A new resurgence of nostalgia for Joseph Stalin is reverberating throughout Russia. As recently reported by the Telegraph, new monuments in several Russian communities are being erected to honor the genocidal Soviet dictator who liquidated millions of Soviet citizens. What is the significance here? Is Russia returning to the dark ages of Soviet totalitarianism? Is this phenomenon connected to Vladimir Putin trying to make himself an absolute ruler? Or will it be impossible for the genie of Russian democracy to be put back in the bottle? To discuss these and other questions with us today, Frontpage has assembled a distinguished panel. We are honored to be joined by:

Richard Pipes, a Professor Emeritus at Harvard who is one of the world's leading authorities on Soviet history. He is the author of 19 books, the most recent being his new autobiography Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger;

Fredo Arias-King, the founder of the academic quarterly Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, based in Washington. He is part of the campaign, headed by Václav Havel, to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, and serves as advisor to the democratic forces in Cuba, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Moldova. In the latter country, he received in 2004 the highest honor awarded by the democratic opposition, the “Inima de Aur” (Golden Heart). He the author of two books, the latest of which, Transiciones a la democracia: Las lecciones de Europa del Este, is forthcoming in 2005;

Yuri Yarim-Agaev, a former leading Russian dissident and a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. Upon arriving in the United States after his forced exile from the Soviet Union, he headed the New York-based Center for Democracy in the USSR.  He was among the first people inside the former Soviet Union to be asked by US officials to assess the work of Radio Liberty;

Dick Morris, an adviser to Bill Clinton for 20 years and the author, most recently, of Rewriting History. He worked for Boris Yeltsin through his work with President Clinton and for a slate of anti-communist congressmen in Russia in the last Russian election (and won 12 of 14). He also worked for Yushchenko in the Ukraine and for Yuri Rosca, the Christian Democrat, in Moldova;

and

Ramsey Flynn, the winner of a National Magazine Award for reporting and a former staff writer for the Washingtonian and chief editor of Baltimore magazine. He is the author of the new book Cry from the Deep: The Submarine Disaster That Riveted the World and Put the New Russia to the Ultimate Test.

FP: Richard Pipes, Fredo Arias-King, Yuri Yarim-Agaev, Dick Morris and Ramsey Flynn, welcome to Frontpage Symposium. It is a privilege to be in such esteemed company.

Mr. Morris, let me begin with you. In your recent piece Russia Next, you note that while Putin “seeks to bring down a second iron curtain around the former Soviet Union, he overreaches and misjudges the power of liberty and freedom to win the souls of men and women.” In your judgement, despite Putin’s attempt to bring Russia back to the dark ages, he will not be able to “stop the scent of freedom from arousing the dreams of liberty. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men may not be able to put Russia back together again.”

You clearly see the forces of democratization as being too powerful to allow a situation where Russia will return to its dark past. In this context, how do you see the revival of Stalin’s cult? What is your reading of this phenomenon?

Morris: My quote about the forces of democracy being too advanced to permit a return to authoritarianism is a few years old.  Now, I am not so sure.  I am amazed and appalled by how easily Putin has castrated democracy by disempowering the governors and eliminating single member districts, both key to democracy.

I do think, however, that Henry Kissinger is right and that Russia is always expanding or contracting.  She cannot exit in stasis.  Composed of so many different nationalities and ethnic groups and religions, the centrifugal forces are so severe that only an expansionist Russia can hope to hold them in line.  Anyone on the "front lines" of Russian expansion tends to rebel.

So I do hope that the democratic reform movements sweeping Georgia, Ukraine, and Krygestan will hasten the forces of implosion in Russia, possibly leading to a reversal of the Putin totalitarianism.

The other place to look for hope is in Russia's dependence on oil for almost all of its prosperity.  Russia has functionally become a Saudi Arabia with a population.  In the US, in particular in California, there are very bold and very important efforts to promote hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.  The mainstream media hasn't covered it much, but by 2010 Schwarznegger, using state, federal, and private funds, plans to convert gas stations all along the state's interstate highways to offering hydrogen to motorists.  Anyone living near an interstate can travel on hydrogen.  And the state will produce the hydrogen and subsidize the purchase of hydrogen cars.  Since 20% of all new cars purchased in the US are in California, this tail has a real chance to wag the dog.

FP: If the Schwarznegger plan is actually realistic that sounds fantastic. The day we stop depending on the Saudis and their oil is the day we can start pummelling them in the manner they deserve best. That will be a good day.

In any case, the spotlight is definitely on the approaching collision between the democracy reform movements in Krygestan, Georgia and Ukraine and Putin’s attempt at re-Brezhnevization – or does this term accurately reflect the developments? Mr. Arias-King, which way do you think this will go? And how does the resurrection of Stalin’s monuments in various Russian communities fit into this? As a Russian, I am well familiar with many of my peoples’ yearnings to be enslaved by an authoritarian father figure. But this is really getting pathological. What gives here?

Arias-King: Thank you. The company I am with here reminds me of the Sesame Street song "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others." I am particularly honored to be with two of my teachers, Pipes and Morris.

When conducting research on the origins of the ChK, NKVD and the KGB, I cited some of Pipes's works to trace a Russian yearning for order and institutionalized fear to well before the Bolshevik coup d'etat of 1917. It is certainly a pity that even after all of Stalin's crimes have been know ad nauseam, starting with Gorbachev's de-Stalinization campaign from 1986-87, some of the latest VTsIOM public opinion polls show a yearning for the Soviet times, and even for Stalin personally. I was in Moscow recently and actually met up with the founder of public opinion research in the Soviet Union, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, and asked her the same question you are asking now. This towering architect of perestroika mentioned she is actually writing a few things on this, and I cannot wait to read what sociological forces she has detected this time. We always do tend to suspect the "slave soul", but maybe there are other factors at play.

I am right now at Harvard actually, soon I will give a talk at the Davis Center for Russian Studies on the "Orange People," those democracy activists and their networks that are overthrowing despotic and corrupt regimes in various parts of the former Soviet bloc. I know many of them, and will show their pictures. One of the takeaways of the talk is: Ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

Despite the current mood in Russia, I share Morris's optimism that the situation is not lost.

I actually met Morris in Mexico, when he came to help a little known democracy activist named Vicente Fox, out of the goodness of his heart, since as he said then, "It is a contest between good and evil." Our opponent was a Mexican Putin: a former secret police chief with a long history of financial and human crimes who had the backing of the budget, the television, the state machinery and the apathy of the population. Our defeat was so certain (I was then handling the foreign relations of the Fox campaign) that my fellow Sovietologist Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Robert Zoellick got candidate George W. Bush to endorse the Mexican Putin, despite our loud protests. Now Rice seems to be once again making her "realist" mistakes.

Ukraine also became liberated despite Putin and despite all the obstacles. In Moldova, the democrats did not win outright but they managed to civilize the communist despot and forced him Westward.

Putin is vulnerable. In this last trip to Moscow, I was struck by the fervor of renewed democracy activism, which I had not seen since the early 1990s. The youth branches of the two main democratic parties (Yabloko and SPS) are officially cooperating, laying the groundwork for their mother parties to do the same. The democrats lost the Duma, but this Putin Duma is losing the trust of the population.

Russia never fails to attract the world's attention, and we ain't seen nothin' yet.

FP: Dr. Pipes, do you share the optimism of Mr. Morris and Mr. Arian-King? Perhaps it is true that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men may not be able to put authoritarian Russia back together again?

Pipes: There is no doubt that Russia, after a brief flirtation with democracy and the free market, is steadily retreating toward autocracy and the managed market. This trend is due not only to the political ambitions of President Putin and his inner circle, but to the wishes of the Russian public at large. Opinion polls indicate that the population identifies democracy with anarchy and yearns above all for security (poriadok) which it identifies with autocratic rule. It wants a dictator to take care of politics and economics in order to free it to pursue its private interests.

When President Putin on April 25 in his address to the Federal Assembly declared the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest political disaster of the 20th Century he was articulating widely held beliefs. One must bear in mind that the 20th century was the century of two devastating world wars, of Lenin and Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. Yet in his mind these horrors all pale by comparison with the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of its ruling Communist dictatorship.

The return of Stalin's popularity is in line with this mode of thinking. Stalin was and remains popular for two reasons: he made Russia a respected and feared world power, and he was ruthless. Ruthlessness has long been regarded by Russians as an attribute of a "good" ruler: such a ruler must be "groznyi" as was Ivan IV, the deranged despot who has always been held in high esteem by the Russian people.

I find these developments most discouraging. Democracy and human rights in Russia today enjoy the support of at most 10 percent of the citizenry. The rest either despises them or does not care. There is a heavy burden of history that accounts for this. It will not be easy to cast it off.

FP: Mr. Agaev, our panel seems to differ, as some are pessimistic and others holding on to some optimism. What are your thoughts?

Yuri Yarim-Agaev: I am an optimist.  Not a complacent one, however, but very concerned.

[1] Communism as global ideology collapsed irreversibly. No ruler can restore it in any country.  After a country becomes open to the outside world, it gets caught up by the global political process, and the overall direction of the current process is democratic.  This global process is overwhelming and will eventually override all historical peculiarities and ethnical characteristics. Any attempt to bring back Stalinism or Brezhnevism to Russia would be futile, although painful.  So here I am a great optimist.

[2] Although the long-term direction has been predetermined, the specific path for each country has not.  This path matters a lot, and herewith come all my concerns. The end of communism does not automatically create democracy, which was apparently the erroneous presumption of our political leaders who rushed to proclaim Russia a democratic country.  Russia was not a democracy then and has yet to become one. There was an opportunity for Russia to become democratic. For that purpose the developments of August 1991 should have been brought to a full completion.  Instead, they turned into a mini revolution. Russia never condemned communism, nor did it remove communists and the KGB from power. While it is true that new leaders were brought to power by radical revolutionary forces and their first steps were in a direction of democracy and freedom, those leaders soon changed their power base back to the old soviet bureaucracy.  The process went backward to its logical end, putting the KGB in charge of Russia. Yet the old soviet bureaucracy cannot reverse inevitable historic process.  So we can soon expect a new mini revolution, maybe in 2008 or even earlier.

[3] A similar pattern is likely to occur in other republics. Each revolution helps democratization by disrupting the monarchical succession of power and bringing broader masses into the political process.  That was the reason why I wholeheartedly supported recent developments in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan.   I would not overestimate, however, the depth of those recent revolutions or the democratic credentials of their political leaders.  It is also possible to expect setbacks in these republics, followed by new mini revolutions. Such a scenario presents an overall positive trend but a very jerky political process.  America can do a great deal to make the path smoother and faster if it chooses to support principles instead of personalities and democratization instead of the status quo. So far it has not, and neither Russia’s nuclear arsenal nor our dependence on foreign oil could be a good reason for our bad Russia policy. 

[4] Our dependence on foreign oil is greatly exaggerated.  Oil constitutes only about 5% of our GDP and this is a good measure of its importance.  The Russian economy greatly (and Saudi Arabian predominantly) relies on oil production.  So who depends on whom?  If they stop producing oil we would experience some discomfort and they would be facing revolutions.  Moreover, we do have an alternative source of energy – nuclear --, which is better and cleaner and can produce all the electricity we need.  Your combined electric and heating bills are much greater than your costs for gasoline.  This means that with nuclear power plants we can continue driving our cars relying only on domestic oil.   So oil is a very poor excuse for supporting dictators in Russia and Saudi Arabia.

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