This is somewhat of a spinoff on the Russian hacker thread. We’re getting hacked by countries such as Russia and China that are rivals, if not once again enemies after the end of the Cold War a quarter century ago. Hacking is just one of the many issues that we are on the opposite side from Russia. Examples include the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. I started wondering how the world would look if Russia was an ally instead of a rival / enemy. Wouldn’t both the USA and Russia be better of with a friendly relationship? In particular, Germany, Japan, and South Korea all became economically prosperous nations after creating Western* style governments and allying with the USA and Western Europe rather than maintaining an antagonist relationship with the rest of the Western world. What if Russia had taken a similar path after the Soviet Union collapsed, deciding to ally with the NATO countries and rebuild with a true representative democracy or republican government rather than their oligarchy that they currently have? Would that have even been possible? If it was possible, what went wrong along the way?
By Western values I mean things like having fair elections, respect for human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and a country run by the rule of law rather than by a dictator. Feel free to substitute first world, developed world, or any other phrase for these values. I don’t want to get hung up on the use of the word Western.
I think that like china that the Russian temperament isn’t suited for a total western democracy
that they prefer someone at the top as a nanny type because if they don’t its near anarchy due to their society never developingthe trait of moderation
I remember after there was no government control of tv and some stations had nude newscasts porn in the daytime ect and it extended to other things as well until Putin came in and cleaned up the mess
Personally, I don’t like any sort of essentialist statement about “temperament” of a nationality. However, it’s pretty clear that there has been a lot of Russian popular support for an autocratic government.
Post-communist Russia was in terrible shape. The economy was broken. There just wasn’t the infrastructure, civil institutions, or effective regulation that enables a healthy capitalist democracy. A lot of people went from a sort of guaranteed mediocrity to complete poverty. Meanwhile, a lot of government officials and businessmen made obscene amounts of money through cutthroat or outright criminal business practices. These men became the “oligarchs” that held nearly complete political power by the late 90s.
Putin earned a lot of goodwill from the Russian electorate in part because he took down some of the oligarchs, and reined in others (all the while placing his own cronies in positions of power). At the same time, the Russian economy started to function and even grow.
Given the turmoil of the early 90s in Russia, how do you want to make it a “Western nation?” Yeltsin offering to join NATO wouldn’t have fixed the economy, or provided rule of law, or magically created a class of experienced civil servants. In retrospect, Yeltsin’s economic reforms probably caused more problems than they fixed, but even with the benefit of hindsight it’s hard to say what would worked better.
(aaand I’ve reached the limits of stuff I remember off the top of my head from that one semester of post-soviet history…)
Yes…I think they could have, and it’s a tragedy they failed. I see it as a fairly near miss. They had a much better chance in 1990 than they did in 1922.
It’s kind of the same reason the Kerensky government couldn’t hold on. As others have said, the rule of law requires social trust in institutions, which in turn requires institutions worthy of social trust. Like the czarist regime, the Soviet Union left no such institutions behind when it fell. There was no systemic authority capable of restraining the oligarchs, and no appetite among the people to wait for such institutions to develop. I think Putin is popular because he presents as a tough guy who is largely above personal financial corruption.
He’s in for some tough years ahead, though. Russia relies heavily on energy extraction and dominance of the European energy supply. US fracking and European source substitution are wreaking havoc on Russian revenue and political leverage.