On the plinth of the statue in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, in the freezing cold, stand beleaguered Russian leftwingers holding banners and surrounded by police. It’s February 1992 and snow is swirling. Inflation is running at 2500%. The streets are filled with elderly people trying to sell their last belongings for cash.
Among the protesters is a bloke in an unfeasibly large fur hat giving out leaflets entitled: “Revolution is the only way out of the crisis”. His name is Paul Mason.
In Kyiv last month, as we ducked and dived between tense meetings with ministers and activists, with war hours away, I remembered it was exactly 30 years since I had my first brush with post-Soviet reality. It was not a success.
I had gone, two weeks after the dissolution of the USSR, with a small group of European left-wing activists to see if we could pull together an anti-Stalinist labour movement out of the dissident left. These were the anarchists, Trotskyists and human rights activists who had begun to network in the last days of the Soviet Union, when “networking” meant meeting in a coffee shop under surveillance by the KGB.
Despite a crash course in Russian, I could not understand anything. And we were followed, photographed and taped by the KGB from the second we arrived to the second we left. But that wasn’t the main problem.
Society was in a state of absolute collapse. When we took taxis, the driver would stop 100 metres from the pickup point to collect a colleague armed with an iron bar, just to make sure we didn’t rob him. I lived in a wrecked student dormitory, where the rooms of Vietnamese and African students had been trashed by racists.
When we took to the streets, in a massive demonstration against Boris Yeltsin’s privatisation of the economy, the sad fact was that the dominant voices beside us were Stalin nostalgics and, in the wings, the nationalist right. I saw elderly generals link arms and push through a line of young riot cops. But ultimately the riot cops won, and so did the oligarchs and the Western capitalists who decided to strip Russia of its wealth and dignity.
Fast-forward 30 years and post-Soviet society is once again in crisis. But this is a different world. The young people I saw in Kyiv have a totally altered perception of the possibilities from those who lived through the collapse of the USSR.
They are Western-oriented and they are networked. What they protested for in 2014, and what they’re fighting for now, with Molotov cocktails in hand and white plastic in their ears, is the right to be European. To them, this is merely the continuation of something that has been going on for eight years. It’s us that now have to stumble, blinking, into the light.
What it felt like in 1992 to emerge into the whirlwind of marketisation, information overload and insecure work was captured by Victor Pelevin in his novel Babylon.
Soviet life had been depicted as an unchanging eternity. But for Pelevin’s antihero, Babylen Tatarsky, suddenly it was gone. “No sooner had eternity disappeared than Tatarsky found himself in the present, and it turned out that he knew absolutely nothing about the world…”
Now it’s our turn to pass from what seemed like a liberal-democratic “eternity” to a present full of danger and uncertainty.
Anyone with the remotest residual belief in the “end of history”, the triumph of liberal democracy, the permanence of a rules-based global order, the universality of human rights, the unthinkability of war — saw it all go out of the window on February 24.
Vladimir Putin has unleashed not just a war of aggression on Ukraine, but a war to cancel international law. Putin’s war is not just on Ukraine’s democracy, but on our democratic system and values. I am surrounded by lifelong socialists and progressives who just cannot process this. They keep returning to their old obsessions — Boris Johnson’s lies, the injustice of austerity, the hypocrisy of the West over Palestine and Yemen — and though these were good obsessions, they are now the wrong obsessions.
Everyone who framed their political assumptions around the eternal existence of an order based on the international rule of law, a global marketplace for talent, semiconductors and energy, and a stable geopolitics will be thrown into confusion.
As Pelevin’s novel recounts, those who survive are the ones who adapt quickest. And the key to adaptation is to accept what has failed. To accept that this horrible emergent reality is not going to subside anytime soon.
I failed in Russia — so badly that I did not go there again until 2018. Now we have all failed — the left, the centre, the right, the journalists, the pundits, the defence boffins. The recriminations can come later, but with the attack on Ukraine’s democracy, a systemic conflict has begun between democracy and dictatorship, truth and lies, naked power and the rule of international law.
As I fled Kyiv, waving a brick-sized wad of currency at the woman selling tickets for the last plane to Istanbul, I had to acknowledge: I have failed again. I remembered the words of Neville Chamberlain on the outbreak of war in 1939. Quoted verbatim they’re probably a good place for all of us to begin from — even for those of us who warned about Putin long ago:
“Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do; that is, to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much.”
The rules-based global order was delivered a terminal blow by the US-led invasion of Iraq, in 2003.
It has suffered many such blows. How many countries has the US invaded? Not to mention various other breaches. But imperfect as it is, how else can we try to get along?
I read a quote some years ago: “Democracy isn’t perfect, but it beats everything else around.” Was it a misquote from the original by Churchill?
In my lifetime David, it was the merciless invasion of Vietnam (with Australia ‘tagging along’, as usual) in the 1960s. Perhaps as many as 2 million innocent Vietnamese civilians died needlessly as a result of that act of unmitigated aggression.
I can still remember those newsreel reports of the US bombing of Vitnam, with myriad B-52s raining countles bomb on the hapless Vietnamese people, and General Curtis Lemay’s vow,”We’ll bomb then back to the Stone Age”.Also, let us also remember the crime of Agent Orange.However, they were the guys wearing the White Hats, weren’t they? Just sit back and eat your popcorn.
I’ve read an estimate of 3-5 million dead all up in Indo-China, counting those killed indirectly by disease, famine, destroyed infrastructure (physical and social), late effects of chemical warfare, etc – the estimate based on a conservative toll of indirect deaths being five times the number killed directly by bombs and bullets in modern warfare. And the toll is rising, isn’t it, due to kids and farmers still being blown to bits by unexploded ordinance and the effects of chemical warfare? And didn’t the US put sanctions on Vietnam after the war? Quite some ‘rules-based international order’ !!
And a total of maybe 12 million deaths due to US wars since 1945 (not counting places like the Philippines prior to 1945) – holocaust levels, but never described as such, of course.
I keep asking myself ‘what makes Ukraine different?’
Whiteness.
Also, the aggressor. The USA and their coalition partners only ever spread democracy and protect.
Poor old Democracy, sagging under the weight of unrealistic expectations and built on the centrepiece of liberal individualism, the idea that individual citizens are both rational and moral, ignoring the fact we are social beings who arrive on the planet in a social world that is already prescribed. Perhaps Fukuyama was talking about the end of U.S democracy in 1992? Hubris writ large. It is well past the time that we let go of the idea of linear time and progress. They have not served us well. As Derrida wrote ‘For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious, macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable, singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.’ (1994). ‘Democracy’ U.S style was outsourced to the powerful and rich from the moment of its inception. Tied to capitalism it has wreaked havoc. There was a brief window of opportunity to incorporate Russia into Europe. It was willfully ignored. If ‘International Law’ is to have value it must consider the interests of all nations, be valued by all, and have its laws observed by all. We haven’t shown the capacity to do this with any global endeavour.
Only inevitable once liberalism was weaponised by the US.
To use as an” in our interests” cudgel for regime change in authoritarian regimes as well as democracies.
Yes. Post Soviet Russia was not a success. I hate to say it and be the magnet for hatred of contributors on this page but Russia itself has never been a success at anything except winning the occasional war. Destruction and force are its fortes. It can beat an invading country – Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. Under the Bolshevics Russia even beat their vast array of enemies and their foreign backers and forces – UK, USA, Japan, Australia, Czechoslovakia, etc. The one thing Russia and Russians can never do is develop a country with a nominally high standard of living like the US, It cannot develop an economy that is efficient, productive and highly effective and powerful i.e., Finland and the nordic countries on the smaller scale and Japan and China in the larger Asiatic model, develop a country with model democratic principles such as western Europe and its “southern” offshoots, and develop a country that faces the future bravely free from the shackles of its past – like Germany. Russia is not a failed state because whatever state Russia is, it is failed. Monarchy, Empire, Soviet-communist, capitalist and now a carbon based oligarchic kleptocracy under an autocrat. They have no traditions of shared power peacefully or a workable parliament. Russia is a failed country and cannot break that cycle like a drug addict who cannot break their cycle of addiction.
Unfortunately uncontrolled aggression is part of human nature, that is why we have laws local and international to control behavior for people and country’s. When an individual who has dictatorial power can try to ignore the respective laws, all others should combine to bring them back to the international agreements ..Unfortunately the West has failed twice in 1939 and now in The Ukraine.The fault lies in the political system where leaders are always looking to the next election.