Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 12 – One pro-Kremlin participant in a Moscow TV discussion of the Forum of Free Peoples of Post-Russia and the League of Free Nations observed that today, most observers are referring to those taking part in these groups as “freaks” forgetting that at the end of tsarist times, many Russians dismissed the Bolsheviks with the same moniker.
But as a result of the repressive actions of the tsarist state and the inability of the moderate opposition to deal with the situation, “what had seemed impossible” at the end of 1916 was realized within a year when Lenin and his Bolsheviks went from a marginal group of emigres and prisoners into the rulers of Russia.
Prague-based commentator Kharun Sidorov cites this observation in his assessment of the most recent meeting of the Forum to caution against dismissing the possibilities of those who he himself descries as dreamers and visionaries rather than the leaders of some powerful organizations or a stalking horse for Western powers (idelreal.org/a/32172621.html).
Sidorov is undoubtedly right on both points. On the one hand, the combination of bold declarations of by the predominantly émigré groups which even their authors acknowledge can’t be realized immediately and serious disagreements among them and their obvious lack of serious financing suggest they are marginal.
But on the other, both they and especially many in Moscow are well aware of how such small groups abroad can exercise an outsized influence on the fate of a country where things that can’t happen often do – and where it is often a mistake to dismiss those who seem to have no possibility of having an influence.
That makes groups like the Forum of the Free Peoples of Post-Russia and the League of Free Nations important even when there seem to be so many reasons to dismiss them as tempests in a teapot.
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