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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