Communism as a Lived System of Ideas in Contemporary Russia

Abstract

Many in the West and the USSR (but not in Eastern Europe) were surprised that communism as an idea fell along with the regimes that it had buttressed. Perhaps because of this exhaustion, the kind of fervent ideas-centered debates that had characterized previous revolutionary periods are largely absent in Russia. Yet communist ideas and ways of life have become the subject of nostalgic memory and reinterpretation, entering the post-communist present partially as legacy but also as novel adaptation, both as new ideas and new practice. In Russia where the democratic design is clearly ailing, if not failing, it is more important than ever to consider the views and the agency of those beyond the elite either to embrace or defeat conflicting visions of Russia’s future. And once again, people are dreaming, not of democracy and capitalism, but of order and a strong hand.