15 years after Soviet collapse, Russians nostalgic for superpower

Moscow - Exactly 15 years ago, the leaders of three of the Soviet Union's biggest republics gathered in a village near Brest, Belarus, and just so happened to end the superstate's 75-year existence. Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Ukraine's Leonid Kravchuk and Belarussian Supreme Soviet chairman Stanislav Shushkevich met 'to discuss questions of gas and oil deliveries into Ukraine and Belarus,' Shushkevich said in remarks carried Thursday by the Vremya Novostei newspaper. 'We spoke literally a half-hour when the question arose of whether we could agree to sign our names under the phrase: 'The USSR has ceased to exist as a geopolitical reality and a subject of international law,'' he said. On December 8, 1991, the document was signed. Today, with Russians marking a decade and a half of capitalism and democracy, the country's relationship with its former, communist self remains paradoxical and nostalgic, even as a generation that never wore the uniform of the Pioneer youth group comes of age. Nearly 70 per cent of Russians say they're wistful for the Red Army, planned economy and powerhouse Olympic teams that symbolized the USSR, a survey conducted by the VTsIOM polling centre ahead of the anniversary showed. Russia's 68 per cent compares with 59 per cent of Ukrainians and 52 per cent of respondents in Belarus. As Russia and other former republics continue to search for a post-Soviet identity, roughly half of Russians and Ukrainians would vote in favour of a new union, VTsIOM's poll showed - compared to the one-quarter of the population in each state opposed to unification. With racial tensions higher than ever in Russia and political problems abounding with the former republic of Georgia, many in today's Russia nostalgically speak of the harmony they say prevailed among the brother republics. Russian President Vladimir Putin last year called the Soviet collapse 'the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.' 'Whoever doesn't regret the fall of the Soviet Union has no heart,' Putin said at the time. 'But whoever regrets it has no head.' But with gross domestic product growth averaging 6.7 per cent over the last seven years in Russia, some of the sting of the Soviet collapse seems to be leaving. While a majority of Russians - 56 per cent - regret the collapse of the 15-republic state, that number has shrunk from 84 per cent in 1997, according to the Bashkirova and Partners polling group. Young people especially find the idea of a communist Russia to be increasingly alien. The Soviet Union was 'something old and ancient, with which nothing good is associated,' Anton Yevseyev, 15, told the magazine Ogonyok. Few of the 15-year-olds interviewed by the publication knew what the letters USSR - or, as the Cyrillic abbreviation looks, CCCP - stood for. (Answer: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.) Yeltsin, also, said he saw no room for regret: The Soviet Union's end, he told state-owned Rossisskaya Gazeta Thursday, could have been softened only by the creation of the looser Commonwealth of Independent States. 'It was the only alternative to the inevitable and unmanageable catastrophic failure of the former Soviet Union,' he said.© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

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Yesterday, not Yesteryear.Dec 7th, 2006 - 21:06:13

Yes, folks, Russians long for the old days, when they had totalitarians, killing of dissenters, nursing a wrecked economy, elitist Marxist monarchistic rule, stifling corruption, zero value currency, mass human rights violations...

This wasn't Yesteryear, this was Yesterday!

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Michael J. DykesDec 12th, 2006 - 22:19:49

The Soviet Union was a brutal, ruthless, heartless regime characterized by hypocrisy, massive human rights violations, and a near total lack of credibility in the community of nations. Only North Korea, Cuba, Libya, and Iraq felt comfortable with it because they, like the Russian Communist Party, were rife with mindless corruption and bought everything from the controlling Mafia.
Now, Russians are talking about getting it all back?
Somehow it may happen that anyone who brings it back will feel the wrath of people who had their first breath of freedom in 1991. Russian Mafiosi now find themselves in prison instead of people who merely owned a copy of Life Magazine. Russia has Boy Scouting and Girl Scouting, instead of compulsory membership in Communist Youth -- miss a meeting and mother will pay for it in bitter tears. Yet a few American leftists support that totalitarian monster, because they like the soft life of those who ran the Soviet Empire, but failed to comprehend the bitter existence of the other 99% of people in that desperate place.
The end of communism there means the end of communist designs on the American people here. We are well ahead to continue helping Russians regain their newly found sense of national pride and good offices with their newly free neighbors.
What good is the use of tanks to 'enforce the peace on dissidents' when no one there was ever free?

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