Paul Goble
Staunton,
Apr. 22 – Had the Kremlin honestly faced up to and then rejected the failed
Soviet past, Russia could have joined the West; but instead, it decided that
its own survival depended on ensuring that Russia would continue in the Soviet
tradition, a decision that has led directly to the war in Ukraine and will lead
to Russia’s collapse, Nikolay Eppl says.
In an essay
for the Carnegie Endowment’s Berlin Center,, the Russian philologist and
translator argues that “the unresolved question about “the identity of Russia
as the heir of the USSR has defined all the zigzags of the country’s existence
over the last 30 years” (carnegieendowment.org/politika/92259).
The
reformist course Moscow adopted in the early 1990s, Eppl continues,
“increasingly came into contradiction with the unpreparedness of the New Russia
to turn away from the identification of itself as an empire and from the former
administrative practices as well as dissatisfaction with democratic institutes
both by the state and by the society.”
“The experience of criticizing one’s
own past could show the Russian leadership that reinventing oneself without
committing suicide is possible, that admitting crimes and being willing to take
responsibility for them is a manifestation of strength, not weakness,” he
argues.
“The refusal to follow this path determined what is happening now with the
Russian state.”
Many Soviet crimes were so heinous that there was at the
end of Soviet times and the beginning of post-Soviet ones a real demand for
condemning that past, but the regime soon refused to go beyond “cosmetic” and
indeed “fictional” denunciations lest the involvement of many of its members in
those crimes led to attacks on them.
According
to Eppl, “the real dilemma for the Kremlin was whether to turn away from
identifying with the USSR and Soviet practices and receive for this the
advantages of compete entrance into the club of Western democracies or openly
recognize that the former model hadn’t gone anywhere and continues to define
the nature of the political regime in Russia.”
For a
few years, “the Kremlin allowed itself to avoid making a final choice and
balanced between authoritarian and liberal-democratic models,” doing just
enough to convince some that it was still headed to reform but protecting
itself by using many of the methods drawn from the Soviet past.
But
after the protests of 2011-2012, the Kremlin recognized that a choice had to be
made; and it made one, by launching the war in Ukraine by seizing Crimea and
then using that to make the system inside the Russian Federation fully
congruent with what had existed in Soviet times.
“Without
functioning democratic mechanisms,” he continues, “there was nothing to
legitimate the regime besides patriotic mobilization,” first in Crimea, then in
Syria, and then in Ukraine again with Putin’s launch of an expanded invasion of
that former Soviet republic in February 2022.
The
collapse of an empire is always difficult, Eppl points out, noting that even
between 1991 and 2014, the much-ballyhooed collapse of the USSR claimed “no
fewer than 200,000 lives.” But collapses can be more or less difficult
depending on whether the successor regime breaks with the past or refuses to do
so.
When
it doesn’t and when it assumes its own survival and that of its own country is
at risk if it were to do so, then the situation becomes worse. And for the
Putin regime, the war in Ukraine is “critical to the survival of Russia in the
form in which its leaders would like to keep it in a deep freeze.”
That
explains both the decision to go to war against Ukraine and the way Moscow has
explained and fought this war, Eppl says. The Kremlin’s decision to refuse to
break with Soviet identity did not and does not “leave it with any possibility
besides a return to the USSR with all or at least very many of the
characteristics of this process.”
That
reality “defines both the official explanations of the goals of this war and
the particular ways it is being conducted,” he argues. If there is a war, it
must be against fascism and so Ukraine must be declared a fascist state,
however absurd that is; and Russian forces in Ukraine must act to restore
Soviet symbols, including erecting Lenin statues in occupied areas.
But
there is an even more serious consequence of the Russian leadership’s refusal
to give up Soviet identity and its efforts to recreate Soviet conditions and it
is this, Eppl concludes. These efforts are restoring a system that already
failed and will lead in the end to the final destruction of that system and the
country that follows this mistaken past.