"Weimar and Russia" forum Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley: Currents

George Breslauer "The similarities, coupled with differences that make the Russian situation appear even worse than the German, force us to take the Weimar analogy seriously. But they do not force us to accept a prediction based on the analogy."

George Breslauer is Professor and Chair of Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Chair of the Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. For eleven years, including the spring of 1994 when this forum was held, he served as the Chair of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies. He is author of numerous books on Soviet and post-Soviet politics and foreign policy, and is currently working on an intellectual history of Western Sovietology. Professor Breslauer served as moderator of this panel.

oday we asked a question, Weimar and Russia: Is there an Analogy?, and obviously there is. The real question is whether it fits and if so, how tightly. When we engage in analogical thinking, it can be either an avenue toward rather rich insight or an invitation to sloppy thinking. To achieve rich insight, we must take special care. I'd like to suggest some guidelines.

or one thing, these kinds of parallels bring up definitional questions, such as: What do we mean by fascism? What do we mean by the Weimar analogy? Weimar can be a code word for:

1. the breakdown of democracy into something else;
2. the victory of fascism over democracy;
3. the victory of a particular form of fascism called Nazism, with its apocalyptic dimensions that other forms of fascism did not necessarily have, such as the Holocaust; or
4. the victory of fascism over democracy by democratic means. (Hitler came to power through democratic elections and only thereafter suppressed civil society and created a monopolistic state through his own organization and mobilization.)

hen we think of comparisons of Russia and Germany, we think of similarities as well as differences, and what we have heard from our three speakers is not intended to be a full catalogue, but rather disparate parallels between the two. I was struck by how often we heard today instances of differences in which Russia case was viewed as being in worse shape today than was Weimar Germany in the early 1930s. To be told that the Weimar analogy doesn't apply because Russia has worse conditions than Weimar Germany did not make me relax in my seat!

n December 24 of 1993, the Los Angeles Times printed an interesting catalogue of its own in the wake of the Zhirinovsky electoral victory. The editors addressed the Weimar analogy, asking their Moscow bureau chief to produce a list of similarities and differences. The list contained fourteen similarities and two differences; that in itself did not make me feel any calmer. The similarities focused on social conditions and the breakdown of state authority, and upon Zhirinovsky and Hitler themselves--their personalities, their backgrounds, their programs.

he differences focused upon the strength or lack of strength of Zhirinovsky's political organization compared to Hitler's and the different attitude of the outside world toward Russia versus that toward Weimar Germany. I was struck, however, by what differences were left out of the Times article. They left out the nuclear dimension entirely; there was no mention of the impact of the nuclear age on the consciousness of elites in raising enormously the perceived costs of adventurism. There was also no reference to the effects on popular consciousness of sixty years of Stalinism and neo-Stalinism. And there was no reference to the fact that historical analogies are available in contemporary public discourse that were not present in the 1930s. In particular, elite and public discussion of the need to avoid Hitlerism and Stalinism is a restraint on their replication.

think that the lists of similarities that we have seen and heard and can think of, coupled with the additional lists of differences that make the Russian situation appear even worse than the German, force us to take the Weimar analogy seriously. But in and of themselves, they do not force us to accept a prediction based on the analogy. I like the quotation Professor James offered from Anna Karenina, "Happy families resemble each other, but unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way," because coming to grips methodologically with the relationship between the general and the particular is what we have to do when we are trying to decide whether an analogical fit is a tight one or not. It seems to me that this decision is not going to depend on the length of the list; it's going to depend implicitly on one's theory of politics, which will inform one's conception of which factors on the list tend to be decisive in given types of situations. That is, we may entertain a particular theory of political development, a theory of the causes of something called fascism, or a theory of democratic consolidation that will inform our opinion as to which of the factors will determine whether contemporary Russia is likely to go the Weimar route or not.

f course, our theories must not be oblivious to the ability of leaders--there as well as here--to intervene in historical processes. On this score, we've heard several examples of policy prescription: Andrei Melville has bluntly said, and I agree with him, that adopting Zbigniew Brzezinski's strategy on the Eurasian continent is a prescription for very rapid "Weimarization," a term I assume means victory of the fascist tendencies, whether by electoral or other means. It is not entirely clear what Brzezinski was advocating because of his fuzzy terminology, but he basically advocated supporting Ukraine in a new strategy of containment of Russia by giving Ukraine security guarantees against Russia. I'm not an apologist for Russian neo-imperialism, which I think is real, but I find that to be one scary strategy. It might keep Russia from touching Ukraine--I suspect that they will be kept from militarily attacking Ukraine anyway--but it could certainly have a major impact on Russian domestic politics.

olicy prescription--how the Western community and other powers relate to Russia--is an element that must be taken into consideration whenever we are tempted mechanically to apply a generic theory of political development, or of the causes of fascism, to the Russian domestic scene. Several of our speakers have used the German comparison to generate lessons that might be applicable to the Russian scene. Professor James, for example, has spoken about the depersonalization of international assistance, which is an intriguing insight that is applicable to thinking about both causality and prescription. Professor Feldman has given specific instances of lessons we can learn from the Weimar experience about the political and economic impact of inflation on societies in this state of disintegration.

onsideration of the role of personalities and leadership raises also the question of behavior "at the brink." Many of the issues that Russians face today are so difficult and threatening to their identities, to their standard of living, to their sense of self-worth, that any number of problems could take them to the brink. The question is whether cooler heads will prevail when they are there. That is something we cannot predict, since there are all kinds of possibilities for irrationality in human affairs. We can hope we will not have to count on the timely intervention of cooler heads, but I fear that in the next decade we may have to.

inally, I'd like to raise a methodological point that relates to how we measure movement toward the brink. In examining public opinion, elite and mass, on the kinds of dilemmas Russia faces, we must be careful to measure not just their goals. Public opinion polls in Russia today indicate substantial mass and elite support for a neo-imperialist vision such as the reconstitution of a formal union among Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus; this reflects people's dreams. They may be very real and salient dreams; one might even want to call them operative goals. But if you are trying to determine whether that means they will lose their heads at the brink, you have to examine the price they are willing to pay to realize their goals. I suspect that if you ask people, "Would you like to see the Soviet Union restored in some form?" they would probably in very large numbers say "yes." If you ask them if they're willing to send 300,000 troops to make it happen, my guess is that in very large numbers they'd say "no."

Presentation by Gerald Feldman | Presentation by Harold James | Presentation by Andrei Melville

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