"Rationally Understanding What Is Happening" - Interview with Georgi DERLUGYAN

"Rationally Understanding What Is Happening" — An Interview with Georgi Derluguian

The article, published in issue No. 1 (34), is devoted to a conversation with sociologist Georgi Derluguian — a native of Krasnodar, a graduate of Moscow State University, who received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton and now teaches at Northwestern University (USA). The interview represents an attempt at rational reflection on the processes taking place in the post-Soviet space and in the world as a whole, which the editors consider especially relevant for Armenians striving to organize their global community.

On Liberalism and Nationalism

Derluguian insists on a sociological rather than rhetorical approach to the analysis of ideologies. Key points of the section:

• Liberalism and nationalism are not independent forces but abstractions serving specific social groups at specific historical moments;
• Liberalism historically expressed the interests of capitalist elites who demanded a weakening of state intervention, while preserving for the state the functions of infrastructure and security;
• Nationalism is an ideology of defending "one's own" through various criteria of belonging, with a clear political program of creating a state coinciding with the settlement of an ethnic group;
• Historically, democratization does not smooth over but sharpens national conflicts, especially amid a weakening of state order;
• The formation of nations in the 19th century proceeded through three institutions: the army, universal education, and the national cult (monuments to poets, symbolism, emotional mobilization);
• Armenian nationalism was formed in line with general European processes of the second half of the 19th century, rather than as a unique phenomenon.

The author emphasizes that counterposing liberalism and nationalism as a mutually exclusive choice is an intellectual trap: successful democratizations in Eastern Europe (Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states) were simultaneously nationalist.

The Effectiveness of the State

The second thematic block is devoted to the nature of Soviet statehood and the post-Soviet crisis:

• The USSR is characterized as a "dictatorship of development," born of the defeat of the Russian Empire in the First World War and aimed at creating a military-industrial complex;
• Stalinist methods of industrialization are compared with other large-scale historical projects (the construction of St. Petersburg, the Suez and Panama canals), which allows the author to argue that there was no significantly more humane historical alternative;
• Perestroika is interpreted as the result of factional struggle within the Politburo, with the Karabakh movement appearing as an unforeseen local consequence of a campaign to weaken the nomenklatura apparatus;
• The post-Soviet period is characterized not by the overcoming but by the disintegration of the apparatus of power, which makes liberalism a utopian ideology in the absence of an effective bureaucratic machine;
• The key thesis: a successful market economy and democratization are impossible with a weak state, and weakness is measured not by the authoritarian or democratic nature of the regime, but by the infrastructural capacity of power (tax collection, control over crime).

The key conclusion of the interview is the necessity of abandoning false dichotomies and rhetorical disputes in favor of sober sociological analysis of historical possibilities — above all in the matter of recreating an effective state apparatus as a condition for any further political and economic transformations.