Vedomosti: “Russia’s rule: wait for your grandchildren”
In its December poll, the Levada Analytical Centre called Prime Minister Vladimir Putin "the man of the year." Medvedev was runner-up. Some groups put Medvedev ahead of Putin, but on the whole this is a picture we've gotten used to.
It would be interesting to know what future generations will say about our current politicians. At one time, both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were "man of the year." Now a mere 13% of Russians hold positive views of Gorbachev, while 33% are negative; the rest of respondents are neutral or indifferent to him. So too, Russians believe that his perestroika produced more negative than positive results (51% versus 22%). As for Yeltsin, he is favoured by 17% and denounced by 34%. His era is believed to have been even worse (63% against 17%).
Not even one person per hundred called Yegor Gaidar "the man of the year." His death left 40% of those polled indifferent, evoked "grief and regret" in another 40%, and "mixed feelings" in the remaining 20%. Gaidar's reforms were considered essential and useful by 38%, and unnecessary and harmful by 43%. The majority of those polled (50%) believe they have lost from these reforms and that they were beneficial for a minority of 20%.
However, the successors are not always so ungrateful. Leonid Brezhnev's era gave rise to many jokes, and people were ashamed of its general ethos. Andrei Sakharov made a public statement about disgraceful Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan under Brezhnev. Despite all this, our contemporaries invariably call Brezhnev's era the best time in the 20th century. The December poll revealed two equally popular opinions. Half of those polled call it "the era of stagnation and a prelude to the collapse," and the other half considered it to be "a period of successful development."
The same thing happened with the public attitude toward Joseph Stalin. His body was withdrawn from the Mausoleum, his statues removed from squares, and thousands of pages written about his crimes. It was rumoured that his name all but became the winner of "Name of Russia" television production. Now 49% of respondents consider his role positive and a mere 33% express a negative attitude toward it.
These examples must be tempting for today's politicians. It is not surprising that they have been making demonstrative attempts to borrow something from Stalin in the last few years. The word "stagnation" was tried on the period of Putin's blissful stability more than once. Politicians feel that their resource is the past rather than the future. They realize that our society is afraid to look into the future, ashamed of our recent past, and seeking ideals and consolation in a more remote period. However, the result is that this remote past is more like a mythologized present. The popular picture of Stalin and Brezhnev's paradise is produced by the projection of current hopes onto it. The current leaders are perceived through the prism of those who had long been dead (which explains the unnatural growth of their ratings).
Many events in Russian history follow this rule: the political and cultural legacy of the grandfathers is passed on to the grandchildren, but it always skips a generation. Perhaps the time of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Gaidar's grandchildren has simply not yet arrived.
By Alexei Levinson, head of the Levada Analytical Centre's Department of Social and Cultural Studies
