Three papers on the Development and Contribution of Ideational Frameworks in Russian Politics, 1917-1934 and 1991-2008

Abstract

The central contention of this dissertation is that political scientists have largely ignored the importance of ideational frameworks for resolving problems of policy-making in times of significant upheaval. In order to illustrate the genesis and contribution of these frameworks, the three papers in my dissertation focus on a diachronic comparison of two moments in Russian history that encapsulate maximal uncertainty, covering the aftermath of the imperial collapses in 1917 and 1991. The first paper focuses on state- and nation-building in the North Caucasus, arguing that the debates between the Bolsheviks and other members of the Second International, particularly Otto Bauer, provided the Bolsheviks with a coherent platform that could largely stem the fissiparous tendencies of the region in a way that Boris Yeltsin and his teams were unable to do in the early 1990s. The second paper examines economic policy and finds the reverse to be true: the economic debates of the Second International largely ignored the problem of the peasantry and the exiled status of many of the leading Bolsheviks meant they were unable to articulate a sufficiently detailed policy to apply to the Russian case. The post-communists under the leadership of Yegor Gaidar, were able to draw on decades of economic research, particularly the Chicago and Virginia Schools, that provided the intellectual rationale for dismembering the Communist command-system, but equally important was the years that Gaidar and his team spent developing an alternative in the twilight years of communism. The final paper considers the legacy of ideational frameworks by considering the rule of Stalin and Putin, arguing that the tasks left unfulfilled provide a basis for regime consolidation by subsequent rulers.