Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 31 – The Putin
regime likes to suggest that nationalism and constitutional right of union
republics to leave the USSR were to blame for that country’s demise. No doubt
they played a role, but former Soviet officials are ever more often coming
forward to warn of another serious cause – the hyper-centralization of the
Soviet regime.
That is not something the current powers
that be are likely to want to hear because under Vladimir Putin, they have been
restoring centralization with a vengeance and so in that regard, despite
anything else they may be doing, they are repeating the mistakes their Soviet
predecessors made with potentially similar consequences for the Russian
Federation.
Valery Paulman, who worked for many
years as head of the Estonian SSR Gosplan before being shifted to Moscow to
become the last Soviet labor minister, said that when he worked on the republic
plan, he had to check with Moscow on the pettiest of matters (svpressa.ru/politic/article/308452/).
“For example,” he relates, when any
building project was being considered, Moscow’s approval had to be sought for
items as small as individual toilets. Not surprisingly, officials in Tallinn
were outraged by that level of invasive supervision and that added to their
desire to get out from under rule by the center.
Dmitry Rodionov of Svobodnaya
Pressa spoke with two Russian experts, Vladimir Lepekhin of the Institute
for the Eurasian Economic Community and Fyodor Biryukhov of the Moscow
Institute of Freedom about Paulman’s observation and about its relevance for
the Russian Federation now.
Lepekhin says that Paulman is only
one of former Soviet officials making this argument, one he suggests is being
used and perhaps even orchestrated by one faction or another in the current
Russian government. What they are saying is not so much untrue as overstated,
the institute director says.
He says his own experience in
Estonia in 1988 when he visited Tallinn as a Komsomol official showed that “Estonian
elites were already looking to the West and not because they were oppressed by
the leadership of the USSR but simply because Europe promised the republic a
higher and more comfortable way of life.”
“The growth of consumer attitudes
and the growth of political and other ambitions connected with them along with
the inadequate reaction to this rooted in the dogmatic rhetoric of the party
nomenklatura was the main cause of regional separatism in the last years of the
USSR,” Lepekhin says.
The “main” problem was not the
central nature of decision making in the USSR but rather the lack of an
adequate strategy for economic development; and that lack, he continues, led to
serious deficits in consumer goods and a sense among people that the situation
would continue to get worse.
Asked by Rodionov as to whether “we
are now not making the very same mistakes,” Lepekhin concedes that “the new ruling
class doesn’t intend to draw lessons from history. And this lesson is not that
we must turn away from a centralized administration and the power vertical.”
Russia needs “a sensible, effective
and tough” state, “but it must be combined with a feedback loop and interrelationships
with the economically active part of the population,” with “the de-monopolization
and de-oligarchization of the economy,” a more sensible tax and fiscal system
and so on. There is a lot to do.
Today, Lepekhin says, “the
population in the regions is dissatisfied not by the centralization of the adoption
of decisions but by the thievish character of the powers both at the center and
in the localities, the unrestrained appetites of the new nomenklatura” which
finds it easier to steal if the state is “completely disorganized.”
“The danger of separatism in the
Russian Federation is hardly in the economically weak regions,” but in economically
stronger ones, like Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, it is very real. But what
Russia is threatened by is “not economic separatism but ethnic separatism”
given the lack of a clearly articulated strategy by the Kremlin.
According to Lepekhin, the
intellectual level of the Soviet nomenklatura in the 1980s was not high; and
the current one isn’t any better. “It is more effective in achieving personal
and corrupt interests,” but like its predecessor, it is incapable of dealing
with questions involving the interests of the country and the state.
Biryukov offers a somewhat different
reaction. He says that “hypertrophic centralism in the economy is fraught with
separatism but not with nationalism.” What happened in at the end of Soviet
times is that Moscow viewed the nationalism of small peoples like the Estonians
as non-threatening even as it worked hard to contain any manifestation of
Russian nationalism.
“We must not forget what was done in
many republics at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, how
Russians were killed, their homes destroyed, themselves threatened and forced
to leave.” The local officials were “denationalized and corrupt,” and when the
USSR fell apart, the nationalists took power in the non-Russian republics.
But in the Russian Federation, in
contrast, “Western multiculturalism” was accepted as the only path forward.
According to Biryukov, “the only ideology which could have saved the USSR was
Russian imperial nationalism, an idea integrating, constructive and patriotic.
But Russian nationalists were declared ‘fascists.’”
That attitude “continues in Russia
to this day.” Still worse, “local nationalism was given the green light which
almost led to the collapse of the Russian Federation itself in the middle of
the 1990s,” the institute director says. And adding to that threat, he says, is
the willingness of Russian officials now for their own profit to import more
and more migrant workers.
That too works against the survival
of the Russian Federation.
