Disrespecting "Real Sovereignty"

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Below are some excerpts from a review of Andrei Kokoshin's book Real Sovereignty in the Modern World System, revised edition published in 2006 (you can buy it here). I'm posting them because they are the sort of trenchant yet erudite takedown that one doesn't often see on the pages of a thick journal, especially when directed at someone on the masthead of the journal; and also because Kokoshin was - and probably still is - the kind of person who Western foreign policy elites meet with when they visit Moscow (an academic who has published extensively in English and held a high-ranking position in the Yeltsin Administration, and someone with extensive contacts in the West) and it's interesting to see this of assessment of his more recent work.

Finally, I want to recommend that anyone with time on their hands and a good reading knowledge of Russian navigate here and read some of the back-issues of Svobodnaya Mysl'. I'm a little concerned that by expressing my delight at finding full-text back-issues online I will reveal my ignorance of what would seem to be an essential publication, but I guess it's a risk I'm willing to take. Incidentally, I think an English-language summary of Kokoshin's thesis about sovereignty may be provided by this article of his in Russia in Global Affairs.

What We Have Come To
The Transformation of a Soviet Scholar into a Russian Propaganda Specialist
By Vladislav Inozemtsev
Svobodnaia Mysl', No. 4, 2006, p. 209
Translated in Russian Politics and Thought, March/April 2007

[...]

It is strange and puzzling to find the style of argumentation used here from a scholar of such stature. Kokoshin constantly invokes the opinion of “Western scholars,” but the reader will search in vain for any mention of the works produced by Western theorists of sovereignty over the last fifteen years. The urgent judgments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau are a different matter (pp. 49–50). That is, Academician Kokoshin clearly has no interest in attempts to comprehend the reality of the post–cold war world. Moreover, the positions of Western sociologists and legal scholars are cited, as a rule, not from the original sources but from materials published in Russian journals: Expert, Kosmopolis, and Mezhdunarodnye protsessy.

Finally, Kokoshkin uses public opinion surveys to support this or that argument. For example, he cites survey findings from the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research (VTsIOM) to support his statement that “a significant portion of the U.S. political elite has demonstrated its intent to weaken Russia’s position in global politics on a range of parameters ever since the end of the cold war, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the collapse of the Soviet Union” (p. 29). His proof is that 30 percent of VTsIOM’s Russian respondents are convinced that the Americans intend to weaken Russia, and 51 percent think that U.S. “aid” to develop democracy in Russia has damaged our state (p. 118 n. 33). (By the way, of the book’s 173 pages, 78 are taken up with verbose notes—probably an odd sort of record for the genre.) No more proof is needed: no statements by U.S. officials, no materials from congressional hearings or reports by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), not even specific examples of actions against Russia funded by the United States! If this approach gains acceptance, the Academy of Sciences will soon be proving mathematical theorems with help from VTsIOM.

[...]

Anyone who finds the time to read Kokoshin’s new book will agree that its topic is not sovereignty. Rather, it offers a defense of the current Russian government. This defense includes the concept of “sovereign democracy,” which differs from “mere democracy” in being enriched by certain features that are “inherently characteristic” of the Russian state and, according to Kokoshin, “deeply rooted” in the Russian value system (for more detail, see pp. 74–77). It remains unclear whether these features include, for example, corruption and thievery, which are inherently typical of Russian officials, nor is it clear in general what exactly Kokoshin means by “features.” The book does, however, communicate unambiguously that it reflects ideally the
logic of the current ruling elite.

Kokoshin writes that the need to develop a theory of “sovereign democracy” has arisen because “in the current decade . . . a considerable segment of society began to view ‘democratic ideology’ as a negative phenomenon. Moreover, the public assesses the ‘democracy—nondemocracy’ juxtaposition not so much by the criterion of efficiency as by the dominance of emotion” (p. 75). But this raises the question: if Kokoshin is right, then is it not Russian professors’ job to teach their compatriots to avoid yielding to emotion and understand reality?! If an academician, professor, and teacher openly acknowledges that he has to adapt his teaching to the level of his failing students and stop teaching them basic knowledge (just to avoid having them kick him out of the classroom), then surely we must give up on the Russian scholarship that our deputy argues vehemently must be restored (see pp. 76–78, 86–88, 90–91).

[...]

Regrettably, the book by Kokoshin, an academician and State Duma deputy, has no scholarly value. But it is a peculiar literary record of a capable scholar’s transformation into a propaganda specialist for United Russia. It is a manual on how to search for and “elegantly” apply dubious sources of scholarly information. An amazed reader will find in it the names of the “well-known Russian political scientists” A. Kustarev, S. Zhiznin, N. Dolgopolova, and M. Khrustalev (the last of whom, let us note, has discovered that “the state has traditional ownership rights over certain territories and their resident population (citizens)” (quoted from p. 58; italics added—V.I.), as well as such giants of Russian scholarly thought as Valerii Fadeev, editor in chief of Expert, or Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation. Kokoshin offers abundant quotations from the latest speeches of such people, made during various meetings of the party’s economic leaders (in fact, these speeches, which timewise largely coincide with the date of Kokoshin’s publishing contract, constitute the “updates and additions” justifying a third edition).

This review has probably turned out to be excessively harsh. Today the shelves of Russian bookstores are breaking under the weight of printed materials next to which even Kokoshin’s deserves praise. But until the very last moment, this reviewer did not want to believe that the wave of obsequiousness could sweep up not only professional political technicians but also prominent members of the Soviet academic establishment. The realities of the struggle for real sovereignty, however, require even these sacrifices. Too bad.