[This Monday’s Archive, “The Doom of Russia,” was originally published on March 18, 2004. Appended to it, as in the original, is “A Short History of Russia,” written for the Reagan White House in 1985. Together, they provide a historical context not only for Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, but more widely, its inability to join the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union, choosing instead to remain its adversary. Your thoughts are welcome on the Forum.]
TTP, March 18, 2004
Last week, Vladimir Putin was re-elected President of Russia with over 70% of the vote. Does this portend the re-animation of the Soviet Russian Empire, led by a man with an unchallenged grip on power, possessed with a deep nostalgia for the glory days of the USSR, and determined to bring back those days again?
No, it means that Russia has taken itself out of the global game. It means that Russia has no future. It means that Russia is resolutely determined to screw itself.
Monopolies of power rarely work in today’s world – especially ossified ones. Putin may look young and energetic, but worked his whole life for the KGB – and every member of his cabinet now is a former Soviet apparatchik. There isn’t a single new thinker among them.
All of them are trapped in their past. In the Kremlin and in the totality of influential academic and journalistic thought in Russia today there is a complete absence of rational analysis of Soviet-Russia history and why the Soviet Union collapsed. There is never an accounting or realistic appraisal from anyone in government or academia.
There is only nostalgia. There is nothing but nostalgia. As Lionel Barrymore would say at the end of a play: “That’s all there is – there isn’t any more.”
This thinking is not imposed upon the oppressed Russian masses whose yearning for freedom is stifled by the tyrannical elite. No, it is reflective of common thinking. The recent elections demonstrate that Russians as a whole simply do not want a real democracy like those emerging in their former colonies of Eastern Europe, with real pluralism, small business growth, and economic freedom.
Americans have a naïve tendency to look upon the world as a place where everyone wants the political and economic freedom that we have if they had the choice and opportunity to have it. Maybe in a lot of countries, but not in Russia.
Let’s draw three bottom lines from this.
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On this July Fourth, it is only appropriate to pay homage to America’s most revered and beloved founders, George Washington, the Father of our country, and Thomas Jefferson, the Author of our Declaration of Independence. It may seem a puzzle to some that Washington’s signature is not on it. That’s because, as Commander of the Continental Army, he was defending New York City from British attack. A copy of the DI was sent to him by express rider on order by John Hancock, which Washington read to his troops on July 9.
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