(Russia’s dominant pro-government party Yedinaya Rossiya [usually translated as United Russia] came into existence in 2001, and in 2007 elected Vladimir Putin as its Leader, and since 2008 as its Chairman. Quasi-paradoxically, but actually unsurprisingly, Mr. Putin has never joined the party as a member. [Incidentally, neither has Mr. Medvedev.] This slight “abnormality” has been “normally” attributed by the commentators to Mr. Putin’s desire to stay above partisanship as a national leader, which could be partly true (Mr. Putin’s most recent assumption of leadership over the supra-partisan national movement All-Russia Popular Front, which he himself initiated, appears to testify in favor of this explanation). But, as is so often the case, this is only a part of the story, at least in my opinion. I am raising certain unexplored aspects of it in this entry.)
Lenin, who knew a thing or two about hardball politics, described a successful revolution as the necessary amalgamation of three key factors. One, that the have-nots do not want the status quo. Two, that the haves cannot have the status quo. (These two factors by themselves constitute the revolutionary situation as such, but by themselves they are not enough to guarantee the success of a revolution. Therefore---) Three, that there is a single tightly-organized and well-disciplined party, to lead the forces of progress to victory. Thus, the key to success in revolutionary politics is the Lenin-type one-party system.
The multi-party systems of European and other democracies, or the two-party system of modern America are all successfully anti-revolutionary, and their objectives are all alike, to maintain the political status quo, that is, reasonable stability, in their respective nations. In Russia, however, right before the collapse of the USSR, its outmoded single-party system was no longer consistent with the regime’s desire to maintain the status quo. In other words, Soviet political system had long ceased to be revolutionary and had become reactionary, for which purpose the one-party format was no longer suitable.
Then Mr. Yeltsin’s transitional pandemonium spawned a myriad of shapeless and useless soap boxes, also known as Russian political parties… The history of March-October 1917 was essentially repeating itself.
The ascendancy of Vladimir Putin changed everything and suddenly it looked like Russia was once again in a revolutionary flux, and consequently was once again in need of a one-party structure.
I confess that for some time I kept wondering when Mr. Putin, already in the process of restoring much of the Soviet legacy, would start taking his cue from Lenin and history, and make yet another step toward the “good old times,” by appropriating a party and becoming its Vozhd/Leader, thus raising himself and his post above the "nonsense" of the democratic process, and ensuring the victory of state power.
Yedinaya Rossiya seemed to be the perfect party to supplant all other parties and ideal for Mr. Putin to lead. This scenario was indeed followed almost to a tee, and then abruptly cut short. Yedinaya Rossiya has indeed become the powerhouse party of Russia, and it has indeed elected Mr. Putin as its leader, but Mr. Putin has never become its member, for which there must be a good reason.
Most Kremlin watchers say that he wanted to put himself above Russia’s “partisan” politics, and above the Party he is leading, too. I say that this explanation is inadequate. Yedinaya Rossiya has essentially put other Russian parties out of business, which makes the phrase “partisan politics” (implying an active multi-party system) totally meaningless. By the same token, “putting himself above his own party” would be an equally meaningless assertion. And, finally, I have a solid hypothesis of my own, to explain why Mr. Putin has not joined his loyal power base Yedinaya Rossiya. In a nutshell, this is analogous to marriage. You cannot marry anybody else if you are already hitched. Likewise, Comrade Putin cannot become a member of the Yedinaya Rossiya, because he is already a loyal member of another party, and for him joining any other party would have been an act of abominable disloyalty.
My hypothesis was born after reading, a few years ago, with a heavy heart, my father General Artem’s obituary. As he was lying on his deathbed, on January 15, 2008, surrounded by his old comrades and much younger new Russian officials, his last words were Sluzhu Sovetskomu Soyuzu, I Serve the Soviet Union! (For more on this, read my entry In Memoriam, posted on March 5, 2011.)
And then I was immediately struck by the thought: But of course! My father Artem had never ceased to be a member of the CPSU, and after the dissolution of the USSR and of the Soviet Communist Party, it would have been an act of disloyalty and treason for him to accept that his membership was now null and void…
Mind you, there must be no confusion here between the existing Communist Party of Russia, which looks to me like a rather sad joke, and the no longer functioning Communist Party of the USSR, which, by virtue of its non-existence, has assumed an All-Russian-Imperial supra-partisan symbolic status, a sort of rallying cry… In life, the butt of all sorts of anti-establishment jokes, in death, a heroic legend!… It takes all sorts to make a hero, but once a hero is made, who would be so foolish as to wrestle with a legend?!
And now, what other party could be better suited to perform the role of the third component of a successful revolution, per Lenin, than this out-of-this-world ghost, once already created by Lenin for precisely such a function… the CPSU!
So, here now is my hypothesis:
What if the CPSU continuing membership has become the mark of loyalty to Russia for her old patriots? I am basing this assumption on a presumptive reconstruction of my probable feelings and conduct under the same circumstances (after all, I am an ideal sounding board in these matters, at least in my own measure of the current events in Russia). In those cataclysmic days, in 1992, when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been disgraced and disbanded, and millions of its members were running like rats off the allegedly sinking ship, there were many others, too, for whom their continuing membership in the now ostensibly outmoded organization might have become a symbolic test of loyalty to the Russian nation, to her history, and to her future. These have never surrendered their old CPSU Party cards, keeping them as a kind of sacred pledge to endure and persevere through Russia’s latest Time of Troubles, and, perhaps, one day soon, to restore Russia’s natural greatness to the next rung of Hegel’s ascending spiral staircase of historical progress.
I believe that such continuing membership may have created a powerful secret society in Yeltsin’s Russia, with its probable oath being those last words of my father, Sluzhu Sovetskomu Soyuzu. What’s more, I can easily imagine Vladimir Putin as one of those secret members (in fact, not so terribly secret, I am convinced, as there must have been thousands of CPSU members at the time who had refused to turn themselves into such rats, and eventually all banded and bonded together, united by that universally recognized and time-honored principle of honor, which in French says: Noblesse Oblige!)
For this reason, I suspect, Comrade Putin has declined to join any other party, which should only earn him profound respect and admiration from the current members of the Yedinaya Rossiya, which has proudly proclaimed him as its Chairman and has even hastily changed the Party rules, to eliminate the mandatory membership requirement for its unanimously chosen leader.
Such symbolic party membership, I repeat, is totally consistent with the role of the national, and even supra-national, leader, which Comrade Putin may already be playing in the evolving Russian and world history…
To many, my hypothesis may read like a far-fetched theory. To me, it is a faithful mental reconstruction of what must really have happened, or at least what ought to have happened in Russia’s unfathomable mystical reality.
Lenin, who knew a thing or two about hardball politics, described a successful revolution as the necessary amalgamation of three key factors. One, that the have-nots do not want the status quo. Two, that the haves cannot have the status quo. (These two factors by themselves constitute the revolutionary situation as such, but by themselves they are not enough to guarantee the success of a revolution. Therefore---) Three, that there is a single tightly-organized and well-disciplined party, to lead the forces of progress to victory. Thus, the key to success in revolutionary politics is the Lenin-type one-party system.
The multi-party systems of European and other democracies, or the two-party system of modern America are all successfully anti-revolutionary, and their objectives are all alike, to maintain the political status quo, that is, reasonable stability, in their respective nations. In Russia, however, right before the collapse of the USSR, its outmoded single-party system was no longer consistent with the regime’s desire to maintain the status quo. In other words, Soviet political system had long ceased to be revolutionary and had become reactionary, for which purpose the one-party format was no longer suitable.
Then Mr. Yeltsin’s transitional pandemonium spawned a myriad of shapeless and useless soap boxes, also known as Russian political parties… The history of March-October 1917 was essentially repeating itself.
The ascendancy of Vladimir Putin changed everything and suddenly it looked like Russia was once again in a revolutionary flux, and consequently was once again in need of a one-party structure.
I confess that for some time I kept wondering when Mr. Putin, already in the process of restoring much of the Soviet legacy, would start taking his cue from Lenin and history, and make yet another step toward the “good old times,” by appropriating a party and becoming its Vozhd/Leader, thus raising himself and his post above the "nonsense" of the democratic process, and ensuring the victory of state power.
Yedinaya Rossiya seemed to be the perfect party to supplant all other parties and ideal for Mr. Putin to lead. This scenario was indeed followed almost to a tee, and then abruptly cut short. Yedinaya Rossiya has indeed become the powerhouse party of Russia, and it has indeed elected Mr. Putin as its leader, but Mr. Putin has never become its member, for which there must be a good reason.
Most Kremlin watchers say that he wanted to put himself above Russia’s “partisan” politics, and above the Party he is leading, too. I say that this explanation is inadequate. Yedinaya Rossiya has essentially put other Russian parties out of business, which makes the phrase “partisan politics” (implying an active multi-party system) totally meaningless. By the same token, “putting himself above his own party” would be an equally meaningless assertion. And, finally, I have a solid hypothesis of my own, to explain why Mr. Putin has not joined his loyal power base Yedinaya Rossiya. In a nutshell, this is analogous to marriage. You cannot marry anybody else if you are already hitched. Likewise, Comrade Putin cannot become a member of the Yedinaya Rossiya, because he is already a loyal member of another party, and for him joining any other party would have been an act of abominable disloyalty.
My hypothesis was born after reading, a few years ago, with a heavy heart, my father General Artem’s obituary. As he was lying on his deathbed, on January 15, 2008, surrounded by his old comrades and much younger new Russian officials, his last words were Sluzhu Sovetskomu Soyuzu, I Serve the Soviet Union! (For more on this, read my entry In Memoriam, posted on March 5, 2011.)
And then I was immediately struck by the thought: But of course! My father Artem had never ceased to be a member of the CPSU, and after the dissolution of the USSR and of the Soviet Communist Party, it would have been an act of disloyalty and treason for him to accept that his membership was now null and void…
Mind you, there must be no confusion here between the existing Communist Party of Russia, which looks to me like a rather sad joke, and the no longer functioning Communist Party of the USSR, which, by virtue of its non-existence, has assumed an All-Russian-Imperial supra-partisan symbolic status, a sort of rallying cry… In life, the butt of all sorts of anti-establishment jokes, in death, a heroic legend!… It takes all sorts to make a hero, but once a hero is made, who would be so foolish as to wrestle with a legend?!
And now, what other party could be better suited to perform the role of the third component of a successful revolution, per Lenin, than this out-of-this-world ghost, once already created by Lenin for precisely such a function… the CPSU!
So, here now is my hypothesis:
What if the CPSU continuing membership has become the mark of loyalty to Russia for her old patriots? I am basing this assumption on a presumptive reconstruction of my probable feelings and conduct under the same circumstances (after all, I am an ideal sounding board in these matters, at least in my own measure of the current events in Russia). In those cataclysmic days, in 1992, when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been disgraced and disbanded, and millions of its members were running like rats off the allegedly sinking ship, there were many others, too, for whom their continuing membership in the now ostensibly outmoded organization might have become a symbolic test of loyalty to the Russian nation, to her history, and to her future. These have never surrendered their old CPSU Party cards, keeping them as a kind of sacred pledge to endure and persevere through Russia’s latest Time of Troubles, and, perhaps, one day soon, to restore Russia’s natural greatness to the next rung of Hegel’s ascending spiral staircase of historical progress.
I believe that such continuing membership may have created a powerful secret society in Yeltsin’s Russia, with its probable oath being those last words of my father, Sluzhu Sovetskomu Soyuzu. What’s more, I can easily imagine Vladimir Putin as one of those secret members (in fact, not so terribly secret, I am convinced, as there must have been thousands of CPSU members at the time who had refused to turn themselves into such rats, and eventually all banded and bonded together, united by that universally recognized and time-honored principle of honor, which in French says: Noblesse Oblige!)
For this reason, I suspect, Comrade Putin has declined to join any other party, which should only earn him profound respect and admiration from the current members of the Yedinaya Rossiya, which has proudly proclaimed him as its Chairman and has even hastily changed the Party rules, to eliminate the mandatory membership requirement for its unanimously chosen leader.
Such symbolic party membership, I repeat, is totally consistent with the role of the national, and even supra-national, leader, which Comrade Putin may already be playing in the evolving Russian and world history…
To many, my hypothesis may read like a far-fetched theory. To me, it is a faithful mental reconstruction of what must really have happened, or at least what ought to have happened in Russia’s unfathomable mystical reality.
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