Russia: Experiment with a People, by Robert Service

Where now for the Russian people? Lesley Chamberlain considers a post-Communist analysis

Russia, since Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union on New Year's Eve 1991, has been a sad and alarming place to watch from the outside – and a difficult place to live for all but a few. The majority is materially worse off, the culture lacks definition, and the political sense of Russia's place in the world is unclear. Since Putin succeeded Yeltsin, things have quietened down at the helm. But financial corruption has left terrible scars, with emotional as well as economic effects on the body of a society not well-practised in democracy and sceptical about its qualities.

The bloody war in Chechnya has dented Russia's reputation as a new, caring kind of power, but it has done so more abroad than at home. Meanwhile, Putin's retrograde authoritarian firmness seems to be welcome everywhere. Blair and Bush can do business with him and, nationally, he has recouped his popularity since his mishandling of the Kursk disaster. The Russians have by chance reaped important diplomatic benefit from the terrorist attacks on America, which left them key players in the international consensus on how and when to retaliate.

What does all this mean for the Russian people? Robert Service has combed through his files for the last decade without coming up with an answer. He calls his subject molten, and molten stuff will keep running out of the mould. So, on the one hand, he appreciates how much of the old Soviet way, for better, for worse, still shapes the Russian mind. Contempt for the law, deep suspicion of officialdom, wilful disregard of rules, targets, efficiency at work, and what Service calls self-indulgence (I would call perpetual it personal anarchy) are part of the Soviet legacy.

These crippling, occasionally endearing habits were coupled in the old days with deep patriotism and genuine admiration for Communist social achievements. Soviet life was overridingly egalitarian, non-nationalistic, and characterised by high culture and sporting achievement, and material standards which, at least, left no one wanting. The brutal repression of dissent ruined everything and should never be forgotten, but in truth, after Stalin, it was only felt by a tiny minority.

What would give a new shape to life now that the Russians find themselves running in every direction between the parameters of guided democracy and deep scepticism? Undoubtedly, some kind of renewed self-belief. But currently there are just too many different ideas for any one to stick.

Service dwells at some length on the difficulty for Russia in establishing selfhood as a nation without the USSR. Shifting boundaries, two centuries as the heart of an empire, and no real impulse to ethnic self-assertion, have not helped. But what he concludes, and could have said more emphatically, is that Russia is not convinced that surface Westernisation and conversion to capitalism express its real calling. Western standardisation, achieved through privileging material prosperity above all other virtues, leaves Russia uncomfortable. There remains a sense in which they expect something more of themselves. Quite possibly the world does too, and Service is sensitive to all our hopes that have been left in limbo these last 10 years. A more impassioned read – less of a catalogue – would have been more encouraging.

Lesley Chamberlain's 'The Good Man in Russia' will be published next year