Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 7 – Just as in Soviet
times, the Kremlin now has “no motivation to change itself and develop the
country,” Kirill Martynov says; and consequently, any demand for change can now
come only from the citizens themselves. That
arrangement, he says, isn’t going to lead to a thaw but to something more
radical.
Every time the powers that be appear
to be acting in less than a cannibalistic way, the political editor of Novaya
gazeta says, Russians, “half seriously and half in gest,” begin to speculate
about the possibility of a new “thaw,” a relaxation of the political system
like the one that followed the death of Stalin (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2019/07/07/81156-rossiya-bez-ottepeli).
But that is to
misread history, Martynov continues. “After the death of the bloody tyrant who
ruled for decades, the country was so exhausted that the authorities had to
give people the possibility to breathe a little. But the thaw never risked
become a real spring, and after a short period of warming, the political atmosphere
was cooled down by new frosts.”
“The climate
remained arctic because the Soviet powers that be up to the middle of the 1980s
did not have serious reasons to change it,” the editor says. And today is much
the same: those in power don’t see any reason to make more than cosmetic
changes and will not do anything to change the situation in any fundamental
way.
More than that, Martynov says, they
will not allow anyone to cast doubt on “axion that the country is moving on the
only correct course under the leadership of irreplaceable professionals.” And the gap between those in power and ordinary
Russians is only growing, as the statements and articles of the leaders make
clear.
If change is going to come to
Russia, he argues, it will only come at the demand of the population; and
changed produced that way won’t be “a thaw” but something far more fundamental.
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