Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 4 – The Putin regime
is trying “to sit on two stools” by claiming to be the successor of both
tsarism and Stalinism, but the Bolsheviks destroyed the first so thoroughly as
to make its restoration impossible. As a result, Sergey Shelin says, Vladimir
Putin can only invent “new chimeras” in both sense of that term.
On the one hand, he is seeking to
combine two things that are not only absent but fundamentally incompatible and
thus is creating a monster. And on the other, this chimera, as Russian readers
of the influential Eurasianist writer Lev Gumilyev will recall, is an
indication of the final degradation of any system.
It is going to be difficult to fit
in a commemoration of the murder of the Imperial Family next week given the
World Cup, the Putin-Trump summit and the Duma’s first reading of the bill to
raise retirement age; but something will be done and that is appropriate, the Rosbalt
commentator says (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2018/07/04/1715112.html).
For the current bosses in Russia, “the
history of Russia (and of the USSR) is the history of rulers,” and the murder
of one of them is thus a signal event, one of the clearest signs that the Bolsheviks
were making a radical break with the past and would not allow any of its
aspects to return.
The Left SRs, who at the time of the
murder, were allied to the Bolsheviks recognized the threat and tried unsuccessfully
to stop it in the summer of 1918; and “we see now that this was the last chance
to overthrow the Bolsheviks from within. In the next seventy years, all real
threats came only from outside.”
Thus, after the failure of the SR rising,
the Bolsheviks were in a position to establish a totalitarian regime and to
destroy all the pre-existing groups and arrangements in society in one wave after
another, each of which was carried out in the name of wiping “’the former
people’” off the face of the earth.
Indeed,
Shelin says, the Bolshevik system “was distinguished from almost all
revolutionary regimes in other countries by the exceptional radicalism of its
break with the past of the country and with the people who in this past played
any essential role, be he an aristocrat, a merchant, a kulak peasant or a
socialist of a non-Leninist variety.”
When the Soviet regime collapsed
despite having become a super power, many looked back to the pre-Bolshevik past
of the country. But “to return to the past
of the ancien regime even in part as
impossible – in its place remained a field of scorched earth.”
“But it has been possible to play at
it” and thus to imagine something else that is not the case either: that the Soviet
past has thus been overcome as well, Shelin continues. “Decades have passed,
and today our autocracy is trying to balance on two stools, imaging that it is the
successor of tsarism and Stalinism at one and the same time.
“This cult of all leaders is called
the restoration of the connection of time, although there is no such connection
and to reconcile the irreconcilable is impossible,” however much some want to
do so. As a result of Kremlin propaganda, Russians now rate Nicholas II, Lenin
and Stalin “as equals” and as part of Putin’s “single stream” of Russian
history.
But “all this show about historical
themes is itself a distant consequence of that destruction of public memory
which the Bolsheviks took up a century ago,” the Moscow commentator says. “What fruits that would give, they of course
didn’t guess at the time.” They simply went about destroying the past and
building a chimera that lasted until 1991.
The chimeras the Kremlin is building
now because of their incompatible components will not last that long, Shelin
concludes.
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