Paul Goble
Staunton,
December 15 – Many people are inclined to blame whatever bad behavior they
observe among Russians as the product of the wild 1990s, Maksim Mirovich says;
but in fact, the way they act now is the product of seven ways in which the
Soviet system inflicted serious and long-lasting harm on their psyches (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5C14A65AE72BE).
First of all, the Russian blogger
says, the Soviet system taught people to avoid work because they were never able
to be interested in the results of their labors. No one was fired for doing bad work, and no
one was given more for doing good.
Consequently, Russians learned that there was no reason to work hard
because it wouldn’t benefit them.
When the Soviet system crashed, those
who accepted that principle most fully lost their positions, Mirovich says; and
consequently, in the years since, they have constantly spoken about how good
things were in the USSR when the state took care of you and how bad things were
in the 1990s when it no longer did.
Second, after the Bolsheviks seized power,
“for more than 70 years, citizens of the country were entirely and completely
excluded from participation in the administration of the state and lived like
slaves of the CPSU.” Russians became
used to that, and when the current powers that be resumed excluding them from
participation, most didn’t object too much.
Third, under the Soviets, Russians were
denied the right to own property and learned to hate the rich. Anything that
they did not in fact occupy, they learned to treat with complete contempt as
shown in how they treated the “public” spaces in and around communal apartments.
And anyone who had more than they did was viewed as an enemy by definition.
Fourth, because the Soviet system was so bleak
and because few had any prospects, many Russians turned to drink. That happened
not because of any Dulles plan or Western conspiracy but because the Soviet way
of life “drove people to drink.” And to
profit from this, the Soviet authorities made the situation worse by opening
alcohol stores everywhere.
What made this especially noxious,
Mirovich says, is that Russians drank not wine or beer but “in the best case”
vodka and in the worst all kinds of surrogates filled with poisons. And they
drank not in a measured way but in binges that made the impact of their alcoholism
worse than would otherwise have been the case.
Fifth, the Soviet authorities sowed hatred
within society not just against foreigners.
Anyone who did not fit into the model of “the Soviet man” was an enemy
and treated in the worst possible way not just by the authorities but by his
fellow Soviet citizens. This allowed the
regime to keep power by ensuring that the population was divided against
itself.
Sixth, Mirovich continues, the Soviet
system encouraged Russians to believe that their country was surrounded by
enemies who spent all their time thinking about how to destroy the USSR. Any outsider
who criticized anything about the Soviet system was an enemy and working toward
that end.
Soviet propaganda presented such a
negative picture of life in the West that many Russians assumed that any Russian
advance would not be aggression but constitute “the liberation of enslaved peoples
from under the capitalist yoke” – and therefore would be welcomed by those
peoples in every case.
And seventh, the Soviet system in the name
of maintaining stability which was another way of saying “maintaining the
Soviets in power” deprived the Russian people of any future. Many fans of the
USSR say that the 1990s took the future away from Russians. In reality, the Soviet
system did that.
The 1990s just brought all this out into
the open.
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