The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Young Post-Imperial Democracies: A Comparison of Weimar Germany and Post-Soviet Russia

This paper seeks to explore the conditions under which a democracy collapses. It is enshrined in the recent historical turn in democratisation studies and explores the multi-layered processes that contribute to democratic regression and authoritarian ascent. This atemporal comparison allows us to reconsider factors for democratic retreat focusing on the citizenry. Since socio-economic and institutional explanations seem insufficient for explaining democracy’s retreat in both cases, a different path will be explored here. The emphasis is on the contributions that citizens made to political developments. Particular attention will be given to political youth movements, key political actors in times of regime crisis and documents produced by these organisations will be the primary empirical base for this paper. A number of shared functional equivalences are helpful to understand how these democracies collapsed: (1) initial enthusiasm of citizens about the arrival of democracy changed in both cases over the following 15 years. (2) discredited democratic parties failed to convince the electorate. (3) prominence of nationalist arguments for political mobilisation, including different forms of scapegoating or parts of the population who lived abroad fuelling ideas of national expansion. However, consequences of democratic breakdown differ across cases: (1) nostalgia, attempts to overcome the experience of national humiliation linked with regime collapse, had very different political implications. (2) the impact of the economic downturn on the citizenry and political consequences differed starkly in both cases (3) the development of civil society differs starkly in these two cases. Whereas a very active civil society contributed to the rise of extremisms in the Weimar Republic, civil society in Russia has been regarded as weak. The causal complexity that can be disentangled by studying the two cases refines our understanding of the role played by ordinary citizens in moments during which political systems change decisively.