If the rate of growth in pre-war Russia were to continue for another generation, rather than wrecked by the revolutions, it would have been a leading power in Europe by mid-century.
Discontent, though, is subjective. Countries that by objective measures are advancing quite rapidly may be very turbulent, first because change can be unsettling, and second because expectations grow faster than they can be satisfied.
Some form of dictatorship would be welcome. What Russia needs is a nationalist government focused on preserving and rebuilding specifically the Russian nation and culture, and what remains of the Russian economy.
That sounds like Solzhenitsyn's idea. It made some sense 30 years ago when the Communists were still in power. I'm not sure it does today. Russian is in the position of any number of countries around the world today where remnants of old dictatorships still have influence.
I don't know what advice I'd give, but returning to dictatorship isn't what I'd suggest. All the more so, since the same left-over Communist interests would worm their way into any regime. Also, any intelligent regime would make enough use of nationalist themes to satisfy a public that doesn't want major political changes. I suspect countries in Russia's position will mostly just muddle through the transition as best they can.
Any democratic system in Russia today will be immediately infected by the old boys of the dormant KGB apparatus, so an unpopular measure of lustrating the KGB ties would have to be taken for Russia to succeed in anything. The free enterprise system in Russia is corrupted by the same class, the Komsomol leaders of the 70's and 80's who are now at the peak of power and push their second generation of parasites forward.
For that very reason, it's not going to happen. Or at least not until the remaining KGBniks are very old. And as I said, the same leftover Communist forces and individual you deplore would probably make headway under any system.
The bottom line is that indeed Russian Federation is all-through socially conservative, whereas the West is torn between liberalism and tradition. However, in RF today the conservatism is not natural conservatism of a healthy nation, but a acid reflux from the conservatism of the Soviet era autocracy. It is not a genuine article. The same forces that today clamor for, for example, criminalization of mutually-consented homosexuality are the people who just as easily would ban all political dissent, free artistic expression, and generally will re-institute the USSR in all its aspects save, perhaps, doctrinaire Marxism.
I'd agree with that. I don't have any great enthusiasm for Putin or his government. My concern was just to say that the world today is very different from what it was at the height of the Cold War.
I would say, though, that at some point, the pendulum in Russia and Eastern Europe will swing back and -- for better or worse -- many Western fashions and ideas will be adopted. There may be more resistance in the East and Eastern Europe may exert a beneficial influence on the West, but I don't see Russia forever holding out against what one might call Western decadence.
No, I think that the world of pre-1914 is gone forever. It is not even the same people: not the same Germans and not the same Russians. These two nations have been by and large destroyed. Well, the Germans may yet survive, but to say that RF today is somehow similar to historical Russia is grossly off the mark.
Of course it's not a literal return to the ancien regime, but the world today is more about economics and power politics than about a struggle of ideologies. The aristocracies are gone. So are the Western European imperial powers. Britain and France don't have the clout they once did.
But in terms of their position in the world and their aspirations, Russia or China today has more in common with the empires of 1914 than with the ideologically inspired powers that replaced them. Even our own position in the world today may have features similar to that of the British Empire a century ago. The situation is different from what it was 50 or 70 years ago.
A positive example of that is set first by post-Nazi Germany, where the rule was simple: position of privilege under the old regime disqualifies for public office, -- and now by Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary where lustration was implemented, in various ways.
the world today is more about economics and power politics than about a struggle of ideologies.
I don't think that is exactly so. Of course, old ideologies of Marxism and National Socialism are simply not operative in a global-manufacture world. But the prevailing "end of history" thinking that built the EU and gave us Obama has no ideological monopoly; in fact its bankruptcy is becoming more and more evident. The world is always about ideology, because ideology is simply popular theology. I think that in the coming generation we shall see a direct conflict between nationalism and theistic worldview on one hand, and big government global consumerism, and scientific agnosticism on the other. I think there is a great potential that big-government technological society will turn violent before it reaches its ideological collapse.
I would agree though that, given the international left that runs the Western democracies almost without interruption, and excepting a few insignificant Marxist remnants like Chavez, and the countries under Islam, there is no opposing social model anywhere that would be adopted by a government. In other words, there is no properly conservative and theistic ideology of pre-1789 implemented anywhere. Spain resisted the longest, but fell, too.