Putin's Russia: It's like the 1970s

The other day I finally got around to reading Martin Walker's review of Jonathan Brent's new book. It is a memoir of his work the past fifteen-plus years on Yale's excellent series Annals of Communism, volumes on Soviet history usually co-written by Russian and Western scholars and containing a significant number of newly released Soviet archival documents in English translation. Discussing the difficulties Russian archivists face in their work today, the review contains an interesting passage about today's Russia:

He [Brent] relates one haunting anecdote of a respected and elderly historian who just two years ago published a straightforward study that included the historically true statement that Red Army troops had occupied Lithuania even before Hitler’s invasion of 1941. Officially ­threatened with the loss of his apartment and pension, and retaliation against his daughter’s career if he dared repeat such allegations, he tells Brent: “It is a return to the 1970s. There is nothing to do about it.” That is a telling point. Russia is not going back to the Terror of the 1930s or to the gulag, but to a softer and greedier form of power that has echoes of Leonid Brezhnev’s years and of prerevolutionary czarism.

During the 1970s, just like today (or until very recently), one could still believe that thanks to high oil prices the Kremlin would be able to buy domestic peace without having to contemplate serious reform. Also during the 1970s, the Soviet leadership was willing to do deals with the West on the basis of equality and without interference in each other's domestic affairs, just like today. There are many differences between the '70s and today, but I had not considered the analogy, and it's an interesting one. The same goes for the reference to "prerevolutionary czarism," a nod to those (historians, for example) who believe that long, historical traditions are as important for an understanding of current affairs as all that's supposedly new.