Russia in Global Affairs

Thirty years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, we have moved towards a world in which all countries are becoming protective of their economies and trying to pass the burden of declining outputs and unemployment onto others.

Perestroika inherited a difficult situation in terms of interethnic and federal relations. I have to admit that when we started perestroika, my colleagues and I did not see the full extent of that problem.

Perestroika and the subsequent 1990s were accompanied by such massive enthusiasm and a sense of liberation that it would be unfair to discard them as illusions from the point of view of some “objective” progress.

More than three and a half decades have passed since the start of the process of change in the Soviet Union known throughout the world as perestroika. I have been trying to find answers to the questions put to me by scholars, journalists and ordinary people in the letters that I receive. It has not been relegated to the past. The experience and the lessons of perestroika remain relevant today.

Like any ideology, patriotism comes along with an illusion of being part of “a big common cause.” However, illusion here is not deception, but an objective necessity, something that has to be hidden for society to continue to exist and at the same time adequately conceived at a conscious level.

Why no new world order has been built since the end of the Cold War

By creating a mechanism for shaping its own system-wide interest, Russia would make the first major step towards renouncing the uncritical copying of Western forms. In this way, Russia could focus on substantive aspects of Western forms and, at the same time, create its own, in both foreign and domestic policies.

The state is a community that is brought into being not by a common faith or ethnic bonds, but by the unanimity of culture open to all manifestations of creative freedom and individual self-expression. The extent to which the citizens of a country and the government share this desire indicates their maturity as a nation.

From the standpoint of peace prospects, the outcome of the end of the Cold War was quite acceptable for Russia. It is an entirely different matter as to how the opportunities for peaceful Russian-Western cooperation that opened up in the early 1990s were used and what has taken us to the crisis of 2014.