Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 5 – Given the nature
of Vladimir Putin’s regime and reflecting the Kremlin leader’s own
understanding, “Russians do not exist,” émigré writer Boris Shumyatsky says.
Instead, “people from the former Soviet Union are united [by] their experience
of life under a dictatorship.”
In a comment to “Die Zeit” this
week, the writer argues that one should not equate “the term ‘Russian’ with the
people of the Russian Federation” because under Putin, “there are no real
citizens there” who can “exert influence on those who take the decisions” and
thus “’Russians’ don’t exist as subjects of political or social life” (nr2.ru/policy/492391.html).
“The local population does not have
access to honest elections,” he continued; instead, “the Putin system exists
and acts on its own independently of what citizens think about it.” In short, “as
has happened many times in Russian history, the state has liquidated the
citizens as a subject of politics.”
Consequently, it isn’t possible to
say “what the Russian in fact wants” from it, Shumyatsky says. Certainly, sociological
surveys and polls do not provide a measure of Russian public opinion because
that is something which “no longer exists.”
“For Vladimir Putin who is
conducting a war in the name of Russians, this is in no way about ethnic
membership, language or origin.” Instead, “Putin is seeking people who are
comfortable under the conditions of a dictatorship or who pine for those ...
Everyone who is nostalgic about the Soviet Union are for [Putin] good Russians.”
Shumyatsky then suggests that those in Germany
who suffer from nostalgia for the east are, “from this point of view, also
Putin Russians.” It also follows by
Putin’s logic, he says, that “anyone who participates in a demonstration in
Russia,” anyone who organizes a trade union, and anyone who seeks to defend
himself against Putin’s capitalism is “not
a good Russian.”
The Russian today under Putin is “a
sov,” the writer continues. Thus, “when Putin says ‘Russian,’ he has ‘a sov’ in
mind, a Sviet man who lived through the greatest catastrophe of the past century.”
Shumatsky said he was especially
unhappy with Germans and others in the West who do not understand this. “For
some, Putin is a counterweight to an unsympathetic US ... Through the prism of
anti-imperialism, Putinist militarism doesn’t look so serious,” to such people
who believe that unless one is a militarist superpower, one can’t stand up to
Washington.
At the other extreme of Putin
apologists in the West, he says, are those who dream of “Putin’s ‘conservative
revolution’” and think that perhaps the Russian leader will be in a position to
restore Prussia. They see him as the incarnation of “the strong hand” who can
also stand up to Brussels.
“The big country in the East,”
Shumyatsky continues, “is thus given the role of a place where Germans can
manifest there dislike of free market democracy and the boring features of a
legal state. To these romantics, Russia
seems a fabulous country” which won’t bow to others, and in addition, it has a
leader who “even speaks German.”
But those on the left who support Putin
are especially dangerous, the Russian émigré writer says. “Their love for Russia bears almost a demonstratively
fascist-like character.”
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