GOING BACK TO RUSSIA: What remains today, in 1994, of the old system, of the former USSR? There remains:
• The old nomenclature. It is still in power. It is the governmental, economic, military, and police bureaucracy. All told, as Russian sociologists compute, around eighteen million people. There is no alternative to this nomenclature for now. The opposition never did exist as an organized force. Dissidents were always few in number, and the majority of them left the country anyway. Some time has to pass before a new political class will arise. It is a process that always takes years.
• Two enormous armies: the Russian army (formerly the Red), as well as domestic troops. There are the border troops and the railroad troops. The air force and the navy. All told — several million people.
• The powerful KGB and the militia.
• All of middle and heavy industry, still in the hands of the state, including the highly built-up military-industrial complex, an enormous armaments machine employing some sixteen million people in production and in research institutes. The captains of this industry play an important and active role in political life.
• The state as landowner. In agriculture, kolkhozes and sovkhozes predominate.
• The whole sphere of old habits of thought, of social behavior, and of benighted views that had been inculcated into people for decades.
• The old legal system.
In addition to these institutions of the old regime, there is also another large and tragic legacy of communism — the awareness of the terror and repression, of the persecutions that began in 1917 and that lasted for decades, assuming in certain years the character of mass extermination. The historians and demographers who occupy themselves with this matter differ significantly in their estimates of the scale of the perpetrated murder. The minimum estimate was calculated by the demographer Siergei Maksundov. According to him, between 1918 and 1953, 54 million citizens of the USSR perished of unnatural causes (including the victims of the First and Second World Wars). The maximum estimate is given by Professor I. Kurganov, who computed that between 1918 and 1958, in the camps, in prisons, and on the fronts of both world wars, 110.7 million citizens of the USSR lost their lives (Znamia, January 1990).
Another kind of legacy of the totalitarian system is the universal poverty of this society. The poverty of apartments, the poverty of the kitchen, the poverty of life.
The third legacy is the staggering demoralization of significant portions of society — the growth of all types of gangs, the terror exercised by armed bands, the criminal power of the rackets. In addition, the ubiquitous presence of the most diverse mafias, reaching as far as the highest rungs of power. The active and impudent black market in weapons, including missiles. The defiant and terrifying thievery. Epidemic corruption. Alcoholism, rape, cynicism, as well as omnipresent, common churlishness.
The fourth and final legacy is the ecological depredations — smoky cities, the universal lack of ventilation in places of work, poisoned rivers and lakes, nuclear-waste dumps. And above all, fifty-six antiquated and overburdened nuclear power plants — fifty-six potential Chernobyls, which nevertheless cannot be closed down because they illuminate large cities and supply energy to many factories.
THE PERIOD of transition in which the Imperium now finds itself, and in which it will remain for years, actually began in 1991. In its course, the gap between the time of material culture and the time of political events might become even more pronounced. There will certainly be many political developments; in material progress — significantly fewer.
What is happening on the political stage? A fierce battle for power is being waged by various groups. Anti-Yeltsin forces want to overthrow the president and his government. It is difficult to determine clearly which of these groups standing on either side of the barricade are progressive and which conservative, difficult to say whether in general such criteria have any meaning or application here. Officially, it is said that Yeltsin’s group wants reform and the opposition groups (active mainly in the Parliament) do not. But is it really this way? The need for reform is today an objective necessity dictated by the time and the situation, and any team that attains power must somehow reform and change the disintegrating economy, because otherwise the country will perish, and that very team with it.
Of course there is the question of the tempo of reform. But how can one measure and define this? Experts maintain that in 1992 Russia took a step forward, but that this step could have been larger — and even, significantly larger. In other words, while the country has apparently taken a step forward, has it really just stayed in place? As a result, the society is tired and disenchanted. Perhaps it is disenchanted because Yeltsin and the many Western experts advising him estimated the chances of reform too optimistically, forgetting that reform will mean the transformation of a reality that is a granite boulder shaped over seventy years by blood and iron. How much time, strength, and money one must have to crumble this boulder! It seems to me, the backwardness of this country, its indigence, neglect, and ruination, are so great that a year seems too short a period during which to expect clear progress. Let us wait ten, twenty, years.
And yet this year of disenchantments has been sufficient to put a chill on the political atmosphere of the country.
Everyone has forgotten about perestroika and glasnost.
The democratic camp, so active during the struggle against communism, has been pushed to the margins of the political stage and finds itself either in disarray or simply forgotten. In general, democracy is spoken about less and less in Russia.
A mood of waiting and apathy prevails throughout society; people are largely apolitical.
Forces calling for the consolidation of power (especially of central power) and a strong, mighty nation are gaining the upper hand. It is a climate that encourages authoritarian methods of government, favorable to various forms of dictatorship.
AND THE FUTURE?
A difficult question. Almost no prognoses about the contemporary world come true. Futurology is in crisis; it has lost its prestige. The human imagination, shaped for thousands of years by a small, simple, and static world, today cannot grasp, is no match for, the reality that surrounds it, which is augmenting at a rapid rate (especially due to the advances in electronics and the accretion of information), in which there is increasingly more of everything, in which millions of particles, elements, units, and beings are in continual motion, in battle, in new configurations, arrangements, and assemblages, all of which it is no longer possible to seize, to stop, or to describe.
Despite these difficulties, one can assume that three processes will come to predominate in Russian life.
The first is the battle between the forces of integration and disintegration. Nationalism. Russians will want to maintain a large and strong state, an imperial superpower, whereas various non-Russian minorities will pursue more and more explicitly their own, autonomous goals. These minorities now constitute only twenty percent of the population of the Russian Federation (eighty percent, or 120 million, are Russians), but the non-Russian population is growing at a rate five times greater than the Russian, which means that the percentage of Russians is decreasing rapidly. The dominance of the Russian language is likewise shrinking. Fewer and fewer people in the territories of the former USSR speak Russian, and it is being studied less and less. In the course of my journey, I had difficulty communicating in Russian in several places, especially when speaking with young people. Older people know Russian best, the young know it less well, and small children almost not at all.