Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 8 – In any
country as large and diverse and with such a complicated history as Russia,
there are going to be some unusual people with unusual and perverse ideas. Today, Lenta journalist Mikhail Karpov
interviewed one of them, Sergey Taraskin, who styles himself “the acting
president of the USSR” (lenta.ru/articles/2018/02/08/psycho_war/).
Taraskin, a former Soviet officer,
has been pestering journalists for the last eight years, Karpov says, inviting
them to meetings where they can here his unique version of history and his
plans for the restoration of the USSR in place of what he calls “the occupying
power of the Russian Federation.”
Most people simply ignore Taraskin’s
appeals; but Karpov says he and his news agency decided to see what the man and
his followers are about. What he saw and
heard, he said, left him first with a vision of the future straight out of Soviet
fantasies but then with a sense that doctors from a psychiatric hospital should
be called in.
Speaking to a group of about 60
followers in a hall in Moscow, Taraskin talked about the “dawn of a new USSR,
which as it turns out, he did not think had ceased its existence,” Karpov says.
(To pay for the hall, his followers sold a brochure entitled “Defense of the USSR
Citizen” for 500 rubles (8.50 US dollars).)
Taraskin said he began his campaign
to restore the USSR or more precisely to get people to realize that it had
never ceased to exist on January 25, 2010, when he made a declaration in a Moscow
district court that he “as an officer of the USSR took upon himself
responsibility for [the country] after the desertion of the supreme commander
who had been Mikhail Gorbachev.”
“What have we been able to achieve
over this period?” he asked rhetorically. “When this information first
appeared, naturally no one had thought about it. Then people appeared who found
in this something interesting and step by step it won over their minds.” To
explain why, Taraskin gave his version of Russian history, one not found
anywhere else.
The acting president insisted that
the 1917 revolution should “in no case be called the Great Russian one because not
a single Russian participated in it. It took place because of the actions of
special organs of foreign states.” From
this it follows, “there was no civil war, there was [only] foreign
intervention.”
“In general,” he continued, “everything was bad until Joseph
Stalin came and directed the situation ‘in a positive direction’ and stopped
the evil doer Trotsky-Bronstein who intended to throw Russia into the furnace
of a planet-wide revolutionary process.”
Stalin then won World War II but he was never able to achieve his full
potential.
After
the war, foreign powers continued to work to undermine and dismember Russia.
They placed their hopes in Yury Andropov, Taraskin said; but the former KGB leader
was too ill to achieve all of their plans.
But then Gorbachev and Yeltsin carried it out, helping others to destroy
the USSR.
At
the same time, Karpov continues, Taraskin insisted that Yeltsin was never
properly president of the Russian Federation because he simply assumed that the
Russian Federation was the direction continuation of the RSFSR. But there is no
basis for that idea, the acting president declared. And Yeltsin helped the foreigners
take away all of Russia’s wealth.
According
to Taraskin, there were three pairs of traitors in Russia over the last
century: Kerensky and Lenin in 1917, Yeltsin and Gorbachev in the 1990s, and
Putin and Medvedev now. “He noted that
four of these six had studied law at St. Petersburg State University,” a hotbed
of dangerous Western radicalism in his mind.
Taraskin
believes his moment has come, Karpov says, because of the sanctions policy of
the United States. Only by declaring the return of the USSR can those accused
of having stolen from the country return to Russia and be protected from the depradations
of the US and other Western powers.
Over
the last eight years, the acting president said, “we have revived the theme of
the USSR out of oblivion … and if you look around, then you’ll see that now a
significant part of the media space in the Internet is devoted to the theme of
the USSR,” to the kind of traditional way of life Stalin promoted and
celebrated.
Taraskin
made many other comments – he rejected Marxism, socialism and anti-Semitism, he
supported direct action by workers against criminals, and he urged that the
state be so constituted that all people in it can have the chance to rule.
He is clearly mad, but his words and
Karpov’s story are a reminder of the ways in which individuals subjected to a barrage
of propaganda re-arrange things in their own minds in ways that their authors
never intended. That is, most of
Taraskin’s ideas have some connection with those of Vladimir Putin even if they
are hyperbolically overstated.
Indeed, there are probably many more
Taraskins out there; and they may matter more than those less extreme may imagine.
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