Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 30 – Russians are
now at the brink of a nervous breakdown because they suffer from the worst of
all possible combinations, “anger and self-confident stupidity,” Lev Shcheglov
says, a combination that will take much effort and a longtime to overcome but
one that the Putin regime has done much to create.
The Moscow psychiatrist tells Znak’s
Yevgeny Senshin that Germany after World War II shows what Russia could have
achieved if the government had constantly talked with the people, thereby “inspiring
people and giving them new strength after a grandiose defeat” (znak.com/2019-12-30/chem_stradaet_sovremennoe_rossiyskoe_obchestvo_s_tochki_zreniya_psihiatrii).
Among critically
thinking Russians, Shcheglov says, hopes for changes by the regime “have almost
disappeared.” The last straw was the Moscow Case which showed that “any appeals
to the highest power structures are senseless.” And the powers made it worse by
proclaiming that they would ignore any such appeals.
Young people are completely
disaffected with more than half saying they want to move abroad, a terrifying
number and a serious inditement of the regime.
And even those who watch television and say they support the regime are
angry. But they suffer from the all-too-frequent Russian schizophrenia of
believing in a good tsar despite his bad boyars.
Those who live outside of the five
to ten cities where the economy is still functioning generally feel themselves to
have been cast away. And “the icing on
the cake” is their incomes are falling while the wealth of the billionaires
around the thrown is increasing even faster, the psychiatrist says.
With regard to the country’s
demographic disaster, Shcheglov says that “any reasonable individual who is told
that the indigenous population is declining in number will view this as a sign
of poor administration.” But those who might be able to do something don’t care
because they can always bring in more migrant workers.
“The powers that be explain to us,”
he continues, “that the demographic collapse is the consequence of events which
occurred 30 years ago. When I studied in school and at the institute, CPSU
propagandists explains their failures as ‘the birth marks of capitalism.’ Today
we see exactly the same explanation but with the ‘wild 1990s’ being held to
blame.”
The
Putin regime hasn’t done much to correct the situation: Maternal capital is
fine as far as it goes, but the regime hasn’t invested in the infrastructure
that families need to decide to take on the responsibility of having children.
As
far as Russian support for Stalin is concerned, Shcheglob says there are three
reasons for that. First, “slavery and force in our relatively recent past has
played an enormous role in the spiritual state of our people: it needs a strong
leader it can follow.”
Second,
for many, support for Stalinism is “not conformism and conservatism but a form
of protest.” They imagine that a Stalin will come and punish all those they don’t
like and reward themselves while remaining modest in all things forgetting that
this man “actually own the entire country.”
And
third, there is the continuation of authoritarian thought. Russians want someone
to tell them what to do because then they know where they are at all times.
Asked
if there is any hope for the future, the psychiatrist responds that the young
do want to change the country but the old who are in power have blocked them as
much as possible. Consequently, there is not much reason for hope in the near
term. But over the longer term, there is no question that everything will be
changed.
Ever
more Russians recognize that the authorities are ineffective and offer nothing
as far as the future is concerned, and everyone can take heart that “Putin and
his entourage are not eternal.” They won’t
be in power forever, although they may be there far longer than their opponents
would wish.
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