#10
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
December 24, 2001
Past for Russians holds no future
A decade after the Soviet Union's collapse, a new mood of realism has replaced
regret
By GEOFFREY YORK
MOSCOW -- On Christmas Day in 1991, Nina Zdanovich's world fell apart. Her Soviet motherland, one of the great empires of the last century, collapsed into a collection of independent states.
A decade later, Ms. Zdanovich has already forgotten that tomorrow is the anniversary of that momentous event. She remembers the pain she felt when the Soviet Union collapsed, and she still blames the breakup for the economic woes of the past 10 years -- yet she admits she would never want the empire back.
"We need a union, but a different one, maybe like the European Union," the 46-year-old Moscow economist says.
"In Soviet times, I talked too much and I was always afraid that I would suffer for that. Now I can talk freely and nobody sends me to jail. My relatives have emigrated to Israel and nobody punishes me for that either. And there are all kinds of goods in the shops now."
Most Russians still feel a vague sense of regret at the loss of their mighty empire. But the nostalgia is slowly fading, replaced by a new mood of realism over their destiny.
An opinion poll by the ROMIR agency last month found that 30 per cent of Russians now believe that the Soviet collapse was inevitable. Two years ago, only 20 per cent said the breakup was inevitable.
The same poll found that 72 per cent of Russians regret the Soviet collapse -- still a high proportion, but down five percentage points in the past two years.
"People are becoming less and less nostalgic," said Yelena Bashkirova, president of the ROMIR group. "A change of generations is taking place. For younger people, the USSR is a part of history that they read about in their textbooks. People are more realistic now. Even the Communists do not feel that we can recreate something like the Soviet Union."
Most Russians are indifferent to this week's historical milestone. Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the day when the Soviet flag was hauled down from the Kremlin, leaving 15 struggling new nations in its wake.
The Russian news media have paid little attention to the anniversary, and most ordinary Russians aren't even aware of it. When the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, held a news conference last Friday to mark the event, he found himself addressing a half-empty room. Less than two dozen journalists bothered to attend, and many were visibly bored, chatting on their cellphones or slipping out of the room early as Mr. Gorbachev rambled on.
"Younger people don't remember and don't care," Ms. Bashkirova said. "Even among those who are nostalgic, they're not recollecting the Soviet Union -- they're just recalling the old way of life, how they could travel cheaply to the Black Sea resorts and so on."
Among the Russian political elite, there is still some gloominess at the disappearance of the powerful Soviet empire, which had been feared and respected around the world. Even those who helped destroy the empire are burdened with dark memories of its final days.
"We felt somewhat depressed, as if we had just buried a close relative," Sergei Shakhrai, a former aide to ex-president Boris Yeltsin, said in an interview on a Russian Internet site this month.
He said the Soviet Union fell apart because of an "envy virus" among the 15 Soviet republics as they watched others gaining autonomy. Without the Soviet collapse, there would have been a civil war, he said.
In a debate organized by a Moscow newspaper this week, some analysts argued that the collapse was inevitable.
"The Soviet Union was always based on violence, tyranny and despotism, and it couldn't have survived," scholar German Andreyev said. "It cannot be restored, unless there is another Stalin or Hitler."
Others, however, saw the collapse as a disaster.
"For the Soviet republics, except the Baltic states, the breakup was a national catastrophe," said Mikhail Delyagin, head of a Moscow economic think tank. "Industrial output fell, investment dropped, life expectancy dropped. Ten years of degradation have brought us back to the status of a Third World country."
Much of the Soviet legacy, of course, lingers on. President Vladimir Putin has restored some of the most famous Soviet symbols, including its national anthem. At a deeper level, his government has revived the old Soviet idea of a powerful bureaucratic state that dominates most aspects of life, including the media.
But ordinary Russians have found much to be grateful for in the past decade. "Thank God the Soviet Union broke up," said Svetlana Kuibysheva, a 75-year-old Moscow pensioner. "I worked as an engineer at a factory in Soviet times and my salary was high enough, but I couldn't buy good clothes or good food or anything."
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