1991 was Russia’s Revolution of Dignity, One that Putin, following Yeltsin, is Working to Do More than Just Reverse, Skobov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 7 – Many people excuse Putinism because they argue that the USSR was “’a traditional society’” and that all the current Kremlin leader is doing is building on that background, Aleksandr Skobov says. But in fact, the Soviet Union was not a traditional society but rather “a modernizing project” as the perestroika period showed. 

            Unless that is appreciated, the Russian commentator says, the full horror of what Putin and Putinism are doing to Russia in their drive to reverse not only the democratic gains of the early 1990s but even the modernization that the Soviet system is not obvious (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5CA6275D1C403).

            “The USSR was hardly the frozen desert or ‘traditional society’” many imagine, Skobov says. “’The Bolshevik project’ was ‘a modernization project.’ It aspired to be an alternative to ‘European modernization’ and as a result reached a dead end. But many common ‘primary modernization’ tasks it did in fact address and solve.”

            “As a result of its authoritarian nature,” of course, it did so “in an ugly and one-sided way and at a horrific price, but it did solve them.”  It used slave labor, but “at the same time, it promoted a progressive change of the structure of employment, urbanization and, connected with this, more contemporary forms of life, mass education and the development of science.”

            In an improbable way,” Skobov continues, “the Soviet regime was able to the very end to combine a cannibalistic, in fact fascist cult of state force with a declared attachment to the classic set of ‘progressive humanistic values,’ values which arose in the Renaissance and Enlightenment.” 

            And its official culture, which was entirely controlled by the CPSU, provided a continuing inoculation of Soviet citizens against xenophobia, chauvinism, aggression, and oppression and celebrated the struggle for liberation and justice.” This combination produced schizophrenia, which required Soviet citizens “to think one thing, say another and do a third.”

            “But all the same,” Skobov says, “the majority of participants of perestroika’s democratic movement took their ideas about freedom, justice and humanism not so much from Western radio stations and samizdat as from Soviet children’s books and Soviet films directed at children.”

            At the time of the onset of perestroika, “the USSR was a highly-developed industrial society standing at the brink of a transition to the post-industrial stage. In the West, this transition had already occurred;” but in the USSR, it was being held back by “the Stalinist social system, economic and political.”

            But that system was based “only on state force, and when the state weakened, the society was ready to move ahead. “Soviet society was completely ready to adopt both a market economy and political democracy.” What had to happen was the liquidation of “the Soviet (Stalinist) model” and that largely happened during perestroika.

            No one should doubt that Soviet people “carried out ‘the velvet revolution’ of 1991.” To be sure, many of the leaders were part of the nomenklatura. But “the face of the revolution was given by those who made it and not by those who manipulated them.”  It was the people who kept the events bloodless: many above them were quite prepared for violence.

            “Civic movements in fact did not become a decisive political force,” Skobov concedes. “But this doesn’t mean that they weren’t political actors. Yes, important political decisions were taken without their participation in a purely nomenklatura milieu. But success in the struggle of elite groups was secured precisely by mass movements from below.”

            The population at that time accepted a democratic “but not liberal” ideology including support for “freedom of speech, assembly and organizations,” “the supremacy of law” as a check on the powers that be, the parliament as a manifestation of popular rule, and “anti-imperialism” based on the acceptance of the idea that no people should be ruled by another by force alone.

            Those who launched the August coup suffered a humiliating defeat, Skobov says, because they were viewed by people in the two capitals at least as aspiring to do away with these things and to restore a system in which the rulers could do anything they wanted regardless of the views of the people.

            Tragically, Boris Yeltsin, who was “flesh of the flesh” of the old nomenklatura, betrayed these principles too, not in 1991 but in 1993 (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5CA88CF755751).  And now Putin is doing the same, not building on what the Soviet system achieved but rather seeking to destroy even that.