Robert C. Tucker - "Dual Russia"

"Dual Russia"

Spotlighting an important element of cultural continuity, Tucker coined the concept of “dual Russia.” This concept focuses attention on the psychological rift between the Russian state and society and on the “we-they” mentality of Russia’s coercive elites and coerced masses. “The relation between the state and the society is seen as one between conqueror and conquered.” Tucker stressed that this “evaluative attitude” was embraced and reinforced by the most violent and impatient state-building and social-engineering tsars, especially Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Tucker also stressed that Alexander II tried to narrow the gulf between the “two Russias,” but his “liberalizing reform from above coincided with the rise of an organized revolutionary movement from below.” Indeed, expectations and assessments of “dual Russia” seem to have greatly influenced the decisions and actions of tsars and commissars, revolutionaries and bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens of Russian and non-Russian ethnicity.

Tucker underscored that most tsars and tsarist officials viewed state-society relations as hostile, and that most of the huge serf peasantry, small urban proletariat, and tiny educated stratum had similarly hostile views. But Tucker did not observe a stable or complementary relationship between authoritarian Russian elites and obeisant Russian masses. Instead, he saw mounting pressures from social units and networks for an “unbinding” of the state’s control of society. Tucker’s illiterate serf and literate proletarian view the tsarist state as “an abstract entity” and “an alien power.” His collective farmer resents enserfment and his factory worker resents exploitation in Stalin’s “socialist” revolution. And his post-Stalin democratic dissident and liberal intellectual actively and passively reject “dual Russia.”

Tucker used the concept of “dual Russia” to elucidate a very important component of de-Stalinization:

The regime, it would appear, looks to a rise in the material standard of consumption as a means of reconciling the Russian people to unfreedom in perpetuity. But it is doubtful that a policy of reform operating within these narrow limits can repair the rupture between the state and society that is reflected in the revival of the image of a dual Russia. A moral renovation of the national life, a fundamental reordering of relations, a process of genuine “unbinding,” or, in other words, an alternation in the nature of the system, would be needed.

In short, Tucker viewed “dual Russia” as a core element of the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet political systems, and he affirmed that systemic change must be founded on spiritual healing of state-society relations.