Russia, old and new

This is just a quick note, I've got a lesson about Napoleon III to teach in a moment so I will return to this later. This article in the Independent caught my eye. This is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, this is nothing new, it's a pretty time honoured response of Russia to the states on her border and also to the management of the shared past in Russia itself. Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to adopt a scandanavian style of democractic socialism at the end of the 1980s when it became abundantly clear that the command model of economic mangement wasn't working. In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein makes a number of interesting parallels between the October Revolution/Bolshevik coup d'etat and the establishment of the oligarch's Russia. In both instances, a democratic people's revolution had taken place beforehand, and in both instances a dedicated, power hungry and deeply politicised elite group clung on to the coat tails of the people's revolution and subverted it using armed force.

She writes: "Once again a group of self-described revolutionaries huddled in secret to write a radical economic program. As Dimitry Vasiliev, one of the key reformers, recalled, "At the start, we didn't have a single employee, not even a secretary. We didn't have any equipment, not even a fax machine. And in those conditions, in just a month and a half, we had to write a comprehensive privatization program, we had to write twenty normative laws... It was really a romantic period."

On October 28, 1991, Yeltsin announced the lifting of price controls, predicting that "the liberalization of prices will put everything in its right place." The "reformers" waited only one week after Gorbachev resigned to launch their economic shock therapy program-the second of the three traumatic shocks. The shock therapy program also included free-trade policies and the first phase of the rapid-fire privatization of the country's approximately 225,000 state-owned companies."

Following this Yeltsin effectively staged an anti parliamentary coup by attacking Russia's White house in October 1993, he did so to quell the many mutinous voices who lamented the pillaging of the Russian economy by domestic and foreign 'capitalists'.

"A clear signal from Washington or the EU could have forced Yeltsin to engage in serious negotiations with the parliamentarians, but he received only incouragement. Finally, on the morning of October 4, 1993, Yeltsin fullfilled his long-prescribed destiny and became Russia's very own Pinochet, unleashing a series of violent events with unmistakable echoes of the coup in Chile exactly twenty years earlier. In what was the third traumatic shock inflicted by Yeltsin on the Russian people, he ordered a reluctant army to storm the Russian Whitehouse, setting it on fire and leaving charred the very building he had built his reputation defending just two years earlier. Communism may have collasped without thr firing of a shot, but Chicago-style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire to defend itself: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns-all to defend Russia's new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy"

This was the political backdrop to the previously most recent re-writing of Russia's history. Glasnost has very little to do with burying the memory of Stalin and discrediting October 1917, instead the violent imposition of free market capitalism has required a wholsale re-writing of history. Soviet communism wasn't regarded as a mistake from any human or humanist point of view, as many of the violent anti democratic practices from state repression to imperialist war in Chechnaya still endure. It was regarded as a mistake from the point of view of market orthodoxy, the free market revolutionaries of the 1980s and 90s helped to create a coup in Russia's system of ownership and in her collective memory.
More fool them, Russians are up there with the Irish for long cultural memory, the sufferings of the Russian people have been such that their very survival has depended on an ability to remember. Neoliberalism is in tatters, a totally bankrupt and utterly discredited idea, spread throughout the world with evangelical zeal. Unfortunately the former USSR bought into the idea when she was in a vulnerable position, it was a mistake that cost, New Internationalist estimates $400 billion in wealth siltd out of the country, never to be returned. History is being re-written again, authoritarian nationalists are in charge, the old glory days of Kursk and Berlin are being reimagined for a new generation as many Russians are waking up to the strong suspicion that they've been done over royally by the perennially untrustworthy west. In the west there is a new and mounting post Litvinenko paranoia about Russia. Again, thisis nothing new, the last 200 years have been marked by an almost never ending concern about Russia and her plans, the 1840's saw extraordinary levels of British public animosity towards Russia, all fuelled by rampantly jingoistic newspapers, the 'Great Game'.