Russia: A possible collapse? | reset
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– I think the Soviet Union will collapse in a year’s time, so an acquaintance of many in the winter of 1987-88, after having for some time had contacts with people in the nomenclature of the Soviet Union.
– Squirt, I said, the CIA has said that the Soviet Union will last for the foreseeable future. The CIA believes that the Communist Party has full control and control. In addition, Mikhail Gorbachev is embarking on economic and political reforms. No, the Soviet Union will last for a long time to come.
But my acquaintance was right. In 1989, the system began to crack in earnest, and in 1991, the agreement that sealed the fate of the Soviet Union was signed by Boris Yeltsin and the political leaders of Belarus and Ukraine.
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Knowledge and meetings with people in the Soviet Communist Party were the basis for the prediction that my acquaintance made this midwinter day in 1987-88. And it was business interests that formed the basis of the contacts associated with the Soviet Union. The economically impoverished Soviet state needed capital and technology to make better use of the oil fields in Baku where they had been pumping oil for a hundred years, with an equally old technology. The utilization rate, ie how much oil they got from the fields, was 10 percent. With modern technology, the Soviets thought they could get the utilization rate to 35 percent on old felt, and they eager for cooperation with Norwegian companies and Norwegian capital. But in Norway, those interested in a Soviet oil adventure were not present at all either. In the Cold War, naturally, skepticism of the Soviet Union was well developed in Norway, as in the rest of the Western world.
What was it that made my acquaintance so sure of his prediction of a Soviet collapse? Several things, but what convinced him was the meeting with people in the Communist Party, which when they became intoxicated, unequivocally expressed that they were ashamed of the whole system. The Soviet economy was virtually in ruins. There was a shortage of goods, and the industry was severely weakened by business leaders who lied about achieved production goals and who presented falsified accountants. And workers gave the bluff, either because of alcohol abuse or as a result of other forms of demoralization, provoked by the system.
– I talked to a Soviet engineer from Moscow who told about a day when it was asked that it was electric wheel beaters for sale in a shop on the outskirts of the city. He threw himself on the bike and dragged the long way to the store, which stood a huge queue of people outside waiting to drop in to buy wheel beaters.
– Weren’t electric wheel beaters to be bought in Moscow?
– Yes, but no one bought them because they did not work. These were wheel beaters made in Estonia (then a Soviet republic), and wheel beaters from Estonia worked, the engineer said.
Russia today is something other than the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, but the regime under Vladimir Putin seems to have retained much of the authoritarian and totalitarian traits of the Soviet state. From the time of the tsars, it has been a tradition in Russia to have an uncritical and worshipful relationship with the political power. The tsars were called “Little Father” because they were perceived as a security and safety by the people. When people suffered harm, there was nothing wrong with the tsars, oppression and injustice were blamed on corrupt officials or a morally intoxicated nobility who kept the peasants as slaves in bondage.
The same attitude could be seen among the peasants in Norway in the Danish era, who during feuds with greedy and corrupt bailiffs turned to “he father” (the king) in Copenhagen to end the injustice that the Danish government officials inflicted on the peasants. This attitude to the supreme power was a common feature of feudal Europe, which saw the king as installed by God (the great father).
Despite the revolution of 1917, Russia retained many of the traits of the pre-revolutionary society and attitudes that characterized the past Russia. Vladimir Lenin, and not least Joseph Stalin, passed on the legacy of the Tsars as “Little Father”. According to this tradition, the supreme leader is respected and honored despite the regime cowering, harassing and killing people over a low shoe. The Stalinist regime drove this legacy to excesses by sending people to death camps in Siberia and liquidating millions of the country’s inhabitants. Still, there were some who survived the camp stay and who continued to look up to “the little father” in the Kremlin. The many pictures of Stalin hang on the wall after they have come home, destroyed on both body and soul, as evidenced by Svetlana Alexeyevich’s book on “The End of the Red Man”.
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The Russian culture of loyalty reached a peak during the Moscow trials in the 1930s when people were guilty of and sentenced to death for crimes they had not committed, true to the Communist Party and the Stalin regime. The best description of the Moscow trials and the Russian loyalty madness dare be the Franco-Russian professional revolutionary Victor Serge’s novel, “The murder of Tulayev”, published in Norwegian in 1980. Serge had first-hand knowledge of the Moscow trials which he experienced from within and with criminal conviction and view to Siberia as a result.
It is a dimension in Russia’s history, after experience of several invasions and very bloody wars, which goes on for the desire for stability and loyalty to the ruling regime. During the Soviet regime and in our time, this dimension has gained a foothold where economy and shame over the incumbent regime are elements. Reactions to the systemic chaos and poverty that accompanied the solution of the Soviet Union are indications of these dimensions and make, among other things, the Russian fear of economic sanctions in the current situation more understandable.
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During the collapse around 1990, when the West in many ways failed Russia, it became a renewed length in the country after stable conditions and a turn to authoritarian forces, accompanied by a form of communist and tsarist nostalgia. In a speech by Vladimir Putin, during one of his first presidential terms, Putin said he wanted to be a strong president, based on inherited, traditional, Russian values: “For the Russians, a strong state is no stranger. On the contrary, a strong state is a source of and guarantee of order (…) It is a fact in Russia that has the tendency that collective forms of activity always dominate over individualism. It is also a fact that paternalistic attitudes are rooted in Russian society. Most Russians are used to expecting to improve their lives not coming as a result of their own initiatives and efforts, but with the help and support of society and the state. “
With such a backdrop; can there be any hope that Vladimir Putin will be the last “Little Father” in the Kremlin?
Erna Solberg and the end of the story
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