Valdai Discussion Club 2016

pdf file: What if the Soviet Union had not collapsed? by author Oleg Barabanov

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Russians find it difficult to give an unambiguous assessment of their Soviet past in part because officials hold diametrically opposing views of the initial and final stages of the Soviet period. The current conservative camp consistently and unvaryingly sums up its view of the 1917 Revolution with the simple phrase: “Never again!”. ...For obvious reasons, this anti-revolutionary and counter-revolutionary approach will dominate the official ideological campaign during the upcoming anniversary year.

In other words, pathological anti-communists - even those who are too stupid or block-headed to distinguish today's Russian Federation with Soviet Russia – will find themselves in the position of being in complete agreement with the current Putin administration over an assessment of the Great October Socialist Revolution. That should be amusing for the rest of us. The other amusing bit is some speculation over Chernobyl - a pivotal political event in Russian history, not just environmental - time travel, preventing the disaster, saving the Soviet Union, yadda yadda and.... Putin as Gen Sec of the CPSU. An alternate universe with certain obvious similarities with the present.

 Russian SF is like that.

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On the other hand, the very same officials will undoubtedly take the exact opposite view of the events of 1991 and the Soviet period as a whole. Everyone recalls President Vladimir Putin’s famous remark that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” That attitude, together with the reverence given Gagarin’s spaceflight and Victory Day – the two main pillars of Russia’s historical memory – greatly reinforces an almost pious attitude toward the Soviet era. There is also a positive reassessment of Stalin’s role – not as a communist, but as a statesman – that the media powerfully reinforced during the anniversary of the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 2016. The aphorism “Stalin built it up and Khrushchev broke it down” also hearkens to the Soviet era.

So conservatives, like liberals, can talk well out of both sides of their mouths. Who knew?

The author gets into Crimean “geopoetics” - a new term which interested readers should familiarize themselves with. I mean Russian culture, of course. The bulk of the piece is actually almost biographical in approach - what if so-and-so, etc.

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In considering these “historical turning points,” it is worth asking how events would have developed differently without Mikhail Gorbachev.

Plenty of Communists would likely be very interested in this scenario. Gorby is viewed by them as a terrible traitor.

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Unfortunately, history has no subjunctive mood. We will never have any definite answers to these questions. However, when analyzing all the available sources, it almost seems as though some form of inevitable doom led Gorbachev and the whole country to ruin, and that nothing could have prevented it. In any case, here we have presented a strictly textbook introduction to the role that specific individuals played in history.

A fascinating bit of speculation and a good read.