Translated material
“So far, internal contradictions are not enough for the political regime to transform into something radically different.” Historian Ilya Venyavkin - about the similarities and differences of Putin's Russia and the USSR
Vladimir Putin instructed the government until March 2024 to prepare proposals for physical education parades on Red Square, which were regularly arranged under Stalin. From September 1, 2023, the initial military training returned to Russian schools, which was removed from the school curriculum in the 90s. And the State Duma continues to adopt repressive laws against Russians who do not support the Kremlin’s policy and oppose the war. All this makes researchers talk about the revival of Soviet methods of government - with a strict ideology, the persecution of dissenters, censorship and militarization of society. Farida Kurbangaleeva spoke with the historian of Soviet culture Ilya Venyavkin about why repressive practices respond to the mass of Russians, why people again write denunciations with pleasure and whether Putin Russia can collapse in the same way as the Soviet Union.
- Boris Akunin, in response to a criminal case in charge of him, stated that he considers it an “important milestone”. According to him, "books in Russia have not been prohibited since Soviet times, writers have not been accused of terrorism since the time of great terror." Is this really a step towards a return to the worst Soviet traditions, and Akunin and Bykov are new Pasternaks?
-In a sense, yes. There are really formed traditions of ideological repressions and control over dissenters. Such repressions are now included in the nearest accessible repertoire of the authorities. I fully admit that the number of writers whose books will be prohibited and removed from the sale will also grow. If we just observe how the repressive Russian policy has changed, we will see that everything is going on the principle of "the tail must be cut into pieces." First, a soft ban, then someone is fined, then they have been brought criminal cases. That is, the level of ideological intolerance increases gradually.
But if we compare this with the Soviet time, then we must admit that then it was completely special, it seems to me that the cult of the artistic word and the cult of the writer are quite unique for the modern world. Writers and representatives of the artistic intelligentsia often played the role of the rulers of the Duma, and literature took the function of creating a political alternative. Pasternak came across very strong pressure, but at the same time many readers reprinted his poems and a novel and connected a significant part of their identity with him. Relatively speaking, they lived "on Pasternak." Now the writer’s word, unfortunately or fortunately, does not have such a crushing weight. And I'm not sure that literature in modern Russia has a comparable role.
Historian Ilya Venyavkin
Provided by Ilya Venyavkin
- If we draw an analogy with the Soviet era, at what point are we now? Some say that modernity is similar to stagnant times of Brezhnev, others - that Stalinism has come. Are such parallels permissible?
- If we look at the elites that now govern the country, they largely inherit the already established Soviet system and have it as a reference. Medinsky, who writes a single history textbook, studied on some “single” textbook. That is, to a large extent, he simply refers to Soviet practice.
But it seems to me that direct comparisons with the Soviet time now do not make sense. The Soviet era with its dynamics is not applicable to what is happening in modern Russia, because the Soviet project began as a revolutionary restructuring of the world. Then this idea in a sense “cool” and transformed. And now the dynamics are completely different, and we are observing a strange hybrid, which was not before. In fact, over the past 10 years, a new state ideology has appeared before our eyes in Russia, which now sounds from each iron, and we are now at the point of increasing this ideologization.
“How would you describe it?”
- Recently, I spoke with the researcher Mikhail Suslov, who calls this ideology “Putinism”. In general, what he says. This ideology is unusual, new. This is a mixture of conservatism, populism and faith that Russia has its own special path and values that unite society. Such an ideological transformation was definitely not during stagnation.
Moreover, Russia is now waging an ideological war. The war in Ukraine is not like a war in Afghanistan, because the war in Afghanistan was not in the spotlight and did not appear as a sacred war against the West. And now thousands of residents of Russia are dying precisely for the idea. They not only capture the territory or conduct a “peacekeeping operation”, they fight with an existential enemy. This resembles the time after the end of World War II, when the Cold War began and began to declare that there is an absolute evil with which the Soviet Union fights.
That is, if we compare our time with the Soviet Union, then ideological pumping occurs as in the 1930s. And the level of persecution of political opponents is rather reminiscent of the one that was in the early 1980s. Elements from the Soviet past are recognized, but are formed in a completely new picture. And she has many differences from Soviet ideology.
Now there is no universal faith in the progress of mankind, which was in the Soviet Union. And there is no progress itself. There is no team economy in Russia, and it is unlikely to be. At the same time, the Soviet project was largely intellectualized. Intellectuals played a special role in him, and if you were an employee of the Research Institute or the Writer, you had access to a number of privileges. And in modern Russia there is nothing similar. If you are a writer or scientific worker, you are most likely not entering the elite.
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