Russian political psyche: history and modernity

[Firn]

A Soviet Leader Who Saw Russia Clearly is an interesting piece by Leonid Bershidsky about the late Eduard Shevardnadze.

In 1992, the field commanders who had deposed independent Georgia's first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, invited Shevardnadze to return to his homeland and lead it. As he freely admitted, he was never fully in control. Contrary to his orders, one of the military commanders who had brought Shevardnadze to power led troops to the separatist region of Abkhazia. Shevardnadze tried to stop the advance and even negotiated a peace with the Abkhaz leadership, sealed with a handshake in Moscow in the presence of Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Then Abkhazians, backed by Russian warships and planes as well as well-trained "volunteers" from neighboring Russian regions, such as Chechnya, struck back, and the weak Georgian army was crushed.

In other words, Shevardnadze was the first post-Soviet leader to see a Russian-backed unofficial military operation on his land. Like Ukrainian politicians today, he called it a war with Russia. Today's military operation in eastern Ukraine is as deniably but transparently Russian-backed as the 1992 war in Abhkazia was. Shevardnadze recalled in his memoirs that Yeltsin proposed splitting Georgia in two to stop the conflict. He called Leonid Kravchuk, then the Ukrainian president, to complain: "Can you imagine someone giving you a friendly recommendation to split Ukraine in two?"

"The centuries-long process of expansion and 'collection' of other nations' lands by Russia continues in the 21st century," Shevardnadze wrote more than a year before Russian troops openly entered Georgia in 2008 and Moscow recognized the separatists states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Personally I think it is rather obvious why that Soviet age glowed so golden for so many. While the seeds of the mighty implosion were sown already early most seem to have been unable to understand that the SU collapsed by it's own making. The sinew was streched till it had to break, and the economic and political result weren't pretty. Other nations were able to clean up the Soviet mess early while Russia and Putin needed the gift of a ressource boom to gain some of the ground lost.

Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia is indeed a worthy read about that economic tragedy.