THE DOOM OF RUSSIA

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.

First, when all you have is nostalgia, it means you have no hope, you’ve given up on having a future. Thus the Russian birth rate has collapsed. Within 10 years (2014), there will be fewer Russians than there were 30 years ago (1974). The average Russian life span is shrinking: in 1991 it was 67 years, today it is 60 – and in men it is 55. That’s lower than many sub-Saharan African countries and is due in large part to the world’s highest alcohol addiction.

Second, there’s no chance for Russia to economically succeed. The only thing propping up the economy now is high oil and gas prices – and there is no way those prices are going to stay that way.

Yes, the Saudis are restricting the supply to jack up the price of crude in a crude (I’m sorry, I can’t resist…) attempt to damage the US economy thus hurting George Bush’s re-election. But the Bushistas are going to put an end to this fairly soon, and in any regard there are just too many other sources coming on stream – Iraq and Libya to mention two. Oil prices are going to eventually head south and consequently so will the Russian economy.

Third, it does not matter that while other power centers of the former Soviet Union are dissolved or deteriorated beyond redemption (such as the Soviet, now Russian, military), the KGB kept itself together and through Putin is now in charge. The KGB-ification of Russia makes it impossible for Russia to revive.

Many of the KGB guys are smart and shrewd, but they haven’t a clue about how to really make money, how a modern economy really functions. They really know only how to rip people off, how to extort, how to behave like a mafia. The Chinese make good businessmen. The Russians — forget it.

Thus the argument being made that Putin’s consolidation of power is a precursor for the consolidation of the former Soviet Union leaks like a sieve. There’s no ideological justification for it, no rationale for it, no fire and passion for it, no money for it, and no ability to achieve it. It is naught but a sad dream by a people committing cultural suicide.

To understand the origin of such a dream, the origin of Russian and its moral values, I am placing in the Classics section an analysis I prepared for the Reagan White House almost 20 years ago. Entitled A Short History of Russia, it will give you a clear and concise grasp of how Russia came to be and how it is the way it is.

In 1985, we could hope that a post-Soviet Russia would be able to break free of the bonds of its past. It is a tragedy that today, this seems increasingly unlikely.