TALLINN - An American economist who has tracked the convergence of attitudes among Eastern and Western Germans about the state and the economy since the reunification of their country says that the “survivals” from the communist past will be part of the Russian mental make-up until at least 2030.
In remarks quoted in “Vedomosti” on November 1, Harvard Economics Department chairman Alberto Alesina said that a recent study he and Nicola Fuchs-Schundlin had conducted in Germany suggests that the values of former East Germans will resemble those of West Germans in one or two generations.
(Their research, which focused on attitudes about state intervention in the economy, is reported a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled “Good-Bye Lenin (or Not): The Effect of Communism on People’s Preferences.” It is available online at
http://www.nber.org/w11700 )
Alesina said that his research showed that these overall shifts in orientation reflected deaths among older people who were most profoundly affected by communism and the rise of younger ones whose socialization took place under capitalism and whose views on economic questions were thus very different.
Although he and his colleagues have not conducted research in the Russian Federation, Alesina said that it appeared to him that “in this case the period of restoration will take a great deal more time” because “the longer people were engaged in the construction of communism, the stronger the influence this will have on them.”
And he made reference to the Bible’s report that “Moses led the Jews through the desert for 40 years in order that all those who had been born in slavery would die out” before they reached the Promised Land.
Not surprisingly, Russian scholars queried by “Vedomosti” were not entirely impressed by Alesina’s arguments or conclusions about their country, especially since they were based on an extrapolation of his work elsewhere.
Ksenia Yudayeva, who works at the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow Center, said she agreed it would take more than two generations for Russians to overcome the past, but she insisted that this was not because they had been under that system longer but because they lacked the “example” of West Germany that the East Germans had had.
Vladimir Magun, a scholar at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology, argued that Alesina had been wrong to focus on such a narrow range of questions. Some attitudes can change more quickly than the Harvard professor suggests, Magun said, and that is what is happening among Russians.
And Vladimir Pozdnyakov, who works at the Academy’s Institute of Psychology, agreed, saying that if Norwegians and Swedes had been asked about their attitudes about the state in the economy, their support for that idea might have been higher than the East Germans or the Russians – even though they never lived under communism.
Pozdnyakov added that in looking at the Russian Federation, one must adopt a territorial approach. In Moscow, he said, most people have changed dramatically in their attitudes since 1991, but “for the basic mass of the population over the last 15 years little has changed.”
Nonetheless, the psychologist insisted, change is coming to all of them and Russians like other peoples who have emerged from communism will have only two choices: “adapt or die.”
