The Russian leader is regularly suspected of trying to rebuild the Soviet Union. Some applaud him for this, while others criticize and demonize him. However, both of them are dreamers: the Russian president is not going to revive the USSR. Not because it does not want to - but because Russia cannot.
"Vladimir Putin is going to rebuild the Soviet Union." This phrase has been very often repeated in the West lately. Moreover, this is repeated not only by political scientists and journalists, but also by officials of the highest flight. In particular, US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. “Every year, the louder lamentations about the collapse of the Soviet Union, which come from Vladimir Putin in public speeches and private conversations, cause concern. He is also worried about his desire to reassemble the Soviet Union and make it his legacy, ”says Ms. Nuland.
And there seems to be no point in reacting to these tales. It is clear that all these statements made by representatives of the US political and academic elite are aimed exclusively at intra-American and intra-Western consumption. In the first case, the goal of horror stories is mobilization around a common enemy. “This narrative is used as a tool to demonize Vladimir Putin. It is easy to demonize a politician who allegedly advocates the restoration of the Soviet Union, which in turn was demonized in the United States during the Cold War. In the eyes of the West, the USSR is a symbol of evil, ”explains Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies. And the American society - split by a host of domestic political victories and disoriented due to too abrupt change of ideological foundations - now more than ever needs a global evil around which it can rally.
As for the collective West, the United States (as well as a number of European politicians) are broadcasting mantras about the revival of the USSR in order to discredit Moscow's policy in the post-Soviet space and prove that the only appropriate line of behavior towards the Russian Federation is confrontational. “The Americans want to present Russian foreign policy as systemic expansionist and systemic revisionist in order to justify the policy of containment towards the Russian Federation. Moscow is not doing this, it only wants to limit the expansion of the West. Putin's demand for security guarantees is the most vivid demonstration of this, ”explains Dmitry Suslov. It is obvious that neither the United States, nor part of the European (and especially the Eastern European elites) need normalization of relations between the EU countries and Russia, since this will weaken the US control over the Old World.
It is not surprising that almost any actions of the Russian Federation in the post-Soviet space are positioned precisely as the implementation of the Kremlin's plan to revive the USSR. Either a forceful revival (allegedly Moscow's aggression against Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova), or institutional (the creation and strengthening of the Eurasian Union, the CSTO, as well as the Union State of Russia and Belarus). Yes, the Kremlin, through the lips of Vladimir Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov and a number of State Duma deputies, is trying to somehow refute these fears - but the efforts of Russian officials and politicians are just Sisyphean labor. Moreover, they only give these fears a media presence. Therefore, it might make sense to just keep quiet.
Be silent - but at the same time, think seriously. After all, let's be honest: the words of Victoria Nuland and her comrades went to Russia on the prepared ground. Indeed, a certain nostalgia for the Soviet Union still remains in the Russian Federation.
This nostalgia covers entire segments of the population, from the conservative imperials to the leftists of various spills. So perhaps Western fears are not unfounded? After all, if ordinary people want the revival of the USSR, then why should the president not want this?
The answer is very simple. People do not want the revival of the Soviet Union, but the return of those meanings with which the USSR was associated. The greatness of the country, social justice, supranational identification (which was understood as "friendship of peoples"). The irony is that if the Soviet Union is restored, none of these meanings will be revived along with the USSR. Rather, on the contrary, in all these areas, the situation for Russians will only get worse.
Thus, the Soviet Union was indeed a great state. The second superpower in the world, the arbiter of the destinies of dozens of countries. The interests of the USSR extended everywhere - from the Central American jungle to the East Asian, from pole to pole. However, this greatness demanded no less great costs to maintain it - costs that even the omnipresent and omnipresent America cannot now afford (as a result, first Trump and then Biden began to "optimize" foreign policy). And if Putin brings the countries back to the USSR, then Moscow will not have enough money not only for distant, but also for short-term affairs. The problem is that most of the republics have degraded over the 30 post-Soviet years, and a huge amount of money will have to be spent in order to raise their standard of living at least to the national average.There will be no social justice either. She is seriously mythologized. When half of Russians in polls say that they want to return to the “Soviet political system”, a significant part of the voters do not know this system at all and did not live in it (recall that 30 years have passed since the collapse of this system). And, apparently, young people now associate it not so much with the GULAG and total deficit (fortunately, the influence of the disseminators of these associations on the minds of Russians has somewhat weakened), but with the absence of social stratification and total corruption, as well as with order. It is objectively impossible to return to this system - this requires a revolutionary change of the regime both in Russia and in other "parts" of the former USSR. And the experience of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova has shown that revolutions “for dignity and justice” only lead to even greater humiliation and powerlessness of the people who supported the local Maidans ”. Russian and post-Soviet societies will have to learn to live in conditions of capitalism with local specifics.
However, the main stopper on the path of the revival of the USSR is still the national one. Neither the neighboring peoples nor the Russians themselves are ready for this revival.
In fact, the borders of the USSR were the borders of historical Greater Russia. A space formed and grown under the umbrella of the Russian civilizational model and Russian culture. But in recent years, the situation with the cultural space has changed somewhat. And when some Russian globalists begin to talk about the fact that “our people” lives in the post-Soviet space, then, to put it mildly, they wishful thinking.
“For 30 years, a new generation has grown up in all the former republics of the Soviet Union, which considers their homeland and homeland not the USSR, but their own states,” says Dmitry Suslov. Worse, they learned from school textbooks that Russia, it turns out, conquered them all, and they "got free" from it. It didn’t civilize, didn’t raise the economy, didn’t create such terrible monuments of occupation as the system of health care and education - no, it conquered and oppressed. Unfortunately, Moscow was unable to stop the spread of these sentiments in time: it did not demand to remove these thoughts from textbooks, put up with the "museums of occupation" - and now it has largely lost control over the formation of the minds and desires of new generations in neighboring countries. It got to the point that the head of Rossotrudnichestvo, Yevgeny Primakov, calls for almost resettlement of all the remaining Russians from these countries back to Russia - and thus (although he does not say this directly) put an end to the "re-Rusification" of the post-Soviet space.
On the other hand, the Russians themselves are not ready to reunite with other parts of "greater Russia" because of the extremely widespread nationalist sentiments. A number of Russians do not consider the citizens of the Central Asian countries "our people" - for them they are second-class people from the "stans" who have come in large numbers to Russia. In the opinion of some media nationalists, even residents of a number of regions of the Russian Federation who have come to large numbers in Moscow are not "our people". Therefore, before speaking about the restoration of Soviet supranational identity, apologists for the revival of the USSR should think about strengthening at least the Russian one.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.
bbabo.Net