‘The Soviet Union Collapsed but Did Not End,’ Kulbaka Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 12 – In 1991, “the Soviet Union collapsed,” but the Soviet system “did not end” because while institutions were renamed, most of those working in them remained the same; and they not continued to act as they always had but passed on their approaches to the younger people who joined these institutions, Nikolay Kulbaka says.

            As a result, while many institutions were renamed and seemed to be something new, they in fact remained much of what they had been and still worse ensured that that would continue for another generation, the émigré Russian scholar says (mostmedia.org/ru/posts/totalitarizm-bez-ideologii-pochemu-sovetsky-sojuz-ruhnul-no-ne-zakonchilsja).

            The consequence of this was that the old system replicated itself in the new people who by the time they rose up the career ladders of their professions were far more like the old Soviet officials who had been in charge than the reformers they themselves were only a few years earlier.

            Only where entirely new institutions were created was there a chance for the reformers to remain reformers, but these institutions lost out to the much more numerous and powerful older institutions. They showed that Russians could in fact reform but only if those who had been Soviet in culture were removed from the scene or at least significantly reduced in number.

            Kulbaka says that there are good reasons to think that this process can be avoided in the future “when the window of institutional changes arises again.” Russians today know far more about the outside world than they did; and fewer of them will continue to defer to those who want to continue to live in an archaic system.

            He sums up: “People have already seen other institutions, worked in them, studied in them, created them - and created themselves in the process. If Rome is destroyed, the roads really for some time will continue to lead to where they led before. They can survive the state that built them, and people who are accustomed to considering it eternal.”

“But,” he says, “the roads themselves do not choose the new Rome and do not decide where to go now. They can be connected differently – if there are people and institutions which can agree on a direction.”

These observations make Kulbaka’s article extremely important, but his article is even more useful because he cites a variety of studies showing how the Soviet system continued to live after 1991 and made Putinism possible – and thus what needs to be done to ensure that system won’t continue.