One hopes whoever succeeds him turns Russia into a more progressive democratic state.
Starting back with
glasnost and
perestroika, I hoped -- even assumed -- that this would be the case. However, as the years have passed and I have become more steeped in Russian history, I have come sadly to the conclusion that it may never be.
The modern western states all have their own histories of cycles of progression and regression, but in all of them over time the cycles of progression advanced far enough and subtly and permanently altered attitudes enough that a kernel of the political progress remained to form a higher starting point for the next cycle of progression. In England, it went all the way back to
Magna Carta, the lineage of which can still be traced in British constitutional law despite some very despotic intervening regimes and the bizarre experiment of Cromwellism. In France, enough Enlightenment attitudes survived the conflagrations of The Terror and the dullness of the Restoration to form the basis for a modern democratic France. Even in Germany, the heritage of early 19th-century liberalism and Bismarckian administrative progressiveness came through the fires of National Socialism to form the basis for the modern German state.
Not so in Russia. There, despite many attempts at reform, none attained the momentum to weather the next cycle of autocratic resurgence. And this was in spite of the fact that, looking back to the glory days of Kievan Rus and the great city states such as Lord Novgorod the Great, that part of the world showed more promise of a progressive, democratic future than almost anything further westward.
But the tide turned with Ivan III, with autocracy gaining a foothold in the Russian mindset and body politic that has not since been fundamentally shaken. Peter the Great undertook serious reforms of Russia, some of which stuck although in somewhat distorted form. But they were aimed at making Russia a more efficient military and economic force, not a more liberal civil society. Catherine the Great stepped off the line with her ambitious
Nakaz but quickly found herself in the quicksand of Russian reactionism among a nobility whose support she needed to maintain her initially tenuous hold on a throne to which her legal claim was somewhat dodgy. Finally the Pugachev Rebellion and the French Revolution doused the last embers of her early fire to bring Russia into closer alignment with western European enlightenment attitudes. Despite some interesting reform work during Michael Speransky's periods of influence under Alexander I and even Nicholas I, no serious attempts to liberalize Russian society at a fundamental level were made until the reign of Alexander II -- a reign which, ironically, was terminated by leftist terrorists whose biggest fear was that Alexander's reforms might, in fact, succeed enough to lighten the yoke of autocracy and make it more tolerable to a wider spectrum of Russian society.
Then came Russia's brief courtship with true democracy in the chaos of the months between the February and October revolutions 1917 -- a time during which, not insignificantly, Kerensky could hardly wait to move into the tsar's personal quarters in the Winter Palace.
And then, of course, came Leninism which, despite its philosophical grounding at the opposite end of the political spectrum, quickly availed itself of all the tools of autocratic control, including the secret police, censorship, suppression of political opposition, and government by fiat. In the process, it became simply a left-wing dictatorship instead of a right-wing monarchy. And with Stalinism Russia saw days such as it had not seen since Ivan IV and his terroristic
Oprichniki and social and economic control such as not seen since the height of Peter I's reforming zeal.
And now we have Putin, under whose government political opposition has been suppressed, the government had reasserted control over the media (including the assassinations of opposition journalists), free elections have been bald-facedly rigged, xenophobia has been made a cornerstone of government policy, and minority groups have been scapegoated as proxies for Russia's deep and abiding problems.
It's hard to digest, but as the west comes to understand more of Nikita Kruschev's time at the helm, he might ultimately be realized to be perhaps the most selfless and sincere liberalizer in modern Russian history. Unlike Gorbachev, he did not do it because the state was collapsing around him. He did it because he felt Stalin had been wrong, both morally and practically. And, in trying to make Russia more humane, he threw bold rolls of the political dice which, sadly and perhaps predictably, he lost. It's a damned shame that in the west he is remembered primarily as the buffoon who pounded his shoe on the podium. He was anything but.
