A few weeks ago, I went into a souvenir store in one of the capitals of Baltic states. Three saleswomen were talking in Russian and the oldest of them was fiercely trying to prove something to her colleagues, mentioning in her speech the names of Soviet leaders from a distanced epoch – Brezhnev, Kosygin... It was so strange to witness these nostalgic signs of another era in one of the successful and modernized capitals of the new Europe. But the legacy of the empire has not simply disappeared, it is here with us in the present moment.
The Soviet Union as an empire (in the expanded sense, together with the Soviet bloc) did not collapse totally in 1991, its disruption did not end in December 1991, but only began. We are still going through this process.
There are several arguments to support this claim. For instance, the presence of unrecognized states along the perimeter of Russia, the forgotten relics of the empire; the annexation of Crimea as an act of returning to the empire status – it is really significant for Russian elite and still for the majority of the Russian society; the permanent hybrid war with Ukraine (without this republic the Soviet Union as an empire could not exist); and the transformation of Belarus into a totalitarian (not simply authoritarian) state. Further aspects that can serve as a proof for the continuing disintegration of the empire include economic problems (transit sometimes turns out to be reversible - from open market to partly state economy, as in Russia), political (autocratic trends even in Eastern Europe) and psychological troubles (nostalgia of a significant part of the population for the Soviet times; an imagined retro-utopia even for the young - this is especially characteristic of Russia).
One of the main sources of Russia's problems is the imperialist thinking of today's Putin's establishment (with elements of traditionalism and nationalism); the traditionalist ideology is being imposed, including through politics of hisotry, which became a tool of ruling the country and a source of legitimization of power (Putin and his elite are the «successors» of the Great victory in World War II).
We must differentiate between society and civil society. Russia has a society which is archaizing or adapting to the rules of the game by supporting the state. There is also a civil society which is aspiring to modernize.
After Putin’s twenty years in power, the institutional framework of the normal democratic state has been replaced with the institutional framework of an authoritarian state. It was enshrined into the Constitution and despite serious problems and challenges that await Russia in future, this framework is relatively stable.
At the beginning of 2008, during the presidency of Dmitri Medvedev, when there were hopes for normalization if not modernization, the level of support for the Soviet system according to the Levada-Center data, was 29%. The Western system was supported also by 29%, and the current regime was supported by 20% of respondents. In 2021 the Soviet system is supported by 49%, a record for this century, the current system (after the takeoff of support after the annexation of Crimea) is approved by 18% (it is a serious decline in recent years), the Western system - by only 16%. The Soviet planned economy was supported by 49% in 2012, while 36% were in favor of the market model (the last time market economy won popular support in Russia was in 1993). In 2021, the Soviet planned economy reached the peak of support for all years of observation and stood at 62%; the market economy is preferred by 24% of respondents[1]. All these people do not share communist views as such, they are simply searching for an example of a more just system.
Nevertheless, today we can talk about new sustainability of the authoritarian regimes, including post-Soviet. As we see in the examples of Belarus and Russia, if the army, police, security forces and bureaucracy do not move to the side of the people in the situations of turbulence and/or protests, the regime remains stable: for the indifferent majority this is a signal that the system does not change.
Is modernization and eradication of the legacy of the empire possible in such conditions? Not under the current Russian political regime. The political system of securitocracy lives in a defensive mode, because of that it introduces more and more repressions. It is evident that the conflict between the state (together with the conservative part of the society) and civil society leads to polarization and radicalization, which is fraught with episodic conflicts.
[1] https://www.levada.ru/2021/09/10/kakoj-dolzhna-byt-rossiya-v-predstavlenii-rossiyan/
Andrei Kolesnikov, Senior fellow and the chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center