Twenty years on, Russians feel under siege

Carl Schreck

• Last Updated: November 05. 2009 8:54PM UAE / November 5. 2009 4:54PM GMT

MOSCOW // Twenty years ago, as totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe were falling and the reforms of perestroika were in full swing under the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a leading Soviet public opinion research centre asked a sample of its citizens whether the country had any enemies.

Only 13 per cent of respondents in that poll by the All-Soviet Public Opinion Research Centre – since renamed the Levada Centre – replied yes, the country does have enemies.

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union, however, opinion polls show that an overwhelming number of Russians see their country as besieged by enemies.

In 1989 “there was a sharp sense that the country had reached a dead end and that change was needed,” said Lev Gudkov, the head of the Levada Centre. “The Soviet system was beginning to collapse, and after 70 years of the communist regime, people realised that the country couldn’t continue down the same path.

“People figured we were our own worst enemy. We didn’t need to look for enemies elsewhere.”

In an analogous poll conducted by the Levada Centre this year, some 70 per cent of respondents said Russia had enemies, a dramatic increase from 1989.

Russians’ increasing perception of their country as plagued by adversaries is largely explained by widespread disillusionment with capitalism and democracy in the wake of the collapse of communism, sociologists and political analysts say.

The drastic drop in living standards in the turbulent 1990s came as a shock to many Russians, who had expected that the rejection of communism would automatically lead to more money and more opportunities, Mr Gudkov said.

“All of the disappointment turned into anger against [the former president Boris] Yeltsin and his team of reformers, who were portrayed as western agents, as enemies of Russia,” Mr Gudkov said. “The trauma of the collapse of an empire turned into a search for explanations and enemies. By the mid-1990s, all of our problems stemmed from internal and external enemies.”

Russians’ increasing disenchantment with democracy and capitalism was echoed in a Pew Research Center poll released this month ahead of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fifty-three per cent of Russian respondents polled this year approved of their country’s “change to democracy”, down from 61 per cent in 1991.

While conceding the many mistakes made by Mr Yeltsin’s government that led to the popular 1990s neologism “dermo-cracy,” or “crap-ocracy”, critics of Russia’s current ruling elite say the Kremlin intentionally stokes citizens’ fears of enemies without and within.

The political commentator Yulia Latynina, a staunch critic of Vladimir Putin, the former Russian president and current prime minister, compared Russia’s growing antagonism to the outside world to marital strife.

“If a man and a woman divorce, it may be the fault of the man, it may be the fault of the woman,” Ms Latynina said. “If a wife gets divorced with 10 different husbands, maybe the problem is with the wife. If we don’t like a country or two, that’s not a big problem. If we claim no one in the world likes us except for Venezuela, that’s a little paranoid.”

Others say the constant spectre in state-controlled media of purported western attempts to keep Russia down and push it out of traditional spheres of influence are merely signs of a government that is weak at its core.

“Any weak government looks for enemies, it’s a law of nature,” said the political analyst Georgy Satarov, head of the Indem think tank based in Moscow.

State-owned Russian television in recent years – particularly after the ascent of western-leaning governments in Georgia and Ukraine amid popular revolutions in 2003 and 2005 respectively– has regularly hinted at the United States’s desire to covertly incite a similar revolution in Russia by funding a fifth column of liberal politicians and youth activists.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, has consistently repeated that it is ready to co-operate with any country willing to respect its sovereignty and treat it as a full-fledged partner.

Ms Latynina said it would likely take a long time before Russians cease seeing enemies around every corner. “It’s a common reaction in our society. Instead of taking the best elements from the West, we envy them and think of them as enemies just because they live better than we do.”

cschreck@thenational.ae