Putin's Counter Revolution

[alice malice]

Putin's Counter-Revolution

James Meek reports from Ukraine




When Putin spoke of 'chaos' in Kiev and Ukraine as a whole, in his
press conference a few days after the Crimean invasion, he must have
realised that his foreign audience, as well as the citizens of Kiev
and all the people of Ukraine who favoured the revolution, knew there
was no chaos. His audience were those who both believed and wanted to
believe the 'Banderite' revolution had brought anarchy: neo-Soviets on
both sides of the border who yearn for an enlarged Russophone space -
socially conservative, militarily strong, inheritors of the cherished
myths, martyrs and achievements of imperial and Soviet times - but who
nonetheless don't feel bound by the old Soviet restrictions on travel,
Orthodox Christian piety or consumerism.


[...]

The Russians and Ukrainians of the 1990s were able to temper regret at
the collapse of the USSR with their own knowledge of the dismembered
country's shortcomings. A generation later, this is less and less the
case. Many of the most articulate and thoughtful Russians and
Ukrainians, those of middle age who knew the realities of Soviet life
and later prospered in the post-Soviet world, have moved abroad, gone
into a small business or been intimidated: in any case they have been
taken out of the political arena. In Russia and Russophone Ukraine the
stage is left to neo-Soviet populists who propagate the false notion
of the USSR as a paradisiac Russian-speaking commonwealth, benignly
ruled from Moscow, a natural continuum of the tsarist empire,
disturbed only by Nazi invaders to whom 'the west' are heirs and the
only obstacle to its re-creation. If you were born after 1985 you have
no remembered reality to measure against this false vision, just as
you have no way to situate those charming Soviet musical comedies of
the 1960s and 1970s, idyllic portrayals of an idealised Russophone
socialism, brightly coloured and fun, propaganda now in a way they
weren't when they were made. This is the context that has made it
possible for Vladimir Putin and his government to sell Russia's
opportunistic invasion of Ukraine to his own people and to Ukrainian
neo-Soviets: the idea that it undoes what should never have been done,
an artificial division of Russian-speaking Eurasia by fascists/the
West/America/rabid Ukrainian nationalists - in neo-Soviet discourse,
avatars of a single anti-Russian monster.


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n06/james-meek/putins-counter-revolution
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