Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union - a process encapsulated in a failed hard-line communist coup on August 19, 1991 - many Russians long for the return of the "Empire." The nostalgia has risen as the 20th anniversary approaches, according to Moscow-based pollsters Wziom.
A fifth of those surveyed would like to return to the superpower status of the Soviet era, Wziom found. A decade ago, the figure was just 16 percent. It appears that memories of life under the totalitarian communist regime are fading. In August 1991, the world was captivated by images of events in Moscow. The old Soviet apparatchiks mounted a coup, arresting Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev while he was holidaying on the Crimean Peninsula. A state of emergency prevailed in the capital, where enraged Russians confronted tanks. It took days for the mood to turn. The military refused to obey the coup leaders, who fled.
In the ensuing months, the Soviet Union fell apart. Two decades later, longing is deep-seated for the old days of global might. Thus, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once called the demise of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) century."
Putin has spoken clearly of a possible reunification with Belarus, and recently pushed through a customs union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Talk is ongoing of other former Soviet republics joining forces. But a return to the old empire status remains unlikely, either in the form of the defunct Soviet Union, led by Moscow, or as a counterpart to the European Union.
Democratic structures would be necessary for the latter, Moscow historian Irina Shcherbakova of human rights organisation Memorial told the German Press Agency dpa. Almost all former Soviet states are far from that. The Soviet Union's main successor, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), is not a genuine political power. And 20 years on, old conflicts continue to plague the former Communist bloc.
Georgia, which aims for Nato and EU membership, withdrew from the CIS after a war with Russia in 2008. The five-day conflict saw Russia recognising the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. In the Republic of Moldova, the breakaway region of Transnistria has been under effective Russian control for years in a kind of post-Soviet limbo. Presidential elections are due there next month.
In the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is part of Azerbaijan under international law, Armenia is in control following a lengthy war that ended in 1994, as its protector Russia lurks in the background. Talks on a resolution of the conflict have run into the sand, despite numerous attempts to mediate by Russian President Dimitry Medvedev.
The Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan face constant criticism for their human rights records, their allegedly paternalistic policies and repression harking back to Soviet days. The authoritarian rulers in these largely Muslim countries increasingly seem to fear the kind of changes that have swept the Arab world.
Gorbachev, who rose to power through the old Soviet system but is seen by many of his compatriots as the "gravedigger of the Soviet Empire," recently criticised what he saw as authoritarian tendencies in his own country. In March, on the occasion of his 80th birthday, the former Soviet president rebuked Putin and Medvedev for creating a power monopoly that did not leave room for other political forces.
"Gorbi," who is honoured in the West for his role in the Soviet break-up, is calling for a revival of his policies of Glasnost and Perestroika (Openness and Reconstruction) that augured the final years of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Those ideas took hold in Moscow's eastern European vassals, which gradually deposed their governments, introduced democratic change, tore down their frontiers and joined Nato and the EU, ending almost half a century of Cold War.
Shcherbakova believes Russia needs a new "democratic breakthrough" like those under Gorbachev and Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin. When Yeltsin stood on a tank by the parliamentary buildings in August 1991, he not only put paid to the hardline communists, but also gave hope to Russians, tired of Gorbachev's inability to take decisions.
"Poverty had become unendurable in August 1991, with people queuing to buy bread," Shcherbakova said. "Many still have the food vouchers at home that they were unable to exchange for anything of value. It was a wartime situation. The country was finished." Gorbachev secured the confidence of the West. He pushed through disarmament and freedom of the press. And he withdrew the Soviet troops from Afghanistan after a long and pointless war.
"But he failed when it came to a new political system in the country," Shcherbakova said. He neglected to unite the reform-driven forces within the party, for example by instituting social democracy, she said. Historians have long accused Gorbachev of holding back economic renewal in Russia by sticking to a socialist planned economy. Market reforms were only introduced in 1992 under Yegor Gaidar, who was acting prime minister for just six months. Today, there are new calls for a wave of reforms among the ranks of the country's political leadership. But, as analysts point out, there are no true modernises in sight.
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