Welcome to the "RuZZkiy Mir"
I was shellshocked by the war like everyone else. Now after my initial panic has subsided I wanted to say a few things.
Here in America, most of the “experts” interpret Putin’s enduring rule in general and this new war of his in particular as Soviet reboot. He’s supposed to be some sort of Stalin 2.0. But that view of things is wrong on just about every level. I believe it’s actually a much worse narrative than simply “Back to the USSR.”
Despite how bad the reality of the USSR could be and how cynical its nomenclature was, at its core the Soviet Union did pursue communism — a liberatory utopian ideology. It inspired people all over the world. So on paper at least, the country did stand for something good, something to aspire to. The USSR wasn’t just a continuation of Imperial Russia under a new name and flag but with the same exploitative ideology. That’s a very simplistic Cold War lens that shows a complete lack of understanding of Russian history and politics.
But Putin’s regime — one that is finally taking a much more definitive shape — is very different. It is not rooted in any utopia. It doesn’t offer any alternative or any new inspiring way to organize society. It was pragmatic from the start and what it aimed to do was to preserve a semblance of stability in post-criminal-privatization-Russia of the early 1990s. Now it’s taking a new turn and foregoing stability. But it’s not that surprising that many people in Russia are cheering for it.
Vanguard of the Russkiy mir: Rogozin, Vaino, Sechin, Matvienko, Shoigu, Medvedev, Lavrov, Volodin…
After decades of quasi-socialism and poverty in the Soviet Union, people were plunged into the quasi-capitalism, much more feudal and raw than people experience in the West. A majority of Russians became even more impoverished, a minority benefited form the privatization of state industries and the new business opportunities that opened up in a capitalist society. The entire country turned into a brothel, lacking any ideology whatsoever. Some people of course turned to the Russian Orthodox religion in a desperate attempt to have some meaning in their lives because the old paradigm was destroyed. But it’s hard to call those people truly religious, the same way there were not really Marxist-Leninists before that.
The failed “civil society” in Russia that many of the liberal Russians who fleeing the country are now crying about didn’t fail yesterday. It didn’t even fail under Putin. I believe it already failed in the mid-1990s, after privatization and the creation of a tiny robber baron oligarchy. But there was no public discourse around that. Besides some pensioners protesting the loss of all their savings, this privatization was rarely criticized by liberals — even the liberals who were opposed to whoever was sitting in the Kremlin. In fact, liberals often laughed at critics of privatization, calling them “sovki” — meaning Soviet simpletons. As far as I could tell, the “civil society” that liberals were supposedly building boiled down to them having their civilized bourgeois lives with western goods, tourism and travel, and media projects. No one seemed to care about the need for economic justice for their plundered and robbed country. If they had bothered to look beyond their own little comfortable world, they would have seen the swarms of impoverished people who didn’t have time or energy to engage in “civil society.” And now it’s exactly this part of the population — the screwed-over, poor, and bitter Russian people — that is being engaged and weaponized by Putin’s propaganda, whipped into a patriotic frenzy to support a war that’s presented to them as confrontation of Holy Russia and the Satanic West.
What is happening now is not the reviving of USSR in any shape, it is not “1984” coming to life. Putin’s project is distinctly and openly anti-Bolshevik.