Russia: A Chance for Survival

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Russia has a unique capacity for attracting the world’s attention, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out 150 years ago. Daily newspapers and even CNN, let alone magazines, prove increasingly unable to keep up with the rapid pace of change or to find their way through the maze of everyday facts.

It is important to resist the temptation to simply describe the flow of events, becoming hostage to routine developments. Instead we should take a broader look. Granted, grand designs need to be seen from afar, and only future historians will be able to make a truly unbiased judgment of the second Russian Revolution. However, making no effort to fathom the profound meaning of recent events is tantamount to losing one’s bearings.

It is important to see that, behind present-day affairs, we are witnessing a tectonic shift, a global change in the world’s political landscape as a continuation of age-old processes in a new historic setting. One sixth of the world land mass that at different times has been known as the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union is now in a state of flux. It is undergoing a major facelift that affects the evolution of the world community. As a result 15 newly independent states, in lieu of one, will be joining the mainstream of human events.

Having lived through all the suffering associated with despotism, Russia awoke from centuries of lethargy, and no attempts at a simple cosmetic facelift or at building Socialism with a Human Face, through our own version of the Prague Spring, can keep people any longer from aspiring to profound changes.

II

Much of the explanation of the Soviet phenomenon must necessarily be historical. In taking that approach we might conceivably focus only on the last phase of Soviet history and agree with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who said that the crisis of authority in the Kremlin and the perception of the historical collapse of communism have finally brought about a disintegration of the Soviet empire. That, however, would be too facile an explanation. After all the U.S.S.R. did not materialize out of thin air; it came in the wake of the former Russian Empire and bore many of its birthmarks. It will be long before many of those blemishes cease to affect the fate of those countries that have now inherited the expanses of the former U.S.S.R...