A line is pressed against the wall to escape the biting December wind, under the decrepit “Gastronom” sign, stretches out, and disappears around the corner. The wait is long, at least two hours. In this grocery store in a residential district of Moscow, on this day, sugar is sold. One kilo per person. We came as a family, to multiply the catch. The children play cat – slips and slips on the tiled floor soiled by the mud brought in from outside – between the shelves and stalls completely empty for months, covered with dust. A single edible product in sight on the counters, pyramids of canned condensed milk, a necessary passage from all Soviet childhood. it was thirty years ago.
Story of the barricades
At the end of 1991, in Moscow, the refrigerators were empty but the spirits were heated. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, economically and politically weakened by the Gorbachev reforms, feverishly lives its last hours, after a year of strikes and massive demonstrations in the big cities, the declarations of independence in cascade of the republics. In the Moscow kitchens, everyone has their own story of the barricades, those days in August spent protecting the White House, the seat of the Russian government, from which Boris Yeltsin led the resistance to the putsch organized by the old communist guard. Others went to Lubyanka Square, under the windows of the KGB, to dismantle the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the terrible political police. When he finally resigned, on December 25, “Gorbachev received no calls from the leaders of the Newly Independent States, not a single one, remembers Andrei Gratchev, the last assistant to the last general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Only Western presidents called, Bush especially wanting to make sure the nuclear case was safe. “ For the West, it is the culmination of the collapse of the entire communist edifice, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall two years earlier.
Today the stores are overflowing, but is Russia really out of communism? Did she manage to regenerate herself by getting rid of her Soviet demons? Thirty years after the breakup of the USSR, the country which was both its center and its summit seems doomed to endlessly reproduce the dynamics and the great (dis) balances of the empire for which it nostalgia. The capital, Moscow, continues more than ever to concentrate power and wealth, and the “vertical” erected by Vladimir Poutine, himself from the KGB, which restricts the autonomy of the provinces, is a distorted version of the Soviet politburo. The transition to a market economy has certainly propelled the country into globalization, allowing the population to own and undertake (more or less) freely, but the interventionist and centralizing culture inherited from Stalinist totalitarianism, by falling back essentially on the exploitation of natural gas and oil resources, gave birth to a rent economy, a “state capitalism” in the sole service of power, corrupt and unequal.
Tentacles of political power
Likewise, the Russian state has not given up on favoring the frenzied development of the military-industrial complex, this very imbalance which had plunged the USSR into economic stagnation. Convinced of being a besieged fortress, but also a great power, the Kremlin intends to protect its borders with a formidable army and advanced weapons against a West which has, in fact, never ceased to be perceived as the existential enemy, who would never stop threatening it at its borders, this “decadent” and moralizing West which interferes in domestic affairs, by financing innumerable “agents” … The diplomacy of influence practiced by the Kremlin in his near abroad, in an increasingly uninhibited manner, in defiance of international law, is imperialist … Lastly and above all, while the secret services dominated the Soviet century, tentacles of the political power from which they emanated but to which they were subject, they have become, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the very essence of power. They are the power.
The end of the USSR, the “Greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century”, in the words of Vladimir Putin, was seen by a large part of the Russians as a promise of change, inside the country and in the face of the outside world. A horizon of openness and deliverance. The end of a secular dictatorship and the possibility of democratic learning. The abolition of fear and the leisure, finally, to travel, to consume, to decide for oneself. To live “normally”. “It was a time of freedom, we lived, we breathed, remembers political scientist Andrei Kolesnikov, then a young journalist. Chaos too, for some, of course. It was inevitable, we were really moving from one dimension to another. ”
In 1991, the expression was freed: a press law had just ended decades of censorship and propaganda, and criticism of power on television and in the newspapers was becoming a national sport. Thirty years later, Putin muzzles the media, condemns independent voices to silence and neutralizes any discussion of the present.
In 1991, democracy was liberated: the political field is pluralizing to the extreme and the Communist Party is banned. Thirty years later, the same Communists, that is to say the executioners of yesterday, are the only opposition force that survives in the political field, like the promise of a nightmarish repeat.
In 1991, the memory was freed: the Memorial association, created in 1988 by Soviet dissidents, could finally write the history of Stalinist repressions and work to rehabilitate millions of victims. Thirty years later, by attacking it head on and brutally, the Kremlin intends to deprive the Russians of any past that would not be glorious.
There is not much left of the promises of emancipation of 1991, of the euphoria that accompanied the end of the communist regime. Vladimir Poutine, who has decided to remain in command of the country indefinitely, has built his power on the denigration of the rupture of thirty years ago, to be part of the long term, the continuity with Soviet Russia, and even imperial. “We have moved away from the liberation that was the fall of the USSR, we find ourselves today in the exact opposite, says Andrei Kolesnikov, who now heads the Russian domestic policy programs at the Carnegie think tank. This is not a total return to Soviet reality, even if a certain Soviet reflex is reproduced. In fact Russia today is authoritarianism, without Marxism-Leninism. “
“Relapse totalitarianism”
If the present of the Russians is not free, if they must fall back on their former executioners to resist in the political field and if they do not have access to their past, the circle seems closed. At the end of 2021, if the Soviet system has partially survived, it is reproducing itself thanks to the sustainability of certain basic institutions. Sometimes in altered and hybrid forms, but stubborn. Starting with the political police from which the regime’s executives come, Vladimir Poutine himself, but also the army and the judicial system. “These institutions have never been reformed because the FSB, the Ministry of the Interior and Defense, the prosecution, continued to have their own closed educational establishments. They not only continued to reproduce executives, but also the professional spirit, a corporate conscience ”, explains Gudkov.
“We thought, with Yuri Levada, that the totalitarian regime was collapsing because new needs had emerged, especially among the young. We thought that it was enough for the generation born at the beginning of the Soviet period to leave for the regime to collapse. But the survival of institutions has allowed the reproduction of man and the system ”, said the sociologist again. According to him, poutinism, a “Relapsing totalitarianism”, “not very sympathetic, but more flexible, more pluralist than in the days of the USSR”, would in fact “A kind of reaction to the collapse of the communist system, which will last a long time yet. We are still in the collapse phase. Rapid change is an illusion. It is not a matter of a few years, it will take several generations ”.