Crafting Democracy: How Novgorod Has Coped with Rapid Social Change

The word ""democracy"" has, for better or worse, morphed into a monolithic term, often defined through the political lens of the West, writes Petro (Russian Foreign Policy: From Empire to Nature-State), a political science professor at the University of Rhode Island. In this prescient look at the evolution of democracy in the Russian province of Novgorod, Petro challenges the conventional wisdom of how Russia's democracy went wrong with a hopeful, if somewhat dry, survey of a region that seems to have gotten it right. Novgorod's success, Petro argues, is rooted both in its pre-Soviet history as a flourishing center of trade and culture and in its ""active civic infrastructure,"" which grew in the 1990s as local businesses and civic and cultural institutions worked to help Novgorod achieve financial autonomy from Moscow. Novgorod's audacious and pragmatic governor Mikhail Prusak led the charge and shepherded the province toward a status of ""consolidated democracy"" by encouraging the use of cultural symbols such as the church and other antiquated institutions that held weight during Novgorod's medieval heyday. (An example is Novgorod's progressive newspaper Veche, which is named after the council that governed the province during the Middle Ages.) Such a combination of old and new, Petro claims, allowed for progress without alienating the population and created an atmosphere of organic pluralism. Amid this didactic analysis of democratic models, Petro offers a fresh template for the future, suggesting that, at a time when the exportation of democracy is being debated for its efficacy, new ways to make democracy work--even in the darkest corners of the world--are not only necessary, but possible.