ABSTRACT
One of the most fundamental challenges for Russia in the post-Communist period has been that Russian society lacks any profound consensus on its own historical development. There is intense disagreement as to the meaning of the various stages of historical progress in Russia (Cohen 1999). So far, there is little indication that any such consensus on the wider purpose of the Russian Communist revolution, let alone its legitimacy, is forthcoming. This only echoes the profound conceptual confusion in democratisation studies and Sovietology in the Western academic community (Cox 1998; Guo 1999; Kubicek 2000; Hanson 1995). Parallel to this, Russia suffers from the absence of any rudimentary consensus on its cultural belonging in the wider sense. Its geographical expansion across two continents allows Russians to adopt various and often contradictory geo-strategic positions and, equally, agreement seems still far off as to where its cultural roots are. While this may be a political question, any geo-strategic dissent often spills over into the problem of how current political institutions ought to be legitimated. Central Europe controversially declared the era of transformation to be a part of its journey back to Europe, thereby evoking a more or less stable set of political and economic terms of reference that constituted the established repertoire of Western democratic society in public and academic debate (Salmin 2004: 133). For Russian scholars the circumstances are more complex. Russia’s relationship with the West has alternated between rapprochement and rejection, where the former was often associated with violence and force and the latter permeated with feelings of resentment on Russia’s side.
