Tuesday, April 14, 2020

‘Will Russia Survive Until 2024?’ Timofeyev Asks


Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 12 – A half century ago, Andrey Amalrik asked “Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?” Lev Timofeyev, a fellow veteran of the Soviet dissident movement recalls, adding that recent developments as well as underlying conditions compel one to ask, at least in a preliminary way, “Will Russia Survive to 2024?”

            “The current pandemic,” he says, “divides the history of Russia and indeed the history of all humanity into BEFORE and AFTER,” with “the after” still cloudy and uncertain except for those – and they dominate among the people in power – assuming that it will be much like “the before” (echo.msk.ru/blog/lev_tim/2623662-echo/).

            As a disturbing example of that pattern, he points to the March 25  remarks of Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu who told the Federation Council that the West was using democratic activists to penetrate and thus undermine Russia’s military objects and that they must be stopped (ria.ru/20200325/1569119235.html).

            “At a time of pandemic, speaking about the opposition in the language of military times is of course no accident,” Timofeyev says. It reflects the habit of mind of commanders to blame everything on the current crisis rather than see that the crisis reflects not only a new challenge but the exacerbation of problems which already existed and which they helped create.

            No one is going to suggest that the harm from the pandemic is anything but great; but conditions in the Russian Federation before it arrived were anything but good. Indeed, they were “catastrophic.”  With the pandemic, “the situation is becoming still worse,” although the powers that be are focusing only on the coronavirus and not the broader picture.

            They clearly hope to uses the pandemic to suppress all dissent and to mobilize society along military lines, Timofeyev says, failing to understand that their past failures which have led to sanctions and the absence of investment in the population won’t change if their policies do not.

            Mobilization will only work for so long and only if it is supported by political and administrative restrictions, as those who lived in Soviet times remember well. But now as Shoygu’s remarks indicate, there are again those who are attracted by the temptation of another militarization of Russia completely failing to understand that this was tried before.

            When Amalrik warned in his book that the Soviet Union would not survive if it continued on its course of the time, few believed him. The country was too strong and powerful for that, they assumed. But as events only a few years after the date he gave proved, he turned out to be right and they were proven wrong.

            If Russia is to avoid a similar outcome, Timofeyev says, the only way out is a new “perestroika” of Russian political life “AFTER the pandemic.” And that will require far greater changes than the initial perestroika it. It will require an understanding that in the current world, “the true greatness of a country lie in its economic development.”

            Russia today has economic measures equivalent “to the European levels of the 1930s. Is our current greatness to be found in this? In our weapons? In the annual celebration of the Great Victory?” Timofeyev asks.

            “Perestroika with a real acceleration of development is the only way to return Russia to the ranks of the advanced countries,” he suggests.  Claiming greatness in the way that it is doing now is a path toward the end because today, as events show, the distance “from wealth to poverty” and from great power to nothingness is very, very short.

            That is what Russia must understand AFTER the pandemic rather than assume that once it is passed, everything will be fine. The country has made that mistake before; and as a result, it has not escaped the trajectory toward collapse that it proceeded along earlier. One can only hope, Timofyev concludes, that the greatness of its people will allow them to find another way.

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