Posted on 06/18/2005 7:39:40 PM PDT by familyop
After a week in St Petersburg, I can't seem to get that old Beatles number out of my head: I'm back in the USSR/ You don't know how lucky you are. Russia's pre-revolutionary capital has certainly changed since I was last here in 1990. It has, needless to say, acquired all the garish trimmings of post-perestroika capitalism: billboards for US-style sports utility vehicles and a rash of neon lights along the Nevsky Prospekt, the city's Champs Elysées.
And not just the trimmings. Fifteen years ago, the state-run shops lacked even the most basic essentials; people appeared to subsist on air and pickled gherkins. Today there are supermarkets offering a cornucopia of cheeses and chardonnays.
Yet look behind this patina of economic progress and you soon spot disquieting vestiges of the old Soviet Union. Every public building still seems to be guarded by its gimlet-eyed babushka, hell-bent on denying you admission if you do not have five copies of your permit stamped by five different government offices. The Russian bureaucracy may have lost its old air of menace. But it still lurks in its dingy, stale-smelling offices, just waiting for the signal to spring back into inaction.
The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, also paid a visit to St Petersburg this week. This, too, brought back memories of the old days. Whole streets were cordoned off. Motorcades roared around the city, bringing traffic to a standstill. Close to where I was working, a stretch of potholed sidewalk was hastily repaved so that Mr Putin could unveil a plaque there (to the Soviet-era president of Azerbaijan) without stubbing his toe.
Since coming to power as Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor, Mr Putin has worked hard to concentrate power in his own hands. His party, United Russia, dominates the Russian parliament. In the aftermath of the disastrous Beslan school siege last September, he took over the appointment of regional governors, who had been directly elected in the 1990s. He has also tightened the Kremlin's grip on the country's main television networks.
But Mr Putin's most dramatic power-play has been his decision to break the political power of the business "oligarchs" who were the main beneficiaries of the Yeltsin era. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company, has just been sentenced to nine years in jail for alleged tax evasion and fraud. Everyone here knows, however, that his real crime was to pose a political threat to Mr Putin.
Nobody can deny that all kinds of mischief went on in the Yeltsin years. The privatisation of the energy sector was one of the scams of the century, but the vehemence with which Mr Putin heaps opprobrium on the oligarchs awakens unpleasant memories of the old Soviet regime, which specialised in the vilification and destruction of internal enemies.
Even more troubling is Mr Putin's unapologetic nostalgia for the days when Russia ran the affairs of nearly all its immediate neighbours. "We should acknowledge," he declared in an astonishing speech two months ago, "that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century."
Mr Putin clearly intends to restore Russia's influence over the Commonwealth of Independent States, the vestigial association of former Soviet republics. "We need not turn this CIS space into a battlefield," he said last Monday. "Rather we should turn it into a space of co-operation." The idea that these are the two options being considered by Mr Putin is not reassuring.
Is Putin's long-run aim to restore the Soviet Union? Russians always insist that it would be impossible to turn back the clock now that people have grown accustomed to the whole range of Western freedoms - not least the freedom of information symbolised by the crowded internet cafes along the Nevsky Prospekt.
Yet there is a discernible nostalgia for the terrible simplifications of the old days. In a poll conducted in 2003, the Russian Centre for Public Opinion found that 53 per cent of Russians still regard Stalin as a "great" leader. The explanation is not far to seek. The collapse of Communism has meant not just greater freedom but also widening inequality and a dramatic decline in average living standards.
Since 1989, the Russian mortality rate has risen from below 11 per 1,000 to more than 15 per 1,000 - nearly double the American rate. For adult males, the mortality rate is three times higher. Average male life expectancy at birth is below 60, roughly the same as in Bangladesh. A 20-year-old Russian man has a less than 50/50 chance of reaching the age of 65.
This has much to do with the round-the-clock consumption of fags and booze - the typical St Petersburg man walks around with a bottle of beer and a cigarette in one hand the way a Londoner carries his mobile phone - not to mention an attitude to road safety apparently inspired by the Mad Max films. It also reflects the long-term effects of the planned economy on the Russian environment and the near-collapse of the healthcare system.
Exacerbating the demographic effects of increased mortality has been a steep decline in the fertility rate, from 2.19 births per woman in the mid-1980s to a nadir of 1.17 in 1999. Because of these trends, the United Nations projects that Russia's population will decline from 146 million in 2000 to 101 million in 2050. By that time the population of Egypt will be larger.
All this helps explain why so many Russians might welcome a return to the USSR. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that they would willingly trade their own recent history for a version of China's, which would give them the benefits of the market economy without the costs they associate with the collapse of the Soviet state.
Whether Mr Putin can deliver that is a moot point; it is probably too late now for Russia to exercise the Chinese option. But what he can undoubtedly give Russians is a sense of geopolitical revival after the humiliations of 1989-91, which saw perhaps the swiftest decline and fall ever experienced by a great empire. For in military, diplomatic and economic terms, Russia still remains a serious power.
Just consider Mr Putin's diary over the past week. On Monday he welcomed Tony Blair to Moscow. On Tuesday he had a phone call from President Bush. And on Wednesday his guest in St Petersburg was Sonia Gandhi. Needless to say, all this gets blanket coverage on the television news. Still, there is substance behind the show.
Other world leaders have good reasons to hobnob with Putin. Mr Blair came here to get his backing for African debt cancellation and the Kyoto Protocol, which Russia recently signed. Russia, is after all, a member of the G8, which will shortly convene in Gleneagles.
Mr Bush wanted to hear Putin's thoughts on reforming the United Nations. Russia is, after all, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. And no doubt Sonia Gandhi wanted to talk economics. Russia is, after all, Asia's number one source of oil, gas and other vital commodities.
Any British visitor to Russia instantly recognises the symptoms of post-imperial trauma. The place has the feel of the 1970s, right down to the terrible clothes, teeth and hairdos. Yet those who wrote off Britain in the 1970s overstated our decline. The same mistake was made by a British journalist last week who compared Russia with Africa.
This is not, despite the old Cold War joke, "Upper Volta with missiles". There may be no going back to the USSR. But it is much too early to consign Putin's Russia to what Soviet propaganda used to call the dustbin of history.
• Niall Ferguson is Laurence H Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. His latest book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, has just been published in paperback by Penguin. ©Niall Ferguson 2005
You can't survive long as a nation (or a party--Dems take note) that's simply against things. You have to BE something.
When I asked him about it his main comment was "all the little markets/strip malls to buy stuff (for me!)". He liked it there...as a tourist.
As for the people he is working with, he has commented that their attitude is very different from Americans. He says that he's used to working with people that can confidently make decisions; related to work. Where he is working, they appear to think more as a group and are always saying that they need to check with someone else before giving an answer.
It's probably hard changing some of the old habits. ;)
Perhaps Ferguson meant St. Pete, Florida? I don't recognize the St. Petersburg Russia he writes about. Perhaps my over 40 visits to the city since 95 pales in comparison to his two weeks there, but me smells a fraud!
Your hubby hit the nail on the head. The most frustrating things about conducting meetings with Russian counterparts is it's extremely rare that the people who sit across the table from you are empowered to make any decisions.
Anyone who thinks this trully has zero clue about the Russian mentality. The Rodina, to the Russians is one step down from God. Next to God, for many Russians, the Rodina is everything, it's the center of their self-identity and a love of their life.
By end of 1941 the Soviets stopped urging the Russian soldier to fight for Socialism, they were surrendering in droves. Instead they made it the Great Patriotic War (to the Motherland) and then the Germans began to learn fear.
ping
Let Europe learn that fear again.
maybe it has to do with the corruption is worse now then ever?
DUH!
Few small lie so.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company, has just been sentenced to nine years in jail for alleged tax evasion and fraud. Everyone here knows, however, that his real crime was to pose a political threat to Mr Putin. ==
His frauds and tax evasions are not denied by even his payed supporters. The people who took money from him and have to convice everyone that he is saint.
So his crimes are NOR "allerged" and "everyone here knows" this fact.
Second thing. It is true that Putin has to begin his compaign against oligakh crime ring with Khodorkovskii since he is most dangerous criminal.
In Russia criminals was traditiionally forbidden to go into political circles.
It was ame during czar times. So Putin just fulfilled long standing tradition to destroy criminals to try to buy political parties.
"We should acknowledge," he declared in an astonishing speech two months ago, "that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century." ==
It is phaze ciutted from context. In next sentence of his speach Putin said that no one with sane mind wants today USSR back.
The author ommited second sentence to reach propagandistic effect.
Russian Centre for Public Opinion found that 53 per cent of Russians still regard Stalin as a "great" leader. ==
The propagandistic ommition again. In poll the question was longer and different. It sounded like this: "Who was great leader during Great Patriotic War and make dsisive share in Victory?". Poll was conducted in eve of 60th Aneversary of Victory.
SO you see the distortion of this author?
About athor's conclusions made on base of his propagandistic distortions I would say they are misleading readers.
We went last week to the Moscow House of Photography which has a special exhibit on photos from World War II, and there are posters everywhere on the streets about "60 Years of the Great Victory". Not a mention anywhere of this person named Stalin. I think the official celebration is in late June, tied in with the anniversary, not of the taking of the Reichstag May 9th, but the Victory Parade June 26 1945. (I once mentioned to a friend that the Russians lost as many men in two weeks taking Berlin as the USA did the entire war, and his response was "sure, they were drunk and shot each other". You can't win with some people.)
For anyone who pretends to be a journalist, to claim with a straight face that 53% of Russians want Stalin back, there ought to be the journalistic equivalent of malpractice suits. Journalism should consist of MORE than a legal license to lie with impunity.
Exactly. In much the same way, those let out of prison find freedom scary and difficult to adjust to, thus the high rates of recidivism even among those who'd prefer to go straight.
Fascinating article; and thread posts! Intently learning, here. :)
I think the end of the article summed it up best.
The Russians look back on the Soviet times with fondness because, back then, they had an empire and were powerful, feared, and respected.
Now, they don't.
They don't want to go back to the days of the secret police, gulags, and rationing. But they want the power that Russia had during that time.
Oops, the third sentence should read:
Now, they aren't.
(I should really proofread my writing more than once.)
:-)
Some things to remember about "political consultants"
and "public opinion" pollsters in Russia (check out original post and post #1):
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1420995/posts
Fascinating!! Thank you VERY much for posting these. I have no doubts we'll be seeing "mirror" posturing as news in multiple areas around the world. Marketing packaged as "news". Not at all free from political intent, purposes, and agenda.
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