Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 2 – Many Russians
draw a sharp contrast between Boris Yeltsin and the wild 1990s and Vladimir
Putin and the stability, albeit repressive, which followed, but “beyond doubt,”
Vladimir Pastukhov says, Putin represents a direct continuation of Yeltsin and
the problems of the early 2000s were a direct outgrowth of the problems of the
decade before.
Speaking on Ekho Moskvy’s “The Year
2019” program, the London-based Russian scholar says that “all that we call the
problems of the 2000s are only a mechanical continuation of the problems of the
1990s and that the key points which formed our present-day reality are 1991,
1993, and 1996” (echo.msk.ru/programs/year2019/2378631-echo/).
“What took place
in 1999-2000,” Pastukhhov continues, “was an outcome already predetermined by
those decisions, by the decisions of the early and mid-1990s.” It is simply not true that a group of
security offers fell from “another planet” and “seized our beautiful country”
and changed its direction. To think that is “very superficial.”
Worse, such a failure of
understanding means that Russians do not recognize that “the entire political class
which did not foresee these events” must be held accountable for what has
happened, he says.
According to Pastukhov, “Putin
beyond doubt is a continuation of Yeltsin” even in the way he has denounced his
predecessor but not changed what he did. “In essence, Putin has not touched a single one
of Yeltsin’s holly cows,” although it is true that under him the political
class has widened to include security officers and some of the older members have
been cast out.
But the core of that elite, the
London-based analyst says, remains the same as the one which emerged “out of the
turbulent movement of the 1990s.” And
that highlights something else that is often neglected: “the real revolution in
Russia occurred in 1989 … from any point of view,” given that it was in that
year that “the new economy arose.”
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