Believing in a Beautiful Russia of the Future in 1991 Meant You didn’t Have a Heart, Eidman Says; but Doing So Now Now Means You Don’t have a Brain

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 21 – Igor Eidman, a Russian sociologist and commentator now living in exile in Berlin, says on the anniversary of the collapse of the August 1991 coup attempt that if you didn’t believe then in a beautiful Russia of the future, you didn’t have a heart, but that if you still believe in that now, you don’t have a brain.

            The Russian liberal, he says, “is eternally and unrequitedly in love with the beautiful Russia of the future,” but that image is “only a mirage, a hallucination that inflames the imagination but disappears when you try to get closer to it,” with any moves toward in quickly being reversed by moves away (region.expert/emd/).

            “From time to time,” Eidman continues, “it seems to From time to time, it seems to Russian liberals that the beautiful Russia of the future is very close, but again and again they find themselves deceived.” And today as so often in the past, “in Russia are being beaten again; but they are incorrigible and do not learn from their mistakes.”

            Regardless of what it calls itself, “the Russian empire a priori cannot become a free country.” Its peoples can “become free only after its final collapse. Yeltsin was very proud he saved the Russian Federation” and was grateful for the Tatarstan president Mintimir Shaymiyev for helping him to do so.

            Thirty years on, Eidman argues, it is obvious that “Shaymiyev, having betrayed the independence movement in Tatarstan, realy did help Yeltsin preserve the empire;” and that outcome quickly became infected “with the ancient bacilli of external expansion and internal slavery that have manifested themselves under Putin.”

            From the beginning, “Russian liberals have always talked about freedom and at the same time have wanted to preserve the empire. Pavel Milyukov, the patriarch of Russian liberalism, after Soviet aggression again Finland, wrote that he “felt sorry for the Finns” but he wanted Russia to have Vyborg.”

            If that is what you want, then you must “fall in love with the boots of Stalin,” Eidman concludes, noting that “many liberals even now do not understand that the Russian empire falsely called the Russian Federation and freedom are incompatible. Freedom will come … only after defeat in war and the disintegration of the colonial empire.”

            And consequently, Eidman says, addressing Russian liberals among others, “if you want freedom for the residents of present-day Russia, don’t deceive people with the mirage of a beautiful Russia of the future, help the empire lose the law and die.”