How have the fall of the USSR and the long dominance of Putin
reshaped Russian politics and culture?
Ilya
Budraitskis, one of the country’s most prominent leftist political
commentators, explores the strange fusion of free-market ideology and
postmodern nationalism that now prevails in Russia, and describes the
post-Soviet evolution of its left. He incisively describes the twists
and contradictions of the Kremlin’s geopolitical fantasies, which
blend up-to-date references to “information wars” with nostalgic
celebrations of the tsars of Muscovy. Despite the revival of
aggressive Cold War rhetoric, he argues, the Putin regime takes its
bearings not from any Soviet inheritance, but from reactionary
thinkers such as the White émigré Ivan Ilyin.
Budraitskis
makes an invaluable contribution by reconstructing the forgotten
history of the USSR’s dissident left, mapping an entire alternative
tradition of heterodox Marxist and socialist thought from
Khrushchev’s Thaw to Gorbachev’s perestroika. Doubly outsiders,
within an intelligentsia dominated by liberal humanists, they offer a
potential way out of the impasse between condemnations of the entire
Soviet era and blanket nostalgia for Communist Party rule–suggesting
new paths for the left to explore.