The sinister old mother of history never fails. It does not follow anyone’s commands, but its own, always resulting in the destruction of those who attempt to use it, and often with even greater viciousness. Russia knows it well, perhaps better than anyone else. So good, in fact, that one would say it is inextricably linked to his past and now also to his present.
This old woman in labor who is now returning is the one who is always inclined to change regimes and open the door to revolutions. Without going further, the two from Russia, that of 1905, after defeat by Japan, and that of 1917, now conjured up by Vladimir Putin, against Germany. Will he now also fulfill his bloody task?
Only in one rare case, namely through Mikhail Gorbachev, did he remain on the brink of political change. Or maybe he put it off until now. He was the first to want to settle disputes peacefully and without shooting. And maybe the last. Then it gradually came back, but without a break. With such persistence that one would say he never left. Even from the hands of Boris Yeltsin, the hero of democracy in the face of the coup that sent the tanks against a reactionary but legitimate parliament that wanted to replace him.
The two devastating and uncivil wars in Chechnya were waged under his liberal rule. The first failed, but the second triumphed thanks to its newly sacked prime minister, that uncertain novice named Vladimir Putin, but both were equally cruel and bloody. With such credentials, the die was already cast: the former KGB agent was the right man, perhaps the only one, able to follow such a violent tradition and dare the feat of reclaiming the lost empire.
Western blindness, our blindness, is amazing. Georgia in 2008 and nothing happened. The same Syria in 2011. Not even Crimea and Donbas in 2014, which cause us the greatest concern and minimal concern. Not to mention the scandalous poisonings and murders of journalists, opponents, ex-secret agents and oligarchs ordered in the Kremlin. Or the so-called false flag provocations and acts of terrorism, in which the Russian secret services organized massacres of innocent people to justify their repressive activities.
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This is how politics is done in Russia. With blackmail, police and judges bought; the poison, the mace, and the weapon; the tank, the missile and the bomb. With the urn and the parliament as theater or festival decoration. All fake, fake, even before fake news was invented.
As in the distant days of tsarist autocracy or Stalinist dictatorship, force is all that matters. Get power and money first and then keep power and make more money. It has always been so and it will continue to be so if people like Putin or Prigozhin remain at the helm of the state.
It is loyalty to an age-old tradition. It began with the oprichnina, or Ivan the Terrible’s personal guard, which was just as terrible as its creator. He continued with the Okhrana, the secret police of 19th-century tsarism, capable of compiling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to trace the Jewish population of the empire. The successive vicissitudes of police Bolshevism, from Lenin’s Cheka to Stalin’s NKVD to Khrushchev’s KGB, into whose ranks Putin was forming, surpassed all merits. With its purges, its gulag and its thousands of shots in the neck like in Katyn, a horrible and uncomfortable story that surfaced in the days of Gorbachev and Yeltsin and that Putin now wants to hide.
It is defined by the nihilism of absolute power. A life is worth nothing. Millions of lives are still worth less. Kill and die, what does it matter? A mere procedure is to recruit entire generations of young people from time to time and send them to the front lines as cannon fodder to fulfill the schemes and whims of a perverse and often corrupt political will.
Poor country that can only solve difficulties and disputes in this way. With those outside and with those inside. In its foreign policy and in its internal power struggle. Through blood and fire. Subject to the dictatorship of the old and bloody teacher, who is now rebelling against whoever called her.
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