φασδφαδ
Part I: Results and consequences of the Soviet collapse
First of two articles
Read the second one here
By Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
Aug 14, 2022
Thank you very much for your invitation to participate in this very important debate, an invitation both honorable and very interesting for me. (*)
There is a tendency nowadays to examine the cultural questions and among them the question of values independently of the socio-economic, material processes and also from geopolitics. I believe it is a huge mistake, and this is why I will try to combine the examination of social, international and cultural processes.
A defining moment of our world: Gorbachev’s perestroika
I have followed closely, as a correspondent in Moscow, the late perestroika and Yeltsin’s period. I remember Soviet President Gorbachev proclaiming very important ideas. Some of them are today more relevant than at the time he spelled them out. But, as Faust puts it, show me the goal, but show me also the way to achieve it. Mikhail Sergeyevitch did not know the path to his goals. As a consequence, social and international forces and dynamics working not for the reformation, but for the destruction of the soviet society and the state hijacked his reform.
I was in Moscow when Russia was building the symbol of the new religion of Money to replace communism or whatever it was, the biggest McDonald in the world. I see now its signs demolished, the red flag appearing spontaneously in Donbas and other places, the czar of the privatizations quitting the country. Russia is forced to enter a new era in its history, but nobody can predict with certainty what will be its characteristics. The choices you will make now will shape your country but they will shape also the world, to some extent at least, given Russia’s importance.
A disaster in the ‘90s
I belong to the extremely few western observers who can claim to have correctly understood and predicted the disasters which would inevitably follow the way the Soviet system was dismantled and replaced by a worse, not a better one. I feel vindicated by what followed the destruction of the USSR, although I am not of course happy with what happened.
Back in 1992, everybody was speaking about the “end of History” and the new era of the “Eternal Peace”. At that time, I wrote in an article that the “Cold War will begin again, but not from Berlin and Kabul, as in the past, but from Kiev and Tashkent”. By Tashkent I had in mind not precisely Uzbekistan, but the south of the USSR. Most people were thinking that I make crazy predictions; such was the confidence to the peaceful character of the new period opened by the soviet collapse (which some would rather call a suicide).
I do not say all that to praise myself but only to prove that what followed the soviet collapse was easily predictable. The reason I was able to make the prediction about the new Cold War thirty years ago was rather simple. I had studied Thucydides, Hobson and Lenin on imperialism and I had followed closely US foreign policy. I find deeply ironic that in a country, which made a god out of Lenin, nobody in its leadership was interested in studying his work!
As for the social and economic effects of the so-called “transition”, they were also easily predictable by anybody who adopted a critical analysis of how the international system of Capitalism is working.
I find very positive that we face now a Russia different from the country I have known 30 years ago, defending its interests and not willing to submit to even the most irrational Western diktats. This is good not only for you but for all humanity. I hope of course that the present crisis around Ukraine will end soon in a way promoting world peace and stability and leading us to a better world.
Back in the 90’s, Mikhail Gorbachev, then visiting Greece, asked the conservative President Karamanlis what gift he would like to bring him from Russia. “Bring us Russia back”, the Greek President answered to him. We are happy that Russia is back even if we would prefer of course that this would happen in less tragic circumstances than the present ones.
It has been correctly said that the soviet dissolution was a major geopolitical catastrophe, not only for the Soviet peoples, but also for all humanity. Western capitalism and imperialism (and there is no capitalism without imperialism in our epoch) felt unhindered to show their most abominable face, destroying Yugoslavia and half a dozen countries in the Middle East, abolishing any restrictions to the activities of Financial Capital and attacking without mercy the European welfare system.
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