Putin's Russia ‘a Mutation of Soviet Communism’ and Sovietology Needs to Be Restored If It is To Be Understood, Savvin Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 25 – Putin’s Russia is “not just a dictatorship” like so many others, Dimitry Savvin says. It is “a mutation of Soviet communism.” Many in the West do not understand that, believing instead that while Putin “may not be a nice guy … Russia isn’t the Soviet Union” but “a normal state” and that the West should take his views into account.
    What is needed, the Riga-based conservative Russian nationalist writer says is the development or better recovery of a Sovietology that will recognize the way in which Russia has descended from the Soviet system, an origin that makes it fundamentally different from other dictatorships (europeanconservative.com/articles/interviews/interview-with-dmitriy-savvin/).
    To promote such a development, Savvin has just published in Latvian a novel entitled P.U.T.I.N. The Blue-Green Empire, a book whose titular reference to the Kremlin leader is the Russian acronym for a new Moscow computer system called “the Promising Installation of Tactical and Institutional Configuration.”
    “This idea of creating a perfect machine,” Savvin continues, “is very Marxist. In the Soviet Union, every idea, no matter how absurd was presented as ‘scientific’ and thus because its ‘science,’ it can’t be denied, a hybrid notion that typifies not only the Soviet past but the Russian present.
    The roots of the myths Putin invokes have their origins in the Soviet period and in Marxist thought; and “if we do not understand that Castro’s Cuba, Communist China and neo-Soviet Russia are all part of the same axis, we have a serious problem,” the Russian conservative writer says.
    “We must understand [as well] that the origin of Sovietism or communism is not Rusisan or Chinese.” Instead, “the historical home of this spiritual disease is in Germany and in Central Europe and that it is a threat to all humanity … They are our enemies,” and this is something we must use Sovietological methods to understand.