Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 7 – As the
anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union approaches, many people are
speculating on why the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe on the one hand have
made significant strides toward becoming part of the West with its democratic
norms when Russia has not.
The most typical explanations
include the view that the former viewed the events of 1989 and 1991 as national
victories and were thus more ready to exclude from power formally or informally
than was Russia many of whose residents viewed those years as defeats and found
themselves living under the rule of people who sprang from the CPSU and KGB.
But in a speech last week now been
posted on the Rufabula portal, Russian blogger Yegor Yershov points to what he
suggests is an underlying problem for Russia that might have been avoided and
that still can be addressed in some way: Moscow’s insistence that the Russian
Federation was and remains the legal successor to the USSR.
Yershov made that argument at a
December 3 conference in Podolsk on “The White Movement in the Discourses of
the Authorities and the Opposition” (rufabula.com/articles/2016/12/07/identities-war).
“Hardly anyone will deny that the
Baltic and East European coungtries have been able to overcome the communist
past, complete the democratic transit and become part of the Western world if
at its margins, but that the Russian Federation has not been able” to achieve
these things, the blogger says.
“Moreover,” he continues, “during
all the time of the existence of the Russian federation, the situation inside
the country has slowly but truly changed toward re-Sovietization, which has
become expecially marked after the Ukrainian events.” It is time to ask “why
did this happen?” and try to find an answer.
The reasons that this has happened,
Yershov says, have their roots in “the fatal errors which were committed after
August 1991, the chief among them was even not the lack of lustration and
restitution but the proclamation of the Russian Federation as the legal
successor of the USSR.”
That is because this not only had
legal implications but even more because it had consequences for the identities
of Russians and hence about their views of the future. It meant that Russians, unlike others, could
still say “we are Soviets” and that in rejecting communism, the post-Soviet
Russian leaders didn’t “consider it necessary to dismantle the Soviet identity.”
It must be remembered, Yershov says,
that “the bearer of a Soviet identity hardly was required to be attached to
Marxism-Leninism.” In fact, such individuals could consider Bolshevism “evil.”
But the Soviet Union for them remained theirs, its victory and its defeats
theirs as well.
“If the bearer of Soviet identity considers
himself an anti-communist, he de facto the
right to anti-communism only for Russians and for those peoples who in any case
cannot seriously threaten the Soviet world and are not subject from his point
of view to certain inclusion in the
Soviet world.”
But such identification has domestic
consequences as well: it means that its bearers cannot accept the idea tha the Soviet
system needed to be destroyed. At most, such people believe it needed only to
be “reformed.” That of course makes
further moves away from the Soviet past ever more difficult for Russians rather
than for others.
Yershov devotes the remainder of his
article to a discussion of the failure of alternative identities – regional,
tsarist, or, at least so far, the White Russian movement – and argues that only
by an identity like the one pushed by the last of these and its commitment to a
Constituent Assembly with no preconditions about its outcome.
Only by having such an open approach
can Russia hope to escape not only from the Soviet past but also from the
consequences of having mistakenly claimed to be the legal successor of the
USSR, he concludes.
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