Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 28 – One of the
most powerful constraints on demonstrations and protests in the Russian
Federation today is the assumption that such actions do not have an impact on
the powers that be and thus participation in them involves high risks with low
chances of making a difference.
Most Russians and most specialists
on the Soviet Union and Russia today believe that the top leaders make their
decisions exclusively in terms of their own interests without regard to the
actions of the population. Indeed,
Russian history since 1953 has been written and accepted as the record of what
particular leaders wanted, with the attitudes and actions of the people.
Thus, Khrushchev moved to
de-Stalinize to protect himself and his comrades a recrudescence of terror,
Brezhnev pursued policies intended to avoid rocking the boat, Andropov sought
to remobilize the country, and Gorbachev concluded that “we can’t continue to
live like this” and ushered in perestroika, glasnost and the demise of the
Soviet system.
Since 1991, Yeltsin first loosened the
constraints on the population and then began to tighten them again, a process
that his successor, the current Russian president Vladimir Putin is pursuing
with renewed vigor.
No one could or would deny that the
personality and goals of particular leaders were irrelevant to the directions
Moscow has taken. These things are obviously critical. But to say this does not mean that protests
and demonstrations by the population were irrelevant. In many cases, those protests
helped to shape the attitudes of the Kremlin leader.
Once that is understood, it can be
seen that protests and demonstrations in the future may also have a profound
impact on the individual in office even if he is a committed authoritarian like
Putin because anyone interested in maintaining power has to recognize certain
limits to his freedom of action given the reaction, real or likely, of the
population.
In the course of a long essay in
which he considers the evolution of the Putin regime, Yakov Azimandis says that
“the thaw in the 1960s did not come by itself.
Many rights and freedoms were won not by Khrushchev’s voluntarist desire
but as the result of a wave of protests and risings, first in Stalin’s camps
and then in Soviet cities (rufabula.com/author/azimandis/1512).
Most people
remember only the Novocherkassk rising in 1962, he says; but there were many
more; and he urges Russians to familiarize themselves with F.A. Kozlov’s
543-page study, Mass Disorders in the
USSR under Khrushchev and Brezhnev (in Russian; Moscow, 3rd edition,
2009. The full text is at eland.ru/dirty/kozlov_massovyie_besporiadki_2010.pdf).
Among them were protests and risings
in Podolsk in 1957, Temirtau in 1959, Kirovabad in 1961, Biysk in 1961, Murod
and Aleksandrov in 1961, Beslan in 1961, Sumgait in 1963, Bronnitsy in 1964, Moscow
in 1966, Frunze in 1967m Chimkent in 1967, Priluki in 1967, Slutsk in 1967, and
Nalchik in 1968, not to mention the many in Gorbachev’s time.
The powers that be were simply “forced”
to make certain concessions to the population and open the way for more working
class people to enter the government, something that is less likely to happen
now, Azimandis says, because “generals have their own children.” As a result, the elite has become “incestuous”
and thus “condemned to collapse.”
The Putin regime “doesn’t want and
cannot renew itself,” he continues, and thus “it is useless to wait for a thaw
or even more a spring.” Russians need to take things into their own hands because
“spring will come when anger breaks out in the hearts of people … No one gives
anyone any rights; they have to be taken.”
That means that Putin’s plans for
the future elections are “good news” for Rusisanns because they show that he no
longer has any room for maneuver. He simply wants to keep power. And that in
turn creates a situation where demonstrations and risings by the population can
have an effect, perhaps one even more powerful than in the 1950s.
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