Russia Can’t Become a North Korea or Iran Despite Hopes of Some and Fears of Others, Nikulin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 15 – Many Russians fear that the efforts of the Putin regime to isolate their country from the world will leave it like Moscow’s new allies, North Korea and Iran, but such fears ignore the enormous difference between those two countries and Russia, differences that mean Russia will never become like them, Andrey Nikulin says.

            The Russian philosopher points out that North Korea “was built from nothing, on the ruins of a post-colonial country that had been destroyed by war” and that Iran, after the 1979 revolution forced into emigration the thin layer of Westernized elites (rosbalt.ru/news/2024-10-16/andrey-nikulin-pochemu-rossiya-ne-smozhet-stat-iranom-ili-severnoy-koreey-5222860).

            As a result, both the one and the other could function more or less well on the basis of populations that were already predisposed to be isolated from the world, Nikulin continues, a far different situation than the one that Russia, with its experience of communism and Westernization, now does.

            Russia today, however much some may want  it to self-isolate, lacks the possibility of doing so and to completely isolate itself from the outside world, he suggests. “If more primitive societies, like primitive organisms, sacrificing part of their cells, could relatively easily adapt to such changes, in some ways without even noticing them,” Russia can’t do so.

            According to Nikulin, “Russia with all its problems is a much more highly developed organism that is integrated into the surrounding space, and as such, cannot afford to lose its nervous or circulatory systems and at the same time feel as carefree as a worm cut in half can,” the situation of North Korea and Iran.

“No amount of propaganda can weed out the conditioned reflex [in Russia] of going to Wikipedia in search of answers to questions, removing from the consciousness the meager understanding of decency and the rudiments of humanism taken from Western culture, or making its population forget about the existence of complex technology or gadgets.”

Moreover, although it is seldom commented upon, “even its imperialists and chauvinists, broadcast the remnants of European and American ultra-conservative thought,” a characteristic of Russian society when “coupled with many other factors — blocks the possibility of degradation of society so serious as to slide down to the level of our new ‘friends.’”

Consequently, the pursuit of isolation will “either finish off both society and the cuntry itself half way to Iranian or North Korean ideals or force it, when the risk of the physical end of the state becomes obvious, simply out of a sense of self-preservation to turn around and wander back into a dull future, one illuminated by the light of a Western sun.”