![]() ![]() If they were so much better off under democracy and capitalism, why were they dying in such numbers? We now know that this decline was largely driven by massive increases in alcoholism among men. I remember in high school wondering how freedom-loving, liberal-democratic Russians could have a life expectancy of 65 in 1994, already four years shorter than in the final years of Communism. Signs abounded that the narrative the American public was fed was missing something. We heard tales of an American-style liberal democracy rising from Communism’s ashes, not the dispiriting mobster rule that Russian citizens were enduring. If he rules until 2030, his tenure will have matched Stalin’s, and he may appreciate the parallel.Įven Americans now acknowledge that in the decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia did not achieve an idyllic end of history. Putin waxed in popularity during the 2000s because he brought order and ended chaos for the common people. Finally, the reemergence of a strong central state was a shift back to the traditional pattern Russians had known, not some authoritarian innovation suddenly imposed upon a populace that cherished the Rights of Englishmen. In the West, oligarchs like the late Boris Berezovsky were seen as bulwarks of liberalism and free speech, but Russians widely viewed them as corrupt gangsters plundering public resources with impunity and living above the law. But it wasn’t that simple in Putin’s country. His suppression of a violent Islamist rebellion in Chechnya-the suppression proving incredibly violent, in turn-his persecution of the oligarchs, and his ideology of a strong and muscular state were viewed in the West as evidence of a sinister turn, an end to our dream of a liberal-democratic Russia. ![]() This is the ship of state and society that Putin righted. Yeltsin’s descent into alcoholism and personal chaos paralleled the hedonistic anarchy of 1990s Russia. Yeltsin had been a reformer during Mikhail Gorbachev’s time, but as the leader of the Russian Federation in the 1990s he oversaw the rise of oligarchs who came to dominate a society riddled with corruption, while the state became a cat’s paw for Western social engineers experimenting with neoliberal economics. On December 31 of that year, Yeltsin resigned, and a then-obscure Vladimir Putin became president. Geopolitically, it was all quiet on the Russian front until the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, when Boris Yeltsin objected to the West’s move against Serbia, a historical Russian ally. In the 1990s, Russia faded from the American consciousness, with such occasional newsworthy events as internecine violence during the 1993 constitutional crisis or its 1998 financial collapse. That it was now officially called the Russian Federation was just a footnote. Almost overnight, “Russia” was no longer a vast nation-state that stretched from Europe to the Pacific, enfolding within its frontiers everything from chunks of Eastern Europe to Afghanistan, but a more modest, albeit still massive, country. Despite Ronald Reagan’s optimistic rhetoric about defeating the “evil empire,” the rapidity of Communism’s collapse and the dissolution of the Soviet Union came as a shock. The Cold War had its ups and downs, but Americans tended to see the American–Russian rivalry as a permanent fact of the geopolitical landscape. And a national rivalry was seen as such an eternal condition that the original Star Trek, set centuries in the future, had a Russian character, Pavel Chekov, to indicate a rapprochement between the two great powers. In 1985’s Rocky IV, Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago is a towering figure of Russian muscle, the perfect villain for Sylvester Stallone’s plucky American underdog, Rocky Balboa, to face off against and defeat. The abstract rivalry between global alliances and ideologies, between First World capitalism, and Second World Communism, was the concrete battle between Americans and Russians. This is how a prominent Stalin expert could refer to his subject as the “ Red Tsar.” ![]() Despite being the bulwark of international Communism, the Soviet Union, by the time Joseph Stalin led it in the 1930s, was for all practical purposes the heir of the Russian Empire. Though Russians were only 50 percent of the population of the Soviet Union, Russian language and culture dominated the USSR. But in the United States, what we really talked about wasn’t the Soviets or the Communists so much as the “Russians,” conflating the dominant Soviet ethnicity with the whole nation. For many of us Cold War kids, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and the battle between capitalism and global Communism were just background conditions of our youth. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |