Russians Still Obsessed with Disintegration of the USSR Because It Fell Apart So Easily, Kuzmitsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 1 – Had the Soviet Union fell apart after a protracted battle, Russians might still be upset that it happened; but the ease with which it disintegrated has made it an obsession because they suspect that there was either some conspiracy behind the scenes or because there was a flaw in that state that may exist in the Russian Federation as well.

            Thus, military commentator Sergey Kuzmitsky develops an idea Vladimir Putin has often expressed, that the USSR fell apart as it did because Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning created national republics with institutions that resembled those of independent states (topwar.ru/170784-pochemu-sssr-raspalsja-tak-legko-i-pochemu-jeto-nas-do-sih-por-volnuet.html).

            But in contrast to the Kremlin leader, Kuzmitsky focuses on the speed of the collapse of the Soviet Union.  As things spun out of control at the end of the 1980s, he says, “no one rose to the defense of the USSR: not the party, not the army and not the special services.” The August Putsch was “so strange and toothless that one doesn’t want to remember it.

            Instead, each of these groups saw benefits to itself from the disintegration of the country: republic party leaders got to become presidents, party and military elites in Russia got to grow rich through privatization, and the special services found that they could have even more power if the CPSU was swept away.

            In thinking about why the USSR came apart so easily and quickly, he continues, one must not deceive oneself into thinking that the country was destroyed by “democrats, Russophobes, Gorbachev or people from the outside. It was one by the very sasme people who had power in the Soviet Union” but wanted something more.

            “It seems to me,” Kuzmitsky says, “that today one must not be for the Soviet Union or against it. It doesn’t exist, and never will exist again in its former format. One must approach it as part of our own history. That which happened happened and it is impossible to change it. Both the creation and the collapse of the USSR already took place.”

            He continues: “In contrast to the present and the future, it is impossible to change the past. Therefore, one should try to understand what it was and then look always forward into the future” even if one believes there is no “statute of limitations” on crimes like the disintegration of the USSR.