Anton Kobyakov, a senior advisor to Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, shocked the world in May by making a bizarre statement that the USSR legally exists and hence the War in Ukraine is an internal matter.
“The procedure for the so-called dissolution of the USSR was violated. Since the Congress of People’s Deputies (also known as the Congress of Soviets) established the USSR in 1922, it should have been dissolved through a decision by that same Congress”, said Kobyakov to TASS during the sidelines of St.Petersburg International Legal Forum this year.
Kobyakov, a biologist and economist, with a stint in the coal industry, heads the Roscongress Foundation, which describes itself as a non-financial development institution and organizer of international conventions and exhibitions.
In 2023, Lu Shaye, the Chinese ambassador to France, stoked a diplomatic furore by claiming that the eastern European countries formed post the Soviet collapse in 1991 do not effectively have a sovereign status in international law. Beijing distanced itself from the statement of its Special Representative for European Affairs after the outrage, but the statement took the world back to the tumultuous early 90s.
Ghosts of USSR
The abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union traces its roots to the agreement signed between the then leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus at a hunting lodge in the forests of Belavhaza. Yelstin, the President of the Russian Federation, stunned the US and the world by announcing the death warrant of the USSR.
USSR is dead; long live USSR seems to capture not just a throwback to the heydays of the superpower, but an exercise in continuity and self-identification.
The politics of memory and nostalgia is so strong in the former Soviet bloc countries that in eastern Germany Ostalgia is a popular slang. It defines those who miss the iron-clad state welfare guarantees of the GDR, the plastic-cardboard Trabant cars, often referred to as among the worst vehicles in the world, and other trappings of Erich Hoenecker’s ‘Consumer Socialism’. This was, afterall, an era when ‘Neither an ox nor a donkey’ were supposedly able to stop the onward march of socialism.
In Russia, this remembrance of things past takes mystical forms, which range from the revived Stalin cult, to the renewed popularity of Soviet motifs, insignias, and emblems.
Rebuilding Statues
The toppled statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first Bolshevik chief of Cheka, the Stalinist precursor to the KGB, was reinstated in Moscow in 2023.
The ‘Iron Felix’, born to a family of Polish nobles, was the architect of Red Terror as the spy chief. He expressed the crux of his mission as “We stand for organized terror, this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity”.
There are demands by citizen groups to rename Volgograd to Stalingrad. The city’s airport has already been named by the local city council and Putin to Stalingrad Airport, as a tribute to the Battle of Stalingrad during WW2, the most gruesome urban war in history that led to two million deaths.
The Hollywood movie ‘Enemy at the Gates’ is based on this battle. The defeat at Stalingrad turned the tide for Hitler and set in motion his defeat.
An exact replica of monument to Stalin, which was removed during Khruschev’s de-stalinization process, has been reinstalled by the Moscow Metro at the Taganskya station this year.
As Per the Moscow Times, the popularity of Stalin and the bid to install more and more statues of him, have made a comeback.
While MAGA (Make America Great Again) is faltering, MRSA (Make Russia Soviet Again) is going on strong, at least in the minds of its votaries.
The Soviet Generalissimo famously stated before his death in 1953, that “After my death there would be a pile of rubbish heaped on my grave, but history would absolve me”. The Kremlin leadership seems to agree.
