Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 7 – As this
week’s holidays show, the Kremlin suffers from an “unhealthy” divided
consciousness, unwilling to commit to defining the country as heir to the
Soviet Union or heir to Imperial Russia and thus sending out mixed messages that
are contrary to the country’s interests, according to Vladislav Inozemtsev, head
of the Civic Force Party.
In today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,”
Inozemtsev traces the varied celebrations of November 7 after 1991 and the
appearance of the alternative holiday of November 4 but argues that this
history reflects the unwillingness or inability of the Putin regime to choose
between the Russian Federation’s two very different pasts (www.ng.ru/politics/2012-11-07/2_soznanie.html).
The first post-Soviet and “democratic”
power in Russia regularly declared “its intention” to distance itself from and
repent of those things that the Bolsheviks had done, the activist
continues. However, that regime has been
succeeded by a regime of “former KGB officers” who have to try to ignore this
past altogether.
That change of focus helps to
explain the appearance of November 4 as
a special holiday, but the timing of its introduction, three days after Ukraine’s
Orange Revolution, reflected the new Russian rulers desire to send a message
that “any revolution is bad and even terrible, and any resistance to the
selfish intentions of the West good and hopeful.”
The new holiday also clearly was
intended, Inozemtsev insists, to send a message about “the unity of the people
with its elected autocrat and the founding of a new dynasty.”
But far more interesting has been
the attitude of Russia’s new rulers to November 7 and also “to the entire
Soviet inheritance.” They are closely connected with that past, having been
members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and even having written “dissertations
and scientific works on the role of the CPSU.”
Indeed, Inozemtsev points out, Vladimir Putin has “more
than once reiterated that the disintegration of the USSR was the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” and that the period of
Brezhnevite ‘stagnation’ [can be best] characterized as a time of the
successful development” of the country.
And how often have Putin and his
colleagues recalled Stalin, identifying him as the creator of a great state and
“’a super-effective manager,’” the activist continues. “Only D. Medvedev mentions about the reverse
side of this ‘effectiveness.’” And the Putin regime has showed itself prepared
to have the population but not the elite live like in Soviet times.
But there is a problem with all of
this, Inozemtsev says. “The USSR was and until the end of its days remained a
product of the October Revolution. Its
successes of the 1930s and then of the 1930s are owed above all to the fact
that [that revolution] destroyed former hierarchies and liberated the enormous
forces and talents of the people.”
The revolution demonstrated in
addition that “elites are not eternal and can be effectively replaced by others
no less professional and that it is relatively easy to find an alternative to
any failing regime.” This “Soviet lesson”
is not one that Russia’s current rulers for self-evident reasons want to teach
the population, Inozemtsev notes.
As a result, he continue, “in recent years,
practically each step of the Russian powers is characterized by an unhealthy
(let us call it that) divided consciousness.” On the one hand, “it speaks about
the continuation of the pre-revolutionary Russian traditions; but on the other,
it speaks about “the Soviet experience and its positive aspects.”
Moreover, “at one and the same time,
[the regime] recalls Stalin and Brezhnev but condemn any and all revolutions
and even more their ‘export.’” Ivan Ilin has been reburied in Russia, but “the
Kremlin wall remains a place of burial of the most terrible persecutors of
their own people.”
“All this,” Inozemtsev says, “speaks
of a complete loss of a political orientation, about the absence of any
ideology besides the banal striving to hold onto power, about the inability
(and lack of desire) to construct clear and understandable vectors of
development for the country and society.”
“It is time for the Russian powers
that be to define who they are, to specify whether they consider themselves the
heirs of Soviet or Imperial Russia.” If
that happens, Inozemtsev suggests, “much will become far clearer both to the
powers and be and to the people” over whom they rule.
On anniversaries of events like the
Bolshevik revolution, both the powers and the people should draw certain “lessons
of history even if some of these are not very acceptable” to one or
another. First of all, Inozemtsev says,
everyone needs to recognize that “all new passionate societies arise as a
result of revolutions uprising and radical changes of the direction of social
development.
Second, he argues, “the people have
the right to revolt against a government that is oppressing it. And third – and this he suggests everyone
needs to particularly remember – “revolutions involve force, blood and cruelty”
even if those who won subsequently try to present things differently.
From these three lessons, Inozemtsev
concludes, the following proposition follows: “to oppose revolutions is
senseless: the active minority which provokes them will always find supporters,
the passive majority which supports the powers that be will not come together
for the defense of the government.”
It is of course possible to delay
revolutions or make them softer. But “for
that, the powers must not ‘feed the fires of revolution’” by their actions, but
rather they must move ahead of where the population is heading. “However, few
have the intelligence and the will to do that” successfully.
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