Voluntary association in Russia and Estonia: From the third sector to civil societ

In this dissertation, civil societies in Russia and Estonia are analyzed in the context of the evolution of their state-society relations. The focus of attention is on voluntary association, which is seen as the most characteristic activity of civil society. The main question is: Given the bleak history of civil society in Russia and Estonia, how is one to explain its forceful emergence in both countries at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s? The proposed answer lies in the history of association. The genesis of civil society is sought in the organized voluntary association that gained popularity in Russia and Estonia in the nineteenth century. It will be shown how voluntary association carved for itself a niche--the third sector--between the state and society. Under Communism, the third sector degenerated into a secondary public sphere that was dependent on the party-state and subservient to its ideological ambitions.;To make sense of the evolution of voluntary association in the late Communist and post-Communist conditions, a distinction is introduced between a civil society and a liberal democratic civil society. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist leadership had no intention of establishing a civil society; instead, it erected a sphere of restrained autonomy for voluntarism, a surrogate civil society. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, democratic leaders in both Russia and Estonia expressed their support for the idea of a liberal democratic civil society. In the Western experience such a civil society has appeared in two major forms, called the "open civil society" and the "cooptive civil society" in this presentation. Which one of the models has the most appeal in the countries under observation? During the period between 1991 and 1995, Russia and Estonia were preoccupied with securing proper conditions for the functioning of democracy and a market economy. Toward the end of the period, Estonia had made more progress than Russia in establishing a liberal democratic civil society.