By Peter Baker and Peter Finn Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, May 10, 2005; Page A01
MOSCOW, May 9 -- The goose-stepping troops hoisted hammer-and-sickle banners bearing the visages of the Soviet icon Vladimir Lenin. Gray-haired veterans waved red flowers from truckbeds, their chests brimming with medals and ribbons, their faces etched with the wear and tear of hard lives. The boom of artillery fire thundered across the air and jets roared overhead.
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The celebration came at a time of continuing change for Russia, which is still searching for a national identity nearly 14 years after it emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Led by a former KGB officer, Russia has increasingly engaged in nostalgia for what many feel to be the glory of their fallen empire.
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Full:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/09/AR2005050900152.html --------------------- This has been the predominant reaction of the Western press - that Putin is engaging in simple "nostalgia" for the USSR because he is a "former KGB officer" or because it is politically popular to do so, especially among veterans and pensioners.
My sense is that it goes much deeper than that, and I'd be curious if people more familiar than I with Russian developments would agree. The growth of official public nostalgia for the USSR - which has discouraged Western pundits and politicans - seems to have directly coincided with the the Bush administration's drive to install strongly pro-American regimes under the guise of "democracy" around Russia's periphery - Georgia, Ukraine, and, most recently, Belarus. The US probably would like to provoke a similar movement with Russia itself, where the nationalist Putin administration has pursued a more independent energy and foreign policy than the previous Yeltsin regime, although this would fraught with greater risk.
The Putin regime therefore seems to be enlisting the prestige and the social model which the USSR represented to counter any lingering appeal for the US system within Russia and its border states, especially among the young. The Russian masses strongly identified "prosperity" and "freedom" with American capitalism after the fall of the USSR, but 15 years of capitalism and corruption seemed to have largely dispelled that illusion.
Nevertheless, pro-US and anti-Russian sentiment still animated the movements which produced the so-called "rose revolution" in Georgia and "orange revolution" in the Ukraine, and possibly the one which resulted in the recent overthrow of the Aliyev regime in Kyrgistan, so it seems the Putin ideological counter-offensive is aimed first at halting the spread of the epidemic to Belrus and the other "near abroad" states bordering the Russian federation. This is not to suggest that genuine democratic reform is not needed in the region, but the dilemma has been how to effect it outside American auspices without producing American satrapies. It is a global problem, as we all recognize.
MG