Putin’s Re-Sovietization a Parody of the Original and Therefore Won’t Last Long, Trifonov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 3 – Re-Sovietization is taking place, Yevgeny Trifonov says, “but it is a parody of the original” which may be horrific but won’t cease to be a parody and thus will generate laughter and shame. “But that is its weakness.” The original was backed by “legions of fanatics who could believe because their faith was “strictly logical and not contradictory.”

            But what Vladimir Putin is promoting has many of the structures but none of the logic and faith, the Russian commentator says. “No one is going to go into battle for the uniqueness of Russian civilization because that notion is anything but convincing.” No one can believe it except for fools (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5EFE0B5E29AD9).

            Under the banners of today, “instead of iron legions,” there is simply “a crowd of ordinary people who want to get paid” and are afraid that if they don’t chant what the powers that be want, they won’t and might even lose their jobs. They don’t believe in anything more than that, Trifonov says; and they will behave only until the parody becomes totally laughable.

            The current occupants of the Kremlin should remember that “the Soviet Union fell apart when it became a parody of itself. The Chekists became more concerned not by exiling and killing an enemy identified by the bosses than by access to foreign currency and an increase in the size of their apartments.” 

            And at the same time, “the generals became less concerned about the military capabilities of their legions and more often forced their legionnaires to build dachas for them. And the all-powerful bosses shifted from wanting to spill the blood of capitalists to wanting to live the same way they did.”

            The re-Sovietization of today is more like the Soviet parody of itself at the end than like the Soviet system before then. And like that Soviet parody of itself, which didn’t last long, this one won’t either.  Indeed, the referendum the Putin regime has just held recalls nothing so much the vote on whether Soviet people wanted to keep the USSR.

            That was an indication regardless of the percentages that the end of that system was near; the referendum vote this past week is an indication that the parody won’t last long either, Trifonov argues. But there is a big difference: what the Soviets did was often horrific but it was never laughable. What Putin does is all too often both.

            “The Soviet lie always was clear and logical: everything that was for communism was true; everything against was a lie. Therefore, no questions arose, it was useless to argue, and it was dangerous to have doubts.”  Now there is no clarity or logic, and everyone can see through the verbal acrobatics the powers that be engage in.

            The communists had an answer for why the capitalist West hated the USSR and why the Soviet people had to sacrifice to defend it. The current regime doesn’t have an answer. Its suggestion that everyone is a Russophobe who hates Russia and wants to rob it simply doesn’t wash or mobilize.

            And “when the entire Soviet people as one man voted in elections, this was disgraceful, criminal and horrific. But when it is totally unclear why anyone is voting for anything, then that is laughable and shameful,” and that is what Putin is offering, a poor parody of the original thing and one that isn’t sustainable for very long.