Russia Experiencing ‘a Real “Black Revolution”’ from Below, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 1 – Many analysts would like to believe that Russia has experienced only “a reactionary coup d’etat,” the seizure of power by a group of people who want to turn the clock back, Vladimir Pastukhov says. But the reality is different and far worse: that coup has opened the floodgates of “a real ‘black revolution.’”

            This is a mass phenomenon, the London-based Russian analyst says as it “involves broad sections of the population in its muddy flow, mixing these layers among themselves, and as a result, raising the values of the bottom of society” upwards (t.me/v_pastukhov/960 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=65BB49B892CF6&section_id=50A6C962A3D7C).

            Putin did not want them to enter political life, Pastukhov suggests; but his policies “loosened the bottom,” gave them the sense that everything that had been banned was now permitted, and allow them to believe that there were “unprecedented prospects” for those at the bottom “in the muddy waters” of Russian life now.

            Putin’s departure from the scene may be quick, the analyst says; but “it will take decades for t his mud to settle again on the bottom.” And while he doesn’t add, it flows from the logic of his words: it may become the basis for a new and more draconian authoritarianism when many see what Putin wittingly or not has stirred up.  

           Indeed, there is a precedent for that: Stalin's rise on the basis of the desire of many Soviet citizens to put the genie of the bottom back in the bottle, a genie of destruction and chaos that was classically described in Boris Pilnyak's novel,  The Naked Year (1922).