Mary Dejevsky: Regime change happens fast – so how stable is Medvedev?
[One of the country’s most respected commentators on Russia, the EU and the US, Mary Dejevsky has worked as a foreign correspondent all over the world, including Washington, Paris and Moscow. She is now the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent and regularly appears on radio and television.]
When all else fails, seek a parallel in history. So it is that the Great Depression and the works of John Maynard Keynes have become fashionable reference points across the English-speaking world. But it is not only the stricken West that is looking for answers in earlier times. Russians, too, have been scouring the past in the hope of finding lessons for today.
Their period of choice, since Gorbachev's perestroika brought the Soviet system to its untidy end, has been the decade before the 1917 revolution. Tsarism had survived the uprising of 1905. Russia seemed to be moving towards constitutional monarchy. Social and economic change were rapid, what with rural reform, railway-building, urbanisation and the growth of a professional middle class.
Curiosity about those years only grew after the Soviet Union's collapse. Bookshops are stuffed with the works of early 20th century movers and shakers. It is as though Russians want to go back to where they were before modernisation was so crudely interrupted, and try to do it properly the second time around.
This helps to explain how Pyotr Stolypin, Nicholas II's Prime Minister between 1905 and 1911, took second place in a recent television poll for the greatest Russian of all time. (Alexander Nevsky, the medieval warrior prince, topped the poll, while Joseph Stalin – for all the horrified foreign reaction to his prominence – actually came in only third.)
Stolypin was the acceptable face of Russian reform. He tried to defuse peasant unrest by encouraging a new class of small land-owners. He was also a stickler for law and order, introducing summary justice to tackle a spate of assassinations and police killings. Some might describe him as the Vladimir Putin of his day, higher-born and more visionary, but with a similarly iron sense of purpose.
The positive light in which Stolypin and his reforms are now viewed by many Russians, however, negates another, more ominous parallel. The Stolypin reforms failed to turn the tide of unrest, which escalated not just in the countryside, but in cities and universities. The Prime Minister himself was assassinated, while accompanying the Tsar to a performance at the Kiev Opera.
What is more, in the years, months and even days before popular protest finally toppled the Tsar, no one realised that the whole established order was in its death throes. What seems obvious with hindsight was invisible to those for whom life would never be the same again. Something similar could be said of the last days of the Soviet Union...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
When all else fails, seek a parallel in history. So it is that the Great Depression and the works of John Maynard Keynes have become fashionable reference points across the English-speaking world. But it is not only the stricken West that is looking for answers in earlier times. Russians, too, have been scouring the past in the hope of finding lessons for today.
Their period of choice, since Gorbachev's perestroika brought the Soviet system to its untidy end, has been the decade before the 1917 revolution. Tsarism had survived the uprising of 1905. Russia seemed to be moving towards constitutional monarchy. Social and economic change were rapid, what with rural reform, railway-building, urbanisation and the growth of a professional middle class.
Curiosity about those years only grew after the Soviet Union's collapse. Bookshops are stuffed with the works of early 20th century movers and shakers. It is as though Russians want to go back to where they were before modernisation was so crudely interrupted, and try to do it properly the second time around.
This helps to explain how Pyotr Stolypin, Nicholas II's Prime Minister between 1905 and 1911, took second place in a recent television poll for the greatest Russian of all time. (Alexander Nevsky, the medieval warrior prince, topped the poll, while Joseph Stalin – for all the horrified foreign reaction to his prominence – actually came in only third.)
Stolypin was the acceptable face of Russian reform. He tried to defuse peasant unrest by encouraging a new class of small land-owners. He was also a stickler for law and order, introducing summary justice to tackle a spate of assassinations and police killings. Some might describe him as the Vladimir Putin of his day, higher-born and more visionary, but with a similarly iron sense of purpose.
The positive light in which Stolypin and his reforms are now viewed by many Russians, however, negates another, more ominous parallel. The Stolypin reforms failed to turn the tide of unrest, which escalated not just in the countryside, but in cities and universities. The Prime Minister himself was assassinated, while accompanying the Tsar to a performance at the Kiev Opera.
What is more, in the years, months and even days before popular protest finally toppled the Tsar, no one realised that the whole established order was in its death throes. What seems obvious with hindsight was invisible to those for whom life would never be the same again. Something similar could be said of the last days of the Soviet Union...