Paul Goble
Staunton, December 17 – The Russian people and the
Russian powers that be have just passed through completely different 2016s, with
the one increasingly impoverished and suffering and the other ever more wealthy
and celebratory, cannot continue indefinitely without producing an explosion, Kalmyk
commentator Badma Byurchiyev comments.
“I don’t know whom state leaders are thinking about
when they assure us that ‘we are developing’” and make other remarks of that
kind, he says. But they should know what has happened before “when the
governing class … ceases to be political because it ceases to fulfill its
functions” (kavpolit.com/articles/itogi_goda_ot_nashego_stola-30424/).
As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his “The Ancien Regime
and Revolution,” feudalism collapsed when the gap between the rulers became so
wide and so obvious that those below were increasingly isolated and offended by
what their rulers said that was clearly not true. “What happened then is well known,” Byurichev
says.
Many may be tempted to recall that another ’17 is rapidly
approaching. “But,” he says, he doesn’t believe in the magical properties of
numbers and dates.” On the other hand,
“I know that in real space even parallel lines intersect and this means that
sooner or later the world of fakes and simulacra … must return to the hard
earth.”
“And the cheaper will be our holiday table,” the
Kavkazskaya politika commentator says, “the closer will be this clash.”
Byurichev draws this conclusion on the basis of a
comparison between the recent upbeat speeches by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry
Medvedev and the facts on the ground in his home republic, all of which suggest
that the reality of people’s lives there is very different and much worse than
the version of reality provided by the two Russian leaders.
Indeed, he says, the gap between the two is now so great
that it can be seen by everyone in Kalmykia. The wonder is that apparently it
can’t be seen or at least admitted in Moscow.
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