Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

Sorokin mentioned the Paris Commune and the October Revolution of 1917 as examples of such economic revolutions. It is clear that the Russian Revolution of 1991, that put an end to communism with its planned economy and, after an absence of more than seventy years, reintroduced a market economy, was not a purely political revolution, but equally an economic revolution and consequently as deep and fundamental in impact and scope as the October Revolution of 1917 that it, finally, buried.

But revolutions are dialectical processes. They carry, as a rule, their negation—the counterrevolution—in their womb. After the first period of revolutionary fervor follows a second period in which the pendulum swings in the opposite direction. Sorokin described this process as follows:

Everyone knows the refrain “It was the fault of Rousseau and Voltaire,” sung in the second period of the French Revolution, when the ideologies of the first phase were giving way to those of Chateaubriand, J. de Maistre, de Bonald, and others. The story repeated itself in the Russian revolution [of October 1917]. In the first period bourgeois science, philosophy, Pushkin, Tschaikovsky and other representatives of the “degenerate aristocracy” and the “bourgeoisie” were assailed. Religion, the emperors and the great military generals of the past, the family, marriage, and sexual chastity were likewise attacked. In the second period, the Revolution banned the Marxian texts of history, restored the family, praised sexual chastity, and elevated Pushkin and Tschaikovsky to even higher positions than they had before. It idealized the great Russian Czars, the famous generals, and even the religious leaders of the past. It exalted patriotism, “Our Soviet Fatherland.” . . . Soviet Russia resumed exactly the same foreign policy as that of the Czarist regime.^[25]

According to Sorokin, “ideologies of the second stage represent a revival of the living ideologies of the prerevolutionary society in new dress and colors. The revolution itself, when successful, inherently and necessarily consumes its earlier ideologies and resurrects the living prerevolutionary ideologies. This explains why in practically all great revolutions the ideologies of the first phase turned out to be unpopular in the second.”^[26] This process may explain why in present-day Russia the capitalist liberalism of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys,” which guided the reforms of the early 1990s, has fallen into disgrace, together with the protagonists of the perestroika period. Not only of its leaders: Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but also of the liberal reform ministers, such as Yegor Gaidar and Andrey Kozyrev, who are now accused of being responsible for the economic breakdown and the loss of empire. Putin is clearly the representative of Russia’s “restoration” after the chaotic transformation years. It was Putin who called the loss of empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” Although he does not want to restore communism, he is the man who exalts in the second phase what had been destroyed in the first: a centralized, strong state, a positive assessment of Stalin’s “geopolitical genius,” a leading role for the secret services, and the eternal glory of the Russian empire.

The Use of Nationalist Propaganda

by the Leadership