Actually, a view that communism could not be viable endured for
much longer. The Whites and the liberal intelligentsia took this conviction
along as they went into exile after the end of the Civil War. Throughout the
1920s and the 1930s, the emigre press in Paris, Berlin, Prague and elsewhere
was full of predictions of the Soviet regime’s imminent demise. It was too
bloody, its economic notions were hare-brained, pauperized the population. Even
worse: the country was literally starving. The communist ideology was laughable
and reading Soviet newspapers made one think they had been written by inmates
in an loony bin. The pious Russian people would not tolerate an atheist
government run mostly by Jews and other ethnic minorities that was
systematically destroying their churches. The death knell for the regime was
rung when, in a feat of apparent madness, the revolution began devouring its
own children, executing the military brass, party cadres and loyal citizens, and
even purging its own repressive apparatus.
When I emigrated from the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, I
met some of the elderly White emigres still living at the time in Rome and New
York. They were nostalgic for the country of their youth and still, in their
hearts of hearts, they could not believe that the monstrous experiment to which
Russia had subjected itself was real. I stayed briefly with the noble
Zolotnitsky family in Rome and the grandmother, who had left Crimea on one of
the overcrowded refugee boats when she was in her mid-twenties, kept querying
me eagerly about various aspects of life in the Soviet Union. She kept shaking
her head as though she couldn’t quite fathom that people in the Soviet Union
could be born, grow up, get an education, raise a family and die peacefully in
their beds.
According to 1st century B.C. Chinese general Sun Zi, if you wait by the
river long enough, the body of your enemy will eventually float by. In time,
the unlamented dead body of the Soviet Union – if not Lenin’s mummy – finally
floated by the descendants of those Whites who by then were scattered around
the world and only dimly aware of their Russian heritage. But the system turned
out to be far more durable than anyone had expected. After a half-hearted attempt
to join the community of civilized nations, Russia gleefully turned itself into
a kind of neo-communist proto-fascist state. Unlike the final years of the
Soviet Union, when the population was emotionally and physically drained,
demoralized and browbeaten, today’s reincarnation of that state is brimming
with negative energy. The new generation of Russians is in some ways closer to
the generation of the 1920s, the ones who became Stalin’s power base, who
enthusiastically gave him absolute power and who wept and stampeded at his
funeral even though he had killed millions of them and filled the rest with
deadly fear.
The
1920s’ generation consisted of semi-literate boys and girls born on the
countryside and living in recently created industrial suburbs. They were raised
during the years of World War I and the Civil War and became infected with
Lenin’s vulgarized Marxism. Not only were they given the one and only “correct”
ideology, but they were also told that they had to show the way to the rest of
the world. And if smarter and more educated people didn’t want to follow them,
they were enemies that had to be destroyed.
For
the current generation of Russians, the corrupting role of leninism was played
by the easy petrodollar prosperity, which gave them an illusion of greatness
and a huge sense of entitlement. They form the backbone of Putin’s support, a
know-nothing generation that grew up on lies and distortions supplied by
television and became imbued with a sense of national exclusivity.
In
the 1930s, Stalin sicked his communist masses on the old-style intelligentsia –
all those engineers who got a professional education and therefore thought they
knew better how to run factories, on prosperous, hard-working peasants, on
experienced military commanders and on the educated party elite. After World
War II came the turn of the Jews and other “rootless cosmopolitans”.
Invariably,
the targets were eggheads – the ones who claimed that the world was too complex
to be explained away by marxism-leninism and that solving some problems
required education and professional training, not just love for the Great
Leader.
I
have no doubt that in Putin’s Russia, the turn of “domestic enemies” and the
“Fifth Column” will also eventually come. For now, however, Putin is channelling
the national anger out of the country. It’s the Anglo-Saxons – the British and
the Americans – who have always conspired to keep Russia down. The perfidious
Anglo-Americans bought everyone up and turned other nations into their lackeys
in order to keep Russia from assuming its rightful role as a global leader.
Russia
has accumulated a long litany of historical grievances, going back to the dawn
of history. They include facts cited by “serious” political analysis as well as
downright silliness and craziness – such
as a recently advanced claim that Jesus travelled to Northern Russia, where he
developed his teachings. There is an entire branch of history in Russia which
has discovered that Western Europe was a Russian-speaking federation during the
Middle Ages.
Today, those Anglo-Saxons and the West in general are flaunting their advanced
technologies, their well-engineered cars, their dollar-based financial system
and their control over commodity markets. Their movies, music, fashions and
McDonald’s have insidiously spread into Russia, corrupting and weakening
it. They are proud of their prosperity,
tolerance and civil rights, claiming it to be a mark of an advanced
civilization.
Russia
can’t harm the United States and its allies in any real way – because indeed,
the West’s military, technological, financial and economic superiority over
Russia is at this point overwhelming. Vladimir Putin thought he could rile up
EU farmers if he banned their products from the Russian market. But Russia turned
out to be too insignificant to make a difference. While Brussels made up the
farmers’ losses, Russia’s own economic decline meant that its imports were
going to shrink anyway. All Russia can do is to burn banned food products
brought into the country illegally in a kind of a voodoo ritual in which
cheese, ham, fruit and vegetables become stand-ins for Western politicians.
More
ominously, ex-Soviet nations that are hoping to join the West but do not yet
enjoy NATO protection have also become stand-ins for the hated Americans.
Ukrainians, along with Georgians, Moldovans and, in time, othersl, can expect
to bear the brunt of Russia’s impotent rage.
All
this suggests that the Russian madness can’t be expected to end painlessly
merely if Putin goes. Stalin’s generation outlived its patron saint by three
decades. Mikhail Suslov, the party ideologist of the Brezhnev era, is a classic
example of a young Stalinist. He died in 1982.
Even
if the Russian economy crumbles – as it is likely to do in the near-to-medium
term, just as the Russian economy collapsed under Bolshevism – it will not
result in any kind of a new beginning. There may be changes, but probably not
for the better.
Khersonsky,
the poet, put it best: “I think that this regime will endure for a long time
(not necessarily its principal, but the regime). We must go on living and
making plans for the future based on this assumption. And if all of a sudden
Putinism starts to crumble, we must do everything possible to avoid being
buried alive under its ruins.”
