by Stefano Caprio

A quarter of a century has now passed since Boris Yeltsin's ceding of power. No one then thought that the peaceful and flourishing Russia that celebrated Moscow's 850th anniversary in 1997 would disappear. Today, however, the New Year greetings ominously repeat ‘we will go on, until victory’ while everything seems to be dragging Russia further and further backwards.

It is now a quarter of a century since Vladimir Putin ascended the throne of the Kremlin, the event that - according to Andrej Kolesnikov's definition in Novaja Gazeta - caused ‘the greatest anthropological catastrophe of the 21st century’.

In reality, the decision to entrust him with the fate of the country after ‘the most tragic turning point of the 20th century’, as Putin called the end of the USSR, had taken place before the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian era, when Boris Yeltsin triggered the ‘time-delayed landmine’ of the obscure KGB-FSB official, putting him in charge of the government at the end of 1998 and handing over the presidency to him on the eve of the new century, leaving the scene and history, advising the former deputy mayor of St Petersburg to ‘take care of Russia’.

It was the end of the uncertain post-Soviet democracy, which had been expressed since Yeltsin's election in 1990 as president of the Russian Soviet republic Rsfsr in a Gorbachevist attempt to save the system by reforming it from within.

In 1996 Yeltsin was then re-elected as president of the Russian Federation, narrowly defeating the reborn communist party of Gennadiy Zyuganov, supported by the Orthodox Church of Metropolitan Kirill (Gundjaev), and even then it was clear that Russia was going backwards in history, recalling its imperial pretensions.

In 2000, the election of Putin, already acting in place of Yeltsin, was held on 26 March and saw the victory of the ‘democratic’ successor, with 53% against the 30% of the communist Zjuganov, who from then on became his devoted supporter, thus adding the ‘popular consensus’ to the fateful 80%, the minimum figure of the totalitarian tradition. Russian democracy was now exhausted.

Returning totalitarianism', as the sociologist Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada-Centre, calls it, generated the progressive anthropological regression of the Russian people, a sense of self-repression even before the anti-everything laws and proscription lists, now the order of the day in Russia at permanent war.

Men and women who were experiencing the intoxication of freedom of expression and the confrontation of different ideas about Russia's present and future gradually began to think and behave in a servile and blindly ‘patriotic’ manner.

On New Year's Eve broadcasts in recent days, it was impressive to see libertarian singers such as Filipp Kirkorov performing almost in military uniform, and men of culture decorating the tree with bombs and ammunition, wishing the extermination of Ukrainians ‘if not within the year, at least in two or three years’.

By the 1990s, the type of the ‘new Russian’ had become widespread, dedicated to unbridled consumerism after decades of Brezhnev abstinence, travelling between the Mediterranean coasts and the French Alps, trying to cast off the inferiority complex compared to the opulence of the West, and to chase away the regurgitations of resentment over the loss of the Soviet super-power, which instead charged Putin's mine until the 1920s explosion.

The pale liberal reforms of the first five post-Soviet years were quickly cast aside in order to preserve the illusion of oligarchic prosperity, which was then bent to the service of central power until the investment of the current war economy, the real purpose of the wealth accumulated in the first two decades of Yeltsin-Putin Russia.

In the words of Aleksandr Rubtsov, one of the most important political scientists who recently passed away, the top of the Putin power pyramid was built on the basis of a selection of managerial cadres defined as a ‘sewer elevation system’, creating a caste of ‘Putin-like’ people who make it impossible today to think of a future of political change and renewal, whatever the tsar's personal fate. Writer Denis Dragunsky says that 2025 opens in Russia as ‘an inviting picture of pro-retrospectives’.

No one thought a quarter of a century ago that the peaceful and flourishing Russia that celebrated Moscow's 850th anniversary in 1997, and St Petersburg's 300th anniversary in 2003, would disappear, refurbishing the country's two historic capitals in the whirlwind ofevroremont, the construction of modern European-style buildings.

Russia did not feel the humiliation of feeling excluded, as it was very active on international markets with its infinite energy resources, science and education intersected with the most important institutions of all the countries of the East and West, the modern pension system, guaranteed by the oligarchic network, ensured the serene maintenance of families and the elderly, even healthcare worked for everyone, beyond the inevitable drifts of corruption.

Today, instead, the New Year greetings ominously repeat ‘we will go on, until victory’, when it is clear that Russia is running increasingly backwards, retracing the Siberian routes of the Soviet lagers to the forced Russifications of the Ukrainians by the 19th century tsars, and the dreams of the Third Rome of the first tsar, Ivan the Terrible.

In the words of the hero of a novel by the philosopher and writer Aleksandr Zinov'ev, ‘we are moving forward, going far beyond our own backsides’, without giving anyone a pause to reconsider what is happening.

Those who even express doubts are marginalised, or even excluded from society as ‘traitors to the nation’, with tendencies towards extremism for those who do not give in to catastrophe.

The era of drones crashing into cities, and planes disasters due to obscure causes, is called the ‘age of security’, and the disintegration of families and human relations is celebrated in the Year of the Family that has just ended, ahead of the Year of Victory and Unity that will be celebrated on 9 May, on the 80th anniversary of the glorious end of the Great Patriotic War.

Isolation from world culture and society, with the exclusion of any possible exchange of students and research with foreign universities, the closure of energy and technology markets, even the ecclesiastical schism with the other Orthodox Churches, all this is extolled as the new ‘sovereignty’ of Russia, against any interference from outside.

Archaic and grotesque rituals are held in schools, with kindergarten children marching under portraits of Stalin to defend ‘traditional moral and spiritual values’.

The defence of the most elementary rights, from those of the biblical Ten Commandments to the UN charter, or even those listed in the Constitution of the Russian Federation itself, turns out to be a ‘destructive ideology’, surpassing in reality even the fantasies of Orwell and Kafka, or Bulgakov and Zamjatin.

The resentment of Putin's Russia traces back to the accusations of the most classic question in Russian literature and publicity, ‘whose fault is it?’.

It goes back to Nikita Khruschev, who allowed the wearing of blue-jeans that ‘mortified the male gender’ and gave Crimea to the Ukrainians, to Mikhail Gorbačëv, who shattered the immutable system of the ‘Brezhnev stagnation’ and handed over the whole of Eastern Europe to the West, to Egor Gajdar, Yeltsin's economist who with privatisations ‘sold Russia off to the Americans’.

Even the semi-divine Vladimir Lenin is accused, who was unable to hold the empire together and ‘invented Ukraine’, forcing Stalin to put the pieces back together ‘making a few victims’.

There is no shortage of accusations against the Hungarian-American oligarch George Soros, an emblematic figure of the ‘strong powers’ plotting in the shadows, who with his ‘humanitarian’ actions has infected Russia with systems of education and publications totally alien to the true patriotic spirit.

For twenty-five years, an increasingly gloomy and oppressive regime has dominated in Russia, which cannot be discussed or objected to, and one is forced to discuss the faults of Yeltsin and Gajdar.

History is continually rewritten and readjusted, in compulsory textbooks for schools of all levels, right up to the removal of the memorial plaque to the victims of the Solovki lager from the Lubjanka square, the realm of the Kgb-Fsb from which the Putin anthropological type originates.

Instead, monuments to Stalin, the true progenitor of this insensitive and aggressive, retrograde and apocalyptic form of humanity that now dominates an increasingly unrecognisable and degenerate country, even compared to its most bloodthirsty epochs, are being erected again in many cities.

One of Putin's top supporters and ideologues, the Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, addressed a New Year's greeting from the screens of his Tsargrad TV channel, assuring that ‘this year everything will be different, without that old fanatic Biden and with a pragmatic, Russia-loving person like Trump’, revealing the Russians' true feelings for a figure who largely reflects the dimensions of “sovereignist anthropology”.

A quarter of a century is a long time, surpassing those of many other dictators of ancient and modern Russia, and above all, making people forget the bright visions of the ‘end of history’ in economic and technological globalisation. It opens an era of universal isolation, from Trump to Putin, from the East to the West, where what seems to be disappearing is not only democracy and peace, freedoms and rights, but the human person itself.