Mother Russia
Interesting piece here by the ever-readable John Lloyd on the state of the Bear today:
As the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin puts it in the best short account of the period (Armageddon Averted): "Russia's was not, and could not have been, an engineered transition to the market. It was a chaotic, insider mass plundering of the Soviet era with substantial roots prior to 1991 and ramifications stretching far into the future."
Vladimir Putin, who has captured Paton Walsh's affections at last, benefited from four quite different elements. The first was that the chaos of the 1990s was beginning to sort itself out. New powers, very substantially based on Soviet models (the quote from the anonymous Putin aide, "the solutions are half Soviet", is very apposite here) had settled into place. The division of property had been made - and though it could be unpicked (was, in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's vast holdings, and may still be further), it is at least a basis for a functioning economy. Second, that economy functions, at present, on a vast surge in the oil price - a "boon" that will be a cursed if it stops structural reforms, as it seems to be doing - but for the moment, a great boost to Putin, and to the standard of living of Russians. And third, Putin and his closest aides were KGB men who had fewer inhibitions about the use of force in Chechnya than had the Yeltsinites, and thus felt themselves free to pursue a war of terrible attrition until today's unmistakable, if tenuous, victory.
And fourth is the yearning of the Russians for stability. This is always supposed to be a particularly Russian trait explaining the much vaunted love of autocracy, but which is more sensibly explained, I think, by a general human desire for predictability and security in life.
Because of the four elements above, the Russian president has been able to give this security and to preside over - as Paton Walsh vividly describes - an expansion in the middle class, the class on which Gaidar pinned all his hopes for success; and to benefit from the support of Russians, who see in him a reliable ruler - one even able to reverse some of the national humiliations (as many see it) of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years.
Russia is a fascinating place. Source of such delights as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but also creator of such monsters as Stalin and Lenin. Still a nation with so much to offer, let us hope that its fledgling democracy is not destroyed by the ever-present and short sighted human demand for 'stability'. As Thomas Jefferson put it:
'Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.'
The Russians could never be accused of being timid, let us hope that they rise to the challenge, leaving behind the horrors of their past and moving into the new century with a commitment to modern values and human rights. Values which they had to struggle to win from the muck of Bolshevik tyranny.
-posted by Adam
