EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 56, No. 3, May 2004, 347–368 State Legitimacy and the (In)significance of Democracy in Post-Communist Russia RUDRA SIL & CHENG CHEN Democracy, legitimacy and the Russian state A FEW APOCALYPTIC PREDICTIONS of a post-communist ‘maelstrom’ notwithstanding, 1 the break-up of the USSR was initially greeted by optimistic assessments of the prospects for democracy in the ‘new Russia’, with much faith placed in the explosion of new political parties, local organisations and social movements dating back to the Gorbachev era. 2 Recent assessments have been more cautious, predicting neither chaos nor democratic consolidation. In contrast to the optimists of a decade ago, a new generation of ‘possibilists’ now employ a minimalist definition in order to classify Russia as a ‘democracy’, emphasising the absence of an authoritarian backlash, the growth of a more robust ‘discourse of democracy’, the spread of politically aware social networks and an emerging ‘civil society from above’ under Putin’s ‘guided democracy’. 3 Sceptics, for their part, do not expect Russia to return to authoritarianism, but they view Russia’s nascent democracy as possibly ‘stillborn’ and certainly enfeebled by the heavy-handed tactics of ‘market Bolsheviks’, increas- ing restrictions on the media, a legacy of public apathy and distrust dating back to the communist era, and demographic trends that appear to be leading to a crisis of ‘human capital’. 4 While the predictions offered on both sides are less bold than they were ten years ago, the debate still revolves largely around the question of whether the glass is half empty or half full. The differences in interpretation are more a result of prior assumptions than any fundamental disagreement on the situation on the ground: cautious optimists emphasise the importance of whatever associational life and democratic procedures are presently in evidence, while restrained sceptics view these as irrelevant under a ‘superpresidential’ 5 system that offers little space for meaningful political contestation. This article is predicated on the assumption that the debate over the prospects of democratic consolidation and civil society in Russia can be given new life only if subsumed within a more general problematique focusing on the level and sources of state legitimacy. By ‘legitimacy’ we mean, following Fish, ‘a generally positive orientation among the populace toward the political regime. A regime is legitimate to the extent that the populace regards it as providing a satisfactory order and believes that no available alternative would be vastly superior’. 6 This is effectively a Weberian understanding of ‘legitimacy’ in that its conceptualisation depends not so much on the ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/04/030347-22  2004 University of Glasgow DOI: 10.1080/09668130410001682672