Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

What surprised all of us was that the youngest participants voted almost overwhelmingly in favour of the policies and vision offered by the Bolsheviks. But perhaps we should not have been taken so off-guard. Their generation wants a new project: they want to have the chance to play an active role in shaping an alternative future for the world, one that allows individual nations to become more than just pallid, dependent imitations of the United States; they recognise that GDP growth is an arid, impoverished rubric for a nation’s health – it says little about a population’s happiness, or about their hopes and fears for the future; and they want to be part of a country that means something.

This was an ideal that was once represented by the Bolsheviks. The Soviet Union, for all its manifold faults, was a competitor to the West. Its existence alone was a challenge to the world of capitalism and profit; it offered the promise of a different, fairer, way of arranging a nation’s business. So while perhaps there was something unanticipated about their support for the Bolsheviks, their desire for a change seems to be of a piece with much of what I see happening around me as I write this.

There was a time when many of the things we talked about at the Foundation and also at the Dialogue of Civilizations were regarded as illusions, almost insulting to professional economics. But I think things are changing. Terms like ‘neo-liberal orthodoxy’, which were almost outlawed years ago, are now a matter of common currency. I spoke with the head of a New York-based economic think tank recently. I told him that I was struck by the fact that in a recent speech he had stated that we were in the depths of a crisis. In his response to me, he began his analysis of the situation with a discussion of values, something that has not hitherto been acknowledged to have any connection with the economic models that have governed our world for the past twenty years. I asked him: if we are talking about a crisis in the world today, should we really be saying that we are talking about a crisis in humanity? Without pausing for a second, he said yes. It was a conversation that could not have taken place even five years ago – that it was possible shows both how serious the issues we’re facing are, but also that perhaps a new kind of consensus is emerging that might help us solve them.

This is becoming the new mainstream discussion. Whatever you think about the extraordinary shocks in 2016 that have left much of the conventional wisdom about the world and the way it works in tatters, one thing is clear: people are tired of the political paradigm that has reigned for so long. They want to dismantle the existing system and replace it with something that works for them, not rich corporations or entitled elites. I believe that, increasingly, there is a demand not only for different answers, but for different questions entirely. If we are going to have a conversation about inequality, or the way in which tension and violence might mount in a particular country, then we need to address the anthropological basis, to start thinking about values and how they have to be returned to the centre of our social and political lives: simply growing a country’s GDP by a couple of percentage points is no longer an adequate response. People are, finally, looking for something more.

The past is always with us. It is never over; it will never lose its power. No action or event ever really disappears, even if sometimes it may seem as though it has receded from view.

In 1991 I thought that the cold war had died along with the Soviet Union. I wondered if everything we had lost would, in part, be compensated by all that we would gain in a new era – one in which the tensions and suspicion that had characterised the decades since 1945 would ebb away. It did not. Perhaps for a while it went into something like hibernation, but now it is becoming clear that it never really left.

Perhaps to you it may seem as if Donald Trump has radically altered the direction of the United States’ foreign policy; that under Putin’s influence (as some people argue) the President has relaxed his country’s position towards Russia. But the way I see it, although he has largely eschewed the kind of rhetoric Hillary Clinton would probably have employed had she won, in real terms this makes little difference. Consider, for instance, the decision by Congress earlier this year to impose an extended range of sanctions and to use its influence in Western Europe to ensure that the force of the sanctions is felt. Or the US’s newly published National Security Strategy, which casts Russia (along with China) as a ‘revisionist power’ that seeks to ‘challenge American power, influence and interests’, while ‘attempting to erode American security and prosperity’.

The skeletons of the cold war are up and walking about once more. And with every passing day they become stronger. Some politicians in both Russia and the West have avoided using the term, and yet I cannot see that they will be able to do so for much longer. It is high time to start calling it what it is.

Of course there is no longer the same wide ideological gap; one can find few places in the world now where the markets do not reign (although places like China, India and Russia have all modified the model to suit their own particular circumstances). And yet while classic capitalism is no longer ranged against pure socialism, and loyalties across the world have been realigned (the Warsaw Pact now seems as much of an anachronism as the Hanseatic League or the Triple Entente [23] This may read like a crude characterisation, but I would argue that a new divide has split the world. On one side there are all the nations in the West who adhere to a neo-liberal model of politics and economics, and believe that the rest of the world should be encouraged to adopt the same values. For them, there is only one route to prosperity and civilisation. I see this as a form of chauvinism that is not only insensitive, but which, it is becoming increasingly clear, has failed on its own terms. There is no attempt to understand local conditions or listen to local terms, which means that their interventions invariably come to resemble the damage caused by a bull in a china shop. The other side bears little resemblance to the relatively cohesive socialist bloc of the twentieth century’s second half. In comparison to the united Western system, it is dispersed and disparate. There is little that China, or the Arab nations, or even the central European countries that have joined the EU but have remained on its periphery, have in common, except that they have chosen to push back against attempts to force their culture and economies into a shape that pleases the politicians of the developed world. ), it seems that once more the West is at odds with Russia.

After 1991, we never felt as if we were welcomed into the international community as an equal partner; it seemed as if there was an expectation that we should behave like a supplicant. And yet those days now seem like a brief golden age of cooperation and hope, when something better seemed possible. That hope has been replaced by suspicion and the old temptation to demonise Russia has returned.

One could perhaps argue that to a large extent, the security, political and military establishments of Russia and the West alike are still populated by people who came of age when the cold war was at its height, and have never managed (or wanted) to rid themselves of the assumptions and prejudices that were instilled in them more than three decades ago. This situation has been exacerbated by the pressure placed by US-led Western institutions on Russia in the years following 1991 to adhere to an economic and political model that was inimical to its traditions and historical experience. Russia was never fully integrated into the new global order that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union; instead we have seen the kind of cultural friction predicted in Samuel P. Huntington’s theories about the clash of civilisations.