Putin and His Elite are ‘Direct Heirs of Gorbachev,’ Shusharin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 29 – Russia did not make the transition to democracy in the 1990s because neither the Russian elites nor the Russian people wanted that, Russian commentator Dmitry Shusharin says. Instead, they were each quite prepared for a return to totalitarianism with a democratic façade much like what Mikhail Gorbachev pushed at the end of Soviet times.

He argues that “the current model of Russian totalitarianism grew out of the 1990s, although the regime seeks to contrast itself with that time.” But in fact, Putin has returned the country from the attempts in the 1990s at real democracy to the façade democracy conceived at the start of perestroika” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=66A7858592B64).

“Whatever progressives may say,” Shusharin suggests, that means that “the current ruling elite are Gorbachev’s heirs, the direct successors of his work. Perestroika was an attempt to renew totalitarianism, to reorganize it on rational principles and to abandon its most archaic features.”

Almost 40 years on, everyone can see that this project was “a success.” Single-party rule has been eliminated, the economy has a market but not a free one, planning is mostly gone, and “the ruling elite has managed to secure itself irreplaceability without repressions” as there are now elections “but not electoral democracy.”

Indeed, Shusharin insists, “the wars with Georgia and Ukraine and the occupation of part of the territory of Moldova are also a direct continuation of Gorbachev’s attempts to save the USSR by force in Kazakhstan, Georgia, Azerbaijan and the Baltic countries.” And that isn’t going to change until both the elites and the population change as well.

            But that hasn’t happened: “both the elites and society were and remain equally interested in adapting new institutions, new freedoms and new opportunities to the needs of the totalitarian structures of society and power.” And to overcome that will require not only a re-formatting of the country but new thinking.

            Gorbachev talked about that, but he failed to spark its spread across the elites and society if indeed he was really interested in overcoming totalitarianism and not just erecting a new façade around it, Shusharin suggests.