Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 12 – Many
commentators suggest that what Vladimir Putin is doing is restoring Sovietism,
but they are mistaken, Aleksandr Skobov says. What is occurring the final
triumph of the ideas of what has been called “the Russian Party” which existed
within the KGB and the Komsomol in late Soviet times (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=57D5220202964).
The Moscow commentator’s observation
in this regard was prompted by a remark Yevgeny Ikhlov made in a recent
article. Ikhlov argued that “the
communist restoration did not happen because instead of moves toward revanchist
communism, [Russia] moved in the direction of fascism” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=57D5220202964).
“In 2000,” Ikhlov continued, “came
to power an intra-soviet counter-elite, the very same ‘Russian party’ from the
Komsomol and KGB about which historian Nikolay Mitrokhin has written, It should
have won in 1986-87, but Gorbachev, Yakovlev, Sakharov and Yeltsin gave
[Russia] 14 more years just as Weimar secured 14 years between the kaiser and
Hitler.”
Skobov says Ikhlov’s
comment “shows precisely how pathetic and inadequate any suggestion that the
Putin system is ‘a revenge of sovietism’” because in fact the the KGB and
Komsomol-organized “Russian Party” was really about because it was never “a
party of communist fundamentalism” with “a cult of ascetic anti-bourgeois
attitudes.”
Instead, the ideology of the Russian
Party was a synthesis of Stalinism with good old fashioned pre-Soviet
imperial-monarchist nationalism” which dispensed with all that was genuinely
communist. Skobov argues that “Stalin himself went along this path, but it was
completed only by the ‘great’ Prokhanov.”
The Russian Party’s ideology was “in
the first instance an ideology of state worship.” It had nothing against social
inequality and was only awaiting its time to come out. Consequently it is “no accident” that it was
the KGB and the Komsomol nomenklatura whose members were the first to engage in
primitive capitalist accumulation after the end of communism.
As for its “anti-bourgeois” quality,
Skobov continues, this was hardly the anti-bourgeois attitudes of communisms
but rather “classical feudal anti-bourgeois” views. And now under Putin one can see all “the
ornaments” of this set of attitudes: “nationalism, xenophobia, aggressive
anti-Westernism and ‘third empire’ messianism, religious obscurantism and so
on.”
The Russian Party was and is “a
party of ‘authoritarian capitalism,’ which conservative statists oppose to the Western
liberal model” and believe can promote “’authoritarian modernization.’” Many deluded people supported this idea until
the Russian Party “threw off its mask” and revealed its Stalinist and fascist
nature a few years ago.
“Today we observe,” Skobov
continues, “the drama of the completion of the most grandiose authoritarian-modernization
experiment in history. It is ending in just the same way all such experiments
end by a return to the archaic past. It is time in fact to say there will not
be any authoritarian modernizations.”
Many who don’t like what the Russian
Party is doing think that it is promoting the return of Sovietism, having
completely failed to see that the Russian Party has no interest in that but
rather in restoring “the monarchy of Alexander III and Nicholas I. This is a
revenge not of Lenin and Trotsky but of Uvarov, Pobedonostsev, Katkov, and
Konstantin Leontyev.”
Liberals on the right keep fighting
the wrong enemy, the return of communism, even as they are held by the throw by
“traditional Russian autocracy.”
Communism at least, however mistaken and destined to fail, at least was “a
modernization project, an attempt at the realization of the most radical variant
of humanist and enlightenment ideology.”
Having dispensed with all this, the
Russian Party in its victorious Putin form has nothing left but “ordinary
fascism, which is an extreme form of feudal traditionalist reaction. That is
what the KGB-Komsomol ‘Russian Party’ has been putting in place.”
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