RUSSIA Like the USSR, Russia is heading towards disintegration

The “Putinian” man is the current and unhappy version of the “homo sovieticus”. The Russians no longer have hope for the future, except in the apocalyptic version of orthodoxy. Putin’s violence is the “Russian national characteristic”, its true ideology.

Moscow () – December 25 marked the 31st anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was the exit imposed by the President of the Russian Republic, Yeltsyn, in the face of the impotence of Mikhail Gorbachev, who, after the summer coup attempt by the KGB, had lost all control over the structures of the empire. Putin’s 10-month war in Ukraine has suggested to many commentators a comparison between the end of the USSR and that of a Russia that also seems destined to disintegrate.

One of Russia’s most influential freelance journalists still at large, Andrej Arkhangelskij, published his thoughts on this anniversary. on the website of Radio Svoboda, he refers to the current condition of “Putinian man”, a current and unhappy version of the “homo sovieticus” of yesteryear. He recalls that in the early 2000s, public opinion bristled at the memory of 1991-“how much longer will we have to keep talking about the Soviet era and its tragedies.” It was preferable for historians to deal with this subject in their dissertations.

“A new life has finally begun”, writes the journalist, “only it is a non-life, as the philologist Mikhail Epstein says”. The year that is ending was “the bloodiest in all of post-Soviet history”, and it makes Memories of Soviet events become relevant again: the invasion of Ukraine “is as Soviet as imaginable. History returns to square one, and the “new Russia” is over, ushering in a dark phase. which is not yet possible to imagine.

In 1994, a renowned Russian sociologist, Jurij Levada, observed: “The USSR no longer exists, but the Soviet man continues to reproduce.” This statement “turned out to be prophetic,” says Arkhangelsky. And this is a lesson for all “sovietologists Y kremlinologists“, who argued that the country could recover from the Soviet experience by resorting to “natural methods”: through the economy, overcoming totalitarian ideology and the advancement of democratic institutions, which give citizens freedom to choose.

And yet “Sovietity” did not dissolve, but was transfigured into a new way of life, the putinian: “In the first 10 years it was preserved by inertia, then Putin revived it, rescuing it from the underground where it still survived in a sleepwalk,” explains Arkhangelsky.

For the journalist, “Putin’s regime has not created anything new -neither ideology, nor story, nor principles-; it has only restored a form of expression to an inanimate being”. The man putinian, divorced from reality and the world, is a “local man, reclusive, unlike the broader variants of the “Khrushchevian” and “Brezhnevian” man, who searched for the world around him.” He is a “naked Soviet man”, uprooted and without hope for the future, save in the apocalyptic version of orthodoxy, which is also a vestige of Soviet heritage.

Then one is reminded of the Russian proverb that Putin uttered just before the invasion of Ukraine: “Whether you like it or not, be patient my girl!“(nravitsa, nie nravitsa – terpi, moja krasavitsa!). The phrase is incomprehensible to Westerners; “Only those who grew up in Soviet schools and courtyards” understand its meaning. The allusion is a justification of the violation; what’s more, it is a hymn to violence as such, “which is justified with historical and moral dimensions; It is the code of violence that we see in action today.”

Therefore, the violence putinian it is the “Russian national characteristic”, its true ideology, propagated through the thunderous propaganda in which “rape is committed with words”. The post-Soviet experience was traumatic because the Russians had to rediscover and redefine themselves – unlike all other countries and especially the West, whose self-awareness was not mobilized by “telluric shocks”. And instead of creating a new man in a new world, the old man has reasserted itself, furiously trying to make the world go back to what it was before.