Putin Gambles In A Tortured World: Is Russia’s Star Rising From The Ashes?
Prof Kumar David
From the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, no from the latter part of Gorbochev’s cock-up, Russia has been sick, a wounded creature crawling on its belly. The state-owned economy was ripped and robbed by squadrons of oligarchs capitalising on the neoliberal Washington Consensus of the IMF, World Bank, and US Treasury, and dyed-in-the-wool dogma of American academia’s MIT economics department. At its nadir, poverty exceeded 50%, starvation and malnutrition spread, and alcoholism was up by 60%. Population declined sharply due to deprivation, not natural aging. Soviet rump Russia was a spent force, an impotent flop, bereft of military and economic clout. In this decade and a half long lean years NATO humiliated the rump, pushing its unwashed posterior right up the prostrate bear’s nose.
Nevertheless, strategically, Russia is custodian of the world’s largest and possibly dirtiest nuclear arsenal, though the efficacy of its delivery systems is suspect against high-tech American defences. But enough of a first salvo will get through to destroy metropolitan conurbations. As a global power, Russia will raise its head at a pace depending on opportunity and leadership. The question is whether this has already commenced. Putin scored a good six months in the second half of 2013 and successfully projected his national and international visibility. What next?
You can’t keep a resource rich country with superior research and education, a skilled labour-force and a classy cultural ethos down in the mud forever. If English is supreme in poesy (a multitude led by Shakespeare) Russian literature can claim a comparable status in prose (Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov for starters); and so it goes in music and ballet, architecture and in the sciences. On the grand scale the Russian chronicle sweeps through Peter the Great, the rituals of Orthodoxy, and a hundred year revolutionary tradition from Herzen to Bakunin to Lenin.
