Russia's tryst with destiny

100 years of tumultuous change yields a Stalinist czar

There is some irony that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has acquired the status of Great Satan in American politics in the centenary year of the October Revolution. Indeed, it is fair to say that for Russia, history has come full circle. To explain it in a line: The czars are dead, long live the czar. There is good reason the centenary commemorations of the October Revolution — actually, it occurred in November, according to the widely used Gregorian calendar, which was 13 days ahead of the Russian one — have been muted in Moscow. They raise an uncomfortable reminder about Mr Putin’s rise to his current position of absolute power at the turn of the 21st century on the ashes of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Though he has officially repudiated communism as an economic credo, his version of capitalism has taken dirigisme to another level. Mr Putin is undoubtedly the inheritor of the both the Stalinist and the czarist legacies. His occupation of the Crimea, his long-drawn, and so far unsuccessful, efforts to win back Ukraine and his proxy battles against the US in West Asia are all symptoms of his efforts to establish Russia’s former imperial reach. 

But despite these superficial similarities, the 21st-century world offers unique challenges to Mr Putin in his quest to recreate a czarist-Soviet empire in his image. The force of arms and an iron curtain kept former Soviet satellites in line till 1991; now these countries have discovered the weapons of democracy and free markets to fend off the overtures of Mr Putin’s oligarchic regime. Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria — all have turned to western Europe in their quest for prosperity; only the hapless little Moldova stays within Russia’s economic ambit. Along the south, the resource-rich central Asian republics and Georgia, which once grouped themselves into the Commonwealth of Independent States, remain under the thumb of local strongmen who leverage their oil, gas and minerals and the imperatives of the war against Islamic terrorism to steer a tricky course among Russia, China and the US. 

Still, Mr Putin is a quintessentially 21st-century strongman. Where the force of arms cannot always be wielded as they were under the Romanovs or the Soviets, he freely uses his people’s formidable IT talents to meddle in the politics of European rivals and the US. So far, his covert war has had limited success. In France, a candidate the Kremlin opposed is in the Elysée Palace; in Germany, Angela Merkel won a hard-fought victory despite his best efforts. In the US, Mr Putin may have managed to get his favoured candidate into the White House but the robust nature of American governing institutions has ensured that he has reaped few gains from this victory. Mr Putin’s undoubted popularity in his early years was predicated on the promise of stability after a decade of chaos post-1991. Now, as Generation Next mounts more vocal opposition within Russia, and Xi Jinping consolidates his hold on the world’s putative superpower, Russia’s future hangs in the balance, once again.