November 7, 1991 demonstration in St. Petersburg -- then Leningrad still. Goodbye, Empire, reads the makeshift sign on the left -- meaning, goodbye, USSR. But it was not a farewell, as it turns out. It was not a clean break with the past. Today, in St. Petersburg, and in Moscow, as well as in other large Russian cities, thousands of people celebrating May 1 holiday marched, holding with pride repugnantly and unabashedly racist signs, along with the large portraits of Putin, Stalin, and Stalins shuddersome henchman Lavrentiy Beria. Stalin and Beria portraits. It would be the same if people in Germany today paraded around with Hitler and Himmlers portraits. Not even during the darkest periods of post-Stalin Soviet history did Russian people exhibit such comprehensive depths of moral depravity. Well, people have been asked, by their president Vladimir Putin, to become their worst selves. And people are only too glad to comply. People want their beloved evil Soviet Empire back. They want for their country once again to be feared and loathed by the rest of the world. And the empire is only too happy to oblige, too: it will come back, and it will swallow them all. This is the classic case of the The Empire Strikes Back syndrome: when people cannot deal with their past, the past will return to deal with them in its own way.
Posted on: Thu, 01 May 2014 23:39:44 +0000
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