad).  Slovakia’s relatively flexible constitutional framework allows a united parliamentary majority to impose significant changes not only on policy but on the institutional structure, and the institutional manipulations of Viktor Orban in Hungary and Vladimír Mečiar in Slovakia the 1990’s offer worrying precedents.  But Fico is not Orban or Mečiar, and what Fico might want to do is less relevant than what he has actually done.  In practice Smer has refrained from reckless and self-serving changes to institutional boundaries. Fico’s post-election public statements and cabinet appointments suggest a degree of self-restraint that has impressed even some of his critics.  From his first post-election press conference, Fico has been keen to stress his pro-European credentials and to avoid the kind of international ostracism produced by inclusion of the SNS and HZDS in his 2006 coalition government.

If the moderation does not continue, Slovakia can now fall back on other institutional structures that have strengthened since the Meciar era. Slovakia’s civil society has also demonstrated its ability to play a vibrant (if not always decisive) role. The anti-gorilla demonstrations may not have had much overt impact on the election result, but they show the willingness of many Slovaks to come out onto the streets if given provocation.

Fico’s own party may also impose subtle limits on institutional change.  Smer remains Fico’s party, but organizational expansion has left the party with a variety of internal factions (and, some claim, financial sponsors) whose livelihoods depend on good relationships within the EU and a reputation for probity and stability. Fico’s last government rode a wave of economic growth which his predecessors had done much to create, but a new era of austerity limits his options.  He must be able to reward party members while at the same time avoiding corruption scandals at lower levels of government and controlling those who jumped on the Smer bandwagon to feather their own nests.

Self-restraint will be the key test of Fico’s second government.  Fico has periodically demonstrated an ability to take the long view, but Slovakia’s first single-party parliamentary majority will produce strong temptations to opt for short-term institutional gains for himself and financial gains for his supporters.  If Fico can resist those temptations, he may secure for himself a long future in politics and a place in Slovakia’s history.  If he cannot, then in 2016 he may again find himself on the losing end of electoral calculations.

Other scholars, however, argue that the case of Moldova is proof that the assumption does not hold: the country is, so to speak, the bumblebee that flies against all odds — its wings are too short and its body too fat and heavy (Way 2002). Beyond Rustow’s assumptions, the case also challenges central arguments in the modernization tradition, such as those advanced by Lipset (1959). Despite national cleavages, weak economic development, and an inability to control its own territory, a process of democratization has been carried out in Moldova. After Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Moldova is sometimes represented as the most democratic of the post-Soviet states. However, Way (2002) has suggested that Moldova is more an example of failed authoritarianism than of successful democratization. This state of affairs is partly explained by the country’s national fragmentation. This “pluralism by default”, as Way has chosen to describe it, offers a perhaps less encouraging explanatory model of the democratization of Moldova. The fundamental assumption is that the elites actually want authoritarian rule, but because each stymies the other, they have failed to realize their intentions. From his point of departure in Rustow’s and Way’s at least partially opposed assumptions about the role and preconditions of national unity in the democratization process, Johansson has formulated his main research question: How and why has Moldova, despite being a nation divided, been able to achieve relatively high democratic standards?

This question is followed by two sub-questions: What are the effects of Moldova’s national division on political developments in general and democratization in particular? How does national identity influence the nature of Moldovan political support? Here the author examines whether there are other factors influencing political support by the population at large.

Johansson’s dissertation is based on extensive secondary literature in Swedish, English, and German, as well as Russian and Moldovan. Dense, descriptive accounts are supplemented by statistical analyses of survey data: the results of a survey of 1,100 respondents performed in 2003, as well as a correspondence analysis. As is customary, all of these scene-setting elements are presented in chapter 1 of the dissertation.

A compact historical and socioeconomic background to Moldovan political development is provided in chapter 2. The author relates how present-day Moldova, like other European countries situated in borderland areas, has been overrun by different empires over the centuries: first the Ottoman and later, under the name Bessarabia, the Russian. This was followed by a brief interval as an independent state in 1917—1918, the first experience of independence in modern times. Later in the chapter, Johansson describes the history of Moldova as a Soviet Republic, its incorporation into Romania during the period 1941—1944, and its subsequent restoration to the status of Soviet Republic at the end of World War II. The historical outline extends to the achievement of independence in 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Incorporated as it was in the Soviet division of labor, with all central plans drawn up in far-away Moscow, Moldova was politically and economically as ill prepared as most other Soviet Republics for the speed with which independence arrived.

Chapter 3 establishes the theoretical groundwork — or perhaps one could more accurately say that it articulates the conceptual nodes to which the dissertation relates thereafter, for while the author cracks the doors to allow a glimpse of vast and wide literary traditions, he never really enters the rooms. He seldom discusses theoretical arguments in depth; using theory mainly as context, he has no ambitions to develop it further. However, a number of key concepts are introduced, discussed, and put in relation to one another, such as nation, ethnic group, national identity, and nation-building, on the one hand, and democracy, democratization, political support, and transition, on the other. While Johansson deals with the canon of nations and nationalism rather cursorily, he builds his arguments concerning levels of democracy on Robert Dahl’s (1971) polyarchy model, with its focus on democratic institutions such as free and fair elections and freedom of expression. On the matter of political support, Johansson draws on Pippa Norris’s (1999) expansion of David Easton’s (1965) model, ranging from the most diffuse object of support (with bearing on the political/national community) to the most specific object (support for parties as political actors). With regard to transitology, Johansson defends leading scholars like Schmitter & Karl (1994) and Linz & Stepan (1996) against the frequent charges of determinism in their perspective on the direction and end results of transition. He argues that the allegations simply do not correspond to what these authors wrote. The link between democracy and the nation often advanced in the literature is also recounted and discussed here and Johansson again points to the tension between Rustow’s (1970) and Way’s (2002) premises.

Chapter 4 presents the ethnic minorities in Moldova, including, in descending order of size, Ukrainians, Russians, Gagauzians, Bulgarians, Jews, and Roma. A key section presents the competing Moldovan and Romanian nationalisms, which claim to represent essentially the same ethnic group — the Moldovan- or Romanian-speaking population — but on different grounds, either that the Moldovan nation constitutes a unique community (Moldovanism) or that it is part of a Greater Romania (Romanianism). This antagonism is the empirical hub around which the dissertation’s analysis revolves.

The likewise central chapter 5 discusses five phases in the evolution of independent Moldova from 1989—2009, which were informed by either Moldovanism or Romanianism. The chapter describes the rise and fall of the Popular Front during the nascence of the Moldovan state, Gagauzian separatist claims during the early years of independence, and, most importantly, the de facto division of the country in 1992 when, after a brief civil war, Transnistria declared independence, with Russian military support. The chapter recounts how serious conflicts sometimes arose in Moldovan politics over national symbols, the writing of national history in school curricula, and contention over a national language, primarily the extent to which Russian should be granted official status alongside Moldovan (or whether Moldovan should be called Romanian, a tricky question to which the author often refers). The main elements of Moldova’s bumpy road toward democratization are explained. Until 2000, the constitution decreed that the president was directly elected by popular vote, and the parliament and the president counter-balanced each other throughout the 1990s. After a protracted struggle between the president and the parliament, the constitution was changed in the legislature’s favor and the president was thenceforth elected by the parliament. When the Communist Party achieved a qualified majority in parliament, the former beneficial balance of power between the legislature and the executive went up in smoke. Nonetheless, elections were free, regular, and reasonably fair throughout the entire period.

In chapter 6, Johansson employs a few of the most common indices of democracy (Polity IV, Index of Democracy, and a few variants of the Freedom House Index) to estimate on qualitative grounds the historical development of Moldovan democracy. He concludes that democratic consolidation remains distant, even though the formal institutions have been established and their arrangements not seriously questioned. Democracy — to use the expression Johansson often quotes — is still not “the only game in town”.

In the seventh chapter, Johansson analyzes data collected in his 2003 survey, which was, as noted, subjected to correspondence analysis. According to the author, the results of the analysis indicate that popular support for all or parts of the political system cannot be traced merely to national or ethnic identity. Instead, he identifies partitions along generational, educational, and urban-rural divides, all of which seem to have greater impact than national identity.

Chapter 8 concludes and summarizes the dissertation. Johansson finds that the national division in Moldova is an important determinant in political developments and that political parties in the country have often used national identity to underpin their message.

Nevertheless, issues of national and ethnic identity seem not to have played any prominent role in how people conduct their affairs in daily life.

Addressing the main question of the dissertation, how and why Moldova has, despite being a nation divided, been able to achieve relatively high democratic standards, Johansson concludes that Moldova’s institutional arrangements have been an important factor. He points to the now lost balance of power between the legislature and the executive as a beneficial influence at an early and formative stage. In concluding, the author asks whether Moldova should be seen as a divided nation or one in the process of formation. In agreement with Rustow, he argues that shared national identity and shared beliefs about the ways and means of political development indeed seem to improve opportunities for successful work toward democracy. He is somewhat more cautious about the second prominent scholar cited — Way — concerning the relationship between nation and democracy. According to Johansson, Way’s “pluralism by default” postulate is weakened by the assumption of autocratic intentions on the part of the elites, an assumption that is virtually impossible to prove.

Defining “nation”

In several places in the manuscript the fundamental distinction between state and nation is unfortunately not maintained. I believe this is a consequence of the less than ideal choice to define nation as a “political community”. The strong emphasis on the political dimension at the expense of the socio-cultural, ideational, or identity-based blurs the distinction between the nation and the political-legal framework of the state. The confusion between state and nation becomes almost painfully clear at certain points in the text. One example is when Johansson (p. 70) argues the following:

If the nation manages to claim a certain territory, governs it, and is recognized by other states in the international system as the legitimate holder of the land, then a nation-state exists.

Beyond the fact that the quoted text diverges from the common Buzanian understanding of the nation-state as a unit where the borders of the state coincide with the pervasive ideological affinity with a specific nation (Buzan, 1983), it also suggests that Johansson assigns to the nation a number of political-legal functions that are usually and rightfully assumed to exist in the state, such as governing a territory and being recognized by other states.

Although there are more aspects of the author’s use of the term “nation” and related concepts that might warrant a discussion (such as nationality, nation-building, core nation, ethnicity, people vs. population, contested vs. consolidated nation, etc.), I will confine further remarks here to just one other element under this heading. The distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism, where the former is represented as origins-based, exclusive, and malignant, while the latter is portrayed as values-based, inclusive, and benign, is not only relatively shopworn but often misleading (see Brubaker 1999). Nevertheless, it is used so often in the literature that it is hard to ignore. Johansson indeed writes that the civic-ethnic dichotomy is problematic and should therefore not be applied, but he seems nonetheless to use it implicitly, if only by asserting several times in the text that national affinity is usually, albeit not always, based on ethnicity (see for example p. 76 and p. 80). When, relatively early in the dissertation, he gives an example of national affinity with a non-ethnic identity construction at its base, he chooses to cite Mauritius and not, for example, the United States, which could otherwise have served as a powerful refutation of notions of both the marginal nature of socially based nationalism and its always beneficial effects. I would have preferred clearer positioning and a more consistent argument by the author here.

The presumed nation-democracy link

The connection between nation and democracy is thus a key question for Johansson. First, I believe the formulation should instead have been aimed at the connection between nationalism and democracy; the nation can hardly be an active agent, but nationalisms and their interpreters certainly are. That said, my objections under this point are closely linked to the use of the concept of the nation. Once again, the problem lies in designating the nation as a political community: Johansson (p. 32) writes:

Without a clearly defined citizenry that acts as members of and agrees on the boundaries of the same political community, possibilities for acceptance of the rules of the democratic political game grow slim.

This is where the danger in defining a nation as a political community becomes apparent: state and nation flow together in a way that makes them practically impossible to separate.

Rustow’s postulate that unity on the borders of the national territory is a precondition for democracy thus constitutes a fundamental premise for the entire dissertation. As Johansson interprets it, we are talking here about the borders of the nation, not the state (p. 71), but as far as I understand it, political community according to Rustow is a matter of relatively minimal agreement on borders. Rustow does not talk about shared national identity: for him, political community is about the state (1970: pp. 350—352). When he talks about “national unity”, “theory of nationhood”, etc., he is probably, in line with common usage at the time he wrote, referring to the state, not the nation. When he approaches identity, he talks instead about “issues of community”, matters that democracies must tussle with even in the habituation phase. I believe Johansson has over-interpreted Rustow; it is hardly justified to cite Rustow concerning the connection between the nation (or nationalism) and democratization. One could however talk about national unity, but that is something entirely different, and it is likely that the adjective then refers to the state.

Structure and interpretations

With respect to the second main concept of the dissertation, democracy, the author initially mentions Moldova as a successful example of how democracy has been established against the odds in a former Soviet Republic. Towards the end of the dissertation, however, and in connection with his exposition of the flaws in Moldova’s democratic development, the author increasingly talks about the country as an example of successful democratization, which is, of course, an entirely different matter (see pp. 30—31, 33, 140). The bumblebee is indeed flying, but perhaps not doing much else.

Another objection concerns the correspondence analysis based on the survey which Johansson performed back in 2003 when the dissertation process was, it can reasonably be presumed, at a very early stage. When this survey was performed, it was probably expected to be considerably more central to the dissertation than it turned out to be. This begs the question how much value can actually be derived from it, considering that the survey refers to a single measurement period early in the research process, during a year when even Johansson concedes not much happened in Moldovan politics. It seems that repeating the survey and the subsequent correspondence analysis toward the end of the research process would have been a reasonable alternative to heighten the usability and relevance of the collected data. The results have instead become a chapter whose place in the whole does not seem entirely clear, although it does contain interesting empirical findings per se.

On one occasion, Johansson describes the divide in the Moldovan national identity as follows: “For the time being, the core nation is being divided into two narratives” (p. 101). This phrasing seems to suggest what might have been a promising analytical doorway. Here, one could very well imagine an analysis of the discursive battle in Moldova on the nature of the national narrative, how hegemony is being pursued, and how various political elites are fighting for interpretive precedence. I believe this would have been a more accessible and promising route than reliance on dated survey data. In the analysis, the author would also have avoided having to constantly and painstakingly express how what he calls the core nation is divided into two groups, and how part of the population belongs to both. If the orientation had instead been narrative analysis with focus on the rhetoric of political elites within the Moldovan nation, the structure of the study would have been clearer and the interpretations less forced.

The empirical hub around which the analysis revolves thus concerns the antagonisms surrounding what the Moldovan nation is: a separate, “unique” nation or a part of the Romanian nation. Johansson consistently emphasizes this struggle over interpretations and their implications for the political development of independent Moldova. A question presents itself, which is actually never answered in the dissertation, as to whether there have been any serious attempts to form and legitimize a more inclusive Moldovan identity that would offer affinity to all ethnic groups in the country, including Russians, Ukrainians, and Gagauzians for instance. In an identity category like this, the question of whether or not one’s first language is Moldovan/Romanian would not have been a marker of identity. The present-day Moldovan national identity is, however, based precisely on the participants having Moldovan as their native language: this Moldovan nation seems therefore, in terms of the familiar dichotomy, at once both ethnic and civic.

Executive power in Molodivan politics has never actually been held by the Romanianists, but only by the Moldovanists.  It seems as if the Romanianists’ moment in the sun came in the early 1990s when everything was in flux and new conditions prevailed after the fall of the Soviet Union (Popa 2011). At the same time, Johansson gives the impression that the dichotomous struggle between the Romanianists and Moldovanists had a decisive impact on politics. This raises the question: How can the persistence of the struggle be explained when it actually seems to be one group that has had an almost hegemonic hold on power? One alternative interpretation might be that political developments have been shaped by rather pragmatic considerations of whether Moldova should retreat from or draw closer to the Russian great power. While conflicts about school curricula and official languages are shown in Johansson’s analysis, one does not see much else that could underpin the notion that political developments are necessarily driven by conflicts of identity. How do we know that Johansson’s interpretation is the proper one? Might the early 1990s be only a temporary deviation from the pattern? Mightn’t good old discontent with those in charge — simply because they are in charge — be an equally strong explanatory factor? The Soviet nostalgia that seems to flower in bad times — “things were better in the old days” — fits into such an explanation, while the Soviet nostalgics, who presumably include ethnic Russians and perhaps even the Ukrainians, are not easily placed in the dichotomous Romanianist/Moldovanist matrix. On the contrary, one has to wonder what happened to these large ethnic groups, presented so carefully in an introductory chapter, in the analysis.

Other elements are also strangely absent. Johansson often refers to Moldova as “a nation divided”, and when I began reading the dissertation, I thought this referred to the tangible fact that a part of the country, Transnistria, since the short civil war in the 1990s, has been de facto independent from Moldova, partitioned and with a significant Russian military presence. The fact that Transnistria has separated from the independent and, under international law, sovereign state of Moldova, and is a base for foreign troops should have been a significant national trauma for any country. It would have been reasonable to expect this to be a theme around which national politics revolved, but once the Transnistrian issue has been dispatched in the introductory chapter, it disappears from the analysis of the dissertation, and the author’s dense description of Moldovan politics focuses instead on disputes about school curricula and the matter of an official language, which of course feel epiphenomenal given the context. In the analysis, Transnistria takes on the nature of the proverbial elephant in the room: palpable, embarrassing, and hard to ignore, but not explicitly mentioned. ≈

Literature 

Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, New York 1999.
Barry Buzan, People, States, and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations, Brighton, Sussex 1983.
Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, New Haven 1971.
David A. Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life, New York 1965.
Juan J. Linz & Alfred C. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, Baltimore 1996.
Seymour Martin Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy”, in The American Political Science Review, vol. 53:1 (1959) pp. 69—105.
Pippa Norris (ed.), Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government, New York, 1999.
Dankwart A. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model”, in Comparative Politics, vol. 2:3 (1970) pp. 337—364.
Gabriela Popa, “State-Formation and Belonging in the Republic of Moldova: An Overview”, unpublished manuscript presented at Centre for European Studies, Lund University, 2011-11-25.
Philippe C. Schmitter & Terry Lynn Karl, “The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?”, in Slavic Review, vol. 53:1 (1994), pp. 173—185.
Lucan Way, “Pluralism by Default in Moldova”, Journal of Democracy, vol. 13:4 (2002), pp. 127—141.

That the perpetrator was acting on his own, if he was, does not necessarily mean he was alone in his desire to strike a blow against a power that few could accept as legitimate. At the moment of seizing power, neither the Bolsheviks nor the National Socialists could rely on a popular majority. Yet how many revolutions, whether national, political, or social, ever have? At best, the legitimacy of the Russian Communists was based on victory in a protracted civil war (which was in part a defensive war against foreign military intervention). And as for the popular appeal of the Hitler regime, it was not based on a call for ethnic war — that was actually a complicating factor. What Hitler and his cohorts claimed they were able to do was to govern an ungovernable country, something none of his competitors had managed to do.

With the Reichstag fire came the emergency decrees, the obliteration of political opposition, and the regimentation of the social system, Gleichschaltung. The Kirov assassination was followed by repressions unprecedented in the history of modern states, but also by social chaos that threatened the foundations of the Communist monopoly on power: relatively cohesive cadres, a party machine with a long-term perspective, and the capacity to attract and retain sufficient administrative and intellectual competence to avoid being regarded as rabble by the masses. The line between populism and brutishness, between simplicity and foolishness, had to be held. When the fight against individual terror, albeit under the pretext of prevention, evolved into state-organized terror against undesirable party members (and undesirable non-party elements) who were also fully behind the fight against terror or at least willing to shut up and accept the brutalization of society, the line was jeopardized. The unity of the Soviet state collapsed. Only a fast-approaching confrontation with the archenemy Germany did change the course of a manipulative Soviet leadership. It was, nonetheless, almost too late.

Reading Wendy Z. Goldman’s book, one is struck — not once but several times — by the impression that a regime capable of unleashing such political madness as repressions of the party, the nomenklatura, and the technical intelligentsia — which would ultimately victimize tens of thousands of innocent engineers, technicians, and military personnel — must surely have expected a political opposition that wanted something completely different and whose ultimate aim was to topple it. And honestly: would it not have been extremely surprising if no attempts, however fumbling, had been made to organize a resistance, albeit symbolic and in rather desperate forms, against a leadership that did not tolerate the least objection, did not respect human life, and regarded its daily political work as one long, steady military campaign against a myriad of class enemies who would never admit defeat? After all, you may not be surprised to find an absurd rationality in Stalin’s, Molotov’s, Vyshinsky’s, Kaganovich’s and Yezhov’s many calculations — even in the “National Operations” of 1937—1938, when hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens charged with working on behalf of foreign powers were executed or given long GULAG sentences.3 That hardly makes them more appetizing.

The framework of the mass terror, most recently portrayed with a masterful hand in a monumentally structured book by Karl Schlögel4, was the three major trials of Joseph Stalin’s main competitors and opponents in the internal party struggle, with Zinoviev–Kamenev, Pyatakov–Radek, and Bukharin–Rykov as the principal leaders — and at least in Nikolai Bukharin, posterity has been tempted to see something approaching a credible and effective alternative to Stalinist centralism and tyrannical outrage. Yet these persons had been, at least ostensibly, outmaneuvered and disarmed long before, and if any of them had planned a coup d’état, it had already been nipped in the bud.5 The show trials can be seen on one level as personal acts of revenge, delayed vendettas, or political paranoia pure and simple.  However, this staged indignation and perverse paranoia ought to have had its own peculiar rationality.

For if, as indicated by the charges, Bukharin and a couple of parallel centers had conspired against the Soviet government, personified in Stalin and his henchmen, like Zhdanov and — yes — Kirov, they could hardly have done so only by entering into secret and treasonous alliances with an enemy power (and with the exiled Trotsky, who was by no means averse to the exercise of terror, considering that he was the early chief architect of Bolshevik state violence6): they must have relied on battalions of willing activists within their own country and among their own people. Only then did the equation work. And it was these real, potential, or imagined sympathizers and collaborators who were the targets of the mass terror. It was the Trotskyites and Zinovievites at the local level who had to be arrested and interrogated. The most committed proletarians and party workers of the “workers’ state” had to be put under the microscope, and both the scale and the targets were utterly unlike the cleansings and purges (of bourgeois experts, the Menshevik All-Union Bureau, etc.) of the late twenties and early thirties. “The Party grows stronger when it purges itself”, Stalin’s ominous 1924 slogan read, casting the Party as organism and the membership as corpuscles, impurities and poison in the blood.

Another equally ominous slogan was, “The cadres decide everything”. When something went wrong at a workplace or in an organization, there was always a human factor to finger, and this living and usually identifiable human factor could never shirk its responsibility. He (the targets of these accusations and subsequent purges were nearly always men) could not put the blame on a design flaw or an incorrect shipment, the laws of nature, or an accident. There were no accidents, only damage done. There were no unintentional omissions, only sabotage. And if there was a fault, there was always someone who had failed to detect or report it. Goldman’s accounts of the open human hunt at Dinamo, a large machine plant in Moscow with 10,000 employees, zero in on the unwavering suspicion directed at saboteurs, at elements (such as people of foreign extraction: Poles, Lithuanians) who could conceivably be agents for a hostile foreign intelligence service or espionage organization. Dinamo (like other factories) had a daily newspaper that aired suspicions, criticized suspect individuals in responsible positions by name, and called for resolute interventions in personal matters. The wall newspapers were a rumor mill, and zeal decayed into a competition for pettiness. The security organs invited written denunciations of coworkers and shop heads in such utmost secrecy that no one was told, until matters came to a public action, who had denounced whom.

And public actions and exposures did take place — at Dinamo and a number of other factories in Moscow that Goldman has studied at the lowest possible level. The author has combed through newspaper materials, letters to the NKVD and higher party organs, and stenographic records from local party meetings that could, in the end, assemble hundreds of members and that decided on matters of expulsion from the party or continued membership. Goldman has selected a large number of individual cases and focused on personal histories and attitudes, individual strategies and counter-strategies, career patterns, techniques of argumentation, and family relationships. What emerges is a microcosm of emotional outbursts, self-righteousness, and rigidity of principle, vengefulness, naïveté, empathy, shrewdness, and reckless frenzy. How might individuals behave? Being politically correct, devoted, loyal was by no means enough. People also had to be prudent, suspicious, vigilant, and informative. Yet even those perceived as too eager to unmask hidden enemies and wreckers were at risk of attracting attention. Hyperactivity might be a way to conceal true intent, as fury might be misdirected sympathy. Goldman’s source material is boiling with political magma.

In a few brief years (1935—1938), the mass terror at workplaces went through a number of phases. At first, accusations of sabotage and deliberate mismanagement of production were obviously widely believed among ordinary workers and party members. Events often happened that put them in danger: a collapse, an explosion, or a fire. Foolish managers and cadres ought to be punished and replaced: this was a reasonable local logic. Accusations of misuse of authority, drunkenness, and injustice by officials had been made in complaints to the leadership, even by non-party members, for several years.7 Initially, this did not escalate into hysteria. On the contrary, those higher up in the hierarchies were displeased that so many took the unsatisfactory state of affairs with too much composure, sometimes verging on lethargy. It was thought that factory party committees were too restrained in their correctional methods. Exchange of party documents was not enough. At this point, the Communist Party Politburo in the autumn of 1937 adopted a resolution aimed at “democratizing” and including every individual member in internal party criticism as a way of counteracting the relative lack of interest in the human hunt. The hectic era of mass meetings began. Earlier that year, the targets had been expanded from “class enemies” to encompass “enemies of the people”, which meant that a proletarian class background and a worthy revolutionary past could no longer be counted as an automatic merit. Everyone, without exception, could be made a scapegoat: political immunity could not be relied upon anywhere.

The outcomes were multifarious. The turnover of cadres, especially at the highest level, had a devastating effect: Dinamo had three directors in six months, and one out of ten party members was sent to prison in 1937. Anxiety and instability crept into every corner; promotions to fill gaps put incompetence in the driver’s seat. General chaos spread and production losses were huge, much greater than under the management of wreckers who were eliminated early on. Goldman applies a rule of thumb concerning well-attended factory-wide meetings for mass criticism: “These larger assemblies, dominated by the most aggressive speakers, often voted to mete out harsher punishments than the party committees handed down. The rank and file tended to be more rabid than their leaders, and their participation was apt to produce a worse outcome for those subjected to their judgement.”

The atmosphere could become intimidating, monstrous. Rumors were taken as evidence and kinship as an aggravating circumstance. Even a gesture, a turn of phrase, or a general boorishness could be made politically discrediting; it was not, after all, the action that counted but the presumed intent.8 Paradoxically: the more who came to grief, the less credible became the individual denunciations. An inflationary cycle of blame and accusation arose. At the same time, the trust that may have existed in the beginning — the intent to clean up a swamp of poor conditions that no one was doing anything about (dangerous work procedures, horrible housing) — was replaced by fear of persecution and undeserved suffering. That culture of suspicion and distrust had been germinating long before the mass terror blossomed. In early 1934, Stepan Podlubny, a 20-year-old printing apprentice at Pravda who is trying to “transform” himself from the son of a kulak to Soviet man, notes:

I do not know why, but I constantly have a suspicion that Kol’ka Galankin is spying on me. Behaving very strangely. Either he is a spy, or he idolizes me, a hero in his eyes. Minor facts and evidence speak in favor of both, but neither makes complete sense. Don’t understand the matter, but must continue being careful.9

Over the course of 1938, those in the highest ranks realized something had in fact gone wrong. This insight was gained through the countless reports submitted to Stalin and the Politburo from meetings, interrogations of arrested technicians, engineers, and directors, Stalin’s own notes about the interrogations and decisions as to whether the investigations should continue or be suspended, along with his remarks to other Politburo members which bore witness to rising frustration over the fact that unsatisfactory conditions in industry and the transport system seemed as widespread as before the purges.9 The masses had taken excessive liberties in the destruction of enemies of the people. Nothing worked as it should in strategically vital industries. As during the collectivization of farming and the campaigns to exterminate the kulaks as a class, high-handed potentates had become “dizzy with success” (the title of a famous article by Stalin published in 1930).10 Considerable numbers had denounced someone with a view to gaining a position held by the accused, while others had made denunciations in order to gain a reputation as particularly vigilant — in other words, in a naïvely pre-emptive sort of self-defense. Naïve, because the more people who were deposed, expelled, convicted, imprisoned, deported, and executed, and the more who were dragged onto the carousel, the greater the risk that the individual, including the denouncer, who must always expect to be denounced in turn, would end up in the claws of the security organs. The pre-emptive move had become a chimera.

At the Central Committee level, the Party had no desire to change policy, nor did it find reason to engage in self-criticism. It was rather, as Moshe Lewin put it, a matter of camouflage meant to give the impression of a return to “normality”, and in 1939 the Party gained as many as a million new members.11 This required a re-examination of individual cases: when a party member had been excluded without subsequent intervention by the NKVD, a mistake had obviously been made and the mistake had to be rectified. (The opposite did not apply: if a person had been arrested who had been a party member all along, then the matter was clear and the case remained closed.) But the hunt for enemies had ceased to be the Party’s top priority, and from now on its local organizations had to deal with things other than humiliating and condemning individual comrades, which had been their all-overshadowing preoccupation for a number of years. The gigantic bleeding of resources needed somehow to be stopped and the lost skills and readiness for action regained. The Party was for all practical purposes paralyzed. The ones they wanted to get at now were the “careerists”, those promoted through machinations and chutzpah. Effective authority somehow had to be restored.

Wendy Z. Goldman has conducted a beautiful empirical investigation, a study in everyday Stalinism in the inspiring spirit of Sheila Fitzpatrick. An inquisitional ritualism prevailed in the war against enemies of the people, but there was also, in the rumormongering and slander that was officially encouraged, an almost anarchistic dynamic that made every petty inquisitor into a weak vessel.12 Goldman’s insights into the smallest mechanisms of terror call into question just how totalitarian the system was: during this period, she argues, the system was becoming ungovernable and on the verge of spinning totally out of control.13 The author does not align herself with any specific theory and it is difficult to assign the work to any particular school of Soviet studies. Beyond doubt, the strength of her book lies in the narrative. Goldman’s political/psychological interpretations can sometimes feel a bit light on substance, although without deteriorating into speculation and propagandizing, which has become tediously fashionable in a certain type of historical writing about the Soviet epoch. Goldman’s basic research into the repressions at the lowest level makes it possible to examine the scanty accounts from contemporary testimony, mainly by German and American workers, who published their memoirs of the time they spent at Soviet companies. ≈

Against this backdrop, many of the discussions at the conference arranged by CBEES at Södertörn University November 24—26 seemed particularly relevant and urgent. The critical review of cosmopolitanism as a historical, philosophical, and moral concept was afforded a special place on the agenda, but presentations oriented towards practical policy applications of cosmopolitan ideas were also represented. In his keynote address with the expressive title “A Reluctant Cosmopolitan: The Problems of Cosmopolitanism”, Andre Vincent, professor of political theory at Sheffield University, outlined the evolution of the concept from Kant’s Perpetual Peace of 1795 to the renaissance of political theory in Western European academia in the 1990s. At that point, cosmopolitanism began to be studied as a concept in its own right and various disciplines fought for their respective definitions of the c-word, from the transnational ethical pathos of moral philosophy, to the focus of jurisprudence on international law aimed explicitly at transcending national borders by drafting laws that spoke to the individual rather than the nation-state. In his historical overview, Vincent argued that academics have had a strong tendency to idealize Kantian cosmopolitanism and that both Rawlsians and neo-Kantians have painted the philosopher from Königsberg as more of a cosmopolitan than he actually was. Instead of regarding Kant as the “Godfather of Cosmopolitanism”, we should instead read him as a cautious proponent of certain cosmopolitan ideas, according to Vincent. Despite his open skepticism towards cosmopolitanism as a normative political and moral program, Vincent found fault with post-colonial critique of cosmopolitanism as Eurocentric. As Vincent interprets it, many post-colonial critics argue that the universalist pretensions of cosmopolitanism ignore the “situatedness of human beings”, and therefore ethical principles and laws must instead be rooted in this particularity. Vincent rejected this criticism by referring to how people the world over do in fact manage to communicate with each other, which would not be possible if universally applicable human beliefs — that injustice is wrong, that murder is wrong, and so on — did not exist. Vincent himself argued for a kind of golden mean of pragmatic cosmopolitanism oriented towards resolving current and pressing problems rather than rationalizing our way to universal, normative solutions.

One of the twelve conference sessions emphasized the period after the fall of the Iron Curtain under the heading “The Legacy of 1989: Methods, Concepts, Controversies”. All of the contributions evinced an ideology-critical attitude towards cosmopolitanism as philosophical abstraction. The speakers’ various concrete, geographical-historical examples often illustrated the fluid and contradictory nature of the concept. Sociology researcher Michael Skey from the University of East London argued that cosmopolitanism is in danger of becoming a “dumping ground for different approaches”. A general definition of cosmopolitanism as “engagement with others” must therefore be scrutinized critically and filled with substance, according to Skey, who maintained that trafficking and international crime could be included in such a definition — after all, they are both phenomena characterized by transnational relationships and genuine encounters with people from diverse ethnic and national settings.

Under the heading, “Patriotic Cosmopolitanism?”, sociology researcher Ksenija Vidmar Horvat of the University of Ljubljana stressed the importance of reevaluating the cosmopolitan project in light of the nationalist backlash after 1989. Her example was the western Balkans, which, after the breakup of the socialist multinational and multicultural federal state of Yugoslavia, were characterized by violent nationalism and ethnic reengineering. But cosmopolitanism as described by Martha Nussbaum or Julia Kristeva is not a panacea against recent nationalist currents, according to Vidmar Horvat, because these scholars ignore the spatial dimension in human identity creation. She criticized Kristeva and other theorists of cosmopolitanism shaped by Eurocentrism for giving rise to the “fetishization and idealization of the ‘alien’”, which does not take into account whether the choice to give up territorial affiliation was voluntary or forced. The groups of people compelled to leave their homes and live a migrant life in the true sense, deprived of the social and cultural safety nets that the nation-state once could offer them, were at risk of being equated in the idealized cosmopolitan discourse with the ideal of liberation from ethnic and cultural origins. She also argued that the oft-repeated link between nationalism and territory on the one hand and cosmopolitanism and deterritorialization on the other is a false and unfortunate antagonism. Instead of regarding nationalism and cosmopolitanism as incompatible quantities in their relationship to territory, Vidmar Horvat posited that, on the contrary, the destructive dominance of nationalism could be challenged by incorporating the spatial dimension into cosmopolitan thinking. According to her, the post-Yugoslavian area is an interesting example of a process of this kind, which does not permit itself to be translated into the nationalism-cosmopolitanism dichotomy. She referred to ethnographic studies by Stef Jansen and Ivana Spasić, who identified a kind of “everyday cosmopolitanism” among people in Belgrade and Zagreb. By recalling the memory of the Yugoslavian era’s officially proclaimed cosmopolitan society, many Belgradians and Zagrebians have created a counterweight to Serbian and Croatian national hegemonic claims upon identity-creation and historiography in the post-Yugoslavian region. This everyday cosmopolitan resistance of the memory is, however, more of a nostalgic look back at a former national identity than it is “orthodox” cosmopolitanism in the traditional sense.

Overall, the majority of conference participants seemed to be calling for a reevaluation of the concept of cosmopolitanism, from philosophical abstraction to concrete manifestation — in short, various attempts to pull the concept down from cosmos to polis, from the world of ideas to the ground level of cities and states. Considering the delicate political and economic situation in Europe and the rest of the world, the conference was an important step towards a more nuanced understanding of cosmopolitanism — and maybe, just maybe, towards a world inhabited by firmly rooted cosmopolitans. ≈

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union twenty years ago, the Moldovans realized there was a global market for the nuts.

Moldova is the poorest state in Europe. Maxim, a driver from the capital city of Chişinău, is taking me south to Gagauzia. “People are really poor here”, Maxim says when I return to the car after a house call in a village. “Two of them who walked by while I was waiting here cadged cigarettes. Imagine not being able to afford cigarettes. And you don’t see such worn-out, dirty shoes where I come from.”

“I’ve never regretted coming home for the nuts fifteen years ago”, says Aleksandr Chernovenko. “And the profits end up in the pockets of humble people who really need the money”, he adds.

Chernovenko, an aerospace engineer and a PhD, worked for many years at the Academy of Sciences in neighboring Ukraine. When the Russian financial crisis of 1998 hit Moldova, an acquaintance of his at a wine company back home in Komrat, the largest city in Gagauzia, called him up. The company wanted to start selling walnuts as a new product line, and Chernovenko agreed to come manage it.

With the nutcrackers

The walnut trees growing here and there in people’s yards are low to the ground, and the nuts are easily harvested by beating them down with a rod and then gathering them up. But the trees lining the avenues are tall. I see people using sticks to knock down the nuts from low-hanging branches, and here and there young men trying to hit nuts higher up by throwing branches at them. The rest are gathered from the ground in mid-October when they fall naturally.

I figure at least one or two of the Moldovan companies — out of at least 20 in total — buy walnuts in Komrat, but none of my friends knows of any. But we are given an address by some women selling knitted goods in the bazaar. From the outside, the low building looks like a closed up warehouse, but inside it’s as busy as Santa’s workshop. The pickers arrive carrying their nuts in plastic bags, for which they are paid according to weight and quality, with a higher rate for shelled nuts. Hardworking pickers can manage a ton over the season, at the most, for which they earn about 1,100 euros. The unshelled nuts are poured into sacks and carried out to the storehouse. They are taken from there to the sorting trays, one or two at a time, where women work in teams of three. Nuts that fell or were picked from the trees when green have blackened by now and are put in separate sacks. The nuts allowed to ripen on the trees are paler. They get sorted into the highest quality category. The sorted sacks are then put in a corner of the room, where they wait for other women to crack them.

The nutcrackers of Gagauzia do not move in either march or waltz time as in Tchaikovsky’s ballet. Instead, I discern a refined 7/10 time as they rake a few nuts out of the bag, crush them with syncopated hammer blows, and then pick out the nutmeats from the shells.

Seventy percent of Moldovan walnuts go to the EU, twenty-five percent to the Arab world, and the rest to Russia. Wine produces ten times more revenue for Moldova than the nuts, but many small walnut groves are being planted these days while several wine producers are waiting for better times before they think it will be worthwhile to bottle wine again. One exception is Cioc Maidan Vin, located about 20 kilometers east of Komrat. Their production was exported in tank cars to Russia until 2006, when Russia banned imports of wine from Georgia and Moldova. But Cioc Maidan Vin found other buyers in Abkhazia across the Black Sea, so the cars now trundle along the railroads via Ukraine.

“In Abkhazia, they add sweetened fruit juice to make our wine taste like theirs”, says product manager Maria Politsmerskaya with a sigh. The wine has been babied in her lab and wine cellar for many years before export. She suspects the sweetened wine is sold on to Russia as Abkhazian.

The remnants of the Gagauzian people

There is no hotel in Gagauzia, so while I’m conducting my interviews I stay at an inn in Cahul 70 kilometers away, almost at the Romanian border. Several vineyards around Cahul have been abandoned because they haven’t been profitable for many years. There’s a waiter at the hotel, also named Maxim, who becomes my local driver. He calls his native language Romanian, even though the state language is officially called Moldovan — which is basically Romanian with a large contingent of Russian loanwords, especially when it comes to technical terms. When I first meet him, Maxim says he thinks the Gagauzians should speak Romanian with him, but they are used to using Russian to talk to anyone other than Gagauzians. But Maxim is curious — he tags along to my interviews and asks his own questions, getting more interested all the time. After all, he says after a couple of days, the Gagauzians live the same way we do. When we visit the Gagauzian theater in Çadır-Lunga, he is keen to tell actors that his father is a teacher and that he also has great respect for the dramatic arts.

I came to Gagauzia the first time in the early 1990s. Two days before that, I had lain in a foxhole at Bender and interviewed men of the Moldovan home guard while snipers on the Transnistrian side fired inches above our heads; that was the civil war that would eventually claim more than a thousand lives.

When I was later taken toward Gagauzia, the Moldovans had set up roadblocks there. Some were manned by police, but most were patrolled by the civilian guard, who were armed with a motley collection of weapons. Once I got to Gagauzia, there was not a single defensive line. The Gagauzian civil defense was known as the National Guard, with the local police making up its core. The National Guardsmen remained in their usual workplaces, but kept their weapons at hand. Keeping patrols at border stations could have provoked a confrontation.

“It’s ridiculous”, National Guardsman Sasha told me then. “They’ve put up roadblocks because they’re afraid of us. There’s 150,000 of us and four million of them. Do they really think we’re going to attack them?”

A couple of people were murdered in Gagauzia during the period of greatest tension, but war never broke out.

Several indigenous peoples had “autonomous republics” in the Soviet Union, a system intended to guarantee certain services in the local languages. When the Union fell apart, these republics declared themselves sovereign, usually in a bid to strengthen their negotiating position when Russia was drafting a new constitution, for example. The tiny Gagauzian remnant had not been granted status as an autonomous republic, but they declared themselves one to fend off Romanian nationalism in response to Moldova’s independence. When another region in Moldova, Transnistria, also declared itself sovereign, however, the issue was not ethnicity alone. As in the rest of Moldova, there are Romanians, Ukrainians, and Russians living in Transnistria, although in Transnistria the Slavic element is larger. The crux of the Russian demand for sovereignty in Transnistria was that the country’s key industries were found there and were often managed by Russians and others who had ended up there in the course of their Soviet careers.

Russian was the second language of the Gagauzians and rumors that the government in Chişinău intended to shut down the Russian TV channel sparked outrage.

When I interview a school principal in Çadır-Lunga one afternoon, a pupil is there who she believes is one of the best remaining at the school. When I ask 16-year-old Olesa to tell me the names of people in the Moldovan government, she just shakes her head. Olesa reads Russian literature, watches a Russian-language channel from Ukraine, prefers to listen to Russian rock music, and is concerned that fewer and fewer people believe in God. She dreams of moving to Ukraine, where there are more educational opportunities. She would love to be a teacher. The countries she would most like to visit are Egypt and the remnants of Greco-Roman civilization, but also China, India, France, Germany, and Holland. Why Holland? “I don’t know”, she says. “I once saw a TV show from there.”

As a result of massive unemployment, at least 600,000 Moldovans work abroad and the money they send home amounts to one third of the GDP. People have a better chance of finding a job in a country where they can navigate in Russian rather than Romanian. Students who speak Gagauzian, a Turkish language, can manage relatively well at Turkish universities. Since the job market does not generate a lot of inter-language meeting places in the country, the barrier of suspicion remains.

The theater and cultural identity

Mikhail Konstantinov, director of the Gagauzian regional theater, actually has a daughter who works for the National Opera in Chişinău. When he took on the post in 2007, he tried to broker an agreement on sending young actors from Gagauzia to a state school for the dramatic arts in Chişinău. The idea was rejected on the grounds that Gagauzians do not speak fluent Romanian.

I end up sitting with the actors as they eat their bag lunches in a chilly room above a closed-down theater space in Çadır-Lunga. It’s so cold here in winter the theater cannot be used. The rest of the year, the space is often used as a meeting room, so the ensemble does not have a permanent venue. The actors soon fall into a discussion with Maxim about where you can buy the cheapest potatoes in southern Moldova. Their wage, paid from the Gagauzian state budget, is around 500—800 lei, or 30—50 euros a month. That is about equal to an ordinary retirement pension.

Gagauzia’s arts budget is shrinking, and as of 2012, the theater has been administratively merged with a folklore ensemble and an orchestra in Komrat in an attempt to keep everything going. The theater tours the villages and some plays are also performed in Romanian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian in order to reach a wider audience. One third of the audiences are children. Tickets cost 10 lei (60 euro cents) and the receipts just about cover the cost of transporting the actors and props. Directors and stage designers are sometimes invited in from Chişinău. An American director who was financed through development aid was very well received.

There are no resources for understudies, so if an actor falls ill and cannot be there for a rehearsal or performance, it affects the entire ensemble. The actors and actresses assure me they do not have the time to moonlight, but Konstantinov says the income from his private vineyard has occasionally saved him.

Here, as at other meetings, the gap between the Gagauzian cultural and political elites is apparent. The culture workers assert that the main purpose of the autonomy Gagauzia was granted after the difficult years in the early 1990s is to strengthen Gagauzian cultural identity. The politicians I encounter are more inclined to talk about how Gagauzia should have the right to make its own laws in most areas and even to engage independently in foreign trade. The Communist Party received sixty percent of the votes in the last parliamentary election in Gagauzia. This can partly be explained by the strong support for the party even after the fall of the Soviet Union in the agricultural belt that stretches across parts of Moldova, Ukraine, and southern Russia. In their rhetoric, the Moldovan Communists seem more modern than their Russian counterparts, but they still appeal to many Russian-speaking voters.

“We’ve thought about reorganizing the theater as a business with its own website and trying to find foreign sponsors to get around the internal political squabbles”, says Konstantinov. “But a theater without its own venue, or at least a technical base, is an impossibility.”

We have to break off the conversation when a group of pre-adolescent girls troops into the room with expectant faces. It’s time for one of the actresses to give them this week’s lesson in the performing arts.

“You can never stop using your imagination”, Konstantinov says on the way out. “When I got married, I bought an electric accordion. People thought I was nuts and wasting my money. But actually, it was the accordion that made it possible for me to buy a house and other things. With my accordion and my professionalism, I could replace an entire band and I was hired to play at a lot of weddings.”

Poet, prose writer, painter, and film director Dmitri Kara-Çoban is one of the prominent figures of Gagauzian culture. At his death in 1986, he left as a legacy a museum of history and ethnography in the community of Beşalma, where we are reminded that the Gagauzians declared the autonomous Republic of Komrat for a few days in 1906, but quickly fell under Russian control again. Forty percent of the Gagauzian people died in the famine of 1946.

When I sat with the head of the Gagauzian Chamber of Commerce, Vitali Kyurkchu, one evening a couple of years ago, he dwelled on all the evil Lenin’s party had done to the Gagauzians and their culture, including the deportations to Kazakhstan. It is thus a mystery why the statue of Lenin still stands in front of the administrative building on the main street running through Komrat. Of course, until there is something to put in its place, you wouldn’t be able to guess the location of the center of town without it. Over the years, I’ve been accustomed to arranging to meet people at Lenin’s feet, for lack of any other landmark.

At the Kara-Çoban museum, Maxim the waiter remarks enthusiastically to the guide when he realizes that the Gagauzians use the same farm implements as the Romanians do back home, a few dozen kilometers away. And how could it be otherwise? Like the nuts, the wine has been here for millennia. Peoples have come and peoples have gone over the centuries, but the crops have determined the tools of production.

Wine bottles, grapes, and ewe’s milk cheese

Winemaking is an important sideline for most farmers in Moldova. Piotr Sirkeli in Kirsova spends one week a year harvesting and pressing one ton of grapes. When his son was at school, he bought an additional two tons from other growers for his wine production. The plants that make wine for bottling are going through hard times, in part because the younger generation has discovered beer. But the new wine from the farms is much sought after in the cities. It tastes of grape must, both before and after fermentation. Like so much else in Moldova, the farm wines are sold on the black market. But Piotr Sirkeli is already retired and gets 570 lei a month from the state. The extra income from his wine is below the taxable threshold. He also makes his own ewe’s milk cheese and sells it to order. The cheese is stored next to the four oak barrels of wine in the cellar. One of the barrels is thirty years old, the others five.

“You just have to replace the hoops once in a while”, Piotr says. There is a shortage of wood for new barrels, since oak trees are protected in Moldova. “But that can usually be got round”, he adds with a sly smile.

A dark grape called Moldova is a popular choice for the farm wines, but Piotr sometimes mixes in a couple of other varieties, including a light grape his wife prefers.

After I’ve been allowed to see how Piotr presses his wine, I am invited to have a bowl of potato soup in the kitchen. The position of the kitchen makes it easy to come in and out while working in the garden. Piotr explains that despite the hard times he can find customers for his wine because he has taken care of the vines and maintains high quality. The same goes for the ewe’s milk cheese. He sold the first batches in the town square, but his customers loved it so much they started ordering it directly from him.

Otherwise, he and his daughter-in-law Maria, who is sitting with us at the table, both know very well that Moldovan wine has been subject to a lot of manipulations over the years. She is Bulgarian, and speaks Russian with her husband and in-laws.

“Almost no wine is exported in bottles; it is thus susceptible to tampering along the way, by watering it down, for example”, Maria says, whose family is in the wine business.

I reply that I’ve seen Moldovan wine in bottles in many countries and had in fact seen it only a month before at restaurants in Kyrgyzstan.

“I don’t think all the wine sold as Moldovan really comes from here”, Maria answers. She tells me about some people who collected bottles from several different countries containing wine that, according to the labels, was of the same Moldovan origin.

“They all tasted very different”, Maria says.

It’s time to say farewell to Gagauzia this time round. The Maxim who lives in Chişinău has come to pick me up. Something broke in one of the rear wheels, so he has had to leave the car on the side of the road and get a taxi the rest of the way. When the taxi passes the last community on the main road out of Gagauzia toward Chişinău, we end up in a traffic circle planted with bushes and a tree in the middle. After having nearly completed the turn, we discover a big dog on the asphalt behind the bushes. It is sitting with its back toward us, basking in the sun. The taxi driver swerves at the last second. He exchanges a look with Maxim and then Maxim glances at me.

We see the dog in the rearview mirror, still sitting in the same position, unaware that its life was in danger only seconds ago. And so the last picture burned into my retina in Gagauzia this time was of a dog sitting next to a tree and enjoying life, like Ferdinand the bull, although this tree bears nuts, not cork. ≈

Table 1

The ethnic structure of the autonomous province of Vojvodina, according to the 2002 national census

Table 2

Istria’s ethnic structure in accordance with first tongue, 2001

Croatia

Croatia submitted its application to the EU in 2003. The European Commission granted Croatia the status of a candidate country in mid-2004 and the accession negotiations commenced in October 2005. The first decade since the year 2000 saw remarkable progress in the field of minority legislation. However, in order to comprehend and assess the significance of this progress, a short overview of minority policies during the 1990s is needed. Article 15 of the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia (1990) formally endorsed the equality of members of all national minorities before the law. Nevertheless, the realities “on the ground” were different. Since the declaration of Croatian independence, Franjo Tuđman initiated a nationalization process. His government proceeded to purge employees, mostly those with an ethnic Serb background. This affected the administrative bureaucracy, the police, the judiciary, the media, and education. Even as late as July 2000, government statistics demonstrated that only 2.8 percent of state administration employees belonged to the Serbian minority.2 Furthermore, in 1995, the UN expressed concern about the state authorities’ failure to take action over the propagation of ethnic hatred against Serbs by the media and the press. The landscape became fuzzier because of indications that Croatian society had been hugely scarred by the war and that ethnic cleavages were indeed pronounced. Consequently, the situation with regard to minority rights remained static until the end of the 1990s.

The year 2000 saw radical changes in Croatian politics. The voters’ change of mood resulted in Stipe Mesić’s victory in the presidential elections (January 24 and February 7, 2000), and the Social Democrats’ (SDP) victory in the parliamentary elections (January 3, 2000). The new government promoted an agenda of alleviation of ethnic cleavages within Croatia and the establishment of better relations with the leadership of neighboring states. Most important, the new leadership demonstrated great interest in Croatia’s accession to the EU, as well as eagerness to comply with the recommendations of EU advisers. A series of bilateral talks were held between EU advisers and representatives of the Croatian government. In the course of these negotiations, the former outlined to the latter a number of reforms that had to be undertaken in order for Croatia to tread the path of democratization more effectively. As part of the constitutional revision (2000—2001), Article 15 was amended to add a clause saying that the special right of the members of national minorities to elect their representatives to the Sabor (parliament) may be provided by law (this is in addition to the general electoral right).3 This was an explicit stipulation of positive discrimination in favor of national minorities.

The culmination of the entire process came about with the inauguration of the new Constitutional Law on the Rights of National Minorities, CLRNM (December 19, 2002). A key aspect of the new law was the national minorities’ authorization to elect advisory councils in local administrations and their proportional representation in the Sabor (Article 7, Articles 19—20, 24, 25—31, and 32—33). This new law is of particular significance for the more ethnically mixed općine (municipalities) in that it has encouraged the application of regional mechanisms for the accommodation of the minority communities’ demands. An appropriate example is the coordination among the national minorities’ councils in the municipality of Rijeka in the multiethnic region of Istria.4 In Istria, the proper operation of such institutions and mechanisms has also relied upon the longstanding tradition of harmonious multiethnic cohabitation. Last but not least, the laws on education and the use of the national minorities’ languages (2001) additionally safeguard the status of minority languages in public information and the education system.

These developments at   the legislative level did not fully correspond to the realities of implementation, for certain deficiencies persisted. First, a lack of competence or eagerness has been observed on the part of certain bodies in the state administration in the implementation of the
CLRNM. Similar symptoms have also been detected at the local government level. Another obstacle has been the varying degrees of apathy or insufficient motivation among the national minorities’ elites to take full advantage of the new legal framework. To these one might add that the Council for National Minorities functions as an advisory body and not as a full-fledged legal entity, empowered to represent national minorities before the Croatian government. Lastly, the persistence of ethnic intolerance in the society has often emerged as a factor that obstructs the timely implementation of the novel provisions. In particular, the picture remains rather blurred with regard to the collective status of the Serbian minority. Two urgent tasks for the Croatian government, as prescribed by the European Commission, have been the facilitation of the Serbian refugees’ return to their homes and the resolution of their civic status and property restitution.

The legal aspects of the Serbian refugee question in Croatia bear the scars of the recent conflict. Unlike Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Section VII of the Dayton Agreement enabled Serbian refugees to obtain citizenship and regain their abandoned property, the international element in Croatia was not very active during the 1990s. It was not until to the “changing of the guard” in Croatian politics that the Croatian authorities, in coordination with EU advisers, demonstrated a greater decisiveness towards resolving the Serbian refugee question. Since 2000, a greater number of Serbian refugees have been enabled to obtain Croatian citizenship and regain their property.5 A series of amendments to the Law on Areas of Special State Concern (2002) recognized the former owners’ right to bring a case for restitution of their property and provided for compensation. In spite of the frequent lack of willingness on the part of the local authorities to cooperate in the implementation of these provisions, the new framework has enabled a considerable number of Serbian refugees to reclaim their property or be granted alternative housing options. Moreover, no serious instances of discrimination against the Serbian Orthodox Church have been witnessed lately. In an overall assessment, the more effective coordination between Zagreb and the EU sub-bodies has, since 2000, resulted in the formulation of a more adequate framework for the management of ethnic relations. The CLRNM and the other legal documents have provided a good basis for the harmonization of the Croatian legislation with the acquis communitaire and the improvement of the position of national minorities in Croatia. It is therefore up to the Croatian authorities to adhere to the proper implementation of the new legal framework.

Serbia

As in Croatia, the period since the year 2000 saw considerable progress in Serbia’s minority legislation. Once again, in order to comprehend the extent of this progress, a brief overview of Serbian minority policies during the 1990s is required. The rights of the national minorities in Serbia and FR Yugoslavia were to be regulated by a variety of documents. Certain provisions were included in the Yugoslav Constitution (1992) and the Serbian Constitution (1990). Nevertheless, as long as neither FR Yugoslavia nor Serbia had a separate law on national minorities, the constitutional rights of national minorities were also codified in Serbian statutes. Still, the realities in the implementation were different. In Vojvodina, the new Serbian elites promoted a series of subtle policies with the objective of renationalizing the province. Since the termination of Vojvodina’s autonomy (1989), the nationalizing dimension became manifest in irregularities in the implementation of the provisions on education and the public use of minority languages, as well as in alleged cases of discrimination against minorities in employment.

The end of Slobodan Milošević’s rule was accompanied by rapid developments in the field of minority legislation. The post-Milošević elites manifested great interest in recovering the lost ground in Serbia’s path towards the EU. A number of documents came into force under the umbrella of the Serbian-Montenegrin Constitutional Charter (March 2003), including the Federal Law for the Protection of the Rights and Freedoms of National Minorities (LRFNM, February 27, 2002). This law guarantees the public use of minority languages in those municipalities where a minority forms at least 15 percent of the population (Article 11). It also provides for education in minority languages, at all levels, in the same municipalities (Article 13). The most notable innovation of this law was the establishment of the “National Minorities’ Council” at the former Federal Assembly (Articles 18—20). As in Croatia, this is a body tasked with supervising the implementation of the minority legislation6. However, on this occasion, Article 19 clearly designates this body as a “pravno lice” (i.e. “legal entity”). After the dissolution of the Serbian-Montenegrin state union (June 2006), the “National Minorities’ Council” and the LRFNM were incorporated into the legal system of the Serbian republic.

In July 2008,   a new institution was assigned the aforementioned tasks and a fully-fledged legal entity came into existence: The Ministry of Human and Minority Rights. Most importantly, the new Serbian Constitution (2006) summarized a number of fundamental provisions for national minorities (e.g. the public use of minority languages, prohibition of discrimination and relations with kin states — Articles 75—80). Last but not least, the laws on local self-government (2002), the official use of minority languages (amended in 2005) and prohibition of discrimination (2009) also contributed to the arrangement of an articulate infrastructure for the protection of minority rights. One more factor that facilitated the arrangement of the new legal framework is the state of fragmentation in Serbian elite politics and the formation of government coalitions in which minority parties have participated (e.g. Vojvodina’s ethnic Hungarian parties). This granted minority elites the opportunity to promote their demands from within the power structures. Minority entrepreneurs have seen Serbia’s “European aspirations” as an “ethnically neutral” terrain on which they can voice their demands and serve their interests more effectively.

In Vojvodina, the protection of minority rights became entangled with the concession of administrative competence to the province. Vojvodina returned to the fore with its new statute (December 14, 2009). A major “external factor” behind the approval of this document was Belgrade bureaucrats’ desire to demonstrate that Serbia conformed to the European standards for regionalization. The preamble upgrades the status of national minorities to that of national communities (nacionalne zajednice). Articles 6 and 7 reaffirm Vojvodina’s multiethnic physiognomy and the equality of ethnic groups. They also provide for the implementation of positive discrimination with the aim of safeguarding minority identities. Article 23 reaffirms the dual dimension of minority rights, while Article 26 safeguards the use of minority languages in education and public information. An institutional provision of major importance is the establishment of a Council for National Communities at the provincial assembly (Article 40). These clauses supplement the relevant provisions in the LRFNM with a more regionalized focus towards the regulation of ethnic issues locally.

Overall, the endeavor by Serbian policy makers to comply with European standards has resulted in the arrangement of an efficient framework for the protection of minority rights, both at the state level and at Vojvodina’s provincial level. As in Croatia, a problem that has to be dealt with is the frequent lack of coordination among state, provincial, and local authorities towards the implementation of these provisions, as well as their weak motivation to do so. To these might be added the conscious assimilation process among certain minorities (e.g. Vojvodina’s Ruthenes and Romanians).

Serbia, Croatia, and European standards

The Copenhagen criteria (1993) have set as one of the conditions for the acceptance of post-communist states into the EU the adequate protection of the rights and freedoms of national minorities, in accordance with the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM). In principle, both the Croatian CLRNM and the Serbian LRFNM are consistent with the FCNM. For a start, both affirm the individual and collective dimensions of minority rights. The prohibition of acts of discrimination, forcible assimilation, or alteration of the ethnic structure in ethnically mixed localities is consistent with FCNM Articles 4.1, 5.2, and 6.2. Both countries allow media and press institutions in minority languages (Article 9.3). The provisions for the public use of minority languages (e.g. in signposting) in the areas where minorities form dense concentrations comply with Article 11.1–2. Other conforming clauses concern the provision of education in minority languages at all levels; the teaching of subjects relevant to the minorities’ culture, language, history, and religion; and the establishment of private educational institutions by minority entrepreneurs (Articles 12.1—2, 13.1, 14.2). The authorization of minorities to maintain relations with legal subjects based in their external homelands is consistent with Article 17.1. Some clauses, such as the Serbian LRFNM’s provision on offering financial breaks for the establishment of private educational institutions, even go a step beyond the FCNM. In addition to these specific laws, the relevant provisions in the Serbian and Croatian constitutions, as well as the other Serbian and Croatian laws, are all consistent with the FCNM. The Serbian and Croatian laws on the official use of languages and their alphabets, in particular, are also consistent with Articles 8.1 (on education), 9.1 (on judicial authorities), 10.1 and 10.2 (on public services and administration), 11.1 (on media) and 14 (on cross-border cooperation) of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (COE, 1992).

At this moment, it seems that Serbia’s legal framework for minority rights is somewhat better articulated than Croatia’s, particularly with regard to its enforcing mechanisms and institutional provisions — most notably the Ministry for Human and Minority Rights. Moreover, the LRFNM explicitly designates the National Minorities’ Council as a legal subject before the Serbian government. In Croatia the Council for National Minorities remains an advisory body with no legal status before the Sabor. In addition the Croatian CLRNM contains some ambiguities and minor deficiencies with regard to the system of election of minority representatives to the Sabor. First of all, Article 19 does not make it entirely clear whether the number of seats to which minorities are entitled may be determined by the outcome of the election by universal and equal suffrage. What causes the confusion is wording such us “at least five representatives and at most eight” (19.1), “at least one representative and at most three” (19.2) and “at least four representatives” (19.3), with reference to the size of each minority group. This wording creates the impression that the number of seats to be reserved for minority representatives cannot be fixed in advance. In this case, Article 19 could potentially come into conflict with the constitutional provision that fixes the total number of the Sabor’s seats beforehand (Croatian Constitution, Article 71). This potential discrepancy must therefore be clarified. Moreover, the special voting system for members of minority groups requires that both voters and candidates reveal that they belong to a national minority in the election of the national minority councils. However, persons belonging to certain minorities may feel reluctant to do so out of fear of discrimination. Therefore, it is essential that the Croatian authorities create mechanisms for the more effective safeguarding of confidentiality. Equal respect for the principle of confidentiality must be shown in the special elections for minorities that are held in Serbia, too. These include the elections of the national minority councils at both the Serbian parliament and Vojvodina’s assembly.

Both Serbian and Croatian   state authorities must combat symptoms of weak coordination, incompetence, or unwillingness to implement the new legal frameworks on the part of regional and/or local authorities. In particular, allegations of ethnic discrimination in employment must be investigated and combated. This can be facilitated through the accumulation of reliable data on the employment of persons belonging to national minorities in the public sector. Moreover, the Serbian and Croatian organs responsible must make sure that the use of minority languages in education and public information is provided as dictated by the relevant legislation. This also entails the satisfactory arrangement of programs in the minority languages on the state radio and television. Lastly, authorities in both countries must ensure that persons belonging to national minorities are granted the right to full participation in Serbian and/or Croatian political life.

At this point, it should be noted that a number of resolutions and measures have been taken recently towards the correct implementation of the new legal norms. In Croatia, the “Action Plan for the Implementation of the CLRNM” (June 2008) aims at ensuring the quick and efficient application of the law. A series of periodic reports, focusing on the adequate implementation of the minority legislation in Vojvodina and other ethnically diverse areas, is also being prepared in Serbia under the aegis of the Ministry for Human and Minority Rights. Apart from governmental policies, the minority groups themselves are expected to demonstrate a greater interest in taking full advantage of the new provisions. In particular, it is up to political and intellectual entrepreneurs among minorities to reverse instances of conscious assimilation within certain groups. Despite possible shortcomings, Serbia and Croatia are currently endowed with sustainable and efficient frameworks for the protection of minority rights. This is also evident in the positive remarks in the latest EU and COE reports over the progress made by the two countries in the course of their accession to the EU.7

What needs to   be pointed out, among other things, is that both Serbian and Croatian legal experts and policy-makers have made proper use of certain mechanisms for the management of inter-group relations during the communist era. As components of the multifaceted and hazy constitutional and legal framework of SFR Yugoslavia, these provisions turned out to be disastrous in the long run. Nevertheless, within the process of European integration, legal experts and policy-makers from both states modified certain mechanisms employed in SFR Yugoslavia and adapted them to the European standards for the protection of minority rights. For instance, the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Croatia (Articles 219 and 380) granted minorities the right to participate in representative bodies at all levels of state administration. SR Croatia’s 26 multiethnic municipalities were granted extensive autonomy in managing intergroup relations with regard to a variety of areas (i.e. education, the public use of minority languages, and public information). In the context of independent Croatia’s legal infrastructure for the management of ethnic relations, these provisions “correspond” to the national minorities’ advisory councils at the local self-government level; although their powers more restricted than that of the multiethnic općine during the communist era.

Nevertheless, a specific feature distinguishes the Serbian from the Croatian legal framework — namely, the application of more regionalized mechanisms for the management of ethnic relations in Serbia’s most multiethnic region, Vojvodina. The main driving force behind the formulation of these mechanisms has been the popular demand for the restitution of certain powers (i.e. administrative and fiscal) to Vojvodina’s assembly. Provisions such as the new statute for Vojvodina endow Vojvodina’s assembly with an array of mechanisms for the more efficient accommodation of minority demands locally. Closer communication between the provincial organs and minority representatives can ensure that the former respond more quickly to the demands of the latter. Article 40 of the new statute and its authorization for the formation of the minority council at Vojvodina’s assembly can bring about fruitful results if this body coordinates its activities properly with larger institutions at the national level (i.e. the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights, or the National Minorities’ Council at the Serbian parliament).

In all of this,   it seems that Serbian policymakers and legal experts also paid close attention to regionalized mechanisms for the management of ethnic relations which operated under the umbrella of Vojvodinian autonomy during the communist era. They selected certain of their elements, reformulated them and adapted them to the latest European trends in the areas of regionalization and minority legislation. A suitable example is the new statute’s authorization for the election of the national minorities’ councils at the provincial assembly. Others include the national minorities’ authorization, by the same document, to cooperate with legal subjects based in their kin states, and the ban on ethnic discrimination and the propagation of ethnic hatred. Similar provisions were in force as part of the Vojvodinian Constitution (1974) (Articles 4 and 194) and its supplementary legislation. In addition to these, the abolition of Vojvodina’s legislative and judicial powers in the 1990s did not amount to the dissolution of the formal structures of its autonomy (i.e. the provincial assembly and its executive council). This provided the soil where new and up-to-date proposals for the devolution of authority, including the authority to manage ethnic relations, to the provincial organs could take root.

In Croatia, the new legal framework has opened up new prospects for coordination among minority councils in ethnically mixed regions such as Istria. Institutional provisions such as the national minorities’ councils can promote the more adequate representation of minority communities in Istria’s local administration. The positive state of multiethnic cohabitation provides an additional incentive towards coordination among the various minority councils in the region. This, in turn, can facilitate a consensus regarding the joint communication of the minorities’ demands and issues of major concern to the local, regional, and state organs. At a first glance, Istria’s case is quite comparable to Vojvodina. Istria is another ex-Yugoslav region characterized by a high degree of ethnic plurality. As in Vojvodina, the persistence of the trans-ethnic cultural substratum of “Istrianity”, at the grass-roots level, functioned as a catalyst for the alleviation of intense ethnic cleavages and friction during the 1990s. Furthermore, Istria is home to a popular regionalist party, the Istrian Democratic Assembly (IDS). As result of coordination between the IDS and Istria’s Italian Union, the statute of the Istrian županija (“county”) stipulates that a number of posts in local administration must be reserved for members of the Italian minority.8 Moreover, a well-established supervisory infrastructure guarantees the satisfactory use of the Italian language in local administration, public information, education, and signposting throughout the region’s urban centers (e.g. Rijeka and Pula).

However, unlike Vojvodina,   Istria lacks the political heritage, from the not-so-distant past, of powerful governing institutions at the regional level. In fact, no forms of regional autonomy were established in Croatia during the communist era. Furthermore, Croatia’s regional restructuring in the first half of the 1990s was rather shortsighted and interest-driven. The main impetus behind this project was Croatian Democratic Community’s (HDZ) intention to capitalize on its high popularity back then. Therefore the 11 “associations of municipalities” were dissolved and their powers transferred to the 21 new županije. Nevertheless, this did not amount to an extension of the constituent units’ powers, and Croatian policymakers have to this day remained keen on centralization. The IDS and other regionalists must lobby for more drastic steps along the path towards Croatia’s regionalization and the management of ethnic relations at the regional level. At this moment, though, it is hard to predict the effectiveness of such an endeavor in the immediate future. To date, Serbia has been more successful than Croatia in drafting and implementing more regionalized mechanisms for the management of inter-group relations.

Finally, the status of ethnic Croats in Serbia and of ethnic Serbs in Croatia has also been upgraded. Croatian has regained its status as one of Vojvodina’s official languages and the Democratic Alliance of Vojvodina’s Croats (DSHV) participates in the current governing coalition. In Croatia, the Serbian Independent Democratic Party (SDSS) also participates with three seats in the Sabor. Meanwhile, no serious instances of harassment against the Serbian Orthodox clergy in Croatia or the Croatian Roman Catholic clergy in Serbia have been recorded lately. Nevertheless, an urgent task for the Croatian government remains the rapid and effective facilitation of the return of Croatian Serb refugees to their homes and the restitution of their property. Although a number of Croatian Serb refugees are currently dwelling in Serbia (mainly Vojvodina and Belgrade) and demonstrate no interest in returning to Croatia9, this objective could become more attainable through joint efforts between Zagreb and Belgrade. Serbian and Croatian authorities should cooperate towards estimating the exact percentage of Serbian refugees who are keen on returning to Croatia. The necessity for cooperation between Serbian and Croatian authorities, towards the facilitation of the Serbian refugees’ return to their hearths, can also form part of an agreement or memorandum of good relations between the two states.

In lieu of a conclusion

Overall, the management of ethnic relations in Central and Eastern Europe has been a particularly complicated and hard task. Conflicting national narratives and the long-term democracy deficit have often resulted in non-viable combinations. In the specific case of Serbia and Croatia, the whole picture is even more battered by the legacy of the recent warfare. Even today, certain segments within the two countries’ political scenes continue to view the respective Serbian and Croatian minorities as “unreliable elements”. Nevertheless, the two countries’ “European aspirations” have alleviated the traumas of the recent past and encouraged the formulation of sustainable and effective legal frameworks that are highly compatible with European standards in the field of minority rights. One could argue that the recent developments in the Serbian and Croatian legislations on minority rights represent one occasion on which the EU’s informal engagement has exerted a beneficial influence. One should also note that, throughout the last decade, the roles of Serbia and Croatia as kin states to ethnic Serbs in Croatia and ethnic Croats in Serbia has been constructive. The leadership of both groups have watered down their rhetoric and have opted for cooperation instead of confrontation over the accommodation of their co-ethnics’ interests in each state. Therefore, it is up to the Serbian and Croatian authorities to enforce the proper implementation of the new legal provisions. ≈

The scene in Stalker is a random example of how the telephone in the Russian and Soviet context can have completely different connotations from those found in an American or Western European film, where the phone call is a common device for speeding up the action and focusing the spectator’s attention on the solution of the plot. The differences have a historical explanation.

The telephone in Russia and the Soviet Union

The history and sociology of the telephone in Russian society have only slowly become the object of serious study.2 The scope of this essay is limited to the following two topics: first, the forms of use, in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, of the telephone as a means of communication, potentially universally available and “horizontal” but actually restricted by “vertical” forces; and second, the symbolism that accumulated around this means of communication in Russian and Soviet culture.

The telephone, during its almost 150-year history, has created new spatial-temporal conditions for communication. Before Bell’s invention, communication entailed either the simultaneous presence of the participants in one and the same place (conversation, discussion), or the overcoming of geographical distance between the sender and addressee at the cost of lost time and the exclusion of any signals not recorded in the text (written correspondence or telegram). The appearance of the telephone created a new situation involving simultaneous contact over great distance, as a result of which the significance of the human voice increased dramatically. At the same time, the loss of paralinguistic signals that accompany ordinary speech required active compensation on the part of the participants in a telephone conversation.

Sociologists seem to agree on the availability of telephone communications and telephones as one of the indicators of a society’s degree of modernization.3 In Russia, the telephone, like many other technical novelties, appeared early but had a very limited geographical and social distribution. In 1896, the Bell Telephone Company published what was in all likelihood the first telephone directory for Moscow, containing approximately 2,200 telephone numbers for private individuals and organizations; most of all it resembled the membership list of a motorist club.4 According to international statistics, Russia was far behind the US and leading European nations around 1900 in the number of inhabitants (of all ages) per telephone: USA — 60, Sweden — 115, Switzerland — 129, Germany — 397, France — 1,216, Italy — 2,629, Russia — 6,988.5

The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (1901) described the successful expansion of the telephone in the West, compared to Russia, in almost lyrical tones:

With the development of urban life, the telephone acquires ever-greater significance; with the intensification of industrial development, it acquires great importance in the countryside as well, particularly in the United States, a country of heightened industrial pace. In order to save expenses on the installation of telephone lines, American farmers use fences surrounding fields; wires strung on these fences serve as telephone lines and special telephone poles are erected only when it is necessary to extend the telephone network across a road. Such telephones cost very little and function very well, even when the fence is covered with dew.6

In spite of the low ranking of Russia in comparative statistics, in the upper echelons of society in the two capitals the telephone was as much a part of daily life as in any other large European city. Like other similar novelties (trains, airplanes, or computers), it was  initially met with curiosity on the part of some and suspicion on the part of others, but it was generally received as semiotically “charged” and not merely as a practical object of utility. The particular tension between simultaneity and distance, characteristic of all forms of telephone communications, gave rise to various complexes of associations. The communicative situation between two speakers not seeing one another could generate misunderstandings and fantasies, reflected in anecdotes about telephone conversations and telephone operators, and subsequently regulated by books on telephone etiquette. Due to the possibility of direct contact in time without physical presence in space, the telephone eliminated or crossed the boundary between private and public spheres of life; it became what Marshall McLuhan has called “the irresistible intruder”.7 In Russia before World War I and especially after the October Revolution, the possession of an office telephone became a symbol of status and power: the more telephones or different telephone lines an official had at his disposal, the higher his status.8

In Western sociology,   telephone communications are usually described as a direct, horizontal, centripetal, or even decentralizing means of communication, for which the current metaphor is the network.9 Such potentialities of the telephone were realized only partially in the Soviet Union, where concepts such as horizontality, centripetal movement, etc., were rather at variance with the fundamental norms of the system.10 To put it simply, various forces, intended to restrict or counteract the inherent tendencies of the telephone system, were mobilized, namely:

— permanent technical shortcomings: shortage of lines and telephones, low quality of switchboards, absence of automated long-distance (and especially international) lines;
— the creation of separate and secret telephone networks for the state apparatus, which in terms of speed and audibility maintained an entirely different standard than that of the public network;
— wiretapping of telephone lines by state security organs, which deprived the telephone of its function as a “direct” means of communication, regardless of whether surveillance was actually conducted;
— limited circulation of telephone directories, which are a basic and indispensable factor for ensuring the reciprocity and accessibility of telephone communications.

The Lack of Telephone Directories as a Feature of Soviet Culture

In the West, the telephone directory or telephone book has always (at least until the computer revolution) been one of the most widely distributed, universally available and content-rich sources of information. However, what we in Sweden, Germany, Poland, or the United States associate with the telephone book — a universally available, open, comprehensive, and regularly published list of telephone subscribers — was scarce in the USSR before the war and almost nonexistent after the war. Granted, there was one well-known type of telephone directory, which was often referred to as telefonnaia kniga. The differences between this publication and that which we in the West call a telephone book are quite apparent.

Let us take a look   at the directory entitled Moscow: Telephone Numbers and Addresses of Organizations, Institutions, and Business Enterprises, 1989, published by the Ministry of Communications in 1989 (the last Soviet edition). The first thing that strikes one is the composition of the directory. All entities listed as having telephone numbers, i.e. the universe of the telephone book, are divided into fourteen concentric sections, or categories with subsections — from governmental institutions of the USSR and the RSFSR and Communist Party organizations down to “emergency services, bathhouses, domestic services, garage construction cooperatives, housing construction cooperatives, hotels, cemeteries, crematoriums, pawnshops, hair salons, sewing, repairs, manufacture, laundries, rental agencies, repair services, photography, darkrooms, photography studios, dry cleaning, and dyeing”.11

The universe formed here — Moscow, capital of the USSR — by its structure is actually reminiscent of the Tree of Knowledge (originating from Francis Bacon and the Encyclopédie of d’Alembert and Diderot). In the Moscow—1989 telephone directory, each concept — be it an organization, institution, or business — has its own predetermined place on the branches of the Tree. Who is the implied reader of such a telephone directory, if we consider what is said and left unsaid in the text? It is apparent that s/he is an enlightened reader who does not require an introduction to the norms of the Tree of Knowledge, which is in fact the Tree of Power. It is expected of her/him that s/he will know (or will not question) why the world is divided into fourteen categories, and which subsections are to be found under which category. This reader’s point of view coincides with the point of view of the Center, the center of bureaucratic and administrative power, for which the principles of order and subordination are obvious and indisputable. One could hardly expect anything different from a directory with a print run of 250,000 for a population of nearly 10 million.

Thus, a kind of telephone directory did exist, primarily as an administrative instrument available to a minority. It resembled the “Yellow Pages” long known in Western countries and widely published in Russia today. However, the telephone directory as understood in the West, i.e. a universally available list of private subscribers, published with the aim of facilitating communication among citizens, appeared only as an exception in the USSR. Prior to the Second World War, this kind of directory was published only rarely. The last edition of Vsia Moskva [All Moscow], a mixture of a Moscow “Yellow Pages” and a telephone directory, appeared in 1936.12 In 1937 and 1939, telephone directories for Moscow were actually published. They have, however, been extremely hard for foreign scholars to gain access to, and the number of copies printed has not been established.13 In connection with the evacuation during World War II, existing telephone books were systematically destroyed and very few new editions appeared during the Stalin era.14

An interesting event was the publication of the four-volume directory of Moscow telephone subscribers in 1971—1972.15 From the very outset, this telephone book was a collector’s item: the official edition was 50,000 copies for approximately 600,000 telephone subscribers (of whom 67,000 were collective subscribers, i.e., belonging to communal apartments) among 8 million inhabitants.16 If the above-mentioned Moscow—1989 directory with its hierarchical structure was compiled for communication along a line leading from the Center to the periphery, then the Moscow directory might appear to have been constructed for horizontal communication between subscribers, like any other such list in the world. Judging from the severely limited size of the edition, however, this was not likely the case. The directory seems in fact to have been calculated to simplify communication within the Center, over the heads of the subscribers themselves.

The potential and   dynamics of the telephone communications system in the Soviet Union were thus restricted by powerful means. The telephone was “domesticated” and turned into an instrument of control for those who held power, while for the broad masses it remained an instrument of contact within the private sphere. For ordinary citizens, the telephone became an object associated with two rather independent worlds. On the one hand, there was the world of the power structures, where the telephone mainly communicated internally (or sometimes made ominous calls to the individual citizen), and on the other hand, the “little world” of private life and the part of the public sphere closely connected with it (school, stores, health care). Telephoning within the boundaries of this sphere — excluding intercity (and, where possible, international) calls — was virtually free of cost; until 1992 there were no time restrictions on local calls in Russia. For the “little world”, telephone directories were not a necessity.

In Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the mysterious telephone call answered by the Writer leaves the three men bewildered. But after a short pause, the Professor — the rationalist and technocrat — suddenly picks up the receiver of the old-fashioned telephone and calls a number. The connection works immediately, and he asks for “Laboratory No. 9”. As a person used to being in control, the Professor tells the person answering where he is and says that he will not use the bomb he has brought into the Zone. Threatened that he will be reported to the Security organs, he unperturbedly tells the person on the other end of the line (whose voice is also heard) to mind his own business.

“Vertushka”

If telephone communications could play an important role in the process of erasing the boundaries between private and public life in Western Europe and the United States, things were very different in Soviet society.17 As early as 1922, on Lenin’s initiative, a special automated network was installed for the Kremlin bureaucracy, parallel to the public telephone lines. This government telephone was called vertushka [“pinwheel”, or “whirligig”], because, while the ordinary telephone system was run with manual exchanges — i.e. one had to ask the operator to connect to a certain number — the Kremlin automatic exchange functioned like all telephones today; that is, the subscriber himself dialed the desired number on the rotary dial, hence the name vertushka. Later, this telephone was also called kremlyovka.

From the beginning, this vertushka network, officially called ATS VTsIK [Automatic Telephone Exchange of the Central Executive Committee], had only 100 subscribers. It guaranteed its subscribers high technical quality, swiftness, and secrecy of communication.18 The directory of this exclusive service from 1922 has recently been found and published on the Internet, showing the numbers of all the Party leaders.19 Gradually, vertushkas were installed in the private flats and even dachas of party leaders, ministers, and other members of the highest Soviet elite, both in Moscow and in the capitals of the Soviet republics. In the 1970s, the government ATS was finally divided into two systems, ATS-1 with a maximum of 1000 subscribers, and ATS-2, for the second-highest elite, with a maximum of 5000 subscribers. A leading expert on post–World War II Soviet history, Rudolf Pikhoya, notes that “[p]robably the most exact indication of the size of the highest layer of power in the country is found in the directory of the subscribers of the government telephone net”. According to Pikhoia’s source — the internal directory of the ATS-1 from 1991 — this system, at the end of the Soviet era, did not have much more than 600 subscribers.20

The vertushka was a system for communication and control inside the Soviet elite. Using the ordinary telephone communications system, those in power could call whomever, whenever they pleased, but the reverse was not true. The well-known idiosyncratic telephone habits of Stalin are an extreme example of this. No one ever called Stalin unless he was expecting the call.21

An interesting description   of Stalin’s telephone calls and their immediate effects is found in the memoirs of the famous airplane designer, once vice-minister for aviation, Aleksandr Yakovlev. In the 1930s he was a relative newcomer in the highest Soviet elite:

In 1939, I received a new flat in the house of the ministry at the Patriarch Ponds. The engineers Ilyushin and Polikarpov also took up residence there.

The house was new; a telephone was installed only for Polikarpov. Several times, I was asked to answer a call from Stalin in Polikarpov’s flat, which was a floor below. I felt extremely embarrassed. Therefore, when Polikarpov’s maid once came running and said that I was asked to call immediately to Poskryobyshev, that is, to Stalin, I went to the next shop and rang up from a pay phone in order not to disturb Polikarpov. During the conversation, Stalin asked why I was so late calling back. I explained that I was calling from a pay phone.

He was surprised:

— What, don’t you have a telephone?!

The next day, when I came home late from work, I found a municipal telephone in the apartment.

But this was not the whole story. During one of our next conversations, Stalin asked about certain details concerning the armament of a new airplane and put a question that I refused to answer:

— Comrade Stalin, I cannot speak with you about that.

— Why?

— It is prohibited to discuss such matters on a city telephone.

— Yes, of course, I forgot that! But what’s that, don’t you have a direct telephone at home?

— Of course not.

— Is that not regulated in your job description? answered Stalin laughing.

— Well, good night.

And again, just as in the earlier case, the next day I found on my desk at home beside the city telephone a second one. This was a government telephone, a vertushka.22 

In Western eyes

The peculiarities of the Soviet telephone — situated in the contradiction between the open communication of a new era and the abyss of secrecy — have often been recognized and thematized in Western mass culture. The telephone, traditionally used as a means of heightening suspense in the thriller genre, acquired special connotations in plots set in or connected with Soviet society. Thus, in Walter Wager’s novel Telefon,23 a disillusioned KGB officer and participant in a Stalinist conspiracy turns up in the United States, where he intends — for the purpose of sabotaging the policy of détente — to activate a number of “sleeper” Soviet saboteurs who have been planted in the United States during the Cold War as part of an operation called “Telefon”. However, the KGB, more peaceably inclined during the period of détente, sends another agent to the US to prevent the plan from being implemented.

Frederick Forsyth’s Icon is a well-known thriller about how an American-British joint force manages to prevent a fascist coup in Moscow in 1999. Eventually the Russian fascist dictator in spe Igor Komarov realizes that his plans have failed, and in a rage he attacks a symbol of modernization — the telephone standing on his desk:

Without warning, he began to shriek his rage at his persecutors, using the ruler to hit his own telephone until the plastic cracked and shattered. Grishin stood rigid; down the corridor there was utter silence as the office staff froze where they were.

“. . . There will be no czar in this land other than me, and when I rule they will learn the meaning of discipline such that Ivan the Terrible will seem like a choirboy.”

As he shouted, he brought the ebony ruler down again and again on the wreckage of the telephone, staring at the fragments as if the once-useful tool was itself the disobedient Russian people, learning the meaning of discipline under the knout.24

The telephone in Russian literature

The conscious “domestication” of telephone communications in Soviet society was never carried through to completion and always remained inconsistent. As even the most preliminary analysis of telephone symbolism in literature, cinematography, and visual art reveals, the telephone was an exceptionally “charged” object in the Soviet era, with strong connotations, if not a mythical aura.

The telephone first appears in Russian literature in Anton Chekhov’s works. His little story “On the Telephone” (1886) makes fun of the difficulties of getting a normal call through, due to the unreliability of the operators.25 The seventeen-volume Soviet Academy Dictionary cites the following quotation from Chekhov’s “In the Ravine” (1900): “A telephone was installed at the volost government office, but it soon ceased to work.” The Dictionary, however, leaves out Chekhov’s colorful continuation: “as bedbugs and cockroaches had taken up residence there. The head of the volost was semiliterate and capitalized every word in documents, but when the telephone was out of order, he said, ‘Well, now it will be difficult without a telephone’.”26

During the first decade of the twentieth century, the telephone had already become a natural component of life in the big cities of Russia. However, the duality of the telephone — lightning speed on the one hand and the one-channeled character of the communication on the other — created great possibilities for mythologization. Telephone operators, who — in the capacity of a potential third, silent participant — attended communication, served as a topic of both anecdotes and serious texts.27 The strictly non-material, yet intimate nature of telephone conversation was frequently associated with supernatural forces:

Unexpected and bold
A woman’s voice on the phone, —
Such delightful harmony
In this bodiless voice!

Joy, your gracious step
Doesn’t always pass by:
Clearer than a seraphim’s lute
You are even in the phone receiver!28

No less often, the telephone was linked to infernal subterranean forces, to death and suicide: “In this savage, frightening world / You, friend of midnight burials, /In the high, austere office / Of the suicide victim — telephone!”29 However, in literature the telephone became above all a symbol of love, especially unrequited love or separation. As Vadim Rudnev points out in his Dictionary of Twentieth Century Culture, “throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the telephone was one of the most stable symbols of love, specifically of love in the twentieth century, a symbol of texts and discourses on love”. 30 Examples of this can be found in plays, but first and foremost in poetry and all its subgenres, from high poetry to the lyrics of popular songs. Widely known variations on the theme of the telephone appear in Mayakovsky’s works, in Kornei Chukovsky’s children’s verses (“Telefon”, 1929), in the poetry of Nikolai Zabolotsky (“The Voice in the Telephone”, 1957) and Vladimir Vysotsky (“07”, 1969).

Of particular interest   is Mayakovsky’s poem “About This”, from 1923. Here, a telephone not only figures as a channel for a (broken-off) liaison; a telephone call and the technology involved are also anthropomorphized and become characters in the poem. In essence, the poem constitutes a chain reaction of associations in the poet’s mind during a moment of stopped time in front of an Ericsson telephone while he waits to be connected to his beloved through the telephone lines running below the streets of Moscow. In Mayakovsky’s hyperbolized language, this situation of being one-on-one with the telephone develops into “two series of expanded metaphors connected with the telephone: that of the ‘telephone storm’ and that of the ‘telephone duel’”:31

Suddenly
                the lamps went berserk,
                          and then —
the whole telephone network is torn to shreds, see!
“67–10
        Connect me!”
In the Little Alley!
                Hurry!
               Into Vodopiany’s quiet!
Look out!
                or else electrically that call —
on Xmas Eve —
                       will blow you sky-high —
yes,
       with your telephone exchanges and all.32

The transgression of the boundaries between private and public is striking. In the poem “About This”, the telephone is no longer a means of concealing something; on the contrary, all elements of this lovers’ drama, including the telephone number of the beloved, are open and transparent.33

The initial connection among the telephone, love, and distance was subsequently banalized and became a theme of mass culture. Other associations began to develop in the 1920s. After Soviet authorities had confiscated or “communalized” private telephones, the image of the telephone as a symbol of power began to dominate in Russian literature.34 In Boris Pilnyak’s “Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” (1926), the telephone as an instrument of power is a constantly present element of the sinister “machine of the city” which forms the universe of the narrative. The enigmatic leader in “House No. 1” has “three telephones which emphasized the tranquility of the logs crackling on the hearth. The three telephones brought into the room three main arteries of the city, so that, out of that tranquility, the city could be commanded — commanded, that is to say, as regards the city itself and its arteries”. It is precisely through this thrice-mentioned system of special telephone communications, “the inside telephone that connected with thirty or forty others” (the vertushka), that oral commands for the liquidation of the commander-in-chief of the army on the operating table are transmitted and their execution confirmed.35

In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita (1929—1940), earlier telephone associations — with notions of infernal forces — are combined with the connection between the telephone and power typical of Soviet literature. From apartment number 50, Woland’s retinue unabashedly makes calls to any authority, always with fatal consequences for the telephone subscriber. Calls made to apartment number 50 are not answered by Woland, but, it would seem, by the telephone itself: “They are busy, answered the receiver in a jingling voice. Who’s calling?”36 In the Variety Theater, where Woland gives his black magic séance, all the phones are switched off, yet suddenly the telephone rings in the office of the financial director Rimsky, who is seized by panic:

And suddenly the deadly silence of the office was shattered by the sound of the telephone itself, blasting in the financial director’s face. He shuddered and grew cold. “Boy, my nerves are really shot”, he thought and picked up the receiver, whereupon he recoiled and turned white as a sheet. A soft but at the same time insinuating and depraved female voice whispered into the phone, “Don’t make any calls, Rimsky, or you’ll be sorry. . . .”37

Through the window Rimsky sees the moon — the same moon that looks over the “machine of the city” in Pilnyak — “and the more he [looked], the more strongly he felt the grip of fear”. Naturally, Margarita also receives the invitation to Bald Mountain through a telephone call from Azazello.38 Only the security services are able to use the telephone so effectively: a single word over the phone from “one of the Moscow institutions” is enough to make the chairman of the Acoustics Commission, Arkady Sempleyarov, stop resisting and realize that he must appear immediately for interrogation.39

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s   novel The First Circle (1968), the telephone connects two parallel worlds in a fatal way. The plot takes place in the year 1949, in the Moscow of the Soviet elite, and a prison with a particular purpose — a sharashka. Events begin with an anonymous telephone conversation: an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs warns a friend, in a call from a pay phone, of a dangerous foreign contact, and the conversation is intercepted by the security services. A group of imprisoned scientists is given the task of identifying the voice on the magnetic tape with the help of modern technology. One floor up in the same prison building, another group is working on the opposite task, namely to construct a telephone for Stalin’s office in the Kremlin that is incapable of being tapped. Technology is completely subordinated to totalitarian power, and whoever designs it inevitably becomes the servant of those in power. The cruel irony of the situation consists in the fact that if the researchers from the Acoustic Laboratory succeed in determining which of the five suspects from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs placed the anonymous call, they will essentially be sentencing him to death. The prisoner Rubin attempts in vain, in a conversation with an NKVD officer, to preserve at least an ounce of freedom for himself in this technical-political system:

“Wait. Wait twenty-four hours”, protested Rubin. “Give us a chance to produce the complete evidence.”

“You’ll have your chance when the investigation begins. We’ll put a microphone on the interrogator’s table and you can listen for three hours on end if you like.”

“But one of them is innocent!” cried Rubin.

“Innocent? What d’you mean?” Oskolupov’s green eyes opened wide in astonishment.

“Not guilty of anything at all? The security service will sort that one out.”

Having said this, he left without a word of praise for the two exponents of the new science. [...]

They sat down on the same chairs on which they had sat such a short while ago, dreaming of the great future of their newborn science. They said nothing.

It was as if their whole beautiful fragile structure had been stamped on.

Since two could be arrested to make sure of one, why not arrest all five to make it easier still?40

In the works of Solzhenitsyn, all constructed meta-languages and all technological means are thematized as fundamentally falsified and alienating.41 This includes the use of numbers in place of human names in the system of prison camp records, as well as the use of X-ray therapy in the novel Cancer Ward. In Solzhenitsyn’s texts, the telephone is both an object and a means of observation; it comprises an element of the modern political-technological system, in counterbalance to which Solzhenitsyn proposes a utopian program, turning his back on modernity in any form.

With the end of World War II in Vasily Grossman’s magnificent epic Life and Fate (1959, published 1980), the nightmares of the terror, the front and the camps both in Germany and in the Soviet Union seem to be fading away in an atmosphere of relief. But suddenly the central character, the nuclear physicist and Academician Viktor Shtrum, feels that his situation is threatened, possibly a sign of a new wave of anti-Semitism and purges. People stop greeting him, friends stop calling, Shtrum stays home waiting for his arrest. Suddenly, one afternoon the telephone rings. It is Stalin:

“Good day, comrade Shtrum.”

At that moment everything came together in a jumble of half-formed thoughts and feelings — triumph, a sense of weakness, fear that all this might just be a some maniac playing a trick on him, pages of closely written manuscripts, that endless questionnaire, the Lyubyanka. . . .

Viktor knew that his fate was now being settled. He also had a vague sense of loss, as though he had lost something peculiarly dear to him, something good and touching.

“Good day, Iosif Vissarionovich”, he said, astonished to hear himself pronouncing such unimaginable words on the telephone.42

The conversation lasts just a few minutes. Stalin says that he considers Shtrum’s work interesting and useful and asks if he has everything he needs.

With a sincerity that he himself found astonishing, Viktor said: “Thank you very much, Iosif Vissarionovich. My working conditions are perfectly satisfactory.”

Lyudmila [Shtrum’s wife] was still standing up, as though Stalin could see her. Viktor motioned to her to sit down. Stalin was silent again, thinking over what Viktor had said.

“Goodbye, comrade Shtrum. I wish you success in your work.”

“Goodbye, comrade Stalin.”43

When Shtrum comes to his institute after several weeks’ absence, everything seems to have changed.

Viktor had imagined that the people who had tried to destroy him would now be too ashamed even to look at him. Instead, they greeted him joyfully on his return to the Institute, looking him straight in the eye as they expressed their heartfelt goodwill. The most extraordinary thing of all was that these people were quite sincere; now, they really did wish Viktor well.44

A victim of complete resignation and vulnerable nakedness in front of total power, Shtrum receives Stalin’s telephone call as a gift. In the grim irony of Grossman’s novel, the gesture of total control and total arbitrariness of power is seen by those afflicted as a ray of light and a gesture of grace from above. Here, McLuhan’s “irresistible intruder” has acquired a completely different meaning. ≈

Setting up a private business is something new; it was not possible during the Soviet period. Women have taken advantage of this new opportunity and set up businesses in traditionally female sectors that had low-priority status and underdeveloped economic activity during the Soviet era. In the early 1990s, female entrepreneurship was primarily oriented towards science, consulting, retail trade, and services. Women also started small-scale businesses in the fields of childcare, healthcare, education, dressmaking, knitting, handicrafts, and fruit and vegetable production. According to official statistics, 90 percent of production in the female-dominated consumer goods sector takes place in small firms. This sector is growing and is fairly competitive. It may also be that women have benefitted from a positive attitude towards female entrepreneurship. Women are believed to be responsible and to be trustworthy in their business relations, since they are assumed to be driven by the need to support their families. They are also expected to run businesses with social aims.

Meanwhile, women had few resources to build up sustainable entrepreneurship, with the possibility of expansion beyond the level of merely treading water. According to the national labor force survey in Russia, the share of women among individual entrepreneurs in 2007 was 41 percent. The sharpest increase in the number of self-employed women occurred between 1996 and 1998; it actually doubled during this time, when unemployment reached its peak level. There also seems to be a positive correlation between female entrepreneurship and male unemployment.

Interviews from three communities in a Russian region illustrate that there are many new opportunities for potential entrepreneurs, while there are also many at times unpredictable obstacles to overcome.3 Women have set up trade firms, but firms have also been set up for processing timber, berries and mushrooms, and agricultural products, as well as in the textile and tourism sectors. All the interviews paint the same picture. The arbitrary enforcement of rules and treatment by authorities forces the female entrepreneurs to rely on several sources of income. Politicians and municipal officials are “in the hands of the oligarchs”; consequently, the large male-managed firms do not have to worry about rules that apply to smaller ones. But there are also examples of how mayors have helped small female entrepreneurs with various facilities, renting them commercial property, or even lending them money.

The interviews support the impression that it has been more difficult to start small businesses in recent times than it was just after the privatization reforms in the 1990s. One reason could be that it was easier to get hold of equipment needed to get started, since one could take over existing equipment, or buy it cheaply, from old state firms. Another reason could be stricter rules for obtaining licenses. Despite many problems, individuals still try to start their own businesses. Possible explanations could be high general levels of tolerance towards risk-taking, too little knowledge of difficulties that may be faced, personal networks, the fact that having one’s own business is the only way to support oneself, or simply that this is something the individuals really want to do. The insufficiencies of the legal system are not of major importance; people still try, even if they have difficulties with the registration and licensing of their activities. Several said explicitly they did not want business partners or collaborators from outside the family. The perceived instability of the situation has meant that people are hired on an informal basis, especially at unlicensed businesses.

The stories of Ludmila, Daria and Anastasia

The stories of the business development processes of three female entrepreneurs will illustrate what the situation might be like.4

Ludmila lives with her husband and two children in a town of some 10,000 inhabitants, situated 600 kilometers from the regional capital. As a teenager, Ludmila had dreamed of starting her own business. Anxious to realize her ideas as soon as she had the possibility, in 1992, at the age of 19, Ludmila took over a sewing machine from the textile firm where she was working. She took a loan to buy all the equipment she wanted from the state-owned firm at a very low price, since it was about to close down, and she also took over the ten employees. She was thus one of those who bene-fitted from privatization reforms in the early 1990s. She registered her firm in 1993, producing traditional costumes and work clothes.

Ludmila developed her textile enterprise slowly, and did not invest in new technically advanced machines until there was enough capital within her own business. She collaborates with her husband: she told about how he invested money that he earned from timber cutting in her textile firm, while she helped him with bookkeeping. Only after twelve years did she start to make some money. Both explicitly said they did not want partners from outside the family. She also told about how her husband stayed at home with their newborn baby when she returned to run her enterprise a couple of days after giving birth.

Ludmila runs the sewing activities connected with her shop in the village. She had employed some young women with small children; they were able to work at home, although this meant they could not utilize the modern equipment. She was sewing to order only, due to the limited buying capacity in the area. These orders included ladies clothes, costumes and work clothes for firms and linens for restaurants. She said her expansion was limited by a lack of skilled staff in the local community. Her solution was to train her staff herself. In 2008, she had opened a new shop in a town 400 kilometers away. The number of employees had increased to 18. She had been considering moving to the town as she felt it was not possible to expand in the local community where most people are poor apart from those who were already her customers. But she had decided to stay in the village and to keep on with the sewing there, where the rents are low, while also sewing on orders to the town. Ludmila had also expanded her activity to include sewing curtains and interior decorating, which she had learned by attending special courses in the town.

Daria lives with her husband and three children across the river from a village of 5,000 inhabitants, 10 kilometers from the municipal center and 600 kilometers from the regional capital. For five years she tried to get a license for her tourism business without success; she was one of those who ran her business without being registered, and the community knew it. In her case, this was due to land registry problems. Daria felt unsafe, since her family had built houses without being registered as legal owners. Finally, at the end of 2006, her “rental cottages” business was registered. Her financial capital came from retail trade and timber cutting. Together with her husband, she started a sports school that was free for children. Their salaries for this activity were paid by the state. The couple had also run a shop in the village together with some relatives. Although they earned very little from this shop after paying salaries and taxes and repaying loans that they had taken out in order to start it, some money was left to put into the development of a tourist business. By renting out the shop, they got money to build a house of their own to live in as well as other houses. (Timber for building your own home is free).

The tourism business has been built up gradually, step by step. In 2008, five houses were made available for rent to tourists, the first of which had been built in 2003. From the money earned over the years, they have also been able to build a sauna, a café and a building for administration. Gradually the ski and tourism center is being developed, partly by state money and increasingly with money from the private sector. Daria expresses a fear of being absorbed by one of the larger local entrepreneurs: “As long as the firm is small it is your own, but if you start to grow somebody will buy you up.” Nevertheless, she is proud to be an example of how to “start with two empty hands” and develop your business little by little, using income from timber and trade to finance the development of tourism activities. Daria tells about how she handles all the “begging” she is exposed to, being perceived of as a successful local entrepreneur. She has to choose what she wants to support, as she can’t contribute in all areas. She has chosen ski-related activities for children, which dovetail with her public employment as a ski instructor.

Food shops in the municipal center continue to be important sources of money for the development of the tourism business. But Daria believes that new rules concerning the sale of alcohol will cause problems for smaller food shops, and hence lower financial capital from trade that can be used to develop their business. Daria expresses the opinion that, while it has been possible to earn a lot of money in the grocery business, it has gradually become harder, due to new tax rules and various restrictions. Nevertheless, it has been quite easy to get permits for shops, cafés, restaurants, recreation and sports facilities, while it has not yet been possible to get a license for a hotel. The development of the tourism business with the gradual expansion in the number of employees has facilitated life for the private household, which benefits from cooking, cleaning, building repairs, maintenance of vehicles, and even on some occasions childcare.

Anastasia lives with her husband in a beautiful village of 1,000 inhabitants some 100 kilometers away from the municipal center and almost 700 kilometers from the regional capital. She has three adult children. One daughter, one son and three grandchildren live in the same village. She was the director of a local child care unit for 25 years who in the early years of perestroika, in the early 1990s, became a local politician for a couple of years. After not being re-elected, she decided she wanted to realize her ideas about developing her own business. Consequently, she was eager to apply to take part in the SIDA-financed project (see note 3), an opportunity she became aware of through her engagement in the development of the community. Anastasia tried to get started by means of borrowed money; she ran a business processing berries and mushrooms for almost five years without a license.

Anastasia describes how her proposal was accepted by five municipal officials, while a sixth person said no. She hired an electrician who made the electric installations that she required to get started, but when the inspector found out that the electrician did not have the required permit, she was fined. According to her, this happened because the inspector had learned about safer installations in Sweden. Then she had to get hold of the only licensed electrician in the region, borrow more money from her son-in-law to pay him, and make the electrician come to her village and redo the necessary installation.

According to Anastasia, municipal officials have the same mentality as they did under the Soviet regime, restraining people who have ideas of their own. She had bribed three persons, but said she would have to bribe another one to get her license. She felt that the possibility of setting up a business depended very much on how administrators deal with the various permits that are needed, and she said she sensed right away whether it was worthwhile to talk to a particular bureaucrat or not. She felt that administrators and officials behave differently, and as there are many hierarchies to go through, it seems likely that obstacles will appear on at least one of the levels. Anastasia’s own experience provides an illustration. She was anxious as setting up her business and getting started had become much more costly than she had expected. She had borrowed money from relatives, the municipal administration, and three entrepreneurs. She had already invested in modern equipment, but needed to borrow more in order to get the necessary documents to get started.

For the pioneers in a given field, there appear to be obstacles of which the person who is in the process of starting a business is simply unaware. Anastasia described how she was simply unaware of all the permits she needed to get started. For instance, she needed permission from the health authorities, the fire authorities, and the energy authorities, and she did not know in advance how much she had to pay for each permit. Neither was she aware of quality control procedures, how much she had to pay for each product or how often, the need to give monitoring authorities three kilos of dried mushrooms each time, and present each product to the center for standardization and certification three hundred kilometers away.

Anastasia described how she and her husband survived thanks to their small pensions, the sale of meat from their own cattle, her little shop, and the sale of products from her non-registered business. Her firm was finally registered in mid-2007, but in her daughter’s name, in the framework of a family business in the same village.

Concluding remarks at the end of May 2011

What has happened in the municipality since the last time I was there? Starting with the municipal administration, I learn that they now have a young male glava (municipal commissioner), and a new deputy commissioner, Olga, one of participants in the SIDA project, and former director of the cultural center in Ivaksha. The previous deputy commissioner has become minister of culture at the regional level. This new glava defeated his predecessor, Andreev. It was interesting to hear the various views about this, some positive, some not — some people believing that the new glava doesn’t know anything, isn’t spearheading any projects, and that he was elected simply because people do not want Andreev back. Andreev had been glava at the time of my first visit to the municipality eight years earlier, in 2003. I remember that Andreev had had the old politruks (political commissars), who worked for United Russia, against him. Then when we met him in 2008 he said he finally joined the party because it made it easier for him as an entrepreneur. I learn that the new glava is not a party member — interesting that this did not prevent him from being elected. And it was he who convinced Olga to accept the job as deputy commissioner; like her predecessor, she comes from the cultural sector. As Olga put it at the time, her predecessor, whom I have met several times, most recently in 2008, thus managed to get the job that she was hoping to get, once she realized that people were not ready for a woman glava in the municipality.

We have called Sergei and asked him to meet us, but Olga also comes to the train, with her chauffeur, to greet us. She is very well dressed, with high heels there in the grassy slope, and she is eager to set up a rewarding agenda for us. This time I am traveling with Irina.

Lunch is waiting for us at the café. It’s just the two of us — it’s pretty late in the afternoon. This time we get the nearest house, with two bedrooms, living room, kitchen unit, toilet, and a shower with sauna. For the first time we have a sauna in our own house. I see that there are now a few more houses, and that there is a fine red fence that separates the cottage area from the next lot. Daria has given birth to her fourth child. Maxim is a strong little chap at eleven months. They seem to have quite a few employees, just like the old days. Daria solves her own family’s needs for meal preparation, laundry, carpentry, babysitting, and car repairs as part of her business. One of the employees is also an “extra mother” to the youngest son — she is available around the clock.

Now Daria is finally registered as the owner of the land, and thus of all eight houses. This is important to her, some of the uncertainty is gone, and now she has the possibility of selling a house if she ever wants to. They have a buffer now. Each house is registered separately. Daria thinks that things are right now, she feels satisfied with having positioned herself in the middle ground — the concept is that it should be simple but comfortable. “This doesn’t make sense for people who want to strike it rich”, she says. But getting there through the forest is still difficult; the municipality does not want to pay for road improvements. Nor is anyone registered as a private owner of the road, so nothing happens.

I often encounter the view that “there is no need to save money today in Russia”. “We live for the day”, they say. Sergei thinks that the state should support agriculture; the land previously used for farming has been transformed into open ground. “It’s easier to fell the forest, then there’s money right away, you cut and sell. But agriculture requires a little work first, and then you might get something, but now nobody wants to wait.” There is still no dairy in the municipality.
Tania, a politician at the lowest local level, believes this is because the men who planned it did not have enough patience. “If it had been women, it would have gotten done”, she says.

I want to try to convey my view of today’s Russia, that special blend of Soviet mentality woven together with unrestrained entrepreneurship, “business po russkii” and “russkaia demokratiia”. The impression I carry with me is very much one of misery, hopelessness, and recklessness. But there are also many bright spots, those people who find ways to weave past the various obstacles, even in the middle of it all — all these amazing people who make the impossible possible! ≈

And here stands   a man, born in a time when no one dreamed it would one day be possible to use modern technology to peruse a book nearly a thousand years old. When the pages of the Ostromir Gospel turn by themselves under the glass, it is pure magic: in this, the second-oldest preserved manuscript of the Russian world, the uncial manuscript is itself a work of art. It is dated 1056 or 1057. The time perspective is slightly dizzying.

The schoolchildren being ushered around the stands filled with sacred contents are rowdy, like kids all over the world. The boys are goofing off; their gray blazers seem too uncomfortable. The girls’ pleated skirts are as prim and proper as their freshly pressed hair ribbons. A few listen intently as the guide drones on about the objects in the exhibition. Perhaps one of the girls will join the host of silent, fine-limbed figures in long dark dresses and headscarves in one of the major cathedrals of the city? One of their duties is to take care of all the icon candles. In the second-largest city in Russia, they live in a world where people encounter religious art as a matter of course. Handwritten icons, many of them new creations, are in demand for church walls, monasteries, and private homes. Icons are seen here, there, and everywhere — cheap copies are bought and sold wholesale and retail. The wide range of icon bracelets sold in the gift shop of the Russian Museum are a trendy favorite among young women — all over the world.

But is there  something that can be termed modern icon writing? The icons being created now are almost exclusively based on originals that have been around for 400 to 800 years. Or even more than 2000 years: after all, the tradition holds that the first icon is the one called the “divinely wrought” image of Christ, the image “not made by human hands”. As the legend goes, King Abgar, a contemporary of Jesus, was afflicted with leprosy and asked for help. Jesus wet his face and dried it on a towel, which he had delivered to the king. Abgar is said to have been partly cured by this very first “portrait” of the face of Christ. (The Veil — or Sudarium, meaning “sweat-cloth” — of Veronica is a variation on the theme.) Saint Luke is said to have made the first icon written by human hands.

The icon writing   of our time is generating keen interest in many areas and St. Petersburg is no exception. A publishing house was established here in 2007 that is exclusively devoted to works about icons and other sacred art. The publisher, Kolomenskaya Versta, arranged an international conference in November 2011 under the heading “Modern Sacred Icons in the World”, which drew 120 attendees. Most of the participants were from Russia, but many traveled from the US, Canada, Finland, Japan, Greece, Italy, England, Serbia, and Uruguay to devote three days to modern iconography.

Kolomenskaya Versta was founded by Elena Petelina. At first, it was part of another publishing house that had long been publishing books specifically about icons aimed at Russian audiences. Elena Petelina wanted to internationalize the publications and arrange conferences, exhibitions, and pilgrimages focused on the icon, and the contemporary icon in particular.

At a meeting   at the publishing house, which boasts a prestigious address on the famous Nevsky Prospect, I am shown a few of the twenty or so titles published in the last five years. The books they show me seem very lavish. The publisher’s English-speaking spokesperson and vice president, Natalya Loseva, tells me that the company has an expansive network in Russia, Europe, and the US, and that the conference held in November clearly showed that the icon writers of the world had both a need for and an interest in getting together to discuss their work. The next icon conference will be held in St. Petersburg in September of this year.

A trilingual publication was issued in connection with the conference. The participants and their varying opinions about what iconography is and should be in the 21st century were presented in Russian, English, and Italian. Conference speakers included authorities like Paul Busalaev, who began writing icons in 1982. Educated at the Graphic Art Faculty of Moscow Pedagogical Institute, Busalaev has worked in the United Kingdom and Norway and has co-written a book with the even more renowned Michel Quenot.1

Busalaev argues that icon writing is an integrated part of the liturgical life of the church, but must still develop its imagery, for two reasons:

The first and most important reason is reconsideration of the events of modern history of both the church and the state, such as the persecution of the church in the Soviet era and the Second World War, especially in association with the worship and glorification of the new martyrs. The second reason is a new interpretation and imagery in icon painting of personalities and events already manifested in church art.

Busalaev’s opinions have garnered support from quite a few others, including 22-year-old George Panaiotov, who emphasizes that the Assembly of Hierarchs held in August 2000 canonized an amazing 1,200 new saints — and so there are masses of new subjects for icon writers! Panaiotov has been writing icons since the age of six; one of his older colleagues calls him the “Mozart of icon writing”. George’s mother realized how gifted her little boy was from a very early age and his icons are now found in churches and the finest collections in the country. He seems to have any number of commissions to handle, both in Russia and abroad. He tells me this with pride while he serves olives and wine at his kitchen table. He lives quite simply by Western standards, in a one-room apartment with a kitchen and a little studio filled with some of the icons he is working on or has just finished. But in a city where collective housing is still a reality — where several families are crowded into an apartment with a shared toilet, bathroom, and kitchen — his home is comparatively luxurious. He earns enough from the icons to afford both the apartment and his studies in art history at the Ilya Repin State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. He paints in his spare time. He can usually write two icons a month and tells me that one of them is now going to be copied using digital photo technology. Forty copies are going to be sold by a hard-working entrepreneur in the icon business. George seems quite pleased with the arrangement, but I am appalled: what will happen to the divinity of the icons, I wonder? With some effort, I have managed to learn that icon writers certainly do not copy old icons when they write yet another image of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or a saint who is very meaningful to the icon writer in question. Saint George and the Mother of God are two of George’s favored motifs. They may seem like portraits, but some call them religious meditation and others liken iconography to theological research. Everyone I talk to asserts that every element of writing an icon is a form of prayer, praise of the eternal and the divine. But how can a copy machine create true sacred art? Or for that matter, how much of a divine presence can a six-year-old child communicate in a conscious manner?

Putting good manners aside, I pose these questions, but they don’t bother George Panaiotov. He believes he has been given a gift from God and that his icons thus meet the right criteria. He shows me an icon he wrote many years ago, of Saint Anastasia surrounded by a Russian patriarch, a Catholic Pope, and two cosmonauts. The icon was written in honor of a peace project carried out jointly by the Orthodox and Catholic churches some years ago.

 The day after   my visit to young Panaiotov, I go to the Church of St. Pantaleimon, which blends in easily with the surrounding homes and stores. A couple of George Panaiotov’s recently written icons hang in the church. You almost have to know they are contemporary, unlike most of the sacred images here, to tell that they are so new the paint has hardly dried.

People prefer not to talk about money in connection with icons, and some seem not to need anything so worldly. Archimandrite Zinon, who works at the Pskov-Pechory Dormition Monastery, is a legend among modern icon writers. In an online interview, he says the only payment he wants is to be included in people’s prayers and the joy his icons give to those who pray before the sacred images.2

Today’s Russia lives in a strange mix of tradition and hyper-modernity. After the Soviet parenthesis of seventy years or so, it might sometimes seem as if nothing happened, as if people here still lived in a Byzantine era, even though Western capitalism is everywhere apparent. Could it be that people feel a deep need for comfort? Icons are still used in everyday life, as protection against evil, to call forth miracles, to help someone find housing or a job, or to cure someone from a serious disease. One Tuesday morning like any other, I go into the Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospect, where I find lively activity with Mass in progress, people lining up in front of the icon of Kazan himself, people lighting candles before an icon or standing in the gift shop thinking about buying some kind of sacred art, or perhaps just a postcard.

Among those who have made icons the subject of their academic research, there are a few who are horrified by what they see occurring in modern society. Anastasia Trapeznikova is currently completing her doctoral studies, which are devoted to contemporary iconography. At the international icon conference in St. Petersburg in 2011, she did not mince her words: the paper in which she attacks the pop culture and superficiality that devalue icons was titled “Kitsch and Modern Iconoclasm”. She wrote:

When we talk about kitsch, we mean that the icon image is used by non-Orthodox people who deliberately devalue it. It is reflected in the creation of objects of pop art, which employ the idea of the image in comic interpretations or render stylizations of the contemporary art of postmodernism.

Trapeznikova also accuses parts of the Orthodox Church of being the iconoclasts of our time, because its priests do not resist newfangled ideas. She criticizes not only the way modern icons are far too often written, but also the fact that they are copied en masse and disseminated to the four winds. What should be done? One way to save the situation, she believes, would be if all icon writing henceforth and forever were permitted only under the aegis of the church. The church should take over all training and approve the new icons, according to Trapeznikova. Old-fashioned ideas? Maybe, but this particular scholar was born in 1987.

Icon writing is taught at universities and colleges, painting schools, workshops, and night classes at the hobby level in St. Petersburg. Philip Davydov is one of the most sought-after teachers. He and his wife Olga Shalamova run a respected icon studio in St. Petersburg, to which we drive in his ramshackle car. We enter through the back courtyard and it becomes obvious that the spruced-up facades along the larger streets of the city may be hiding even worse dilapidation. But once inside the studio, the place is warm and bright. The couple rent the city-owned space at a subsidized rate through the Union of Artists of Russia, to which they both belong. When we come in, Olga Shalamova waves happily at us, her hands white with the paint she is using to prime a large number of wood panels. Six or seven coats of priming paint have to be put on before the panels are sent out to a workshop in Australia.

The walls of the studio are covered with finished icons and shelves bowing under the weight of books about icons and art history. Philip Davydov’s doctoral dissertation, presented at the St. Petersburg State Fine Art Academy, was entitled Genesis and Evolution of Medieval Altarpieces in Italy. He learned to write icons from his father, a priest who was one of the first to catch on that icons were once again becoming popular in Russia. As Philip expands upon his thoughts about modern iconography, he emphasizes the importance of tradition, but also that medieval icons should not be cloned. And to clarify the difference between visual art and icon writing, beyond the sacred purpose, he says that the icon is poetry, while other visual art is prose.

History, theology, and practice are all important elements of writing an authentic icon — but there must be room for development. When I push him to explain what good, innovative icons might look like, he has one recommendation: the works written by Todor Mitrovic, from the Serbian capital Belgrade. Mitrovic has found a form of his own that Philip likes very much.

 Much of Philip’s   and Olga’s work is done on commission, but quite a bit springs from their own yearning to devote themselves to a particular motif. There are now about 150 icons, frescoes, and works in metal by Philip Davydov spread all over the world.

No shortcuts are taken in this studio. Everything is done meticulously, from the design of the panel and the size mixed of chalk and glue to the image painted in egg tempera, which yields the most gorgeous, bright, and permanent colors. The tiny pots of natural pigment in every color of the rainbow offer their own experience of beauty. The gold is of the highest purity and most heavenly glimmer. The icons written here have been praised to the skies by critics, students, and those who buy the works. Philip Davydov has been a professor at the Orthodox Institute of Theology and Sacred Arts in St. Petersburg since 2006. How he finds time for it all is something of a mystery.

Sweden has proud traditions in iconography, if not out in the churches, at least at the National Museum in Stockholm. Its icon collection is considered one of the finest in the world outside Russia. It is small in terms of the number of exhibited works, but the icons crowded into the small space are of the highest quality, of tremendous breadth and depth, and are only a tiny fraction of the total collection of 320 icons, of which 250 were donated by the “Red Banker”, Olof Aschberg.

Reading the learned   discourses of Per-Arne Bodin on an obscure saint like the Blessed Xenia of St. Petersburg is stimulating. Bodin is a professor of Slavic languages, and his book of essays Skruden och nakenheten [The robes and the nakedness] includes the tale of the remarkable Xenia, a fool-for-Christ who lived in the 1700s.3 Since she was not canonized until 1988, there are no ancient icons to fall back on: the icon writers are free to create to their own inclinations, which they do. You can see examples on the net from many places around the world.

There are a great many people in Sweden who can style themselves icon writers, and even more are taking classes to learn how to write icons. One of those who have been involved in iconography for a long time is Yelena Kimsdotter Kuzmina. She was born in Latvia, has a solid arts education from Russia — but learned to write icons in the Swedish provincial city of Sundsvall. She was taught by Father Olof Åsblom of the Catholic parish in Luleå. The education included masses, meditation, learning about old originals, and training in the painterly craft. She eventually took a master’s class at Valamo Abbey in Finland.

She now writes her icons in Visby and teaches courses in icon writing in various places in Sweden. Yelena Kuzmina also emphasizes that icon writing is not about copying, that for her it is a way of praying to God, of expressing her yearning to be with God and to become a better person. “Icon writing is a long, slow process, it’s impossible to stress out about it. On the contrary, as the work proceeds, you often find stillness, inner peace, and the answers to many questions”, Yelena Kuzmina explains.

Her thoughts are very much in agreement with what Dr. Margareta Attius Sohlman writes in a book about the icons of centuries past: “The icon is an image of the divine. The icon never depicts the exterior reality, but only the inner, the extracorporeal.”4  Attius Sohlman stresses that icons should not be regarded as art, but as part of the liturgy. It is the spirituality that gives the icon its quality, that conveys a message. For her part, she is drawn to older icons, which is chiefly where she finds what resonates with her.

 They say you   can call yourself an icon writer when you have devoted yourself to the process for seven years — and Jesper Neve has been writing icons since 1987. He started because he wanted an icon of his own. He had seen an exhibition of icons whose genuineness was guaranteed by a Soviet certificate of cultural historical authenticity. Instead of buying one, he decided to learn to write icons himself. As he has a doctorate in physics and a day job in IT, it was a struggle to find the time to learn and develop his iconography. He first approached the Right Reverend Bishop Johannes of the Orthodox Church of St. Constantine and St. Helen in Vårberg, south of Stockholm, and bought two icons there. He then signed up for an icon course in Kista, the “Silicon Valley” of Sweden, which gave him an understanding of the painting technique, but not the fundamental religious aspects. He went back to Bishop Johannes and began a course of training with the bishop and Theodora that lasted 17 years. For his part, Jesper Neve has chosen a classic, Russian/Greek style. Even within rigid confines, there is clearly room for personal choice — but always with one singular purpose: the prayer to God. This is one of the things Neve teaches at the icon writing courses he now holds. ≈