“The Center of the World”
RIA Novosti sees Russia’s future in the USSR
3/22/2022, 3:59 p.m
Two days after the attack on Ukraine, the Russian news agency RIA accidentally published an op-ed already celebrating the victory and talking about a “new world order”. Now the author of the text speaks up again – with more disturbing theses.
The Russian news agency RIA Novosti sees the future of their country in a return of the Soviet Union. After the end of “hostilities,” as the state agency calls the war, there will be neither Ukraine nor Russia as we know it today, according to an article entitled “The Russia of the Future – Forward, in the USSR”. According to author Pyotr Akopov, “the post-Soviet transitional period” is over, as is the “time of ambiguities”. “We will live again in the USSR, but not in the one that the anti-Soviets fear or that the communists dream of. No, we are beginning to build a just, solidary and sovereign Russia.”
Just two days after the war began, RIA had made headlines around the world with another article by the same author. On February 26, the agency inadvertently published a comment by Akopov prepared in case of a Russian victory in Ukraine. “The advance of Russia and the new world,” read the text. In it, Akopov wrote that “Russia’s military operation” in Ukraine had ushered in a new era. The author spoke, among other things, of an alleged new world order. Russia has shown that the time of “Western global dominance” is over.
“The Two Great Civilizations”
The current article also talks about a new world order. “The most important thing we’re missing and the only thing we really need to learn from foreigners is the idea of Russia as the center of the world,” Akopov claims. This is no pride, no arrogance and no “chauvinism of a great power,” it continues. “Our thinking must become Russocentric,” demands the RIA commentator.
Here he cites China as a role model, because according to Akopov’s idea, the Chinese perceive the whole world as a peripheral region of the Middle Kingdom. “And if our worldview becomes similar, that is, national, it will only strengthen mutual understanding with our neighbor and make the alliance between the two great civilizations much stronger than it was in Soviet times,” he says, referring to China.
“Atone for the collapse of the Soviet Union”
Akopov describes “post-Soviet state capitalism” as the “greatest weakness of the outgoing Russia.” The nouveau riche’s ideological dependence on the West has led them to despise their own people, writes Akopov. That’s why he sees the effect of the sanctions against Russia as positive: “Many representatives of the ‘elite’ simply fled abroad. Putin very aptly described this as a natural and necessary process of our society’s self-cleansing,” writes Akopov, referring to a speech by the Kremlin chief February 16, in which he defended the military operation in Ukraine with harsh words.
In the new Russia, justice is becoming the new socio-economic order in which the worker, the creator, the engineer, the inventor is rewarded – “someone who creates something instead of packaging it up and selling it on,” explains the RIA journalist. Akopov is sure: “The spirit of Russian history, the spirit of our ancestors gives us the chance not only to atone for the collapse of the Soviet Union, but to correct it through creation, through the rebirth of a great Russia”.
RIA Novosti is one of the largest news agencies in Russia. Her website is the most quoted Russian medium on social networks.