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Rise, decline and fall of the USSR

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This book by Sergio Romano offers more than it promises: it is titled “The suicide of the USSR” but to explain the fall it takes a run from the origins of the October Revolution and in fact traces the whole story of the Soviet phenomenon, obviously not to provide a manual but a series of critical interpretations. Here are collected in volume numerous writings live by the Roman ambassador, dating back to the ’80s and’ 90s and published at the time, in many cases, precisely in La Stampa; the precision of so many predictions come true, and this (attention) is not due to posthumous retouching of the texts, nor to the divinatory abilities of the author, but to a vocation to analyze facts without preconceptions which in the end bears fruit, as underlined by Luciano Canfora in the preface and Ezio Mauro in the Introduction.

Unfortunately, this vocation does not seem very widespread among commentators on international politics, who are easy to confuse (for example) hopes and realities regarding Gorbachev’s real abilities and possibilities of success as a reformer of the USSR, or to interpret the Yugoslav wars through the rudimentary scheme. good / bad (forcing by forcing, it should be said, if anything, that in that context they were all bad, and that some fatal choices of the West have worsened the situation), or to judge the Putin phenomenon today with the misleading rhetoric of the “new Hitler”; you can read years and years of articles by certain Russian commentators without ever coming across explanations, if not demonological, of the internal support that Putin has enjoyed continuously and still enjoys today. Henry Kissinger warns that “to understand Putin you have to read Dostoevsky, not the My fight”, And deplores the errors to be corrected in Western politics regarding Ukraine; he says he is convinced that the West would win a tug-of-war with Russia through economic sanctions and military pressure, but adds that “a new post-Tito Yugoslavia ravaged by conflict and extended from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok is not in the national interest American”. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon version of geopolitics would aspire to see Russia dissolve as the USSR did (in order to clear the famous “pivot area”) and in fact cheered for Yeltsin who was bringing his country to ruin.

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When reading Sergio Romano’s book, one must prepare for new surprises and perspectives; for example, the author inspected the places of Yeltsin’s counter-coup very shortly after the events, collected testimonies, and got the idea that apart from Yeltsin getting into the tank, very little happened that day: none mass resistance against the coup leaders, as CNN led us to believe, only great passivity and the final dissolution of a non-drama. And Romano also surprises us by citing a sensational historical precedent: to transform, in the eyes of the world, Lenin’s coup d’état into the Glorious Proletarian Revolution was (according to Sergio Romano) the book The ten days that shook the world by the American John Reed, who in that case played a role from CNN ante litteram: it was Reed who created the interpretative scheme of the events, and the same protagonists subsequently made explicit reference to what Reed had written, to tell what they remembered little and badly; Trotsky, for example, admitted that he did not remember what Lenin had said on the fatal night between 24 and 25 October, but added that “if Reed wrote it, then Lenin said so”.

Sergio Romano’s story and analysis of the events stop at the fall of the USSR and do not cover the next phase, but in this regard we would like to introduce an element of reflection: in many regime changes (not only this one) he complains that the the dissolution of the system was accompanied by the explosion of corruption and the embezzlement of state assets; but it may be that this is physiological: perhaps (let’s just say maybe) it is the price to pay for the previous ruling class to agree to be deprived of authority without a fight. Maybe you need to offer her an easy way out. If, on the other hand, extermination is promised, as did the FIS in Algeria or, more recently, Isis in Syria, the holders of power will be led to fight to the death. And if a civil war with an unpredictable outcome had broken out in the former USSR, with its tens of thousands of nuclear warheads scattered everywhere, who knows what would have happened. It is a cynical conclusion, but buying with corruption and embezzlement the acquiescence of a ruling class to be liquidated can be the lesser evil. Much minor.

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Sergio Romano, “The suicide of the USSR”, Sandro Teti Editore, 312 pages, 18 euros

The author of this article recently published the book “Arcane empires. Cold War and geopolitics: George Kennan from Stalin to Putin “, Mimesi Edizioni, 143 pages, 12 euros


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