Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 6 – The alliance of
reformers in the CPSU nomenklatura and Soviet liberals who were prepared for
various reasons to cooperate with them led to the defeat of the dissidents who
rejected the system as a whole and condemned Russia again to suffer once again
a return “to the ideology of Russian imperialism and authoritarianism,” Mikhail
Berg says.
Now, the regime no longer needs the
liberals as the murder of Boris Nemtsov shows, the Moscow commentator says, and
that in turn means that “the transition from the fictional democracy [of the
last decades] to a real dictatorship [of the kind now on offer] … began not
today but a quarter of a century ago” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=54F82908AA247).
To understand what is happening now,
Berg suggests, one must look back to the first years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s
perestroika. The political struggles of
that time “took place under the sign of a struggle of two in part real and in
part fictional forces: reformers and conservatives, democrats and communists,
liberals and retrogrades.”
The
reality of these conflicts was “above all, rhetorical,” about the words people
used and thus the limits of the permissible, but the fictional nature of them
was that behind what seemed to be serious and irreconcilable differences were “concealed
various positions of one and the same Soviet nomenklatura which as a result
turned out to be the main beneficiary of reforms.”
“The
victory of the reformers from the nomenklatura was secured not only by their
genuinely dominating positions among the authorities of the transitional period
but also by their main ally – the Soviet liberals,” Berg says. The latter
provided the language of the times that “the party-Komsomol and KGB
nomenklatura couldn’t come up with on its own.”
For
their assistance in this regard, he continues, the Soviet liberals were “generously
compensated.” They were given much of
the mass media, new and old, “the most prestigious positions in the academic
(humanitarian) sector and also preferences in business connected or not
connected with the ideological sphere.”
Some
might see this as inevitable, but there were other possible outcomes. Had they
been followed, the situation in Russia today would be very different.
At the end of Soviet times, Berg says, the
Soviet liberals were opposed by those “whom one may call dissidents,” and the
opposition of these two groups reflected “a struggle between those who even
before perestroika agreed to cooperate with the Soviet system … and those who
opposed the Soviet system because they did not consider any cooperation with it
possible.”
That division existed throughout the USSR and the Soviet
bloc. In those places “where the dissidents won politically important
positions, reforms to various degrees succeeded.” But where the dissidents were
forced out by the nomenklatura-liberal alliance, the reforms announced proved
half-hearted and ultimately failed.
While it is obvious that the liberals enjoyed enormous
advantages in this situation, including their alliance with the nomenklatura
reformers, their victory in the Russian Federation was not a certainty as the
victory of the dissidents and non-conformists in other countries proves, the
commentator argues.
That is because this struggle was not only about real
political power based on position but also about ideology, and there, the
dissidents and the non-conformists had real advantages. In many parts of
Eastern Europe, the ideas of dissident minorities triumphed. But “in Russia
this did not happen.”
“The victory of Yeltsin, a liberal but highly placed
representative of the party nomenklatura and also his reliance not on
non-conformists but on Soviet liberals … was already a sign of the choice of [that]
future with which we have to deal now,” Berg says.
Many people missed this because it seemed to them that “the
victory of Yeltsin was a victory of reformers over communist retrogrades. In
fact, this was a victory of the conformists over the non-conformists, and everything
else was a slow repetition of what is still the only possible scenario for
liberal reforms” here: the borrowing of Western technology “under liberal
phraseology and then the inevitable return to the ideas and practice of Russian
imperial values.”
“In this sense, the rise of Putin was made inevitable
most of all as a result of the fictional political reforms (according to the
version of Soviet liberals), the creation of an imitation of democratic
institutions, privatization, and the principle of the division of power.” In the
end, that meant the triumph of the reformist part of the Soviet nomenklatura
but not its displacement.
According to Berg, the murder of Nemtsov is a sign that
the situation has reached the point where those in power no longer need the
liberals, where “the process of redistribution of means and power has been
completed” and where the former allies of the nomenklatura are targeted for
removal.
Thus, he concludes, “the transition from fictional
democracy to a real dictatorship was in large measure fated to happen, but this
turn of events began not today but a quarter of a century ago.”
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