Russia’s Attack on Ukraine: Epistemologies at War

Abstract

This chapter focuses on two distinctions: between ideology and empiricism and between authoritarianism and liberal democracy. It describes how they are related. It traces the development of this relationship from the American Federalist Papers through the New Deal to the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction and development of the EU. It relates this to the Soviet refusal to participate in the Marshall Plan, the ensuing Cold War, Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and the conflict between Russian authoritarianism and the EU. It considers how Russian authoritarianism can be ended.

1. Introduction

Democracy is not a luxury that only a few wealthy countries can afford; it is the system of government and law that generates their wealth. Authoritarianism is not the way to catch up; it suppresses the initiative and imagination that catching up requires.

The war in Ukraine has been described many times as a war between liberal democracy and authoritarianism and between rule of law and rule of force. It is also a war between the development theory of the American New Deal and the development theory underlying Fascism and Bolshevism. And if we focus on the epistemological difference enabling all of these oppositions, it is most fundamentally a war between empiricism and ideology.

Europeans have been comparing democratic governments based on empirical knowledge to authoritarian governments based on ideology since the conflict between Athens and Sparta. The differences are well established. Throughout this history, an alternative name for Empiricism has been “Skepticism,” as in in Robert Boyle’s Skeptical Chymist. The term Skepticism has also been more prominent in moral and legal philosophy. Foundational works in modern Skepticism include Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Kant’s critiques of pure and practical reason, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, the American Declaration of Independence and Federalist Papers, and everything from the American Pragmatists.

Ideological thinking, by contrast, is represented in philosophy and political theory by the long line of arguments that juxtapose idealism and materialism. Modern versions particularly depend on formulations from Hegel ‘s idealism and Locke’s materialism.

All government requires widespread interpersonal agreement. The processes required to build such agreement based on empirical knowledge are entirely different from those required to build agreement based on ideology. Empirical knowledge has to grow up and out from practical individual experience. Ideology has to be imposed by a dominant authority.

Democracy began in cities and has been widespread as a form of local government [1, 2, 3, 4]. The difficulty has been to find a way to scale it up. The first enduring large-scale supra-local democracy intentionally created on the basis of empiricism, with no monarch, theocrat, or emperor, was the American republic. In Western Europe, the problem remained unsolved through World War II. It only ended with the post-war redevelopment under the Marshall Plan. This institutionalized empirical democracy at the national and international levels in two main ways. First, it introduced the methods of relating government to business activity that had been developed in the American New Deal. Second, it established a system of international organizations that expanded on the organizations of the United Nations. This has continued to expand and intensify in the European Union (EU).

The Soviet delegates to the first European discussion to develop the Marshall Plan recognized that its empirical democratic implications were incompatible with their own ideological authoritarianism. They walked out. The Soviet Union created its own plan consistent with this ideology. In 1989, it collapsed. The collapse presented the constituent republics with the renewed possibility of choosing empirical democracy.

Knowing that a choice is possible is not the same thing as knowing how to make it. But by 1989, for countries of the former Soviet Union, the choice was simplified to two alternatives: stay with the Russian Federation or join the EU. Most joined the EU. The boundaries of the EU therefore moved toward Russia.

Meanwhile, Putin was rebuilding Russia’s authoritarianism with a sequence of new ideological justifications. Ukraine found itself in between geographically and divided intellectually. Russia tried to shift power to Ukraine’s authoritarians. The interference culminated in its invasion. The invasion has forced most other Ukrainians to identify their national survival with joining Europe. The democracies are responding with support for Ukraine. So the conflict is at once political and military, domestic and international.

I review these events in order to explain what the difference between empirical democracy and ideological authoritarianism is, how it has shaped what has happened so far, and what it means for the future.

2. Empiricism versus ideology

The distinction between empiricism and ideology is epistemological. The distinction between democracy and authoritarianism is political. Epistemology is not politics. But they are connected in practice.

Empiricism builds systems of knowledge by connecting facts with facts. Facts are descriptions or explanations established by observation and critical analysis to remove ambiguity and alternative formulations. When claims are falsified, they are rejected.

In fact, human beings create their social organizations with systems of ideas that define reciprocal relationships [5, 6, 7]. The ideas defining different kinds of reciprocal relationships have different semantic content and are associated with different imageries: kinship, courts, schools, farms, factories, businesses, armies, organized religions, governments and so on. Unfortunately, there is no contemporary social science that agrees on this in the way biologists agree about DNA or chemists agree on the periodic tables. It is recognized only in some theoretical streams and most often only in part, such as describing the ways different ideas establish different social situations but not recognizing that they form systems with logical structures [8, 9, 10]. Moreover, some “theories” in every social science are variants of the same ideologies being invoked in the present conflict.

“All men are created equal” is a fundamental statement of principle for democracy. It is empirical, although not in the simple sense in which we might say all men have the same height. Rather, we recognize it as a principle that all law, policy, and practice should embody. We recognize that it is ambiguous, but we also recognize that it can be disambiguated. We can ask whether people are equal in ability, equal in being subject to law, equal in rights, equal in potential, and so on. We can identify what “people” are. We can identify what “equal” is. For any such disambiguation, we can consider together if the statement is observably true. If it is not, we can further decide if the way that it not true poses a problem for democratic practice that needs to be corrected. And, finally, we can consider how to correct it.

An ideology is a set of interrelated claims about reality that are supposed to follow from some undoubtable premises or principles, but that cannot be falsified by observation. Ideologies are logically circular. Ideologies also invariably include claims that the causes of what we find in our experience lie beyond our experiences. The prototypic European political ideologies are associated with Christianity and Islam, such as the idea of a king as “the Lord’s anointed.” Important modern secular examples include Hegel’s state-philosophy, St. Simon’s Socialism, Comte’s Positivism, Mill’s Utilitarianism, Marx’s Communism, and “classical” economic theory as espoused by Friedman and Hayek.

For example, Marx claimed to replace Hegel’s idealism with materialism. His argument for the inevitable self-destruction of capitalism is based on the supposed materialist truth that all value comes from labor. If “value” means price, it is observably wrong. If it does not mean price, it is not possible to specify any other material property or quality of things that would make the statement true. The same problem applies to “labor.” If it means “work” the statement is again obviously false. Many things of low value are produced with a lot of work; many things of high value are produced with little work. In fact, it does not make sense to speak of value as a property inherent in things at all. It is, rather, something people attribute to things for some purposes in some contexts. Marx’s first principle defines one unknown with another unknown.

The same kind of unobservability attaches to the fundamental economic definition of a market as the intersection of supply and demand for a good at a point in time. Neither a supply curve nor a demand curve nor a point in time is observable. Nor is a market that simple or abstract. Anyone who has sought to buy any real thing will know that all goods are not identical and few if any have one and only one price at any time. More importantly, there is much more to making a market than price, supply, and demand. Buying, renting, hiring, and so on are legally defined processes involving an exchange of money for rights in a thing. The transaction must follow a certain form; it must be legal; it requires records to be made and kept. This depends on a complex institutional context.

Liberal democracy is sometime described as an ideology. It is not, just as geometry is not. Considering the phrase to indicate a democracy in which the obligations of government include the obligation to promote and protect individual freedom and equality; recognition of human rights; rule of law; freedom of association; freedom of the press; and separation of church and state, it can be considered a kind of ideal. It is a political system to strive for even if what we actually find does not match it in all respects. But it still empirical. It is what we get if we look at failures and successes comparatively and examine how these features support each other in the light of the principle of reciprocity.

The principle of reciprocity calls upon our human ability to think self-other, our ability to put ourselves in the place of another. There is an enormous literature recognizing such thinking as a basic requirement of community cohesion. One version is “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Kant stated it more testably as his Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Principles of action that cannot be willed as universal laws are “self-nullifying.” If so willed, they would defeat the purpose for which they are intended.

“Can will” does not mean “can wish.” It means “could cause to be.” Nor does “universal” only mean that the maxim can be applied to everyone. It also has to mean that it is accepted by everyone. So reciprocity plus universality entails popular sovereignty.

If we next ask how this sovereign populace can determine which maxims actually meet this test, the answer has to be through discussion based on evidence available to all and using reason that is common to all. This is empiricism.

And if we also ask how this imperative would apply in forming rules to regulate the ways people earn their livings, it would have to mean that each person should earn their living in a way that allows the same opportunity to all others. So reciprocity also entails the idea of the general good.

Empirical democracy comports with an independent judiciary. A judiciary in which the judgments of one court will be consistent with the judgments of others requires laws and rules that describe actions and intentions that can be determined by observations [11, 12].

Contrastingly, ideology comports with authoritarianism. For any given ideology, some people will find it plausible, but many others will not. Since factual proof is not possible, the only way to induce those who do not find it plausible to accept it is by force. The recurrent hope of supporters of such systems is that if their favored ideology is established and all others are suppressed with enough force once, it will be self-perpetuating thereafter because no-one will know the alternatives. This is a delusion for two reasons. First, vacuity cuts two ways. An ideology that can be held to be true no matter what can also be held to be conformed to no matter what. So it will always generate disputed interpretations. Second, most people actually can recognize when a set of ideas that claims to explain a situation at hand does not do so. So the more widely an ideology is promulgated, the more clearly it comes to be seen as a facade for arbitrary rule imposed by force.

3. Marshall plan empiricism

George C. Marshall was Chief of Staff of the United States Army during World War II. He retired when the war ended. President Truman then appointed him Secretary of State.

During the war, the United States had received many requests for post-war recovery assistance. Truman charged Marshall with formulating America’s response. Allen Dulles described what happened in a manuscript intended for publication to gain public support for the necessary federal legislation. Dulles had been wartime head of the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS was the apex United States organization for gathering intelligence and coordinating resistance activities across Europe and was officially charged with post-war planning. In 1947, core functions were carried over into the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Dulles was its first director. No other single individual was in a better position to understand the prospects and needs of Europeans in the immediate post-war aftermath.

Dulles’s paper was drafted in the winter of 1947–1948. It was not finished. It was found by Michael Wala among the Dulles papers in the Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. Wala edited it and, apparently, added information on implementation and outcomes year by year until 1952. He published it in 1993 [13]. There is no better description of the thinking that was involved.

The Marshall Plan was approved by Congress as the Economic Recovery Act of 1948. President Truman signed it on April 3. On the same day, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) was founded to implement it. The Soviets formed COMECON in response.

The “plan” started with a process. The process could not have been more democratic or more empirical. Marshall stipulated that all the governments that intended to participate should work together, decide what support they could provide each other, and together tell the Americans what they needed in addition to restore production to pre-war levels. The US would then do what it could. The invitation was open to all countries that had suffered war damage. This included the Soviets.

Leading up to World War II, industrial states had six great unsolved problems. The first was recurrent depressions. The second was unemployment, labor unrest, and the demand for unionization. The third was abuse of official power by government officials. The fourth was the corruption of government officials by individuals with great wealth. The fifth was the increasing need to regulate businesses and production to protect workers, the environment, consumers, and the public. The sixth, for most but not all, was colonialism and resistance to it.

Fascists and Communists both argued that representative democracy was inherently incapable of solving the problems of industrialization. They differed in their solutions. The Fascist solution was to legitimize large-scale corruption by wealth. Right came from power. Authoritarian government would cooperate with corporate power to control everyone else. The aim of the cooperation was imperial expansion, to overtake the older imperial powers whose governments were parliamentary democracies. The business cycle would be ended by government control of labor, banking, and investment [14, 15, 16].

The Communist solution solved the problem of capitalist accumulation and influence by eliminating private ownership. It ended the business cycle by ending market competition. It ended labor unrest in theory by making workers owners and in practice by regimenting the assignment of workers to work and eliminating independent labor unions.

Both systems called for rule by an all-powerful group of ideological insiders. Both called for state power to impose this ideology on everyone and every area of life. Truth was not what people found and agreed on interactively, it was what state power created.

The New Deal solution, by contrast, did not overthrow established democratic traditions and principles. It extended them [17]. It did not try to make government more powerful than previous administrations had. It sought to make it more useful. It did not become everyone’s employer or try to control business and labor directly. It did not seek colonies to exploit or people to enslave.

The word “deal” in the phrase “new deal” referred to the relation between government and citizens. Laissez faire was over. It made the government a concerned observer in all manner of commercial and productive activities, for-profit and not-for-profit, to assure that Americans everywhere had a fair chance at getting ahead, decent working conditions, competitive pay, and security in old age.

Its solution to the business cycle was a combination of increased transparency to reduce business mistrust and increased regulation tailored to each type of business to assure that competition would be constructive and not destructive. It created national parks and put large numbers of unemployed young men to work building their roads, bridges, lodges, cabins, dams, and trails. It undertook enormous infrastructure projects on America’s rivers, providing employment, water, flood control, power, and irrigation. It empowered employees of businesses in interstate commerce to form unions and bargain collectively, creating the National Labor Relations board to assure open and fair union elections. It provided agricultural price supports and production controls that stopped the cycles of overproduction and price collapse that led to previous agricultural depressions and the dust bowl. It enabled non-profit cooperatives of all sorts, institutionalizing new forms of agricultural credit not administered by commercial banks. It assured that all businesses who sought investments from the public would provide uniform and honest information on their activities and finances. It provided an enormous range of industry-specific regulatory commissions made up of representatives of the industries themselves, plus enough government involvement to assure they worked openly to produce regulations that balanced business stability against the public interest in having good products at affordable prices. It set up the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock market. It set up commissions to regulate banking and insurance and insured deposits in the regulated banks. It established purpose-designed administrative courts to back up such regulation. It established Social Security. It supported art and artists, and the artists and others documented all of this for both technical and popular audiences. Most of these activities and organizations were self-funding by fees or charges to the beneficiaries.

Some ideas it tried succeeded and some failed. This was neither socialism nor capitalism. The aim, as stated in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, was “managed competition.” The method was participatory experimental democracy. The outcome was what Michael Hogan describes as the “associative state” [18]. This in turn, with some additions including Keynesian economic theory, made up the “the New Deal synthesis” that Hogan describes as “guiding” American post-war policy ([18], pp. 22–23).

In 1942, when America entered the war that the Fascists had begun a decade earlier, the New Deal administration rapidly pivoted to war production. This also succeeded. War procurement was competitive and transparent. Profits were regulated. Corruption and profiteering in contracting were exposed and punished. Rationing was effective. Production was extraordinarily efficient. The United States did not become the arsenal of democracy only because of its natural resources.

The Marshall Plan incorporated this experience. The ultimate goal was much more than economic recovery. The American intent was to end what Dulles characterized as Europe’s “tribal nationalism” that had formed “a patchwork of watertight compartments” competing for colonies ([13], p. 12). As Dulles says in describing the first meeting after the Soviet withdrawal:

In a sense, they were discussing the liquidation of the war in the economic field. But it was really more than that. It might well mark the beginning of an effort which could bring a step nearer the establishment of a United States of Europe ([13], p. 39).

The Truman administration set up a nineteen-member committee chaired by Averell Harriman to advise the government on how best to meet the European needs. Harriman was then Secretary of Commerce. He had previously chaired the committee overseeing the Lend-Lease program and served as ambassador to Russia. Before that, he had served in the National Recovery Administration of the New Deal. Dulles’s description of the rest of the group shows clearly how it mobilized empiricism:

All of them except the chairman, were at the same time private citizens, though many had at various times rendered important services to the government. Almost every section of the country was represented, and they were chosen from the fields of business, banking, and education. There were also outstanding leaders of labor, as well as experts in the fields mining, shipping, and agriculture. And to answer those who say that the Marshall Plan is possibly a good political gesture but is impractical and unrealistic, I would call as my first witness the contrary the hardheaded men of affairs listed below and cite the testimony from them which I have quoted above ([13], p. 58).

Every part of this is important. First, the committee represented empiricism in the sense of all the bodies of practical, scientific, and engineering knowledge embodied in the men and women who worked and taught in the institutions they headed. Second, they knew how to bring people with such knowledge together in effective working teams, often teams of teams. They understood what incentives were needed to get those with the necessary skills to apply them constructively and cooperatively and to lead people to align their personal interests with genuine and compelling public interests and not just hollow ideological slogans. Third, they knew the kinds of conditions that promote integrity and service, rather than corruption and self-dealing. And fourth, they understood the kind of political and legal policies and organizations needed to bring all of this together on national and international scales. They had all been through the New Deal. They were applying their collective experience. Compared to the Harriman committee, the Soviet Politburo was a cult of know-nothings.

4. Creation of the EEC

Marshall Plan assistance ended in 1951. The program had succeeded in every aim. Famine was averted. The camps of displaced persons were emptied and closed. Production exceeded pre-war levels. Industries were rebuilt on a new and larger scale to weave the participating nations together in a web of mutual interdependence.

The cooperation continued. In 1957, the Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community (EEC), also known as the European Common Market. Initial member countries were West Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. In 1961, the Organization on Economic Cooperation and Development was established to expand the functions and membership of the EEC beyond Europe.

In 1974 several EEC nations established the European Regional Development Fund to assist countries whose EEC obligations to attract additional investments to improve infrastructure cannot be met with their internal revenues. Its purpose is to enhance equality in living standards across the region by raising the living standards of the poorer members. This carries on the funding philosophy of the original Marshall Plan.

Denmark, Ireland, and UK joined the EEC in 1973. Greece joined in 1981. Portugal and Spain joined in 1986.

5. Soviet collapse

Life in the Soviet Union improved much more slowly. Product quality was poor. Prices were low but things to buy were scarce. Enormous amounts of time were wasted waiting in lines. Access to professional, scholarly, and technical information was restricted. Military expenses were enormous but impossible to measure. All art, architecture, and literature were subject to censorship. Only that which glorified the state was permitted. Censorship was supported by internal spying. No-one was safe from arbitrary arrest and incarceration. Educational opportunities were shaped to meet the needs of state five-year plans. Corruption was endemic. Serious environmental pollution spread without mitigation.

In 1973, the system of censorship and spying was described in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. It was first published in Paris, in Russian, and in English and French the following year. The KGB prevented its publication in Russia. Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned while working on it and eventually forced into exile. One of the typists who worked on it was found hung in the stairwell of her apartment building after KGB interrogation. It was not published in Russia until 1989, after Mikael Gorbachev came to power.

Gorbachev was elected General Secretary in 1985. He had grown up on a collective farm and earned university degrees in law and agricultural production. Under the headings of glasnost and perestroika, his government began a sequence of irreversible reforms. Glasnost ended the system of thought control and allowed press freedom and multiparty elections. Perestroika included a set of orders intended to transform the soviet managerial system into a market economy in 500 days. These included removing price controls, allowing entry of foreign firms and foreign investment, promulgating laws establishing individual property rights and contracts, and establishing a professionally trained judiciary to apply them.

The process of privatizing state businesses began by issuing all Soviet citizens certificates that could be used to buy shares. Businesses made available started small. The first was a bakery. Most of those who received the certificates sold them for cash to a very few individuals. Those few thereby rapidly accumulated the ability to buy the available businesses at extremely low prices in relation to the value of what they produced. They also founded private banks to finance such purchases.

Presidents Ronald Reagan and then G. H. W. Bush met with Gorbachev personally. Both were Republicans, the party that still sought to undo the legislation of the New Deal wherever they could. Both persistently described the United States as having a “free market economy.” It is not likely, based on their rhetoric, that either understood the New Deal. In 1988, after their second summit, Reagan declared that he no longer considered the USSR an “evil empire.” Bush began US efforts to assist with loans and economic reforms and encourage US and international corporate investments.

Gorbachev had hoped that his reforms would preserve the Soviet Union. In fact, they triggered the Revolutions of 1989. In March 1990, Gorbachev resigned as Secretary of Communist Party of the Soviet Union and asked the Presidium of the Soviet Union to elect him President of the Soviet Union. They did so. One month later, after East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Moldova had broken away, the remaining Soviet states formed the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (SSRSFSR).

On June 12, 1991, Boris Yeltsin was elected President of the Russian Republic, receiving 57% of the vote. He had run as an independent, having publicly resigned from the Communist Party on July 12, 1990. He did not have Gorbachev’s endorsement. Gorbachev’s preferred candidate received 16%. That left Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union in conflict with Yeltsin as president of the RSFR.

Without an institutional framework like that in the EU countries, Gorbachev’s “market liberalization” was bound to fail. Prices increased. Productivity continued to fall. Pensions were not paid. People were starving. More zealous Communists said the reforms went too far. Progressives, led by Yeltsin, said they had not gone far enough. The conflict came to a head on September 18, 1991. Gorbachev was out of Moscow at a vacation house in Crimea. Reactionary Communists attempted a coup. Gorbachev’s communications were cut off. He and his wife feared arrest or assassination. Tanks entered Moscow and surrounded the Supreme Soviet building. Crowds with flags and banners surrounded the tanks. It was not clear which way events would go. Then Yeltsin climbed onto one of the tanks with a microphone and amplification. He spoke passionately and clearly. The demonstrators listened. The tankers listened. When he finished, the tankers drove back to their bases. Gorbachev was brought back to the capital safely. The coup attempt was defeated. Public consensus finally turned decisively against the Communist Party and Communist ideology. But no one in power recognized the problem with ideology as such. They just began to look for a different one. The obvious alternative was Capitalism, as they understood it.

6. The first capitalist ideology

In January 1992, Yeltsin called Jeffrey Sachs to join his economic team. Sachs described the conversation in a 2022 interview on the US National Public Radio. It included the idea of the need for “shock therapy” (https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1097135961). Sachs was known for it. He had called for it in Poland, 2 years before, where it had seemed to work. He described his “playbook:” Set prices free. Free trade. Free up the currency. Curb inflation by cutting spending and raising taxes. Get Western monetary support. It would be painful for “three or four months” [ibid]. Then the shortages and hyperinflation would end.

Shock therapy replaced Marxist ideology with the “classical” free-market economic theory. It is the same narrowly economic view of development that the World Bank has been applying in its loan conditionalities since the Marshall plan ended.

The World Bank has a well-earned reputation for enabling corrupt authoritian regimes to stay in power while perpetuating poverty and dependency [19, 20]. Several important policies that the World Bank insists on were explicitly rejected in the Marshall Plan. All Bank loans are bilateral; there is no concern with promoting international productive cooperation. The Bank assigns its highest priority to having its loans repaid rather than to improving societal working conditions, welfare, and morale. The Bank ignores governmental corruption. The Bank nevertheless demands that these governments reduce the welfare payments and subsidies that corrupt and incompetent government officials had been using to blunt public anger so they can stay in office. The Bank makes no effort to assure the democratic legitimacy of the governments they lend to. And the Bank does not require transparency. Rather, they avoid it. The Marshall Plan also provided for substantial grants in cases where loan repayment would have been counterproductive. The Bank does not.

Shock therapy also did not work [21]. Russia’s economic problems intensified further. On September 21 to 24, 1993, there were violent public protests. By this time, Russia’s GDP had declined by half. From 1986 to 2004, Russian life-expectancy declined by 4 years. Sachs says there was nothing wrong with his recommendations. The reason the decline continued was that the Russians did not fully implement them, and the West did not provide enough aid.

Sachs quit Yeltsin’s economic group at the end of December 1993, but his conception of market economics remained in place. There are two obvious reasons. One is the immunity to factual correction reflected in Sachs’ excuses. The other is that Russia began to take loans from the World Bank. From 1995 to 2014, the Bank funded a total of 71 projects worth over $14.4 Bn. New loans stopped in 2014.

External dependency stimulated internal corruption. In 1995, Yeltsin was planning to run for reelection in 1996. Polls said he would lose. To address the growing foreign debt and gain support from the emerging oligarchs, the head of the committee overseeing privatization offered shares in some of Russia’s most valuable state enterprises as collateral for bank loans to the government. This included Russia’s oil and gas companies. If the government defaulted, ownership would transfer to the banks. As promised, the government defaulted. So the individuals who owned the banks also became owners of the newly private corporations. These are the oligarchs.

The oligarchs used their money to support Yeltsin’s reelection and Yeltsin supported their further enrichment. Yeltsin was also endorsed by Western leaders, including Bill Clinton. The International Monetary Fund approved a $10.2 Bn loan to keep the government solvent. Yeltsin was reelected on July 3, 1996.

By the time Yeltsin was reelected he was a notorious alcoholic in declining health. On September 9, 1998, he appointed Vladimir Putin Prime Minister. Putin had been a career KGB agent. His education is an LLB from the Leningrad University and a PhD in engineering from the Leningrad State Mining Institute. On December 31, 1999, responding to accusations of actually rather small-scale bribery (paid-for credit cards given to members of his family), Yeltsin resigned and appointed Putin as his successor.

On March 26, 2000, Putin was elected president. His first presidential decree was to grant Yeltsin lifelong immunity from prosecution. The oligarchs originally supported Putin for the same reasons they supported Yeltsin. They thought they could control him. Putin disabused them. According to Bill Browder, Putin’s terms were “50%.” Half of everything they made would go to Putin. Browder was at the time the largest foreign investor in Russia and involved in the same network of relationships. He says this made Putin himself the world’s richest man. Browder now lives in London. Russian courts have convicted him several times in absentia of tax evasion and fraud. The Russian government has sought his arrest through Interpol. Interpol has rejected the warrants. A business colleague, Sergei Magnitsky, was convicted with him on one charge. Magnitsky was murdered in prison.

In 2012, the United States passed the Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. This authorized sanctions of 18 named Russian officials responsible for Magnitsky’s death. In 2016, the US passed the Global Magnitsky Act. This authorized the US government to sanction officials of any foreign government, worldwide, who are human rights offenders. Sanctions include freezing their assets and banning them from entering the US. The list of sanctioned individuals and companies is available on the website of the United States Department of State.

In 2018, Novokmet et al. described Russian income distributions from the Czarist period to 2016 [22]. From 1998, Russian living standards increased from about 60–65% of the Western European average to about 70–75% [p. 190]. At the same time, however, the portion of total Russian wealth held by the top 1% increased from about 21% in 1995 to about 42% and the amount of “non-official foreign wealth” held by Russians—obviously, this same 1%—outside of Russia increased from about 10% of total national income to between 67% and 110%. Their conclusion is directly relevant:

The dramatic failure of Soviet communism and egalitarian ideology – in the form it was applied in Russia – seems to have led to relatively high tolerance for large inequality and concentration of private property (partly coming from outright plundering of the country’s natural resources and foreign reserves). In effect, extreme inequality seems acceptable in Russia, as long as billionaires and oligarchs appear to be loyal to the Russian state and perceived national interests. Whether this fragile equilibrium will persist in the coming years and decades remains to be seen ([22], pp. 221–222).

7. The EEC becomes the EU

Meanwhile, in Western Europe, the EEC continued to work out and expand the unifying principles of empirical democracy. In 1992 the EEC member countries formed the European Union by the Treaty of Maastricht. Maastricht provides for a European Parliament, the Court of Justice of the European Union, a European central bank and a common currency. All citizens of EU member states are citizens of the EU. EU citizens can vote and run for office in the European Parliament. The treaty also called for greater cooperation on environment, trade, police, and social policy.

The EU established the three “Copenhagen criteria” for other countries wishing to join:

1. Stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and respect for and protection of minorities;

2. A functioning market economy and ability to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the EU;

3. The ability to take on the obligations of membership, including the capacity to effectively implement the rules, standards and policies that make up the body of EU law (the ‘acquis’), and adherence to the aims of political, economic, and monetary union.

Note the way the first criterion links democracy with rule of law, protection of human rights and protection of minorities. This embodies the implications of the principle of reciprocity. Note that the second criterion calls for “a functioning market economy” rather than “a free market.” It does not require governments to leave everything to market forces. It requires governments to “cope with” them, through law, policy, and collective action. This is the perspective of the New Deal. And in requiring new members to take on the obligations recognized among current members, the EU is saying that it is a federal system and intends to expand as such.

The EU acquis is a document that anyone can access. It now has 35 chapters and runs to over 130,000 pages.

Finland and Sweden joined the EU in 1995. The next group was added on May 1, 2004. There were 10 in all. Eight had been in the USSR: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007.

The EU is what the Marshall Plan hoped for. The fact that it is still evolving does not detract from this. It affirms it.

8. Constitution as ideology vs. constitution as law

The Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in effect when the Soviet Union collapsed had been written in 1936. It is a statement of state ideology. It deliberately did not provide a foundation for a system of personal or business law.

The Constitution gives all power to the ideologically conforming. It stipulates that:

The right to nominate candidates is secured to public organizations and societies of toilers: Communist Party organizations, trade unions, co-operatives, youth organizations and cultural societies (Chap. XI, Article 141].

It further specified that all courts are supervised by the Supreme Court. The judges of the Supreme Court of the USSR were elected by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for 5 years. The Supreme Courts of the Soviet Republics were elected by their Supreme Soviets for 5 years. Territorial and regional courts were elected by their Soviets for 5 years. And the lowest-ranking Peoples Courts were elected by the citizens of their districts for 3 years. This method of appointment leaves no way to form a or maintain a professional judiciary. It therefore also prevents law from becoming an accumulation of records of observable experience.

In 1993, the Soviet constitution was replaced by Constitution of the Russian Federation. This was drafted by an 800 person constitutional convention, after much renegotiation. President Yeltsin submitted it to a national referendum for approval. The referendum was held on December 12. It came into force on the day of the vote. One of the provisions was that future amendments would also require a national referendum.

The Federal Constitution embodied Gorbachev’s reforms and Yeltsin’s efforts to create a legal framework to enable Western firms to invest with a sense of legal security. It is described as similar to the constitution of France. It includes a long list of civil rights on 64 specific topics that are consistent with the UN Declaration on Human Rights. They include equality before the law of all nationalities/ethnicities, the right to vote, gender equality, the right to own property, the right to housing, freedom of speech and freedom of peaceful assembly. All of the practices the Soviet state had used to control and intimidate citizens are explicitly prohibited: secret trials, detention without trial, torture, censorship, spying (prohibited by guaranteeing a right to privacy) and taking property without a court procedure. The state is secular. There is no establishment of religion. The constitution removed the privileged position of the Communist party, provided for multi-party elections to legislative bodies and executive office. It very clearly provided for an independent judiciary with judges trained in law. Judicial appointments are permanent. It also limited the President to two consecutive four-year terms. A former president who had been out of office for 4 years could run again.

The parliament has two houses, the Duma and Council of the Federation. Half of the seats in the Duma are allocated through proportional representation party list voting. For a party to be represented, it must poll at least 7% of the votes. The other half is appointed through majority voting, where one deputy is elected for one constituency. The term is 5 years. The Council has one representative from the legislative body and one from the executive of each republic and other recognized administrative body in the federation.

But the door to a return to authoritarianism was not closed. Checks and balances are weak. Specific powers are assigned to the federal government and the federated states. The federal government alone has jurisdiction over defense and police. The only topic over which the republics alone have jurisdiction is property rights in land. Republics are obligated to assure that their laws are consistent with federal laws. Where there is a conflict, federal law prevails.

Complementarily, the electoral system is conceptualized as a competition between ideologies. The American system of political representation was deliberately designed to suppress what the Federalist Papers discuss as “the spirit of faction.” The Russian system promotes it. The number of votes a party receives determines the number of legislative seats it gets. Who actually occupies those seats is determined by the party leadership, not the voters. So parties have to differentiate themselves.

Yeltsin was supported by the Unity Party. In 2001, the Unity Party joined with the Fatherland—All Russia Party and the Agrarian Party of Russia. This formed the Russia United Party. Russia United describes itself as pragmatic (in the sense of practical) and concerned with getting legislation passed to suppress corruption, support business development, and encourage foreign investment and international trade. The party is also explicitly aligned with the Russian Orthodox church. Russia United has won a parliamentary majority in all elections since 2007. Voting majorities have run from 37.6% to 54.2%. Legislative majorities run from 59 to 76%. Electoral proportions translate into larger parliamentary proportions because the opposition is divided among about six smaller parties and some of these fail to get enough votes to have any seats at all.

In 2008, Putin was prevented by the constitutional term limits from running for president for third time. Dmitri Medvedev ran instead on the Russia United ticket. Medvedev is 7 years younger than Putin. They have been mutually supportive colleagues since early in their respective careers. Medvedev has and LLB and a JD from Leningrad State University. After getting his JD, Medvedev taught Civil and Roman Law at Leningrad until 1999.

Medvedev promised to appoint Putin Prime Minister if elected. He was elected. Putin was appointed PM. In 2012, Putin could run again. His campaign theme this time was unity, working together. He was elected and appointed Medvedev PM.

Medvedev has had a major role in the Russia United Party program of legal modernization. He was reputed in the middle years of his career to be more “liberal” than Putin, apparently in the sense that his values were more liberal-democratic. This is not apparent now. His support for the war in Ukraine has been strident and he has been much more prominent than Putin as the object of demonstrations against public corruption. In 2016 and 2017, his personal wealth was described in two reports of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It is estimated above $1.2 Bn. This is far more than he could accumulate legally.

Putin was reelected again in April of 2018. This time, his campaign theme shifted to Russian nationalism. There were protests and allegations of election fraud. In June 2020, Putin submitted a list of constitutional changes for an “All-Russian vote.” These consisted of several measures to significantly increase the power of the President in relation to the legislature and courts, a few provisions that seem to be reasonable evolutionary developments from the 1993 constitution, and provisions that seem intended to appeal to people who would vote for personal advantage even if it made no sense as a constitutional requirement. The presidential changes included increasing the term of office from 4 years to six, removing the word “consecutive” from the description of the number of terms, and enabling the president to dismiss the legislature, remove federal judges, and remove supreme court judges with the approval of Federation Council. Putin and Medvedev were excluded by name from being subject to the previous term limits. So they can run for two more six-year terms. Contrary to the stipulated equality of all citizens in the 1993 constitution, Russian is described as the language of the “state-forming people.” The constitution is placed “above” international law, nullifying a provision in the 1993 constitution that Russian law would observe rights normally recognized internationally even if the constitution did not list them. The personal benefits included requiring that the minimum wage should never be lower than the “subsistence minimum” and indexing pensions. A disproportionally large part of the member of the Russia United party is government workers and pensioners. Provisions also included requiring patriotic education in schools, declaring belief in god, and defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

Voting dates were from June 25 to July 1, 2020. The ballot did not allow separate votes for separate provisions. It was yes or no for the entire list. Turnout was nearly 68% of all registered voters. “Yes” votes were 79%. The way the vote was conducted and Putin’s wording in speaking about it set a precedent for ignoring the 1993 constitutional requirements for constitutional conventions and for a referendum to approve all amendments. William Pomeranz describes the amendments on the website of the Wilson Center. He says in part:

In reality, Putin’s amendments signify a return to the Soviet practice, where the nation’s highest law was largely ornamental and disconnected from its actual system of governance. Such an observation should not somehow be read as an unqualified endorsement of the 1993 constitution. Boris Yeltsin’s constitution was born out of violence and political exhaustion, ultimately retaining a strong pro-statist orientation that Putin has freely exploited during his two decades in power. Yet for all its faults, it also was the most liberal constitution in Russian history [23].

9. The second capitalist ideology

Recognizing the failure of the market, the Russian government turned to regulation. But it was still ideology, imposed top-down and apparently calculated to enhance Putin’s power while welcoming Western businesses and investment.

US, EU, and UN assistance with law-writing and judicial reforms helped improve the legal climate for business. The idea of property was articulated in the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, issued in four parts in 1994, 1996, 2001, and 2006. The court system was professionalized in a way that foreign businesses could have reasonable confidence in [24]. Civil society organizations expanded. Russia’s GDP increased at around 7% a year. But the laws did not try to reverse the pattern of oligarchic ownership or establish an agency outside presidential control to prosecute official corruption.

Russian law now recognizes all the corrupt and illegal practices defined in Western law: dummy corporations, fraud, embezzlement, extortion, kickbacks, sweetheart contracts, money-laundering, skimming, padding, breach of contract, collusion, extortion and theft. The difference is that Russian law also makes them much easier to get away with if you know the right people. Open bidding on contracts on the public record apparently does not occur.

Conflicts of interest are endemic. Large businesses are owned by one or a few individuals, not thousands of shareholders. The Russian Federation owns Russia’s subsoil resources. Rights to mine them are granted to private companies by license. So government officials can set prices higher or lower than what is elsewhere available in exchange for kickbacks. Or they can issue export or import licenses in exchange for kickbacks. There is enormous theft in government procurement. Billions have been paid to fake corporations for weapons that were delivered only on paper or contracts for work that was never done. The same applies to lumber. Russia’s vast forests are state owned. Permission to cut is by license. Most lumber is exported. Export is also by license. Observers seem to agree that the amount of illegal cutting and exporting is about 20% of total production.

The laws enable Putin and his network to hold power through corruption. Their basic method is to permit illegal transactions, presumably demanding a share, while ordering selective prosecution of co-conspirators who are insufficiently “loyal.” The courts are also used to remove opposition figures.

The economic ideology is joined to a new version of Imperial grandeur. Putin has framed his public appearances with conspicuous opulence in settings associated with the Czars. Add this to his manipulation of the oligarchs and the wealth of his own inner circle. Add the association with the Russian Orthodox Church. Add his identification of the survival of his regime with the survival of Russia itself. Add his military aggression. The parallels to the Czars and the Boyars are obvious.

Finally, the worldview that led Putin and his collaborators to believe that this public-facing imagery and rhetoric will succeed for them is apparently a picture of Western capitalism as no different from their own.

There is very good consensus that Putin and his colleagues have been surprised by the strength and determination of the Ukrainian resistance. They have also been surprised by the strength and depth of the support for it by the United States and NATO, among others. But they apparently continue to believe that this support will crumble if they can threaten sufficient destruction.

10. The EU, NATO and Ukraine

Ukraine declared its independence on September 24, 1991, 5 months after Lithuania. It, too, promptly tried to apply for accession to the EEC/EU. But there was much more opposition. Russia opposed it as EU aggression. EU members who opposed it cited more governmental corruption, weaker rule of law, and greater Soviet domination. In fact, the actions of Yeltsin’s government that created the Russian oligarchs had also created oligarchs in Ukraine and the networks were interlinked.

Overcoming oligarchic and pro-Russian delays, Ukraine approved the first version of its constitution in 1994. It provides for a long list of recognized human rights, an independent professional judiciary headed by a constitutional court that elects its own chairman, a president elected by universal suffrage, and a unicameral 450 member parliament. The entire parliament is elected every 5 years. The majority coalition in parliament nominates a prime minister. The president appoints the prime minister, and the parliament controls the cabinet appointees. Apparently responding to Russian corruption, it is much clearer than the 1993 Russian constitution about prohibiting legislators from engaging in any sort of business activity while in office.

In 2018, Mathew Rojansky and Mikhail Minakov reviewed Ukraine’s political struggle:

Through the 1990s, the country’s political system developed along two parallel paths combining a liberal democratic facade with post-Soviet oligarch-controlled distribution of power and resources. The contradictions between these two dimensions of Ukraine’s politics yielded 2 revolutionary cycles, spanning roughly 1992 to 2004 and 2005 to 2014. During each of these cycles a period of popularly supported democratic reforms was soon displaced by simulated democracy driven essentially by oligarchs competition and then, later, by authoritarian consolidation, resulting in civic protests and eventual regime change, resetting the cycle ([25], p. 1).

The changes supporting authoritarianism and corruption involved strengthening the President, weakening the legislature, weakening local government, corrupting the constitutional court, and turning the constitution into a Soviet-style facade. The counter-changes after the two popular uprisings involved weakening the president, increasing the powers of the Prime Minister and the legislature, strengthening the constitution, and prosecuting corruption. The present war is a militarized and internationalized continuation of the same cycle.

In 2013, the EU offered Ukraine an association agreement. It had been worked out over many months with a Ukrainian delegation. This is not an accession agreement, but it starts a process that can lead to one. Viktor Yanukovych was President. He refused to sign it. Supporters of accession then took to the streets in the “Euromaidan protests,” also called the “Revolution of Dignity,” in opposition to Russian influence and corruption. Special police responded with force. Many were killed and injured. On February 21, 2014, Yanukovych announced that he had an agreement with the opposition and drove to Russia. The next day, the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him and set new elections. Constitutional changes shifted power back to the parliament. The elections returned Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko signed the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and began Ukraine’s military action against Russian-backed separatists in Donbas. Russia occupied Crimea. In 2019, a Ukrainian court convicted Yanukovych in absentia of treason.

Poroshenko ran for reelection. Zelensky ran against him. Poroshenko had become involved in corruption involving military procurement. Zelensky focused on it and won. Zelensky’s anti-corruption record has been solid. This includes not caving into President Trump’s effort to hold up US military assistance until Zelensky provided something incriminating on President Biden stemming from his son Hunter Biden’s previous activity on the board of the oligarch-owned Ukrainian energy company Burisma, true or not.

In 2014, responding to IMF and European Commission requirements, Ukraine established an anti-corruption court and an independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) to investigate governmental corruption. They have taken numerous actions against oligarchs and senior officials. In May 2023, they announced the arrests of the Mayor of Odessa for embezzlement and the President of the Supreme court for bribery. Charges against more judges are expected.

EU interest in admitting Ukraine has increased as cooperation between the EU and Russia has deteriorated. On February 28, 2022, 4 days after the Russian army invaded, President Zelensky signed the application for accession. On June 23, 2022, the European Commission recommended that the European Council grant Ukraine candidate status. There is still a long way from this to membership, but every day the adjustments toward it are infusing the empirical democracy of the Marshall Plan into Ukrainian society. On December 14, 2022, the Ukrainian Parliament adopted a package of laws intended to meet all the remaining requirements for EU membership.

Ukraine is engaged in the same kind of decentralized learning process with NATO. Between the time of Russia’s encroachments in 2014 and its invasion in 2022, the US by itself provided Ukraine $3.2 Bn in military training and equipment, notwithstanding NATO’s hesitation and President Trump’s nationally embarrassing infatuation with Putin. Since the invasion, additional US aid and training has been valued at over $30 Bn. Although no other NATO country has contributed as much in absolute terms, several have contributed much more in proportion to their own national budgets.

The equipment being provided is increasingly NATO-standard. This requires additional training. Training involves altering battle tactics and organizations. So the effect is that even without being in NATO by treaty, Ukraine is integrating in practice. NATO knowledge and practices are propagating eastward.

Putin’s attack on Ukraine makes sense for him geopolitically. If Ukraine joins the EU and NATO, Belarus will be in a good geographical position to follow it. Cross-border links with Ukraine will enable government based on empiricism and democracy to continue to spread east. On the other hand, if Russia can absorb Ukraine, Belarus will be trapped between them, and Russian domination will be secured there as well. Moldova will be easily overwhelmed. Putin could thereby restore authoritian domination to a large part of the Czars’ empire.

11. Conclusion

Through his crimes and abuses so far, Putin has staked his life on making his rebuilt Russian authoritarianism permanent. If this analysis is right, he will fail for two main reasons. First, because Ukraine will win the war and join the EU and NATO. Second, because authoritarianism is self-destructive. The ideologies that provide its justification are empirically empty facades covering arbitrary and self-serving action. They undermine essential institutions internally. They generate isolation and opposition externally.

Russia has to transition to empirical democracy. Since the necessary changes are now well established in international agreements, it cannot make them in isolation. The alternative is to conform to the EU acquis while engaging in the established consultative process.

Russia’s information control now is what the militarized iron curtain was for the Soviet Union. It protects Russian authoritarianism by preventing interactions with people and organizations in the democracies. When it is breached, Russians who have never experienced empirical democracy will interact with others who live it. Ideology will face facts.

The fact that liberal democracy has to be empirical democracy is both a weakness and a strength. The weakness is that it cannot be reduced to or summarized in any ideology-like scheme. It requires factual knowledge of a wide range of proven governmental solutions to practical problems of production and allocation. So it has to spread by the decentralized transfer of knowledge from legislature to legislature, tax office to tax office, anti-corruption court to anti-corruption court, agricultural cooperative to agricultural cooperative, air-pollution agency to air-pollution agency, and so on. The strength, however, is that once such a system of decentralized, participatory organizations is created, each one harnesses the universal principle of reciprocity so that in all these diverse activities, whatever rules and judgments they come up with will be based on facts and answerable to the public interest. This is how empirical democracy creates wealth and improves welfare.