Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 9 -- A majority of
Russians consider that Russia is living through “the most democratic period in
its history” and that “Vladimir Putin is the most democratic ruler” their
country has ever had, according to results of a new survey conducted by the
Public Opinion Foundation.
In second place in terms of
democracy, in the estimation of Russians, was the period of Leonid Brezhnev’s
rule, with the periods of rule by Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Dmitry
Medvedev trailing, with seven percent, three percent, and one percent
respectively, a pattern that Valery Vyzhutovich says needs to be explained (politcom.ru/18162.html).
There are a variety of reasons for
this somewhat unexpected set of responses, the commentator says. Russians do not have a single definition of
democracy or a single assessment of its value. Sixty-two percent say it is
important, but 16 percent say it isn’t. “For 43 percent, democracy is ‘glasnost,’
‘freedom of speech,’ ‘free elections,’ and ‘observation of human rights.’
But only 12 percent of Russians say that
democracy involves “the participation of the people in the administration of
the country.”
Asked
whether there is enough democracy in Russia today, “a third of the respondents,”
Vyzhutovich says, say that there is as much as necessary, 22 percent say there
isn’t enough, and one in ten says that “there is too much” democracy in
Russia. Another 33 percent say it is
difficult to say whether there is enough or not.
Such answers indicate, he continues,
that when Russians rate their leaders in terms of democracy, they are in fact “subconsciously
answering a different questions; who of the named Rsusian leaders is the most
sympathetic?” That of course explains the evaluation of Putin given his high
standing in the polls. But explaining Brezhnev requires taking nostalgia into
account.
And that nostalgia among Russians
today is based on “false memories.” Russians remember that sausage was cheap
but they don’t remember that there was no sausage. They remember that they
could go to Crimea for a summer break, but they don’t remember how long they
had to wait while living in communal apartments.
As
Vyzhutovich notes, “a special feature of false memories” is that idealized
memories about one part of life “when ‘lines were shorter,’ ‘ice cream more tasty,’
and ‘girls more kissable’ are all too often “translated into assessments of the
political system. In this case, to the Soviet one.”
The
idealization of that system is now going one “from top to bottom,” the
commentators says. The government “with the help of the media” and the citizenry
“each from its one side is creating ‘a happy past,’ in place of ‘a happy
future,’ which was promised but which never came.”
In
place of Andropov who persecuted dissidents is, in the presentation of one
media series, “an Andropov who writes poetry. There was no Andropov who
practiced punitive psychiatry as a means to cure people who thought
differently; instead, there was an Andropov who attempted to establish order
and discipline.”
“There
was no Andropov who together with his comrades in the Politbur sent tanks to
crush the ‘Prague spring’ and dispatched ‘a limited military contingent’ to
Afghanistan; there was instead, an Andropov who was concerned about corruption
in the Soviet elites,” Vyzhutovich says.
The
same thing has happened in the case of Brezhnev, he continues, with Russians
now forgetting much of what he did and saying instead to themselves that the
general secretary was “a normal guy. He lived and allowed others to live. The
country under his rule didn’t know grief.”
“People
evaluate leaders of the past not according to historical measures but through
the prism of present-day hopes, disappointments and fears,” Vyzhutovich says.
The events of the 1990s left some winners in the economic game but many more
losers. And as a result, today’s “mass consciousness puts on the pedestal the
rulers of former times, even those like Brezhnev.”
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