Russian history gives America an ominous warning
Russia is often in the news these days – corrupt and repressive at home, aggressive and malevolent in relation to neighbors and rivals. Yet this Russia is heir to a country that shaped the twentieth century and had a formative impact on the cultural and political history of the modern world. It cannot be dismissed as a plaything of Vladimir Putin’s arrogant ambitions. Over the past hundred years, Russia has been a bellwether, not an exception. We should take heed.
Russia has more than once demonstrated the ease with which complex societies can fall apart. It has shown how difficult it is to uphold the legitimacy of nations and to install and sustain democratic regimes. The country we know as the Russian Federation changed names, borders, and political systems twice in the course of the twentieth century. We remember the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. A megapower suddenly vanished–the ideology that sustained it deflated like a punctured balloon. The periphery defected – fourteen former Soviet republics emerged as independent nations. Nevertheless, Moscow remains the center of a multiethnic territory that continues to span the Eurasian continent. Democratic in form, authoritarian in practice, Russia is still a major player on the international stage.
Russia has more than once demonstrated the ease with which complex societies can fall apart. It has shown how difficult it is to uphold the legitimacy of nations and to install and sustain democratic regimes. The country we know as the Russian Federation changed names, borders, and political systems twice in the course of the twentieth century. We remember the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. A megapower suddenly vanished–the ideology that sustained it deflated like a punctured balloon. The periphery defected – fourteen former Soviet republics emerged as independent nations. Nevertheless, Moscow remains the center of a multiethnic territory that continues to span the Eurasian continent. Democratic in form, authoritarian in practice, Russia is still a major player on the international stage.
This recent transition – by now thirty
years old – was not the first time the center held, against all odds, and the
promise of liberation was disappointed. Seven decades earlier, between 1917 and
1921, an entire civilization collapsed and a new one was founded. In 1913 Tsar
Nicholas II celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty;
in August 1914 he took Russia into World War I on the side of the Allied
powers. In March 1917 mutinies in the imperial armed forces, bread riots by
working-class women, industrial strikes in the key cities, and peasant revolts
in the countryside led to the defection of the military and civilian elites.
For years, a burgeoning civil society and a disaffected radical fringe had been
dreaming of change – the one of the rule of law, the other of socialist
revolution. When Nicholas renounced the throne, a seven-month experiment in
democratic politics ensued – at the grass roots in the form of elected soviets
(councils), on the scale of empire in the form of elections to a Constituent
Assembly. Millions voted at every level; democracy was in the air. Yet, the
Provisional Government, which honored Russia’s commitment to the Allied cause,
could not cope with the same war that had proved the monarchy’s undoing. In
October 1917, the Bolshevik Party, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin,
arrested the liberal ministers, took control of the soviets, and heralded the
installation of the world’s first socialist government... read more:
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/russian-history-gives-america-an-ominous-warning/
