Lost in a Dark Wood: Russia's Road Not Taken

Wednesday, 13 December 2006

Last week, the world marked -- or rather, failed to mark -- the 15th anniversary of what American scholar Stephen Cohen calls "the most consequential event of the second half of the 20th century": the formal, if completely illegal, dissolution of the Soviet Union in a boozy meeting in a Belorussian hunting lodge between Russia's Boris Yeltsin, Ukraine's Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislau Shushkevich of Belarus. In today's Guardian, Cohen provides a succinct and powerful account of the malign consquences of that now-forgotten (in the West) event. As the Guardian intro points out, for all those now in a lather about polonium poisoning and Russian energy-market power moves, "Putin's Russia can only be understood in the light of the national collapse triggered by the dissolution of the USSR." The article is worth reading in full, and also quoting at length:

The breakup of the Soviet Union ended Russia's march to democracyExcerpts:

...For most western commentators the Soviet breakup was an unambiguously positive turning point in Russian and world history. As it quickly became the defining moment in a new American triumphalist narrative, the hope that Mikhail Gorbachev's pro-Soviet democratic and market reforms of 1985-91 would succeed was forgotten....[The] view that there had been other possibilities in Soviet history, "roads not taken", was dismissed as a "dubious", if not disloyal, notion. Gorbachev's reforms, despite having so remarkably dismantled the Communist party dictatorship, had been "a chimera", and the Soviet Union therefore died from a "lack of alternatives....

A large majority of Russians, on the other hand, as they have regularly made clear in opinion surveys, regret the end of the Soviet Union, not because they pine for "communism" but because they lost a secure way of life. They do not share the nearly unanimous western view that the Soviet Union's "collapse" was "inevitable" because of inherent fatal defects. They believe instead, and for good reason, that three "subjective" factors broke it up: the way Gorbachev carried out his political and economic reforms; a power struggle in which Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet state in order to get rid of its president, Gorbachev; and property-seizing Soviet bureaucratic elites, the nomenklatura, who were more interested in "privatising" the state's enormous wealth in 1991 than in defending it. Most Russians, including even the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, therefore still see December 1991 as a "tragedy."
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