Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 17 – At the end
of Soviet times, some commentators suggested that the USSR was becoming like “Upper
Volta with Missiles.” Now, a Russian commentator suggests that the situation is
becoming even worse: Russia is retreating into the values of the past while
retaining its nuclear weapons and thus becoming even more dangerous than it
appears.
Indeed, Aleksandr Rubtsov writes in “Novaya
gazeta,” Russia is growing within itself “something like the Islamic State,” based
“on an imitation of Orthodoxy, political obscurantism, and specially construed ‘nationality’
… Russia could become a much greater problem for itself and the world than even
the worst predictions suggest” (novayagazeta.ru/comments/69948.html).
This is recent development, he
continues. “Until 2011, the lexicon of the authorities was filled with terms of
the future: modernization” and the like. But “the reset happened when the
command was given to “’turn about’” and now those in power talk about “spiritual
values, identity, and uniqueness” and other terms which are “accessories” of
traditionalism.
“Creativity
has become a curse word, the brain drain an organized process and the turn to
the East repeats the turnaround of Primakov’s plane over the Atlantic,” Rubtsov
says. What is striking is that this has happened without a change of regime,
something unprecedented in other countries.
The new
ideology is quite simple, he says. “We are heirs of a history so glorious that
there is nothing we must do. The work of the nation is to blindly be proud of the
achievements of our ancestors, military and spiritual.” In sum, the history of Russia is being drawn
on like the reserves of gas and oil, the supplies of which are being used up
with nothing new built.
The
official “canonization of myths” is not teaching people to love the Motherland,
Rubtsov continues. It is teaching them to love the television. “The cult of the
past without criticism of meanings and sources promotes an uncritical attitude
toward the present,” and “the militarization of history” becomes the basis for
ignoring all shortcomings now.
In this
way, Russians are being transformed into a people who have “no place in the
future.” They are simply involved in the
redistribution of whatever was or is but not in the production of something
new, and to get more things, they must take more things, a most dangerous
linkage.
The
failures in economics that this will inevitably produce will lead to new
conflicts in the ideological sphere – “Mount Athos against the I-phone” – and to
“the canalization of aggression” both outside the country and within. That in
turn will lead to the imitation of “small victorious campaigns in the framework
of strategic defeat.”
But
because this system with all its archaic features possessed the most modern
weapons, it is far more dangerous than any archaic system has been before. And
as it moves to destroy itself, it is entirely possible that it will destroy far
more than that.
“Now, the
conflict of fundamentalism with the contemporary world is becoming a sign of
the times,” Rubtsov says, with “terror, the threat of nuclear blackmail, and
refugees. And here Russia in a gigantic miniature is beginning to reproduce within
itself this conflict with the murky archaic,” that has somehow survived and
reemerged from a former time.
Emblematic
of that conflict and an indication of why Russia is becoming so dangerous to itself
and the world is the failure of the Russian authorities to punish the
fundamentalists who have vandalized art. When a few hooligans do things like
that, it is one thing; but when the state supports them in this way, it is
quite another.
That is
something Russians and the world should reflect upon, Rubtsov suggests.
No comments:
Post a Comment