Is Modern Russia an Oxymoron?

There was hardly a word of comment during Christmas about the 20th anniversary of the death of the Soviet Union. I’ve been waiting to see some analysis about it ever since, but there’s been precious little. So, what’s happened since then? If you say Yeltsin and Putin that may be sufficient. There’s more, but I’ll need a few paragraphs to explain.


The U.S.-Soviet arms race ended at Reykjavik in 1987, after the two sides agreed to scrap their ground-based intermediate-range missiles in accordance with an INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty.

It may be said that the Cold War ended at the same time – or when, at the 1989 Malta summit, Mikhail Gorbachev told President George H. W. Bush, “We don’t consider you an enemy.” In Gorbachev's 1990 New Year’s address, he pronounced 1989 the “year of ending the Cold War.” Then that spring the New York Times ran a series of op-ed columns centered on the question, “Is the Cold War Over?” Predictably the Times answered its own question in the affirmative.

But the Soviet Union itself staggered on a self-destruction course until, soon after an attempted August 1991 coup, Soviet leaders came to a terrible admission: they could not bring Bolshevism back to life. Since the fall of the wall that divided Russia-controlled and West-controlled Berlin, communist regimes had already toppled in East Germany and most other countries that had come under Kremlin rule.

On December 8, 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (Yeltsin then notified President George H. W. Bush, and then Gorbachev). Officials of all the Soviet republics except Georgia approved the agreement on December 21, and Gorbachev resigned as president on December 25. That’s what made our recent Christmas an important geopolitical anniversary.

I tried to get some insight on the State of Russia from my physicist friend Peter Zarubin during a visit to Moscow. He wasn’t overly helpful. Or, possibly, he knew exactly what was going on and was rather embarrassed to talk about it.

It didn’t come easily. With encouragement from a shared half liter of White Birch vodka at the Novy Arbat Hokey Pokey restaurant, Peter first told me the tale of three men, a Frenchman, a German, and a Russian, each of whom agreed to write a story about elephants. The Frenchman titled his story “The Elephant and Love”; the German, “Introduction to the Elephant”; the Russian, “The Elephant as a Russian Animal.”

We ordered food, and Peter talked about what the natural inclination of all creatures to fight each other, as a natural and inescapable fact of life. A threatening asteroid from outer space might bring humanity together, he said, but then the confrontations would start all over again. I thought this is a gross over-generalization: what about cooperation among ants, bees, etc., etc., even other primates. I argued that it is human responsibility, as critter at the top of the heap, to overcome any such urges and to make peace and cooperation possible. He seguéd into the growing world demand for energy, the greenhouse effect, and so forth, arguing that to bring all nations to the standard of living enjoyed by the USA would require 100 times more energy than we now produce, but we only have the capability to produce 10 times as much. How and where will it end?
If the answer was war, or pandemic, he didn’t mention it. I wasn’t sure of his figures, but he had a point even though I thought it might be a digression into a Russian kind of dirge.

So I asked him again about Russia. We had just come from the Lebedev Institute, where we learned there was only one transmission electron microscope in all of Russia, which was hard to believe except that, at least outside the oil/gas arena, Russia seems to have back-shelved much of its basic research while trying to move ahead with software development.

Peter finally responded to my original question with a stolid, cryptic remark that I think I heard somewhere before: “Nations rise and fall.” And, he added, it follows that their science will rise and fall with them. “Look at Germany, France, England – what happened to their scientists?” he asked. “They went to America.”

He didn’t say where Russia’s steadily declining population is going, but there’s a lot of truth in what he had to say. The migrations of smart European scientists to the US of A should push fresh innovation, via engineering, into technology, and technology should result in marketable, money-making products. These in turn would fund companies that hire workers. I may be looking in the wrong place, but I don’t see enough of this happening, even as the result of American-born talent, which troubles me considerably. Infotech and software yes, but elsewhere not so hot.

The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, admired by his fellow German Karl Marx, figured that as economic systems (i.e. nations) develop into powerful organisms, they are at the same time developing internal inconsistencies and weaknesses that gradually tear them apart. Stalinist Russia followed this path, and Putin appears to be doing the same, albeit on a shorter timescale, after converting his country’s traditional type of economy (monocrop) from nuclear-armed intercontinental missiles to hydrocarbon fuels.

On a somewhat happier note, Russia has a larger middle class these days, heavily concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and there is more freedom than there was in the USSR . But the people retain the same history and basic social psychology, as is the case with the rulers, who are having a very hard time (controlling their reluctance, perhaps) converting from a control-fixated state apparat to one that is confident enough to run open elections resembling those held in the West. The Bolsheviks had a similar situation after they moved Russia from the Tsarist style to Lenin’s Vanguard Party style.

It should go without saying that I fervently hope that policy wonks in the more stable, democratic nations consider ways of controlling the Hegelian cycle at home, in the hope that it is not already too late.

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