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COVER
STORY: RUSSIA
Still
in the Red
At
the Rasputin night club in Moscow, romance is measured in dollars. A night
out in the Russian capital is no longer a journey in dreariness, discovers
Senior Editor S. Prasannarajan. It is an
encounter with a market struggling to be born.
History
in this country is an active volcano, continually churning, and there
is no sign of its wanting to calm down, to be dormant.
-Ryszard
Kapuscinski, Imperium
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| Same
Difference: Putin (right) and Yeltsin |
There
is no way of knowing this subterranean conspiracy when you are stuck in
a traffic jam outside the Kremlin, when the stillness of the moment is
exaggerated by the afternoon lassitude of the river Moscow. This may be
a fraction of a pause in the history of Russia.
Volga, guide
and interpreter, breaks the carbon-coated calm: "On your right side,
across the river, is the Red October chocolate factory, founded in 1851."
Before you realise the bitter-sweet irony, Volga's pointed finger aspires
to break the window shield of the minibus. "See, there, he lives
somewhere there." "There", far beyond Volga's perceiving
finger, is the Kremlin, once the Vatican of communism, still the sacred
fortress of post-communist Russia. And "he" is Vladimir Putin,
once a spymaster of Soviet Russia, now the paramount master of New Russia.
The Kremlin
is all majesty and memory, protected by a brick-and-stone wall, supervised
by some 20 towers. Since 1918, when Lenin shifted the capital from St.
Petersburg to Moscow, the destiny of Russia has been managed from this
labyrinth of absolute power and stony secrecy. Today, the lord of these
lofty heights happens to be Putin. "I saw him the other night on
television. He looked so wonderful. He was personally guiding a foreign
dignitary through Lenin's museum," says Volga.
Volga is
right. Putin is all wonder, at least for the moment, and is guiding Russia
through the relics of the past, through the turbulent uncertainties of
the present. Says Vladimir Yakovlev, governor of the President's native
city, St. Petersburg: "Each historical period needs its own leader.
This period needs Putin." Even G.N. Seleznyov, the communist speaker
of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, endorses: "Putin
listens to the Duma. During the Yeltsin years, the power of the state
Duma was zero. Putin is different, and it satisfies me."
Really,
is he all that different? Has Russia overcome the Yeltsin hangover? Or,
does he too signify what Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the great poet,
calls the "element of sameness" in the successive stages of
Russian leadership? From Lenin's "creative socialism" to Stalin's
murderous apparat to Khruschev's unheroic closed-door courage to Brezhnev's
inert dictatorship to the brief appearances of Andropov and Chernenko,
it was the march of the last century's most ambitious idea, beneath which
lay the unchanging reality of the empire-the gulag, the exile and the
slain outcast.
Then came the artist of deconstruction, the "Mikhailangelo"
of Soviet history. For, Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who pitted his mind
against the disembodied evil that was Soviet insanity, too cracked while
chiselling the megalith to human proportions. And out of his tragedy was
born Boris Yeltsin, the "elected" ruler of Russia. If Gorbachev,
in a Socratic exercise of the mind, had reduced communist certitude to
a question in the marketplace, Yeltsin, the first child of Gorbachevism,
manipulated that freedom to become a neo-tsar.
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