Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 3 – Aleksandr Tsipko,
one of Russia’s most senior political commentators who worked closely with
Mikhail Gorbachev during perestroika, says that he feels quite separate and
apart from those Russians who are complaining that their plans to travel to the
West have been upset by the coronavirus pandemic.
Such people, he says, “believe that
a few months will past or perhaps ayear, and everything will return to where it
was” and those Russians who want to travel or even live abroad will beyond
doubt be able to do so (mk.ru/politics/2020/05/03/koronavirus-grozit-snova-otbrosit-rossiyu-za-zheleznyy-zanaves.html).
But Russians of his generation,
Tsipko says, have a different sense. “In our souls, the coronavirus has sowed
the old Soviet fear that suddenly some extraordinary event will provoke the
transition of all power to ‘the siloviki’ and return us back to the USSR and
that again all of us will be surrounded by the same ‘iron curtain’” that kept
Soviet citizens from going abroad.
“We the representatives of the former
Soviet intelligentsia cannot but recognize, the commentator says, that just as ‘his
highness chance’ in the form of Gorbachev freed us from ‘the iron curtain, so
too ‘his highness chance’ could cut us off from the West and from human civilization
once again.”
“And why not? With us in Russia the
apparently unthinkable is always possible.” We received freedom by chance and
we could lose it again by chance. We
could be another North Korea if not forever than at least for many decades,
Tsipko argues. The danger of that has been obvious since the annexation of Crimea
undercut our links with the West.
“The overwhelming part of guests on
Ekho Moskvy … are people who have already ‘zeroed out’ their residence in
Russia. I am glad that my colleagues, political scientists, journalists and
economists, have in this way preserved the chance to live and work where they
are viewed as needed.”
But at the same time, Tsipko says,
he is bitter because the departure of such people puts the future development of
Russia at risk because with it, “we encounter the deep contradiction of our
eternally autocratic Russia:” it seems hard to have stability without the kind
of power vertical that drives people away and for which the country pays a
terrible price.
According to Tsipko, “there are a
sufficient number of objective reasons for the rebirth of ‘an iron curtain’ in
Russia. Authoritarianism has already succeeded in being revived over the last
several years here. And one must see that this has occurred because freedom,
democracy and human rights did not have and do not have any value for the
Russian.”
“For the last 100 years,” he rights,
“nothing has changed in this regard.” Russians remain hostile to the values of freedom
and indifferent to the value of human life. And an obvius example of that today
is “the insanity of the current sacralization not from fear but from ‘the
breadth of the Russian soul’ of the sadist and murderer Stalin.”
Russians needs to recognize that “the
weaker the intellectual foundation of the country, the fewer chances it will
have to develop and preserve itself. And the most horrible is that there exist
many objective reasons which are leading to a revival of a new ‘iron curtain’ among
the overwhelming part of the population as something routine.”
Everyone knows that 70 percent of
Russians “do not have any savings and live paycheck to paycheck.” But far more
serious is another statistic: “80 percent do not have foreign passports and
have never travelled abroad.” For such people the return of Soviet-style “exit
commissions” wouldn’t be a problem.
Moreover, as one can see in the case
of Vladimir Putin, “supreme power in Russia by tradition is impossible without
constant self-isolation, without every step impossible without guards and
witnesses. Gorbachev was a victim of
this, but so too is Putin. He can never retire or visit his beloved Leipzig as
a private person. That is unthinkable.
Such “self-isolation,” Tsipko
continues, “is a life sentence for Putin.” Those who are upset about being
inconvenienced for only a few months cannot fathom that. Russia has been on the path to “the
self-isolation” of the country since 2014; and there are great risks that it
will continue in that direction under Putin or after him.
Nonetheless, the commentator says,
he “believes that Putin will not seek to transform the extraordinary situation
of our current life into self-isolation from Europe.” He may feel driven to do
that for many reasons, but he won’t go there and not only because “he
understands that making Russia “a sister of North Korea” would be its end.
“Self-isolation which was
characteristic of the USSR is already entirely anti-natural and destructive
under conditions of present-day civilization. And my optimism,” Tsipko says, “is
strengthened by the fact that despite everything Putin in fact is a Westerner.”
Like many others in late Soviet time who became KGB agents or diplomats abroad,
he wanted to travel there.
The commentator says that because
that is the case, he very much hopes that Putin will not rebuild the iron
curtain or hand power to others who might want to do so – and thus as a result,
many of the freedoms perestroika gave Russians including the right to travel
abroad will remain “both under the current power and after it.”
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