Saturday, October 26, 2024

Ever More People are Saying Putin is Restoring Soviet System but Ever Fewer are Studying that System, Savvin Warns

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 22 – Dimitry Savvin, the editor of the conservative Russian Riga-based Harbin portal, says that at a time when ever more observers are declaring that Putin is restoring the Soviet system, ever fewer of them and other scholars are studying that system and thus are ever less well positioned to say what the restoration of the Soviet system will mean.

            After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Sovietology largely disappeared as well; but now it is obvious, the editor says, that Sovietology must be restored and developed if the world is to understand precisely what Putin is about and what it will mean for Russia and the world (harbin.lv/stalinskiy-sotsializm-tekhnokratiya-neosovetizm).

            As a contribution to this task, Savvin offers his new article, “Stalinist Socialism, Technocracy, and Neo-Sovietism: the Russian Federation as a Product of the Natural Evolution of the Communist System” which appears in Russian in the latest issue of Warsaw East Law Review (ipw.com.pl/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/The-Warsaw-East-Law-Review_numer-1_2024-r_.pdf).

            In that article, he draws on the writings of émigré Russian scholars whose works about the Soviet system were sometimes but far from always employed by Western sovietologists, something that only adds to the weight of his argument for the revival of the study of the Soviet system not simply as a subject of history but as one of immediate political import.

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