Posted on 05/26/2019 1:51:38 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
MOSCOW -- Konstantin Vyatkin has never acknowledged the Soviet collapse.
"For the past 28 years I've tried to live in this country called Russia," he says. "But in my heart I still live there, in the Soviet Union."
The words may sound banal in a country where two-thirds of the population professes nostalgia for the former empire, motivated by economic concerns and the absence of a welfare state.
But Vyatkin does not simply miss the Soviet Union -- he actively denies its breakup, and claims to obey only its laws. And now a vibrant cottage industry is helping legitimize his discontent.
Sitting behind the steering wheel of his Mercedes in central Moscow on a recent afternoon, he produces a brand-new Soviet passport. Date of issue: March 9, 2019.
It looks identical to the real thing -- with a stamp bearing the Soviet emblem, a black-and-white photograph, and hammers and sickles on each two-page spread. It came, he says, with a red-and-white sticker now stuck to his windshield: "I am a citizen of the U.S.S.R.," it reads.
Vyatkin is among a loose but growing network of Russians.
At banks, police stations, and inside courtrooms across the country, people calling themselves "citizens of the U.S.S.R." demand their right to impunity before the legal system of the Russian Federation, a state they neither recognize nor, apparently, fear.
Grigory Yudin, a sociologist at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, said that a noticeable shift has taken place in Russia recently "from nostalgia driven by the imperialist past toward a nostalgia driven by a demand for social justice and for equality."
(Excerpt) Read more at rferl.org ...
The Internet, which only reached the masses after the Soviet collapse, is now helping spread their basic conspiracy theory: that a document dissolving the Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, and signed on December 25, 1991, by its then-President Boris Yeltsin, is illegal.
Vyatkin has long felt like a stranger in his own country. But around six months ago his disillusionment reached a head, and he began scouring the web for validation.
"I was looking for information and like-minded people," he says. "I knew I couldn't continue living in a country like this."
On a website that claims to represent "MVD SSSR" -- the Soviet Interior Ministry -- he filled out an online form and paid 3,800 rubles ($58) to receive his "Soviet" passport. The organization, which uses the Soviet .su domain but lists no address or other identifying details other than "Moscow, RSFSR," told RFE/RL in an e-mail that it has issued more than 10,000 such passports since early 2018.
On YouTube, Vyatkin found hundreds of channels peddling conspiracy theories: that Russia's an offshore company registered in Delaware; that President Vladimir Putin was killed in 2012 and replaced by a body double; that the Soviet Union, and its ministries, are being resurrected. Some gave him convincing explanations of the inequality he was witnessing in Russia.
But beyond feeding widespread Soviet nostalgia and disillusionment, the channels also promote ways newly minted "Soviet citizens" can skirt Russian laws, open bank accounts, and evade taxes. Bloggers harass parliamentary deputies on camera, prank-call government ministries, set up bank accounts using "Soviet" passports, and ridicule traffic cops who stop them for displaying illicit, "Soviet" registration plates.
Some of these channels have hundreds of thousands of followers. The most popular video on the YouTube channel Pravoved TV (Jurist TV), claims to offer "practical tips and advice for citizens of the U.S.S.R."
yes, they want the Soviet Union back, just without the Communism.
Ef em...
You can’t have the USSR without Communism. So no, he most likely wants the Communism back. Same with Putin.
The nostalgists weren’t part of the 30-50 million people brutally murdered under the system.
He’ll have to trade in his Mercedes for a Trabant or bicycle to make it official.
More like Sovereign Citizens in the US
Did Crazy Bernie and his wife get two of them to celebrate their honeymoon in Moscow?
“....and ridicule traffic cops who stop them for displaying illicit, “Soviet” registration plates.”
From the vids I’ve seen, angering a Russian cop is not a good idea. Backup arrives in hordes swinging truncheons.
Nostalgia for a welfare state is one thing; these idiots who want Communism restored are nothing less than Party wannabes hoping for positions of power, privilege, and dollar stores.
And I swear, Russians are more gullible about conspiracy rumors than even the Arabs. I thought we could be semi-friends after 1991, but they are determined to be our enemy and are looking for a rematch.
As noted, real commies don’t drive German luxury cars; they should be driving Moskviches or Trabants.
Konstantin Vyatkin would fit right in with the modern Democrat Party, or the Civil War one as well.
Agree...I thought we and the Russians could maybe be semi friends..I had business dealings with some in the UAE during the mid/early 90s. But the old Russian mentality and their despot leader cant help themselves. leader
I believe it was Ben Stein who once observed that the only true-believing Communists remaining in the world today are BMW-driving American college students.
Radio Free Europe, now there’s an unbiased source.
It’s probably at most a few thousand people out of a population of almost 200 million.
Getting stopped on the street in Moscow is ordinary, and less often then it used to be. One of the reforms that Putin did back in the early 2000’s was raising the cop’s pay, and restraining them from opportunist traffic stops - they collect the fines and write the infraction on your license (it’s a book with a log for that).
It’s one of the things that endeared people to Putin. He eliminated some of the overbearing petty corruption that the old system was based on.
I’ve also never seen a truncheon wielding gang in Moscow. Maybe there’s some internet video to that effect, and it would shock me, but I never get that feeling in central Moscow. It’s not much different then any other big city, and a lot less threatening then say, New York City.
There’s a simple reason people in Russia are nostalgic for the Soviet Union. It’s that they feel like they’ve been duped, intentionally humiliated, and the promises of the West were empty. The Oligarchs are real; robber capitalism is what they do. Bust out stock scams, dog eat dog competition with no social safety net, evaporating industries and theft on a scale never seen in civilized countries left them with the conclusion that what was sold to them as Nirvana was anything but.
The author Anne Williamson documented all this:
https://gizadeathstar.com/2014/08/look-back-anne-williamson-rape-russia/
I saw it with my own eyes, and talked to many young and old Russians about what was happening. They were stoic and cynical at the same time, which is a central trait of Russians. Most of the intelligent people - which is a lot of Russians - understand that turmoil is the price of change. But what happened to them between 1991 and 2003 was far worse then anything they could have imagined, and they were a population psychologically unprepared to deal with such change. The West should have implemented a gradual, stepped approach to weaning them from the State as all pervasive. BS like free market ‘shock therapy’ just enriched a few criminals and destroyed the livelihoods and savings of the many.
Moscow now is a city of stark contrasts: hyper rich and hyper poor. In general, there are many more people far better off then before, but life for most is a lot less secure then it was under the all pervasive Communist state. Do they have more? Well, many do, many don’t. But they do have Audi dealerships now and you can buy a Camry if you somehow have the cash.
Putin put a stop to a lot of the egregious crap and stabilized things. Then he started doing things that are egregious on their own: Ukraine. Everyone knows what he wants; he wants an ersatz Soviet federation that is basically a Customs union so that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians have a market for their decidedly non-competitive products. So it might be mangy, but it would be their mutt: a semi-functioning Second World, maybe not Britain or even Italy, but better then Brazil or India.
And that’s where you end up with Soviet nostalgia guy. It may have been oppressive, but it was more secure then what they have now which is close to chaos in their minds.
One of the great things about Don Trump is that he recognizes all of this and wants to solve this by pulling the Russians back from the abyss and integrating them into the West, this time properly. We should follow his lead. Putin won’t be there forever, the kids in Russia want to have a life.
LOL
The West should have implemented a gradual, stepped approach to weaning them from the State as all pervasive.
We had friends who got out of Hungary in the seventies. They had friends who also got out ... and went right back. Being raised under communism, these folks were terrified of the prospect of losing one’s job and starving to death in the west.
Having a guaranteed job and income, such as it was, was more important to them than freedom, and freedom to fail.
Everyone wants to be an apparatchiki - someone who works for the government in a no-show job. But armies of apparatchiki are what drove the Soviet economy to its knees. If those jobs return, the long lines for bread and other basic necessities will also re-emerge.
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