Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin by Andrei A. Kovalev

Author:Andrei A. Kovalev [Kovalev, Andrei A.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, POL060000 Political Science / World / Russian & Former Soviet Union, HIS032000 History / Europe / Russia & The Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9781612349473
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2017-07-31T22:00:00+00:00

Postscript to an Epoch of Hope

In the process of dismantling Soviet totalitarianism, colleagues who shared my democratic ideals and I tried to get rid of sticky, omnipresent spiderwebs. At their center was an enormous, ideological law enforcement Spider that had earlier been called the leadership of the Communist Party and the KGB—in short, the TsK GB, or the Central Committee of State Security. After the breakup of the USSR, neither the CPSU nor the KGB existed any longer under their prior names, but the monster behind them survived essentially unchanged.

In totalitarian states the Spiders are rather different from those depicted in scholarly literature. This particular Spider does not kill all those who fall into its web. The basic poison it deploys is hypnosis, which it uses to manipulate the people of Russia. When the poison failed to work, the Lenin-Stalin era Spider dispatched its victims to the GULAG, the country’s most important building sites, which were founded on slave labor. It also sent people there to meet the “needs of production”; moreover, the production demands continued into the post-Stalin period.

The Spider now has other means at its disposal as well—from shooting to depriving one’s freedom to administering polonium-210 (which was used to kill Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006). Punitive psychiatry, which worked for the totalitarian Spider and was terminated only toward the end of Gorbachev’s perestroika, has been revived under Putin’s “vertical of power.”

Unlike in an ordinary spiderweb, the Alpha Spider in the totalitarian spiderweb coexisted with smaller spiders.

The threads of the totalitarian spiderweb entangled the entire country, including almost every single person. It snagged them organizationally via the Communist Party, the Soviet government, the professional organizations, and, of course, the law enforcement organs—namely, the KGB and the militia, which worked for this monster. It also ensnared the people psychologically and morally via the hypnosis of their upbringing and education; through the state means of mass information, intimidation, and punishment of dissidents; and through the powerful system of mythmaking that few could stand up to. Feeding on human flesh and human souls, the spiders acquired and maintained power and material benefits. The Alpha Spider could not have held out for long without the Beta, Gamma, and other smaller spiders: the leaders of ministries and departments, local bosses, bureau heads.

Twice the Spider loosened its grip on the totalitarian spiderweb. The first time was in the period of Khrushchev’s thaw following Stalin’s death. During Gorbachev’s reforms of the late 1980s and in the early Yeltsin period, the spiderweb thinned out, and the weakened Spider sitting at its center became even more embittered and even more eager to catch its prey. Russia was at a crossroads after the breakup of the USSR. The future fate of the country depended on whether the Spider would succeed in restoring its spiderweb. Paradoxically the democratic reforms impregnated the totalitarian monster, and its young spread out all over Russia, even venturing beyond its borders.

After the failure of the attempted 1991 coup d’état, it seemed that the totalitarian web had been broken and the Spider had breathed its last.

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