piero scaruffi
http://www.scaruffi.com/

January 31, 2012
The Russian Revolution of 1917 that installed the communists in power and created the Soviet Union had a side effect that has been harder to undo than communism itself: it isolated Russia from the rest of Europe (at least from the part of Europe that was not occupied by the Soviet Union). Until then the Soviet Union had been a full member and protagonist of the big European mess, a continuing shift of alliances for the purpose of conquering small (and sometimes irrelevant) territories.

Starting in 1917, Russia was no longer perceived by the rest of Europe as one of them but rather as a sinister and cryptic entity. In retrospect, the Soviet Union’s most influential feature may have been its control of information, that created what is still one of the most inscrutable regimes in history, a model later copied by mainland China, North Korea and all the other communist regimes. The net effect was to turn Russia into the polar opposite of the Western world. When the Soviet Union fell, a lot of things were undone, but not that one: Russia still lives on the margins of the Christian world, is emarginated in the process of European integration and is perceived as a potential threat by its European neighbors even if (in theory) it has adopted the capitalist democratic model.


It goes both ways: Russians perceive any move by the Western powers (whether it’s about the Iranian nuclear reactor or the Taliban in Afghanistan) as targeting, first and foremost, Russian interests. The West, at the same time, perceives any move by Russia as, first and foremost, defending Russia’s old sphere of influence at the expense of whatever makes sense to Western observers.


In my opinion, the main effect of the Arab Spring in the long term will be to bring the Arab world much closer to the values and lifestyle of the West. The main driver of that revolution was dignity: the average person in North Africa and in the Middle East wants to enjoy the same degree of dignity that has become (over the last 60 years) standard in Europe. Europe has largely eliminated dictatorship, corruption, organized crime and feudal disparities that had plagued the continent since the fall of the Roman empire. The Arab Spring aims at doing the same in the Arab world.


Russia has been left behind: a country still plagued - by an authoritarian regime that imprisons its opponents, by organized crime that rules undisturbed, by a ridiculous wealth gap that saps money away from the working and middle classes, and by widespread corruption. Its citizens risk becoming not only second-class citizens, but fourth or fifth class, behind the Far East, Latin America and now even the Arabs. When Putin announced that he was returning to the post of president, after a brief vacation as prime minister, he indirectly told Russians just that: Russian society will trail behind the rest of the world. 


Putin may have miscalculated how patient his people are willing to be. They might agree with him on many foreign issues, but they know enough of what happens in the world to yearn for a better model of state.

At the same time the periphery is in turmoil: both Kazakhs and Uzbeks are rapidly beginning to resent the totalitarian regimes that have ruled them since 1991. There is a point in every system when the economic benefits of a regime are no longer enough to justify the existence of that regime. People start demanding dignity, fairness, justice. A social crisis is brooding in Central Asia as much as it was in the Arab world.


The Western borders are much quieter, but it is telling that Russia has been arguing with its most trusted ally, Belarus (the last dictator left in Europe), and that its second trusted ally, Ukraine’s president Viktor Yushchenko is courting the European Union. Even when they are old friends, European countries want to become integrated with the European Union more than they want to be grateful to Russia. Take Serbia: Russia was the only country to stand with the Serbians when NATO was bombing them, but in December 2009 Serbia applied for membership in the European Union and some day it may become part of NATO. 


The Russian regime may therefore come into attack from three sides: the West that is slowly but steadily corroding its sphere of influence, the Arab Spring that is presenting an appealing model for the Russians of the Facebook/Twitter generation, and Central Asia that might ignite the fire of social upheaval.

Russia has the same major problem that the Arabs had: no strong candidate to start and lead the revolt. In the Arab world eventually the revolt was started by two unlikely candidates: a man who set himself on fire in Tunisia and a Google executive in Egypt. Something similar might happen in Russia: an obscure everyman or everywoman whose extraordinary action triggers a chain reaction among the young people (blogger Aleksei Navalny is the West’s favorite). The difference, of course, is that Arabs were so desperate that they were willing to die; and they could count on the silent complicity of the Western powers who could exert power on the regimes (and bomb the one in Libya). Neither factor will work in Russia: young urban Russians are relatively rich and spoiled, and are unlikely to risk death or even arrest. The West has no influence on the Russian regime, and, in fact, any pressure by the West could backfire in favor of the regime. Internally, the Russian opposition is divided between the old-fashioned communists (who won a respectable 20% of votes in the last rigged elections) and the discredited liberal democrats (who are widely viewed as responsible for the economic collapse of the early 1990s). Neither side is likely to attract the crowds that we have seen in the Arab world.

Change may have to come from the top, and the one man who could enact such change is the current president: Dmitry Medvedev. He was installed by Putin as a temporary place-holders for himself. Medvedev was an obedient puppet but he often presented himself as more Westernized. Putin owes his survival to having created a divide between his Russia and the West (just like Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last president, can blame his fall on having tried to bridge that divide). Medvedev has to decide if he will just quietly fade away, despised as a faceless bureaucrat, or if he wants to remain a force in politics. If the latter, his chance to make history is to become the one who stands up to Putin and begins the political reforms that Russia needs in order to move into the 21st century.

piero scaruffi is an author, cultural historian and blogger who has written extensively about a wealth of topics, ranging from cognitive science to music.

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