Russia is a fascinating country, historically, culturally and politically. As has been said, it’s a riddle, wrapped up in a mystery, inside an enigma. It’s generally for the past few centuries been considered a European Great Power, and its literature, art, and science has contributed greatly to the human experience.
But one thing Russia has seemingly never been able to grasp is the rule of law. Why is this? I mean, there are plenty of countries in Europe and out of it which have at some point in the past been ruled by dictators and cliques great and small that have governed by means of ‘reasons of state’ allowing them to freely violate the law, supposedly for the greater good. Generally this has been abused, and those dictatorial regimes were crushed, swept away, and, for many at least, at length replaced with regimes that respected the rule of law. England went from Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution. France went from the Ancien Regim through Napoleon to the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics. Italy abandoned fascism. Germany went from the legalism of the Empire, through Hitler, to the successful Federal Republic. America is built on the idea of the rule of law. Japan, China, and various other Asian states have a strong culture of rule of law, although it can be said in nondemocratic states some violations may be seen as justified.
But Russia seems to have always missed this seemingly broadly-grasped concept. The Empire defined itself on the pure will of the Tsar; the brief democratic experiment of 1905-1917 proved abortive; the Soviet Union was infected with Stalinism, and the stagnation of the 60s and 70s was followed by Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The democratic Russia decayed under Yeltsin and is effectively gone under Putin.
We can comment all we like on the regimes of China and the like, but even China’s Communist authoritarianism seems, to me at least, to follow form and appreciate structure and process. So why does Russia seem so impatient with it? Where’d the culture of respect for law go?
A rather unfortunate use of the phrase since the second part of of it was that the “key was Russian self interest”. i.e Churchill was being ironic and sarcastic,
Moreover, I am pretty sure no one in S Asia, Kenya, N Africa, the Windies, the Far East etc would ever accuse the European powers of living by the “rule of law”.
Which leads us to the answer.Russia is not a country. It is (still) an Empire, one composed of dozens of ethiicties, each less than an enthusiastic member of the whole. The other European powers can afford “rule of law” since they have now been shorn of their colonies, and are more or less homogenous.
India has dozens of ethnicities and has some semblance of rule of law, of which most is derivative from its former European colonial ruler. Some degree of law is good for business as it sets benchmarks for the commercial environment.
IMO Russia has no rule of law because throughout its history it’s never had stable borders, it’s always had to defend itself against existential threats from either the Mongols or the Europeans from Western and Central Europe, with that being taken into account, you can see how the mindset of a Russian ruler would be to keep the status quo (authoritarianism) whilst bolstering defenses on the frontier. In a situation like that, you can’t really envisage rule of law, only rule by decree.
There is a strong anarchic streak in Russian culture. A common expression says, “It’s not allowed but if you really want to do it you can.” (That sounds impossibly clumsy in English translation!) Ignoring rules is a way of life. Russians often make fun of people who come from “law-abiding” societies as naïve or uptight. When various leaders have blithely rewritten or ignored laws or placed themselves in untouchable positions, the popular response is often admiration for such behavior. It can be a source of pride in a “No one can tell me what to do” sort of way. Whether this element of Russian culture is a cause or an effect of autocratic rule is hard to say.
Every country has its problems. But to imply that somehow that a multi ethnic polity cannot adhere to the rule of law as well as a homogenous one is a questionable statement.
It depends on whether one buys into the idea that Russia has “always missed this seemingly broadly-grasped concept.” While current Russia seems disturbingly lawless under Putin, I have repeatedly seen explanations that Stalin, of all people, adhered to rigid interpretations of international law in his WWII and post-war decisionmaking. Sure, Americans didn’t agree with those interpretations, but Stalin often observed curious limits on what he would do, and was careful to adhere to the letter of many international agreements, if not the spirit. And other Soviet leaders paid at least some attention to legalistic limits on their power. It’s my understanding that Gorbachev actually had to operate somewhat outside the letter of Soviet laws to help bring the Soviet Union’s crisis to peaceful resolution, but perhaps he was closer to the spirit than the letter and had at heart the interests of all those who would otherwise have died in a cataclysmic Soviet civil war.
I think perhaps you are allowing our current disgust with political assassination and dictatorship-by-another-name to color your views of Russia’s past.
That’s interesting because the Soviet Union was stereotyped as being rigidly autocratic and America is stereotyped as laissez faire, the “lone ranger” or wild west mentality.
Rule by the strong man was the norm throughout most of human history. It started in tribes and is now being used in world powers. Rule by law has been the exception not the norm.
So humans seem to have a natural instinct towards obeying a leader. The alternative of collectively creating and following an impersonal set of rules may work better but it’s not part of our nature. In a time of crisis, many human societies abandon rule by law and revert back to rule by strong man.
As far as the masses go, there was an effective law enforcement/legal system under the Tsars, wasn’t there?
I suspect that what we’re seeing now is an extension of attitudes developed under the autocratic Communist system, where the way to get things done was to go around the system, instead of playing by the laws. I get the impression that if a law wasn’t ruthlessly enforced in those days, it was observed more in the breach than in the practice.
So when you have an entire culture with those values, it’s difficult to impose a culture of law-abiding (abidement?) from on high, and I’ll bet there’ll be a period where things will get worse before they’ll get better. Eventually one would hope that the Russian people would demand stricter law enforcement and more fair courts, and that popular desire will be reinforced by more effective courts and law enforcement.
Of course, there are a lot of places that are otherwise law-abiding that seem rather loosey-goosey from an American or British perspective. To me, it seems unthinkable that people in Greece just flat-out don’t pay their taxes. Doesn’t their IRS equivalent come down on them like a ton of bricks?
Which European powers are those? It’s not the UK (Welsh, Irish, Scots, more recent immigrant minorities) nor the French (Basques, Bretons, etc.) nor the Spanish (Catalans, Basques, etc.) nor the Germans (Poles, Turks, etc.) nor the Italians (Mezzogiorno).
They may project homogeneity, but it is emphatically not the case for any European power I’m aware of. Russia is 80% Russian, with the next-largest groups, the Tatars, at under 4% (according to Wikipedia). That’s comparable to the UK, where the English / British identity is about 78%, and the next largest group is the Scots at around 8%. British stats are complicated by the various reporting of racial, regional, national, and linguistic identites. Even so, it looks like Russia is more homogenous than the UK. The French stats include Bretons, Basques, etc., as “French,” and so the 90–95% French figure is somewhat inflated.
This.
In a communist system it is almost impossible to survive by following the rules. Just about everything is determined not by hard work or talent but by politics. Thus the only way to get ahead or improve your life at all is to go around the rules. Everybody, from the top of society to the bottom is doing it all the time. In such a society rules become just speed bumps instead of fences. Even basic morality starts to erode and the only limitations are what you can get away with. The Russians had to live under a communist society for seventy years. That destroyed their culture and it is a hard thing to rebuild.
Well, there was a legal system, but power was held and controlled by the absolute authority of the tsar. The autocracy was supported by the army, the police (including, of course, the secret police), the civil service, etc. People’s lives were ruled by the whims of the monarch, and there was nothing remotely approaching individual rights. The tradition of a single strong leader is far older than the Soviet system and in fact is one reason the Soviet system was able to maintain control for so long. And it also explains a great deal of Putin’s success.
Someone above mentioned Stalin adhering to international law. I’m not sure what in particular the poster was referring to so can’t really comment on that. But at home Stalin freely ignored most provisions of the Soviet constitution of 1936, which included elements such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly. As many historians have said, the constitution was a lovely work of fiction but bore no relation to reality.
Not really. What there was was more of a system of carrying out the Tsar’s orders. The Tsar could, for example, issue an order making Taco Tuesdays mandatory. But if the Tsar deciding he felt like a cheeseburger next Tuesday, he could go ahead and have it. Or the Tsar could decide that everyone who ate tacos last Tuesday was now farting too much and declare they were all enemies of the state. And the Tsar could have executed the first thousand people who were arrested for eating tacos and then decided to let the rest go.
The Rule of Law means that everyone knows what the laws are. You should be able to know what’s legal and what’s illegal. You should know what the consequences for breaking the law are. And the law applies to everybody.
Sure, but did the Tsars really meddle that much in everyday laws like murder, theft, robbery, libel, slander, assault, battery, etc… ? Plenty of places had monarchs and varying degrees of absolutism, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they had no rule of law.
Also, prior to Communism, did Russia have a reputation as being particularly lawless or disdainful of the laws of the land? I have never read anything that implied that, only that the Tsars were more absolute for a longer period than other European Monarchs.
But for Viktor the gunsmith in 1905 Tula, was there any ingrained disdain for local/provincial law like there almost certainly was for Valentin the machinist in 1965 Tula, or that Valery the gunsmith in 2015 Tula has?
There’s a good chance that Viktor was born a serf, bound to his master’s estate, forced to work, with no property of his own and no justice other than his master’s whim. Why should he have any respect for the law?
In places where the Tsar’s rule was thin, you’d have some local noble acting as a sub-Tsar. He’d have the same power of ruling by whim locally that the Tsar had on a national level. The only check on the noble’s whim was the possibility that the Tsar might overrule him on a whim. There was no place in Russia with a working legislative system.
Keep in mind, not having a rule of law doesn’t mean you have an anarchy. Rule by leader can provide plenty of order. It’s just there’s a difference between being arrested because you broke a law and being arrested because the King said so. The law is an impartial rulebook that anyone can read and follow. The King might arrest you for any reason. Or choose not to arrest you for any reason. One person might get thrown into prison for burping in public and another person might walk free after committing murder. Nobody knew from one day to the next what might be get you in trouble. And even if you lucked out and happened to have a reasonable King who chose to follow a set of rules, you knew that he might drop dead any dead and be replaced by a new guy who’d do things completely different.
Because serfdom had since then been long abolished in Russia, and several Russian governments had established programmes for selling land to peasants and encouraging the establishment of something akin to the Prussian Junker class. The early 20th Century equivalent of encouraging ‘startups’.
If Viktor was 45 years or older in 1905, then he could have been born a serf. Yes, serfdom was abolished when he was a child, but he was still born a serf.