Russia and revolution. Beginning

In June 2015 Russian mass media reported that Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu had instructed the General Staff’s Military Academy to carry out a complex analysis of the phenomenon of “color revolution.” On July 2 his deputy Nikolay Pankov suggested introducing a training course on technologies to spread color revolutions and methods to oppose them.

For the first time, this subject in Russia was mentioned after the events in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004). The war in Donbass has made it urgent again. It is obvious that one of the key tools of the West is to cause instability and to change political regimes in different countries by means of violence. Now it seems to be Russia’s turn.

Revolution means a change of government and deep reforms in society. For most of the Russians revolution has always been something progressive. But this is a fiction. The principle of dialectic says that the reverse side of any achievement is a loss. For example, the reverse side of technological progress is regress of environmental conditions. For France the French Revolution was the start of democracy and civil society but it was also the end of its political, military and cultural leadership in Europe.

French writer Victor Hugo was well aware of this problem. In his Ninety-Three novel, one of the heroes, Marquis de Lantenac says, “Ah! I do not know how all this will end: but these gentlemen, your friends, are noble beggars! Ah! yes; it is fine; I am in perfect sympathy with all these splendid signs of progress; in the army, the punishment of giving the drunken soldier a pint of cold water for three days running has been abolished; you have your maximum, your convention, your Bishop Gobel, your Monsieur Chaumette and Monsieur Hébert, and you have wiped out all the past at one fell swoop, from the Bastille to the Almanach. You are putting vegetables in place of saints... This is the question: to be a great Kingdom, to be the ancient France, to be this magnificent land of system, according to which first the sacred person of the monarch, absolute lord of the state, is regarded, then the princes, then the crown officers in charge of the army on land and sea, of the artillery, and the direction and superintendence of finances. Then came the judges of the higher and lower courts, followed by the officials engaged in the revenues and receipts of custom, and lastly the police of the kingdom in its three orders. There was something fine and noble in this system. You have destroyed it. You have destroyed provinces, like the miserable ignoramuses that you are, without having an idea of what the provinces were... You will have Azincourt, but you will have no Sieur de Bacqueville, grand bearer of the Oriflamme, wrapping himself in his banner, to meet his death. Go! go! Do your work! Be the new men! Become pigmies!”

 The concept of “progressism” says that traditional society is behind the time while modern “civil” society is ahead of it. Just one paradoxical example: only 19 crimes were recorded in Arkhangelsk province in 1844, of which 11 were illegal cutting of woods. And now look what is happening there today.

According to liberal “political expert” Dmitry Oreshkin, the Soviet Union was a slave-holding society of Asian type. “So, it would be really brave for us to hope that we would be able to jump from Ancient Egypt to liberal capitalism. We still have to go through a bourgeois revolution.” Like many Moscow intellectuals, Oreshkin advocates the ideas of Europocentrism. But does he have any guarantees that the revolution he is dreaming of will be bourgeois and will result in progress rather than regress? All the color revolutions that have occurred in the post-Soviet area so far have shown that revolution may cause social regress as well. Here I would like to remind you the words of Fazil Iskander, “progress is when they are still killing but are not already cutting ears.”

Here the advocates of a bourgeoisie revolution in Russia should know that present-day Russia is facing a system civilizational crisis – something like Smuta (the Time of Troubles, the 16th-17thcenturies). Smuta was a crisis of Russian civilization. Most of Soviet historians believed that Smuta was caused by a foreign intervention but deeper analysis shows that it was a crisis of society. The following reforms made things even worse. It was a kind of zugzwang, where each next step caused an even deeper crisis.

 Most of “orange revolutions” were caused from outside and served the interests of external agents. Such revolutions may be used as “directed explosions” aimed to trigger an internal conflict and to move in necessary direction. And there may be several such explosions throughout the life of one generation. We could well regard the current Russian authorities as a regime of restoration - the end of the cycle of the revolution 1991 – were it not for the new wave of instability that is covering Russia today.

 The goal of the authors of “orange revolutions” is to deprive Russia of its sovereignty, nuclear weapons and scientific and technological potential. For the territorial dismantling of Russia, they will use ethnic constructivism and will present the breakdown of Russian identity as a natural “historical” process.

 In the next article we will examine the problems of Russia’s general instability as a civilization in the modern world.