IMPRESSIONS

Ask any passerby on the streets about Russia, and the response is predictable. It was a great nation, most powerful in the world at par with USA, but now much reduced in size, and shrunken in terms of power and prestige. This is the usual response. Yet, is this completely true? Has Russia slid from being the world’s most glorious power to now being a mere trifling? Let us examine this theory.

At the time of the ‘greatness’ of USSR, all the ‘republics’ within the Soviet were to have their own SSRs, thus the nation was an amalgamation of all these ‘local’ units. But while Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan and all the other ‘republics’ have their own authority, Russia was denied an SSR. There was only one reason for this, and that was to deny another rival body to the supreme communist party. Russia contained 90 per cent of the land area of the Union and 72 per cent of the population. A local Russian body could easily oppose the centre. And most of these policies were framed at the time of Stalin’s Comradeship, clearly explains this fear, as he himself was a Georgian. The Russian people constantly faced discrimination of a sort in their own country. Crimea was Russian till as long as recorded history exists, yet it was ‘given’ over to Ukraine in order to appease the Ukrainians, now proud possessors of a naturally very prosperous piece of land. Russians also lost the land of their forefathers in the Steppes, as the Kazakhs were distributed highly fertile cotton growing soil, while the original tillers were packed off as slave labour in Siberia. Many were even transported to the Baltics or elsewhere as part of a ‘melting pot’ strategy. And to crown all this, the Russian Orthodox Church, the lifeline of the Motherland was stripped down naked, people forbidden to worship their gods. Yes, Russia may have been at the head of a powerful empire, yet the people may not have been colonizers.

We now come to the present scenario. Siberia produces oil, Oligarchs travel the world’s capitals as some of the richest men on earth, Russian ‘beauties’ are now amongst the luminaries of the fashion world and what’s more, Russians are even good at Lawn Tennis, a traditionally upper class sport. Under Putin’s leadership, the country is showing signs of an economic improvement from the doom and gloom of the nineties. St. Petersburg, barring the Cyrillic script on the sideways, actually appears a modern version of Detroit. And all this somehow makes the situation a bit scary.

Russia is a wounded nation. Misguided young people may want to change their nation’s destiny, and want to reclaim the imagined glory the nation possessed barely 20 years back. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. Now I shall not go so far as to suggest such cataclysmic a consequence for the whole world, yet Russia’s recent military manouvres near the western border and its claim to the North Pole, suggests a growing self-belief. The self-belief may not always have the best desired results.

The world requires Russian oil. And Russia requires the foreign wealth to keep pouring in. And the nation’s future is still in the hands of the people themselves. Russia may end up once again churning out deadly weapons as its primary focus. Or she could prove to be a glorious chapter in the history of free enterprise.