"Opinion polls in those days showed that the overwhelming majority of people were not impressed by the new Russia. At the end of 2000, 75% of respondents said they regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union, "points out Walker. "The majority of the population did not recognize the Russian Federation as genuine," the former adviser to Yeltsin and Putin, Gleb Pavlovsky, told a journalist. "They thought they lived in a strange derivative of the Soviet Union. We had to ensure the transfer of power, as well as create a kind of self-awareness among the people ".
"Such, in the broadest sense, was Putin's mission," says Walker.
"At the end of 2003, I returned to Moscow, studying Russian and Soviet history at the university. I worked for an NGO for a year before taking up journalism. The capital was slowly moving towards prosperity. In the next ten years, oil prices so jumped that even with the corruption in the inner circle of Putin's corruption, money seeped down and gave real benefits to people in cities. The abomination of desolation began to disappear from the central streets of Moscow and other large settlements, and the middle class began to develop. With him came coffee shops, wine bars and frequent flights to Europe, "reads the article.
However, something in the country caused Walker to be depressed - in particular, "suffocating massacres of civil society, glaring inequality and terrible social problems". Alcoholism with the use of technical alcohol-containing fluids, an epidemic of drug addiction in the absence of humane methods of its treatment, a synthetic opioid "crocodile", from which parts of human bodies began to rot.
"Putin's goal was to breathe new life forces and a sense of national unity into this sprawling people. In the first ten years of his reign, a gradual improvement in the economic situation was enough to convince many Russians that things were gradually getting better. A hard ideology was a cat that wept, and Kremlin political technologists used it cynically, "reads the article.
"One of the few narratives that evoked sincere feelings was the Soviet victory in World War II, or the Great Patriotic War, as it is still known. After the 1990s, absorbed in the reassessment of values ??over the dark sides of the Russian past, Putin wanted the Russians to be proud of their history again. The book I wrote about my life in Russia - The Long Hangover - is partly about Putin's attempts to overcome the legacy of the collapse of the Soviet Union and restore Russians a sense of pride, in particular, through the victory in that war. Putin appealed to many historical events and various ideas of Russianness, but the war almost organically took the place of the cornerstone of the new nation. The victory in 1945 was the answer to the trauma of 1991, "points out Walker.
"For a wounded nation, which had occasion to celebrate few victories in the memory of those living, the war was a powerful inspiring idea. Almost every family was somehow connected with that war, during which the Soviet Union suffered unimaginably huge sacrifices, but under Putin the dark sides of the military efforts and the Stalinist regime that headed the country at that time gradually moved aside. A clear search for national pride turned into a hurray-patriotism, beating yourself in the chest with your fist. Military rhetoric painted a modern narrative, and again Russia faced an avid enemy - this time the US. Of course, all countries have a selective approach to their history, and the German ambassador to Britain recently suggested that voting for Breckzit is at least partly due to the fact that Britain could not overcome its obsession with the Second World War. But in Russia, electoral memory has reached truly alarming levels, and the narrative of the glorious war has become something of a secular religion with its saints, martyrs and unquestionable truths, "points out Walker.
"The logical completion of this growing hostility came in 2014. In response to the Maidan revolution, Russia annexed the Crimea and began a multi-month war in eastern Ukraine. Thousands were killed, including the passengers of the MH17, almost certainly shot down by a Russian missile meant for a Ukrainian military aircraft. Putin's decision to annex the Crimea and get involved in the war in the east of Ukraine had many causes, but one of them is discord between the two countries still trying to create new national identities after the collapse of the Soviet Union, "reads the article.
"After 2014, anti-Western sentiment began to grow in Russia, and it became more difficult to write articles about the Kremlin. Putin's inner circle narrowed even more, and some of the doors wide open for me slammed shut. The idea that the West is working to replace the regime in Russia and that foreign media is just a part of this policy has become more common, "recalls Walker.
"In recent years, the international political situation continued to deteriorate, but the quality of life in Moscow has continued to improve," reads the article.
"Whether the plan of distraction has worked, it is more difficult to measure. Political apathy still governs the ball among both the urban elite and the wider population, and Putin will surely win elections next month. Putin has done a wonderful trick: he managed to pass himself off as part of solving problems, although he has been in power for 18 years. Although the rating of his support is real, a large part of this support is fragile and is due to the lack of an alternative.
During my trips around the Russian province, people often told me that they were unhappy with their lives and despaired of corrupt officials. The Kremlin has long argued that the alternative to Putin is revolution and chaos, and tried to make it so that it was. He strangles any opposition movements that arise naturally, even before they get to their feet. Keeping in mind the economic hardships that followed the collapse of the last government, many Russians prefer to hold onto Putin, "reads the article.
Source: inopressa.