The Soviet Union collapsed overnight. Dont assume western democracy will last forever
The Soviet Union collapsed overnight. Don’t assume western democracy will last forever
The liberal order could fall apart just as suddenly as the USSR. If we want it to survive, we have to learn from what happened in Russia
Paul Mason Monday 5 December 2016 10.52 EST
Since Putin stole the 2011 election, and the subsequent protest movement was suppressed, the young people who took part in it have retreated into an angry silence. It’s not exactly a new situation for Russian intellectuals. Lenin was arrested here in 1887 for leading a student protest and spent most of the next 30 years in exile or underground. Then the Bolsheviks suppressed free speech and political opposition for another 70 years and Russia’s capitalist oligarchs are doing their best to suppress it now.
In the face of this, why do Russian artists, philosophers and journalists persist in their belief in change? In short, because they have seen the moral and physical collapse of something that once seemed permanent: the Soviet Union.
Alexei Yurchak, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, decribes the event in a book whose title speaks for itself: Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More. Yurchak was fascinated by the fact that, while nobody predicted the fall, when it happened, many people realised that they had, in their hearts, expected it all along.
Since Trump’s victory in November 2016, it has become possible to believe a similar collapse will happen in the west, to globalisation and liberal values.
The parallels are obvious.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/05/soviet-union-collapsed-overnight-western-democracy-liberal-order-ussr-russia
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