This is the text I was refering to:
Waiting for a Democratic Left
A Dangerous Gap in Russia’s Political Spectrum
PONARS Policy Memo No. 257
Dmitri Glinski Institute for World Economy and International Relations October 2002
A decade ago, the politically entrepreneurial vanguard of Moscow's ruling elite—the so-called reformers—came to power under a slogan that was attractive by virtue of its simplicity: transforming Russia into a “normal country.” “Normal” meant a Western-oriented market democracy with higher living standards than existed under the Soviet Union. Since then, Russia has survived multiple crises and the transition to another presidency, but the record of advancement toward the conventional standard of normalcy has been mixed, even according to the most favorable accounts. For the overwhelming majority of Russians and most of the country's industries, the costs of transition to normalcy still clearly outweigh the benefits from economic, political, cultural, and psychological viewpoints. Under these circumstances, external certification of Russia as a normal country by Western partners has become a cornerstone of the system's legitimacy, given that such certification from the majority of Russians themselves has not been forthcoming.
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National Humiliation and the Peripheralization of Russia
It is generally assumed that consistent internationalism is an indispensable ingredient in any left-of-center ideology (and, vice versa, that every nationalism is by definition conservative). The criterion of internationalism is stringently applied to newcomers by Westerners who, for understandable historical reasons, dominate the Socialist International and similar supranational avenues for left-of-center politics—never mind the fact that European socialist and social democratic parties themselves often deviate from this criterion under pressures from their own support base and domestic conservative rivals as well as from the realities of international balance-of-power politics (the recent elections in Germany are the latest case in point). Nevertheless, Russia's only force on the Left that is present in parliamentary and presidential politics—the Communist Party (KPRF), still the most numerous and popular party—fails even the declaratory test of internationalism that would qualify it as progressive by Western standards. In this regard, its record is tarnished by anti-Semitic statements made by a few of its prominent members in the past.
Yet, those Westerners who are justifiably repelled by these ugly excesses tend to neglect the larger underlying reality that connects the KPRF leaders with millions of voters, although anti-Semitism among the mass public has been generally low and the overwhelming majority of the KPRF supporters are preoccupied with economic problems rather than with the geopolitical ambitions of some of the party's ideologists. This underlying reality is the extent of national humiliation, dependency, and the loss of the basic characteristics of a developed industrial nation a loss experienced in daily life, not nearly compensated by the elite's effort to secure a symbolic position for itself in such councils as the G-8 and G-7. This feeling of marginalization and subordination to external forces, unprecedented in modern times, is a major factor that sets the new Russia apart both from its pre-1917 conditions and from other post-communist and post-Soviet states that did not experience such a drastic downgrading of their international status. Regardless of whether the type of national sentiment currently prevailing in Russia is seen as a progressive or a retarding phenomenon, confusing it with xenophobia and fascism is evidence either of inadequate analysis or of a Western-centric bias. And although some elements of a Weimar Germany−type of resentment and imperial nostalgia is also present in Russian society, it is more marginal and analytically distinct from the former.
Under such circumstances, it is unavoidable that any left-of-center party in present-day Russia relying on grass-roots electoral support is bound to be more nationalist than its European counterparts and more similar to left-of-center parties of the developing world, or “global periphery,” that historically have combined a social and economic agenda with the spirit of national liberation and an emphasis on state sovereignty. (It also helps to explain why the tiny social democratic party, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, seems to be permanently incapacitated by his foreign policy record, which is viewed as one-sidedly pro-Western, and hardly has any electoral future to speak of.) But recurrent efforts to build a left-of-center organization allowing for an element of constructive nationalism have been very difficult to sustain, as they met with intense hostility on the part of Russia’s ruling elite and elicited little sympathy on the part of Western social democrats and socialists.
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There is still room for non-governmental players in the West to redress some of the damage namely, by adopting a less exclusionary and more open-minded attitude to a handful of opposition groupings and individual actors on Russia's democratic left, regardless of their distinctively national features, and by giving them not some material support but a respectful hearing that is vital to opening up the space for non-violent, left-of-center politics in Russia. © 2002 5
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