‘Russia Returning to Condition USSR was in During Winter of 1952,’ Kalitin Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Feb. 27 – Russia is returning to the condition it was in during the winter of 1952, Russian journalist Andrey Kalitin says. Everyone knows that there will soon be a change at the top, but no one knows what it will look like because there is no idea around which people can consolidate and so the population remains silent.
    His conclusion is a response to Patriarch Kirill’s statement that Russia must consolidate to avoid a time of troubles and the ROC MP leader’s failure to recognize that consolidation is possible “only around some unifying figure or idea” (t.me/akalitin/1098 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=67BDA8EE21E4A).
    Russia soon will lose the former and does not have the latter because the current leadership has provided no image of the future and has suppressed Russian society to the point that no one can speak out in ways that will allow the population to consolidate around such an idea.
As a result, Kalitin argues, a struggle within the Russian elites is inevitable as is a time of troubles, while the Russian people will continue to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Fortunately, “trauma is not a sentence.” It can be overcome, but as after 1952, it won’t happen quickly or in a simple unilinear direction.