RUSSIAN WORLD The dark 25 years of Tsar Putin

It has now been a quarter of a century since Boris Yeltsin handed over power. Nobody thought then that that peaceful and prosperous Russia that in 1997 had celebrated the 850th anniversary of Moscow would disappear. Today, however, New Year’s greetings ominously repeat “we will continue forward until victory”, while everything seems to take Russia further and further backwards.

A quarter of a century has already passed since Vladimir Putin’s accession to the Kremlin throne, the event that – according to Andrej Kolesnikov’s definition in Novaya Gazeta – caused “the greatest anthropological catastrophe of the 21st century.” In reality, the decision to entrust the country’s destiny to him after the “most tragic turning point of the 20th century”, as Putin described the end of the USSR, had been taken before the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian era, when Boris Yeltsin activated the “delayed bomb” of the obscure KGB-FSB official, putting him at the head of the government at the end of 1998. He handed over the presidency to him on the eve of the new century and he left the scene and history recommending to the former vice mayor of Saint Petersburg to “take care” of Russia.

It was the end of uncertain post-Soviet democracy, which had been expressed since Yeltsin’s election in 1990 as president of the Russian Soviet Republic (RSFSR), in Gorbachev’s attempt to save the system by reforming it from within. In 1996 Yeltsin was re-elected president of the Russian Federation, narrowly defeating the reborn communist party of Genadiy Zyuganov, supported by the Orthodox Church of Metropolitan Kirill (Gundyaev), and even then it was evident that Russia was going backwards in history, evoking his imperial pretensions. In 2000, the election of Putin, who had already replaced Yeltsin in office, took place on March 26, and marked the victory of the “democratic” successor with 53% compared to 30% for the communist Zjuganov, who as of At that moment he became his devoted supporter, thus building the “popular consensus” of the fateful 80%, the minimum figure of the totalitarian tradition. Russian democracy was exhausted.

“Returning totalitarianism,” as the sociologist Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada-Centr, calls it, has caused a progressive anthropological regression of the Russian people, a feeling of self-repression even prior to anti-everything laws and outlaw lists. , which are now the order of the day in a Russia at permanent war. Men and women who lived the euphoria of freedom of expression and the confrontation of different ideas about the present and future of Russia, little by little began to think and behave in a servile and blindly “patriotic” way. In the New Year’s broadcasts of the past few days, it was impressive to see libertarian singers like Filipp Kirkorov performing practically in military uniform, and men of culture decorating the tree with bombs and ammunition, wishing for the extermination of the Ukrainians “if not within the year, at least in two or three years.

In the nineties, the type of “new Russian” had spread, given over to unbridled consumerism after decades of Breznevian abstinence, who traveled between the coasts of the Mediterranean and the French Alps trying to ignore his own inferiority complex in the face of the opulence of the West, and to chase away the regurgitation of resentment over the loss of the Soviet superpower, which instead carried Putin’s bomb until it exploded in the 1920s. The pale liberal reforms of the first five post-Soviet years were quickly set aside to preserve the illusion of oligarchic prosperity, which was then put at the service of central power until investment in the current war economy, the true destiny of wealth. accumulated in the first twenty years of Yeltsin-Putin Russia.

As Aleksandr Rubtsov, one of the most important political scientists, who recently died, said, the top of Putin’s power pyramid was built on the basis of a selection of leading cadres that has been defined as a “sewer raising system”, creating a caste of “Putin-like” people that today makes it impossible to think about a future of political change and renewal, whatever the tsar’s personal destiny. Writer Denis Dragunsky claims that 2025 opens in Russia as “an attractive picture of pro-hindsight.”

A quarter of a century ago, no one thought that that peaceful and flourishing Russia would disappear, which in 1997 celebrated the 850 years of Moscow, and in 2003 the 300 years of Saint Petersburg, restoring the luster to the two historic capitals of the country in the whirlwind of the evroremontthe construction of modern European-style buildings. Russia did not feel the humiliation of feeling excluded, because it was very active in international markets with its infinite energy resources, science and education were intertwined with the most important institutions of all the countries of the East and West, the modern retirement system, guaranteed by the oligarchic network, it ensured serene protection of families and the elderly, and even health care worked for everyone, beyond the inevitable drifts of corruption.

Today, however, greetings for the new year sinisterly repeat “we will continue forward, until victory”, when it is evident that Russia is running further and further backwards, traveling the Siberian routes from the Soviet concentration camps to the forced Russifications of the Ukrainians by the tsars of the 19th century, and the dreams of the Third Rome of the first tsar, Ivan the Terrible. As the hero of a novel by the philosopher and writer Aleksandr Zinoviev said, “we move forward, far ahead of ourselves,” without allowing anyone to stop to reflect on what is happening. Anyone who even expresses doubts is marginalized, and even excluded from society as a “traitor to the country,” and anyone who does not surrender to the catastrophe is accused of extremist tendencies. The era of drones exploding over cities and planes crashing due to obscure causes is called the “age of security,” and the disintegration of families and human relationships is celebrated with the Year of the Family that has just passed. end, in view of the Year of Victory and Unity that will be celebrated next May 9, on the 80th anniversary of the glorious end of the Great Patriotic War.

The isolation of world culture and society, with the exclusion of any possibility of student exchange and research with foreign universities, the closure of energy and technological markets, even the ecclesiastical schism with the other Orthodox Churches, all this is exalted. as the new “sovereignty” of Russia, against any interference from abroad. Archaic and grotesque rituals are held in schools, and kindergarten children march under portraits of Stalin to defend “traditional moral and spiritual values.” The defense of the most basic rights, from those contained in the ten biblical commandments to those of the UN Charter, and even those listed in the Constitution of the Russian Federation itself, turns out to be a “destructive ideology”, which surpasses in reality even the fantasies of Orwell and Kafka, or of Bulgakov and Zamjatin.

The resentment of Putin’s Russia repeats the accusations of the most classic question in Russian literature and advertising, “who is to blame?” They go back to Nikita Khruscev, who allowed the use of blue-jeans that “mortify the male gender” and gave Crimea to the Ukrainians, to Mikhail Gorbachev who shattered the immutable system of “Brezhnevian stagnation” and handed over all of Western Europe to Westerners. This, even Egor Gajdar, Yeltsin’s economist who with privatizations “sold Russia to the Americans.” Even the semi-divine Vladimir Lenin is accused of failing to keep the empire together and “inventing Ukraine,” and forcing Stalin to put the pieces back together “causing some victims.” There is no shortage of accusations against the Hungarian-American oligarch George Soros, an emblematic figure of the “strong powers” that conspire in the shadows, who with his “humanitarian” actions infected Russia with educational systems and publications totally alien to the true patriotic spirit.

For twenty-five years, an increasingly dark and oppressive regime has reigned in Russia, against which one cannot argue or object, and one is forced to discuss the guilt of Yeltsin and Gajdar. History is continually rewritten and adapted, in compulsory textbooks for schools of all types and levels, and even in the removal of the plaque commemorating the victims of the Solovki lager from Lubjanka Square, the kingdom of KGB-FSB where the Putinian anthropological type comes from. In many cities, monuments to Stalin are being erected again, the true progenitor of this callous and aggressive, retrograde and apocalyptic form of humanity that today dominates a country that is increasingly unrecognizable and degenerate, even compared to its most bloodthirsty times.

One of Putin’s main supporters and ideologists, Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, led a New Year’s greeting from the screens of his television channel Tsargradensuring that “this year everything will be different, without that old Biden fan and with a pragmatic, Russia-loving person like Trump”, revealing the true feelings of Russians for a figure who largely reflects the dimensions of “anthropology sovereignist.” A quarter of a century is a long period, which has surpassed that of many other dictators of ancient and modern Russia, and above all has made us forget the luminous visions of the “end of history” in economic and technological globalization. An era of universal isolation opens, from Trump to Putin, from East to West, where what apparently disappears is not only democracy and peace, freedoms and rights, but the human person himself.

“RUSSIAN WORLD” IS THE ASIANEWS NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO RUSSIA. DO YOU WANT TO RECEIVE IT EVERY SATURDAY IN YOUR EMAIL? SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER THROUGH THIS LINK